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Episode: The Power Broker #11: Brennan Lee Mulligan

Author: Roman Mars
Duration: 02:49:47

Episode Shownotes

This is the eleventh official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Brennan Lee Mulligan, a comedian and host with Dropout TV, where he’s the creator of Dimension 20 —

a Dungeons & Dragons show that features incredibly complex and campaigns, with improv actors and special effects. And as the Dungeon Master, Brennan leads these stories. Season three of Dimension 20 takes place in a magical New York City, where the main villain is a fictionalized, undead Robert Moses, who shares the real Robert Moses’s passion for building roads and destroying lives through bureaucracy.Elliott and Roman also cover the second section of Part 7 (Chapter 42 through Chapter 46), discussing the major story beats and themes.The Power Broker #11: Brennan Lee MulliganJoin the discussion on Discord and Reddit. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_05
This is the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. I'm Roman Mars. And I'm Elliot Kalin. So today we're continuing Part 7, The Loss of Power, Chapters 42-46, that's pages 984-1081.

00:00:17 Speaker_05
And later in this episode, our special guest is Brennan Lee Mulligan. Brennan is a comedian and host with Dropout TV, where he's the creator of Dimension 20.

00:00:24 Speaker_05
It's a show that features incredibly complex and fun and dynamic Dungeons and Dragons campaigns with improv actors and special effects. And as the Dungeon Master, Brennan leads these stories.

00:00:35 Speaker_05
And I know that might sound completely unrelated to the Power Broker, but one season of Dimension 20 features a villain that all of you listening would be very familiar with in a very different context.

00:00:46 Speaker_04
To my understanding, Mr. Moses is a powerful form of undead. Robert Moses is a powerful historical figure.

00:00:56 Speaker_04
Never elected, but was part of a lot of government boards, had a lot to do with the building and infrastructure of New York, specifically a lot with the building of roads and highways.

00:01:09 Speaker_03
Causing interference in the magical world.

00:01:13 Speaker_05
So last time on the 99% visible breakdown of the power broker, Robert Carroll went into incredible detail about how Robert Moses refused to include mass transit as part of his transportation plans.

00:01:23 Speaker_05
And it doomed New York to a future choked with cars and traffic and really explicit detail about how awful different railroads were. It was very vivid.

00:01:36 Speaker_05
But we also saw how an assortment of activists were starting to recognize the serious issues with how Moses was running his slum clearance programs and the public housing construction projects. So that was a little bit of a glimmer.

00:01:51 Speaker_05
There were rumors, rumors of rumors. And so on this episode, we'll be covering chapters 42 to 46, that's pages 984 to 1,081. And this is a delightful collection of chapters, Elliot.

00:02:08 Speaker_00
These are, especially after the last chapters, which were so gloomy and doomy, this is gonna be a nice, yeah, this is a nice change of pace because Robert Moses is on the dissension rather than the ascension.

00:02:20 Speaker_00
And it's going to happen in ways that are not entirely satisfying in terms of the scale and scope of the crimes he's being hoisted on. The petard he's being hoisted on is not the petard we hoped it would be. But there's something fun about that.

00:02:34 Speaker_00
And Robert Caro is clearly having fun writing about it. And that really comes through. And by the end of today's episode, Moses will have been hoisted. buy his own petard. There's no other way to put it. It's a petard hoisting.

00:02:50 Speaker_00
It's a classic petard hoisting. And as you were saying, we're going to pass the thousand page mark in this episode, which is very exciting. That's a lot of pages.

00:02:59 Speaker_00
And we'll have to take a moment to pop some champagne, really reminisce about the pages that brought us here. But it's going to be exciting. going to be exciting.

00:03:07 Speaker_05
So we start here with Chapter 42, Tavern in the Town, which chronicles, you know, probably one of the lesser crimes of Robert Moses, but still makes a good story. So how does it begin?

00:03:18 Speaker_00
It makes a great story. And it's also let I'll just say this before I even start, Roman, this will be an annoying, unnecessary little tangent.

00:03:25 Speaker_00
Forty two, as anyone who's read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series knows, is the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything. And in this chapter, we get finally the answer to what will it take to really break away

00:03:38 Speaker_00
the reputation Moses has as the great guy, the park's man, the man who can get things done for the people. It's in this chapter that what he does is seems so incredibly trivial and yet reverberates through so much.

00:03:51 Speaker_00
So it begins talking about how this is going to be the Battle of Central Park. Carol reminds everybody how in 1934 Robert Moses, he refurbished and renovated Central Park.

00:04:03 Speaker_00
He replaced the sheep meadow, which previously had been full of inbred mutant sheep that had been there for generations. He replaces the sheep meadow near Central Park West and 67th Street with a restaurant, Tavern on the Green.

00:04:17 Speaker_00
Regular listeners will know that's where my dad proposed to my mom before they got married. Ghostbusters fans will know it as the restaurant where Rick Moranis is finally overtaken by the terror dog.

00:04:28 Speaker_00
I guess eaten, you know, in plain view of the diners at the restaurant. And he cut a road extension into the park and a parking circle into the park that serves the restaurant.

00:04:41 Speaker_00
And what's funny to me here is that Carol is using the sheep as a symbol of the pastoral world that was shunted aside for the restaurant and its parking circle. When back when Carol was talking about the sheep previously, they were monsters.

00:04:54 Speaker_00
They were just like – they were implied as disgusting, something you needed to get rid of. But now Caro is kind of having it both ways and he's like, what was once a bucolic sheep meadow? It's like, oh, all right.

00:05:02 Speaker_00
There's different ways to look at sheep I guess. So the year is 1956. Let's place ourselves in time. We are now in 1956.

00:05:11 Speaker_00
And local families have come to depend on this little tree-shaded glen between 67th and 68th streets in the park as a place for their kids to play.

00:05:20 Speaker_00
They're using it the way parks have been intended by Moses to be used, as community spaces for people to play in them. And the local mothers, they find the space especially precious. It's somewhere very close to their apartments.

00:05:32 Speaker_00
They're kids who live in apartments and have no outdoor space of their own. middle-class, upper-middle-class kids. These are kids who have resources. These are not slum kids, but they still don't have outdoor space of their own. They don't have yards.

00:05:44 Speaker_00
So this is a place they can run around. The moms can talk. It is a very important little place in their lives, a place that carries a lot of meaning and emotion for them until one day on April 9th, 1956. What happens on that day, Roman?

00:06:01 Speaker_05
Well, one of the moms, Roselle Davis, she sees these surveyors with blueprints looking over her bucolic glen. And when they break for lunch, they accidentally leave the blueprints behind. And she reads on the title, detailed map of parking lot.

00:06:17 Speaker_05
And this is the plans to replace the glen with a parking lot to serve Tavern on the Green, which is just like a movie scene. It's incredible.

00:06:28 Speaker_00
Yeah, literally, that it's like a parking lot here because they found these papers. And this is the kind of thing that if you saw it in a movie, you'd be like, come on. It happens in real life all the time.

00:06:37 Speaker_00
I forget what Civil War battle it was where they literally found the Confederate plans wrapped around a cigar. And they're like, oh. okay, now we know what's going to happen, you know.

00:06:46 Speaker_00
And this is something that – it's not necessarily important but the last few chapters in the last episode felt very much like data, data, data.

00:06:54 Speaker_00
Like I'm giving you hard information about this urban transportation issue and here it feels like Caro has shifted much more into reporter-storyteller mode. He is telling a story and this section is very dramatic, cinematic in a very fun way.

00:07:08 Speaker_05
But that also sort of describes why this fight, unlike other fights that involve a lot of data or a lot of, you know, a lot of like real problems that Moses has caused, don't gain traction.

00:07:21 Speaker_05
Whereas this one with this nice story of these nice moms and their upper middle class life really does take hold in newspapers, which is really the big deal with this one.

00:07:33 Speaker_00
Yes, it shows you the importance of a story, as we'll see, like the importance of a narrative, that it is hard to convince people with a lot of numbers, but it is much easier to convince people when you've got moms and kids versus bulldozers, as we'll see.

00:07:46 Speaker_00
And so Davis, she tells another mom, Augusta Newman, and Augusta Newman is the wife of Arnold Newman, who's a well-known photographer, and I think this is

00:07:54 Speaker_00
One of the differences we had kind of talked about in previous episodes between what happens here and what happened earlier is these are people who have access to media.

00:08:02 Speaker_00
These are people who have access to professional assistance or are professionals themselves in a way that the people of East Tremont, the people of Harlem just do not have access to.

00:08:12 Speaker_00
So they write up a petition and they try to get it signed by many of the well-known artists and writers who live on the block. A name that comes up a lot is the novelist Fanny Hurst who – I've not read any of her work but I've heard the name before.

00:08:24 Speaker_00
Carol mentions playwright and screenwriter Samson Raifelson and he refers to him as Samuel Raifelson for some reason but I don't – unless I'm getting the names mixed up, I don't know there is a Samuel Raifelson but Samson Raifelson is a well-known – is a classic playwright, screenwriter.

00:08:39 Speaker_00
So this might be – the third error I've ever found in the thousands of pages of Caro's work. And one of the other errors is just him getting the name of a movie slightly wrong in one of the Lyndon Johnson books. So I'm not that mad about it.

00:08:52 Speaker_00
But this is like Ludwig Bemelmans, the author of Madeline, lives here, like Pearl Lang, the dancer. May Murray, this former silenced movie star, lives there.

00:09:00 Speaker_00
And there are these other names that I'm sure were more well-known when the book came out but would have to be researched by modern readers. But in the end, They have this petition with just 23 names on it.

00:09:09 Speaker_00
You know, we've seen petitions with thousands of names get knocked aside. And the park department, they're like, yeah, 23 name petition. I'm ignoring this. I don't we don't want to deal with this.

00:09:18 Speaker_00
And the newly installed deputy mayor tries to arrange a meeting and is told off by one of Moses's secretaries over the phone. But here's the difference. One of the moms, she signs it. She is not just a person with access to the newspapers.

00:09:33 Speaker_00
She is a person who is married to a Herald Tribune reporter. So, Roman, this time is personal.

00:09:40 Speaker_05
That's right. But it's so funny to me how this starts with Moses being completely disdainful because he, you know, he has been so used to this for so long. You know, 23 moms versus like the thousands and thousands when it came to

00:09:57 Speaker_05
You know, the one mile section, we have, you know, the 5,000 moms of Manhattan town, 4,000 moms of Lincoln Center. Nobody cares. Presto loves them. Everything is just going his way at this point, but just the amount of time.

00:10:10 Speaker_05
And really it's the constituency of the people who are upset that really, really changes things.

00:10:16 Speaker_00
Yes, but he's so complacent about it. And there's a Carol sums it up that he's refusing to meet with them. He sends them a letter that says, like, let's talk about it. But his plan is he'll just start tearing up the Glenn before they talk about it.

00:10:29 Speaker_00
It's just what he does. And he sends them this letter. And Carol writes, his letter would not placate the mothers, of course, but that would no longer matter.

00:10:36 Speaker_00
By the time they read his explanation of why it was necessary to destroy the Glenn they were fighting for, they would no longer be any point in fighting for it. It wouldn't be there.

00:10:44 Speaker_00
This protest would be disposed of as he had been disposing of protests for 30 years." And then there's a space in the page and then he writes, but this protest was different. And why is it different?

00:10:55 Speaker_00
For these reasons we're talking about, these protesters are educated. They are financially secure. They are well-connected to the media. There are lawyers in these families.

00:11:02 Speaker_00
They can afford to raise the money to fight this legally or they can do the work themselves. This is not

00:11:08 Speaker_00
These are not people who are lower class people who live in a neighborhood that even though it's clean and nice and people love it, does not have the resources. And this is also different because it's so clear cut. Carol makes the point.

00:11:21 Speaker_00
You can have competing ideas about whether a road is more important in this space or a neighborhood, whether housing is more important in this space or a neighborhood, what the needs of a city are. But this is

00:11:32 Speaker_00
children's play space versus a parking lot for a restaurant, which is so this is the closest the book gets to the plot of break into electric boogaloo, where it's literally a community center for needy kids versus a shopping mall.

00:11:45 Speaker_00
Like it's there's no it's so it's so clear cut. And most of his role is so clear cut in this in the housing fights that he does.

00:11:53 Speaker_00
He can hide behind the private developers who are technically responsible for the on the ground stuff, even though he's calling a lot of shots. This is a park issue. It's in Central Park. And everyone knows Moses is the parks man.

00:12:06 Speaker_00
And not only that, this is Central Park, which is a special park. It is literally, as everyone says, the lungs of the city. And I think it is hard to argue that the single greatest decision of the planners of New York City, it's hard to argue that

00:12:20 Speaker_00
There was a greater decision than the one to leave this space open, than to not grid it out and make it into just streets, to leave this enormous space. Because Central Park is huge. It's a huge park. It's not the biggest park in New York City.

00:12:33 Speaker_00
I think that's Pelham Bay Park, but nobody goes up there. I mean people do but it's not the same.

00:12:37 Speaker_00
Central Park is right in the middle of the action and it is really a sacred space and I remember months ago we talked about what a big deal it was when Moses refurbished the park in the 1930s.

00:12:49 Speaker_00
That was one of the things that made him such a heroic figure for the city. is that he turned Central Park into this beautiful place again that people could take a break from living in this crammed-in city.

00:13:02 Speaker_00
And it's a park that people spend a lot of time in. He can't do something there and hide it and keep it secret the way he could when he rammed the Major Deegan through the Van Cortlandt Park marshes. You know, people see Central Park.

00:13:13 Speaker_00
It's in the middle of Manhattan. It's very open. And so it's a very public place for him to pick a fight and especially to pick a fight with mobs.

00:13:22 Speaker_05
Yeah. Yeah. But he he does. And he starts doing the thing that he normally does, which is, you know, before anyone can sort of like realize that he sends his bulldozers to rip it up and, you know, to to make it so that

00:13:35 Speaker_05
When that it's a fait accompli and they can protest all they want to but they actually caught on to this like they see the bulldozers coming. One of the Central Park West residents Eleanor Sanger looks at her bathroom window.

00:13:48 Speaker_05
She sees bulldozers ripping up trees.

00:13:51 Speaker_00
It's such a cinematic scene. She's just going in the morning to brush her teeth or whatever, and she looks out the window and sees bulldozers. I mentioned Hitchhiker's Guide already.

00:14:00 Speaker_00
It's literally the opening of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is he looks outside and sees bulldozers are going to knock his house down. So so she sees it. And what does she do?

00:14:09 Speaker_05
I mean, she just calls her friends and they run down there, you know, like just basically like women and children and baby carriages. And they stand in front of a bulldozer. And that looks so fun to take photographs of to put in the newspaper.

00:14:21 Speaker_05
And they know it.

00:14:22 Speaker_00
They don't necessarily stand in front of the bulldozer because these are women with children in their hands, but they make themselves visible to the bulldozer and the bulldozer driver stops his work. And she is also called Stanley Isaacs.

00:14:33 Speaker_00
We mentioned him before, a longtime civic reformer, and he helps to get the press there and the press shows up. Like you're saying, this is moms and kids versus bulldozers. And this is a good story for the media that you can take pictures of.

00:14:48 Speaker_00
And when Lillian Edelstein was trying to save her part of East Tremont, She could barely get reporters to notice. She would hold rallies with hundreds of people and reporters not there.

00:14:56 Speaker_00
But now moms with baby carriages are having a face-off with bulldozers in Central Park and reporters from all the newspapers and the TV stations and the radio stations rush in and soon the story is everywhere and something that Caro does not.

00:15:11 Speaker_00
talk about too much here, I think maybe because he's such a newspaper guy, is the difference that television probably made with this too. That television just brings an immediacy to things that newspapers and radio don't necessarily.

00:15:25 Speaker_00
Sorry, Roman, I hate to say that about radio, but- There's just something about television and maybe that's a difference too, but he doesn't quite get into that and the mothers They set up a rotating guard from 7 a.m.

00:15:35 Speaker_00
To dark every day to keep the bulldozers from starting up and the reporters they Love it. It's got famous names. It's got moms and kids. It's got trees during what happens to be Arbor Day week not the best week to be knocking down trees in your park and

00:15:50 Speaker_00
It's got a park in danger. It's got bulldozers. And this isn't just a local park issue in some neighborhood. This is the Battle of Central Park. That's how they frame it.

00:15:59 Speaker_05
And Moms vs. Moses, which is another way they frame it.

00:16:02 Speaker_00
You know, it's perfect. The Battle of Central Park, colon, Moms vs. Moses. Like, that's your movie title right there. It's amazing. And even now in the 21st century, what is the most potent thing in any political conversation?

00:16:13 Speaker_00
What's the thing that gets brought up is what is this going to do to our kids? I'm a mom and I'm concerned about my kids. It is the single most probably universal basic fundamental relationship in human existence is probably mother and child.

00:16:30 Speaker_00
Sorry dads, I hate to break it to you. Sorry aunts and uncles and siblings. And it doesn't mean you need a mother to be raised great, but it goes back to the animal kingdom and evolution, that relationship between mothers and children.

00:16:43 Speaker_00
And so to be able to tap into that, Robert Moses can bluster all he wants, but it's like there's an unbreakable bond between between people and their mothers. Yeah.

00:16:52 Speaker_05
Yeah.

00:16:53 Speaker_05
And this is also one of those things where because he's the parks guy and it's Central Park and he's so such a towering figure, you know, he can kind of stand behind like the engineers say this for this road that, you know, all sorts of stuff like.

00:17:08 Speaker_05
This is the one that he's always held on to, where every decision is his. He gets credit for all of it. And therefore, he gets all of the blame for this one.

00:17:17 Speaker_00
Yes.

00:17:17 Speaker_05
That's just totally different than the other stuff, which you can sort of like put these layers of like, engineers say this, the city needs this, the different rules that are complicated that he wrote the laws for and everything like this.

00:17:29 Speaker_05
But this is just a choice. It's very simple. It just makes good copy. And he's just completely out of his league.

00:17:36 Speaker_00
And he's saying the same things he said before but it's not working. Even the New York Times comes out against the parking lot, which is a big thing. They usually support him on things. And Moses responds.

00:17:45 Speaker_00
He just sends his park workers and his park's executive, Stuart Constable, aka the mustache. And I'm not sure – I don't remember if Caro attributes that nickname to anyone in particular or if –

00:17:56 Speaker_00
If he came up with it or if – that's what they called him but this is a character we'll see a lot of in the next chapter as well, the mustache, and they secretly install a fence in the middle of the night and send the bulldozers in.

00:18:06 Speaker_00
Even the NYPD is not notified. They find out in the middle of the night when someone reports to a police officer, hey, it looks like people are building things in the park. Something is going on.

00:18:14 Speaker_00
And they have to send police officers in to hold the moms back in the morning while trees are knocked down and being chopped into pieces. And the media in the past has always applauded Moses' ways of getting things done.

00:18:26 Speaker_00
They kind of winked at him for those kind of devious ways. They talked about it was the like oops, sorry method of getting things done. But now they turn on him. They got pictures of mothers crying as trees are cut down.

00:18:39 Speaker_00
They appear everywhere, though unfortunately they're not in this book. Again, the photo section is the one part of this book that I feel like is such a letdown.

00:18:45 Speaker_00
But they do show a photo in the book of a picture Caro describes of a little boy holding a toy rifle as a police officer stands guard at the fence.

00:18:53 Speaker_00
And it's just there's all these photos come in, embarrassed police officers, anguished mothers, anti-Moses letters the editor pour in. And Moses is not destroyed, but for the first time, he's really tarnished.

00:19:04 Speaker_00
And Carroll writes, Tuesday, April 24th, 1956, the day that Robert Moses sent his troops into Central Park was Robert Moses' Black Tuesday. For on it, he lost his most cherished asset, his reputation. The Moses boom had lasted for 30 years.

00:19:19 Speaker_00
Now it was over. And it's not like, I mean, before anyone thinks, it's not like then Moses is like, all right, never mind. Like he's still, the trees come down. Like he tears those trees down.

00:19:29 Speaker_05
Yeah. And he's, he's like, during this period, he's also building some of the major highways and bridges of this time. You know what I mean?

00:19:36 Speaker_05
This is like, this is not like a complete diminishment of his power, but right here, he really takes it on the chin.

00:19:42 Speaker_00
Yes. And the mayor stands behind him because he has the power. The mayor needs that power. But something one thing kind of different happens before he can start laying down the concrete for this parking lot.

00:19:53 Speaker_00
And so remember back in 1934, he tore down the Central Park Casino and people were like, you shouldn't do that. And the state court said he can do whatever he wants. He has total power over the parks. Now, 22 years later, it's 1956.

00:20:05 Speaker_00
And the state supreme court, one of the justices, actually grants an injunction halting work pending a hearing. And this is the kind of thing they didn't even do before, grant these injunctions. And Moses is like, I'm going to win this.

