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

by Caro, Robert A

  Bitterness roiled over Albany. In a voice "shaking with emotion," John Knight, usually so stolid, stood at his Senate desk and cried, "He [Smith] ought to sign this bill instead of dancing up and down like a spoiled child."

  "People on Long Island [are] afraid to go to bed for fear that when they wake up in the morning they would find their property seized by Robert Moses," another Republican senator shouted. Jumping out of his seat, a Democrat replied: "Is it not true that if they don't go to bed on Long Island it is because the bedsheets may be in use elsewhere?"—a reference to the Ku Klux Klan. And Jimmy Walker, his suavity gone for a moment, his cravat for once askew, shook his fist at the Republican senators and shouted, "These millionaires made their millions out of the poor despised kikes and wops of the tenements whom, through you, they are now seeking to shut out . . . from a day in the country."

  From the Governor's chambers, Smith thundered that "sealed orders" had been delivered to the GOP. The Westchester delegation had "welched," he said. Seabury Mastick had promised him support—he did not say what he had promised Mastick in exchange—but Mastick later had confessed to

  him that there had been brought to bear on him "too much pressure" for him to resist. Others quoted Mastick as saying that he had been told bluntly that if he supported Smith, "my career would end."

  The facts which confronted Smith and Moses after the special session were as bitter as the shouting: not a cent had been appropriated for park acquisition or development. The option on the two miles of beach front at Hampton Bays was lost, and the land was promptly bought by three developers, who divided it into lots and began to erect bungalows on them. The option on Sunken Meadow was lost, and while the land was not sold, its value had obviously been tripled or quadrupled by the publicity. Other property on Long Island that Moses had coveted was being swallowed up by real estate developments.

  More important—politically, at least—there was still no money to lacquer even a veneer of legality over the ugly surface of the Taylor Estate appropriation. An angry Justice Van Siclen had scheduled the Taylor Estate trial for September i—and had said that no further delays would be tolerated. On that date, Macy was at last going to get Moses on the witness stand, and Moses was going to have to admit that he still didn't have money available to pay Macy for the property he had taken from him. Smith and Moses might have reaped a windfall in the political arenas of Albany, but, they knew, that advantage would be lost when the act they were defending was flatly declared illegal.

  "Well," Smith said to Moses one afternoon when the two men and Mrs. Moskowitz were alone in the Biltmore apartment, "can't you get someone to give you the money to make the thing stick?" Who? Moses said. The kind of money they were talking about was too much for his own family even to consider; real wealth was required, and people with real wealth were the people who were angriest at him. No, he said, he didn't know anybody. And they couldn't take a chance on a turndown; if they asked someone who refused, and then spread the story that they were desperate for funds to legalize the seizure, the Republicans would make capital of it—and so would Macy's lawyers. They could make only one phone call—and they couldn't make a mistake in deciding whom it would go to.

  The two men turned to Mrs. Moskowitz, who had been sitting quietly in the corner, her head bent over her knitting. "August Heckscher," she said.

  Smith was doubtful. He knew that Heckscher, a seventy-six-year-old multimillionaire philanthropist, was a recreation enthusiast who had already donated a playground to New York City. But a playground cost a few thousand dollars; what was required here was a quarter of a million. And Heckscher was an elf of a man—so short that when he sat on a chair his shoes dangled several inches above the floor—with a snow-white goatee, a snow-white fringe of hair around his bald pate, spectacles and a perpetual serene little smile. He would know that he would probably become involved in the lawsuit if he gave the money, and he hardly seemed the type of man who would voluntarily enter so savage a fight. But Mrs. Moskowitz, who

  had worked with Heckscher on various charities, thought he would, and she telephoned him. He agreed immediately. If it was true—as Moses' opponents were to charge—that the little millionaire demanded in return that the park be named after him, Moses must have considered this a cheap price to pay for the opportunity to be able to say in court that he had money to pay for what he had taken.*

