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

by Caro, Robert A

  On the next peninsula, Glen Cove, there were five beaches open to the public, two owned privately and three by Oyster Bay Township, rocky and unappealing, pitifully narrow strips of pebbles and weeds for whose use city residents had to pay exorbitant rates, and whose combined capacity was less than ten thousand.

  There were long stretches of more appealing beach open to the public in Cold Spring Harbor, the area east of the Glen Cove peninsula, but the barons of Cold Spring had solved that problem; they had built a gate across the only road that led to the beach and stationed armed guards at the gate. Would-be beachgoers who questioned their authority were told that the road was on private property, a legal question somewhat difficult to research on a summer weekend.

  Every foot of the two commas of land east of Cold Spring—Lloyd Neck and Eatons Neck—was owned by barons. Huntington Township, just beyond them, contained forty-eight miles of shoreline; 1,250 feet of it were open to the public.

  Like those on the South Shore, then, the beaches on the North Shore of Long Island had been effectively closed to city residents. A New Yorker who wanted to take his family for a swim on Long Island could head only for Long Beach on the South Shore, tedious to reach because of inadequate roads and so crowded that it seemed like an extension of the filthy, incredibly jammed Coney Island beach in Brooklyn. The North Shore stood impregnable against the importunings of the masses.

  And the barons of the North Shore knew how to keep it impregnable. Accustomed to dealing in the political marketplace (so many of the largest contributors to the Republican Party came from the North Shore that during the i92o's the GOP's National Finance Committee contained forty-nine members—one from each of the forty-eight states and one from Nassau County), they furnished the bulk of the war chest of the state Republican organization—and of the smooth-running Nassau County GOP machine. And they knew how to get value for money spent. They saw to it that key legislative committee chairmen were men who took orders. They sent to Albany as the assemblymen and senators from Nassau County young knights from their own ranks—bright-eyed, enthusiastic F. Trubee Davison, son of Morgan partner Henry P.—or young villagers whom their eyes had picked out as promising men to enlist in their service, such as a handsome, ambitious young lawyer whose father had been Theodore Roosevelt's coachman at Sagamore Hill, Leonard W. Hall. And while state roads of broader width, better paving and improved design might be built elsewhere, they were

  not built on Long Island. A strangely permissive state law, moreover, allowed the barons to incorporate their estates into self-governing "villages" so that the measures necessary to keep out the city hordes could be legitimatized, given "governmental status"—and enforced by "village police forces," which before incorporation had been their privately employed guards.

  So when the families of New York City reached Long Island, they found the milk and honey sour indeed.

  If they were heading for the North Shore on Northern Boulevard, 160 feet of smooth macadam shrank to eighteen at the city line. The cars heading east had to cram into a single file. As they crept along, the paving of the boulevard deteriorated, so that each family had to watch the cars ahead jounce, one after the other, into gaping potholes, and then wait for the jolts themselves. More and more frequently, they came to unpaved stretches in which, if there had been a recent rain, cars became mired, bringing the endless line behind them to a halt. If the earth was dry, thick clouds of dust hung over the unpaved stretches, turning dirty the gay dress Mother had worn for the excursion.

  As the families drove, they could see on either side of them, through gates set in stone walls or through the openings in wooden fences, the beautiful meadows they had come for, stretching endlessly and emptily to the cool trees beyond. But the meadows and trees were not for them. The gates would be locked and men carrying shotguns and holding fierce dogs on straining leashes would point eastward, telling the families there were parks open to them "farther along." There was no shade on Northern Boulevard and the children became cranky early. In desperation, ignoring the no trespassing — private property signs that lined the road, fathers would turn onto the narrow strip of grass between the boulevard and the wall paralleling it and, despite the dust and the fumes from the passing cars, would try to picnic there. But the guards were vigilant and it was never long until the fathers had to tell the kids to get back into the car. Later, in Oyster Bay Town and Huntington, they would come to parks, tiny but nonetheless parks, but as they approached them they would see policemen at their entrances and the policemen would wave them on, explaining that they were reserved for township residents. There were, the policemen shouted, parks open "farther along."

  Of those who turned off the boulevard, trying to find a beach, the lucky ones found a spot on the five rocky strips on the Glen Cove peninsula. The others, searching mile after mile for a piece of beach not marked private, seldom even got close enough to glimpse the water, for most of the roads down to it had locked gates across them. They would turn south again, heading back to the boulevard.

  The more persistent, who determined to head east until they discovered someplace to swim or picnic, found the road becoming worse and worse. They would see Long Island villagers sitting on the fences and laughing at the families who, because of engine overheating or in a desperate try at a piece of grass, pulled off the road. The line of cars was so solid, the radiator of one almost touching the tailgate of the one before it, that, once out

  of the line, it was hard for a car to get back in—and it was fun, the villagers said, to watch them try.

