Robert is joined again by Bridget Todd to continue to discuss Robert Moses.
Oh, Holy leading Jesus on a cross, his legs broken. That's the podcast. Stabbed in the side by a spear. That's a different that's a different show. Holy that Jesus. I'm Robert Evans. Are you? I am Robert Evans, the Jesus of podcasting, crucified, crucified by the need to make content, which I do for your souls in the same way that Jesus died. I'm sorry you're fired. I feel like I feel like this is a good direction to go is do not. I think it's really going to work out for so if people love blasphemy, everybody's a big fan of blasphemy. That's what made the Beatles so huge. It was blasphemy. They were, in fact, bigger than Jesus speaking, a bigger than Jesus. Bridget Todd my guest today. I'm good with that, bro. Yeah, you know what, I'm gonna take it. I'll take that intro. I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, I mean you know the fuck him. Um, Bridget how are how are you doing? How how are you feeling as we go into part two? I'm feeling good. I have to, I was telling Sophie before we hit record I'm a little bit hungover, but I'm otherwise doing well. That's great. Um, I am hungover from uh taking a bunch of pain killers last night after laser eye surgery. Um. Just like bridget all, it was an open bar. Oh ship ye man, open bar. Had a minute since I had me an open bar. I love great Goose Martini's I can't be trust bar. Um. So let's uh, what do we what do we? What do we bridget? When we last left off, we're talking about that Jones State Park, the overpasses that he built real low. Um, We're and like kind of the debate to it about it to this day and kind of the shitty arguments people make to be like, no, he had to make the bridges too low for busses. It was prettier that way. Um. So yeah, and it's it's it's kind of like as we kind of talk about the degree to which it's fair to blame Moses for making bridges too low, and you'll find again, you can find a ton of there's like this whole wave in the last couple of years and people being like, actually, Robert Moses did nothing wrong and like it's unfair to critique him for that, they all tend to ignore the fact that not only did he like build his bridges super low, but he drafted because again he's the legislation guy. Right, He's really good at writing laws. One of the things he did was he drafted and passed legislation to forbid the use of busses on parkways. UM because again he wants to cut off where poor people can travel to um. And and this is like, uh, he considered, you know, this was part of his This was part of his kind of plan to silo off poor people of color from white people in the places white people went affluent white people in particular, because he was not just racist, he was classist. UM. And laws like that kind of like trying to restrict busses on parkways where something he would do as like an emergency stop gap because he couldn't funk around with like construction everywhere. Um. But he considered those laws a lot less useful in stopping poor people and particularly poor people of color um, from living around white people than he did physical construction. Um. Again, you can change a law. A law can be changed overnight, as we're all currently dealing with, right. Um. It takes as a court of returning something or a legislature voting infrastructure has a long lifespan, right, Um, This is why you know he constructed something like a hundred and seventy two hundred and eighty bridges that were too low for buses. Um, and he saw that kind of thing is much more important. He was quoted often is saying, quote, legislation can also be changed. It's very hard to tear down a bridge once it's up, um, and Moses found it considerably easier, in fact, to tear down the homes of poor black people, which he did regularly as part of his construction schemes. His justification for this was always the need to create a massive network of urban highways within New York City. The number one thing that he did, the thing that people remember him fondly for, is he made all these bridges and parks. The thing he spent most of his time doing was building urban highways, because again, he hates public transportation. He fucking loves cars. And not only do urban highways lead to congestion, UM, lead to a city in which a lot of people have to have cars that would probably be happier living off a public transportation. What you can do with a highway is you can use it as a wall, because the highway is a very effective physical barrier. Right, you can't like run across the highway, He'll get fucking killed. Um. And so he was. He not only built these highways and kind of tried to wrench away progress in New York from towards public transportation, but and and in favor of like everyone having their own fucking car. But he used the highway to wall off poor, majority black parts of the city from affluent white ones. And he also made sure that whenever he was constructing a highway, because again you're adding a highway to a city that's already quite dense, you have to destroy a lot of houses, you have to bulldoze neighborhoods. And it just so happened that all of the neighborhoods he destroyed, uh in order to make his urban highways were majority black. Um. Now, Robert Carro argues that Moses purposefully placed roots in such a way as to demand that it would demand the eviction of large numbers of non white people living in places he didn't want them to live, particularly neighborhoods that bordered upper class white neighborhoods um and he would do this even when the route he picked, even when like going through these neighborhoods, was hideously inefficient. A great example of this is the Cross Bronx Expressway, which I'm sure we're all familiar if you've been to New York, like, you know of the Cross Bronx Expressway. In order to build the Cross Bronze Expressway, they had to eliminate the neighborhood of East tremant Um. This one mile chunk of highway couldn't be constructed without evicting tens of thousands of people, most of whom were black. Under Moses's reign, these people were forced out of their homes five years before construction was completed, and the eviction was brutal. People did not want to give up their neighborhood for this road, as pa Rights quote now, and this is after people were forced out, sometimes by police with weapons. Now, East Trement looked as London