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This is the 99 % Invincible Breakdown of the Power Broker.
I'm Roman Mars. And I'm Elliot Kalem.
So, today we're continuing part seven, the loss of power, chapters 42 through 46.
That's pages 984 through 1081.
And later in this episode, our special guest is Brennan Lee Mulligan.
Brennan is a comedian and host with Dropout TV, where he's the creator of Dimension 20.
It's a show that features incredibly complex and fun and dynamic Dungeons & Dragons campaigns with improv actors and special effects.
And as the dungeon master, Brennan leads these stories.
And I know that might sound completely unrelated to the Power Broker, but one season of Dimension 20 features a villain that all of you listening would be very familiar with in a very different context.
To my understanding, Mr.
Moses is a powerful form of undead.
Robert Moses is a powerful historical figure.
He never elected. It was part of a lot of government boards, had a lot to do with the building and infrastructure of New York, specifically a lot with the building of roads and highways.
Mm -hmm. Causing interference in the magical world.
So last time on the 99 % visible breakdown of the Power Broker, Robert Cara went into incredible detail about how Robert Moses refused to include mass transit as part of his transportation plans, and it doomed New York to a future choked with cars and traffic and really explicit detail about how awful
different railroads were.
It was very vivid. But we also saw how an assortment of activists were starting to recognize the serious issues with how Moses was running his slum clearance programs in the public housing construction projects.
So that was a little bit of a glimmer.
There were rumors, rumors of rumors.
And so on this episode, we'll be covering chapters 42 to 46.
That's pages 984 to 1081.
And this is a delightful collection of chapters.
Eliot. These are, especially after the last chapters, which were so gloomy and doomy, this is going to be a nice, yeah, this is a nice change of pace because Robert Moses is on the dissension rather than the ascension.
And it's going to happen in ways that are not entirely satisfying in terms of the scale and scope of the crimes he's being hoisted on.
The petard he's being hoisted on is not the petard we hoped it would be.
But there's something fun about that, and Robert Caro is clearly having fun writing about it.
And that really comes through.
And by the end of today's episode, Moses will have been hoisted by his own petard.
There's no other way to put it.
There's no other way to put it.
Yeah, it's a petard hoisting.
It's a classic petard hoisting.
And as you were saying, we're going to pass the thousand -page mark in this episode, which is very exciting.
That's a lot of pages, and we'll have to take a moment to pop some champagne, really reminisce about the pages that brought us here.
But it's going to be exciting.
It's going to be exciting.
So we start here with chapter 42, Tavern in the Town, which chronicles probably one of the lesser crimes of Robert Moses, but still makes a good story.
So how does it begin?
It makes a great story.
And it's also—I'll just say this, before I even start, Roman, this will be an annoying, unnecessary little tangent.
42, as anyone who's read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series knows, is the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything.
And in this chapter, we get finally the answer to what will it take to really break away the reputation Moses has as the great guy, the parksman, the man who can get things done for the people.
It's in this chapter that what he does seems so incredibly trivial, and yet reverberates through so much.
So it begins talking about how this is going to be, the Battle of Central Park.
Carol reminds everybody how, in 1934, Robert Moses, he refurbished and renovated Central Park.
He replaced the Sheep Meadow, which previously had been full of inbred mutant sheep that had been there for generations.
He replaces the Sheep Meadow near Central Park West in 67th Street with a restaurant, Tavern on the Green.
Regular listeners will know that's where my dad proposed to my mom before they got married.
Ghostbusters fans will know it as the restaurant where Rick Moranis is finally overtaken by the terror dog.
And I guess Eaton, you know, in plain view of the diners at the restaurant.
And he cut a road extension into the park and a parking circle into the park that serves the restaurant.
And what's funny to me here is that Carol is using the sheep as a symbol of the pastoral world that was shunted aside for the restaurant and its parking circle.
When, back when Carol was talking about those sheep, previously they were monsters.
They were just, like, they were implied as disgusting, something you needed to get rid of.
But now Carol is kind of having it both ways, and he's like, what was once a bucolic sheep meadow?
It's like, oh, all right, there's different ways to look at sheep, I guess.
So the year is 1956.
Let's place ourselves in time.
We are now in 1956.
And local families have come to depend on this little tree -shaded glen between 67th and 68th streets in the park as a place for their kids to play.
They're using it the way parks have been intended by Moses to be used as community spaces for people to play in them.
And the local mothers, they find the space especially precious.
It's somewhere very close to their apartments.
Their kids who live in apartments and have no outdoor space of their own.
And these are middle -class, upper -middle -class kids.
These are kids who have resources.
These are not slum kids, but they still don't have outdoor space of their own.
They don't have yards.
So this is a place they can run around, the moms can talk.
It is a very important little place in their lives, a place that carries a lot of meaning and emotion for them until one day on April 9, 1956.
What happens on that day, Roman?
Well, one of the moms, Roselle Davis, she sees these surveyors with blueprints looking over her bucolic glen.
And when they break for lunch, they accidentally leave the blueprints behind.
And she reads on the title, detailed map of parking lot.
And this is the plans to replace the glen with a parking lot to serve tavern on the green, which is just like a movie scene.
It's incredible. Literally, that it's like a parking lot here because they found these papers.
And this is the kind of thing that if you saw it in a movie, you'd be like, Come on.
It happens in real life all the time.
I forget what Civil War battle it was where they literally found the Confederate plans wrapped around a cigar and they're like, Oh, OK, now we know what's going to happen.
You know, and this is something that it's not necessarily important, but the last few chapters in the last episode felt very much like data, data, data, like I'm giving you hard information about this urban transportation issue.
And here it feels like Caro has shifted much more into reporter storyteller mode.
He is telling a story.
And this section is very dramatic, cinematic in a very fun way.
But that also sort of describes why this fight, unlike other fights that involve a lot of data or a lot of like real problems that Moses has caused, don't gain traction.
Whereas this one with this nice story of these nice moms and their upper middle class life really does take hold in newspapers, which is really the big deal with this one.
Yes, it shows you the importance of a story as we'll see, like the importance of a narrative that it is hard to convince people with a lot of numbers, but it is much easier to convince people when you've got moms and kids versus bulldozers, as we'll see.
And so, Davis, she tells another mom, Augusta Newman, and Augusta Newman is the wife of Arnold Newman, who's a well -known photographer.
And I think this is one of the differences we had kind of talked about in previous episodes between what happens here, what happened earlier is these are people who have access to media.
These are people who have access to professional assistance or our professionals themselves in a way that the people of East Tremont, the people of Harlem, just do not have access to.
And so they write up a petition and they try to get it signed by many of the well -known artists and writers who live on the block.
Like a name that comes up a lot is the novelist, Fanny Hirst, who I've not read any of her work, but I've heard the name before.
Carol mentions playwright and screenwriter Samson Raffleson, and he refers to him as Samuel Raffleson for some reason.
But I don't, unless I'm getting the names mixed up, I don't know there is a Samuel Raffleson, but Samson Raffleson is a well known, you know, is a classic playwright screenwriter.
So this might be the third error I've ever found in the thousands of pages of Carol's work.
And one of the other errors is just him getting the name of a movie slightly wrong in one of the Lyndon Johnson books.
So I'm not that mad about it.
But this is like Ludwig Bemelmann, the author of Madeline, lives here, like Pearl Lang, the dancer.
Mae Murray, this former silent movie star lives there.
And there are these other names that I'm sure were more well known when the book came out, but would have to be researched by modern readers.
But in the end, they have this petition with just 23 names on it.
You know, we've seen petitions for thousands of names get knocked aside.
And the Park Department, they're like, yeah, 23 name petition.
I'm ignoring this. I don't we don't want to deal with this.
And the newly installed deputy mayor tries to arrange a meeting and is told off by one of Moses's secretaries over the phone.
But here's the difference.
One of the moms, she signs it.
She is not just a person with access to the newspapers.
She is a person who is married to a Herald Tribune reporter.
So Roman this time is personal.
That's right. But it's it's so funny to me how it starts with Moses being completely disdainful, because he you know, he has been so used to this for so long.
You know, 23 moms versus like the thousands and thousands when it came to the one mile section, we have the 5000 moms of Manhattan town, 4000 moms of Lincoln Center.
Nobody cares. Presto loves them.
Everything is just going his way at this point.
But just the amount of time and really it's the constituency of the people who are upset that really, really changes things.
Yes, but he's so complacent about it.
And there is a cara sums it up that he's refusing to meet with them.
He sends them a letter that says like, let's talk about it.
But his plan is he'll just start tearing up the Glen before they talk about it.
It's just what he does.
And he sends them a letter and Karl writes his letter would not placate the mothers, of course, but that would no longer matter.
By the time they read his explanation of why it was necessary to destroy the Glen they were fighting for, they would no longer be any point in fighting for it.
It wouldn't be there.
This protest would be disposed of as he had been disposing of protests for 30 years.
And then there's a space in the page and then he writes, but this protest was different.
And why is it different for these reasons?
These protesters are educated, they are financially secure, they are well connected to the media.
There are lawyers in these families.
They can afford to raise the money to fight this legally or they can do the work themselves.
You know, they this is not these are not people who are lower class people who live in a neighborhood that even though it's clean and nice and people love it does not have the resources.
And this is also different because it's so clear cut.
Carol makes the point.
You can have competing ideas about whether a road is more important in this space or a neighborhood, whether housing is more important in the space or a neighborhood, what the needs of a city are.
But this is children's play space versus a parking lot for a restaurant, which is so this is the closest the book gets to the plot of Break into Electric Boogaloo where it's literally a community center for needy kids versus a shopping mall.
Like it's there's no it's so it's so clear cut and Moses role is so clear cut in this in the housing fights that he does, he can hide behind the private developers who are technically responsible for the on the ground stuff, even though he's calling a lot of shots.
This is a park issue.
Yeah, it's in Central Park and everyone knows Moses is the park's man.
And not only that, this is Central Park, which is a special park.
It is literally, as everyone says, the lungs of the city.
And I think it is hard to argue that the single greatest decision of the planners of New York City, it's hard to argue that there was a greater decision than the one to leave this space open than to not grid it out and make it into just streets to leave this enormous space because Central Park is huge.
It's a huge park. It's not the biggest park in New York City.
I think that's Pelham Bay Park, but nobody nobody goes up there.
I mean, people do, but it's not the same.
Central Park is right this right in the middle of the action and it is really a sacred space.
And I remember months ago, we talked about what a big deal it was when Moses refurbished the park in the 1930s.
That was one of the things that made him such a heroic figure for the city is that he turned Central Park into this beautiful place again, that people could take a break from living in this crammed in city.
And it's a part that people spend a lot of time in.
He can't do something there and hide it and keep it secret the way he could when he rammed the Major Deagon through the Van Cortland Park marshes.
You know, people see Central Park.
It's in the middle of Manhattan.
It's very open. And so it's a very public place for him to pick a fight and especially to pick a fight with moms.
Yeah. Yeah. But he he does and he starts doing the things that he normally does, which is, you know, before anyone can sort of like realize it, he sends his bulldozers to rip it up and, you know, to to make it so that when that it's a fait accompli and they can protest all they want to.
But they actually caught on to this.
They see the bulldozers coming.
One of the Central Park West residents, Eleanor Sanger, looks at her bathroom window.
She sees bulldozers ripping up trees and it's such a it's such a cinematic.
Yeah, she's just going in the morning to like brush her teeth or whatever.
And she looks at the window and sees bulldozers.
And it's I mean, it is, I mentioned, it's good already.
It's literally the opening of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is he looks outside and sees bulldozers going to knock his house down, you know, it's and so.
So she sees it. And what does she do?
She just calls her friends and they run down there, you know, like just basically like women and children and baby carriages and they stand in front of a bulldozer.
And that looks so fun to take photographs of to put in the newspaper and they know it.
They don't necessarily stand in front of the bulldozer because these are women with children in their hands, but they they make themselves visible to the bulldozer.
And the bulldozer driver stops his work.
And she is also called Stanley Isaacs.
We mentioned him before a longtime civic reformer and he helps to get the press there and the press shows up like you're saying this is moms and kids versus bulldozers.
And this is a good story for the media that you can take pictures of.
And when Lillian Edelstein was trying to save her part of East Fremont, she could barely get reporters to notice.
She would hold rallies with hundreds of people and reporters not there.
But now moms with baby carriages are having a face off with bulldozers in Central Park and reporters from all the newspapers and the TV stations and the radio stations rush in and soon the story is everywhere.
And something that Caro does not talk about too much here, I think maybe because he's such a newspaper guy is the difference that television properly made with this too.
That television just brings in immediacy to things that newspapers and radio don't necessarily sorry, Roman, I hate to say that about radio, but there's just something about television and maybe that's a difference, too.
But he doesn't quite get into that.
And the mothers, they set up a rotating guard from 7 a .m.
to dark every day to keep the bulldozers from starting up.
And the reporters, they love it.
It's got famous names.
It's got moms and kids.
It's got trees during what happens to be Arbor Day Week.
Not the best week to be knocking down trees in your park.
It's got a park in danger.
It's got bulldozers.
And this isn't just a local park issue in some neighborhood.
This is the Battle of Central Park.
That's how they frame it.
And moms versus Moses, which is another way they frame it.
You know, it's perfect.
The Battle of Central Park colon moms versus Moses.
Like, that's your movie title right there.
It's amazing. And even now, in the 21st century, what is the most potent thing in any political conversation?
What's the thing that gets brought up is what is this going to do to our kids?
What is it? You know, I'm a mom and I'm concerned about my kids.
It is the single most probably universal, like basic, fundamental relationship in human existence is probably mother and child.
Sorry, dads. I hate to break it to you.
Sorry, aunts and uncles and siblings.
And it doesn't mean you need a mother, you know, to be raised great.
But it goes back to the animal kingdom and evolution.
You know, that relationship between mothers and children.
And so to be able to tap into that, Robert Moses can bluster all he wants.
But it's like there's an unbreakable bond between between people and their mothers.
Yeah. And this is also one of those things where because he's the parks guy and it's Central Park and he's so it's a towering figure, you know, he can kind of stand behind like the engineers say this for this road that, you know, all sorts of stuff like this is the one that he's always held on to where every
decision is his. He gets credit for all of it.
And therefore he gets all of the blame for this one.
Yes. That's just totally different than the other stuff, which you can sort of like put these layers of like engineers say this, the city needs this, the different rules that are complicated, that he wrote the laws for and everything like this.
But this is just a choice.
It's very simple. It just makes good copy.
And he's just completely out of his league.
And he's saying the same things he said before, but it's not working.
Even the New York Times comes out against the parking lot, which is a big thing.
You know, they usually support him on things.
And Moses responds.
He's a census park workers and his parks executive Stewart Constable, aka the mustache.
And I'm not sure I don't remember if Caro attributes that nickname to anyone in particular or if he came up with it or if they called him.
But this is a character we'll see a lot of in the next chapter as well.
The mustache and they secretly install a fence in the middle of the night and send the bulldozers in.
Even the NYPD is not notified.
They find out in the middle of the night when someone reports to a police officer, hey, it looks like people are building things in the park.
Something's going on and they have to send police officers in to hold the moms back in the morning while trees are knocked down and being chopped into pieces.
And the media in the past has always applauded Moses's ways of getting things done.
They kind of winked at him for those kind of devious ways.
They talked about it was the like, oops, sorry, method of getting things done.
But now they turn on him.
They got pictures of mothers crying as trees are cut down.
They appear everywhere, though, unfortunately, they're not in this book.
Again, the photo section is the one part of this book that I feel like is such a letdown.
But they do show a photo in the book of a picture Caro describes of a little boy holding a toy rifle as a police officer stands guard at the fence.
And it's just there's all these photos come in, embarrassed police officers, anguish mothers, anti Moses letters the editor pour in and Moses not destroyed.
But for the first time, he's really tarnished.
And Carol writes Tuesday, April 24th, 1956, the day that Robert Moses sent his troops into Central Park was Robert Moses's Black Tuesday for on it.
He lost his most cherished asset.
His reputation. The Moses boom had lasted for 30 years.
Now it was over. And it's not like I mean before anyone thinks it's not like then Moses is like, all right, never mind.
Like he's still the trees come down like he tears those trees.
Yeah. And he's he's like during this period, he's also building some of the major highways and bridges of this time.
You know what I mean?
This is like this is not like a complete diminishment of his power, but right here, he really takes it on the chin.
Yes. And the mayor stands behind him because he has the power.
The mayor needs that power.
But something one thing kind of different happens before he can start laying down the concrete for this parking lot.
And so remember, back in 1934, he tore down the Central Park Casino and people were like, you shouldn't do that.
And the state court said he can do it every once.
He has total power over the parks.
Now, 22 years later, it's 1956 and the state Supreme Court, one of the justices actually grants an injunction halting work, pending a hearing.
And this is the kind of thing they didn't even do before grant these injunctions.
And Moses is like, I'm going to win this.
I can get it done my way.
He refuses to compromise.
And that's when Stanley Isaacs, that wily old reformer, he remembers one thing and discovers two things.
He remembers that, one, when Moses tore down the original casino to build the tavern, he said he made a big stink about how only restaurants with reasonable prices should be in a public park.
And by 1956, the tavern's prices are not reasonable.
They're charging $4 .50 for a hamburger and a beer.
And I mean, it sounds like an amazing deal.
