Lyndon Baines and his Jumbo Johnson

Another reaction was voiced by a Latin American diplomat taken on a tour by La Guardia himself. At each bridge and highway that the Mayor pointed out to him, the visitor asked, "And who was in charge of giving the contracts?" Each time La Guardia replied, "I was." "Ah, La Guardia," the diplomat said at last, with real admiration in his voice. "Ah, La Guardia. You must be a very rich man."

Robert Moses had always displayed a genius for adorning his creations with little details that made them fit in with their setting, that made the people who used them feel at home in them. There was a little detail on the playhouse-comfort station in the Harlem section of Riverside Park that is found nowhere else in the park. The wrought-iron trellises of the park's other playhouses and comfort stations are decorated with designs like curling waves. The wrought-iron trellises of the Harlem playhouse-comfort station are decorated with monkeys.

Cats That Look Like JFK 🐱

Raymond Torrey, whom he tried to strangle at a State Council of Parks meeting and at whom he then hurled a heavy smoking stand, was a pudgy little bird watcher. Moses had also staged a fist fight with WPA administrator Hugh Johnson in Bernard Baruch's apartment, and Johnson, at the time, was fifty-two -- eight years older than Moses -- and exceedingly drunk.

[Moses] was using forces outside the city to bend its highest elected official to his will. By employing forces outside the city's control, he was remaking the city in certain crucial areas without allowing the city any say in that remaking.