New Ways to Understand Robert Moses: An Interview with Katie Uva and Kara Murphy Schlichting

By Robert W. Snyder

If you teach courses on New York City’s history, or just have a passing interest in its past, you are sure to come across Robert A. Caro’s biography The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Published in 1974, it remains influential and informs an exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, echoes into David Hare’s new play Straight Line Crazy, and appears conspicuously in Zoom conversations on the bookshelves of politicians and journalists.

But there is more to understanding Moses, his city and his times, as Katie Uva and Kara Murphy Schlichting argue in a valuable two part-series published in the “Teach New York” section of the journal New York History. Writing with clarity and authority, Schlichting, an associate professor of history at Queens College, and Uva, a teacher, writer, and historian, deliver an analysis of the historiography around Moses that prompts new interpretations of his career and present a wealth of primary sources (nearly all of which are available online) that will be useful for teaching. 

Caro’s version of Moses is very much a creation if its own time and place. New York didn’t “fall” after all, and when it did stagger you can’t blame it all on Moses. Caro’s depiction of the master builder in places rests on evidence that is open to question, and he often blames Moses for inculcating practices — like racism in urban renewal — that were widely held in his time. Finally, the lessons to be drawn from Moses’ career look one way in the era of the urban crisis and another today, when New York City is struggling back from the pandemic and starved for affordable housing.

All these points are introduced and explored in this short audio interview and analyzed in depth in the attached essays, which have been combined into one document:

Katie Uva and Kara Murphy Schlichting, "Teach NY: Robert Moses in the Twenty-First Century," New York History, 102:2 (Winter, 2021-2022): 399-405 and Katie Uva and Kara Murphy Schlichting, "Teach NY: Three Case Studies for Re-Assessing New York’s 'Power Broker,'" New York History, 103:1 (Summer, 2022): 168-177.

To be sure, The Power Broker has great merits. But the gap between popular knowledge and scholarly history often means that journalists, politicians, and students all understand Moses strictly through Caro’s perspective, unaware that historians who write about New York City have much to add to Caro’s interpretation. With this new series by Uva and Schlichting, the perennial story of Robert Moses and New York can be retold with new layers of nuance and significance.

Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus at Rutgers University, is editing a documentary history of the Covid pandemic in New York City. He is the author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York and coauthor of All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York.