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The Power Broker—I: How Robert Moses Transformed New York | The New Yorker

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From 1974: Robert A. Caro on how an idealistic urban planner discovered that decisions about the city’s future would not be based on democracy. They would be based on power.

Save this story Save this story ( This is the first part of a four-part series. Read the second part . ) The power of most public officials is measured in years. The power of Robert Moses was measured in decades. It was formally handed to him on April 18, 1924, ten years after he had entered government. He held it for more than four decades thereafter—until the day in 1968 when he realized that he had either misunderstood Nelson Rockefeller or been cheated by him and, in either case, had lost the last of it—and it was a power so substantial that in the fields in which he chose to exercise it n

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