NEW YORK BOOKS:

...His was a brutal career that continued un-questioned until he finally abused the press that helped make him and under-estimated the power of a man more ruthless than himself-Rockefeller...

...and there is a selected list of 115 Art Deco buildings (1923-1939), plus handsome plates-from the Chrys-ler Building to Horn and Hardart...

...It seemed to me that a reporter was the highest and noblest of all the cal-lings," Jacob Riis wrote, "no one could sift wrong from right as he, and punish the wrong...

...He interviews a professional page-turner for piano ac-companists: "I'm the man behind the man behind the man...

...Two of the best, The AIA [American Institute of Architects] Guide to New York City, edited by Norval White and Elliot Wil-lensky (Macmillan) and Henry Robb Ellis' breezy popular history, The Epic of New York City (Coward-McCann), are now out of print and just a few years out of date...

...Bletter's essay traces the influence of the 1925 Paris Exposition, Fritz Lang's movie sets and Frank Lloyd Wright...

...William H. Hemp's New York En-claves (Clarkson N. Potter, $6.95), a collection of 26 word and pen sketches of remnants of the old city, is a very good idea...

...Caro explains all this partly on the grounds that Robert Moses was his mother's son ("Behind her spectacles were the eyes of a builder"), but he relies largely on the theory that Moses was an "idealist" corrupted by power -as if power were that first teenage beer or toke that plunges the imbiber into inevitable addiction...

...People no longer mattered...

...To fill the gap some publishers are reissuing old books for their nostalgia value, like The 1866 Guide to New York City (Schocken, $2.75 paper), or keeping treasures like Mary Black's Old New York in Early Photographs (Dover), Nathan Silver's Lost New York (Schocken) and John A. Kou-wenhoven's The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York (Harper & Row) available in paperback editions...

...They became the eggs that had to be broken if the great omelet was to be made...

...Three recent volumes in particular recapture and preserve in haunting and sometimes lyrical photographs both the grime and glory of the city's past and the majesty of at least some of its buildings...

...The most specialized is Skyscraper Styles: Art Deco in New York, with essays by Cervin Robinson and Rosemarie Haag Bletter (Oxford University Press, $20...

...Meanwhile, in the last few months, a renewed interest in the old city has brought forth a few new titles...

...Yet the evi-dence of Moses' youthful idealism is slim...

...There is a chintzy decadence about many of these places, particularly the interiors, but many of them are more fun to look at than the World Trade Center and the uniform glass slabs now sprouting up along Sixth Avenue...

...Art Deco was American architecture's attempt to be at home in the Jazz Age, and its ex-pression- through ornament, lush textures and color achieved by mixing stone, terra-cotta, brick and metal- that looking at buildings should be fun...

...The "man who gets things done" has become the American Ozimandias, where "Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/ The lone and level sands stretch far away...

...The New York Times' McCandlish Phillips has gathered some of his more pic-turesque feature writing in City Note-book: A Reporter's Portrait of a Vanish-ing New York (Liveright, $10.50)- sensitive, compassionate stories that measure the sun's hour-by-hour retreat from the gutters of Times Square, that climb the back stairways and knock on locked doors to discover the diverse, sometimes bizarre, individuals who give the lie to the myth that New York is an impersonal town...

...The inner man eludes us...

...and no comparable works have come along to take their places...

...As his career unfolds and the highways spin out we are moved to admiration, awe, sympathy, fear, but seldom to understanding...

...In building the "good life" around the automobile rather than investing in mass transit, and in trying to relieve congestion by building more highways, he turned both urban and suburban life into a monumental traffic jam...

...If only his prose were not so cliched and his illustrations of the streets-many of which I have visited -not so sentimental and children's bookish...

...His was a public policy unhampered and uninspired by a long-range moral vision that both dreamed of a better society and respected the uniqueness and dignity of individuals...

...In an inter-view a few weeks ago Moses declared that Grand Central Station might just as well be torn down and that the people who put landmark plaques on old buildings in an attempt to preserve them were "fanatics...

...He walks the East River docks once swarming with life and gives a boost to the still-uncompleted South Street Seaport Mu-seum project, which-it is hoped-will restore three dead blocks of nineteenth-century buildings to their 1800s charm...

...Riis was not only the first muckraker to lead the newspaper readers through the dark bowels of Mott and Mulberry Streets in the 1880s, where pigs gobbled garbage and criminal to ram the Cross-Bronx Expressway through one mile of the East Tremont neighborhood when a simpler alternate route was just two blocks away...

...He did too many things that enriched people's lives for us to be convinced of his profound personal corruption...

...It helps to have his list of quaint neighborhoods and useful in-formation in his text on little hideouts like Patchin Place and Sniffen Court (just two blocks from the Commonweal office...

...Ultimately, if we are to make a judgment on Robert Moses it cannot be on how he treated his co-workers, brother or wife but on whether or not his major public policies were really good for the city...

...These were not the ravings of a senile old man, but a consistent statement of the insensitive and ultimately destructive philosophy that has guided his career...

...With this in mind, it seems that the tragedy of Robert Moses' career is that like so many planners and politicians of his time, he did not see cities as true homes...

...ch far away...