99% Invisible - Roman, Elliott, and Robert Caro: Live in Conversation

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

What makes The Power Broker endure 50 years on? Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with legendary author Robert Caro to explore the humanity, drama, and untold stories behind his iconic book. Recorded live from the New York Historical Society.Roman, Elliott, and Robert Caro: Live in Conversation Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the 50 years since The Power Broker was published, the book has endured in ways that few biographies have. First and foremost, it completely upended how the public viewed the former New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. He went from being the man who built all those nice parks to an urban design villain. If you've been following along with the 99%

visible breakdown of the Power Broker, you know what I'm talking about. And you also know that last month I was at the New York Historical Society with my co-host Elliot Kalin to interview Robert Caro, the author of the Power Broker, live on stage. The New York Historical Society holds Robert Caro's archives, which include his research for the Power Broker, as well as the papers for his four-volume biography of President Lyndon Johnson. At 89 years old, Caro is still working on the fifth and final installment. To celebrate 50 years of the Power Broker, the Society went into their archives and curated

a special exhibit that is a must-see for any power broker reader. There are so many amazing documents on display. There's Caro's handwritten notes from his interview with Lillian Edelstein, who tried and failed to stop Moses from tearing down her home in East Tremont to make way for the Cross Bronx Expressway. And next to that, there's notes from Caro's interview with Robert Moses on his side of the story.

You can see in his notes where Moses told Caro that the opposition was, quote, a political thing that stirred up the animals there. There's also pages from early drafts of The Power Broker, with huge slashes through entire paragraphs made by Caro's editor, Robert Gottlieb. Caro often says that he cut 350,000 words, around a third of his initial draft of The Power Broker, partly because the publisher could not bind a book that would hold that many pages. It was physically impossible to release a book of that size. And woven throughout the exhibit are examples of Caro's famous attention to detail, which just floored Elliot and me when we saw it.

One of the things that I admire so much about Carver's work is that he goes everywhere. And these notes here about the West Bath House at this beach. West Bath House Beach is practically deserted at 1038. Of course, it's V. Cold. Hank Bogak, a New Paltz student. It's generally pretty empty here, except for Tuesdays and Fridays. And it's like just how many people he must have talked to and at all different levels of wherever he was. You know, I don't think he set up an appointment

with this new Paltz student that works at a lifeguard at the beach. I think he just went and started interviewing people. And it's the way to do it. And just to have a confidence to it. I can't do that. Just walk up to somebody and start interviewing them. If you're in New York City,

you should definitely make a trip to the New York Historical Society to check out the exhibit. And now here's Elliot and me interviewing Robert Caro, live on stage. Thank you so much, everybody, for joining us tonight. I know, speaking for Roman and myself, we're so excited to be here. We're so honored to be here with Mr. Caro. And Mr. Caro, thank you so much for joining us tonight. It just means more than we can say

to be talking with you. I know we only have about an hour. We've got to move really fast. So, page one. No, that was my dumb comedy opening bit. Thank you everybody for indulging me with that. I appreciate it.

So what I was hoping is that you could take us back to the moment before the publication of The Power Broker, either the excerpts in the New Yorker or the book itself. Were you more concerned that no one was going to read it or that one person in particular was about to read it? Well, I knew Robert Moses was going to attack it because he attacked anything he didn't like. I knew he was great with words. Robert Moses, when he was at Yale, was a poet and he was actually a good one.

He coined a good phrase about me, venomous viper. And the New York Times then would print anything Robert Moses said as fact. So the headline was, Kero Venomous Viper, Moses Says. Wow. And what did that feel like when you heard venomous viper? And were you prepared for it?

That he would attack him? I mean, just like, what did it mean to be attacked by him? I mean, you had done so much work. Your opinion of him was right there in black and white. But did it do something? Like, what did it feel like when you finally got that type of reaction from him? Well, I, you know, I was, I was expecting the book wouldn't sell very many copies, and I was sort of overwhelmed

by the reception. I'll tell you one anecdote. My first review in the New York Times was not wholly favorable. So in those days, if my publisher expected you to have a lot of interviews, they gave you an offer, someone's offer who was on vacation. So I was sitting in there having digested this review, and suddenly Joseph Heller was standing in the doorway.

