Robert Moses engineered New York's segregation through racist infrastructure, using low bridges and highways like the Cross Bronx Expressway to physically isolate black communities while denying them transit access. His blueprint for exclusionary architecture, amplified by federal housing policies, replicated across Detroit and Los Angeles, prioritizing property values over human life and causing fatalities like that of Cynthia Wiggins. Ultimately, this legacy reveals how subtle design choices entrenched systemic inequality, modeling a national pattern where infrastructure serves to divide rather than connect. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Robert Evans: The Jesus of Podcasting00:03:26
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Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, holy bleeding Jesus on a cross with his legs broken.
That's not this podcast.
Stabbed in the side by a spear.
That's a different show.
Holy that Jesus.
I'm Robert Evans.
Are you?
I am.
Oh, okay.
Robert Evans, the Jesus of podcasting.
Crucified.
Crucified by the need to make content, which I do for your souls in the same way that Jesus died.
Okay, Robert.
Sophie, how are we doing?
I'm sorry.
You're fired.
I feel like I feel like this is a good direction to go.
Do not.
I think it's really going to work out for us, Sophie.
People love blasphemy.
Everybody's a big fan of blasphemy.
That's what made the Beatles so huge.
It was blasphemy.
They were, in fact, bigger than Jesus.
Speaking of bigger than Jesus, Bridget Todd, my guest today.
I'm good with that intro.
Yeah.
You know what?
I'm going to take it.
I'll take that intro.
I appreciate it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Blasphemy and the Cost of Roads00:15:23
I mean, you know, fuck him.
Bridget, how are you doing?
How are you feeling as we go into part two?
I'm feeling good.
I have to, I was telling Sophie before we hit record, I'm a little bit hungover, but I'm otherwise doing well.
That's great.
I am hungover from taking a bunch of painkillers last night after laser eye surgery.
Fair.
Just like Bridget Shila to it was an open bar.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
Open bar.
Minutes since I've had me an open bar.
I love you.
Grey goose martinis.
Oof.
I can't be tough.
So let's.
What do we, what do we, what do we, Bridget, when we last left off, we're talking about that Jones State Park, the overpasses that he built real low, were, and like kind of the debate about it to this day and kind of the shitty arguments people make to be like, no, he had to make the bridges too low for buses.
It was prettier that way.
So, yeah.
And it's kind of like, as we kind of talk about the degree to which it's fair to blame Moses for making bridges too low.
And you'll find, again, you can find a ton of, there's like this whole wave in the last couple of years of people being like, actually, Robert Moses did nothing wrong.
And like, it's unfair to critique him for that.
They all tend to ignore the fact that not only did he like build his bridges super low, but he drafted, because again, he's the legislation guy, right?
He's really good at writing laws.
One of the things he did was he drafted and passed legislation to forbid the use of buses on parkways.
Because again, he wants to cut off where poor people can travel to.
And this is like he considered, you know, this was part of his, this was part of his kind of plan to silo off poor people of color from white people and the places white people went, affluent white people in particular, because he was not just racist, he was classist.
And laws like that, kind of like trying to restrict buses on parkways, were something he would do as like an emergency stopgap because he couldn't fuck around with like construction everywhere.
But he considered those laws a lot less useful in stopping poor people and particularly poor people of color from living around white people than he did physical construction.
Again, you can change a law.
A law can be changed overnight, as we're all currently dealing with, right?
All it takes is a court overturning something or a legislature voting.
Infrastructure has a long lifespan, right?
This is why, you know, he constructed something like 170 to 180 bridges that were too low for buses.
And he saw that kind of thing as much more important.
He was quoted often as saying, quote, legislation can also be changed.
It's very hard to tear down a bridge once it's up.
And Moses found it considerably easier, in fact, to tear down the homes of poor black people, which he did regularly as part of his construction schemes.
His justification for this was always the need to create a massive network of urban highways within New York City.
The number one thing that he did, the thing that people remember him fondly for, is he made all these bridges and parks.
The thing he spent most of his time doing was building urban highways, because again, he hates public transportation.
He fucking loves cars.
And not only do urban highways lead to congestion, lead to a city in which a lot of people have to have cars that would probably be happier living off of public transportation, what you can do with a highway is you can use it as a wall because a highway is a very effective physical barrier, right?
You can't like run across a highway.
You'll get fucking killed.
And so he was, he not only built these highways and kind of tried to wrench away progress in New York from towards public transportation, but and in favor of like everyone having their own fucking car, but he used the highway to wall off poor, majority black parts of the city from affluent white ones.
And he also made sure that whenever he was constructing a highway, because again, you're adding a highway to a city that's already quite dense.
You have to destroy a lot of houses.
You have to bulldoze neighborhoods.
And it just so happened that all of the neighborhoods he destroyed in order to make his urban highways were majority black.
Now, Robert Caro argues that Moses purposefully placed routes in such a way as to demand that it would demand the eviction of large numbers of non-white people living in places he didn't want them to live, particularly neighborhoods that bordered upper-class white neighborhoods.
And he would do this even when the route he picked, even when like going through these neighborhoods, was hideously inefficient.
A great example of this is the Cross Bronx Expressway, which I'm sure we're all familiar.
