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

by Caro, Robert A

  Arriving at the spot he had marked from the train, Moses would order the chauffeur to drive north along side streets until there was no more road for a car, and then he would get out and walk through back yards and vacant lots and along footpaths until he reached the gates and could show his letter to the guards. Then he would plunge into the woods.

  They contained surprises.

  Through the train windows, he had glimpsed in the woods that lay between Merrick and Freeport a small pond. When he got into those woods on foot, he found the pond, but, beyond it, he could see another gleam of water. Reaching that, he found a larger pond and, beyond it, another gleam. Beyond that, there was another. There were four ponds, linked by a stream that ran due north, and each was larger than the one before. Lilies floated in them. Pickerel and trout flickered beneath the pads. Huge oaks, beeches, birches and pines surrounded him. And as he tramped steadily north, there seemed no end to them. He was not in a small woods, he realized, but in a forest—it would survey out at more than seven hundred acres—that lay untouched in the heart of Nassau County.

  There were another four ponds—and another wooded seven hundred acres—stretching south from Wantagh all the way to the Great South Bay. There were 595 more acres near Massapequa. Between Valley Stream and Lynbrook, there were only fifty acres, but in the center of them was a lake a quarter mile across. And when he entered the woods between Lynbrook and Rockville Centre, he realized he had come to something that dwarfed the others. The thin band of woods that he had seen from the train at that spot ran north for more than three miles, broadening as it went. Within the woods were long, rolling meadows. He had heard that somewhere in the woods was a reservoir, where a stream had actually been dammed by Brooklyn municipal engineers decades before, that couldn't be seen from the train, and he pushed on, trying to find it. With branches slapping at his face and vines tangling his feet, he came at last to a man-made embankment. Scrambling up, he peered over its top—and there before him lay a body of water almost a mile long and half a mile wide. It was much bigger than the big reservoir in Central Park, he realized. And there was more land around it, he guessed—and he turned out to be right—than there was in Central Park.

  Back on Merrick Road, Moses saw the cars from the city still creeping along in the dust and heat, thousands of them, tens of thousands, crammed with people searching desperately for a little patch of green, a spot of clear water, and most of them destined that weekend to find neither.

  And behind him, not a quarter mile from the road but unknown to all but one in a thousand of the drivers on it—and closed to even that one— was land, a vastness of land, overflowing with the fruits they sought. Land that didn't have to be purchased. Land that didn't have to be condemned. Land that was owned not by the governments of Long Island, which viewed the masses of New York City as foreigners, but by the government of New York City. Land that could be opened to the city's people merely by turning a key.

  Adding together the acreage of the various tracts of woods, Moses could hardly believe the figures. They totaled 3,500 acres. Three thousand five hundred acres just sitting there empty and unused.

  And ideally situated. All five tracts were within thirty miles of Manhattan, within eleven miles of the city line. The woods between Valley Stream and Lynbrook, in fact, were only two miles from that line.

  And what you could do with those acres! There could be hiking trails through the woods, of course, and picnic sites in the clearings. But there could be more. When reformers, when park planners in general, talked about large parks they talked in terms of keeping them unspoiled and rustic, as close to nature as possible. Even Central Park contained relatively few facilities for any sports other than walking.

  But Moses saw a different vision. He had noticed meadows back in those woods that seemed just made to order for baseball diamonds, and level spaces with only a few trees that could be cleared for tennis courts. Why, a portion of the biggest tract, the one between Lynbrook and Rockville Centre, seemed almost made to order for a golf course. And why should people be restricted to looking at the ponds and lakes? Why couldn't they swim in them? That great reservoir alone could cool thousands of sweating youngsters from the city! And there were so many acres available that even after all the facilities were laid out, there would still be vast stretches of woods that could be left untouched except for rustic hiking trails.

  Suddenly, the burning eyes were looking at everything on Long Island in terms of parks.

  Having fallen in love with the South Shore, Moses had done so with his customary fullness of passion. He kept the Babylon village librarian scurrying to the cabinet in which were locked the ancient, privately printed books that recounted the legends of the Great South Bay. Buying an old bayman's old, broad-bottomed, very slow motorboat, partly covered with a canopy, which Mary named the Bob, he putt-putted around the bay following the maps described in the books, sometimes with Mary and his daughters, often alone. Heading out to the pier where the Bob was moored, he paused frequently to chat with the sailors who were too old to follow the bay any more and instead

  spent their days sitting on upturned oyster barrels looking out over it; and, finding him a willing listener to their stories, the old men told him about hidden inlets and about meadows where flocks of wild birds nested, and he spent long days exploring them. Sometimes, in fact, he spent days that were too long; then, as he sat in reverie, the bay's ebbing tide would leave the Bob stranded on a sand bar. After a while, Mary knew what it meant when darkness came and her husband still hadn't returned from the bay; she would call a friend, Harry Fishel, whose boat had a shallower draft, and Fishel would go out and bring him in. In the morning, the two men would return to the Bob, now refloated by the flooding tide, and Moses would go back on board with a sandwich Mary had prepared—and spend another day on the bay.

