The Northwestern University Transportation Library is proud to debut a new exhibit: Concrete Plans: Reports and Planning Studies from the Projects of Robert Moses, now on display in our fifth floor lobby in University Library.
2024 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Power Broker: The Rise and Fall of New York, Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Robert Moses.
During his four decades in office, Moses positioned himself in a place of nearly unchecked power, reshaping the City of New York as the head of several influential governmental agencies all at once – perhaps most dramatically through transportation projects as the Chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. More than works of infrastructure, these projects drove housing, land use, and development patterns, shaping the region’s uneven growth and decline, and disproportionately impacting the communities along those corridors. That impact, particularly on those without political power, is as central a theme in Caro’s text as are the construction projects Moses spearheaded.
This exhibit features items from the Transportation Library, displayed alongside excerpts from The Power Broker. Some reports on display are directly referenced in Caro’s text, while others are selected to illustrate key moments or themes from the book. Items in the exhibit highlight the library’s strength in grey literature: government reports, planning studies, engineering documents, and other literature published outside traditional commercial publishing channels.
Excerpts from The Power Broker appear in purple in this blog post, and include the corresponding chapter number and title from which they were taken.
This post links to catalog records for all included items. Links to digitized reports in HathiTrust are also provided when available.
“Composing the introduction to a brochure – expensively bound, wide-margined, printed in full color on paper of a weight and sheen suitable for an invitation to a royal wedding – that he issued in 1941 to mark the fifth anniversary of the Opening of the Triborough Bridge, [Moses] wrote, ‘I would say that it has long been a cherished ambition of mine to weave together the loose strands and frayed edges of New York’s metropolitan arterial tapestry. We have never lacked plans, sound and unsound, practical and fantastic. What we have lacked has been unified execution. … The expedient was adopted here of having one person hold at the same time several city and state and authority positions, so that he could act as a sort of coordinator and liaison officer between and among the various agencies responsible for parts of the work. This lot has fallen upon me.’””
Chapter 28, “The Warp on the Loom”
The Transportation Library’s copy of this brochure is displayed in the exhibit, alongside reproductions of interior pages. Through text and full-color photos, it highlights the Triborough Bridge, Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, Henry Hudson Bridge and West Side Improvement, Marine Parkway, Jamaica Bay, and Jacob Riis Park, Cross Bay Bridge and Rockaway Improvement – a remarkable record of building in just five years, with a permanent and transformative impact on the city’s landscape.
In 
the background behind Moses marched a mighty division: the giant automobile manufacturers out of Detroit, the giant aluminum combines, the steel producers, the rubber producers, fifty oil companies, trucking firms in the hundreds, highway contractors in the thousands, consulting engineers, labor union leaders, auto dealers, tire dealers, petroleum dealers, rank upon rank of state highway department officials, Bureau of Public Roads bureaucrats, congressmen, senators – all the selfish interests whom author Helen Leavitt was to label ‘The Highwaymen.’ That coalition was always behind him; it was no accident that he was the recipient in 1953 of a $25,000 reward from the General Motors Corporation for the best essay in a nationwide contest on “How to Plan and Pay for Better Highways…”
Chapter 40, “Point of No Return”
General Motors President Harlow H. Curtice presents Moses with the $25,000 award in this photograph, which is printed at the front of How to Plan and Pay for Better Highways. Moses’ 26-page essay is reproduced within.
View a digitized copy of this report in HathiTrust.
See our catalog record here.
“In February, 1954, the Port Authority agreed to work with Triborough on a “Joint Study of Arterial Facilities,” and on January 16, 1955, the results – sixty-two pages long, hard-bound, four-color, glossy paper, summed up by Moses, who wrote its introduction and whose name, not by coincidence, was listed first among its sponsors – were released to the press.
Chapter 40, “Point of No Return”
The library’s copy of Joint Study of Arterial Facilities is on display in the exhibit. Proposals for future construction included projects that were later built – including the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, completed in 1959, the Throgs Neck Bridge, completed in 1957, as well as projects that would remain unbuilt, including two elevated expressways for Manhattan: the Midtown Expressway and Lower Manhattan Expressway.
“The construction of the [Triborough Bridge], the most gigantic and modern traffic-sorting and conveying machine in the world, had not only failed to cure the traffic problem it was supposed to solve – but had actually made it worse. Moses was convinced he knew the solution to the problem: build another bridge.”
Chapter 25, “Changing”
Moses built highways with the promise that, as he titled an essay in Freedom of the American Road, a Ford Motor Company-produced publication, “We Can Lick Congestion.”
The phenomenon that New Yorkers were experiencing would come to be known as induced demand: the phenomenon in which increasing the supply of something leads to an increase in its usage. In this case, the construction of bridges and highways – intended to ease congestion – encouraged more drivers to take to the roads, driving up use of roadways and increasing the amount of congestion that existed before construction.
Federal agencies that conduct work that could have a significant impact on the environment are required to produce environmental impact statements (EISs). These federal documents are 360 degree views of a project, looking at the proposed work as well as alternatives, and evaluating the project’s impact – in the case of a highway project, this would include, among other things, an accounting for projected costs, projections for how the project would impact air pollution, noise pollution, employment, and displacement of residents and businesses. Draft and Final versions are required for each EIS; following the publication of the Draft, public comment is solicited – and comments are printed and addressed in the Final EIS.
EISs were mandated in the National Environmental Policy Act, the first major federal environmental legislation in the United States. Signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1970, it postdated Moses’ influence – but one wonders how the outcome of his projects might have differed if this analysis and public review were required.
The Transportation Library holds more than 30,000 EISs, dating back to 1970. The EIS for the West Side Highway Project, dating from 1974, illustrates a proposal to modify the existing, partially collapsed elevated highway built between 1930 and 1951, largely under Moses.
View a digitized copy of this report in HathiTrust.
See our catalog record here.
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