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I’d like to write a report on Robert Moses, the great New York architecht / engineer / urban planner, and was wondering what anyone knows of him that you might care to share.
You do know that if you Google “Robert Moses” you will get ~1,100,000 hits in .34 seconds, right?
Moses was a complicated man. A brilliant planner and builder, responsible for Jones Beach,numerous state parks, and virtually every bridge and major highway in NYC and Long Island and the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel. He was also a self hating Jew, a racist who hated mass transit and working class people. He respected only power and money. The beautiful stone overpasses on his LI parkways were built with a low overhead to prevent.t busses with poor people from the city from getting to his parks. The BAD in Brooklyn Heights was Robles decked at great cost and the Northern State parkway twists and curves to minimize impact on the estates that existed back then. On the other hand, he destroyed a vibrant Jewish and Italian Bronx community when he destroyed thousands of homes when he built the Cross Bronx expressway.
Robert Caro’s book the Power Broker is the definitive book on Moses
There’s a famous and comprehensive biography of him by Robert Caro (a descendant of the Mehaber?) and innumerable references to him online and elsewhere. But one warning is in order: the sources tend to emphasize Moses’ abrasive personality and strong-arm methods; they then lead you to conclude from this that his decisions and beliefs were wrong. It’s a good idea to keep the two issues apart.
The writer of the main biogrpahy on the Robert Caro is decended from Rav Joseph Caro
takah –
You do know that all the information on the internet used to NOT be on the internet, right? I’m sure shmoel is aware of google; perhaps he is looking for certain pieces of interesting information about the man, and isn’t just looking to fill up pages (maybe someone like you who is a master of the internet can help him sift through all those sites and find what he’s looking for?); perhaps he is interested in the specific knowledge base of the CR? For all you know, Moses’ great-grandson could be a CR regular, and that 1,100,001st hit will be an interesting anecdote that doesn’t exist in any of those other 1,100,000. No, I’m not suggesting that it is likely that Moses’ great-grandson will contribute, but why not prod the source of the internet (i.e. humanity’s collective brainpower) in order to increase the information contained within said internet?
My intent is to be no more (and admittedly no less) belligerent than you, takah 😛
That said, I don’t have any useful info about Moses, but I was unaware of him before your q, shmoel, and being a civil engineer, he seems to have been an extremely interesting individual. Good luck with your report!
He was a brilliantly complex figure, and I agree that it is necessary to separate the controversy from the man.
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