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Episode: Roman, Elliott, and Robert Caro: Live in Conversation

Author: Roman Mars
Duration: 00:44:34

Episode Shownotes

What makes The Power Broker endure 50 years on? Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with legendary author Robert Caro to explore the humanity, drama, and untold stories behind his iconic book. Recorded live from the New York Historical Society.Roman, Elliott, and Robert Caro: Live in Conversation Subscribe to

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Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the 50 years since The Power Broker was published, the book has endured in ways that few biographies have.

00:00:11 Speaker_01
First and foremost, it completely upended how the public viewed the former New York City Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses. He went from being the man who built all those nice parks to an urban design villain.

00:00:23 Speaker_01
If you've been following along with the 99% Invisible breakdown of The Power Broker, you know what I'm talking about.

00:00:29 Speaker_01
And you also know that last month, I was at the New York Historical Society with my co-host Elliot Kalin to interview Robert Caro, the author of The Power Broker, live on stage.

00:00:40 Speaker_01
The New York Historical Society holds Robert Caro's archives, which include his research for The Power Broker, as well as the papers for his four-volume biography of President Lyndon Johnson.

00:00:51 Speaker_01
At 89 years old, Caro is still working on the fifth and final installment. To celebrate 50 years of the Power Broker, the Society went into their archives and curated a special exhibit that is a must-see for any Power Broker reader.

00:01:07 Speaker_01
There are so many amazing documents on display. There's Caro's handwritten notes from his interview with Lillian Edelstein, who tried and failed to stop Moses from tearing down her home in East Tremont to make way for the Cross Bronx Expressway.

00:01:21 Speaker_01
And next to that, there's notes from Caro's interview with Robert Moses on his side of the story. You can see in his notes where Moses told Caro that the opposition was, quote, a political thing that stirred up the animals there.

00:01:33 Speaker_01
There's also pages from early drafts of The Power Broker, with huge slashes through entire paragraphs made by Caro's editor, Robert Gottlieb.

00:01:41 Speaker_01
Caro often says that he cut 350,000 words around a third of his initial draft of The Power Broker, partly because the publisher could not bind a book that would hold that many pages. It was physically impossible to release a book of that size.

00:01:56 Speaker_01
And woven throughout the exhibit are examples of Caro's famous attention to detail, which just floored Elliot and me when we saw it.

00:02:04 Speaker_03
One of the things I admire so much about Robert Carroll's work is that he goes everywhere. And these notes here about the Westbath House at this beach. Westbath House Beach is practically deserted at 1038. Of course, it's V-cold.

00:02:17 Speaker_03
Hank Bogack, a New Paltz student. It's generally pretty empty here except for Tuesdays and Fridays. And it's just how many people he must have talked to at all different levels of wherever he was.

00:02:26 Speaker_03
I don't think he set up an appointment with this New Paltz student that works as a lifeguard at the beach. I think he just went and started interviewing people. It's the way to do it and just to have to have the confidence to do it. I can't do that.

00:02:36 Speaker_03
Just walk up to somebody and start interviewing them.

00:02:39 Speaker_01
If you're in New York City, you should definitely make a trip to the New York Historical Society to check out the exhibit. And now here's Elliot and me interviewing Robert Caro live on stage.

00:02:52 Speaker_03
Thank you so much, everybody, for joining us tonight. I know, speaking for Roman and myself, we're so excited to be here. We're so honored to be here with Mr. Caro, and Mr. Caro, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

00:03:02 Speaker_03
It really, it just means more than we can say to be talking with you. I know we only have about an hour. We've gotta move really fast, so. Page one. No, that was my dumb comedy opening bit. Thank you, everybody, for indulging me with that. I appreciate it.

00:03:21 Speaker_01
So what I was hoping is that you could take us back to the moment before the publication of The Power Broker, either the excerpts in the New Yorker or the book itself.

00:03:34 Speaker_01
Were you more concerned that no one was going to read it or that one person in particular was about to read it?

00:03:45 Speaker_00
Well, I knew Robert Moses was going to attack it because he attacked anything he didn't like. I knew he was great with words. Robert Moses, when he was at Yale, was a poet, and he was actually a good one.

00:04:02 Speaker_00
He coined a good phrase about me, venomous viper. And the New York Times then would print anything Robert Moses said as fact. So the headline was, Caro, venomous viper, comma, Moses says.

00:04:20 Speaker_01
Wow. And what did that feel like when you heard Venomous Viper? Were you prepared for it? That he would attack him? I mean, just like, what did it mean to be attacked by him? I mean, you had done so much work.

