The Psychopath Who Wrecked New York
19th March 2022
Robert Moses was the man, they say, who built New York. He was never elected to anything, yet he had absolute control of all public works in the city for more than forty years, until 1968. His record was mind-bending. He personally conceived and directed the building of 627 miles of New York parkways and expressways, seven of New York’s bridges, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the entire Long Island highway system; he built the Lincoln Center arts complex, the United Nations, Jones Beach Park, JFK airport, Central Park zoo and the Shea Stadium; he built 658 playgrounds, eleven swimming pools, 673 baseball pitches and cleared thousands of acres of slums; he put up tower blocks for hundreds of thousands of families; he created vast acres of state parks and the Moses-Saunders Power Dam on the St Lawrence, one of the world’s engineering wonders.