The Power Broker #07: Sec. Pete Buttigieg 02:42:47

this is the ninety nine percent of us will breakdown of the power broker im Rowen Mars and im Eliot Kale so today we recovering the final section of part five the love of power and the beginning of part 6 the last for power thats chapters 27 through 32 pages 607 through 725 and later in this episode， our special guest is the secretary of transportation peet budget in addition to overseaming the federal dollars for infrastructure in this country secretary budget was also responsible for several major infrastructure projects when he was mer of south bend and Ana， hes also talked about acknowledging the racism built into transportation systems around the country something he has mentioned publicly kind of paraphrase in the power broker and gotten a lot of push back for， so on the lesson Robert Moses was showing what an amazing visionary he was， but also， what a petic tyrent he could be on one hand he was brilliantly take advantage of these like tax assessments and federal programs an archival research to complete the funding of this massive was sidemen had construction project， which is this amazing chapter and just like how he works down a hundred nine million dollars to something that the city can afford on the other hand hes destroying neighborhoods these historic nearheods hes join new yorks last natural wilderness space without uh taking anyone else is needinto account and harassing the clubia yeah， club just because he can because he thought that they were rude to him its also becoming clear how much he is using racing class when it comes to his part projects like hedeliberately underserving new yorks poor people and people of color and meanwhile all these bridges and expressways of these building that are meant to relieve New York traffic problems are actually seeming to make traffic worse and this is becoming a this thing that is constant and this almost a universal truth in when it comes to building bridges and more roads and more lanes， but he can not see this that this is his only solution no matter what the the outcome actually proves its off to be and then weve also learned in this distorablechapter a good chapter but a very sad chapter of Robert Moses relationship with his own family the dekat he spent undermining the career and the success of his own brother and his disdain is sort of completely ignoring his sister and just the just the completely undermining the vitality and the life force of Mary his wife so that was on the last episode so check it out if you havent！

it now were up to chapter 27 also again called changing and tell us what are we in store for im excited because this changing chapter is a different changing chapter from the last one meamber from the last episode that changing chapter was 75 pages long or so yeah， this one this this episode were going to be zoom in through zoom in through chapter some of the shortest chapters in the book or of this one you cant judge a chapter by the size theres still valuable information concepts， moments scenes uh， its amazing and i know last episode it probably had a lot of audience member saying something they never thought they would say before ah， that poor yacht club and this episode well get i have more shocks and twists like that one， universally acknowledged that the making of a bridge will lead to more cars on the bridge thats right uh， so this chap were start with chapter 27 changing were still in part five the love of power uh the love of power thats the worst emotion you can feel for power right no get ready for were gonna get to part six and that it gets dirtier but chapter is about how rover Moses is continuing to change from someone who vote the previous change of our Moses was from someone who was an idealist to a realist， someone who held so firm to the principles they could not get things done and now they will do whatever it takes to get things done and now kera says in the past that Moses even the realist Moses he was because he cared about his dreams it wasnt power that he wanted someone to see one to achieve these dreams and he would do anything to make a happen but lying in his personality laying away was this suptibility to an addiction to power and now this further changes healdoanything he wants or needs to not just to get a thing made but to maintain his power and to accumulate more power in by nineteen 36， which infwhen， this chapter begins as of Web jump round in time quite a bit at different times now were firmly in nineteen thirty six he is seeking power for its own sake and in this case he really wants to be part of the New York city tunnel authority， which is going to be the new authority that will build a Queens midtown tunnel and a browplan battery tunnel theyre big passageways for getting people between Manhattan and the other borrows and these are big things tunnels are bigin in New York were going to talk a little bit about the Holland tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey on the hospital thats a big tunnel its super important theyre important let s do we dont think about tunnelsmuch there wholes in the ground， but theyre important wholes uh the end the thing is browmoses says legordia make me a part of this tunnel authority and legordia has smarted up a little bit since the past and he knows i need federal funds for this tunnel and if theres one guy， the president president hates it is revert Moses and that got me to a lot of trouble and you know what rovermoses is the master bridges masterroads he doesnt anything about underwater tunnels so legordy says no im not going to make you part this authority so Moses what is he going to do hes going to try to derail the legislation creating the authority because theres no post for him in it uh and that doesnt work and so then he tries to schmuse some cooperation from the head of the project the engineer url singstead or old singstead we had a lot of discussion before the recording we had a pronounceit uh the i always thought was old sing stead like thats good all singstad over there， but uh the uh olay sing stead was also thrown around， but but uh all the old sings did he is a hesomeone who is not going to be pushed around quite as easily， or she moved quite easily and i love carros description for him on page 六七 he says uh there were engineers available outsidemoces organization most notally ulecings did a cocky hard driving table pounding Norwegian who designed the then novel ventilation system that unmade the Holland tunnel feasible who after tunneldesignare Clifford m Holland collapsed and died from overwork had ranged the job through the completion and whois regarded as the worlds leading authority on underwater vehicular tunnels and i love what a particular specialization that is that uh if youre gonna be the worlds party and anything underwater vehicles is is a great way to do it um but Roman before the episode you were talking about how were taking more talk about since that uh carrigie says he designed the ventilation system for the Hola tunnel。

but you were saying that was a big thing that was a big deal it it was its such a long tunnel its the very beginning of the serve card traffic being carried under these long tunnels and figuring out a ventilation system so that people didnsoficate on carbon monoxide was a huge deal like they spent a ton of time on it tons of tests probably ethically questionable tests with young engineers， no and sugraduate students and stuff can you hang out this tunnel will felt the carbon on oxide until you dont feel good exactly and hes going to crack this and the Hola tunnel was a huge engineering feed and i dont think you can overstatehow important only since dot is to tunnel development as a as a in engineering becauseof his vanilation systems， i mean its really hes coming against someone who actually knows how to do something rather than just believe people you know like he knows engineering in a real sense！

eh and revermoses you are saying this before the according as a builder， but hes not an engineer he doesnt really know the mechanics of these things so he can bs people and he can he can snowthem with with his made effects and since dad is like well no i know this！

this is my science i think thats it like if i were to sort of get to this， the heart of this is like hes a real engineers， engineer and he might find the sort of pure， cratic phonenus of Moses and and its so like his kind of thing might not work on him you know like Moses uh bravado might not work on sync start if i were this sort of you know cast them and make this a dramatic story i i would that thats what i would focus on yeah giving notes to Robert Carol thats a its hubristic in its way you know uh but you know no？

no， no i mean even a cat can look at a king i was i mean if i were to cache this is the movie and i would say you know to someone without explaining you know the vanilation system of the Holland tunnel i would say youre an engineer who really knows how to do this and you see this guy as yeah crat pretending to be an engineer the thats the level which you should treat your like your disdain for him a action you know thats thats what i mean thats really good inside thats great inside is his character because he comes out hes someone who at will will see later if we if we mention it that uh Carol talk to him he interviews syncstat before singset died in nine sixty nine think and he comes across as a very forceful figure who sees through rover Moses he does he is not going to get uh fooled by any of this and i just want to give a tip my hat to sync add ive crossed through the Hola tunnel thousands of times in my life and i didndie whats so that ventilation system i soon are using the same one it still works really well， um so Moses cant mos sing set as we said its its not gonna work so next he tries using his allies not any to delay the project until it loses its federal funding but that doesnwork either and his basically saying i will lead controlthis or i will destroy it i will savertize it if i cant have it and earlier we saw him have a project he display wanted to build and he accrued power to make it real now when someone else has a project that he cancontrol hes gonna try to use that power to record and for no other reason than that he wants to have control of as much as he can if theres some big transportation related project in the new area he wants it or is going to destroy it he doesncare what the effect is he doesncare who that hurts and just to be clear since we spent so much time talking about the hongtitle this is about the brocclam battery tunnel yes， the Hong tunnel is built already that exists most is late to the party he cant do anything about that this is about specifically， the what the Queens， mytown tunnel and the broklan Barry time right， wecan talk about the brokenbatary tunnel a lot in this chapter the cleansmidtown tunnel i mean even compared the other tunnelsnew York doesnget a lot of attention and in this book it doesnget a lot of attention its very much the its very much the neglected childof the New York tunnels but thats OK um so thats nineteen thirty six thats happening now we are moving little forward by nineteen thirty eight the federal work relief money that Moses has been using to maintain that power it starting to dry up the depression it has been were they even going through it and its and its feels like it starting to end a little bit the war is going to start ramping things up thats where the money is gonna go it is storm cloud so very Europe thats where the money is gonna have to be directed rather than employment at home just for employment sake uh and so Moses needs money and theres a new source of federal funds that is coming up public housing money this is subject Moses has never really been super interested in he doesnt care about housing the poor he doesnt care about doing much of anything for the poor but now there are hundreds of millions of dollars available for public housing any wants that money for his projects so as with the tunneling authority he sets up to pro replace the cityhousing authority with a group he can control and once again he comes up against legordia showing more backbone than before because the gordia hedoescare about public has a very personal stake in it， because he believes that his， his wife and his child who died of treculosis that they died of that because of the tenement， theyd lived in that it was the i the ventilation， the switch everything about it was bad and he blames that for their deaths and while readingus it was just like imagining a mer of New York whos family lived in a tenement not when he was a child， but when he was a married man and who later on， will see has no money when he leaves off， so when he dies what that makes me think of is like how much we spend so much time talk praising Moses at the time for not taking graph not beenum take and this whole time it like you know ligordia clearly isnt doing too well from sofeither you know like its kind of uh notable i dont know like yeah yeah its its itshows you i guess sometimes that it when you publicize the thing you can get credit for it when you dont what other people that theres a uh theres the story about uh honekin years ago i think there advocampaigners like went back when bottles would be returned to the bottler and then reused again theyre like we steam clean our bottles and it was like yeah everybody does but but they made it sound like only they did it ever else is using dirty bottles get out right uh so you publicize you do a thing it doesnmatter further people do it you get it at it so this is a personal issue for ligoria and uh Moses nose if im in a steel control of public housing away from the thought currenauthority， i cant do it directly through legordia im Gonna have to kind of build a groundswell of public opinion that demands i take it so he secretly arranges for some reform organizations to rent the auditorium of the museum of natural history my single greatest most favorite place on earth that i love the most and any time any tribi take new earth that i dont care that museum is a wasted trip as far as iconcern um so he can present to speechtitle housing a recreation he convinces w e Nic to broadcast over the radio and he hands out to the audience the event these preprinted brochure is proposing this enormous， slab， clearance and a public house in program where rather than rehabilitate preexisting buildings just what legordy want to do he wants a term all down and build all these blocks of new housing and hes clearly trying to recreate the trying of he had back in episode for when he gave his speech about his unified transportation plan and people loved it so much that there was no way to stop it and uh the cost of his program its going be two hundred five million dollars and he says he can do it without raising city real estate taxes and his plan is clearly im gonna do what i did before gonna present this plan people are gonna love it so much that it will be politically unfeasible to stand against it little does he know this is the best this is so great this is childrens movielevel kind of like planning and plotting to undermind Moses that the inagoodway that legordy has gotten a hold of one of these brochers ahead of time earlier that day and has arranged with the wnyc stationheads to pretend to broadcast Moses speech even to the point of having technicians there pretending their operating machines and giving Moses the thumbs up to start talking because theyre ready for him and while the station itself actually goes off the air for the extension of the speech and my god Moses doesnt learn this until at hes finishing the speech when i think one of his people go turns on a radio and theres nothing half theres nothing coming out of it uh the so his his whole a plan of his has been undermined and been basically wasted that that hes announced the plan to the people in the auditorium， but that doesnhelp too much this groundswell is gonna get from the people of New York is not gonna happen and uh liquordia managers just out thinkmoses in this case he builds his own housing projects without Moses input and that my favorite aspect of this is Moses then submit subbuilds the government to pay for the printing of the brosharers and the gordy tells the controller dont do dont pay like this is my mos is gonna cover that that amount so legordia sees really clearly now that Moses is trying to expand his power beyond parks， beyond park related roads， beyond roads to any kind of construction that he can take that he can get the money on the power from and decides， Moses needs to be curved in some way and is seeing as care presentity seeing that Moses also so focused on the upper classes to the exclusion of the people that legordia as with else myth perform thought of as his real people the kind of poor new yorkers he still respects Moses abilities he still wants Moses sibilities be working for him but he wants to reorient Moses goals and do that he starts cutting the park budget he starts canceling projects uh he feels like hestarting get the upper hand on Moses but what he doesnrealize and as will see in the next chapter， Moses is leaving the era when it matters him at all what the mirror of New York thinks or wants from him because he has discovered a new source of potential power that will take him to the point of his highest degree of controlling power that will make him kind of a mini emperor within the New York system and that is the institution known as the public authority im so excited about talking about its gonna be amazing and this is chapter twenty eight！

the warp on the loom thats all about the creation of the public authority and in goes to great lengths i i love this chapter！

this is its a great chapter this is a this is a it is considering especially， this is a twenty or twenty page chapter about the functioning of public authorities pure cratically and the legal openings it creates for the abuse of that authority， and it is so exhilarating like its， a， its， a， its， a tortohorse chapter its exciting to hear Carol unfolding this and so first hes got explain what a public authority is i know， i didnt before i rethis book i dont really understand the difference between it and the other thing they are semi independent organizations theypublifunded to the sale of bonds and sometime end to some government funding in the case of like the mta， which do didnexist at this time you know， well get to that later on the book， but there they have specific goals to create a specific thing they sell bonds to fund that thing， and then they operate like a private corporation for the duration of the construction of the thing there records are private theyallowed to charge the public for the use of their things in orders to payback the bondholders and Moses uh through the hidden provisions as will talk about in a new set of laws he gets passed basically allowsed himself the power to handle bonds differently than authorities have in the past and will turn the tribor authority into this immortal self governing personal fitdom that he uses to basically push other people around in in the thousands if not millions， uh public authorities as Carol says they go back to England they go back sentries he does not going to as much detail in the centrieslong history of English public authorities as he could have considering he went into such geologic detail that the creation of law island and i think we appreciate that but authorities were reltively new in America the port a thority of new York， New Jersey existed already， but that was kind of slopply put together its kind of a mass， much as Porter bus terminal for anyone whos been there nose is also a mass， its a gross place to be its not not a pleasant place to take a bus uh traditionally as a sing public thereardies were focused on a single project they sold bonds to fund it they collected revenue they paid off the bonds and then these rd just goes out of exists and this is really key they are limited term existance organizations yes， they dont last forever and once they get pay， once they pay off their bills the thing they created becomes public property， becomes property of the city or threatened they dont exist anymore and Moses early therties fit this model to and so he always led people to believe that the toles on his projects would go away when the bonds were paid off， these were temporary toles， but now his thinking is changing because his bridges are bringing in， so much more money than anyone expected them to Bringin in the late thirties the Henry had some bridges profting six hundred thousand dollars per year the trial broadgespring in one point three million dollars in property year in the thirties back when a hamburger cost a nickle you know or whatever so this is a lot of money and the number of tall paying cars on those bridges is only going up its only making more money each year and under the law this means the bonds of bridges they could be paid off in one decade rather than 4 decades which was the plan and then the toles would be removed and that it would be a major success story of urban infrastructure financing he builds enormous bridge you was so much more successful in carrying cars if not in cutting down traffic， then it was supposed to be then then youhave thirty years of new yorkers not having to pay toles on this bridge that that they were going to have to whats is scared about that nothing he cant get anything from amazing success stories of urban infrastructure finance say no his power is not rooted in accomplishing goals and then relinquishing the tools to get those goals done its in the use of political power and ultimately its the use of money as they say in cavalry money makes a wrong around uh and its not just spending that particular money but the power that that money gives him to entice bankers to purchase bonds to fund to allow him even more funding and so by 1938， the total income manually of his authorities is four a half million dollars thats as large as spark department budget but if he can change the law to allow him to hold on to that money as long as he can he can use that four and a half million dollars to capitalize for your bonds worth 81 million dollars in genuine construction funding and not only that because the more bridgesy builds the more tools he is bringing in the lower the interest rates on the bonds that he can afford to float the more he can sell so by his recognicarol for every dollar in tall revenue that he gets he can capalize eighteen dollars for the building of more bridges so eight its eighteenfold he can he can use that money for and want you build more bridges you can bring in more revenue to float more bonds to build more bridges he just he can do i get its a selfperpetuating money and building machine and his dreams are getting bigger and bigger because hes not happy when you build our expressway how can you be building happy building another expressway you got a build a major system want to build one bridge actually that you gotta build more bridges theres so much the city that does not have expressways running through it theres so much land that has not even turned into enormous ballfields and halffieldsstadiums like that fire island expressway he never got to build because those two old ladies would sell their houses like hes he could still build that the city has does not have the money for this the state doesnot want to spend any money on this the federal government is soon going to have to turn its money towards destroying not see Germany if Moses can hold on to the revenue of the authorities he wont need money from the federal government， the city government， the state government hell have his own money to play with he will be his own funding machine， which is so totally not the way democratic politics is supposed to work。

