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

by Caro, Robert A

  The conflict came to a head over Jones Beach. In 1926, public bathing beaches in America fell into one of two classifications: ill-equipped huddles of shabby, unpainted wooden bathhouses that contained nothing but toilets, showers and lockers; or "boardwalk beaches" such as Coney Island and Atlantic City, which had surrendered the beauty of their seascapes to roller coasters, weight-guessing games, blaring funhouses, bawling barkers and other carnival concessions. But Robert Moses wasn't thinking of unpainted wood or carnivals.

  One day, he invited to Jones Beach Gilmore Clarke, landscape architect of the Bronx River Parkway, Harvey W. Corbett, the architect responsible for the design of some of the Long Island barons' most beautiful manor houses, several other famous architects, landscape architects and engineers, and a handful of young commission staffers with whose work he had been impressed. As the little group of men stood on the vast, empty expanse of sand, Moses began pointing

  One bathhouse would be over there, he said, and the other over there. But then they would be almost a mile apart, the men with him pointed out. Yes, he said, and they should understand at once that he wasn't talking

  about ordinary bathhouses. These were going to contain ten thousand lockers apiece. In addition to bathrooms and shower rooms, they were going to contain wading pools, diving pools and swimming pools, and the swimming pools were going to be large enough to accommodate hundreds of bathers at a time. There were going to be canopied terraces above the pools so people could sit in the shade and watch the swimmers, and there were going to be other terraces on which people could dine at tables set beneath gaily colored umbrellas. The bathhouses were going to contain solaria. They were going to contain restaurants in every price range. Although they were at a bathing beach, they were going to be constructed not of wood but of stone and brick, and the stone and brick were going to be of the finest quality. They were going to be surrounded by landscaped lawns, hedges and flower beds. And he wanted the bathhouses designed with as much care as the finest public buildings in America. With this difference: most public buildings in America were too heavy and stodgy, designed only to impress and awe. The bathhouses would have to be quite large, of course, but they were buildings for people to have a good time in; the architecture must encourage people to have fun. It must be airy and light, gay and pleasant. There must be a thousand little touches to make people feel happy and relaxed. And he didn't want the bathhouses to spoil the panorama. Let them be designed to complement it, not dominate it. The panorama was long, low lines of sand and dunes and the sweep of the ocean. Let the lines of the bathhouses be long, low and sweeping, he said, horizontal rather than vertical. One other thing, he said. The bathhouses were going to have at least one innovation never included in any public or private building in America: diaper-changing rooms. He had designed them himself, he said. They would be divided into cubicles and each cubicle would contain only a diaper-disposal basket, a washbasin, a mirror and a shelf for a mother to lay her baby on. And the shelf shouldn't be table-height, he said. He had watched mothers changing diapers and higher shelves would make it easier.

  Frances Perkins would have smiled.

  Yanking an envelope from his pocket, Moses began to sketch on its back: Two X's to represent the bathhouses, lines to show how they would be connected on the beach side by a wide boardwalk, on the bay side by an "Ocean Parkway." Midway between the two X's, where the causeway from the mainland would join the parkway, he drew a large circle between two squares. The causeway would end in a circle, he said. People who didn't want to use the bathhouses could drive around it and into the squares, parking lots each large enough to hold ten thousand cars, and then walk with their families to the beach through underpasses under the parkway, or they could drive around the circle, stop on the beach side, drop their families off first, and then park in the lots and walk back to the beach to join them. Or, if they didn't want to go to the beach at all, they could simply keep driving on the parkway east or west. The families that got out at the circle would walk to the beach along a broad mall that ended at the boardwalk, and along the boardwalk would be open-air cafes serving inexpensive meals and a restaurant with cuisine, atmosphere and service equal to the finest

  in America. And stretching off to either side would be outdoor games: pitch-and-putt golf, table and paddle tennis, shuffleboard, roller-skating rinks, baseball fields set in little stadia. For the evenings, there would be bandstands and dancing under the stars. He sketched in restaurants, parking lots, playing fields and bandstands until there was no more room on the envelope.