00:04:33 Speaker_01
Your opinion of him was right there in black and white. But did it do something? Like, what did it feel like when you finally got that type of reaction from him?

00:04:42 Speaker_00
Well, you know, I was expecting the book wouldn't sell very many copies, and I was sort of overwhelmed by the reception. I'll tell you one anecdote. My first review in the New York Times was not wholly favorable, you know?

00:05:05 Speaker_00
So, in those days, if my publisher expected you to have a lot of interviews, they gave you an offer from someone's office who was on vacation.

00:05:15 Speaker_00
So, I was sitting in there, having digested this, you know, review, and suddenly, Joseph Heller was standing in the doorway. Now, his book, Something Happened, was published the same month as The Power Broker,

00:05:29 Speaker_00
And so I would see him, you know, in the halls, but I was too much in awe. I would say hello. We used to say hello. I was too much in awe. We never had had a conversation. And there he is suddenly standing in the doorway.

00:05:45 Speaker_00
I later figured out that Bob Gottlieb said, go in there and cheer him up. And he says, hey, hear this kind of voice. Hey, kid, great review this morning. And I said something like, oh, I don't know what was so good. And he said, you don't understand.

00:06:06 Speaker_00
He says, the only thing that matters is the space. This guy usually only writes this long. For you, he wrote this long.

00:06:17 Speaker_03
So that's Rara Moses' reaction, negative. That Time's reaction, mixed. I was wondering, the names on the cover of the book are Robert Moses and Robert Caro, but there's so many people in this book.

00:06:30 Speaker_03
There's so many people whose stories you tell and whose names you bring attention to when another book might have glossed over them.

00:06:37 Speaker_03
And I assume on the assumption that if everyone who's mentioned in the book buys a copy, you're good for like a couple dozen copies.

00:06:44 Speaker_03
But I was wondering, had you received any reaction after publication from anyone you talked about in the book, any of the people like Lillian Edelstein or anyone like that?

00:06:53 Speaker_03
How did they feel about the way their stories were told, if you heard from them?

00:06:58 Speaker_00
Oh, you know, there are a lot of people, a lot of different chapters. The most moving thing for me were the people of the Cross Bronx, the people who were throwing out for the Cross Bronx Expressway.

00:07:10 Speaker_00
And that morning I had interviewed like two people, two couples. One lived in Co-op City and one lived with their kids. And that afternoon I had an interview with Robert Moses. So my first question was, what do you think

00:07:27 Speaker_00
the effect was on the people who lived there. And I still remember, and if I didn't remember, it's in that notebook. Oh, he said, there was very little hardship there at all. They stirred up the animals, but I just stood fast, so I won.

00:07:46 Speaker_00
That's not quite answering your question. I noticed.

00:07:52 Speaker_03
I've learned from you.

00:07:53 Speaker_00
But it's leading up to your question. The book is a war.

00:08:00 Speaker_00
But over the years, over and over again, I'd be giving a talk somewhere and someone would come up to me and say, I lived on 187th Street or I lived on Southern Boulevard and I'm so glad that you told what happened to us. So that was a reaction.

00:08:21 Speaker_00
People in power were enraged at the book. Mayor Wagner was enraged at it issued a really strong statement denouncing it, you know. And you're not really used to that, to tell you the truth. And you keep wondering if you did something wrong, you know.

00:08:42 Speaker_00
But it sort of faded away, I must say, rather quickly. And all of a sudden, people were talking about the power broker in their columns or in in a way that really made me feel good.

00:09:02 Speaker_01
in The Power Broker, you take a lot of care as a biographer to sort of, you know, set the stage of like why Robert Moses is the way he is, talking about his mother, Belle, Belle Moskowitz as well.

00:09:17 Speaker_01
And in the Lyndon Johnson books, you even go deeper and you're like, what is the soil composition of the hill country to lead him to be who he is?

00:09:27 Speaker_01
And I wonder, this part of you, this core of you that is so attuned to the people who have less power and so committed and driven to telling their story, where does that come from for you? Where did you get that impulse?

00:09:46 Speaker_00
Oh, no one's ever asked me that question. But I'll tell you, it started actually on Newsday when I was still working just nights. And I came across, they were taking, I'm trying to think of a word. I'm editing myself now. So the story will be.

00:10:11 Speaker_03
There's no editor here. You can finally talk at length however long you want.