but thats never stopped in before right yeah because the key part of this is like he used depend on public support that was his thing like he had the support the public behind him but as we learned last time with the sort of the fall of our smith is that public support in public love is a you know slender read eleanon and hes learning that they they a much more um you know like robust uh read eleanon is eighty one million dollars yeah！

they say they theyre say you know theres， theres no saying about how moneytalks and another thing walks and for him now public support is that other thing you know money is money is concrete is the thing that people will pay attention to and with this own money he can do things like ignore civil service regulations those same civil service regulations he was such a big fan of as a youngman they are stiming him all the time and the only power the civil service commission has is that it can disapprove salary payments， it can cancel payment or block them if he control so money， he doesncare if the civil service commissions not gonna allow him to pay some he can do what he wants he can hire whoever he wants he can pay them whatever he wants he can get them， their own cars he can get them， their own houses he can assemble the loyal dedicated staff of professionals hes always dreamed of and then he can use them to produce studies and blueprint he can fund those studies in blueprint that he can then present to the governments as a fate because what Politician is going to risk telling the public they cant have this great new Moses thing that Moses has the money to build it will cost them nothing except having to dealwithit for the rest of their lives and for enumerable generations to come money can be his and run around the things that gotttens when the past he has never had been able to appropriate money in the ways he wanted for the techniques that he thinks are necessary to get things done making scale models to persuade people buying not sinthroing parties on them to move the press hiring bloodhounds to dig up dirt on opponents you cant go to the civil service commission and be like yeah yeah i need money for a detective to find out if this guy in the assemblies having an affair， but if you have your own money， you could just do that and if you can keep the story revenue itto you can do whatever you want with it and a public authority would given the same some of the same powers that a soveren state has an authority can issue bonds， which are a legal agreement between a buyer and a seller that is a technically a contract between the floater of the bond and the buyer the bond and it will settle law in the United States America going back almost to the beginning of the country that a contract it legal contract can not be changed， undone canceled， interfered with byany governmentoffice whatsoever， its like Moses is discovered a cheat code for the law where its like magic where hes like if i just write the powers of my authority into the bonds into the wording of the bonds that im selling then that becomes a contract and the legislature they can repel laws but they cant cancel contracks and so as long as the thirdexist and hes at the head of it hehaswhatever power he can write into those bonds now i was wondering and im wonderthis again possibly as it comes again what are the limits of this？

cause its not like he can write into the bonds rovermoses can murder people like there are certain laws that he cant get around。

but Carol can represence it as this kind of magic and run around everyone else that if its written in a contract that the government cant do anything about it i wonder Roman you are a professional lawyer whats whats the whats the what the limits of that yeah yeah what the limits of that i mean i anyone listing Roman is not a professional legal advice from Roman yeah again really really just make a stuff up here but mostly its like its its like we know for fraud first things theyre mistakes you know like yesterday as we recording this like berkture hathwaystock went down to like like drop 99 percent by by some sort of technical that sounds very visible and people and people bought it at that level and you know you could say thats a contract but it got voided by regulatory authorities， it just said hey， this is a mistake， this wasnt meant to be this way and normally that would be a contract， but its no like people were recognized that two sides the party didnt have all the information to agree to it properly and therefore， it can be voited you know like i think theres all kinds of reasons but i think like a bond measure because how carefully has be worded。

has been written and has to be you know bought and sold um it would be extraordinary for for the us government to come and avoid it i guess yeah that youset your saying this bondis being purchased on the understanding as written into the bonds that this authority is capable of doing these things and to take that a power away you i guess you have a legal case that you are interfering with a private semi， private contract okay that make sense i get it， but he cant write in like rover Moses is the isnow the president of triberles Vania you know it independent sovernation in hour i think theres yeah。

theres limits in the init， theres different checks in the creation that would limits its ability to do these things， but these are very basic things yeah build a thing you sell a bond for it you get paid revenues for it to solve off that bond and interest and undermining that in a specific sense， would make a sort of shaky foundation forever doing that you know like when you default on bonds to very its a very big deal to void them obrarely， it would just would undermine a system that is extremely porting that it stay in place and not be undermined like people have to believe that there buying bonds and will be paid back they can fail by chance they can fail by all kinds of reasons um but we count on those being um uh solid contracts so Moses i that make sense that Moses staging vanage of the fact that we live within a world。

built on a fiction that money has a value and agreements are have have concrete true then OK and you keep and to to undo his would be to undo that to bring it to question that basic fiction that are entire civilization basically resson thats right thats right okay that makes sense so kera says that improposing doing this Moses is effectively proposing a fourth branch of government independent of the usual three branches and he knows that the people who make up those three branches， the legislator， the mayor you know the city counts of the governer saying nothing of the courts who dont really come into at this moment they would not be OK with that so hes gonna put through a law that allows him to hold on to that revenue hes gonna have to keep his true purpose of secret from them he does a right a law uh that eliminates some of the safeguard that seeming to eliminate them to do that why youd need the best building all the day you would and lucklyhe didnt look very far the fun just look the man in the mirror that we saw but the but this is the real key like coming up with the idea to captilize on your you know like to to turn you know four million dollars into eightmillion dollars is is one thing that probably that innovation could have you know。

other people could come up with that but what he really hisfigure out here， which is um uh really quite genius and quite evil is this idea of the selfimposed lifespan of a public authority and how to subvert that and so instead of excepting that you build the thing you sell bonds for it to pay for it they make revenue you sell you know you you pay off the bonds and those happening in a forty years he writes into the bill very far into the bill that people dont notice or read in section nine you gottably both people stopping by section three thats right that the authority can issue new bonds to refund the original bonds and start the clock again on these new bonds so effectively， you can just like keep the authority going by using new bonds to pay off the old bonds starting the clock again and just like havent go and go and go and thats what he figures out and its really somethingelse the authority supposego at the add of commission whenits paid off but if it never fully pays off。

not never has to go at a commission and now you can basically treat the limit of the amount of bonds that hes allowed to issue not as a sealing that he cant fund beyond， but as a credit line essentially yeah that he can always issue new debt to bring himself back up to that and pay off the old bonds and do new bonds and tall revenues keep coming in and so people wanna buy those bonds theyre very attractive because its its incredibly stable you know youre gonna get your return eventually right？

right， its really somethingelse and its sort of amazing that he figured this out and actually made it， so that he could uh get away with it but it is just it is really an athmud to actual democracy yes！

thats to get the theres you know theres two that theyve eed people talk about people i ive read that of out how congress has kind they feed us congress is kind of two powers the controls is the power of the purse and the power of the gun essentially you know it can to clear war it can control what gets paid and if you take away， the need to go to the legislator for money， then they lose most of their power of you i mean Moses never tested the proposition that he could declare war on another gun i mean it kind of does declare war on on the tunnel agency but you know its were by the means but uh hes it really is yeah its undermining the basic idea of democracy， which is that the people have a say in whats going on in this case， one person will have a say Robert Moses because also not only does he slip into that law the bit about being able to issue new bonds to payoff the old ones and keep things soft waiting he puts in a thing that uh tribro can handle you know any roads， any road that connected to parks， any roads， connected to roads， connected to parts and quote facilities for the public， not inconsistent with the use of the project， which just is anything yeah， which means any that like yeah as carls like what things are consistent with the use of a project would a house would it would a partbuilding be consistof the use of a road like， and he inserts provision taking the power to release the therties money away from the city comtroller in giving it to the chairman of the Thor of the authority and this is all stuff that individually doesnt look like much if your legislator whos working during the day， youvenoutdrinking all night with your ofanybodies i dont know whats the same as it was when else myth was there at this point in the thirties but you have other things hung on in your life just as somebody who speaking for myself i have a family its sometimes hard to keep on top of my work that i cant you know and my work is not affecting the lives of millions uh you can understand that they are not they dont are not seen the full power of this and like we said theres something really like exhilarating about this chapter seeing it on unfolly you cant help to get kind of caught up in it and just how exciting this implicationleads to this implication would lead to its like watching you know， watching the the the lotus flower at the heart of creation unfold or uh of watching a movie where scientist makes a big discovery yeah！

sonlytheyrealizing the implications that discovery like its really its nexiting chapter about unicible bonds and a laws governing the creation of authorities or or any of these sort of modern movies like the blackberry movie or the air movie where its like yeah yeah its like its about uh you know a genius sort of business move thats figuring something out that has that has a wide range in implications i mean the i think the main difference here on what should you know kind of blunt your your like your your sense of of this is just a person like figma out and bean his best selfand you know like an actualizing his dreams is that you know public authorities are very specific in and they have tons of power that we give them um and a lot of in that power you know to to do really destroy peoples lives and you know has the power for eminent domain it can it can really really affect peoples lives these ways that a normal corporation cant do and the checks on these powers are this lifespan a ano and this ability to control the money that goes to them and its its super important and this becomes this just mutated monster of a public thority under the guidance of rubber Moses and then the laws that he is able to pass it can do so many things that it is not intended really to do like it they have power of eminent domain they can create their own rules on their property and higher police to enforce those rules they can do things the state cant like just sign contracks without having any competitive bidding。

which allows Moses direct specifically where money goes that helps ensure of his power like and all of this is encoded in the covenant between him and the bondholders， and so once he has the setup， he doesnt need the executive support he always felt he needed in the past doesnmatter he doesnt the public support that he would rally before the only thing he needs to do is never stop building this as long as he keeps building he can keep issuing new bonds and that works are great for him because he doesnt stop building anyway， like when your goal and the evil thing you need to do to keep your power to achieve the goal are the same thing thats a beautiful synchronicity you know that it thats like barmosis we you can do this we have to always keep building bridges and roads was like great John thats why im doing this exactly exact and it Carol points out this structure it matches most is preferred style， which is you dont have public hearings because its all private records and it still appears to the public as this is a public authority working for the good of the people without a salary edhead you know its independent from partisan politics its free of a lot of the red tape hes weaponizing the things that have always been kind of what people agreedabout him and turning them into aspects of the authority that that he can do a lot of damage with and Robert carroquotes Emerson， he says in institution is the length shadow of one man and hes making the case that the way the tribero party set up is basically if Robert Moses was a government organization， you know， rather than a human being and the title of the chapter the work on the loom， which i cant help it always sounds kind of science fictioning to make thats where my mind goes for the world work， but uh it comes from something most writes in a nineteen 41 brosure about how hes always wanted to weave together what he saw the loose strands of the Metri 跑 ten Tapestry heschool is saying the Tribero Bridget thirty is provided the work in the Metripolton loom the heavier threads across which the lighter ones are woven and thats the way he sees it he is going to be creating basically the shape that New York is going to have to accommodate itself to you know hes heis the work on the loom and hepushaws eggs and authority basket hes all the revenue from sparks that he controlls its going into the authority and he builds himself a new fifth office i dont even have one office Roman i i have to work out of my bedroom and he has five offices and this ones gonna be as main headquarters its everyone understands this is where the rm is gonna be its on Randles island right underneath the Tribero bridge its only accessible the people who have paid a toll to use the bridge so even when the mayor comes over to see him he has to pay a toll to go to see Robert Moses which is so amazingly symbolic and tribros lawserenforce there not the cities and the building is under the tribro told plaza basically and its positioned in a way that if youdriving on the bridge， you cant see it like you dont know its there theres so its like Robert Moses is going so far out of his way to make the physic to make the symbolic physical in concrete， hes taking metaforce for his own shadow use a power and hes like lets build things that really represent that in a way that would seem very on the nose if this was a novel， its gonna do it and he he gets the law passed and set finally， theres a disagreement between Moses legordia about hiring somebody and legordy is like ill have my legal advisors look at the law uh i i mean i want to show the governor governor laymen that we didngive Moses too much power and he discovers， Moses to gain waymore power they intended and he can do whatever he wants now and the gordia can fire him as city park commissioner， but Moses could retaliate by having the legislator basically cut state funds to city projects because it was allies there that he has financial relationships with and the gordy doesnt want to try doing what rosebelt feels do， which was pitting himself against the peoples desire to have a champion who is free from government deference to get things done Moses is at this point he is says too powerful and too popular fileguardia to try to remove him or even risk pissing him off and Carey says the powers that the mayor persist over Moses authorities in theory he did not possess in practice political realities gave him no choice but to allow Moses to remain at their head Moses is essentially the mayor of Triboro whois equally soverin and someway is more soveren than the mayor of New York， which is terrifying and is only gonna get more so as we get into the next part whats the title of the next part roven its called part 6 the last for power。

which is even worse than the love of power i gas i dont know lost ings OK to me sometimes but well get to that after the break， OK were on to part 6 the loss for power the first chapter in this section is chapter 29 and when the last law was down da？

da and Roman id love to title spend sometime on your on your surprising， but string defensive lus as a feeling but we got a move on i just take that lot sometime you say it has its place in it should be distriated as horrible all the time thats fair， thats fair， but i mean itll the last the last for a for you know， for a for a lover， for a partner， but the lust for power maybe thats not so amazing yeah that exactly yes， uh and the chapter here it opens with a quote uh from the diary of former new Yorkmayor Philippone from 1835 but how beautiful the Manhattan battery is uh it for for nonnew yorkers， anyone is listening the battery is its the maritime southern tip of Manhattan this is im sure i knew at some point， the reasonits called the battery i could look it up i dont remember， but i know either but but its essentially if you go as far south as you can possibly get Amanda as far downtown as you can go until its just water thats the battery and in 130 hes talking about what a what a beautiful side it is and the battery is going to be the central point of battle for this chapter its a chapter of the public battle for Moses plans for the battery uh in its ironic because the last chapter is time about what an unsolable colossus Moses has built himself to be and this chapter right after the chapters that him beg stopped from doing something spoiler other he gets he gets stopped in his plans but the ultimate point is just how much power it now takes to stop this guy so its nineteen thirty eight nine thirty eight again were clouds looming over Europe everybodys dancing the Charleston still probably anknows more of a Chinese dance the big hit in the theaters is A38 so hollywouldsgreatest year 139 hasnhappened yet after look that up what was going on anyway uh look why that was so my attempt to set the scene of nineteen thirty eight has failed Mr blade theres maybe the Charleston which is twenty ten years at a date maybe still may be dancing it you know people still do like the robot you know thats its so uh legordia he wants to build Moses circumferential by pass root the big road around the city is gonna cost a hundred and five million dollars and the city guess what it has no money it never has money i is isorry anything New York has never had money history the city and he tries get funding for the Brooklan battery tunnel part of this circumferential bypass root but he cant raise it anywhere and Moses triberauthority it can raise the moneyfor the tunnel but in exchange she says i want control the tunnel authority i want control of all crossings into and out of Manhattan like a supervillain with demand like why would who？

