Robert Moses grew up in a wealthy servant-staffed New Haven household.

Evidence

Dwight Street, two blocks from the Yale University campus, was a wide, sleepy, dirt street shaded by some of the biggest of New Haven’s elms. The houses along it were substantial, if not elegant, and they were built close to the wooden sidewalk, so that most of the big lots consisted of back yards, and in those yards, because the families on the street were well-off manufacturers and businessmen, were well-tended grape arbors and stables—and inside the stables were horses and carriages. The numerous children of Dwight Street rode up and down the street on those horses, with coachmen or house servants leading them and carefully holding them in to a walk, and played on the shady porches or in the spacious back yards under the tall trees, and there were so many servants in the big houses that mothers didn’t scold if boys like “Mr. Paul” or “Mr. Robert,” who slept in the same bedroom on the second floor of No. 83, got their Eton collars and Little Lord Fauntleroy suits dirty. To the end of their lives, the three Moses children would remember New Haven with fondness. Searching for an adjective to describe Dwight Street, Robert Moses would say “comfortable”; Paul would say “shady, well-kept, nice.” — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 125

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Robert Moses was born in 1888 in New Haven. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 124

Broader Connections

• Robert Moses was born in 1888 in New Haven. #expands (0.85) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 124