00:10:17 Speaker_00
There was a huge thing going on where con men were selling retirement home sites in the Mojave Desert, aiming at the widows of patrolmen and PBA and firemen.

00:10:31 Speaker_00
And for some reason, I had never done an investigative piece, for some reason it struck me that something was wrong. And I remember I went to Alan Hathaway, who was this tough old managing editor, and I said, I'd like to go out to Arizona.

00:10:48 Speaker_00
I've never done anything like this before. And for some reason, he allowed, he authorized me to spend time. I went to the Mojave Desert and there was nothing there. You know, there was a,

00:11:02 Speaker_00
where they had pictures of the beautiful country club and the swimming pool. There was nothing there. There was just a sign. This is Rio Rancho Estates or something.

00:11:14 Speaker_00
So I started to look into this and I went to the county clerk's office and I saw the vast scope of this thing, that tens of thousands of people had actually bought land out there that they could never get water from. There was no water and there was,

00:11:31 Speaker_00
And I didn't know what to do with it. I'd never done a long story. And I remember the next day, I was driving around the desert. And I came to the top of a rise. And there below me was an old lady carrying two buckets of water.

00:11:51 Speaker_00
And it appeared to me she was carrying from nowhere to nowhere. drove over the next rise, I saw she had sort of a corrugated iron. She had built sort of a corrugated tin shack.

00:12:07 Speaker_00
And I looked at her as he was coming, and I suddenly said, you know, you don't have to explain everything to people. You just have to tell about her. And That worked as it happened.

00:12:26 Speaker_00
And after that, I just always felt attracted to the people who were hurt. That's about all I can say.

00:12:39 Speaker_01
I mean, I think you feel it in the work. I think it's one of the reasons why it endures is that thing, not just the story of Moses, but the story of all these other people. Thank you.

00:12:48 Speaker_03
This is going to seem like a non-sequitur question after that very dramatic answer and question, but it's related in a way.

00:12:57 Speaker_03
Something that sticks out to me from that reporting series that you did is the picture you took where you are sitting at a table with a bottle of wine in the middle of nowhere. for that Newsday article. And it's a very funny picture.

00:13:10 Speaker_03
And in The Power Broker, something that I feel like does not get talked about, but I guess maybe it stuck out to me because I'm a comedy writer by trade, is that there are times when it's a very funny book.

00:13:20 Speaker_03
There's a line in it that I love so much where you're quoting Moses saying, traffic on the LIE will flow freely. And then you just write inappropriate adverb right afterwards.

00:13:32 Speaker_03
Or when you're talking, I forget which bridge or expressway it is that the press is saying this will solve traffic forever, and then there's a space, and then afterwards it just says, it solved it for about two weeks.

00:13:42 Speaker_03
And I wondered if while you were writing it, there were times when you were aware of how funny those lines are, and if it ever felt strange, or if there were times when you were like, this book's getting a little dry, I need to put a joke in somewhere.

00:13:57 Speaker_03
Or if there's just something, very New York about speaking that way and writing that way. I was wondering if comedy ever came into your mind while you're writing it, because there are very funny parts to the book.

00:14:08 Speaker_00
Well, I wouldn't say that was a funny line. I would say that's a line to hit hard. In my writing, I do pay a lot of attention to first lines and last lines. Maybe Bob Gottlieb would say too much, you know.

00:14:31 Speaker_00
But it just sort of came naturally, actually, to me.

00:14:36 Speaker_03
It really feels like perhaps it's that your feeling for rhythm is so strong that you're tapping into that rhythm that maybe I'm reading it as a comedy rhythm, but it makes it such a lively book. It makes it such a living book that you have this

00:14:49 Speaker_03
feel for the rhythm of the words and those, there was, on the episode that we just recorded, I think, the chapter, was it Rumors and Reports of Rumors, where you're saying, for so-and-so, it was garbage cans.

00:15:02 Speaker_03
For so-and-so, it was, like, your opening lines are so fantastic for each of those sections in that chapter. Did you find it was hard to come up with those opening lines, or did they come to you like a lightning bolt?

00:15:13 Speaker_00
No, hard. I'm glad you used the word rhythm twice in the thing. I should have used it three times. That would have been better for rhythm. Even better. Because it's my, you know, Pete, if I can just digress.

00:15:34 Speaker_00
People say nobody reads history anymore, you know, we're not interested in history. But the fact is, I think history is fascinating and anyone would be interested in it if it's written the way it is.

