There were other reasons, too, why the men who stayed didn't resent the driving.
"It was exciting working for Moses," one of the commission staffers recalls. "He made you feel you were a part of something big. It was almost like a war. It was you fighting for the people against those rich estate owners and those reactionary legislators. And it was exciting just being around him. He was dynamic, a big guy with a booming laugh. He dominated that scene in the mansion. He would sit there with people running back and forth around him and he would be banging his hand down on that big table and
giving orders—and when he gave orders, things happened! Howland would go hurrying out of the room and twenty-five draftsmen would hurry to their tables and start drawing or surveyors would jump into their cars and head out on the road."
And, men recalled, incongruous as it might seem to use the word "fun" in connection with unremitting work, it was, nevertheless, fun to work for Bob Moses. "There was a very informal atmosphere in the mansion," one engineer says. "Everyone worked in their shirt sleeves—my recollection of Moses is of him sitting with his tie pulled down and over to one side, sleeves rolled up—and there was always a lot of joking going on." And the joking, the engineer says, went both ways. "You weren't afraid to kid him."
He turned the commission staff into a big family. If he couldn't get home to his wife and children as much as he would have liked, he brought them to his work. Commission staffers became accustomed to seeing Barbara and Jane playing on the playground equipment that Moses had brought from all over the United States and set up on the mansion's lawn so that he could test it. Jane was much more adventurous than her quiet, shy, dark-haired sister, who eyed the equipment with distrust, and the staffers laughed to watch the little blonde tomboy scramble around on the top bars of the jungle gyms and swing higher and higher on the swings. Mary was always around. She was the hostess at the little luncheons that Moses would have catered at the mansion if a politician or key landowner was visiting. She was a pleasant, easy friend to the young men working for her husband and a confidante, a sympathetic shoulder for their wives to cry on, who remember her with real affection. Moses was always consulting her; says Mrs. Harold Morse, a friend, "Bob used to say that the only decisions he made that were mistakes were the decisions he had neglected to talk over with Mary first."
He and Mary organized outings and insisted that Howland, Latham, Shapiro, McNulty and Junkamen—and Tom McWhinney, with whom Moses was getting along famously—bring their wives and children along. The outings were very informal—fishing trips on the commission motor launch Apache or clambakes—and they were fun. Recalls McWhinney's daughter, Dolie, twenty-eight at the time: "We used to go over to Fire Island for the whole weekend. There was an old frame building at the Coast Guard station there, and we'd sleep in it on cots, all the men in one room and the women and kids in another. There weren't any stores on Fire Island, so we'd bring most of our food along and go trolling from the Apache or clamming for the rest." While the women were cleaning the catch, the men would dig a great hole in the sand, cover its bottom with logs and light them for the clambake. There would be bonfires on the beach at night, and singing.
Moses set the tone. His clothes were a constant source of merriment. His pants were khakis faded white or corduroys only some of whose holes had been patched. Possibly because his hairline was beginning to recede, he wore, no matter what the weather, a hat—the same hat. "Robert!" Mary would say. "Take off that hat!" Everyone would laugh. "It was one of those fedoras with a big brim and it was completely shapeless and all stained," Dolie McWhinney recalls. "It was the funniest hat you ever saw. And Bob
would never take it off except when he went swimming." He helped arrange the logs for the clambake, helped clean up afterward, helped with the children. Because Charlie Smisek, the Apache's skipper, would be away from home all weekend, Moses insisted that Charlie's wife, Mae, come along, and he went out of his way to make the Smiseks feel at home. "There was no side to Bob Moses at all then," an acquaintance says. The only thing that set him apart was his swimming: hurling himself through the first of the big Atlantic rollers, he would appear on the far side of its tumult swimming and head straight out into the Atlantic, far beyond where even outdoorsman Latham would dare to go.
Of all the reasons why Moses' men didn't resent his driving, the one most frequently mentioned in their reminiscences is that he brought out the best in them. One of Junkamen's duties was to work with Long Island villages on zoning restrictions on the land adjoining the Southern State Parkway. "Mr. Moses wanted five hundred feet on either side of the parkway zoned in the highest residential classifications," Junkamen recalls. "And he didn't want any water tanks or other unsightly structures near them, either. Zoning was a relatively new thing. Hardly a village on Long Island had a zoning ordinance. I had to draw up a lot of what we wanted myself. Then Mr. Moses would have to speak to officials in the municipality and get them to draft over-all zoning ordinances in which our stuff could be incorporated. I'd have to work with the local counsel every step of the way. And then, after the ordinances were adopted, I'd have to work with the local zoning board when people tried to break the restrictions. And I found that at every step of the way, Mr. Moses had ideas that started me thinking along whole new lines."