00:20:16 Speaker_00
I can get it done my way. He refuses to compromise. And that's when Stanley Isaacs, that wily old reformer, he remembers one thing and discovers two things.

00:20:25 Speaker_00
He remembers that, one, when Moses tore down the original casino to build the tavern, he said he made a big stink about how only restaurants with reasonable prices should be in a public park, and by 1956, the tavern's prices are not reasonable.

00:20:40 Speaker_00
They're charging $4.50 for a hamburger and a beer. I mean, that sounds like an amazing deal, but in 1956, it was not. Carroll quotes one news story. So dinner and tip for two came to $23. There was another $5 at the bar for two drinks each.

00:20:55 Speaker_00
It's not a place to go the day before payday." And again, I'm like with the rents we were talking about in previous episodes, I'm salivating over those prices.

00:21:06 Speaker_00
It's just this is not a restaurant the average person could just walk into and buy a hamburger in. And the second and more important thing Isaac discovers is the sweetheart deal that Moses gave to the restaurant's owner, Arnold Schleifer.

00:21:19 Speaker_00
Schleifer is supposed to pay the city 5% of his gross income, which is already ridiculously low rent for a fancy restaurant in a major city park in a fantastic location. But even that percentage

00:21:31 Speaker_00
he hasn't been paying because his contract allows him to deduct the cost of improvements to the restaurant from his taxes.

00:21:37 Speaker_00
So Isaac finds that over a four-year period, Schleifer made almost $1.8 million and he paid the city $9,000 in taxes and Moses essentially making this guy rich at the city's expense and Carol makes it clear. The deal is not illegal.

00:21:51 Speaker_00
Moses is not getting a kickback.

00:21:53 Speaker_00
Although the quid pro quo is that Schleifer has to cater every banquet Moses likes and we talked in that earlier episode about how Schleifer catered that one banquet in a way that was just a little too fancy schmancy ethnic for Moses and he wrote that great memoir about it.

00:22:07 Speaker_00
But this flies in the face of another part of Moses' reputation, this idea that the guy doesn't cater to favoritism, that he doesn't do sweetheart deals. He clearly is, and the press can make a lot of hay about this, too.

00:22:19 Speaker_00
They can oversimplify the story to make it sound more corrupt than it is. But whereas in the past, the press's oversimplification has helped Moses, now is starting to hurt him.

00:22:30 Speaker_05
Yeah. Well, he's just like, it's like an infection, like the

00:22:34 Speaker_05
You know, the mothers and the images of the cute kid with the air rifle and stuff like that, they sort of make a little cut and then all of a sudden this type of thing, which normally wouldn't cause him any problems whatsoever, there's just enough damage there to infect, you know, and sort of get him off of his normal game when it comes to this stuff.

00:22:55 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's this chipping away, this little bit of chipping away at the reputation that holds him up. And I just want to note, it's at this part of the story that we were on page 999 in the book. We're about to do it, people.

00:23:07 Speaker_00
We're about to tip over into quadruple digits in page numbers. Not something you see in a lot of books. So really love it.

00:23:16 Speaker_00
Only the people who loved the Shogun TV series so much that they're now reading that novel are going to feel this thrill this year. of reaching a thousand pages.

00:23:24 Speaker_05
But what's so what's funny about this still is that, you know, for decades, Moses has just sort of lived this way and sort of bulldozed over people metaphorically and literally. And he still doesn't quite get that he's on the losing side of this.

00:23:39 Speaker_05
And so he takes off to Spain.

00:23:41 Speaker_00
Yeah, he leaves on a 24-day vacation to Spain. This is one of those things where I kind of wonder sometimes, I trust Caro so much, but he'll be like, Moses was unstoppable. He always worked. Then he went on a vacation for two weeks in the Bahamas.

00:23:55 Speaker_00
Then he went on a 24-day vacation to Spain. I'm like, I don't work as hard as Moses, and I don't take 24-day vacations in Spain. You were just in Spain, Roman, right? You were not there for almost a month.

00:24:06 Speaker_05
I was not there for almost a month, but I definitely could have been. That place is

00:24:10 Speaker_00
Such a great country. It's wonderful. I want to go back so badly. I haven't been in years. It's so good. But you're right. He's so confident. He's like, I don't even need to be here.

00:24:19 Speaker_00
Unfortunately, and this will be a problem in the next chapter too, who does he leave in charge? The mustache constable. who is like Moses without the tact and the strategizing and the grace and the wit.

00:24:32 Speaker_00
Constable is just unnecessarily over stonewalling the press and that keeps the story alive. It makes the city angrier and Moses is not there to coordinate the responses of politicians, of park reps.

00:24:43 Speaker_00
The media is pouncing on and sensationalizing every little comment that someone makes to keep the story going, and the next round of judges in the court battle upholds the injunction, and one of them comments how he's happy with his judge's salary, but even for him, a steak at the tavern is pretty pricey.

00:24:58 Speaker_00
He can't afford to eat there regularly. And it starts getting safer to publicly criticize Moses. This is a guy that people had to whisper about before if they wanted to criticize, but now it's becoming easier and easier to do that.

00:25:10 Speaker_00
And Moses returns to the city after – that was probably an amazing vacation in Spain. It was harder to get news from overseas then, so like I'm sure he was shielded from some of this.

00:25:18 Speaker_00
And he tries to keep his cool, but he ends up blowing up in the press the way he always kind of used to when he was mad.

00:25:24 Speaker_00
And he goes so far as to attack Fanny Hurst, this respected elderly novelist, for making a stink about this children's play area when she doesn't even have children. How does she have a stake in this if she doesn't even have children?

00:25:35 Speaker_00
Which, reading this, I was like, oh my god, I didn't think this part was going to be as relevant.

00:25:40 Speaker_00
as it is now it's really loathsome yeah it's really the fact that it felt like it was ripped from today's headlines this idea of someone saying well if you don't have children you don't have a stake in the in the in the country you know you know you're somehow selfish don't care about the future

00:25:55 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's it's it's bonkers. But unlike in the past, now the media is also giving the people most attacks a chance to reply to his attacks. And this attack on Fannie Hurst is really seen as too far, you know. Oh, you know what?

00:26:09 Speaker_00
I just realized I kept saying next chapter about Constable in the mustache, but it's actually a chapter after next chapter.

00:26:15 Speaker_02
So that's OK.

00:26:16 Speaker_00
My apologies. Later in the episode. And Moses realizes that if this case keeps going through the court, then there's going to be a discovery of other statements he's made, other sweetheart deals he's made.

00:26:30 Speaker_00
He's going to have to testify about these things. That would be bad. He can't be in court testifying about this stuff because then he's on the record. He can't play games about it. So he does what he almost never does.

00:26:41 Speaker_00
He does something that is anathema to him. Roman, what does he do in terms of building this parking lot? What does he do? Yeah, well, he gives up.

00:26:48 Speaker_05
I mean, yeah, I mean, it's kind of amazing. Like, you know, he just yeah, he doesn't go through with it, which is amazing.

00:26:55 Speaker_00
He just backs down. He tries to do as quietly as possible. He has these delaying motions for the lawsuit. And then when the media dies down a little, he kind of agrees to give in so that it doesn't seem in his eyes as such a big loss.

00:27:10 Speaker_00
And he agrees to build a playground in that spot where the parking lot would have been. And now, Roman. I did a little on-the-ground investigating for this part of the episode. Well, I was preparing for this episode.

00:27:22 Speaker_00
We had our event at the New York Historical Society where we talked to Robert Caro on stage. It was amazing. When people hear the audio from it, they will hear me noticeably run out of words. I'm so emotional at the end of it.

00:27:33 Speaker_00
It was an experience I'll carry with me in my heart for the rest of my life. But beforehand, I decided to do a little Caro-style investigating, and I walked over to that part of the park because it's very close to the Historical Society.

00:27:44 Speaker_00
and I want to be on the scene. I said, what would Robert Carrow do? He would go and be in the space. And I walked around to those playgrounds that they put in, which are still there, which are definitely not as nice as a grove of trees would be.

00:27:56 Speaker_00
They're okay. They're okay playgrounds. And I went down to Tavern on the Green. And that parking circle is still there where cars can drop people off.

00:28:04 Speaker_00
And when you look at it, it feels like someone came along and took a bite out of the park and just left pavement behind.

00:28:10 Speaker_00
It really feels like the outside world of the city has invaded briefly and been pushed back but has left an emptiness, a void behind. And so to imagine that parking lot in the area where those playgrounds are,

00:28:23 Speaker_00
It would have been a very noticeable chunk taken out of the park. And it's an enormous park. But walking around, you're like, yeah, this would have had an effect. It would have had a real effect on the people who lived in that neighborhood.

00:28:35 Speaker_00
And it feels like something would have been torn out of it. And for what? For a parking lot? For a restaurant? I looked at the prices on the menu and I was like, this is an overpriced restaurant.

00:28:47 Speaker_00
Like the prices have kept kept up with inflation, let's say, you know, it's still an expensive hamburger. So no, thanks. That's what I say to that parking lot.

00:28:55 Speaker_05
Yeah. It's one of those things where he just he just kind of there was a plan he dug in. He maybe had some, you know, friendly conversations with the proprietor of the restaurant or something like that to make it all make sense at the time.

00:29:07 Speaker_05
But like it I mean, it's kind of amazing because. this is not a thing to like, not a great hill to die on for him. You know, like it doesn't make any sense. It's such a small thing.

00:29:21 Speaker_05
And what's notable is that at a certain point he perceived that as well. Um, because that's, that's the new sort of behavior with him is he just realized like, I, like, there is no reason to take, uh, this much damage for this parking lot.

00:29:35 Speaker_00
And it's chipped away at his reputation in a number of ways and it's such a tiny hill for this to happen on. But Moses' hope was nobody is going to notice that I gave in and lost this battle.

00:29:45 Speaker_00
But it gets big media attention and Kara talks about the effect of that. He says the aura of infallibility was gone also. He's talking about some other stuff that was gone but the aura of infallibility was gone also.

00:29:54 Speaker_00
If Moses was the man who got things done,

00:29:56 Speaker_00
Implicit was the assumption that the things that he got done were things that should be gotten done He had always been portrayed as a man who was right now in a single dramatic tableau He had been shown to be utterly unmistakably wrong this idea that He's not a guy who can always get things done He's not a guy who's incorruptible look at this sweetheart deal And he's not infallible that he is not someone that you you don't dare go up against because you're always gonna lose all these things have been Removed from his reputation by this

00:30:25 Speaker_00
Again, it's kind of a trivial thing that – like to give a parking lot to a restaurant, which of all the things he's done is not – by far not the worst and not something you would even expect him to stick so on.

00:30:35 Speaker_00
You all kind of have to wonder maybe if he hadn't gone on that vacation to Spain, he would have wriggled out of it in some way. more faith-saving way, I don't know.

00:30:46 Speaker_05
But what this does is it starts this, you know, cycle of fights in which Robert Moses does not win and also where Robert Moses is the bad guy.

00:30:56 Speaker_00
Yes.

00:30:57 Speaker_05
And what's really notable is that there begins to be like a group of newspaper reporters who were not alive. or at least sentient during those time periods where Robert Moses would destroy a newspaper man's life pretty easily.

00:31:13 Speaker_05
And so they start seeing that there's some stories here and they start acting. And that's what the next chapter is about. It's called Late Arrival. We'll get to that after the break. Uh, so this is chapter 43, late arrival, which is like a little rude.

00:31:37 Speaker_00
Carol's like, I've been writing about this this whole time. What about you guys? But I think he's, I think he is talking about, um, I think he's not talking about the reporters as the editors.

00:31:48 Speaker_05
He really is the powers that be that run these newspapers. Finally, they start to see like that. criticizing Moses and telling these stories that are very compelling to the newsreading public is like, you know, it's worth it.

00:32:05 Speaker_00
And it takes a lot of work to get them to that point and the work of a group of reporters that Carol really has a lot of fun writing about. I think he feels a real kinship with these characters and real and admires them.

00:32:16 Speaker_00
So he starts the chapter with an incredibly prescient quote from Robert Moses, one of these quotes where it's like – it's super ironic. So he makes use of it a lot.

00:32:24 Speaker_00
So 1933 and Robert Moses is talking about another New York politician who was having his comeuppance.

00:32:30 Speaker_00
He says, the great statesman McKee is a synthetic character which never actually existed on sea or land puffed up by the press … and now in the process of deflation.

00:32:40 Speaker_00
There's a large amount of unfairness to the individual in this process but in the end, it arrives at the truth. As if 25 or so years earlier, 23 years earlier, he's writing his own epitaph, you know, which is amazing. It's very prescient.

00:32:55 Speaker_00
It just happens sometimes, you know, history rhymes or whatever. So we're introduced to some characters here. And one of them, one of the main ones here is this reporter for the World Telegram and Sun, again, a newspaper that does not exist anymore.

00:33:10 Speaker_00
And I always wonder if it's like, did the Telegram newspaper and the Sun newspaper merge and then the World newspaper merged with that one?

00:33:18 Speaker_05
A lot of these read like magnetic fridge poetry. You know, there's there's like World Telegram, Herald Times, you know, and then and then they just throw them up, rearrange them over time.

00:33:30 Speaker_00
So, yeah, I love it. Yeah.

00:33:33 Speaker_00
And so this reporter, Gene Gleason, he says to his editors, I want to investigate Robert Moses because I'm sure that there's other fishy stuff that the Tavern on the Green Contract is not the only fishy thing about Robert Moses.

00:33:43 Speaker_00
And normally his editors would say no. But the Battle of Central Park has inspired them to say like, okay, I'll allow it. His editor says, I'll allow it. And Gleason wants to start investigating the power of public authorities.

00:33:55 Speaker_00
But unfortunately, no groundwork's been done on that story before because the records are inaccessible. You can't get them. There's nowhere to start. But a little groundwork has already been done on the Manhattan Town public housing project.

00:34:07 Speaker_00
And so Gleason is like, okay, I think there's potential. There's something for me to work off of. And he starts working with one of the rewrite men at the newspaper.

00:34:13 Speaker_00
And I apologize to call him a rewrite man, but they're all – all the reporters pretty much are men at this point. Again, not for fair reasons, not because the men were just doing such a bang-up job reporting.

00:34:25 Speaker_00
And so he works with this rewriter, Fred J. Cook.

00:34:27 Speaker_00
And I think what's interesting here is I forget how a newspaper works in this way, where there's often this delegation of abilities between the person who is out doing the investigative work and the person that you call it into at the office who does the actual kind of writing of the article.

00:34:45 Speaker_00
And they work together so well on this, but it's a – it's just a reminder to me of like, oh, he could have – like Robert Carroll could have written a whole book about how newspapers work. And it would have been fascinating.

00:34:55 Speaker_00
There's just so much I don't know about it. But they start putting together a series of articles that don't discover new things so much as they assemble all the known facts about Manhattan town in one place for the first time.

00:35:05 Speaker_00
And the facts show that Moses' slum clearance program is clearing out functioning neighborhoods and replacing them with nothing.

00:35:15 Speaker_00
just unfinished projects or slums and they haven't found the corruption in the program yet but they do make it clear that the program is making housing worse.

00:35:23 Speaker_00
It is not improving the problem and most importantly rather than blaming the city in quotes, they name Moses and they put the blame on him and so in a movie, This would be front page news. It would crack the case.

00:35:37 Speaker_00
Suddenly everyone be investigating Moses. Is that what happens, Roman?

00:35:40 Speaker_05
No, that's that's not what happens at all. It's also one of those things where the story is just so complicated, you know.

00:35:47 Speaker_00
Yes.

00:35:47 Speaker_05
And it involves lots of different people. And maybe those people, their their victimization isn't as compelling to newspaper readers. You know, it's just one of those things that doesn't quite have the traction. that these sort of park fights do.

00:36:04 Speaker_05
Because the other one that we're going to talk about in the next chapter is another kind of low stakes park fight.

00:36:10 Speaker_00
It's the lowest stakes park fight. It's basically over a misunderstanding, you know, more than anything else.

00:36:17 Speaker_05
But yeah, this one it's it's this one doesn't quite stick because it has the same kind of like issues of all this stuff.

00:36:23 Speaker_05
But I mean, like this is a very classic corruption that they uncover, you know, like developers siphoned off money and then and the story just gets buried. You know, it just is not interesting to people.

00:36:34 Speaker_00
They put it on the back pages of the paper and the editors are still afraid enough of Moses that they would tell him about it ahead of time and they provide space in the paper for him to like have a rebuttal where he attacks the paper's own story and they don't put Moses' name in the headlines and something that I think we've only become more familiar with in modern times is often people just look at the headlines.

00:36:53 Speaker_00
They don't read the article and the way you – this is something that James Fallows writes about is that a headline frames a story in a way that tells the reader what the main information is.

00:37:04 Speaker_00
And so the headline can be vastly unrepresentative of the actual story, but the headline is what's going to stick with people. So if Moses' name is not in the headline, people are not going to think it.

00:37:13 Speaker_00
But one story leads to another and there's this domino effect that Caro talks about where he says, investigative reporters quickly become aware of a phenomenon of their profession.

00:37:22 Speaker_00
Information so hard to come by when they are preparing to write their first story in a new field suddenly becomes plentiful as soon as that first story has appeared in print.

00:37:31 Speaker_00
Every city agency has its malcontents and its idealists and its malcontent idealists, which is a... I love that. It's such a great way to say it.

00:37:41 Speaker_00
Officials and aides and clerks and secretaries unhappy with the philosophy by which it is being run or the payoffs that are being made within it, who have been just waiting for years for the appearance of some forum in which their feelings can be expressed.

00:37:54 Speaker_00
And so once these first articles come out, even though they're in the back, Gleason and Cook's phones start ringing. People are coming out of the woodwork to complain about Moses.

00:38:01 Speaker_00
And suddenly there are lots of leads for them to continue this investigation and dig deeper. And of course, everyone's afraid of Moses. So it all has to be off the record.

00:38:10 Speaker_00
And a source in the comptroller's office reveals how the developers are milking their housing developments for millions while leaving tenants without heat. They're not paying taxes to the city for years. Again, these stories don't get that much play.

00:38:22 Speaker_00
They're complicated in a lot of ways. They involve names and numbers. If other papers mention them, it's usually just to run Moses' denials and the New York Times is still carrying Moses' water for him. They're still not ready.

00:38:34 Speaker_00
They did disagree about the parking lot but they're not ready to turn on him completely. Then in June 1957, it comes out that the Manhattan Town developers have siphoned off so much money

00:38:46 Speaker_00
that they have none left to pay their taxes or their mortgage or build any of the buildings they've contracted to build and the city will have to foreclose on this development. This is a city project that was given to developers.

00:38:58 Speaker_00
The city will now have to foreclose on and The Times buries the story but the other papers don't and Gleason gets Mayor Wagner to say at a press conference that he was conned for five years by these developers and that's a big thing.

00:39:11 Speaker_05
Yeah. I mean, and this is like the tone of these newsrooms is changing a lot.

00:39:16 Speaker_05
Um, and the, the older reporters who used to criticize some of these upstarts for questioning the powers that be at the, in the city are now like doing follow up questions where they ask it.

00:39:25 Speaker_05
And, and it's beginning to become clear that, um, this sort of, uh, rich diversity of different newspapers is helping the situation now. Like they're, if the times isn't going to do it, someone else is going to, to cover it. And therefore like,

00:39:40 Speaker_05
I mean, this is the whole point of having an active and vibrant press, really. It's kind of amazing.

00:39:46 Speaker_00
And Gleason and Cook, once again, they fall prey to the great liberal myth that once you get the information out there, the system will do its job and people will get mad or they'll change their minds. It'll be great.

00:39:58 Speaker_00
They're like, Moses is going to get his comeuppance now. He's going to have his wings clipped by the mayor. But they don't understand how central Moses has become to the actual invisible machinery of the city.

00:40:09 Speaker_00
And so Kara says, the two reporters' expectation was not unreasonable.

00:40:12 Speaker_00
Ordinarily, the tainting of a city program with scandal and failure, scandal of immense proportions, failure five years in duration, would result in at least curtailment of the powers of the mayoral subordinate heading that program, lest the public outcry turn against the mayor.

00:40:25 Speaker_00
Their expectation was just based on a false premise, that Robert Moses was really the mayor's subordinate. They did not understand that, as a matter of practical politics, the mayor could not discipline, demote, or remove Title I's administrator.

00:40:37 Speaker_00
And so they were surprised at ensuing developments. And those developments are that… a spokesman of Moses's announces that new developers are coming in to take over Manhattan Town. They're not going to have foreclosure hearings.

00:40:47 Speaker_00
The old developers will have no penalties. In fact, the two principal stockholders of the mismanaged Manhattan Town Inc. are going to be kept on the payroll as consultants.

