Moses envisioned the Manhattan waterfront parkway as early as 1914

Evidence

One Sunday in 1914, he was crossing the Hudson by ferry to picnic in New Jersey. With him were some college friends and their dates, one of whom was Frances Perkins, later to be United States Secretary of Labor. As the ferry pulled out into the river, Moses leaned on the rail, watching Manhattan spread out behind the boat. Miss Perkins happened to be standing beside him and suddenly she heard Moses exclaim, “Isn’t this a temptation to you? Couldn’t this waterfront be the most beautiful thing in the world?” As the woman looked at him in astonishment, words began to pour out of Bob Moses and she realized that “he had it all figured out. How you could build a great highway that went uptown along the water. How you’d have to tear down a few buildings at Seventy-second Street and bring the highway around a curve…. He wanted places where people could leave their boats safely, public clubs…like private clubs.” Staring back at the bleak mud flats covered by a haze of smoke from the railroad engines, she heard Moses paint for her a picture of what the scene could be like on a Sunday—the ugly tracks completely hidden by the great highway, cars traveling slowly along it, their occupants enjoying the view, and along the highway stretching green parks filled with strollers, tennis players and families on bicycles. There would be sailboats on the river and motor yachts tied up in gracefully curving basins. And the thing that astonished her most, Miss Perkins was to recall, was that Bob Moses had the exact location of tennis courts and boat basins quite definitely in mind; the young Bureau staffer beside her was talking about a public improvement on a scale almost without precedent in turn-of-the-century urban America, an improvement that would solve a problem that had baffled successive city administrations for years. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 281

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the later built reality of the West Side Highway and Riverside Park Moses actually constructed — the gulf between his vision and what he built. — connects to: Moses envisioned the West Side improvement decades before building it — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 281; Moses transferred his vision of unused space from Manhattan to Long Island — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 700; Moses began building roads twelve years after first proposing them — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 973
• SEED: A portrait angle: how a young man’s ‘beautiful thing in the world’ vision first crystallizes — usable in profiles of planners or idealists.

Broader Connections

• Moses envisioned the West Side improvement decades before building it #corroborates (0.95) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 281
• Moses transferred his vision of unused space from Manhattan to Long Island #expands (0.75) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 700