Ben Weinstein’s Reviews > The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York > Status Update

'Tavern in the Town' chapter is up there for most enjoyable.

1000: 'When Brown argued that the restaurant was open to anyone, one of the justices said: "You mean anyone who can afford it. I'm not complaining about my salary, but I can't afford $5.85 steaks"—"MORE THAN I PAY," SAYS JUDGE.'

Title I slum clearance is going to be Moses's downfall; nearby Manhattantown/Park West apartments lead to 'rumors and reports of rumors'

praying on Moses's downfall; need to read some Lewis Mumford; Long Island doomed forever

Moses, ominously: There seems to have been a good deal of sentiment in Nassau in favor of attracting more industry and business into the county. Let me warn you against too much enthusiasm for commercializing what nature has given you. Nassau should always be largely residential and recreational... Figure out what sort of people you want to attract into Nassau County...

Been a while since I read One Mile and One Mile (Afterward) but they were as advertised. I liked how Caro wrote from the fog of war perspective of the E Tremonters. The rest of the book is so detailed on Moses's perspective and trying to reconstruct how he thought, but one of the emphases here is how inscrutable his reasoning was to the people most impacted by it

Imperial RM dining experience. "Finally, RM himself would appear—at the head of a procession of eight or ten aides, for if emperors had courts, so, of course, did he. (If by chance he was called out of the room to take a telephone call, when he returned his aides would jump to their feet, and would not sit down until he sat down.)"

Poor Impy.

Ch 33 is one of the densest, lots of stuff on loans and lists of people and industries and organizations Moses charmed or cut deals with or bullied into compliance, especially in the return of Democratic machine politics after LaGuardia. He is, at the end of the chapter, "the supreme power broker."

'He had taken measures to minimize the threat to his purposes posed by key officials who were not Moses Men: ...their secretaries were on Moses' payroll as well as the state's, and in transcribing confidential memoranda and minutes of secret meetings devoted to blocking a Moses project or to curbing Moses' power, these secretaries made an extra carbon, which was delivered nightly to Moses' representatives in Albany.'

Ch 29/the Battle for the Battery Crossing is Caro at his best. Such a great combination of stirring (or enraging) scenes in detail (the patriotic history of the Battery, Moses's City Hall performance), and then descriptions of larger processes in motion around them. And such dread that only the president could defeat Moses—and only due to the particulars of this case. The bridge would have been truly awful.