Everything about Robert Moses totally explained
Robert Moses (
December 18 1888 -
July 29 1981) was the "master builder" of mid-20th century
New York City,
Long Island, and
Westchester County,
New York. As the shaper of a modern city, he's sometimes compared to
Baron Haussmann of
Second Empire Paris, and is one of the most polarizing figures in the history of
urban planning in the United States. Although he never held elected office, Moses was arguably the most powerful person in New York state government from the 1930s to the 1950s. He changed shorelines, built roadways in the sky, and transformed neighborhoods forever. His decisions favoring highways over
public transit helped create the modern suburbs of
Long Island and influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and
urban planners who spread his philosophies across the nation.
Moses' projects were considered by many to be necessary for the region's development. During the height of his powers, New York City participated in the construction of two huge
World's Fairs: one in
1939 and the other in
1964. Moses was also in large part responsible for the
United Nations' decision to headquarter in
Manhattan as opposed to
Philadelphia. His supporters believe he made the city viable for the 21st century by building an infrastructure that most people wanted and that has endured.
However, his works remain extremely controversial. His critics claim that he preferred automobiles to people, that he displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in New York City, uprooted traditional neighborhoods by building expressways through them, contributed to the ruin of the
South Bronx and the
amusement parks of
Coney Island, caused the departure of the
Brooklyn Dodgers and
the
New York Giants Major League baseball teams, and precipitated the decline of public transport through disinvestment and neglect.
Early life and rise to power
Robert Moses was born on
December 18,
1888, to assimilated
German–
Jewish parents in
New Haven, Connecticut. He spent the first nine years of his life living at 83 Dwight Street in New Haven, two blocks from Yale University. In 1897, the Moses family moved to New York City, where the family lived on East 46th Street off of Fifth Avenue. Moses' father was a successful department store owner and
real estate speculator in New Haven. In order for the family to move to New York City, he sold his real estate holdings and store, and then retired from business for the rest of his life He actively precluded the use of public transit that would have allowed the non-car-owners to enjoy the elaborate recreation facilities he built. After much litigation by private landowners, his highway projects on
Long Island followed a circuitous path so as not to cross the properties of
wealthy landowners such as
J. P. Morgan, Jr., while those same highways demolished numerous
working class neighborhoods throughout New York City.
During the
Depression, however, Moses, along with Mayor
Fiorello H. La Guardia, was responsible for the construction of ten gigantic pools under the
WPA Program. Combined, they could accommodate 66,000 swimmers. This extensive social works program is sometimes attributed to the fact that Moses was an avid swimmer himself. One such a pool is
McCarren Park Pool in
Brooklyn, now dry and used only for special cultural events but scheduled for reopening in 2008.
Moses persuaded Governor Smith and the government of New York City to allow him to hold state and the city governments jobs simultaneously; at one point, he'd
twelve separate titles, maintaining four palatial offices across the city and Long Island, and actually holding control of all federal appropriations to New York City. For the city itself, he was parks commissioner, and for the state, he was President of the
Long Island State Park Commission and
Secretary of State of New York (1927–1928), as well as chairman of the
New York State Power Commission, responsible for building hydro-electric dams in the
Niagara/
St. Lawrence region.
During the 1920s, Moses sparred with
Franklin D. Roosevelt, then head of the Taconic State Park Commission, who favored the prompt construction of a
parkway through the
Hudson Valley. Moses succeeded in diverting funds to his Long Island parkway projects (the
Northern State Parkway, the
Southern State Parkway and the
Wantagh State Parkway), although the
Taconic State Parkway was later completed as well. Moses is frequently given credit as the father of the
New York State Parkway System from these projects.
As the head of many public authorities, Moses's title as chair gave his entities the flexibility associated with private enterprise, along with the tax-exempt debt capacity associated with government agencies. The inner workings of the authorities were free from public scrutiny, allowing money to be freely allocated to expenses a public government couldn't sustain. Contrary to his public image, Moses horse-traded and dealt out patronage extensively, building support from construction firms, investment banks, insurance companies, labor unions (and management), and real-estate developers. Calling on these vast reserves of power, Moses quickly developed a reputation for "getting things done" and used his influence to fast-track projects in legislators' home districts, a tactic for which these same lawmakers repaid him by granting money for ever more ambitious projects. He dealt out enough spoils to both political parties to ensure he avoided unwanted attention to his patronage politics.
