The Power Broker, Part III: The Rise to Power
"Meet me in Montauk"
Much to my delight, this section includes a tossed-off aside about how former New York governor Al Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt had a “blood feud.” I plan on spending at least three hours in a Wikipedia fugue investigating that particular antagonistic relationship. (Love a good blood feud! Also love to learn more about the life and times of FDR.) Caro veers into a mini-bio of Smith as he explains how he mentored Moses. It’s all interesting stuff. The gov was an Irish-American autodidact from the slums who yanked himself up the political ladder through a combination of grinding wonkery, back-slap charisma, and flexible morals. But what I want to focus on from this part of the book is something else—Moses falling in love with Long Island. Because Long Island rules! And this is my personal blog!
Ever since we moved to Brooklyn, Charlie and I have taken a weekend trip to Montauk in early May, to celebrate his birthday. Montauk is the town on the far tip of Long Island, well past the Hamptons, sticking out into the Atlantic. The area is a summertime hotspot now, too, so we’ll probably never be able to afford to stay there during the high season. (The concentration of Instagram influencers during the summer seems kind of awful anyways.) In the spring, it’s too cold to pose in bikinis, and it tends to get very windy, so the crowds stay away. But it’s great weather for biking and hiking and taking a mug of wine down to the beach at night, so we show up.
I was obsessed with Montauk in high school due to the classic film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which convincingly portrays Montauk as a mystical lovers’ escape. (Sorry for using the word “lovers,” it will not happen again.) That movie also convinced me that poorly applied Manic Panic and having a light drinking problem were also extremely cool, but that’s okay! No movie is perfect!
When I realized that getting to Montauk from Clinton Hill is easy—we can walk to Atlantic Terminal from our place, and from there it’s a straight shot on the Long Island Railroad—I planned the first trip. While Charlie does not really care about the iconoclastic screenwriting of Charlie Kaufman, he loves hiking and biking and taking a mug of wine down to the beach at night, and we had so much fun that we made it an annual thing.
We’ve biked to the picture-perfect lighthouse, around Camp Hero and Hither Hills, and to the bay side’s waterfront crab shacks. Our hotel is right on the water, next to craggy bluffs, which locals call “hoodoos” and I call “so beautiful they almost make me cry.” Surfers in wetsuits bob on longboards year-round, and I always say that next year I’ll definitely do a surf lesson. This year I really would’ve done the surf lesson. I swear.
Anyways—The Power Broker. As this section makes clear, sneaky ole Robert Moses is the reason we can go to Montauk at all. As he gained more clout and began positioning himself to make bigger moves, his “burning eyes were looking at everything on Long Island in terms of parks.” He would not be deterred by the simple fact that the world’s wealthiest people controlled access to the area at the time.
Caro explains how the robber baron inhabitants of Long Island’s shorelines made it impossible for poor and working-class people from the city to visit their beaches. They’d drive hours in traffic and get turned away by local cops who claimed only residents could access the water. Moses, although he was still an enormous snob, thought this was bogus, especially after spending more and more time on Long Island and realizing how much land and shoreline was sitting unused by the gilded dickheads. So he did what he loved doing most: he wrote a sprawling, obscenely comprehensive report, outlining a plan to completely remake the entire region. “The report was a seminal document in the history of parks in America,” Caro writes, calling its scope “revolutionary.”
Moses proposed a unified park system for the entire state, costing a cuckoo amount of money ($15 million, which is over $200 million today) and creating an unheard-of constellation of public lands with himself at the helm. The scheme was just as grandiose and impossible-sounding as his earlier attempts to transform municipal workings, but this time Moses had learned a thing or two about how to get people to listen to him, and he had Smith’s backing. The plan was so popular with the public that the politicians, including Smith, realized it’d be stupid not to support it, even though it was absurdly expensive, totally unprecedented, and would lead to huge conflicts with the ruling class.
I’m sure as we keep reading I’ll find plenty of reasons to hate his haughty ass again, but I feel so grateful to Moses for making Montauk accessible. I can’t wait to see it again next May.
PB is a seminal work and I'm happy to see new generations finding it. Caro is an exceptional writer. You aren't bad, yourself.