But in 1956, it was not.
And Carroll quotes one news story.
He goes, dinner and tip for two came to $23.
There was another $5 at the bar for two drinks each.
It's not a place to go the day before payday.
And again, I'm like, like with the rents we were talking about in previous episodes, I'm salivating over those prices.
And it's just it is not this is not a restaurant the average person could just walk into.
And buy a hamburger.
And the second and more important thing Isaac discovers is the sweetheart deal that Moses gave to the restaurant's owner, Arnold Schleifer.
Schleifer is supposed to pay the city 5 % of his gross income, which is already ridiculously low rent for a fancy restaurant in a major city park in a fantastic location.
But even that percentage, he hasn't been paying because this contract allows him to deduct the cost of improvements to the restaurant from his taxes.
So Isaac finds that over a four year period, Schleifer made almost one point eight million dollars and he paid the city $9000 in taxes and Moses essentially making this guy rich at the city's expense.
And Carroll makes it clear the deal is not illegal.
Moses is not getting a kickback.
Although the quid pro quo is that Schleifer has to cater every banquet Moses likes.
And we talked in that earlier episode about how Schleifer catered that one banquet in a way that was just a little too fancy schmancy ethnic for Moses.
And he wrote that great memo about it.
But this flies in the face of another part of Moses reputation, this idea that the guy doesn't cater favoritism, that he doesn't do sweetheart deals.
He clearly is. And the press can make a lot of hay about this too.
They can oversimplify the story to make it sound more corrupt than it is.
But whereas in the past, the press's oversimplification has helped Moses now is starting to hurt him.
Yeah. Well, he's just like it's like an infection.
Like the mothers and the images of the cute kid with the air rifle and stuff like that, they sort of make a little cut.
And then all of a sudden this type of thing, which normally wouldn't cause him any problems whatsoever, there's just enough damage there to infect and sort of get him off of his normal gain when it comes to this stuff.
Yeah, it's just this chipping away, this little bit of chipping away at the reputation that holds him up.
And I just want to note, it's at this part of the story that we are on page 999 in the book.
We're about to do it, people.
About to tip over into quadruple digits in page numbers.
Not something you see in a lot of books.
So really love it. You know, only the people who loved the Shogun TV series so much that they're now reading that novel are going to feel this thrill this year of reaching a thousand pages.
But what's so what's funny about this still is that, you know, for decades, Moses has sort of lived this way and sort of bulldozed over people metaphorically and literally.
And he still doesn't quite get that he's on the losing side of this.
And so he takes off to Spain.
Yeah. He leaves on a 24 day vacation to Spain.
This is one of those things where I kind of wonder sometimes I trust Cara so much.
But he'll be like, Moses was unstoppable.
He always worked. Then he went on a vacation for two weeks in the Bahamas.
Like then he went on two weeks, 24 day vacation in Spain.
And I'm like, I don't work as as hard as Moses, and I don't take 24 day vacations in Spain.
You know, you were just in Spain, Roman, right?
You were not there for almost a month.
I was not there for almost a month, but I definitely could have been.
That place is such a great country.
It's wonderful. I really want to go back so badly.
I haven't been in years.
It's so good. But you're right.
He's so confident. He's like, I don't even need to be here.
Unfortunately, and this will be a problem in the next chapter, too.
Who does he leave in charge?
The mustache constable who is like Moses without the tact and and the strategizing and the grace and the wit constable just unnecessarily over stonewalling the press.
And that keeps the story alive and it makes the city angrier.
And Moses is not there to coordinate the responses of politicians, of park reps.
The media is pouncing on and sensationalizing every little comment that someone makes to keep the story going.
And the next round of judges in the court battle upholds the injunction.
And one of them comments how he's happy with his judge's salary.
But even even for him, a stake at the tavern is pretty pricey.
You know, he can't afford to eat there regularly.
And it starts getting safer to publicly criticize Moses.
This is a guy that people had to whisper about before if they wanted to criticize.
But now it's becoming easier and easier to do that.
And Moses returns the city after it was probably an amazing vacation in Spain.
It was harder to get news from overseas then.
So like I'm sure he was shielded from some of this.
And he tries to keep his cool, but he ends up blowing up in the press the way he always kind of used to when he was mad.
And he goes so far as to attack Fanny Hurst, this respected elderly novelist for making a stink about this this children's play area when she doesn't even have children.
How did how does she have a stake in this if she doesn't even have children?
Which reading this I was like, oh, my God, I didn't think this part was going to be as relevant as it is now.
It's it's really low.
Yeah, it's really the fact that it felt like it was ripped from today's headlines.
This idea of someone saying, well, if you don't have children, you don't have a stake in the in the country.
You know, you're somehow selfish.
Don't care about the future.
Yeah, it's it's it's bonkers.
Unlike in the past now, the media is also giving the people Moses attacks a chance to apply to his attacks.
And this attack on Fanny Hurst is really seen as too far.
You know, you know what, I just realized I kept saying next chapter about Constable in the Mustache, but it's actually a chapter after next chapter.
So my apologies later in the episode.
And Moses realizes that if this case keeps going through the court, then there's going to be a discovery of other statements he's made, other sweetheart deals he's made, he's going to have to testify about these things.
That would be bad. He can't be in court testifying about this stuff because then he's on the record.
He can't play games about it.
So he does what he almost never does.
He does something that is anathema to him.
Roman, what does he do in terms of building this parking lot?
What does he do? Yeah, well, he gives up.
I mean, yeah, I mean, it's kind of amazing.
Like, you know, he just yeah, he doesn't go through with it, which is amazing.
He just backs down.
He does it. He tries to do it as quietly as possible.
He has these delaying motions for the lawsuit.
And then when the media dies down a little, he kind of agrees to to give in so that it doesn't seem in his eyes as such a big loss and he agrees to build a playground in that spot where the parking lot would have been.
And now, Roman, I did a little on the ground investigating for this for this part of the episode.
You know, well, I was preparing for this episode.
We had our event at the New York Historical Society where we talked to Robert Caro on stage.
It was amazing. When people hear the audio from it, they will hear me noticeably run out of words.
I'm so emotional at the end of it.
Like I'm so I was when we were is an experience I'll carry with me in my heart for the rest of my life.
But beforehand, I decided to do a little Caro style investigating and I walked over to that part of the park because it's very close to the Historical Society and I want to be on the scene.
I said, what would Robert Caro do?
He would go and be in the space.
And I walked around those playgrounds that they're that they put in, which are still there, which are definitely not as nice as a grove of trees would be.
Like they're OK. They're OK playgrounds.
And I went down to Tavern on the Green and that parking circle is still there where cars can drop people off.
And when you look at it, it feels like someone came along and took a bite out of the park and just left pavement behind.
It really feels like the outside world of the city has invaded briefly and been pushed back, but has left an emptiness of void behind.
And so to imagine that parking lot in the area where those playgrounds are, it would have been a very noticeable chunk taken out of the park and its enormous park.
But walking around, you're like, yeah, this would have had an effect.
It would have had a real effect on the people who lived in that neighborhood.
And it's it feels like something would have been torn out of it.
And for what? For a parking lot?
For a restaurant that is like I looked at the prices on the menu and I was like, this is an overpriced restaurant, you know, like the prices have kept kept up with inflation, let's say, you know, it's still an expensive hamburger.
So no thanks. That's what I say to that parking lot.
Yeah, it's one of those things where he just he just kind of there was a plan.
He dug in. He maybe had some friendly conversations with the proprietor of the restaurant or something like that to make it all make sense at the time.
But like it, I mean, it's kind of amazing because this is not a thing to like not a great hill to die on for him, you know, like it doesn't make any sense.
It's such a small thing.
And what's notable is that at a certain point he perceived that as well, because that's that's the new sort of behavior with him.
So you just realize like I like there is no reason to take this much damage for this parking lot.
And it's chipped away at his his reputation in a number of ways.
And it's such a tiny hill for this to happen on.
But Moses, his hope was nobody's gonna notice that I gave in and lost this battle.
But it gets big media attention.
And and Kara talks about the effect of that.
He says the aura of infallibility was gone.
Also, he's talking about some other stuff that was gone.
But the aura of infallibility was gone.
Also, if Moses was the man who got things done, implicit was the assumption that the things that he got done were things that should be gotten done.
He had always been portrayed as a man who is right now in a single dramatic tableau.
He had been shown to be utterly unmistakably wrong.
This idea that he's not a guy who can always get things done.
He's not a guy who is incorruptible.
Look at the sweetheart deal.
And he's not infallible that he is not someone that you you don't dare go up against because you're always going to lose.
All these things have been removed from his reputation by this.
Again, kind of a trivial thing that like to give a parking lot to a restaurant, which if all the things he's done is not by far not the worst and not something you would even expect him to stick so on.
And you all kind of have to wonder, maybe if he hadn't gone on that vacation to Spain, he would have wriggled out of it in some more face saving way.
Right. Right. Right.
But what this does is it starts this, you know, cycle of of fights in which Robert Moses does not win.
And also where Robert Moses is the bad guy.
Yes. And what's really notable is that there begins to be like a group of newspaper reporters who were not alive or at least sentient during those time periods where Robert Moses would destroy a newspaper man's life pretty easily.
And so they start seeing that there's some stories here and they start acting.
And that's what the next chapter is about.
It's called late arrival.
We'll get to that after the break.
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This month is all about gratitude, so it's a good opportunity to thank all the people in your life.
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So this is chapter 43, late arrival, which is like a little rude.
I've been writing about this this whole time.
What about you guys?
But I think he's I think he is talking about I think he's not talking about the reporter's reporters as the editors.
He really is the powers that be that run these newspapers.
Finally, they start to see like that criticizing Moses and telling these stories that are very compelling to them, you know, to the news reading public is like, you know, it's worth it.
And it takes a lot of work to get them to that point.
And the work of a group of reporters that Carol really has a lot of fun writing about.
I think he feels a real kinship with these characters and real and admires them.
He starts the chapter with an incredibly prescient quote from Robert Moses, one of these quotes where it's like, it's so it's super ironic.
So he makes use of it a lot.
From 1933 and Robert Moses talking about another New York politician who was having his comeuppance and he says, The great statesman McKee is a synthetic character which never actually existed on sea or land, puffed up by the press...
And now in the process of deflation, there is a large amount of unfairness to the individual in this process.
But in the end, it arrives at the truth.
And it's like as if 25 or so years earlier, 23 years earlier, he's writing his own epitaph, you know, which is amazing.
It's very precious.
We just have it sometimes, you know, history rhymes or whatever.
So we're introduced to some characters here.
And one of them, one of the main ones here is this reporter for the World's Telegram and Sun, again, a newspaper that does not exist anymore.
And I always wonder if it's like did the Telegram newspaper and the Sun newspaper merge and then the World newspaper merged with that one?
A lot of these read like magnetic fridge poetry.
You know, there's like World Telegram, Herald Times, you know, and then and then they just throw them up and rearrange them over time.
So I love it. Yeah.
And so this reporter, Gene Gleason, he says to his editors, I want to investigate Robert Moses because I'm sure that there's other fishy stuff that the tavern on the green contract is not the only fishy thing about Robert Moses.
And normally his editors would say, no, but the Battle of Central Park has inspired them to say, like, OK, I'll allow it.
His editor says I'll allow it.
And Gleason wants to start investigating the power of public authorities.
But unfortunately, no ground work has been done on that story before because the records are inaccessible.
You can't get them.
There's nowhere to start.
But a little groundwork has already been done on the Manhattan Town Public Housing Project.
And so Gleason is like, OK, I think there's potential.
There's something for me to work off of.
And he starts working with one of the rewrite men at the newspaper.
And I apologize to call him a rewrite man, but they're all all the reporters.
Pretty much are men at this point.
The you know, not again, not for fair reasons, not because the men were just doing such a bang up job reporting.
And so he works with this rewriter, Fred Jay Cook.
And I think what's interesting here is I forget how a newspaper works in this way where there's often this delegation of abilities between the person who is out doing the investigative work and the person that you call it into at the office who does the the actual kind of writing of the article.
And they work together so well on this.
But it's a it's just a reminder to me of like, oh, he could have like Robert Carroll could have written a whole book about a newspaper's work.
And it would have been fascinating.
There's just so much I don't know about it.
But they start putting together a series of articles that don't discover new things so much as they assemble all the known facts about Manhattan Town in one place for the first time.
And the facts show that Moses is long clearance program is clearing out functioning neighborhoods and replacing them with nothing, you know, just just unfinished projects or slums.
And they haven't found the corruption in the program yet, but they do make it clear that the program is making housing worse.
It is not improving the problem.
And most importantly, rather than blaming the city, in quotes, they name Moses and they put the blame on him.
And so in a movie, this would be front page news.
It would crack the case.
Suddenly, everyone be investigating Moses.
Is that what happens, Roman?
No, that's that's not what happens at all.
It's also one of those things where the story is just so complicated, you know, and it involves lots of different people and maybe those people, their victimization isn't as compelling to newspaper readers.
You know, it's just one of those things that doesn't quite have the traction that that these sort of park fights do.
Which I mean, because the other one that we're going to talk about next chapter is another kind of low stakes park fight.
But it's the lowest stakes park fight.
It's incredible. And it's basically over a misunderstanding, you know, more than anything else.
But, yeah, this one, it's it's this one doesn't quite stick because it has the same kind of issues of all this stuff.
But I mean, like, this is a very classic corruption that they uncover, you know, like developers siphoned off money and then the story just gets buried.
You know, it just is not interesting to people.
They put it on the back pages of the paper and the editors are still afraid enough of Moses that they would tell him about it ahead of time.
And they provide space in the paper for him to like have a rebuttal where he attacks the paper's own story and they don't put Moses name in the headlines.
And something that I think we've only become more familiar with in modern times is often people just look at the headlines.
Yeah, they don't read the article.
And the way you this is something that James Fallows writes about is that a headline frames a story in a way that tells the reader what the main information is.
And so the headline can be vastly not unrepresentative of the actual story.
But the headline is what's going to stick with people.
So if Moses name is not the headline, people are not going to think it.
But one story leads to another.
And Caro, there's this domino effect that Caro talks about where he says investigative reporters quickly become aware of a phenomenon of their profession, information so hard to come by when they are preparing to write their first story in a new field suddenly becomes plentiful as soon as that first
story has appeared in print.
Every city agency has its malcontents and its idealists.
And its malcontent idealists, which is a for I love that that is like, that's that's like it's such a great way to say it.
Officials and aides and clerks and secretaries unhappy with the philosophy by which it is being run or the payoffs that are being made within it who have been just waiting for years for the appearance of some forum in which their feelings can be expressed.
And so once these first articles come out, even though they're in the back, Gleason and Cook's phones start ringing.
People are coming out of the woodwork to complain about Moses.
And suddenly there are lots of leads for them to continue this investigation and dig deeper.
And of course, everyone's afraid of Moses.
So it all has to be off the record.
And a source in the comptroller's office reveals how the developers are milking their housing developments for millions while leaving tenants without heat.
They're not paying taxes to the city for years.
And again, these stories don't get that much play.
They're complicated in a lot of ways.
They involve names and numbers.
If other papers mention them, it's usually just to run Moses' denials.
And the New York Times is still carrying Moses' water for him.
Like, they're still not ready.
They did disagree about the parking lot, but they're not ready to turn on him completely.
And then in June 1957, it comes out that the Manhattan town developers have siphoned off so much money that they have none left to pay their taxes or their mortgage or build any of the buildings they've contracted to build.
And the city will have to foreclose on this development.
This is a city project that was given to developers.
The city will now have to foreclose on.
And the Times buries the story, but the other papers don't.
And Gleason gets Mayor Wagner to say at a press conference that he was conned for five years by these developers.
And that's a big thing.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and this is like the tone of these newsrooms is changing a lot.
And the older reporters who used to criticize some of these upstarts for questioning the powers that be in the city are now like doing follow up questions where they ask.
And it's beginning to become clear that this sort of rich diversity of different newspapers is helping the situation now.
Like they're, if the Times isn't going to do it, someone else is going to cover it.
And therefore, like, I mean, this is the whole point of having an active and vibrant press, really.
It's kind of amazing.
And Gleason and Cook, once again, they fall prey to the great liberal myth that once you get the information out there, the system will do its job and people will get mad or they'll change their minds.
That'll be great. They're like, Moses is going to get his comeuppance now.
He's going to have his wings clipped by the mayor.
But they don't understand how central Moses has become to the actual invisible machinery of the city.
And so Cara says the two reporters expectation was not unreasonable.
Ordinarily, the tainting of a city program was scandal and failure scandal of immense proportions, failure five years in duration, who result in at least curtailment of the powers of the mayoral subordinate heading that program, less the public outcry turn against the mayor.
Their expectation was just based on a false premise that Robert Moses was really the mayor's subordinate.
They did not understand that as a matter of practical politics, the mayor could not discipline, demote or remove Title One's administrator.
And so they were surprised and ensuing developments.
And those developments are that a spokesman of Moses announces that new developers are coming in to take over Manhattan town.
They're not going to have foreclosure hearings.
The old developers will have no penalties.
In fact, the two principal stockholders of the mismanaged Manhattan Town Inc are going to be kept on the payroll as consultants.
They're actually going to have their stock bought out from them and they're going to remain stockholders in the new development.
