The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York
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But the arrangements entered into by the Triborough Bridge Authority during its days of domination by Tammany Hall threatened to make the project as nearly worthless as it was possible for a $50,000,000 enterprise to be.
Before he had taken over the project himself, Moses had told aides that the Authority's refusal to make any semblance of provision for approach roads in Queens and the Bronx was the most glaring example of poor planning that he had ever seen. But now, studying the project more closely, he realized that he had spoken too hastily. What the Authority had done in Queens and the Bronx, he saw, was as nothing compared to what the Authority had done in Manhattan.
The Queens terminus of the Triborough Bridge was directly across the East River from 100th Street in Manhattan. Therefore, the Manhattan terminus of the bridge should have been placed at 100th Street. It certainly should not have been placed any further uptown; the bulk of the bridge traffic—85 percent by one estimate—would be coming from, and going to, destinations south of 100th Street. Placing the Manhattan terminus at 125th Street condemned most motorists traveling between that borough and Queens to drive twenty-five totally unnecessary blocks north and then, once on the bridge, twenty-five totally unnecessary blocks south—to thus add two and a half totally unnecessary miles to their every journey over the bridge. And the complete lack of provision for any approach road from downtown would make the Manhattan portion of the totally unnecessary journey tortuous.
Then there were the plans for the bridge structure itself.
The plans called for a two-deck, sixteen-lane affair. Such a bridge would have a capacity of approximately 16,000,000 vehicles per year, but traffic studies Moses had commissioned had convinced him that it would be forty years before that capacity would be needed. (Moses was, in fact, worried about attracting even the 7,500,000 vehicles per year required to meet amortization and interest payments on the Authority bonds purchased by the PWA; he was convinced that only a network of excellent approach roads that would make the trip via Triborough clearly superior to the old, toll-free, routes would persuade that number of drivers to pay twenty-five cents per trip.) Moreover, building the bridge on two decks would greatly increase its weight, and therefore would require towers, anchorages and piers of enormous size—and cost. And the weight would, under the old plans, be further increased by the fact that the Authority was planning to cover the Triborough's steelwork with great masses of enormously costly ornamental granite. Moses' engineers told him that the two-deck bridge would cost at least $51,000,000 instead of the $44,200,000 the PWA had allocated.
His engineers had another surprise for Moses. They informed him that the Authority's engineers had made Triborough's lanes the same width as the lanes on the Queensborough Bridge which had proved too narrow for cars and had had to be closed while the curbstones were chipped away. Triborough's "eight-lane" decks would hold only six adequate lanes.
After taking over the Authority, Moses took almost no time to find out why the Manhattan terminus had been placed at 125th Street: William Randolph Hearst had owned deteriorating real estate there and he had wanted the city to buy it. And it took Moses little time to learn why the bridge was supposed to be bedecked with costly granite: the quarries that were supposed to furnish the granite were owned by Tammany interests.
Moses had learned how to get things done and one way not to get things done in New York was to pick a fight with Hearst and his three newspapers. He left the Manhattan terminus at 125th Street.
But that was about all Moses left. With George V. McLaughlin admiringly letting him run the Authority as he wished, Moses controlled two of its three votes. The third, he soon learned, was in his pocket, too; its possessor, the chairman and lone remaining member of the original Authority, was an attorney, Nathan Burkan, whose only interest was in protecting Hearst's, and once Moses indicated that he would not interfere with those interests—the publisher received a $782,000 award for his 125th Street holdings—Burkan showed little further concern about the operations of the body of which he was the nominal head and never attempted to contest Moses' assumption of its executive functions. Two years earlier, Moses had called on the Authority's chief engineer, Edwin A. Byrne, the old Tammany man who had entered city service in 1886 as an axeman, and had pleaded with him to strip the granite from the bridge design and to use the money saved for approach roads, and Byrne had refused. Now Moses was Byrne's boss. In his own words: "I sent for the chief engineer and asked him which he thought was more important—adequate approaches or ornamental granite. He unhesitatingly replied, 'Granite.' This ended the conference and I told him to resign and get his pension." And Moses gave similar instructions, after conferences of similar length, to almost all of Byrne's aides.
