Exhibition Review: Robert Moses and the Modern City - Columbia ...

1. The cover of Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York. (Arnold Newman/Getty Images,
Courtesy W.W. Norton)
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Exhibition Review
Randall F. Mason
Future Anterior
Volume IV, Number 1
Summer 2007
Robert Moses and the Modern City
Columbia University historians Hilary Ballon and Kenneth
Jackson and their colleagues deserve high praise. Their revisionist
project, which documents and debates Robert Moses,
is characterized by superb scholarship spread across three
museum exhibits, a website, lectures, panels, and a catalogue,
Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation
of New York. The three exhibits are “Robert Moses and the
Modern City: Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution” at
the Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University;
“Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Road to Recreation”
at the Queens Museum of Art; and “Robert Moses and the
Modern City” at the Museum of the City of New York.
This season of Moses confirms that he left a wonderful
legacy—dozens of places of lasting public value. The exhibits
and catalogue will be acknowledged as essential material for
the education of planners, urban designers, politicians and
urbanists of all stripes. Moses had enormous effect on the
New York materially (the buildings and landscapes), politically
(empire building, bullying, alienating “the people”), and
culturally (we are still talking about him, due to Robert Caro’s
The Power Broker as well as the current exhibits). 1 In all these
senses, Moses’ legacy is obvious and extensive.
But the discussion surrounding his character—cast in
the formulation “Was he a good or a bad man?”—is a red herring.
The serious question ventured by the exhibits is what we
should remember and learn from Moses, his built works, and
his political agility. Or, taking the current exhibits and scholarship
on their own ground, how should Moses be remembered?
The assembled scholars behind this project recognize Moses’
incredible legacy without bowing before it. The legacy is handled
evenhandedly, though the balance sheet is positive, a
different and welcome take from Caro’s until-now canonical view.
Each school of thought, though, is a sign of its time. Caro
wrote in the aftermath of the denouement of Moses’ downfall,
with the cynicism it rightly engendered about powerful government
agency. Ballon, Jackson, and their collaborators write in
a period of renewed confidence about public-sector building
and acceptance of community will as part of the city-building game.
Apart from Moses’ legacy, one would expect these eminent
historians to dwell on Moses’ own history. Yet little
interest is shown in where Moses came from, what legacies
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he inherited, on whose shoulders he stood—on what came
“before Moses” and enabled his full flowering. The exhibits
convey the message that Moses sprang, fully formed—brilliant
though flawed—to his perch on the steel beam commanding
the city. (Figure 1)
The Exhibits
The three complementary exhibits are impressive in scope and
scale. They document the vast reach of Moses’ influence by
showcasing his projects: roads, parks, pools, housing complexes,
urban renewal schemes. The Wallach Gallery focuses
on the clearance and modernist design of urban renewal
schemes; the Museum of the City of New York on roads,
bridges and parks; and the Queen Museum of Art on recreational
projects such as beaches, pools, and playgrounds. The
ensemble of Moses’ works definitively transformed New York
from a walking and transit city into the automobile metropolis
of today. They created a sense of mobility fueling a metropolitan
sense of the region while infusing dense and rebuilt neighborhoods
with park infrastructure.
The design of the exhibits varies in quality and effectiveness,
ranging from the simple, careful, and surprisingly lovely
display of original documents at Columbia, to the hastily
constructed and cheap Museum of the City of New York installations.
The organization and design of the vast exhibit at the
Queens Museum is particularly clear, affording the space for
inspection as well as reflection on the many historical photographs
and graphics. Andrew Moore’s large-format color
photographs, parceled across the three exhibits, match the
clarity and power of Moses’ vision, though without hubris. The
photographs document the quality design as well as the contemporary
social values the places continue to nurture—more
than pretty pictures of good design, they capture people using
the places, such as kids swimming at the well-loved pools.
The dozens of projects shown in the exhibits are best
described as muscular. Many of them asserted modernism as
a new and confident language for public works, particularly
the pools and housing towers by some of the leading midtwentieth-century
architects including I.M. Pei and Wallace
Harrison. Each required massive amounts of labor, material
and dollars; the bridges and highways transcended the
natural and human geography of region, crossing rivers and
clearing neighborhoods. Moses’ projects—and their shaping
of New York’s landscape—were all business, even when they
were really about play. But many were also beautiful, including
some projects never completed: what fan of mid-century
modernism doesn’t secretly wish that an unbuilt Edward Durell
Stone pavilion were presently standing in Central Park?