Now his book, Something Happened, was published the same month as The Power Broker. And so I would see him in the halls, but I was too much in awe. I would say hello, we would say hello. I was too much in awe. We never had had a conversation. And there he is suddenly standing in the doorway.

I later figured out that Bob Gottlieb said, go in there and cheer him up. And he says, hey, hear this kind of voice. Hey kid, great review this morning. And I said something like, oh I don't know what was so good. And he said, you don't understand, he says, the only thing that matters is the space. This guy usually only writes this law. For you, he wrote this.

So that's Robert Moses' reaction, negative. The Times reaction, mixed. I was wondering, the names on the cover of the book are Robert Moses and Robert Caro, but there's so many people in this book, there's so many people whose stories you tell and whose names you bring attention to when another book might have glossed over them. And I assume on the assumption that if everyone who's mentioned in the book buys a copy, you're good for like a couple dozen copies. But I was wondering if you had, had you received any reaction after publication from anyone

you talked about in the book, any of the people like, like Lily Nettlestein or anyone like that, how did they feel about the way their stories were told, if you heard from them? Oh, you know, there are a lot of people, a lot of different chapters. The most moving thing for me were the people of the Cross Bronx, the people who were thrown out for the Cross Bronx Expressway. And that morning I had interviewed like two people, two couples, one lived in Co-op City and one lived with their kids. And that afternoon I had an interview with Robert Moses. So my first question was, what do you think the effect was

on the people who live there? And I still remember, and if I didn't remember, it's in that notebook that's there. Oh, he said, there was very little hardship there at all. They stirred up the animals, but I just stood fast, so I won. That's not quite answering your question. I noticed. But I...

I've learned from you. But it's leading up to your question. The book is a war. So, but over the years, over and over again, I'd be giving a talk somewhere and someone would come up to me and say, I lived on 187th Street or I lived in Southern Boulevard and I'm so glad that you told what happened to us. So that was a reaction. People in power were enraged at the book.

Mayor Wagner was enraged at the book. Mayor Wagner was enraged at it and issued a really strong statement denouncing it. And you're not really used to that, to tell you the truth. And you keep wondering if you did something wrong. But it sort of faded away, I must say, rather quickly. And all of a sudden, people were talking about the power broker in their columns or in a way that was really made me feel good.

Wonderful. So in The Power Broker, you take a lot of care as a biographer to sort of, you know, set the stage of like why Robert Moses is the way he is, talking about his mother Belle, Belle Moskowitz as well. And in the Lyndon Johnson books, you even go deeper and you'll like, what is the soil composition of the Hill Country to lead him to be who he is? And I wonder this part of you, this core of you, that is so attuned to the people who have less power

and so committed and driven to telling their story, where does that come from for you? Where did you get that impulse? Oh, no one's ever asked me that. But I'll tell you, it started actually on Newsday when I was still working just nights and I came across, they were taking, I'm trying to think of a way, I'm editing myself now so the story will be...

There's no editor here, you can finally talk at length, however long you want. There was a huge thing going on where con men were selling retirement home sites in the Mojave Desert, aiming at the widows of patrolmen and the PBA and firemen. And for some reason, I'd never done an investigative piece, for some reason it struck me that something was wrong. And I remember I went to Alan Hathaway, who was this tough old managing editor, and I said, I'd like to go out to Arizona. I've never done anything like this before. And for some reason, he allowed, he authorized me to spend time. I went to the Mojave Desert,

and there was nothing there. You know, there was a, where they had pictures of the beautiful country club and the swimming pool. There was nothing there. There was just a sign. This is Rio Rancho Estates or something. So I started to look into this and I went to the county clerk's office and I saw the vast scope of this thing, that tens of thousands of people

had actually bought land out there that they could never get water from. There was no water and there was, and I didn't know what to do with it. I had never done a long story. And I remember the next day, I was driving around the desert and I came to the top of a rise. And there below me was an old lady

carrying two buckets of water. And it appeared to me she was carrying from nowhere to nowhere. When I drove over the next rise, I saw she had sort of a corrugated iron. She had built sort of a corrugated oint. She had built sort of a corrugated tin shack. And I looked at her as she was coming, and I suddenly said, you know,

