Robert Moses and urban planning in twentieth century America

Robert Moses Demonic Angel

Robert Moses has been called many things from "master builder" to "racist," and just about everything in between. Moses' building projects literally transformed the New York City into a modern city. Beginning with the parks system, he built parks, pools, bathhouses, beaches, and parkways, before moving on to roads, bridges, tunnels, and eventually highways. Prior to Moses, New York was a city built of small streets, isolated neighborhoods, and filled with areas of tenements and slums. After Moses, New York was a modern city, with interconnected boroughs, nice parks and beaches, and a road and highway system that connected every neighborhood in New York with the outside world.

New York is a city that grew up somewhat organically. While laid out on a general grid pattern, there was no overall planning in the development of the city as a whole. In effect, each borough developed independently. The was also no overall system which connected the different areas of New York with the other areas, as well as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or any other number of nearby states. New York was also filled with large sections of crammed and overrun tenements and slums where the poor suffered. Small, dirty streets crisscrossed the city, but without any central planning, travel through the streets of New York was long, indirect, and sometimes very dangerous.

The automobile was the inspiration behind many of Moses' building projects. When Moses came to power, "congestion was slowly strangling the great metropolis…The city's street system, much of which had been planned and mapped more than a century earlier, could not handle all the traffic" (Ballon, 86) As the head of New York's parks system, he began his development of the road system by building parkways; but with an increase in federal funds from the Roosevelt New Deal programs, he quickly began to build roads, bridges, and tunnels, to connect the boroughs. It was federal funding which enabled Moses to begin his transformation of the city. However, by putting up toll booths on many of the bridges, Moses was able to finance greater development, even when the federal programs stopped. Many of Moses' greatest advancements, like some of the cross-town highways, came after the end of federal funding.

By the 1950's, Moses had created a modern city, fully equipped for the automobile. It is at this point that Moses began increase the connectivity of New York's road and highway system with the interstate system that was created at that time. Throughout the 1950's and 60's, Moses continued to work on roads and highways, transforming New York into a modern city with fully integrated boroughs, and by a highway system that could take a New Yorker anywhere in the country.

What eventually led to Robert Moses' downfall from power was his increasingly controversial project proposals. While Moses' projects remained on the fringes of the metropolitan area, he ran into only limited opposition. But as his proposals moved increasingly toward the center of the city, he ran into greater opposition. His programs would "displace more people, were more likely to disrupt established neighborhoods and communities, and generally had the potential to do more damage to existing property and the surrounding urban fabric." (Ballon, 92)

Another cause of his fall from power came because of the public's reaction to the ever increasing flow of traffic and congestion. By the late 1960's, the American public no longer supported highway development for the sake of development, they did not want any further building of large highway projects.