00:15:50 Speaker_00
That history is a wonderful story, very dramatic, what's happening. What's happening in America today, how much more dramatic can you be? It's like a horrible but fascinating movie. So I have always, for some reason,

00:16:08 Speaker_00
felt that the rhythm of the words was very important.

00:16:13 Speaker_00
I don't know that anybody agrees with me, you know, but I think that more people would read history if history was written with more attention to the things that novelists, fiction writers, the rhythm of sentences, the rhythm of words.

00:16:34 Speaker_00
You know, there is, I believe, there is a right word for what you're trying to say, even if you have to spend a long time thinking about that word, looking for that word, you know?

00:16:49 Speaker_00
So if the answer to your question is it's deliberate, you know, that's all I have to say.

00:17:00 Speaker_01
We notice as we're talking about it on the podcast and we go chapter by chapter, One of the things I love and love, you know, noting and talking about is the way that each chapter has a bit of a cliffhanger to get you to read the next one.

00:17:17 Speaker_01
And it's really, I just think the wordsmithing is just so much fun. It seems like very newspaper writing, just like get you to the next, Like, I wanna read the next thing, like right now.

00:17:30 Speaker_00
Well, I want them to read the next thing. And I also wondered, like, in terms of this... Oh, could I? Yeah, please. In answer to your question. I mean, I didn't mean to interrupt. No, no, no. You answering the question is why we're all here.

00:17:50 Speaker_00
I've said it, you know, I've said it before on television, but I don't know that any, you know, people saw it. I mean, when I was starting the book, I do all my, and particularly on The Power Broker, I did all my research before I started the book.

00:18:06 Speaker_00
And then I realized nobody's gonna read this book. No one really knew who Robert Moses was. They certainly didn't know there was an interesting story there. I said, how am I gonna get them to read this book?

00:18:21 Speaker_00
And I have to do an introduction that tells people what he's done. And I couldn't figure out, I mean, you talk about time, days, I couldn't figure out a way to do it. But I thought of Well, who else wrote about someone who had so much to compliment?

00:18:40 Speaker_00
Homer, you know, in the Iliad. So I said, how did he do that? And I remember I went and said, oh, he did it by listing the countries that sent ships one after the other. Somehow that draws you into the book. the rhythm in which he wrote.

00:18:59 Speaker_00
So I said, I'll try to do that with his highways, because if you just say, he built 627 miles of expressways and parkways, that's not gonna get anyone to read the book. So I listed them, that didn't do anything. I said, so what's the rhythm here?

00:19:20 Speaker_00
I said, what if I find a rhythm that draws people in? And that was a deliberate thing I was thinking of. And I listed them over and over again, and they came out different. Suddenly I saw they're coming out in a rhythm. I'm almost there, you know?

00:19:43 Speaker_00
And I don't say I succeeded in getting there, but that's what I was trying to do. So if you're talking about something in government or history that seems as dry, if it's dry, then it's dry.

00:19:59 Speaker_00
But if it's dramatic, if there's a man trying to put a highway through a crowded area and throw all the, whatever I said in the book, 15,000 people out with no place to go, you say, that's a story. And you gotta find a way to tell it as a story.

00:20:18 Speaker_00
And that takes a long time sometimes.

00:20:23 Speaker_03
The time – I mean from the point of view of me, someone who did not have to do that work and just gets to read it, the time seems very well worth it because the book is so beautiful.

00:20:33 Speaker_03
And an indication of that, which I think we have not talked about on the podcast, is that I have a ten-year-old son and there are nights when before he goes to bed, he asks me to read him a page or two of The Power Broker.

00:20:45 Speaker_03
And he particularly likes those lists in the introduction. And he'll ask me to read him those pages, the lists of the expressways and the bridges. And I think it's that rhythm just, it captures him.

00:20:55 Speaker_03
And he doesn't know those places, you know, and it's made it very hard to continue through the book at a pace that... It's going to take a while to finish reading it, a page or two at a time to him at bedtime.

00:21:06 Speaker_03
But it's such a — I feel like there's no other work of history that I can think of that my 10-year-old is asking me to read to him at bed to get him into that — and it doesn't lull him to sleep.

00:21:17 Speaker_03
I have to stop because he's not sleeping and I have to leave the room. But it's that rhythm, I think, really captures him, even just the sounds of those words are so beautiful, the way you put them together.

00:21:27 Speaker_00
Well, you just made my day. Thank you very much. That's something I'll remember. Thank you.