you don't have to explain everything to people, you just have to tell about her. And that worked as it happened. And after that, I just always felt attracted to the people who were hurt. That's about all I can say. I mean, I think you feel it in the work. I think it's one of the reasons why it endures, is that thing. Not just the story of Moses, but the story of all these other people. Thank you. This is going to seem like a non-sequitur question after that very dramatic answer and

question, but it's related in a way. Something that sticks out to me from that reporting series that you did is the picture you took where you are sitting at a table with a bottle of wine in the middle of nowhere for that Newsday article. And it's a very funny picture. And in The Power Broker, something that I feel like does not get talked about, but I guess maybe it stuck out to me because I'm a comedy writer by trade, is that there are times when it's a very funny book. There's a line in it that I love so much where you're quoting Moses saying, traffic on the LIE will flow freely and then you just write inappropriate adverb right afterwards.

Or when you're talking, I forget which bridge or express the way it is that the press is saying this will solve traffic forever. And then there's a space and then afterwards it just says, it solved it for about two weeks. And I wondered if while you were writing it, there were times when you were aware of how funny those lines are, and if it ever felt strange, or if there were times when you were like,

this book's getting a little dry, I need to put a joke in somewhere. Or if there's just something very New York about speaking that way and writing that way. I was wondering if comedy ever came into your mind while you were writing it, because there are very funny parts to the book. Well, I wouldn't say that was a funny line.

I would say that's a line to hit hard. In my writing, I do pay a lot of attention to first lines and last lines. Maybe Bob Gottlieb would say too much. I do pay a lot of attention to first lines and last lines. Maybe Bob Gottlieb would say too much, you know. But it just sort of came naturally, actually, to me. It really feels like, perhaps it's that your feeling for rhythm is so strong, that you're tapping into that rhythm that maybe I'm reading it

as a comedy rhythm, but it makes it such a lively book. It makes it such a living book that you're tapping into that rhythm, that maybe I'm reading it as a comedy rhythm, but it makes it such a lively book, it makes it such a living book, that you have this feel for the rhythm of the words and those... There was on the episode that we just recorded, I think, the chapter, was it Rumors and Reports of Rumors, where you're saying for so-and-so, it was garbage cans. For so-and-so, it was like your opening lines are so fantastic for each of those sections in that chapter. Did you find it was hard to come up with those opening lines or did they come to you like a lightning bolt?

No, hard. You know, I'm glad you used the word rhythm twice in the thing. I should have used it three times. That would have been better for rhythm. Three times, even better. Because it's, you know, if I can just digress, people say nobody reads history anymore, you know? We're not interested in history.

But the fact is, I think history is fascinating and anyone would be interested in it if it's written the way it is. That history is a wonderful story, very dramatic what's happening. What's happening in America today, how much more dramatic can you be? It's like a horrible but fascinating movie.

So I have always, for some reason, felt that the rhythm of the words was very important. I don't know that anybody agrees with me, you know? But I think that more people would read history if history was written with more attention to the things that novelists, fiction writers, the rhythm of sentences, the rhythm of words, you know, there is, I believe, there is a right word for what you're trying to say,

even if you have to spend a long time thinking about that word, looking for that word, you know? So if the answer to your question is, it's deliberate, you know, that's what I have to say. We notice as we're talking about it on the podcast and we go chapter by chapter, one of the things I love and love noting and talking about is the way that each chapter has a bit of a cliffhanger to get you to read the next one.

And it's really, I just think the word smithing is just so much fun. It seems like very newspaper writing, just like get you to the next thing. Like I want to read the next thing, like right now. Well I want them to read the next thing. And I also wondered like in terms of this. Oh could I?

Yeah please. In the answer to your question. I mean, I didn't mean to interrupt you. You answering the question is why we're all here. I've said it, you know, I've said it before on television, but I don't know that any, you know, people saw it. I mean, when I was starting the book, I do all my, and particularly on the Power Broker, I did all my research before I started the book. And then I realized nobody's gonna read this book. No one really knew who Robert Moses was.