Constantly, Moses was encouraging his architects and engineers to use their imagination, to make their designs different from and better than any similar designs done before. When the men designing a drawbridge for the Jones Beach causeway submitted their first design, he said, "I know you can do drawbridges. Can you do beautiful drawbridges?" In their second design, the bridge operators' quarters were no longer the standard ugly shacks but turrets faced with stone worked with the silhouettes of sailing ships. Gilmore Clarke thought he had surpassed himself in the design of bridges for the Bronx River Parkway. But he found Moses had some new standards. He wanted variety, Moses told him. Not only were the bridges to be designed to harmonize with the landscape and not only were they to be stone-faced, but every bridge on every parkway on Long Island—all one hundred of them— was going to be different from every other bridge.
Engineers assigned to design guard rails and light poles for the parkways expended tremendous effort making the standard iron poles graceful. But iron wouldn't blend in with a rustic setting, Moses said. Guard rails and light poles would have to be made of wood. But it had been proven that no form of wooden guard rails would resist the impact of a speeding car, the engineers said. Moses sent them back to ponder the problem again, and this time one thought of drilling holes in wooden rails and inserting strong steel cable—and now all the rails on all the parkways could be wood.
As always, it was on Jones Beach that Moses' imagination focused. He thought himself of many little touches to make people feel happy and relaxed there. The dunes, he said one day, were a natural protective wall for an archery range, so archery should be included as one of the sports offered at the beach. And why just have ordinary targets? he said. Why not let kids shooting arrows feel they were really in the Middle Ages, when archers stormed castles? Let some of the targets be cutouts in the shape of enemy bowmen crouching behind castle turrets. Why just have signs directing people to various activities? he asked. Why not decorate the signs with ironwork showing the activities—and showing them in humorous fashion? One day, a designer rather hesitantly showed him a design for the directional signs to the men's rooms. The design was the silhouette of a man, obviously in a desperate hurry, rushing to a bathroom so fast that the little boy he was dragging behind had his feet pulled off the ground. It was, of course, a little daring, the designer began. Daring! Moses said. He wanted his designers to be daring. This was a great design, he said. It would be used.
"Mr. Moses was no lawyer, but he had a great knowledge and grasp of the law," Junkamen would say. "He was not an engineer, but he had a great knowledge of engineering. He knew politics, he knew statesmanship— he was an altogether brilliant man. If you were work
ing with him, you just had to learn from him—if only through osmosis." One of the commission's engineers rhapsodizes: "I don't think there was a man who came into daily contact with him who wasn't inspired to do better work than he had thought he was capable of doing."
If the political difficulties involved in creating a park on Jones Beach were enormous, the physical difficulties were of a size to match. Building on a barrier beach proved to be a very different proposition from building on the mainland. Commission engineers found themselves faced with a succession of problems engineers never encountered on mainland jobs. Cleveland Rodgers, Moses' first biographer, was to write that sometimes it seemed as if Nature herself had "joined forces with the skeptics and obstructionists who had fought Moses all the way from Albany to the beach." But Moses refused to let Nature stand in his way.
None of Moses' engineers had expected work on the barrier beach to continue in winter because drifting ice packs that kept boats off the Great South Bay for days at a time could maroon anyone caught on the strand. But with Smith's time as Governor running out, winters could not be wasted. Moses told the engineers taking surveys for the causeway to cache emergency supplies of food in a shack on the beach and keep working. Even on mornings when wind was whipping the bay into waves and ice was coating the piers, Sid Shapiro led his hip-booted surveyors into boats for the trip across.
One day, while they were on the strand, ice packs closed the bay. It stayed closed for ten days. All the cached food ran out except pancake batter, and the surveyors lived on pancakes. For the rest of his life, Sid Shapiro would never be able to stomach another pancake. But when the ice
cleared and the surveyors returned to Babylon, Shapiro could tell Moses, who was standing on the dock waiting for a report, that ten days' more work had been completed.
The completed surveys contained the worst of news. The mean level of the existing barrier beach, Moses was told, was only two feet above mean sea level. During storms, the ocean rose six, seven or even eight feet and covered the strand almost completely. This did not matter as far as the portion of the beach that was to be a beach was concerned, but the portion that was to hold Moses' buildings and parking lots and parkway would have to be built up to a mean height of fourteen feet if they were not to be submerged in every storm, and if he wanted a road seventeen miles long along it, it would have to be built up to that height for seventeen miles. The job could be done, of course—floating dredges, huge pumps mounted on barges, could suck up hydraulic fill, which would become sand when dry, from the bay bottom, and pipelines could spill it out over the strand. But approximately forty million cubic yards of fill would be required. The job would take months—and it would be expensive. Even Smith quailed at this, and Moses had to talk fast and hard to persuade the Governor to go along. But he did persuade him, and the largest floating dredges in the United States were brought to the bay as soon as spring cleared the ice off it in 1927. The job could not be completed by the time ice set in again in the winter, but Moses refused to let the dredges leave. Their crews could live on them, he said, and all through the winter of 1927-28 they did, and the pumps kept working. "Night after night," Shapiro recalls, "they kept working to midnight."
When the sand from the bay bottom was spread on the barrier beach, it proved to be the worst problem of all. It was beautiful to look at, dazzling white and fine-grained, but the fineness meant that when it dried, it blew. Even the lightest breeze stirred it into the air in swirls so thick that the strand looked like a desert during a violent sandstorm.
