Robert Moses: Migration To New York City

Robert Moses was born on December 18, 1888, in New Haven, Connecticut. His family then moved to New York City in 1897 and grew up in Manhattan. He attended Yale University after graduating in 1909, Moses went on to study political science at Oxford and Columbia Universities. In 1913, Moses began his career at Municipal Research Bureau in New York. While he was working there, he suggested and completed a restructure of New York City's civil service system. In 1919, Governor Al Smith made Moses chief staff of New York state's reconstruction commission.

Robert Moses was then considered the most “powerful modern builder of all time”. He was known especially for the building of the Cross-Bronx Expressway. This highway connected New Jersey,
North Manhattan, South Bronx and ended up in Long Island. The building of this new expressway system meant that over 60,000 residents would have to be relocated to new areas. Most of these people were white and it seemed as if Moses had led a white migration out of the Bronx. Most of the white residents moved to either Westchester or Northern Bronx areas and others moved to small suburban houses being built around the Cross Bronx Expressway in New Jersey. The poorer people who were given a meager of about $200 per room were forced to move out and settle in new high rise apartment buildings that were being built. As a result of this massive relocation the economy of the Bronx suffered extremely. The South Bronx area lost over 600,000 jobs. Unemployment rose to 40 percent and in some areas as high as 80 percent.

The most devastating affect of the Cross Bronx Expressway took place when the new built apartment buildings passed into the hands of slumlords.
These people used many different tactics such as demanding more money when they shut off heat and water supply to the people living there. Another tactic that the slumlords used proved to be the most effective and profitable for them. They would find junkies and rent thugs to set fire to abandoned apartments and then they would collect the insurance policies from the city. The slumlords had made very good profit from this as they collected as much as 150,000 dollars per fire. The insurance companies didn’t really mind in the beginning as they were leasing out many new insurance policies, but after a time even they realized that their costs were beginning to get to high. As insurance companies refused to provide insurance policies to cover certain buildings in South Bronx then the fires continued to spread. Whole city blocks became completely abandoned and opened up a place for crime and
gangs.

This had resulted in higher crime and rising in poverty rates.
This is when young people in the South Bronx made use of their limited resources to create cultural expressions that surrounded not only music, but also dance, visual art, and fashion. In music, Latin and Caribbean traditions met and danced with the music of the sixties and seventies Soul, Disco, and Funk. Emerging art of Hip Hop were public parks and community centers, sheets of cardboard laid out on city sidewalks and became dance floors, brick walls were transformed into artists’ canvases. Turntables became laboratories for musical experimentation as old sounds were remixed in new ways. This was a huge invention because it was the spirit left of the people in the bronx's who had nothing left but empty lots, boarded up windows and, burned out buildings. Living in poverty and having no merchandise meant very limited access to instruments and music education. Young music makers created with what they could find. DJs assembled their own sound systems and built extensive record collections by searching secondhand stores for old Soul, Funk, and Rock albums. They would then use their collections to provide entertainment for their
communities.

At the end the culture of hip-hop came from the Bronx and it rose out of misery and despair. It was a way for people to express theirs problems without turning to much violence or drugs. The people here turned to hip hop which was viewed as a new way of art. This type of art emerged literally from the destruction of the South Bronx. Robert Moses was a brilliant but heartless genius who is now remembered as both a builder and wrecker. A New York who began constructing the Cross Bronx Expressway and involved the demolition of many homes within its path that lead the south Bronx into the ground. Moses effectively created this ghetto art that was inspired from poverty and crime to the place of birth of hip-hop.