From The Washington Post , “A peek inside Robert Caro’s home library, hidden shelves and all.”

Robert Moses on the wane, his power gone.

Lillian Edelstein, a self-described “housewife,” became the leader of the East Tremont Neighborhood Association and kept up a valiant fight against Robert Moses and the Cross Bronx Expressway.

“But nothing about his roads was as awesome as the congestion on them.”

Robert Moses, hacking his way through neighborhoods.

I found this Arnold Newman photograph chance. It’s from 1975 and shows Robert Caro in his office, holding a Mongol pencil in his hand.

Rovert Caro on Robert Moses: “He had, in a way, been deaf all his life — unwilling to listen to anyone, public, Mayor, Governor, deaf to all opinion save his own. But this new, physical deafness contributed in a nonsymbolic, very real way to his divorce from reality.”

Paul Moses alleged that his brother Robert had cut him out of part of his inheritance and kept him out of city positions for which he was, as an engineer, eminently qualified.

Robert Moses objected to “frills” in public housing, like covers on toilet bowls.

At the New-York Historical Society: “Turn Every Page”: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive.

Robert Moses, adored by the press.

Two of the East Tremont buildings destroyed to make way for the Cross Bronx Expressway.

It’s a measure of Caro’s humanity that he’s able to depict Moses in his own humanity: arrogant, underhanded, and vain, but a gifted visionary, a tireless worker, and a figure who inspires pity in his downfall. Allowed to keep his chauffeurs and limousine, Moses in decline reminds me of Lear with his retinue of knights: the trappings of power, without the power.

Michael J. Madigan was a Moses engineer given to malapropisms.

Robert Moses’s racism.

In the Robert Moses universe, playground design allowed for little variation.

“Even if he only had one guest, he would always have six or eight of his ‘Moses Men’ — ‘my muchachos,’ he used to call them — at the table and it was all ‘Yes, sir, RM,’ ‘No, sir, RM,’ ‘Right as usual, RM!’ When he laughed, they laughed, only louder — you know what I mean. Christ, when he made a statement, you could look around the table and see eight heads nodding practically in unison. It was like a goddamned Greek chorus.”

Another Third Avenue pharmacy torn down for the Gowanus Parkway.

All by himself.

From The Power Broker: “The Casino was Jimmy Walker’s Versailles. Friends joked that the Mayor spent more time there than he did at City Hall.”

Martin Dressler walking around the city and imagining its possibilities is a nineteenth-century version of Robert Moses walking around his New York. The difference is that Dressler imagines the vertical possibilities; Moses, the horizontal ones.

This building, at the southeast corner of 46th Street and 3rd Avenue, was one of many that were destroyed to make room fo Robert Caro’s Gowanus Parkway.

In 2014, Robert Caro wrote that Robert Moses’s racism was “unashamed, unapologetic.” The Power Broker makes that clear.