The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York

by Caro, Robert A

  Moses posing with Brooklyn B.P. Cashmore, Cardinal Spellman, Manhattan B.P. Wagner, and Mayor O'Dwyer at the opening of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, 1950.

  Moses visiting Pope John XXHI at the Vatican, 1963.

  MOSES AISD THE PRESIDENTS

  Moses and Hoover

  Moses and Truman

  Moses and Eisenhower

  Moses and Port Authority Chairman Howard S. Cullman (third from right) at the groundbreaking for the Lincoln Tunnels third tube, 1952.

  Moses, Charles Preusse and George Spargo huddling in the Plaza's Oak Room to discuss plans for the UN building, 1947.

  Moses and Harry Van Arsdale at the World's Fair, 1964.

  MOSES AND THE POWER BROKER!

  Bernard F. Gimbel, Thomas F. Deegan and John W. Hanes watching as Newbold Morris signs the Flushing Meadows Park over to the World's Fair Corporation, i960.

  Moses, Tom Shanahan and Jim Farley.

  Moses, Wagner and Samuel I. Rosenman at the Jones Beach Marine Theater, i960.

  /. Russel Sprague, Moses, Smith, Grover Whalen, W. KingslandMacy, 1932.

  Moses with William J. Rone and William Vermaelen (fo> and third from right), 1968.

  Moses, Guy Lombardo and three members of the Jones Beach Marine Theate chorus line, c. i960.

  MOSES AND THE MOSES MEN

  Sid Shapiro and "RM" at the Belmont Lake Office.

  The Boss in the field with (left to right) aides Darcy, Andrews, Loeser, Ammann.

  Mr. Moses and "Mustache" Constable.

  :ker

  %# ^r «•«

  TUESDAY. AH®. 24. 1956

  Right: The "Little Soldier" of the Tavern-on-the-Green Battle, 1956. Below: Moses, Shapiro and Rockefeller, 1961.

  T £S£si Jr* Re ports from Lot,

  it Leaders 'Drop

  Actor Robinson's Mothers Fenced Out IRT Breakdown ;T*£rA ^ Bulldozer Digs In »££

  **# tt «# «/wjvw«r» i wl u Pmrfc* QMftmtestotw Robfrt Mumi **Xy t
  Rockefeller applauding, Moses crying, at the dedication of Robert Moses Plaza at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University, 1910.

  iMiiiiiiii

  M

  ROBERT ttOS'E

  MASTER:. FRIEND Of FGaDHA

  three boulevards—Northern, Conduit and Queens—one of which, Northern, was perhaps the widest highway in the country. For Brooklyn and Queens residents, moreover, there was no necessity for either bridges or boulevards. Long Island was just down the road.

  So was disappointment.

  The Island's South Shore, the edge of the meadow that had been transformed into the Great South Bay, offered gentle waves and sandy beaches. But the bay was the haunt of the baymen, a closemouthed, independent breed, some of them descendants of families that had "followed the bay" since the Revolution, others New England Yankees who, hearing about the bay's bountiful harvests of oysters and clams, tommycods and smelts, had left the whaling boats and had moved to Long Island, bringing with them their taciturnity and distrust of outsiders.

  Less than thirty miles from the borders of New York City, the baymen lived in a world that resembled nothing so much as the remote fog banks of Nova Scotia. Their lives revolved around the bay. When its tides were flood, no matter what the hour, through the thick, damp mist, hip boots slung over their shoulders, caps pulled low over their eyes, they trudged to their weather-beaten little trawlers and crept out into the fog, returning hours later so heavily laden that only the bows and sterns of the boats were out of the water. They loved the bay's sparkle in summer, its cool breezes; somehow they loved its treacherous shoals and tides and the hidden traps of swamp grass that tangled their boats' propellers. Forced off it by winter storms, they settled down in taverns near the piers that jutted into it, drinking (they were famous for their drinking) and spinning legends about it. Once you were "bay salted," they said, you would never leave.