To head Triborough's new engineering staff, Moses hired the austere, no-nonsense Swiss aristocrat who had designed the graniteless George Washington Bridge: Othmar Hermann Ammann. To head Triborough's new administrative staff, Moses hired a male version of Amelia Clanton, a stern disciplinarian he had met at Hog Island and had hired to shape up the Long Island Park Commission: retired army brigadier general Paul J. Loeser. Loeser had a gift for rubbing almost anyone the wrong way—La Guardia called him "a Prussian and a Nazi"—but Moses had seen in brief encounters with the General qualities that could be useful to him. "He was, no doubt, a martinet," Moses was to recall. "He was tough. ... He was not popular."
Then Moses set about giving Ammann and Loeser staffs to shape up: a team of the country's most experienced bridge builders. Within weeks, this team had come up with the kind of plans Moses wanted. The granite
was eliminated. The two decks were reduced to one, the sixteen lanes were slashed to six on the Manhattan arm of the bridge and to eight on the rest— and the cost of the bridge was cut by 40 percent, from $51,000,000 to about $30,000,000. The Authority was now going to have a surplus of about $14,000,000 from its $44,200,000 PWA allocation.
Moses' plans for using the money to build the roads that would link the great bridge with his Westchester and Long Island parkways raised legal problems: the PWA allocation was for building a bridge, not roads, and while the allocation did permit expenditures for bridge "approaches," that word had traditionally referred only to the ramps leading directly up to the bridge. But Moses persuaded PWA Administrator Harold L. Ickes that "approaches" could be defined as "approach roads." He told him that without such roads the number of motorists who would use the new bridge would be too small to enable the Authority to meet the payments on the bonds the PWA had purchased—an argument that weighed heavily with the thrifty Ickes. In fact, he persuaded him not only to let him use the $14,000,000 for approach roads but to give him an additional $2,000,000 as well.
Sixteen million dollars was an impressive sum, but it wasn't nearly enough for the approach roads Moses had in mind. He persuaded La Guardia to search the corners of the city treasury for additional right-of-way contributions. He persuaded Civil Works Administration officials to permit him to list some of the road-building work as "park" projects—and thereby obtain hundreds of CWA laborers. Then he obtained hundreds more by diverting CWA-paid laborers on other Park Department projects to the Triborough project without CWA permission. (It always took a few days for CWA officials to find out what their laborers were doing, and by then Moses could tell them that since the work had been started, it would be silly not to allow it to be completed. After all, he pointed out, if the laborers were now reassigned, the jobs would be left unfinished—unsightly scars, offending residents of the neighborhoods in which they were located. And if the newspapers got wind of such an example of governmental inefficiency . . . The argument never failed.) And by the autumn of 1934, thanks to the success of his tactics with CWA's successor agencies, work had been begun to widen Whitlock Avenue, the Bronx thoroughfare with which the bridge connected, and Eastern Boulevard, the thoroughfare with which Whitlock Avenue connected, all the way to the Hutchinson River Parkway.
The building of Triborough's Queens approach was
a triumph of imagination over seemingly insoluble problems. The four-mile gap between the bridge and the Grand Central Parkway was four miles of Jackson Heights and Astoria, and in those two communities neat one-family homes, garden apartments, stores and small factories were jammed tightly together. Condemning the number of buildings involved would be impossibly expensive, but there was no vacant land left for a parkway right-of-way.
So Moses made land. A hundred yards out from the shoreline of Jackson Heights, giant pile drivers, mounted on giant barges, pounded steel bulk-
heads into the muck at the bottom of Flushing Bay. Then long strings of barges piled high with sand from the Rockaways made their broad-beamed way up the East River, through Hell Gate and into the bay to dump the sand behind the bulkheads. Long convoys of dump trucks loaded with shale and stone and gravel rumbled across Queens to heave up their backs and slide the shale and stone in with the sand. And the mixture became a mass solid enough to hold concrete, specifically the six concrete lanes that would allow the Grand Central Parkway to circle Jackson Heights for more than two miles and wait until the last possible minute before plunging into Astoria Boulevard for the final run to the Triborough Bridge ramp.