  One of the famous architects standing around Moses said, "Are you crazy?" The others knew what the architect meant. As one was later to put it: "It was the scale of the thing—nothing on a scale like this had ever been done in public recreation in America. Here we were on an absolutely deserted sand bar—there was no way even to get there but by boat—and here was this guy drawing X's on the back of an envelope and talking about bathhouses like palaces and parking lots that held ten thousand cars. Why, I don't think there was a parking lot for ten thousand cars anywhere in America. And landscaping? Landscaping on a sand bar? We weren't even sure anything would grow on a sand bar. We thought he was nuts."

  The men gathered around Moses included some of the biggest names in American architecture, but they didn't think big enough for him. When they began drawing up tentative plans, the plans naturally included a water tower; fresh water had to be provided in great quantities in any large park, of course. But their water towers were conventional water towers: aluminum storage tanks set on four spindly uprights, they were exactly like the ones that, in other parks, were invariably the unsightliest feature of the landscape. Moses determined to turn the potentially ugliest part of the park he had planned into its most beautiful. He already knew that he wanted a focal point for the beach, a beautiful centerpiece big enough to be seen from miles away, that would be a symbol of Jones Beach, something that visitors could identify with—he was, after all, the son of the woman who had ordered the huge "Camp Madison" banner—and it might as well be the water tower. But he had a hard time getting the architects to think in his terms. "I was very anxious to have this water tower mean something architecturally," he recalls. "I got the top people out there and I asked them about it. The first suggestion came from our chief engineer and I said, 'That's the goddamnedest stupid thing I've ever heard.' And then someone suggested a lighthouse, and I said, 'No, goddammit, we're not going to have any lighthouse.' We already had a lighthouse, for God's sake." (He was referring to the Fire Island lighthouse, which was visible from the eastern end of Jones Beach.) On the next trip to the beach, Harvey Corbett suggested that the water tower be designed as an Italian campanile, or church bell tower. There were many different types, Corbett said, and started to reel them off. As he was reeling, he mentioned the one in Venice. Venice! "I like the one in Venice best," Moses said. According to one of the men there, "he pulled out another one of his envelopes and sketched the campanile in Venice right there—and that's how the water tower was done. And that's the way 'most everything was done. He had the architects and engineers there, but he was the architect and the engineer of Jones Beach. He's more responsible for the design of Jones Beach than any architect or engineer or all of us put together."

  Finding the bathhouse designs submitted by the famous architects unimaginative, Moses selected those of an unknown young commission staffer, Herbert Magoon. Magoon had designed two vast pleasure palaces to sit upon the sand. One was a long, low, sweeping expanse of brick and stone and green-tinted glass. Its central portion—a terrace raised just five feet above the beach; behind the terrace, wide expanses of green-tinted glass separated by thin vertical stone columns that held another, set-back terrace surmounted by canopies, and behind that terrace a wall topped with flags— was set off from two wings of glass and brickwork by two simple, square, flat-topped medieval turrets. It was simple, almost austere, from a distance, but Magoon's detail drawings showed Moses that the tu
rrets and walls had been cunningly worked with a thousand little devices of stone and brick. The other bathhouse was, if also of stone and brick, much gayer—Middle Eastern, in fact, almost Moorish. If the first bathhouse, despite its lack of height, resembled a medieval castle like those from which knights rode forth to join the Crusades, the second looked like one of the castles the knights saw when they reached the Holy Land. Each of its two towers, which seemed, at sixty feet, very tall against the dunes, was topped, in fact, with a green turret that swirled upward into a little spear point as did the helmets of the sultan's warriors the knights might have had to fight. Moses was ecstatic over the designs. He loved them, he said. But, the morning after he first saw them, he called in Magoon with endless lists of small changes he wanted to make.

  Moses decided himself how he wanted the bathhouses faced. He was determined that the stone and brick of the facades would blend in perfectly with the beach on which they stood. One of the samples brought to him was obviously the perfect type of stone: Ohio sandstone was gray with just enough tinges of tan and blue to catch the colors of sand and sea. Selecting the brick was harder. Nothing seemed exactly right. Then, one day, passing the Barbizon Hotel on East Sixty-third Street, he noticed that it was faced with a random pattern of beige, brown and brownish-red that would catch the color of the sand and complement it. He decided that, to give the Jones Beach development unity, every structure of any size built there would be faced with Ohio sandstone and Barbizon brick.

