There he is again.

Robert Moses.

Builder of infrastructure. Ravager of neighborhoods. Maker of omelets. Breaker of eggs. Never mind civics texts. “The Power Broker,” Robert A. Caro’s biography of Mr. Moses, is the book that still must be read — 43 years after it was published — to understand how New York really works.

The reputation of Mr. Moses, good and bad, has outlived those of every governor and mayor he nominally served, with the possible exceptions of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, who had the sense to get an airport named after him, and Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, whose name speaks for itself.

Mr. Moses rose again from his unquiet grave this week.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo invoked his ambiguous legacy as he announced $700 million in state financing for the first phase in the replacement of the Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx with a more modest and amenable boulevard, one that no longer cuts adjoining neighbors off from the Bronx River.

Mr. Cuomo said the expressway was one of Mr. Moses’s mistakes.

No governor would have dared talk that way when Mr. Moses was in his prime, holding as many as a dozen state and city offices simultaneously, impervious to every attempt to remove or bridle him.