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2. Title I Slum Clearance Progress,
April 16, 1956. (Avery Library Archives,
Courtesy W.W. Norton)
Moses understood the power of visual communication
through models, brochures, and constant press attention.
The exhibits build upon Moses’ own propaganda to make the
visual argument for Moses’ historical significance extremely
well, though a sense of the historical narrative is left for the
catalogue, which is an essential companion to the exhibits.
(Figure 2)
While the urbanistic expression of Moses’ work is
brilliantly displayed, a correspondingly thorough account
of Moses’ political works is missing from the exhibits. The
administrative architectures he employed, his boldness
in deploying them, and his personal political skills are not
conveyed. Likewise, only a weak sense of the community
opposition, so important to shaping our memory of Moses,
is included. The narratives are there—regarding Washington
Square Park, for example—but the opposition tends to get
lost, or cartooned, in the exhibits. Politics and community
opposition usually are not as visually interesting as master
building, so perhaps there is little surprise that the exhibits
are weaker on this topic.
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The Catalogue
Ballon and Jackson’s catalogue is superb in every regard, and
spares the exhibits from most weaknesses and elisions. The
book’s portfolio of photographs, drawings and other graphics
from the exhibit, with accompanying dossiers and capsule histories
of individual projects, gives one the take-home exhibit.
And it collects a set of rich, clear, and relatively brief essays
by leading scholars, who use Moses as an axis to spin out the
contexts in which he operated—they don’t fetishize Big Bob
the Builder, while remaining centered on his successes and
failures. 2 The authors match Moses’ muscular legacy of public
works with their own forceful and carefully researched analyses.
They rebuild Moses’ story with balance and depth, restoring
what was lost in Caro’s enthusiastic but cynical reconstruction.
Jackson begins by presenting the argument for revisiting
Caro’s interpretation of Moses. It is even-handed, and
puts Moses’ entire mid-century moment in historical context.
Owen Gutfreund’s essay does the best job of giving Moses
a history before his moment, emphasizing, for instance, the
design precedents Moses copied (the Bronx River Parkway, for
instance) and the public benefit corporation model of administration
he adapted. Built on the historical and contemporary
contexts out of which the master builder emerged, Gutfreund
concludes, “Moses was the right person in the right place at
the right time. He did not invent a vision of a novel New York
from whole cloth, but instead he deftly appropriated innovations
and plans of others, adapting and combining them to
suit his purposes and then readapting them as circumstances
changed.” 3 Or, as Jackson puts it: “What made [Moses] unusual
was not the originality of his thought but the personal qualities
that allowed him to build where other could only dream.
Moses the visionary was second rate; Moses the builder was
in a class by himself.” 4
The ever-present reality of racial discrimination, not just
in Moses’ psyche but also as a social structure of the period, is
prominently included in Martha Biondi’s essay. Marta Gutman
takes up one set of Moses’ vast works—recreational projects
such as pools and beaches and playgrounds—sensitively, considering
race and how it should shape our memory of Moses.
Joel Schwartz’s posthumous thoughts couch Moses thoughtfully
in the history of efforts to plan New York in the first half of
the twentieth century.
Robert Fishman’s persuasive essay highlights Washington
Square Park (Figures 3 and 4) as a watershed conflict not just
in Moses’ career but in American urbanism—marking the
arrival of community voices and grassroots participation as
new, transformative partners in the urban process. Like his
colleagues in the book, Fishman draws compelling evidence
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3. Comparative plans of Washington
Square Park with Moses’ proposed
alterations on the right. (New York
Times, Mar. 11, 1955, Courtesy W.W.
Norton)
from the archives, unfolding the scenes in which the politics of
the day, and Moses’ politicking, play out as a game, a game in
which Moses begins his career-ending losing streak.
These essays work together to create a masterful analysis
of Moses’ moment. But from where did this moment come?
The historians should be stronger on this theme. Moses and
his opponents, and the resources he used did not appear
all at once in the 1930s. They emerged out of decades of the
city’s development, on the efforts of countless reformers,
visionaries, and designers, and from contingencies quite
outside of Moses’ control. The historians let Moses’ giant
shadow obscure these important precedents and foundations.