Triborough Bridge
Robert Moses had power over the construction of all
public housing projects, but the one position above all others giving him political power was his chairmanship of the
Triborough Bridge Authority.
The
Triborough Bridge, a cluster of three separate spans, connects
the Bronx,
Manhattan, and
Queens. The legal structure of this particular public authority made it impervious to influence from mayors and governors, due to the language in the
bond contracts and multi-year appointments of the Commissioners. While New York City and New York State were perpetually strapped for money, the bridge's toll revenues amounted to tens of millions of dollars a year. The agency was therefore capable of financing the borrowing of hundreds of millions of dollars, making Moses the only person in New York capable of funding large public construction projects. Toll revenues rose quickly, as traffic on the bridges exceeded all projections. Rather than pay off the bonds, Moses sought other toll projects to build, a cycle that fed on itself.
Battle of Brooklyn Battery Bridge
In the late 1930s a municipal controversy raged over whether an additional vehicular link between Brooklyn and
lower Manhattan would be a bridge or a tunnel. Bridges can be wider and cheaper but tall ones use more ramp space at landfall than tunnels. A "Brooklyn Battery Bridge" would have destroyed
Battery Park and physically encroached on the financial district. The bridge was opposed by historical preservationists,
Wall Street financial interests and property owners, various high society people,
construction unions (since a tunnel would give them more work), the Manhattan
borough president, Mayor
Fiorello LaGuardia, and governor
Herbert H. Lehman.
However, Moses favored a bridge. It could carry more automobile traffic than a tunnel and would also serve as a visible monument. More traffic meant more
tolls, and more tolls meant more money and therefore more power for public improvements. LaGuardia and Lehman, as usual, had no money to spend and the federal government, by this point, felt it had given New York enough. Moses, because of his control of Triborough, had money to spend, and he decided his money could only be spent on a bridge.
Only a lack of a key Federal approval thwarted the bridge scheme. President Roosevelt ordered the War Department to assert that a bridge in that location, if bombed, would block the
East River access to the Brooklyn Naval Yard upstream. A dubious claim for a river already crossed by bridges, it nevertheless stopped Moses. In retaliation for being prevented from building his bridge, Moses dismantled the
New York Aquarium that had been in
Castle Clinton and moved it to
Coney Island in Brooklyn where it grew, prospered and added to the attractiveness of this amusement area. He also attempted to raze Castle Clinton itself, on a variety of pretenses, and the historic fort's survival was assured only after ownership was transferred to the federal government. Ultimately, Moses was forced to settle for a tunnel connecting Brooklyn to
Lower Manhattan, now called the
Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. A 1941 publication from the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority claimed that the government had forced them to build a tunnel at "twice the cost, twice the operating fees, twice the difficulty to engineer, and half the traffic," though actual engineering studies didn't support this conclusion, and a tunnel actually may have held many of the advantages Moses publicly tried to attach to the bridge option.
Post-war city planning
Moses' power increased after
World War II, when, after the retirement of LaGuardia, a series of politically weak mayors consented to almost all of Moses' proposals. Named city "construction coordinator", in 1946, by Mayor
William O'Dwyer, Moses also became the official representative of New York City in
Washington, D.C. Moses was also now given powers over
public housing that had eluded him under LaGuardia. Moses' power grew even more when O'Dwyer was forced to resign in disgrace and was succeeded by
Vincent R. Impellitteri, who was more than content to allow Moses to exercise control over
infrastructure projects from behind the scenes. One of Moses' first steps after Impellitteri took office was killing the development of a city-wide Comprehensive Zoning Plan, underway since 1938, that would have restrained his nearly uninhibited power to build within the city, and removing the existing Zoning Commissioner from power. Impellitteri enabled Moses in other ways, too. Moses was now the sole person authorized to negotiate in Washington for New York City projects. He could now remake New York for the
automobile. Before Moses, most housing projects in New York were small scale (like the
Queensbridge projects on the Queens side of the
Queensboro Bridge). With Moses, projects grew to be the spartan, featureless
skyscrapers now widely associated with public housing. By 1959, Moses had built 28,000 apartment units on hundreds of acres. Ironically, in clearing the land for high-rises in accordance with the innovative
tower in the park scheme, he sometimes destroyed almost as many housing units as he built.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, Robert Moses was responsible for the construction of the
Throgs Neck, the
Bronx-Whitestone, the
Henry Hudson, and the
Verrazano Narrows bridges. (This last bridge project, which involved placing Interstate Highway 278 through the neighborhood of Bay Ridge remains a controversial thorn in the side of many Bay Ridgeites to this day.) His other projects included the
Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the
Staten Island Expressway, the
Cross-Bronx Expressway, the
Belt Parkway, the
Laurelton Parkway, and many more. Federal interest had shifted from
parkway to
freeway systems, and the new roads mostly conformed to the new vision, lacking the landscaping or the commercial traffic restrictions of the pre-war ones. He was the mover behind
Shea Stadium and
Lincoln Center, and contributed to the
United Nations headquarters.
