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

by Caro, Robert A

  Moses' charm was as powerful a weapon as his mind. Turning it on John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Moses persuaded the billionaire to donate several other pieces of land to the city. He persuaded his old benefactor August Heckscher to donate a playground in Central Park. When he discovered a well-to-do family with philanthropic leanings but insufficient resources to buy and equip a playground completely, he brought it together with another family in similar circumstances—as he did to give the city the Dreier-Offerman Playground in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Learning that a small charitable foundation was unable to meet mortgage payments on a piece of property in Queens and was planning to let it go to the bank by default, Moses appeared before its board of trustees, several of whom were directors of the bank, and talked to them so movingly about the need of slum children for recreation that they agreed to use the foundation's few remaining assets to pay off the small balance remaining on the mortgage—and default instead on the taxes, so that the city could take it over rather than the bank.

  And as soon as Moses had his hands on the title to these pieces of land, he filled them with workmen. By July, the eight War Memorial Playgrounds had been finished, by Labor Day, there were fifty-two others, including the Chrystie-Forsyth Street complex, which was really a park but which was dubbed "the finest playground in the United States"—and a city which in its entire history had managed to build 119 playgrounds had seen its stock of that item increased by 50 percent in a single year.

  The city cheered. Its thirteen daily newspapers, however divergent their philosophy, united in heaping wreaths of adjectives on his head. The new Park Commissioner was "dynamic" and "brilliant" in the ultra-conservative Sun, "able" and "enterprising" in the then ultra-liberal World-Telegram, "tireless," "fearless" and "incorruptible" in the sometimes conservative, sometimes liberal Hearst Evening Journal.

  Headline writers, using topical catch phrases, talked of Moses' new

  DEAL FOR PARKS and the AMAZING ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF MOSES' FIRST 100

  days. Editorial writers were more poetic. "Robert Moses has made an urban desert bloom," said an editorial in the World-Telegram. The Herald Tribune, formally recanting the heresies of which it admitted it had been guilty during his Long Island controversy, dubbed him the "Hercules of the Parks." And the Times said:

  . . . Jan. 19 of this year was a red letter day in the history of New York. . . . The time, the place, and the man met in Mayor La Guardia's appointment of Robert Moses as Park Commissioner on that date. Measured in park progress and development on the scale to which this city had been accustomed, it seems years ago. . . .

  The achievements, tangible as well as intangible of the new Commissioner in his first few months of office . . . seem little short of miraculous. It is almost as if Mr. Moses has rubbed a lamp, or murmured some incantation over an old jar, and actually made the jini leap out to do his bidding.

  Reporters fought for interviews with him. And when they got them— for he gave them freely—the interviews were very friendly. Murray Davis of the World-Telegram, telling readers that "for ten years he has worked long hours, without pay, to give New Yorkers inexpensive outdoor pleasures," added:

  To the suggestion that he was independently wealthy and giving hard work and time to an unremunerative job, he smiled.

  ". . . You can't teach an old dog new tricks and I'm 45 now. Ever since I was a kid I was interested in government. My fancy led me into parks and playgrounds and I have nourished those fancies as a hobby, avocation; take your pick.

  "The fact remains that I enjoy this work more than any other, so why not stay with it? I have had only two public offices that paid salaries. Now I have my third. It pays—? I don't know. What do commissioners get? $13,000? I don't know. I'm satisfied to make just a bare living if I can realize all my plans for these things I enjoy. I'm interested in cutting down the overhead and getting results, not in pay."

  During 1934, Moses was in the New York papers even more than J. Edgar Hoover, who spent the year compiling a highly publicized elite hierarchy of "Public Enemies," and then shooting down Number One on the list, John Dillinger, in a blaze of gunfire. Moses was in the New York papers almost as much as La Guardia. The Times editorial on Moses, for example, was only one of 29 praising him in that single newspaper that year. And the Times also carried 346 separate articles on his activities, an average of almost one a day.* There were days, in fact, on which there were five separate stories in the Times. So many were carried on the "split page," the first page of the second section, devoted in the early 1930's largely to municipal affairs, that there were whole weeks in which this prominent page of the nation's most respected newspaper read like a Park Department press release. There were Sundays on which six separate newspapers were carrying long, uncritically laudatory interviews with Moses or reviews of his accomplishments. His picture stared out from their pages a hundred times during that year.

  Each park opening brought forth a new volley of praise. After one, the Herald Tribune, under a headline proclaiming: the people own the parks, called the event "just another of those triumphs whereby Mr. Moses has almost convinced the public that it really owns the parks. After the long night of Tammany it is an idea difficult to grasp."

  The cheers of the press were echoed by the public. While the parks were blossoming with flowers, editorial pages were blossoming with letters from the public praising the man who had planted them. And it was not unusual at park and playground opening ceremonies for children, prodded by their parents, to break into the cheer "Two, four, six, eight—who do we appreciate? Mr. Moses! MR. MOSES!! MR. MOSES!!!"

