A single man’s personal pique, not city institutions, blocked Moses’ bridge

Evidence

In the governmental institutions—Board of Estimate and City Council—established to insure that the voice of the city’s people would be heard and obeyed, their voice had been drowned out by his voice. There were other governmental institutions—Planning Commission, Art Commission—set up to insure that physical changes to the city would be governed by rational, logical planning considerations and that their specific form would be determined by informed and educated aesthetic taste, not by capricious whim and passing fancy, and certainly not by the whim and fancy and personal taste of a single individual. But rational, logical planning considerations and informed and educated aesthetic taste had crumbled before his will. The explanation for the denouement of the Battle of the Battery Crossing was simply personal pique, the fact that a man who for years had hated Robert Moses had finally been given a chance to give that hatred a little venting. The battle had proven that the powers he had obtained as head of a new part-private, part-public entity, a “body corporate and politic,” were vast enough so that in his spheres of activity he, not the formal democratic institutions of New York, would henceforth shape New York’s destiny. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 2878