#robert-moses — Public Fediverse posts

Passend zum heutigen #DigitalIndependenceDay:

Dieser etwas längere, aber dafür inhaltlich umso reichhaltigere Artikel aus #Noema zieht Parallelen von Plantagen, #Massentierhaltung und der autogerechten top-down #Stadtplanung zur monopolistischen Struktur des Internets und schlägt analog zum #Rewilding von Naturgebieten ein Rewilding des Internets vor.

"The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late. …

Internet infrastructure is a degraded ecosystem, but it’s also a built environment, like a city. Its unpredictability makes it generative, worthwhile and deeply human. In 1961, #JaneJacobs, an American-Canadian activist and author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” argued that mixed-use neighborhoods were safer, happier, more prosperous, and more livable than the sterile, highly controlling designs of urban planners like New York’s #RobertMoses."

"Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists also know how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it."

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

#DIDay #DigitalIndependence #RewildTheInternet #systemsthinking #systemdynamics #complexsystems #Decentralisation #Interoperability #Portability #OpenSource #Resilience #Longread #Enshittification #Broligarchy #NoOligarchy #NoKings #StopTheBillionaireTakeover

Geez, I had no idea that there was a #RobertMoses-proposed east-west freeway planned for #Portland that would run down Division and then Powell! Depending on the exact route they settled on, it might have run right through my house!

https://youtu.be/Qz1RZh7LB4U

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/01/03/mamdani-announces-full-mcguinness-road-diet-finishing-a-job-halted-by-adams “The consequences of Moses's acts have been measured in the human toll that this four-lane highway has incurred, and in so many other unseen but deeply insidious ways” #SafeStreets #RobertMoses #NYC

Matthew Rhys Is In Talks With Netflix Over Adaptation Of Robert Caro’s ‘The Power Broker’
#News #MatthewRhys #Netflix #RobertCaro #RobertMoses #ThePowerBroker

https://deadline.com/2025/12/matthew-rhys-netflix-robert-caro-the-power-broker-1236631815/

August 29, 1961 - The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was pursuing its voter registration drive in Amite County, Mississippi. Of 5000 eligible Negro voters in the county, just one was registered to vote. SNCC leader Robert Moses was attacked and beaten this day outside the registrar’s office while trying to sign up two voters. Nine stitches were required but the three white assailants were acquitted.
#RobertMoses #SNCC

🔍 A writer waxes poetic about the "legendary" Jane Jacobs, whose most notable accomplishment was foiling the evil urban overlord, Robert Moses. Meanwhile, Hollywood churns out an animated flick featuring Jacobs as New York's #superheroine, because nothing screams intellectual discourse like a cartoon battle scene. 🍿🙄
https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/75-on-jane-jacobs #JaneJacobs #UrbanPlanning #HollywoodAnimation #RobertMoses #IntellectualDiscourse #HackerNews #ngated

I'm personally neither a fan nor a critic of Brennan Lee Mulligan's roleplaying style. But I did enjoy The Power Broker episode where they interviewed Brendan, in part about his D&D campaign patterned as a sort of mythic NYC shaped by an esoteric version of Robert Moses, inspired directly by this book.

Potentially of interest to roleplayers, historians, and civics junkies.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-power-broker-11-brennan-lee-mulligan/

#ThePowerBroker
#99PercentInvisible
#RobertMoses
#DnD
#Dimension20
#BrennanLeeMulligan

I finally finished reading The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro and while the book is extremely long, it paints an extremely detailed picture of Robert Moses' work in the City of New York. I read this as a part of the podcast 99% Invisible's book club, which went through all of 2024.

There are some chapters that feel like: 'here's a bunch of data'. There are other chapters that demonstrate how Moses would not help public transit, not on his watch, cars come first! One such example of that would be to run both sides of a highway far enough apart that you could run trains down the middle. Moses just wasn't interested.

And of course, there are examples of Moses pushing people out of their homes to make room for infrastructure. There are other examples where Moses is going to run a highway through some people's homes, even though there was a park one block south of there that would still work. Moses was having none of that. After all, he had the power – built up over decades.