Moses had direct influence outside the New York area as well. City planners in many smaller American cities hired Moses to design freeway networks for them in the 1940s and early 1950s. Few of these were built; initially postponed for lack of funding, projects still unbuilt by the 1960s were often defeated by the awakening citizen-led opposition movement. The first successful examples of these
freeway revolts were in
New Orleans. Original plans for
Interstate 10 followed
U.S. Route 90 through Uptown, but instead the Interstate through the western part of the city was routed along the
Pontchartrain Expressway. Following that adjustment was the blocking of New Orleans'
Vieux Carre Expressway, an elevated highway that would have sliced through the
French Quarter, resulting in an even greater impact on the city's sense of history. Later, successful freeway revolts that saw highway projects either scaled back or cancelled outright also occurred in
Boston,
Oregon (see
Mount Hood Freeway),
San Francisco,
San Diego,
Washington, D.C.,
Baltimore,
Toronto and eventually even
Los Angeles.
Car culture
Moses himself never learned to drive, and his view of the automobile was shaped by the 1920s, when the car was thought of as entertainment and not a utilitarian lifestyle. Moses' highways in the first half of the 20th century were
parkways, curving, landscaped "ribbon parks," intended to be pleasures to drive in and "lungs for the city". While appearing utopian on its face, some critics contend Moses' vision of towers, cities and parks linked by cars and highways in practice led to the expansion of wholesale ghettos, decay, middle-class urban flight, and blight. Beginning in the 1960s and reaching a peak in the 1990s, public opinion and the ideals of many in the city planning profession shifted away from this strand of car-oriented thought.
Brooklyn Dodgers
Moses is viewed by many as the man directly responsible for the move of the
Brooklyn Dodgers to
Los Angeles. Dodger owner
Walter O'Malley wanted to build a
new stadium to replace the outdated and dilapidated
Ebbets Field. O'Malley determined the best site for the stadium was on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn at the end of the
Long Island Rail Road. O'Malley pleaded with Moses to help him secure the property in a cost effective manner, but Moses wanted to use the land to build a parking garage. Moses envisioned New York's newest stadium in
Flushing Meadows on the site of what would become the World's Fair in Queens. O'Malley was vehement in his opposition, but Moses wouldn't be moved on this issue. After the Dodgers left for Los Angeles, and subsequently, The New York Giants to San Francisco, Moses was able to build
Shea Stadium in Queens on the site he planned for stadium development. Construction began in October 1961 and the stadium opened in April 1964 to house the National League's
New York Mets.
End of the Moses era
Moses's reputation began to wane in the 1960s as public debate on urban planning began to focus on the virtues of intimate neighborhoods and smallness of scale. Around this time, Moses also started picking political battles he couldn't win. His campaign against the free
Shakespeare in the Park received much negative publicity, and his effort to destroy a shaded playground in
Central Park to make way for a parking lot for the expensive
Tavern-on-the-Green restaurant made him many enemies among the middle-class voters of the
Upper West Side.
The opposition reached a crescendo over the demolition of
Penn Station, which many attributed to the "development scheme" mentality cultivated by Moses (although the impoverished
Pennsylvania Railroad was actually responsible for the demolition). This casual destruction of one of New York's greatest architectural landmarks helped prompt many city residents to turn against Moses' plans to build a
Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have plowed through what is now
Greenwich Village and
SoHo. This plan and the
Mid-Manhattan Expressway both failed politically; to this day no superhighway goes through the heart of the city. One of his most vocal critics during this time was the urban activist
Jane Jacobs, whose book
The Death and Life of Great American Cities was instrumental in turning opinion against Moses's plans; the city government rejected the expressway in 1964.
