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

by Caro, Robert A

  Moses himself spent a lot of time at Orchard Beach, a very low, very narrow sand bar that linked together the eastern edges of Hunters Island and Rodman Neck, two of the little wooded pieces of land at the eastern fringe of Pelham Bay Park that were washed by the water of Long Island Sound. Here, in New York's northeastern corner, so far from any built-up areas in 1934 that visitors could hardly believe they were still within the borders of America's largest city, was located New York's most ambitious park project. When Moses arrived, $346,750 had been spent on bathhouses, a breakwater and a retaining wall running behind the sand bar and designed to turn the bar into a bathing beach convenient to the bungalows of the six hundred families, Bronx Democratic stalwarts all, to whom most of Hunters Island and Rodman Neck had been leased. The engineer who designed the bathhouses, which were constructed of granite paving stones and had cost $84,000 apiece, had apparently been inspired by the Black Hole of Calcutta; the only ventilation in the thirty-foot-high buildings was provided by a few narrow slits near the ceilings. The breakwater had been run out into the Sound through the very center of the beach, thereby splitting it in two and

  forcing anyone wanting to get from one half to the other to climb over the top—which wasn't easy, since the breakwater designer had neglected to include steps. But the location of the retaining wall made reservations about this splitting of the beach irrelevant. The engineer who designed the wall had apparently seen the sand bar only at low tide; he had placed the wall so close to the water that, for most of the day, the waves lapped right up against it— and there was no longer any beach left to be split.

  Moses dispatched teams of engineers to "inventory" New York City's parks—their acreage (incredibly no one knew their exact size), the buildings, paths, roadways, statues and equipment in them, the condition of these items and the type and amount of labor and materials that would be required to renovate them. He filed this information in a loose-leaf notebook kept atop his desk. By the time he was sworn in as Park Commissioner, the notebook was more than a foot thick, and he had a list of 1,800 urgent renovation projects on which 80,000 men could immediately be put to work.

  But renovation was only a small part of Moses' plan. Day after day during the bitterly cold November and early December of 1933, while the great city lay inert in the grip of its long malaise, Robert Moses was being chauffeured around it in the big Packard, Hazel Tappan beside him with a stenographer's note pad open on her lap. Twenty years before, as a young staffer at the Bureau of Municipal Research, Robert Moses had wandered around New York City "burning up with ideas, just burning up with them." Now Moses was not young—one of the days he spent in the big Packard was his forty-fifth birthday—but he was still burning. "Sometimes it seemed to me that his voice never stopped," Miss Tappan recalls. "Things just kept pouring out of him. I remember once we were downtown someplace and he wanted to see some underground garage—for sanitation trucks or something —under a city building there to see if it would interfere with some plans he had for putting a park on the street near it and we started to go down this spiral ramp and it was getting darker and darker and he was still dictating. And finally it was almost pitch-black and he was still dictating. To this day I can see it getting darker and darker and that voice going on and on. Until finally I had to say, 'Mr. M! Mr. Ml Wait a minute! I can't see!'"

  By late December, the outline of his ideas for large-scale park construction projects was ready, and now, crowded into the Packard with him and Miss Tappan were his Long Island engineers. They came in relays. One crew would drive with him to certain parks—describing these trips, one engineer echoed Frances Perkins' words of two decades before, "Everything he saw made him think of some way it could be better"—and then that crew would go back to Babylon and translate his ideas into general engineering plans while another would head out with him to other parks.

  Relays were needed to keep up with him. "His orders just poured out," recalls the engineer. "Bam! Bam! Bam! So fast that we used to all try to take them down at once so that when we got out to Babylon we could put them together and maybe get one complete list of everything he wanted. You'd start at dawn—hell, sometimes we'd start before dawn; I remember

  driving around Manhattan when everybody was still sleeping except the milkmen, maybe, and the cops on the beats. I remember once a cop really jumping when that big black car filled with men came around a corner in front of him—and by late afternoon, I can tell you, your head would be just absolutely spinning. But he'd still be firing things at you." Didn't they break for lunch? "You didn't break for lunch when you were out driving around with Robert Moses."

  Soon the engineers' concepts of his ideas were being presented for his approval.

  With few exceptions—City Hall is perhaps the most notable—the public works of New York City were hack work designed by hacks. But the men driving around with Robert Moses were not hacks. They included the unknown young architects, landscape architects and engineers—the Herbert Magoons and Earle Andrewses—responsible for Jones Beach and the other highly acclaimed Long Island parks. And they included Major Gilmore D. Clarke and Aymar Embury II. Clarke, designer of the Bronx River Parkway and other outstanding examples of highway beautification, was in 1934 the most famous landscape architect in the United States; he had been in the process of retiring from public work to accept lucrative private assignments. Embury, an architect, had designed Princeton University's classic Class of 1915 Dormitory and many of Long Island's most beautiful estates—parks in themselves. In 1934, he had waiting for him "more private business commissions than he could handle in a decade." Moses persuaded Clarke and Embury to come to work on New York's parks.

