In the footsteps of Robert Moses – Aresluna
In the footsteps of Robert Moses
“I anthropomorphize for living,” I sometimes say to strangers, with what I hope is the right amount of self-conscious humor. But there’s a grain of truth in every joke. Sometimes I suspect that even though I’m a designer and swear by my intentions to focus on people, my motives are not so clear. That my true allegiance sometimes runs retrograde, and in some of the many skirmishes between People and Machines I am secretly supporting the other side. I take photographs of old computers, joke about vacations in Detroit, give tours at the Computer History Museum, speak about technology pioneers, and annoy people with my stories about the rise and fall and rise of The High Line because I simply love technology. Everything else – my job title, my human-computer interaction degree, my everyday rants about badly kerned captions and awful smartphone interfaces – may be just an elaborate cover-up.
This is what was on my mind one chilly morning at the bank of Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. I was standing close to the massive Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, admiring its gargantuan anchorages made out of 10 million cubic feet of concrete, its 700-foot towers shrouded in fog, and its curved decks shielding hundreds of thousands of vehicles a day from the frigid waters of the Narrows below.
To me, it wasn’t just a bridge. In the months before, I’d read about its beginnings, its history, its construction, and the people – the person – behind it.
Now I was there, watching the endless stream of cars headed towards and from Brooklyn in what to an outside observer would look exactly like awe. And maybe it was. It seems ridiculous to say something like this about an inanimate object, but I was glad, finally, to have met the bridge.
Damn. That didn’t take very long. This was the first stop of my little two-day road trip, and already I had joined the other side.
I will forever blame Amazon for never telling me about the book. Sure, the algorithm may have been corrupted by that one time a few years ago when my №1 recommended item was Girls Gone Wild on Blu-Ray – apparently just because I bought a few summer blockbusters in that format. That was not its crowning predictive moment. But this omission grated much more. After all, I had bought many other volumes about urban designers, New York history, city studies, people like Jane Jacobs fighting for cities to be more humane. And this was a book that’s been around for almost 40 years. A book that won a Pulitzer Prize. A book that felt like it was written for me.
But instead, I heard about it only earlier this year, on a random technology podcast. I ordered it straight away. At 1,200-plus pages it was a big commitment, but I was committed. I took that brick of a book – it was heavier than my laptop – all the way to Europe, angering TSA agents, turning pages in a cramped 737 as everyone else slept, eventually finishing it in a hotel room in the middle of the night, no matter the time, no matter the jet lag.
The book is called The Power Broker. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read, and the first one that inspired a road trip. It’s a book about a guy named Robert Moses.
Cross-Bronx<br>Expy
Bruckner<br>Expy
Randall’s<br>Island
Throgs<br>Neck<br>Bridge
Flushing<br>Meadows<br>Corona Park
Atlantic Ave
Northern<br>State Pkwy
Southern<br>State Pkwy
Ocean Pkwy
Heckscher<br>State Park
Robert<br>Moses<br>Cswy
Wantagh<br>State<br>Pkwy
Meadowbrook<br>State Pkwy
Robert Moses<br>State Park
Jones Beach<br>State Park
Verrazano–<br>Narrows<br>Bridge
Brooklyn–<br>Battery<br>Tunnel
Long Island<br>Expy
Sunken Meadow<br>State Park
Belt Pkwy
Gowanus<br>Expy
A map of my road trip
After the bridge, I headed east to Long Island via Belt Parkway (originally to be named Circumferential Parkway, until someone noticed that name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue) hugging Jamaica Bay, then took the scenic Southern State Parkway, winding through the island, eventually turning south towards the Wantagh State Parkway, and terminating at Jones Beach State Park.
Eighty years earlier, this park’s opening was Moses’ spectacular achievement and, at the onset of his career, it provided him with enough of the public’s goodwill to last until almost the end of his life.
It seemed deserved at the time. Robert Moses fought with the island’s robber barons who were controlling huge swaths of land and were unwilling to give any of it up. He was creative in his interpretation (and later, shaping) of various laws that allowed him to conceive of and build his impressive public works. He worked harder than anyone, and some of his methods from so many decades ago inspire even today. Among my favorite quotes from The Power Broker:
A third feature of Moses’ office was his desk. It wasn’t a desk but rather a large table. The reason was simple: Moses did not like to let problems pile up. If there was one on his desk, he wanted it disposed of immediately. Similarly, when he arrived at his desk in the...