They certainly didn't know there was an interesting story there. I said, how am I gonna get them to read this book? And I have to do an introduction that tells people what he's done and I couldn't figure out I mean you talk about time and days I couldn't figure out a way to do it but I thought of well who else wrote about someone who had so much to compliment Homer you know in the Iliad. So I said, how did he do that?

And I remember I went and said, oh, he did it by listing the countries that sent ships one after the other. Somehow that draws you into the book, the rhythm in which he wrote. So I said, I'll try to do that with his highways because if you just say he built 627 miles of expressways and parkways that's not gonna get anyone to read the book

So I listed them that didn't do anything. I said so what's what's the rhythm here? you know, I said what if I find a rhythm that draws people in and That was a deliberate thing I was thinking of. And I listed them over and over again, and they came out different. Suddenly I saw they're coming out in a rhythm. Now I'm almost there. And I don't say I succeeded in getting

there, but that's what I was trying to do. So if you're talking about something in government or history that seems as dry, if it's dry then it's dry, but if it's dramatic, if there's a man trying to put a highway through a crowded area and throw all the whatever I said in the book, 15,000 people out with no place to go, you say that's a story and you got to find a way to tell it as a story. And that takes a long time sometimes. The time I mean from the point of view of me, someone who did not have to do that work and just gets to read it, the time seems very well worth it because the book is so beautiful.

And an indication of that, which I think we have not talked about on the podcast, is that I have a 10-year-old son and there are nights when before he goes to bed, he asks me to read him a page or two of The Power Broker. And he particularly likes those lists in the introduction. And he'll ask me to read him those pages, the lists of the expressways and the bridges. And I think it's that rhythm just captures him and he doesn't know those places, you know, and he's, and it's made it very hard to continue through the book at a pace that it's going to take a while to finish reading it, a page or two at a time to him at bedtime.

But it's such a, I feel like there's no other work of history that I can think of that my 10 year old is asking me to read to him at bed to get him into that. And it doesn't lull him to sleep. I have to stop because he's not sleeping and I have to leave the room. But it's that rhythm I think really captures him even just the sounds of those words are so beautiful. The way you put them together. When you just made my day.

Thank you very much. That's the, that's something I'll remember. Thank you. I'll tell him you said that. When you're writing, um, how much are you balancing being a historian and making sure that this number is out there for people to have for all time versus moving the story forward dramatically?

Talk about the difficulty of that because that seems very hard. That's really hard. Sometimes you feel you're trapped by the facts. You know this is a dramatic scene. Like right now in the book I'm writing now. Oh, you're working on a book right now? I had no idea.

I didn't know this either. No, it's about Lyndon Johnson. Oh, is it? Oh, okay, interesting. It's a good subject. And he's passing Medicare. And it's really, it's changing the financing of the social security system. And it's really, it's changing the financing of the social security system.

And it's really dry. It's really a lot of numbers. But more than that, it's a very complicated fight is going on in the Ways and Means Committee because the chairman, Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, doesn't want Medicare. And he's going to stand Medicare, and he's gonna stand because he thinks it's gonna destroy the financing of the social security system. And this is a chapter about numbers,

and it's really dry. But you said, it may be boastful to say, but you said, no, it's not dry. This is all the people in the United States who had to choose between financing their, sending their kids to college and taking care of their grandparents because there is no Medicare.

That's not dry. You have to take these numbers and find a way of weaving them into something that people understand how big this question is. So you're constantly, it's a very good question. You're constantly, that's an extreme example, but you're constantly stuck by facts. These numbers.

Do you ever find one of the things that makes your writing so powerful is there's this passion behind it, there's this excitement behind it about making sure people know these things. I imagine you, like, if you didn't have books, I imagine you running out into the streets saying, people need to know this, and just grabbing people and telling them. Do you ever, is it hard? I've never done them.

Well, luckily you've got the books to put them through. You should try it sometime. It's it sometime. It gets the blood racing. Do you ever find you're in danger of losing that passion because you're digging through numbers or because you're struggling to find just the right words? Is it hard to maintain that sense of energy that you need to get through the book to make people interested? You ask good questions all the time actually. Because you say if you do it by concentrating on individuals, telling their stories, first place it's going to take another additional two weeks or two months or something.

