Robert Moses, the planner-politician-architect who infamously built overpasses too low for buses to bring New York’s urban poor to his beaches, is the subject of a new graphic novel by Pierre Christin and Olivier Balez titled Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York City. Admirable for its candid rawness, their profile of perhaps the most polarizing and important figure in American planning history is no lionizing eulogy. The impressive triumphs of Moses’ tenure are juxtaposed with unsparing accounts of his regrettable social policies and the often-shortsighted consequences of his public infrastructure. For each groundbreaking feat of structural engineering and political mobilization, there is another story told of his callous social engineering, the consequences of which reshaped the lives of New Yorkers as much as his architecture.
The chronicles of ‘Big Bob the Builder’ are told through an entertaining and well-illustrated sequence of panels that combine elements of pure biography with critical analysis. Born into a gilded life of wealth and privilege, Moses’ prosperous upbringing was the springboard for his later forays into New York political life. Raised in New York and educated at Yale, Oxford, and Columbia, the well-pedigreed young Moses set his sights early on political science and government. He was a dreamer and an idealist, intent on resolving the city’s planning deficiencies by overhauling its notoriously corrupt and inefficient bureaucracies. But as he gained a foothold in the city administration and began climbing his way up, it became clear that his agenda would also be shaped in part by his extraordinary personal ambition and no small measure of social elitism.
