Economic whisperers, not voters, decided New York’s public works for three decades.

Evidence

During Moses’ reign over public works in New York—a thirty-four-year reign that not only was significantly long in a city that had, after all, existed as a consolidated entity in its present governmental form only since 1898, but also occurred at the most crucial point of time in the city’s history, the decades during which its vast open spaces were filling up and being shaped on a significant scale—it was not the shouts of the people but the whispers of banks, labor unions, insurance companies, big construction combines, big business and, of course, the Retainer Regiment that determined what public works would be built in New York. He centralized in his person and in his projects all those forces in the city that in theory have little to do with the decision-making process in the city’s government but in reality have everything to do with it, and by such centralization he made them strong. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3200

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Reform economy and machine patronage both starved New York of public works — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 1460