Edward Norton’s 2019 film Motherless Brooklyn presents a character, Moses Randolph, largely based on Robert Moses, who—more than any other person—shaped the built environment of twentieth-century New York. The Moses Randolph character isn’t particularly interested in wealth, though he uses it, but in power, authority. His goal, he insists, is to reshape the city for those millions who will live in it in the future. Central Park serves as a living model for his work; he is more than willing to dislocate those—mainly black—now living in Brooklyn and Manhattan to bring about that future. In the past, he imposed himself on a black woman and fathered a mixed-race daughter; she now works with preservationists to oppose Randolph’s effort to destroy thriving communities in the name of “slum clearance”—aka “Negro removal,” as one of the film’s characters comments.

While the film is set in the 1950s, Randolph’s outlook models the characteristic form of twenty-first-century capitalism: Silicon Valley disruption. Amazon will displace the bookstore and the mall; Uber will displace the taxi driver and the bus; charters and computers will displace public schools and teachers. Randolph will, in the imagery of the movie, displace the communities that provide nourishment for jazz musicians and the local black society. Of course, much money will be made by “developers” who will build on newly opened grounds. But that isn’t Randolph’s object in organizing a base for his operation, referred to in the film as the Borough Bridge Authority. The name is a neat substitute for its models, the Port of New York Authority, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, the Metropolitan Transit Authority. “Authority,” the key term here, designates the unelected power of those who run the organizations in the name of the citizens of New York and New Jersey. And generally for the benefit of future generations. Generally.

I remember a student at SUNY Old Westbury who worked as a conductor on the New Jersey Transit railroad. He always spoke of the “Port of Authority,” which I took as a humorous jab at his employer. But I’ve now rethought his phrase. Not because these authorities create the disruptive troubles Moses Randolph produces in Motherless Brooklyn. Generally, they do not.