The building of Triborough's Manhattan approach was another triumph of imagination.
Since the Manhattan terminus was to be located at 125th Street, Moses told his aides, there had to be some way of getting up to 125th Street. York Avenue, which presently ended at Ninety-second Street, would have to be extended along the riverfront.
If Charles Dickens had been looking for an illustration for an American edition of Hard Times, he could have stopped looking when he got to that riverfront. The stretch between Ninety-second and 125th streets was a catalogue of the unlovely by-products of industrialism; scented by the raw filth pouring from open sewers into the river below was a long row of small, grimy factories, used-car lots, auto-repair shops, junkyards, coal pockets and oil-storage depots. Hogarth could have found a whole gallery of models in the occupants of the bars, whorehouses and tenements that mingled with them. To Moses, however, the panorama possessed less appeal. Unlovely as was the scenery, it would not be cheap to condemn it. On a single factory, the Washburn Wire Works, a large, grimy building that occupied three solid blocks of riverfront, from 116th to 119th streets, the price asked was $3,000,000.
A riverfront highway had been proposed before, but an early Corporation Counsel had announced that he had searched the deeds to the land involved and found that there was no loophole that would allow the city to take title by any procedure other than the unfeasibly expensive one of condemnation. Succeeding city administrations had assumed for decades that that finding was correct. But Moses told his bloodhounds to forget about assumptions and search the deeds again—and to find something, goddammit. And the bloodhounds found something. The title to some of the lots contained a covenant more than a century old, dating back to a time when the lots had been owned by the city itself, they told Moses. And in the covenant the city reserved the right to reclaim a sixty-foot strip along the waterfront in case it ever wanted to build a street there. Moses could have sixty feet of right-of-way along a considerable stretch of his riverfront highway for nothing.
Moses' problems were still far from solved. At least six lanes were required, he figured, and the minimum width for six lanes was not sixty feet
but one hundred. And Moses did not intend to waste the waterfront in a park-starved section of the city on a highway. He wanted the river side of that highway to be not a guardrail for the highway but a park from which residents of the area could enjoy the waterfront. There should, he decided, be a tree-shaded esplanade along the waterfront, complete with benches and play areas. And for such a park at least another thirty or forty feet in width were needed, thirty or forty feet that would, if condemnation was required to obtain it, be terribly expensive.
There were other complications. The Washburn company told La Guardia that, if it was forced to move, it would move out of the city altogether and find a cheaper location somewhere else—and the Washburn company employed 1,200 men. The Mayor told Moses that the city could not afford to lose 1,200 jobs—and therefore could not take the chance that the company was bluffing. The Consolidated Edison Company owned large portions of property that were set back from the river and would not have to be condemned. But Con Ed needed access to the waterfront, and that access was now provided by overhead conveyors which crossed the property on which the East River Drive Extension would have to run. If those conveyors were eliminated, Con Ed would be hurt, and the city would have to pay the utility substantial damages.
To keep the amount of land required for the improvement as small as possible, Moses decided to build the park out over the river on a reinforced concrete platform ten feet wide—because a ten-foot-wide platform was the maximum width that could be supported without the construction of expensive pilings. He wouldn't condemn the Washburn Wire Works, he decided. He would chop off its front, run the Drive through the land thus obtained, build additions atop the factory so that its floor space would not be reduced and an underground tunnel beneath the Drive so that it would still have access to the waterfront—and reface the entire shabby edifice with neat brick. This solution would cost a million dollars—two million less than condemnation would have cost. And it saved the city 1,200 jobs.
