The NYPL Robert Moses archives contain a wide breadth of information. The archive encompasses his personality and his being, whereby it is cohesive and stark as a whole, but in pieces are sporadic and heavily concentrated. That being said, it includes a variety of documents: photographs, printed matter, speeches, correspondence papers that record his reign in numerous office, and his invention of several major public transportation and parks projects.
These papers are organized chronologically, although sometimes events and projects in his life overlapped, therefore some timelines bled over each other. Ā Each paper is linked to a page which further summarizes the contents of the document. Some papers are highly dense, thus they are further segmented (ex. the 1stĀ Series: Personal and Library Correspondence) or highly organized and indexed. All of these documents however, facilitate the needĀ to contact the NYPL ARCHIVES & MANUSCRIPTS division to plan for a visit to study these documents.
The Moses speeches, in particular, may be interesting to study along side other primary source documents like maps and blueprints since they likely capture the public PR dimensions of housing and transit projects and perhaps outline Moses’ vision for urban renewal and infrastructure.