  The architects hastened to explain to him that Ohio sandstone and Barbizon brick were simply not used on public buildings. They were among the most expensive of all facing materials. Why, by using them on structures as large and elaborate as those he had in mind, each bathhouse would cost alone what Moses had originally said would be the cost of the entire Long Island park system: a million dollars.

  Ohio sandstone and Barbizon brick it was going to be, Moses replied.

  Hutchinson and Hewitt were "guys from the backwoods," recalls one who knew them. "When you said 'water tower' to them, that meant a tank on four skinny poles. A bathhouse was a little wooden thing you put up for fifty or a hundred bucks so the boys couldn't watch the girls undressing.

  And here Moses comes along and tells them he wants to spend a million dollars on one." They flatly refused to give him anything like it. Only after Smith had pleaded with them for hours did they consent to appropriate a total of $150,000—for the water tower and both bathhouses.

  Moses' architects expected him to tell them to scale down their plans.

  "You just go right on the way you were doing," Moses told them. "You forget all about what the appropriation is. I'm never going to put up just a tank on poles."

  He had already told Smith his plan. "I told him, 'We'll put all the money into the foundation for one bathhouse and then, when it gives out, we'll just go back and tell them they'll have to give us more or leave the foundation just sitting there with no building on top of it.' The Governor thought it was kind of a good joke."

  The foundation laid, Moses invited Hewitt and Hutchinson down to see what he had done. To make matters stickier, blowing sand had completely buried the foundation the night before they arrived, and there was not a trace of it visible. All that existed, as far as the two legislators could see, was a god-forsaken sand bar that could be of no possible use to anyone—and the knowledge that, somewhere on it, on their authorization, had been spent $150,000 of the taxpayers' money.

  They raged. They demanded that Smith fire Moses. In Moses' words, "They went to the Governor and said, 'Get rid of that son of a bitch and we'll go along with something reasonable.' "

  But, in Moses' words, "The Governor never backed away from me." So Hutchinson and Hewitt said they would see that Moses was impeached. And they guaranteed the Governor that every appropriation for every park in the state would be cut off until this mess was cleaned up.

  But Moses had applied his lessons well. When his antagonists began to think about the situation, they realized they were trapped. What, exactly, for all their power, could they do? Charge that he had misled them—thereby admitting that they hadn't investigated the project thoroughly enough in advance? Deny him further funds—thereby insuring that the $150,000 already spent would be utterly wasted?

  And wasn't the overriding issue the same one—Parks vs. No Parks— with which Smith had destroyed them in 1925? Did they want to make him a hero again?

  There was, really, very little they could do. Trying to salvage some revenge, they refused, in making the 1927 budget appropriations, to give Moses any money at all for the second bathhouse, for which the foundation had not been laid, and they saw to it that the additional funds they gave him for other Long Island park projects were far less than he wanted even to complete the buildings already begun. But such satisfactions were small ones. They knew that the difference needed to complete the projects to Moses' specifications could easily be made up by Smith out of the appropriations to other state departments.

  troop assigned to the commission, recalls, "If he wanted a job done, he wanted it done. Period. And he wouldn't take any alibis if it wasn't done; he didn't want alibis, he used to say."

  Moses knew exactly what he wanted each of his men to do, and he was impatient when they had difficulty grasping that fact. William H. Latham, a young engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was also assigned to observe and report on meetings of the Nassau County Board of Supervisors. "I came back from the first meeting and in giving him my report, I generalized," Latham recalls. "He corrected me, but I guess I didn't get it, and the second time, I started to generalize again. Well, he didn't let me get very far. His palm came down on that table of Belmont's and he jumped up and he paced around that table and he told me he wanted facts, no assumptions. All he wanted from me was what had happened at that meeting. He'd draw his own conclusions. And he let me know right there and then that if I couldn't do it that way, he'd have to find another engineer."

