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

by Caro, Robert A

  Roosevelt was unsure how to deal with the challenge. So were his legal advisers, some of whom told him to avoid a test of the issue in the courts since a decision could go either way and since while it was being decided all state expenditures might be paralyzed. The new Governor's initial inclination was to sign the bills, distasteful though their rider may have been.

  When, however, he asked Moses' opinion, he was told to veto the bills. The courts, Moses said, would hold that the Governor's budget was constitutional and the Legislature's unconstitutional—and it was perfectly possible to work out a method for financing state activities while the courts were deliberating. Roosevelt sent his former law partner, Basil O'Connor, to see George Wickersham, the reformer and ex-United States Attorney General, and Wickersham said Moses was right. As Roosevelt drafted a veto message, he found himself asking Moses for "suggestions." Moses gave them—-and the message as delivered to the Legislature was substantially the one Moses wrote. When lawyers began to draft the Governor's brief, they found themselves relying more and more on Moses for background information. Then they realized they were relying on him for strategy. On November 19, 1929, the seven members of the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals, held unanimously, as Moses had predicted they would, that the Legislature's action was unconstitutional. The principle of executive and legislative separation was at last irrevocably established in New York State— and Roosevelt had learned the truth of a saying of Al Smith's: "If Bob Moses says it's constitutional, it's constitutional."

  And then there was Moses' record of accomplishment and his potential for more accomplishment, the fact that Moses had gotten things done and could get things done again. Moses' cleverness in writing laws cementing himself in power helped explain Roosevelt's initial decision not to try to take that power away. But a large part of the explanation for Roosevelt's subsequent willingness to increase Moses' power was not cleverness but accomplishment, the record of what Moses had done with the power he had given himself. For the accomplishment and the potential for more accomplishment had very strong political connotations indeed.

  The program for which Moses had so frantically shoveled sod under

  Smith came to full bloom in the first of Roosevelt's gubernatorial summers. The summer of 1929 was the summer of the "Hoover Market." It was the summer of General Motors, Radio and Big Steel, of AT&T, of General Electric, which would by Labor Day hit 306, having more than tripled its price in eighteen months. The summer of 1929 was the summer of Big Bill Tilden, who won his seventh American amateur tennis championship, of Bobby Jones and his putter, Calamity Jane, who together carried off the U.S. Open golf championship, of Ernest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms and of Thomas Wolfe, whose first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, was uncrated at the bookstores in June. It was the summer of Kate Smith, who began in those golden months her career as a radio songstress, and of Gertrude Berg, who in those months first shouted "Yoo Hoo!" across a Bronx airshaft. And the summer of 1929 was the summer of Robert Moses.

  Heckscher State Park was formally opened in June and the onlooker who shouted "God bless him!" when Moses was introduced was only sounding the first note of the chorus of hosannas the summer was to bring. "You owe this park ... to the amazing public spirit of Robert Moses," August Heckscher told 15,000 cheering onlookers, and Lieutenant Governor Lehman, praising Moses for his "vision and courage," agreed.

  The Southern State Parkway was opened in July, and fathers driving their families along the lovely tree-shaded road—which, with a width of forty feet, seemed wonderfully wide—were explaining to their wives what "no grade crossings" meant and telling their children as they passed Wantagh that by the end of the summer they would be able to take another parkway there and drive down to the ocean and swim, and every newspaper story on the Southern State coupled its marvels with the name of its creator.

  And when, on August 4, 1929, the Wantagh Causeway opened the way to Jones Beach, the hosannas became a hallelujah chorus.

  On the day the causeway opened, 25,000 cars rolled across it. In the first month of its operation, attendance at Jones Beach State Park—which legislators had said would never justify its investment because people would never drive forty miles to a park on a sand bar—topped 325,000. The press— not only New York's press but the press of the entire country—spoke of the expanses of surf and sand in tones of awe. Reporters vied with one another in searching for superlatives to describe the parking areas that one said "look as big as a cattle range" and bathhouses "such as you have never seen before."