Gutfreund touches these bases the best, and most of the other
chapters build some sense historical precedent, but the exhibits
fail to communicate this, and leave the giant exposed—in
his glory and infamy—but without enough historical narrative
or context to understand the origin of Moses and his moment.
Myths and Legacies
There is romanticizing on all sides of the Moses debates: celebrators
picture the figure on the cover of the book—virile, in
charge, a force of nature, damning those who dared to stand
in his way; detractors find an easy villain. All of which leaves
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4. Hulan Jack’s revised proposal of
a roadway in Washington Square
Park. (New York Times, May 18, 1957,
Courtesy W.W. Norton)
a great deal of important history and urbanism unrecognized,
or worse, obscured. The exhibits perpetuate the myth that
only big, new construction projects are worthy of historians’
attention and of public notice, though the catalogue’s essays
give the reader many reasons to doubt the myth. The romantic
Janus-like figure of Moses the Villain–Moses the Hero blots
out important narratives about building New York that are
worth remembering themselves.
The exhibits have little to suggest the Moses evolved
out of any tradition or that he built upon foundations laid by
others. But he did not spring, fully formed, upon the scene in
1934. And his design ideas as well as political strategies owed
great debts to those who preceded him. Quasi-governmental
commissions (also called public benefit corporations) created
the political space Moses later occupied so brilliantly with
the largesse of federal funds he amassed. The commissions
responsible for Central Park, preservation of the Palisades,
reform of the police and housing commissions, and many others
far predated Moses, most prominent among them Andrew
Haswell Green (1820-1903). Though Green is mostly forgotten
today, his long and illustrious career, spanning the sec-
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ond half of the nineteenth century, included key roles in the
building of Central Park, the creation of the New York Public
Library, the preservation of Niagara Falls and the Palisades,
and other projects to build or preserve great public works in
and around New York. Of greatest moment, Green was known
as the “father of Greater New York,” for his advocacy of the
consolidation of the city finally achieved in 1898. Green also
formed the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society
in 1895, a state-chartered non-profit group at the center of the
New York’s nascent historic preservation field in the early twentieth
century.
The emergence of parkways is swept under the wheels of
traffic on Moses’ many road projects, even though he merely
applied ideas already formed by others. Yes, landscape architect
Gilmore Clarke gets a cameo appearance as a designersoldier
in Moses’ army, but his marginal mention reinforces
the mythic proportion of Moses’ genius, at the cost of portraying
more clearly the history and agency behind earlier roads
and environmental reform projects like the Bronx River Parkway.
For generations before Moses, the broad idea that public
infrastructure projects should be catalysts for urban improvement
and metropolitan transformation was ingrained in New
York’s history. Consider the Croton Aqueduct, the planning
of new streets and avenues, or the building of Central and
Prospect parks. The idea that great public spending on vast
public works would prompt economic growth, guide geographical
expansion, create civic identity, and perform social engineering
reached their apex in the Progressive visions of the
early twentieth century—reforms partly realized when Moses
was learning at the foot of an older generation of reformers
early in his career, working at the good-government Bureau of
Municipal Research.
Public Service
Moses’ empire came crashing down amid the shifting politics
of locality, community, and other special interests in the 1950s
and 1960s. And while the exhibits underemphasize Moses’
history, the whole project performs a great public service,
and begs similar retrospectives devoted the other agents
of change in New York, or American cities more generally: of
mayors or community groups, of mavericks like Jane Jacobs
and her colleagues, who helped turn the tide in Washington
Square Park. Not that these agents could rival the giant Moses
(or photograph as well), but such exhibit-book projects could
round out our picture of urban history in leaps equal to this
year’s Moses extravaganza.
Together, the Moses exhibits and catalogue capture his
career and impact well, giving practitioners, officials, observers,
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and students today much to reflect on. But to the extent that
Moses will continue to be understood as an ahistorical character,
he will haunt New York’s memory more than inform it.
Randall Mason is an Associate Professor in the Graduate Program in Historic
Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design. The efforts
of Andrew Haswell Green and others to build a preservation movement in New
York are detailed in the author’s forthcoming Memory Infrastructure: Historic
Preservation in Modern New York, 1890-1920.
Endnotes
1 Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York (New
York, Knopf, 1974).
2 Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds. Robert Moses and the Modern City: The
Transformation of New York (New York,W.W. Norton and Company, 2007), 122.
3 Ibid., 86.
4 Ibid., 70.
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