So these guys who cheated the city out of millions, they're going to keep making money off of it.
And there's an outcry.
And the mayor's like, all right, I'll take action.
I will cut off some of the money those developers would receive.
They're still going to be rewarded for their failure.
They're just not getting as much reward.
And Gleason and Cook are like, we did all this work and all we managed to do was get more money to the bad guys.
And Moses has not really been affected at all.
And Moses has big plans at this point.
He's planning this new vision of Manhattan's West side Lincoln Center, which involves raising, not raising like raising up, raising is like raising to the ground.
You know, like a razor shave.
Yeah, exactly. Oh, they probably come from the same group.
I never thought about that.
Roman, you're so smart.
Come on. You're as smart as the as the empire that bears your name.
They're going to raise 18 square blocks and they're replacing them with Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the New York Ballet, the High School of Performing Arts, Juilliard, Fordham University's new campus.
The newspapers are like, they love this plan.
It's going to displace 7000 low income families and replace their homes of 4000 luxury apartments.
But the newspapers love it.
And Roman, I want to hear you say, but then I have everything I want to say about Lincoln Center.
So. Here's the thing.
It's not better than 7000 homes for people who can afford it.
But Lincoln Center is pretty great.
It is. I that was what I was going to say in all disclosure, I have spent so many memorable hours and beloved hours of my life at Lincoln Center.
Some of my happiest memories of experiencing culture and art have taken place there.
It's a place that is it's inextricably tied in with my memories with my grandmother, who I spent many, many hours with there.
And so it's when I think about her, I think about Lincoln Center.
I was in New York for that event and I walked by Lincoln Center twice.
And each time I was just flooded with with these feelings.
It's a it's a really it's a magical place.
But again, you don't want to kick out 7000 people.
No. Or you operate or if you do these big plans, you have to take care of them and he never did that sort of thing.
But but like, you know, you see movies in the park there in the summertime, you know, like I've watched people dance to this goes there.
You know, like it's and it has all these cultural as a center of culture, it's kind of stunning how concentrated it all is at this place.
Yes. And anyway, it's just one of those ones like I mean, Jones Beach didn't have anything that it was knocking down.
So therefore it's kind of this unalloyed, you know, good and this one plenty alloyed, I guess.
But but but Lincoln Center is pretty awesome.
I think, you know, yes, it's it's a I mean, I feel a little about it.
Like I felt like when I visited Versailles years ago where I was like, they could have fed so many people with the money it took to build this house.
But those people would still be dead now.
And the house is still here.
So like I wouldn't get to enjoy the house like that.
So it's like you're saying the people that were displaced should have been taken care of, should have been accounted for, maybe should have had a say in the in the process, you know.
Absolutely. But it is it is hard not to feel as a New Yorker like a certain amount of pride in this that there's this space where you can I mean, if they were all scheduled on the same day, you go to the opera, then go to the ballet, then hear the Philharmonic, then look at the fountain where they shot
that scene in the producers.
You know, like it's there's I've seen I've seen so many things that were amazing.
It just but but it's hard to know that while you're there, so many people's homes were taken from them to make it possible.
You could you could argue.
I mean, it's a little different, but it's sort of in the same philosophy.
That the existence of Central Park, even though it doesn't knock down homes, its existence does deny a lot of spaces where homes could be built to make to make life more affordable in Manhattan.
And and that's a choice that we make.
And I think it's a good choice that is made on behalf of citizens of New York.
But, you know, it's one of those things.
It does matter that there was something there ahead of time.
I'm not just being I'm not trying to just like abstract this to the point of of of of having just a philosophical discussion that where people mean nothing.
But but there is a cost when it comes to, like, you know, things take place in physical space and if you have one thing, you don't have another.
And this is one of those ones where at least the end product, I think, was executed in a interesting and valuable like that was interesting.
Valuable thing was made.
I cannot say that about the Cross Bronx Expressway.
No, I certainly I have no loving memories of the Cross Bronx Expressway at all.
You know, whereas Lincoln Center is is a place that, like I said, I have such a I have such a personal, you know, relationship with.
I can't be impartial about it.
But you're right that I think it gets to it gets the heart of what so much of what Caro is saying that everything is a choice, everything in governance and how you run a city is a choice and choosing to keep Central Park a park means effectively raising the price of housing for everyone who lives in the city a certain amount.
And that was an easy choice to make when the city was half for not even a quarter built and you still had farm estates up up in what would become, you know, 125th Street.
But it's it is a choice that they make.
And you're true that you're right that it's a there are those choices.
What is not the best way to do it, though, with Lincoln Center is the things that the papers didn't dig into in their enthusiasm for the next project.
So now Moses is selling the land involved to developers at discount prices, how he's paying politically connected landowners like the Kennedy's above market purchase prices, like the federal limited seven times as much as something like that.
That's crazy. A lot more money.
And the federal administrator for Title One funds, Albert M.
Cole, he thinks this is the moment to demand Moses answer for his kind of slip shot and misleading way of administering Title One projects, and he threatens to cut off all of Title One's funds to the city if Moses doesn't change his ways and Moses threatens to resign.
And within an hour, Mayor Wagner is backing him publicly and the papers rushed to back up Moses against the federal government, just like when Roosevelt tried to get him fired and Moses calls his power for friends.
They call the White House and Cole has to back down.
And Gleason and Cookley start realizing Moses is still too powerful for the federal government to undercut him, let alone the city government, let alone regular people.
And this aura of incorruptibility, even though it's not all the way there, it's still strong enough that people will defend him against the federal government and his infallibility has been disproven by the Central Park battle.
But there's still this idea that he is a public servant above politics.
He's not on the take.
He doesn't get involved in petty political battles.
And they realize it's going to take a lot more work on behalf of reporters whose editors have invested a lot of years in the Moses myth to make a real difference.
Moses had has had such a relationship with top publishers, top editors, that he can just take it for granted that they are going to believe in him.
And Gleason and Cook find that their sources within city agencies after that first rush, they're newly paranoid.
They don't want to talk about it, but they keep digging and they're able to start reporting the ties between local politicians and the slum clearance developers, the developers who get contracts.
And by 1958, they can show that William S.
Leibovall, the director of Moses' slum clearance committee, is a stockholder in the Nassau Management Company, the real estate relocation firm that we talked about in a previous episode that has been paid millions to do essentially nothing to help nobody.
And they start finding more and more links between Moses' people and the companies being given contracts and local politicians.
But at this point, Roman, you talked about how like other reporters are going to jump in.
They're still not jumping in yet.
Editors keep removing Moses names from their articles.
They keep pressuring them to do some other stories.
These are too complicated.
And Cara says the stories about corruption in these projects are being put on page 27 and the stories about how Moses has this great project he's building are on page one.
And by 1959, the leads are really drying up.
Moses is starting to get public works named after him, which is pretty out of the ordinary for a living person.
And Gleason and Cook, they're like, we're going to pin them on title one on the corruption, but I guess that's dead now until they come up with their plan.
And Cara says to understand what Gleason and Cook did, then it is necessary to understand Gleason and Cook.
And you're like, I've been reading about these guys.
You're now now is when you're going to tell me about them.
And he just gives he gets into their their personalities.
Gleason, he's that classic front page, you know, his Girl Friday hard drinking, fast talking reporter dedicated to protecting the little guy loves the thrill of it.
The rush and Cook is this unassuming guy.
But he's also a crusading liberal who wants to protect the little guy.
And Carol mentions how Cook wrote a book defending Alger Hiss when Alger Hiss was at his most prius, a stance that in 1974 seemed better than it has aged poorly now, considering Alger Hiss.
I don't want to reopen it, but you probably did what he was accused of doing.
You know, it is no longer a just taken for granted.
If you're liberal, you love Alger Hiss.
Defend him. That's right.
And for anyone listening who doesn't know that name, either look it up or don't worry about it.
What's the kind of thing that like my grandparents took as just as took as gospel that Alger Hiss had been railroaded, you know, and cook hates that Moses pushes people around.
And Carol quotes him using the phrase the power to talk about Moses and the people around him, which is I think the first time the phrase really gets brought up in the mouth of somebody.
You know, maybe this is around the time it's getting it's getting boring.
I actually kind of wondered if this is where Carol gets the name of the book, like because this is all reported, you know, obviously well before he's writing all this stuff and if this is unlocking.
I don't know. I don't know.
The power broker is not is not a phrase.
I know besides coming from this book, really.
I mean, I know it from this book and I know it from the Marvel Comics supervillain, the power broker, who's the guy who gives people superpowers.
Yeah. But it but it seems to me like it's possible that I mean, maybe it's just sort of like common parlance among people who write about politics and stuff that there are power brokers and this and that and maybe it's just such super common of a phrase, but it shows up here and it's very notable to
me, you know, like this is sort of a great moment in the book.
It is the moment in the movie where someone says the title.
He's like some kind of power broker and the audience goes, oh.
And we've heard it from we've heard the phrase used by Caro, but we haven't used we haven't heard it used by a character in the story.
You know, yes, which is really great.
But he doesn't make a lot out of it.
You know, he just has it in the quote and it's so it's done very subtly.
And so Gleason Cook, the thing that he talks about here also is that they're competitive.
All these reporters are competitive.
They want the credit, they want the glory of the big story.
They want to beat the other papers, but they realize if their editors aren't supporting them, they're going to have to find a way around that.
And the only way around that is to start colluding with the ultimate enemy.
Other reporters at other papers.
And this is what I was hinting at earlier, is this I love this so much.
Like this is the whole part.
I mean, this is the best part of this chapter, which is essentially them coming to the conclusion that well, if every if editor is going to bury it here, I can tip off this other person and and we can begin to sort of trade parts of these stories and they and they actually kind of I mean, they really do
collude like it's not it's not just sort of like kind of allowing it to happen like they meet and decide what's going to happen.
They're meeting in bars and saying you take this part of the story.
And then after you run that, I'll do this part.
OK. And then you take this tip and you handle that.
They are. I mean, it's like insider trading between reporters, you know, but in a way that is there's nothing legal about it.
And it and it helps them, you know, and Caro every now and then he'll indulge in a in a very in a kind of fanciful metaphor or description.
And he has one here and he just says soon like two flamenco dancers spurring each other to wilder and wilder efforts had and Gleeson were both helping and striving to do each other.
There are stories picking up and taking off from each others and hitting harder and harder.
I love that. I just look at them to two flamenco dancers, you know, challenging each other.
And they know that if their editors see a story about title one corruption and another paper, they're going to want them to get on.
It's like, you know, they're bringing the spice back into the relationship between their editors and the story by by cheating with another paper, you know, and soon there's this circle of reporters that are trading tips and things to strategizing how to get this done.
And Carol says about these reporters, like you said, Roman earlier, these are young people, they're mostly in their 20s and 30s.
They're young enough that they are still idealistic.
And they're also young enough that the Moses myth does not matter.
That's right. They were babies.
When Jones Beach got built, they don't remember him as the hero of the of the working class and the liberal reformers.
They know him as an old man, the stubborn old dictator who needs to be toppled.
And they're also too young to remember or have felt the threat of Moses ending your career when his bloodhounds go after you.
They are fearlessly young.
And they're also like in the way that it can help a young person kind of ignorant of history or the feeling of history in that what Moses means to them is what Moses is right now and not what he used to be.
And Carol, he like you can't help but feel that he loves these guys.
You know, he's just and these these women and he glorifies them and he notes.
Oh, they're competitive.
They want glory. That's not all, you know, just sterling heroism, you know, but he mostly attributes their actions to their need to see Moses get justice for pushing people around.
And it's just, again, if you're making a movie of the power broker, don't do it.
It's too big. But this could be this would be this could be that.
Yeah, this is the real like kind of spotlight having people, you know, like spar with each other, you know, trying to create the best story meeting secretly.
And it's just great.
And it just this is why.
The world progresses when old people step aside and new people come in and it's super important to have that in the world.
You know, like it's just like it's great.
These guys have no memory or sense of don't speech or no fear.
This is exactly what you need in society.
There's certain standard bearers that that hold history and there's certain people that do not give fuck about history and and it's and it's important to have all those people to make progress.
And I just I love this stuff.
It makes me very it makes me very happy.
Yeah. And as we've seen in the book, like Moses used to be one of these types of people, you know, and there are the other thing is that they are living in the world that Moses is positive work has created and so they can take it for granted.
Moses's fight years ago was people should have parks.
This is a new thing.
And now their fight is maybe people shouldn't be pushed out of their homes.
You know, like it's like to make those parks.
Moses had to ride roughshod over people.
But now if they live in a world with parks and now it's maybe we shouldn't ride roughshod over people.
I love this idea of this team of reporters.
I think it's just I think it's just hilarious.
And I think the part of me that, you know, that gets nervous and nostalgic about this stuff is the fact that there's enough papers and like warning editions and late editions and stuff that they can be in conversation like this in a way that papers just don't anymore.
They just can't be.
Yeah. And knowing that whatever they write, someone's going to read it.
You know, even if it's buried in the back of the newspaper, it's going to get to somebody, you know.
But there's, you know, there's got to be new ways to do that podcast or whatever.
So now it's 1959. Moses is 70 years old.
He is seemingly still at the top of the New York Power Pyramid.
He is basking in praise all the time.
He's raking in all his investment dollars for his projects.
He is easily reappointed as the state power authority.
He's on his way to building this massive dam at Niagara that Robert Caro never spends much time on.
It is so massively important.
And yet he never talks about it because it has nothing to do with the things he's really talking about the same way.
And we have to thank him for that.
Like you look at this book and you're like, he must have left it all in.
He didn't make any decisions.
No, he did. He does not go into the story of this dam.
I don't care about it.
Thank you. I don't want to hear about it.
I know it's there. I don't need to.
I'm sure there are a lot of struggles.
I'm sure there was engineering, amazing feats of engineering that was done.
Don't care. Thank you, Robert Caro, for not getting into it.
I mean, I bet you probably in his archives.
At the historical society, there's probably pages and pages about this dam.
I'm sure there's pages and pages.
I bet you could write a whole book about what he discovered about that dam.
Yeah. But that's not a book I'm necessarily as interested in as New York City.
I think there's a feeling of like what's relevant to someone who lives in the New York area, you know, which you could say makes the book a little provincial in some ways, but also focuses the book quite a bit, you know.
There's also a different version of this book where Robert Caro spends a lot more time on Moses' itineraries on his vacations.
I'm glad we don't have that.
That's OK. That's right.
So but then in February, so Moses seems like he's on the top of the heap.
In February, one of the reporters, he writes a story about how Sidney Unger, pretty good name, the man Moses picked to sponsor his Riverside Amsterdam Urban Renewal Project is actually a politically connected slumlord.
He is not he is not a developer with a good track record and he's politically connected and suddenly the editors these papers, they're afraid they'll miss out on similar scoops like this.
And now it's not just that they are listening to their reports and saying, OK, you can look at title one.
They are assigning reporters to title one projects to investigate them.
And the stories are getting closer and closer to the front page.
They're on page seven and they're on page four.
And finally, Moses is being named directly in these stories, directly in the headlines.
And this is this is this is the longest excerpt, but I love it.
So I'm going to read it.
It's got a lot of power packed into it.
In 1953, the Women's City Club had issued reports disclosing that Moses had been shifting tenants in slum clearance sites to other buildings on the site, like and then he uses the word for Roma that I'm not going to use on the podcast.
But you know, it's books from 1974, the reports had been ignored.
In 1954, a minority report, the City Planning Commission had made similar revelations that report had been ignored.
But now in 1959, when Jay Clarence Davies Jr.
knew independent head of the city's real estate bureau made the same report.
It was headline letters.
City admits shifts from slums to slums.
The press of the city awake at last.
Fred Cook exalted and he was right.
The press had not been awakened by its owners, dot, dot, dot, or by its top editors, dot, dot, dot.
It had been awakened by its reporters, not by its famous reporters, but by young unknown staff writers scheming together to force publishers and editors to do what the young men felt was their duty.
But it was a wake. I feel like it's such a powerful thing, like they didn't do it now.
They didn't do it here.
They didn't do it here.
But these guys, they they forced it to happen just through their sheer need for it to happen in some ways and their strategy.
Yeah, just sort of ingenuity and sort of playing these different powerful editors and newspaper owners and against their own insecurities about being the best paper, having the first story.
They just were so smart about it all.
I love it. I think it's just a hilarious and fun.
And this is the part that I get like really, really excited about.
Yeah. And it's and there's a feeling this is not kind of what we think of when we think of like community activism in a way, but it's the same basic principles of people working together for a common goal and using the tools that they're allowed to command to make that happen.
And it's really, you know, when it's for a good thing, it's wonderful.
You know, I could see thinking about it now.
I could see the same techniques being used for a bad thing, you know, totally.
But that's the nature of tools.
And as all these stories are landing, another great story that cannot be denied, even though the stakes are so low, the lowest in probably Robert Moses career, this is chapter forty four, Mustache and the Bard, its page is one thousand twenty six to one thousand thirty nine.
This one's pretty silly.
This is a silly chapter.
The title is silly and the chapter is silly.
And I wonder maybe that's the point that this is this is a small, seemingly trivial, not even necessarily misdeed of Moses, like miscommunication and mismanagement of a subordinate.
And it leads to one of his biggest public relations issues.
And I think that's I wonder if that's that's the theme that Caro is getting to.
Is that like the little things end up being what trip him up?