  The praise wasn't only for the size of the park's buildings; it was for the taste with which they had been designed and the ingenuity with which there had been worked into their steel and stone delicate details which the eye, to its delight, was endlessly discovering. Visitors could see that the nautical theme had been carried out everywhere. Walking along the mile-long boardwalk connecting the two bathhouses, they noticed that the boardwalk railing was a ship's railing. Bending down to drink from a water fountain, they found that the fountains were turned on and off by ships' pilot wheels. Looking for trash cans, they found them concealed in ships' funnels. Looking up, visitors saw on the flagpoles crow's-nests and yardarms and halyards

  decorated with long rows of bright semaphore signals. They saw ships' lanterns swinging on davits from the lampposts. Looking down, expecting the paved walks in the park to be standard gray concrete, they were surprised by mosaics—of compasses, maps and the gay seahorse that Moses had chosen as the emblem of Jones Beach—set into the concrete. The games along the boardwalk were ships' games: shuffleboard, quoits, deck tennis, Ping-Pong. Even the pitch-and-putt golf course was made maritime by the placing near every hole of some reminder of the sea—a rusty anchor, the keel of an ancient boat, old rum kegs retrieved from the Great South Bay. All Jones Beach employees were garbed as sailors, complete with sailor caps, and their supervisors wore officers' uniforms, complete with gold braid. And every button on the uniforms was engraved with a seahorse.

  Architects exclaimed over the long, low sweeping lines of the bathhouses and restaurants, their medieval and Moorish cast, the combination of Ohio sandstone and Barbizon brick ("Perfect!" exulted one architect. "Perfect!") with which they were faced. They were startled when, searching for the water tower, they realized that it was concealed in the 200-foot-high campanile. They described with delight the diaper-changing rooms, the cutouts of bowmen crouching against the dune that formed the backdrop for the archery range, the symbolic ironwork cutouts on the directional signs, the gay devices of stone and brick—all the touches that Robert Moses, standing alone on a deserted sandbar, had decided he must have in his great park. "It is in the smaller things that Mr. Moses is at his very best," Architectural Forum was to say. "Usually a public institution of any kind in this country has been the occasion for especially dull architecture and walls of cheerless dimensions which invite only the scribbling of small obscenities. But Mr. Moses, being essentially a romanticist, has revived the handicraft spirit in his designers, with the result that the equipment at Jones Beach exhibits irrelevant and endearing good spirits. The architecture has the great virtue of being scaled down to the size of a good time." Even the Herald Tribune could only wax rhapsodic over this "most prosaically named, most beautifully landscaped of beaches."

  And the letters on the editorial page almost outdid the editorials. Ernest Biehl of Manhattan, just back from a cross-country trip, hastened to take pen in hand to inform his fellow Times readers: "I have visited nearly all of the important beach resorts in this country and I must say that nowhere on this continent is there a public or private beach that is even comparable to the one that the State under Robert Moses has built." A thousand letters-to-the-editor echoed Biehl's appraisal. A nation looked at Robert Moses' dream and found it good.

  And not just the nation. Delegations of architects and park designers came from France, from England, even from Scandinavia, traditional leader in park development, to learn from Jones Beach.
Their comments were summed up by one Englishman who said flatly, "This is the finest seashore playground ever given the public anywhere in the world."

  Never, observers agreed, had any park been kept as clean as Jones Beach. College students hired for the summer were formed into "Courtesy

  Squads." Patrolling the boardwalk, conspicuous in snow-white sailor suits and caps, they hurried to pick up dropped papers and cigarette butts while the droppers were still in the vicinity. They never reprimanded the culprits, but simply bent down, picked up the litter and put it in a trash basket. To make the resultant embarrassment of the litterers more acute, Moses refused to let the Courtesy Squaders use sharp-pointed sticks to pick up litter without stooping. He wanted the earnest, clean-cut college boys stooping, Moses explained to his aides. It would make the litterers more ashamed. He even issued the Courtesy Squaders large cloths so that they could wipe from the boardwalk gobs of spittle. His methods worked. As one writer put it: "You will feel like a heel if you so much as drop a gum wrapper."

