Moses’ massive park plan went from seeming impossible to nearly complete within three years.

Evidence

It had been more than a year since Robert Moses had announced his revised and broadened park and parkway plan, a plan which had, after all, included parks and parkways not only on Long Island but throughout the rest of New York State, along the Niagara Frontier, in the Genesee Valley, in the farmland of the Taconic region, and among the peaks of the Alleghenies, Catskills and Adirondacks. Now, more than a year later, parks and parkways were still located nowhere but in the map of Moses’ imagination. After all the talking, all the planning, all the fighting, they simply didn’t exist. And at the end of 1925, there seemed little possibility that they would come into existence at any time in the foreseeable future. If one looked ahead a decade, even a generation, it seemed unlikely that any substantial part of the dream would be reality. … Within three years, almost all of it would be reality. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 907