Moses' power was further sapped by his association with the
1964 New York World's Fair. His assumption of aggregate attendance of 70 million people for this event proved wildly optimistic, and generous contracts for fair executives and contractors didn't help the economics. His repeated and forceful public denials of the fair's considerable financial difficulties in the face of the evidence eventually provoked press and governmental investigations, which eventually found accounting deceptions. In his organization of the fair, Moses' reputation was tarnished by his disdain for the opinions of others, his high-handed attempts to get his way in moments of conflict by turning to the press, and the fact that the fair wasn't sanctioned by the
Bureau of International Expositions (BIE), the worldwide body supervising such events. Moses refused to accept BIE requirements, including a restriction against charging ground rents to exhibitors, and the BIE in turn instructed its member nations not to participate. (The United States had already staged the sanctioned
Century 21 Exposition in
Seattle in 1962. According to the rules of the organization, no one nation could host more than one fair in a decade.) The major European democracies, as well as Canada, Australia and the Soviet Union were all BIE members and they declined to participate, instead reserving their efforts for the Seattle fair to be used at
Expo 67 in
Montreal.
After the World's Fair debacle, New York City mayor
John Lindsay, along with Governor
Nelson Rockefeller, sought to use toll revenues from the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority's (TBTA) bridges and tunnels to cover deficits in the city's then financially ailing agencies, including the
subway system. Moses opposed this idea and fought to prevent it.
Lindsay removed Moses from his post as the city's chief advocate for federal highway money in Washington afterwards, a small victory in what was largely seen as a political misstep.
But Moses couldn't so easily fend off Rockefeller, the only politician in the state who had a power base independent of him. The legislature's vote to fold the TBTA into the newly-created
Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) could technically have led to a lawsuit by the TBTA bondholders, since the
bond contracts were written into state law and under
Article 1, Section 10 of the
U.S. Constitution states may not impair existing contractual obligations, and the bondholders had right of approval over such actions.
However, the largest holder of TBTA bonds, and thus agent for all the others, was the
Chase Manhattan Bank, headed then by none other than
David Rockefeller, the governor's brother. No suit was filed or even discussed. Moses could have directed TBTA to go to court against the action, but having been promised certain roles in the merged authority, Moses in turn declined to challenge the merger.
So, on
March 1,
1968, the TBTA was folded into the MTA and Moses gave up his post as chairman of the TBTA. He eventually became a consultant to the MTA, but its new chairman and the governor froze him out - the promised roles didn't materialize, and for all practical purposes Moses was now out of power.
Moses had thought he'd convinced Nelson Rockefeller of the need for one last great bridge project, a span
crossing Long Island Sound from
Rye to
Oyster Bay. Rockefeller didn't press for the project in the late 1960s through 1970, fearing public backlash among suburban Republicans would hinder his re-election prospects. While a 1972 study found the bridge was fiscally prudent and could be environmentally manageable, the anti-development sentiment was now insurmountable and in 1973 Rockefeller cancelled plans for the bridge. In retrospect, NYCroads.com author Steve Anderson writes that leaving densely-populated Long Island completely dependent on access through New York City may not have been an optimal policy decision. During the last years of his life, Moses concentrated on his lifelong love of
swimming and was an active member of the Colony Hill Country Club, but the biggest attack on his reputation would come after he retired.
Caro
Moses' image suffered a further blow in 1974 with the publication of
The Power Broker, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by
Robert A. Caro. Caro's 1,200-page opus (edited from over 3,000 pages long) largely destroyed the remainder of Moses's reputation; essayist
Phillip Lopate writes that "Moses' satanic reputation with the public can be traced, in the main, to...Caro's magnificent biography." For example, Caro described how insensitive Moses was in the construction of the
Cross-Bronx Expressway, and how he willfully neglected
public transit. Moses's reputation today is in many ways attributable to Caro, whose book not only won a Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1975, it also won a Francis Parkman Prize, which is awarded by the Society of American Historians, and was named one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books of the twentieth century by the
Modern Library.
Caro's depiction of Moses' life gives him full credit for his early achievements, showing, for example, how he conceived and created Jones Beach and the New York State Park system, but he also shows how, as Moses' desire for power came to be more important to him than his earlier dreams, he destroyed more than a score of neighborhoods, by ramming thirteen huge expressways across the heart of New York City and by building huge urban renewal projects with little regard for the urban fabric or for human scale. Yet the author is more neutral in his central premise: the city would have been a very different place -- maybe better, maybe worse -- if Moses had never existed. Other U.S. cities were doing the same thing as New York in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.
