Kenneth T. Jackson - Robert Moses, Hero of New York?

Jackson argues that without Moses’ bridges, expressways, parks, housing, and civic complexes, New York likely would have hollowed out like many Midwestern and Northeastern cities, instead of remaining a premier global capital.

While praising *The Power Broker* as an extraordinary achievement, Jackson says its details on topics such as the Cross‑Bronx Expressway, public transit decline, and low bridge clearances are often wrong or overstated, in part because Caro focused almost exclusively on Moses’ own papers and ignored national patterns.

He routinely delivered huge works—Whitestone Bridge, Jones Beach, the Triborough network—on time and under budget, using overlapping authorities, bond finance, and sheer will, in a dense, litigious city where similar projects now stall or bloat in cost.

Moses worked for a token salary across multiple posts, died with less money than he started with, and used bond‑funding tricks mainly to keep building—not to siphon wealth—distinguishing his ‘corruption’ from more typical graft‑driven machines.

Moses prioritized highways and suburbanization, dismissed old neighborhoods as slums, and rejected rail add‑ons to roads—but Jackson notes that New York still ended up as the nation’s strongest transit city, with far higher relative transit use than anywhere else.