00:21:35 Speaker_01
I'll tell him you said that. When you're writing, how much are you balancing being a historian and making sure that this number is out there for people to have for all time versus moving the story forward dramatically? Talk about

00:21:54 Speaker_01
the difficulty of that, because that seems very hard.

00:21:56 Speaker_00
That's really hard. Sometimes you feel you're trapped by the facts. You know, this is a dramatic scene. Like right now in the book I'm writing now.

00:22:07 Speaker_03
Are you working on a book right now? I had no idea.

00:22:09 Speaker_00
I didn't, I didn't realize it. No, it's about Lyndon Johnson. Oh, okay.

00:22:14 Speaker_01
Interesting. Good subject. I, yeah.

00:22:18 Speaker_00
and he's passing Medicare. And it's really, it's changing the financing of the social security system. And it's really dry. It's really a lot of numbers.

00:22:32 Speaker_00
But more than that, it's a very complicated fight is going on in the Ways and Means Committee because the chairman, Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, doesn't want Medicare.

00:22:44 Speaker_00
And he's going to stand in because he thinks it's going to destroy the financing of the social security system. And this is a chapter about numbers. And it's really dry. But you said, it may be boastful to say, but you said, no, it's not dry.

00:23:03 Speaker_00
This is all the people in the United States who had to choose between financing their, sending their kids to college and taking care of their grandparents because there is no Medicare. That's not dry.

00:23:18 Speaker_00
You have to take these numbers and find a way of weaving them into something that people understand how big this question is.

00:23:27 Speaker_00
So you're constantly, that's a very good question, you're constantly, that's an extreme example, but you're constantly stuck by facts.

00:23:39 Speaker_03
Do you ever find, one of the things that makes your writing so powerful is there's this passion behind it, there's this excitement behind it about making sure people know these.

00:23:49 Speaker_03
I imagine you, like, if you didn't have books, I imagine you running out into the street saying, people need to know this and just grabbing people and telling them. Do you ever, is it hard?

00:23:57 Speaker_00
I've never done that.

00:24:00 Speaker_03
Well, luckily you've got the books to put it through. You should try it sometime. It gets the blood racing.

00:24:08 Speaker_03
Do you ever find you're in danger of losing that passion because you're digging through numbers or because you're struggling to find just the right words?

00:24:14 Speaker_03
Is it hard to maintain that sense of energy that you need to get through the book to make people interested?

00:24:20 Speaker_00
You ask good questions all the time, actually, because you say, If you do it by concentrating on individuals, telling their stories, first place, it's going to take another additional two weeks or two months or something.

00:24:43 Speaker_00
And you don't know how to do it when you first think of it. You know, what you just asked is what would take so long. I know it takes my books, you know, they're too long. It takes too long.

00:24:57 Speaker_00
But I could do it a lot shorter, you know, in time and in length, you know. But it's that, and my feeling is then people wouldn't read it. People wouldn't understand why it's important.

00:25:13 Speaker_00
Do you know President Kennedy is assassinated, and that night Lyndon Johnson is back in Washington, he's in his bed, he calls Bill Moyers, Jack Valenti, and Cliff Carter, three of his young aides, and he starts talking about what he's gonna do.

00:25:32 Speaker_00
He says, I'm gonna pass Harry Truman's Health bill for him.

00:25:37 Speaker_00
Well the story of how he passes the health bill Could be a very dry story It's changing votes in the Senate and in the ways the means committee in the house You say yes, but this is a really important thing in American history It's a government trying to take care of so how does that work out?

00:25:59 Speaker_00
How does he get it through and how does it work out? so you're really You spend a lot of time just staring at a piece of paper and wondering how to do it.

00:26:13 Speaker_01
More of our conversation with Robert Carroll live from the New York Historical Society, coming up. So we have a few questions from the audience. I wanted to run past you.

00:26:31 Speaker_01
You know, how do you, this is one, how do you hope future generations will use the power broker and in particular your archive that's upstairs, your 20,000 linear feet of miles of archives?

00:26:43 Speaker_03
It's rare when an author's work is measured in linear feet.

00:26:47 Speaker_01
Like what, what do you, what do you feel when someone's like going through that stuff that you probably meant for no one to read but yourself for, Ina?

00:26:58 Speaker_00
Oh, great question. Um, You do feel funny about that, you know. But you say, but there's so much in it, in the archives, that no one knows, that I want people to know. I'll give you one quick example. Al Smith was the governor of New York.

00:27:18 Speaker_00
You know, Franklin Roosevelt, when he was president, said to Francis Perkins, You know, Francis, 90% of everything we did in the New Deal, Al Smith did in New York.

