The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York
Page 21
Moses' plan aroused the opposition he had expected from the Correction Commission bureaucrats and the Legislature, but Smith incorporated Moses' prison-industry suggestion in an administration bill, pushed it through the Legislature in 1923, turned the agricultural schools into reformatories by the same method in 1924 and told Moses to draw up the laws creating the new department.
Smith wanted to eliminate grade crossings, the thousands of intersections on the same level of roads and railroad tracks that every year caused not only delays to motorists but deaths running into the hundreds. Other Governors had had the same desire, but the sheer cost of the job—the simplest elimination, in open countryside, cost $60,000—put it beyond the traditional scope of state expenditures. And the subservience of the Republican legislators to the railroads had insured that the railroads would not be forced to pay. Each year, as a gesture, the Legislature would appropriate the funds for a handful of crossing eliminations, but, because of division of responsibility among the many state agencies involved, even these were generally not completed. Smith asked Moses to look into the situation.
Moses recommended that the state and the railroads split the cost and that the state finance its share by selling revenue bonds authorized by a constitutional amendment. Smith accepted the recommendation—and fought for it, campaigning for the amendment across the state. With the press denouncing Republican opposition to such unprecedented governmental expenditure and interference with private enterprise, the 1924 Legislature was forced to pass the amendment, the 1925 Legislature to repass it, and in 1926 the voters ratified it by a margin of more than a million votes. While the amendment was still being debated, Smith asked Moses to see if anything could be done to speed up grade-crossing eliminations already authorized. Moses devised a form that could be sent to Highway Division regional engineers showing the steps in each elimination and the suggested target dates for completion of each step. And these forms were not allowed to yellow in stacks in the corner of some office. Smith ordered Highway Superintendent Greene to send them out to the engineers—and to see that they used them.
Moses had a taste of power now, and he liked the taste—so obviously that, to some observers, it seemed as if he liked the taste in and for itself. Keen-eyed little Reuben Lazarus, who had been brought to Albany from the Old Neighborhood as an Assembly page when Smith was Assembly Speaker and had already become one of the most knowledgeable men in the capitol on the intricacies of bill drafting, remembers that "when I first used to see Moses in Albany, before he had any power, he was a striking figure, dark and handsome, tall and gangly, striding down the corridors with those long strides of his, but he was withdrawn, he was within himself. But then, when Smith brought him up there, he began to be, quite suddenly and quite
noticeably, a lot more arrogant, stiff-necked and self-assertive." Belle Moskowitz's son, Carlos Israels, noticed the same transformation when Moses visited the Moskowitzes. "Now he attitudinized when he talked. He would lean back, cross his knees and hold his pipe in an affected attitude."
The man who had had to wait outside so many offices liked being on the inside of everything. He talked—perhaps a bit more than was discreet— about what Jimmy Walker had said to him and about what he had said to Walker. He liked to describe how some assemblyman had refused his instructions on a bill and how he had told the Governor about it and how the Governor had laid down the law, and, thereafter, how the assemblyman had jumped to obey when he, Moses, gave him instructions. If what he was on the inside of was a world he would once have despised, he did not seem to remember those earlier feelings now. Reform work was, more and more, an irritating intrusion on his time. The hours he put in at the New York State Association office each week became fewer and fewer. The gaps between issues of the State Bulletin, once a monthly publication, grew longer and longer. And when the Bulletin did appear now, it made less and less pretense of being a reform pamphlet. More and more, it resembled a Tammany Hall broadside in support of Al Smith.
Reorganization, of course, was the key to all the hopes of Smith—and of Mrs. Moskowitz and the other reformers around the Governor. No sooner had he been returned to office in 1923 than he hurled down the gauntlet to the Legislature with a special message, drafted by Moses, that restarted the three reorganization amendments down the tortuous road to law. "The Legislature passed the amendments consolidating state departments and reducing the number of elected state officials in 1923 and again in 1924, after battles in which Walker and Democratic Assembly leaders fought for every vote— and Moses hurried up and down the marble stairs of the capitol between the Executive Chamber on the second floor and the Senate and Assembly Chambers on the third, bringing them fresh ammunition.
Day after day, during the reorganization fight, Smith had watched Moses drafting the bills that contained the specifics of departmental reorganization: which agency went in which department, which powers were given to each agency. Bill drafting was called by Albany insiders "the black art of politics." An expert bill drafter had to know thousands of precedents so that he could cull out the one, embodying it in the bill he was working on, that would make the bill legal, or so that he could, by careful wording, avoid bringing the new act within the purview of an old one that might make it illegal. He had to know a myriad ways of conferring, or denying, power by written words. He had to know how to lull the opposition by concealing a bill's real content. For years, everyone had known the identity of the best bill drafter in Albany: Alfred E. Smith. And Smith had never been shy about accepting that accolade. But now, when someone brought up the subject, Smith said, "The best bill drafter I know is Bob Moses."
Al Smith was a man who believed in paying his debts. In 1923, he found for Moses a state sinecure with high pay and a low work load: the
directorship of a board that would supervise the industries that, thanks to Moses, had been installed in state prisons.
