A single unelected official built nearly every major New York highway.

Evidence

Standing out from the map’s delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines, lines girdling the city or slashing across its expanses. These lines denote the major roads on which automobiles and trucks move, roads whose very location, moreover, does as much as any single factor to determine where and how a city’s people live and work. With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads. He built the Major Deegan Expressway, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Sheridan Expressway and the Bruckner Expressway. He built the Gowanus Expressway, the Prospect Expressway, the Whitestone Expressway, the Clearview Expressway, and the Throgs Neck Expressway. He built the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Nassau Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway and the Long Island Expressway. He built the Harlem River Drive and the West Side Highway. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 43

Categorization

• XREF: Highway location determining where and how people live and work prefigures the ADDENDUM-relevant theme of infrastructure as shaping world; connects to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ article’s argument that infrastructure is underused worldbuilding.
• SHARE: A litany of expressway names revealing that one man built them all would delight anyone into urban history or the Moses legacy debate.