Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

Caro’s 45-year-old masterpiece, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, is often billed as a biography of New York’s most important 20th-century builder, an unelected official who remade the city’s landscape between the mid-1920s and the late 1960s. But the 1,296-page book was also an indictment of government power that has since become a core tenet of progressive thinking. Since the 1970s, even as progressives have championed Big Government, they’ve worked tirelessly to put new checks on its power—to pull it away from imperious technocrats who might use government to bulldoze hapless communities. And it’s that impulse to protect the powerless from the abuse of public power that is most responsible for the morass that is Penn Station.