  As had been the case with the famous architects who had gathered around him on the barren sand bar called Jones Beach a decade earlier, however, some of the men with him in the big Packard in 1934 had difficulty grasping the extent of his vision. When the plans came in for Riverside Park, where, twenty years before, he had dreamed of a great highway along the water, a highway that would cover the ugly tracks and cleanse the West Side of Manhattan of the smoke and stench from the trains that ran along it, they left the tracks uncovered. The engineers told him that to cover them would add millions to the cost of the park development—for which at the moment there was almost no money at all in sight, not to mention the additional millions that would be needed to build the Henry Hudson Bridge across the Harlem River Ship Canal and a parkway linking the bridge with the Saw Mill River Parkway. Moses told them to worry only about the plans; he would worry about getting the money for them.

  Exasperated with their plans for Orchard Beach, he loaded the architects into the big Packard and drove out onto barren, snow-covered Hunters Island.

  Standing under winter-stripped trees on a little hill that rose out of the marshes that fringed the islet, he looked across at Rodman Neck, four hundred yards away, at the sand bar, covered now with a thin scum of ice, that held them tenuously together, at the Tammany-built breakwater and Hole of Calcutta bathhouses, and at the six hundred private bungalows.

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  The sand bar would never be a decent bathing beach as long as those monstrosities were there, he said. He wanted them torn down; he didn't care how much they had cost— tear them down! And tear down those goddamned bungalows—yes, all six hundred of them. He had been spending a lot of time wandering around up here in the afternoons, he said, and he had decided

  j§ HUNTERS ISLAND

  * TWIN „ ISLANDS

  ORCHARD BEACH

  Long Island Sound

  CITY ISLAND

  Orchard Beach: BEFORE

  CITY ISLAND

  Orchard Beach: AFTER

  that the beach should consist of more than just the sand bar. If it extended all the way around the eastern shore of both Hunters Island and Rodman Neck, it would be almost a mile long and almost crescent-shaped. In fact, if it extended over to the Twin Islands—he pointed to two islets to the northeast separated from Hunters Island by
two narrow strips of water— the length could be a full mile and the shape of the crescent perfect. He wanted the beach extended to the Twin Islands, he said; the strips of water couldn't be very deep; fill them in. And he wanted the sand on the beach to be gleaming white ocean sand like the kind at Jones Beach and the Rocka-way beaches, not their present coarse, pebble-filled gray Long Island Sound sand. The sand could be dredged off the Rockaway beaches and then brought here by barge, up the East River to the Sound. Behind the beach, paralleling its mile-long crescent, he wanted a bathhouse—designed with the same imagination, the same attention to detail, as the bathhouses at Jones Beach, he said; he didn't want it looking like the typical public bathhouse. But that didn't mean it should look like the Jones Beach bathhouses, he said; if his men looked around him, they would see that the setting here was very different from that at Jones Beach. The setting there was the long, low sweep of sand and sea; here it was hills and trees. The Jones Beach bathhouse had

  been long and low, its lines horizontal; the lines here should be more vertical— perhaps they should start thinking about columns, maybe even a colonnade. He would leave it to them, but he didn't want any of them forgetting that the function of a bathhouse wasn't to impress or overawe; it was to help people have a good time—he wanted it light, airy and gay. And for God's sake, he said, use this kind of imagination on the city's other parks—all the city's parks.

  getting those men working on worthwhile projects was to provide them with plans. Blueprints in volume were needed, he said, and they were needed immediately. He must be allowed to hire the best architects and engineers available and he must be allowed to hire them fast. The CWA must forget about its policy of keeping expenditures for plans small to keep as much money as possible for salaries for men in the field. The agency must forget its policy that only unemployed men could be hired so that Moses could hire a good architect even if he was working as a ditch digger or was being kept on by his firm at partial salary. And the agency must drop its rule that no worker could be paid more than thirty dollars per week. The CWA refused: rules were rules, it said. I quit, Moses said. La Guardia hastily intervened. After seven days of haggling, the CWA surrendered. Moses was given permission to hire 600 architects and engineers without regard to present job status, and to pay them up to eighty dollars a week. So that he could hire them as fast as possible, he was even given an emergency allocation to summon them to interviews not by letter but by telegram.

  The CWA capitulated on the morning of January 27. By noon, 1,300 telegrams were being delivered to carefully selected architects and engineers all over New York State, telling each of them that if he was interested in a job, he should report to the Arsenal the next day.

  No profession had been hit harder than architecture and engineering. Engineers were particularly reluctant to accept relief. "I simply had to murder my pride," one said. "We'd lived on bread and water for three weeks before I could make myself do it." But The Nation estimated that fully half of all engineers were out of work—and six out of seven architects.

  These men had been hiding out in public libraries to avoid meeting anyone they knew, or tramping the streets carrying their customary attache cases although those cases contained only a sandwich. Although the Park Department interviews weren't supposed to begin on January 28 until 2 p.m., on that day, with the temperature below freezing, when dawn broke over the city, it disclosed a line of shivering men outside the Arsenal. The line began at the front door. It wound down the steps, out to Fifth Avenue at Sixty-fourth Street, and along the avenue to Seventy-second Street.