It's not the big things.
It's not the systems that are supposed to keep people in check.
It's these little things, not because they affect the most people, but they affect things that the people in the media are interested in talking about and also things that have a like an intangible quality.
You know, again, you can argue it's too bad you have to lose your house.
But we need this road.
It's hard to argue kids don't need to play or that William Shakespeare is not good.
You know, that kind of stuff.
It's it's it's hard to argue.
Yeah, exactly. And Caro opens with an excerpt from the 1958 hearing where theater producer Joseph Paparofsky, better known as Joe Papp, now he's known as Joe Papp everywhere, who will become one of the towering figures in in New York and American theater.
He's being asked if he's using Shakespeare to spread communist ideology.
And the ridiculousness, even the in the transcript, the congressman who is asking the question seems to understand how ridiculous the premise is, even as he uses it like that ridiculousness goes through.
And Carol, when he gets it after the excerpt, he opens it with it almost an acknowledgement that this is an unfair story that's being told, that this is the press and the public getting outraged about this tyrannical move of Moses's when it's really a fight that Moses seems to have not wanted and didn't
really have the stomach for and gave up on.
But it still hurt his reputation so badly.
And it's it seems like comparing that, that quote from earlier from Moses, it's unfair, but it gets at a truth because if ever there was a thing to get Moses on, it's not this one.
And so Moses, he's always been a fan of Shakespeare.
He wrote poetry in college.
You know, he loves Shakespeare.
Come on. And in 1956, Joseph Papp, he's a young theater impresario.
He says to Moses, can I put on free Shakespeare plays in this amphitheater and on the Lower East Side that the Parks Department built and that Moses built in part because Al Smith had told Moses when I was young, I could not afford tickets to the theater.
I just couldn't afford to go.
And Moses seems to admire Papp's genuine interest in providing shows for free.
And besides, the stage is empty all the time anyway.
No one does anything with it.
So why not? And Papp starts putting on productions there and they're very respected.
The local audiences who cannot afford theater tickets love them, and this happens throughout history with live theater.
But especially with Shakespeare is that you show them to people who you think are going to be like, this is too complicated.
I understand it. And they and they love it.
Like in the old West, Shakespeare was incredibly popular.
Like it's just it's it's writing that just gets to you know, he's almost Robert Caroesque in his ability to put words together.
You know, and Papp is like, I want to expand these shows.
I want to put them in more parks.
And there's one person standing in his way.
Moses gives permission, but there's one person who doesn't like it.
Stuart Constable, the moustache, who we already know is a foe of mothers, doesn't like moms.
You know, there is a kind of like strain in these chapters of subordinates to Moses who don't have any of his skill whatsoever, like they're as pugnacious as he is, but but can't like operate around people, can't like bully people the same way and make wrongheaded decisions that, you know, to his credit
in a way, Robert Moses has great loyalties to his subordinates.
Yes, but they just don't deserve it because they are kind of so boneheaded so much of the time.
Yeah, you see it a lot in organizations where someone at the top has a special quality that has allowed them to create this this position of power.
And then, yeah, the people underneath them try to imitate that or have been taught to work in that ethic and they just don't have it.
You know, they just don't they can't do it the right way.
And and we'll see as we get through it.
Yeah. His loyalty to his subordinates, which would normally be a positive thing, gets him into so much trouble here.
And this whole chapter has an element of farce about it.
You know, there's there's it's written with a kind of like almost the most winking that Caro gets throughout.
And it's it's a it's a fun chapter, but it's the I have this is the chapter.
I maybe have the most trouble with in some ways in the whole book.
Yeah, we'll talk about it.
We'll talk about it.
OK, partly because there's part and we'll get to it later.
But there's times when I'm reading it each time I've read it where I'm like, why is this Japer in the book?
Like, well, there's not about Jane Jacobs.
There's all stuff about Joe Papp and Shakespeare.
But yeah, but I think it's because this larger point I think he's getting to.
But Papp proposes putting on plays in Central Park.
And I'm like, that's OK if you don't charge admission for them.
And this is a start of Shakespeare in the Park, which again, is for the cultural life of New York City is one of by this point in the year 2024, one of the most beloved things going on in New York.
And I have seen shows in that festival.
I know like Friends of Mine.
I couldn't do this because I had a job.
But Friends of Mine would go.
They would wait online for hours because all you need to do is wait online.
You wait on for out.
And like I remember my friend being like, oh, yeah, I was standing next to Mike Myers waiting for Shakespeare in the Park tickets for four hours, you know, like that's just what you do.
And it's first come first serve.
And it's just it's just a beloved event to a certain section of New Yorkers.
And it's kind of magical when you are in the park, how Central Park, even it's a safe park, but now.
But it's still scary to be in a park at night.
You know, it's like you're in the woods.
It's it's scary. And you've been raised on these stories of people being killed in the park, you know.
But there's something magical about how when there's a large group of people seeing a performance, because I used to see the Philharmonic in the park quite a bit, too, it transforms that space and it takes a space that could be threatening and turns into this communal space that is magical and warm and what a city
does best, you know, which is take the fear of solitude and turn it into a shared experience with lots of strangers who who become your neighbors.
You know, they become people that you know for a moment and have a connection to that otherwise would just be, you know, unknown names, unknown faces, unknown lives.
It's just there's something very magical about it.
And Moses, to his credit, likes it.
Yeah, no, he's great.
This is what he this is this he's not a big fan of like just wild glens and trees and stuff.
But this is the type of thing that he is into.
Yes, you are using a space.
He does not like unused space.
And so if you can use it and use it for something that no one else is doing with it, it's he's for it.
And he really appreciates the chutzpah that Joe Papp has in the way he fundraises for it.
And Moses comes to see him.
The book implies as kind of like a young go getter like himself who has a project that's to help people and will go to any length to do it.
And so by 1959, Moses, who they've never met each other, but Moses is telling Joe Papp, I'll handle the fundraising for another season of plays in the park.
I'll take care of it.
I like what you're doing.
Don't worry about money.
And then he leaves town on a three week vacation of Barbados.
Another one of these long vacations that this workaholic is taking.
You know, maybe he's taking more of them at this age.
I don't know. And unfortunately, he leaves things in the hands of the mustache.
Constable, who does not like Shakespeare, doesn't trust Papp.
And it only gets worse when he learns that Papp refused to name names before Hugh act because Constable is, if anything, just a straightforward anti -communist, you know, steak and potatoes.
New York guy with a big mustache.
Later on, reporters are like, does this smack of McCarthyism?
And he goes, what's wrong with McCarthy?
And that kind of says everything you need to know about about the constant about the mustache.
Yeah. And so what you know, what the constable or not the constable, I guess the mustache constable.
Yeah, his name is Constable, but I keep calling him almost the constable.
Also, yeah, decides to do is that, you know, he doesn't like all these people like using the park and maybe causing some maintenance issues with, I don't know, the sitting down on blankets or something like that.
And so he says that, well, you know, what you've got to have to do is you need to reimburse the park department for maintenance.
And therefore that would require charging admission to Shakespeare in the park, which is against the sort of like deal that Papp had made with Robert Moses about doing Shakespeare in the park.
And so it puts him in this bind.
He has to. Yeah, that he has promised I will never charge for Shakespeare.
And he doesn't want to.
But I was being told you have to.
And Constable is sure that Moses would be like, yeah, get this subversive out of the park.
I don't want him in there.
So he is, it is one of those things where it's like my boss did the exact opposite.
But I know he really wants me to do this because it aligns with the values I ascribe to him.
And it's just it's foolish.
Don't do that, people.
Just do it. Do with the ball.
Do what the boss did.
And because that's what they want being done right now.
And you would think again that Moses would just overrule mustache when he hears about.
But like Roman, if you were saying earlier, one of these commandments that was ingrained in him in politics was you always have to support your subordinates.
That's how you get their loyalty.
You make them feel like you have their back all the time.
And in addition to that, if he says constable is wrong, then it's almost like saying he's wrong because he has invested constable with this power.
So if if his whole thing is infallibility, if the guy he hired is wrong, that means he's a little wrong.
And so he had vowed publicly to a subordinates.
I will never overrule you.
And that's how I'm going to keep you loyal to me is I'm going to be loyal to you.
So when Moses comes back, he backs up the mustache and refuses to talk to Pat and the money he said he'd raise for the Shakespeare Festival.
That's not happening.
And Moses writes, Papa letters saying, well, for maintenance, it's going to cost between one hundred thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand dollars that you're going to have to reimburse the parks department.
And like this is 1959.
Like, I mean, that's a lot of money now.
That's an astronomical amount back then.
And Pat is trying to meet with Moses, but Moses like, I'm not in charge.
Constable is in charge.
And I wonder if here it's a little bit loyalty and a little bit him trying to insulate himself from blame, that like, if there's constable between me and Pap, then Pap can't get mad at me.
And Constable keeps moving the goalpost.
He used to say he's like, you got to charge a one dollar admission fee.
And perhaps like, OK, I'll consider it because it was OK.
Then it's two dollar admission fee.
And Pap starts to realize this is not about money.
This is about the mustache thinks I'm a communist.
And that's what it's about.
This is not a fair fight and I have to fight it like a fight.
And so what does he do?
He uses the same tool the moms use.
He goes to the press.
What does he do, Roman?
Yeah, no, he goes to the media and starts like, you know, he starts to talk about Shakespeare.
These are all like educated people love Shakespeare.
They are now at a point in Moses career where the newspapers are criticizing Moses on a somewhat regular basis.
And the funny thing here is he really goes for drama.
You know, like he's going to he's going to kind of do the things that Robert Moses is known for.
It's like this sort of like attack on character, different sort of innuendo, you know, like different things to sort of like make it feel like there's a lot of corruption here, that Moses is a kind of kind of villain here.
Doesn't like actually I don't think it really highlights his role in the beginning of making it all possible.
No, not at all. He really he makes it into he makes it into a play.
You know, and he's he's quoting Shakespeare all the time and the reporters love that.
And Moses responds in kind and he tries to go back to his old playbook.
Similarly. And he starts these, you know, innuendos behind the scenes about Pat being a red.
But that used to work.
Times have slightly changed.
This is not a time when it's OK to be a communist, but Joe McCarthy has been dead for a couple of years.
People kind of look back at that as gross.
They're not like I love communism ever to believe what they're like that was gross.
And they called and saw reporters when they hear these rumors, they say this is McCarthyism in a disapproving way.
And just as with the first battle of Central Park, the story is getting simplified.
Moses is the villain.
He hates free Shakespeare, something that is objectively good.
You cannot argue that there is a downside to putting on free Shakespeare plays in the park.
You can't. It's impossible.
And the thing is that they also do is they start to fact check his claims about what's going on in ways that they didn't used to do used to be.
If Moses said something, that was the end of it.
You didn't question it.
But now they're questioning it.
And once again, public opinion turns against him.
And Carol points out that in the past when there had been serious PR crises, Moses would get sick and be in the hospital.
And the same thing happens here for reasons that are never fully explained.
My pet theory is that he has a heart attack.
But who knows? You never know.
But he goes to the hospital and Carol says that photos of Moses leaving the hospital make him look for the first time old like actually old like an old weathered man.
And then Pap is like, I'm going to put this the onus of this on Mayor Wagner.
Mayor overrule these policies.
And of course, the mayor is like, I'd love to.
I'd love to just say, yeah, put Shakespeare in the park.
But he can't overrule Moses.
And it's almost like at this point, the mayor must have felt so annoyed.
Moses is punishing the mayor just for considering it.
He refuses to take Wagner's calls.
And he Mayor Wagner becomes the subject of these joking headlines where they're going to be like, I plan to talk to Moses later.
I can't quite get him.
And so that is headlines where it's like mayor searches for Moses.
Where is Moses? You know, Mayor can't find him.
And if I was Wagner, I'd be so pissed that I'm not even a fight with Moses.
I'm in a fight with the mustache.
And I'm looking like a fool because with a guy who shouldn't even I shouldn't have to deal with, you know, and and he can't fire Moses.
And so Wagner has to then support him and say, Moses too valuable.
I can't do anything about it.
The press plays it as Wagner giving in to Moses.
So, again, if I'm Wagner, I'm like, I'm losing a fight with the mustache.
This is ridiculous.
And ultimately, Pap goes to the courts and a court finds narrowly, kind of for the first time, that Moses is being capricious with his power and that he cannot do that.
Yeah. And this is really stunning because, you know, this was a kind of thing that like in the previous court cases, the law was interpreted in such a way written by Moses and interpreted in such a way that anything within the park walls, anything that related to parks whatsoever was the complete domain of Robert
Moses. He was the king of the parks.
They could not. He could tear down any structure that he wanted, build any other one that he wanted.
I mean, like it was really and for something related to like, you know, ephemeral exhibition of Shakespeare plays to think that this is the thing that, you know, a non -permanent, you know, cultural institution, just like or even just like cultural like, I don't know, occurrence is the thing that stops
him when it comes to court interpretation of what his power is inside of the park.
It's really stunning.
This is a real change in his power.
It's huge. And again, if you're making a movie about Robert Moses, this is one of the things you do because the drama and the narrative is there because it's so simple.
And it's like, it's such an ephemeral thing, you're right, but the story is so clear.
You know, it's such a clear story.
And the only thing that that screws up this story dramatically is Moses probably not really wanting to do it.
And the whole, just as we've been yelling this whole series, why don't you just accept its resignation?
There's the part of me here that's like, just do it.
Just swallow your loyalty philosophy and just do it because it's so obviously wrong.
You know? But maybe this is like one of those things like if you if you eliminate the penny, people like begin to like understand that that money has no meaning.
That money is not real.
It's kind of one of those things like he knows that he's so propped up in this system of you just support your guys.
I, you know, the mayor just supports me, the governor just supports me like, you know, they trust me to do it.
And so I think that this is really something that he can't possibly move on mostly because he knows that the whole structure that holds him in place is at the base level, this thing, you know, of this idea of like, I trust your judgment because you are you.
That's what he depends on for the newspapers.
That's what he depends on for his relationship and in politics as he remains this bureaucrat inside of, you know, this constantly changing political machinery.
And so I get it. I get that this is the thing that he can't change on.
It makes sense. It's like when we talked to AOC, she was talking about how like so much of politics is based on if you give your word, can you keep it?
Do you have the power and the strength to keep it if you promise something or if you say you're going to support something or go against something?
And this is one of those times you're right.
Yeah, he has to he has to maintain that that power of saying like, no, when I say something, it happens.
But Carol points out that based on precedent, Moses could have appealed this court case and won.
Yeah, for sure. But instead, he says, I'll abide by the decision.
We'll have Shakespeare in the park.
And he tries to arrange the money Papp needs to get the festival back into the park.
And Papp only has time for one play.
He puts on Julius Caesar.
It's a huge triumph.
Everybody loves it.
I think it's very funny that he probably did maybe didn't promise the story of a potential tyrant being taken down.
You know, yeah, and Carol wonders, he says, why did Moses give up this fight when previously he had never admitted defeat so relatively easily?
And he says one explanation is that Moses could see the damage it was doing to his public image.
But Carol, ultimately, he's like, I think that Moses just didn't want to fight this battle in the first place and got dragged into it because of constables, dumb choices.
And he seems to have mired Papp so much that he let it happen.
And he eventually builds the Delacorte amphitheater in the park expressly as a permanent home for Papp's productions.
And and so Sid Shapiro, he suspects and he says to Caro that he thinks Moses wanted to lose this one, that like this, if there ever was a battle that Moses not just was okay with losing but didn't want to win, you know, on the merits, this is it.
And Carol goes on to talk about Joe Papp.
This fight was one of the best things that ever happened to Joe Papp.
He's the darling of the liberal elites.
He becomes his institution in the theater world.
He founds the public theater eventually down by Esther Place, which is still there.
But for Moses, it's another blow to his reputation.
It's another demonstration of just how much power he has over the mayor, which people are starting to realize.
And the press turns further against it.
They see that constable is kind of this mini version of the boss, that this arrogance is just his boss's arrogance.
And now it's not just the young go -getters who are looking to get Moses.
It's the establishment as well.
And even the times starts to investigate Moses title one projects and the new frame for the media isn't Moses the hero, who occasionally maybe I don't know if he's wrapped up in something we'll see.
But Moses the villain.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, which is not Shakespeare.
I should have had a Shakespeare quote.
I don't think it is anyway.
I don't think it is.
Well, while you look it up, we'll play some ads and then we'll come back with Chapter 45 off to the fair.
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PNC Bank. You hear people say that things change very slowly and then suddenly very fast and that this is the slower part of that change and then the chapter after it, which we'll end this episode with, is the fast change.
Before we get into it, we do have unfinished business.
I just want to say, oh, what a tangled web.
It's Sir Walter Scott.
It's not Shakespeare.
I apologize. That's okay.
Another great UK author, another towering giant in English language literature.
But, okay, we're still in 1959 and off to there.
It's May 1959. And the New York Citizen's Union, it's another one of these civic reform groups, Moses had been close to it once.
They want to ask Moses some questions about his Title I projects.
And he answers them in print.
He answers them very haughtily.
And the newspapers, they would normally run those statements just as straight facts.
They wouldn't have questioned them.
But now, they're going to look into them.
And they point out he hasn't been truthful about, say, who actually pursued that Manhattan Town development.