00:40:55 Speaker_00
They're actually going to have their stock bought out from them, and they're going to remain stockholders in the new development. So these guys who cheated the city out of millions, they're going to keep making money off of it.

00:41:02 Speaker_00
And there's an outcry, and the mayor's like, all right, I'll take action. I will cut off some of the money those developers would receive. you They're still going to be rewarded for their failure. They're just not getting as much reward.

00:41:15 Speaker_00
And Gleason and Cook are like, we did all this work and all we managed to do was get more money to the bad guys. And Moses has not really been affected at all. And Moses has big plans at this point.

00:41:26 Speaker_00
He's planning this new vision of Manhattan's west side, Lincoln Center, which involves raising, not raising like raising up, but raising is like raising to the ground, you know, R-A-Z. Like a razor. Shaving. Yeah, exactly.

00:41:38 Speaker_00
Oh, they probably come from the same group. I never even thought about that. Roman, you're so smart. Come on. You're as smart as the empire that bears your name.

00:41:49 Speaker_00
They're going to raise 18 square blocks and they're replacing them with Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the New York Ballet, the High School of Performing Arts, Juilliard, Fordham University's new campus.

00:42:00 Speaker_00
The newspapers are like – they love this plan. It's going to displace 7,000 low-income families and replace their homes with 4,000 luxury apartments but the newspapers love it.

00:42:08 Speaker_00
Roman, I want to hear what you can say but then I have a thing I want to say about Lincoln

00:42:11 Speaker_05
Well, here's the thing. It's not better than 7,000 homes for people who can afford it, but Lincoln Center is pretty great.

00:42:21 Speaker_00
It is – that was what I was going to say. In all disclosure, I have spent so many memorable hours and beloved hours of my life at Lincoln Center. Some of my happiest memories of experiencing culture and art have taken place there.

00:42:35 Speaker_00
It's a place that is – it's inextricably tied in with my memories of my grandmother who – I spent many, many hours with there. And so it's when I think about her, I think about Lincoln Center.

00:42:46 Speaker_00
I was in New York for that event, and I walked by Lincoln Center twice. And each time I was just flooded with with these feelings. It's a it's a really it's a magical place. But again, you don't want to kick out 7000 people.

00:42:56 Speaker_05
No opera or if you do these big plans, you have to take care of them. And he never did that sort of thing.

00:43:03 Speaker_05
Um, but, but like, you know, you see movies in the park there in the summertime, you know, like, yeah, I've watched people dance to some of this goes there, you know, like it's, and it has all these cultural, like as a center of culture, it's kind of stunning how concentrated it all is at this like place.

00:43:22 Speaker_05
Um, and anyway, it's just one of those ones, like, I mean, Jones beach didn't have anything that it was knocking down. So therefore it's kind of this unalloyed, you know, good. And, and this one, Plenty alloyed, I guess.

00:43:34 Speaker_05
But but but Lincoln Center is pretty awesome, I think.

00:43:38 Speaker_00
Yes, it's it's a I mean, I feel a little about it. Like I felt like when I visited Versailles years ago where I was like, they could have fed so many people with the money it took to build this house.

00:43:47 Speaker_00
But those people would still be dead now and the house is still here. So I'm getting to enjoy the house.

00:43:54 Speaker_00
And like you're saying, the people that were displaced should have been taken care of, should have been accounted for, maybe should have had a say in the process.

00:44:01 Speaker_00
But it is hard not to feel, as a New Yorker, like a certain amount of pride in this – that there's this space where you can –

00:44:09 Speaker_00
I mean, if they were all scheduled on the same day, you go to the opera, then go to the ballet, then hear the Philharmonic, then look at the fountain where they shot that scene in the producers. I've seen so many things that were amazing.

00:44:21 Speaker_00
But it's hard to know that while you're there, so many people's homes were taken from them to make it possible.

00:44:28 Speaker_05
It's a little different, but it's sort of in the same philosophy that the existence of Central Park, even though it doesn't knock down homes, its existence does deny a lot of spaces where homes could be built to make life more affordable in Manhattan.

00:44:44 Speaker_05
And, um, and that's a choice that we make. And I think it's a good choice that is made on behalf of the citizens of New York. But, um, you know, it's one of those things. It does matter that there was something there ahead of time.

00:44:56 Speaker_05
I'm not just being, I'm not trying to just like abstract this to the point of, of, of, of having just a philosophical discussion where people mean nothing. But there is a cost when it comes to like, you know, things take place in physical space.

00:45:09 Speaker_05
And if you have one thing, you don't have another. And this is just one of those ones where at least the end product, I think, was executed in a interesting and valuable, like that was an interesting, valuable thing was made.

00:45:22 Speaker_05
I cannot say that about the Cross Bronx Expressway.

00:45:25 Speaker_00
No. I certainly – I have no loving memories of the Cross Bronx Expressway at all whereas Lincoln Center is a place that like I said I have such a personal relationship with. I can't be impartial about it.

00:45:37 Speaker_00
But you're right that I think it gets to the heart of what so much of what Carol is saying that everything is a choice. Everything in governance and how you run a city is a choice and choosing to keep Central Park a park means

00:45:49 Speaker_00
effectively raising the price of housing for everyone who lives in the city a certain amount and that was an easy choice to make when the city was half or not even a quarter built and you still had farm estates up in what would become, you know, 125th Street.

00:46:07 Speaker_00
But it's – it is a choice that they make and you're true that – you're right that it's – there are those choices.

00:46:11 Speaker_00
What is not the best way to do it though with Lincoln Center is the things that the papers didn't dig into in their enthusiasm for this project.

00:46:19 Speaker_00
how Moses is selling the land involved to developers at discount prices, how he's paying politically connected landowners like the Kennedys above market purchase prices. Trevor Burrus Like seven times as much or something like that. It's crazy.

00:46:32 Speaker_00
Aaron Powell Yes, like a lot more money. And the federal administrator for Title I funds, Albert M. Cole, he thinks this is the moment to demand Moses answer for his kind of slipshod and misleading way of administering Title I projects.

00:46:45 Speaker_00
And he threatens to cut off all of Title I's funds to the city if Moses doesn't change his ways and Moses threatens to resign. And within an hour, Mayor Wagner is backing him.

00:46:54 Speaker_00
publicly and the papers rush to back up Moses against the federal government just like when Roosevelt tried to get him fired and Moses calls his powerful friends and they call the White House and Cole has to back down.

00:47:04 Speaker_00
And Gleeson and Cooke, they start realizing Moses is still too powerful for the federal government to undercut him, let alone the city government, let alone regular people.

00:47:13 Speaker_00
And this aura of incorruptibility, even though it's not all the way there, it's still strong enough that people will defend him against the federal government. And his infallibility has been disproven by the Central Park battle.

00:47:27 Speaker_00
But there's still this idea that he is a public servant above politics. He's not on the take. He doesn't get involved in petty political battles.

00:47:35 Speaker_00
and they realize it's going to take a lot more work on behalf of reporters whose editors have invested a lot of years in the Moses myth to make a real difference.

00:47:44 Speaker_00
Moses has had such a relationship with top publishers, top editors that he can just take it for granted that they are going to believe in him.

00:47:53 Speaker_00
And Gleason and Cook find that their sources within city agencies after that first rush, they're newly paranoid. They don't want to talk about it.

00:48:00 Speaker_00
But they keep digging, and they're able to start reporting the ties between local politicians and the slum clearance developers, developers who get contracts.

00:48:08 Speaker_00
And by 1958, they can show that William S. Leveval, the director of Moses' Slum Clearance Committee, is a stockholder in the Nassau Management Company, the real estate relocation firm that we talked about in a previous episode that has been paid millions to do essentially nothing, to help nobody.

00:48:23 Speaker_00
And they start finding more and more links between Moses' people and the companies being given contracts and local politicians. But at this point, Roman, you talked about how other reporters are going to jump in. They're still not jumping in yet.

00:48:35 Speaker_00
Editors keep removing Moses' names from their articles. They keep pressuring them, do some other stories. These are too complicated.

00:48:41 Speaker_00
And Carroll says the stories about corruption in these projects are being put on page 27 and the stories about how Moses has this great project he's building are on page 1. And by 1959, the leaves are really drying up.

00:48:56 Speaker_00
Moses is starting to get public works named after him, which is pretty out of the ordinary for a living person. And Gleason and Cook, they're like, We're going to pin him on title one on the corruption.

00:49:05 Speaker_00
But I guess that's dead now until they come up with their plan. And Carol says to understand what Gleason and Cook did, then it is necessary to understand Gleason and Cook. And you're like, I've been reading about these guys. Are you now?

00:49:18 Speaker_00
Now's when you're going to tell me about them. And he just gives he gets into their their personalities. Gleason, he's that.

00:49:24 Speaker_00
Classic front page, you know, His Girl Friday, hard-drinking, fast-talking reporter, dedicated to protecting the little guy, loves the thrill of it, the rush.

00:49:32 Speaker_00
And Cook is this unassuming guy, but he's also a crusading liberal who wants to protect the little guy. And Carol mentions how Cook wrote a book defending Alger Hiss when Alger Hiss was at his most pri-ish.

00:49:44 Speaker_00
A stance that in 1974 seemed better, that it has aged poorly now considering Alger Hiss – I don't want to reopen it, but he probably did what he was accused of doing.

00:49:52 Speaker_00
It is no longer a just take it for granted if you're liberal, you love Alger Hiss and want to defend him. For anyone listening who doesn't know that name, either look it up or don't worry about it.

00:50:02 Speaker_00
It's the kind of thing that like my grandparents took as – just as took as gospel that Alger Hiss had been railroaded.

00:50:10 Speaker_00
And Cook hates that Moses pushes people around and Carroll quotes him using the phrase, the power brokers, to talk about Moses and the people around him, which is I think the first time the phrase really gets brought up in the mouth of somebody.

00:50:22 Speaker_00
Maybe this is around the time it's getting born.

00:50:24 Speaker_05
Trevor Burrus I actually kind of wondered if This is where Carol gets the name of the book, like, because this is all reported, you know, obviously, well before he's writing all this stuff. And if this is unlocking, I don't know, I don't know.

00:50:39 Speaker_05
The power broker is not a is not a phrase. I know besides coming from this book, really.

00:50:44 Speaker_00
I mean, I know it from this book and I know it from the Marvel Comics supervillain, the power broker, who's the guy who gives people superpowers.

00:50:51 Speaker_05
But but it seems to me like it's possible that I mean, maybe it's just sort of like common parlance among people who write about politics and stuff, that there are power brokers and this and that.

00:51:01 Speaker_05
And maybe it's just such super common of a phrase, but it shows up here and it's very notable to me, you know, like this is sort of a great moment in the book.

00:51:09 Speaker_00
It is the moment in the movie where someone says the title. He's like some kind of power broker.

00:51:14 Speaker_05
And the audience goes, oh. And we've heard it from, we've heard the phrase used by Caro, but we haven't used, we haven't heard it used by a character in the story, you know.

00:51:23 Speaker_00
Yes.

00:51:24 Speaker_05
Which is really great.

00:51:25 Speaker_00
But he doesn't make a lot out of it. You know, he just has it in the quote and it's, so it's done very subtly. And so Gleeson Cook, the thing that he talks about here also is that they're competitive. All these reporters are competitive.

00:51:34 Speaker_00
They want the credit. They want the glory of the big story. They want to beat the other papers. But they realize if their editors aren't supporting them, they're going to have to find a way around that.

00:51:44 Speaker_00
And the only way around that is to start colluding with the ultimate enemy, other reporters at other papers.

00:51:51 Speaker_05
And this is what I was hinting at earlier, is this, I love this so much. Like, this is the whole part.

00:51:56 Speaker_05
I mean, this is the best part of this chapter, which is essentially them coming to the conclusion that, well, if editor is going to bury it here, I can tip off this other person and we can begin to sort of trade parts of these stories.

00:52:09 Speaker_05
And they actually kind of, I mean, they really do collude. Like, it's not just sort of like, kind of allowing it to happen. Like, they meet and decide what's going to happen.

00:52:20 Speaker_00
They're meeting in bars and saying, you take this part of the story and then after you run that, I'll do this part. Okay. And then you take this tip and you handle that.

00:52:27 Speaker_00
They are – I mean it's like insider trading between reporters but in a way that is – there's nothing legal about it and it helps them. Every now and then he'll indulge in a very – in a kind of fanciful metaphor or description.

00:52:41 Speaker_00
And he has one here and he just says, soon like two flamenco dancers spurring each other to wilder and wilder efforts, Haddad and Gleeson were both helping and striving to outdo each other, their stories picking up and taking off from each other's and hitting harder and harder.

00:52:54 Speaker_00
I love that. I'm comparing them to two flamenco dancers challenging each other. They know that if their editors see a story about Title I corruption in another paper, they're going to want them to get on it.

00:53:05 Speaker_00
It's like they're bringing the spice back into the relationship between their editors and the story by cheating with another paper. Soon there's this circle of reporters that are trading tips and things, strategizing how to get this done.

00:53:19 Speaker_00
Caro says about these reporters, like you said, Roman, earlier, these are young people. They're mostly in their 20s and 30s.

00:53:24 Speaker_00
They're young enough that they are still idealistic, and they're also young enough that the Moses myth does not matter to them. They were babies when Jones' speech got built.

00:53:32 Speaker_00
They don't remember him as the hero of the working class and the liberal reformers. They know him as an old man, this stubborn old dictator who needs to be toppled, and they're also too young to remember or have felt the threat

00:53:46 Speaker_00
of Moses ending your career when his bloodhounds go after you.

00:53:49 Speaker_00
They are fearlessly young and they're also like in the way that can help a young person kind of ignorant of history or the feeling of history in that what Moses means to them is what Moses is right now and not what he used to be.

00:54:02 Speaker_00
Caro, he like, you can't help but feel that he loves these guys, you know, he's just these men and women, and he glorifies them and he notes, oh, they're competitive. They want glory.

00:54:10 Speaker_00
That's not all, you know, just sterling heroism, you know, but he mostly attributes their actions to their need to see Moses get justice for pushing people around. And it's just, again, if you're making a movie of the power broker, don't do it.

00:54:22 Speaker_00
It's too big. But this could be this would be this could be that.

00:54:25 Speaker_05
Yeah, this is the real like kind of spotlight having people, you know, like, spar with each other, you know, trying to create the best story, um, meeting secretly. Um, and it's just great.

00:54:37 Speaker_05
And it just, this is why the world progresses when old people step aside and new people come in. And it's super important to have that in the world.

00:54:50 Speaker_05
You know, like, it's just like, it's great that these guys have no memory or sense of Jones Beach or no fear. This is exactly what you need in a society.

00:55:01 Speaker_05
There's certain standard bearers that hold history, and there's certain people that do not give a fuck about history. And it's important to have all those people to make progress. And I just, I love this stuff. It makes me very happy.

00:55:16 Speaker_00
Yeah. And as we've seen in the book, like Moses used to be one of these types of people, you know, and there are the other thing is that they are living in the world that Moses is positive work has created. And so they can take it for granted.

00:55:27 Speaker_00
Moses's fight years ago was people should have parks. This was a new thing. And now their fight is maybe people shouldn't be pushed out of their homes, you know, like it's like to make those parks Moses had to ride roughshod over people.

00:55:39 Speaker_00
But now it's the new they live in a world with parks. And now it's maybe we shouldn't ride roughshod over people.

00:55:43 Speaker_05
I love this idea of this team of reporters. I think it's just I think it's just hilarious.

00:55:48 Speaker_05
And I think, you know, the part of me that, you know, that gets nervous and nostalgic about this stuff is the fact that there's enough papers and like warning additions and late additions and stuff that they can be in conversation like this in a way that papers just don't anymore.

00:56:05 Speaker_05
They just can't be.

00:56:07 Speaker_00
Yeah. And knowing that whatever they write, someone's going to read it. You know, even if it's buried in the back of the newspaper, it's going to get to somebody, you know.

00:56:13 Speaker_00
But there's, you know, there's got to be new ways to do that, podcasts or whatever. So now it's 1959. Moses is 70 years old. He is seemingly still at the top of the New York power pyramid. He is basking in praise all the time.

00:56:27 Speaker_00
He's raking in all his investment dollars for his projects. He is easily reappointed as the state power authority. He's on his way to building this massive dam at Niagara that Robert Caro never spends much time on.

00:56:39 Speaker_00
It is so massively important, and yet he never talks about it because it has nothing to do with the things he's really talking about in the same way, and we have to thank him for that.

00:56:47 Speaker_00
Like, you look at this book and you're like, he must have left it all in. He didn't make any decisions. No, he did. He does not go into the story of this dam. I don't care about it. Thank you. I don't want to hear about it. I know it's there.

00:56:59 Speaker_00
I'm sure there were a lot of struggles. I'm sure there was engineering, amazing feats of engineering that was done. Don't care. Thank you, Robert Carroll, for not getting into it.

00:57:08 Speaker_00
I bet you probably in his archives at the Historical Society, there's probably pages and pages about this dam.

00:57:13 Speaker_05
Trevor Burrus I'm sure there's pages and pages. I bet you could write a whole book about what he discovered about that dam.

00:57:18 Speaker_00
Yeah, but that's not a book I'm necessarily as interested in as New York City.

00:57:22 Speaker_00
I think there's a feeling of like what's relevant to someone who lives in the New York area, which you could say makes the book a little provincial in some ways but also focuses the book quite a bit.

00:57:33 Speaker_00
There's also a different version of this book where Robert Caro spends a lot more time on Moses' itineraries on his vacations. I'm glad we don't have that. That's okay. So – but then in February – so Moses seems like he's on the top of the heap.

00:57:46 Speaker_00
In February, one of the reporters, he writes a story about how Sidney Unger – pretty good name – the man Moses picked to sponsor his Riverside Amsterdam urban renewal project is actually a politically connected slumlord.

00:57:58 Speaker_00
He is not a developer with a good track record and he's politically connected and suddenly

00:58:03 Speaker_00
The editors of these papers, they're afraid they'll miss out on similar scoops like this and now it's not just that they are listening to the reporters and saying, okay, you can look at title one.

00:58:10 Speaker_00
They are assigning reporters to title one projects to investigate them and the stories are getting closer and closer to the front page.

00:58:15 Speaker_00
They're on page seven and they're on page four and finally Moses is being named directly in these stories, directly in the headlines and this is a longish excerpt but I love it so I'm going to read it. It's got a lot of power packed into it.

00:58:28 Speaker_00
In 1953, the Women's City Club had issued reports disclosing that Moses had been shifting tenants in slum clearance sites to other buildings on the site like – and then he uses the word for Roma that I'm not going to use on the podcast but it's books from 1974.

00:58:41 Speaker_00
The reports had been ignored. In 1954, a minority report at the City Planning Commission had made similar revelations. That report had been ignored.

00:58:49 Speaker_00
But now, in 1959, when J. Clarence Davies, Jr., new independent head of the city's real estate bureau, made the same report, it was headline letters. City admits shifts from slums to slums.

00:59:00 Speaker_00
The press of the city awake at last, Fred Cook exalted, and he was right. The press had not been awakened by its owners, dot, dot, dot, or by its top editors, dot, dot, dot.

00:59:09 Speaker_00
It had been awakened by its reporters, not by its famous reporters, but by young, unknown staff writers scheming together to force publishers and editors to do what the young men felt was their duty. But it was awake.

00:59:20 Speaker_00
I feel like it's such a it's like it's such a powerful thing. Like they didn't do it now. They didn't do it here. They didn't do it here. But these guys, they they forced it to happen just through their sheer need for it to happen in some ways.

00:59:31 Speaker_05
And their strategy. Yeah. Just the sort of ingenuity and sort of playing these different powerful editors and newspaper owners and against their own insecurities about being the best paper or having the first story. They just were so smart about it all.

00:59:46 Speaker_05
I love it. I think it's just a hilarious and fun, and this is the part that I get like really, really excited about.

00:59:52 Speaker_00
Yeah, and there's a feeling, this is not kind of what we think of when we think of like community activism in a way, but it's the same basic principles of people working together for a common goal and using the tools at their command to make that happen.

01:00:05 Speaker_00
And it's really, you know, when it's for a good thing, it's wonderful. You know, I can see, thinking about it now, I can see the same techniques being used for a bad thing. Totally, totally.

01:00:13 Speaker_05
But that's the nature of tools. And as all these stories are landing, another great story that cannot be denied, even though the stakes are so low, the lowest in probably Robert Moses' career. This is chapter 44, Mustache and the Bard.

01:00:29 Speaker_05
It's pages 1026 to 1039. This one's pretty silly.

01:00:35 Speaker_00
This is a silly chapter. The title is silly and the chapter is silly. And I wonder, maybe that's the point, that this is a small, seemingly trivial, not even necessarily misdeed of Moses, like miscommunication and mismanagement of a subordinate.

01:00:50 Speaker_00
And it leads to one of his biggest public relations issues. And I think that's I wonder if that's the theme that Caro is getting to is that like the little things end up being what trip them up. It's not the big things.

