Politics
The Power Broker at 50
Robert Caro’s hugely influential book still resonates with politicians and public officials in New York City today.
Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look at “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro, which has its 50th anniversary this month, and hear what it means to New York officials.
Robert Caro, the author of “The Power Broker,” at the East Hampton Library in August.Credit…Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for East Hampton Library
Once you’ve read “The Power Broker,” it’s hard not to see the legacy of Robert Moses everywhere you look.
I read the book in 2016 when I reported on the Second Avenue subway, which opened then in Manhattan nearly a century after it was first proposed. I wanted to know why New York City stopped expanding the subway in the 1960s and learned about the car-loving reign of Moses, painstakingly detailed by Robert Caro over 1,246 pages.
As the book hits its 50th anniversary this month, it is still beloved in political circles and serves as a Rorschach test for diagnosing what ails the city and how to fix it.
Brad Lander, the city comptroller who is running for mayor against Eric Adams next year, read it in 1993 with a group of young planners and immediately took a daylong driving tour of places mentioned in the book “touching all five boroughs, and ending on Randall’s Island, where Moses collected the tolls that were the coin of his realm.”