Moses leaves out the name of a graft crook, and politician Samuel Casper, who's going to be a big figure in that corruption scandal.
And even worse, when asked if there are written reports about the bidders for the projects, and whether those are available to the public, he gives us indignant response of like, well, of course, they are, and of course, they're open to the public.
Like, as if I'm offended, you would even accuse me of hiding those things.
And the reporters, they see that.
And they are nearly orgasmic over this, because this is the promise, oh, like, what he just did is gave us permission to ask him to look at the title one files, these have been secret for years.
And now we can finally look at them.
This is amazing. And Caro sees this as like a real tactical blunder.
And he says, why did he make this tactical blunder?
Why did he do this?
Basically giving permission to have people come investigate him.
And Caro speculates, maybe he knew that legally he could not block them.
Since slum clearance is a city committee, it's not an authority, you can't treat it like a private corporation.
Or maybe he'd been so busy with the Messina and Niagara power dams, again, these dams that the book barely talks about, which are enormous, enormous projects that really take up so much of his brain space, we don't hear much about him again, I don't want to, that he wasn't paying that close attention to
title one anymore, didn't know how damning the files were.
This is at a point where he's less than six weeks until the gala opening of the Messina dam.
Nixon, the vice president is going to be there.
Queen Elizabeth the second is going to be there.
This is a big deal for him.
He cannot let, I forgot the name of the guy from Tavern on the Green, but he cannot let him feed garbage to the vice president and the queen of England.
He's got to be on top of that.
But Caro, he also talks about Moses is undeniably at this point for all the power he has always had, for what a dynamo he is.
He is an old man and he is overseeing the parks department, the Long Island Park expansion projects, the expressways, the bridges, those big dams that again, take up a lot more of his life than the book would lead you to believe.
Maybe he's just stretched too thin and maybe he's just trusting his own reputation too much.
Maybe he thinks his subordinates can get in those files and strip anything negative out before people look at them.
And so he delays letting people see them, but he can only do it for so long.
And then finally on May 29, 1959, he has to let these two reporters had a con we didn't mention in detail before, but the reporters there.
He says, OK, you can come to Triboro.
You can look at those files and they go there and they go to see those files.
And they are salivating.
They're so excited about it.
They're very excited.
There's so many files and they find nothing.
They really find nothing.
It is. It is such a disappointment for them.
They are. First, they have to wait for hours to get in and finally they go in and they're like, oh, boy, nobody's looked in these files for 35 years and it is a real Geraldo with Al Capone's vault situation.
Where you're just like, what's in this thing?
And you open it and there's all they've got are brochures, formal memos.
There's nothing about the project sponsors.
And the thing there's a great detail here that I love.
They go to talk to Spargo, who is one of Moses right hand man is we haven't talked about him a huge amount, but Spargo is a hugely important part of Moses operation.
And Spargo is being so disrespectful to them that while they talked in his office, he just keeps eating soup through the whole meeting.
And I just love the same.
Like, it is hard for me to think of a way to be more disrespectful to someone who's going to talk to you than to be eating soup, because that's a noisy thing to eat.
It's a sloppy thing to eat less like.
So even if you're eating it cleanly, you're slurping it, you know, like it's to just be like the only thing was if he was eating just a box of crackers and just spitting out crumbs at them the entire time, you know, every time you open his mouth, it's.
And Caro, he takes a paragraph also talk about how shabby the reporters are in the used car they drive compared to the this kind of neatly put together tribro officers.
And so it seems like this is a bust.
These files seem like they were so excited about them and they're kind of a bust.
Do they give up, Roman?
Do they stop looking through them?
They do not. They are reporters.
They keep going and they turn every page as as they turn every page in the in the approved of Caro Manor.
And they end up finding sort of like a smaller project called Mid Harlem.
They find this short letter of appreciation from Louis Pokras, who is an associate of the mob boss Frank Costello.
And then it begins to become like, oh, OK, like this is a real thing.
Because Frank Costello, nobody knows the name Louis I.
Pokras, which is a great name.
You know, it looks like his name is Pokras, which is which is a funny name.
But the Frank Costello has just recently been the star of these televised hearings that Senator Estes Kefauver did on organized crime.
Everybody knows Frank Costello.
It's like Al Capone.
If you have Costello's name in some way connected to this, then it's it's gold.
And they find this handwritten note from Tom Shanahan, who we've mentioned in the past.
He runs a big bank that all of Moses's contractors have to park their money in.
And he says in this note, I've been made aware of a delicate situation involving Pokras, but the sponsorship gets approved anyway.
And this is this is a story.
Right. This is the kind of story they can do something with.
Yeah, because it just has all the characters like it has all these short hands for people to understand it without having to understand complex details of like of math and numbers and things like that.
It just has Costello's name on it and therefore it's all of a sudden Title I and the mob.
And it takes Moses to disprove that.
You know what I mean?
It's it's more like it's just set up to tell the story that that everyone knows.
And this is another one of those things where Caro goes.
I don't know if this is exactly fair.
This is like levels and levels and levels down from actual Moses decision making.
Yeah, like it's very unlikely.
It's possible that he just handed this off to Shanahan to deal with and is not aware that someone with connection to the mob was doing it.
And they find this other story where they find that Vincent the Chin Gigante, who had already been it was a former attempted hit man.
He was hired as a temporary night watchman.
And this is what it damages Moses of this.
This other mob associate was hired to work there.
And Moses is like to be fair to Moses.
Moses like the man went to jail like he can't get a job now.
And this is the lowest level job.
How like a like a former felon was given a low level job as a night watchman by a contractor hired by another contractor hired by the project sponsor who Moses didn't necessarily handpick.
And it just it's so super unfair.
But the only funny thing about it is that, of course, Vincent the Chin Gigante goes on to be a major mob figure like they didn't know that they couldn't have known this at the time.
But eventually he is leading the mob in New York in many ways.
And he becomes famous.
And I remember I remember very well the years when, because I have for decades, they used to call him the odd father, because he would deliberately walk around in a bathrobe kind of mumbling to himself in public so that people would think he was crazy so that the feds wouldn't wouldn't charge him with anything.
He did this for like 30 years.
It was amazing. And I remember when he died, they're like, oh, the odd father's finally gone.
But this just adds to more.
They don't know that he's going to become the odd father, but it adds to the dirt and most reputation that like even this, which is the tiniest of things you can still put in a headline mob mob hit man hired on Moses project.
That's right. That's right.
It's it's it's so so this sort of stink of underworld stuff.
It, you know, it really just becomes something that he just can't get away from.
And and now all these, you know, really tenacious reporters who have probably dug up worst dirt things that Moses had a hand in directly.
You know, they see an opportunity here to just go to town on this stuff.
And they and they start finding it.
They find real stuff.
They find bribes to politicians.
They find sweetheart purchases by the committee of land owned by local politicians.
They find stories about crooked machine bosses being involved in the housing projects.
And and had had uncovers how important Tom Shanahan, one of the Democratic bosses is.
And he's the guy who qualifies developers mainly by getting kickbacks from them through his bank.
You know, if they put his money in the bank, then they are qualified to do this, which means a lot of money for his bank, which means money for him.
And the reporters are continuing that strategy.
We talked about of sharing information and doling out this paper gets it and then this paper gets it.
And they are taking advantage.
They're using the inborn competitiveness of the papers to keep this going.
And so much of this is now a matter of public record that the paper of record, the New York Times, like they can't ignore it.
And they start doing a series of articles, not necessarily investigating, but synthesizing the information from the other papers articles.
Classic New York Times shit right there.
Yeah. Let's get into this.
Let's get into this.
This is an axe you've had to grind against them for a while.
They just have just like we've just noticed this thing.
It represents like reporting from a million different sources and different newspapers already.
But anyway. But now that they're talking about it, it's real.
It's the exact opposite of the joke about the Times Style section used to be.
Well, what are the Friends of Times reporters doing these days?
Like, let's that's the style.
That's what people do.
There was a I loved it.
There was an article I wish I had kept it.
I wish I had clipped it.
That was in the Times Style section years ago, where there were like a new development among young Brooklynites, a new styles trend, the pot belly.
And it was like, well, no, your friends are getting older.
Like, that's what they're they're gaining weight and they're carrying it in their belly.
Like, that's what this is not a style trend, you know, and they're refusing to stop wearing T -shirts.
That's so funny. I got to find that in the archives somewhere anyway.
But now even the Times are on it.
Tips are pouring in about Title One stories and the older reporters.
Now they're starting to help the younger reporters.
They're realizing that there's something there.
They're late to it, but they're there and reporters are starting to notice the names of Moses Associates on the payrolls of housing project sponsors of the developers that are doing these projects.
And Caro takes a moment.
He humanizes the reporters.
He talks about they feel sympathy for the families of these guys because they know we're about to write exposes of these people.
They talk to a guy who they're going to write an expose on and they see a picture of his family on his desk and they're like, yeah, I feel bad about it.
But this is the story.
I got to run it. I think what he's doing here, I think Caro is trying to draw a distinction between Moses' form of reputation destroying and this kind of more principled form that this is for this is necessary even though there's something not great about the effects rather than Moses, which are just
for the sheer accumulation of power.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, he this is a book really about journalism in a lot of ways.
And yeah, and he's trying to sort of just give a full picture of why this this type of thing is is better than the other type of thing.
And these folks are not out to destroy individuals.
They really are trying to take on a system.
And these are the systems that need to be taken on.
And these are things that Caro obviously cares about deeply, that these systems are challenged.
You could say they're out to destroy one individual, Robert Moses.
But at this point, he has become a system.
Yeah, exactly. And stories soon start breaking about George Spargo, who you may remember earlier, eating soup in front of some reporters and just about how he's receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees, in quotes from Moses authorities, while also being the director of this shady
bank that we talked about a couple of episodes back.
It's just he's so close to Moses that you can't help but Moses his name, not just in the articles about corruption, but in the headlines.
Yeah, yeah, which is what everyone reads.
Everyone reads the headlines.
Yeah, I mean, you can't help it glance at it.
Exactly. Yeah, take it in.
It's right there. And Moses responds with official statements.
But that only serves him to tie him closer to the stories, you know, and he strikes out at the press in petty ways.
He stops telling them when committee meetings are beheld.
He locks the hallway at Tribero where there's a vending machine that the reporters have been using to get snacks while they're working.
And the more he attacks the press, the more he gives them a reason to hit him back, you know, he is he is now hurting them in a way that is making the papers mad at him.
And the time starts having this divided relationship with him where it's going to print these stories about problems with his projects and then print his reaction as news and is still printing editorial saying, oh, if Moses resigns, it would be an irreparable loss.
You don't bench Babe Ruth, you know, yeah, the owners of the Times, they're still trying to keep their relationship with Moses, but the editorial staff, they cannot ignore these stories.
There's real news value.
And Caro is like time had the new media, they're chopping away at the supports of this Moses reputation.
And he uses again that Moses quote from the chapter a little bit ago about the synthetic character of the statesman that was built up by the press and then deflated unfairly but truthfully.
And he talks about how Al Smith had said told him, yeah, popularity is a slender read to lean on.
And he says now that read was broken.
Yeah. But here's the thing, Roman, does Moses still need to be popular to be powerful?
He doesn't because he's already built up this war chest like he controls all this money right now.
So so so this is a big deal.
So like as the sort of PR love of the public, all that can erode because now he has this you know, war chest.
He's he's already kind of abandoned the need for for public approval a little bit before this.
He's never been quite a villain, but he just didn't need like people to like cheer him on for him to do his things.
But yeah, he still has this problem of like everyone in politics needs jobs in their ward, you know, and to be reelected and he still controls that money.
There's still this unshakable logic, yeah, that real political power comes from money and jobs and being able to provide those.
And he's the only one who can provide them.
And so the newspapers are like, certainly now the mayor will fire Robert Moses.
And of course, they can't because there's just too much money.
There's too many jobs.
There's too much need for the political machine for that.
And also that Mayor Wagner, if he can avoid it, he's not going to fire anybody.
He's a guy who wants to be liked.
He doesn't like firing people.
And he has this longstanding relationship with Moses.
I mean, his father knew Moses.
You know, like it's you know, it's just that he's known Moses since he was a little boy, you know, and he says at one point to somebody, I forget if he says to care.
Somebody says you don't fire your father.
You can't fire your father.
Like Moses is a father figure to him in many ways.
But even if Wagner did fire him from his city posts, Moses would still he'd have five New York state jobs.
He'd still be the chairman of the tribal authority.
All firing him would do would make an enemy out of someone who is still massively powerful.
And still has access to all this money that Wagner believes the city needs.
And so he can't risk giving Moses a reason to throw his power behind one of his opponents.
What if he endorsed someone in the next election and it wasn't Mayor Wagner and the press doesn't know any of this because they don't have access to the documents that would show them how the democratic machine actually works with Robert Moses.
And Carol also says the press misunderstood the relationship because of what he calls the wishes predilection to be father of the thought, which I think is such a beautiful phrase.
And I don't know if he's quoting it somewhere if it's a famous phrase or whatever.
But the idea that I want this to be the case.
So I think it is going to be the case.
You know, I am going to think it's that way.
They want Wagner to fire Moses.
So they assume that Wagner will do it and wants to do it.
And every time Wagner stalls, the press takes that to mean that he will eventually do it, that he just hasn't done it yet.
So fascinating. But one of the things that's again a new thing, a new turn in Moses, who's now 24 years old.
So I'm glad he can learn a few new things.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Yeah, this old dog has got some new tricks in it.
Is he's recognizing that the source of all of his misery is this title one stuff.
Like, you know, he knows that this is just out of control for him.
He knows parks. He knows highways and all he knows dams, apparently, but I don't know anything about him knowing dams.
But yeah, the book certainly wouldn't tell you too much about it.
He figures it out. Yeah, but you're right.
Like he was never really that interested in housing as a thing.
He saw it as a source of power and a source of money.
And now that money is starting to dry up, the power is starting to dry up.
It's becoming more of a hassle.
And the press thinks, Oh, Moses won't let go of title one housing.
He just holds on to it with his his vulture like claws.
But the people around Moses starting to convince that he doesn't really want to do it anymore, that he would be happy to leave it.
But he can't do it while the press is hounding him or else it'll look like they won.
And the thing he hates more than anything else is still look like he's losing.
But wait, what if what if an exit strategy came along?
Robin, what if what if a perfect exit came along?
But what would that be?
What could possibly be an exit would allow him to leave this realm of construction while still saving face and looking like it was his idea?
What could that be?
Well, it's brand new thing that everyone loves.
The 1964 New York World's Fair is coming and they need someone who knows how to get things done and build things fast and take care of business.
And he decides that if he can focus on that and let go of title one, then he can sort of save face.
He doesn't have to be he's not hounded out.
He has this new shiny new thing that only he can achieve.
And therefore it just gives him a way out, making himself look good.
Yes. And he's got even even there even more reasons waiting.
He needs money. He has he's a guy who is 71 years old.
He is still supporting some of his children.
His wife is in such bad health that she needs round the clock nursing care.
He needs money. And he doesn't make a lot of money from his jobs.
That's part of his whole thing.
He's the guy who doesn't make money from his jobs.
He doesn't care about money.
And the World's Fair presidency, which has offered him would pay him a lot of money.
Yeah. I forgot. I forgot about this part.
But yeah, that's that is a thing like he it has the sort of a near of this sort of same civic duty because it sort of bolsters and boosters the New York area.
These world fairs are a very big deal.
But this is like this is a job job.
You know, this is a high paying job.
Yeah. This is essentially a private job.
He is entering the private sector in it in a big way.
And it sets into motion.
This other thing, which is it's one of those things that whereas he was able way back when when LaGuardia was trying to get him to be in charge of all of the parks and other aspects like where he was he changed the law.
It's like both work in the state and the city and have these dual appointments, even though they were in conflict to each other.
This creates a conflict that is sort of untenable.
Like he can't be ahead of this private corporation and be the person who would approve those things.
And it sets up a little bit of this unwinding of his sort of like this rope of like that he's built through all these different cords that that is uncuttable, you know, because he just has to let go of some of his public stuff if he's going to be in charge of this corporation.
Yes, legally, he cannot hold his city jobs and be the president of the fair.
And he sees it as in some ways a trading up, you know, is worth letting go of those things, which he feels he has expended a lot of the power from for this new thing, which will bring in new power and new money.
And it's also going to be more fun, probably, like this guy, he loves he liked making the Central Park Zoo.
He liked making Jones Beach.
He doesn't love building public housing, you know.
And so it is a way, I think, in his mind of cutting that Gordian knot.
Yeah, he can unwind these things by just getting rid of the problem.
And so he takes the thing that was hurting his reputation, Title one, his city jobs, and he trades them for this other thing that he thinks is going to build it back up.
And so he works out this arrangement with the mayor that they are first going to have the legislature.
First, they're gonna have a legislature pass a law exempting officers of the fair from the city's code of ethics, which should be a red flag right there.
But then he starts resigning from his city jobs.
He resigns from this as the city park commissioner.
He resigns the city planning commission.
He resigns in the committee on slum clearance.
He recommends that his job as the construction coordinator be abolished as it is no longer necessary now that he's not doing it.
And the press is like, oh, Wagner is trying to push out Moses.
But Moses is doing this all himself.
He leaves in triumph from these jobs.
And there's this 1044 person dinner where everyone pays $100 a plate to be there.
