Sunday, August 24, 2014  The defeat of the power broker  Robert
Caro’s The Power Broker is one of the all-time classics of
urbanism, assigned in many courses and read even by casual
students of history. Caro intended his biography of Robert Moses
to be an examination of the nature of political power, and how
powerful people rise and fall, as evidenced by the title and by
his follow-up multi-volume study of Lyndon Johnson.  What is
surprising to me is how often people pair Moses with Jane Jacobs
and talk about their conflicts over Washington Square Park and
the Lower Manhattan Expressway. You could even get the
impression, from the way that some people tell it, that it was
Jacobs who brought Moses down. It’s true that Moses and Jacobs
showed a striking clash of ideologies and worldviews, but Caro
spends very little time on Jacobs, focusing instead on the
conflicts that Moses had with the mayors (LaGuardia, Wagner) and
governors (Smith, Roosevelt) that he nominally served.  I am
also surprised by how few people