8. Robert Moses Once Tried to Persuade Wright to Redesign the Building

Image via Wikimedia: Robert Moses (left) image via Library of Congress, right Frank Lloyd Wright portrait via Wikimedia: public domain

Robert Moses, city planner extraordinaire and maybe one of the single most polarizing figures in New York City history, hated modern art. Naturally, he hated the design of the Guggenheim Museum, then in construction, and tried to persuade Wright to revise his design into something that fit in with the industrial, hard-square urban landscape that he was already building. On an unrelated, awkward note, the two were distantly related cousins.