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

by Caro, Robert A

  The next day, as John Jacob and his five sons were in the fields, a young engineer Moses had hired, Sidney M. Shapiro, drove up with a surveying crew. "They just walked on the property and set up their things without asking permission," P. G. Rasweiler recalls. "Father asked them if they had papers from a court, and they didn't." John Jacob walked into his house, came out with a shotgun, put it against Shapiro's chest, and said, "I'll blow you to hell if you don't get off my land." Getting off, Shapiro telephoned Moses, who said, "Get the state troopers and go back there."

  "They wanted to scare you, I guess," Rasweiler says. "But Father asked the troopers if the surveyors could go on our land without papers, and the troopers asked them if they had papers and they said no and the troopers said to them, 'You can't go on this man's property without papers,' and they went away. So we thought we had won, but the next day, they set up their things on the next farm—Moses only wanted land on the edges of that, so the farmer was friendly to him—and got the survey lines they needed from there and they condemned up the piece of property they wanted. We went to the Court of Claims and got $2,700 an acre—more than twice what Moses offered us. We kept what was left of the farm, but it

  wasn't the same. Me? I went into the trucking business—worked for my brother-in-law."

  The charm could vanish as quickly with a financier as with a farmer. The Timber Pointers were shocked when they learned that Moses planned to turn the adjoining estate into a public park. Pointing to the spot where the proposed park would run alongside the club's golf course, old Horace Havemeyer, "the Sultan of Sugar," growled to his young brother-in-law, stockbroker W. Kingsland Macy: "I tell you, Macy, if they get a park over there, there'll be so much screwing you won't be able to tee up a ball." Havemeyer, Macy and Wall Street trader Buell Hollister had even more reason to be disturbed than the other ninety-seven Timber Point members. Anxious to attract more of "the right kind of people" to East Islip, the trio had recently decided to purchase the Taylor Estate themselves, divide its 1,486 acres into thirty building lots and sell them, at prices ranging from $50,000 on up, to thirty persons so right that they would even be invited to join, on purchase of a lot, the Timber Point Club. The proposition promised to be highly rewarding financially as well as socially. Now, to forestall Moses, Havemeyer, Hollister and Macy hastily persuaded the Timber Pointers in the Deer Range Corporation, the corporation that had turned the Taylor Estate into a hunting preserve, to overrule their officers, deny Moses the option he had been promised and instead sell the estate to them for the same $250,000 he had offered—plus 50 percent of any profit they made on subsequent resales. Learning of these machinations, Moses asked Macy to drop around to his office. When the stockbroker arrived, Moses bluntly ordered him not to consummate the deal. Macy indignantly refused to agree. Then, as he was later to testify under oath, "Mr. Moses told me they were going to take that place away from us and nothing we could do would stop it. . . . Mr. Moses informed me that he had the arbitrary power to seize this property, which was owned by myself and my associates, even though the state did not have one cent to pay for it. . . . Mr. Moses told me that he could take my home away from me. He told me personally that his power was such that he could seize my house, put me out of it and arrest me for trespass if I tried to get into it again. . . . Mr. Moses told me not only that he possessed this arbitrary power, but that he was able to control the press of New York City, so as to hold me up to such obloquy that I would not be able to stand it." And Moses was as good as his word. No sooner had Havemeyer, Hollister and Macy actually purchased the Taylor Estate than, without even a pretense of negotiating with them as the law required, he directed Park Commission attorneys to draw up a Notice of Entry and Appropriation and serve it on the three men—and while it was being served he stationed armed state troopers on the property and instructed them not to allow the three men to enter it even to remove personal property they had left there.

  The route Moses had planned for his "Northern State Parkway" ran, west to east, through the estates of Mrs. Henry Phipps, Payne Whitney, Claus Spreckels, Clarence Hungerford Mackay, Henry Carnegie Phipps, Henry Payne Whitney, Francis P. Garvan, E. D. Morgan, Mrs. William K.

