[sjwalter]

One of the tricks Robert Moses had when he was basically building modern NYC was he had on staff a top-notch crew capable of the end-to-end implementation of whatever project proposal he came up with. Designers, engineers, project managers, accountants, even down to the guys digging the holes.

Not sure what happened and why cities stopped having all these capabilities on staff (seems obvious that e.g. NYC will eternally need a huge amount of people like this).