  At the head of Hempstead Harbor, the inlet that separates the Sands Point and Glen Cove peninsulas, Northern Boulevard dipped down, curving and winding, rutted and potholed, unpaved in one stretch, and became the Main Street of Roslyn Village. It narrowed as its width was cut by sidewalks in front of little stores, and then, on the other side of the town, wound upward again before resuming its eastern course. Roslynites, watching the endless line of cars, said it took two hours just to get through town, but this was, of course, an exaggeration. In 1923, state officials clocked it on successive Sundays and found you could make it in an hour and a quarter. The officials also determined the length of time it took on an average Sunday to get from the Queensborough Bridge to Huntington, a distance of 32.4 miles. The time was four hours.

  If the New Yorkers stayed on Northern Boulevard long enough, there were, indeed, after the estates and guards of the Gold Coast had been left behind—and even if the promised parks "farther along" never materialized— plenty of quiet places with grass and trees in which one could picnic. Why, Smithtown, the township beyond Huntington, alone had 92.5 acres of cemeteries, and fallen tombstones made excellent picnic tables. When the cemeteries were filled, there were always farms, for although the Suffolk farmers were as determined as the barons to keep the foreigners off their lands, they couldn't afford guards to help them do it, and they never seemed to have enough dogs and sons with pitchforks to do the job thoroughly, although they certainly tried. New Yorkers could even swim in Smithtown, if they found a beach whose owner wasn't around. Everyone knew they could, because, every Monday, newspapers would carry stories about the city residents who, swimming in the choppy Sound without the protection of lifeguards, had drowned in Smithtown waters.

  Most New Yorkers, however, didn't last to Smithtown. They turned around and slunk home, eating their picnic lunches in their cars, washing them down with bitterness and frustration. If they swam on Long Island, they swam in their cars in their sweat.

  Northern Boulevard was not, of course, the only route to the North Shore from New York. There was also Jericho Turnpike. There was one difference between Northern Boulevard and Jericho Turnpike. Jericho Turnpike was two feet narrower.

  And the greed of the robber barons had not been satisfied by the riches of the North Shore. Led by Horace O. Havemeyer, the "Sultan of Sugar," a group of them had seized the choicest areas of the South Shore, a series of promontories below East Islip that jut
out into the Great South Bay about midway along its sixty-mile length.

  They lived there in a splendor equal to that of the North Shore—and they displayed an equal determination to keep their privacy unimpaired. When one of their number, Julian T. Davies, died in 1922, they feared that his estate might be bought by some undesirable or, worse, subdivided. A group of them, led by Havemeyer and his brother-in-law, W. Kingsland Macy,

  decided to turn it into a private club. The obstacles might have deterred less determined men. Davies had owned only 231 acres and most of them were marshland that was covered by water at high tide, so that there was only enough solid land for a nine-hole golf course. To make the second nine, they were told, dredges would have to work for a year to haul up sand and fill in the marshland with it. They set the dredges to work.

  To design the course, they brought over an Englishman who was the most famous golf-course designer in the world. To help the members with their swings, they hired a famous touring professional. They staffed the kitchen with the best chefs they could find. For those members who wanted to sail, they built a large boat basin. And when all was ready, they thought of a name, the Timber Point Club, and opened the club—to exactly one hundred persons.

  "You could play golf there on a weekend and if there were two other golfers on the whole course, you considered the place crowded," recalls Robert Hollins, the son of one of the members. "God, that place was empty."

  And that was exactly how the members wanted it. As they toured the majestic course that sloped down to the bay, men in caps and knickerbockers and long socks, ladies in long pleated skirts and middy blouses, they considered the lack of people as big an asset as the view. In 1923, Suffolk County established a Mosquito Control Commission and asked various members of the club for contributions. "God, the mosquitoes in the summer were unbelievable on that golf course," Hollins says. "You'd look at the fellow you were playing with and there might be twenty on his face." But most Timber Pointers gave nothing. If the commission got rid of the mosquitoes, Mrs. Hollins explained, more "foreigners" might find the South Shore attractive and try to live there. "I'd rather have the mosquitoes," she told her friends.

  To keep the public out was worth any price. When the property adjoining the Timber Point Club, a 1,500-acre estate owned by an eccentric old millionaire who had never been one of them, anyway, George C. Taylor, came on the market after his death, the Timber Pointers raised $250,000 to buy it. Then they hired caretakers, stocked it with herds of deer and flocks of wild pheasant—all for less than ten days of hunting a year and an additional guarantee that they would never have to look over from their golf course and see on the land adjoining it anyone they didn't know.

  Thanks to the barons and the baymen, the sandy beaches of the South Shore were as thoroughly closed off to New Yorkers as the rocky beaches of the North. Those New Yorkers who could not afford the exorbitant charges at Long Beach or squeeze into the limited public area of the beach there were shunted along the South Shore from village to village until they reached the flat, unshaded, bleak potato fields of Suffolk County.

  And the shunting on the South Shore was along Merrick Road, an artery as narrow as Northern Boulevard and even more congested, which crossed the clogged downtown areas of a dozen South Shore villages and was intersected at half a hundred locations by the tracks of the Long Island

  Rail Road, so that every time a train came through, the line of cars, miles long, would have to stop and wait until the crossing gates went up again.

