More so than any other city covered so far, the design of New York City's freeway network and urban renewal programs was the prerogative of one individual: Robert Moses, New York's "Master Builder." As Robert Caro notes in his biography of Moses, “The Power Broker,” "The tremendous extent of Robert Moses’ power, and the extent to which, with that power, he shaped the greatest city in the New World and the suburbs stretching out from it, is demonstrated by the roads he built during the quarter century following WWII. These were roads like no other roads in history, for these were roads built through a city [rather than through open country as had been typical].”

Freeway construction directly displaced over 60,000 people in the Bronx, with property owners given buyouts well below market rate, and renters often having no assistance at all. From “The Power Broker”:

“Once, in a speech Moses said, ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs… when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat axe.’ The metaphor, like most of his, was vivid. But it was incomplete. It expressed his philosophy—but it was not philosophy but feelings that dictated Moses’ actions. He didn’t just feel that he *had* to swing a meat axe. He *loved* to swing it.”

“Because of the enormous power he controlled, power that was close to absolute in fields he had carved out for his own, such as transportation, he could impose his plans on the metropolitan region, and on its 12,000,000 residents.”*

*12 million when “The Power Broker” was written in 1974. Today it is 20 million.