  They were fiercely determined to keep their world for themselves. The bay bottoms, the hell-fire preachers in their weather-beaten little churches constantly reminded them, were "sacred," their "priceless natural heritage," and when it came time each year for the townships that bordered on the Great South Bay—Hempstead, Oyster Bay,* Babylon, Islip and Brookhaven —to sell leases to mine the bay's underwater crops of shellfish, the baymen crowded into town halls to listen while the leases were awarded—and no outsider was ever given a lease. No authority could awe them. In 1892, when the German liner Normannia arrived in New York flying the yellow flag that signaled a cholera epidemic on board, the state bought the only hotel on Fire Island so it could quarantine the passengers and crews there. Trawler-loads of armed baymen met the Normannia as it tied up to the hotel dock and cut loose its hawsers, and only the dispatch of a National Guard regiment put down the uprising.

  Distrusting anyone "from away," the baymen distrusted especially anyone from New York. Hating the city—many boasted that they had never

  * The incorporated villages of Hempstead and Oyster Bay are, respectively, in the center and northern part of Long Island but the Townships of Hempstead and Oyster Bay, of which the villages are a part, extend to the South Shore and the barrier beach.

  been there—they feared that its "foreigners," hordes of long-haired Slavs, hook-nosed Jews and unwashed Irishmen, would descend on and befoul their beautiful beaches at the first slackening in their vigilance.

  And to keep such intruders away, their township boards had created, on every piece of publicly owned waterfront property that might conceivably attract visitors from the city, "parks" whose exclusive use was by statute reserved to township residents.

  The baymen's land-locked cousins, the farmers of Long Island, were men of conviction, too. In no part of New York State were the white hoods of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization whose venom was directed in the I920's not only against Negroes but also against Jews and Catholics, as numerous as in Suffolk County. Three successive chairmen of Suffolk's Republican Party had been members of the Klan, and anyone who needed an additional symbol of its power had only to look at the flagpole in front of the Islip Town Hall: the pole, read the inscription on an attached plaque, had been donated by the Islip branch of the Ladies of the Klan and gratefully accepted by the Town Board. (In 1928, when Al Smith ran for President, fiery crosses would blaze on the hills of Alabama and Mississippi—and, by orders of the county GOP organization, on the hills of Suffolk.) Combining with the baymen to dominate the Suffolk political picture, the farmers had no difficulty persuading the county's supervisors to make sure that there was not a single park in Suffolk open to city residents.

  And it was neither the baymen nor the farmers who most firmly barred Long Island to those who hungered for it. The huddled masses of New York City had a far more powerful enemy. It was wealth—vast, entrenched, impregnable wealth—and the power that went with it. For it was to Long Island that the robber barons of America had retired to enjoy their plunder.

  These were the men who, during the "Middle Ages of American industry," the half century of unbridled industrial expansion following the Civil War, had harnessed America's vast mineral resources and tapped its long-stored capital to create needed industrial growth but who, to turn that growth into personal wealth, had stationed themselves at the "narrows" of production, the key points of production and distribution, and exacted tribute from the nation. They were the men who had blackmailed state legislatures and city councils by threatening to build their railroad lines elsewhere unless they received tax exemptions, outright gifts of cash—and land grants so vast that, by 1920, the elected representatives of America had turned over to the railroad barons an area the size of Texas. They were the men who had bribed and corrupted legislators—the Standard Oil Company, one historian said, did everything possible to the Pennsylvania Legislature except refine it—to let them loot the nation's oil and ore, the men who, building their empires on the toil of millions of immigrant laborers, had kept wages low, hours long, and had crushed the unions. Their creed was summe
d up in two quotes: Commodore Vanderbilt's "Law? What do I care for law? Hain't I got the power?" and J. P. Morgan's "I owe the public nothing."

  The northern tip of Long Island's Glen Cove peninsula was Morgan's estate, the waters beside it the anchorage for his great black yacht, Corsair,

  and all the northern reaches of the peninsula were "Morgan Country." His son—Morgan the Younger, reporters called him—and four partners of the House of Morgan lived there, their yachts riding to anchor beside that of their father and chief, and so did George F. Baker, the chop-whiskered, taciturn Sphinx of Wall Street who was the president of the First National Bank, the largest single stockholder of both AT&T and United States Steel (his holdings in Big Steel alone totaled $212,500,000 in 1920), and who rode at the right hand of Morgan the Elder in the turn of the century's bloodiest stock-market raids. Baker was old now—eighty in 1920—but not too old to lift his sword; in 1930, when he was ninety and America was in the Depression, he climbed out of bed, pushed aside his doctors, strode to his office and, in a series of incredible stock manipulations, increased his fortune in that year alone by $50,000,000.