Moses told Smith he didn't want the job.
"What do you want, then?" Smith asked.
"Nothing," Moses replied.
Over and over during 1923 and the beginning of 1924, as Smith watched Moses driving himself in his service, he asked Moses what he wanted. Over and over again, Moses said, "Nothing."
And then, one day, there was something. The something was parks.
for his workers. Before the eyes of America a bright new world of mass leisure was unfolding.
And along with time the new technology brought a means by which the time could be used to conquer space. In 1909, after sixteen years of experimentation with gasoline-driven vehicles, Ford had announced the invention of the Model T, which could be mass-produced, and, with the unrolling of the unparalleled prosperity of the Twenties, which gave the average American money to spend on luxuries, America beat a path to Ford's door and to the doors of his imitators. The number of automobile-owning families in the country in 1919 was less than seven million; by 1923, it would be twenty-three million.
Their newly acquired leisure time and the mobility to use it to conquer space meant, to the urban masses of America, something very particular. The countryside was no longer inaccessible. For millions of New York fathers, thanks to the machine parked near their door, no longer did a Sunday outing have to be to a Bowery beer garden or a hard-surfaced playground framed by the grimy buildings that they saw every day. Suddenly, it could be to grassy meadows beneath expanses of blue sky, perhaps even to white sand and sparkling surf. They could escape the city, and, more important, they could free their children for a time from its clutches; they could take them boating and hiking and camping, could roam with them through fields and forests, sprawl with them eating picnic lunches on blankets. They could let them do the things that they themselves had done so seldom when they were children. When they taught their sons to swim now, it would not have to be in the East River. Without even a delay for cranking up—self-starters had become standard equipment—they piled into their Fords (or Lexingtons, Maxwells, Briscoes, Hudsons, Templars, Dodges, Buic
ks, Chevrolets or Cadillacs) on weekends and headed out of New York City.
They headed into disappointment. Most of the land around the city was in private hands and closed to them. To the north, in Westchester County, there were indeed public parks, the rolling hills and green playing fields they sought, but Westchester had barred its parks to anyone not a resident of the county. Fourteen miles north of the city, beyond Mount Vernon, Bronxville, Scarsdale and White Plains, was an unrestricted attraction, Kensico Dam, surrounded by 2,500 acres of trees and meadows, but, since the Bronx River Parkway was still under construction, the only way to get to Kensico—after crossing the Harlem River on the narrow Broadway drawbridge that caused traffic jams even when it wasn't raised (as it was on the average of fourteen times each day) or on the even narrower East River bridges to the south and creeping through the narrow and often unpaved streets of the Bronx—was to take another narrow road that led through the traftic-clogged downtowns of the four Westchester communities. Families who left New York in the morning were lucky to arrive at Kensico by late afternoon.
To the west of New York City, across the broad Hudson River, was a vast preserve open to the city's masses: Palisades Interstate Park. Founded in 1900, funded by the Rockefellers and Harrimans with $15,000,000, it was
considered, with its lakes, landscaped drives, herds of elk, and buildings erected "to resemble the eternal hills themselves," the finest park in the United States.
Getting there, however, could be eternal. Since there were no bridges or vehicular tunnels across the Hudson—the Holland Tunnel would not be opened until 1927—the only way across the river was on ferries, the same method the Dutch had used after having purchased Manhattan from the Indians three hundred years before. The Palisades Park Commission operated two that ran to the park itself, but they carried between them only five thousand persons. Every Saturday and Sunday morning in summer, when the ferry ticket takers nailed up the signs that said, in large black letters, full, there were thousands of disappointed faces—of fathers carrying picnic baskets and mothers carrying babies, of children who had been so excited about the trip that they hadn't been able to sleep the night before—still in front of them. Privately operated ferries plied the Hudson, but their New Jersey termini were some forty miles south of the park, so families using them had to bring their cars. A ferry carried twenty-four cars at a trip; often, at ten o'clock on a weekend morning, there would be hundreds of cars lined up at the ferry slips in Manhattan. Disembarking in New Jersey, families faced a drive on two-lane roads through the narrow streets of Weehawken, Englewood and Alpine.
So desperate were New York's masses that they made the trip anyway —in steadily increasing numbers. (In 1921, attendance at the park was 3,100,000. In 1922, it topped 4,000,000.) Every year, the Rockefellers and Harrimans built more playing fields and campsites, and nonetheless every year the playing fields and campsites were so jammed that Palisades Park on weekends, for all its beautiful woods and landscaped drives, seemed as crowded as the city its visitors had come to it to escape.
Increasingly, the eyes of the city's masses—and of the reformers interested in providing parks for them—were turning to the east.
The east was Long Island.