If you've been to New York, like you know the Cross Bronx Expressway, in order to build the Cross Bronx Expressway, they had to eliminate the neighborhood of East Trement.
This one-mile chunk of highway couldn't be constructed without evicting tens of thousands of people, most of whom were black.
Under Moses's reign, these people were forced out of their homes five years before construction was completed.
And the eviction was brutal.
People did not want to give up their neighborhood for this road.
As Caro writes, quote, Now, and this is after people were forced out, sometimes by police with weapons, now East Tremont looked as London might have looked if after the bombs, troops had fought their way through it from house to house.
It had the look of a jungle.
Now, later in the power broker, Caro alleges that, quote, during the seven years since the end of World War II, there had been evicted from their homes in New York for public works, mainly Robert Moses' public works, some 170,000 persons.
He suspects this number is actually quite low.
A report published more recently by the New York City Planning Commission describes this process overseen by Moses as an enforced population displacement, unlike any previous population movement in the city's history.
You could see this as an act of ethnic cleansing, and it is in a lot of ways.
But it's done under the auspices of, well, we're improving the city.
This is going to make it better for everybody.
We have to add in these roads.
We're paying people for their houses, even if they don't want to sell them and we have to force them out using police.
I'm going to quote now from a write-up by Poverty Justice Solutions that makes it clear just how fucked up the demographics on this were.
The evicted population was 40% black or Hispanic at a time when those demographics made up only a little over 10% of the city's overall population, meaning that a large proportion of the evicted tenants faced extreme discrimination in finding new housing.
And little arrangement was made by the city to help evicted tenants find new housing.
Caro tells us, for several years, Moses had been giving the impression that the bulk of the low-income families displaced by his public works had been accommodated in public housing projects.
In reality, it was found that the percentage of displaced families placed in public housing was pathetically small.
Many tenants were forced to cram into already crowded tenement buildings nearby, exacerbating conditions caused by poverty and allowing exploitative landlords to reap huge profits.
In the worst cases, tenants were forced to shelter in their old neighborhoods as they were being torn down, surrounded by the deafening noise of demolitions and often without basic utilities.
A member of the Women's City Club investigating the Manhattantown development on the Upper West Side described people living in a scene that looked like a cross-section of bombed-out Berlin right after World War II.
Some of the tenements were still standing, broken windows gaped sightlessly at the sky, basement doors yawning and covered on the sidewalks, and surrounding them were acres strewn with brick and mortar and rubble where wreckers and bulldozers had been at work.
So that's heartbreaking.
I mean, like, that's heartbreaking.
And also, even if those people had gone into like public housing and like housing projects, that's not ideal.
And the fact that that wasn't even really what was happening, they were being crowded into tenements and things like that.
Like, I can only imagine the lasting legacy that had on those families for generations.
I mean, that's so heartbreaking.
They're being made refugees in the city they were born in.
Absolutely.
And you can find pictures of this period of time, and they're pretty harrowing.
They look like war zone photos.
It'll be like, you know, you'll see pictures of like three or four little black kids sitting on like a pile of like rocks next to like a burnt out shell of a building.
And it's usually framed, especially when like it's brought up as like, this is how bad New York was before like the city got poverty under and got crime under control and like all this stuff.
And it's like, no, no, no, this is how ugly the city was after they went to war with like several neighborhoods in order to build a highway so that people didn't have to get on a train because Bob Moses didn't like trains.
And then that's why this happens.
Yeah.
Yes.
And then that sentiment, that like false sentiment of like, oh, this is how the city was before they got it under control, that's used to like usher in all manner of really fucked up policies.
Like it's such a fucked up cycle of, that really has criminalizing and targeting poor people and black people and people of color at the heart of it.
And it's, yeah, it really breaks my heart.
Yeah, it's really fucked up.
And when Bob Moses wasn't busy displacing black New Yorkers, he was deliberately routing roads in such a way as to clog their neighborhoods, like heavily black neighborhoods, with pollution and traffic.
He specifically built the road and highway system of New York as to offload the majority of the traffic and thus the pollution on black neighborhoods.
The Yale Law Journal notes that he placed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridges exit ramp in Harlem when a better location would have been the Upper East Side.
The only reason to locate it in Harlem was to stop traffic from exiting in wealthy neighborhoods and instead crowd Harlem with traffic headed for the bridge, right?
And I'm sure that when asked, he was like, oh, the aesthetics are just better this way.
It just looks better this way.
It looks better this way.
This is going to be like a, you know, he would, they always have some wonky reason why it's not racism, right?
But it just keeps happening this way.
When he constructed the Long Island Expressway, it would have cost Moses 4% more to add mass transit in the middle of the highway, right?
To like add a mass transit line in the middle of the highway, 4% increase.
And we already know Bob Moses is great at getting his budgets increased, right?
Right.
So when he builds the Long Island Expressway for 4% more, they could add mass transit to the highway.
This would have doubled the carrying capacity of the Long Island Railroad.
Massive improvement in the ability of New York's public transportation.
Moses is presented with this option and says no.
When he was designing the Van Wyck Expressway to the JFK airport, he was asked to reserve space for future mass transit.
