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Frost and Caro Photography
Frost and Caro Photography sells photographs from Italy, France,
ancient Israel and exciting Buenos Aires, Argentina. All photos are printed on Fuji archival
paper, mounted on foam core board and each one is hand signed.
Frostandcaro.net ~
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Robert A. Caro's Robert Moses
I had first been drawn to Robert Moses out of curiosity, in a very idle, fleeting form. As a new reporter at Newsday during the early nineteen-sixties, I would, as the occupant of an extremely low rung on the city-room totem pole, occasionally be assigned to write a short article based on one of the press releases that poured in a steady stream from one or another of the twelve governmental entities he headed, and as I typed “New York City Park Commissioner Robert Moses announced today . . .” I would wonder for a moment what that title had to do with the fact that he was also building something that was not a park, and was mostly not even in the city—the Long Island Expressway. I would type “Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority Chairman Robert Moses” and it would cross my mind that he was also chairman of some other public authority—actually the New York State Power Authority—that was building gigantic hydroelectric power dams, some of the most colossal public works ever built by man, hundreds of miles north of the city, along some place with the romantic name of the “Niagara Frontier.” It gradually sunk in on me that in one article or another I was identifying him as chairman or “sole member” of quite a few authorities: the Bethpage State Park Authority, the Jones Beach State Park Authority, the Henry Hudson Parkway Authority, the Marine Parkway Authority, the Hayden Planetarium Authority—the list seemed to go on indefinitely. And as, within a few months of my coming to Newsday, my interest began to narrow to politics, I began to wonder what a public authority was, anyway. They were always being written about simply as non-political entities that were formed merely to sell bonds to finance the construction of some public work—a bridge or a tunnel, usually—to collect tolls on the work until the bonds were paid off, and then to go out of existence, and, in fact, a key element of the image of Robert Moses that had for forty years been created and burnished by him and by an adoring press was that he was the very antithesis of the politician, a public servant uncompromisingly above politics who never allowed political considerations to influence any aspect of his projects. After all, the reasoning went, he built most of his projects through public authorities, which were also outside politics. No journalist or historian seemed to see authorities as sources of political power in and of themselves. I remember looking up every article on public authorities that had been written in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals for some years past; there was not one that analyzed in any substantial way the potential in a public authority for political power. Yet, in some vague way, they certainly seemed to have some. Moreover, Robert Moses held still other posts—city posts, such as New York City Construction Coördinator, and chairman of the city’s Slum Clearance Committee; and state posts, such as chairman of the State Council of Parks, and chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission. I began to feel that I was starting to glimpse, through the mists of public myth and my own ignorance, the dim outlines of something that I didn’t understand and couldn’t see clearly, but that might be, in terms of political power, quite substantial indeed.
Robertmosesnyc.com ~
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