  Moses' attention had early been caught by the barrier beach, the strip of dunes and beach grass and wild marshes about five miles offshore that from the pier was a long low line on the horizon across the bay. Baymen called it "the strand." Deserted except for a few tiny, scattered summer colonies, an aura almost of mystery hung over it. The baymen told stories of murders and duels to the death on it between sailors armed only with hand spikes. The summer colonies had names—"Short Beach," "Gilgo"— but the names didn't match those on the old maps he found in the library. The very shape of the strand was different. That, the baymen explained to him, was because the ocean was constantly remolding it. Because the "set" of the Atlantic off Long Island was inexorably to the west, they said, sand and pebbles were continually washed up at its western end and the beach grew longer every year. But storms, particularly the howling "sou'easters," also swept away part of the strand each winter, slashed new inlets through its dunes, closed old ones. The name "Fire Island" by which the easternmost section of the strand was known was actually a corruption of "Five Islands," a name given to it in the eighteenth century when it had been divided into five parts by four inlets, all of which have since completely disappeared.*

  Fire Island stretches from Bay Shore in Babylon Township east to Moriches. The western section of the strand, separated from Fire Island by a narrow inlet, parallels Long Island from Bay Shore all the way to Freeport. This section was called, vaguely, "Jones Beach." Even the oldest baymen weren't certain where the name had come from, but Moses was. In the old books in the Babylon Library, he had read about Major Thomas Jones, a seventeenth-century Welshman whose valor at the Battle of the Boyne moved King James II to grant him a commission as a privateer. ("That was far from being a pirate," one of the old books emphasized; "it was a legitimate business.") Jones made a fortune legitimately plundering ships that did not fly the English flag. In 1695, he purchased thousands of acres of the deserted strand from Long Island's fierce Indian tribes "for a

  * Contrary to the belief, held even by some Long Island historians, that Fire Island was named for the signal fires set by whalers and pirates, the old documents in the Baby
lon Library—they can still be found there—show conclusively that it was originally "Five Islands."

  barrel of good cidar," peopled it with crews which dashed out in longboats to capture whales drifting nearby—and made another fortune. Marrying beautiful Freelove Townsend, he erected a house—with thick walls and slits for rifles—on one of the necks of land which at that time linked the strand to Long Island.

  After Jones's death, sou'easters tore away the necks, and the strand became an island itself. Between it and the mainland, the underwater reeds grew thicker. The tides tugged at the sand underneath the Great South Bay and the channels between the shoals became more and more crooked and treacherous, sometimes shifting course from week to week. People who tried to sail or motorboat to Jones Beach had to get out and push their boats off sand bars so frequently that one bay captain referred to his weekend journeys as his "walks to the Beach." The summer-cottage colonies grew smaller and smaller. In winter, except for occasional hunters after wild birds and a few hermits who lived in caves hollowed out of the dunes, Jones Beach was deserted.

  Sometimes, when Bob Moses stepped out of his boat onto Jones Beach, he could not see another human being. In front of him would be nothing but a wide, straight strip of the whitest sand he had ever seen, stretching unbroken until it disappeared at the horizon, sliding on one side beneath the ocean surf, rising on the other into dunes covered with tufts of beach grass, little gnarled bushes and stunted trees, with, between the dunes, marshes of a peculiar, striking grayish-green color from which swooped up herons and gulls. He had returned to it a hundred times, pushing and pulling his little boat through the reeds, to sit lonely on the beach with wind rustling his hair, drinking in the wild, desolate scene.

  Had he been still the poet he had been at Yale, Moses might have looked at this scene and thought of Byron. But now he was thinking of parks. He looked at Jones Beach with eyes that had looked at crowded New York City and had seen a hundred ways of improving it—and he realized that the emptiness of the strand, its endless, untouched vistas, was a clean canvas on which he could draw whatever he chose. And, looking at it that way, he realized that all the landscape needed was the painting in of people to make it a bathing beach, a great bathing beach, a bathing beach such as America had never seen. Moreover, the people, the masses of New York City, were amazingly close. Jones Beach had seemed so cut off from the world, but, he realized with a start, when he stood on its western end he was less than twenty-five miles from Times Square.

  The problem, of course, was to get the people out there, and now in the evenings, in his Babylon bungalow, Bob Moses began to study maps of Long Island. One night he suddenly noticed that the water-supply properties off Merrick Road lay in a row. A straight line could be drawn through them. Therefore, so could a road. If a road were built out from New York so that it traversed those properties, a substantial part of the right-of-way would not have to be purchased or condemned. Moreover, the road could give the city masses easy access to the water-supply properties, which he had already determined were themselves ideal for parks. And since one of the

  properties, the one at Wantagh, ran all the way down to the Great South Bay, another road—connecting with the road leading out from New York— could be built south down to the bay without the necessity of any purchase or condemnation at all. Once it reached the bay, it would be directly opposite Jones Beach. And since the bay was so shallow, it ought to be easy to construct a causeway from the end of the road to the beach. "That was the idea behind Jones Beach and the Southern State Parkway," Moses would recall years later. "I thought of it all in a moment."

