When Robert Moses began making his move, it wasn’t as if the powers that be were blind: Al Smith the future governor and Fiorello H. La Guardia weren’t naive politicians.

Robert Moses ran the 1964 New York World's Fair, but it was a financial failure. By 1968, he had been maneuvered out of power. He died in 1981, at 92, embittered.

Carly Johnson in Robert Moses’ “SILT,” 2015. Credit: RJ Muna. Yet, rather than indulge in nostalgia for his early years, Moses has set out to offer an indictment of the predicament in which our nation ...

Robert Moses in 1954. His victories, which included some 660 playgrounds and more than 400 miles of parkway, were perhaps eclipsed by his crimes against urban New York, none more noxious than the ...

Power broker Robert Moses is seen as a villain now, but he transformed the urban landscape, sometimes for good. The play "Straight Line Crazy" starring Ralph Fiennes explores his legacy.

Moses’ loyalties lay more or less exclusively with the car-owning middle class, who he believed were just as entitled to the joys of the shoreline as the Whitneys and Vanderbilts around Oyster Bay.

Robert Caro’s 1974 biography “The Power Broker” is a book befitting its subject, Robert Moses — the unelected parochial technocrat who used a series of appointed positions to entirely ...

The iron monkeys with shackled wrists were mentioned in “The Power Broker,” which was published nearly 50 years ago, but had remained mounted in a Riverside Park playground until recently.

Moses-style efforts should be applied, too, to the construction of high-speed rail, wind farms, new transmission lines and the infrastructure needed to prepare the nation for climate change.

Now Mr. Fiennes is in New York, starring at the Shed in “Straight Line Crazy” as Robert Moses, the master builder who created, for better or worse, the New York of today.

Moses’ actual demeanor and utterance, as portrayed in the nearly 1,300 pages of Robert Caro’s biography “The Power Broker,” are little in evidence at the Hudson Yards theater. Fiennes is ...