This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. In 1974, the New Yorker first published a series about a

political big shot in New York City. He was an appointee. He never held

elective office and even in the city you might have recognized

his name, but you probably wouldn't know what job he had.

Yet at his peak his power dwarfed that of any mayor or governor.

The very shoreline of the city was different before he came to power.

He hammered bulk heads of steel deep into the muck beneath rivers and harbors and crammed

into the space between bulk heads and shore masses of earth and stone, shale and cement,

that hardened into 15,000 acres of new land.

His name, of course, was Robert Moses.

And the writer who decided to chronicle his rise to power

was a journalist named Robert Carrow. In the seven years between

1946 and 1954, seven years that were marked by the most intensive public

construction in the city's history.

No public improvement of any type, no school or sewer, library or pier, hospital or catch basin,

was built by any city agency unless Moses approved its design and location.

To clear the land for these improvements, he evicted hundreds of thousands of the city's people from their homes and tore the homes down.

Neighborhoods were obliterated by his edict to make room for new neighborhoods reared at his command.

50 years ago in July, the New Yorker began publishing the Power Broker.

And when the book appeared, it ran over 1,200 pages and won a Pulitzer Prize, an absolute

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