Moses redirected public-agency wealth and staff toward personal hospitality and self-glorification.
Evidence
In New York, highly paid Triborough officials had as their principal duty the entertainment of Moses’ guests. They conducted tours of the empire, pointing out its principal natural features—the towers of the Triborough Bridge, marching like the façades of twin cathedrals across the East River, the long lawns of Riverside Park—and repeating, at each monument, the legends, burnished by time and constant retelling, of how Robert Moses had created it. … And the thousands of guests at the summer capital of the empire, Jones Beach, were entertained—in a million-and-a-half-dollar restaurant whose main purpose, judging from its financial statements, was to entertain them; in a four-million-dollar stadium that he had turned over to his favorite bandleader, Guy Lombardo, virtually as a gift on which Lombardo reaped immense personal profits, so that Lombardo’s orchestra would be constantly on call—on a scale and with a sumptuousness that was as close as anyone in America ever got to the entertainment afforded by a monarch. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 75
Categorization
- CANDY: A four-million-dollar stadium gifted to Guy Lombardo so his orchestra would be ‘constantly on call’ is a delightfully absurd single fact for a dinner conversation.
- SEED: This public-official-as-patron pattern could anchor an essay comparing how personal favor economies operate inside nominally public bureaucracies, with Moses and Lombardo as one case.
- XREF: connects to: Robert Moses ran his public agencies with imperial personal splendor. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 74
Broader Connections
- Robert Moses ran his public agencies with imperial personal splendor.
#corroborates(0.95) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 74