might have looked after the if after the bombs troops had fought their way through it from house to house. It had the look of a jungle. Now. Later in The Power Broker, Carol alleges that quote during the seven years since the end of World War Two, there had been evicted from their homes in New York for public works, mainly Robert moseses public works some hundred and seventy thousand persons. He suspects this number is actually quite low. A report published more recently by the New York City Planning Commission describes this process overseen by Moses, as an enforced population displacement, unlike any previous population movement in the city's history. Um, you could see this as an act of ethnic cleansing, and it is in a lot of way, and it's but it's done under the auspices of what we're improving the city. This is going to make it better for everybody. We have to add in these roads. We're paying people for their houses even if they don't want to sell them, and we have to like force them out using police. I'm going to quote now from a write up by Poverty Justice Solutions that makes it clear just how fucked up the demographics on this were. The evicted population was forty black or Hispanic at a time when those demographics made up only a little over ten percent of the city's overall population, meaning that a large proportion of the evicted tenants faced extreme discrimination and finding new housing, and little arrangement was made by the city to help evicted tenants find new housing. Carol tells us for seven years, Moses had been giving the impression that the bulk of the low income families displaced by his public works had been accommodated in public housing projects. In reality, it was found that the percentage of displaced families placed in public housing was pathetically small. Many tenants were forced to crammond already crowded tenement buildings nearby, exacerbating conditions caused by poverty and allowing exploitative landlords to reap huge profits. In the worst cases, tenants were forced to shelter in their old neighborhoods as they were being torn down, surrounded by the deafening noise of demolitions, and often without basic utilities. A member of the Women's City Club investigating the Manhattan Town development on the Upper West Side described people living in a scene that looked like a cross section of bombed out Berlin. Right after World War Two. Some of the tenements were still standing, broken windows gaped cyclessly at the sky basement doors, yawning and covered on the sidewalks, and surrounding them were acres strewn with brick and mortar and rubble where wreckers and bulldozers had been at work. So that's heart I mean, like that's heartbreaking. And also even if those people have gone into like public housing and like housing projects, that's not ideal. And the fact that they that that wasn't even really what was happening. They were being crowded into tenements and things like that, Like I can only imagine the lasting legacy that that is that had on those families for generations. I mean, that's that's so heartbreaking. They're being made refugees in the city they were born in um and it's you can find pictures of this period of time and they're they're pretty harrowing. They look like war zone photos. It will be like, you know, you'll see pictures of like three or four little black kids sitting on like a pile of like rocks next to like a burnt out shell of a building, and it's usually framed. Especially when like it's brought up, it's like this is how bad New York was before, like the city got poverty under and got crime under control, and like all this stuff. It's like no, no no, no, this is how ugly the city was after they went to war with like several neighborhoods in order to build a highway so that people didn't have to get on a train because Bob Moses didn't like trains. And then that's why this happens. Yeah, yes, And then that sentiment that like false sentiment of like oh, this is how the city was before they got it under control, that's used to like usher in all manner of really fucked up policies, Like it's such a fucked up cycle of that really has criminalizing and targeting poor people and black people and people of color at the heart of it. And it's yeah, it really breaks my heart. Yeah, it's really fucked up. Um. And when Bob Moses wasn't busy displacing Black New Yorkers, he was deliberately routing roads in such a way as to clog their neighborhoods, like heavily black neighborhoods, with pollution and traffic. He specifically built the road in a highway system of New York as to offload the majority of the traffic and thus the pollution on black neighborhoods. The Yale Law Journal notes that he placed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridges exit ramp and Harlem when a better location would have been the Upper east Side. The only reason to locate it in Harlem was to stop traffic from exiting and wealthy neighborhoods and instead crowd Harlem with traffic headed for the bridge, right. And I'm sure that when asked he was like, Oh, the aesthetics are just better this way. It just looks better this way. It looks better this way. This is going to be like you know, he would They always have some wonky reason why it's not racism, right, m hmm, but it just keeps happening this way. Um, when he constructed the Long Island Expressway, it would have cost Moses four more to add mass transit in the middle of the highway, right, to like add a mass transit line in the middle of the highway. Four percent increase. And we already know Bob Moses is great at getting his budgets increased, right, right, So when he builds the Long Island Expressway for four percent more, they could add mass transit to the highway. This would have doubled the carrying capacity of the Long Island Railroad, massive improvement and the ability of New York's public transportation. Moses is presented with this option um and says no. When he was designing the Van Wick Expressway to the JFK Airport, he was asked to reserve space for future mass transit. Basically like, for an extra two million dollars, we can add space into this development so that in the future we can add mass transit and it will be cheap, right, um, And the two million bucks would have cost is again a peddling some given the budgets involved in the potential benefit. Uh, he says no, And again he could have done it