Triborough

I had planned to begin The Power Broker on Tuesday but events beyond my control precluded that from happening.

My neighbor, an elderly and amusingly racist Hungarian man with an Ecuadorian wife of formidable indigenous extraction—an improbable coupling only made possible by Queens, New York City, USA—asked me to drive the happy couple to JFK for their annual trip to Budapest Tuesday morning. I agreed, good neighbor that I am, with the belief that this would only take a small bite out of my day. I'd have plenty of time for the book. But when the aging Inca reached the check-in desk and realized she had grabbed an old passport that had expired nine years previously a series of unfortunate events transpired that kept me busy helping these two unfortunates get to Budapest for two whole days.

The details of this misadventure with the dotards are immaterial. I only share the story to say that during my multiple travels to and from John F. Kennedy International Airport, I enjoyed the sights of outer borough New York City as seen from the Grand Central Parkway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Long Island Expressway. All of these, reports the introduction to The Power Broker, which I finally got around to reading this morning, were built by Robert Moses.

As I am wont to do while contemplating this great metropolis, and with the standstill traffic between my apartment and the airport there was plenty of time for contemplation, I fell into an imperial reverie about the awesome nature of this city.

Is there a more imposing skyline than Manhattan which rises over the horizon like a parliament of Titan Gods as one drives west over the Grand Central Parkway? Hell, even my outer borough neigbhorhood's "downtown" is bigger and more impressive than most American real downtowns. What engineering feat is more expressive of mankind's creative genius than this colossal city? None. And then, of course, the relentless, Whitmanesque barbaric yalp that screams $1.3 trillion worth of economic dynamism at you from all sides and at all times from our wildly diverse people and their infrastructure. It's a soul-blistering circus and I love it.

So then: how to reconcile the fact that New York City is a peerless global alpha city with Caro's subtitle for this book: The Fall of New York? The pessimism of this subtitle runs throughout the introduction and culminates in a passage related to its antique epigraph: "In the evening of Robert Moses' forty-four years of power, New York, so bright with promise forty-four years before, was a city in chaos and despair." I see only a beautiful chaos and the only despair I'm familiar with are the lamentations born of an encounter with the olfactory nightmare that is Bangladeshi cuisine.

The answer to the question of how to reconcile the book's subtitle with the greatness of the city is found in the year of the book's publication and Caro's undeniable strengths as a nonfiction writer.

First, this book was published in the Fear City era of New York. The Bronx was burning. Crime and disorder was rampant. The Mets were terrible. The city was a mess. Secondly, in my opinion, Caro is arguably the greatest writer of nonfiction in the English language. He writes with the eye and ear of a novelist and like a good novelist he understands the need for a good villain. Who better, then, to blame 1970s era NYC dysfunction on than Bob Moses?

So I'll be reading the book through the lens of a Tolstoyan anti-great man theory of history and with the idea that Caro needed a villain to explain the dire straits the city found itself in during the time of the writing of the book.

Any disagreement I might have with Caro though certainly won't detract from my enjoyment of the book. I'm already in love with it. Caro is great. In particular his description of Randall's Island surrounded by a protective "moat."