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Among Moses’s early works were the eleven public pools he built in New York City in 1936. Beautifully re-photographed in their present state, they appear at the beginning of Robert Moses and the Modern City, a new catalogue and scholarly assessment of Moses’s work published in conjunction with three exhibitions (curated by Hillary Ballon) revisiting his career and impact on New York City. Inaugurated over the course of a sweltering summer 70 years ago, the pools today still teem with swimmers. The solid, dignified brick pavilions, housing locker rooms and showers, validate the editors’ claim that Moses “set a standard of high-quality design that remains unmatched to this day.” That the pools should take a place among the greatest works of civic architecture in the U.S. is all the more surprising for their relative obscurity: these are neighborhood centers scattered throughout the five boroughs, serving a local public - not international icons like the United Nations Headquarters or Lincoln Center, more striking marks of Moses on Manhattan. But in terms of their architectural integrity and original purpose, the pools seem to be holding up well, better adapted to changing times than the U.N. headquarters, in desperate need of renovation, and Lincoln Center, which is undergoing an architectural “reactivation” to deal with the demands of contemporary life.

Yet there is a second point to be gleaned from the new photographs. The vast majority of people in the pools and their associated gyms have dark skin. This makes perfect sense in light of the pools’ location and the city’s demographics, but in light of Moses’s history and reputation, they give pause. The pools, monuments of an expanded public realm, have also been singled out as early proof of Moses’s contempt for the public he served, and of his racism. In the depths of the Depression, Moses insisted on charging an admissions fee to use the pools (today they are free). And in these pools for all, the Parks Department enforced segregation through a practice called flagging, where only white lifeguards were hired in order to dissuade blacks and Puerto Ricans from swimming. Still worse, legend has it that at Jefferson Pool in East Harlem, a site of growing racial tensions, Moses ordered that the water temperature be kept cold, because blacks allegedly couldn’t stand to swim in it. These accusations prompted Marta Gutman, author of an essay on the pools, to collect oral histories and scour early film footage of the pools in a search for evidence of segregation. Films from the 1930s and ’40s, she reports, show some mixing of races, though more often than not, pools were exclusively white. As far as the cold water charges, Gutman reports that Jefferson Pool, like all the others, “was capable of being heated,” though there is no way to know if it actually was.

The water temperature at Jefferson Pool circa 1940 seems like a minor question for such extensive historical investigations, but there is more at stake in setting the record straight. So much of Moses’s work has been permanently tarnished by stories like this one, most constructed or disseminated by Robert Caro. The Power Broker, his 1974 biography of Moses, was until now the final, damning word on the man and his works. Moses hated people. Moses loved power. And so Moses, with the myriad strategies he devised for the purpose of wielding power, ran roughshod over the city, single-handedly imposing his megalomaniacal, misanthropic vision and bringing about, as Caro calls it, “the fall of New York.”

At almost 1200 pages, The Power Broker catalogues every twist and turn in Moses’s long life, from his idealist, progressive youth to the corruption of power and his ultimate fall from grace. Caro’s exhaustive research and interviews unveil the machinations behind Moses’s projects - and their consequences. Chronicling the construction of a one-mile stretch of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, for instance, Caro interviewed 127 residents and former residents of the East Tremont section of the Bronx. The resulting chapter is a devastating tale of rampant injustice, lives and neighborhoods destroyed, and spiraling urban decay wrought by one man’s intransigent obsession with highways. Moses’s refusal to divert the trajectory of his road the negligible distance from a dense neighborhood to the edge of a park resulted in the wholesale and unnecessary eviction of hardworking Jewish hatters and storekeepers and their families - who had the will but not the resources to fight city hall. As a result, their poor but functional neighborhood transformed into a bombed-out nightmare. Caro’s model of causation for urban decline is unsophisticated, to put it mildly; he insists that ultimately Moses is exclusively to blame for the fall of the South Bronx.

But Caro is telling a tale of “the effects of power on personality,” not a history of postwar urban planning. That history shows plainly that Moses was not the only one to dispossess city residents for roads or to embrace other aggressive forms of urban renewal unreservedly. As historian Kenneth Jackson argues in his contribution to the new book, “the great builder simply was swimming with the tide of history.” After the Second World War, many American cities were reconfigured by highway construction and unsettled by urban renewal - often to a greater degree than New York. Slum clearance and expressways were not Moses’s inventions but rather projects tied to federal funding and legislation, undertaken by cities across the country and implemented by many different people and organizations. In this new collection of essays, Moses is seen as a supremely effective builder, not a deranged visionary. He should be judged not on personality or morality, but on what he built.

Robert Moses and the Modern City catalogues and illustrates Moses’s oeuvre in New York City - every pool, beach, neighborhood playground, city park, road and crossing, housing and urban renewal project, along with some miscellaneous ones, like the U.N. headquarters or the Queens Museum’s diorama of New York City - each with a lengthy explanatory and historical entry. (His vast projects on Long Island and upstate fall outside the scope of the book and exhibitions.) The cumulative effect is formidable, with more than 150 pages of projects. And not only are pools and parks redeemed, but highways, reconsidered from a technical-rational point of view, figure favorably. Thus, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, destroyer of urban fabric, becomes, according to the highway’s entry in the book, a “vital link in the city’s modern transport system.” And history strips Moses of authorial control: the road had already appeared in the 1929 Regional Plan of New York - if Moses hadn’t built it, someone else would have. The conflict over the “one mile” in East Tremont becomes representative not only of Moses’s power and inflexibility, but also of “the preeminence of three planning objectives: facilitating regional traffic flows, protecting parks, and reducing residential densities in low-income neighborhoods.” The importance of people, in this re-revision of Moses’s history, fades in comparison to the over-arching planning principles of the day.

How can we see the Cross-Bronx in this light after all that Caro has told us? Behind any critical reappraisal is the passage of time, and in New York, time has healed many wounds. The year 1974 was perhaps New York’s darkest hour, and it is easier to blame a city’s ills on one man than on vague patterns of deindustrialization, disinvestment, and decentralization. The elevated Cross-Bronx Expressway became a “vantage point for motorists to survey the 1970s urban crisis,” as the catalogue’s encyclopedic entry points out. The abandoned and burned-out buildings visible from it were, for many, “the public face of urban tragedy.” Today, the city appears to be recovering. As drivers speeding (or crawling) across the expressway toward the George Washington Bridge look out on new construction, the idea of the expressway itself has become much more palatable. The defeat of Moses’s mid- and lower- Manhattan expressways in the mid-1960s, and the subsequent flourishing of neighborhoods like SoHo, also helps us to appreciate Moses from a safe distance. History and organized opposition prevented him from leaving a more damaging legacy. Jackson goes so far as to credit Moses with providing the material conditions not for New York’s fall but for its subsequent rise.

Jackson’s analysis seems correct in the sense that Moses provided the material preconditions for New York’s development as a world city, a cultural capital for a post-industrial age and an oasis for the affluent. As New York’s growth continues - the population is expected to reach 9 million in 2030 - we may only grow more nostalgic for other aspects of Moses’s reign.

In reassessing his work, we might take some comfort in the fact that urban forms can be retooled. If their maker’s motives were compromised, redressing certain wrongs can still make them the pleasure grounds of an expanded urban public.

This article appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!