And now that I'm done with The Power Broker, I need to read some more of the books on my shelf. I have such a backlog.

#thepowerbroker #99pi #Caro #reading #biographies #publicservice #RobertMoses

https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/jane-jacobs-missing-chapter-robert-caro “There are two entire chapters that were cut out…One was on Jane Jacobs stopping the Lower Manhattan Expressway. And one was why the New York City Planning Commission has no power” #ThePowerBroker #JaneJacobs #urbanplanning #NYC #RobertMoses

I don’t have a nice simple intro to #janejacobs and her relatively complicated but important contributions to urban theory, except the big ideas that context, scale, and preservation are important and sudden shocking change is not always the best choice. She is often compared with the grand modernist schemes of her foil #robertmoses

2024: book seventy. #bookstodon #2024books #books2024 #books #urbanplanning #biography #thepowerbroker #robertmoses #robertacaro

Part of my #zoning class is about the history of #preservation regulations, which means I get to talk about Jimmy Walker and how much #RobertMoses hated him https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_Casino?wprov=sfti1

Started listening to 99% Invisible's "Power Broker" #podcast , and.. wow. AOC episode was revelatory, to say the least.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/power-broker-01-robert-caro/

Series concludes October 7th with a live interview at NY Historical with author Robert Caro. Wow. #robertmoses #gentrification #urbanism #cityplanning #fuckcars

https://www.archpaper.com/2024/06/exhibition-robert-caro-the-power-broker-new-york-historical-society/

August 29, 1961 - The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was pursuing its voter registration drive in Amite County, Mississippi. Of 5000 eligible Negro voters in the county, just one was registered to vote. SNCC leader Robert Moses was attacked and beaten this day outside the registrar’s office while trying to sign up two voters. Nine stitches were required but the three white assailants were acquitted.
#RobertMoses #SNCC

A Couple Recent Interesting Podcast Episodes

First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation in the world. AI in general has long been a topic for science fiction, but this short story tackles the current LLM version of AIs. I found it to be a very fun episode that is a master class in providing a huge amount of backstory without an exposition dump. I don’t want to spoil anything about this story, but they naturally drop all these background details about the world that make me want more stories in this universe. It also has a fun, light tone to it. I highly recommend you either listen or read (the full text is available at the episode link above)

The other podcast episode I wanted to mention is actually a series of episodes. There have been a few times where I have come to the realization that I prefer the wikipedia summary of the story compared to the real thing. One example is Bioshock. I haven’t played it, but I know for a fact that I would not enjoy the story nearly as well as I enjoyed reading the summary of the story and all the backstory that led to the events of the game. The same is true of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. I know myself and I know I would not nearly enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoy listening to Roman Mars, Elliott Kalan, and each episode’s guest discuss the contents of each chapter and provide color commentary. You can get to the archive of all the episodes here. It’s a fascinating story of one man’s transformation from working in the NYC parks department to becoming one of the most powerful men in NYC (able to challenge US presidents and win!).

#99PI #AI #LLM #NYC #podcast #RobertMoses #scienceFiction #shortStories #ThePowerBroker

https://wp.me/p5cs3g-4LW

"To ease access to Flushing-Meadows Park - [#RobertMoses] had determined that The [World's] Fair was going to be held in that park - a vast network of new Queens highways, $120 million dollars worth of new highways, would be needed."

Booooooooooo

I just finished reading The Power Broker and, man, that was a heck of a book!

I feel like RM was the epitome of the "brilliant jerk".

It makes me wonder what things would be like in New York (and elsewhere) if he had built public transit they way he built roads.

All-in-all, a good book. I'd recommend it.

(I started it because of 99% Invisible, but then I just kept reading...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker

#99PercentInvisible #ThePowerBroker #books #bookclub #RobertMoses #RobertCaro

I’m doing 99 Percent Invisible’s year long read through The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro and it’s fascinating to see the parallels between the 1920’s and today – especially when it comes to courts and appeals.