but a villain would be like i need to control all roots into an out of the business the most densely populated part of the United States of America i control it and legordy doeslike this he actually writes lousy exclamation point across a memo from Moses about this but in the any he has to agree to the deal， because he can get the money anywhere else right， so Moses hes gonna be in charge of the building the Browland battery tunnel he died so hard to get involved in this last chapter he couldndo it but moneytalks you know， the other thing walks like we said， so he decides you know what i dont like tunnels the brooklandbattery tunnel it should be a Brooklyn battery bridge no， i like bridges there more appealing to investors there more impressive would you say you built a bridge thats way more impressive than to say you built a tunnel as shown by the fact that theres a huge book about robber Moses i dont know how any who treasure books there are about url singsdad you know that the master tunneler um each of it uh is there a bridge in Marvel comics yes， its the rainbow bridge from earth to asguard is there a tunneler in Marvel comics yes， the molman nobody likes him so bridges people just like them were then Moses， he says abridgesthe finest architecture made by man， while a tunnel， he says is mere a tiled vehicular bathroom smelling faintly of minoxide and i love the condattention towards tunnels in that like yes， like a bathroom where cars are being pooped out of the city like i dont wanna build that and controller joseof de macledreke points out if they pay for Moses bridge there there per tionof it the city will literally have no money for any other construction or maintenance of the physically restructure through at least 1940 theywill not be building any schools they will not building hospitals they will not be maintaining the subways and New York spent building great roads and bridges uh， uh of a sort next Moses， but its schoolsnet hospils are crumbling theyre ancient the subways are inadequate and also crumbling this is the other longrunning thread of New York history is that the subways are always falling apart uh， i experience it my parents experienced it its a generations long tradition that everybody loves the whole thing comes to ahead at a board of estimate meeting were Moses implies that mcgltrick is corrupt and he says if you stop this bridge， it will never be possible to build this bridge ever again the money will never be available， the project will be dead forever， you will never have a crossing between the battery and Brooklin and behind closed doors ligordy as like control mcgltric you got if you dont support this project they will be a rift between you and me for the rest of my administration and the controllers like wegot so much work to do i cant allow a feed to exist between me and the measure so they get so they approve it and on January 20， second， 1939， most is now ces theyre gonna be building a Brookland battery bridge crossing， which is going to plant enormous peers through battery park to support a causeway that would connect the bridge who an extension of the west side highway and then Carol says and then on January 25， the storm broke in the speakout cricomes from the powerful New York gentry who are the core of the good government and fusion groups the Google s the old fashiongos who used to be on most side theydidnsantupforforinwouldhill theydidnknoboutit they didntwork familiar with it but these people theyworkenearthebattery they know lower Manhattan they know Brooklyn heights where the bridge is gonna stop its foot on the other side and Moses announces this the bridge with this artist rendering that really minimizes the size of it uh that the actual board of estimate plans they show this will seriously change lower Manhattm this will change it in a big way and Manhattan borrowpresident， Stanley mis x is really familiar with this and he shows these things to the press and i want to read a little bit of a before before we get into the history of the area which i know Roman has some very controversial thoughts about i want state of that i wanna say read this here so the public might be interested to know Isaac said that the proposed bridge ankoriginbattery park barely visible on Moses rendering would be a solid massive stone and concrete equlansize to attend story office building the approach Ramp linking the bridge to the west side highway a Ramp to picted on the rendering as a narrow path through battery park would actually be a roadwider than fifth avenue a road supported on a mense concrete peers and would cross the entire park the entire lower tip of Manhattan island encurve around the west side of the island almost director ST at heights ranging up to a hundred feet in the air， not only would anker agent appears obliterate a considerable portion of battery park they and the approach road would block off much of the light not only from what was left to the park， but also from the lower floors of every large office building they passed because the approach Ramp was really an elevated highway that would dominate the entire tip of Manhattan it would depress real state values throughout the entire area many good government leaders own some of their real state and they saw ASICS prophecy confirmed almost immediately when a corporation broke off negotiations releasing an entire floor at 21 Weststreet when it suddenly realized the view from the Windows would no longer be of the Harbor the underside of a highway this is the sum of the most valuable real estate in the United States of America and Moses is planning to cover it with a road and block out the sun for it and this will massively depress New York s real state tax revenue and all sing stead who will hear more from he calculates that over the next twenty years would cost the city more than 29 million dollars in lost real estate taxes and ill mention again New York does not have money so they they need to they dont wanna lose this and heresware Carol takes take a specific tag he goes into this kind of four page revery about the beauty of the waterfront this is where Carol the poet comes in this is not just about money this is not just about faxistics this is about the importance almost spiritually for the city that the waterfront is for the city that is so crowded its so built up and im going to read a little bit of that says the buildings in which twelve million persons lived in work to 1939 seemed to stretch out endlessly to the horizon， but from such vantagepoints， it could be seen that they were not only stretching out but closing in building up pressing inwardcrowdingcloser and closer together until as if the concentrating inwardsurge of humanity constuded a geologic force in the epicenter of that surge the buildings of Manhan were thrust upwarden toward the sky， and it was neartheisland southern tip the tip judding into the Harbor that the colossal upthrust had been greatest in the upper part of man hadnthemasses of concrete were mostly sixty feedhigher 70 in the center of the island， there were a hundred fifty or two hundred， but as the island narrowtoward its southern tip， they were four hundred feet， high five hundred crammingclostering closer together bulking a pier in higher as they loomed southfordepressing inexorably toward the islands tip untilat that very tip at the very end of the most crowded island in the world at the very spot the entire world in which buildings should have been crowded most closely together there is suddenly with the exception of a tinyold forte converted into a querium no buildings at all at a point in which a single square foot of landsworth thousands of dollars， which the value in acer was computed not the millions of dollars， but in the tens of millions， theyre set nine 6732 square feed offland 22POINT 2 acers vacant except for grass and trees pathways between them benches and abroad breeds， waterfront， promenade， and this is something that if you live in New York， this strikes you so hard in the heart because the experience of living in New York its exciting its wonderful i love it there， but you feel like you live in a term i hill theres people just constantly crawling all over each other you are stacked on top of other people the only way to get around disco underground underall the people mean a can with a lot of other people and these spaces that are open that are not built on are so creative， valuable and youll hear this so much about Central Park and Moses should know this because hes the man who rebuilt Central Park essentially that that people say the greatest decision that the early founders the city ever made was blocking off all this land so that couldn be built on so youd have this open space open space is so valuable and this is where he goes into the history of that spot in the city and what it was like in colonial days， revolutionary days， the early American Republic， and then he talks about specifically this one building in battery park that fort that i mentioned， which by the late nineteen thirties was the New York Aquarium， but the Ford itself dates back to eighteen twelve， and then it became a entertainment spot where Marcii？

the Lefyet returned the United States from France 1824 and Carol takes us back to that day any talks but other historic people who appeared at the battery in 1855 it was one of the dissimbarcation points for immigranstoamerica so much history is packed in this building and now its beloved is the aqueryum and i can see roman getting so mad history is being used to stop progress tell him why is wrong tell me why is wrong i i think hes right in this case i do not want this a this a bridge approach i do not want Barry park to be an i anated i do think that where you enter i parks from in yeah what i do think that some of this revery about like George washeden once walked here and laphiate had a Brownstone nearby his is often used to stop cities working for people of the modern day when you you have so much reverence for history it is nothing can move forward and cities also need to function for the people who live today and so thats always a balance and so like so when i read this um i i can totally hear that in this case is the right argument for a stopping the wrong project， but often this is the wrong argument used to stop the right project and so i i hear that when i read this it it a little bit of that just like oh my god you just have to let some of the stuff go because you you know people need to live in the city to and i do actually believe that like like it as a park in open space is much more relevant to me than yes storage Washington walk your once i it just its its its so much more important to me i think it it hurts me to admit it because i love history and i love his old things i hate new things i hate uh the hate modern world a lot of ways uh even though it！

even though it subjectively the best time to live in the history the world but its if it i still you know， im distalldcheck for the times before i was born yeah， which is again is my entitled right as a as a straight white man that i can that i can do this things but i get what yous saying like it you have to prioritize ideally the people who are alive over people who live and died and that the memory of something is very valuable its very valuable， but its not as valuable as the life of a of a person today。

and theres a way to balance both things its just that its often a cultural against a type of progress that i think is important to the no better men of peoples lives and and so i， i hear it， and i， and i， and a little bit of my guard is putup when i read this type of stuff you know like yeah um but in this case what you know what Carol is demonstrating is that you know despite all of Robert Moses power he hes running into all these oppositional forces like the wait of history， the the value of open space， the wealth of these people who own buildings all around this thing maybe thats the most important one of all when and and carros putting good the best possible spin on that。

which is not that they just have a financial interesting but that they know this area you know there now they are finally recognized what Moses doing because its a its happening is its happening in there backyard you know its happening in the space that they know as supposed these spaces that they havenbeen to you know he has not yet built the crossbrocks but when when hes doing that the same strat of people， they dont spend time in the brocks， so theyre not really thinking about that but they spend a lot of time in lawminute at this where the financial district is thats were a lot of the the business set of time were especially located because do your history is a history of starting at the southern tip of Manhattan and moving up and outward and so thats where the old family is the old money they they know that area exactly they they find this to be particularly uh galling！

uh yes！

because this is where theyre from yeah yes and in that way it almost like the yacht club again like it feels so weird to be like yeah well， hes got a protect the ancestrual you know a heritage of of the richest people in New York but itsa its history you know politics is a weird thing strange bad fellows you know and basic but i agree with it that here its cares bringing a this historcal argument into it and its more i think because the survival of the fort itself is going to be such a major part of this， but he essentially boils it down to saying Moses wants to take a quiet park and make it the ground underneath a highway and thats and that is a bad deal for especially when we know that hes always told us how the highways and the bridges， they dont really help with the traffic they just bring more cars in and if youre having a hard time victory in this？

like what these type of concrete pillars to hold up this type of approach onto the bridge theyre not just pillars like columns in front of a building the these are tenstorytall gigantic structures like the size of a city block i mean they are they are gigantic they just they are here radicate everything thats around you know if if um you know！

theres a neighborhood right by the the Brooklyn approach of the Brookleanbridge theres you know， theres a end， theres Dumbo， which is under the Manhattan bridge its right there in the name but like right where the pillars are that holds up the bridges you cant build the thing there like its nothing you know it it takes up a lot of space and you Donwanna be there its it anyway， its yeah it this should obliterate this spark and so now Carey he gives us kind of many bios as he likes to do of two other formers approve particular posers， George Mac and any longtime respected Reformer activist current president to the regional plan association and Stanley mayor isex manhattbrowpresident 1937 啊 a longtime public thousand Reformer uh and hes been mentioned earlier hes the guy that Moses threatened to punch in the nose i think that was the last episode um and Carol paints isax as someone who isics is another very respected beloved figure in kind of the New York Civic history and Carol paint some as someone whogoing after the same goals as Moses， but using more principled techniques， not making the compromise of morals that Moses was prone to and Carey says George MCN any was a man who Robert Moses had once 叹 Stanley isix was the man who Robert Moses had once been and they once thought of Moses as theyre champion but now， because hes playing in their backguard they see that his values theres dont really align anymore and theyfinally gonna get a closelook at his methods because now hes gonna use those methods on them and they cant turn abline i to at first the reformers as i think weve mentioned in the past they have that beautiful liberal dream that never works out if i just sit down and talk to him if i just explain to him， you know the the truth of it then all changes mind never works does not how humans are uh they try to get a meeting with them he wont even apply to them and they study the numbers that hes released they see hes underestimating the cost the bridge hes overestimating the cost of the tunnel hes underselling how much the the battery will be changed and the hermers again they they make the same again the liberal mistake they go well lets trust in the official approval process thatll give us a chance to make our case guys what are you doing is that ineverworksthat way um then they see in the papers the newspapers that Moses has requested all many pass a law taking the authorization to build a battery crossing from the tumble authority， and give it to the tribero Bridget arty something that he would only do if he assumed he would get that approval， which is exactly what happens and the planning of commission gives the approval not because our bridges better than a total， but because as cars as no one was offering to finance a tunnel， someone was offering to finance abridge only Moses has the money to build whatever， this crossing is gonna be so if Moses wants it to be a bridge， its gonna be a bridge thats there， there are there theyre gonna take the thing they can get rather than uh get another because the thing they can get is not exactly what they want yeah and this is another example of most is just acting the sort of like antifact antism like he he just wants a bridge and he he must know the numbers are being cooked in a certain way to to give his result that he wants this is the guy who on yellow pads was able to figure out exactly how much money he needed for the west side improvement and how he could chip away from it so the idea that hes like henot doing the math in to the decimal point yeah its its impossible hes he does exactly what hes doing and he doesnt care and its just he likes bridges yeah， he doesnt like tunnels and almost Carol was come you know earlier he he compared him to an artist this is the artist work with her like im not gonna do that way cause i it doesnt string right to me i just dont like it you know they operate on on creative whims and you can do that when youre artist but you shouldnreally do that when your build when youbuilding a massive piece of construction running between two parts of a city you know i used to Ive had a i you know when i ive written for television shows and oftentimes if theres a joke that the boss doesnlike theyll try to give you a reason why it doesnt work and i always want to say them just tell me you donlike it thats fine i understand like you could just tell me you dont like this show were right another one uh so i can start good work pretty well smows us yeah， anyway！

