![]() Engulfed by construction and vehicle congestion, my father was nine when his health got so bad that his teachers finally decided to hold him back a year, separating him from classmates and friends. My dad spent his youth in perpetual sickness, one of countless Jewish kids in the Bronx whose skinny legs and bad asthma kept them out of school. That quote has been mistakenly attributed to Stalin, but today it rings rather Trump-like, with a callousness so dumbfounding it’s almost comical. He was notorious for paraphrasing the adage, ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ Moses was famous for blatantly overlooking this kind of social capital, and for celebrating rather than ignoring proposals that required entire neighbourhoods to be bulldozed. You could leave your house keys with your shopowner, whose brother would send condolences to your family when a loved one passed away. When my father recalled the Bronx that raised him, he described a place that was diverse and down-to-earth, sometimes veering toward mean, but one where people looked out for each other. In addition to his unelected political influence and scores of towering turnpikes, Moses was known for spearheading planning projects that splintered local communities. For ordinary people, this is how history happens.ĭad was brought up in Robert Moses’ New York – a city undergoing major infrastructural development to produce a sprawling highway network. He was young and with friends, and so they laced up their skates. He didn’t know that he was gliding above one of the city’s most contested planning projects, or what kind of impact it would have on his life. He wasn’t a politician or an urban planner – he was a child, concerned with the size of his clip-on roller skates, and whether they’d fit over shoes large enough to support his lanky frame. He didn’t live in East Tremont or Spuyten Duyvil, which were literally cut through by the highway, but he did live in between Fordham Heights and Kingsbridge Heights, about two miles north of the new road. Born in 1953, he would have been seven or eight when New York City’s massive thoroughfare reached the peak of its construction, facilitated by the destruction of many tight-knit Bronx neighbourhoods. My father rollerskated on the Cross-Bronx Expressway before it opened to car traffic. ![]()
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