01:01:01 Speaker_00
It's not the systems that are supposed to keep people in check.

01:01:04 Speaker_00
It's these little things, not because they affect the most people, but they affect things that the people in the media are interested in talking about and also things that have a – like an intangible quality. Again, you can argue.

01:01:17 Speaker_00
It's too bad you have to lose your house but we need this road." It's hard to argue kids don't need to play or that William Shakespeare is not good, you know, that kind of stuff. It's hard to argue that. Yeah, exactly.

01:01:29 Speaker_00
And Kara opens with an excerpt from the 1958 HUAC hearing where theatre producer Joseph Paparovsky, better known as Joe Pap, now he's known as Joe Pap everywhere, who will become one of the towering figures in New York and American theatre.

01:01:42 Speaker_00
He's being asked if he's using Shakespeare to spread communist ideology and the ridiculousness – even in the transcript, the congressman who is asking the question seems to understand how ridiculous the premise is even as he uses it.

01:01:54 Speaker_00
Like that ridiculousness goes through. And Carroll, when he gets – after that excerpt, he opens it with almost an acknowledgment that this is an unfair story that's being told, that this is – the press and the public

01:02:08 Speaker_00
getting outraged about this tyrannical move of Moses's when it's really a fight that Moses seems to have not wanted and didn't really have the stomach for and gave up on, but it still hurt his reputation so badly.

01:02:19 Speaker_00
And it seems like comparing that quote from earlier from Moses, it's unfair, but it gets at a truth because if ever there was a thing to get Moses on, it's not this one. And so Moses, he's always been a fan of Shakespeare. He wrote poetry in college.

01:02:34 Speaker_00
You know he loves Shakespeare. Come on. And in 1956, Joseph Papp, he's a young theater empresario, he says to Moses, can I put on free Shakespeare plays in this amphitheater on the Lower East Side that the Parks Department built?

01:02:48 Speaker_00
And that Moses built in part because Al Smith had told Moses, when I was young, I could not afford tickets to the theater. I just couldn't afford to go. And Moses seems to admire Papp's genuine interest in providing shows for free.

01:02:59 Speaker_00
And besides, the stage is empty all the time anyway. No one does anything with it. So why not? And Pabst starts putting on productions there and they're very respected. The local audiences who cannot afford theater tickets love them.

01:03:09 Speaker_00
And this happens throughout history with live theater, but especially with Shakespeare is that you show them to people who you think are gonna be like, this is too complicated, I don't understand it. And they love it.

01:03:21 Speaker_00
Like in the Old West, Shakespeare was incredibly popular. Like it's just, it's writing that just gets to you. He's almost Robert Carowesk in his ability to put words together. And Pap is like, I want to expand these shows.

01:03:33 Speaker_00
I want to put them in more parks. And there's one person standing in his way. Moses gives permission, but there's one person who doesn't like it. Stuart Constable, the mustache, who we already know is a foe of mothers, doesn't like moms.

01:03:48 Speaker_05
There is a kind of like strain in these chapters of

01:03:53 Speaker_05
Subordinates to Moses who don't have any of his skill whatsoever like they're as pugnacious as he is but but can't like operate around people can't like bully people the same way and Make wrongheaded decisions that you know to his credit in a way Robert Moses has great loyalties to his subordinates Yes, but they just don't deserve it because they are kind of so boneheaded so much of the time

01:04:23 Speaker_00
Yeah, you see it a lot in organizations where someone at the top has a special quality that has allowed them to create this position of power and then yeah, the people underneath them try to imitate that or have been taught to work in that ethic and they just don't have it.

01:04:36 Speaker_00
They just don't – they can't do it the right way and we'll see as we get through it. Yeah, his loyalty to his subordinates which would normally be a positive thing. gets him into so much trouble here.

01:04:46 Speaker_00
And this whole chapter has an element of farce about it, you know? It's written with a kind of like almost the most winking that Carrow gets throughout.

01:04:55 Speaker_00
And it's a fun chapter, but this is the chapter I maybe have the most trouble with in some ways in the whole book. Yeah, we'll talk about it. We'll talk about it.

01:05:05 Speaker_00
Partly because there's part, and we'll get to it later, but there's times when I'm reading it, each time I've read it where I'm like, why is this chapter in the book?

01:05:11 Speaker_00
It's not about James Jacobs but it's also about Joe Papp and Shakespeare but I think it's because of this larger point I think he's getting to.

01:05:16 Speaker_00
But Papp proposes putting on plays in Central Park and Moses is like, that's okay if you don't charge admission for them and this is the start of Shakespeare in the Park, which again is for the cultural life of New York City is one of – by this point in the year 2024, one of the most beloved things going on in New York.

01:05:34 Speaker_00
I have seen shows in that festival. I know friends of mine – I couldn't do this because I had a job, but friends of mine would go. They would wait on line for hours because all you need to do is wait on line. You wait on line for hours.

01:05:45 Speaker_00
I remember a friend being like, oh, yeah, I was standing next to Mike Myers waiting for Shakespeare in the Park tickets for four hours. That's just what you do. It's first come, first serve.

01:05:53 Speaker_00
It's just a beloved event to a certain section of New Yorkers and it's kind of magical when you are in the park how Central Park even – it's a safe park now but it's still scary to be in a park at night. It's like you're in the woods.

01:06:06 Speaker_00
It's scary and you've been raised on these stories of people being killed in the park.

01:06:10 Speaker_00
But there's something magical about how when there's a large group of people seeing a performance – because I used to see the Philharmonic in the park quite a bit too.

01:06:18 Speaker_00
It transforms that space and it takes a space that could be threatening and turns into this communal space that is magical and warm.

01:06:26 Speaker_00
what a city does best, which is take the fear of solitude and turn it into a shared experience with lots of strangers who become your neighbors.

01:06:36 Speaker_00
They become people that you know for a moment and have a connection to that otherwise would just be unknown names, unknown faces, unknown lives. It's just there's something very magical about it. And Moses, to his credit, likes it.

01:06:48 Speaker_05
No, this is great. This is what he this is. But he's not a big fan of like just wild glens and trees and stuff. But this is the type of thing that he is into.

01:06:58 Speaker_00
Yes, you are using a space. He does not like unused space. And so if you can use it and use it for something that no one else is doing with it, he's for it. And he really appreciates the chutzpah that Joe Papp has in the way he fundraises for it.

01:07:11 Speaker_00
And Moses comes to see him, the book implies, as kind of like a young go-getter like himself who has a project that's to help people and will go to any length to do it.

01:07:21 Speaker_00
And so by 1959, Moses – they've never met each other, but Moses is telling Joe Papp, I'll handle the fundraising for another season of Plays in the Park. I'll take care of it. I like what you're doing. Don't worry about money.

01:07:32 Speaker_00
And then he leaves town on a three-week vacation of Barbados, another one of these long vacations that this workaholic is taking. Maybe he's taking more of them at this age. I don't know.

01:07:43 Speaker_00
Unfortunately, he leaves things in the hands of the mustache, Constable, who does not like Shakespeare, doesn't trust Pap, and it only gets worse when he learns that Pap refused to name names before Huak because Constable is, if anything,

01:07:56 Speaker_00
just a straightforward anti-communist, you know, steak and potatoes, New York guy with a big mustache. Later on, reporters are like, does this smack of McCarthyism? And he goes, what's wrong with McCarthy?

01:08:06 Speaker_00
And that kind of says everything you need to know about the mustache. Yeah.

01:08:12 Speaker_05
And so what, you know, what the constable or not the constable, I guess the mustache constable.

01:08:17 Speaker_00
Yeah. His name is Constable, but I keep calling him almost the constable.

01:08:21 Speaker_05
decides to do is that, you know, he doesn't like all these people like using the park and maybe causing some maintenance issues with, I don't know, sitting down on blankets or something like that.

01:08:31 Speaker_05
And so he says that, well, you know, what you got to have to do is you need to reimburse the park department for maintenance and therefore that would require

01:08:42 Speaker_05
charging admission to Shakespeare in the Park, which is against the sort of like deal that Pap had made with Robert Moses about doing Shakespeare in the Park. And so it puts him in this bind.

01:08:52 Speaker_00
He has promised, I will never charge for Shakespeare, and he doesn't want to, but now he's being told you have to. Constable is sure that Moses would be like, yeah, get this subversive out of the park. I don't want him in there.

01:09:04 Speaker_00
It's one of those things where it's like my boss did the exact opposite, but I know he really wants me to do this because it aligns with the values I ascribe to him. It's foolish. Don't do that, people.

01:09:14 Speaker_00
Just do what the boss did because that's what they want to be done right now. And you would think again that Moses would just overrule Mostache when he hears about it.

01:09:22 Speaker_00
But like Roman, he was saying earlier, one of these commandments that was ingrained in him in politics was you always have to support your subordinates. That's how you get their loyalty. You make them feel like you have their back all the time.

01:09:33 Speaker_00
And in addition to that, if he says Constable is wrong, then it's almost like saying he's wrong because he has invested Constable with this power. So if his whole thing is infallibility, if the guy he hired is wrong, that means he's a little wrong.

01:09:45 Speaker_00
And so he had vowed publicly to his subordinates, I will never overrule you and that's how I'm going to keep you loyal to me is I'm going to be loyal to you.

01:09:53 Speaker_00
So when Moses comes back, he backs up the mustache and he refuses to talk to Pap and the money he said he'd raise for the Shakespeare Festival, that's not happening.

01:10:01 Speaker_00
And Moses writes Pap a letter saying, well, for maintenance, it's going to cost between $100,000 and $150,000 that you're going to have to reimburse the parks department. And like, this is 1959. Like, I mean, that's a lot of money now.

01:10:12 Speaker_00
That's an astronomical amount back then. And Pap is trying to meet with Moses, but Moses is like, I'm not in charge. Constable's in charge. And I wonder if here, it's a little bit loyalty and a little bit him trying to insulate himself from blame.

01:10:25 Speaker_00
That like, if there's constable between me and Pap, then Pap can't get mad at me. And Constable keeps moving the goalposts. He's like, you've got to charge a $1 admission fee. And Pap's like, OK, I'll consider it.

01:10:36 Speaker_00
Constable goes, OK, then it's $2 admission fee. And Pap starts to realize this is not about money. This is about the mustache thinks I'm a communist, and that's what it's about. This is not a fair fight, and I'm going to have to fight it like a fight.

01:10:48 Speaker_00
And so what does he do? He uses the same tool the moms use. He goes to the press. What does he do, Roman?

01:10:55 Speaker_05
Yeah, no, he goes to the media and starts like, you know, he starts to talk about Shakespeare. These are all like, educated people love Shakespeare.

01:11:03 Speaker_05
They are now at a point in Moses career where the newspapers are criticizing Moses on a, you know, somewhat regular basis.

01:11:10 Speaker_05
And the funny thing here is he really goes for drama, you know, like he's gonna, he's gonna kind of do the things that Robert Moses is known for. It's like this sort of like,

01:11:20 Speaker_05
attack on character, different sort of innuendo, you know, like different things to sort of like make it feel like there's a lot of corruption here, that Moses is a kind of villain here, doesn't like actually, I don't think it really highlights his role in the beginning of making it all possible.

01:11:37 Speaker_00
No, not at all.

01:11:38 Speaker_00
He really he makes it into he makes it into a play, you know and he's he's quoting Shakespeare all the time and the reporters love that and Moses responds in kind and he tries to go back to his old playbook similarly and he starts these You know innuendos behind the scenes about pap being a red.

01:11:52 Speaker_00
Yeah, but that used to work times have slightly changed This is not a time when it's okay to be a communist but Joe McCarthy's been dead for a couple years people kind of look back at that as

01:12:04 Speaker_00
They're not like, I love communism, everyone should believe what they want, but they're like, that was gross. And so reporters, when they hear these rumors, they say, this is McCarthyism in a disapproving way.

01:12:12 Speaker_00
And just as with the first Battle of Central Park, this story is getting simplified. Moses is the villain. He hates free Shakespeare, something that is objectively good.

01:12:21 Speaker_00
You cannot argue that there is a downside to putting on free Shakespeare plays in the park. You can't. It's impossible. The thing is that they also do is they start to fact check his claims about what's going on in ways that they didn't used to do.

01:12:32 Speaker_00
It used to be if Moses said something, that was the end of it. You didn't question it. But now they're questioning it. And once again, public opinion turns against him. And Carol points out that

01:12:44 Speaker_00
In the past, when there had been serious PR crises, Moses would get sick and be in the hospital. And the same thing happens here for reasons that are never fully explained. My pet theory is that he has a heart attack, but who knows? You never know.

01:12:55 Speaker_00
But he goes to the hospital, and Carol says that photos of Moses leaving the hospital make him look, for the first time, old, like actually old, like an old weathered man. And then Pap is like, I'm going to put this the onus of this on Mayor Wagner.

01:13:10 Speaker_00
Mayor, overrule these policies. And of course, the mayor is like, I'd love to. I'd love to just say, yeah, put Shakespeare in the park, but he can't overrule Moses. And it's almost like at this point, the mayor must have felt so annoyed.

01:13:24 Speaker_00
Moses is punishing the mayor just for considering it. He refuses to take Wagner's calls. And Mayor Wagner becomes the subject of these joking headlines where Mary will be like, I plan to talk to Moses later. I can't quite get him.

01:13:35 Speaker_00
And so there's headlines where it's like mayor searches for Moses. Where is Moses? You know, Mary can't find him. And if I was Wagner, I'd be so pissed that I'm not even a fight with Moses. I'm in a fight with the mustache and I'm looking like a fool.

01:13:46 Speaker_00
Because with a guy who shouldn't even – I shouldn't have to deal with, you know. And he can't fire Moses. And so Wagner has to then support him and say, Moses is too valuable. I can't do anything about it.

01:13:57 Speaker_00
And the press plays it as Wagner giving in to Moses. So again, if I'm Wagner, I'm like, I'm losing a fight with the mustache. This is ridiculous.

01:14:05 Speaker_00
Ultimately, Papp goes to the courts and a court finds narrowly, kind of for the first time, that Moses is being capricious with his power and that he cannot do that with the parks.

01:14:14 Speaker_05
Trevor Burrus Yeah. This is really stunning because this was the kind of thing that – like in the previous court cases, the law was interpreted in such a way, written by Moses and interpreted in such a way.

01:14:25 Speaker_05
that anything within the park walls, anything that related to parks whatsoever, was the complete domain of Robert Moses. They could not, he could tear down any structure that he wanted, build any other one that he wanted.

01:14:41 Speaker_05
I mean, like it was really, and for something related to like,

01:14:45 Speaker_05
you know, ephemeral exhibition of Shakespeare plays to think that this is the thing that, you know, a non-permanent, you know, cultural institution, um, just like, or even just like cultural, like, I don't know, occurrence is the thing that stops him, uh, when it comes to court interpretation of what his power is inside of the parks is really stunning.

01:15:05 Speaker_05
This is a real change in, in, in his power.

01:15:08 Speaker_00
It's huge and again if you're making a movie about our Moses, this is one of the things you do because the drama and the narrative is there because it's so simple and it's like it's such an ephemeral thing, you're right, but the story is so clear.

01:15:20 Speaker_00
It's such a clear story and the only thing that screws up the story dramatically is Moses probably not really wanting to do it. And just as we've been yelling this whole series, why don't you just accept a transignation?

01:15:32 Speaker_00
There's the part of me here that's like, just do it. Just swallow your loyalty philosophy and just do it, because it's so obviously wrong.

01:15:41 Speaker_05
But maybe this is like one of those things, like if you eliminate the penny, people begin to understand that money has no meaning.

01:15:48 Speaker_00
That money is not real.

01:15:49 Speaker_05
And it's kind of one of those things, like he knows that he's so propped up. in this system of you just support your guys. I, you know, the mayor just supports me. The governor just supports me. Like, you know, they trust me to do it.

01:16:03 Speaker_05
And so I think that this is really something that he can't possibly move on mostly because he knows that the whole structure that holds him in place is at the base level, this thing, you know, of this idea of like,

01:16:20 Speaker_05
I trust your judgment because you are you." That's what he depends on for the newspapers. That's what he depends on for his relationship in politics as he remains this bureaucrat inside of this constantly changing political machinery. And so I get it.

01:16:39 Speaker_05
I get that this is the thing that he can't change on.

01:16:42 Speaker_00
It makes sense. It's like when we talked to AOC, she was talking about how like so much of politics is based on if you give your word, can you keep it?

01:16:48 Speaker_00
Do you have the power and the strength to keep it if you promise something or if you say you're going to support something or go against something? And this is one of those times, you're right.

01:16:57 Speaker_00
Yeah, he has to maintain that power of saying like, no, when I say something, it happens. But Carroll points out that based on precedent, Moses could have appealed this court case and won. But instead he says, I'll abide by the decision.

01:17:11 Speaker_00
We'll have Shakespeare in the park and he tries to arrange the money Pap needs to get the festival back into the park. And Pap only has time for one play. He puts on Julius Caesar. It's a huge triumph. Everybody loves it.

01:17:21 Speaker_00
I think it's very funny that – he probably did it on – maybe he did it on purpose. That's the story of a potential tyrant being taken down, you know. And Caro wonders.

01:17:29 Speaker_00
He says, why did Moses give up this fight when previously he had never admitted defeat so relatively easily? And he says one explanation is that Moses could see the damage he was doing to his public image. But Caro ultimately, he's like,

01:17:43 Speaker_00
I think that Moses just didn't want to fight this battle in the first place and got dragged into it because of Constable's dumb choices and he seems to have mired Papp so much that he let it happen.

01:17:53 Speaker_00
He eventually builds the Delacorte Amphitheater in the park expressly as a permanent home for Papp's productions. So Sid Shapiro, he suspects and he says to Moccaro that he thinks Moses wanted to lose this one.

01:18:06 Speaker_00
If there ever was a battle that Moses not just was okay with losing but didn't want to win. you know, on the merits. This is it. And Carol goes on to talk about Joe Papp. This fight was one of the best things that ever happened to Joe Papp.

01:18:18 Speaker_00
He's the darling of the liberal elites. He becomes his institution in the theater world. He founds the public theater eventually down by Esther Place, which is still there. But for Moses, it's another blow to his reputation.

01:18:27 Speaker_00
It's another demonstration of just how much power he has over the mayor.

01:18:30 Speaker_00
which people are starting to realize, and the press turns further against it, they see the constable as kind of this mini version of the boss, that this arrogance is just his boss's arrogance, and now it's not just the young go-getters who are looking to get Moses, it's the establishment as well, and even the Times starts to investigate Moses' Title I projects, and the new frame for the media is Moses the hero, who occasionally, maybe, I don't know if he's wrapped up in something, we'll see, but Moses, the villain,

01:18:56 Speaker_00
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, which is not Shakespeare. I should have had a Shakespeare quote. I don't think it is anyway. I'll look it up. I don't think it is.

01:19:03 Speaker_05
Well, while you look it up, we'll play some ads and then we'll come back with chapter 45 off to the fair.

01:19:20 Speaker_05
This is chapter 45 off to the fair, which is like one of these weird chapters that it sets up the sort of big deal that's about to come, which is there's just something that allows.

01:19:33 Speaker_05
Uh, Moses to be kind of dislodged from his like tendrils and everything, because there's this one thing for him to do.

01:19:41 Speaker_00
Yes, this is the beginning of – you hear people say that things change very slowly and then suddenly very fast and that this is the slower part of that change and then the chapter after it, which we'll end this episode with, is the fast change.

01:19:53 Speaker_00
Before we get into it, we do have unfinished business. I just want to say, oh, what a tangled web. It's Sir Walter Scott. It's not Shakespeare. I apologize. Another great UK author, another towering giant in English language literature.

01:20:07 Speaker_00
But okay, we're still in 1959. It's May 1959 and the New York Citizens Union, it's another one of these civic reform groups. Moses had been close to it once. They want to ask Moses some questions about his Title I projects.

01:20:21 Speaker_00
He answers them in print and he answers them very haughtily and the newspapers, they would normally run those statements just as straight facts. They wouldn't have questioned them.

01:20:30 Speaker_00
But now they're going to look into them and they point out he hasn't been truthful about say who actually pursued that Manhattan town development.

01:20:39 Speaker_00
Moses leaves out the name of a graft crook and politician Samuel Casper who's going to be a big figure in that corruption scandal and even worse.

01:20:48 Speaker_00
When asked if there are written reports about the bidders for the projects and whether those are available to the public, he gives this indignant response of like, well, of course they are and of course they're open to the public, like as if I'm offended.

01:20:57 Speaker_00
You would even accuse me of hiding those things. And the reporters, they see that and they are nearly orgasmic over this because this is the promise. Oh, like what he just did is gave us permission to ask him to look at the title one files.