back in like the fifties for two million dollars. Instead, years later, when the city priced adding a rail link, they were quoted three million. This is one of the concept. This is part of what because of the way he builds the highways and build the roads and builds the parks in the city, one of the things that it does because he hates public transit. It's part of why it's so fucking expensive today to make any change to New York City. And there's other reasons, right, there's permitting and why. There's a bunch of reasons why. One of them is that Moses specifically puts a bunch of ship in the city that he builds without even though he has the option without any like without space for a public transit, because he hates it, right, And that's part of why it's so expensive to expand anything in the city. Again, not trying to say that's the whole thing. This is a complicated story, but he's this is a significant factor in it, and it's it's still very hard today. Like it's like a lasting legacy, and it is really wild to me. I know that you've said this a few times, but like hating public transit while being in charge of public transit and like never taking public he's in charge of the parks. Well yes, but that that also means that he gets to be in charge as they're building these roads and these things that like connect you know, all of this stuff. Like as he's doing these developments, he gets to make decisions about public transit. Again, he's not in charge of technically anything but the parks. This is all the way he's like wielding power because of he's he's he's not None of this is formal right. None of this is like him issuing executive orders. This is all him sitting down and talking to people are like using the flex at the park depart Parks Department has pushing his budgets like threatening people who are elected with like well, if this doesn't get done, it's gonna look bad. Like that's how he does all of this. Um So, the New York City bridges that are built under Robert Moses, which are the Tribe Borough, the Verrizono, the Henry Hudson, throgs Neck, and Bronx white Stone, all became iconic symbols of the city, and all of them are built without a mass transit component. Moses repeatedly shut down proposals to add this capacity whenever it came up, and he also acted to hamper the subway system whenever possible. On two occasions, the city attempted to build a second Avenue subway line. Both times Moses stopped them from using funds which he controlled, to pay for the project. He instead diverted the money to bridges and high ways. In nineteen fifty five, the transportation budget Moses Shepherd it was large enough to modernize the Long Island Railroad and build two new tunnels under the Hudson, and I'm gonna quote again from the power broker here, it would have been more than enough to build a long, proposed and desperately needed Second Avenue subway, and to build a tunnel along across the East River through which a branch of the Second Avenue line would extend out to Queens to provide adequate subway service there, and to build extensions of the existing subway lines to Queens to provide service for the hundreds of thousands of residents of Eastern Queens who were miles away from the nearest subway, And to extend the Nostrand Avenue subway in Brooklyn three miles along Flatbush Avenue to a new modern terminal that would serve the growing Mill basin area that possessed no rapid transit at all. And to construct a new plaza and great elimination project at the Calb Avenue that would eliminate switching delays which caused the most severe bottleneck and train service between Brooklyn and Manhattan. So he he has the budget, he has can do all this right. This could have all been in place decades ago in New York City, but instea of using it for that, Moses ensures the money is diverted to build more highways. He takes the money that could have gone and he builds more fucking roads for people's personal cars. Um. And again his justification for this is always this is going to solve traffic. This is going to help people's commute time, right right, like that, Yeah, what a joke. It never does, right, raise your hand listening at home, if you've been in a city that expanded a highway and if it actually helped with your commute, it never does, like if they always say that, it never does. And the traffic in New York, as you said Earl as you opened the show with it, is a nightmare to this day. Yeah, it never quite seems to work. Um the because again, cars are actually a hideously inefficient way of getting large numbers of people around a dense urban area. Um so yeah, And this becomes clear eventually city officials are like, wait a minute, none of these roads are helping with the traffic problem. The in fact, the more roads that he builds, the worst traffic gets because and also the more cars are just in the city that need parking, that are like and so parking is now more expensive and the streets are even more crowded, and yeah, um people do start as like this becomes clear and the fifties and stuff pushing for him to add more public transit, but Moses, for forty years, fights it every chance he gets. Right, He doesn't always get his way, but he always fights whenever he whenever it like crosses his purview. He fights to limit the expansion of public transit because like, fuck people, you know, I have a driver, right, I don't want to get all I'm not gonna get on a subway. No, I mean, the whole justification really is fun. People. He probably has no sense of what like the ways that expanding public transit would actually improve cities and improve livability. He can't because again, he doesn't drive. So that's the other part of this. He takes a car everywhere, but a dude is driving him when he needs to get somewhere. He has a fucking driver because he never learns how to drive, So that also means he never has to park. Like's not he is. He is. He is because of his wealth and privilege, completely immune to the consequences of all the decisions he's making. So he just gets to like, well, when I'm on the highway, I just get to like read my book or you know, work on paperwork or something, and then off I go. And this seems like a good development. No more nasty subways. You know, he sucks pretty bad. He sucks pretty bad, Bridget. But you know who doesn't suck pretty bad? You know who sucks good? They suck