Unfortunately, when the book was handed in it was one million words long and had to be cut by a third - 300,000 words. “Over 30 years ago, when she typed the original manuscript for The Power Broker, there was a wonderful chapter on Jane Jacobs - as good, she thought, as the one on the Cross Bronx Expressway. After reaching out through Caro’s lecture agent, Oder received news from Ina Caro, Robert’s wife. I found a 2007 post by journalist and blogger Norman Oder, of the Atlantic Yards Report, which offered up the promise of something I had by then given up on: a chapter on Jacobs, by Caro, cut from the original manuscript of The Power Broker. Sure, it was one of the best books I had ever read. What kind of writing could Caro have produced with these perfectly (if only briefly) matched antagonists? And despite the book taking over a significant part of my brain (there was not a road in New York City that didn’t inspire a Caro-sourced anecdote or fact from me for weeks after I finished), I felt a little cheated. Her absence was profoundly strange to me, both on a biographical level - she was an important figure in Moses’ legacy - but also on a literary one.
If you’ve read The Power Broker, you’ll already know there is no Jane Jacobs inside. I started to get a little nervous around page 871 - where Caro’s famous section on the Cross Bronx Expressway began - but after all there were nearly 500 more pages left, and that was almost three Great Gatsby’s. I assumed - without question - that, at over 1,300 pages, the iconic and devastating biography of city planner Robert Moses (Jacobs’ most famous adversary) was bound to include the woman who helped stop his highway from running down the center of Washington Square Park. I read Robert Caro’s 1974 The Power Broker because I wanted to learn more about Jane Jacobs. I read Jane Jacobs’ seminal 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities because I wanted to learn more about the way urban spaces worked.
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