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complex, could discriminate if they wished since, as the judge declared, “housing accommodation is not a recognized civil right.”
    Moses was pleased with the decision. As early as 1943, he had added legislation to the city’s 1942 Redevelopment Companies Act to make sure private companies, such as Met Life, could do as they pleased when it came to urban renewal. Moses also personally lobbied Ecker not to cave in to Mayor La Guardia, who pleaded with the Met Life chairman to soften his discriminatory stand. To do so, Moses believed, would cede decision-making control to the public and its elected officials, which in turn would curb his own power as the head of the Slum Clearance Commission. And that could not be allowed. When it came to racial issues, Moses was hardly on the side of the angels. While he was a public servant, the public could not be allowed to interfere with his work. He attacked his critics as nothing more than “demagogues . . . who want to make a political, racial, religious, or sectional issue out of every progressive step which can be taken to improve local conditions.”
    With the passage of the Housing Act of 1949, America embarked on a new urban policy intended to restore the nation’s neglected cities, which would dramatically increase Moses’ power again. The laws introduced a controversial program known as Title I, a regulation thatenabled the government to claim private property—citing eminent domain—and develop the land in partnership with private companies for the benefit of the public good.
    A leading force behind the legislation was Ohio’s powerful senator Robert A. Taft, the embodiment of the Republican Party’s conservative wing, who was both a Moses ally and a fellow Yalie. Moses kept a close tab on the housing law as it worked its way through Congress. When it finally passed, he made sure he had multiple projects that were “shovel-ready.” Moses would ultimately claim $65.8 million in Title I funding for New York—more than any other American city (his closest competitor was Chicago, which received $30.8 million in federal largesse). In the decades after WWII, urban renewal would become a much-reviled phrase—Mumford considered the term “a filthy word”—and in the minds of many, Moses would come to personify the expression.
    Of all Moses’ critics, his most vocal—and eloquent—was Mumford, who opposed nearly every public works project that the Master Builder embarked on. For nearly as long as Moses was a titanic source of power in New York, Mumford used his position at The New Yorker to combat Moses’ vision of urban America. A true Renaissance man, Mumford’s interests were even more catholic than Moses’; his nearly two-dozen books touched upon history, philosophy, architecture, science, art, and literature.
    Born in Queens but raised in Manhattan, Mumford celebrated urban architecture that lived in harmony with nature, practicing what he preached. In 1922 he moved his family to Sunnyside Gardens, Queens—the first planned “garden city” community in the United States—where he lived until 1933. Although at first he championed Moses’ work, particularly his scenic parkways and Jones Beach (a “masterpiece,” he called it), by the advent of the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair, the pair were at odds. Mumford was not in the least impressed by “the World of Tomorrow” or the Fair’s other attractions. “[The Fair] has no architectural character whatever,” Mumford wrote. As for GM’s much-celebrated Futurama exhibit, he felt that “what the Futurama really demonstrates is that by 1960 all [rides] of more than fifty miles will be as deadly as they are now in parts of New Jersey and in theFarther West.” Eventually, The New Yorker scribe would describe Moses as “the great un-builder.”
    In 1955, shortly after Moses