incredibly these they could they could take the lug nuts off of an eighteen wheelers tires, Bridget. Who's that the products and services that support this podcast? Wow? So if you just let me get away with that one, she didn't stop it at all. Didn't stop it at all. Suck him right off, pop him out. Have the energy for this today? Well, our sponsors have the energy to do that, Sophie. Here they are. Oh, we're back, and we're talking about the mouth game of our sponsors, which is solid um anyway. So if he's still fine with us, Wow, she just muted herself. Incredible, just great, everybody's wow, what a professional podcast. Unbelievable. I can't believe you're allowing us. She gave me the thumbs up that means we're good to go. Okay, So obviously Bridget Moses is new Defenders cannot deny his staggering racism or the degree to which his policies contributed to a small, choked city based around the least efficient form of transit conceivable. But they will argue, while he was not perfect, he did a lot of good things to and people don't note all of the good things he did for black people, right, he did a lot of nice stuff for black people. So really, like, how could he be that racist if he did nice things for black people helping us out? What do you do? Here's Bloomberg to tell you what he did? Okay, but Moses was complex. He gave Harlem a glorious pool and play center. Now Jackie Robinson Park one of the best public works of the New Deal era anywhere in the United States. A crowd of twenty five thousand attended the opening ceremony in August nineteen thirty six, sixty nine, regiment playing when the music goes Round and Round before park's commissioner, Moses was introduced to great applause by Bill bow Jangles Robinson. So this is undeniable, right, have you been to that park? Jackie Robinson's Yeah, it's a lovely Park. It's undeniable that, like he's the mastermind of making that happen. Um. But even while he's building things that carried real benefits to New York black citizens, he couldn't avoid the urge to be racist as all hell. And this quote from the Power Broker, you may need to brace yourself for here, all right, I'm strapped in Robert Moses had always displayed a genius for adorning his creations with little details that made them fit in with their setting, that made the people who use them feel at home in them. There was a little detail in the Playhouse comfort station of the Harlem section of Riverside Park that has found nowhere else in the park. The wrought iron trellises of the park's other playhouse and comfort stations are decorated with designs like curling waves. The wrought iron trellises of the Harlem Playhouse comfort station are decorated with monkeys. Oh my fucking god, not monkeys. I mean it's I mean, it's it's really saying the quiet part a loud, if you know what I mean. Yeah, it's it's not even yeah, it's not the quiet park for Bob Moses, Like well, It says a lot about New York City government culture too that like they're having they have there has to have been like a meeting where they're like, how should we uh and what what do you what do you want on these on these playground Treillis is in the Harlem side of the park, should we just add like the more of those wave designs? And He's like, no, no, no, let's put some monkeys in there. And everyone was just like, oh yeah, okay, go right along with it. They definitely had to have a meeting where this was decided and everybody agree it was a good idea that he must have signed off on it. All of that. Yeah, Now that Bloomberg quote, because again it's very funny to me as opposed to just saying that, like look his his Like anytime you talk about like a powerful white dude who's like Legacy was for a long time beloved but also was super fucked up, you have to call it complex um, which is I guess true because he was. He had a lot of power that he exercised in a variety of ways, and that is complicated. His racism isn't complicated the fact that he also made some playgrounds for black people is not does not make it complicated that he did all of this, other that he bulldozed neighborhoods and made people refugees. Right, it doesn't make it's like saying, hey, there was a complicated figure, right, he had he made some mistakes in Eastern Europe, But the Volkswagen is a pretty good car. Right. That's a complex legacy, you know, Like you wouldn't say that. Um, some people would say that, And Bloomberg fails to note in their talking about his complicated legacy that while Moses made two and fifty five playgrounds in New York City during the nineteen thirties, do you want to guess how many we're putting Harlem? Oh? How many? One? Uh, that's one more than I thought you were a park? What more do you want? Well, it really reminds me of how we started the previous episode about talking about sort of like how people can be like patronized in this way where it's like we'll give you a little something, but like you know, it's just crumbs, and we know it's just crumbs, and like you should still enjoy the park, and like you shouldn't turn up your nose at this park. But like you know, if you live in Harlem, you don't have, Like you live in Harlem, what more do you want? Do you want more than one park? Because like if you haven't noticed your poor so like yeah, and we need that space to to shotgun traffic into your neighborhood so the rich people don't have to see it and small and like keep you out. And this this was this by the way, Like obviously there's other black wound at neighborhoods in New York such as Stuyvesant Heights and South Jamaica in this period, and in both of those neighborhoods together he built a combined one park in the nineteen thirties. UH nineteen forty three grand jury investigation into the high crime rates in Stuyvesant in the neighborhood found one of the major causes was a complete lack of recreational facilities there, which again for nineteen forty three a pretty reasonable finding that like, well, yeah, one of the reasons crime is so high is there's fucking nothing to do, Like are our neighborhood is a parking lot, there's no parks, there's nowhere for people to like go be um so like kids get up to fucking ship. Um. Now, A stark example of how differently Moses valued projects meant for white and black people can be seen in the fact that he spent eight million dollars per mile on parks in the Western Manhattan