ive been on the other side of that conversation yeah！

youre like i cant just tell them i dont like this thing i have to tell them why it doesnwork and that person other side is like it is its always its always much more insulting to be told you dont understand the workyoudoing as opposed to andis donlike this thing you know um， anyway， so thats thats a management tip anyway， anyway is listing uh， so there are number of reasons the performers think they have a shot against Moses they think they found a clause in the authorization bill they would force the pit city pay Eleven million dollars to link the bridge to the west side highway when legordius says i know what the city have to pay for anything for this and there formers they are united they were strong in the recent local elections， they got their fusion candidates in there marshalling their total forces and their goal is modest they just want to get a bridge to be studied they just want a study done before the bridges agreed to and they used an influence to see the mayor they get their opinions printed the papers public opinion it starts to turn in favor of the tunnel over the bridge and their formers are like while we have public opinion thats crucial in a democracy and will just direct that pressure at the city council before it meets about the bridge and will get them to to get the study because the people want it and meanwhile most is so confident that none of this matters that he goes to florder for three weeks on vacation and Moses he does take a moment to send legory a telegram with an ultimatum that says i will only pay for a bridge i will not pay for a tunnel and so the gordy again he cant cross him is the money the money is going to be more important than than this kind of public force and so Carol he takes us into the city council chamber he describes it mahogany panels delecate wains scotting this is sealing neural with gold details this is a space for democracy this a Temple for the respect of the of the people of New York and the audiences filled with veteran reformers and Carol takes us to the city council meeting where Stanley isex introduces a series of experts who systematically dismantle all of Moses claims in favor of the the bridge uh and they show its gonna be more expensive than he says its gonna be more heavily impacted by whether than a tunnel a tunnel can operate the insnow， it can operate in rain and the bridge is going to be impact to get by that and that battery park deserves better than to essentially become a highway on Ramp and their former stock for four hours theyve really made their case they did it you know this is if this was the movie， then theyd make their case and Moses would rip up this papers and walk out to feed it and the council would vote be like we will be a tunnel and theyll celebrate uh， but then Moses get something speaks and he says my bonus are communists theyre just naseyers theyre always wrong about everything he refers to georgemacinanyas an extinct volcano and an exomed mummy this should be saying in the meeting about these people who were right there and he just its attacks its nonsense he refuses to answer their arguments and when he is asked why cant you just delay it， so we can study the proposal he goes this is a showdown project if you want it or you dont want it and if you want it now or you dont get it at all and the committee wants it and the immediately evode unanistly in favor of supporting the bridge to the full city council for the vote the next day and there formers are there so shocked by his tactics that he just got up there and instead of saying well actually heres why my fax figures are correct he says everyonesacommunist hes a dumboldman dont listen to them and Carey says they had no justification for such an emotion there was nothing new about that philosophy yeah or those tactics its the same thing is always done but now hes doing it against them he is now using the tools that hes used to ruin and or end stampeed over and shovelside in both other people， hesusingit against them now and they cannot avoid this and now theyre his enemies they finally realize it this is not the guy we thought he was hes our enemies now and theyalso turn to realize even if he is an enemy， even if opposing him， it doesnt matter because he is so much power he doesnt need our support we used to feel like we were one of the pillars that was holding those as up and Moses himself has already just like knocked that pillar out was like dont need this im like im in a hot airballoon now i dont need a pillar its it must have been a very especially for these expressive the older members。

the crowd it must have been a it must have been a very dramatic and shocking moment just sit there and realize like oh this is this is not the game we thought where plan but i like carros indictment here its pretty mild its not like uh you know extremely you know uh forcefulhim condeming but like hes saying you know like they have no excuse to think this is new behavior yeah Moses and this is where like the you know the good you know progressive liberal caro you stands out just you know like he hes like they cant they cant have been fooled by Moses they had to have known this is the way he was because this is the way he was over and over and over again they just do not like it when is pointed toward them？

either there ignorance of who this guy really is was the case， which is inexcusable or they knew it and like they didnt care because it was affecting them， which is also inexcusable and its i re i like i mean Carol is he is it is a kind of mild no way he writes because he is he is very enamored and attracted to these older reformers the the kind of older people represent in earlier New York but at times he is kind of like this judging angel of vengeance whos like yeah you should realize to guys like what where are you？

you know you brought this on yourself it doesnmatter you went the fact that he he talks that you know its formoses to refer this guy as an extinct volcano is incredibly insulting but carros kind of it in a way implicitly is like he kind of is like his time is that the time for this kind of reform is passed partly because of their own actions you know theyve theyve zone the seeds of their own observes and now they are reefing what theyve sown and he says this is a Turing point for the city this is the first time that everyone is against Moses plans privately or publie the reformers dont like it the electificials dont really like it the press doesnt like it theres no groundsful of opinion that says come on， we deserve a big beach or we need a new bridge to to get to this place nobody wants it but Moses calls the shot its it doesnmatter the city council the fluence the goes the full council next day they vote nineteen to six to support Moses even they dont want it they dont like it yeah and the next day after that the state assembly the state senate they overwanlingly approve the bills giving Moses this authority to build the crossing governmen says hes sign the bill right after that all Moses needs is the simplest most unnecessary of formalities the word apartment giving him permission because the bridge is built on navigable waters that are near a the brooklynaviards and that is so performera hes not even thinking about it he guess that has of all the time that the word department has never been like ui no you cant build this thing New York because what if we find a war in New York someday you know its snap never has happened and this one Carol reveals the meaning of the title of the chapter uh when the last law was down， its comes from some dialogue from a man for all seasons and the character rocket telling the certhomas more that he would cut down every long England to get after the devil and more response to him oh and when the last law was down and the devil turned round on you， where would you hide rober？

the lawss being all flat and thats exactly what these were hormes done to help Moses get things done to help them do things like the parks in the beach they have cut down all the laws that studen is way and now that what hes doing is something they dont want and they need something to have standas way theres no los left for the city a high befind theres nothing that the city itself can do therenothing the state kin to and their formers they are out of ideas they are not theyve done the things theyre supposed to do they try to get a meeting they made a presentation at a city council it didnt， it didnwork and so they dont do they turn to advise to this new character comes in Charles Copecc Burlingham eighty one years old from the most respected old school reformers and Carol doesnmention this but Wikipedia describes him as being known as the first citizen of New York he was just like the civic performer you know， since the late nineteentsentry and they go to him and care describes any thanks and any smiling says call Eleanor on April 5939 elearroosevelt who Robert Moses has called teral terrible names and said horrible things about and she knows it she is at this point shes writing a daily newspaper Kong called my day uh and she puts a paragraph in it about the bridge she doesnt mentionmoses but she mentions oh， theyre gonna build this bridge and she says isnt there roomfor some consideration of the preservation of the few beautiful spots that still remain to assign over crowded island and Carol describes this paragraph as a small ripple showing that there is larger movement going on beneath the surface of the water of this not you know the New York carvers but i mean that the metaphoracle water because as you may remember Elena Roosevelt is of course， married to the most powerful man in the United States of America whois also rover Moses greatest enemy in the history of the world yeah！

Frankthan Roosevelt yeah and this problem that he has been kicked up to the word department， which is something under rosevolts perview this is yeah！

this is this if theres one person who can tell the word department to do something or not do something it is the commander chief literally the highest ranking official in the military and the United States government and so they were formers theystill having letterspintthe newspapers saying we should have a ton along a bridge but its the private letters that theyrightinto rosevelt that enda being decisive in this and so the pro former hearing for the word apartment report somehow mysterically gets delayed and heraldicky is the the interior secretary who we remember from before he took the blame for order number one twenty nine and things like that he wants this bridge to be built he wants big projects that are good employee people still and he keeps bringup and meetings neachtime rose bels like i dont know um im not so sure about it and eventually it gets sued icky is that hes gonna have the word department to say that the bridge in peeds navigation too much around lower mana happen like rosevelt is not going to let this bridge get built not becauseof necessarily the things that robber Moses is about it not necessarily even because the reformers have a good argument about it long sure if any president would understand the importance of the battery as a as a place， yeah， it would be either Frank on roseval or the other roseval who literally grew up in Manhattan and would go down to the to the battery and do theres a the story in his autobiography about going down to the to the maritime partz the city and seeing a seal carket that had been laid out on a table and that instilling into rose vote his interest in naturalism in an animals， which would run to the rest of his life and be such a big influence on the park system park system so anyway， the rose of else understand New York and they understand water they love water and they like New York water so theres any present whogonna take an interest in this its Frank the mosaval， but he may be doing this just because he hades Robert mos there and finally， he has a chance to to get him so the word apartment they do exactly that they decide now were not going to different mission for this they sit on the decision for two months before releasing it on July 171939 ago yeah， this bridge is Gonna be too close to the Navy yard and Brooklin so if there is a war and someone bombed the bridge and it fell into the water， it would block the access we cant build that and Robert Carl points out， otherbridges in the same basic position to the navy yard and its a suspension bridge its not easy to knock down like if you bomb it from the from the air， the bombs are just going to go through or blow up the deck theyre not really gonna get there its gonna be hard to knock it down but thats the thats reasoning they give and most is furious and he tries to do what he did with order one 29 he tells the press rosevels by the decision and when the press goes to rosevalthe go， did you decide this he goes i dont think so i dont really care like Abridge im not even thinking about it and most is tries get liberty to back em up and liberty a suddenly is not that interested in the bridge anymore either maybe its because by coincidence， the federal government has just extended a low interest loan to the city that will allow them to build a Brooklyn battery tunnel maybe that is something to do with it and years later even after Moses， eventually does get controlof this tunnel he doesnt get to build this bridge， but he does control the tunnel eventually， hestogets furious if the subject of the bridge comes up and he will feel about elinerosevels involvement and what a moreon she was and how you know how what meddling it was and to add further insult injury ligordy is like oh yeah， uh rovermosis the cities not gonna pay for the road linking the battery crossing to your park with system so you left to pay for that this fivemile gap in the belt system that he been dreaming about closing all this time and wert you just bragging that the authority has like twelve million dollars on hand so you should be able to pay for that fine we have to help you with that at all so not only does he not get to build his bridge， but he used to pay to build a road to link to the tunnel that he didnt want built and the central committee of organization opposing the battery toll bridge， which is the full name of the organization， Ive said again the organizations opposing the battery tolbridge， which is a very specific name for a， for a， for a group， and its like thats a civic group， built like a public thirty it has one goal stop a battery toll bridge and then its going to dismaneffords they hold a victory lunch in to celebrate winning this the battle of battery park and Carol again hes like kind of shaking his head talking about it he the you know you can imagine going the fools the same way aliens doing in movies where earth sets off photomic weapons are something the aliens always go the fools what they dont know what theydoing uh he describes them as theys still ignorant of the most important lesson of this battle yes， they stop Moses that bridge is not going to be there but order to stop him the president of the United States had to step in the city couldnstop him the state couldnstop him no civic or municipal or institutional check on his power would could stand up to him it had to take the most powerful man in the country who was a particular mad on for this guy to stop the bridge where that bridge would be there today battery park would basically not exist and there would be a bridge there today if the president had stepped in and Moses had still even after losing this this battle in the longerwar of the control near he still is more say over the city future than anyone else below the level of the commander in chief of the armed forces its really something and this war is not over because the next battle is about to be fought and rower Moses is going to get his revenge on the people who love the battery park uh that is after this， so were on to chapter thirty called revenue and it starts what a great chapter title good one it starts with us Frances baking quote what what is that quotalit so the quota is a man that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green and this is from a short sa or writing that you know they donreally have SaaS per save but a shortwriting called of revenge from 1625 and its a francispac and peace all that how you should not try to get revenue yeah revenue only you know as the old saying goes he doesnt say this the old saying goes when you could seek revenge dig to graves you know uh but Carol i love hes being very literary in the string of chapters uh when the last law was down this one， his somewould scalletshowingoff but i like to believe that Carol is just including the stuff that he discovered a longthe way， while researching Robert Moses， which i think is really a fun way to do it so revenge whatsasallabout as we know hedidnget his bridge across from the battery to Brooklyn he didnt get to wreck battery park internedinto the underside of an enormous highway bridge so he wants revenge he wants revenge on the people who did this to him and he sits on it for a little bit and he figures whats the best way to strikeout this reformers？

the best way to strikeout these reformers is to petutally destroy something that they love and so in February nineteen 41 when much of the world is worried about the war， thats going on in Europe， he decides that castle Clinton， which holds the New York aquarium is unsafe and it needs to be turned down for the Brookland battery tunnel， and is going to demolish it immediately and then hes going to give land to the broncs they can build a two million dollar aquarium， close to the branch Zhou and you remember from early on the episode castle Clinton its a amazingly beautiful piece of New York history Roman you were so excited about hearing about all the famous people that came through it and how can there be touched because it was so wonderfully historic um， but youre not the only one who felt that way the kera says that there is a storm of letters to the header from people who love the old aquarium， love the old forte they can understand why for all that money the two million dollars that they say the aqueries gonna cost in the branch why they can use that money to update the building right revenue tear down and build a new one and most is like people this fortisineminent dangerfalling down it is a public safety hazard， which is clearly elie like its a ring of 8 foot thick walls that have stued for a hundred and thirty nine years of that point and spoiler alert， he fails and tearing a down and theystill standing you know another hundredyears later almost so its fine but he tells people its dangerous， its ugly he says its not historical and he says nobody wants it there but those elderly googues but ordinary New York， new yorkers but ordinary you know， but ordinary new yorkers which is a hard phrase to say art there upset the idea of tearing it down and Carol asks in the book even if they are building a new aquarium， why did they have to tear down the old one immediately before the new one is even built it doesnt seem like a big thing for city to have an aquarium especially for maritime city that doesnget to cv the water very much at least this is a connection to to the creatures of the seeds but Roman had you feel about this tearing down the aquery when there is even one there to replace a yet i mean is awful and out you know the thing is is that there is no reason all of his reasons are trumped up nonsense and the only answer is hes mad like he cant build the bridge the way he wants to the Brooklyn battery crossing is going to be a tunnel and hes going to destroy the park which he has complete uh domain over it like anything inside the park he can kind of do what he wants to and hes taken it out on these people that wanted to preserve the park and its just awful this is a situationwhere even the president of the United States was able to stop him from building that bridge last time canreally do anything about this is part land yeah Moses has unlimited power in part plans the courts always refirm that uh and so Moses hes like im doing it on closing battery park while construction is going on im gonna close the aquarium forever and all the reformers can do there theyre cold conference is they can protest at a meeting of the board of estimate where Moses has for 20 dollars 2 housethefish during the construction of the new querium and is like if you dont give me the money im just gonna throw the fish into the sea like this this is a scorched earth aquarium policy of a kinds that New York has never seen before uh because Moses he doesnt need their permission to do any of this he doesnt approach to close the park to tear the fork down and hes still popular enough because of his parks work that the elected officials who could make a stingabout at least they dont want to piss off because theres another election coming up theres always another election coming up and these officials who have been on the record against Moses plan to do this when it comes to a vote， they vote to approve it legordia does not like the aquarium plan， but he supports it seemingly inexchange for Moses turning down the opportunity to run as the republican mayoral hmm candidate and publicly supporting ligority is reelection theres Moses is just still such a powerful figure in the public mind even outside of his park power that people dont wanna get on the bad side even if they dont like what is doing and theyll be mad effortwhen happens so by October first of that year， the aquarium is closed the fish have been moved out thankfully to tanks i believe and not just to there or their native seas uh and i just have this image i wish and i almost wish you done it there be a photograph of Robert Moses personally hurling fish into the water at the at the tip of Manhattan but didnhavenuh and hes preparing to tear down the old forte he the there nothing can stop him from tearing down the salt for but wait theres that spoilearlier i said the fortstill there right something does get in the way it took the president to stop him last time this time it takes world were two to stop him from turingdown the fork by this point the world is starting up America joins the war by December of 41， the war takes so much manned power out of New York that no demolition companies will bid on the job of tearing the sport down because they dont have the workers their business the workers are busy fuling the war machine that will destroy Hitler and so Moses its were these with things were Moses interest are directly opposed to that of the free world because Moses wants workers available to take on the fort so hes able to remove the fourth proof but not those big walls and the performance timeup in court for a little bit but he always wins in court because he wrote the law the law is clear he has supreme power over the parks and he knows hes not going to get the job done into the wars over so he settles for just putting a fence around battery park and keeping the park closeto the public for five years just out of spike he doesnt need to do this theres no reason Carey spent so much time in the previous chapter time at how necessary this park is for this over built up part of the city and now Moses like um well！

you dont get it like its really one of his more petulant acts ittruly is its truly awful and you know join this time period the the people are trying to you have the national park service takeover the possession of the fort or store it maintain it you know， he puts offense around it he basically just all does all these things to abstruct he tells people uh the national park service cant take it over because i already destroy it yeah！

