In 1974 Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York debuted to the applause and acclaim of those fed up with the superhighway and slum-clearance policies of the recent past. The massive book portrayed Moses as an arrogant bastard who wreaked irreparable damage on the city and precipitated its fall from glory and transformation into a bankrupt, decaying hulk. In 2007, however, a Columbia University exhibition and symposium on Moses forced a reconsideration of his character and his legacy. But Moses’ fluctuating reputation is also a product of changing views of democracy and technology.

Robert Moses is the most reviled man in the history of American urban planning. But recently a trio of exhibits in New York City, mounted this past spring in coordination with a symposium at Columbia University and the publication of an extensive catalog of Moses’s public works projects, summed up the extent to which historians’ perspectives on this brilliant and arrogant man have evolved.