"It was always blowing in your face when you worked," Shapiro remembers. "When it got bad, it would fill your eyes, your ears and your nose as fast as you could clean them out. You'd be choking and coughing. You'd be talking to somebody not three feet away and an especially violent gust would come, and you couldn't even see him any more. You couldn't even see the hand in front of your face." During the day, workmen would dig an excavation. At night, the sand would fill it in—so completely that the workmen couldn't even find its edges. One workman who left his car with its rear end turned into the wind for a few days came back to find the numerals—and all other color—completely erased from its rear license plate.
Moses dispatched landscape architects to other Long Island beaches to find out why the sand on older, natural dunes was more stable. They reported that it was because of the presence on these dunes of a form of "beach grass" (Ammophilia arenaria), whose roots, seeking water in the dry sand, spread horizontally rather than vertically and thus held sand around it in place. But to be effective, they reported, the grass had to be planted thickly—hundreds of thousands, even millions, of clumps would be required to hold down the new dunes on Jones Beach—and it could be planted only
by hand. In the summer of 1928, on the desolate sand bar on the edge of the ocean, amid half-completed building skeletons that looked like ancient ruins, was a panorama out of the dynasties of the Pharaohs: hundreds, thousands, of men, spread out over miles of sand, kneeling on the ground digging little holes and planting in them tiny bundles of grass.
The peculiarities of man seemed sometimes to join with those of nature to thwart Moses. But he would not be thwarted.
The contract to build the causeway had been awarded to an Atlantic City, New Jersey, firm. In the autumn of 1927, the president of the firm coolly informed Moses that its money had run out and it couldn't meet its payroll. Its laborers wouldn't work without pay, and work would have to stop unless $20,000 was found immediately. Moses drove to Albany, but Smith told him that every cent that could be squeezed out of the Highway Bureau budget—in fact, every cent that could be squeezed out of the budget of any department—had already been squeezed. More money would be available in the 1928 appropriations, of course, but they wouldn't be available until after January 1. Promising to pay her back as soon as the appropriations came through—he did—Moses borrowed the $20,000 from his mother and paid the laborers himself. And they kept working.
To the east of the portion of Jones Beach ceded to him by Hempstead Town, directly in the path of his proposed Ocean Parkway, lay five hundred acres of meadowland owned by Oyster Bay Town and leased as a duck-hunting preserve to a group of wealthy sportsmen headed by Solomon Guggenheim. When Moses appropriated the tract, the sportsmen obtained an injunction and served it on the contractor. But Moses met the contractor on the dredge and, as Cleveland Rodgers put it: "The legal papers somehow slipped off the deck into the swirling waters. . . . When the hunters, in their furlined cloaks and escorted by their formidable legal advisers, arrived a few days later to shoot ducks, under full protection of the law, they found the meadow" slashed through and filled in for the parkway.
And always, day after day, summer and winter, Moses was out on the job, encouraging the men in the field. "People will work harder for you if they have a good time," he told the Morses, and he urged the laborers working on Jones Beach to go swimming during their lunch hour. Organizing softball games on the beach, he umpired them himself. Joking with the men, he made fun about his hat. And he told them what a great project they were building. "He had a gift for leading men," Shapiro recalls. "Those men idolized him. You'd see him walk up to a pickax gang that was tired and talk to them awhile and when he walked away, you could see those pickaxes swing faster."
Hanging over Moses was the realization that every battle he won brought him closer to one there seemed no way of winning—and whose loss would mean that his dream would remain substantially incomplete. Every step he took to develop the land ceded him by Hempstead and Oyster Bay only brought him closer to the day when he must face up to the fact that the rest
of Jones Beach was not his. Its eastern half—nine miles long, thirteen hundred acres—still belonged to Babylon Township. Hutchinson and Hewitt might think the park he was laying out was already too big; he knew that, to serve the metropolitan area adequately, it would one day have to be far bigger—and the only place for expansion was Babylon's land. Moreover, if he didn't get that lan
d before the Wantagh Causeway and Ocean Parkway, which would run up to its edge, made it accessible and immensely valuable, he knew he would never get it. And unless he got it, there was nothing to prevent Babylon from building a road to connect with the parkway and lining it with hot-dog stands, gas stations and tiny, ugly summer bungalows that would march right up to the edge of his great park and spoil forever its pristine beauty. Without Babylon's land, moreover, the Ocean Parkway would be only half as long as he wanted it, and it would be difficult to build a causeway and loop it back to mainland Long Island and the Southern State Parkway because he had planned to cut the expense of that causeway by running it over Captree Island, a tongue of land at the eastern end, Babylon's end, of Jones Beach, which extended up toward the mainland. And since it was the eastern end of Jones Beach that almost touched Fire Island, without it he would never be able to build a bridge from Jones Beach to Fire Island and thus enable the Ocean Parkway to continue along Fire Island to the Hamptons.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 34
