Rethinking Robert Moses in New York City

Robert Moses is a singular figure in twentieth century New York City history. His impact on the city’s urban form is indelible. This course will survey Robert Moses’s more than half-century career in greater New York City. We will consider Moses’s career in three eras: his 1920s state park work, his 1930s New Deal-funded projects in New York City, and his post-WWII career, especially in relation to so-called “urban renewal” clearance programs. Topics covered will include the Long Island State Park System (est. 1924) and Jones Beach State Park (est. 1929), the New York World’s Fairs (1939-1940, 1964-1965), the Triborough Bridge Authority (est. 1933), the Cross-Bronx Expressway (circa 1955), and Lincoln Center (est. 1962). This class will follow the shifts in Moses’s career and situate him in the broader systems and coalitions that shaped urban development in the mid-twentieth century. We will also consider the ubiquity and influence of Robert Caro’s 1974 The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York and reevaluate this assessment of Moses as we approach the biography’s fifty-year anniversary.

Tuesdays, 5:30-7:00 PM
November 14-28
$125 (3 sessions)

Meet your instructor

Kara Murphy Schlichting

Kara Murphy Schlichting is an Associate Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY. She earned her PhD from Rutgers University. Her work in late-19th and 20th-century American History sits at the intersection of urban, environmental, and political history, with a particular focus on greater New York City. Schlichting has published in a number of scholarly journals including Environmental History, the Journal of Urban History and the Journal of Planning History. Her first book New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore was published in 2019 with the University of Chicago Press.