  To the south of the Morgans lay the demesnes of Standard Oil, where Charles Pratt and Stephen C. Harkness, partners of John D. Rockefeller the First, had carved out adjoining fiefs on either side of a small stream. On his, Pratt built six manor houses for his six sons.

  South of the Pratts, around Westbury in the Wheatley Hills, the bolt of the scissors that made Long Island beautiful, there established himself Henry Phipps, full partner of Andrew Carnegie, a man who, while Carnegie drove men to ordeals of sweat, grime and injury in the roaring steel mills of western Pennsylvania, obtained the cash to let Carnegie build more mills by using a talent "for keeping a check in the air as long as any man." Around him, in the hills, Phipps gathered his children and grandchildren. To the west of the Phippses' lands, also in Wheatley, lay "Harbor Hill," the 480-acre holding of Clarence Hungerford Mackay, president, board chairman and major stockholder of the Postal Telegraph Cable Company, precursor of Western Union, who had, during World War I, defied President Wilson's attempts to put the telegraph to use in America's service. North of Mackay lay the principality of Child's Frick, son of Henry Clay Frick, baron of coal and coke, who had gained his legendary wealth during the Panic of 1873 by purchasing for a pittance the land of desperate farmers without telling them that it contained coal, the raw material of the coke essential to steelmaking, then by crushing other rivals in the field and, with a virtual monopoly of the fuel in his hands, by quintupling its price.

  To the west of Mackay stretched the fiefs of other barons of American business—the sugar truster Claus Spreckels, for example, and other Standard Oil heirs like Payne Whitney, who in the early 1920's was paying an annual income tax of a million and a half dollars. To the east of the Phippses there were more Whitneys; Ogden Livingston Mills, congressman son of Darius Ogden Mills of the San Francisco "bank ring"; and the lawyers who were the barons' trusted counselors, Colonel Henry L. Stimson, Rockefeller's Robert W. De Forest, Morgan's John W. Davis and Colonel H. Rogers Winthrop, and Francis P. Garvan, the brain behind the Chemical Trust; and, finally, in the eastern outpost of Centerport, the castle of fierce old Commodore Vanderbilt's indolent grandson, Willie. Mingled with the barons were representatives of older wealth—won by gentler means—and of newer. There

  were six hundred estates on the North Shore, most of them more than fifty acres in size, some of them hundreds of acres, some of them thousands. The turrets of the barons' castles loomed above the trees along the entire North Shore of Nassau County and fifteen miles deep into Suffolk.

  The castles reflected the extent of their triumphs. Mrs. John S. Phipps, already mistress of seven other houses, wanted her Long Island residence to look exactly like the great eighteenth-century English manor houses. To make sure that it would, the famous London manor-house architect George Crawley was summoned to the Wheatley Hills to design "Westbury House" and to stay for years until it was completed—a masterpiece of cherry-red brick and limestone, Georgian chimneys and a pale-gold roof rising above the trees, complete with a vault for the family silver, separate rooms for glasses and china and luggage, silver-plated bathroom fixtures and doorknobs, and a cellar so large that in i960 the Nassau County Office of Civil Defense would designate it as a bomb shelter large enough to hold eighteen hundred persons. To make sure that the mood of England should not be lost in the furnishings, envoys of the Phippses scoured England for furniture made by Chippendale himself. The armoire in Mrs. Phipps's bedroom had belonged to James II. The mantel clock in her study was made by the clockmaker to King George II. The desk in the hall outside it was the desk on which Cromwell had signed the death warrant of Charles I.