  Even with Heckscher's contribution, the court fight did not go well. Commenting that "it would be a pretty state of affairs if a state commission could go about seizing land with gifts provided by private individuals," Macy's attorney, Charles H. Tuttle, later a Republican candidate for Governor, said that if Moses used the money to reappropriate the land, he would be confessing that the first appropriation had been illegal—and Macy and his partners would be entitled to damages for that first appropriation. And the second appropriation would be as illegal as the first because, he said, state law required that the money for a land appropriation come from legislative segregation, not from some other source. Moses apparently feared Tuttle was right. Smith tried privately to persuade Macy to accept Heckscher's $250,000 —plus another $12,000 the millionaire had donated to take care of accrued interest—for the first appropriation and drop the fight. Even when Macy indignantly refused, Moses apparently tried to avoid reappropriation: when the formal examination before trial began, the step had not yet been taken.

  At times, Moses seemed almost desperate to avoid being put under oath. On the day he was scheduled to be examined, he didn't show up in court. Tuttle asked Justice Selah B. Strong to cite him for contempt, but Strong accepted a commission attorney's explanation that Moses had believed that arrangements had been made for him to be examined at his office.

  And when Moses, ordered to appear, finally took the stand, he did not make an impressive witness. Testifying under oath, he swore that he had never been advised by anyone that the Taylor Estate appropriation would be illegal unless the Legislature segregated money for it. Had he not been advised precisely that several times, Tuttle demanded—orally and in a written memorandum—by Deputy State Attorney General Irving I. Goldsmith? No, Moses said. Tuttle thereupon produced the Goldsmith memorandum and waved it in front of Moses as he sat on the witness chair. Before the start of the actual trial, Moses, apparently forced into the act, took the step of reappropriation, and his attorneys began a new series of delaying actions in an attempt to stall the proceedings until January, when there would convene in Albany a new Legislature that just conceivably might give him the appropriation he needed. Assailing the commission's "dilatory tactics," Norman S. Dike, the latest in the relay of judges sitting on the case, said the trial would begin October 18 without fail. On October 18, he called the case—and Moses was not present. "1 especially asked Mr. Moses to be here at the opening of

  * Heckscher was the grandfather of the August Heckscher who was New York City Park Commissioner during the Lindsay administration.

  this trial, and he might have had the courtesy to grant the court's request," Dike said from the bench. "It seems as if his absence, unaccounted for, shows a studied effort to affront the court." Tuttle asked that he be punished for contempt, but Dike accepted a commission attorney's explanation that he had advised Moses it would not be necessary for him to appear. The attorney then moved for a jury trial—and when Dike granted the motion, the start of the trial was delayed until December 6. On December 7, the commission attorneys filed more than six hundred pages of briefs asking for dismissal of the case— but Dike peremptorily denied the motion, and there was a note in his decision that the commission could only have considered ominous. As the Times reported: "In his decision yesterday [the] judge . . . ruled that the Commission had not had appropriated at the time the Taylor Estate was seized, the funds necessary."

  There were ominous developments on another front, too. Jones Beach was owned by the townships of Hempstead, Oyster Bay and Babylon, and while the Long Island State Park Commission could buy, condemn or appr
opriate land owned by private individuals, state law provided that property owned by a township could be transferred to other ownership only by a vote of the township's residents.

  Moses had decided to try Babylon, where he spent his summers, first. On July 18, 1924, he had appeared in the red-brick Babylon Town Hall and asked the Town Board to hold a referendum.

