How did one unelected man rebuild New York around the car?

He did it by collecting the tolls. Robert Moses never won an election, yet for four decades he shaped New York. He held as many as 12 titles at once, and as head of the Triborough Bridge Authority he had near-complete control of the tolls on bridges, tunnels and roads. Bond contracts made that authority largely impervious to pressure from mayors and governors, so the money from one toll project paid for the next.

What he built was a city for cars. Over four decades Moses built a network of highways and parkways that reoriented the region around the car, opened Long Island to mass suburbanization and set the template for urban highways across the United States. He also gave New Yorkers Jones Beach, the most visited public beach in the country. In the 1930s, when New Deal money arrived, he was one of the few officials with shovel-ready projects, so New York obtained significant federal funding.

But the roads ran through neighbourhoods. The Cross Bronx Expressway, the first highway built through a crowded urban environment in the United States, required relocating as many as 60,000 residents and is blamed for worsening decay in the South Bronx. Robert Caro's biography calculated that Moses's projects displaced about 250,000 people in all. Moses defended it with a famous line about making omelets without breaking eggs.

Today Moses is still argued over. Critics point to the displacement and to expressways that, to some extent, replaced planned subway lines. Some scholars say New York might not have recovered from the 1970s without the infrastructure he built. In the 1960s, activists such as Jane Jacobs began to cast doubt on the benefits of his projects, his plan for a Lower Manhattan Expressway among them, and that is where our next lesson begins.