Basically, like for an extra $2 million, we can add space into this development so that in the future we can add mass transit and it'll be cheap, right?
And the $2 million it would have cost is again a piddling sum given the budgets involved in the potential benefit.
He says no.
And again, he could have done it back in like the 50s for $2 million.
Instead, years later, when the city priced adding a rail link, they were quoted $300 million.
This is one of the consequences.
This is part of what, because of the way he builds the highways and builds the roads and builds the parks in the city, one of the things that it does, because he hates public transit, it's part of why it's so fucking expensive today to make any change to New York City.
There's other reasons, right?
There's permitting and there's a bunch of reasons why.
One of them is that Moses specifically puts a bunch of shit in the city that he builds without, even though he has the option, without any, like without space for public transit because he hates it, right?
And that's part of why it's so expensive to expand anything in the city.
Again, not trying to say that's the whole thing.
This is a complicated story, but this is a significant factor in it.
And it's still very hard today.
Like it's like a lasting legacy.
And it is really wild to me.
I know that you've said this a few times, but like hating public transit while being in charge of public transit and like never taking public transit.
Well, he's in charge of the parks.
Well, yes.
But that also means that he gets to be in charge as they're building these roads and these things that like connect, you know, all of this stuff.
Like as he's doing these developments, he gets to make decisions about public transit.
Again, he's not in charge of technically anything but the parks.
This is all the way he's like wielding power because of he's, he's, he's not, none of this is formal, right?
None of this is like him issuing executive orders.
This is all him sitting down and talking to people or like using the flex that the parks department has, pushing his budgets, like threatening people who are elected with like, well, if this doesn't get done, it's going to look bad.
Like that's how he does all of this.
So the New York City bridges that are built under Robert Moses, which are the Triborough, the Verrazano, the Henry Hudson, Throgsneck, and Bronx Whitestone, all became iconic symbols of the city.
And all of them are built without a mass transit component.
Moses repeatedly shut down proposals to add this capacity whenever it came up.
And he also acted to hamper the subway system whenever possible.
On two occasions, the city attempted to build a second avenue subway line.
Both times, Moses stopped them from using funds, which he controlled to pay for the project.
He instead diverted the money to bridges and highways.
In 1955, the transportation budget Moses shepherded was large enough to modernize the Long Island Railroad and build two new tunnels under the Hudson.
And I'm going to quote again from the power broker here: It would have been more than enough to build the long-proposed and desperately needed Second Avenue subway and to build a tunnel across the East River through which a branch of the Second Avenue line would extend out to Queens to provide adequate subway service there, and to build extensions of the existing subway lines to Queens to provide service for the hundreds of thousands of residents of eastern Queens who were miles away from the nearest subway.
And to extend the Nostrand Avenue subway in Brooklyn three miles along Flatbush Avenue to a new modern terminal that would serve the growing Mill Basin area that possessed no rapid transit at all.
And to construct a new plaza and grade elimination project at DeKalb Avenue that would eliminate switching delays, which caused the most severe bottleneck in train service between Brooklyn and Manhattan.
So he he has the, the budget he has can do all this right.
This could have all been in place decades ago in New York City, but instead of using it for that, Moses ensures the money is diverted to build more highways.
He takes the money that could have gone and he builds more fucking roads for people's personal cars.
Um, and again, his justification for this is always, this is going to solve traffic.
This is going to help people's commute time.
Right right, like the yeah, what a joke it it?
It never does.
Right, raise your hand listening at home, if you've been in a city that expanded a highway and if it actually helped with your commute.
It never does, like they always say that it never does.
And the traffic in New York, as you said earlier as you open the show with it, is a nightmare to this day.
Yeah, it never quite seems to work.
Um, the because again, cars are actually a hideously inefficient way of getting large numbers of people around a dense urban area.
Um so yeah, and this becomes clear eventually, city officials are like, wait a minute, none of these roads are helping with the traffic problem.
Then, in fact, the more roads that he builds, the worse traffic gets because, and also the more cars are just in the city that need parking, that are like, and so parking is now more expensive and the streets are even more crowded.
And yeah um, people do start as, like this becomes clear in the 50s and stuff, pushing for him to add more public transit.
But Moses, for 40 years, fights it every chance.
He gets right.
He doesn't always get his way.
But he always fights whenever he, whenever it like crosses his purview.
He fights to limit the expansion of public transit because like, fuck people, you know I have a driver right, I don't want to get on, i'm not going to get on a subway.
Moses, Ego, and Modern Drivers00:05:27
No, I mean, the whole justification really is, fuck people.
He probably has no sense of what of like the ways that expanding public transit would actually improve cities and improve livability.
He can't because again, he doesn't drive.
So that's the other part of this.
He takes a car everywhere, but a dude is driving him when he needs to get somewhere.
He has a fucking driver because he never learns how to drive.
So that also means he never has to park.
Like what an asshole.
Like what an asshole he is.
He is.
He is, because of his wealth and privilege, completely immune to the consequences of all the decisions he's making.
So he just gets to like, well I, when i'm on the highway, I just get to like, read my book or, you know, work on paperwork or something, and then off I go and this seems like a good development.
No more nasty subways.
