Moses, Robert

1888 – He was born this year in New Haven, Connecticut.

1920 – He sparred with Franklin D. Roosevelt, then head of the Taconic State Park Commission, who favored the prompt construction of a parkway through the Hudson Valley.

1927 – He was President of the Long Island State Park Commission and Secretary of State of New York, as well as chairman of the New York State Power Commission, responsible for building hydro-electric dams in the Niagara/St. Lawrence region.

1930 – He was arguably the most powerful person in New York City government. And was responsible for the construction of the Throgs Neck, the Bronx-Whitestone, the Henry Hudson, and the Verrazano Narrows bridges.

1938 – His first steps after Impellitteri to kill a citywide comprehensive Zoning plan, underway.

1939 – His projects were considered by many to be necessary for the region’s development, and Moses participated in the construction of two huge World’s Fairs.

1946 – He also became the official representative of New York City in Washington, D.C.

1959 – He had built 28,000 apartment units on hundreds of acres. Ironically, in clearing the land for high-rises, he often destroyed almost as many housing units as he built.

1960 – His reputation began to wane in the 1960s, as the public debate on city-planning policy began once again to appreciate the virtues of intimate neighborhoods and smallness of scale.

1964 – With his association with New York World’s Fair, his power was sapped.

1968 – He was forced to give up his post as chairperson of the TBTA. He eventually became a consultant to the MTA, but for all practical purposes was now out of power.

1974 – His image suffered a further blow in 1974 with the publication of The Power Broker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Robert A. Caro. Caro’s 1,200-page opus (edited from over 3,000 pages long) largely destroyed the remainder of Moses’s reputation.

1981 – He died because of heart disease on 29th day of July this year, at the age of 92 in West Islip, New York.