Waterfront. These parks butted up against an almost all white neighborhood. Uh. Meanwhile, the four point seven mile stretch of the park that butted up against Harlem cost one point seven million per mile. So you've got this big long park, the Western Manhattan Waterfront Park, which is a huge park, eight million dollars per mile in the parts of the park that are next doors in white neighborhoods one point seven million per mile, and the parts that touch Harlem. Right, it's just very blatant when you actually look at the numbers. Um. Not a subtleman. Yeah, these these disparities are very stark. And again the fact that there are still people today who would look at his legacy and be like, oh, well, it's unfair to judge him by the standard, or it's very complex. It's like, no, it's not, it's not very complex. Well, and they make it part of like it is within their interest to make it seem complex. And part of how they do that, and this isn't just with Bob Moses, this is this is like what that kind of person does with everything is they'll zero in on some incredibly specific niche detail and so let's start arguing, like, well, what about this specific bridge, because this bridge, if you actually look at it, they say it's this height, but really it would have been this height at this point, and like if this bridge is that size, and like number one, they're ignoring a lot of other bridges. But also by zeroing in on this one thing that they can claim was was not wholly accurate about his legacy, they focus the discussion about this single rather than like the broad picture of how fucking racist the development that he engaged in was. And it's broad ranging consequences and they're always going to have with anything like this, one or two things they can redirect around, Like so the heart that they who built the best park in the city and it's in a black neighborhood and it's like, yeah, well, how many other parks city build in black neighborhoods, right, Like how much did you spend on I'm compared to the white neighborhoods right, but they don't. They don't want to have like again, this is just this is how you kind of redirect the topic of discussion and anger away from things people should be angry about and things that like have negatively impacted their lives, um and just try to be like, well, he was complicated, and we're not denying that there were problems with the man. But boy, look at look at the how nice this one park was, and look at how pretty these bridges are. And it's like, well, why don't those bridges have transit access or why did it cost an extra two million to put it in? And any way, Robert Moses operated with almost unchecked power until the late nineteen fifties, when resistance to his policies finally started to build. Uh and I'm gonna quote now from the Culture Trip. Often intransigent and prone to belligerence, Moses grew complacent. A series of flubs, such as a public tussle with the Shakespeare in the Park initiative, exposed him to criticism. More broadly, his rip it Up and Started Again approach to urbanism had begun to come under attack. His plan for a Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would see neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village and Soho leveled became a crisis point. Activists, including the journalist Jane Jacobs, who Moses never met but has come to be seen as his most eloquent nemesis, argued for a mixed use, street scaled, community conscious city rather than one driven from above by the all powerful planners. He was finally stripped of most of his offices in nineteen sixty two, when state Governor Nelson Rockefeller accepted a resignation that Moses had intended as a feint. By this time, he had become so despised that the destruction of Pennsylvania Station, which he had no hand in, were penned on his ideology. So he does like the tight of public opinion turns against him, But it's because he like Fox with Shakespeare in the Park and tries to build an expressway that would have destroyed Soho at Greenwich Village. Like it's because he got he like goes kind of mad with power, and people are like, well, number one, the folks that you're attempting to funk over with your policies has changed your exerting power against the folks. You're exerting power against are like wealthier than they used to be and wider than they used to be. So that's going to be a problem for you. Um, but yeah, it's it takes forty years of of of basically having total power over like construction in the city of New York for any of that to happen. Yeah, it's so funny to me that you say that he was even though he wasn't involved in Penn Station. It's like his his ideology is sort of what shaped it. I don't know if you have been to Penn Station lately, but there is not a fucking single place to just sit the funk down for one second. It's like, it's like I have never seen anything like it. And it's like even though he wasn't involved in that, in that redesign, but there's no place to sit. So he shaped And we're about to talk about this nationally, the attitudes towards how you use architecture and how you use the layout of a city to stop things like people sitting where you don't want them, right, like the wrong people sitting where you don't want them to sit, you know, exactly. And it's so fund up because like even if you're saying like, oh, we don't want on house people to be sitting here, blah blah blah. That's sucked up. But even if that's what you're going for, it makes the experience worse for everyone, right, Like everyone loses, well everyone but Bob Moses. I mean he eventually lost, but you know, and he does. One of the things that's nice is yeah, he gets he kind of ends his career in disgrace, like he he does a power play with Nelson Rockefeller and it's like, well, I'm going to resign if you don't do this, and Rockefeller is like okay. Um, So he doesn't get to destroy Soho or Gringach Village, which, depending on your opinions of those neighborhoods, could either be seen as a good or a bad thing. Um. He does live to see the publication in nineteen seventy four of The Power Broker by Robert Carrow, which effectively Sabbage, savages his reputation and paints him as an outrageous bigot. He spends his last years in a state of modest disgrace, rich white person disgrace until he dies in nineteen eighty one. By the time he passed, the New York City subway system