Moses decided to tear down Con Ed's overhead conveyors and build more underground tunnels to the river so that the company could not claim consequential damages. While he was negotiating with the company about this, he horsetraded—Con Ed's citywide operations required an endless stream of concessions from the city, so, with La Guardia behind him, Moses had plenty of ammunition to horsetrade with—and obtained portions of Con Ed's property along the right-of-way without having to pay for it. Then he made another trip to Washington and asked the PWA to contribute an additional $6,000,000 to acquire land for the Drive so that the bridge would be made more accessible to motorists and more of them would be persuaded to pay tolls to use it. The PWA wouldn't give $6,000,000—but it would give $2,000,000. Moses took La Guardia on a tour of the proposed improvement. La Guardia, who lived in an apartment at 106th Street and Fifth Avenue, was keenly aware of the park needs of the neighborhood. And he was fascinated by the engineering aspects of the work. Moses persuaded him that men paid by CWA and its successor agencies could be reassigned
from other city departments to provide the labor needed for the job. This reduced the cost, for land acquisition and materials mainly, to $1,878,500. Scour the city treasury as he would, La Guardia could find no more than about $1,300,000 that could be made available—but this contribution brought the balance down to about $578,000, and Moses said the Authority could afford to pay that itself. And by the end of 1934, the Board of Estimate, under La Guardia's goading, was rushing through the resolutions necessary to obtain title to the area.
Then Moses turned to the question of transforming Randall's and Ward's islands into parks. His Authority had no authorization from the PWA to build parks, it was true, but he convinced PWA officials that the parks would attract to the islands—and to the bridge—enough toll-paying motorists to justify a modest investment. And a modest investment was all he had in mind, he told the officials. The Authority would have to pay for the materials needed to construct baseball diamonds, tennis courts and bench-lined esplanades, but the total cost should not be more than $225,000. The big cost involved, that of labor, would be paid for by the CWA, for he would make the reclamation of the islands a Park Department project.
The old Authority had planned, and had received PWA authorization to build, a Randall's Island municipal stadium with a seating capacity of 10,000. "Wholly inadequate," Moses said. He wanted a stadium seating "at least" 70,000, big enough to hold an annual interborough athletic competition—the competitors to be champions selected in track meets and other athletic events held in each borough—and the big crowds that he was sure would attend. And he wanted it big enough to be the s
ite of Olympic try-outs and great outdoor spectacles. "The stadium must be adequate for big events or it is a failure," he said. "There is ample room on the island for a big stadium." Its components must be of commensurate size, he said. For example, it should have the largest movable outdoor stage in the world. Construction of such a stadium would cost the city millions in ordinary times. But now, the labor, the biggest single item, would be paid for by the federal government. He persuaded the CWA to list the stadium as a Park Department project. A million dollars in materials would be needed for these men to work with, but he persuaded the PWA that the stadium would help attract toll payers to the bridge, and the agency allowed the Authority to increase its previously authorized contribution by $300,000.
There was still an obstacle to the creation of parks and a stadium on Randall's and Ward's islands: the institutional buildings already there. The military hospital was only partly filled and Moses had little difficulty persuading U. S. Army and Navy officials to move the patients to other hospitals and vacate the buildings. But the House of Refuge, the Hospital for the Feeble-Minded and Manhattan State Hospital presented a more difficult problem; city and state reformatories and asylums were already overcrowded. La Guardia's hospital commissioner, Dr. Sigismund S. Goldwater, flatly refused to move patients out of the city buildings on the two islands,
and state officials said any moves would have to wait until new state institutions were constructed. But Moses persuaded Lehman to overrule the state officials and La Guardia to overrule Goldwater, and by the end of 1934, with the patients crammed into overcrowded institutions, the House of Refuge had been vacated and demolished and the razing of the Hospital for the Feeble-Minded was under way.
Meanwhile, Moses' eyes had focused on the Sunken Meadow, the fifty-acre sand bar east of Randall's Island. The hundred-yard strip of East River that separated it from the island concealed land that lay only a few feet below the surface. Moses ordered the strip filled in—and Sunken Meadow was thereby made a part of Randall's Island, and another fifty acres was acquired for park space.