  And, Latham adds, Moses wasn't "really angry" at him on that occasion. Latham, an athlete and outdoorsman, is a tall, rangy man with huge shoulders and an easy, friendly grin. But the grin fades when he says, "I won't talk about what he's like when he's really angry."

  Another technique was the silent treatment. "All of a sudden," a staffer recalls, "you just wouldn't be called in to sit at the conferences any more. He wouldn't talk to you if he passed you in the hall. And then, one day, you'd just be gone."

  The men who stayed didn't resent Moses' methods. "If he drove other men hard," says Junkamen, "he drove himself harder."

  He was supervising a dozen nonpark projects for Smith, of course, and he was constantly commuting to Albany, a four-hour train trip away. During legislative sessions, he tried to make his trips on Mondays because the Legislature convened each week on Monday evening and it was then that GOP strategy became apparent—and the Governor liked to have his advisers gathered in the Executive Chamber ready to counter it. So that he could get in a full day's work in Albany before the Executive Chamber session, Moses left his New York apartment at 6 a.m. to catch the early train to the capital and avoid a car trip made tortuous by the lack of a through road. When the session broke up, usually well after the last train back had left at midnight, Moses would ask Smith for the use of a state car and chauffeur. He had a lot of work to do back on Long Island, he'd say. If he drove back at once, he'd be able to start in the morning.

  Albany wasn't the only duty that pulled Moses from Long Island. To supervise the State Council of Parks, he had to spend at least part of three days a week in New York City. To inspect the regional commissions' upstate projects, he was constantly being driven to or from Watkins Glen or Chittenango Falls or Letchworth Gorge.

  But when his car pulled up in front of the Belmont Mansion, Moses never seemed tired. Charging into Arthur Howland's office, he would slam the door behind him and listen to the chief engineer's problems. Then, one

  by one, he would call in the other
top commission officials and, behind the closed door, listen to theirs. Then the door would fly open and he would charge out into the dining room and sit down at the huge table and begin solving the problems. Junkamen recalls: "He might have been working in New York and not arrive out at Belmont until three o'clock in the afternoon, but then he would work from three until ten o'clock or midnight. Another day, I might get there at nine o'clock in the morning and he'd already be there working at the big table. Then I'd go out on some errand and wouldn't get back until supper time, and he'd still be sitting there. And he'd still be sitting there at midnight." Saturdays were no different. "Hours didn't mean anything to him," Latham says. "Days of the week didn't mean anything to him. You worked when there was work to be done, that was all." And there was always work to be done. Since none of the staffers dared leave the mansion until Moses left, they longed for him to get a telephone call from Mary, which usually got him away from the big table and back to his house in Babylon. "Sometimes," Junkamen recalls, "Ray McNulty would slip out and call her and put her up to calling." One Saturday night, repeated telephone calls from Mary failed to bring Bob home, and at ten o'clock she snowed up at the mansion. Striding into the conference room, she "just took him by the ear in a very nice but firm way" and pulled him to his feet, Junkamen recalls. "He just laughed and went along—and then we could all go home."

  Going home did not, however, necessarily mean a cessation of work for Moses. Giving Howland a key to his Babylon house on Thompson Avenue, he told the chief engineer to stop by every morning on his way to the mansion. Almost invariably, when Howland arrived at about 7:30 a.m., there would be waiting for him on the flat-topped bottom post of the banister a large manila envelope crammed with notes, memos and handwritten letters ready to be typed and mailed, an envelopeful of testimony to what Moses had been doing during the night while his men slept. He tried to keep Sundays free for his family, teaching Jane and Barbara to swim or sail, taking them for picnics, telling them stories. But often the girls would notice that their father had disappeared. When that happened, they knew he was out on the big screened porch on the side of the house, scribbling furiously on a yellow legal pad. And most of the family picnics were held in one of his parks. "Hell," one of the men working under him remembers, "any Sunday at all you could expect to look around and see the boss and his wife and kids and he'd be making notes as he walked along if he saw something he didn't like. So you figured if he was working, why shouldn't you be?"