Separated from Manhattan only by the East River, it stretched out into the Atlantic Ocean for eighty miles, its bulk about twenty miles wide, and then threw two curving spits of land thirty-nine miles farther out so that its shape reminded Walt Whitman of a whale ducking its great head to plunge beneath the southern tip of Manhattan while its flukes waved behind. Its westernmost sixth was Brooklyn and Queens, crammed in 1920 with two and a half million people, a population greater than that of all but eight states in the Union, but beyond the eastern border of Queens that marked the end of New York City lay, divided into the counties of Nassau and Suffolk, another 1,373 square miles—878,720 acres—inhabited by less than a quarter of a million people, one person to every four acres, an area four times the size of the whole city and with a population less than one twenty-fifth as large, a prodigal extravagance of precisely that luxury of which New York was rapidly being drained: space.
And what space. Once, before the Ice Age, Long Island had been only the easternmost extension of the barren plains stretching out from the new-
formed Alleghenies. But the weight of two great glaciers rumbling down from Hudson Bay had pushed under the ocean a wide, deep valley, turning it into a body of water that would one day be called, at different spots along its route, Long Island Sound, Hell Gate, East River and the Narrows, and thereby freeing the land south and east of the valley from the mainland. Then the glaciers had cut into this land hundreds of indentations, so that when the ice had melted, its sharp edges softening and retreating, the north shore of Long Island was fjords and coves, harbors and bays, straits and peninsulas, an endless, beautiful coastline. The melted ice ran south, flooded a huge low-lying meadow on the south side of the Island and left on the ocean side of the meadow just enough low sand bars and dunes to form a barrier beach that checked the force of the Atlantic rollers before they smashed on the Island and then let them continue as gentle waves that washed the Island's shore. The ocean deposited on it gleaming white sand that gave it long horseshoes of beaches, while between the sand bars and the Island, on top of the meadow, a long, narrow, beautiful bay was created. And the tides of eons gently etched into the south shore of the mainland a panorama of incredibly twisting channels and coves and necks, of sandy shoals and tiny bays off the big one, of a marshland catacomb.
Before the two glaciers, the land had been flat, but the glaciers had pushed before them boulders, gravel, sand and clay and, coming to a halt on Long Island and melting there, had left such debris behind as two great ridges that marked the outlines of their farthest advance. The ridges lay along the flatness like a pair of scissors, with the bolt holding the blades in a place called the Wheatley Hills. One blade trailed off along the northern fluke of the Island in a mass of small rocks and pebbles; the other cut down, far out along its length, to the southern fluke and reached out along the fluke in a mass of gravel, clay and rock hills, crowned with gnarled and twisted trees, that ended in a series of steep bluffs. Over the centuries, the ridges had been smoothed and shaped into chains of gently rolling hills that ran to the edge of the whitecapped Sound and the hills had been covered with lush growths of trees—beech, oak, maple and elm, copses of sassafras and dogwood, birch and pine—so that the North Shore of Long Island became "a fresh, green breast of the New World," and, looking at it, F. Scott Fitzgerald would think that "for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder.' In summer, to the sweltering masses of New York, the cool green hills and rolling surf of Long Island beckoned like a vast playground filled with the milk and honey of leaves and grass, of sun and sand, that would sweeten the bitterness of city life.
Certainly, the Island seemed open to them. Unlike the Hudson, the East River had been spanned by great bridges—Williamsburg, Queens-borough, Manhattan and Brooklyn—and running out from the bridges through Brooklyn and Queens, to the very threshold of the Island, were
Al Smith at the Central Park Zoo.
Belle Moskowitz
Fiorello La Guardia, Al Smith and Robert Moses at the opening of the Belt Parkway, 1938. Behind Moses is Smith's wife, Katie.
t %
v/:
PAGEANTRY: The dedication of Moses' seven-block-long Chrystie-Forsyth Park, 1934.
PRESENT A TION of award by Park Association president, Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, and Association official Gustavus Kirby, 193$.
ha Guardia speaking — with Moses behind him — at the Chrystie-Forsyth dedication.
/I' ,% '*% :f
'/L
f
THE CANDIDATE: Above: 1934 GOP gubernatorial nominee Moses
arriving at Madison Square Garden for a campaign speech; left: with his wife, Mary, voting on Election Day.
Herbert Lehman, Al Smith and August Heckscher dedicating Heckscher State Park, 1929. The two girls are Moses' daughters, Jane (left) and Barbara.
Franklin Roosevelt dedicating Jones Beach State Park, 1929, as Smith and Moses sit listening.
l
• :
■JEp*
Al Smith speaking at the Heckscher dedication on the porch of the old Taylor Mansion. Moses is framed in pillars at left.
Moses receiving an award from children's clubs, 1934.
5?
EDUCATIONAL ALLIANCL GARDENING CLUB?
HARVEST FESTIVAL
+ + **
<-M*
MOSES AND THE GOVERNORS
Moses and Smith
Moses and Roosevelt
Moses and Lehman
Moses and Dewey
Moses and Harriman
(and, left,
William Zeckendorf)
Moses and Rockefeller
MOSES
AfsD THE MAYORS
Moses (left) and Walkei (third from left)
a Guardia
! and (TDwyer
( third from left;
Email and
Moses and Impellitteri
Moses and Wagner
Moses presenting the World's Fair Gold Medal to Generalissimo Franco in Madrid, 1964.