>>1759302>Do you think the Bronx would be a better area today if Robert Moses hadn’t bulldozed a bunch of it to pave a highway?It's possible. This isn't exclusively the reason why the Bronx is shitty, but the fact that large parts of the borough are terrible to cross and rundown is definitely due to Moses's work. My walk to Parkchester station was always about 2-4 minutes longer because I had to cross the highway to get to the station from where I lived. Not to mention the fact that it didn't really make shit nicer after it tore down the "blight", it just made it slightly easier for Westchester commuters to get in and out.
>From what I understand he displaced quite a divrerse collection of residents, many of them middle class.Sure, but a good number of them willingly moved to the suburbs when they got enough money to do so. A lot of the ethnic white and Jewish wealth moved to suburban counties along with historic trends of suburban flight. The highways added to that, but historic trends were pushing these people of of NYC anyway.
Moses did good things too, such as the Bronx's Orchard Beach expansion, but the borough was already fucked by deindustrialization and suburban flight and running a highway through old neighborhoods without even taking a stab at improving the area is going to have negative consequences. Moses helped fuck over the Bronx but he wasn't the one catalyst for destroying the borough.
