MOSAIC LAW IN NEW YORK:

...He was a pioneer journalism photographer, his flash pow-der illuminating the back alleys and "stale beer dives" where, in his harsh light, the distinction blurs between the refuse dumps and the human refuse that inhabits them...

...Some of the Riis pictures are in-cluded in Roger Whitehouse's New York, Sunshine and Shadow (Harper & Row, $15), a photographic record of the city and its people from 1850 to 1915-with its 355 pictures and concise, informative text, as lovely and captivating a book as any I know on this town...

...So Caro, an investigative reporter for Newsday, has studied urban plan-ning at Harvard, labored seven years and brought forth: the richest social and political history of New York City's last fifty years...

...The Power Broker is more than just one book...

...There I could run miles through the bronzed crowds along the ocean's edge, plunging in and out of the surf when I grew tired...

...the great sailing ships lined up along South Street in 1884...

...He tried to keep blacks away from his beaches and he tried to deny his own Jewishness...

...A few scenes: a 1953 view of the interior of the old Crystal Pal-ace...

...I finished my book convinced that if Brooklyn was indeed dead, Moses, with the Eagle cheering him on, had helped kill it, since those highways, rather than binding the community together, had drained those "big" peo-ple with cars out of the borough into another way of life...

...He revo-lutionized park building by forming a park system all over New York City and State-not traditional silvan re-treats but elaborate recreation areas with golf courses, ball fields and pools...

...And it is an extension of the old muckraking, an application of Lincoln Steffens' dictum that "Whenever anything extraordinary is done in American municipal politics, whether for good or for evil, you can trace it invariably to one man...

...chil-dren's coffins laid to rest in a mass grave in Potter's Field, Hart's Island, 1889...

...Before F.D.R., whom he scorned and called "a pretty poor ex-cuse for a man," finally outflanked him, he tried to build a Brooklyn-Battery Bridge that would have wrecked the southern tip of Manhattan...

...I was writing the history of the Brooklyn Eagle and I had gone to his Triborough Bridge Authority office on Randall's Island to question him on his alliance with Eagle editor Cleveland Rodgers in promoting his key projects-the Triborough Bridge Authority and the great 1930s network of work-project highways that linked downtown Brook-lyn to the reaches of Long Island and Long Island itself to the other boroughs of New York...

...Jacob A. Riis, Photographer and Citizen, by Alexander Alland, Sr...

...With his bridges and parkways he transformed Westchester, Staten Island and Long Island from country coun-ties and isolated islands into function-ing parts of the larger metropolitan organism, the bedrooms of the man-agerial middle class that made their money in Manhattan and their homes where they wouldn't have to face the problems this sprawl was bringing on...

...New York is the town where someone can come up behind you in the subway and grab you and turn out to be a mugger, thrill-killer or long lost friend...

...Sometimes he began bulldozing and building even before he had authoriza-tion and money, knowing that once the first stake had been pounded and money has been spent no one would have the nerve to stop him...

...I'm going down to 114 Bowery one of these days and I'm afraid of what I'm going to find...

...For no good apparent reason he wiped out 159 buildings and 1530 apartments children (some to be hanged in the Tombs) scampered and robbed, and where typhus victims sprawled on the police station floor...

...The "big" people who "made it" moved out...

...Once I had mas-tered the Bruckner Expressway and Triborough Bridge (500), with luck I could drive from Fordham to mid-Manhattan in twenty-five minutes, when the subway, walking and waiting time included, might take an hour...

...the story of a city systematically destroying itself through the weakness of the timid men who allowed Moses to push them around, the incompetence of those who could not compete with his skill and vision, and the rapacity of the accepted building policies that con-sistently sacrificed the city's soul-its neighborhoods and its heritage-to the fast buck and the car...

...R.A.S.it or it destroys them...

...A recent research project on Bronx Puerto Rican drug addicts by Fordham's Joseph R. Fitzpatrick, S.J., names the Expressway as a symbol and cause of the borough's deterioration...

...and, by knowing how to promote his park plans in the press, write legislation and exploit his good-buddy relationship with Al Smith, he seized those lands for the public...

...It is the latest and largest (1162 pages) spawn of the new hubris school of historical journalism-the W. A. Swanberg biography of Luce, David Halberstara's- The Best and the Brightest and, to a lesser degree, Gay Talese's family portraits of the Times and the Mafia...

...If Caro's work is most valuable as a collection of colorful and well-docu-mented stories about neighborhood change, highway and housing legisla-tion, and political characters like Al Smith, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and even Vincent R. Impellitteri, it is less suc-cessful where it is most ambitious- as a moral tale...

...If only, we are expected to say, this personal brilliance could have served justice and truth...

...Alexander Hamilton's country home in 1880, in what is now the heart of Harlem...

...But it can't, we are asked to conclude, because truth, justice and the taste of power cannot mix...

...He strode the Long Island shorelines, hinterlands and baronial estates...

...He turned his own staff into sniveling toadies...

...As I settled into my own new life in New York, Robert Moses touched my life in other ways...

...We wonder sometimes how any one man could be as mag-nificent as Robert Moses...

...R.A.S...

...Before us parade faceless and remorseless in-stitutions created and driven by idealists and geniuses gone cynical, selfish or sour...

...Or, on a hot-August morning, with a car, the Throggs Neck Bridge and three parkways, I could make Jones Beach in forty minutes...

...We need a book called The Personal History of New York-a less-than-400-page paperback filled with life-stories, neighborhood histories, maps and old photos-an interpretation of this city that would help its citizens love it intelligently before they destroy it or it destroys them...

...He physically assaulted, smeared and broke people who stood in his way...

...And it is hard to imagine how any one man could be as bad...

...Maybe in the Bronx too everyone would be the same size...

...the personal story of a big man who was often very' small...

...the interior of Steve Brodie's bar at 114 Bowery in 1890-with its pictures of pugilists on the ceiling, its wooden slats over the sawdust to soak up the beer, and its towels dangling from the bar to wipe the foam off your mustache...

...Aperture, $17.50) is a col-lection of 82 Riis photographs, with an introductory essay by Alland, the man who rediscovered and restored the old Riis faded glass plates for exhibition, and deposited them in the Museum of the City of New York...

...and the Luce, Johnson, McNamara, Bundy or Moses who paused to think through and weigh the full human implications of his pub-lic policies would not be the giant he is but just another hand-wringing bu-reaucrat, and no fitting subject for a superbook...

...But now I have finally finished Robert Caro's The Power Broker and have another sense of the man and his work-a reali-zation of how the same hideous, roar-ing highway, Moses' Cross-Bronx Ex-pressway, that saves me a few minutes on the way to New Jersey or the beach, may have killed the Bronx...

...He sat behind his desk old and deaf but still looming large-like a giant sea turtle that had just crawled out of the ocean to claim his beach-and gave me, in a statement that revealed as much about his own concept of the American mobility dream as it did about Brooklyn, one of the central in-sights of my thesis: that the trouble with Brooklyn was that "everybody was the same size...