why I have always wanted to read the PoBro

I’ve had The Power Broker on my bookshelf since the summer of 2007, when there was RoMo fever all over NYC. There was a new book coming out, and there was a huge exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. I picked up the colossal volume at the MCNY gift store and lugged it all the way home from E 103rd Street. I actually made it through a few chapters then-- can you believe, I took the book to Brighton Beach and read it while sunning.

At Vassar, Jacob and I were in a class together, The City in Fragments— and that class was about “non-monumental New York”. Although, I beg to inject that the housing projects at Far Rockaway are pretty monumental. We talked a lot about RoMo then, mostly about how evil he was. I think it's useful to paste the course description here, because it has shaped how I think about the city, and besides, this is where it all started.

The City in Fragments. In this seminar, we use the concept of the fragment to explore the contemporary city, and vice versa. We draw on the work of Walter Benjamin, for whom the fragment was both a central symptom of urban modernity and a potentially radical mode of inquiry. We also use the figure of the fragment to explore and to experiment with the situationist urbanism of Guy Debord, to address the failure of modernist dreams for the city, and to reframe the question of the “global” in contemporary discussions of global urbanization. Finally, we use the fragment to destabilize notions of experience and evidence—so central to positivist understandings of the city—as we make regular visits to discover, as it were, non-monumental New York. Readings include works by Walter Benjamin, Stefano Boeri, Christine Boyer, Guy Debord, Rosalyb Deytsche, Paul Gilroy, Rem Koolhaas, Henri Lefebvre, Thomas Lacquer, Saskia Sassen, Mark Wigley, and others. Ms. Brawley, Mr. Chang.

I moved to Brooklyn, and first lived in an apartment building on an onramp to the Prospect Expressway. This stub expressway is a bridge to nowhere (it ends after a couple of miles, depositing cars on Ocean Parkway) and a reminder that RoMo didn’t succeed at everything, as his goal was to have the road extended all the way to Coney Island. It is annoying and dangerous to live next to a highway onramp, and I only wonder what it was like to have been a resident in this neighborhood as the highway was being proposed and built.



In the last two and a half years, I have traveled to many of the Moses sites in NYC, some with frequency. Shore Promenade underneath the Verrazano Bridge, Far Rockaway, and Red Hook are especially memorable. I like these lonely waterfront spots because they are the edge of the city, still the city but definitely not the suburbs, quiet and village-like, with an open expanse of the ocean or the Buttermilk Channel. I don’t think there is anything like this anywhere else in the USA; most places in the USA don’t deal with the “edge” of a city. These places are extremely moving; it’s a monumental sort of desolation. Was RoMo the proto- city condenser? I guess not unless he had proposed turning Red Hook into an urban farm.

I want to see if Robert Moses has done any good. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt.