Robert Moses is a mythical figure, and people cling to myths. So I will continue to believe my favourite myth about this dark master of 20th-century city-building, even though Hilary Ballon of Columbia University, the great New Yorker's new champion, says it just ain't true.
Yes, she allowed, it's true that Mr. Moses built his opulent and impregnable headquarters on an island in the shadow of his mighty Triborough Bridge, but not directly underneath the toll booth, as durable myth contends. The headquarters was off by itself. So it couldn't be true, the scholar indulgently explained, that the master crafted his lair in such a way that he could hear the clunk of every nickel as it tumbled from the booths above down into the vast hoard below, the single source of all his fabled power.
One nickel at a time, a relentless drip into the treasury of a fiefdom bizarrely immune to political interference - a personal treasure leveraged with Ponzi-style recklessness - turned Mr. Moses into "the only person in New York capable of funding large public construction projects," according to Wikipedia. And with that power he wrought wonderful and terrible works, culminating in the tragedy of the neighbourhood-busting Cross-Bronx Expressway.
That isn't quite true either, according to Prof. Ballon, who has earned her own fame by revising the previously definitive image of Mr. Moses crafted by Robert A. Caro in his 1974 biography The Power Broker. "If Mr. Moses weren't there," she said, treading confidently into the counterfactual after an enlightening lecture at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre, "the Cross-Bronx would have been built anyway."
Given the same licence, I say it doesn't really matter whether or not Mr. Moses actually heard those coins tumbling down copper chutes behind the mahogany panelling of his inner sanctum. That indelible image remains necessary because it so brilliantly communicates the fundamental lesson Mr. Moses can teach Toronto today.
Some revisionists, following the same line as the three Moses-related exhibitions Prof. Ballon curated in New York this year, take the lesson to be that Jane Jacobs - the great democrat who finally brought Mr. Moses down - was wrong about cities. Thus their prescription for a "stalled" Toronto, where nothing seems to happen: Less of that darned democracy.
The medicine takes many forms, "public-private partnership" being the current fave, but is invariably intended to dissolve the entrenched power of petty interests and individuals allegedly blind to the greater good - the messy urban irregulars Mr. Moses derided "as partisans, enthusiasts, crackpots, fanatics and other horned cattle" ... the "hare-brained dreamers" with their "excited, maggoty brains," "a bunch of mothers."
Jane Jacobs, et al., in so many words.
"The critics build nothing," Mr. Moses sneered.
The opposition of the two views is clear, the lesson less so. As Prof. Ballon made clear, Mr. Moses' passion was always the public interest, and his accomplishment was "the most dramatic expansion of the public domain the government had ever attempted." He was an idealistic reformer active in the administrations of governor Al Smith and mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, which served as the urban embryo of the New Deal, and emerged in the 1930s as a hero of major social reform enacted by big government.
Like Jane Jacobs after him, Robert Moses proved the axiom that successful social reform at any scale is always rooted in urban activism.
At his best and worst, Mr. Moses was so obsessively committed to public enterprise he seems eerily Canadian. Toronto philanthropist Alan Broadbent compared him with Adam Beck, the tyrannical crusader who nationalized Ontario's electrical utilities. Even more apt is Fred "Big Daddy" Gardiner, founding chairman of Metro Toronto, who implemented a Moses-inspired agenda as radical as the original and, in some ways, even more thoroughgoing.
In this myth, revised to suit a local audience, Jane Jacobs becomes our salutary Yankee, deeply democratic and skeptical of big government. Her lesson to Canadians was that social reform needn't and indeed shouldn't depend on big government, which was a novel concept in the land of the
Social Gospel.
But that's not the lesson we get from Mr. Moses, that other great reformer of 20th-century New York. The hare-brained dreamers of Toronto still value public enterprise, and they know what needs doing, beginning with a rail-based transportation plan as radical as Mr. Moses' expressways. We get that part.
The lesson from Mr. Moses is simple: Follow the money. Grab it and use it.
It's the tolls, stupid.