Robert Moses

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Robert Moses with a model of the planned Battery Bridge (1939)

Robert Moses (* 18th December 1888 in New Haven , Connecticut ; † 29. July 1981 in West Islip , New York ) was an US -American city planners . From the 1930s to 1968 he had an immense influence on the fortunes of New York City and the surrounding area. He is considered one of the most influential urban planners in history and has often been compared to the Parisian urban planner Baron Haussmann .

Life

Moses came from a family of German-Jewish immigrants. He studied political science at Yale University , at Wadham College of Oxford University and at Columbia University .

In the 1920s, under Al Smith , the governor of New York , he rose in the administration of the state. Under Smith, he reorganized and modernized the organization of the state. As the head of the Long Island State Park Commission , a federal agency created according to his ideas, he achieved greater notoriety for the first time with the construction of Jones Beach State Park on Long Island . With the Northern State Parkway and Southern State Parkway , he then began expanding the system of parkways around New York City and thus set the standard for all subsequent parkways planning. From 1927 to 1929 he served as Secretary of State of New York. In 1934 he ran as a Republican for governor of New York, but was defeated by the Democratic incumbent Herbert H. Lehman .

Triborough Bridge , partial view

In the 1930s, the newly elected Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia brought him to New York to head the newly formed City Parks Department and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority , which continued construction of the Triborough Bridge , a system of three, which had begun in 1929 individual bridges connecting Manhattan , Queens and the Bronx . The Triborough Bridge Authority developed under Moses into an independent authority that issued its own bonds and financed itself through its toll income . This enabled Moses to expand his activities considerably. He also worked on planning construction projects funded under the New Deal , including numerous parks and ten large swimming pools in New York City. At times he was also the head of twelve different organizations and thus controlled not only the Triborough Bridge Authority, but also, for example, the Department of Parks for New York City , the New York State Parks Council or the state New York Power Authority , which under his leadership the later named after him power station Robert Moses Niagara built on the Niagara River . At times, up to 80,000 workers were employed in his projects.

Moses was responsible for the urban planning of the world expositions that took place in New York City in 1939 and 1964 . He was instrumental in getting the United Nations based in New York. From 1946 to 1959 he was responsible for the city's social housing. A total of approx. 28,000 residential units were built during this time, the vast majority of them by means of area renovation with extensive demolition of old buildings. He also oversaw the planning for the Henry Hudson Bridge , the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge and the Throgs Neck Bridge (both between the Bronx and Queens ) as well as the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge , Shea Stadium and Lincoln Center . Other projects included the city ​​highways such as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway , the Staten Island Expressway , the Cross-Bronx Expressway , the Belt Parkway and the Laurelton Parkway .

Moses also supported numerous city highways from the 1940s through the 1960s that ultimately never were built, including the Lower Manhattan Expressway and Mid-Manhattan Expressway in New York, and the Vieux Carré Riverfront Expressway in New Orleans . As a result of these projects, the concept of the car-friendly city was criticized for the first time to a notable extent in these cities , as was the destruction of historic city districts. Large parts of Lower Manhattan, such as Greenwich Village , were considered obsolete and not worth preserving due to their old building fabric and their chaotic use and social structure; for Moses, the destruction of historical monuments and intact neighborhoods were at best collateral damage.

In the late 1930s, Moses tried to push through the construction of another bridge instead of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel between Manhattan and Brooklyn, which was completed in 1950 . The bridge ramps to this bridge would have cut up Battery Park as well as interfering with the urban fabric of Lower Manhattan . It took the influence of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to stop the project of the bridge construction, also against the background that the bridge could have obstructed access to the base of the US Navy New York Naval Shipyard .

After reaching the age limit, Robert Moses regularly received special permits for his further work. However, when he offered his resignation in 1962, as he had on several occasions, in order to enforce his plans, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, to his great surprise , accepted his resignation for a number of positions. In 1968 the Triborough Bridge Authority was merged with the new Metropolitan Transportation Authority, after which the almost 80-year-old Moses had to retire to an advisory post.

In 1974, Robert Caro , an American author and journalist , published the extensive biography The Power Broker . In it, Caro deals mainly critically with the lasting effects of Moses' work on New York and other major American cities.

Debate about the "Bridges of Moses"

Within the sociology of technology, there is an intense debate on the question of the extent to which Moses pursued socio-politically reprehensible goals with his bridges. According to the author Langdon Winner , Moses is said to have deliberately built several bridges particularly low to keep the predominantly colored underclass, who relied on public transport such as buses, away from local recreation areas. Subsequent studies, however, came to the conclusion that Moses' constructions were less due to possibly racist traits, but rather to the then widespread planning maxim of the car-friendly city .

Movies

  • 2019 Motherless Brooklyn - In the fictional film by and with Edward Norton, his antagonist Moses Randolph is unequivocally modeled on Robert Moses.

literature

Fonts

  • Public Works: A Dangerous Trade. McGraw Hill, 1970. (autobiography)

Secondary literature

  • Robert A. Caro : The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York . Knopf, New York 1974.
  • Kenneth T. Jackson, Hillary Ballon (Ed.): Robert Moses and the Modern City. The Transformation of New York . WW Norton 2007, ISBN 978-0-393-73206-1
  • Joel Schwartz: The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City . Ohio State University Press, Columbus OH 1993. ISBN 0-8142-0587-9 ( digitized version on the publisher's pages in full access)
  • Pierre Christin u. Olivier Balez: Robert Moses - The Man Who Invented New York . Editions Glénat 2014, ISBN 978-1-907704-96-3
  • Bernward Joerges: Do Politics have Artefacts? In: Social Studies of Science 29 (3): 411-31 June 1999; Digitized at researchgate.net, accessed on April 1, 2017

Web links

Commons : Robert Moses  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The article is mainly based on the information from the obituary of the New York Times: "Robert Moses, Master Builder, is Dead at 92" , The New York Times , July 30, 1981
  2. ↑ Bridge building for eternity Der Spiegel from December 2, 1964
  3. ↑ Nikolaus Piper : The Age of Vulnerability - Three weeks ago hurricane "Sandy" raged in New York; in Süddeutsche Zeitung from 24./25. November 2012
  4. ↑ Johannes Novy: In the footsteps of Jane Jacobs in ARCH + 176/177
  5. ↑ Bernward Joerges: The bridges of Robert Moses - silent post in the urban and technology sociology . Leviathan , 27 (1), 1999, pp. 43-63. Online version  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 121 kB)@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.wzb.eu  
  6. ↑ Langdon Winner: Do Artifacts Have Politics? , Daedalus, Vol. 109, 1980, pp. 121-136.
  7. ↑ Lutz Prechelt: Sociology of Technology: The bridges of Robert Moses. (PDF; 1.4 MB) Freie Universität Berlin, 2008, pp. 5–42 , accessed on July 5, 2012 .
  8. ↑ Jürgen Schickinger, badische-zeitung.de: The dream of a clean, functional metropolis . Badische Zeitung , October 25, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Moses, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American city planner
DATE OF BIRTH December 18, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH New Haven , Connecticut
DATE OF DEATH July 29, 1981
Place of death West Islip , New York