As Caro explained, his 1,162-page book – which won the Pulitzer Prize and quickly became a modern classic – was not as much about the massive urban projects that Moses “got done,” but about the power he amassed to get them done. As a young Newsday reporter covering local politics, Caro encountered the Moses name on the roads he drove on, the beach he went to, the tennis court he played on: in other words, everywhere. He wondered who Moses was and how he came to do what he did.
In fact, Moses was city parks commissioner and held literally a dozen other titles between 1930 and 1960 that sound far more prosaic than were the eventual uses to which he put them.
“If I could find out where he got his power, how he used it and how he shaped the New York I knew, I would be showing the reality of power, the essence of urban power in the 20th century,” Caro told those assembled on Feb. 11 to hear the writer most responsible for creating the largely critical conception of Moses that the three-part exhibit (also at Columbia University and the Queens Museum of Art) is now re-examining.
As Caro documented so exhaustively, the essence of urban power is about the process through which power is exercised. The process moves either from the top down, which is to say from City Hall out, or bottom up, when actual people affected by built projects participate from the beginning of the process that shapes those projects.
Process is the key word more than power or project, but the three exhibits’ emphasis is on projects. Considering the present, another symposium held by the museum was quite enlightening. On Feb. 1, Dan Doctoroff, deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding, and Majora Carter, executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, among others, discussed process – and by implication, power – in New York City's development decisions of today.
Doctoroff went to great lengths to distance himself from the famous Moses recipe for making omelettes by breaking eggs. “I believe we have found a new model for getting things done,” he said. “I don’t believe you have to break eggs.”
The question should not be whether his model is a Moses model. As powerful as Doctoroff clearly is, he is not Robert Moses and no one ever will be again. But the “new model” he described is still very top-down. Moses exhibited one form of top-down, but there are many variations.
In fact, this “new model” of the process started even before Mayor Bloomberg's election in 2001. “We brought into office a fully formed agenda around the Olympics,” Doctoroff said. The process he described involved bringing in “developers, architects, engineers, and planners who worked together” on the “development of underutilized areas of the city along two mass transit lines.” Now, he says, “every area covered in that plan is undergoing a renaissance.” Doctoroff didn’t specify which neighborhoods he was referring to, but the plan for the Olympics covered various areas in all five boroughs.
Doctoroff’s definitions of "underutilized" and "renaissance" are in conflict with the view of many of the affected stakeholders in those neighborhoods who watch viable areas either become classified erroneously as blighted or, at the opposite extreme, watch residents and businesses pushed or priced out as new projects emerge. (How the buildings on the Atlantic Yards site can be classified as “blighted” when investors are paying $600,000 for a condominium across the street has not been explained.) These local people are not necessarily averse to change, but they are averse to alien change that transforms their communities rather than strengthening them.