  * The Times index lists them not only under his name but under "New York City— Parks, Department of," under the names of the individual parks and under other listings given in the index.

  * * *

  The cheers rose to a crescendo when the Central Park Zoo reopened on December 3, 1934.

  Moses had a personal reason for being interested in the zoo. Nineteen thirty-four had been a sad year for Al Smith. The public humiliation to which Jimmy Walker had subjected him at the Inner Circle dinner was only one indication of the fact that there was no longer any place for the old leader in the organization he had led and loved. Only sixty years old, as vigorous as ever, Smith wanted desperately to play a role in the federal government's efforts to end the human misery caused by the Depression. No man was better qualified; Roosevelt himself had told Frances Perkins, "Practically all the things we've done in the federal government are like things Al Smith did as Governor of New York." Roosevelt had asked Smith to campaign for him against Hoover, and Smith had done so. And when Roosevelt had won, Smith had told acquaintances flatly that a man did not feud with the President of his country; he gave him loyalty. He only hoped, he said, that Roosevelt would allow him to work for him. But Roosevelt, another young man of whom Smith had been fond and whom he had helped up the political ladder, refused even to consider him for any federal post. And if Smith considered this the ultimate humiliation, he learned during 1934 that it was not. Worse was to come. When John J. Raskob and the other businessmen who controlled the Empire State Building Corporation had offered him its presidency, they had told him the post was honorary, but, with the skyscraper completed, the Depression made it so difficult to obtain tenants that the corporation was on the verge of bankruptcy, and they told him he would have to do something to earn his $50,000 a year: he would have to go to Washington and beg Roosevelt to throw some government leases his way. For months, Smith refused, but he was finally persuaded that loyalty to his friends required him to help them. Roosevelt responded generously to his entreaty—federal agencies were moved out of offices as far away as Philadelphia to fill up the New York skyscraper—but now in the late afternoons, when Moses dropped by to see him, he would often find the man who had been called the Happy Warrior sitting staring out the windows of his apartment with new lines of bitterness and disillusionment hardening on his face.

  Moses knew how much the old Governor loved animals
and he knew he missed the little zoo he had maintained behind the Executive Mansion in Albany. The former Governor and Katie now lived at 820 Fifth Avenue, almost directly across from the Menagerie, and Smith spent a lot of time strolling among the cages, feeding and talking to the animals. Saddened by the unsanitary conditions in which they had to live and the lack of care for their physical ailments, Smith was horrified when he learned that in case of fire the animals might be shot. When Moses was appointed Park Commissioner, Smith told him he would regard it as a special favor if the Menagerie were improved.

  Moses gave the job top priority. When materials and equipment ran low—because of the CWA's reluctance to spend money on them, they were

  always running low—what was available was diverted there from other projects. The best ramrods were put on the job to drive the thousand men working around the clock in the fenced-off area behind the Arsenal. Most of the animals had been moved out, but not all, and the lions, shunted from one animal house to another as the buildings were torn down and kept awake by the glow of the carbide flares and the pound of the pneumatic drills, roared through the night, while a reporter who visited the site early one morning found the Menagerie's old polar bear pacing "restlessly up and down in bewilderment, pausing occasionally to peer out at the grimy, torch-lit laborers." The residents of Fifth Avenue apartment buildings near the site roared, too, but Moses refused even to listen to their complaints. Often, in the evenings, he would suddenly materialize on the scene, joking with the field superintendents and with the men, encouraging them, telling them how important their work was, urging them on. All summer and fall, he spurred the job with a special urgency. And when it was finished, on December 2, he turned the reopening into a surprise party for Al Smith.

  It was quite a party. Some observers said New York had never seen anything like it. To emphasize that he was trying to make the zoo not so much a great animal museum like its counterpart in the Bronx but a place of delight for young children, Moses had already dubbed it a "picture-book zoo," and when the twelve hundred invited guests filed into the stands set up in front oi the Arsenal for the opening ceremonies—twenty-five thousand other persons lined Fifth Avenue waiting to be admitted—they found that in front of the zoo entrance had been erected a six-foot-high wooden replica of an open picture book, with painted green elephants charging across its bright-yellow pages. Flanking the speakers' platform were two huge boxes wrapped in striped and polka-dotted paper and adorned with satin bows like a child's present. As the ceremonies began, four olive-clad trumpeters blew a flourish, the wrapping paper was pulled away—and inside one box was a cage containing a lion, inside the other a cage with a gorilla. Public Welfare Commissioner William Hodson, called to the microphone to give a speech, startled the audience by breaking instead into several choruses, delivered in a rather wheezy tenor, of "Oh, I went to the animal fair." Thousands of balloons were released at intervals to fill the air with color until they were wafted northward by the prevailing breeze. Uniformed, flag-bearing high-school bands and elementary-school fife-and-drum corps came marching, one after the other, up Fifth Avenue. And clattering around the corner of the Arsenal came a team of white ponies drawing a tiny, gaily colored barouche in which sat a little girl holding a large gold key with which La Guardia could "unlock" a door in the middle of the picture book and thus officially open the new zoo.