was in a disastrous state of repair. The financial crisis of the nineteen seventies contributed to this, of course, but the fact that Moses has been decades worth of boom time money on choking highways played a larger role. One year after his death, the m t A announced a massive plan to revitalize the transit system. It has remained in a state of deferred maintenance ever since, right, Like this is I mean, you know, right, have you been? Right? Yeah? I love the New York City subway system, but it is not in It is in a state of disrepair, and it has been for a really long time. And it's it's a I guess we're talking about infrastructure from so long ago that it has never really been updated or modernized. No, and it part of why is because Bob Moses made it a lot harder to do it. And I'm gonna quote from a write up by Curb to kind of make that point. As Raskin says, we're still playing catch up from the mt A program initiated in the nineteen eighties, and the current stakes are much higher, as wridership levels recently hit the highest numbers since ninety eight. Just this week, the MTA began the slow process of addressing those issues. Chairman Joe Lhota revealed an eight hundred and thirty six million dollar, thirty point action plan to address the key drivers that account for subway delays and system failures. As he said in a press conference announcing the plan, we're here because the city New York City subway system is in distress. But some see it as too little, too late. Despite Moses's focus on highway development, modern day New York emerged as a city whose inhabitants depend not just on automobiles, but trains, buses, ferries, and bicycles. And the period of development under Moses stands as one of New York's great lost opportunities to invest in and expand public transit. Because when it comes to Moses, as Draper puts it, if he wanted to get it done, it absolutely would have been done. And that's what an indictment he had. This was again, there was more money back then, there was more money to put into and it was cheaper to do these developments. And when that we had this kind of precious period that would not wind up coming again. He poured all the money into highways that he made deliberately like difficult to add transit to. And that's like if you actually think this is not a man who like murdered people, right, But if you think about the lost human hours and like traffic and transit in New York City, I don't know if that seems like a body count, right, especially comedy people died by getting hit by cars or whatever, run over across walks and ship who might not have been if the city had been built by a guy who was not basing his attitudes on traffic on how nice it is to be driven around in a limousine. Absolutely, and just like asked someone who lived in New York not that long ago, just the quality that the quality of life like, I don't know. I I firmly believe that poor people people around people, we doesn't we still do we deserve like a nice quality of life. We didn't don't deserve to be sitting in traffic and being claws like like having all the respiratory and health impacts of things like you know, environmental factors, like I think that it's easy to not see these as deliberate choices and deliberate like strategies to make our lives more difficult. And I think the last he may not have murdered people, but the lasting legacy of that, I think is really really something to contend with. Yeah, it is something to contend with. And you know what else is something to contend with, bridget what's that the sponsors of this show. Uh, we're back um talking about the legacy of Robert Moses and probably you know, we've just talked about his influence on the subway, which is extremely negative, and a number of things he did in New York, Um and how people are still grappling with the consequences of that to this day. Perhaps the greater long term consequence of Robert Moses, though, is the concept of exclusionary architecture. Well, again, he didn't. He's not the first guy to do this. He was its most successful, influential, long standing practitioner, and his work provided models for cities around the United States. In Detroit in nineteen forty, a private developer constructed an eight mile long, six foot high wall to separate an existing black neighborhood from a new white one in development. You may recognize this from the eminem documentary Eight Mile Now This was not done just because the constructing company was racist. This was done because the Federal Housing Administration at the time refused to finance new developments and less neighborhoods were segregated. The wall still exists today, and Detroit is still the most segregated metropolitan area in the country. Another divider is a tin foot high, fifteen hundred foot long fence that separated the mostly white development of Hamden, Connecticut, from the majority black housing projects of New Haven. The fence, erected in the nineteen fifties, was eventually torn down in two thousand fourteen, but in the decades prior, it meant that residents of New Haven had to travel seven point seven miles just to buy groceries at a store three miles away. Right, Like, that's again, and we talked about food deserts. This is come down just in like what happened in Buffalo, right the mass shooting at the at that supermarket, which like people had to fight for for years to get because of ship like this um due to inadequate public transportation in New Haven. It took two hours to complete this journey. And again, Bob Moses is a New York guy. He barely leaves that fucking state. His work is in New York, and you're not going to find people saying Bob Moses told us to do this in Detroit, Bob Moses told us to do this in New Haven. But as New York goes, so goes an awful lot of As we talked about f DR patterns, the way his government is kind of set his administration is set up during the New Deal on New York. It is a model in a lot of ways for the rest of the country. So people are following Bob's example, right, Not that they not that they would not have tried to segregate neighborhoods if he hadn't been around, But he provides a very effective bluep it for how to do it. He's good at it, and people pay attention. You know. Um. And I'm going to close out this episode, probably by quoting from the Yale Law Review quote. Often cities use barriers and blockades to