You needn’t care especially about New York to be awed by the changes Moses wrought there: during a 44-year reign, he built nearly 700 miles of road, including the giant highways that snake out of the city into Long Island and upstate New York 20,000 acres of parkland and public beaches, plus 658 playgrounds seven new bridges the UN headquarters, the Central Park zoo and the Lincoln Center arts complex, racking up expenditures of $27bn, dwarfing any previous run of construction in US history.

Like the multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson for which Caro is best known, you might call The Power Broker “unputdownable” – except that, at 1,300 pages, putting it down occasionally is the only way to avoid sore muscles. But its themes are too timeless to seem dated. Caro’s enormous book, meanwhile, is less a life story than an epic, meticulously detailed study of power in general: how it’s acquired, how it’s used to change history, how it ultimately corrupts those who get it.įirst published in 1974 – Barack Obama read it aged 22, and was “mesmerised” – The Power Broker was released in the UK for the first time this year. For more than four decades, this particular urban planner was the most powerful man in New York, an unelected emperor who dominated the mayors and governors who were supposedly in charge, and who physically reshaped the city through sheer force of will. T echnically, Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker is a biography of urban planner Robert Moses, but that description feels laughably inadequate on multiple counts.

Robert moses and the fall of new york