01:21:11 Speaker_00
These have been secret for years and now we can finally look at them. This is amazing. And Caro sees this as like a real tactical blunder and he says, why did he make this tactical blunder? Why did he do this?

01:21:21 Speaker_00
Basically giving permission to have people come investigate him and Caro speculates maybe he knew that legally he could not block them since slum clearance is a city committee. It's not an authority. You can't treat it like a private corporation.

01:21:33 Speaker_00
Or maybe he'd been so busy with the Messina and Niagara Power Dams – again, these dams that the book barely talks about, which are enormous, enormous projects that really take up so much of his brain space. We don't hear much about them again.

01:21:45 Speaker_00
I don't want to. That he wasn't paying that close attention to Title I anymore, didn't know how damming the files were. This is at a point where he's less than six weeks until the gala opening of the Messina Dam.

01:21:55 Speaker_00
Nixon, the vice president is going to be there. Queen Elizabeth II is going to be there. This is a big deal for him.

01:22:01 Speaker_00
He cannot let – I forgot the name of the guy from Tavern on the Green, but he cannot let him feed garbage to the vice president and the queen of England. He's got to be on top of that. But Carol, he also talks about

01:22:11 Speaker_00
Moses is undeniably at this point for all the power he has always had, for what a dynamo he is.

01:22:15 Speaker_00
He's an old man and he is overseeing the parks department, the Long Island Park expansion projects, the expressways, the bridges, those big dams that again take up a lot more of his life than the book would lead you to believe.

01:22:28 Speaker_00
Maybe he's just stretched too thin and maybe he's just trusting his own reputation too much. Maybe he thinks his subordinates can get in those files and strip anything negative out before people look at them.

01:22:37 Speaker_00
And so he delays letting people see them but he can only do it for so long. And then finally on May 29th, 1959, he has to let these two reporters, Haddad and Kahn, who he didn't mention in detail before but they're reporters,

01:22:49 Speaker_00
There, he says, OK, you can come to Triborough. You can look at those files and they go there and they go to see those files and they are salivating. They're so excited about it.

01:22:59 Speaker_05
They're very excited. There's so many files and they find nothing. They really find nothing.

01:23:06 Speaker_00
It is it is such a disappointment for them They are that first they have to wait for hours to get in and finally they go in and they're like, oh boy Nobody's looked in these files for 35 years and it is a real Geraldo with Al Capone's fault situation Well, you're just like what's in this thing and you open it and there's all they've got our brochures formal memos there's nothing about the project sponsors and and

01:23:28 Speaker_00
There's a great detail here that I love. They go to talk to Spargo, who is one of Moses' right-hand men.

01:23:34 Speaker_00
We haven't talked about him a huge amount, but Spargo is a hugely important part of Moses' operation, and Spargo is being so disrespectful to them that while they talk to him in his office, he just keeps eating soup through the whole meeting.

01:23:46 Speaker_00
I just love this image. It is hard for me to think of a way to be more disrespectful to someone who's come to talk to you than to be eating soup, because that's a noisy thing to eat. It's a sloppy thing to eat.

01:23:54 Speaker_00
Even if you're eating it cleanly, you're slurping it. The only thing I can think of is if he was eating just a box of crackers and just spitting out crumbs at them the entire time. You know, every time you open his mouth, it's up.

01:24:07 Speaker_00
And Carol, he takes a paragraph also talk about how shabby the reporters are in the used car they drive compared to the this kind of neatly put together tribunal officers. And so it seems like it's this is a bust.

01:24:18 Speaker_00
These files seem like they were so excited about them and they're kind of a bust. Do they give up, Roman? Do they stop looking through them?

01:24:23 Speaker_05
They do not. They're reporters. They keep going and they turn every page as they turn every page in the in the approved of Carol Manor. And they end up finding sort of like a smaller project called Mid Harlem.

01:24:38 Speaker_05
They find this short letter of appreciation from Louis Pokras, who is an associate of the mob boss, Frank Costello. And then it begins to become like, oh, OK.

01:24:49 Speaker_00
This is a real thing because Frank Costello – nobody knows the name Louis I. Pokras, which is a great name. It looks like his name is Pokras, which is a funny name.

01:24:57 Speaker_00
But Frank Costello has just recently been the star of these televised hearings that Senator Estes Kefauver did on organized crime. Everybody knows Frank Costello. It's like Al Capone.

01:25:07 Speaker_00
If you have Costello's name in some way connected to this, then it's gold. And they find this handwritten note from Tom Shanahan, who we've mentioned in the past. He runs a big bank that all of Moses' contractors have to park their money in.

01:25:19 Speaker_00
And he says in this note, I've been made aware of a delicate situation involving Pacras, but the sponsorship gets approved anyway. And this is a story, right? This is the kind of story they can do something with.

01:25:30 Speaker_05
Yeah, because it just has all the characters like it has all these shorthands for people to understand it without having to understand complex details of like of math and numbers and things like that.

01:25:40 Speaker_05
It just has Costello's name on it and therefore it's all of a sudden title one and the mob and it takes Moses to disprove that. You know what I mean? It's more like it's just set up to tell the story that everyone knows.

01:25:55 Speaker_05
And this is another one of those things where Carol goes, I don't know if this is exactly fair. This is like levels and levels and levels down from actual Moses decision making.

01:26:05 Speaker_00
Yeah, like it's very unlikely. It's possible that he just handed this off to Shanahan to deal with and is not aware that someone with connection to the mob was doing it.

01:26:12 Speaker_00
And they find this other story where they find that Vincent the Chin Gigante, who had already been it was a former attempted hitman. He was hired as a temporary night watchman. And this is what damages Moses of this.

01:26:25 Speaker_00
This other mob associate was hired to work there. And Moses is like, to be fair to Moses, Moses, like the man went to jail, like he can't get a job now. It's like this is the lowest level job.

01:26:36 Speaker_00
How like a like a former felon was given a low level job as a night watchman by a contractor hired by another contractor hired by the project sponsor who Moses didn't necessarily handpick. And it just it's so super unfair.

01:26:50 Speaker_00
But the only funny thing about it is that Of course, Vincent the Chinchilla goes on to be a major mob figure. They couldn't have known this at the time. But eventually, he is leading the mob in New York in many ways, and he becomes famous.

01:27:02 Speaker_00
I remember very well the years when, because I haven't heard decades, they used to call him the odd father because he would deliberately walk around in a bathrobe kind of mumbling to himself in public so that people would think he was crazy so that the feds wouldn't charge him with anything.

01:27:15 Speaker_00
He did this for like 30 years. It was amazing. I remember when he died, they're like, oh, the odd father is finally gone.

01:27:20 Speaker_00
But this just adds to more – they don't know that he's going to become the odd father but it adds to the dirt in most reputation that like even this, which is the tiniest of things, you can still put in a headline, mob hit man hired on Moses project.

01:27:32 Speaker_05
That's right. That's right. It's, it's, it's so, so this sort of stink of underworld stuff, it, you know, it really just becomes something that he just can't get away from.

01:27:42 Speaker_05
And, and now all these, you know, really tenacious reporters who have probably dug up worse dirt, things that Moses had a hand in directly. You know, they see an opportunity here to just go to town on this stuff.

01:27:56 Speaker_00
And they start finding it. They find real stuff. They find bribes to politicians. They find sweetheart purchases by the committee of land owned by local politicians. They find stories about crooked machine bosses being involved in the housing projects.

01:28:08 Speaker_00
And Haddad uncovers how important Tom Shanahan, one of the Democratic bosses is, and he's the guy who qualifies developers mainly by getting kickbacks from them through his bank.

01:28:19 Speaker_00
You know, if they put his money in the bank, then they are qualified to do this, which means a lot of money for his bank, which means money for him.

01:28:25 Speaker_00
And the reporters are continuing that strategy we talked about of sharing information and doling out so that this paper gets it, and then this paper gets it, and they are taking advantage, they're using the inborn competitiveness of the papers to keep this going.

01:28:38 Speaker_00
And so much of this is now a matter of public record that the paper of record, the New York Times, like they can't ignore it.

01:28:45 Speaker_00
And they start doing a series of articles, not necessarily investigating, but synthesizing the information from the other paper's articles. And- Trevor Burrus That's classic New York Times shit right there. Aaron Powell Yeah. Let's get into this.

01:28:56 Speaker_00
Let's get into this. This is an ax you've had to grind against them for a while?

01:29:00 Speaker_05
We've just noticed this thing and it represents like reporting from a million different sources and different newspapers already, but anyway.

01:29:19 Speaker_00
I loved it. There was an article – I wish I had kept it. I wish I had clipped it. That was in the Times Style section years ago where they were like, a new development among young Brooklynites, a new styles trend, the pot belly.

01:29:30 Speaker_00
It was like, well, no, your friends are getting older. They're gaining weight and they're carrying it in their belly. This is not a style trend and they're refusing to stop wearing t-shirts. That was so funny.

01:29:43 Speaker_00
I got to find that in the archives somewhere. Anyway, but now even the Times are on it. Tips are pouring in about Title I stories and the older reporters. Now they're starting to help the younger reporters. They're realizing that there's something there.

01:29:53 Speaker_00
They're late to it but they're there. And reporters are starting to notice the names of Moses Associates on the payrolls of housing project sponsors, of the developers that are doing these projects. And Caro takes a moment. He humanizes the reporters.

01:30:06 Speaker_00
He talks about they feel sympathy for the families of these guys because they know we're about to write exposés of these people.

01:30:12 Speaker_00
They talk to a guy who they're going to write an exposé on and they see a picture of his family on his desk and they're like, yeah, I feel bad about it. this is the story. I got to run it."

01:30:21 Speaker_00
I think what he's doing here – I think Carroll is trying to draw a distinction between Moses' form of reputation destroying and this kind of more principled form that this is for – this is necessary even though there's something not great about the effects rather than Moses which are just for the sheer accumulation of power.

01:30:40 Speaker_05
I think that's right. I mean, he this is a book really about journalism in a lot of ways. And yeah, and he's trying to sort of just, you know, give a full picture of why this this type of thing is is better than the other type of thing.

01:30:53 Speaker_05
And and these folks are not out to destroy individuals. They really are trying to take on a system. And these are the systems that need to be taken on. And these are things that Carol obviously cares about deeply that these systems are challenged.

01:31:05 Speaker_00
You could say they're out to destroy one individual, Robert Moses, but at this point he has become a system, you know.

01:31:11 Speaker_00
And stories soon start breaking about George Spargo, who you may remember earlier eating soup in front of some reporters, and just about how he's receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees, in quotes, from Moses authorities while also being the director of this shady bank that we talked about a couple episodes back.

01:31:28 Speaker_00
It's just – he's so close to Moses that you can't help but put Moses' name not just in the articles about corruption but in the headlines.

01:31:34 Speaker_05
Yeah, which is what everyone reads.

01:31:36 Speaker_00
Everyone reads the headlines. Yeah. I mean, you can't help but glance at it. Exactly. Yeah. Take it in. It's right there. Yeah.

01:31:42 Speaker_00
And Moses responds with official statements, but that only serves him to tie him closer to the stories, you know, and he strikes out at the press in petty ways. He stops telling them when committee meetings will be held.

01:31:52 Speaker_00
He locks the hallway at Trier Borough where there's a vending machine that the reporters have been using to get snacks while they're working. And the more he attacks the press, the more he gives them a reason to hit him back.

01:32:03 Speaker_00
He is now hurting them in a way that is making the papers mad at him.

01:32:07 Speaker_00
And the Times starts having this divided relationship with him where it's going to print these stories about problems with his projects and then print his reaction as news and is still printing editorials saying, oh, if Moses resigns, it would be an irreparable loss.

01:32:19 Speaker_00
You don't bench Babe Ruth. The owners of the Times, they're still trying to keep their relationship with Moses, but the editorial staff, they cannot ignore these stories.

01:32:27 Speaker_00
There's real news value and Caro is like, the new media, they're chopping away at the supports of this Moses reputation and he uses again that Moses quote from the chapter a little bit ago about the synthetic character of the statesman that was built up by the press and then deflated unfairly but truthfully and he talks about how Al Smith had said, told him.

01:32:48 Speaker_00
popularity is a slender reed to lean on. And he says, now that reed was broken. But here's the thing, Roman, does Moses still need to be popular to be powerful?

01:32:57 Speaker_05
Well, he doesn't because he's already built up this war chest, like he controls all this money right now still. So this is a big deal. So like as the sort of PR love of the public, all that can erode because now he has this war chest.

01:33:10 Speaker_05
He's already kind of abandoned the need for public approval a little bit before this. He's never been quite a villain, but he just didn't need people to cheer him on for him to do his things.

01:33:22 Speaker_05
But he still has this problem of everyone in politics needs jobs in their ward and to be reelected, and he still controls that money.

01:33:33 Speaker_00
There's still this unshakable logic, yeah, that real political power comes from money and jobs and being able to provide those, and he's the only one who can provide them.

01:33:41 Speaker_00
And so the newspapers are like, certainly now the mayor will fire Robert Moses, and of course they can't because there's just too much money, there's too many jobs, there's too much need for the political machine for that.

01:33:51 Speaker_00
And also that Mayor Wagner, if he can avoid it, he's not going to fire anybody. He's a guy who wants to be liked. He doesn't like firing people.

01:33:55 Speaker_05
Yeah. And he has this longstanding relationship with Moses.

01:33:58 Speaker_00
I mean, his father knew Moses, you know, like it's, you know, it's just he's, he's known Moses since he was a little boy, you know, and he says at one point to somebody, I forget if he says to care, somebody says, cause you don't fire your father.

01:34:08 Speaker_00
He can't fire your father. Like Moses is a father figure to him in many ways. But even if Wagner did fire him from his city posts, Moses would still – he'd have five New York state jobs. He'd still be the chairman of the tribal authority.

01:34:19 Speaker_00
All firing him would do would make an enemy out of someone who is still massively powerful and still has access to all this money that Wagner believes the city needs.

01:34:26 Speaker_00
So he can't risk giving Moses a reason to throw his power behind one of his opponents. What if he endorsed someone in the next election and it wasn't Mayor Wagner?

01:34:34 Speaker_00
And the press doesn't know any of this because they don't have access to the documents that would show them how the democratic machine actually works with Robert Moses.

01:34:43 Speaker_00
And Carroll also says the press misunderstood the relationship because of what he calls the wishes predilection to be father of the thought which …

01:34:51 Speaker_00
I think it's such a beautiful phrase, and I don't know if he's quoting it somewhere, if it's a famous phrase or whatever, but the idea that I want this to be the case, so I think it is going to be the case.

01:34:58 Speaker_00
You know, I am going to think it's that way. They want Wagner to fire Moses, so they assume that Wagner will do it and wants to do it.

01:35:05 Speaker_00
And every time Wagner stalls, the press takes that to mean that he will eventually do it, that he just hasn't done it yet.

01:35:11 Speaker_05
It's so fascinating. But one of the things that's, again, a new thing, a new turn in Moses, who's now 74 years old, so I'm glad he can learn a few new things.

01:35:21 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah.

01:35:22 Speaker_05
This old dog's got some new tricks in him. Is he's recognizing that the source of all of his misery is this Title I stuff. Like, you know, he knows that this is just out of control for him. He knows parks. He knows highways.

01:35:35 Speaker_00
He knows dams apparently, but I don't know anything about him knowing dams, but yeah, I didn't tell you too much about it Yeah, but you're right that like he was never really that interested in housing as a thing He saw it as a source of power and a source of money and now that money is starting to dry up the power is starting to dry up it's becoming more of a hassle and the press thinks

01:35:57 Speaker_00
Oh, Moses won't let go of Title One housing. He just holds on to it with his vulture-like claws. But the people around Moses are starting to become convinced that he doesn't really want to do it anymore, that he would be happy to leave it.

01:36:08 Speaker_00
But he can't do it while the press is hounding him, or else it'll look like they won. And the thing he hates more than anything else is to look like he's losing. Wait, what if what if an exit strategy came along? That's right.

01:36:20 Speaker_00
Roman, what if what if a perfect exit came along? But what would that be? What could possibly be an exit? We would allow him to leave this realm of construction while still saving face and looking like it was his idea. What could that be?

01:36:30 Speaker_05
Well, it's a brand new thing that everyone loves. The 1964 New York World's Fair is coming. And they need someone who knows how to get things done and build things fast and take care of business.

01:36:42 Speaker_05
And he decides that if he can focus on that and let go of title one, then he can sort of save face. He doesn't have to, you know, be he's not hounded out. He has this new shiny new thing that only he can achieve.

01:36:55 Speaker_05
And therefore, it just gives him a way out, making himself look good.

01:37:01 Speaker_00
Yes. And he's got even even there are even more reasons why he needs money. Yeah, he has. He's a guy who is 71 years old. He is still supporting some of his children. His wife is in such bad health that she needs round the clock nursing care.

01:37:13 Speaker_00
He needs money and he doesn't make a lot of money from his jobs. That's part of his whole thing. He's the guy who doesn't make money from his jobs. He doesn't care about money. And the World's Fair presidency, which has offered him

01:37:23 Speaker_00
would pay him a lot of money. Yeah, I forgot.

01:37:25 Speaker_05
I forgot about this part. But yeah, that's that is a thing like he it has the sort of veneer of this sort of same, you know, civic duty because it sort of bolsters and boosters the New York area. These world fairs are a very big deal.

01:37:39 Speaker_05
But this is like this is a job job. You know, this is a high paying job.

01:37:43 Speaker_00
Yeah. This is essentially a private job. He is entering the private sector in a in a big way.

01:37:48 Speaker_05
And it sets into motion this other thing, which is

01:37:52 Speaker_05
It's one of those things like whereas he was able way back when, when LaGuardia was trying to get him to be in charge of all of the parks and other aspects like where he changed the law to like both work in the state and the city and have these dual appointments even though they were in conflict to each other.

01:38:10 Speaker_05
This creates a conflict that is sort of untenable. Like he can't be a head of this private corporation and be the person who would approve those things.

01:38:20 Speaker_05
And it sets up a little bit of this unwinding of his sort of like this rope of like that he's built through all these different cords that is uncuttable, you know, because he just has to let go of some of his public stuff if he's going to be in charge of this corporation.

01:38:36 Speaker_00
Yes, legally he cannot hold his city jobs and be the president of the fair and he sees it as in some ways a trading up.

01:38:46 Speaker_00
It is worth letting go of those things which he feels he has expended a lot of the power from for this new thing which will bring in new power and new money and it's also going to be more fun probably. He likes making the Central Park Zoo.

01:38:57 Speaker_00
He likes making Jones Beach. He doesn't love building public housing. So it is a way, I think, in his mind of cutting that Gordian knot. Yeah, he can unwind these things by just getting rid of the problem.

01:39:07 Speaker_00
And so he takes the thing that was hurting his reputation, Title I, his city jobs, and he trades them for this other thing that he thinks is going to build it back up.

01:39:17 Speaker_00
And so he works out this arrangement with the mayor that they are first going to have a legislature pass a law exempting officers of the fair from the city's code of ethics, which should be a red flag right there.

01:39:29 Speaker_00
But then he starts resigning from his city jobs. He resigns as the city park commissioner. He resigns from the city planning commission. He resigns from the committee on slum clearance.

01:39:38 Speaker_00
He recommends that his job as the construction coordinator be abolished as it is no longer necessary now that he's not doing it. And the press is like, oh, Wagner's trying to push out Moses. But Moses is doing this all himself.

01:39:49 Speaker_00
He leaves in triumph from these jobs. And there's this 1,044-person dinner where everyone pays $100 a plate to be there. This is in 1959. And the city's power elite, they give him a standing ovation.

01:40:01 Speaker_00
He is leaving at seemingly the height of his power to take on this other stuff. He's getting rid of the things that were hurting his reputation. Not only that, his replacement at the Parks Department is this guy, Newbold Morris. Again, a great name.

01:40:13 Speaker_00
I love the first name, Newbold. Especially because he is very much not a bold man and he does not have new ideas. And he is – Carroll portrays him as this like well-meaning bumbler who is so eager to do whatever Robert Moses tells him.

01:40:25 Speaker_00
And he tells a story about a reporter calling Morris and Morris says, let me call you right back about that. And then the reporter calls Moses' private number, which is busy. And then Morris calls him back and tells him what Moses told him to say.

01:40:36 Speaker_00
Like he immediately got off the phone and called Moses. Like Morris and Moses are even similar sounding names. So – and Moses still controls. the federal and state highway programs in New York.

01:40:45 Speaker_05
So what's clear is so the city stuff has all been resigned in order to take this this job for the for the World's Fair. The federal and state highway program stuff is still that still stuff that he has control of.

01:40:58 Speaker_05
But because so much of his power was drawn from having the connections between the two and that if he was let go of one, he would be in control of another.

01:41:07 Speaker_05
It really does just erode one of his like the legs of his stool here, you know, I mean, by having this one. And because now, you know, when it comes to state authority, there is a new person in charge who can take that power away from him.

