Working

by Robert A. Caro

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  AND, FINALLY, I was drawn to Robert Moses by something that wasn’t imagination at all but, in some ways, its opposite: by an insight, a hard, cold, and, I believed, rational calculation about what I wanted to do with my own work, and how it was through Robert Moses that I could do it.

  As I began, little by little, to understand the magnitude of his impact on New York, I was beginning to feel that he could be a vessel for something even more significant: an examination of the essential nature—the most fundamental realities—of political power.

  One of the reasons I believed I had become a reporter in the first place was to find out how things really worked and to explain those workings, and, as my focus had narrowed to politics, that reason had become to explain how political power really worked. And during the few years I had been a reporter I had convinced myself, in part because of the easy gratifications that go with the journalist’s life—the bylines; the gratitude or the wary respect or fear that the subjects of your articles had for you; the awareness of friends or neighbors of what you were doing; the feeling that you were at the center of the action—that I was succeeding in doing what I had set out to do.

  But the more I thought about Robert Moses’ career, the more I understood that I had been deluding myself. In the terms in which I had always thought about New York politics, elected officials—mayors and governors in particular—were the principal repositories of the political power that plays so significant a role over our lives: in a democracy; after all, ultimate power theoretically comes from the ballot box. But Robert Moses had never been elected to anything. And yet Robert Moses had held power for forty-four years, between 1924 and 1968, through the administrations of five mayors and six governors, and, in the fields in which he chose to exercise it, his power was so enormous that no mayor or governor contested it. He held power, in other words, for almost half the century that began when, on January 1, 1898, the five boroughs were united into a single city (which became, with that unification, the greatest city in the New World). And during that century he, more than any mayor or governor, molded the city to his vision, put his mark upon it so deeply that today, fifty years after he left power, we are still, to an astonishing extent, living in the city he shaped.

  The legislative act that unified New York created a city of five boroughs, but only one of them—the Bronx—was on the mainland of the United States, so the new city was really a city of islands. It was Robert Moses, more than any legislature or any other individual, who tied those islands together with bridges, soldering together three boroughs at once with the Triborough Bridge (and then tying two of them, the Bronx and Queens, even more firmly together with the Bronx-Whitestone and Throgs Neck Bridges), spanning the Narrows to Staten Island with the mighty Verrazano, tying the distant Rockaways firmly to the rest of the metropolis with the Marine and Cross-Bay spans, uniting the West Bronx and Manhattan with the Henry Hudson. Since 1917, seven great bridges have been built to link the boroughs together. Robert Moses built every one of those bridges.

  He built every one of the expressways that cut across the city, carrying its people and its commerce—fifteen expressways, plus the West Side Highway and the Harlem River Drive. If a person is driving in New York on a road that has the word “expressway” in its name, he is driving on a road built by Robert Moses.

  He built every one of the parkways that, within the city’s borders, stretch eastward toward the counties of Long Island, and he built every one of the parkways that, beyond those borders, run far out into those counties, thereby shaping them as well as the city. There are eleven of those parkways in all. And he either built or rebuilt—rebuilt so completely that they became largely his creations also—five parkways stretching toward, or within, Westchester County, so that he built a total of sixteen parkways. In New York City and its suburbs, he built a total of 627 miles of expressways and parkways.

  He created—or re-created, shaping to his philosophy of recreation—every park in the city, adding twenty thousand acres of parkland (and 658 playgrounds) in a city that had been starved for parks and playgrounds; since he left power, several new parks have been built, and several older parks—most notably Central Park—have been restored to their pre-Moses form, but most of New York’s parks are still, today, essentially the parks of Robert Moses. And for the use of the city’s residents he created, outside the city’s borders, on Long Island, another forty thousand acres of parks, including not only Jones Beach, which may be the world’s greatest oceanfront park and bathing beach, but other huge parks and beaches—Sunken Meadow, Hither Hills, Montauk Point, Bethpage, Belmont Lake, Hempstead Lake, and eight others.

  And bridges, roads, parks, and beaches are only a part of the mark that Robert Moses left on New York. During the time in which he controlled—controlled absolutely—the New York City Housing Authority, the authority built 1,082 apartment houses, containing 148,000 apartments which housed 555,000 people: more people than, at the time, lived in Minneapolis. Those apartments are mainly for persons of low income. For persons of higher income, he created, under urban-renewal programs, tens of thousands of additional apartments. He was the dominant force, moreover, behind such supposedly “private” housing developments as Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village, Concord Village, and Co-op City—and such monumental features of the New York landscape as Lincoln Center, the United Nations headquarters, Shea Stadium, the New York Coliseum, and the campuses of Fordham, Pratt, and Long Island Universities. He changed the city’s very shape, enlarging it by adding to its shoreline more than fifteen thousand acres of new land, tying together small islands within its borders with rock and sand and stone, so that, for example, Ward’s Island and Randall’s Island were united, and Hunters and Twin Islands were joined to Rodman’s Neck, so that their combined area would be big enough to hold the mile-long crescent of his Orchard Beach creation. He built public works that, even in 1968 dollars, cost $27 billion (a figure that would have to be multiplied many times to put it in today’s dollars). He was the greatest builder in the history of America, perhaps in the history of the world.