This is 1959. And the city's power elite.
They give him a standing ovation.
He is leaving at seemingly the height of his power to take on this other stuff.
He's getting rid of the things that were hurting his reputation.
Not only that, his replacement at the parks department is this guy, Newbold Morris.
Again, a great name, I love the first name Newbold, especially because he is a very much not a bold man and he does not have new ideas.
And he is, Carol portrays him as this like well -meaning bumbler who is so eager to do whatever Robert Moses tells him.
And he tells a story about a reporter calling Morris and Morris says, let me call you right back about that.
And then the reporter calls Moses, his private number, which is busy and then Morris calls him back and tells him what Moses told him to say.
Like he immediately got off the phone and called Moses.
Morris and Moses are even similar sounding names.
So and Moses still controls the federal and state highway programs in New York.
What's clear is so the city stuff has all been resigned in order to take this this job for the for the World's Fair.
The federal and state highway program stuff is still that still stuff that he has control of.
But because so much of his power was drawn from having the connections between the two and then if he was let go of one, he would be in control of another.
It really does just erode one of his like the legs of his stool here.
You know what I mean?
By having this one.
And because now, you know, when it comes to state authority, there is a new person in charge who can take that power away from him.
Yes. What he's got an accomplice so that we're going to meet someone in the next chapter is a very fun person to talk about who is going to be a little bit more than than Moses can handle.
But this guy has an accomplice and that accomplice his name is Robert Moses because as Caro says, only Robert Moses could lose Robert Moses, his power.
And he did. Okay, this is Chapter 46 and it's just called Nelson.
It's not about the band Nelson.
I'm sorry, everybody.
It stands for Nelson Rockefeller.
And oh, my God, this is it.
This is it. Buckle up.
This is the chapter you've been waiting for.
You've sat through hours and hours of us talking, waiting for Moses to finally get what he was getting.
And this is when he gets it.
It's it's Nelson. And so, yeah, the Nelson here as Nelson Rockefeller in nineteen ninety, he's the new New York governor.
And Nelson Rockefeller Caro tells us he's a little different from the previous governors that Moses has dealt with.
He is not quite the same type of politician.
What's the reason for this?
Because Nelson Rockefeller, as you can tell from his last name, is enormously rich, like cosmically rich.
Absolutely rich. And they're basically he mentions that the Rockefeller family has basically been bankrolling the Republican Party.
Basically like it pays for the Republicans.
So anything that they want to do, you know, it's just up to him and his family.
So like the idea that Moses controls a lot of money is just nonsense to him.
Now, this is a guy this a guy like that.
His grandfather was the richest man possibly in the world, you know, when he was alive.
This is a guy who Caro talks about.
He has a ranch in Venezuela that is five times as large as the combined boroughs of New York City.
Like this guy owns so much.
His brother controls Chase Manhattan Bank.
At the time, Caro says probably the most powerful financial institution in the world.
They have a controlling stake in Con Edison where almost everyone gets their power from.
Like it's they are so rich and they have so many sources of power in a way that Robert Moses just can't with his rinky dink bridges, you know, his authorities, things like that, like just can't do it.
This family is so powerful that Nelson's brother, David Rockefeller, his lawyer is former governor Thomas Dewey.
Like one of the one of the major governors is his works for him.
It's crazy. And so Nelson Rockefeller is like, I want to be governor.
And he basically buys his way into the office.
Like you said, if he tells the Republican Party I want to be governor, then it's going to happen.
But he also plays politics well.
This is guy he's going to run for president years later.
He's going to be vice president years later.
He's a real political figure.
And he's good also in a way that other governors have not been at visualizing the pros and the cons of big building plans.
He can't think of these big plans, but he's really good at looking at someone else's plan for a massive project and seeing what's good or what's bad about it.
And he was really heavily involved in Rockefeller Center when it was a new thing, when he was 30 years old, when his father was building it.
And so as governor, he has these big building plans that he wants to do.
And so he has that in common with Robert Moses, that he has big infrastructure dreams.
What he also has in common with Robert Moses is he is incredibly arrogant.
He's incredibly stubborn.
And Carol describes it as a serene sense that because his motives are pure, his decisions are right.
Like he's wealthy. He's a wealthy man.
He's always been wealthy.
He was born basically with the assumption what I want is going to happen and I want it.
So it must be the right thing.
I'm going to get it if I want it.
And Carol says, Rockefeller's arrogance, it's different from the abrasive, hard arrogance of Robert Moses.
Robert Moses has this kind of like poking you arrogance.
Whereas Nelson Rockefellers is the easy, gracious arrogance of someone who does not have to prove himself, who just takes it for granted.
You will listen to me.
And he is ruthless, but he's ruthless in a way that assumes I will win.
And it's something that Robert Moses has never really had to face ever in his career.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, what the two share is this love of cosplaying in a hard hat.
They do. They both love that thing.
And neither of them are engineers or construction contractors, but they like to be around a site.
And they understand the power of money.
And what's so funny is up until like the previous thousand pages, what Caro has really demonstrated is that these nickels and dimes, you know, what fortune they amass to make Robert Moses able to do what he has done.
And then right at this moment when Nelson Rockefellers enters the scene, all of a sudden they're nickels and dimes again.
And it's like, you don't understand what money is.
And it's it's really something.
If there is ever a guy who is burning thousand dollar bills to light a cigar, like it's this guy.
So all the change that commuters are throwing in is nothing.
And Caro says, survey the whole vast cast of characters on the New York political scene.
And there is only one man who could with impunity confront and defeat Robert Moses.
The man who is now governor.
Like this is this is going to be bad for Moses.
And Carol's like, Moses should see this.
He should recognize how tough Rockefeller is going to be.
But the old Moses is no longer interested in kind of understanding who he's up against.
And Moses and Rockefeller have a history.
He's worked with the Rockefeller family.
He's worked with Nelson Rockefeller.
Like Nelson Rockefeller worked with him on getting the U .N.
into the New York. So like they've worked together.
He thinks he has the measure of him.
And Moses is in the 70s.
Rockefeller is 50. And so Moses is like this young man.
I can be fatherly towards him.
I can assume his support because I think he kind of sees him like Wagner.
Where Wagner is like I'm a young man.
Moses an old man. I look up to him.
I have to listen to him.
And the difference again is that Wagner is not colossally like globally rich in the way that Rockefeller is.
And so conflict seems inevitable.
They're huge arrogant fish in this New York state sized pond.
And there's one early point of conflict.
Rockefeller has this aid who's a former NYU professor go NYU my almater William J.
Ronan who has sparred with Moses in the past and recommended abolishing the state Council of Parks and putting it out of the Department of Conservation.
And most like nope that's not going to happen.
And nothing happens.
And I think Moses takes from that.
Oh I can push these people around the same way that I pushed everyone else around.
But Rockefeller starts intruding on the territory that Moses considers his territory essentially parks and Long Island parks especially.
And Nelson Rockefeller's brother Lawrence.
His name is spelled L .A .U.
like the fancy way of spelling Lawrence not that not L .A .W.
like the normal people would.
He starts getting involved in having the state acquire more Parkland and Moses like great I want more Parkland.
But in 1960 Rockefeller wants this massive state mass transit program put into place and transit is Moses thing.
And he puts Ronan Moses new nemesis.
He makes him his closest advisor and has him looking at this program.
And the first big battle that's kind of around these these kind of shared interests that they're going to squabble over is over Moses age.
Like I said he's 70 years old at this point when Rockefeller becomes governor 65 is the mandated state retirement age legally.
If you work for the state you have to retire at 65 unless the governor signs an age extension and you can sign them for up to two years.
And previous governors they would sign them as early as possible.
They'd sign them for two years.
Rockefeller will only give Moses one year extensions and he always waits as close to Moses his birthday as possible.
So in the days leading up to Moses birthday which should be a time for you know excited celebration.
Instead he is agonizing over whether the governor is going to sign this extension and let him keep his jobs.
Yeah yeah which really begins to eat at him.
I mean like you can tell that where Lisa as Caro describes it you know he he is an older man.
He is perceived as an older man.
He has these hearing aids he can't hear as well.
You know they think that maybe this is one of the reasons why Rockefeller like feels like he can do this.
You know I mean because the world is perceiving Moses as older too.
Yes and I have to assume when you're in a meeting with Moses he probably comes off as very old.
Caro describes him as not really being able to hear what people are saying.
So he just kind of assumes what people will say which reminds me of a story about my wife's grandmother that she refused to wear a hearing aid.
And at one point she was eating dinner with their family and her dad says something about like how's the food.
And she said the doctor says it's fine because he was responding to the question she thought she was being asked rather than the question she was actually being asked.
And it feels like Moses doing that stuff.
And so Rockefeller has this sense.
Moses has agreed to transfer the Parks Department to my brother Lawrence and Moses has this sense.
That will happen way in the future whenever I decide it and this comes to a head in 1962 the first appearance of Spiderman that year.
Moses is 74th birthday is approaching and Rockefeller and Moses they're having lunch to kind of smooth over this disagreement.
Over when Moses will transfer the parks the state parks to Lawrence Rockefeller and nobody knows exactly what happens in this lunch.
But Moses ends up storming out and Rockefeller goes out on the sidewalk and is trying to pull him back into the building and Moses shakes himself out of his hands and gets in his car and he leaves the governor standing on the sidewalk being like come on.
Come on. Like this is crazy.
And Moses tells it Shapiro and he says don't tell anybody about this.
But of course the truth tells Carol to sit here loves to talk to Robert Carol that Rockefeller said he kind of holds up in his hands an extension of Moses's presidency of the Long Island State Park Commission and his other hand he holds up this kind of transition of the state council of parks chairmanship
to Lawrence and what Moses feels is this is a quid pro quo.
You're saying you won't extend it unless I sign this over Lawrence and Moses goes well maybe I should just resign all of my state posts then.
And it was like no I just want you to resign the council parks position.
That's all I want and most like they're all connected and he storms out when Rockefeller says don't tell anyone about this conversation and Moses is in his arrogance is like well I defeated the governor.
He wanted me to hand over this power and I said no I'll resign everything if you make me do that and he gave in because I didn't do it ignoring I guess the fact that he stormed out of the building like it's not he's like I showed the governor thing or two as if the conversation ended and he's I guess
hanging out with a friendly editor at the.
Daily news and he says hey hey you should arrange for a news reporter at Rockefeller's next press conference to ask if Moses is keeping all of his jobs because that's gonna force Rockefeller to say of course I want to keep Moses because he doesn't want me to lose those jobs and he knows I threatened
to resign all of them so if you ask him it's gonna force him to say of course I want him publicly.
And back around his island most refusing to answer the governor's calls he's assuming if the governor's calling me I've already won the winner doesn't call the loser calls he wants me back and I'm not gonna go and Caro says this every indication that if Moses had just stopped there I just let it lie.
Maybe he would have one if it wasn't public maybe Rockefeller would have backed down from this transition idea he had backed down from it in the past so maybe Moses thinks this is just another one of those times where.
Someone asked me to do something I say I'll resign and they stop and the governor did it before and it'll happen again.
But Moses he pushes things too far he wants to show Rockefeller how completely in control of the situation he is he wants to force Rockville to surrender completely so he writes a letter.
Don't do this this is this is don't do this he writes a letter saying I'm preparing to resign from all of my state posts this is what I am trying to do and he's like I know Rockefeller now he's gonna call me again I'll finally take his call he will say no no don't do it we don't do it we need you and it's
gonna it's I'm gonna just have defeated him it's what I do it's what it always works works always works all the time.
This is his ultimate weapon it has never failed him and Carol writes.
This time, however, the ultimate weapon misfired after 30 years of issuing that defiant challenge he had issued it to a man who would take him up on it on the day after he received Robert Moses is resignation Nelson Rockefeller accepted it.
I hope you will continue in the power authority post Rockefeller said as for the others, I know that you are making arrangements to resign from the Long Island State Park Commission, this is a decision, which I accept with regret.
Roman Oh my god what just happened someone finally took his resignation took him seriously they just like they faced his ultimate and said you know what no no Walker feller accepted his resignation for the first time he accepted it.
Oh no no we need you we can't do that he said oh that's too bad well it's I'm gonna be sorry to see you go but you know don't let the door hit you this is the first time since he was on the Yale swim team that someone has accepted his resignation for decades governors and mayors have quailed in fear.
The idea that he would ever resign and now so easily he just gets a letter back to being like I see you've made those arrangements to resign I guess you'll do it now neither letter has been released publicly.
So as this whole thing could have been swept on the rug but there's rumors that of the conflict that I've leaked out and Moses is like oh no.
I planted that question at the press conference where the reporter was gonna ask Rockefeller if I if he wanted me to continue in all my posts and now.
Rockefeller's gonna say no he resigned and I accepted his resignation it's gonna look like Rockefeller pushed me out it's gonna look like Rockefeller fired me I can't let that happen oh no I can't let that happen I got that's a nightmare scenario that everyone's gonna know I lost to him.
So he heard the release of the public statement saying Nelson Rockefeller asked me to resign in favor of his brother and I refused and I'm so insulted I'm resigning all of my state posts and inventing his grievance with the Rockefellers and he's like so that's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna resign all
of them he says is publicly.
Rockefeller thinking again that Rockefeller is gonna be like no no no no I can't be looked to have seen to be pushing out in favor of my brother did all Rockefeller graciously publicly accepts all the resignations he's clearly a little mad about the reference to his brother.
But yeah I don't know I'm not quite sure what Moses thought the governor was going to do to be honest but whatever he thought was going to happen it didn't happen.
Moses has managed to checkmate himself out of power purely as the way carols is by sitting in his office worrying about what's going to happen you know and assuming the worst and then making the worst happen it's really something like he just never thought this would happen and he had all these sort
of things in place over his whole life that he thought he was sort of protected and he is not in this situation at all.
And I don't know it's just like it I mean I think one of the key parts of this is that it involves you know Nelson's brother you mean like you know like if it was another person potentially it would be like.
You know he might have bent or you know changed his his tune to this but like this family no one goes against this family he must have just been like no then then just just like piss off you know I mean.
I don't need you yeah everyone before him has felt I need this guy I can't afford to let him go and this is the first day says I literally can't afford to let him go.
Literally don't need him if money is power then you know it's it's like a you know Superman is going up against God you know like it's just not it's it's not enough and Moses has now in that instant.
Mainly through his own actions he has lost every government post he has he still is the tribro authority chairman he's still president of the World's Fair he sells this informal role as the New York City is representative to the federal government on arterial highways very exciting but.
He's lost most of his power and Roman you made this comment in the notes here that hearkening back to very early on when the guy said ain't I got the power when Commodore vander bells of that and you say right here he ain't got.
got power. It's just gone hey.
He ain't got it and he ain't got it at all.
And Carol says so previously his power came from popularity and money the popularity is long gone it didn't matter because the money remained now he's lost most of that.
The state power authority which he has resigned from even though rock feller kind of wanted him to stay on it that was about to generate.
Tens of millions of dollars at least something yeah from these dams these dams that are so important that we never talk about what why we talk about these dams.
How come nobody ever nobody nobody talks about these dams ever and snow somebody else is gonna get the power that comes with managing that money and in public Moses like i'm glad to retire you know i just wanna retire this is great but behind the scenes his allies are furiously lobbying Rockefeller
to bring him back in the past.
This would worked but Rockefeller refuses and carol says.
For what might have been the one reason for Rockefeller to let Moses withdraw his resignation not his parks council resignation perhaps but is others.
Did not to his surprise and that the political insiders exist the expected storm of protest had not materialized Robert Moses had been fired and hardly anyone had really cared like Moses like well now this is public the public will rise up as one voice to demand that they're champion.
Be back in power and just doesn't happen the even the times that you know three years earlier they had said you don't bench Babe Ruth and now the times runs in a trail it's like.
You know it's too bad Moses is great but no government function can be made so dependent on a single individual that he becomes the indispensable man they're like yeah we still love Moses but you know what maybe it's time for him to go and this may be is my favorite detail in the whole book possibly
that's not true but it's one of my favorites.
Caro says and you know there is this young reporter who is assigned to sit in the news day office over the weekend to compile the statements that were going to come in from public officials commenting on Moses ouster.
And only one statement from a minor official comes in and then the notes Carol's like that was me I was the young.
In the notes though it's not in the text.
It's not in the tech he doesn't say and when I was sitting there it's in the you got to go to the notes the notes I'm anyone who finishes this book with the with the last line of it you haven't read the whole book is the notes have a lot of great stuff.
But I just love that it's like even before he has started to write and research this book Robert Caro his professional life is touched for this moment.
At the very beginning of his career with the very end of Robert Moses career and there's such a beautiful symmetry to that that at the start of his career as a reporter he is having this moment where he is seeing the downfall this man whose life will become the study of.
You know seven years eight years of his own life and the thing is most politicians they are not making statements they will not go in record with public comments because Moses is not the power person they need to be on the side of it all is a powerful person that's right they don't know what tone to
take you know when it comes to when it comes to Moses and so they just say nothing which is like what Moses.
Yeah exactly and there was this at character there's this illusion for years decades in political circles that Moses was so popular that you could not get rid of him the voters would punish you so.
Hard for getting rid of this man and now the governor finally has done it and nothing has happened the voters do not care they have no if anything they're happy to see it happen if they even think about it and it feels like this is still the case in politics that certain people accrue.