And you don't know how to do it when you first think of it, you know? What you just asked is what takes so long. I know it takes my books, you know, they're too long, it takes too long, but I could do it a lot shorter, you know, in time and in length, you know? But it's that, then my feeling is then people wouldn't read it. People wouldn't understand why it's important. Do you know, President Kennedy is assassinated,

and that night, Lyndon Johnson is back in Washington, he's in his bed, he calls Bill Moyers, Jack Valenti and Cliff Carter, three of his young aides, and he starts talking about what he's going to do. He says, I'm going to pass Harry Truman's health bill for him. Well, the story of how he passes the health bill could be a very dry story. It's changing votes in the Senate and in the ways the means committee in the House. You say, yes, but this is a really important thing in

American history. It's the government trying to take care of. So how does that work out? How does he get it through? And how does it work out? So you spend a lot of time just staring at a piece of paper and wondering how to do it. More of our conversation with Robert Carroll live

from the New York Historical Society coming up. So we have a few questions from the audience So we have a few questions from the audience I wanted to run past you. You know, how do you, this is one, how do you hope future generations will use the power broker and in particular your archive that's upstairs, your 20,000 linear feet of miles of archives? It's rare when an author's work is measured in linear feet. That's... Like, what do you feel when someone's, like, going through that stuff that you probably

meant for no one to read but yourself or Aina? Oh, great question. You do feel funny about that, you know, but you say, but there's so much in it in the archives that no one knows, that I want people to know. I'll give you one quick example. Al Smith was the governor of New York. You know, Franklin Roosevelt, when he was president, said to Francis Perkins, you know know Francis, 90% of everything we did

in the New Deal, Al Smith did in New York. New York was first in welfare, first in all the things we think of today, helping people out. And it's all because of this guy, unleaded, had to drop out of school in the fifth grade, and was once called Tammany's leading henchman, says to the divorcers of Tammany, I'm governor now, you have to free me, and gets all this passed. I learned about him because he raised

Robert Moses to power, okay? And I said, this is the greatest story, and I did write a lot on Al Smith, which we cut out of the power broker. Now when I was researching, I said, I'm going to try to find, there's no good book, not even a half good book on Al Smith. So I said, well, I'm going to try to find everybody who was truly close to him, truly, not Bolsheviks, but really worked with him. So there were 14 people, as I recall, left the live.

And I did extensive interviewing them, typed them up as I do transcripts. And they're in that archive. And I'm hoping someone will come along and do a biography of Al Smith. And you- Don't look at me, Roman, I don't know this. I don't, it seems like your territory.

I do, I do like Ghostbusters stuff. Like I don't know this, I'm not good enough for this. Yeah. But if they do it, they'll be able to talk about what it was like working with him. Same thing with Bell-Moscowicz. No one even knows the name Bell-Moscowicz. In the 1920s, a woman named Bell-Moscowicz was arguably,

I think definitely, the most powerful woman politically in the United States. Nobody even knows her name. So I also did a lot of interviewing on her. There's so much in my archives that didn't make it into the book. I mean, even though I wrote it, we cut out 350,000 words.

I mean, not so funny. Not so far-ish. The piggy-macking off of that, Roman and I got to look at the Power Broker at 50 exhibit right before we were doing this event. And on the wall, there's a napkin that you wrote a note on about the women of East Tremont went to see Fiddler on the Roof. And for me, someone, it was two sacred things, the power broker and Fiddler on the Roof in one document. And I found myself so kind of affected by seeing it, so overcome by it. And it made me think this is a note that Mr. Caro jotted down for his book. And this book that so many people have this very deep connection to and they get very obsessed with it and becomes very special to them and they read

the book and it's all they want to talk about. And do you find that weird? Like, you know, at all, like I'm asking for a friend. Do you think it's weird that people get so wrapped up in the power brokers, in your work, but in the power broker especially, Does that ever feel strange to you? Well, what's your question? Oh, just, basically, I guess the most basic way to boil it down is, do you think I'm weird for being,

for caring, for taking this book and it feeling so special to me, someone who has only read it? I assume you're mostly thankful, but does it ever feel strange that it's become such a talisman for people? It just makes me feel so humble. You know, the 50 years it so fast. But I ride the number one train a lot. Columbia students are on there.