00:27:30 Speaker_00
New York was first in welfare, first in all the things we think of today, helping people out.

00:27:37 Speaker_00
And it's all because of this guy, unlettered, had to drop out of school in the fifth grade, and was once a, calls Tammany's leading henchman, says to the divorces of Tammany, I'm governor now, you have to free me. and gets all this passed.

00:27:55 Speaker_00
I learned about him because he raised Robert Moses to power, okay? And I said, this is the greatest story, and I did write a lot on Al Smith, which we cut out of the Power Broker.

00:28:11 Speaker_00
Now, when I was researching, I said, I'm gonna try to find, there's no good book, not even a half good book on Al Smith. So I said, well, I'm going to try to find everybody who was truly close to him, truly, not bullshit, but really worked with him.

00:28:32 Speaker_00
So there were 14 people, as I recall, left alive. And I did extensive interviewing. I'll type them up as I do transcripts. And they're in that archive. And I'm hoping someone will come along and do a biography of Al Smith. Look at me, Roman.

00:28:51 Speaker_00
It seems like your territory.

00:28:54 Speaker_03
I do like Ghostbusters stuff. I'm not good enough for this.

00:28:58 Speaker_00
Yeah. But if they do it, they'll be able to talk about what it was like working with him. Like the same thing with Belle Moskowitz. No one even knows the name Belle Moskowitz.

00:29:11 Speaker_00
In the 1920s, a woman named Belle Moskowitz was arguably, I think definitely, the most powerful woman politically in the United States. Nobody even knows her name. So I also, did a lot of interviewing on her.

00:29:29 Speaker_00
There's so much in my archives that didn't make it into the book. I mean, even though I wrote it, you know, we cut out 350,000 words. Not so funny.

00:29:49 Speaker_03
But piggybacking off of that, Roman and I got to look at the Power Broker at 50 exhibit right before we were doing this event. And on the wall, there's a napkin that you wrote a note on about the women of East Tremont went to see Fiddler on the Roof.

00:30:06 Speaker_03
And for me, it was two sacred things, the Power Broker and Fiddler on the Roof in one document. And I found myself so kind of affected by seeing it, so overcome by it.

00:30:16 Speaker_03
And it made me think, this is a note that Mr. Caro jotted down for his book, and this book that as so many people have this very deep connection to and they get very obsessed with it and it becomes very special to them.

00:30:30 Speaker_03
And they read the book and it's all they want to talk about. And do you find that weird? Like I'm asking for a friend.

00:30:37 Speaker_03
Do you think it's weird that people get so wrapped up in the power brokers, in your work, but in the power broker especially, does that ever feel strange to you? Well, what's your question?

00:30:48 Speaker_03
Basically, I guess the most basic way to boil it down is, do you think I'm weird for taking this book and it feeling so special to me, someone who has only read it?

00:31:00 Speaker_03
I assume you're mostly thankful, but does it ever feel strange that it's become such a talisman for people?

00:31:08 Speaker_00
It just makes me feel so humble. You know, the 50 years passed so fast, but I ride the number one train a lot, and Columbia students are on there, and apparently they teach the power broker in a couple of courses.

00:31:32 Speaker_00
So for 50 years, I've said to Ina, I saw the most wonderful thing today, another kid was reading the power broker. So, and the other hand, the things that are cut out of it, you know, what you just referred to.

00:31:53 Speaker_00
So, as I said, everybody was thrown out and they scattered to the forewinds. I said, how different is that from the czar destroying a shtetl? And we went to see Fiddler on the Roof, and at the last song is Anna Tevka.

00:32:11 Speaker_00
And if you remember, in the staging that I saw, They're singing, Anatevka, Anatevka, a place where you know everyone you meet and you'll be in a place where you're looking for one familiar face.

00:32:25 Speaker_00
And I said, oh, that's, I'm gonna do a chapter on that, you know? And I wrote, I evidently, I didn't remember this, they showed me the map, I evidently wrote that down.

00:32:38 Speaker_03
You probably went to dinner after the show and were thinking about it, yeah.

00:32:43 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, and I wrote it. And so there was a chapter called One Mile Afterwards, okay? We had to cut it, Bob Gosling, he said, I think, and I cut 350,000 of the best words I ever, well, I think that's about the best chapter I ever wrote.

00:33:07 Speaker_00
And we just cut it down to like six pages or something like that. So you have so many mixed feelings about that book.