  But before La Guardia got the key, there was something for Smith. Moses had given the former Governor no hint that he would even participate in the ceremonies, simply telling him that there would be a seat for him on the reviewing stand. But when the old warrior walked out the front door of his apartment house to make his way to the stand, he found three hundred schoolchildren from the Fourth Ward lined up in front of the door, cheering

  and waving balloons, waiting to escort him across Fifth Avenue. He found that his seat was in the place of honor next to La Guardia. (Moses, who had been supposed to sit on his other side, was absent; during the past week he had refused to take a day off despite a severe case of influenza, and doctors summoned over his protests by a worried Mary just two hours before the ceremony began found him in a state of complete collapse and ordered him to bed.) Hardly had Smith sat down when he realized that he was being summoned to the microphone himself, and Earle Andrews, substituting for Moses, pinned to his lapel a large, elaborately engraved medal with a lion's head on its face and announced that he was now, and permanently, "Honorary Night Superintendent of the Central Park Zoo." As Andrews finished speaking, a horse-drawn wagon, reminiscent of those Smith had chased through the Fourth Ward in his youth, rolled around the corner of the Arsenal, and it was jammed with boys—from the Fourth Ward—singing, "East Side, West Side." The horses pulled up in front of him and eleven-year-old Eddie McKeon jumped out and presented him with a large Christmas turkey as the whole reviewing stand stood and joined in his old campaign song.

  The old Governor's eyes were tearing, from the cold December wind, no doubt, and it took some time for him to clear them, and even after he did he spent a rather long time chewing on his cigar, which was already in shreds, before he began to speak, but when he did, he knew exactly what he wanted to say. "When Mr. Moses was appointed Park Commissioner, I used all the influence I had with him to get him to work on a new zoo," he said. "And now look at him! In less than eight months, we've got a zoo that's one of the finest of its kind in the world." Smith began then to recite the whole list of Moses' achievements, stopping only when he noticed the children on line trying to peer over the park wall at the cages. Cutting himself short, he said with a smile, "I bid you welcome to this new zoo as night superintendent, and I hope you have a good time," and sat down.

  Later that week, when he was well enough to tell him himself, Moses informed Smith that the night superintendency carried with it certain privileges. He gave Smith a master key which unlocked the animal houses and told the Governor that the zoo caretakers had been instructed that he was to be allowed to enter them whenever he wanted, day or night. And until the end of his life, Smith would delight in this privilege. The doormen at No. 820 would become accustomed to seeing him walk out the front door in the evenings and across Fifth Avenue under the street lights, a somewhat paunchy figure with a big brown derby set firmly on his head and a big cigar jutting out from his face, and disappear down the steps of the darkened zoo, not to reappear for hours. The former Governor and presidential candidate would walk through the animal houses, switching on the lights as he entered each one, to the surprise of its occupants, and talk softly to them. He would have in his pocket an apple for Rosie, the huge hippo. And if one of the zoo's less dangerous animals was sick or injured, Smith would enter its cage and stand for a while stroking its head and commiserating with it. When he had dinner guests, he would take them along and, since

  they were usually Tammany stalwarts unhappy at what La Guardia was doing to the Tammany Tiger, they delighted in a little show he would put on with the zoo's biggest and fiercest tiger, who could be counted upon to respond angrily if anyone growled at him. When Smith and his guests approached, the tiger would be sitting silently staring at them through the bars. Smith would walk up to the cage, thrust his h~ad toward the bars and, in his deepest and harshest voice, roar at the tiger, "La Guardia!" The tiger would snarl, bare its teeth and leap at the bars, growling in what Smith's daughter describes as "obvious disapproval."

  While there were cheers aplenty for Smith at the zoo opening, however, there were plenty left over for Moses.

  The invited guests on the reviewing stand had been startled by the transformation in the Arsenal. The stucco had been sand-blasted off its walls, revealing handsome dark-red bricks. The cupolas had been torn off its turrets, revealing battlements complete with archer's slits. The newel posts of the banisters on the stairs leading up to its front entrance were now upturned Colonial cannon muzzles, and the banisters themselves were supported by wrought-iron imitations of Colonial flintlock rifles, painted white. Atop the gleaming
white doorway, whose lintel had been crenelated to mirror the battlements on the roof above, an eagle glared from between two carved mounds of cannon balls, and on the jambs had been carved crossed swords and Indian spears. The large lamps on either side of the door had been enclosed in wrought-iron replicas of tasseled drums like those carried by Revolutionary War drummer boys. And above the doorway three large flags fluttered colorfully from flagpoles. All in all, the once shabby wreck looked quite like a little fort, a gay little fort that when seen in miniature from the higher floors of Fifth Avenue apartment houses seemed almost to have been set in the park by mistake and really to belong six blocks down the avenue in the windows of F. A. O. Schwarz.