A Quarantine Project: Reading “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro
Hello! Welcome to the Knibbs Review of Books. I am happy you found your way here.
This newsletter went on hiatus last fall because I was spending all my free time fretting about what to do with my life instead of literally everything else. I decided what I needed to do was to get a new job. Then I got a new job! I’m extremely happy about it, but I’ve also been navigating that stressful “please don’t realize you made a mistake and fire me” newbie phase where most of my energy is dedicated to not sucking profusely at magazine journalism. I’m still in that phase, to be honest. However, now that we are in quarantine indefinitely, I think I need hobbies again. In fact, only an attention-consuming and slightly intimidating project that isn’t work will do. So: The blog is back, and better than ever! Read on:
A few springs ago, on the first true nice day out, a group of us went to Prospect Park. It was one of those moments when half of New York has the same brilliant idea— “relax outside”—and so the field was packed with dogs, toddlers, yuppies, stoners, college kids, and jocks. People leafed through paperbacks in the grass. They threw footballs. They ate mushrooms and giggled. They watched each other. Our group made a flotilla of adjoining picnic blankets and gossiped while passing around beers and chips. Later that afternoon, I took a luxurious amble home, wandering up Washington Avenue in an unhurried sunny-day daze. I stopped for bubble tea. I stopped to take shitty pictures of flowers. And I stopped when I found a copy of Robert Caro’s gigantic biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, lined up on a stoop next to some other discarded books. “Sweet,” I remember thinking, “I am definitely going to read this next, maybe even tonight.”
It was our second full year in Brooklyn and I figured it’d be pleasingly New York-y to read a thousand plus pages about Robert Moses, who had shaped the city in a major way. (According to the back of the book, which I scanned as I walked, Moses was “for almost half a century, the single most powerful man in New York’s history.”) He seemed a person worthy of study. Perhaps I would become a sort of amateur local historian!
The book sat unopened on our shelf for three years.
It probably would’ve languished like that forever, except that this week I realized I was looking like a half-woman/half-potato in our work Zoom meetings, and I needed to somehow remedy the situation. I tried to find a more flattering video-chat set-up by stacking the thickest books in the house underneath my laptop so the screen tilted at a less horrifying angle. This worked surprisingly well; I looked like a quarter-potato max by the end of it. I also finally picked up The Power Broker again, and decided not to put it back.
Over the next few weeks—or months, considering how fat this book is—I’ll be blogging about The Power Broker and New York. The book is divided into seven parts, so there will be at least seven installments. If you’ve been meaning to read it and have been letting your copy gather dust, please join me. If you are intrigued but need to order the book, I recommend using Bookshop.org if your local store is not delivering or doing pick-up.
If you already have a copy and open it up, you’ll see that it opens with maps of New York. These maps demonstrate Moses’ vast influence on how the city is organized. Some of my all-time favorite places in New York are on these maps, including the dreamy, perfect Jacob Riis Park in the Rockaways, and Pratt Campus in Clinton Hill. But Moses also destroyed communities and sapped public transit in favor of expressways. He knocked down beloved neighborhoods and erected awful slums and was by all accounts a reprehensible racist asshole. For all the beauty he brought to the city, he brought at least as much horror. “It is impossible to say that New York would have been a better city if Robert Moses had never lived,” Caro writes in the introduction. “It is possible to say only that it would have been a different city.”
Right now, New York feels like a different city than it did when I picked this book off a stoop with my bare hands. It’s so quiet, except for the constant sirens. The restaurants and boutiques are boarded up, and we cross the street to avoid getting too near to one another. Rubber gloves and masks are abandoned on curbs instead of cigarette butts and condoms. People still sit in the sun in Prospect Park, but none of the blankets are touching, and even exercising feels somber. People still take stuff from stoops, but they disinfect it first. This is a tough, necessary version of the city, the version it has to be as we try to protect each other. But, man. I hope this haunted, withdrawn iteration is a temporary state of affairs. In the meantime, it feels appropriate to read about how an older version was forged. I miss it so much.