Boston and
Seattle, for instance, both built highways straight through their downtown areas. The New York City architectural
intelligentsia of the 1940s and 1950s largely believed in such prophets of the automobile as
Le Corbusier and
Mies van der Rohe and supported Moses. Many other cities, like
Newark,
Chicago and
St. Louis, also built massive, unattractive public housing projects.
Caro argues that Moses also demonstrated racist tendencies. He, along with other members of the New York city planning commission, were vocal opponents against black war veterans moving into
Stuyvesant Town, a Manhattan residential development complex created to house World War II veterans.
People had come to see Moses as a bully who disregarded public input, but until the publication of Caro's book, they hadn't known that he'd allowed his brother Paul to spend much of his life in poverty. Paul Moses, who was interviewed by Caro shortly before his death, claimed Robert had exerted undue influence on their mother to change their will in his favour shortly before her death. Caro notes that Paul was on bad terms with their mother over a long period and she may have changed the will of her own accord. Caro suggested that Robert's subsequent treatment of Paul may have been legally justifiable but was morally questionable.
Death
Moses died of
heart disease on
July 29,
1981, at the age of 92 at Good Samaritan Hospital in
West Islip, New York. The title of his
New York Times obituary package is both a found poem and a thumbnail sketch of his life and influence:
"Robert Moses, Master Builder, Is Dead at 92; Robert Moses, Builder of Road, Beach, Bridge and Housing Projects, Is Dead; Associate of High Officials; The Grand-Scale Approach; Not a Professional Planner; Part of 'Our Crowd'; Into the Orbit of Power; Fur Coat or Underwear?; An Overwhelming Success; Long Court Fights; Drafted Park Legislation; Moses' Tactics Were Both Extolled and Criticized; Badly Beaten in Election; Built to His Own Tastes; A Sampler of Quotations by Moses; The Face of a Region; and How One Man Changed It."
Moses was ethnically Jewish, but was raised in a secularist manner inspired by the
Ethical Culture movement of the late nineteenth century. He was a convert to Christianity, was buried in
Woodlawn Cemetery in
the Bronx following services at Saint Peter's Episcopal Church in
Bay Shore, New York.
Legacy and lasting impact
The bridges of Robert Moses are an exemplary and disputed topic in the
Social construction of technology. The main question is, how much
ideology and
politics can be built into
technology and
infrastructure such as bridges? (
Cf. Langdon Winner, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" in
Daedalus (journal), Vol. 109, No. 1, Winter 1980, and reactions on that article,
for example, by
Bernward Joerges).
Robert A. Caro was fortunate enough to be able to interview Moses on seven occasions. He was also able to conduct 19 interviews with Sidney M. Shapiro, Moses's General Manager,and chief engineer of the Long Island State Park Commission, who worked for Moses for forty years, and was the man who carried out Moses's instructions to build the bridges on his parkways too low for buses. In his notes on sources Mr. Caro writes: "It is thanks to Shapiro, more than any other source that I came to understand Moses' attitude towards Negroes...."
For example, the construction of low overpasses on parkways were made purposely too low for buses to clear, and the veto of extension of the
Long Island Rail Road to Jones Beach, were to prevent the poor and racial minorities (largely dependent on public transit) from accessing the beach while providing easy car access for wealthier, white groups. In furtherance of this point of view, Caro also notes the provision of numerous park amenities on the West Side highway below
125th Street (the southern boundary of
Harlem) versus the provision of few (if any) amenities north of 125th Street.
Fort Tryon Park and
the Cloisters (both of which sit in the northern part of Manhattan Island) were built in
Inwood, then a white neighborhood, rather than Harlem which is predominantly black.
Aside from the sociological view of Moses' accomplishments, there lies the question of urban destruction and
suburban mobilization. Did Moses's work degrade the quality of life in the inner city? Does increased accessibility from the suburbs improve the quality of life by enabling commuting? Was the general direction of Moses's work a damaging trend which is now being corrected, or a natural part of urban evolution? While Caro and others attributed the urban decay of New York neighborhoods to Moses's aggressive road building, it may be noted cities with far less aggressive postwar highway construction such as Philadelphia and Baltimore suffered similarly negative--or even worse--social trends.