mold traffic patterns. For example, the concrete barriers and ballards that exist throughout the streets of Berkeley, California, were installed to calm traffic. However, the barriers do this by preventing people from driving down the streets on which they are placed. In Shaker Heights, Ohio, the city installed a traffic diverter, which was called the Berlin Wall, for black people by nearby neighbors in Cleveland. Yeah, I mean again, people always like, know, how fucked up this is? Right? Oh? People know? And again, like, I think that you've done a great job of showing how like not only was it effective, but it gave that like plausible deniability of like it's you. You can't say he specifically is the reason he didn't tell them to do this, But people know, people feel it in their communities, like you you know when you're being boxed out. Yeah, you know when you're being boxed out. And it's like, again, this is a broader problem than Bob Moses. He's just one of the most successful problems solvers in the community of people trying to solve the problem of folks who aren't rich and white hanging out near folks who are rich and white, right, Like, that's that's that's what's happening here. I'm going to continue that quote. In some communities, the purpose of rerouting traffic is to inhibit harmful behaviors tied to drugs and crime. Concrete barriers were put in place near the highways of Bridgeport, Connecticut, to block quick access into the city by those who wanted to buy drugs. The strategy, according to police, was that buyers would fear driving all over looped streets, stopping and turning around trying to find drugs with the possibility of having their nice cars though jewelry their money ripped off as they look. A similar technique was implemented in Los Angeles, which put traffic barriers in place on certain streets that allegedly provided quick escape routes for gang members who had committed crimes. Sometimes transit will allow a person to get close to a given area, but not all the way. They're leaving the writer in a dangerous situation. This was the scenario faced by Cynthia Wiggins, a seventeen year old woman who was hit and killed by a dump truck while she was attempting to cross a seven lane highway to get to the mall where she worked. Wiggins took the bus from the inner city where she lived, to her job at the suburban mall. However, the mall's owners had actively resisted requests to allow the bus to stop on its property. Rather, the bus stopped outside the mall on the other side of a large highway. Documents produced during the trial revealed that this transit sitting decision was motivated at least in part by race or class bias. A local transport official wrote in an internal document that quote mall decision makers feel it will not bring the type of people they want to come to the mall. One mall retail store owner recalled a conversation with a mall official who said something like the people who rode the Walden Avenue bus were not the kind of people they were trying to attract to the Walden Galleria. The mall did, however, allow some charter buses to stop on its property. Members of Buffalo's black community asserted that the mall was trying to use the highway as a moat to exclude some city residents, a classic example of architecture exclusion. The case settled, but it presents a stark exam ample of the dangers inherent in exclusionary transit design. And so again, like there's a there's body counts to this ship, right, like when the walls are made up of moats of fast moving cars. People are going to die trying to get from A to B. People who can't afford public trains. People are gonna get arrested hopping onto public transit because they can't afford it, because it's expensive because funds have been drained away, Like people are going to the consequences of all this are so titanic and echo out so widely in our society, and they all come down to like, well, we don't think it's good for the mall if certain people come here, right, it's not good for this neighborhood and Manhattan if certain if the traffic comes out here, so we'll rout it the Harlem and will put more lead into like the air in Harlem and will put more traffic onto the streets and where kids will get hit, right, Like, it's not. The plan is not I want more black kids to have bad lungs and to get hit by cars. The plan is I want to protect this nice neighborhood from the consequences of the traffic that I have needlessly increased in the city. But that's what happens, you know, and who cares if there's a human cost, If that cost is poor or black or brown, well, and it's you know, the argument is always the argument always comes down to when you're looking at the people who are like defending this ship, Well, I just want my neighborhood to be nice. I just want my housing price to go up, right, I just I I uh, you know, I don't I, as the person spending all this money on this mall and this business, have a right to try to ensure that like the right kind of people come here that like, you know, isn't that isn't that important too. I'm trying to keep I'm trying to improve the neighborhood right and and and the justifications change through time. Now you would have a lot of trouble being like we're going to build a nightmare highway interchange system with a bunch of like loops in order to stop people from buying drugs in this neighborhood. Um. But instead it's like, well, we need to, um, we need to carry out this project to like make it more difficult for homeless people to like sleep under this overpass, or we need to carry out this project, like we want to put a park here. We want to keep this space green and open, so we can't allow um new construction it would ruin the look of the neighborhood if we allowed higher density housing developments to live here, right, don't people deserve to have like their property values stay high and whatnot? Like it's it's these are the kind of things we're talking a lot these days about, like the literal Nazis and the literal fascists always trying to take power. But it's worth noting that, like for decades a lot of the worst problems in our country that have like contributed massively to everything that's wrong with it. Today, we're like not people being like I seek a white ethno state, but we're people being like, well, I have a right to and I have a right to look out at a nice hill, don't