Have you been listening to the Hell Gate Podcast? You can catch last week's episode here in audio and here in video.
While Robert Moses was building the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, according to the "Power Broker," he rented the penthouse of a hotel overlooking the project. "He spent a lot of time looking down at it, watching the cranes and derricks and earth-moving machines…in the giant trench being cut through mile after mile of densely packed houses," biographer Robert Caro writes. "'And I'll tell you,' says one of the men who spent a lot of time at the old hotel with him, 'I never saw RM look happier than he did when he was looking down out of that window.'"
Now Moses looks down at us from another penthouse: heaven. And the man who is essentially responsible for designing America's car dependence is likely just as happy in the afterlife as he was when he beheld that massive construction project in the early 1950s, because his peculiar triple cantilever highway girding a section of Brooklyn Heights is here to stay—for at least 40 more years!