  Vanderbilt II, Bronson Winthrop, Henry Rogers Winthrop and Otto Kahn.

  The Phippses, Whitneys, Spreckelses, Mackays, Garvans, Morgans, Vanderbilts, Winthrops and Kahns refused even to discuss the parkway with Moses. One summer weekend in 1924, as they relaxed in the manor houses which they had so carefully secured against the public, they noticed, outside their gates, surveying crews setting up their telescope-like surveying levels—and pointing the telescopes in their direction. They dispatched servants to inquire what the surveyors were doing—and the servants returned with the information that the surveyors said that they were "laying out the route for the parkway." Astonished, the barons took a closer look at where the telescopes were pointing—and found that it was right at their houses. In some cases, before the guards could chase them away, the surveyors laid out a line of red and white flags to mark the exact route of the parkway—and the flags marched straight across their lawns and right by their front doors.

  The barons dispatched their lawyers to Moses, and Moses did not treat those lawyers with the deference to which they were accustomed. The exact nature of his conversation with Colonel Henry L. Stimson is unknown, but Stimson stormed out of the meeting to write Governor Smith: "I believe thoroughly in the importance of improved highway facilities and parks. . . . But, my dear Governor, it cannot be done in this country by Napoleonic methods." Another lawyer told Moses that there was enough power in Wheatley Hills to insure that no parkway would ever run through there. "Well," Moses replied, "we're going to teach the Wheatley Hills people a lesson." To all the barons' lawyers, he spelled it out bluntly: If their clients were willing to donate land for the parkways, its location could be shifted away from their houses to the borders of their huge estates. But if they weren't cooperative, the commission had the power to appropriate the land right next to their houses—and it was going to do so.

  "Appropriate?" the lawyers asked one another. What did that mean? In law offices all along Wall Street, pages were hastily turned to section fifty-nine of the State Conservation Law. And then calls were hastily placed to F. Trubee Davison.

  "I felt awful, of course," Trubee was to recall. "It's a terrible, highhanded way for a public official to act, to threaten someone with the loss of his home unless he surrenders land. But Moses had the power to do it. He could walk in and take it. And he had the power under the law I had introduced. There was nothing else for me to do but to admit to these fellows who called that I just hadn't studied it thoroughly before I introduced it." One attorney, after studying the law, wrote a friend: "The powers most innocently expressed in Sections Eight and Nine are, when read in conjunction with Section Eighteen, sufficiently broad to permit this Commission to take over the whole of Suffolk County" as long as the Governor was willing to sign the appropriation form.

  And even while the lawyers were studying the powers conferred by

  the act, Moses was giving new evidence of his intention to use them. In August, the owners of the Montauk Point land he wanted learned that Carl G. Fisher, developer of Miami Beach, was planning to transform Montauk into a similar resort area. If he succeeded, their land would become immensely valuable. They notified Moses that they would not sign the option agreement. He promptly appropriated the choicest portion of their land, a 1,700-acre tract called "Hither Hills." A week later, he appropriated twenty-two other acres on Lloyd Neck.

  The lawyers told their clients they were in for a fight.

  The skirmishers made contact first on the Taylor Estate. The attorneys for Havemeyer, Hollister and Macy's Pauchogue Corporation informed their clients that the powers given to the Long Island State Park Commission by the act Moses had drawn were broad—but that, broad as they were, Moses had overstepped them. He may have written the law, they said, but he had also broken it.