you cant see it but its already gone i mean and like at one of the newspapers eventually， hires a plane to fly over and theyre like its still there like this is we can see it there and its its ridiculous that hes even a he hes just going to such a such lengths to get this thing destroyed um and finally in 1946 um he gets an a demolite authorization from the board of estimate theres a new mayor will emoji wire by then uh and he told the fort preservers yeah yougot my support and then he immediately flips in like its like yeah mos is there down that for and another court battle and the reformersed literally they want a file lawsuit to stop him and theres the story where theyre like yeah wefile it on Monday and the person is like you got a file it this afternoon Friday afternoon because that fortwill be gone this weekend if you dont do it and eventually， it takes a New York supreme court justice injunction to stop it from being torn down over this weekend in nineteen 46 the orders too late to stop Moses from taking these huge wooden doors on the fourth that have been there for oversentry and just burning them like yeah this take the delivery hes such a， such a kid you know！

such a child and just give you this a little bit of idea of this the amount of time here what war two is happened uh fdr is dead like like this is like its present trumen now like in its for other things that when you get when when he mentions present truemen in the book here its like shocking cause you realize like it feels like one fight like this is a really fun and exciting chapter really inferiing chapter actually， but its also just like it moves and its like easy to lose track of the fact that it moves so much is happening or so much time is going by this revenge is just like these wounds are green like this is lasting a long long time his main namesis in the White House is already dead and he just keeps on having this fight and he can not let it go hes just and the same dictive man and the same time that hes still working on this hes doing many other things like its not like this is the one thing that hes just knowing away at hes got lots of stuff to keep his bit。

keep him busy to distract him and yet he can not give up the idea of destroying this thing so when heforstarts getting involved with the possibility of a brokenbarry crossing thats another eight， its a late thirties， this doesnt stop until ninefifty yeah when finally congress passes a law naming fort Clinton as a national historic monument， thats gonna be preserved for the parks service， so you would think over the course of the nine years between loses the crossing fight uh in 141， and when they fourth is actually protected by congress， that he would lose interest give up do anything else but like weve， said rosevelsteadworld 2 has come and gone like the its this is the fifty is now when this is happening and its this is a very different time in American history when we started。

but hes just held out hope that he can destroy this thing until then because when you hold on your avenge your wound stay green like your wounds dont heal you know and so hes still itstill bugs him so the fortdoesget saved but because its of houses aquarium the theres kind of an ego system of attractions that made it a vibrant place like people wanted to go to the aquarium it was close by in the tips and it was free of that and it was free and the and the forte was there and they all kind of support each other and forclint like it was close for a long time and then it had nothing in it and people then visited as much the aquery was much for the outin cost money in you know it just was one of those things and it took a long as time for the new aquarium to open as well。

it goes it so New York doesnt aquarium for fourteenyears yeah doesnopen again till nineteen fifty five and Robert Carroll he really he really kind of takes a dump on the cony Allen to quarium the one thats it like hes， hes like its it theres a new aquarium but people dont really like it very much and as a kid who went to that aquarium and has been there as recently as last year， i still like it and it was very i was very sad by the fact that when hurricane sandy hit me， your really trash that aquarium the aquery is not fully recovered from it but i i feel like Carol hes hes letting the hes letting the old， be the enemy of the new therewers like there are generations of new Yorker Zoo and people in New York area who do like that aquarium， but hes really like hes like the old one was great this it was mustinfa nice and this ones sticks its too slick no one goes to it but at the but that for because of its location and because of the querium youwrite was a viron living part of the city and at the time that caro was writing this book it is now a dead thing its a thing that is historic piece of architecture but theres no reason for people to go there its just a monument and core since the book was written that is changed in a nineteen eighty six it became the ticket office for the statue of liberty so its now incredibly busy now yeah now its a sight that if you ever been there its very crowded yeah and so theres some life to it there but 因为 1986 years after this book came out so its these long stretches of time that this building that could have use and i know Roman like yous saying you like things that are useful you dont like just having a monument that just sits there taken up space i know people can living。

people can do things i just think that people wait on kind of there can use it as a culture when it really can be a place thats vibrant and historic and develops with the times thats aweme yes！

but this but it means that this building because of Robert Moses petules for almost half a sentry basically for more than forty years， it was just offlimits you know you just couldn you couldnt do anything with it because he just didnt want people doing anything with it， which is astounding you know thats its such a show of it and the you think its like he didnt fully get us revenge but he didnkind get us revenge revenue like all but the time that was a now a place that people would go again for the ticket office the situation everybody Moses fought with in the performers movement i assume was either dead or elderly you know most of them did not see that for again as a viron place and it just its just too bad but it means that opinions about Moses among the majority of performers has now turned he is no longer there young champion the miracle man who occasionally over steps it is sometimes you know a little reckless now they seem hes， a liar hes， a bullet more than one person compares him to Hitler when talking to robrtc Carol， which is a bit much， which is i mean its its what is suing is bad， but its not its not quite that bad， but theyre reaching theys so matted him theyre theyreaching for literally the most sinister thing in their lifetime that they can think that to compared to and he clearly puts his own， whims above the needs the people and his own peddiness and people recognize that now and theystarting to realize like oh just because he doesnt have a financial interest in things doesnt mean he is disintristed he has interest and that interest is in power and throwing his way around and now he has as we have said before now he has enemies， but those enemies are kind of week they cant really stop him from doing much in this case whats there victory that eventually， he didnt finish destroying this building and just let it molder for many deckets yeah！

yeah， its really a shame！

but it really shows what he is like during this period i mean it shows what he was always like theres another example of may be care of like point out the idea that that these people should have known better a different points in Robert Moses uh career they just seem to like the direction his um his bulling was pointed in and now this pointed to us them they do not like it and its just awful maybe theres something i dont know maybe this is a conservative thing to but liberals they get medic conservatives but theres nothing that they despise more than older liberals who are kind of out a touch and dont see things that seem clear and it feels like carros a little bit doing some of that stuff herewords like i dont like Moses i dont like the things he did but even more than that im like disappointed in these older liberals who could not recognize the trap they are falling into yeah um certainly the same way that i get mad more mad at the babyboomers for being not as good as hippies as i wanted them to be as i am at conservative people because im like what course， the serve is to do stuff i dont like but you guys come on you should be better than this theres some of that disappointment in there， theres a its funny to think about this in a book， that is fifty years old but there is， theres a generational energy there of Carol as a younger man finding fault with these older people who he otherwise admires， but who he sees the shortcomings of and said its another kind of itsomething i hadnt thought about too much before with this， but its something that just adds to the richness of the book it makes the book feel more like a living thing you know！

i suppose just kind of old history totally totally i think thats really a student its really interesting to think about him as a disappointed young man in his thirties uh looking at these old guard liberals and and how they failed and keep in watch over the things that he cares about it！

totally that makes sense to me yeah that ruver hero he wasnt always the kind of elder states men of of American bigraphy you know he was a young guy， who was reporter and he wouldnever written this book without ideals without things that he believed in unpassionately uh wanted to push forward and yeah that is able to express that disappointment in a way that feels subtle to me and not a screen this is not the way that like hunterestompsomething right this book four hundred option would just be kind of out on the page being like these old parts that didnre i mean saying the kinds stuff that Moses would say honestly you know being openly insulting these dinosaurs falling into tarpits unable to see the asteroid flying towards the you know thats a this is me im not as good a writers hundred stops so im not doing a good job of of parading have but its that hes able to layer that that emotion into it it just its a just a it its a it really shows why on this fifteh anniversary of the book it bears taking us back take yourselves in mindsetys back to the year was written and not just the year that we were reading it thats right thats right so Moses has demonstrated his power in his vindictiveness in this fight and if we sort of go back in time a little bit again because now were rollback from 1950 to the to the end of this fight into backed when the um。

the Brooklin battery crossing was done um， hes going to get even more power and the power of a monopoly that is on chapter thirty one monopoly where Moses gets the second chance to take over the battery tunnel a thing that he want another to do with but now that it exists uh he really thinks that he should control all the ends in outs of this city well well！

talk about this a little bit leader on when he achieves this， but its like hes essentially kind of a supervillain at this point hes like no one will cross into our Manhattan without my having been controlat like no only with my leave will this city live like its its a j it is a eight a scale of needing power that is on a comic book level you know like this is the kind of thing that Batman is fighting against you know that a villain is gonna take control of all the water crossings in that of Gotham but hes godis chance because of World War two world were two got the way of him tearing down that fork but dont worry silver lining rule were two givesome more opportunities to get power and take over that tunnel he uses his new position that he all only holds for seven weeks as head of the cities scrap metal drive， he says hey， theres 28 万 tons of steelinquotes lining the uh tunnel thats under construction and uh we need to stop work on that tunnel so we can strip that steel and then we wont finish the tunnelsthe wars over because we need that steel for the war effort in a reality， the tunnel it only had a couple more years left of work to go it could have been up and running before the world was was done and the steel that he wanted was actually， cast iron that was unsuitable for military use the military didnot want it but hes able to kind of confuse peoples knowledge of metals enough to convince them to shut shut down total construction and the world production board is like yeah， we kind of worried that the public will see this tunnel continuing and think will that effort should go towards the war， so we want finish the tunnel for the duration of the war， which means the tunnel authority is not collecting tolmoney on that tunnel， which means they cant cover the intersepaements payment on their bonds even though the federal bontholders say were willing to wait， but Moses uses the situation to present a kind of dobious financial uh statistic to convince ligordia that the tunnel thirty can not meet its needs its falling behind on its bond payments its doing this because of a situation Moses has orchistrated the kind of thing we see a lot in politics now， where a a Politician will stop a project or stop a law from passing and then be like well， i told you it wouldnwork that it could that it that it wouldnhappen and even though there the person stopped from happening yeah and hebadmouthsah olasingstead the tunnel engineer he says the only solution to solve this revenue shortfall for the tunnel is for trybrowto take over the tunnel authority even though and he doesnmentiss tribros also facing a revenue shortfall theres a war on the biggest war in the history of the world is going on theres few people driving a work across the tribero bridge you know thats uh but he also has a secret of his leave Moses is bloodhounds we hear a lot about the bloodhounce in mentions but we dont hear a lot about what they dug up in the book but that we do hear this and what they dug up here is pretty reltively underwhelming， but they find out that all the singsteads Brotherin law purchased some tenements in the areover the tunnels entransplaza is supposed to go and obviously thats a possiblitive corruption that his brothernlaw had inside knowledge bought those buildings no is going to sell them to the city for inflated price uh investigation shows that sincstead was not involved the purchase was mad at his brotherin law for doing it and made him lower the price that he was selling the lens the town thirty four and that he didnt want to put the plaza there in the first place that his his plans had been changed but he hes totally blame lesson this， but he never reported his brothernlaws interest because hes worried Moses would find out about it and smear him unfortunately thats exactly what happens he because he didnreported if you have a thing that seems unefical， but its not really tell people about it yeah， explain it like youre always gonna get in trouble when people find out about it oa its too late we should learn that listen uh and Moses sends a little ligordia saying that since dad was caught in this graft that he is hes corrupt he cant trust him he just line and legordy is like im going to run for president someday i dont wanna have any wift of scandal involves ligordy of course will never run for present he wont live to run for present so in another 45 Moses again， says gimecontrolthetunnel authority and the guardia after years and years of saying no， you cant have controlthis thing he gives an and he gives it to him whens he gonna be able to do it， theres three members the tunnel authority other， because each everyone， even those called authority and speaker organization theres essentially always like a committee that runs it you know theres three people on that committee in 143， one of the members dies and the other two members are like well were not doing work on the tunnel i guess theres no rush to recommend replacement to ligordia and whenever its time will tell them hill hire that one so were not going to bother telling him who we think should feel the seat and Moses good is like take my guy put him in there to the Gordia he says put my guy in there the Gordia says no but this means 45 another a thirty memberhe seeds piers theres not two vacancies to fill and the thirty member whoisin that seed hes like well， im sure， ill be reappointed just as i was before theres no reason to think legordia wouldnt appointme ill just open this letter from legordia that ill sure saying that hes reappointme what thanking me from my service of pointing somebody else and gordy announces hes merging the tunnel on tribra authority is he points Moses and one of Moses man as commission members and most belies the final thirty mem board member into residing and has been replaced by another member of the trybroboard and so now Moses is total controlthe tall authority he cleanses house he fires all the previous leaders he fires sing stead and his engineers and now like we said he is， he is the successful supervillain who has control as as cars as of every modern water crossing within the cities borders not only those above the water but those beneath it not only every bridge but every tunnel constructedwithin the cities borders for the use of motorvehicles since 19 was now underthecontrol of authorities that he controlled more important all new watercrossings would also be under his control he and he alone would be able to decide， which crossings will be built and when what their shape and design would be andwhere there approach roads would run， he and he alone moreover would decide what tolls would be charged on these crossings so hes got hes does he has a monopoly he did it hes eliminated his competders hes a monopoly on going into or out of minhatton like he is monopoly on crossing the Hudson in east rivers and the Bronx rivers amazing and so cars says hence worth the remaining quarter of a century in which he would be in power no motorist would be able to use a modern bridge or tunnel in New York city without paying his authorities and this is an an amazing windfall and cool for him as we talked about earlier as long as hes bringing in revenue he can float bonds and he can make more money to to build more things off of that and now he has what the tunnel revenue is going to be says that uh his public battle to take over the tunnel authority had failed， but care notes that the private battle to do so had succeed and its just the the states of alder enormous the amounts of money are enorments theyve going to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars， per year and beyond even that Moses now has such vast power he controlls transportation in the biggest city in the United States， its essentially invested in one man this is all being decided away from the public eyes of the city cars there are no newspaper stories about Moses trying to take over the tunnel 30 in all of nineteen 42143144 now again these are bigyears wework were two is going on no Einstein stories other exactly yeah thats true but i mean this are but the news papers got a field whole file this is city edition you know maybe they could do one story on it but he is Moses he now has this total control and part of his doing this is he immediately has to deny great old sins tags engineering abilities this guy who is not an engineer isdentigrating the worlds greatest builder of underwater tunnels and he goes on to use the syncstatus plans exactly as theyre drawing a side from one change in waterproofing the tunnel that they end up having to go back to the regional plan on in change because the new version doesnwork as well， but even while hes using ultsinctadspans he talks about how bad he is engineering and he was ads way to remove all public credit for him hes not invited to the opening of the tunnel that he designed the promotional brushers theylist twenty one engineers， but they dont listhim and since that he would live in New York for the next twenty four years he would die at age eighty seven in 1969 and in that time， hes designing tunnels and highways all of the world hes a major figure in municipal design he would never again build anything in New York city or New York state and Carol describes intervieingsynstead in his office and his that has ingsays basically told that syncdad would bit on jobs and would be told youneargonna build a New York state as long as Robert Moses alive and the scene here its really powerful the way he the right he writes it is really you just get a sense of sync said as this just this forcefulfigure caught in a box that in his own what his hemade his home city hes just been cut out and theres nothing he can do about it and has i knew with anything hes done other than that i guess he refuse to roll over and let Moses take over and be an ally for him and it just it its a of all the of of the many heartbreaking things in this， this is this is a one of the smaller heartbreaking moments because again hestill usually successful， but theres still a little bit of heartbreak to it yeah， yeah！

