The Power Broker and the Poor
(Excerpts from post-partum reading)
Yesterday, I turned in the full manuscript for my book The Dignity of Dependence. It took a lot of hustle (and big help from my husband in children-wrangling) to get over the finish line. And I got much needed help from the Wollstonecraft Fellowship to work through all the details of my bibliography and formatting, rather than do everything myself while also working through cluster feeding.
Pictured below, not my actual research assistant.
Which means I can return to some leisure reading! I put The Power Broker on my 2024 list specifically for the summer, and I’m nearly halfway through. It means a lot to me because I grew up on Long Island. Robert Moses built the roads that shaped my childhood, and designed the beach we drove to.
In the section on Jones Beach, it was incredible how much Moses thought about every detail (specifically not giving the young men picking up trash little sticks to grab it with, because he wanted beachgoers to be ashamed when they saw the sharply dressed attendants stooping to gather their litter—and it worked!). But here’s the detail that seemed most Other Feminisms relevant:
One other thing, he said. The bathhouses were going to have at least one innovation never included in any public or private building in America: diaper-changing rooms. He had designed them himself, he said. They would be divided into cubicles and each cubicle would contain only a diaper-disposal basket, a washbasin, a mirror and a shelf for a mother to lay her baby on. And the shelf shouldn't be table-height, he said. He had watched mothers changing diapers and higher shelves would make it easier.
I would love for more amenities to be designed by people who had one-tenth of Moses’s eye for detail and zeal for integration of parts into a whole. (As the book unfolds, it’s clear Moses did not prioritize integration of races).
There are times, reading the book, that it feels like Moses has all the architectural genius of Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, but is applying it in order to provide a preferential option for the poor. (Again, this varies significantly over the years for Moses). The more public facilities are designed for ease of use and accessibility, the more hospitable they are to those with limited access to private facilities.
I’ve read some of the more dramatic incidents aloud to my husband (Moses bringing a pile driver on a barge to wipe out a ferry house he isn’t legally allowed to destroy and his men only stopped by a police boat and boarding party!), but what it a little wearing and sad as I go is how much, as Moses’s career unfolds, he leaves the mark of his spite as well as his genius as a permanent feature of New York City.
The rest stops on the Pennsylvania Turnpike have a "mommy and me" stall in the women's restroom that contains an adult-height toilet and a child-height toilet. When she saw it, my daughter stopped in her tracks and said in amazement, "Mama, there is a toilet here that is FOR ME." I had thought before about how inconvenient it is for everything to be too big for kids but I hadn't really thought of it in terms of children's personal sense of whether anyone is thinking of them or whether they belong. Now we always plan our stops to include at least one on the Penna Turnpike.
I've also been reading The Power Broker this year (I'm about 2/3 of the way through), and it does a phenomenal job of demonstrating both how incredibly talented Moses was at what he did and also the steady moral decline of him as a person. The shift from an ineffectual idealist to a massively powerful and power-hungry settler of scores is remarkable, and so well told by Caro