What he did was to destroy cohesive neighborhoods in order to build huge, wide,
unnecessary super highways. But that's not all. He was a racist and he arranged
his roads and highways to ensure that there could be no public transit, not
ever, on Long Island, in order to keep poor people of color away from certain
areas. I never knew, for example, why there is a law that no buses are allowed
on Long Island parkways. That law was put in place to make sure that people
from the city, had no way to travel to Jones Beach, a beach he created on the
south shore in Nassau County. You had to have a car in order to get there. The
railroad didn't get you there. He said something like, he wanted to keep the
floods of filthy Puerto Ricans from his beach. Back in the late 40's and early
50's, New Yorkers despised the many Puerto Ricans who settled in the city.
Actually, much later, there were buses to Jones Beach, but they were few, on a
limited schedule, and left from only one location in Nassau County. I can't
remember now if one could even reach that location by bus or if one had to be
driven there.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 2:07 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Robert Caro on Democracy Now
I heard the democracy now broadcast, but never seem to get to the pod
casts...in fact I've never tried one. Too much stuff to do in too little time.
I had been raised to believe that Moses was the Sacred Savior of New York,
but along the way I'd heard that he had created hardships for many low income
families. Some vague threads of feuding between Superintendent Moses and Mayor
Laguardia.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/29/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I don't know if you heard Robert Caro today on Democracy Now, Not only
did I hear him on the program, but I then heard Part 2 of the
interview which happily downloaded to my stream this afternoon. I was
so really impressed and entranced by him. Interestingly, he was
interviewed on the NYT Book Review podcast and I barely listened. But
anyway, I looked on BARD just now and found the four volumes that he
has so far completed of the Johnson biography over a really long
period of time. The first number is 1800 something, and the last is
7800 something, and all of them are huge. Power Broker, which he
talked about a lot in the second part of the interview, the book about
Robert Moses, isn't on BARD. Probably because I live where Moses did
his dirty work, I was horrified by some of the things that Caro
described which, if I ever knew them, I've forgotten. So I have these
4 books about Johnson on my wish list. Somehow, I doubt I'll ever get
to read them. I just now started Jill Leper's These Truths, which is a
recent, popular, easy-to-read book about American history. I've read
some of her articles and heard her interviewed. She's lovely.
I think I'd rather read history just now, than current events. (smile)
Miriam
