Triborough controlled 161 square miles of land with $213 million annual income

Evidence

It was a vast empire. In 1960, the year of its furthest expansion, the land area under its direct control—the parks of Long Island and New York City, the highways and highway-bordering playgrounds in the city and the enclaves in which are placed the upstate power dams—totaled 103,071 acres, 161 square miles, an area half as large as New York City. But the best measure of the size of the empire was its wealth; its annual income—the toll-booth revenue, the fees it received for the use of electricity produced at Massena and Niagara, the yearly budgets of the Long Island State Park Commission and the City Park Department—ran as high as 213,000,000; the surplus of just one of its four constituent public authorities, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, ran to almost 30,000,000 a year. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 71