and then it turns out in the end that all this is a lie， all the pretexfor taking over the brocclam battery tunnel is ally the tunnel was not in a financial discussion of it was a little bit from from the war， but as soon as the war wasnhappening， the tunnel was profitable and so much so that in the end it contributed 20 percent of tribor authorities total revenues of the end like there was this i mean it was more successful than his bridges in most of them and so its just kind of a crazy thing that he got away with like he he was a he had this ability i mean Moses had command of so many facts this finger tips and he sort of like open up the fire hose of facts in his authority on so many subjects that people this didnt question the stuff as much as they should of in the beginning maybe he was a little more on the level but by the end he was this making completely areners arenously about what was going on in terms of transportation in the city it was just its just he just made stuff up his whole argument was these tunnelsare unprofable my bridges are necessary to bail them out and by the sixties。

the tunnelare bailing out the bridges the tunnelser whats keeping charbra fote and it just yeah its its itamazing and reminds me of a we are saying about this kind of fire， hose of facts and people cant really check it they just kind of take it for take it as truth even when its made up i read a book once about life in the thirteenth century and they were saying that to be kind of like a wise manner and intelligent manner scholar the emphasis was on how much you know not how true the things you know are better for you to know a thousand things about which type of frogs you have to insert into your mouth overnight to cure the month then it is to know one thing about you know how electricity works in lightmake or something like that you know its its its better to know everything about dragons then need to know one thing about you know measles and its kind of the way most works get is he will Bam boost you with so many pieces of information that you dont have the expertise or the time to check yeah and by old ap psychology professor covi hes to save he cant dazzling with brilliance bathroom with bullshit that was his that was his advice on how to write papers for his class and for college classes and thats most is doing he does he will baff you until you dont know which waisy and you have to give in because heso confident and youre so swimming in in argument that you donhave a choice totally！

totally um well its amazing that he just at this point he just has a lock on nearly everything and so this leads is the the next chapter chapter 32 quitproquo uh its the shortest chapter in the book its its quite short only three pages long its three pages considering we have A7 十五 pagechapter last！

last episode im like three pages Robert Carroy you feeling okay， okay you are feeling healthy but and uh！

and its all concerned about Mary Legordia who has an another sort of ignominious and uh！

uh in his life uh like weve seen an a number of times its very reminiscent of of the end of else myth yeah and it makes you wonder does anyone leave New York politics successful or satisfied or happy or healthy yeah probably not i dont know they all seem kind of angry when they leave， but its 145 were kind of in between with those other chapters were um milliquordie is dying he is cancer that run for national office its not gonna have it hes in frequritpain leaves untrained and tired his popularity has created his political sport is created uh he has been privately refused the fusion and gop nominations to run for marien so he announces he will not run for reelection and legordia backs this new Fusion candidate against the Tamini democratic candidate will emoji and Moses he has spent years attacking the Tamini machine he has been the Fusion champion all this time the campaign comes and he pretty much stays out of it he doesnt uh really want to get involved and he doesnt say a word against odire and the reason is because four days before the election oddrier goes on the radio and he says if he selected heala pointmoses to a new post coordinator of construction with power over public housing finally， who get public chasing and all the major public works in the city and ojoir winds in a landside yeah partly thanks to the way having Moses on his team makes them seem less like a tamini hack the press theyre still in the theystill donget it， so theyre like how will the noble incorruptible Moses？

how will he possibly function in this administration thats bound to be full of backscratching tamanygraphters this end that the hero tribute says how long how long would Mr Moses last under adminstration that was dominated by the more selfish encropped elements of taminyhall at a good guess， we would give him about six weeks and Carol continues the guests off by approximately fifteen years whos about as good， as the assumption that underlayout an assumption revealing only the depth of the misapprehension about Moses true character for the rovert Moses about who the herald tribute was editorializinghadexisted for a longtime， the rovermoses of 145 was not the foe of the practical politician， but the essence of that peculiar animal he was the complete realist willing in order to accomplish his purposes purposes which in 145 revolved around the retention and acquisition of power to throw on to the table anychip he held hehadin the election of 1945， the chants to obtain more power than he had ever possessed before thrown onto the table the most valuable of all his chips his name he is it at this its hes gone as far as he can go at this point hes like yeah Tammy use me youre gonna give me power over all major construction the city yeah definitely id do it thats all i care about and i just love that that theyre like we give it six weeks and i have to imagine at the seventh week they were like anyday now and then fifteen years later theyre like wepretty sure that this is a good last too much like they were so holding on to it and uh by the end of the chapter we were reaching as Moses sees legally if the last time in 147 when the exmer is on his deathbed and Moses kind of shaken by it and Carol ends the chapter with the story of a moment 46 before ligorieties when uh this this engineer reformer Walter binger he sees ligordy a eating lunch somewhere by himself looking gloomy and he comes over to talk to him and legordy is like hes got too much power now Moses has too much power and binger says well， major who gave it to him and binger recalls the guardii answering sadly yes， but i could control him now no one will be able to control him and Carol ends the chapter saying the first part of the xmayer statement was not completely accurate the second part was like Gordia to his death bed is still like i was the only one who could harness Moses but he could nobodycan and thanks ligordia no one maybe will ever again he may still be running your city to this day Roman we have to read the book to find out we do have to find out and this is really interesting because it again it its sort of mirrors the else with chapter um but at this point。

because Moses is such a different character， or so has such a different relationship of the gordy that he did without smith um you know the gordy is aware of what hes created here i mean its a little bit like you know just like the theres a just a real i dont know a calle we will kind of like quality to um where youjust like oh come on like this whole thing like you knew what was going on here well theres！

theres an overconfidence in Ligordia， yeah its almost like hes first， he saw himself having a similar relationship to Moses that else my pad yeah， not realizing 1 Moses is smarter than him and two else myth made Moses like ulsmith raise and taught Moses and made him like the the relationship between Moses and else myth was almost father in son and the gordy is like ill run him the way ill smith ran him and its like no， no， no you are at best an equalcolleg and at worst someone that Moses sees as a temporary liver of power and someone to get more power and i think its maybe its the egotism of of anyone who runs for executive office you know that they assume theyre the top guy who can control everything or else they wouldnt go for it but i feel smith theres that last scene with him in Moses and allsmith is basically like learn from example， im warning you that eventually the public will turn on you and Moses like nah and with ligordy its more being like not quite but almost bringing himself hes realizing the mistake he made but he cant bring himself to realize how he was the one who was not the power position in this dynamic yes！

relation she yeah no he is this thing of like of thinking that oh now the sudden Moses gonna be so much worse and he was bad this whole time he just feels like its worse because hes now on the old wire team and he has control over so many more things um but you know it had he gone after that stuff with the verdia um he probably would got in it then to yeah the idea that look wordie was the one holding him back you know who the only the only se you know guard real of liberty of democracy the us holding him is is kind of silly。

but also， we should always remember this book is written from a real Moses， centric position， and when garden is got， other things going on in running your industry operate Moses the same way that the book makes it seem like Franklin rose bels just sitting in the whitehouse kind of stewing over Robert mos is free years when he is dealing with the depression of over two yeah and i think maybe its easier for me to come to this if only because i read a the else myth biography that i mentioned in an earlier sort was sitting on my to be red shelf and it was not the book that the power broker is but there was something kind of refression of seeing the story of alsmith and rovermos is mentioned in it but is not the story of allsmith mentor of rovermoses is the story of alsmith man and governor and rob Moses a player in that and remembering that to all these people they are not supporting players in the story of rover Moses the way they are in this book there are people with their own lives and so i can kind of forgive ligordy a little bit because its not like legory was even spending all day every day being like Moses oh， how do you the way that like？

in the in the Timbertin Batman movie Joker is just sitting around watching Batman on tv going like oh Batman what do i do next you know like this the of the time out Batman so much in this episode compared to the episodes uh but me and but maybe thats the same thing he thought with all this stuff that hes got a take care of as mayor he can still keep Moses in control and perhaps it it just helps Moses that hes often up against people who are either not as powerful as him or potentially powerful。

but also their attention is split yeah in in in you know when youre busy and you have power um theres nothing you love more than having people who work for you or with you who can handle things without you uh dealing with them on a day basis and theres a real logic to like the tribero authority um taking over the tunnel crossing and like you just like OK， i dont deal with this is this vacancies on this commission i can do this i can put all together i know he knows how to run things theres a real logic to that obviously he had some warning bells going off that you know kept it from happening for those years but eventually you can totally see why its just like OK， just like just front it just dont bother me again you know like， just i you know like， and you just want to you want one thing to be easy because im sure everything else is is so hard what what i do wander about this is that so Robert Carol was intending to write a bigraphy of Lagordia after he finished the power broker um it was kind of the next idea that he had and we started working on it and then he ended up abending that to commit to the lbj project and and commit he did um so thorly committed the rest of his working life to it but i do wonder if Carol route the Ligordia biography how much Moses would be in it you know like would he feel like he was still the center because thats where Robert Carros mind is at or would he really be um you know so off to the side because once you dug into the gordia as the main character um you know Moses maybe wasnthat important or not i i， i i dont know i would love to kind of get an idea of that um to see if you know Moses loomed so large in the ligordia biography um if you were to start from there！

its a good， its a good question， its a good what if like in this alternet world， where Carol did right the ligoriobiography how would it look and also， what would it mean for the power broker in terms of the power broker being these statement on New York political power during this period of history if there is this other book that was looking at it， but the same author from a different angle and whether he would have been reevaluating things that he thought uh like its almost like theres another world where his liberty of biography becomes a robottle by the same author yeah， exactly of the previous one where becomes a supporting one but i think the be cut for that reason i think thatprobably one of the reasons that it was probably better for him to to take on a link Johnson box i think i think that was the thinking was he started working on the Gordia and then he and rover gotly were like too much New York i did New York already its time to do something different yeah！

i think he felt like he knew it hed already really said it but i do wonder what the result would be like because of that i mean e you know Robert Carol has told us that he doesnt think that Robert Moses would be remembered today if it wasnt for the power broker and and i wonder in the examination of another history of the same time period if that would kind of， also be， the case like that there would be a kind of under the radar quality of Robert Moses um even during the you know the you know writing about the contemporaneous period if Robert Moses was able to kind of like kind of stick his head above and to get notice when he needed stuff and then sort of stay under and be a functionary when he didnt and i just wonder how that would play out if you were doing it from the legory， perspective i mean anyway， ive very surprised by this scene uh with Walter binger like that legordy is thinking about Moses， said all in a way but maybe he thought about Moses all the time like i would just be curious to know how much he really thought about Moses when when you took the totality of all of his tasks and the things。

he had to take care of in the city uh yeah yeah i dont know i mean theres something it sounds like a like an amazing project for another biografer to tell the story of a time through biographies of each like interlocking biographies of each of the people， so that you can see whats your right that part of Moses benefit to the Gordia and theother Marison governors he served under was you hand in our project and he does it yeah and the book as its written it leads you to believe that there is just this nonstop series of scandals you know everyones always fighting Moses all the time hes always stepping on tos but the benefit was he gets they he got hesaio gets things done and often getthings done in a way that doesnt splitter back on the mayor or the governer and so probably a lot of his time was spent just working under the rate are working furiously you know with his own staff but not um not newey where everyday liberty walks and is like OK， what did Moses do this time you know givemethemoses report well， mayor oh boy this guy you know why else would the guardia put him in charge of the federal money of the beginning of the depression？

if he doesnt think of this guy as scandal prone and is then surprised to find out that he picked the one guy that the present the United States hates the most in the world but hestill holds on to him even through that like learning that and i think the other thing that is great about this suction and really sort begins to solidify a pattern that you see is this the changing administrations and how you know normally when a new mayor comes in a new governor comes and new president comes and everybody remotely connected to the last administration is out the door there is no part of the lingers Moses manages to get more powerful with each of these new uh elected officials its really i dont know if ive ever heard of anything else like that the only parallelican think of is jedgarhover yeah！

the fbi yeah where he stays had the fbi for forty years and each new president coming in is like we got to do something about hover and they cant because hes he he has he has either dirt on them or hes just the only guy who who they think hes the only guy who can run it or hes just so similar Moses like so beloved in the national consciousness not is like a guy you wanna you wanna hang out with jetruver but like hes americaspleasemen you know yeah and theres a but yeah otherwise its hard me to think of somebody who exactly in that position where they can not just avoid getting thrown out with the other political pointties but like can a mask more power you know hes hes set up the lawswitch hard to get rid of him but its not like he put in a law that said every new mayor has to give me more stuff to do yeah has to give me more control to take it manses to get it its amazing i think that this this is so funny cause i just been circling the new um hover biography g man i adliterally was looking at a name was on today like ah！

like that i kind of want to check it out and so maybe this is a that would be also an interesting parallel with the power broker yeah！

what he would he is for a for law enforcement for a seller to what Moses does for musically transportation words like im going to modernize this its going to be impressive looking a crush a lot of people im not going to treat people well， but my image is so strong that you youre gonna keep me doing it you know because the idea of getting ridemyis is impossible politically there yeah this hes like hes like the gentile Robert Moses Jake Garhover not the gentle but the gentle no not gentle 也能拿得到呀！

coming up our interview with transportation secretary peet budditch， NLR interview with Pete budget secretary of transportation in the Biden administration we wanted to talk with secretary peet about his philosophy on large scale infrastructure projects in current times and also learn more about his experience at the local level whenhewasmayor of soutbendanna， one thing ill always remember about his time as mayor was when he led the cities overhaul of its waste watersystem that feels like the opposite of a Moses project in episogerimprovement that is totally necessary and totally unsane， we recorded this interview back in early June， so thanks so much for doing this i really appreciate！

nice to see you both， i think Roman you may know this but you were you were responsible for one of my favorite episodes as mayor， which is getting a new south bend flag uh designed um because i i saw your talk evaluate our flag and found that it literally hit every single qualification you identified of a of a bad flag it didnjust have a picture on a flag or text on a flag it had a flag on a flag。

it was a flag on a seal on a flag and we thought were gonna change this and i dont really glad we did it was great yeah i was i was really honored to see that i i had some influence on that regard that was really nice to see um well， thank you secreted for a being on the nine percent this will break down other power broker thanks for being here thanks for Amy on uh so my first question is early on in the Biden presidency， you said this in a press conference。

im still surprised that some people were surprised when i pointed to the fact that uh if a highway was built for the purpose of do dividing a white in the black neighborhood， or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus caring mostly black and kids to a beach， or the would have been in the York was was designed too low for it to pass by the that obviouslever flex racism that went into those design choices um i dont think we have anything to lose by confronting that simple reality， and i think we have everything to gain by acknowledging it。

and then dealing with it and so all the power brokerheads in the world knew exactly what you were talking about when you， when you said that， but many people maybe someone good faith， maybe someone bad faith， it were surprised， or at least they find surprise in some way can you talk about the variety of responses you got from that statement yeah！

i certainly i was taken aback by how controversial it was i i know theres always controversies about what to do next intransportation policy but i imagined perhaps niyiv that it was widely understood that these decisions about where roads another piece of infrastructure go sometimes also about where they dont go ah reflect these patterns of of exclusion and yeah， this is something whos document it is documated certainly in in some of the anecdotes that the emerge in the power broker， but also just known as something that happened not just in the south but in places from saint palm and a soda to pitch Berg to to sea queues to ah places like birminghaminatlana and um and your part of what was really puzzling to me？

