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PUBLICWORKS
W H O L LY MOSES
I
n Jonathan Lethem’s detective novel
“Motherless Brooklyn,” from 1999, Li-
onel Essrog, a private investigator with
Tourette’s syndrome, shadows some bad
guys from a Zen Buddhist retreat in Man-
hattan to a Japanese sea-urchin-harvesting
operation in Maine. A new film adap-
tation, written and directed by Edward
Norton and set four decades earlier, scraps
the unlikely Japonica and has Essrog,
played (with some restraint) by Norton,
digging into the villainous schemes of a
powerful city official named Moses Ran-
dolph, who is based on the New York
of operations from lower Manhattan
to this out-of-the-way location, to con-
solidate his power and to conceal it, and
perhaps to get closer to the source of
it: the money from the toll plaza di-
rectly upstairs. “So they could bring it
right down into the building, without
anyone else getting their hands on it,”
Norton said. “It was a straight line of
cash. The tolling mechanism was sup-
posed to sunset once the bridges were
built, but Moses just kept it going. The
genius of this was he had access to per-
manent capital.”
Norton and his director of photog-
raphy, Dick Pope, had filmed only the
T.B.T.A. building’s exterior. Now, es-
corted by two M.T.A. officials, Norton
ducked inside to show why. Past a mod-
est Deco lobby and up a great curving
stairwell, he entered a warren of drywall
and drab office space. In a conference
room, he said, “When a cinematogra-
pher like Dick Pope walks into a room
like this, he says, ‘Please, for the love of
God, don’t make me do it.’” Traces of
Moses were scarce: an elevator, installed
in 1964, when advancing age made it
harder for him to use the stairs, and, on
a third-floor landing, his old desk, a giant
round slab of wood. “In my research, I
learned that he often flat-handed surfaces
him about a new mushroom dish and the
nuanced avocado texture that it demanded.
“It’s almost like pasta,” Vongerichten
said of Gonzalez’s avocado variations.
“If you want al dente, you can have it
that way. If you want it very ripe for a
guacamole, he can do that.”
After a stop at Wayan, in Nolita,
Gonzalez travelled to Brooklyn, mak-
ing drop-offs in lobbies and at brown-
stones. At a red brick house in Carroll
Gardens, he discreetly tucked a bag into
a designated spot, hidden behind a metal
gate. By noon, he was on the day’s final
order: a cash delivery in a graffiti-tagged
block of Bushwick. The customer stood
him up, and Gonzalez left with his paper
bag and a dejected look on his face.
Gonzalez said that his delivery busi-
ness was inspired by childhood memo-
ries of a milkman who would deliver
bottles every morning to his grand-
mother’s house. Demand for avocados
was high when Gonzalez started, and,
after a couple of months of working
with wholesalers in Mexico, he went
out on his own. Cosme Aguilar, a friend
of Gonzalez’s and the chef at Casa En-
rique, was his first client.
Gonzalez isn’t starstruck by the ce-
lebrity chefs on his client list. “I’m just
looking to be part of their back-end
team,” he said. “They often don’t see
me, but they know that they don’t need
to worry about the avocados.”
—Rachel Felder
“He’s Anonymous and I’m Unnamed Source.”
••
THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 17
master builder and political titan Rob-
ert Moses, with elements of Darth Vader
and Strom Thurmond as well.
In the film, Randolph, played (to the
hilt) by Alec Baldwin, is the head of the
Borough Authority, a fictional variation
on the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel
Authority (T.B.T.A.), Robert Moses’s
real postwar seat of power. In one scene,
a character says, “This town is run by
the Borough Authority, and the Bor-
ough Authority is Moses Randolph.”
He quotes Emerson: “An institution is
the lengthened shadow of one man.”
This remark is accompanied by a shot
of Baldwin emerging from a building
into the glare of headlights, his shadow
rising monstrously up the façade.
“That was my idea,” Norton said one
recent morning. He was standing in front
of that same building, the longtime head-
quarters of the T.B.T.A. (now operating
as M.T.A. Bridges and Tunnels), on Ran-
dall’s Island. It’s a squat but strangely re-
gal stone stronghold, tucked under the
span of the Triborough Bridge that con-
nects Randall’s Island to Harlem. (The
Triborough Bridge, now officially called
the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, is essen-
tially three bridges—three spokes, with
Randall’s and Wards Islands at the hub.)
In the thirties, Moses moved his base
