Moses was an American public official who worked mainly in the New York metropolitan area. His decisions favoring highways over public transit helped create the modern suburbs of Long Island. Although he was not a trained civil engineer, Moses's programs and designs influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners nationwide. Moses's projects were considered economically necessary by many contemporaries after the Great Depression. He led the construction of New York campuses for the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs and helped persuade the United Nations to locate its headquarters in Manhattan instead of Philadelphia. Moses's reputation for efficiency and nonpartisan leadership was damaged by Robert Caro's Pulitzer-winning biography The Power Broker (1974), which accused Moses of a lust for power, questionable ethics, vindictiveness, and racism. In Moses's urban planning of New York, he primarily bulldozed homes with Black and Latino residents to make way for parks, chose the middle of minority neighborhoods as the location for highways, and deliberately designed bridges on the parkways connecting New York City to beaches on Long Island to be too low for buses from the inner city to access the beaches.
