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

by Caro, Robert A

  What the city called a playground was an open space—equipped with slides and a swing or two, sometimes equipped with nothing at all—around which chicken wire had been strung. Most "playgrounds" were not surfaced; rain turned them into mud holes. Others were surfaced with cinders spread loosely over the dirt, and mothers hated to let their children play in them because they knew the children would come home covered with cuts.

  If one of the hundreds of statues in the parks was undamaged in 1932, the Park Association couldn't find it. The faces of the statues were masses of bird droppings. Obscenities had been written on—and never erased from— their chests. Their identifying plaques had been torn off. Swords were missing from sheaths, laurel wreaths from brows. Poets plucked at broken harps, saints stood on cracked pedestals. An Indian hunter had lost his bow. The tiger in Central Park was slipping off his rock. The bayonets had been stolen off the rifles of the soldiers in the Seventh Regiment Memorial on Fifth Avenue.

  The ironwork that could be seen in the parks—the fences, benches and playground equipment—was pitted and caked with rust. The condition of the ironwork that couldn't be seen was indicated by the rarity of the comfort stations whose plumbing worked.

  Since park concessions were handed out to anyone who could raise the necessary payoff, pushcarts and ramshackle booths crowded park paths— there were nineteen along one short path in Battery Park, each with its own carnival-type barker—and since many sold substandard food, there were recurring reports of sickness among children who ate the hot dogs they sold.

  Bryant Park, six priceless acres of green amid the concrete masses of midtown, had been allowed to become a haven for drunks and idlers. In 1932, the city obligingly trucked away two of the park's principal ornaments, eight-foot-high statues of Washington Irving and James Marion Sims, founder of the first women's hospital in New York, and allowed a "George Washington Bi-Centennial Celebration Commission" (debonair Grover Whalen. one of Walker's police commissioners, was chairman) to erect a flimsy reproduc-

  tion of Federal Hall, the building in which Washington was inaugurated, in the park and then fence it off and place turnstiles at its corners so that the public would be forced to pay admission to see the hall. When the public declined in great numbers to do so, the commission went out of existence without funds to demolish its creation. After picking up the demolition tab, the city discovered that it had managed to lose the Irving and Sims statues. Possibly because the omission of five tons of granite and metal would not be easily concealed in a reconstructed park, Bryant Park was not reconstructed—and in January 1934 it was a weed-filled vacant lot.*

  Central Park, most famous and beautiful of the city's open spaces, "the most noble, the most praiseworthy, the most philanthropic of all our public works," according to an 1876 New York Herald editorial, had been the creation of Calvert Vaux and the genius of urban landscape, Frederick Law Olmsted, who, in 1857—with Olmsted still an unknown young park department employee—had won a nationwide contest with their design for the park. Olmsted had driven thousands of men to plant half a million trees and shrubs on its 840 rocky, barren and arid acres and to create bowers, mazes, lawns and vistas, revolutionary sunken transverse roads (that were criticized because people said there would never be sufficient traffic across the park to justify them), bridle paths (that were criticized because few New Yorkers

  * The Bi-Centennial Commission was one of the more hilarious episodes in the city's history. Its "board of directors" contained a number of well-meaning DAR types who had lent their names to what they thought was an attempt to honor the Father of the Country, but the presence of Whalen, an intimate of some of Tammany's most greedy insiders, was the tip-off to the fact that the celebration was intended as a public-scalping party—a suspicion confirmed when food-selling concessions at the "celebration" were handed out to Tammany favorites. First, the commission announced that it would finance the construction of "Federal Hall" by "allowing" citizens to sign a "patriotic roll call"—for a fee of one dollar per signature— designed to raise $150,000. Despite parades beginning, or ending, at Washington Arch, and led by Jimmy Walker himself, that were designed to whip up public enthusiasm, the roll call was answered by only 18,629 patriots. Sears, Roebuck & Co. then announced that it would lend the commission the money against turnstile receipts—but the finished structure into which that firm's money was sunk turned out to be a plaster and papier-mache structure that swayed alarmingly and looked barely strong enough to withstand a good wind.