You know he sucks pretty bad.
He sucks pretty bad Bridget, but you know who doesn't suck pretty bad.
You know who sucks good, who's they suck incredibly.
They these.
They could take the lug nuts off of an 18-wheeler's tires.
Bridget.
Who's that?
The products and services that support this podcast.
Wow, Sophie just let me get away with that one.
She didn't stop it at all.
They sucked the shit.
Didn't stop it at all.
Suck them right off.
Pop them out.
I don't have the energy for this today.
Well, our sponsors have the energy to do that, Sophie.
Here they are.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
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I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
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The cops didn't seem to care.
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My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place to come.
Look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
They scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
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Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
Complex Legacy and Lost Neighborhoods00:14:11
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Anyway, Sophie's still fine with us.
Wow.
She just muted herself.
Incredible.
Just great.
Everybody's, wow, what a professional podcast.
Unbelievable.
Can't believe you're allowing this.
She gave me the thumbs up.
That means we're good to go.
Okay, so obviously, Bridget, Moses' new defenders cannot deny his staggering racism or the degree to which his policies contributed to a smog-choked city based around the least efficient form of transit conceivable.
But they will argue, while he was not perfect, he did a lot of good things too.
And people don't note all of the good things he did for black people, right?
He did a lot of nice stuff for black people.
So really, like, how could he be that racist if he did nice things for black people?
Helping us out.
What'd he do?
Here's Bloomberg to tell you what he did.
Oh, wow, okay.
But Moses was complex.
He gave Harlem a glorious pool and play center, now Jackie Robinson Park, one of the best public works of the New Deal era anywhere in the United States.
A crowd of 25,000 attended the opening ceremony in August 1936.
The 369th Regiment playing when the music goes round and round before Parks Commissioner Moses was introduced to great applause by Bill Bojangles Robinson.
So this is undeniable, right?
Have you been to that park, Jackie Robinson?
It's a nice park.
I have.
It is a nice park.
Yeah, it's a lovely park.
It's undeniable that he's the mastermind of making that happen.
But even while he's building things that carry real benefits to New York's black citizens, he couldn't avoid the urge to be racist as all hell.
And this quote from the power broker, you may need to brace yourself for here.
All right, I'm strapped in.
Robert Moses had always displayed a genius for adorning his creations with little details that made them fit in with their setting.
That made the people who use them feel at home in them.
There was a little detail in the Playhouse Comfort Station of the Harlem section of Riverside Park that is found nowhere else in the park.
The wrought iron trellises of the park's other playhouses and comfort stations are decorated with designs like curling waves.
The wrought iron trellises of the Harlem Playhouse Comfort Station are decorated with monkeys.
Oh my fucking God.
Not monkeys.
I mean, it's bad.
I mean, it's really saying the quiet part loud, if you know what I mean.
Yeah, it's not even, yeah, it's not the quiet part for Bob Moses.
Well, and it says a lot about New York City government culture too, that like they're having, there has to have been like a meeting where they're like, how should we, what do you want on these, on these playground trellises in the Harlem side of the park?
Should we just add like the more of those wave designs?
And he's like, no, no, no.
Let's put some monkeys in there.
And everyone's just like, oh, yeah, okay.
Like, go right along with it.
They definitely had to have a meeting where this was decided and everybody agreed it was a good idea.
Somebody must have assigned off on it.
All of that.
Yeah.
Now, that Bloomberg quote, because again, it's very funny to me, as opposed to just saying that, like, look, his, his, like, anytime you talk about like a powerful white dude whose like legacy was for a long time beloved, but also was super fucked up, you have to call it complex, which is, I guess, true because he was, he had a lot of power that he exercised in a variety of ways, and that is complicated.
His racism isn't complicated.
The fact that he also made some playgrounds for black people is not, does not make it complicated that he did all of this other, that he bulldozed neighborhoods and made people refugees, right?
It doesn't make, it's like saying, Hey, there was a complicated figure, right?
He had, he made some mistakes in Eastern Europe, but the Volkswagen's a pretty good car, right?
That's a complex legacy, you know?
Like, you wouldn't say that.
Well, some people would say that.
And Bloomberg fails to note, and they're talking about his complicated legacy, that while Moses made 255 playgrounds in New York City during the 1930s, you want to guess how many were put in Harlem?
Oh, how many?
One.
Oh, that's one more than I thought you were saying.
Jason A Park.
What more do you want?
Well, it really reminds me of how we started the previous episode about talking about sort of like how people can be like patronized in this way, where it's like, oh, we'll give you a little something, but like, you know, it's just crumbs and we know it's just crumbs.
And like, you should still enjoy the park.
And like, you know, you shouldn't turn up your nose at this park, but like, you know what's happening.
If you live in Harlem, you don't have, like, you live in Harlem.
What more do you want?
Do you want more than one park?
Because like, if you haven't noticed, you're poor.
So like, yeah.
And we need that space to shotgun traffic into your neighborhood so the rich people don't have to see it.
Yeah, and smog and like keep you out.
And this, this was, this, by the way, like, obviously there's other black majority neighborhoods in New York, such as Stuyvesant Heights and South Jamaica in this period.