01:41:24 Speaker_00
Yes, he's got an accomplice. So we're going to meet someone in the next chapter who's a very fun person to talk about, who is going to be a little bit more than Moses can handle.

01:41:33 Speaker_00
But this guy has an accomplice, and that accomplice's name is Robert Moses, because as Karo says, only Robert Moses could lose Robert Moses his power, and he did.

01:41:42 Speaker_05
Okay, this is chapter 46, and it's just called Nelson.

01:41:47 Speaker_00
It's not about the band Nelson. I'm sorry, everybody.

01:41:51 Speaker_05
It stands for Nelson Rockefeller, and oh my God, this is it.

01:41:57 Speaker_00
This is it. Buckle up. This is the chapter you've been waiting for. You've sat through hours and hours of us talking, waiting for Moses to finally get what he was getting, and this is when he gets it. It's Nelson.

01:42:07 Speaker_00
And so, yeah, the Nelson here, it says Nelson Rockefeller. In 1959, he is the new New York governor, and Nelson Rockefeller, Carol tells us, is a little different from the previous governors that Moses has dealt with.

01:42:18 Speaker_00
He is not quite the same type of politician. What's the reason for this? Because Nelson Rockefeller, as you can tell from his last name, is enormously rich, like cosmically rich.

01:42:28 Speaker_05
Absolutely rich. And they're basically, you know, he's he mentions that the Rockefeller family has basically been bankrolling the Republican Party, basically like it pays for the Republicans.

01:42:38 Speaker_05
So anything that they want to do, you know, it's just up to him and his family. So, like, the idea that Moses controls a lot of money. It's just nonsense to him.

01:42:52 Speaker_00
This is a guy. This is a guy like that. His grandfather was the richest man, possibly in the world. You know, when he was alive. This is a guy who Kara talks about.

01:43:01 Speaker_00
He has a ranch in Venezuela that is five times as large as the combined boroughs of New York City. Like this guy owns so much. They his his brother controls Chase Manhattan Bank.

01:43:12 Speaker_00
At the time, Carousel is probably the most powerful financial institution in the world. They have a controlling stake in Con Edison where almost everyone gets their power from.

01:43:20 Speaker_00
They are so rich and they have so many sources of power in a way that Robert Moses just can't – with his rinky-dink bridges, his authorities, things like that, just can't do it.

01:43:30 Speaker_00
This family is so powerful that Nelson's brother, David Rockefeller, his lawyer is former Governor Thomas Jefferson. Like one of the major governors is his – works for him. It's crazy.

01:43:41 Speaker_00
So Nelson Rockefeller is like, I want to be governor and he basically buys his way into the office. Like you said, if he tells the Republican Party I want to be governor, then it's going to happen. But he also plays politics well.

01:43:51 Speaker_00
This is a guy – he's going to run for president years later. He's going to be vice president years later. He's a real political figure and he's good also in a way that other governors have not been.

01:44:01 Speaker_00
at visualizing the pros and the cons of big building plans. He can't think of these big plans, but he's really good at looking at someone else's plan for a massive project and seeing what's good or what's bad about it.

01:44:12 Speaker_00
He was really heavily involved in Rockefeller Center when it was a new thing, when he was 30 years old, when his father was building it. As governor, he has these big building plans that he wants to do.

01:44:23 Speaker_00
He has that in common with Robert Moses that he has big infrastructure dreams.

01:44:28 Speaker_00
What he also has in common with Ron Rosas is he is incredibly arrogant, he's incredibly stubborn, and Carroll describes it as a serene sense that because his motives are pure, his decisions are right. He's wealthy. He's a wealthy man.

01:44:39 Speaker_00
He's always been wealthy. He was born basically with the assumption, what I want is going to happen, and I want it, so it must be the right thing. I'm going to get it if I want it.

01:44:49 Speaker_00
Carol says Rockefeller's arrogance, it's different from the abrasive, hard arrogance of Robert Moses.

01:44:54 Speaker_00
Robert Moses has this kind of like poking you arrogance, whereas Nelson Rockefeller's is the easy, gracious arrogance of someone who does not have to prove himself, who just takes it for granted, you will listen to me.

01:45:06 Speaker_00
And he is ruthless, but he's ruthless in a way that assumes I will win. And it's something that Robert Moses has never really had to face ever in his career.

01:45:14 Speaker_05
Yeah, yeah. I mean, what the two share is this love of cosplaying in a hard hat. They both love that thing. Yes, that's true.

01:45:25 Speaker_00
Neither of them are engineers or construction contractors, but they like to be around the site.

01:45:30 Speaker_05
And they understand the power of money. And what's so funny is up until like the previous thousand pages, what Carol has really demonstrated is that these nickels and dimes, what fortune they amass to make Robert Moses able to do what he has done.

01:45:48 Speaker_05
And then right at this moment when Nelson Rockefeller enters the scene, all of a sudden they're nickels and dimes again. And it's like you don't understand what money is. And it's really something.

01:46:01 Speaker_00
If there was ever a guy who was burning thousand-dollar bills to light his cigars, like it's this guy. Yeah, all the change that commuters are throwing in is nothing.

01:46:08 Speaker_00
And Carroll says, survey the whole vast cast of characters on the New York political scene, and there was only one man who could with impunity confront and defeat Robert Moses, the man who is now governor. Like this is going to be bad for Moses.

01:46:21 Speaker_00
And Carroll's like, Moses should see this. He should recognize how tough Rockefeller is going to be. But the old Moses is no longer interested in kind of understanding who he's up against. And Moses and Rockefeller have a history.

01:46:33 Speaker_00
He's worked with the Rockefeller family. He's worked with Nelson Rockefeller. Nelson Rockefeller worked with him on getting the UN into New York. So they've worked together. He thinks he has the measure of him. And Moses is in his 70s. Rockefeller is 50.

01:46:47 Speaker_00
And so Moses is like, this young man, I can be fatherly towards him. I can assume his support because I think he kind of sees him like Wagner, where Wagner is like, I'm a young man. Moses is an old man. I look up to him. I have to listen to him.

01:46:59 Speaker_00
And the difference, again, is that Wagner is not colossally, like, globally rich in the way that Rockefeller is. So conflict seems inevitable. They're huge, arrogant fish in this New York state-sized pond and there's one early point of conflict.

01:47:13 Speaker_00
Rockefeller has this aide who's a former NYU professor, go NYU, my alma mater, William J. Ronan, who has sparred with Moses in the past and recommended abolishing the State Council of Parks and putting it under the Department of Conservation and Moses is like, nope, that's not going to happen and nothing happens.

01:47:27 Speaker_00
I think Moses takes from that, oh, I can push these people around the same way that I pushed everyone else around.

01:47:32 Speaker_00
But Rockefeller starts intruding on the territory that Moses considers his territory, essentially parks and Long Island parks especially.

01:47:40 Speaker_00
And Nelson Rockefeller's brother Lawrence, his name is spelled L-A-U like the fancy way of spelling Lawrence, not L-A-W like the normal people would.

01:47:50 Speaker_00
He starts getting involved in having the state acquire more parkland and Moses is like, great, I want more parkland. But in 1960,

01:47:57 Speaker_00
Rockefeller wants this massive state mass transit program put into place and transit is Moses' thing and he puts Ronan, Moses' new nemesis.

01:48:06 Speaker_00
He makes him his closest advisor and has him looking at this program and the first big battle that's kind of around these kind of shared interests that they're going to squabble over is over Moses' age. Like we said, he's 70 years old at this point.

01:48:18 Speaker_00
When Rockefeller becomes governor, 65 is the mandated state retirement age legally.

01:48:23 Speaker_00
If you work for the state, you have to retire at 65 unless the governor signs an age extension and you can sign them for up to two years and previous governors, they would sign them as early as possible. They'd sign them for two years.

01:48:34 Speaker_00
Rockefeller, he'll only give Moses one-year extensions and he always waits as close to Moses' birthday as possible. So in the days leading up to Moses' birthday, which should be a time for, you know, excited celebration.

01:48:46 Speaker_00
Instead, he is agonizing over whether the governor is going to sign this extension and let him keep his jobs. Yeah.

01:48:50 Speaker_05
Yeah. Which really begins to eat at him. I mean, like, you can tell that, well, at least as Caro describes it, you know, he is an older man. He's perceived as an older man. He has these hearing aids. He can't hear as well.

01:49:02 Speaker_05
You know, they think that maybe this is one of the reasons why Rockefeller, like, It feels like he can do this, you know what I mean? Because the world is perceiving Moses as older too. Aaron Powell Yes.

01:49:13 Speaker_00
And I have to assume when you're in a meeting with Moses, he probably comes off as very old.

01:49:17 Speaker_00
Carol describes him as not really being able to hear what people are saying, so he just kind of assumes what people will say, which reminds me of a story about my wife's grandmother that she refused to wear a hearing aid.

01:49:27 Speaker_00
At one point, she was eating dinner with their family. And her dad said something about like, how's the food? And she said, the doctor says it's fine.

01:49:33 Speaker_00
Because he was responding to the question she thought she was being asked rather than the question she was actually being asked. And it feels like most is doing that stuff.

01:49:39 Speaker_00
And so Rockefeller has this sense, Moses has agreed to transfer the parks department to my brother Lawrence. And Moses has this sense that will happen way in the future whenever I decide it.

01:49:50 Speaker_00
And this comes to a head in 1962, the first appearance of Spider-Man that year.

01:49:54 Speaker_00
Moses' 74th birthday is approaching and Rockefeller and Moses, they're having lunch to kind of smooth over this disagreement over when Moses will transfer the parks, the state parks to Lawrence Rockefeller.

01:50:06 Speaker_00
And nobody knows exactly what happens in this lunch. But Moses ends up storming out and Rockefeller goes out on the sidewalk and is trying to pull him back into the building.

01:50:14 Speaker_00
And Moses shakes himself out of his hands and gets in his car and he leaves the governor standing on the sidewalk being like, come on, come on, like this is crazy. And Moses tells Sid Shapiro, And he says, don't tell anybody about this.

01:50:25 Speaker_00
But of course, Citroen tells Cairo, Citroen loves to talk to Robert Carroll, that Rockefeller said, he kind of holds up in his hand, an extension of Moses's presidency of the Long Island State Park Commission.

01:50:38 Speaker_00
And his other hand, he holds up this kind of transition of the State Council of Parks chairmanship to Lawrence. And what Moses feels is this is a quid pro quo, you're saying you won't extend it unless I sign this up for Lawrence. And Moses goes,

01:50:50 Speaker_00
Well, maybe I should just resign all of my state posts then." And Rockefeller's like, no, I just want you to resign the council of parks position. That's all I want. And Moses is like, they're all connected.

01:50:57 Speaker_00
And he storms out when Rockefeller says, don't tell anyone about this conversation. And Moses is in his arrogance is like, well, I defeated the governor. He wanted me to hand over this power.

01:51:08 Speaker_00
And I said, No, I'll resign everything if you make me do that.

01:51:11 Speaker_00
And he gave in because I didn't do it, ignoring, I guess, the fact that he stormed out of the building like it's not he's like, I showed the governor thing or two, as if the conversation ended.

01:51:19 Speaker_00
And he's, I guess, hanging out with a friendly editor at the Daily News. And he says, Hey, hey, you should arrange for a news reporter at Rockefeller's next press conference

01:51:28 Speaker_00
to ask if Moses is keeping all of his jobs because that's going to force Rockefeller to say, of course, I want to keep Moses because he doesn't want me to lose those jobs and he knows I threatened to resign all of them.

01:51:39 Speaker_00
So if you ask him, it's going to force him to say, of course, I want him publicly. And back at Reynolds Island, Moses refusing to answer the governor's calls. He's assuming if the governor is calling me, I've already won. The winner doesn't call.

01:51:51 Speaker_00
The loser calls. He wants me back and I'm not going to go." And Caro says there's every indication that if Moses had just stopped there, had just let it lie, maybe he would have won.

01:52:02 Speaker_00
If it wasn't public, maybe Rockefeller would have backed down from this transition idea. He had backed down from it in the past. So maybe Moses thinks this is just another one of those times where someone asked me to do something.

01:52:12 Speaker_00
I say I'll resign and they stop and the governor did it before and it will happen again. But Moses, he pushes things too far. He wants to show Rockefeller how completely in control of the situation he is.

01:52:26 Speaker_00
He wants to force Rockefeller to surrender completely. So he writes a letter. Don't do this. Don't do this. He writes a letter saying, I am preparing to resign from all of my state posts. This is what I am trying to do." And he's like, I know Rockefeller.

01:52:41 Speaker_00
Now he's going to call me again. I'll finally take his call. He will say, no, no, don't do it. We don't do it. We need you. And I'm going to just have defeated him. It's what I do. It always works. It always works all the time. This is his ultimate weapon.

01:52:57 Speaker_00
It has never failed him, Carroll writes. This time, however, the ultimate weapon misfired. After 30 years of issuing that defiant challenge, he had issued it to a man who would take him up on it.

01:53:08 Speaker_00
On the day after he received Robert Moses's resignation, Nelson Rockefeller accepted it. I hope you will continue in the power authority post, Rockefeller said.

01:53:17 Speaker_00
As for the others, I note that you are making arrangements to resign from the Long Island State Park Commission. This is a decision which I accept with regret. Roman.

01:53:25 Speaker_05
Oh my God.

01:53:26 Speaker_00
What just happened?

01:53:27 Speaker_05
Someone finally took his resignation, took him seriously. They just like, they faced his ultimatum and said, you know what? No, no. Rockefeller accepted his resignation for the first time.

01:53:37 Speaker_00
He accepted it. Instead of going, Oh no, no, no, we need you. We can't do that. He said, Oh, that's too bad. Well, I'm going to be sorry to see you go but don't let the door hit you.

01:53:46 Speaker_00
This is the first time since he was on the Yale swim team that someone has accepted his resignation.

01:53:51 Speaker_00
For decades, governors and mayors have quailed in fear at the idea that he would ever resign and now so easily, he just gets a letter back being like, oh, I see you've made those arrangements to resign. I guess you'll do it.

01:54:03 Speaker_00
Now neither letter has been released publicly. So as this whole thing could have been swept under the rug, but there's rumors of the conflict that have leaked out.

01:54:11 Speaker_00
And Moses is like, oh, no, I planted that question at the press conference where the reporter was going to ask Rockefeller if he wanted me to continue in all my posts.

01:54:20 Speaker_00
And now Rockefeller is going to say, no, he resigned and I accepted his resignation. It's going to look like Rockefeller pushed me out. It's going to look like Rockefeller fired me. I can't let that happen. Oh, no, I can't let that happen.

01:54:32 Speaker_00
That's a nightmare scenario. Everyone's going to know I lost to him. So he hurriedly releases a public statement saying, Nelson Rockefeller asked me to resign in favor of his brother, and I refused. And I'm so insulted.

01:54:42 Speaker_00
I'm resigning all of my state posts and inventing his grievance with the Rockefellers. And he's like, so that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to resign all of them. And he says this publicly.

01:54:51 Speaker_00
Rockefeller thinking, again, that Rockefeller is going to be like, no, no, no, no, no, I can't be looked to have seen to be pushing out in favor of my brother. No, no. Rockefeller graciously publicly accepts all the resignations.

01:55:02 Speaker_00
He's clearly a little mad about the reference to his brother. But I don't know. I'm not quite sure what Moses thought the governor was going to do, to be honest. But whatever he thought was going to happen, it didn't happen. Yeah.

01:55:12 Speaker_00
Moses has managed to checkmate himself out of power purely as the way Carol says it, by sitting in his office worrying about what's going to happen, you know, and assuming the worst and then making the worst happen.

01:55:21 Speaker_05
It's really something. He just never thought this would happen. And he had all these sort of things in place over his whole life that he thought he was sort of protected. And he is not in this situation at all. And I don't know.

01:55:34 Speaker_05
It's just like I mean, I think one of the key parts of this is that it involves you know, Nelson's brother. You know what I mean?

01:55:40 Speaker_05
Like, you know, like if it was another person, potentially it would be like, you know, he might have bent or, you know, changed his tune to this. But like this family, no one goes against this family.

01:55:54 Speaker_05
He must have just been like, no, then just like piss off.

01:55:57 Speaker_00
You know what I mean? He's like, I don't need you. Yeah. Everyone before him has felt I need this guy. I can't afford to let him go. And this is the first guy who says, I literally can't afford to let him go. Like, I literally don't need him.

01:56:08 Speaker_00
If money is power, then it's like Superman is going up against God. It's just not enough. And Moses has now, in that instant, mainly through his own actions, he has lost every government post he has. He still is the Tribal Authority chairman.

01:56:23 Speaker_00
He's still president of the World's Fair. He still has this informal role as New York City's representative to the federal government on arterial highways. Very exciting. But he's lost most of his power.

01:56:34 Speaker_00
And Roman, you made this comment in the notes here, that hearkening back to very early on when the guy said, hain't I got the power? When Commodore Vanderbilt said that. And you say right here, he hain't got the power. It's just gone. He ain't got it.

01:56:47 Speaker_00
He ain't got it at all. And Carroll says – so previously his power came from popularity and money. The popularity is long gone. It didn't matter because the money remained. Now he has lost most of that.

01:56:59 Speaker_00
The state power authority which he has resigned from even though Rockefeller kind of wanted him to stay on it, that was about to generate tens of millions of dollars a year. Yeah, from these dams.

01:57:10 Speaker_00
These dams that are so important that we never talk about. Why are we talking about these dams? How come nobody talks about these dams ever? And so now somebody else is going to get the power that comes with managing that money.

01:57:20 Speaker_00
And in public, Moses is like, I'm glad to retire. I just want to retire. This is great. But behind the scenes, his allies are furiously lobbying Rockefeller to bring him back. And in the past,

01:57:30 Speaker_00
This would have worked, but Rockefeller refuses, and Caro says, for what might have been the one reason for Rockefeller to let Moses withdraw his resignation, not his parks council resignation perhaps, but his others, did not, to his surprise, and that of political insiders, exist.

01:57:45 Speaker_00
The expected storm of protest had not materialized. Robert Moses had been fired, and hardly anyone had really cared. Moses is like, well, now that this is public,

01:57:54 Speaker_00
The public will rise up as one voice to demand that their champion be back in power, and it just doesn't happen.

01:58:03 Speaker_00
Even The Times – three years earlier, they had said, you don't bench Babe Ruth, and now The Times runs an editorial that's like, you know, it's too bad.

01:58:10 Speaker_00
Moses is great, but no government function can be made so dependent on a single individual that he becomes the indispensable man. Yeah, we still love Moses, but you know what? Maybe it's time for him to go.

01:58:19 Speaker_00
And this maybe is my favorite detail in the whole book, possibly. That's not true, but it's one of my favorites.

01:58:26 Speaker_00
Caro says, then, you know, there was this young reporter who was assigned to sit in the Newsday office over the weekend to compile the statements that were going to come in from public officials commenting on Moses Ouster.

01:58:37 Speaker_00
And only one statement from a minor official comes in. And in the notes, Caro's like, that was me. I was that young reporter. In the notes though, it's not in the text. It's not in the text.

01:58:46 Speaker_00
He doesn't say and when I was sitting there, it's in the – you got to go to the notes. The notes – anyone who finishes this book with the last line of it, you haven't read the whole book because the notes have a lot of great stuff in them.

01:58:55 Speaker_00
But I just love that it's like even before he has started to write and research this book, Robert Caro, his professional life is touched for this moment. at the very beginning of his career with the very end of Robert Moses' career.

01:59:07 Speaker_00
And there's such a beautiful symmetry to that, that at the start of his career as a reporter, he is having this moment where he is seeing the downfall of this man whose life will become the study of, you know, seven years, eight years of his own life.

01:59:20 Speaker_00
And the thing is, most politicians, they are not making statements. They will not go on record with public comments because Moses is not the powerful person that they need to be on the side of. Rockefeller is the powerful person.

01:59:33 Speaker_05
you know, when it comes to when it comes to Moses. And so they just say nothing, which is like what Moses should have done.

01:59:40 Speaker_00
Yeah, exactly. And and there was this at Caratosa, there's this illusion for years, decades in political circles that Moses was so popular that you could not get rid of him. The voters would punish you so hard for getting rid of this man.

01:59:54 Speaker_00
And now the governor finally has done it. and nothing has happened. The voters do not care. They have no – if anything, they're happy to see it happen if they even think about it.

02:00:04 Speaker_00
And it feels like this is still the case in politics, that certain people accrue the myth of indispensability and then they lose power and it's like, oh, that guy? Yeah, okay. And they probably could have gotten rid of him years ago.

02:00:18 Speaker_00
And so Moses has – it's almost – the worst part of it for him probably is not just, oh shit, I accidentally resigned myself out of all of my power for no reason, but also, oh, and nobody even cares about it.

