2021
Robert Moses long kept a vision of a city-that-could-be in the Model Room on Randall's Island.
In 1968, when Moses lost power and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority was absorbed into the MTA, the offices on Randal's Island were cleared of his "Moses Men" and his ideas. The models themselves were put into storage in a pillar of the Triborough Bridge where they remained until excavated in the 1990s.
An alternate history, they reside in a fluorescent-lit office in a building overlooking the imagined approach ramps to the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge.
Many thanks to the Metropolitan Transit Authority's Office of Special Archives and especially to Archivists Nellie Hankins and Mary Hedge for their generosity of time and knowledge and their care of an invaluable reference.
We have definitive maker info for only one of these four models - that of the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge, made by J.J. Werner around 1939.
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