How Robert Moses, a master urban planner, reshaped New York

FOR ALMOST half a century, from the 1920s to the 1960s, Robert Moses shaped the infrastructure of New York. Brilliant and devious, a charmer but also a bully, he pretended to be a modest public servant while creating an empire. His legacy includes such landmarks as the headquarters of the United Nations, the Lincoln Centre and the Triborough Bridge. Yet to his many critics he was guilty of a psychotic disregard for pedestrians and cyclists, schools and hospitals. At times he seemed willing to hack through anything and anyone who obstructed his path; in the words of his own brother, he “had no use for human beings”.

Now Moses’s story is the subject of “Straight Line Crazy”, a new play by Sir David Hare, which recently opened at the Bridge Theatre in London and stars Ralph Fiennes as Moses. It is easy to see what attracted Sir David to this complex overreacher, and he has rich source material in Robert Caro’s mesmerising 1,300-page biography, “The Power Broker” (1974). The majesty of Moses’s vision is clear: influenced by the Swiss-born architect and urban planner Le Corbusier, he imagined an exquisitely rational metropolis. His obsession, which gives the play its name, was roads, and he rammed 627 miles of them in and around the city, including giant highways that caused hundreds of thousands of (primarily black or Latino) New Yorkers to be evicted from their homes.