The myth of indispensability and then they lose power and it's like oh that guy yeah okay and they probably could have gotten rid of him years ago.
And so Moses has it's almost the worst part of it for him probably is not just oh shit I accidentally resigned myself out of all of my power for no reason but also.
Oh and nobody even cares about it like I was used to being the actual that this city in the state turned around and now.
It doesn't even matter to people and at the next state council of parks meeting the first in the council's 38 year history ever to be held without Moses presiding over it.
They do name three parks after him, which is a big thing and people close to Moses say that he is devastated especially to lose his long island parks roles that was where he began it's where he first started accruing his parks power.
But in public Moses hides it and the next time he sees Rockefeller in person they hug each other they praise each other he recognizes it.
This is the power now he is not the power for the first time in decades Moses has to swallow his pride because he does not have the power and he must know in the back of his mind.
Boy I really I really shouldn't have done that like this is on me and they and they take all that sort of looming character of Moses just becomes a kind of figurehead.
He isn't like knock down and then everyone you know like they don't string him up like Mussolini or anything like that they sort of they transmute them into this this other type of elder statesman to be you know revered in this way but definitely not to be feared.
No they did they defang him he goes from being a vital powerful dangerous figure to being kind of like New York's construction grandpa you know like he's he doesn't matter you don't have to have an opinion on him he's around you can you can revere him without without it really meaning anything or you
can ignore him and it is.
Probably the thing that it would be most painful for him to be not just out of power but to be.
Unimportant obscure unnecessary just kind of like easy to easy to to not even pay attention to you know and that's unfortunately.
Eventually going to be the real his real ultimate fate but look he's still got that world's fair going on it's still still that there's still a glimmer out there the world's fair so maybe maybe what if he manages this world's fair.
Just right if he makes it a roaring success maybe he'll be back in power maybe that'll happen maybe he can do it this is his chance that we'll cover that on the next episode will we will also.
Finish the book we will cover chapters forty seven through fifty I cannot believe that we're through the almost at the end of this this is amazing I can't it's a it's a sounding to me I look at my copy of the book that has my notes in it and I look where the bookmark is and I'm like there's not.
Wait a minute so much before the bookmark not a lot afterwards it's what an amazing journey in a wild ride this has been but we'll say we'll talk about that more when I can't believe it finishing the book we're not gonna go through the notes in the podcast so you'll have to do that yourself we will end
at the last line of the text.
That sounds good. Coming up our conversation with Brennan Lee Mulligan host of the Dungeons and Dragons show dimension twenty.
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And now our conversation with professional Dungeons and Dragons dungeon master Brennan Lee Mulligan his dnd show dimension 20 on dropout TV has a very large and devoted following and pretty much since we started the show listeners on our discord server have been asking us to have Brennan on as a guest
all because of one reason.
Our big bad our villain of season one of the Unsleeping City was none other than undead Robert Moses oh no here he comes.
Just when we thought we were through with it finally with this episode finally Robert Caro is going to have to pop back up and get that pen out and start writing baby there's new chapters here we go.
That's right Brennan created the Unsleeping City and made the main villain a fictionalized magical Robert Moses you see Robert raises his hand.
A seam opens in his wrist and a rope of blood shoots out of his arm around the child and he rips the child out of the mirror as it skids onto the floor in front.
When Brennan develops his stories for dimension 20 he pushes the bounds of traditional dnd campaigns his first season was called fantasy high which Brennan describes as a john hugh's movie with swords and magic.
But there's something very different about looking to the power broker for source material so we talk with Brennan about why he decided to pick Moses as the inspiration for his.
Big bad dnd antagonist and how one goes about creating a fantasy version of a very real very bureaucratic man but first a quick primer on dungeons and dragons for those of you who may not be super familiar with the game.
Dungeons and dragons is a storytelling game where one person is the dungeon master who writes an adventure and their friends are the players and they each have one character so basically you have a group of heroes every heroes being played by one person at the table and their job is just to go on the adventure
role playing as their hero and the dungeon master's job is to be everything and everyone else all the monsters all the allies all the environs.
And basically you're just going on an adventure it's it's a group storytelling you're collaboratively writing this adventure improvisation in the moment and the game aspect comes in in moments of stress risk and uncertainty so you go into combat do you slay the dragon or does the dragon devour you we're
going to roll dice to find out do you crack the code in the massive spell book or do you raise your fist to the sky and shake and say no I cannot decipher the codex that's a dice roll right.
So all these moments of dramatic peak are determined by rolls of the dice which creates this really wonderful feeling whether you watch D &D shows or you play D &D where you are watching a story being told by people who love telling that story and the intoxicating part is not only do you not know where this is going
to go the people telling the story are discovering alongside you where the story is going to go.
So we we have discord server will we talk about the book and stuff and you came up very very early in discussions of like who should we have a potential guest because a lot of people listen to us enjoy your show and the idea of Robert Moses the word Moses in this book morphing into a fantasy villain and he
is morphed quite a bit like we should explain a little bit of that is kind of genius and it's just sort of fun to sort of.
Bring the real world into this fantasy world and and play with that so let's let's first talk about who Robert Moses in Unsleeping City is let's describe him a little bit because he's a little bit changed.
He's yeah I would say that he is a very fantasy villain version of the historical figure and and one very much sort of taken up with presumably the decades of whatever his public historical life was we're now in the year 2019 you know after decades of magical shenanigans going on in the fantasy universe.
I should also mention that in terms of license with real figures we did have Stephen Sondheim as an ally of the of the player characters who wielded two broad swords one in each hand so there is a little bit of creative license with some of our beloved New York New York because he was usually a one
weapon fighter. Yeah in real life he was a say he was a sort of Sabre or rapier you know he was a one hand Fencer but we thought it would be fine it's a little license so we gave him two clay mowers.
Robert Moses as he's depicted in the Unsleeping City is the architect of a thing called the highway hex and the highway hex is if you guys are familiar at all with the concept of lay lines which are basically magical.
directional veins that can intersect and create nodes of power and it's sort of based on some real world belief systems and the idea behind Robert Moses in the Unsleeping City is that the highway hex.
Was him creating a complex arcane room a glyph of the intersecting highways and express ways within New York City to repel divination from the forces of good so he's a.
Basically remains a master builder remain someone whose ideology is very rooted in the concrete and building and the creation of an infrastructure with this added level of arcane magical threat on top of it that all of the traffic in New York is actually casting this elaborate fiendish spell.
Right so this version of Robert Moses when Robert has interviewing him would point out to fire island and say don't you see there should be a glyph there be a glyph out there like that it's but it's still like you're saying it's still rooted in the in the things we know about Robert Moses about that his his predilection for slashing
roads across everything but you're giving him if anything kind of a more rational.
Exactly yeah right we're we're explaining in retro respect why he was obsessed with building all these express ways and I get why his road has to take a sudden curve in through East Fremont if it's because oh well we're drawing a some sort of sigil or some sort of a cult sign and it has to be exactly
the right way it makes more sense than is the reasons that we got otherwise I'm very I'm very curious about your so you've read the power broker.
This is not this is you're not just existing off of the urban legends of of Robert Moses what is it it strikes me as such an interesting book to use as a foundation text for a fantasy story because it is such it is so grounded in.
In many ways the real kind of like minutia and data of urban construction traffic flow things like that is it what is it about it that that planted this into your mind that like I could use this for a for a dnd campaign you know it's a great question and there's a lot I mean like especially growing
up so I have a an odd biography right I.
Went to school a little bit early I started attending college at SUNY Ulster when I was 14 for philosophy and humanities and was used to remember you know as a teenager reading Howard's in which is a very similar book in terms of like oh my God this is 80 pages on like and these many bushels of barley
were being exported and they were tabulating kind of the economies of this portion of time and then it will move to a page where you'll read a chapter that makes you burst into tears.
Right where the human cost of all of this data is rendered very plainly and to be honest with you a lot of the Unsleeping City that first season was rooted in and very much dedicated to and sort of honoring my father so I'm a New Yorker my father's lives in New York my entire life and we would walk
around during my childhood and he had this incredible his name's Joe Mulligan he had this encyclopedic knowledge of New York history and.
We've anywhere we've been going to museums are going up to the cloisters are going downtown he took me to five points when I was a little kid but before gangs of New York came out and you know he we laugh about it now because he would point somewhere and be like and this is where bill pool you know
or this is where William you know like came out and this is what happened and.
I would be pointing at a Dunkin Donuts right like this is the this is the site of ultimate significance and he prior even to reading anything about Moses you're right like urban legend is a good way to put it yeah my father as a New Yorker spoke about Robert Moses with this idea of like.
This is someone who forever altered the city and you know explaining the heights of bridges and you know the discrimination of keeping various groups out from these you know that these people will have luxury and plenty and these people will not and in terms of like what drew me to this document and this extremely
kind of like if we're being honest.
The the crimes the social ills of this guy are so fascinating in that the greatest harm is done through these things that require a kind of pointed attention to understand what's happening right like these you know like it's not salacious it's not this thing where it's like the big harms are done by manipulating
authorities and manipulating money and manipulating power and I think it was looking at a setting.
Set in a magical New York and specifically dealing with the idea of how do you fight somebody who's not even interacting with you they are in control of the environment and your your conception of freedom your conception of what individual action can be is totally put up against this guy like you're
saying from from source material that is very very like rooted in.
Infrastructure administration bureaucracy so you know you want to have this big fantasy showdown and it felt like the right way to do that was with the guy with this massive history of extremely dense action that was taken at this level that most individuals don't know how to oppose.
It's something that a that ties into the episode we're talking about today we talked about how the reporters who were trying to make it clear what Moses was doing or having trouble communicating it to the public because it was so complicated and it was not salacious and what they finally got traction with was well
they hired an ex mob guy as a night watchman so the mobs involved and it seems like it would be a big challenge in creating that kind of a traditional.
Fantasy adventure climax when you are dealing with somebody who himself is not a conniving villain so much as the I guess he is pretty conniving but it was not so much a cackling evil villain so much as I guess he kind of does that to nevermind nevermind makes more sense I thought I'll say there's a lot
of meat on the bone you know he really did give us a lot to work with for sure.
I mean I was actually thinking of rather than the incongruities of the text and then your storytelling built on top of it is some of the congruities which is like the idea of Robert Moses being able to write these laws over the course of the first couple of decades of his life that give him power for the remaining
decades almost seems like a wizard it almost seems like a magic spell that he has done to create and accumulate.
And build and build and build the same way that you you know you level up and build in D &D like it has that quality of of a wizard in a way.
You could look at the power broker as kind of a real world version of all the things that happen with Soron before the lord of the rings that all the things that happened in the past where he amasses this power because of secret knowledge and because of the artifacts of that power and then has this period
of dominance and then has his downfall more because of his own overreaching than because of anything else.
I mean you have to assume that Soron would not talk himself into resigning because he's worried Nelson Rockefeller is going to make him look foolish at a press conference, but you know, it could have happened that way too.
It could have happened that way.
There's the wizard Gandalf.
I call a press conference.
The Dark Lord. I totally agree and I think that there's a part of depicting Moses in this in the Unsleeping City which was showing, especially because of who our heroes were.
So like the heroes of our party are people.
You know, Lou Wilson's character Kingston Brown is a nurse in Harlem who is a fixture of his community and knows everybody in the city and is tapped into those communities and and working people.
We have Allie Beardsley's characters is Pete Conlon who's like a dream sorcerer who's like a part -time drug dealer in the art scene in Bushwick.
So you have these like sort of New Yorker staples that are all from different walks of life and the idea of you're making this point with this group of characters that become our heroes in this story.
They're all magical New Yorkers of the power of not only community, but the power of diverse community, the power of, you know, what's the word I'm looking for?
I'm looking for multiculturalism or like that idea of a big pluralistic society.
Right? And the idea of their being, and there definitely are forces at work against that.
And there are definitely depictions in the season and elsewhere of that kind of know -nothing nativist where it's meeting a cultural force with an opposing cultural force and saying like, okay, you want a pluralistic multicultural society.
We don't. We want, you know, homogenous and this one type, this sort of nativist ideal.
But that's one way to oppose that.
The other way to oppose that is to sidestep culture in totality and go, Hey, you can believe what you want.
I'll shape the city without any worry about what you know.
In these chapters that you guys are talking about, like the funny thing is how long protests had been trivial to him.
Where it's like, if you know how to get around, if you know how to actually move power around, if people are paying your tolls, if people are giving you this power and energy outside of their belief system, just cause they're driving on your road, how much of their buy -in do you really need on that cultural
level? Right? And that's so sinister to me, that idea of manipulating, like you're saying, it's a wizardly thing.
It's manipulating a system of power where you're like, I don't need to interface with you.
I don't need to be in conversation with you.
I have mastered a secret language, whether that's law or finance, or in this case, the bonds being issued to the authority.
Like you memorize this, again, like lingua arcana, and all of a sudden, it doesn't matter.
You have sidestepped that entire frame of reference up to a point, of course, but that's what's so interesting about that metaphor to me of the city authority as wizard, as someone whose power does not reflect interaction with large groups of people, but rather with systems that people are supporting
unbeknownst to them.
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting.
So the story is that to gain his power, he sort of sells his soul to different factions, to hell and to the fairy.
And then he builds the highway hex as a way to kind of insulate him.
Because then at that point, they all come in after him, and he's trying to keep them out.
And that sort of action of being surrounded by highways just disrupts their ability to sort of go get him.
And so he's basically remaking the city in this selfish way, just to protect, like he'll put the misery on everyone else to circle this city and circle this city forever, just so he can't be gotten at by demons who are, I guess, worse than him in some way.
Which is, again, it's a nice way to embody this, like put a story on this very sinister thing, to remake something without any sort of input from anyone else, just destroy a place just to make yourself safe is the diabolical.
And the fact that everyone knows in the setting, they're like, oh, yeah, like big celestial or fey or infernal forces can't come to the city.
Like, everyone knows the ramifications.
But it's a discovery in the midst of the season that that is because of this highway hex, and it's to protect one individual.
And you go like, so you're saying the entire shape of my cosmology, like how I understand the magical world to work is not some massive.
It's not like that's been here, like maybe that's why they built the city here.
No, it's one guy's actions that reshaped everything.
And I think the moment, obviously, again, we have a very fantastical villain in our Robert Moses, who, you know, he's way over the top.
But as far as villain goes, does attempt a lot of like persuasion and flattery really tries to get Ally Beardsley's character tries to make Pete Conlon into a Moses man.
You got fucked kid.
I'm sorry. What do you mean?
Well, did you sign up for this Vox Fantasma job?
Did you weigh the health benefits?
Did you get a choice in the matter?
No. No. Does it suck to be the Vox Fantasma?
What do you think? You're homeless.
You got a bunch of problems.
That's just New York.
I think there's one confrontation towards the end of the season where I was like, if there's anything that feels like a statement towards the historical Moses that feels really pointed, there's a confrontation between him and Kingston Brown at the Temple of Dender at the Met.
I hate to say Mr. Moses, but they're all free thinking adults who can make their own choices, as is every person in this city.
You see he says, you think people make choices?
I do. No. People think they make choices.
They think they're going to steer right or steer left.
But they didn't build the roads.
The big choices already got made for them a long time ago.
And that to me is like the heart of his sinister philosophy in the Unsleeping City.
And the thing that as someone who, you know, I come to this as a philosophy major, someone who studied philosophy, you know, the impact that he had on this country, forget just New York, but the country broadly is so profound.
And America, I think, has a cultural love for the idea of individual freedom.
And the idea that like freedom is a substance that lives in the individual and your ability to be a heroic cowboy figure who does whatever the hell you like.
No one's going to tell me what to do.
Very rooted in the American thing.
The rug is totally pulled out from under that philosophy.
If you have to reckon with the fact that life is multiple choice, that you are not born on a blank page, you were born into the context that has often been shaped by very powerful people.
I want to point out for anyone who's listening who is not a New Yorker, when you mention the Temple of Dender, I want people to know that that is a that's a real Egyptian temple that's in the Metropolitan Museum, not a fantasy like magic temple they're going to.
And it makes me think about how there are viewers the show who did not know that Robert Moses was a real person when they started watching it.
And did that, is that a surprise to you that there you see it like on Reddit, people are like, just found out Robert Moses is real.
I thought he was a character in the story.
Does that does that make you feel like you have more of a responsibility to present to you or you should have presented more authentically than as a as a magical monster man.
You know, like me and the guy who puts the facts on the Snapple caps, we get together, we get together and kind of commiserate.
The responsibility of it comes to that power.
Yeah. It comes to that power.
Yes, I think that there's a there's a very pointed feeling of any time you're doing anything connected to like historicity or historical, you know, I think a lot of the players in that season who had not lived in New York also felt like Oh, how do I honor this very real place?
And we had, you know, Steven Sondheim is mentioned there.
We mentioned in the second season, there's like a fight at Ellis Island where people are jumping into photographs from Ellis Island of different waves of immigration in the city.
You're trying to like honor these things, not only in a fantasy show, but in an improvised fantasy show where, you know, it's like, well, our first priority is to make sure that our story reflects our values and is compelling and interesting and funny.
And I think like people finding out that Rob Moses is real through this.
I can only hope that it shuttles them on to the power broker and to reading the history.
Please don't take the headline from an improvised D &D show.