And in both of those neighborhoods together, he built a combined one park in the 1930s.
A 1943 grand jury investigation into the high crime rates in Stuyvesant in the neighborhood found one of the major causes was a complete lack of recreational facilities.
Which, again, for 1943, a pretty reasonable finding that like, well, yeah, one of the reasons crime is so high is there's fucking nothing to do.
Like our neighborhood is a parking lot.
There's no parks.
There's nowhere for people to like go be.
So like kids get up to fucking shit.
Now, a stark example of how differently Moses valued projects meant for white and black people can be seen in the fact that he spent $8 million per mile on parks in the western Manhattan waterfront.
These parks butted up against an almost all-white neighborhood.
Meanwhile, the 4.7-mile stretch of the park that butted up against Harlem cost $1.7 million per mile.
So you've got this big long park, the Western Manhattan Waterfront Park, which is a huge park, $8 million per mile in the parts of the park that are next door to white neighborhoods, $1.7 million per mile in the parts that touch Harlem, right?
It's just very blatant when you actually look at the numbers.
Not a subtle man.
Yeah, these disparities are very stark.
And again, the fact that there are still people today who would look at his legacy and be like, oh, well, it's unfair to judge him by these standards or it's very complex.
It's like, no, it's not.
It's not very complex.
Well, and they make it part of like, it is within their interest to make it seem complex.
And part of how they do that, and this isn't just with Bob Moses.
This is like what that kind of person does with everything, is they'll zero in on some incredibly specific niche detail.
And so they'll start arguing like, well, what about this specific bridge?
Because this bridge, if you actually look at it, they say it's this height, but really it would have been this height at this point.
And like, if this bridge is that size, and like number one, they're ignoring a lot of other bridges, but also by kind of zeroing in on this one thing that they can claim was not wholly accurate about his legacy, they focus the discussion about this single rather than like the broad picture of how fucking racist the development that he engaged in was and its broad-ranging consequences.
And they're always going to have, with anything like this, one or two things they can redirect around.
Like, so the heart, they built the best park in the city and it's in a black neighborhood.
And it's like, yeah, well, how many other parks did he built in black neighborhoods, right?
Like, how much do you spend on them compared to the white neighborhoods, right?
But they don't want to have, like, again, this is just, this is how you kind of redirect the topic of discussion and anger away from things people should be angry about and things that like have negatively impacted their lives and just try to be like, well, he was complicated.
And we're not denying that there were problems with the man, but boy, look at look at how nice this one park was and look at how pretty these bridges are.
And it's like, well, why don't those bridges have transit access or why did it cost an extra 250 million to put it in?
And anyway, Robert Moses operated with almost unchecked power until the late 1950s when resistance to his policies finally started to build.
And I'm going to quote now from The Culture Trip.
Often intransigent and prone to belligerence, Moses grew complacent.
A series of flubs, such as a public tussle with the Shakespeare in the Park Initiative, exposed him to criticism.
More broadly, his Rip It Up and Start It Again approach to urbanism had begun to come under attack.
His plan for a lower Manhattan Expressway, which would see neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village and Soho leveled, became a crisis point.
Activists, including the journalist Jane Jacobs, who Moses never met but has come to be seen as his most eloquent nemesis, argued for a mixed-use, street-scaled, community-conscious city rather than one driven from above by the all-powerful planners.
He was finally stripped of most of his offices in 1962 when state governor Nelson Rockefeller accepted a resignation that Moses had intended as a feint.
By this time, he had become so despised that the destruction of Pennsylvania Station, which he had no hand in, were pinned on his ideology.
So he does like the tide of public opinion turns against him, but it's because he like fucks with Shakespeare in the park and tries to build an expressway that would have destroyed Soho and Greenwich Village.
Like it's because he like goes kind of mad with power and people are like, well, number one, the folks that you're attempting to fuck over with your policies has changed.
You're exerting power against the folks you're exerting power against are like wealthier than they used to be and whiter than they used to be.
So that's going to be a problem for you.
But yeah, it takes 40 years of basically having total power over like construction in the city of New York for any of that to happen.
Yeah.
And it's so funny to me that you say that he was, even though he wasn't involved in Penn Station, it's like his ideology is sort of what shaped it.
I don't know if y'all have been to Penn Station lately, but there is not a fucking single place to just sit the fuck down for one second.
Of course, it's like, it is like, I have never seen anything like it.
And it's like, even though he wasn't involved in that redesign, there's no place to sit.
So he shaped, and we're about to talk about this nationally, the attitudes towards how you use architecture and how you use the layout of a city to stop things, like people sitting where you don't want them, right?
Like the wrong people sitting where you don't want them to sit, you know?
Exactly.
And it's so fucked up because like, even if you're saying like, oh, we don't want unhoused people to be sitting here, blah, blah, blah, that's fucked up.
But even if that's what you're going for, it makes the experience worse for everyone.
Right.
Like everyone loses.
Well, everyone but Bob Moses.
I mean, he eventually lost, but, you know, and he does, one of the things that's nice is, yeah, he gets, he kind of ends his career in disgrace.
Like he does a power play with Nelson Rockefeller and is like, Well, I'm going to resign if you don't do this.
And Rockefeller's like, Okay.