  The five board members just stared at him. They had been elected, placed in their seats at the board table, by the votes of the baymen, and they knew that one way to make sure they would not be re-elected would be to demonstrate anything less than complete vigilance over the priceless heritage of the sacred bay bottoms. The Babylon Leader reminded them that "Babylon wants this land which has been hers ... for nearly a century and a half before the State came into existence to keep as a heritage for its children. . . . Keep it—it is a park at present—a natural park swept by breezes from the bay and ocean. Enjoy it as it is or improve it. But keep it— never surrender one inch." Let the commission spend its money elsewhere, its editorials advised Moses, "before it . . . attempts to snatch property that the residents of the Town of Babylon intend to keep for their children's children until the end of time." Within two months after Moses' request for a referendum, not only the Babylon Town Board but the governing board of every village on the South Shore of Suffolk County—as well as the villages' chambers of commerce, boards of trade and civic associations—were lined up against the proposal, and Judge James B. Cooper, editor and owner of the Leader, could proclaim with satisfaction that "the project at present has as much chance of carrying as a Great South Bay clam has of growing teeth." When Moses turned to Oyster Bay, furious Oyster Bay citizens formed a "Save Our Beaches" committee that within days had a membership of thousands. In desperation, Moses turned to Hempstead, although he knew that votes in Hempstead Town, as, indeed, in all of Nassau County, went which-

  ever way the county's iron-fisted Republican boss, G. Wilbur Doughty, wanted, and he had been unable to convince Doughty to want Jones Beach development. Doughty allowed the proposition to be placed on the ballot in the November 1925 election, and the vote was 12,106 to 4,200 against it. Forty years later, Robert Moses would remember how he had felt in 1925 when he heard the Hempstead referendum results. "It looked like we'd lost Jones Beach," he would recall. "It looked absolutely hopeless." More than with any other single project, his dreams had been tied up with Jones Beach. And so had his sense of urgency. He had been hearing with increasing frequency rumors that real estate developers were making deals with Doughty's machine to have the town turn over the land to them for private development. In his mind's eye, he could see those vast stretches of untouched sand covered with shabby bungalows. He knew there would never be another opportunity to create a great beach so close to New York City. "You know," he would recall, "if we lost Deer Range, it would have been bad, but it wouldn't have been the end of the world. But if we had lost Jones Beach ..." His voice would trail off. And then, remembering, he would say, "And I thought we had lost it."

  At the end of 1925, Robert Moses might well have thought he had lost his entire Long Island dream.

  The fact that development of Jones Beach could not be begun without approving votes from three townships—and that the one township that had voted had disapproved by a three-to-one margin—was only part of the story.

  Not only the options for beautiful Sunken Meadow and for the beach at Hampton Bays but those for the Southern State Parkway right-of-way for which he had drunk beer with farmers had lapsed for lack of money to honor them.

  His negotiations with the North Shore barons for right-of-way for the Northern State Parkway had dragged to a complete halt. He had secured easements from New York City for its watershed properties, but he had no money to develop those properties as parks, and there was no money in sight to enable him to do so. There was no money in sight to develop any park on Long Island. The Legislature had refused to appropriate any in 1925, and there was no reason to believe that the Long Island barons would be any less secure in their control of the Legislature in 1926.

  Al Smith's loyalty and August Heckscher's money had pulled him back from the edge of the precipice along which he had been tightrope-walking in the Taylor Estate affair, but he was shortly—all too shortly—to stand trial in the affair, and the outcome of the trial might well result in the loss to the state of that property, too. And even if Heckscher's gift let the state keep the Taylor Estate, there was no money in sight to legitimatize the appropriations at Montauk Point and Lloyd Neck.

  The only concrete result of all the talk about parkways on Long Island had been an increase in the rate at which real estate promoters were littering the Island with their rows of houses. Every week that winter brought the

  announcement of another large tract of farmland bought by a developer who was planning to erect model homes on it in the spring.

  It had been more than a year since Robert Moses had announced his revised and broadened park and parkway plan, a plan which had, after all, included parks and parkways not only on Long Island but throughout the rest of New York State, along the Niagara Frontier, in the Genesee Valley, in the farmland of the Taconic region, and among the peaks of the Alleghenies, Catskills and Adirondacks. Now, more than a year later, parks and parkways were still located nowhere but in the map of Moses' imagination. After all the talking, all the planning, all the fighting, they simply didn't exist. And at the end of 1925, there seemed little possibility that they would come into existence at any time in the foreseeable future. If one looked ahead a decade, even a generation, it seemed unlikely that any substantial part of the dream would be reality.