  The interviewing went on all day; some of the men who had been waiting on line before dawn didn't get into the Arsenal until late afternoon. But for 600 of them the wait was worth it.

  "When you got inside, nobody asked you how much money you had in the bank or what was the maiden name of your great-grandmother," one architect recalls. "All they asked you was: 'What are your qualifications?'" Those whose qualifications satisfied Moses' men were hired on the spot, shown to the Arsenal's garage, in which drafting tables had been set up, handed assignments and told to get to work. In the evening, some started to go home. Those whose assignments didn't have to be finished for a few days were allowed to do so; several hundred whose plans were needed faster were told flatly, "If you go home tonight, don't come back tomorrow." Without exception, these men stayed, catching naps on cots Moses had had set up in the Arsenal's corridors.

  Out in the parks, the ragtag ranks of the CWA workers were being shaped up.

  Moses had found the men to do the shaping. Out of fear of losing them permanently to rivals, idle construction contractors were struggling to keep on salary their "field superintendents," the foremen or "ramrods" whose special gift for whipping tough Irish laborers into line made them an almost irreplaceable asset. Pointing out that the CWA was not a rival and would probably go out of existence when business improved, Moses persuaded contractors throughout New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New England to give him their best ramrods, "the toughest you've got." And when the new men arrived, 300 in the first batch, 450 more within two months, his instructions to them were equally explicit. CWA workers, he was to say later, "were not accustomed to work under people who drove them. I see to it that my men do drive them."

  Arriving at Marine Park on January 31, new superintendent Percy H. Kenah ordered the men away from their bonfires, and when some moved too slowly for him, fired sixty-six on the spot. The men refused to leave. They moved threateningly toward him—and then they noticed that patrol cars crammed with policemen had quietly driven up behind them. On the same day, with patrol cars backing them up, new superintendents fired hundreds of other workers in other parks.

  If this method disposed of malingerers and malcontents, it nonetheless proved difficult to whip the relief workers who remained into an efficient work force. Most wanted to work at the pace demanded but were unable to do so. The suits, overcoats and fedoras many wore while wielding shovels were testimony not only to their inability to afford warmer work clothes but also to their lack of experience in performing hard physical labor outdoors. Even in mild weather, they would have had difficulty. In winter, they suffered bitterly from exposure. Since their pay was $13.44 per week, many were still scrimping on their own food so that their children could have more. "I remember guys just keeling over on the job," one laborer recalls, "and you always knew that it was just that they had come to work without anything to eat." And they were scrimping in other ways, too. A worker at Dyker Beach Park at the southern edge of Brooklyn, who had caught a reporter's eye because "the side of his neck is swollen and his breath is from a sick throat," told the reporter that he lived in Manhattan. Shivering in a thin overcoat, he said that to get to work "I walk over four hours. I set the alarm clock for half past two and start walking quarter of four." The reporter asked him why he didn't take a trolley, "Carfare is twenty cents a day," he replied.

  Some of the new superintendents quietly handed quarters to laborers whose inability to keep up was due to hunger or frostbite; others fired them. But none of the ramrods stopped driving. If they did, they knew, they would be fired themselves. They were, after all, working for a boss who, when questioned about a new wave of firing that almost touched off riots in several parks, said, "The government and the taxpayers have a right to demand an adequate return in good work, faithfully performed, for the

  money that is being spent. . . . We inherited men who were working without plan and without supervision. The plans have now been made, the supervision is being supplied, and we expect the men to work."

  The winter of 1934 was the first of five of the most severe in New York's history. The temperature dropped below zero on five different days— on one day it hit fourteen below—and a steady succession of heavy storms dumped a total of fifty-two inches of snow on the city. The mean temperature for the entire month of February was 11.5 degrees. But all through that winter, the residents of the tall apartment houses rimming Cent
ral Park could look down into the park and see, in the snow, thousands of men swinging pickaxes and shovels, climbing ladders set against trees, swarming over scaffolding erected around older structures and building new ones. From behind the park's granite-block walls came the pounding of pneumatic drills, the rumble of concrete mixers, the dull roar of steam shovels and the sharp rapping of hammers.

  And to the consternation of those apartment-house residents, this clangor did not stop at five o'clock. At dusk, thousands of men filed into Central Park to replace those who had been working during the day, and when the watchers in the apartment houses retired for the night—for nights that they complained were made restless by the noise—they could take a last look out their windows and see the pickaxes still swinging in the harsh glare of hundreds of high-powered carbide lamps. When they awoke in the morning, the pickaxes were still swinging—and they realized that a third shift had filed into the park during the night. The work was going on twenty-four hours a day. And from behind the granite-block walls of Prospect Park, the high wooden fence left around Bryant Park from the George Washington Bi-Centennial Celebration, and a score of others erected that winter by Moses around other parks, came the same clangor—on the same schedule. Late in the afternoon of February 22, heavy snow began to fall. It continued falling all through the 23rd, dumping a total of eighteen inches on the city. But during those days, the rebuilding of New York's parks never stopped.