Was he a visionary builder for New York or its autocratic, racist and corrupt wrecker? The controversial legacy of urban planner Robert Moses, who reshaped the megacity for 40 years, is the focus of a Manhattan stage show starring British star Ralph Fiennes.
Sometimes dubbed New York’s “Baron Haussmann” for having transformed the “world-city” as the prefect of the Second Empire had done for Paris, the “master builder” Robert Moses (1888-1981) remains ubiquitous in the great metropolis in the United States .
Bridges, tunnels, parks, stadiums, large residential and social structures, suburban development, urban highways: he has left his mark on dozens of architectural and urban developments in New York and its eastern and northern suburbs of Long Island, Rockland and Westchester.
New York – an incredible cultural and socio-economic mosaic of nine million souls – holds an ambivalent memory of this never-elected urban architect who only once in the 1930s tried to be governor, under the label of the Republican Party. .
– All facets of New York –
All facets of Robert Moses, and therefore of New York from the 1920s to the 1970s, are explored in the piece “Straight Line Crazy” which triumphs this fall at The Shed cultural center in western Manhattan.
In the title role: Ralph Fiennes, two-time Oscar nominee and world star for “Schindler’s List”, “The English Patient”, the film series “Harry Potter” and “James Bond”, but also “Hamlet” in the theater the Broadway.
With restraint, the strength of his game and his sometimes disturbing character, the 59-year-old Briton plays a Moses who seduces politicians, deceives his opponents and shows his disproportionate ambition to impose his vision of the city.
– “Lead” and not follow –
“Our job is to lead, not follow,” says Fiennes/Moses on stage, convinced that “people don’t know what they want until they have it.”
Written by the British David Hare, the comedy “Straight Line Crazy” was staged and performed for the first time in London.
Explore the career of this construction employee, a respected but controversial planning professional who shaped the city for 40 years.
Impossible to name all his works of art and buildings in this city with such a particular geography, bathed by the Atlantic: Moses is behind the famous Triborough bridges (renamed Robert F. Kennedy, RFK), Throgs Neck, Whitestone or Verrazano which connect the five boroughs of New York.
He is also the architect – at the cost of much destruction of neighborhoods especially in the Bronx – of tens of thousands of tenement buildings, freeways and expressways in the city center, today in poor condition and a source of air and noise pollution.
– United Nations Headquarters –
New York also owes him the monumental headquarters of the United Nations in Manhattan, on the banks of the East River, and the impressive cultural headquarters of Lincoln Center.
But the Robert Moses statue began to crack in the 1960s with the abandonment of two freeway projects in Manhattan.
In 1974, a journalist, Robert Caro, denounced his imperial and autocratic reign over New York and his delusions of grandeur in a biography of Robert Moses. “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and The Fall of New York” wins a Pulitzer Prize.
It represents a man without faith or law, with his allies as well as his enemies, dictatorial and corrupt. Robert Caro cracks a machine to direct public funds to the rich white elites of the suburbs at the expense of the poor black minorities of the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx.
Moses also enforced the car against public transportation, according to his biographer.
“Caro thought power had corrupted Moses and he nearly went mad with it,” author David Hare said during a panel discussion after a performance.
For Dan Doctoroff, former city assistant for economic development and member of The Shed cultural center, Moses should serve as an example for today’s city decision makers: “He did great things and terrible things. But ultimately, his contempt because the ordinary people forever tarnished his legacy.”