  The lines of wire trash receptacles on the clean white sand were only a symbol of the emphasis on cleanliness there also. At intervals, loudspeakers sounded a bugle call, and then an announcer, in a carefully modulated tone, "thanked" the visitors for their cooperation in keeping the beach clean. "The effect," as one observer wrote, "is magical. In no time at all, every guilty culprit is doing KP in his immediate area."

  Moses' methods extended to his parkways. Stetsoned state troopers stopped every car entering them and gave the driver a card printed with "Rules of the Road," which carefully spelled out rules against roadside picnicking and littering. And the rules were enforced. Littering summonses were issued wholesale. Occasionally, when troopers came across a whole bag of garbage that had been tossed from an automobile window, they would try to identify the driver from the contents. If they could, they would call on him at his home to issue a summons—and Moses would see that there was a troop of newspaper photographers along to record the culprit's expression when he opened his door.

  The public praised also the success with which Moses had kept Jones Beach free of the usual amusement-park trappings of other public beaches. "There are no concessions, no booths, no bawling hot-dog vendors," marveled one writer. "You won't see any weight-guessers or three-throws-for-a-dime-and-win-a-dolly alleys or blaring funhouses. For almost the first time in the history of public beaches, this beach is conceived as a spot for recreation, not amusement stimulated by honky-tonk." Whenever Jones Beach was the subject of a magazine article, it seemed, and it was the subject of literally scores in the 1930's, the article contained—at least once—the word "wholesome."

  The public beat a path to Moses' door. In 1930, the attendance at Jones Beach would be 1,500,000, in 1931, 2,700,000, in 1932, 3,200,000. The path itself, so recently completed, was jammed to capacity—and then to overcapacity. Although all grade crossings had been eliminated on the Southern State, two, one at Sunrise Highway and one at Merrick Road, remained on the Wantagh because of the refusal of the Legislature to allocate money for the bridges that would carry the two cross roads over the causeway. For the same reason, there was a half-mile gap between the Southern State and the Wantagh. By 1930, traffic was backing up at those spots for more than a mile on summer Sundays. In 1931, the Legislature allocated

  funds for the bridges and a spur between the two roads. Moses was jubilant. "The traffic capacity of the causeway will be more than doubled," he said.

  The facilities at Jones Beach proved inadequate. Both bathhouses were usually filled by noon. The parking lots as big as cattle ranges were jammed as full as sardine tins. Valley Stream, Heckscher and Sunken Meadow state parks were just as crowded. Moses revealed more of the plans he had kept secret, and enlarged them.

  There should be an increase in facilities—bathhouses, parking fields and concessions—at all state parks on Long Island, he said. There should be a short parkway—he named it the "Heckscher Spur"—linking the Southern State with Heckscher State Park and a "Sunken Meadow State Parkway" linking the Northern State with Sunken Meadow State Park.

  During the fall of 1930, the two-mile-long Ocean Parkway extending along the barrier beach from Jones Beach eastward toward Fire Island was opened. When he had asked the Legislature for money for the parkway, Moses had said that two miles of an ocean drive was all he had in mind. Now he revealed that he actually had been concealing a few other miles— ninety-eight, to be precise. Why, he demanded, shouldn't there be a continuous road, bordered by the rolling Atlantic, all the way from Breezy Point on the Rockaway peninsula in New York City to Montauk Point at the tip of Long Island, a distance of one hundred miles? It would not be difficult to create an Ocean Parkway through the Rockaways and Long Beach by widening existing streets and turning them into an ocean drive, he said. The gap between these two beaches could easily be bridged. So could the gap between Long Beach and the Jones Beach portion of the strand. In fact, he had already broached to Hempstead Town—to G. Wilbur Doughty and Tom McWhinney, to be precise—the possibility of Hempstead's building that bridge, and Hempstead seemed amenable. (Hempstead should have been amenable; some indications of the size of the political boodle involved in such a construction job may be garnered by the fact that one of the contractors involved secured the job by paying $75,000 in cash to the Nassau County Republican organization and—just to insure against any criticism—another $75,000 to the county's Democratic organization.) Thanks to the deeds of land on the Jones Beach portion of the strand that he had accepted from Oyster Bay, wheedled from Hempstead and politically blackmailed from Babylon, the Long Island Park Commission had already in hand the rights-of-way for the parkway along most of this eleven-mile portion, which was called, in order eastward from Jones Beach State Park, High Hill Beach, Tobay Beach, Gilgo, Cedar Island Beach, Oak Beach and Captree. At Cap-tree a causeway would jump a narrow inlet—and the Ocean Parkway would be on Fire Island. There, for fifty miles, it could run along the sand, the ocean stretching broad on one side, the bay beautiful on the other, until the barrier beach swung back at Moriches to join the southern fluke of the whale's tail that was Long Island's eastern end. By pointing out to them that the building of a road along Fire Island would make their land immensely