  Section fifty-nine of the Conservation Law gave the commission the power to appropriate land, the attorneys said, but section fifty-nine also said that the power could be used only after negotiations with property owners had failed and no price could be agreed upon. Moses had never negotiated; he had never bothered to mention a price to any representative of Pauchogue; he had never even spoken to any representative after Pauchogue had purchased the Taylor Estate. Moreover, the State Constitution forbade any state agency to buy, condemn or appropriate land unless it had enough money on hand to pay for it. Moses had appropriated the Taylor Estate on December 4, 1924. The referendum had been passed, but under its provisions the $15,000,000 was not available to acquire land until each specific acquisition had been approved by the Legislature, and the Legislature had, of course, given no such approvals. The Legislature hadn't even met since the referendum. Even if Moses contended that the $225,000 allocated to the Long Island Commission by the 1924 Legislature could be used for land acquisition—a contention of extremely doubtful legality—the Taylor Estate was worth more than $225,000. Moses himself had admitted that by offering $250,000 for it. And Moses didn't have even the $225,000 any more. Out of that sum, before the appropriation, he had spent $63,000 on "overhead expenses," not to mention the money he owed the owners of the land he had appropriated at Montauk and Lloyd Neck. The Taylor Estate appropriation, the attorneys said, was clearly illegal. They could surely demonstrate this to Governor Smith, they said, and before an appropriation could take effect, Smith had to sign the appropriation form.

  The Timber Pointers did not lack for means to bring their contentions to the Governor's attention. At their behest, visits were paid to his Biltmore Hotel apartment not only by prominent Republican leaders of the Legislature, friends of Smith from his legislative days, and not only by the single most powerful Republican in New York State—GOP national committeeman Charles D. Hillies—but also by Tammany's apple-cheeked ally, Democratic

  boss John McCooey of Brooklyn. One night, as the Governor relaxed at the Biltmore, there appeared before him, ushered in by a pair of Smith's dearest Tammany friends, W. Kingsland Macy himself, and Macy offered Smith, in this personal appeal, a list of an even dozen other Suffolk County estates closer to the city, beautiful in their own right—a dozen estates whose owners wanted to sell. And, he said, if the commission insisted on having an estate in East Islip, why couldn't it buy Willie Vanderbilt's "Idle Hour"? It was as large as the Taylor Estate, as heavily wooded, it had almost as much shore front on the bay—and Vanderbilt's heirs were trying to sell for $150,000, $100,000 less than the price offered for the Taylor Estate, which, he said, was actually worth much more than the price offered.

  It was obvious to his advisers that Smith was uncertain. The efficacy of parks as an issue had been proven again in his 1924 re-election campaign. Running against popular young Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., he had turned his campaign tours into appeals for passage of the park referendum. Although Republican presidential candidate Calvin Coolidge had carried New York State and the Democrats had lost control of the Legislature, Smith had run nearly a million votes ahead of his ticket and won re-election. And, noting that the referendum had carried by nearly a million votes, he felt that no small part of his victory was due to his identification with parks.

  Nonetheless, the question of the legality of Moses' appropriation still bothered him. The appropriation form to which Moses was asking him to affix his signature began with the words: "I, Alfred E. Smith, Governor of the State of New York, being satisfied that there is available a sum representing fair compensation for the land to be entered and appropriated, do hereby approve ..." How could he possibly be so satisfied? His advisers, listening to the Governor thinking out loud on the subject, believed he would probably not sign.

  After the election, the Governor scheduled a closed hearing on the appropriation. Havemeyer, Hollister and Macy were confident when they arrived at the Biltmore with their attorneys. Moses, arriving with McNulty and two other commission attorneys, was not.

  But the outcome of the hearing was not to hinge on legalities. Smith, anxious to learn for himself the basics of both sides' positions, conducted it informally, bantering, telling jokes, encouraging the principals as well as their attorneys to talk. And the Sultan of Sugar talked. Explaining why he didn't want a park in East Islip, Horace Havemeyer said he feared the town would be "overrun with rabble from the city."

  In later years, Smith's biographers, describing the hearing, pictured the Governor as laughing at the remark and saying, with a grin, "Rabble? Why, that's me."

