Kenneth Jackson: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Okay, so I want to be respectful of your time. You've given me so much already. But before we close out the interview, if you have any other things you want to say about The Power Broker or about Moses or about his legacy or about NIMBYism today or the state of construction and public works today. I think of Moses as the polar opposite of Jane Jacobs. Think about what Jane Jacobs saw as important. She saw the block, the store, the people, the mixture of genders and races and everything else as being significant. Robert Moses really didn't see people. He saw massive things, things you put on an architectural board and he didn't see other things. That's both his strength and his weakness. Had he seen people more, maybe he would never have built what he did and we wouldn't have had the bridges. But we do. And can you imagine New York without the Triborough Bridge? It's not imaginable. You’ve got to have it. Listeners who have not been to New York may not understand it. This is a city that has water all through it. It's about water. It's not like Dallas, where there's essentially no water. New York water is everywhere. You've got to cross these bridges. You've got to get over that. So it creates a problem of circulation that's vast, especially when you have tens of millions of people trying to move around. That's something that Moses figured a way around. Yep. Actually, one more question that just occurred to me. I'm curious why you think that this biography of Moses by Caro achieved the cultural prominence it did. Of course, it's like an incredible book and I enjoyed it a lot as well. But like there's countless biographies written every year and many of them are also good. What was it about this book that catapulted it? There's a review of the new play about Robert Moses and the title of that review was just that New Yorkers love to hate Robert Moses. Why does he have this sort of cultural prominence in New York and across the world?…

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