Moses’ View From On High

Cross Bronx Expwy-Major Deegan Interchange by Zach_K on Flickr.

You will soon have an opportunity to view some great models of what our city might have looked like if Robert Moses had gotten his way. Today the Sun has a piece highlighting the work of Queens Museum of Art conservator Joseph Chiarello as he spruces up some of Moses’ display pieces of the Mid-Manhattan Expressway, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and (yikes) the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge. Some of the models had been sitting untouched in storage space under the Triborough Bridge on Randall’s Island, kind of like some of those Civil Defense supplies found under the Brooklyn Bridge. It seems that the spaces under bridge anchorages are really the city’s collective storage closet under the stairs–Cold War crackers under the Brooklyn, Moses models under the Triborough–what/who else are we going to find under there? The exhibit of the models will be part of the Queens Museum of Art’s “Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Road to Recreation,” which will open January 28th out in Flushing Meadows Park. On close inspection of the miniatures, it seems that

the model of Moses’s proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, which was to connect the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges to the Holland Tunnel and West Side Highway, has a portion with Lucite handles whereby one can simply lift a neighborhood out and replace it with part of the expressway.

How delightfully convenient–couldn’t you just see him dreaming of a little parting of the Red Sea Broome Street and having it crash down on those pesky Jane Jacobites giving him chase.

Robert Moses and the Modern City (Queens Museum of Art)
Panel: Lessons From Robert Moses (Museum of the City of NY)
RM’s Response To Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (B&T Club)