Essays From West of 98: The Peril of Disconnect
Important decisions should be made by people who must live with the consequences
Reminder: I now have a West of 98 bookstore with book lists for my essential reads. If you purchase from that list or any of the links in my newsletters, it will generate a small commission to help grow West of 98. More importantly, the good folks at Bookshop.org will give the profit off each purchase to independent bookstores. Check it out and let me know what book recommendations you’d like to see in my store!
📷: archives of the Museum of the West Texas Frontier
Last week, I generated a fair amount of interest with the historic photo of a trainload of implements being delivered to the Penick Hughes Co. in early Stamford, so today I am sharing another photo from that company, one of the most important businesses in early Stamford. That train photo was likely taken west of downtown Stamford. There, the Penick Hughes Co. received goods at this trackside warehouse prior to their display at the company’s magnificent three-story showroom in downtown. Sadly, the warehouse is gone, but the showroom has been renovated and is now a bank and event venue, with more plans on the horizon.
Why do we park on a driveway and drive on a parkway?
It’s an old joke. I do not know its origins, but it’s a point of humor that gets passed on to children in books of jokes/riddles/mildly humorous wisecracks.
There actually is a reason behind it, though! I have never looked up the “park on a driveway” piece, but driving on a parkway is an important bit of history in American transportation planning. A parkway is simply a road with some manner of landscaping. The origins lie with legendary landscape architects Frederick Law Olmstead1 and his partner Calvert Vaux who sought to build “pleasure roads” for carriages in the 19th century. They did not call it a parkway because you parked there. They called it a parkway because it was intended to convey the feeling of driving through a park. As carriages gave way to automobiles, the parkway was intended to heighten the enjoyment of the recreational drive.
Now, to the modern commuter or anyone who gets stuck in traffic, it seems fairly foreign to read words like “pleasure,” “enjoyment,” and “recreation” in connection with driving. What was once an optional form of transportation and even a hobby is now a necessity and not always a pleasant one.
Why is that?
Today I want to tell you about a man named Robert Moses. For more than 30 years, up until the 1960s, Robert Moses was the most powerful man in New York. The power of mayors and governors paled in comparison to that of Moses. He held dozens of titles, many simultaneously, and changed the face of New York’s parks, bridges, and highways. It was not always a good thing. Much of these was detailed in Robert Caro’s2 legendary Pulitzer Prize winner “The Power Broker,” a book so large the audio version must be downloaded in three parts due to its size.3
I cannot give you the full Moses story in this small space, so let me give you the pertinent part. As the automobile took root in America in between world wars, Moses simply began building more highways and expanded the existing highways. As traffic into Manhattan increased, he widened the roads, figuring that would alleviate traffic. It did not. There’s a phenomenon in traffic engineering called “induced demand” in which tools to alleviate traffic will actually make traffic worse, because it creates more space for more cars and trucks. Moses widened highways, so more people drove into Manhattan as a result. Historic buildings were razed. Neighborhoods were split apart. Children had less room to play safely outside. The list goes on.
But here’s the thing about Moses: he didn’t drive. He NEVER did. Robert Moses was arguably the most important and influential person in the development of America’s 20th century highways, and thus, the development of our suburbs and our car-centric society. He never had a driver’s license. Moses lived on Long Island and he had a driver carry him to and from the office each day. He sat in the back of his chauffeured car, working and organizing his day.
Driving began as a pleasure. Under the watch of Robert Moses, it steadily became a more miserable, hassling, necessary task. Moses was blissfully unaware of it all. It didn’t matter whether his drive took 30 minutes or two hours. Stop and go traffic didn’t stress him out. He was quietly working in the backseat all the same.
The detachment of politicians and influential people from the consequences of their decisions is deeply harmful. They do not realize the disasters they create, because they do not experience the disasters. The rest of us do.
As we continue this series on the future of localism, let us remember the perils of detachment. People who understand a place are the ones capable of improving it and making decisions that strengthen a community. When decisions are placed in the hands of the detached and disinterested, the people of a place bear the brunt of ill-informed decisions and get to look on with horror for decades to come.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.
I’ve written about Olmsted before, in my series on parks. He’s one of the most important figures to the development of the concept of a “park” in America and I recommend his biography immensely.
This is the same Caro who has written the acclaimed series of biographies “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” ongoing since 1982 and for which many of us eagerly await the final volume. I count “Means of Ascent” (the second part) as my favorite political biography and not only because it references an incident in Stamford at the Texas Cowboy Reunion parade. I talked about this book at length on my first date with my wife. She knew what she was getting herself into. While working as a New York City reporter, Caro became enamored with the idea of people accumulating and using power. Moses was the nexus of power in New York, and after that book’s success, Caro turned to the great wielder of power from Texas as his next act.
Caro famously submitted a manuscript for “The Power Broker” that clocked in at over a million words. His editors cut it down to a more “manageable” 700,000 words and after a half-century and a Pulitzer Prize, he’s still upset about the edits.