So he doesn't get to destroy Soho or Greenwich Village, which, depending on your opinions of those neighborhoods, could either be seen as a good or a bad thing.
He does live to see the publication in 1974 of The Power Broker by Robert Carro, which effectively savages his reputation and paints him as an outrageous bigot.
He spends his last years in a state of modest disgrace, rich white person disgrace, until he dies in 1981.
By the time he passed, the New York City subway system was in a disastrous state of repair.
The financial crisis of the 1970s contributed to this, of course, but the fact that Moses had spent decades' worth of boom time money on choking highways played a larger role.
One year after his death, the MTA announced a massive plan to revitalize the transit system.
It has remained in a state of deferred maintenance ever since, right?
Like this is, I mean, you know, right?
If you've been in New York, it's like always under, right?
Yeah.
I love the New York City subway system, but it is not in, it is in a state of disrepair and it has been for a really long time.
And it's like, I guess we're talking about infrastructure from so long ago that it's just never really been updated or modernized.
No, and it part of why is because Bob Moses made it a lot harder to do it.
And I'm going to quote from a write-up by Curbed to kind of make that point.
As Raskin says, we're still playing catch up from the MTA program initiated in the 1980s, and the current stakes are much higher as ridership levels recently hit the highest numbers since 1948.
Just this week, the MTA began the slow process of addressing those issues.
Chairman Joe LaHoda revealed an $836 million 30-point action plan to address the key drivers that account for subway delays and system failures.
As he said in a press conference announcing the plan, we're here because the New York City subway system is in distress, but some see it as too little too late.
Despite Moses' focus on highway development, modern-day New York emerged as a city whose inhabitants depend not just on automobiles, but trains, buses, ferries, and bicycles.
And the period of development under Moses stands as one of New York's great lost opportunities to invest in and expand public transit.
Because when it comes to Moses, as Draper puts it, if he wanted to get it done, it absolutely would have been done.
And that's what an indictment.
He had, this was, again, there was more money back then.
There was more money to put into, and it was cheaper to do these developments.
And when that we had this kind of precious period that would not wind up coming again, he poured all the money into highways that he made deliberately like difficult to add transit to.
And that's like if you actually think this is not a man who like murdered people, right?
But if you think about the lost human hours and like traffic and transit in New York City, I don't know, that seems like a body count, right?
Especially if you compare like how many people died by getting hit by cars or whatever, run over crosswalks and shit.
Who might not have been if the city had been built by a guy who was not basing his attitudes on traffic on how nice it is to be driven around in a limousine.
Barriers, Quality, and Human Costs00:14:54
Absolutely.
And just like, as someone who lived in New York not that long ago, just the quality, the quality of life, like, I don't know, I firmly believe that poor people, black people, brown people, we deserve like a nice quality of life.
We don't deserve to be.
Sitting in traffic and being clawed, like having all the respiratory and health impacts of things like, you know, environmental factors, like I think that it's easy to not see these as deliberate choices and deliberate like strategies to make our lives more difficult.
And I think the last, he may not have like murdered people, but the lasting legacy of that, I think, is really, really something to contend with.
Yeah, it is something to contend with.
And you know what else is something to contend with, Bridget?
What's that?
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Ah, we're back talking about the legacy of Robert Moses.
And probably, you know, we've just talked about his influence on the subway, which is extremely negative, and a number of fucked up things he did in New York and how people are still grappling with the consequences of that to this day.
Perhaps the greater long-term consequence of Robert Moses, though, is the concept of exclusionary architecture.
Well, again, he didn't, he's not the first guy to do this.
He was its most successful, influential, long-standing practitioner, and his work provided models for cities around the United States.
In Detroit, in 1940, a private developer constructed an eight-mile-long, six-foot-high wall to separate an existing black neighborhood from a new white one in development.
You may recognize this from the M ⁇ M documentary, Eight Mile.
Now, this was not done just because the constructing company was racist.
This was done because the Federal Housing Administration at the time refused to finance new developments unless neighborhoods were segregated.
The wall still exists today, and Detroit is still the most segregated metropolitan area in the country.
Another divider is a 10-foot-high, 1,500-foot-long fence that separated the mostly white development of Hamden, Connecticut from the majority black housing projects of New Haven.
The fence, erected in the 1950s, was eventually torn down in 2014.
But in the decades prior, it meant that residents of New Haven had to travel 7.7 miles just to buy groceries at a store three miles away, right?
Like that's, again, and we talk about food deserts.
This has come down just in like what happened in Buffalo, right?
The mass shooting at that supermarket, which like people had to fight for for years to get because of shit like this.
Due to inadequate public transportation in New Haven, it took two hours to complete this journey.
And again, Bob Moses is a New York guy.
He barely leaves that fucking state.
His work is in New York.
And you're not going to find people saying, Bob Moses told us to do this in Detroit.
Bob Moses told us to do this in New Haven.
But as New York goes, so goes an awful lot of, as we talked about, FDR patterns, the way his government is kind of set, his administration is set up during the New Deal on New York.
It is a model in a lot of ways for the rest of the country.
So people are following Bob's example, right?