  Within three years, almost all of it would be reality.

  the houses, subcontractors and material-supply houses for the factories. This meant a burgeoning in land sales, insurance premiums, legal fees—in all the areas in which politicians grow fat. It meant as well an intangible, but intense, additional attraction for politicians: in a dormant area, opportunities were limited because everything was cut and dried, prices for land, for instance, being well known and firmly established; in an area opened by a road, everything was changing almost on a day-to-day basis; opportunities were wide open.

  To take advantage of the financial opportunities provided by a parkway, a politician had to have foreknowledge. If he wanted to be first on line with his recommendations for construction contract awards, he had to know that the highway was going to be built. If he wanted to buy land that was to be acquired for the highway's right-of-way or land strategically near the highway, he had to know where the highway was going to be built, not its general location but its precise route, so that he could buy the exact lots that would be acquired, and he had to know before the owners knew so that, not knowing that their land might be valuable, they would sell cheap. And politicians had a weapon they could use in obtaining such advance information; if they did not get it, they would not approve the building of the highway.

  The young Robert Moses, the idealist of Yale and Oxford and the Municipal Civil Service Commission, would not have even considered trading contracts or information for approval. Even the older Robert Moses of the New York State Association, a Moses more admiring of the ways of politicians, would not have done it; that Moses could in 1922 still reserve his bitterest State Bulletin sallies for the Nassau County Republican machine because of its link with "political contractors." Even the Moses of 1924, doffing his principles to lighten himself for the pursuit of his greatest dream, wouldn't do it. No sooner had he announced his park plan in 1924 than intimates of the Governor wrote him asking for advance information on parkway location; Moses indignantly refused to give it to them. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles J. Hewitt offered to sell the State Parks Council a tract of land he owned in Fair Haven; despite Hewitt's importance to his dream, Moses refused to buy.

  Moses apparently took the same attitude in his 1925 attempt to persuade Hempstead Township to cede him its portion of Jones Beach. Hempstead was con
trolled by Nassau County GOP leader G. Wilbur Doughty. "Today they talk about political bosses," Leonard W. Hall, former national chairman of the Republican Party, would say in the 1960's. "They don't know what a real boss was. Doughty was a real boss. When he spoke, the discussion was over. He always kept his word; he was known for that. But cross him and you were finished. There's no one like him today. We used to call him the Last of the Mohicans." A square-faced man with a walrus mustache, Doughty had an almost visionary concept that rural Long Island would one day be a heavily populated suburban area and was always interested in suggestions for public works that could help open the Island to development. But his vision was heavily mortgaged to practicality: he ran

  one of the most corrupt political machines in the state—"In Nassau County," one observer said, "zoning was bought and sold like potatoes"—and much of the corruption revolved around public works. Doughty's brother-in-law, "Uncle Andy" Weston, was president of Booth & Weston, the largest contracting firm in the county, and Booth & Weston, along with Hendrickson Bros., Inc., another firm with which Doughty had close ties, were habitually given the lion's share of county contracts. And since many GOP county committeemen happened to be on the payroll of the two construction firms, the firms helped Doughty keep them in line. The link between Nassau politicians and contractors had come close to surfacing in 1922; in that year, a Supreme Court Justice had impaneled a grand jury to investigate it and the investigation had already turned up a loan from Booth & Weston to Assemblyman Thomas A. McWhinney before McWhinney persuaded the Legislature to pass a bill establishing a commission to investigate the judge, a move that effectively stymied the grand jury. Moses had followed the case closely in his State Bulletin; calling the bill "legislative brigandry," he had nominated it for his "Worst Bill of the Session" award and had castigated the Nassau GOP machine and McWhinney, whom he termed "the creature of the machine." Moses must have known what it took to get things done in Nassau County, but he apparently wasn't willing to do them; the best proof of that was, perhaps, the defeat of his Jones Beach referendum.