  more valuable, he had, he disclosed, already persuaded sixty-seven of the seventy property owners on Fire Island whose lands would be traversed by the parkway to donate the right-of-way, and although two of the three laggards—immensely wealthy and immensely stubborn spinster sisters named Smith—owned so much of the land needed that no public body could afford to condemn it, he was confident that they would sign up shortly. When the Legislature balked, he pointed out that the land deeded to the state by the townships was worth millions of dollars. Did the legislators propose to let it go to waste? The legislators may have considered doing so, but in 1930 the public applause for the two miles of Ocean Parkway already opened made it obvious that such a course would be unwise. During the 1931 legislative session, money was appropriated to extend the road eight miles farther through High Hill, Tobay and Gilgo beaches. The Fire Island portion of the plan had to be dropped when the Smith sisters, for undisclosed reasons, refused to donate, but Moses came up with a substitute plan extending the Ocean Parkway all the way along the Jones Beach portion of the barrier beach to Captree, and then bringing it back to the mainland on a causeway and linking it up to the Southern State Parkway with a spur parkway. There would be time to get to Fire Island later.

  Editorials hailed each new Moses plan. The best proof of the universality of their appeal was furnished by Long Island, which for so long had resisted them. At the opening of Heckscher State Park, two shy little girls had been ushered onto the porch of the Taylor Mansion to present Moses with a silver loving cup donated by the East Islip Community Association, a group that had been among the most vocal of W. Kingsland Macy's supporters in Macy's battle against the park. The presentation was symbolic. Long Island's real estate men adored Moses for opening the
Island to development and thus further inflating its already ballooning land values. Long Island's people had realized that they had the easiest access to the beaches he had created. A 1930 referendum in Islip Township, stronghold of the baymen and farmers, on a proposition to deed the Long Island Park Commission land on Captree to facilitate the building of the Captree causeway passed by a margin of more than three to one. Long Island politicians, fully aware now of the financial benefits that would accrue to them from Moses' plans, saw the political benefits, too. Immediately following the referendum, both Nassau and Suffolk County Boards of Supervisors spent millions condemning right-of-way for Moses' proposed parkways and presented it to him as a gift.

  No Governor would want to be placed in the position of opposing so immensely popular a program—or its creator. Financing Moses' projects placed an immense strain on the state budget. In 1929, with only those announced under Smith under way, their construction, including money spent on them out of the Public Works Department budget, cost the state $5,424,-750, more than 70 percent of the entire state expenditure on construction projects in the metropolitan region, including Westchester County. And as the parks were opened, the cost of their maintenance began to be a sore point. Roosevelt was jolted by budget requests for almost a million in "per-

  sonal service"—salaries—for the Long Island parks alone. Thinking of his national image, not yet aware that liberal public spending might be a way to cushion the effects of the Depression, the Governor was anxious not to give opponents the chance to portray him as a big spender. By the end of 1930, moreover, state revenues had been so slashed by the Depression that the state budget was quiveringly taut. Throughout his second term he was continually pressing his cabinet members to cut costs. There was constant friction over Moses' budget requests.