was who who today stands to lose by acknowledging this historic fact and thats part of what i was trying to get add to and in my remarks is nobodys were soft because were taking the seriously when we whats exciting to me about this moment， whats in the the Biden infrastructure package， is the the resources to do something about it， so when we talk about these problems， were not just wallowing in the harms， were taking account of the harms and then getting involved in the remedy and and thats whatreally exciting about this moment not that were your erasing every historical harm but they were finding specific places where federal dollars help to divide a community and reusing federal dollars to help reconnect those same communities canyou talk about that？

like what does the current infrastructure bill？

how does it address those passed injustices and how do you make it so it connects a community？

so whats really extraordinaring the infrastructure bill is it contains dedicated funding for this？

we just put out about three point three billion dollars through a program called reconnecting communities in neighborhoods for focus or watching really closely just by include some， some of your listeners it actually stitches together two sets of funds one was in the inflation reduction act another was in the infrastructure bill itself， but they all added up into this these billions of dollars to do things like uh Stitch back together China town in Philadelphia， where uh around call the find st expressway uh really in a slow motion disaster for the China town community you in a process the began in the sixties and continued to the nines cut that community up and were capping over it to to put him back were doing something similar in Atlanta there， the project is called the Stitch were over hundred fifty million dollars in to help that in bufflow its the Kensington uh st expressway that came out of our first round of this programming， uh where were teaming up with the state of New York to put a cap in there， its not always putting a cap over a depressed highway， sometimes there are other approaches to uh sometimes you can mitigate this disconnection with something a little more moduce than decking over a highway， uh sometimes its the transitmitigation or pedestrian bridge but what all these projects have been common is that they are knitting back together replace that was divided and importantly were also funding the planning sometimes is gonna take a lot of federal dollars just to get the idea on the drawing board， uh so that it can turn into a proposal to to go on and do the construction on but another thing and and you know i think foxureattentive to to what happened in the Robert Mosasara will will recognize why this matters were investing in a process that engages and empowers the community so that these projects are being done with them and not to them yeah yeah so what what is your experience with the book the power broker i wish i could claim to have read every page of it it is it is on my bedside table uh i would say that i i have consulted it more than i could honestly claim to have read it um but like like everything from our caro it it is so absorbing you， you， you， you look at a big break of a book like that and can imagine it to be a page， turner and yet it it is yeah， um and i yeah i canremember actually， when i was first exposed， i think like a lot of people readers in my generation i knew about the lbjbooks before learning that the power broker was kind of Robert curos arrival， but im also just fascinated with him as a figure i i have a a nerdy fascination with peoples daily routines i think partly because i could never quite figure out my daily routine anyway， thats stable or at least its always evolled and his uh uh unbelievable discipline especially in in in a field， you know being a a a historing being in in the humanities， which is known for you know somewhat chaotic workstyles and lifestyles his unbelievable！

methodical nature coupled with i think the reporters instaging he started out the reporter right， yeah， i think coupled with the reporters instingfor how to make things readable unrelevant uh and the nose for context i i just think is it is something that that uh is is is really compelling and uh and of course now， um i i you know first got interested in these things is a mayor when when a mayor of a small if city south bend about a hundred thousand people， but where we were wrestling with these kinds of questions and now being in a city， which is famously all about the use and exercise of power and knowing that that the power broker represents one of the most zero going and um insightful accounts of how all that actually works i was hoping it was going to turn out that you had been inspired directly by the power broker because when you were mirror south bend。

you did a lot deliberally to make the downtown more pedestrian friendly， and i imagined you reading rober Moses and being like a punk rocker listening to lead seplin when packer should like， this song is too long。

all of my songs are gonna be really short that you you read it you will like too much cars my streets are gonna be for pedestrians so thats thatmyfanacy of the situation at least i wish i was that cool and and that quick to to turn ideas into action but you know i will say i surrounded myself as a young mayor with the people who knew a lot about architecture and an urjanism the university of notor games architecture school is especially committed to some of the principles of new urbanism， which many of which i think were responds to urban reneval and the kinds of thing Robin mos Robin Moses was involved with and uh that certainly trickled into the the kind intellectual architecture what we were trying to do？

i definlyset out as a mayor be partly because i was so new at it and partly because its how i do things to say OK whats what are some principles to go by before we jump into this work even the most uh kind of unglamorous and and day to day things are need to be some principles at stake i i challenge myself and my team for example say OK， whats whats our philosophy of public work what？

what？

whats our philosophy of waste water and the more we thought about it it was it was about freedom and it was about the idea that that your freedom depends on not having to think about waste water or water， and then we rise that translated into really reliability and then affordability being our are kind of main things we were shooting for in how you run a water utility uh similarly trying to connect the big things to the small things， the concepts and the ideas to the everyday definitely motivated what we try to do when we were reimagining our states， the streets of of my hometown were basically designed to just evacuate the downtown to blast vehicles through as quickly as possible uh in a pair of the the main two main kind north， south streets of our downtown had been turned into this pair of one ways， which uh cars were going by so quickly it was hostile the pedestrians you would want to walk on that sidewalk and by changing that we created a different more vibrant downtown as funny， obviously we were far from the only year the first community to take that approach but some of the battles we had uh within the community you would have thought that i had made the subsingle handedly uh in the shower and uh at you banded the round about yeah！

yeah handed we were more less you know imposing on everybody in an n you know basically banding the automobile um， uh and it actually helps to get some top cover from this department where i now serve we got an award i might even the first time i came into this building that im now sitting in as i as i speak to you um was to to receive an award from the then secretary transportation Anthony fox for the work that we were doing back down there was an agent infrastructure build a fund us to do the work but even just getting a lot of top cover to say we might be on the right track was was a big shot in the arm that helpdoes pursue that philosophy in that strategy on our on our states yeah that makes me makes me think of another different string we own robermoses because of robertmoses was in that room getting the award he would have been thinking im gonna take this guys job someday someday！

ill be secretary of transportation someday yeah！

i definitely did not cross my mind when i was here then that id be a thatd be coming back to the building in that uh but now you gotta watch out for everyone you hand in a word to there counting up to you yeah！

so in this in the section of the book that we were talking about for this episode the the big drama uh that concerns it is about whether the Brookland battery crossing should be a tunnel or abridge and every piece of mpirical evidence is that that crossing should be a tunnel but Robert Moses wants it to be a bridge and he has the funds to build that to enforces will and only the power of the president stop some and you know there are a lot of weird bises when it comes to infrastructure that is worthy and exciting but i but i feel like you really only stand the importance of infrastructure if you love replacing a lead pipe or putting sensors in the sewer as much as you love building a bridge， you know im saying yeah！

i think so i mean look as a the sewer system or for that matter a lot of tunnels but definlya you know waste water uh resource isnt something you can point to it isnt something that you can put your name on again to my earlier point its elegance often is in the fact that you dont think about it yeah the the way i always approach and conceptualize these things is the less you have to worry about whether yougonna get a glass of clean， save drinking water or for that matter whether theres a hole in the road on your way to work the more free word concentrate on whatever lifts your soul you know i mean whatever matters to you in life um raising your kids practicing your faith starting a business being a scholar whatever this now having said that i mean bridges are also beautiful and there there are pieces of our infrastructure that up play this elevating role in addition to this functional role um and i think about that a lot although even that two i think is best understood by bringing it back down to the everyday and what i mean by that is you know a a bridge the the beauty of Abridge if it is beautiful， just like its utility if it is useful matters most because somebodys day goes different both exiring that nice bridge on the skyline and you know getting where you going on time uh they do add up in the somebodyeveryday life goes a little bit better because that thing is there yeah yeah！

it sounds a lot like your your articulating very well ai are kind in house philosophy that we talk about on previous episodes that in acronym that i uh i call noticibly improve peoples lives or nipple and its a its a for term im not having a lot of successor category different for use in federal policy here but yeah that what was again noticeable， noticeably improve peoples lives we could just say niplon people know what you mean i think most the time yeah， i thought ire really coming off as the shock jock of the two yes！

youre making me think though because i think part of the tension in what we do as a department is some of it is noticibly improve peoples for shirt like i want you to see these these great airport concourses that were investing in improving and i want you to know that that uh you know this happened because we got this by part in infrastructure， law and happens because a president Biden leadership on the other hand like the most important things we work on in transportation should not be that noticeable i mean especially because first and foremost were safety organization right， so like you should notice that you didnt get injured or killed uh you know i uh uh on your way to work like that should be some you dont even have to think about and it that that side of our work is actually one where you know no news is good news so im halfwith you like i i think a lot times especially when youre trying to get credit for good policy you， you its very important and noticeably improve peoples as make sure you you remind people how we got done to and theres this whole set of questions in in uh you know， moral as well as political about about how credit is accumulated and distributed um uh， which i might have some more thoughts on if you want explore that uh， but then theres the other side of of it were kind of the less people know you there are the better and thats how a lot maybe the part of thats my mentality from from having been in the military and being involved in counterterism to were like you know good day is when nobody even knows that you did uh what youre doing you you just protected them and they get to go about their lives yeah！

its its curious that you bring up the idea of credit especially because so much of Moses sisibility to navigate politics was about the apportioning out of credit for things that he got a certain amount of credit and people for parks some people liked him， but he was always sure to include a lected officials in the day views of the openings of his projects so that their names would be attached because he knew they wanted the credit they would support him if they could get it and i wonder if that kind of uh， that kind of calculation uh calculations kind of a like a sinister way to describe it but that part calculation is part of the politics of running， a department like this were like yous saying some things are notisible， some are not and how the credit get spread around in order to get that kind of support for that kind of um approval or or other types of checkpoints met to to get projects accomplished yeah！

look that uh， thats a thing right and up to a point not the sound to uh naive but up to a point that thats really healthy thing like part of how supposed to work in a democratic system is you as a government official deliver something for people they notice that you delivered it for them uh and they give you credit for that you get to keep your job or you know you fail them and there match you and you dont get to keep your job really that on some of thats thats a basic logic of electoral democracy and i think you know stiffly important to me is i travel a country to uh make sure that i talk about uh the the different people who helped us get something done umm you know with im in Pennsylvania， i want people to know that that uh you know a by parties in law that that was led by president Biden and was supported by their senator Bob Casey um help us get this this bridge down that that were fixing in in filly or these safety dollars going to make a safer st capin langister now one interesting thing about how our funding works is that the vast majority of it actually， is not of the form of discressionary grants where our team puts together a list and then you know its brought to me for a final sign off and were literally picking and choosing winners and losers， um there is a lot of that there is a record level of that and we try to have very clear principles for how we make those choices and be transparent about em but for every dollar that we have going out that way we have many more dollars to go out by formula where we just give it to the state and within certain limits uh they can use it however they want and whats really interesting to me is that some states and some governors will go out of the way to share the credit to put up signs on the side of the road to make sure that everyone knows is happening because of present bytes by parse in infrastructure package in a partnership with the state and some of them wont right， but for those who do， i mean the alchemy of that and this again i dont wanna sound to polyana， but i really honestly believe this is true my my favorite rule of political mathematics is that if two willing parties uh like a federal adminstration and a governor or mayor who work together if they each come in willing to share the credit， each one of them walks away with two thirds of the credit i dont know how works this is kind of a magic today， i love and then you know look， i obviously as a matter of fairness， i also consider important if somebody tries to share in the credit for something they try to stop like some of the members uh of Congress who celebrate projects that are going to their distrix funded with the bill that they voted against in the sum cases attack were gonna call me out on that just a matter of of a fairness yeah， westill gonna fund it if itgood project but but were were if if they are uh you know！

theyre gonna be cheeky about making a sound like theres once you brought the brout the project there we were gonna have something to say about that i dont think thats like makes me i dont think thats like unnecessarily political i think its just about fairness yeah no i think i think youright and its interesting because something thats come up as wetrack down the services kind of the ways that to operate productively in politics to do things for people you need to have traits that at least you know were taodaas childreners are fairy tales things are not the ideal traits like you need a certain amount of ambition for power in order to do things to get to and you need a certain amount of getting the credit in order to continue that support whereas i feel like what were overtalking， were young young is that you know to be that kind of like Garry， Cooper， loan， range or humility we are like ah i didndo anything im just another man you know uh i was i i know i stopped all these people that anyone would have done it whereas to if you do that in politics you will you will not effectively get the support you need to to get the things down the year there in the first place to do most likely yeah maybe i i？

i dont know， i think there are a lot of different ways of being effective i would definlysay some of the most effective people ive encountered since getting this job are not the ones who get their name all over the place， uh thats one way to do it， uh especially in a you know for elected officials。

uh this sounds like that counter intelligence mindset again maybe like because in the military。

theres always the person who like according to the org chart is the is the person who will get something done and then theres the person who will actually get something done like when i was deployed i， i i was very junior officer i like my most important responsibility probably was driving equipment or uh other uh people， uh uh who typically who outranked me， um around cobble or between cobble and bottom and uh we didnactually even know that was an important part of my job i didnactually have direct control of any vehicles so to get a vehicle i i i i had to really think about it and there are two ways to do it there is an official way to do with took forever and sometimes i would never get a vehicle and then theres this guy name Marlin who to this day i dont know what his job title was i dont know hes spilling i dont know what organization he was part of i just knew that if i stayed on his good side and made sure that that ah i i helped him anytime he needed something and gave him first divs on the chocolate chip cookie bars that came in the care packages from southban in the end of my little mailbox in the in in Afghanistan， i get my hands on on a land cruise or when i needed one and uh that really mattered and so i all， which is to say there theres a lot of different ways to do this right and i do think sometimes we get wrapped up in the myth of somebody who uses uh hard or even nefarious means to get something done is kind of the way right um and its fitting again that we talk about this in the context of of rover carrobook because i do think his scholarship on lbj got a lot of people thinking about lbj who delivered so many these incredible results including this this you know it in is in many ways crea credited with the civil rights uh law that that that was one of the most important social leaps forward web had as a country um but theres this idea that you know he in terms of how we treated people was a real bastard and thats what it took to get those important were these things done and there the whole methods around that um that you know we can have a longhistorical debates about how much that thats a thats really the right account of what happened。

but the point is thats what people think works a lot around here and some of them really into the into that in ways i would argue actually counter productive to their long term effectiveness that make sense to me so one of the things about Robert Moses is that he had this idea for how New York should be and it should be you dominated by cars he loved bean a pasterner car he never learned how to drive but he love being a paker in a car he grew up in a time period in which your driving was this you know lesually activity people didndo it commute they did it for for fun and so like he was really into this ideal park with any shaped New York in that image um and you know he really did not pay attention to the changing world he had just had an idea that was fixed and no matter what a amount of empirical evidence sort of counterray canaddicting that um this didnt work on him over the decades that he ruled and i sort think about this when you know what comes to be you know in in charge of your translation the country and thinking about it like how much do you do you not just mean obviously no one should do what Moses did um just steam all over everything with this one ideology that doesnt change but you do want to like shape things and move things to to be kind of different than they are now and not just um just build on whats already been built how do you think about balancing that yeah？

i think its really important to come in with a vision uh yeah again your account of the principles， the ideas， the concept， and sometimes that means pushing i mean i was definitely pushing my community back in my formative years as mayor um with ideas that i believed in that i really think we were right about like you know well play around about was gonna save life yeah and a lot of people hated it and you know in a democracy， yousuppose be accountable to where people uh you you supposed be accountable to people and at the same time have a responsibility sometimes to lead in a direction that that wasnt already how people thought i mean in fact， you could argue by definition younot leading if youre just going to where people already are yeah and so then the tension becomes how can you legitimately be responsive to people， which means listing and being open to the possibility that youre wrong and being ready to adapt your plan and still be doing your job as a leader， which is to arrive with a vision and try to persuade people so when are you persuading people and when are you letting them persuade you？

