Women, fish, creatures of the night, fools, all ye, gather round as I tell you the tale of the most evil man in the history of the state of New York. Robert Moses, the president of the 1964 New York World's Fair and New York City parks commissioner between 1934 and 1960
Our tale begins in the early 1900s where after our despicable little man earned his BAs from Oxford and Yale and a PHD in Political Science from Columbia, 3 colleges known for evil graduates, he became a close friend of New York governor Al Smith by attracting his attention through his plans to simplify and consolidate the new york state government. By the late 1920s he was appointed the Secretary of State and after reforming the New York state government to remove inefficiencies, he began to work on public works projects which required the creation of new political offices which coincidentally he was put in charge of such as the Long Island State Park Commission and the State Council of Parks. Here is where is influence began to become renowned as he designed the first car centric beach with the Jones Beach State Park
This was of course before his entire career would change with the beginning of New Deal and his legacy would go from a public servant and a reformer to that of a bigoted control freak who ran highways through minority neighborhoods.
During the New Deal Era, the federal government gave millions of dollars to states and cities to build infrastructure to get people back to work via the WPA and CCC. The issue was most cities and states did not have shovel ready projects, but guess who did have shovel ready projects. One very famous little bastard boy from New York had many shovel ready projects. A few were good like public swimming pools, but his most famous project of the New Deal would be the Triborough Bridge
Now a simple bridge may not seem it would be one of the most important parts of the legacy of such a famous man as Robert Moses, but the thing is, Robert Advocated for a system of highways and roads to feed into the bridge and that alongside the 2 facts that he was obsessed with automobiles and had previously built highways on Long Island such as the Meadowbrook State Highway, set the stage for the numerous highways he would build, something made easier by how he used the funds from the tolls on projects he ran such as the Triborough Bridge to build other projects of his.
After the New Deal and the second World War, Robert Moses would enter the height of his power as New York Mayor LaGuardia resigned he came into almost unparalleled power by simultaneously holding numerous unelected positions in the New York City Government such as Commissioner of the New York City Planning Commission, and the Parks Commissioner. As the federal government started to push for Freeways, Moses Delivered despite not knowing how to drive, by creating projects such as the Brooklyn Queens Expressway which displaced thousands and destroyed hundreds of blocks
He also designed other highways in New York such as the Staten Island Expressway, and the Cross Bronx Expressway
His Freeway obsession didn't stop at the outer boroughs however as he almost managed to demolish Soho, the Greenwich Village, Alphabet City and Little Italy for I-78 to run across Manhattan with the Infamous Lower Manhattan Expressway which was stopped by Anti Freeway Protests led by Jane Jacob's considered to be the startingpoint of New Urbanism.
But Moses didn't stop at Freeways, he also made sure to demolish massive sections of City for other purposes too
I'm getting kinda sleepy but I was going to talk about his public housing projects, the Lincoln Center, the UN Headquarters and the 1964 New York World's Fair in this section
Okay, it’s the next day and I am ready to post about this awful fucking bastard more
First of all let’s examine the notable urban renewal projects under his leadership. Urban Renewal was the process of attempting to revive urban areas in the US by building new infrastructure with government money from the 1950s to the 1970s in an attemptto reviveurban areas after the start of suburbanization swept across the US, this sounds like a good plan till you look at what projects were pursued. Urban Renewal projects focused on “blight clearance” that being the demolition of minority neighborhoods for these projects to bring white suburbanites back into the city. Now Robert Moses wasn’t the only civic planner to build destructive urban Renewal projects but he is notable for being one of the most influential and earliest to do so. His most influential project and one of his most destructive was the Lincoln Center
The Lincoln Center was built by demolishing the majority Puerto Rican Neighborhood “San Juan Hill” which displaced over 17,000 people in the name of clearing slums. Moses forced people to leave their neighborhoods in the name of Progress instead of providing means for those in poverty to leave it. This policy of demolishing what he saw as slums for new projects would continue but the worst part is the way in which the people of neighborhoods in San Juan Hill were forced into his Social Housing Developments with no other choice as landlords refused to rent to minorities in the 50s and 60s.
Social Housing in and of itself is a good thing, it allows for community and a way for people to avoid homelessness as it provides a home. The issue is in the era of Robert Moses, thousands of people were forced out of their homes both to build the housing projects and were forced into them as their homes were destroyed in the name of Progress, ripping through communities and ruining lives, and to make it worse, once the projects were built they quickly devolved into squalor as the city refused to fund them, worsening the cycle of poverty as people were trapped in decaying rotting apartments unable to move elsewhere. But Urban Renewal wouldn’t be the end of Moses’ career and reputation, that was a combination of his vanity and his albatross, the 1964 New York World’s Fair