I usually don’t highlight in my books but there are passages that really stand out to me:

On pages 193-194, the author talks about how many appeals Robert Moses had the commission's lawyers file. Moses only needed to keep the case going until the special session was over in the legislature. "Every appeal was denied–but every one used up time."

https://99percentinvisible.org/club/

#reading #thepowerbroker #robertmoses #robertacaro #newyork #newyorkcity

"When #RobertMoses came to power in NY
in 1934, the city's mass transportation system was probably the best in the world. When he left power in 1968, it was quite possibly the worst."

"During this decade, 439 miles of new highways were built, and not one mile of new railroad or subway. In 1974, people using subways and railroads in and around New York were still riding on tracks laid between 1904 and 1933 - the last year before #RobertMoses came to power in the city. Not a single mile had been built since."

I guess what I'm saying is, not only Fuck #RobertMoses, but also fuck the #NewYorkTimes.

NY's media played a strong role in allowing the city to be overrun with cars.

"Build railroads at the same time that you were building roads, and solving the metropolitan transportation problem would be greatly simplified. Pour all available funds into roads without building railroads, and that problem would never be solved. Public exposure to this point of view was limited. Editorials such as the one in the herald-tribune that so aroused #RobertMoses ire were rare. Nonexistent in the two newspapers most decisive in shaping public opinion in NY - the NYT and Daily News."

Lol. "Moreover, the colossal true cost of the Cross-Bronx [Expressway] could no longer be concealed. Before it was finished, the highway, including its interchanges with other highways and the bridge carrying it over the Harlem [River], would be the most expensive road constructed in all history - would cost not the $47mil that #RobertMoses had originally estimated, but $250mil."

He created the template for megaprojects (& their cost overruns). Estimate low, and rely on sunk cost fallacies.

@ZaneSelvans "But East Tremont's panic was soon replaced by hope. The hope was based on faith in #RobertMoses; or more accurately, the Moses mystique. East Tremont's pious Jews still held the campaign of 1934 against him. 'I hated him since the time he said he wasn't Jewish', one says, but they still believed in his image of a man above politics and bureaucrats. Believing in that image, [they] were sure that if they could only present Moses with an alternate route through their neighborhood.." 🫣

Hah. "Even Moses' own roads could not be kept up, and the cost of neglected maintenance is astonishingly high. The West Side Highway, for example, could've been kept in perfect repair during the 1950s for about $75k/year. Because virtually no repairing was done, by the 1960s, the cost of annual maintenance would be more than $1mil/year. By 1974, the highway had begun literally to fall apart."

This man truly is the template for our nation's infrastructure woes. #RobertMoses

"The logic behind [the proposed budget increase needed to create a Master Plan for #NYC] was so clear that even the #NYTimes managed to grasp it. While managing to avoid criticizing #RobertMoses, a Times editorial stated, 'The noble purpose set forth in the charter of 1938..'"

I laughed when I heard that. I love how much shade Robert Caro throws at the nyt. It has had shitty ownership (and therefore made shitty editorial decisions) for a long, long time.

"And the new projects that could be financed as a result of this income would be his projects. The projects he told O'Dwyer could be deferred included scores of schools, public libraries, hospitals, and health centers, not to mention fire houses. The non-deferrable list included his proposed new highways. Every one of those huge roads would go ahead on schedule." #RobertMoses

"Before the war, federal aid built mainly highways in the open countryside. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1944 authorized arterial routes within city limits as well, and with each post-war federal highway act, the proposed urban mileage soared. The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 empowered the government in Washington to trowel down 6700 miles of road within the cities of America."

Not me openly booing to nobody on the subway

#RobertMoses

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/99-invisible/id394775318?i=1000642195418 Yes, finally an official #99pi episode! Great book, excited about this #nyc #urbanism #histodons #sophocles #robertmoses #thepowerbroker

Lol, and now we're getting to the part where he realizes that the contract cause of the US Constitution (https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/section-10/clause-1/contract-clause) means that if he inserts himself into the contract of a public Authority's bond issuance, then he's basically untouchable by the government while having the combined powers of business (no answering to taxpayers, able to charge fees/refuse service/spend money) and government (bond issuance, create/modify public works, and taking via eminent domain). #RobertMoses