“You sit there and you think, 'who is this guy?'” Caro said in remarks at the historical society this week. "Gradually it came to you, when you started to think about it, you said, 'Well, he's doing everything here.' ... And he's never been elected to anything. Your first impulse to say, 'how did this happen?'"
Moses shaped New York's political agenda and physical landscape, often at the expense of the poor and marginalized. His Cross-Bronx Expressway displaced 5,000 residents; in Jones Beach, he prioritized car access over mass transit, physically limiting the ways the city's poor residents could visit the beach.
The book quickly earned acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize and finding a home on bookshelves across America, especially among New Yorkers. Now, five decades later, the monumental work still resonates for its look at NYC's past and the lessons it holds for our future.
Even so, it was impossible to predict whether a 700,000-word biography would resonate with readers. The book and its tenacious author are the subject of a new exhibit at New-York Historical Society Museum & Library titled "Robert Caro's The Power Broker at 50."
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