The Phrase That Shaped New York City: ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.’

Pulitzer Prizing Winning Robert Caro Book ‘The Power Broker’ Turns 50
Book Chronicles How NYC Evolved Structurally From An Unelected Official
It Is An Essential Read For Real Estate Market Participants Everywhere

After I moved to Manhattan from Chicago in the mid-80s, I was excited and eager to understand the big, rumbling city I had discovered. Sleeping on the floor of my parent’s one-bedroom apartment until I got a job and found an apartment, I was drawn to a particular book. Today, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which was published in 1974. It won a Pulitzer Prize and is still referenced in articles about the city. It was published eleven years before I moved to New York City, and yet by the time I arrived in Manhattan, it still seemed to be everywhere on full display. Throughout my career, I have often seen it on the coffee tables of apartments I was appraising. I specifically remember seeing a copy in a Trump Tower office by a then-potential mortgage client, literally attempting to create a false housing market through a sketchy mortgage plan. Ha. It was almost as though people were placing the book on display to show that they knew how New York City was made.

When I bought it, I ended up plowing through the book quickly despite its size. It remains highly relevant today, even though it was written several generations of New Yorkers ago. In fact, anyone living and working in New York City can’t claim they are a real New Yorker unless they’ve read it. The same recommendation applies to those outside of New York. It really is foundational to our understanding of the evolution of power and a great city, with its warts and all.

My all-time favorite “New York” quote comes from Robert Moses, the ‘Power Broker’ himself:

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”
Robert Moses

In the book, he uttered this quote quite defiantly at a raucous community board meeting, announcing the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the most expensive highway built per mile at the time. The highway was cut through solid rock, randomly built through thriving neighborhoods, tearing them apart and enabling expansive urban decay to the South, from which they never fully recovered.

Here’s an audio of Moses speaking to members of Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers on Mar 19, 1953, using that well-known quote.

Moses championed public parks, but sadly also championed the automobile in a high-density environment, rejecting Jane Jacobs‘ view on the importance of street life, which evolved into the new urbanism movement we see today from her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Moses is responsible for most of the city’s bridges and tunnels, and as an unelected official, he maintained his autonomy and power from the toll revenue. Whether you’re a fan or not, believe he was good or bad for the city, we’ll never see someone amass the power base he did, and the widespread public works he completed to burnish his status as the “master builder.”

The Power Broker author Robert Caro, reflected on the moment he realized Robert Moses was different, then as a Newsday reporter:

“You’ve been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here’s a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don’t have the slightest idea how he got it.”

The idea that one man could have had such a profound impact on the development of the nation’s largest city is mind-boggling. From Wikipedia:

“The book focuses on the creation and use of power in New York local and state politics, as witnessed through Moses’s use of unelected positions to design and implement dozens of highways and bridges, sometimes at great cost to the communities he nominally served. It has been repeatedly named one of the best biographies of the 20th century, and has been highly influential on city planners and politicians throughout the United States.”

Random Closing Thoughts

UPDATE 2:16 PM – A reader shared this link on The Power Broker with me from 99% Invisible, one of my favorite podcasts. It’s a spectacular way to take a deep dive into the book.

Robert Caro is also the author of four books on Lyndon Johnson. There are really three books, and the fourth overlaps the first three. I’ve read the first two, The Path to Power and Means of Ascent. The third, Master of the Senate, is still on my to-read list.

This is a little off-topic, but Bloomberg is re-playing my short interview in late 2023 with Barry Ritholtz’ At The Money. I’m being told it still holds up!