  On some days total attendance in the park was so low that only twenty persons paid their twenty-five cents to see it. Whalen then conceived the idea of combining the exhibit with "patriotic movies"—which turned out to be Mickey Mouse cartoons. When interest remained low, Italian opera was tried. The commission couldn't even raise enough money to demolish Federal Hall and restore Bryant Park to its original condition, as it had promised to do in its contract with the city. It announced that "a large part of the population feels that this patriotic shrine should be retained" and went out of existence, leaving $76,254 in largely unexplained "expenses," and Sears, Roebuck holding the bag for its contribution. The "Hall" stood, crumbling around the edges, in the huge vacant lot that Bryant Park had become until the city, embarrassed by the screams of rage from the Park Association, tore down the structure at its own—or rather at its taxpayers'—expense.

  The Bi-Centennial Celebration did, of course, provide Whalen with valuable experience in running a public exposition. He put it to use in running the 1939 New York World's Fair—which lost $200,000,000.

  owned saddle horses), delicate and colorful gardens (that were criticized because people said there would always be enough room in New York for private gardens). Then, his vision completed as he wanted it, Olmsted had fought Tammany for a decade to preserve it, his health and spirit breaking in the fight. Finally ousted as Park Commissioner after a series of worsening nervous breakdowns, he had had to watch hordes of Tammany laborers tear the ivy from the Arsenal walls, "clean up" his beloved "wildernesses," sweep moss and ferns out of all the rocky crevices with house brooms and hack down thousands of trees and shrubs along Fifth Avenue so that park strollers could better view the mansions being built there. And, in 1932, Central Park showed the ravages of the sixty years of neglect that had followed Olmsted's ouster.

  The park's lawns, unseeded, were expanses of bare earth, decorated with scraggly patches of grass and weeds, that became dust holes in dry weather and mud holes in wet. Its walks were broken and potholed. Its bridle paths were covered with dung. The once beautiful Mall looked like the scene of a wild party the morning after. Benches lay on their backs, their legs jabbing at the sky. Trash baskets had been overturned and never righted; their contents lay where they had spilled out. The concrete had been stripped off drinking fountains so completely that only their rusting iron pipes remained. And nine out of every ten trees on the Mall were dead or dying.

  The red brick of the Arsenal at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street had been stuccoed over and painted, and when the stucco had flaked away, the bare spots had been repainted in what was supposed to be the same color but wasn't. The building's turrets, which had made it so quaintly medieval, had been covered with striped wooden cupolas, which were supposed to make it gay, but the wood had broken and caved in and had never been repaired. The ground floor was used as a park department garage; the three upper floors were used mostly as a warehouse to store department records.

  Around the Arsenal squatted the twenty-two ancient wooden animal houses of the Central Park Menagerie, crumbling away beneath their yellow paint. So rotted were their walls that park department officials feared that a single charge from a large animal, perhaps maddened by fire, might tear the cage bars right out of them. Instead of rebuilding the animal houses, the department had stationed keepers in front of the lion and tiger cages with rifles and had instructed them to shoot the big carnivores if fire broke out.

  The Menagerie was filled with sur
prises. Because it gratefully accepted any gift that would fill a cage, and people therefore donated their unwanted family pets, it was housing in 1932, alongside the hyacinth cockatoos and the vulturine guinea fowl, several dozen canaries, and, in a cage between the mountain lions and the leopards, an Airedale. Because the Menagerie did not adequately care for its animals or dispose of them when they grew old, its exhibits included such old pensioners as a senile tiger, a puma with rickets and a semi-paralyzed baboon. Its most fearsome exhibits were rats, which roamed it in herds and had become so bold that they were stealing food from the lions' feeding pans. The most vivid memory carried away by many

  visitors was of the sickening stench that rose from the dung-heaped Barbary-sheep pen.