I? Yeah? And I think like what you describe that as sort of soft power. I think that it's almost kind of more dangerous that we associated with like well, like like it's on its face, that's so that's so relatable. It's like, of course you want green spaces and pretty places and blah blah blah. Like that really allows for people to do a lot a lot of like pretty terrible stuff that has a human cost um without really having to take take ownership of how bad some of that stuff is. Yeah, we don't. We're not talking about this today. Perhaps we should. We'll get to it at some point, but like, there's a lot to be said about And I love the National parks. Who doesn't like a nice park, But there's a tremendous amount of racism in the National park system and how it's constructed and why it's constructed, in the idea that like white people need a place to go be in nature. Um, and that doesn't include indigenous people, right, because then we can't claim that this is untamed wilderness because actually it was all like tamed and heavily like regulated by different societies for thousands and thousands of years. Um. But we're going to kick them off and we're going to like try to manage it ourselves. And oh god, now there's forest fires everywhere because it turns out we actually suck at forestry. Um, let's sell access to our forests to people who want to make paper and do that under the ages of we're protecting the forest from forest fires. Oh no, everything keeps getting worse. Um. Anyway, it's all like it's all the same story one way or the other. It's it's this like, I want things to be nice in a specific way where I live, so I'm going to push these laws to protect the area around me or to make this thing that I want to have happen. But there's all these knock on effects, and you ignore or shut down anyone who complains about the knockdown effects, knock on effects by saying like, well, I have a right to this, you know, I have a right to keep my neighborhood this way. I have a right to to drive a car. You know, I have a right to one another high way, to one less traffic. Um. And I don't want to spend money on the public transit system. UM. I don't like public right like I have a right to want my city to be this way. Um. But of course, the reality is always that even though they justify it as saying they're doing it for the people, they're doing it for this community, they're doing it for the city. UM, it's always done for a tiny chunk of the people who live in that city. And it's it's again often administrated by people like Robert Moses, who are all either completely unelected or who, because of the nature of local politics, are elected by like five dudes right, like, yeah, it's cool. It also manifests in like a lot of different ways where people like prioritize like a building over people, and like like like a pile of bricks matters more than than than a person. We saw that a lot in people are like, well, but there's property damage, don't I don't care, Like I don't care about your building. I'm sorry it doesn't have It's not a person. It's very insane, Like I've gotten caught up in a degree of this myself where it's like I don't like I don't like living in in like I don't like condos, um, I don't like the way they look. And it was had to be pointed out to me by like a friend, and again I had like an argument over this and they pointed out, like no, they actually like they do. Like while there are stupid luxury developments that are dumb, the higher density housing lowers housing prices, lowers rent prices, like it makes areas more affordable, and people who cannot afford a house are not going to afford a house under the current system. But if you allow this thing to be subdivided in such a way, they can't afford to actually own and thus not be like fucking renting a place and subject to all of the fun UPHI about the rental market, or we get moved to have to like live on a trailer park, which are really problematic in a lot of exploitative ways. And like, as a general rule, I believe in keeping as much of the world as possible free of development, but we're going to have cities, and cities should be high density and geared towards being livable as high density things because that's what makes sense environmentally and it's what makes them more humane. Right yeah, yeah, anyway, Robert moses, just people need to care more about people and less about piles of bricks, less about piles of bricks and uh yeah, I don't know, um, build more public transit burned down the carry out a series of terrorist attacks on the on the are we not should we not urge a series of terrorist attacks? That is that a federal crime Sophie problem? Okay, well, let's bleep all of that out and adding me doing a plug for um because loves our nation's highway system and interstate system because it's the most efficient way to kidnap children. Right when they try to head into the bathroom at a race track or something bam, and then they're off to the island and Indonesia where we hunt them for sport. That's the promise, Sophie. No children are safe, Bridget, do you have any plugables for us? I sure do. Thank you so much for having me. You can hear me on my podcast there are no girls on the internet. You can follow me on Twitter at Bridget Marie or on Instagram at Bridget Marie in d C. Well lovely, Thank you, Bridget. Thanks for talking fucking parks policy and ship. No, this was this was this fun than like people being you know, yeah, taken out back and shot. You know, it's not not cheery, but it wasn't you know, it wasn't as dark as I thought it was to be. Yeah, you've gotta understand guys like this because they they exercise just as much an influence on like why things are bad. Um, But they're just like guys in suits who who are building stuff in ways that's like secretly really shitty and it's it's just much. It's it's a kind of evil. I guess we don't get into enough, like it's it's it's that kind of UM. It's it's more subtle than like Mitch McConnell evil, which I think is the kind of political evil we're used to. UM, but it has just as much of an impact. And so yeah, uh, if you want to read pages about Robert Moses, check out The Power Broker. UM. Otherwise, just like, drive around in New York City and you'll be you'll be the proper amount of angry. I'm walking here, yeah. Exactly Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.