Does America Need A New Robert Moses?

"Huge swaths of New Orleans are still devastated a year and a half after Hurricane Katrina. The effort to rebuild the World Trade Center site has sputtered for more than five years. Across the country, projects remain on the drawing board for years while studies, hearings and court cases play out in the bureaucratic equivalent of super-slow-motion.

Does America need another Robert Moses?

Moses, an unelected official who ran a bewildering array of New York public agencies for 44 years, built bridges, expressways, parks, playgrounds and housing developments that continue to define the way people move around and live in the nation's largest urban area. He is commonly reckoned America's greatest builder.

"We can learn from what he did," said Hilary Ballon, a Columbia University architectural historian who is the curator of three popular new exhibits at New York museums that are drawing renewed attention to the staggering scale of Moses' achievements, including the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge across the mouth of New York Harbor and significant roles in the construction of Lincoln Center and the United Nations headquarters. "That's what policymakers ask now: 'How did he get so much done?'"

But if a newfound interest in Moses bespeaks impatience with the seemingly glacial pace at which big infrastructure projects move forward these days, progress came at a high price when Moses was in charge."