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up, no one who knew Moses would have been surprised.

3.
    In the twentieth century, the influence of Robert Moses on the cities of America was greater than that of any other person.
    â€”Lewis Mumford
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    For Robert Moses, it all came down to parks. More than the bridges he built (the Whitestone, the Verrazano, the Throg’s Neck, the Triborough, to name a few); or the vast interlocking network of expressways he erected above and below its streets (the Van Wyck, the Clearview, the Whitestone, the Cross-Bronx, the Brooklyn-Queens, among others); or the 416 miles of scenic parkways that course in and out of metropolitan New York and its outer environs; or even the hundreds of playgrounds, dozen or so public pools, amenities, tennis courts, or skating rinks that he created, what mattered most to Moses were parks. Fighting for parks, he said, was always a winning proposition for a public figure, even an unelected one such as himself. “As long as you’re on the side of parks,” he would often tell his underlings, “you’re on the side of the angels. You can’t lose.”
    More than all his other monuments of concrete and steel and feats of ingenuity and engineering, parks would be Moses’ pathway to history. And history is what Moses intended to make. In 1960 he got the chance to build the park of his dreams, one that he had been envisioning for almost forty years. This would be his crowning achievement; and if his vision was carried out—and he would use all the power at his disposal to see that it was—this park would reshape the very geography of New York, improving upon Nature itself.
    Considering his privileged background, it’s a wonder that Moses was interested in parks at all. Born in 1888 in New Haven, Connecticut, Robert Moses was the son of an industrious German immigrant father, Emmanuel Moses, and a demanding mother, Isabella Silverman Cohen, known as Bella. Both families had fled the pastoral beauty of Bavaria, due to its systemic anti-Semitism, for America. Emmanuel Moses becamea successful businessman, owning and operating his own local department store. Bella, who doted on her youngest son, Robert, hailed from a well-connected and prosperous New Haven clan. By 1897 the family had moved to Manhattan and lived in a five-story brownstone inherited from Bella’s father on East 46th Street, just off Fifth Avenue.
    Young Moses wanted for nothing. He lived in a household with cooks and maids who prepared his meals, served his food on the finest china, and made his custom-built bed daily. He and his older brother shared a private library with more than two thousand books. Rembrandt prints hung from the home’s oak-paneled walls. The family vacationed in upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains, imbuing Moses with a love of nature, and they summered on the Continent, fueling his intellectual and cultural appetites. As a Manhattanite, Moses never had to endure the subway or any other aspect of the public transportation system; he was driven everywhere he went by the family chauffeur. In his long life, he would never learn to drive.
    Educated at prep schools and an excellent athlete—Moses disdained team sports, preferring swimming, a lifelong passion, and track—he began his studies at Yale while only sixteen. Unable to penetrate the top social clubs at the university as a Jew, he settled for less prestigious student organizations. Throwing himself into his studies, Moses read voraciously and developed a passion for Samuel Johnson, the learned eighteenth-century man of letters. He spoke Latin and recited lengthy poems from memory. He even wrote his own Victorian-style poetry, which got published in a Yale literary magazine.
    The ambitious Moses had a gift for words, especially when motivated to defend a position or attack an opponent. He penned pointed editorials for the Yale Daily News and ran for student government. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1909.