  The words Smith actually used were similar, but there was no grin. When Havemeyer used the word "rabble," Smith looked up at him. The blue eyes were steel. The laughter in the room died away. "Rabble? That's me you're talking about." He reached out a hand and seized the appropriation form. Trying desperately to turn his remark into a joke, Havemeyer said quickly, "Why, where's a poor millionaire to go nowadays if he wants

  to be alone?" "Try the Harlem River Hospital," Smith said. The Harlem River Hospital was an insane asylum. As Havemeyer flushed, the Governor signed the form.

  The hearing was over, but the fight for the Taylor Estate was not. It would be waged without quarter in both regular and special sessions of the New York State Legislature, and in twenty-five separate appellate court proceedings. It would fill the front pages of newspapers across the state for two years, delay for almost that long all expenditures for any of the parks of which Robert Moses had dreamed, and bring to the brink of ruin not only those dreams but Moses' personal reputation and career. But before it was over, Moses would be hauled back from the brink by Al Smith, with a helping tug from Belle Moskowitz, and his reputation, seemingly certain to be tarnished by his actions, would be burnished instead so that he gleamed in the public consciousness with the aura he would bear for the next thirty years: the aura of a fearless, fiercely independent public servant who loved parks above all else and was willing to fight for parks against politicians, bureaucrats and the hated forces of wealth and influence.

  The Taylor Estate fight also transformed a quiet, conservative stockbroker and connoisseur of antiques into a major New York State political figure.

  The stockbroker was W. Kingsland Macy, a tall, slender former Harvard Crimson editor one year older than Moses, who invariably wore starched high round collars and dark-blue suits with vest, and often pince-nez. Not wealthy, but well off, Macy seemed, with his seat on the Exchange, his modest but well-tended East Islip estate and his love of antiques and old houses, the very model of the country gentleman, except that, unlike brother-in-law Havemeyer and the other members of the Timber Point Club, he was noticeably uninterested in making money. As one observer of his career was to write, "All the while he had a vague idea that he would like to enter politics, but he did not know how to go about it." And since he was an unsmiling man with the thin, tight-pressed lips of the ascetic, very reserved even with friends, it seemed unlikely that he would find out. But, as the observer was to write, "No man living excels Macy in the capacity for appreciating an outrage that has been perpetrated against his rights. He cherished and cultivated his wrongs as other men worship Old Masters." And now Macy felt that Moses had wronged him.

  The day after the hearing at the Biltmore, new fuel was heaped on Macy's outrage. His lawyers had notified Moses that an appeal was planned, and Moses' lawyers had agreed that the matter was still in abeyance—and that a hunting party of Deer Range stockholders could be held the next day as scheduled. But when the hunters' limousines pulled up to the property, barring their way were men in uniform carrying revolvers, state troopers who refused to allow them even to remove the hunting clothes they had previously left there and that had certainly not been included in any

  appropriation. The astounded millionaires saw other men in uniform—Conservation Department workers, they were told—rounding up the pheasants and mallards, also unappropriated, that they had raised and that they still own
ed and putting them in trucks to be hauled away. Within days, Macy was receiving reports that crews of state workmen had begun cutting down trees and tearing down buildings on the property.

  Havemeyer and Hollister were businessmen. Smith's action had cost them the opportunity for a large profit, but at least they could, through the Court of Claims, get their money back—with interest. They saw no point in throwing good money after bad by fighting the state. But Macy no longer viewed the situation strictly in business terms. "There is a question of importance . . . because of certain fundamental principles of this Government which are being ruthlessly overthrown by the Long Island Commission," he wrote his partners. "Moses never even tried to negotiate with us. He decided to seize first and negotiate afterward. There was no condemnation, no proceedings, no notice to us. They threw a cordon of state troopers around the property and now they say, 'Your remedy is to go to the Court of Claims for compensation.' " If Moses could do this to us, Macy said, he could do it to anyone. "No one's home is safe." The principles, he said, were too important to be surrendered without a fight. He tried to persuade Havemeyer and Hollister to invest in a legal fight to oust the commission from the property. Hollister refused. Havemeyer agreed to pay half of all legal expenses up to $25,000, but said he would not spend a cent beyond that.