When I was 22 and working at a local newspaper in Queens, I opened up “The Power Broker” for the first time. I sat in a park in the borough’s leafy eastern reaches, within a short drive of a Robert Moses-constructed bridge (the Bronx-Whitestone) and a Robert Moses-constructed expressway (the Clearview). I commuted to work from my apartment in the southwest corner of Brooklyn, enduring the Moses parkways and expresswaysowking, driving myself to madness in one rush-hour traffic scrum after another. I came to believe this long-dead urban planner had locked me in an asphalt prison that I could never escape.

Like generations of New Yorkers, journalists and historians across America, I came to understand my city through Robert Caro’s magisterial biography of the master builder who dominated the machinery of city and state government from the Jazz Age through Beatlemania. Now a half-century old, “The Power Broker” is every bit the New York institution Mr. Moses ever was — as is Mr. Caro himself.

I was awed by Mr. Caro’s dogged reportage and novelistic sweep. I grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a neighborhood ribboned by two Moses highways and cleaved by what was in the 1960s the largest suspension bridge in the world.

But I have come to believe, with a half-century of hindsight, that Mr. Caro did not get the story of Robert Moses completely right. Today, in the popular imagination, Mr. Moses is understood as an imperious, even racist villain who despised the poor, immolated outer borough neighborhoods and singularly worshiped the automobile. He is a perpetual warning against the consolidation of power, bureaucratic overreach and heedless development; he was, in the aftermath of “The Power Broker,” understood as a catalyst of New York’s deterioration in the 1970s.

Some readers have misunderstood Mr. Caro’s journalism. Others have overlearned the lessons of “The Power Broker” and absorbed to too great a degree Mr. Caro’s framing of a deeply complex, unsettling and extraordinarily accomplished historical figure. By overlearning, they have lost faith in government and failed to comprehend that some of the Moses spirit must be recaptured today if the United States is going to be a great builder again.

Mr. Moses did have tremendous faults — his dedication to highways at the expense of mass transit and his ultimate unwillingness to take opposition to his megaprojects seriously. His elitism bled into his distaste for trains, buses and any initiatives intended to accommodate them. But he left behind within the five boroughs an egalitarian legacy that has not been matched since. Much of the public housing built under his watch exists to this day and shelters residents who otherwise could never afford to live in a rapidly gentrifying city. In cities like Chicago and St. Louis, similar developments would more likely have already been demolished. Today some of the stock has fallen into disrepair, but this is the fault of limited national investment — the federal government still provides funding for the city housing authority and technically oversees it — and local mismanagement; Mr. Moses himself stood these developments up in a startlingly brief amount of time.

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