Not that they would not have tried to segregate neighborhoods if he hadn't been around, but he provides a very effective blueprint for how to do it.
He's good at it and people pay attention, you know?
And I'm going to close out this episode probably by quoting from the Yale Law Review.
Quote, Often cities use barriers and blockades to mold traffic patterns.
For example, the concrete barriers and bollards that exist throughout the streets of Berkeley, California were installed to calm traffic.
However, the barriers do this by preventing people from driving down the streets on which they are placed.
In Shaker Heights, Ohio, the city installed a traffic diverter, which was called the Berlin Wall for Black People by nearby neighbors in Cleveland.
Yeah.
I mean, again, people always like know how fucked up this is, right?
Oh, people know.
And again, like, I think that you've done a great job of showing how like not only was it effective, but it gave that like plausible deniability of like, it's, you can't say he specifically is the reason he didn't tell them to do this, but people know, people feel it in their communities.
Like, you know, when you're being boxed out.
Yeah, you know when you're being boxed out.
And it's like, again, this is a broader problem than Bob Moses.
He's just one of the most successful problem solvers in the community of people trying to solve the problem of folks who aren't rich and white hanging out near folks who are rich and white, right?
Like, that's what's happening here.
I'm going to continue that quote.
In some communities, the purpose of rerouting traffic is to inhibit harmful behaviors tied to drugs and crime.
Concrete barriers were put in place near the highways of Bridgeport, Connecticut, to block quick access into the city by those who wanted to buy drugs.
The strategy, according to police, was that buyers would fear driving all over looped streets, stopping and turning around, trying to find drugs with the possibility of having their nice cars, their jewelry, their money ripped off as they look.
A similar technique was implemented in Los Angeles, which put traffic barriers in place on certain streets that allegedly provided quick escape routes for gang members who had committed crimes.
Sometimes transit will allow a person to get close to a given area, but not all the way there, leaving the rider in a dangerous situation.
This was the scenario faced by Cynthia Wiggins, a 17-year-old woman who was hit and killed by a dump truck while she was attempting to cross a seven-lane highway to get to the mall where she worked.
Wiggins took the bus from the inner city, where she lived, to her job at the suburban mall.
However, the mall's owners had actively resisted requests to allow the bus to stop on its property.
Rather, the bus stopped outside the mall on the other side of a large highway.
Documents produced during the trial revealed that this transit-sitting decision was motivated, at least in part, by race or class bias.
A local transport official wrote in an internal document that, quote, mall decision makers feel it will not bring the type of people they want to come to the mall.
One mall retail store owner recalled a conversation with a mall official who said something like, The people who rode the Walden Avenue bus were not the kind of people they were trying to attract to the Walden Galleria.
The mall did, however, allow some charter buses to stop on its property.
Members of Buffalo's black community asserted that the mall was trying to use the highway as a moat to exclude some city residents, a classic example of architecture exclusion.
The case settled, but it presents a stark example of the dangers inherent in exclusionary transit design.
And I guess, again, like there's a there's body counts to this shit, right?
Like when the walls are made up of moats of fast-moving cars, people are going to die trying to get from A to B. People who can't afford public transit, people are going to get arrested hopping onto public transit because they can't afford it because it's expensive because funds have been drained away.
Like people are going to, the consequences of all this are so titanic and echo out so widely in our society.
And they all come down to like, well, we don't think it's good for the mall if certain people come here, right?
It's not good for this neighborhood in Manhattan if the traffic comes out here.
So we'll route it to Harlem and we'll put more lead into like the air in Harlem and we'll put more traffic onto the streets and more kids will get hit, right?
Like it's not, the plan is not I want more black kids to have bad lungs and get hit by cars.
The plan is I want to protect this nice neighborhood from the consequences of the traffic that I have needlessly increased in the city.
But that's what happens, you know?
And who cares if there's a human cost, if that cost is poor or black or brown?
Well, and it's, you know, the argument is always, the argument always comes down to when you're looking at the people who are like defending this shit.
Well, I just want my neighborhood to be nice.
I just want my housing price to go up, right?
I just, I, I, I, uh, you know, I, don't I, as the person spending all this money on this mall and this business, have a right to try to ensure that like the right kind of people come here that like, you know, isn't that, isn't that important too?
I'm trying to keep, I'm trying to improve the neighborhood, right?
And the justifications change through time.
Now you would have a lot of trouble being like, we're going to build a nightmare highway interchange system with a bunch of like loops in order to stop people from buying drugs in this neighborhood.
But instead, it's like, well, we need to carry out this project to like make it more difficult for homeless people to like sleep under this overpass.
Or we need to carry out this project.
Like we want to put a park here or we want to keep this space green and open so we can't allow new construction.
It would ruin the look of the neighborhood if we allowed higher density housing developments to live here, right?
Don't people deserve to have like their property values stay high and whatnot?
Like it's, it's These are the kind of things we're talking a lot these days about like the literal Nazis and the literal fascists always trying to take power.
But it's worth noting that like for decades, a lot of the worst problems in our country that have like contributed massively to everything that's wrong with it today were like not people being like, I seek a white ethno-state, but we're people being like, well, I have a right to, I have a right to look out at a nice hill, don't I?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think like what you described it as sort of soft power.