And apparently they teach the power broker in a couple of courses. So for 50 years, I've said to Ina, I saw the most wonderful thing today. Another kid was reading the power broker. So... And the other hand, the things that are cut out of it, you know, what you just referred to. So, as I said, everybody was thrown out and they scattered to the four

ones. I said, how different is that from the czar destroying a steppe. And we were, went to see Fiddler on the roof and at the, the last song is Anna Tefka. And if you remember in the staging that I saw, they are singing Anna Tefka, Anna Tefka, a place where you know everyone you meet and you'll be in a place where you're looking for one familiar face. And I said, oh, that's, I'm going to do a chapter on that, you know?

And I wrote, I evidently, I didn't remember this, they showed me the nap, I evidently wrote that down. You probably went to dinner after the show, and we think about it, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I wrote it. And so there was a chapter called One Mile Afterwards. Okay? We had to cut it. Bob, Bob Gottlieb, you know, he said, I think,

that I cut 350,000 of the best words I ever, well, I think that's about the best chapter I ever wrote. And we just cut it down to like six pages or something like that. So you have so many mixed feelings about that book. So I have another question from the audience. It says, after 50 years of reflection, would you portray Moses any differently today?

No. Yeah, I don't think so. Yeah. Nailed it. I know, I'm finding myself, it's hard for me to, and this is for the past couple days, it's been very hard for me to formulate into question form the things that I want to say to you about the book.

And the, I don't, does it ever, does it ever, well, actually, you know, I apologize. Roman, you ask about it. I get very emotional about it. This relates to the exhibit a little bit, so I'm curious about this. Good, that's a great idea, Roman. Ground it in something, yeah. Other than my beating heart for this book, yeah. So the book is subtitled, The Fall of New York.

How responsible was Moses for this fall? Also, were other subtitles considered? And I know the answer to this because I saw one of them out there. So talk about the subtitle, The Fall of New York. Well, the easy answer to that is it's published in 1974. New York was bankrupt, you know. When you looked into it in the book, it shows how his spending on a number of things

really crippled the city's financial capacity. Okay, but that's not all I meant. I meant that by the time he finished being in power, you had a city where there were 100, if I have this right, 144,000 units of public housing that were built in the cheapest possible way because he wanted people who were poor to feel poor. And they didn't have what LaGuardia wanted to put social workers in so that people from rural areas of the South could have somewhat helped them, you know, get that. So they had a city, that's part of New York. New York is by some the most segregated city

in America. You have a city where people commute to and it's the commuting time in New York then was by the way, I forget how they measured it, was the longest commutes in the world. It's still pretty bad. Rereading the book this time, I've lived in Los Angeles for a few years now, but I lived in New York for a number of years, and I would read about the potential for a better subway system, and I would just think about the hours I spent waiting in trains

that had stopped in tunnels in my years here. And it was making me so angry that it's, yeah, that this another way the city fails its residents as a result of the things Moses was doing. Yes, that's the kind of thing I meant. And black people were still not using Jones Beach. He didn't want poor people in general, and people of color in particular, to use Jones Beach. So he did a number of things, which everyone talks about. Some academics try and put a different reason on it, but the people who built it knew why he was making the overpasses too low for buses to get through.

And I remember his chief engineer said, Shapiro, saying, this is an example of, they called them RM. This was an example of RM's wonderful foresight, because we had legislation passed that buses couldn't use the parkways. But you know, legislation can be changed. It's really hard to change a bridge while it's up. So I said to Einar, I want to see if that still works. So let's say this was 1970.

I don't know what year it was. So we went out there and we stood in Jones Beach. There's a main parking lot which holds 10,000 cars. And everybody who parks there, you know, you have to go through an overpass with three archways. So Einar and I stood there with two pads and you did it like four lines and then you'd been across. If you go up to the second floor of this museum, there's the pad and used it. There is, as I recall, 14 Latinos, and I think just five black people.

So his strategy worked. This is so, that's part of what I meant by the fall of New York, you know. We had all these, this is vastums living in these housing projects built as cheaply as he could build them. We had an education system which he had, when he did the World's Fair, he said he would have, and the number kept going up, 20 million, 40 million, $80 dollars, the fair would profit and he turned it over to the education system.