  And the Phippses were noted for their modesty and restraint. Westbury House, after all, contained only thirty-two rooms. The F. W. Woolworth mansion in Glen Cove contained sixty-two, and included not only solid gold instead of silver-plated bathroom fixtures and doorknobs but a dining-room ceiling gilded with fifteen hundred square feet of fourteen-carat gold. The Tiffany Estate in Laurel Hollow contained eighty-two. The Phippses had a private golf course and two private polo fields, but guests of the Marshall Fields in Lloyd Neck were not forced to limit their activities to polo or golf, since their hosts had also provided them with tennis courts, badminton courts, squash courts, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, sailboats, motor-boats, skeet ranges—and a thousand-acre hunting preserve. No extravagance was too great. Finding that all the large hills in the Cold Spring Harbor area, where he wanted to build a chateau, were taken, Otto Kahn built a hill of his own, a small mountain, in fact, and since hauling the necessary earth and stone to the site required a railroad line, he built a railroad line.

  The sports of the feudal lords of the Old World were the sports of these feudal lords of the New. The North Shore echoed to the thunder of their horses' hooves, and to the bay of their hounds as, hunting fox and deer, they ranged unchallenged across the estates, riding in a single hunt from one end of Nassau County to the other. And they partied on a scale the New World had seldom seen, outdoing themselves with swimming pools bearing thousands of orchids, diamond tiaras for lady guests, cigarettes wrapped, and designed to be smoked, in hundred-dollar bills, until an awed America named the North Shore "The Gold Coast."

  And if their displays of wealth were awesome, so were their displays of selfishness. The robber barons intended to keep their world for themselves.

  There was a reason for the size of their fiefs, for their willingness to buy —and, year after year, to pay taxes on—hundreds of acres that they kept in woods and never used. There was a reason for the height and thickness of the walls around those fiefs. There was a reason for their private police forces and armed guards. They needed vast acreage in order that their castles could be set far enough back from public roads so that they would not have to see the public. They needed walls so that the public should understand that it was not wanted on their acres. They needed armed guards to protect their borders from those members of the public who might, on a Sunday excursion to the country, climb a wall to get at the empty green fields beyond. They were willing, they told each other, to spend anything necessary "to keep our privacy"—by which they meant to keep the public out of their demesne.

  And in their view this demesne included the whole North Shore.

  The officials they controlled allowed all public roads not needed for their own access to their estates to fall into disrepair to discourage public use. Lest the public turn instead to rail transportation, a group of them led by Charles Pratt, who had learned how to handle annoyances from his mentor, Rockefeller, bought sufficient stock in the Long Island Rail Road to control its policies—and saw to it that the railroad's North Shore lines were kept especially antiquated and rickety.

  The magnet that most strongly drew the city masses, of course, was their desire to swim in Long Island Sound, and the barons of the North Shore knew what to do about that.r />
  The shore front on the Great Neck peninsula, the first of the series of peninsulas that compose most of the North Shore in Nassau and western Suffolk, was entirely in their hands, except for a few slivers owned by less wealthy individuals who emulated the barons in keeping their property for their own use. So was the shore front on the next peninsula, except for two pieces of property at its tip, Sands Point. One was a small crescent of beach, rather rocky, owned by an elderly widow, a native of Long Island, who liked to see people having fun and had not only resisted entreaties that she bar them from the property but had stubbornly refused, even for an outrageously high price, to sell her beach to those who would; it was in the process of being condemned by a village board controlled by the barons. The other, at the very tip of the peninsula, opposite Execution Rock, where the original, slaveowning settlers of Sands Point had disposed of troublesome slaves by chaining them to the rock at low tide and letting them drown as the tide crept over them, was a sandier five-acre beach owned by the federal government and holding the Sands Point Lighthouse.

  The beach could be reached only by a road that crossed an adjacent, privately owned property, but the federal government had purchased an easement for public use of that road. When, however, the adjacent property was purchased by Mrs. Oliver Belmont, a cold-eyed grande dame famed for her priceless parure of emeralds and for her "Marble House" at Newport, a white marble structure whose pilasters and capitals were modeled on, although somewhat larger than, those of the Temple of the Sun at Baalbek, she

  erected across the southern edge of the property, stretching from one side of the peninsula to the other, a wall made of solid concrete three feet thick, twelve feet high, topped with sharp black spikes and iron dragons' heads. Persons who asked the armed guards stationed at the massive iron gate to allow them to pass were informed that the federal government had "surrendered" its easement and that the road could be used only by persons "having official business" at the lighthouse—a fact federal officials brusquely confirmed.