Introduction and Chapter 1

Introduction: Wait Until the Evening
Caro opens the volume with an anecdote about Moses’ time on the Yale Swim Team. Apparently the guy has been pushy and egomaniacal since then. RoMo walked out on the swim team because he didn’t get his way about funding. This “my way or the highway” character trait remained with him through his years in “public service” (a rather tenuous phrase constantly used to describe RoMo’s career aspirations). He threatened to walk out on Mayor Wagner when he didn’t an appointed office. Of course by then, RoMo was the man in charge, so he got his way. Through these anecdotes and a long listing of Moses’ built works, Caro paints the image of Moses as a empire-builder drunk on power, obsessed with his own immortality. He even goes as far to say that RoMo shaped ALL the cities of America, influencing national policy on urban highways and state parks. Moses gained his power from assembling a loophole organization; the Public Authority. The problem with Moses’ work, Caro declares, is that “He had built great monuments and great parks, but people were afraid to travel to or walk around them.”

Part I: The Idealist
Line of Succesion
RoMo was born on 12/18/1888 (very auspicious birthday: all the 8s). He was born to a storied German-Jewish New York family. His grandmother, Rosalie Silverman was well-off and academic. Bella, Rosalie’s daughter and Robert’s mother, was also rich and a patron of Lower East Side settlement homes. Bella is painted as a RoMo type—she becomes interested in the power she amasses from volunteering with these homes, and she has a unusual interest in physical construction. Robert was actually born in New Haven, to where he would return to attend Yale. He grows up in “snug luxury” and he is close to his mother, from whom he gains the stubbornness, aggressiveness, and arrogance.