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In 1974 Robert Caro's The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York debuted to the applause and acclaim of those fed up with the superhighway and slum-clearance policies of the recent past. This massive 1,246- page tome chronicled the life of New York's public-works master builder Robert Moses, examining his relentless pursuit of power as he supposedly dictated transportation, recreation, and housing policy from the 1930s to the 1960s. Portrayed as an arrogant bastard,Moses and his insatiable hubris purportedly wreaked irreparable damage on the city and precipitated its fall from glory and transformation into a bankrupt, decaying hulk.
Not only did Caro's monumental volume go through twenty-seven printings by 2000, it won both the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize, awarded to works of history that achieve literary distinction. To the growing number of city dwellers opposed to the meat ax of highway programs slashing through neighborhoods and the bulldozers of urban renewal, it became a sacred text second only to Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Those dedicated to preserving the inherited urban fabric had found their savior in Jacobs; Caro recorded the fall from paradise of their Satan. Together Jacobs and Caro established the Manichaean scenario that has influenced urban policy debates ever since.
Caro owed his success in part to fortuitous timing. The Power Broker appeared in the wake of the Watergate scandal, when investigative reporting aimed at toppling the powerful was at high tide. A disenchanted and cynical public was primed to enjoy hatchet attacks on the reputations of public officials. The Power Broker's publication also coincided with the much-publicized burning and abandonment of the South Bronx and the city's slide into financial disaster. Rather than blaming themselves for selfishly blocking subway fare increases necessary for improving service, for electing successive amiable but ineffectual mayors, and for advocating a social policy agenda that they could not or would not adequately fund,New Yorkers could, courtesy of Robert Caro, agree on a scapegoat for their city's problems, targeting an irascible old man who had overstayed his welcome in public office. Instead of recognizing that older central cities across the nation no longer suited the lifestyle of a majority...