02:00:32 Speaker_00
Like, I was used to being the axle that this city and this state turned around, and now, It just doesn't even matter to people.

02:00:39 Speaker_00
And at the next State Council of Parks meeting, the first in the council's 38-year history ever to be held without Moses presiding over it, they do name three parks after him, which is a big thing.

02:00:50 Speaker_00
And people close to Moses say that he is devastated, especially to lose his Long Island Parks roles. That was where he began. That's where he first started accruing his parks power. But in public, Moses hides it.

02:01:01 Speaker_00
And the next time he sees Rockefeller in person, they hug each other, they praise each other. He recognizes it. This is the power now. He is not the power. For the first time in decades, Moses has to swallow his pride because he does not have the power.

02:01:15 Speaker_00
And he must know in the back of his mind, boy, I really shouldn't have done that.

02:01:21 Speaker_05
Like, this is on me. And they take all that sort of looming character of Moses just becomes a kind of figurehead. He isn't like knocked down and then everyone, you know, like they don't string him up like Mussolini or anything like that.

02:01:35 Speaker_05
They sort of they transmute him into this other type of elder statesman to be, you know, revered in this way, but definitely not to be feared.

02:01:44 Speaker_00
No, they defang him. He goes from being a vital, powerful, dangerous figure to being kind of like New York's construction grandpa. He doesn't matter. You don't have to have an opinion on him. He's around.

02:01:57 Speaker_00
You can revere him without it really meaning anything, or you can ignore him. And it is probably the thing that would be most painful for him, to be not just out of power, but to be

02:02:11 Speaker_00
Unimportant, obscure, unnecessary, just kind of like easy to not even pay attention to. And that's unfortunately eventually going to be the real – his real ultimate fate But look, he's still got that World's Fair going on. It's true.

02:02:28 Speaker_05
There's still that. There's still a glimmer out there, the World's Fair.

02:02:31 Speaker_00
So maybe, maybe if he manages this World's Fair just right, if he makes it a roaring success, maybe he'll be back in power. Maybe that'll happen. Maybe he can do it.

02:02:40 Speaker_05
This is it. This is his chance. We'll cover that on the next episode, where we will also finish the book. We will cover chapters 47 through 50. I cannot believe that we're through almost through the end of this. This is amazing.

02:02:53 Speaker_00
I can't. It's it's astounding to me. I look at my copy of the book that has my notes in it and I look where the bookmark is. And I'm like, there's not so much book before the bookmark and not a lot afterwards.

02:03:03 Speaker_00
It's what an amazing journey and a wild ride this has been. But we'll say we'll talk about that more. I can't believe it. Finishing the book. We are not going to go through the notes in the podcast. So you'll have to do that yourself.

02:03:12 Speaker_00
We will end at the last line of the text. That sounds good.

02:03:17 Speaker_05
Coming up, our conversation with Brennan Lee Mulligan, host of the Dungeons & Dragons show, Dimension 20. And now our conversation with professional Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master, Brennan Lee Mulligan.

02:03:37 Speaker_05
His D&D show Dimension 20 on Dropout TV has a very large and devoted following and pretty much since we started the show, listeners on our Discord server have been asking us to have Brennan on as a guest, all because of one reason.

02:03:51 Speaker_04
Our big bad, our villain of season one of The Unsleeping City was none other than undead Robert Moses. Oh no, here he comes.

02:04:02 Speaker_00
Just when we thought we were through with him. Finally, with this episode, finally.

02:04:07 Speaker_04
Robert Caro's going to have to pop back up and get that pen out and start writing, baby. There's new chapters. Here we go. That's right.

02:04:14 Speaker_05
Brennan created The Unsleeping City and made the main villain a fictionalized, magical Robert Moses.

02:04:22 Speaker_04
You see Robert raises his hand, a seam opens in his wrist, and a rope of blood shoots out of his arm around the child, and he rips the child out of the mirror as it skids onto the floor in front of you.

02:04:35 Speaker_05
When Brennan develops his stories for Dimension 20, he pushes the bounds of traditional D&D campaigns. His first season was called Fantasy High, which Brennan describes as a John Hughes movie with swords and magic.

02:04:47 Speaker_05
But there's something very different about looking to the power broker for source material.

02:04:51 Speaker_05
So we talked with Brennan about why he decided to pick Moses as the inspiration for his big bad D&D antagonist and how one goes about creating a fantasy version of a very real, very bureaucratic man.

02:05:04 Speaker_05
But first, a quick primer on Dungeons and Dragons for those of you who may not be super familiar with the game.

02:05:11 Speaker_04
Dungeons and Dragons is a storytelling game where one person is the dungeon master who writes an adventure and their friends are the players and they each have one character.

02:05:22 Speaker_04
So basically you have a group of heroes, every hero is being played by one person at the table and their job is just to go on the adventure role-playing as their hero.

02:05:31 Speaker_04
And the dungeon master's job is to be everything and everyone else, all the monsters, all the allies, all the environs, And basically, you're just going on an adventure. It's a group storytelling.

02:05:42 Speaker_04
You're collaboratively writing this adventure improvisationally in the moment, and the game aspect comes in in moments of stress, risk, and uncertainty. So you go into combat. Do you slay the dragon, or does the dragon devour you?

02:05:56 Speaker_04
We're gonna roll dice to find out. Do you crack the code in the massive spell book, or do you raise your fist to the sky and shake and say, no, I cannot decipher the codex? That's a dice roll.

02:06:08 Speaker_04
So all these moments of dramatic peak are determined by rolls of the dice, which creates this really wonderful feeling, whether you watch D&D shows or you play D&D, where you are watching a story being told by people who love telling that story.

02:06:25 Speaker_04
And the intoxicating part is, not only do you not know where this is gonna go, the people telling the story are discovering alongside you where the story's gonna go.

02:06:36 Speaker_05
So we have a Discord server where we talk about the book and stuff. And you came up very, very early in discussions of like, who should we have as potential guests? Because a lot of people listen to us, enjoy your show.

02:06:47 Speaker_05
And the idea of Robert Moses, the Robert Moses in this book, morphing into a fantasy villain, and he is morphed quite a bit. We should explain a little bit of that, is kind of genius. And it's just sort of fun to sort of

02:07:05 Speaker_05
bring the real world into this fantasy world and play with that. So let's first talk about who Robert Moses in Unsleeping City is. Let's describe him a little bit because he's a little bit changed.

02:07:19 Speaker_04
I would say that he is a very fantasy villain version of the historical figure. And one very much sort of taken up with presumably the decades of whatever his public historical life was.

02:07:35 Speaker_04
We're now in the year 2019, after decades of magical shenanigans going on. in the fantasy universe.

02:07:44 Speaker_04
I should also mention that in terms of license with real figures, we did have Stephen Sondheim as an ally of the player characters who wielded two broad swords, one in each hand.

02:07:56 Speaker_04
So there is a little bit of creative license with some of our beloved New York.

02:08:01 Speaker_00
He was usually a one-weapon fighter, Steven Seinfeld.

02:08:04 Speaker_04
Yeah, in real life, he was a sort of saber or rapier. He was a one-hand fencer, but we thought it would be fun. He's got a little license, so we gave him two claymores.

02:08:16 Speaker_04
Robert Moses, as he's depicted in The Unsleeping City, is the architect of a thing called the highway hex.

02:08:23 Speaker_04
The highway hex is, if you guys are familiar at all with the concept of ley lines, which are basically magical directional veins that can intersect and create nodes of power and it's sort of based on some real world belief systems.

02:08:39 Speaker_04
The idea behind Robert Moses and the Unsleeping City is that the highway hex was him creating a complex arcane rune, a glyph, of the intersecting highways and expressways within New York City to repel divination from the forces of good.

02:08:58 Speaker_04
So he's a, basically remains a master builder, remains someone whose ideology is very rooted in

02:09:06 Speaker_04
the concrete and building and the creation of an infrastructure with this added level of arcane magical threat on top of it, that all of the traffic in New York is actually casting this elaborate fiendish spell.

02:09:21 Speaker_00
Right. So this version of Robert Moses, when Robert Carroll's interviewing him, would point out to Fire Island and say, don't you see there should be a glyph there? Should there be a glyph out there like that?

02:09:32 Speaker_00
But it's still like you're saying, it's still rooted in the in the things we know about Robert Moses, about his his predilection for slashing roads across everything. But you're giving him, if anything, kind of a more rational reason.

02:09:43 Speaker_04
I know exactly.

02:09:44 Speaker_00
Yeah.

02:09:46 Speaker_04
Right. We're explaining in retro retrospect why he was so obsessed with building all these expressways.

02:09:52 Speaker_00
And I get why his road has to take a sudden curve in through East Tremont if it's because, oh, well, we're drawing some sort of sigil or some sort of a cult sign. And it has to be exactly the right way.

02:10:03 Speaker_00
It makes more sense than his than any of the reasons that we got otherwise. I'm very curious about your – so you've read The Power Broker, I believe. This is not – you're not just existing off of the urban legends of Robert Moses. What is it?

02:10:17 Speaker_00
It strikes me as such an interesting book to use as a foundation text for a fantasy story because it is such – it is so grounded in history. In many ways, the real kind of like minutiae and data of urban construction, traffic flow, things like that.

02:10:35 Speaker_00
Is it what is it about it that that planted this into your mind that like, yeah, I could use this for a for a D&D campaign?

02:10:41 Speaker_04
You know, it's a great question and there's a lot – I mean like especially growing up. So I have an odd biography, right? I went to school a little bit early. I started attending college at SUNY Ulster when I was 14 for philosophy and humanities and

02:11:00 Speaker_04
I remember as a teenager reading Howard Zinn, which is a very similar book in terms of like, oh my God, this is 80 pages on like, and these many bushels of barley were being exported and we're tabulating kind of the economies of this portion of time.

02:11:16 Speaker_04
And then it will move to a page where you'll read a chapter that makes you burst into tears, right? Where the human cost of all of this data is rendered very plainly.

02:11:26 Speaker_04
And to be honest with you, a lot of The Unsleeping City, that first season, was rooted in and very much dedicated to and sort of honoring my father. So I'm a New Yorker. My father's lived in New York my entire life.

02:11:39 Speaker_04
And we would walk around, during my childhood, and he had this incredible, his name's Joe Mulligan, he had this encyclopedic knowledge of New York history.

02:11:49 Speaker_04
And anywhere we'd go to museums, or going up to the Cloisters, or going downtown, he took me to five points when I was a little kid, before Gangs of New York came out.

02:11:57 Speaker_04
And we laugh about it now, because he would point somewhere and be like, and this is where Bill Poole, or this is where William, came out and this is what happened. and I would be pointing at a Dunkin Donuts, right?

02:12:11 Speaker_04
Like this is the site of ultimate significance. And he, prior even to reading anything about Moses, you're right, like urban legend is a good way to put it. My father, as a New Yorker, spoke about Robert Moses with this idea of like,

02:12:30 Speaker_04
This is someone who forever altered the city. And, you know, explaining the heights of bridges and, you know, the discrimination of keeping various groups out from these, you know, these people will have luxury and plenty and these people will not.

02:12:45 Speaker_04
And in terms of like what drew me to this document and this extremely kind of like, if we're being honest, the crimes, the social ills of this guy are so fascinating in that

02:12:59 Speaker_04
the greatest harm is done through these things that require a kind of pointed attention to understand what's happening, right? Like these – you know, like it's not salacious.

02:13:11 Speaker_04
It's not this thing where it's like the big harms are done by manipulating authorities and manipulating money and manipulating power. And I think it was looking at a setting set in a magical New York and specifically dealing with the idea of

02:13:27 Speaker_04
How do you fight somebody who's not even interacting with you?

02:13:32 Speaker_04
They are in control of the environment and your conception of freedom, your conception of what individual action can be is totally put up against this guy like you're saying from source material that is very, very like rooted in –

02:13:48 Speaker_04
infrastructure administration bureaucracy.

02:13:51 Speaker_04
So, you know, you want to have this big fantasy showdown and it felt like the right way to do that was with a guy with this massive history of extremely dense action that was taken at this level that most individuals don't know how to oppose.

02:14:06 Speaker_00
It's something that ties into the episode we were talking about today.

02:14:10 Speaker_00
We talked about how the reporters who were trying to make it clear what Moses was doing were having trouble communicating it to the public because it was so complicated and it was not salacious and what they finally got traction with was

02:14:22 Speaker_00
Well, they hired an ex-mob guy as a night watchman, so the mob's in fault.

02:14:27 Speaker_00
And it seems like it would be a big challenge in creating that kind of traditional fantasy adventure climax when you are dealing with somebody who himself is not a conniving villain so much as the – I guess he is pretty conniving, but he's not so much a cackling evil villain so much as – I guess he kind of does that too.

02:14:45 Speaker_00
You know what? Never mind.

02:14:48 Speaker_04
I'll say there's a lot of meat on the bone. You know, he really did give us a lot to work with for sure.

02:14:54 Speaker_05
I mean, I was actually thinking of rather than the incongruities of the text and then your storytelling built on top of it is some of the congruities, which is like the idea of Robert Moses being able to

02:15:06 Speaker_05
write these laws over the course of the first couple of decades of his life that give him power for the remaining decades almost seems like a wizard.

02:15:17 Speaker_05
It almost seems like a magic spell that he has done to create and accumulate and build and build and build. the same way that you level up and build in D&D. It has that quality of a wizard in a way.

02:15:33 Speaker_00
You could look at The Power Broker as kind of a real-world version of all the things that happened with Sauron before The Lord of the Rings, all the things that happened in the past.

02:15:43 Speaker_00
where he amasses this power because of secret knowledge and because of the artifacts of that power and then has this period of dominance and then has his downfall more because of his own overreaching than because of anything else.

02:15:59 Speaker_00
I mean you have to assume that Soran would not talk himself into resigning because he's worried Nelson Rockefeller is going to make him look foolish at a press conference. You don't know, it could have happened that way too.

02:16:10 Speaker_00
It could have happened that way.

02:16:13 Speaker_04
As the wizard Gandalf, I call a press conference. The Dark Lord. I totally agree. And I think that there's a part of depicting Moses in this, in the Unsleeping City, which was showing, especially because of who our heroes were. So like the heroes of,

02:16:36 Speaker_04
our party are people, you know, Lou Wilson's character, Kingston Brown, is a nurse in Harlem who is a fixture of his community and knows everybody in the city and is tapped into those communities and working people.

02:16:51 Speaker_04
We have Ali Beardsley's character is Pete Conlin, who's like a dream sorcerer, who's like a part-time drug dealer in the art scene in Bushwick. So you have these sort of New Yorker staples that are all from different walks of life.

02:17:06 Speaker_04
And the idea of – you're making this point with this group of characters that become our heroes in this story that are all magical New Yorkers of the power of not only community but the power of diverse community, the power of – what's the word I'm looking for?

02:17:23 Speaker_04
I'm looking for multiculturalism or like that idea of a big pluralistic society, right? And the idea of there being, and there definitely are forces at work against that.

02:17:38 Speaker_04
And there are definitely depictions in the season and elsewhere of that kind of know nothing nativist, where it's meeting a cultural force with an opposing cultural force and saying like, okay, you want a pluralistic multicultural society.

02:17:52 Speaker_04
We don't, we want, you know, homogenous and this one type of sort of nativist ideal. But that's one way to oppose that. The other way to oppose that is to sidestep culture in totality and go, hey, you can believe what you want.

02:18:09 Speaker_04
I'll shape the city without any worry about what – you know, in these chapters that you guys are talking about, like, the funny thing is how long protests had been trivial to him where it's like if you know how to get around this, if you know how to actually move power around,

02:18:25 Speaker_04
If people are paying your tolls, if people are giving you this power and energy outside of their belief system just because they're driving on your road, how much of their buy-in do you really need on that cultural level, right?

02:18:39 Speaker_04
And that's so sinister to me, that idea of manipulating. Like you're saying, it's a wizardly thing. It's manipulating a system of power where you're like, I don't need to interface with you. I don't need to be in conversation with you.

02:18:50 Speaker_04
I have mastered a secret language, whether that's law or finance, or in this case, the bonds being issued to the authority. You memorize this, again, like lingua arcana, and all of a sudden, it doesn't matter.

02:19:06 Speaker_04
You have sidestepped that entire frame of reference up to a point, of course. But that's what's so interesting about that metaphor to me.

02:19:15 Speaker_04
of the city authority as wizard, as someone whose power does not reflect interaction with large groups of people, but rather with systems that people are supporting unbeknownst to them. Yeah.

02:19:30 Speaker_05
Yeah. It's interesting. So the story is that to gain his power, he sort of sells his soul to different factions, to hell and to the fairy. And then he builds the highway hex as a way to kind of insulate him.

02:19:44 Speaker_05
Because then, at that point, they're all coming after him. And he's trying to, like, keep them out. And that sort of action of being surrounded by highways just disrupts their ability to sort of go get him.

02:19:55 Speaker_05
And so he's basically remaking the city in this selfish way, just to protect.

02:20:00 Speaker_05
Like, he'll put the misery on everyone else to, like, circle this city and circle this city forever, just so he can't be gotten at by demons who are, I guess, worse than him in some way.

02:20:13 Speaker_05
Which is, again, it's a nice way to embody this, like put a story on this very sinister thing, to remake something without any sort of input from anyone else, just destroy a place just to make yourself safe, is diabolical.

02:20:29 Speaker_04
And the fact that everyone knows in the setting, they're like, oh yeah, like big celestial or fey or infernal forces can't come to the city.

02:20:39 Speaker_04
Like everyone knows the ramifications, but it's a discovery in the midst of the season that that is because of this highway hex and it's to protect one individual. And you go like, so you're saying,

02:20:52 Speaker_04
the entire shape of my cosmology, like how I understand the magical world to work, is not some massive, it's not like that's been here, like maybe that's why they built the city here. No, it's one guy's actions that reshaped everything.

02:21:08 Speaker_04
And I think the moment, obviously, again, we have a very fantastical villain in our Robert Moses, who, you know, he's way over the top. But as far as villain goes, does attempt a lot of, like, persuasion and flattery.

02:21:23 Speaker_04
Really tries to get Ali Beardsley's character, tries to, you know, make Pete Conlon into a Moses man. You got fucked, kid. I'm sorry. What do you mean? Well, did you sign up for this Vox Phantasma job? Did you weigh the health benefits?

02:21:40 Speaker_04
Did you get a choice in the matter?

02:21:41 Speaker_03
No.

02:21:42 Speaker_04
No? Does it suck to be the Vox Phantasma? What do you think? You're homeless? You got a bunch of problems? Um, that's just New York. I think there's one confrontation towards the end of the season where I was like, if there's anything that feels like

02:21:57 Speaker_04
a statement towards the historical Moses that feels really pointed. There's a confrontation between him and Kingston Brown at the Temple of Dender at the Met.

02:22:08 Speaker_02
I hate to say Mr. Moses, but they're all free-thinking adults who can make their own choices.

02:22:16 Speaker_04
As is every person in this city. See, he says, do you think people make choices? I do. No. People think they make choices. They think they're going to steer right or steer left, but they didn't build the roads.

02:22:33 Speaker_04
The big choices already got made for them a long time ago. And that to me is like the heart of his sinister philosophy in the Unsleeping City.

02:22:44 Speaker_04
And the thing that as someone who, you know, I, I come to this as a philosophy major, as someone who studied philosophy, You know, the impact that he had on this country, forget just New York, but the country broadly is so profound.

02:22:59 Speaker_04
And America, I think, has a cultural love for the idea of individual freedom and the idea that, like, freedom is a substance that lives in the individual.

02:23:08 Speaker_04
And your ability to be a heroic cowboy figure who does whatever the hell you like, no one's going to tell me what to do, very rooted in the American thing.

02:23:18 Speaker_04
The rug is totally pulled out from under that philosophy if you have to reckon with the fact that life is multiple choice, that you are not born on a blank page. You were born into the context that has often been shaped by very powerful people.

02:23:35 Speaker_00
I want to point out, for anyone who's listening who is not a New Yorker, when you mention the Temple of Dendur, I want people to know that that's a real Egyptian temple that's in the Metropolitan Museum, not a fantasy, like, magic temple they're going to.

02:23:48 Speaker_00
And it makes me think about how there are viewers of the show who did not know that Robert Moses was a real person when they started watching it. And is that a surprise to you?

02:23:58 Speaker_00
You see, like, on Reddit, people are like, just found out Robert Moses is real. I thought he was just a character in the story.

02:24:05 Speaker_00
Does that does that make you feel like you have more of a responsibility to present to you or you should have presented more authentically than as a as a magical monster man?

02:24:13 Speaker_04
You know, you know, like me and the guy who puts the facts on the Snapple caps, we get together, we get together and kind of commiserate the responsibility of it with that comes to the power. Yeah. It comes with that power.

