Who makes a city? Is it the urban planners, summoning bridges and highways out of thin air, conjuring swimming pools and parks from slums and marshes? Or is it the citizens, crammed cheek by jowl in tenements, hip to groin on subways, making their own desire paths through the metropolis, repurposing the built environment to suit their needs? This is the question that drives Megan Bradbury’s luminous first novel, a kaleidoscopic dreamscape of New York seen through the eyes of some of its most celebrated inhabitants.
First, the master builder: Robert Moses, the visionary despot responsible for structuring and sculpting the mid-century city. His projects included sites for public uplift and enjoyment such as the Lincoln Centre, Shea Stadium and Jones Beach, as well as dozens of roads, among them the FDR Drive and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. His idea of the perfect city was a place you could get into and out of fast, and he was determined to make urban life hygienic and rational, whether the people he displaced wanted it or not.
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