Comments by "Colorme Dubious" (@colormedubious4747) on "The Highway Fight that Changed Cities Forever" video.

I realize that your video is time-constrained, but a key element of the death of the LOMEX project was Moses' big-picture plan to build THREE elevated expressways across Manhattan, at least one of which would have placed noisy, fume-spewing traffic jams right outside the windows of some of the city's most valuable commercial office buildings. This led to many powerful real estate barons turning against Bob the Builder, their former ally. It wasn't just a "grass roots" freeway revolt. He also pissed off the REAL powers that make New York City the center of the known universe. As Caro explains, the final nail in shadow emperor Moses' coffin wasn't his behind-the-scenes monkey business, his destruction of poor but functional neighborhoods, his displacement of at least 300,000 (possibly half a million) citizens, his deliberate financial sabotage of the NYC subway system, the financial failures of the 1939 and 1964 world's fairs, his ultimate bankrupting of the entire city, or any of his other famously notorious actions. It was the simple act of removing a beloved tree from Central Park and pissing off a bunch of moms.
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@justSTUMBLEDupon It's been a while since I read the book but, IIRC, he arranged some cooking of the books to transfer certain debt limits/obligations to the NYC Subway in order to allow his bridge & tunnel authority to issue more debt instruments to build a toll bridge (maybe the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge or the Throgs Neck?). He did THAT one with malice aforethought. He did NOT intend to bankrupt the city as a whole, but a number of people who know things posit that the insane weight of all the debt obligations associated with his road, parks, housing, and other projects (two failed World's Fairs, attracting the U.N. headquarters, etc) put the city's collective ass in a very deep crack. The city eventually solved part of its problem by doing something Moses absolutely despised -- combining the transit authority with his bridge & tunnel authority to create the MTA.
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@justSTUMBLEDupon Oh, about that tree. Moses was City Parks Commissioner for a long time and deserves credit for dramatically increasing the number of neighborhood parks and swimming pools throughout the city. He turned some truly nasty trash and coal ash dumps into magnificent parks. He's also the reason there are sportsball fields in Central Park. He evicted the sheep from Sheep Meadow in 1934 and the building that had housed them became the world-famous Tavern on the Green. In 1956, he wanted to convert a pleasantly wooded part of the park into a parking lot for the restaurant. One night, while the park was closed, he had demolition work commence and a tree was knocked down, but further demolition was stopped by threat of legal action.
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@jamalgibson8139 That isn't exactly what happened in Boston. I'm fairly certain that the Big Dig was a self-contained example of egregious runaway cost overruns. It was managed by the Mass Turnpike Authority. There was supposed to be a rail link included in one of the expressway tunnels but that was killed because of the increased cost of ventilation systems due to MBTA's use of diesel locomotives. The north-south link between the two main train stations was killed due to taxpayer exhaustion, near as I can figure. A number of those originally planned rail rights of way are still available for transit expansion, once the good people of "Taxachusetts" have caught their breath and recovered from the 190% budget overrun of the Big Dig. To be fair, the city is FAR better off with the hideous Green Monster gone. There's a linear park where it used to be, and the surrounding area is eminently walkable again. The Silver Line, at least, got its new tunnel. The new bridge is much more appealing than the nasty piece of crap it replaced. Over the VERY long term, it will probably turn out to have been a somewhat reasonable investment. Like the Asia song says, only time will tell.
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It was not racism. It was classism. He accommodated the desires of the wealthy who could help him gain and maintain power, and he mowed down poor neighborhoods regardless of race because they couldn't do anything for him.
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@brmnyc He also wanted to demolish historic Castle Clinton. There was quite a fight between Moses and the Roosevelt administration over the bridge vs tunnel issue. Moses loved bridges because they were highly visible monuments to HIM. He hated tunnels because nobody could see them unless they were in them. Luckily, Roosevelt hated Moses so he made the Navy Department claim that a bridge would impair their access to port facilities. Obvious BS, but I like it!
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