02:24:29 Speaker_04
Yes, I think that there's a very pointed feeling of, anytime you're doing anything connected to like historicity or historical, you know, I think a lot of the players in that season who had not lived in New York also felt like, oh, how do I honor this very real place?

02:24:45 Speaker_04
And we had, you know, Stephen Sondheim is mentioned there. We mentioned in the second season, there's like,

02:24:51 Speaker_04
a fight at Ellis Island where people are, like, jumping into photographs from Ellis Island of, like, different waves of immigration in the city.

02:24:58 Speaker_04
You're trying to, like, honor these things, not only in a fantasy show, but in an improvised fantasy show where, you know, it's like, well, our first priority is to make sure that our story reflects our values and is compelling and interesting and funny.

02:25:13 Speaker_04
And I think people finding out that Robert Moses is real through this, I can only hope that it shuttles them on to the power broker and to reading the history. Please don't take the headline from an improvised D&D show.

02:25:28 Speaker_04
Please feel free to dig deeper, because there's a lot more information. And obviously, a lot of our information was very much taking the character as a point of inspiration and then doing this big arch-villain version of him.

02:25:42 Speaker_04
you know, in the second season, they spring a creature out of this dragon's cave underneath central park. And literally the Tammany tiger jumps out, who was a giant, it was a giant blind tiger with like cuffs and a top hat with a shamrock on it.

02:26:00 Speaker_04
And you go like, It's like, you know, but I would hope that people would not see that and then go, oh, Tammany Hall, that's where that tiger is, right?

02:26:09 Speaker_05
Yeah.

02:26:10 Speaker_04
Yeah.

02:26:10 Speaker_05
Yeah. Colson Whitehead wrote about this, that, you know, when he was growing up, the Underground Railroad was an actual railroad, like in his mind, like he could not. escape that image. It's one of those things.

02:26:21 Speaker_05
It's kind of funny how you get information like this. And I think it's awesome that people learn about Robert Moses through your show, you know, like, because, I mean, there's definitely a lot more to dig into.

02:26:31 Speaker_05
But it's just the great, like, you take this sort of gestalt of this big book and kind of go, well, these are the things that speak to me about this, this idea of,

02:26:41 Speaker_05
you know, choice taken away from you and places being shaped for, you know, like misguided and selfish reasons. And, you know, it is a way to describe the world as it is.

02:26:55 Speaker_00
It is. It's also it's part of the irony of history that Robert Carroll feels the need to write this massive book, this incredibly researched book in order to tear down the myth of Robert Moses.

02:27:05 Speaker_00
And now 50 years later, there's people who are like, that was a real guy.

02:27:10 Speaker_00
Like that's like that was so omnipresent new york that robert carroll had to marshal so much argument to show that he was not a not doing good work and now the it's it's so around the opposite where people just are like oh yeah that's yeah that's that feeling on that fantasy show you know i mean that that's a fascinating thing is the idea of robert carroll who i mean like

02:27:29 Speaker_04
I can't think of a more... We talked about the influence of Robert Moses. The influence of Robert Caro, growing up in New York, not one time did anyone ever go, you know, Bob Moses got a bad rap. No. That book just decimated that guy. It moderized him.

02:27:49 Speaker_04
He – I mean Robert Carroll is the definitive last word on Robert Moses' legacy and to the degree that if people are unaware of Moses and become aware of him, there is a degree of like

02:28:02 Speaker_04
The probably the first thing you hear is some apocryphal boogeyman style story that sort of reflects or echoes something from the book. Or at least that's been my experience with people finding out about him. It's like, oh yeah, that's the guy.

02:28:14 Speaker_04
And like the first thing they'll tell you is one of the excoriating pieces of evidence from the book, right? Rather than, that's the man that built America. You know, anything like that. Jones Beach, Robert Moses? Jones Beach.

02:28:31 Speaker_05
Um, so this is sort of the end of our, uh, series. Um, we're in the fall of Robert Moses, the, the fall from power. What is it? The loss of power. That's the loss of power.

02:28:40 Speaker_00
Yeah. I mean, so you have to wait till the evening to know how good the day has been and we're getting into the evening, like the, like the sun is sinking down. We, you know, we have one more real summarizing episode left.

02:28:51 Speaker_05
And, um, what's so fascinating about his fall is that, you know, through some sort of machinations of like wanting to control the world's fair and therefore giving up some of the city posts and then in a fit of peak resigning as a bluff to his, to his state posts.

02:29:07 Speaker_05
Um, and then finally for the first time in decades, after doing that over and over again, Nelson Rockefeller, like takes him up on it and he actually, you know, gets forced out of his state posts.

02:29:17 Speaker_05
And it's a pretty, like a whimper, ignominious end to his reign. That is not how your Robert Moses beats his end. And in a way, it's satisfying because you see the beats of it.

02:29:33 Speaker_05
And so as a story, it's really fun to watch, you know, this resignation tactic finally not work. But it doesn't have the kind of like sort of oomph that you kind of want. So, describe the fight and how they ended Robert Moses.

02:29:49 Speaker_04
The big villainous scheme, so it's very, I mean, this is as animated and over the top as you can get.

02:29:57 Speaker_04
Robert Moses and his army of vampires, his army of vampire financiers concoct a ritual at the New York Stock Exchange, which our heroes are unable to stop, on New Year's Eve, and a disembodied Sauron-esque Robert Moses retreats to the ball drop in Times Square,

02:30:18 Speaker_04
where as the ball drops, there's a lot of magic having to do with the Golden Door, Emma Lazarus, the New Colossus, and the idea that in order to basically extend his sphere of influence from New York to the rest of the country, Robert Moses is going to summon the American Dream.

02:30:38 Speaker_04
He's going to summon the embodied version of the American Dream. And the danger of bringing a dream into the real world is that the second a dream becomes real, it becomes one thing.

02:30:53 Speaker_04
When you call a little wish or a figment into the waking world, it can become a spell, a moment, a flash, a joke, a little bit of joy.

02:31:07 Speaker_04
There are dreams that are so large and important that they represent a threat to the cosmos if they are brought into the waking world. And while a dream is a dream, it can be anything. And there's a lot of fairy logic to that.

02:31:27 Speaker_04
But what I think it means more pointedly for Robert Moses as the master of concrete and steel and the idea of concretizing something is the idea that the American dream is at its strongest or best when it is interpretable and where it means something different to everyone who wants to pursue it.

02:31:49 Speaker_04
and by bringing it into the real world and putting it under his control, he will forever kill every other version of it. You see the tendrils of Robert's spell and the infection set in.

02:32:02 Speaker_04
The dream warps, convulses, has its last moment where it could be anything, and begins to take a solid, stationary form, a tall, clean-cut, square-jawed, blonde-haired, blue-eyed man, appears hovering in the air above you.

02:32:31 Speaker_04
It surveys what it can see of the city, the sidewalks, the subways, the buildings, the billboards, and then a resonant voice goes, this.

02:32:52 Speaker_04
So that poetry aside, all the good guys jump in a big tornado in Times Square and on a bunch of floating platforms. This is where we move from the poetic into the insane and literal.

02:33:04 Speaker_04
They jump into a bunch of floating concrete sidewalk platforms, fight the American dream, defeat the spell that Robert Moses is casting and sunder him and break his stranglehold on the unsleeping city forevermore and send the American dream back through the golden door

02:33:21 Speaker_04
into the land of dreams. You glow with the power of the Chosen One, and the frozen flame flies back into the golden door. Robert screams. And that's the final battle.

02:33:42 Speaker_04
And it is a lot, I will say, it is a lot more final than the accepting of a resignation. You know, that's for sure, right?

02:33:52 Speaker_05
So if you end the book, reading the book, and you're like, I really wanted something, you know, I really wanted a good punch to the nose of Robert Moses here. You can read the 51st chapter, which would be The Unsleeping City.

02:34:04 Speaker_04
Exactly. Dropout.tv, and I will say this, we have a lot more spells. There's also a tiny little fairy mobster called Don Confetti, and he talks like this. So where's that, Robert Caro? Where's that in the book, I ask you?

02:34:24 Speaker_05
So good. So when you presented Robert Moses to your dream team, who are your players, Did they know who Robert Moses was? Or did you know, like, did you know their level of familiarity with the character in the real world?

02:34:41 Speaker_04
I did not. The crew knew, obviously. The people that I'd been working with, you know, developing the storyline knew. But yeah, I believe that a couple of them did actually know that Robert Moses was a real historical figure.

02:34:52 Speaker_05
And did that change the way that different people interacted with him? You know, because you're all telling the story together, and you have a master plan and a guide.

02:35:01 Speaker_05
Not an un-Moses-like master plan for how they're going to navigate this space, this story that you're telling, but they do have input.

02:35:09 Speaker_05
Um, and did you notice that different characters, um, interacted with the villain Moses differently if, you know, they were more familiar with New York and what he did and that sort of thing? I just wonder if there was any sort of, uh, breakdown.

02:35:24 Speaker_04
I think what's interesting is the awareness came out in the midst of the season. So it was not like a difference between cast members in that some immediately clocked him and some didn't. It was more that as the season was shooting,

02:35:37 Speaker_04
and it was clear that this was a real historical figure, that pointedness, I think, developed more, to the point where, you know, I think that final confrontation at the Met, there's a really great part of it where Lou's character, Kingston, has basically heard enough, that there's a sort of silence or gravitas to that scene where knowing how

02:36:01 Speaker_04
Just again, like, you know, the sort of horrifying power that this man wielded and his utter remorselessness for the most marginalized communities that were impacted over and over and over again for decades.

02:36:17 Speaker_04
I think that there was a degree of gravitas that is added by that.

02:36:23 Speaker_04
There's this weird delineation, I think, in storytelling, especially fantasy storytelling, where villains either are misunderstood, and they have a point, and they're three-dimensional, or they're like mwahaha, like Maleficent, you know, I am arch-evil.

02:36:40 Speaker_04
And I weirdly think that you get some of both those worlds in an instance where There's nothing more three-dimensional than a real human being, but it almost makes it worse.

02:36:53 Speaker_04
The idea that someone had a complex inner life and had emotional wrinkles and depth to themselves, and was this heartless for this long, wielding this much power, is astonishing.

02:37:07 Speaker_04
And I think that, so the PCs, as they were clocking that, I actually think it gave them a measure of resolve, even as the villain was not a total cartoon. Right? Yeah.

02:37:18 Speaker_05
I'm just going to like add a little annotation here that PCs in this context is player characters, right?

02:37:25 Speaker_04
A PC is a player character. Yes.

02:37:28 Speaker_05
So that means that that's part of the group of this collective storytelling game enterprise that you're telling.

02:37:33 Speaker_04
For folks turning it, and I'm sure, and again, if you're listening to, you know, 99% Invisible, Breaking Down, The Power Broker, I'm sure you've played tons of D&D. I'm sure they have, right?

02:37:45 Speaker_05
I mean, it's a decent crossover. There's probably plenty who don't, who are just like into history stuff.

02:37:50 Speaker_05
We were debating this of how much to describe what D&D is because obviously there's like, you know, there's different sections of the world who know different things for sure.

02:37:59 Speaker_05
But for example, when I was talking to my kids, I have twin 17 year olds who are very into D&D and I mentioned, that I was going to talk to you. And I said, are you familiar with, you know, Brendan Lee Mulligan's work?

02:38:13 Speaker_05
And they were like, he's only the greatest DM in the world, probably of all time.

02:38:17 Speaker_04
You know, like, you know. Oh man, that's so sweet. That's very kind.

02:38:23 Speaker_05
And so, yeah. So, so like, they're the people who know both because I talked about the power broker endlessly and they watched Unsleeping City as it came out. Like I was aware of it, you know.

02:38:32 Speaker_04
Wow, wow, wow. That's incredible.

02:38:35 Speaker_05
So when you're devising something as complex as Unsleeping City, and you have some designs where you want to lead them, but they have their own agency to a certain degree, how do you balance that when you're telling something as complex?

02:38:50 Speaker_05
The idea of the Highway Hex and the American Dream, it's just complex ideas, at least they seem to me to be that way. How do you do that?

02:38:59 Speaker_04
I feel Roman that I'm being set up for an analogy where this very much mirrors Robert Moses.

02:39:06 Speaker_00
And I want to tell you that I see the trap.

02:39:08 Speaker_04
I see that you're laying it out here, okay? I'm onto you, man.

02:39:11 Speaker_00
That was very smart of you. That's why you're a good DM. You can see the game behind his DMing of his interview.

02:39:18 Speaker_04
I see the game, man. No, but you're very right. There is a fascinating... Well, I think that in the language that Robert Moses uses a lot to talk about

02:39:28 Speaker_04
You know, when he's talking about, like, Long Island and he's talking about, like, what are the kinds of people we want to attract, right? Like, that's the language he uses. But there is a, like, a darkness and a cynicism when you understand that

02:39:45 Speaker_04
Individual freedom written over massive populations and a powerful incentive structure is fate. Free will over the aggregate becomes fate when you incentivize strongly enough. And that's really sad.

02:40:03 Speaker_04
And it challenges a lot of our deeply held ideas about the power of individual freedom. And so to answer your question, on a DMing level, sadly, it's the same necromancy. It's the same magic where you go, you are kind of building these tracks.

02:40:22 Speaker_04
You're building this thing where you go, OK, you can do whatever you want. but I know what you want.

02:40:29 Speaker_04
So if I build, it's like, it's sort of there's, when people are seeking a stimulus, you know, it's like, it would be, this is such a, this is, I don't mean this as a disparagement of players, but to use a metaphor that there's like, you have cheese at the end of the maze.

02:40:50 Speaker_04
you don't have to seal off the maze. You don't have to trap anyone in the maze if you know that they're looking for the cheese, right?

02:40:57 Speaker_04
There's this element of when you're building adventures and you're building even these complex ideas in there, you make something very personal.

02:41:05 Speaker_04
You make something where it's like, well, this person has this villainous ideology and that ideology has resulted in concrete harm to a loved one. or it's resulted in something that is very visceral and felt to my character.

02:41:20 Speaker_04
And the best way, honestly, to create these story structures is in collaboration with your players, which doesn't mean that you're pre-writing what the story is gonna be, but there's this beautiful, when I talk to novice dungeon masters about how to construct adventures and flow sheets and sequences of events that your friends will feel compelled to improvise through,

02:41:46 Speaker_04
It's always the idea of the motivation and heart of your players as they're embodying these characters has force and inertia to it. It's like water flowing downhill. You can irrigate a hillside to know where the water is gonna go.

02:42:03 Speaker_04
And it's not a reflection on the water doing what you told it to. It's a reflection on you understand that these people are pursuing their aims rationally.

02:42:13 Speaker_04
And if they're pursuing their aims rationally, you can create the structures that direct those aims.

02:42:19 Speaker_00
Brennan, you're not gonna like this, but talking about knowing what people want and using that as leverage to get them to do what you want them to, sounds like power brokering, to be honest.

02:42:29 Speaker_04
No, man, no. Sounds like you're doing a lot of power brokering, yeah. Come on, man, don't do this to me, dude. You can't do this to me.

02:42:36 Speaker_00
It's almost like DM stands for Dungeon Moses. Hold on a second. No!

02:42:42 Speaker_04
Suddenly, my disguise fades away. Curses! And I fly out. It was him the whole time. It was him the whole time. It's genuinely a joy and a privilege to be able to write these kinds of stories.

02:42:57 Speaker_04
And I think, too, in our first season, Robert Moses was such a fun, compelling villain. for the historicity and how much like history mattered and was important.

02:43:08 Speaker_04
And I think too, in the second season that we did as well, urban fantasy is so interesting in that you're often depicting, both at the same time, you're depicting the heightened fantastical reality as well as the...

02:43:24 Speaker_04
what is actually the mundane reality on the ground? You know, like our second season, we had sort of a large company called Gladiator that was trying to open a campus in Queens.

02:43:37 Speaker_04
And there was like, this was around, you know, this idea of like a big conglomerate shipping, you know, e-commerce company. And it was summoning this extra dimensional being called Null. And that season was very much about,

02:43:52 Speaker_04
kind of the emptiness and urban isolation of hyper-consumerist capitalism, right?

02:44:00 Speaker_04
And so you're depicting these things where there's this haunting entity in the dream world that's coming out of it that's like a faceless, colorless silhouette, very Lovecraftian.

02:44:09 Speaker_04
But then also, you're looking at like an apartment complex with no one living in it because all of the apartments have been purchased as basically

02:44:18 Speaker_04
asset class investments, you know, like, which I think there's some crazy percentage of apartments on Central Park that are vacant for, like, more than 80% of the year, right?

02:44:29 Speaker_04
And so it's a bizarre, it's a fun thing in crafting these stories, especially in any kind of setting like the Unsleeping City that's so contingent on the real world and is very much depicting that, where you're like, here's the metaphor and here's the reality and here's both of them hand in hand.

02:44:47 Speaker_04
You know what I mean? It's not just the analogy. The analogy is here with this other component that is real. It's a joy. It's a real privilege to be able to tell these kind of stories.

02:44:59 Speaker_04
And speaking of New York, we'll be coming to Madison Square Garden in January, which is nuts. What? We, Dimension 20, is going to be performing January 24th at Madison Square Garden. We sold out the garden, so it's a- Congratulations. Thank you.

02:45:17 Speaker_04
I appreciate it. Which is a very, as again, like having grown up in New York, it's a very- Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah. It's nuts. It's nuts.

02:45:26 Speaker_05
Well, I mean, thank you so much for being on the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. It's been a real pleasure. And it was really, it's just fun.

02:45:33 Speaker_05
I hope people like who are interested in D&D, or even if you're not, just like check out the season, watch it unfold. It's a really fun take on the underlying concepts and values of the book. You know, it's just, this is great.

02:45:47 Speaker_00
You add it to the canon. And thank you for using your medium to spread the word of Robert Moses and The Power Broker to those who were previously not aware of it, but are pretty interested in digging into lore.

02:46:00 Speaker_00
So I think they're going to enjoy The Power Broker when they finally get to it. Yeah.

02:46:04 Speaker_04
I'll say if you love lore, Robert Caro's The Power Broker is chock full of lore, my friends. That's how we make a difference. We start referring to history as lore. We're going to get a bunch of people.

02:46:20 Speaker_04
It's truly a pleasure and an honor to be on the podcast today. And I really hope that anyone who is coming here from Dimension 20 digs into not only the rest of the Power Broker, but the rest of 99% Invisible.

02:46:32 Speaker_04
All the things that I talked about that matter to me, I feel very much like,

02:46:39 Speaker_04
If I can do anything as a comedian and storyteller to like direct people towards these things, you know, learning about Robert Moses as the villainous arcane architect of the highway hex is hopefully step one on people digging into not only the history of Robert Moses in New York, but the people wherever you live, the city that you're in and who who is shaping the environs of your life.

02:47:01 Speaker_04
And is there a way to get active in resisting whatever highway hex is being implemented in your town right now? Nice, well said.

02:47:15 Speaker_00
Next month, and I cannot believe what I am saying right now, we are going to be finishing the book. Forget page numbers. Just read it till the end. Read the book till there's nothing left in it to read anymore. We're there, people. It's the homestretch.

02:47:29 Speaker_00
And if you can't wait till next month to hear my voice summarizing something, why not turn to the Flophouse podcast, where we never reach the end. There's always more bad movies to talk about. It's an unending torment.

02:47:40 Speaker_05
We've got a bunch of 99PI Power Broker merch for you to congratulate yourselves on making it this far. There are t-shirts, there are bags, there are bookmarks, and something that we've been waiting to tell you about.

02:47:50 Speaker_05
We have a 99PI Power Broker challenge coin. It's a commemorative coin. It's totally Power Broker themed.

02:47:58 Speaker_05
A prize to get yourself to show to anyone and everyone that you've finished the Power Broker, because you'll no longer have the Power Broker book as this totem, you know, that you're lugging around.

02:48:06 Speaker_05
and you'll now have this coin to commemorate that you are a true power broker nerd. The coins will be in the store soon. If they're not there already by the time this episode comes out, just head to 99pi.org slash store to get one.

02:48:19 Speaker_00
The 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker is produced by Isabel Angel, edited by Committee, music by Swan Rial, mix by Dara Hirsch.

02:48:28 Speaker_05
99% Invisible's executive producer is Cathy Tu, our senior editor is Delaney Hall, Kurt Kolstad is the digital director.

02:48:33 Speaker_05
The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriella Gladney, Martin Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jacob Maldonado-Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Nina Patak, and me, Roman Mars.

02:48:50 Speaker_05
The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stephan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family.

02:49:00 Speaker_05
Now we're headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California.

02:49:07 Speaker_05
You can find the show on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server, where we have fun discussions about the power broker, about architecture, about bad movies that seem somewhat inspired by the power broker, and all that kind of good stuff.

02:49:20 Speaker_05
It's where I'm hanging out most of the time. You can find a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI. at 99pi.org.