Please, please, please feel free to dig deeper.
There's a lot more information and there's a lot and obviously a lot of our information was very much taking the character as a point of inspiration and then doing this big arch villain version of him.
You know, in the second season, they spring a creature out of this dragon's cave underneath Central Park and literally the Tammany tiger jumps out who is a giant.
It was a giant blind tiger with like cuffs and a top hat with a shamrock on it.
And you go like, it's like, you know, but I would hope that people would not see that and then go, oh, Tammany Hall, that's where that tiger is, right?
Yeah, Colson Whitehead wrote about this that, you know, when he was growing up, the underground railroad was an actual railroad like in his mind, like he could not escape that image.
It's one of those things.
It's kind of funny how you get information like this.
And I think it's awesome that people learn about Robert Moses through your show, you know, like, because I mean, there's definitely a lot more to dig into.
But it's just a great like, you take this sort of gestalt of this big book and kind of go, well, these are the things that speak to me about this, this idea of your choice taken away from you and places being shaped for, you know, like misguided and selfish reasons.
And, you know, it is a way to describe the world as it is.
It is. It's also it's the part of the irony of history that Robert Carroll feels the need to write this massive book, this incredibly researched book in order to tear down the myth of Robert Moses.
And now, 50 years later, there's people who are like, that is a real guy.
Huh? Like that's like, it was so omnipresent New York that Robert Carroll had to marshal so much argument to show that he was not not doing good work.
And now it's it's so around the opposite where people just are like, oh, yeah, that's yeah, that's that villain on that fantasy show.
You know, I mean, that that's a fascinating thing is the idea of Robert Caro who I mean, like, I can't think of a more, you know, we talked about the influence of Robert Moses, the influence of Robert Caro.
I growing up in New York, not one time did anyone ever go, you know, Bob Moses got a bad rap like no, like that book just decimated that guy.
It did it moisturized him.
He the I mean, Robert Caro is the is the definitive last word on Robert Moses legacy and to the degree that if people are unaware of Moses and become aware of him, there is a degree of like the.
The probably the first thing you hear is some apocryphal boogeyman style story that sort of reflects or echoes something from the book, or at least that's been my experience with people finding out about him as they're like, oh, yeah, that's the guy and like the first thing they'll tell you is one of the excoriating
pieces of evidence from the book, right?
Rather rather than that's the man that built America.
Jones Beach, Robert Moses.
So this is sort of the end of our series.
We're in the fall of Robert Moses.
The fall from power was at the loss of power.
That's the loss of power.
Yeah, I mean, so you have to wait till the evening to know how good the day has been.
And we're getting into the evening like the sun is sinking down.
We, you know, we have one more real summarizing episode left.
And what's so fascinating about his fall is that, you know, through some sort of machinations of like wanting to control the world sphere and therefore giving up some of the city posts and then fit a peak resigning as a bluff to his state posts.
And then finally for the first time in decades, after doing that over and over again, Nelson Rockefeller like takes him up on it and he actually, you know, gets forced out of his state posts.
And it's a pretty like a whimper ignominious end to his reign.
That is not how you're Robert Moses beats his end.
And in a way it's satisfying because you see the beats of it.
And so as a story, it's really fun to watch, you know, this resignation tactic finally not work, but it doesn't have the kind of like sort of own kind of one.
So describe how they, the fight and you know, how they ended Robert Moses.
The big villainous scheme.
So it's very, I mean, this is, this is as animated and over the top as you can get Robert Moses and his army of vampires, his army of vampire financiers.
Concocter ritual, the New York stock exchange, which our heroes are unable to stop on New Year's Eve and a disembodied Sauron esque Robert Moses retreats to the ball drop in times square.
Uh, where as the ball drops, there's a lot of magic having to do with the golden door and Lazarus, the new Colossus and the idea that, uh, in order to like basically extend his sphere of influence from New York to the rest of the country.
Uh, Robert Moses is going to summon the American dream.
He's going to summon the embodied version of the American dream.
And the danger of bringing a dream into the real world is that the second a dream becomes real, it becomes one thing.
When you call a little wish or a figment into the waking world, it can become a spell, a moment, a flash, a joke, a little bit of joy.
There are dreams that are so large and important that they represent a threat to the cosmos if they are brought into the waking world.
And while a dream is a dream, it can be anything.
And, you know, there's a lot of like fairy logic to that.
But what I think it means more pointedly for Robert Moses as the master of concrete and steel and the idea of concretizing something is the idea that the American dream is at its strongest or best when it is interpretable and where it means something different to everyone who wants to pursue it.
And by bringing it into the real world and putting it under his control, he will forever kill every other version of it.
You see the tendrils of Robert's spell and the infection set in.
The dream warps, convulses, has its last moment where it could be anything.
And begins to take a solid stationary form.
A tall, clean -cut, square -jawed, blonde -haired, blue -eyed man appears hovering in the air above you.
It surveys what it can see the city, the sidewalks, the subways, the buildings, the billboards, and then a resonant voice goes, This place is filthy.
So that poetry aside, all the good guys jump in a big tornado in Times Square and on a bunch of floating pla...
This is where we move from the poetic into the insane and literal.
They jump into a bunch of floating concrete sidewalk platforms, fight the American dream, defeat the spell that Robert Moses is casting, and sunder him and break his stranglehold on the Unsleeping City forevermore and send the American dream back through the Golden Door into the Land of Dreams.
You glow with the power of the chosen one, and the frozen flame flies back into the Golden Door.
Robert screams, And that's the final battle.
And it is a lot, I will say, it is a lot more final than the accepting of a resignation, you know, that's for sure.
So if you end the book, reading the book, and you're like, I really wanted something, you know, I really wanted a good punch to the nose of Robert Moses here.
You can read the 51st chapter, which would be the Unsleeping City with him.
Exactly. Dropout .tv.
And I will say this, we have a lot more spells.
There's also a tiny little fairy mobster called Don Confetti.
And he talks like this.
So where's that Robert Caro?
Where's that in the book, I ask you.
So good. So when you presented Robert Moses to your dream team, or your players, did they know who Robert Moses was?
Or did you know, like, did you know their level of familiarity with the character in the real world?
I did not. The crew knew, obviously, the people that I've been working with, you know, developing the storyline knew.
But yeah, I believe that a couple of them did actually know that Robert Moses was a real historical figure.
And did that change the way that different people interacted with them?
You know, because you're all telling the story together.
And you have a master plan and a guide, not an un -Moses -like master plan for how they're going to navigate this space, this story that you're telling.
But they do have input.
And did you notice that different characters interacted with the villain Moses differently if, you know, they were more familiar with New York and what he did and that sort of thing?
I just wonder if there was any sort of breakdown or pattern.
I think what's interesting is the awareness came out in the midst of the season.
So it was not like a difference between cast members in that some immediately clocked him and some didn't.
It was more that as the season was shooting, and it was clear that this was a real historical figure, that pointedness, I think, developed more.
To the point where, you know, I think that final confrontation at The Met, there's a really great part of it where Lou's character, Kingston, has basically heard enough that there's this sort of silence or gravitas to that scene where knowing how he's just, again, like, you know, the sort of horrifying
power that this man wielded and his utter remorselessness for the most marginalized communities were impacted over and over and over again for decades.
I think that there was a degree of gravitas that is added by that.
And there's this weird delineation, I think, in story telling, especially fantasy storytelling, where villains either are misunderstood and they have a point.
And they're three dimensional or they're like, muahaha, like Maleficent, you know, I am arch evil.
And I weirdly think that you get some of both those worlds in an instance where there's nothing more three dimensional than a real human being, but it almost makes it worse.
You know, like the idea that someone had a complex inner life and had emotional wrinkles in depth to themselves and was this heartless for this long wielding this much power is astonishing.
And I think that though, so the PCs, as they were clocking that, I actually think it gave them a measure of resolve, even as the villain was not a total cartoon, right?
Yeah, I'm just going to like add a little annotation here that PCs in this context as player characters, right?
A PC is a player character, yes.
That means that that's part of the group of this collective storytelling game enterprise that you're telling.
For folks is turning it and I'm sure, and again, if you're if you're listening to, you know, 99 % Invisible, Breaking Down, The Power Broker, I'm sure you've played tons of D &D, I'm sure that is.
They have, right? It's a decent crossover.
There's probably plenty who don't who just like into history stuff.
We were debating this of how much to describe what D &D is because obviously there's like, you know, there's different sections of the world who know different things, for sure.
But for example, when I was talking to my kids, I have twin 17 year olds who are very into D &D, and I mentioned that I was going to talk to you.
And I said, Are you familiar with, you know, Brendan Lee Mulligan's work?
And they were like, He's only the greatest DM in the world, probably of all time, you know, like, you know, man.
So that's very kind.
And so, yeah, so so like they're the people who know both because I talked about the Power Broker endlessly, and they watched Unsleeping City as it came out.
Like I was aware, you know, wow, wow, wow.
That's incredible. So when you're devising something as complex as Unsleeping City and you have some designs where you want to lead them and but they have their own agency to a certain degree.
How do you balance that when you're telling something as complex and like the idea of the highway, hex and the American dream and stuff?
It's a complex idea.
So at least they are.
They seem to me to be that way.
How do you do that?
I feel I feel Roman that I'm being set up for an analogy where this very much mirrors Robert Moses.
And I don't know. And I want to tell you that I see the trap.
I see that you're laying it out here.
Okay. I'm on to you, man.
That's very smart of you.
That's why you're a good DM.
That's why you can see the game behind his DMing in this interview.
I see the game. No, but you're very right.
There is a fascinating.
Well, I think that the in the language that Robert Moses uses a lot to talk about, you know, when he's talking about like Long Island and he's talking about like, what are the kinds of people we want to attract?
Right. Like that's the language he uses.
But there's there is a like a darkness and a cynicism when you understand that individual freedom written over massive populations and a powerful incentive structure is fate.
Free will over the aggregate becomes fate when you incentivize strongly enough.
And that's really sad and it's challenges a lot of our deeply held ideas about the power of individual freedom.
And so you answer your question on a DMing level.
Sadly, it's the same.
It's the same necromancy.
It's the same magic where you go.
You are kind of building these tracks.
You're building this thing where you go, okay, you can do whatever you want, but I know what you want.
So if I build, it's like it's it's it's sort of there's there's when people are seeking a stimulus, you know, it's like it would be.
This is such a this is I don't mean this as a as a disparagement of players, but to use a metaphor that there's like you have cheese at the end of the maze.
You don't have to seal off the maze.
You don't have to trap anyone in the maze if you know that they're looking for the cheese.
Right. There's there's this element of when you're building adventures and you're building even these complex ideas in there, you make something very personal.
You make something where it's like, well, this person has this villainous ideology and that ideology has resulted in the concrete and concrete harm to a loved one or it's resulted in something that is very visceral and felt to my character.
And the PC, the best way, honestly, to create these story structures is in collaboration with your players, which doesn't mean that you're prewriting what the story is going to be.
But there's this beautiful when I talked to like novice dungeon masters about how to construct adventures and flow sheets and sequences of events that your friends will feel compelled to improvise through.
It's always the idea of the motivation and heart of your players as they're embodying these characters has force and inertia to it.
It's like water flowing downhill.
You can irrigate a hillside to know where the water is going to go, and it's not a reflection on the water doing what you told it to.
It's a reflection on you understand that these people are pursuing their aims rationally.
And if they're pursuing their aims rationally, you can create the structures that direct those aims.
Brennan, you're not going to like this, but talking about knowing what people want and using that as leverage to get them to do what you want them to, it sounds like power brokering, to be honest.
No, man, no. Sounds like you did a lot of power brokering.
Come on, man. Don't do this to me, dude.
You can't do this to me.
It's almost like DM stands for dungeon Moses.
Hold on a second. No.
Suddenly, I just, I've, my disguise fades away.
Curse is and I fly out.
It was him the whole time.
The whole time. Yeah.
It's a very, it's, I don't know, it's, it's, it's genuinely a joy and a privilege to be able to write these kinds of stories.
And I think too, like in our first season, Robert Moses was such like a fun, compelling villain for the historicity and how much like history mattered and was important.
And I think too, in the, in the second season that we did as well, urban fantasy is so interesting in that you're often depicting both at the same time, you're depicting the heightened fantastical reality, as well as the what is actually the mundane reality on the ground.
You know, like our second season, we had sort of a, a large company called gladiator that was trying to open a campus in Queens.
And there was like, this was around the, you know, this, this idea of like a big conglomerate shipping, you know, e -commerce company.
And it was summoning this extra dimensional being called null.
And this, that season was very much about kind of the, the empty emptiness and urban isolation of hyper consumerist capitalism, right?
And so you're depicting these things where there's this haunting entity in the dream world that's coming out of it.
It's like a faceless, colorless silhouette, very Lovecraftian, but then also you're looking at like an apartment complex with no one living in it because all of the apartments are there.
And, and all of the apartments have been purchased as basically asset class investments, you know, like, which I think there's some crazy percentage of apartments on Central Park that are vacant for like more than 80 % of the year.
Right? And so it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a bizarre, it's a fun thing in crafting these stories, especially in any kind of setting like the Unsleeping City.
That's so contingent on the real world.
And it's very much depicting that where you're like, here's the metaphor and here's the reality and here's both of them hand in hand.
You know what I mean?
Like it's not just the analogy.
The analogy is like here with this other, this other component that is real.
It's, it's a joy. It's a real privilege to be able to get these kind of, tell these kind of stories.
And speaking of New York, we'll be coming, uh, to Madison Square Garden in January, which is nuts.
What? Uh, we, the Dimension 20 is going to be performing January 24th at Madison Square Garden.
Uh, we, we sold out the garden.
So it's a, congratulations.
Thank you. You appreciate it.
Uh, which is a very, as again, like having grown up in New York, it's a very, yeah.
It's amazing. Yeah.
Love it. It's, it's nuts.
Well, I mean, thank you so much for being on the 90 % Invisible Breakdown on The Power Broker.
It's been real pleasure and it was really, it's just fun.
I hope people like who are interested in, in D &D or even if you're not, just like check out the season, uh, watch it unfold.
It's, it's a really fun take on the underlying concepts and values of the book.
You know, it's just, this is great.
I, it's, you added to the canon.
And thank you for, for using, using your medium to spread the word of Robert Moses and The Power Broker to those.
Who were previously not aware of it, but are pretty interested in digging into lore.
So I think they're going to enjoy The Power Broker when they, when they finally get to it.
Yeah. I'll say if you love lore, Robert Carro's The Power Broker is chock full of lore.
He's chock full of lore.
Uh, that's, that's how, that's how we make a difference.
We start referring to history as lore.
Um, we're going to get a bunch of people, uh, it's truly a pleasure and an honor to, to be on the podcast today.
And, and, uh, I really hope that anyone who is coming here from, uh, dimension 20 digs into not only the rest of The Power Broker, but the rest of 99 % invisible.
Oh, thank you. All the things that I talked about that matter to me in the end, it's, it's, I feel very much like, um, if I can do anything as a comedian and storyteller to like direct people towards these things, you know, learning about Robert Moses as the villainous, arcane architect of the highway
hex, uh, is hopefully step one on people digging into not only the history of Robert Moses in New York, but the people wherever you live, the city that you're in and who, who is shaping the environs of your life?
And is there a way to get active in resisting whatever highway hex is being implemented in your town right now?
Nice. Well said. Next month, and I cannot believe what I am saying right now.
We are going to be finishing the book.
Forget page numbers.
Just read it till the end.
Read the book till there's nothing left in it to read anymore.
We're there, people.
It's the home stretch.
And if you can't wait till next month to hear my voice summarizing something, why not turn to the flophouse podcast where we never reached the end.
There's always more bad movies to talk about.
It's an unending torment.
We've got a bunch of 99 PI PowerBroker merch for you to congratulate yourselves on making it this far.
There are t -shirts, there are bags, there are bookmarks and something that we've been waiting to tell you about.
We have a 99 PI PowerBroker challenge coin.
It's a commemorative coin.
It's totally PowerBroker themed, a prize to get yourself to show to anyone and everyone that you've finished the PowerBroker because you'll no longer have the PowerBroker book as this totem, you know, that you're lugging around.
You'll now have this coin to commemorate that you are a true PowerBroker nerd.
The coins will be in the store soon.
If they're not there already, by the time this episode comes out, just head to 99PI .org slash store to get one.
The 99 % Invisible Breakdown of the PowerBroker is produced by Isabel Angel, edited by committee.
Music by Suan Rial, mixed by Dara Hirsch.
99 % Invisible is executive producer.
It's Cathy Tu, our senior editor, Delaney Hall.
Kurt Colston is the digital director.
The rest of the team includes Chris Barube, Jason de Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriela Gladney, Martin Gonzales, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Ley, Lasha Madon, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Nina Patek, and me, Roman Mars.
The 99 % of its logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.
The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor.
We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family.
Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building.
In beautiful uptown Oakland, California.
You can find the show on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord server, where we have fun discussions about the PowerBroker, about architecture, about bad movies that seem somewhat inspired by the PowerBroker, and all that kind of good stuff.
It's where I'm hanging out most of the time.
You can find a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI .org.
The banality of evil.
That is so goddamn boring.
Yeah, you got to put...
Of course the most evil guy is the guy that built the highway.
He's so dull. Yeah, he's real bad.
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