  He shaped the city physically not only by what he built but by what he destroyed. To build his expressways, he evicted from their homes 250,000 persons, in the process ripping out the centers of a score of neighborhoods, many of them friendly, vibrant communities that had made the city a home to its people. To build his non-highway public works, he evicted perhaps 250,000 more; a 1954 City Planning Commission study of just seven years of Robert Moses’ eviction policy was to call it “an enforced population displacement completely unlike any previous population movement in the City’s history.” And, since the people he evicted were overwhelmingly black, Hispanic, and poor, the most defenseless of the city’s people, and since he refused, despite the policy of the city’s elected officials, to make adequate provision (to make any substantial provision at all, really) for their relocation, the policies he followed created new slums almost as fast as he was eliminating old ones and, tragically, were to be a major factor in solidifying the already existing ghettoization of New York—the dividing up of its residents by color and income.

  Immense as was Robert Moses’ physical shaping of New York, however, his influence on the city’s history cannot be measured merely by the physical. All told, during the decades of his power he used that power to bend the city’s social policies to his philosophical beliefs, skewing, often despite the wishes of its mayors and other elected officials, the allocation of the city’s resources to the benefit of its middle, upper-middle, and upper classes at the expense of the city’s lower middle class and its poor, and particularly at the expense of the new immigrants. These were blacks and Puerto Ricans, mainly, who had begun arriving in New York in substantial numbers not long after he came to power in the city. His power also has to be measured by zoning policies on Long Island that guaranteed suburban sprawl, and by decades of systemati
c starvation of the subways and commuter railroads that he viewed as rivals for his roads and the revenue they produced, a policy that exacerbated the highway congestion that has made traffic jams an inescapable part of New Yorkers’ lives.

  The more I thought about Robert Moses’ career, the more I realized that his story and the story of New York City were, to a remarkable degree, one story.

  And the more I thought about Moses’ accomplishments, the more I realized that I had no idea—as, apparently, no one had any idea—of what the political power was that had enabled him to achieve them, of how he had acquired that power, or, aside from the sketchiest details, of how he had used it. And therefore I came to feel that if what I had for so long wanted to do was to discover and disclose the fundamentals of true political power—not theoretical political power but the raw, naked essence of such power—then perhaps the best way to do that was through portraying the life of Robert Moses.

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  WHATEVER THE REASON, or reasons, that he finally agreed to see me, my interviews with Robert Moses—there would, over the next year, be seven of them; long interviews, one lasting from nine-thirty in the morning until well into the evening—were worth any trouble it had taken to get them. They were less interviews, perhaps, than monologues. Questions were not encouraged. I would raise a subject, and Moses would thereupon embark on a discourse about it that might take an hour or more, and if I attempted to interrupt to clarify a point, the interruption might or might not be acknowledged.

  But, at least at first, who wanted to interrupt? I had thought I understood something—had thought I understood quite a bit, in fact—about the inner processes of political decision-making, and about urban planning and government in general. From the moment Robert Moses started talking, I never thought that again.

  He seemed to remember every vote—even votes from forty years before—and why it had been cast. “On the Jones Beach appropriation, it was eight to seven against us in Ways and Means,” he would say. “But the key was this little upstate guy [and he named some long-forgotten state assemblyman], and he had a mortgage coming due on his farm, and the mortgage was held by a bank up there, and the key to the bank was Hewitt [Charles J. Hewitt, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee], and the governor knew how to get to Hewitt, so it was eight to seven for us.”

  He seemed to remember every decision, and how decisions had been changed—how, for example, the use of liquor had been helpful in effecting some changes, particularly during the Prohibition Era, with upstate Republican legislative leaders who liked to drink but who would never be forgiven by their rabidly dry constituents should it be learned that they did so, and who were therefore all the thirstier at the weekend parties that Al Smith, the Democratic governor, threw for them at the Long Island sites for which Moses wanted legislative appropriations (“They hated my guts,” Robert Moses told me, with that wonderful smile. “But they all loved the governor, so they came”), and at which, as Moses put it, sitting in front of the big window, “we fed them liquor.”

  One such reception was attended by the State Senate Majority Leader, John Knight, who had been blocking Moses’ appropriations for two years; who during the just completed 1925 legislative session had accused Moses, his voice shaking with rage, of “lawlessness and a violation of sacred constitutional property rights”; and who, when a reporter asked him if there was any possibility of his relaxing his opposition in future sessions, had replied, “I don’t change my mind very often, do I?”

