CITY BREAKER:

Saluting Robert Moses (JOHN McWHORTER, February 1, 2007, NY Sun)

I have been obsessed with Moses since tackling Robert Caro's doorstop biography of him, "The Power Broker." Reading it during a six-week stay in Helsinki when I had more down time than I expected, I was struck by how central to the warp and woof of my own existence the works of Moses are. [...]

Moses built all of this and so much more in just a few decades. Even his detractors concede that no one, when municipal funds were always sparse, could have pulled off so much in so little time.

Moses was a kind of genius, slipping a clause into the Triborough Authority's charter granting him authority over all roads leading to the bridge -- which, technically, meant any road that could be traced to it even from multiple miles away, i.e., all roads in New York.

It is hard to imagine that anyone could have done so much after Moses's downfall in the 60s, when Washington was famously telling New York to drop dead.

Might have been better to stop the cash flow before they killed the city.

MORE:
Robert Moses and 'The Great Gatsby' (FRANCIS MORRONE, February 2, 2007, NY Sun)

In 1992, in an early number of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, Roger Starr wrote an essay called "The Valley of Ashes: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Robert Moses." At first, it seemed like an odd pairing of names. It was anything but.

"The Valley of Ashes" will resonate with readers of "The Great Gatsby." Fitzgerald, in his 1925 novel, described

a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

To get from Manhattan to East Egg and West Egg, the train passed through this valley. Many readers may presume that Fitzgerald's biblical image of the ashen valley was as fictitious as his resort towns on the Long Island Sound. In fact, the Valley of Ashes was quite real. It was on the site of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 2, 2007 12:00 AM