’The Power Broker’ is 50. Its latest fans are much younger.

A new generation is reading Robert Caro’s classic biography — sometimes aloud on social media — for its insights about how (and how not) to plan cities.


Robert Caro, author of “The Power Broker,” in his New York office in 2007. (Dima Gavrysh/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

By Marisa Charpentier
September 26, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

On a cloudy evening earlier this month, visitors roamed the halls of the New-York Historical Society in Manhattan, perusing the museum’s latest exhibit, “Robert Caro’s The Power Broker at 50.” With their noses pressed against glass cases to examine marked-up manuscripts and yellowed steno pads, they whispered facts to one another. “Can you imagine having to cut 350,000 words?” one woman said, pointing to a sign claiming that a third of Caro’s massive tome was deleted in the editing process.

Since its publication in 1974, “The Power Broker” has become something of a status symbol. Those in literary and political circles have long been known to place the 1,200-page biography of New York’s controversial city planner Robert Moses on their coffee tables and bookshelves for maximal noticing — and, once the pandemic hit, conspicuously in their Zoom backgrounds.

But in recent years, a new generation of young people has discovered the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, and they’re not just using it for decoration. … One of the first visitors to walk up to the Historical Society’s exhibit on opening day was Natalie Makhijani, 20, a first-year urban studies student at the New School in Manhattan. She listened to the audiobook of “The Power Broker” last year and is now reading a physical copy.

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City planner Robert Moses, the subject of the biography “The Power Broker,” in Brooklyn in 1956. (AP)

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Marisa Charpentier is a freelance writer in Brooklyn whose work has appeared in the New York Times, NPR, the Art Newspaper and more.