  As he thought about the road, he thought about the Bronx River Parkway. Although it hadn't yet been opened, the newspapers were full of stories about it. With the exception of a three-mile stretch of the Fenway in Boston and, of course, the transverse roads in Central Park, the parkway would be the first highway in the country to eliminate traffic lights and intersecting traffic by lifting all crossroads above it. The bridges that carried the crossroads would be faced with stone to blend in with the scenery, and the bordering right-of-way would be completely landscaped. Newspapers were predicting that it would be the most beautiful road in America. A road through the Long Island water-supply properties, Moses realized, would, on that portion of it which traversed the properties, be lined with the beautiful trees he had seen. The north-south road running from it to the bay would be lined with trees its entire length, and the causeway across the water would cross the bay panorama. The roads he was thinking of, he realized, could be more beautiful than the Bronx River Parkway.

  The line he had drawn on the map through the water-supply properties seemed to point like an arrow into Long Island's South Shore. Looking beyond its point, the easternmost of the properties, Moses saw a series of promontories jutting out into the Great South Bay. He recalled that the promontories were supposed to be beautiful. And on weekends now, Moses had himself driven east.

  From the car, he could see that most of the promontories were private estates, but in East Islip he noticed a large piece of property fenced off but overgrown with underbrush and weeds and apparently deserted. A real estate agent told him that it had belonged to an eccentric old millionaire named Taylor and, when he died, had been purchased by a group of wealthy men who allowed it to grow wild because they used it as a game preserve.

  There may have been caretakers on the Taylor Estate, but Moses didn't see them when he returned to it. Tramping through the brush and the woods, frightening groups of deer, startling coveys of pheasants, he came to a group of out-buildings, all deserted and all except one, which had been turned into a hunting lodge, crumbling. Looming over them was an old mansion, paint peeling, with broken windows. In front of the mansion was a long meadow of uncut, waving grass that had evidently once been an imposing lawn. Beyond it was white sand and then the dark blue-gray of the bay, and beyond the bay, just a line on the horizon, the dunes of Fire Island. Stirring the trees, the grass and the water was the gentle breeze which Moses had learned from the baymen invariably cooled the bay shore every day from about eleven o'clock in the morning until near sundown. Overhead was a

  lot of sky. To the east, across a little stream, was an expanse of carefully manicured grass and, on it—the only human figures anywhere to be seen —several foursomes in caps and knickerbockers and long socks striding along with the caddies of the Timber Point Club. Moses had taken to carrying a yellow legal note pad on his excursions. On it now he began to sketch the property, and on the sketch he drew lines, some to indicate where the bathhouses for the bathing beaches would be, others to show a golf course, still others to outline where a public bridle path would wind through the trees and where the fences would be placed to pen the deer and pheasants so youngsters could watch them.

  The mind leaped on. Were there similar vacant properties on the North Shore? Soon, through woods and meadows overlooking Long Island Sound, there was striding a tall, athletic figure dressed in corduroy pants, heavy shoes and, usually, an old and stained windbreaker, and carrying in one hand a yellow legal note pad. Within weeks, Moses had discovered in Smith-town a vacant estate magnificently suited to his purpose. As he walked north through its thousand wooded acres, he noticed they sloped steadily downhill and he assumed they were sloping down to the beach, but when the woods ended, he found himself staring at a huge, pale-green expanse of grass that was actually below the level of the beach beyond, and he thought in that instant of a name for the estate: "Sunken Meadow."

  The road to Sunken Meadow? It could, perhaps, run from New York along the middle of the Island, where the only opposition would be that of farmers, but Moses knew at once that the road wasn't going to go there. If scenery was an attribute of parkways, why, here was a chance to run a parkway through real scenery: the Gold Coast estates. At night, now, Moses began to pore over maps of the North Shore, his pencil sketching out alternate routes. He saw on the map the names across which his pencil was sketching: Phipps, Wh
itney, Garvan, Morgan, Mackay, Vanderbilt, Otto Kahn. But he saw in his mind a road bordered, beyond the grassy right-of-way, by the magnificent stands of trees the robber barons had imported from Europe and by hedges neatly trimmed by their legions of gardeners.

  And the pencil kept sketching.

  The mind leaped on. It took as its compass not an island but a state.

  The state's other large cities—Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Schenectady, Syracuse, Troy, Utica—were growing, not as fast as New York but fast enough. So was their need for state parks.

  But the State Legislature, considering parks a luxury outside city limits, refused to give them any. In 1922, there wasn't a single state park in New York anywhere east of the Hudson River. West of the Hudson, between the Palisades and Buffalo, there were twenty—nineteen enclaves around famous old mansions or Revolutionary War battlefields that had been purchased by private philanthropists and donated to the state, and one, a thousand-acre tract on the Genesee River, that was New York's only state park of substantial size, donated by Buffalo philanthropist William Pryor Letchworth.

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  Even when the state was given land, it didn't take care of it. In 1923, the total legislative appropriation for upkeep of state parks would be $30,000. The philanthropists or their descendants or the historical societies designated in their wills to administer the parks had to pay for their upkeep. Permanent improvements—even comfort stations—were all but unheard of. Most parks could not be reached by automobile. In 1922, those state parks that did exist in New York went all but unused.