  And still, the need was so great that every summer weekend families from New York City flocked to Long Island, trying Jericho Turnpike instead of Northern Boulevard, or the South Shore instead of the North, or a side road they had noticed the weekend before and which would, they felt sure, lead to a beach they could use—an endless eastward-bound stream of baseless hope that lasted from dawn to late afternoon. And all forecasts showed that the need would rapidly grow greater still: the city's population, which had increased by a million persons during the past ten years, was exr pected to increase by another million during the next ten.

  Given the need, therefore, and the possibility that Long Island could meet it, the thoughts of reformers interested in parks had for years turned first to the Island. Here, they all saw, was the land of the greatest opportunity.

  But they also saw, even the most unrealistic of them, that the amount of power with which they had to contend on Long Island was such that efforts to create parks there seemed, even to themselves, foredoomed.

  In the past, the governments that created parks had been the governments of the areas in which the parks would be located. The township and village governments on Long Island would never create such parks. Conservationists had begun to talk about "state parks," but a state park had to be created by a state, and New York State's Legislature was controlled by the Long Island barons. A dozen proposals by the Good Government organizations for Long Island parks had been introduced in that Legislature; not one had ever made it out of committee.

  The scope of the problem discouraged reformers as much as the political difficulties involved.

  Parks large enough to serve any appreciable portion of New York City's millions would have to be measured in the hundreds of acres, and since Long Island was run almost entirely by hostile local governments and landowners, how could those acres possibly be obtained? By purchase? Long Island property was valuable, immensely valuable in the hills and along the beach front where parks should be located. By condemnation? Condemnation of valuable property on the scale required would be fantastically expensive— in fact, unheard of in America. And since the barons' battalions of lawyers could be expected to fight condemnation with every tactic available, the proceedings would take years.

  And if, somehow, the parks were created, how would people get to them? Long highways would be required, and their rights-of-way would necessarily cross hundreds, if not thousands, of different properties, and that meant hundreds, if not thousands, of landowners who would be ready to fight, and that would mean hundreds and thousands of additional condemnation proceedings. The reformers realized that even in the unlikely event that they won on Long Island, that they actually succeeded in unhorsing the powerful barons, they wouldn't know what to do with their victory. The

  problem was so big, the reformers thought it was insoluble; by 1922, their "park" discussions concerned mainly the creation of more small playgrounds in the city and the improvement of playground equipment.

  Often, when Bob Moses went home at night, he would be coming from such "park" discussions, because Smith, trying to maintain his liaison with reform groups in preparation for another run for Governor, frequently asked him to be his "observer" at reformers' conferences.

  Moses tendered such discussions only cursory attention. With his attacks on Governor Miller occupying his time, wordy debates over whether a playground site should be on Fourteenth or Fifteenth Street interested him not at all.

  But during the summer of 1922, when Bob Moses went home, he went to Long Island. Invited to weekends in Babylon by friends during 1921, he and Mary had fallen in love "with the town, with the bay, with the whole South Shore." In 1922, they rented a bungalow of their own for the summer. So when the discussions on parks ended, he would hurry to the Long Island Rail Road station and catch a train on the South Shore line.

  The trips from and to the city took over an hour—forty-five years later, Moses could still reel off without effort the names of the stops as the conductors had chanted them: "Valley Stream, Lynbrook, Oceanside, Rock-ville Centre, Freeport, Merrick, Amityville, Lindenhmst and Babylon" —and the train was hot. Moses would try to bury himself in work, but every so often he would look up and glance out the window. And after a while he began to notice that, while most of the route was filled with one-family homes, there were, between some of the villages, thick leafy bands of woods and, gleaming brightly through the trees, the blue water of ponds and streams.

  The woods were all
to the north of the railroad, the left-hand side of the train going out to Babylon and the right-hand going into the city. Bob Moses began now always to sit on the side nearest them. It was the i92o's; the men around him would be sitting studying the stock-market quotations in their newspapers. Bob Moses sat and stared out the train window.

  One weekend he went to Babylon Town Hall and asked what the woods were. An old-timer told him he must be talking about the old Brooklyn water-supply properties, the streams and the areas around them in Nassau and Suffolk counties that Brooklyn, then an independent city, had purchased in 1874, fenced off and kept guarded so that, in case of a water shortage, it would be able to dam the streams and use their water. On Monday morning, Moses stopped by the New York Municipal Building and asked a clerk in the Department of Water Supply if the city used those properties. Why, no, the clerk said, it never had. There had never been any need. And, come to think of it, now that New York had acquired the huge Croton and Ashokan reservoirs upstate and built aqueducts from them to the city, there probably never would be.

  And suddenly, the eyes that had looked at the mud flats below Riverside

  Drive and seen a great highway and a great park were looking at something else. The eyes that "burned with ideas" were burning again—and they were focused on Long Island.

  Most of the water-supply properties were set far enough north of Merrick Road, behind blocks of private homes, to be invisible from it, but Merrick Road was the only way of getting close to them. Moses had never learned to drive, but he obtained from Smith the use of a car and chauffeur and a letter authorizing the guards at the properties to let him enter their gates. And on weekend mornings, as the line of cars from the city crept east along the road, Moses, leaving Babylon, had himself driven west.