Broken Power

"For more than five years, we have been fighting over what to do at Ground Zero, and the future of much of the sixteen-acre site is still unresolved. The idea of Moynihan Station—a conversion of the classical Farley Post Office, on Eighth Avenue, into an improved Penn Station—was first proposed a decade ago, and it still hasn’t happened. By contrast, Moses’s plan to cover miles of train tracks on the Upper West Side with an extension of Riverside Park took under three years from design to completion. In an era when almost any project can be held up for years by public hearings and reviews by community boards, community groups, civic groups, and planning commissions, not to mention the courts, it is hard not to feel a certain nostalgic tug for Moses’s method of building by decree."

In The New Yorker, Paul Goldberger charts a reevaluation of public-works builder Robert Moses.