00:33:19 Speaker_01
So I have another question from the audience. It says, after 50 years of reflection, would you portray Moses any differently today? No. Yeah. Nailed it.

00:33:36 Speaker_03
I know I'm finding myself, uh, it's hard for me to, and this is the, for the past couple of days, it's been very hard for me to formulate into question form the things that I want to say to you about the book and the, I don't, does it ever, um, does it ever,

00:33:57 Speaker_03
Well, actually, you know, I apologize. Roman, you ask questions.

00:33:59 Speaker_01
I get very emotional about it. This relates to the exhibit a little bit, so I'm curious about this. That's a great idea, Roman.

00:34:05 Speaker_03
Ground it in something, yeah. Other than my beating heart for this book, yeah.

00:34:11 Speaker_01
So the book is subtitled The Fall of New York. How responsible was Moses for this fall also? Were other subtitles considered? And I know the answer to this because I saw one of them out there. So talk about the subtitle, The Fall of New York.

00:34:26 Speaker_00
Well, the easy answer to that is it's published in 1974. New York was bankrupt, you know. When you looked into it in the book, it shows how his spending on a number of things really crippled the city's financial capacity, okay?

00:34:46 Speaker_00
But that's not all I meant. I meant that by the time he finished being in power, you had a city where

00:34:57 Speaker_00
There were a hundred, if I have this right, 144,000 units of public housing that were built in the cheapest possible way because he wanted people who were poor to feel poor. And they didn't have

00:35:16 Speaker_00
what LaGuardia wanted to put social workers in so that people from rural areas of the South could have someone help them, you know, get that. So they had a city that's part of New York. New York is by some the most segregated city in America.

00:35:34 Speaker_00
You have a city where people commute. The commuting time in New York then was, by the way, I forget how they measured it, was the longest commutes in the world. It's still pretty bad.

00:35:51 Speaker_03
Rereading the book this time, I've lived in Los Angeles for a few years now, but I lived in New York for a number of years, and I would read about the potential for a better subway system.

00:36:00 Speaker_03
And I would just think about the hours I spent waiting in trains that had stopped in tunnels in my years here. And it was making me so angry that it's another way the city fails its residents as a result of the things Moses was doing.

00:36:14 Speaker_00
Yes, that's the kind of thing I meant. Black people were still not using Jones Beach. You know, he didn't want poor people in general and people of color in particular to use Jones Beach.

00:36:32 Speaker_00
So he did a number of things, which everyone talks about, and some academics try and put a different reason on it, but the people who built it knew why he was making the overpasses too low for buses to get through.

00:36:47 Speaker_00
And I remember his chief engineer, Sid Shapiro, saying, this is an example of, they called them RM, this was an example of RM's wonderful foresight, because we had legislation passed that buses couldn't use the parkways.

00:37:04 Speaker_00
But you know, legislation can be changed. It's really hard to change a bridge while it's up. So I said to Ina, I want to see if that still works. So let's say this was 1970, I don't know what year it was.

00:37:22 Speaker_00
So we went out there and we stood in Jones Beach, there's a main parking lot, which holds 10,000 cars. And everybody who parks there, you know, you have to go through an overpass with three archways.

00:37:37 Speaker_00
So Einer and I stood there with two pads and you did like four lines and then across. If you go up to the second floor of this museum, there's the pad and there's the entire page down to the bottom under whites. That's how many whites used it.

00:38:03 Speaker_00
There is, as I recall, 14 Latinos and I think just five black people. So his stratagem This is so, that's part of what I meant by the fall of New York, you know.

00:38:23 Speaker_00
We had all these vast slums living in these housing projects built as cheaply as he could build them.

00:38:32 Speaker_00
We had an education system, which he had, you know, when he did the World's Fair, he said he would have, and the number kept going up, 20 million, 40 million, 80 million dollars would, the fair would profit, and he'd turn it over to the education system.

00:38:48 Speaker_00
Well, as it happens, I was the reporter who found out the fair was bankrupt. So, in a way, anyway, that's what I, that kind of thing is what I meant.

00:39:01 Speaker_01
Well, it's been such a delight talking with you. Thank you so much for the book. And when I think about this book, I know that maybe people see it as this 1,200-page book of this dastardly man, Robert Moses. But what I want people to understand

00:39:18 Speaker_01
The pleasure of the book is spending 1,200 pages with this kind humanist who cares about this city and this country and this world in the form of you. And that's one of the things that it makes it.

00:39:31 Speaker_01
So I think that's one of the things that makes it endure for 50 years is your care that you give to the work and to all that you do. So thank you so much for everything. Thank you. Please run this, guys.