i think that we have a lot of process that goes into that uh if youre the local level like， like i come out of uh a lot of public meetings um that were prying not as much a feature of of rover Moses is life but as a mayor， i mean i think about our complete st stuff we counted into the dozens the number of public meetings we have， and i viewed them largely as precisive， largely is in a opportunity to say to the community we really need to do this in herese why but we really did adjust only adapt and rethink our plans uh because uh， because the input we got， and if ive been honest， also because the city council made me to sumix and i couldnt get what i wanted to throw on the first try without some adaptation um so so there was that push pull um but i still wouldnt been doing my job if i just kind of pulled people on what they already thought and and went along with it at the federal level theres a much more um uh uh kind of thoroughly designed version of this， which is especially when you get into something like an environmental impact statement uh so on the biggest narliest most complex projects federal law requires that if federal dollars are involved， there is a very intensive process of getting comment and we have had you know whether its projects or whether its certain rules that weve been considering literally get tens of thousands of comments you go in on uh regulations dot gov which is a real website sounds made up and doesnt suffer exciting but you know when we propose something um that that were good eventually gonna make into a rule or contemplating making a rule everybody gets to wain and somebody has to read all of those comments and thats good right because were were making rules that everybody has to live by um so i i dont know that you know everybody kind of draws the line somewhere um but i think any leader earning their paycheck is not simply reflecting the cm the the the population they serve， but also， it is not a good leader theyre ignoring the population and the community that they serve and by the way one other thing i want to say， which is the deployment of political capital right if you are for something on popular and if you are right， that is right thing to do then you do kind of a trustful where you implement that policy and hope that over the years it delivers enough good results for people that they wind up giving you credit for it um thats what i felt like happened with with the kind of argoof my first term is mayors not the first year a lot of people got mad me because the things we propose， things we try to do， but the fourth year i had no results to show for it that i i could earn the enough trust to to get reelected and and go at it again here in this administration， i feel like were on a similar Ark where we spent year one in just getting the centfrestructure built through now were in the fourth year。

turning in a actual results and hopeful that that urns credit as as romino saying earlier that this episode that uh were wework covering before the before this interview air so the listeners will just heard this but im ill recap its lately anyway， uh is about the building of the Brooklan battery tunnel and how he wanted it to be a bridge it took the present of the United States stepping in and pressure in the word apartment not to give navigal waters uh permission for it， uh to get it stopped and it feels like so much of this is emblematic of an earlier error that was not as standardized and formalized as the process that youre describing now and other was no department of transportation at the time it wouldnit wouldnbe around sixty is when Moses was already basically out of power and it may be wonderate how how you would handle this kind of situation now or this kind of situational rises of sort of master buildermaster planner type was local control local influence and is trying to push to something very big using federal dollars uh that maybe isnt a good idea does the federal government have more more tools uh to handle something like that now than it did back then when literally the president swifeed did say to him， he should do something about this and the present said oh， yeah， yeah！

lets not do that yeah look， there are more tools now uh were very careful and very conscientious about the fact that a lot of these decisions are local for example， fifty four thousand projects in counting that were funding through the Biden infrastructure package zero of those projects was invented here at the USD ot headquarters in aviart all of them were developed by some citytown， state， tribe airport， thority transitions agency and then brought to us or or got funding through a formula and so were very intentional about not dictating the terms of a project and at the same time， we are policycles， right safety， uh job creation， climate equity， and to the extent that the law provides for us to do so we shape things largely by which projects we select for funding in competitive processes and an and by other lawful means to to be a certain way and you know other tools didnexist before are really designed to protect the writes of people who could be impacted by a project notably title six the civil rights law that we enforce so that if people are about to get uh you know roled rover Moses style they have recourse and we come in as a as a watchdog uh or um as an unforce or really to make sure that that those people are heard， but ill also say this one thing ive learned in this job or relearned in this job is the importance of informal or unificial power and ill give you an example thats less in the realm of building things， but is one of the most important things wework on， which is how airlines treat their passengers so there are some things webintrying to get done and are still trying to get done uh through rulemaking， but the roommaking process the administrative procedures act the notice in comment but you can take years while we were working on that especially in the summer of 2022 there are so many frustrations around canclations in delays the idea merged that if we just put more information out in a really easy to understand form uh that that not only would help passengers know， which airlines would take better care of them but knowing it was out there might actually change the airlines behavior and you know living in this world where it takes monster years to do something as the team OK， we set up a website like how long would that actually take this up we we get it in in in a couple of weeks and i said okay well， all send a letter to all the ceos of the airlines saying hey in a couple of weeks， weve gonna put this website out you might want to change your customer service plan before we do it this is gonna be a bunch of green check marks in red axes and they did well this was i did not this is not an enforcement action weve done those this is not a rulemaking wedoingthose this was just saying hey， like were were gonna tell people what youdoin so you might want to think about what youdoing and it led the real change and so i been amazed at how powerful those tools can be when used a long side tools like rulemaking and enforcement and spending money yeah yeah of those for fifty four thousand project that you mentioned i hope i got that number right um dont ask him to tell us every single project no！

but but im wondering like you you you are so you strict me as a real systems thinker like you really enjoy solving a problem and is there a certain type of project that really delightsyou in in the way that its the the type of solution that it is or or you know like i dont know that the fact that i i im sure trick by like i i ive always felt like your waste water thing， seaword thing in in in south Ben was just like great you know i mean and it is one of those things that that absolutely passes by without notice is there a type of project that really delightse you when you hear about it or comes crossher desk yeah！

i love the projects that have a disproportionate impact in the places that they benefit and often those are the actually smaller projects are not our market national headline projects obviously， i love the high speed rail were doing from Nevada to southern California were contributing three billion dollars to make that happening and its it it could be amazing but you know again i mentioned linkest repeniouts just fresh on my mind because its the the last one i visited uh twelve million bucks were gonna help them do safer st capes that is both the a a kind of a vote of confidence in the maiers in the city strategy of adding byclains not just not not in the idea that its ornamental， but actually for safety purposes， uh taking some one way roads turning limited to way excepting that traffic can be a minute or too slower in exchange for real safety payoff um that uh you know is not our biggest dollar amount， but is something that we know is gonna make a difference uh we we were in uh chamblance out the code this community thats twenty five hundred people， but believe are not they have an airport and that airport really matters because they do air ambulance missions in a community thats a long drive from the nearest major hospital with the promise ner and wejust get them a building for their airport the the right now its its a basically manufactured home its you can tell its kind of a double y theyd done a nice job with it but they need an actual break in more to building and for less than a million bucks were getting a month， those kinds of things are especially gratifying because you know how i maybe just because where i come from you i was mayor of a smaller midsize city you know how impaceful theyre gonna be and so i stack those right up alongside the you know what i what i often call the cathedrals of our infrastructure that were working on yeah！

i remember when the eastern span of the bay bridge， it it was rebuilt i am unprebaaria and um the construction was running late and they cancel the event where you could walk across it before it opened and i was so bumped like i really i wanted to take the kids you know like i was like there， was this moment that i felt like that， was this kind of lost in us just exalting in this i idea of this thing that we built that like only a government can build like Amazon can build it apple can build it a governments this and thats the collective will of the people and i just wanted to have that moment of celebration and i miss those and i feel like i feel like were right for having that moment again when it comes down factory。

i love that and i think we do need to do that and i think the challenge and the opportunity with this particular infrastructure moment is that its in so many places at once so theres not this like the golden spike like the single thing you can use to mark the completion of this coast coast project the transcount on a whale road right， its literally tens of thousands of places getting their golden spike and i think the style of celebration youre talking about is is really fitting for that， and and having each community come up with its version of that and and there is something in particular magical about um when you give people access to a piece of infrastructure， theyre all get already going to use a Google Drive over the bridge every day but when you walk it， you feel it differently ill tell you that can be really powerful um ive had an experience of uh occasionally being on a runway um uh to do my job we either do do a press confidence on a tarmac that were about to to revamp or uh uh right along with the with a uh inspector going out on a pick up truck and you not speak not runways at night these are officials just all all culture yeah be you know from a distance you could be forgivenfor thinking a runway is basically like a road and when youre on one， you realize its more like a field yeah， i mean in terms of its scope um and there are things like that when youre on a bridge or or uh or runway， or another piece of infrastructure that if if you get the chance to interact with it in a nonnormal way。

it depends your appreciation for it i mean i honestly feel like there was this wave this wpapwa period in which we took special pride in these things and there was a there was a extraction period in which we didnt we wanted to all product private partnerships， and we didnt want to and now i feel like its do you feel that swell of people wanting to do this stuff a little bit！

more a little bit i dont know that this seems like were back into an era where we could build um with abundance so i have a couple of thoughts about this one is that i think we need to remember that what were building is something that should be a source of pride in is not just making up for lost time and here we may be the victims of our own arguments a little bit because i think we said persuasively and correctly hey for less forty years， weve underinvested we got a huge backlog maintenses a problem we got it just fix all our stuff and thats true by that we have a whole philosophy and whatcalled fix it first， the importance of taking care of backlog but taking care of a backlog doesnt make the heart sore right and the truth is wedoingall the above were were definantly uh dealing with things that should have been done thirty or forty years ago and making up the lost time in repairing or restoring bridges or tunnels um but were also doing a whole new things again the the high speed rail sphere just being one example of it and so i think we need to to remember to to think about the positive the proactive that how were going to be not just as good or as far head as we once were a better than ever if we get this moment right， but the other thing i think that that is always in play here especially now that its not the thirties and forties and we have other things we pay attention to in terms of environmental impact in an an workforce in frankly， just safety yeah on building things that means theres some delayed gratification here the real reason III call the biggest projects were doing cathedrals of our infrastructure is actually not cause its a post word to talk about a big thing， its a reminder of this central characteristic of cathetrials， which is that the people who built them wereneven around when they were complete now， uh unlike the builders of of nature dom， i very much hope to be alive when we finish the the you know the the Hudson river tunnels， but its unlikely that will be secretary transportation when when that happens and so the you know unlike a piece of great i dont know tax policy and isuperproud of the tax policy the monstration you know the child tax creator they did it in and almost did a stroke in a matter of months， a child property plumated in this country like thats amazing it doesnt work that way when youre building a big bridge or a new airport terminal and so how we need to be as excited and as emotional about a project that takes years to bear fruit as we are about something that gets done uh uh almost overnight and to me part of how we do that is we take pride in the how one of the coolest things i get to do is spend time with high school students who are in these vocational uh programs and preapplyship programs that prepare them uh someof them not going to college some them going to college but want to learn building trades anyway， um but prepares them to have a hand in this building thats going on and for all the handling thats gone on about how our country doesnt do would shop school in highschool anymore and doesnt uh uh respect building i see a real change， real kinda counter culture thing happening and these students stand up tallerin their part of it my point is they might be working on a bridge， two or three or four years before anybody gets to drive across it， but its already making somebody better off and thats something that gets me excited that i hope we all take a level！

a pride in thats a really exciting way to think about it feels like one of the big flaws of Moses in the book is that is this impatience hes got to get it done， hes gotta get it done now so we can move on to the next thing and when youbuildingsomething that will last a hundred possibly two hundred years or longer the impatience in getting it built is is only going to hurt you in the long run and you make those mistakes that he made or make those delibrate errors that he made and theres something very exciting about that idea focusing on the building of it to so that the period before the thing is completed isnt just a frustrating period of waiting its a period that you can also make the most of an take pride in i think thats such an inspiring weighted to think about that process yeah！

i mean you know roman you talked about the the uh participation in an event to marker project completion， but there also ways to do that along the way i mean we you know this might be a little romantisize but but we often look back to the era of a barn raising right where people got together that to do something and part of the there the fellowship that was created in the doing of it mattered uh and i think thats true in a lot of service contexts， um uh in in in more modern versions， what we do um by the way i would even say uh just the the the active putting these resources together i mean the political construction project that was the bipartisan infrastructure law if only because it was a bypartisan law in a terrifically divided time， uh， which is the Washington of 2021 something we oughta take some private but i do think look we we need to find ways to celebrate not just as a political matter so that you know people who help get this done get credit but to reconnect all of us with our role because each of us paid into this right and each of us should take some pride in this getting done and its a big deal effect my big thing youve got your uh acronym Elliot i get something im trying to get to catch on OK um lets see if its more perprey than mine。

i dont know lets say！

lets say so i want the some total of the Biden era investments in infrastructure whether its the stuff i work on or the getting rid of lead pipes or the the internet access or any these other things to come to be collectively known as the big deal there was there is the new deal， the square deal， the fair deal i think nothing could be more fitting for present Biden infrastructure work than the big deal so im a keep calling at that uh Wes if a catches on i like it well secreted people so much for joining us its been a real pleasure to talk to you same here thanks for have me on and thanks for your attention to these things they really matter and uh uh theyre more fun to talk about and think about then people might realize and that is this months！

episode of the 99 percent invisible breakdown of the powerbroker next month were going to cover chapters 33 and 34 thatpages 73 to 86 in my book 2 very long chapters and if you cant wait that long to hear me summarize something and you dont care what it is im summarizing whether its the powerbroker were say a really terrible movie whynot headovertwothe flop housepodcast myothermain podcast where you will hear me summarize some kind of terrible movie and we got some exciting news we have new powerbroker breakdown merch for all views along at home something folks have been clearing for from the beginning of the reader long you can finally have something that shows off your enthusiasm for the power broker in addition to logging around a four poundbook infact one of the thingsweve got is perfect for caring around that massive tome that for poundvolume that enormous municipal grim war that youve come to love so much and it is a todebg but not just any totbag this one is from bagu it has two setsofhandles it has a zipper it is pushing the limits of totbag ness in the way onlya visionary like robertmoses would wondering whats possible with a toadbageand not caring who gets hurt in the process truly this is the carrier that the power broker deserves we also got a nine API Powerbroker band t shirt with Robert Moses on the front and a list of episode dates on the back it is at the most Hardcore metal thing that we ever produced invite all at 九九 pi that org slash store and what a link in the show notes by the way the rest of the nine api shop is discounted as we make way for some new merch including a nine API powerbroker Challengecoin。

which will have available for all you guys who have confused the relong with us the 99 percent visible breakdown of the power broker is produced by the wonderfulisavel angel edited by committee our music is by Swan Rio and our mix is by Dara Hersh 99 percent visibleexecutive producer is Cathy to our senior editor is to Leny hall curt colsted is the digital director from the Resteam includes CRISPR Ruby， Jason Dalione， Emitfish Gerald Gabrielle， Gladney martingansulis， Kris for Johnson， Vivian Li Lashmadonn， jacomultananomadina， Kelly prime， Joe Rosenberg， Nina Potec and me Roman Mars the nine percent visible logo was created by stuffing Lawrence the art for this series was created by aren Nester we are part the Stitcher and serious exam Podcast family now headcourt six blocks north in the Vendora building in beautiful Uptown， Oakland， California you can find us on all the normal social media sites was our own discord server where we have fun discussions about the power broker but architecture about movies music all kinds a good stuff its where im hanging out most these days you find a link to that discord server are merch page as well as every pass episode of 99 pi and nine pi dot org。

uh sorry you cared away i love that thats what a great a look great book this a great book you know its a good book we should devote some time to it we should talk about it once。