While the overall impact of many of Moses' projects continues to be debated, their sheer scale across the urban landscape is indisputable. The peak of Moses's construction occurred during the economic duress of the
Great Depression and despite that era's woes Moses's projects were completed in a timely fashion and have been reliable public works since, which compares favorably to the contemporary delays New York City officials have had redeveloping the
Ground Zero site of the former
World Trade Center or the technical snafus surrounding Boston's
Big Dig project.
Three major exhibits in 2007 prompted a reconsideration of his image among some intellectuals, as they acknowledged the magnitude of his achievements. According to
Columbia University architectural historian Hilary Ballon and assorted colleagues, Moses deserves better. They argue that his legacy is more relevant than ever. All around New York State, she says, people take for granted the parks, playgrounds and housing Moses built, now generally binding forces in those areas, even if the old-style New York neighborhood was of no interest to Moses himself. And were it not for Moses’ public infrastructure and his resolve to carve out more space, she argues, New York might not have been able to recover from the blight and flight of the 1970s and ’80s and become the economic magnet it's today, she suggests.
"Every generation writes its own history," said Kenneth T. Jackson, a historian of New York City. "It could be that
The Power Broker was a reflection of its time: New York was in trouble and had been in decline for 15 years. Now, for a whole host of reasons, New York is entering a new time, a time of optimism, growth and revival that hasn't been seen in half a century. And that causes us to look at our infrastructure", said Jackson. "A lot of big projects are on the table again, and it kind of suggests a Moses era without Moses", he added.
Politicians, too, are reconsidering the Moses legacy. In a 2006 speech to the
Regional Plan Association on downstate transportation needs,
Elliot Spitzer, who would be overwhelmingly elected governor later that year, said a biography of Moses written today might be called
At Least He Got It Built. "That's what we need today. A real commitment to get things done".
A testament to the enduring nature of his impact can be found in the various locations and roadways in New York State that bear Moses's name. These include two state parks (one in
Massena, New York, the other on Long Island), the
Robert Moses Causeway on Long Island, the
Robert Moses State Parkway in
Niagara Falls, New York, and the
Robert Moses Hydro-Electric Dam (source of much of New York City's electricity) also in Niagara Falls. Moses also has a school named after him in
North Babylon, New York on Long Island. There are other signs of the surviving appreciation held for him by some circles of the public. A statue of Moses was erected next to the
Village Hall in his long-time hometown,
Babylon Village, New York, in 2003, as well as a bust on the
Lincoln Center campus of
Fordham University.
The impact of Robert Moses on the
Rockaway Peninsula was almost universally considered positive with his development of
Jacob Riis Park and the
Marine Parkway Bridge in the
1930s. However, Moses's construction of the
Shore Front Parkway and his large-scale introduction of
public housing and large-scale demolition of the bungalow area along Rockaway's beachfront provoked a conservative criticism.
Some facts
Moses held power while seven Governors of New York were in office: Alfred E. Smith, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert H. Lehman, Charles Poletti, Thomas E. Dewey, W. Averell Harriman and Nelson A. Rockefeller
Numerous public works bear Moses's name. On Long Island: the Robert Moses Causeway, and Robert Moses State Park - Long Island. Also, at Niagara Falls: the Robert Moses Power Dam, and Robert Moses State Parkway follows the Niagara Gorge to Lewiston, New York and beyond.
In 1945, Moses received a LL.D. from Bates College.
In 1934, Moses ran unsuccessfully for the office of Governor of New York, against incumbent Herbert H. Lehman.
In 1970, Fordham University dedicated a statue to Moses at the Lincoln Center campus.
Also in 1934, Moses received The Hundred Year Association of New York's Gold Medal Award "in recognition of outstanding contributions to the City of New York."
Robert Moses had the Central Park Zoo built for Al Smith--the former governor, and president of the Empire State Building--who lived near the park on the Upper East Side. Moses gave Smith a night key, and the elderly former king of Irish New York would go down to the Central Park Zoo by himself to talk to the animals. Smith loved to spend hours in the zoo after hours, "and he'd switch on the lights as he entered each one, to the surprise of its occupants, and talk softly to them...And if one of the zoo’s less dangerous animals was sick or injured, Smith would enter its cage and stand for a while stroking its head and commiserating with it.” [Caro,382]Further Information
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