00:39:41 Speaker_02
Thank you.

00:39:55 Speaker_01
You may have noticed something that we did not ask Robert Caro about that many people want to know. What happened to the chapter in The Power Broker that was devoted to Jane Jacobs? So here's the backstory.

00:40:05 Speaker_01
Jane Jacobs was a journalist and activist who in the 1950s helped organize a successful opposition to the lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have cut through neighborhoods like Soho, Little Italy and Chinatown.

00:40:17 Speaker_01
Jacobs went on to write The Life and Death of Great American Cities, this incredible book that delivers a withering critique of the urban renewal concepts and other harmful policies that Moses championed.

00:40:28 Speaker_01
In the early stages of The Power Broker, Caro wrote about Jacob's fight with Moses, but ultimately, her name does not appear in the book.

00:40:36 Speaker_01
We didn't ask Caro about the Jane Jacobs chapter because he's been asked about this so many times, like over and over again, and his response is always, I can't remember what's in that chapter.

00:40:46 Speaker_01
But one of the last pieces in the New York Historical Society's exhibit is a letter from Jane Jacobs to Robert Caro from August 1974, shortly before the book was published.

00:40:59 Speaker_01
So it says, dear Mr. Caro, many, many thanks for the copy of The Power Broker, which I treasure, and also for your too generous but much appreciated inscription. I have no doubt that many readers are going to feel the way I do.

00:41:12 Speaker_01
We owe you a tremendous debt for all those years of work, good sense, unflagging curiosity, and compassion. I don't think anybody but a genuinely compassionate person, I do not mean sentimental, could have written that book.

00:41:26 Speaker_01
what an account it is of human... Predicaments? Yeah, predicaments, sorry. There's like a little hyphen that goes into another word going up the side of it.

00:41:35 Speaker_03
It's weird that you see a handwritten note where someone has a hyphen where they continue a word on the next line. That's a writer.

00:41:41 Speaker_01
That's a real writer. It is of human predicaments. It ranks with the great novels in that respect. Well, you deserve a commensurate vacation, but Mary Nichols has told me that you are instead at work on a biography of LaGuardia.

00:41:58 Speaker_01
Selfishly, I can't help but be glad. I look forward to that. It's so much needs to be done and nobody could do it as well. Thank you again for sending the book, but especially for having written it in the first place. Sincerely, Jane Jacobs.

00:42:12 Speaker_01
I'm sorry to say, Jane Jacobs, he did not write that biography.

00:42:15 Speaker_03
No, Jane Jacobs would go to her grave awaiting that LaGuardia biography.

00:42:31 Speaker_01
99% Invisible was produced this week by Isabel Angel, edited by Committee. Music by Swan Real, mixed by Martin Gonzalez. Special thanks to the folks at the New York Historical Society for making Elliot and my dreams come true.

00:42:44 Speaker_01
Cathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kolstad is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. Taylor Shedrick is our intern.

00:42:51 Speaker_01
The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Lausha Madan, Gabriela Gladney, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Nina Patak, me, Roman Mars, and Jayka Medina Gleason.

00:43:05 Speaker_01
Congratulations to you and Billy, Jayka. It's just so nice to see two lovely young people get married and just, we're so happy for you. The 99% visible logo was created by Stephan Lawrence.

00:43:16 Speaker_01
We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California.

00:43:26 Speaker_01
You can find the show on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own discord server, where we have a fun time talking about the power broker. We talk about architecture, movies and music. all kinds of good stuff.

00:43:37 Speaker_01
It's where I'm hanging out most of these days. You can find a link to that Discord server every past episode of 99PI and catch up with the Power Broker breakdown at 99pi.org.

00:43:51 Speaker_03
I wonder what the inscription said. Yeah, I know. That would be something. I wonder if it was like, dear Jane, here's my book, thanks for your part, sorry you're not in the book.

00:44:01 Speaker_01
Yeah, I wonder if there's part of the Jane Jacobs archive that has it.

00:44:05 Speaker_03
This is that now our next podcast series is the mystery of tracking down that inscription. We'll do one of those episodes of a podcast where you follow the whole hunt and then you find at the end and you could have just said what happened at the end.

00:44:17 Speaker_01
Where you find nothing probably. Yeah, that's more likely. That's the podcast demo is to make it all about the process because there is no answer. The answer is truth or something.

00:44:28 Speaker_03
It turns out the answer was the friends we made along the way.