I think that it's almost kind of more dangerous that we associate it with like, well, like, like that's on its face.
That's so, that's so relatable.
It's like, of course you want green spaces and pretty places and blah, blah, blah.
Like that really allows for people to do a lot, a lot of like pretty terrible stuff that has a human cost without really having to take ownership of how bad some of that stuff is.
Yeah, we don't, we're not talking about this today.
Perhaps we should.
We'll get to it at some point.
But like there's a lot to be said about.
And I love the national parks.
Who doesn't like a nice park?
But there's a tremendous amount of racism in the national park system and how it's constructed and why it's constructed and the idea that like white people need a place to go be in nature.
And that doesn't include indigenous people, right?
Because then we can't claim that this is untamed wilderness because actually it was all like tamed and heavily like regulated by different societies for thousands and thousands of years.
But we're going to kick them off and we're going to like try to manage it ourselves.
And oh God, now there's forest fires everywhere because it turns out we actually suck at forestry.
Let's sell access to our forests to people who want to make paper and do that under the ages of we're protecting the forest from forest fires.
Oh no, everything keeps getting worse.
Anyway, it's all like, it's all the same story one way or the other.
It's this like, I want things to be nice in a specific way where I live.
So I'm going to push these laws to protect the area around me or to make this thing that I want to have happen.
But there's all these knock-on effects and you ignore or shut down anyone who complains about the knockdown effects, knock-on effects by saying like, well, I have a right to this.
Prioritizing Bricks Over People00:03:29
You know, I have a right to keep my neighborhood this way.
I have a right to drive a car.
You know, I have a right to want another highway, to want less traffic.
And I don't want to spend money on the public transit system.
I don't like public, right?
Like I have a right to want my city to be this way.
But of course, the reality is always that even though they justify it as saying they're doing it for the people, they're doing it for this community.
They're doing it for the city.
It's always done for a tiny chunk of the people who live in that city.
And it's, again, often administrated by people like Robert Moses, who are either completely unelected or who, because of the nature of local politics, are elected by like 500 fucking dudes, right?
Like, yeah.
It's cool.
It's a good idea.
It also manifests in like a lot of different ways where people like prioritize like a building over people.
Yeah.
Like a pile of bricks matters more than a person.
We saw that a lot in 2020 when people are like, well, but there's property damage on them.
I don't care.
Like, I don't care about your building.
I'm sorry.
It doesn't have, it's not a person.
It's very insane.
Like, I've gotten caught up in a degree of this myself where it's like, I don't like, I don't like living in like, I don't like condos.
I don't like the way they look.
And it had to be pointed out to me by like a friend.
And again, I had like an argument over this and they pointed out like, no, they actually like they do like while there are stupid luxury developments that are dumb, the higher density housing lowers housing prices, lowers rent prices.
Like it makes areas more affordable.
And people who cannot afford a house are not going to afford a house under the current system.
But if you allow this thing to be subdivided in such a way, they can't afford to actually own and thus not be like fucking renting a place and subject to all of the fucked up shit about the rental market or get moved to have to like live in a fucking trailer park, which are really problematic in a lot of exploitative ways.
And like, as a general rule, I believe in keeping as much of the world as possible free of development, but we're going to have cities and cities should be high density and geared towards being livable as high density things because that's what makes sense environmentally and it's what makes them more humane, right?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, Robert Moses.
Just people need to care more about people.
And less about piles of bricks.
And less about piles of piles of bricks.
And yeah, I don't know.
Build more public transit.
Burn down the carry out a series of terrorist attacks on the...
Are we not?
Should we not urge a series of terrorist attacks on the- Is that a federal crime, Sophie?
Probably.
Okay, well, let's bleep all of that out and add in me doing a plug for because loves our nation's highway system, an interstate system, because it's the most efficient way to kidnap children, right?
When they try to head into the bathroom at a racetrack or something, bam.
And then they're off to the island in Indonesia where we hunt them for sport.
That's the promise, Sophie.
No children are safe.
Bridget, do you have any pluggables for us?
I sure do.
Thank you so much for having me.
You can hear me on my podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet.
You can follow me on Twitter at Bridget Marie or on Instagram at Bridget Marie in DC.
Well, lovely.
Thank you, Bridget.
Thanks for talking fucking parks policy and shit.
Evil Impact and Will Farrell00:03:31
No, this was more fun than like people being, you know, taken out back and shot.
You know, it's not cheery, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't as dark as I thought it was going to be.
Yeah, you got to understand guys like this because they exercise just as much an influence on like why things are bad.
But they're just like guys in suits who are building stuff in ways that's like secretly really shitty.
And it's just much, it's a kind of evil I guess we don't get into enough.
Like it's, it's, it's that kind of, it's more subtle than like Mitch McConnell evil, which I think is the kind of political evil we're used to.
But it has just as much of an impact.
And so yeah, if you want to read 1,300 pages about Robert Moses, check out the power broker.
Otherwise, just like drive around in New York City and you'll be the proper amount of angry.
I'm walking here.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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Hey, it's Nora Jones and my podcast Playing Along is back with more of my favorite musicians.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shall we stay with me each night, each morning?
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I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
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