Regional-planning vision on Moses’ scale was vanishingly rare even among professional planners.

Evidence

Robert Moses was brilliant and more than brilliant, possessed of a mind not only quick and supple but broad enough in reach to encompass a great metropolitan region and see its thousand diverse parts in a single, unified relationship. … So was his brother, who was fluent in Greek and Latin (he loved to spend evenings with a massive Greek lexicon, leafing through it as if it were a popular novel), and, an electrical engineer by profession, was considered the most knowledgeable man in New York in the complex field of utility property assessments. While interviewing Paul about his brother—who at the time had rejected requests for an interview himself—the author was, by coincidence, simultaneously researching a series of articles on regional planning. He had been searching for a unifying concept of the metropolitan region as a whole, some sort of overview that would bring at least a measure of coherence to its development, that would suggest some vision of the past and present that could contain clues to—and suggestions about—the future. The search had been in vain. He could spend days, he found, interviewing the region’s highest elected public officials—mayors, county executives, freeholders and presiding supervisors—and scores of urban planners without ever obtaining even a glimpse of such a vision. In talking with Paul Moses, the reporter wanted to talk about Robert Moses’ boyhood; Paul was constantly lapsing into discussions of housing and recreation and transportation. The reporter was irritated by the digressions until, one day, caught despite himself by his companion’s eloquence, he started listening. And then he suddenly realized that he was hearing at last what he had been seeking for so long—a shaping vision of how to plan the most heavily populated and densely congested metropolitan region in the world—hearing it pouring out of a man who had never in his life held any official or unofficial planning position. The author continued interviewing planners and public officials. Eventually he was to hear such a vision—conflicting, of course, but of similar grand scale and scope—from two men: elderly Lewis Mumford and young Lee Koppelman, a brilliant planner from Long Island. He was never—in a hundred interviews—to hear it again. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 2470

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the earlier contrast of mass-level genius versus absent specific local knowledge (ch27 themes) and Mumford as a counterweight throughout.