Mark Wilson/Getty Images in the arena Liberal Activists Didn’t Kill the Amazon Deal. Robert Moses Did. The most lasting legacy of New York’s power broker is that it’s now impossible to build anything in the city.

Marc J. Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, is the author of “The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community.”

Just like with Amazon’s recent proposal to build a new corporate campus in Queens, local residents opposed Robert Moses’ plans to construct the Cross-Bronx Expressway through the working-class neighborhood of East Tremont in the early 1950s. Determined to save scores of residential buildings by forcing Moses, then New York’s most powerful public figure, to alter the route, members of the East Tremont Neighborhood Association lined up a raft of political support.

As Robert Caro tells the story, led by a local “housewife” named Lillian Edelstein, activists extracted a promise from the soon-to-be-mayor, Robert F. Wagner, that he would “vote against any resolution” allowing Moses to acquire private property for the roadway. As Caro explains in The Power Broker, up until the night Moses rolled them, Edelstein and her neighbors believed they were going to win. Not long thereafter, Moses’ wrecking crew plowed through.


More than a half-century later, that narrative has been turned on its head. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: “Anything is possible: today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers & their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world.”

But as uplifting as that fantasy may be, it ignores a more mundane reality. In all likelihood, Amazon could have worked with the deal’s biggest champions, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, to push past the limited public hostility—most New Yorkers supported Amazon’s plan to bring thousands of new jobs to the region. The difference today is that no amount of leverage is capable of overcoming resistance from a small star chamber in Albany known as the Public Authorities Control Board. Without unanimous support from the three voting members of the PACB, Amazon’s plan was dead in the water.

It wasn’t always like this. Before Gov. Hugh Carey agreed to give the state assembly and senate the power to veto any major public project through the PACB—a deal he made in 1976 in a desperate but successful attempt to keep the New York from dissolving into bankruptcy—generations of men like Moses regularly dictated the terms of every public development. But today, even the combined power of the governor and mayor was unable to face down obstruction from Michael Gianaris, the state senate’s PACB appointment, a man who happened to represent the area where Amazon wanted to locate its new campus. Like Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2005 proposal to build an Olympic Stadium on Manhattan’s West Side, this little-known public functionary proved an unbreachable barrier.

After roughly 40 years as New York’s master builder, Moses was shown the door by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in the 1960s. By then, the public was seething and New York seemed to be on the decline. The PACB is one of a raft of new tools established in the wake of Moses’ reign to check the power of government to build new public works and other redevelopment projects.

Among them: After the enormous, beaux-arts Pennsylvania Station was demolished in 1963 to make way for the sad oversized drum of Madison Square Garden, a movement of preservationists persuaded Mayor Wagner to sign a bill establishing a landmarks commission. To protect the public from wanton abuse of the nation’s natural resources, President Richard Nixon established the environmental review process in 1970. In New York, zoning laws have been modified to provide local residents with a more powerful voice in protecting the character of their neighborhoods. Taken together, the effect has been to give a range of characters throughout the system opportunities to throw sand in the gears whenever anyone tries to build anything.

At a Moses retrospective organized more than a decade ago, Caro recalled that, all too frequently, people “of the real estate persuasion,” frustrated that red tape prevents too many developments from getting off the ground, would approach him at cocktail parties and ask: “Don't you think it's time for a new Robert Moses?” And Caro, thinking of Lillian Edelstein and the other residents of East Tremont, would say, “No.”

But even Moses could not work his will on New York City today. As forceful, persuasive, wily and prodigious as he was, Moses would still not have been able to overcome the resistance to the Amazon deal. That’s not because local residents are more forceful today. Like Cuomo, de Blasio and Jeff Bezos, Moses would have lost because he would not have had any leverage on the state senator who sat on the PACB. And that lone state senator had the single-handed power to kill the deal altogether. On this one issue, Gianaris’ “no” was more powerful than every “yes” standing behind the deal.

For those who see themselves as champions for ordinary people like Edelstein, that shift may be welcome. Moses’ mark often left a scar. But for policymakers—and particularly for progressives whose aim it is to use public power for the public good—the hurdles erected in his wake make the process of doing great things next to impossible. The scar tissue built over the past 50 years to prevent the second coming of Moses stops good projects as well as bad.

With few exceptions—a slow-moving water tunnel buried deep beneath the city, three extra subway stops on Manhattan’s East Side, an extension of the 7 line, a bevy of new parks—New York has done little more than maintain the public infrastructure it boasted when the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was opened in 1964. That’s not because the Big Apple has lost its imagination—developers, politicians, associations and other throw big ideas around all the time. It’s because power has been pushed down and out, spread so thin that even projects championed by the governor, mayor and the city’s business elite face impossible opposition.

Amazon’s detractors had a range of legitimate concerns, and experts can argue about the merit of this particular deal. But Amazon isn’t packing up because of public resistance to too many tax breaks or a helipad. It’s leaving because, like in much of the country, the architecture of political power has changed. In ways Robert Moses could never have imagined, those with big dreams now suffer interminably from the absence of leverage. Moses’ final legacy is that he made it impossible to get things done.