Definition
Parks are publicly owned and maintained land set aside from commerce and housing for recreation, contemplation, and civic life. In Robert Moses's career they were both an end and a means: he genuinely loved them and built them at unprecedented scale, and he understood that nothing he built generated public goodwill — and political cover — like a clean, working playground at the corner.
A park, unlike an expressway, is loved on sight by almost everyone. That asymmetry is the source of Moses's signature political technique: harvest the legitimacy of parks early to underwrite less popular projects later.
Why it matters
How it works
A park is built once and pays a political dividend for decades, as long as it is maintained. The maintenance cost is small relative to construction and is paid by a different budget line, which makes the political accounting favorable: the builder takes credit for the asset, and a successor pays for its decline.
This dynamic explains why ambitious administrators build parks faster than the agencies who inherit them can maintain. It also explains the strategic value of putting a park where the political constituency you most need will see it. Moses's pool program of the 1930s built eleven enormous WPA-funded pools, each in a neighborhood whose votes the LaGuardia coalition needed. The dividend was paid back in landslides.