  “We were opening a bathhouse at Sunken Meadow,” Moses recalled. “We had cases of Scotch and bourbon that we were feeding to the fellows and Knight disappeared.” Trying to enter the bathhouse, Moses said, he had found the door jammed, and when he finally pushed it open he discovered that what had been blocking it was Knight, who was sitting on the floor, dead drunk, trying to hold the door shut with his foot while he poured “a whole bottle” down his throat. “I said, ‘You lousy bastard.’ He was so embarrassed he didn’t know what to say”—and thereafter, if Knight didn’t formally change his mind, his fear of exposure led him to drastically soften his opposition.

  Moses remembered subtler, and more brutal, means of decision-changing, too. Once, in an infrequent interruption, I asked him about one of Mayor Robert F. Wagner’s deputy mayors, Henry Epstein. Epstein had long been a Moses ally. “A very able lawyer,” Moses had said earlier. “Outstanding lawyer. I had known him a long time.” But in 1953 Epstein was standing in Moses’ way, telling Mayor Wagner that there was no rational reason for Moses to shove the Cross-Bronx Expressway through the East Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx on a route that, in just one mile, would require the demolition of fifty-four separate apartment houses when there was another, parallel route, which would require the demolition of exactly six small brownstone tenements, just two blocks away. And then Epstein had abruptly changed his mind, and had written a letter to Wagner saying he had been wrong and that Moses’ route was better.

  I asked Moses why Epstein had changed his mind.

  He changed it, Moses said, “after he was hit over the head with an axe.”

  When I asked him what he meant, he said, “I won’t tell you what we did to him.” But in the course of the interview he did tell me, if obliquely.

  He had, he said, put “our bloodhounds”—the team of investigators who compiled the dossiers on other city officials which Moses leaked to newspapers if an official opposed him—on Epstein. And then, he said, he had had a talk with Epstein, who was married, and the conversation had included some references to a woman. “A lot of personal stuff got into it,” Moses recalled. “I said, ‘This woman, this chum of yours.’ He said, ‘She’s not my chum.’ I said, ‘Oh, yes, she is. She’s your chum, all right.’

  “So,” Robert Moses said, with his broad, charming smile, “Henry wrote his letter.”

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  AND HE REMEMBERED things a lot bigger than votes, or decisions, and in the remembering taught me about something much larger than the workings of politics: about a particular type of vision, of imagination, that was unique and so intense that it amounted to a very rare form of genius—not the genius of the poet or the artist, which was the way I had always thought about genius, but a type of genius that was, in its own way, just as creative: a leap of imagination that could look at a barren, empty landscape and conceive on it, in a flash of inspiration, a colossal public work, a permanent, enduring creation.

  As I had thought about Robert Moses gazing down at Riverside Park, my imagination had been filled with the picture of Robert Moses as dreamer. Now Robert Moses taught me about dreams, all right, including a dream much bigger than Riverside Park. Suddenly coming up out of the big chair, seizing my arm in a grip that belied his seventy-eight years, he drew me out of the Oak Beach cottage, down the steps, and up to the top of a sand dune, from which I could see down the Great South Bay and the barrier beach. “There was nothing there then,” he said. “Nothing.” And, standing there on the dune, a broad-shouldered old man with very young gray eyes, the wind whipping his sparse white hair around his olive face, Robert Moses told me how he had first thought of a park on Jones Beach.

  In 1922, Al Smith, who had rescued him from oblivion—four years before, at the age of thirty, Robert Moses, his dreams for Riverside Park and civil service reform shattered, was standing on line outside the city hall in Cleveland, Ohio, applying, in vain, for a minor municipal job; it was the next year that Smith gave him his first taste of power—had assigned Moses as his “observer” at the Good Government organizations that wanted parks outside the cities for the urban masses who suddenly, with the advent of mass-production technology and the resultant shorter workweek, had leisure time to enjoy the countryside and, with the invention of the Model T Ford, automobiles to get to it. No one in the United States, however, seemed able to conceive of parks large enough, or of means to get peo
ple to them, and on the mainland of Long Island the problem seemed particularly insoluble. Virtually every foot of desirable beachfront was in the hands either of local municipalities, determined to bar them to the city’s immigrant “foreigners,” or of America’s robber barons, who had established their great strongholds on the Island’s Gold Coast. Their immense wealth had brought them immense political power, and on Long Island the roads were kept deliberately narrow and unpaved. But during the summer of 1922 Robert Moses had rented a vacation bungalow in Babylon, on Long Island’s South Shore, and had, he told me now, “fallen in love” with “the bay, with the whole South Shore.” Purchasing an old, broad-bottomed, very slow motorboat, partly covered with an awning—a vessel his wife named the Bob—he spent the summer exploring the bay, often so lost in reverie that he would forget time and tide, and find himself stranded on a sandbar. He told me how sometimes he would sail over to the barrier beach (“about over there,” he said, pointing down the bay), which was then just a strip of dunes and beach grass and wild marshes about five miles offshore (it had been named after a seventeenth-century privateer, Major Thomas Jones) and looked like a low line on the horizon, and he would pull the Bob ashore and step out.