  Almost directly across the park, off Central Park West, was Jacob Wrey Mould's sheepfold, considered by some critics the finest existing example of the full-blown architecture of the mid-nineteenth century, and from a distance the sheep who grazed opposite it on the Green or Sheep Meadow, under the care of a resident shepherd who twice a day held up traffic on the park's West Drive to herd his flock across, made a picture as pretty as Olmsted had envisioned. But a closer look disclosed that, because for generations the sheep had been allowed to inbreed, every one of them was malformed.

  Unlovely as the scenery in the parks might be, there was little to do in the parks except contemplate it. Provision for active sports was so inadequate that although Tammany reserved permits for the city's 162 baseball diamonds for teams which had the blessing of its aldermen—Negro teams from politically powerless Harlem seldom got one—there were still 942 teams with permits waiting to use the diamonds on a typical Sunday. Waiting time at tennis courts was measured in hours, and the city's one modern golf course was so crowded on weekends that, the Herald Tribune reported, "a player standing on line at dawn is lucky if he gets through his rounds by sunset."

  New York was a city of islands, a city surrounded by, permeated by, water. But with Orchard Beach and Wolfe's Pond Park handed over to Tammany insiders, the only acquaintance that most of the city's lower-income families, who did not own cars and thus were virtually barred from Jones Beach, made with the ocean surf was at Coney Island, where a million people, treading gingerly among broken glass and filth that seemed never to be cleaned up, jammed the beach so full on a Sunday that one could hardly see the sand. The beach at Jacob Riis Park in the Rockaways was used only sparsely, but there was a reason: there was no way for a family without a car to reach it, and families with cars could reach it only after a tortuous trip. Swimming in one's own neighborhood, moreover, was all but unheard of; in the entire city, there were in 1932 two tiny outdoor swimming pools. Children who wanted to wade and splash in an outdoor shower could wade in the gutters after they unscrewed fire-hydrant covers; no one had ever heard of wading pools in playgrounds.

  The men who worked in the parks complemented the scenery. Even in an era in which every city department was staffed through patronage, the five borough park departments were something special. Recalls one observer: "You couldn't tell the difference between a park employee and the bums hanging out in the parks." The weight of the rheumy-eyed drunks who served as lifeguards at Jacob Riis Park, Rockaway Beach and Coney Island was as excessive for their job as were their ages. "The first time I saw those guys lined up in their swimming costumes, I could hardly believe it," recalls Samuel M. White, who was later put in charge of them. "Some of them ran 225 or 250 pounds. And there were guys there sixty years old." Even on summer Sundays, they used the lifesaving dories for fishing. Not all the lifeguards would go out in the dories, of course. Some of them were afraid to; they

  didn't know how to swim. Parents who took their children to cirv beaches en Sundays learned not to allow them near the shacks on the beach labeled "First Aid Station.** The shacks were invariably rilled with prostitutes sleeping off the effects of their Saturday-night parties with the lifeguards. ('Those whores were as unbelievable as the guys." White recalls. 'They were some ;: the ugliest women I have even seen."') The aged biddies in charge of park comfort stations were widows of Tammany ward heelers and they understood that no work was required of them. According to one reporter: "Some had curtained off all but. say. two of the eight toilet compartments, had imported chairs, tables and hangings into the cozy space, and frequently had in their friends to afternoon tea." The lady in charge of the comfort station perched on a rocky bluff overlooking the Metropolitan Museum of Art spent her time there removing much of the plumbing and then building her-self a cozy little sitting room, in which she had installed a grand piano. The chords of a Chopin nocturne startled more than one woman who entered the comfort station in good faith.

  The Depression adzzz its own touches to the parks: the shack towns named, bitterly. "HooverviLles." in which homeless men sought refuge One of the largest v as a collection of more than two hundred hovels of old boards, flattened gasoline tins and pieces of sheet iron and cardboard in the dried-out bed of the abandoned Central Park Receiving Reservoir behind the Metropolitan Museum of .Art: at night its inhabitants ate birds thej caught in the park's bird sanctuary.