Well, as it happens, I was the reporter who found out the fair was bankrupt. So in a way, anyway, that kind of thing is what I meant. Well, it's been such a delight talking with you. Thank you so much for the book. And when I think about this book, I know that maybe people see it as this 1200 page book of this dastardly man, Robert Moses. But what I want people to understand, the pleasure of the book is spending 1200 pages with this kind humanist who cares about this city and this country

and this world in the form of you. And that's one of the things that it makes it so, I think that's one of the things that makes it endure for 50 years is your care that you give to the work and to all that you do. So thank you so much for everything. Please run. Thank you.

Please run. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for everything. Thank you. Please run. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You may have noticed something that we did not ask Robert Caro about, that many people want to know.

What happened to the chapter in The Power Broker that was devoted to Jane Jacobs? So here's the backstory. Jane Jacobs was a journalist and activist who in the 1950s helped organize a successful opposition to the lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have cut through neighborhoods like Soho, Little Italy, and Chinatown. Jacobs went on to write The Life and Death

of Great American Cities, this incredible book that delivers a withering critique of the urban renewal concepts and other harmful policies that Moses championed. In the early stages of The Power Broker, Caro wrote about Jacob's fight with Moses, but ultimately her name does not appear in the book. We didn't ask Caro about the Jane Jacobs chapter because he's been asked about this so many times, like over and over again, and his response is always, I can't remember what's in that chapter. But one of the last pieces

in the New York Historical Society's exhibit is a letter from Jane Jacobs to Robert Caro from August, 1974, shortly before the book was published. So it says, dear Mr. Caro, many, many thanks for the copy of The Power Broker, which I treasure, and also for your too generous but much appreciated inscription. I have no doubt that many readers are going to feel the way I do. We owe you a tremendous debt for all those years of work, good sense, unflagging curiosity

and compassion. I don't think anybody but a genuinely compassionate person, I do not mean sentimental, could have written that book. What an account it is of human... –Predicaments? –Yeah, predicaments, sorry. There's like a little hyphen that goes into another word going up the side of the... –It's weird that you see a handwritten note where someone has a hyphen where they

continue a word on the next line. That's a writer. That's a real writer. –It is of human predicaments. It ranks with the great novels in that respect. Well, you deserve a commensurate vacation, but Mary Nichols has told me that you are instead at work on a biography of LaGuardia. Selfishly, I can't help but be glad. I look forward to that. It's so much needs to be done, and nobody could do it as well. Thank you again for sending the book, but especially for having written it in the first

place. Sincerely, Jane Jacobs. I'm sorry to say, Jane Jacobs, he did not write that biography. No, Jane Jacobs would go to her grave awaiting that LaGuardia biography. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Isabel Angel edited by Comiti, music by Swan Real mixed by Martin Gonzalez. Special thanks to the folks at the New York Historical Society for making Elliot and my dreams come true. Cathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kolead is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor, Taylor Shedrick is our intern. The rest of the team includes Chris Barube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher

Johnson, Vivian Ley, Lasha Madon, Gabriella Gladney, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Nina Potuck, me Roman Mars, and Jaka Medina Gleason. Congratulations to you and Billy, Jaka. It's just so nice to see two lovely young people get married and just we're so happy for you. The 99% of his logo was created by Stephen Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building,

in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show on all the usual social media sites as well as our own discord server where we have a fun time talking about the powerbroker we talked about architecture movies and music all kinds of good stuff it's where I'm hanging out most of these days you can find a link to that discord server every past episode of 99 PI and catch up with the powerbroker breakdown at 99PI.org. I wonder what the inscription said. Yeah, I know.

That would be something. I wonder if it was like, dear Jane, here's my book, you know, thanks for your part. Sorry you're not in the book. Yeah, I wonder if there's part of the Jane Jacobs archive that has it. This is that now our next podcast series is the mystery of tracking down that description. We'll do one of those episodes of a podcast where you follow the whole hunt and then you find at the end and you could have just said what happened at the end. Or you find nothing probably.

Yeah, that's more likely. That's the podcast demo is to make it all about the process because there is no answer. Something, the answer is truth or something? It turns out the answer was the friends we made along the way. The nature of truth and the friends we made along the way.