  It wasn't what the Depression did to ex:>::n: parks that most worried New York's reformers, however: they were more concerned ibowl its effect on the city's plans to acquire new ones

  Nothing was more disturbing :: ictutme is than the city's lack of park land. In 1932. only 14.827 acres, or 7.28 percent of its area, had been set aside for the recreation of its citizens, a percentage smaller than that set aside for recreation in any of the other ten largest cities in the world or in America. And almost half the 14.827 acres were not really parks but only land intended for parks: 3^256 of those acres, for example, were contained in the two "marine parks" in Brooklyn and Staten Island, and these two parks were nothing but utterly undeveloped marshlands under water part of each day.

  There was least park land, moreover, in those areas that needed parks the most. For generations, reformers had been attempting to nerve city officials to buy up tenements, tear them down and thereby shatter with shafts ;: sunlight the solid shad shun streets But the difficulties of relocating

  tenement families, the veto power over city policies exercised by powerful Tammanv district leaders who didn't want Democratic voters removed from their districts, and the lack of will to civic improvement had kept the Hylan and Walker administrations _ : - - c;a

  and Nlitchel administrations, led to the brink seven! :.ntes. had always dried awav at the last moment because of the sheer enormity of the cost in-

  volved. As a result, after nearly a century of agitation for the creation of "breathing spaces" in slums (Moses' grandfather, Bernhard Cohen, had been one of the agitators during the i870's), there were on the Lower East Side—in an area a mile wide into which were crammed more than half a million people—exactly two small parks, neither of which contained a single piece of play equipment. With the exception of a block-square dirt- and weed-covered vacant lot owned by the city at Corlears Hook just to the east of this area, there was not another clearing in the wilderness of tenements stretching away from the massive granite piers of the Brooklyn Bridge all the way to Tompkins Square—thirty-one blocks to the north. And if one stood, atop the Upper West Side's high ridge, in Morningside, St. Nicholas or Colonial Park and looked down to where the ridge fell suddenly into an alluvial plain once known as Harlem Flats, which in 1932 contained the city's Spanish, Negro and Italian slum areas, he would see nothing between the end of Central Park on 110th Street down to his right and the beginning of Coogan's Bluff at 155th Street down to his left but a vast expanse of the asphalt gray of streets, the tar-paper gray of tenement roofs and the dingy brick red of tenement walls stretching endlessly eastward until it was at last mercifully cut short by the East River, an expanse in which, except for a poignant hint on the rocky slopes of Mount Morris Park at 124th Street, there did not exist a single patch of green. Wrote one reformer: "In the winter months, when the sun is most needed, it is no uncommon sight
to see herds of children blocking the streets in sections where a little sun has been allowed to penetrate because there happen to be a few low buildings on one side of the street."

  If slum children could not have parks, reformers had pleaded, at least let them have the tiny, pathetic, chicken-wire-fenced, cinder-paved substitute known as playgrounds. But in 1932, after generations of such pleading, there were only four playgrounds on the Lower East Side and two playgrounds in Harlem. In all Brooklyn, there were only thirty-six playgrounds. In all New York, a city which in 1932 contained approximately 1,700,000 children under twelve years of age, there were only 119, or one for every 14,000 children.

  "Children's gardens" in playgrounds were the only places in which most slum children could engage in that most precious of childhood activities: digging. So few were the playgrounds—and their "gardens"—that they could accommodate no more than a handful of those who wanted to use them. Playground supervisors made children stand on line with their pails and shovels until a spot in the gardens was open, and the lines were so long that most of the little girls and boys could see at a glance that they were unlikely to get a turn. Most of them stood on the line anyway; childhood, after all, is the time of hope—and there was, after all, little else for them to do.