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

by Caro, Robert A

  The residents of the high-rent apartment houses that lined the Manhattan side of the East River had never gotten much of a view for their money. Opposite them—to the east and dragging off to the south—was scenery done in Early Industrial Era Midlands, the grimy warehouses, factories, tenements, oil tanks and open storage depots of Astoria and Long Island City. Its dreariness broken only by the gaudiness of occasional monster billboards painted large enough so that their messages could be seen clearly across the river, that vista stretched away without a break (there were no housing developments or parks there then) beneath a pall (the word "smog" had not yet gained currency) cast over it by belching smokestacks. And the scene to the north where Ward's Island lay, low in the water with Randall's behind it, had not been any prettier. Dull-colored and lifeless in the distance even when fog didn't shroud them, the two islands had been adorned only by the squat red and gray institutional buildings that failed to block out the scenery behind the islands: the South Bronx, Long Island City's spiritual descendant. Since 1932, the piers erected for the first, abortive attempt to build the Triborough Bridge had been part of the scene, but, dun-colored, featureless and, without a bridge on top of them, seeming in the distance like a succession of walls to play handball against, they did little to relieve its drabness. The view had not been inspiring.

  By the end of 1934, that was no longer true.

  By the end of that year, the residents of the East River apartments, looking north, could see giant cranes moving about on the islands like long-necked dinosaurs prowling far-off marshes. Around the cranes were stirring masses of men. Over the water came the pound of pile drivers, a sound that was dull and far away, but that never seemed to stop. And rising from behind the little buildings on the left of Ward's Island and curving off to the right across the island in a gigantic curve, a highway was being bolted into place in the sky.

  The highway, carried across Ward's Island on the piers, climbed in a long, slow, powerful line. Across the river—to the right as the watchers looked north—they could see its steel roadbed slanting unhurriedly down behind the first line of factories. There was a great gap in the center, but it took

  little imagination to see how the roadbed would continue to rise there until it was flung across the Hell Gate, for the hulking concrete anchorages that would hold the cables for the Hell Gate suspension bridge were already in place ("Immense things they are," wrote an observer; "beside the Nile they would pass for pyramids"), and so were the bridge's steel towers, which loomed over the river like the facades of twin cathedrals. And even as the watchers watched, new portions of the roadbed paraded past them. Pushing aside the sullen gray of the East River would come a squad of barges, lashed together side by side to bear a weight measured in thousands of tons and pushed along by a whole covey of panting tugboats, bearing to the waiting cranes the specially fabricated steel girders that would hold the bridge roadbed girders—some of which were as big as a ten-room ranch house.

  Enormous as the Triborough Bridge seemed to watchers along the East River, moreover, they were seeing only a small portion of the whole project.

  Engineers and journalists felt that it was only from a plane that one could get a feel of the project in its three-borough entirety. From the air, one journalist said, "you could see the avenues being widened as if a giant chisel was being rammed between them."

  And from the air, more than one journalist said, the project seemed almost too big to grasp.

  Robert Moses erected the complex of buildings that was the Central Park Zoo at least partly because of his devotion to Alfred E. Smith. He tore down another building in the park wholly because of that devotion.

  He tore down Jimmy Walker's Casino.

  Everyone who was interested in the cause of parks in New York City disapproved of the use to which Calvert Vaux's Ladies Refreshment Salon was being put, of course. But none of them wanted the building torn down. As a structure designed by one of the creators of Central Park, it held a special place in the city's history. And for many of the reformers, it was associated with pleasant memories; they could remember accompanying their parents on Sunday bicycle or horseback rides through the park that ended with lunch there in the quieter days before the World War. Moreover, the building possessed a Victorian charm precious in its own right. As a practical matter, although Solomon and his backers had poured almost $400,-000 into improvements in the building's interior, he was nonetheless only renting it from the city. The city still owned it. The Park Department could ask him to lower his prices and thereby make the magnificent dining rooms and pavilions more accessible to the general public. If Solomon refused, the city could attempt to cancel his lease and install in his place a more amenable concessionaire. And even if the attempt failed, the lease had only five more years to run; after that, the building, and the improvements, would revert to the city forever. The Park Association had been campaigning for the Casino's conversion into a moderate-priced restaurant, but when the Association's members heard that Moses was planning to raze the building—announcing

  that it was structurally unsound, that it would cost too much to repair and that luxury restaurants had no place in parks anyway, he said that a playground, complete with wading pool, would be constructed on its site— they were aghast. Such an act, they said, would be wanton destruction. Financially, it made even less sense; a group of restaurant owners had already asked for permission to operate the Casino as a moderate-priced restaurant, abiding by any rules that Moses wished to establish—and pay the city $25,000 annual rental plus a liberal share of the receipts. And finally, as the Casino's chef, Henri Charpontier, put it in a plaintive letter to the Times: "Why choose the site of the Casino . . . when there are broad expanses as far as the eye can reach on either side of the Casino, where as fine a swimming [sic] pool as the Commissioner's kind heart urges him to provide could easily be located?"

  But Moses refused to compromise. The considerations which motivated him were not historical, aesthetic or financial. To a large extent, they were hardly rational. "It was a case of revenge, pure and simple," says Paul Windels, La Guardia's Corporation Counsel who advised Moses on the case before turning it over, "in disgust," to Assistant Corporation Counsel William C. Chanler. "He never said so straight out, but everyone around him knew why he was doing it—he wanted to get back at Walker for what Walker had done to Governor Smith. God, he wanted to get Walker!" (And the oddest part about the affair, Windels says, was that, "to the best of my knowledge," Moses never spoke to Governor Smith about it—and if he had, Governor Smith "would have told him not to do it.")

  Solomon, panicking over his investment, offered to confer with Moses and revise his price list. "I am not going to confer with Mr. Solomon,'-' Moses replied. With La Guardia, advised by Windels against supporting an establishment as notorious as the Casino, refusing to intervene, Chanler served Solomon with an eviction notice that charged the Casino Corporation with a number of technical violations of its lease; a typical charge was that, by allowing fashion shows to be held there, the Casino had violated a regulation prohibiting advertising on park property.

  Solomon took the case to court. The trial turned out to be embarrassing for both him and Moses.

  Solomon was forced to admit that, during the five years of its existence, the Casino had grossed more than three million dollars and he himself had drawn more than a quarter of a million in salary—while paying the city a total of $42,500 in rent. He had to admit that Park Department officials had been allowed to consume tens of thousands of dollars of free food and liquor. And he had to manage to keep a straight face while maintaining under cross-examination that he couldn't remember the name of a single one of those officials, or of a single one of the Casino's stockholders.

  But Moses had some bad moments on the stand, too.

  One was reminiscent of the way he had been trapped in an apparent lie the only other time he had found himself under oath. In the Taylor Estate trial, he had testified that he had never
been advised that appropriation without funds was illegal, and W. Kingsland Macy's attorney, Charles H. Tuttle, had thereupon produced the paper which had given him that very

  advice and waved it in front of him. Now, sitting in the witness chair in State Supreme Court in Foley Square, Moses said that he would allow in city parks only restaurants that charged "reasonable" prices, and when pressed for his definition of "reasonable," he said that luncheon should be one dollar or less, coffee no more than a dime—and that "the a la carte system" is a luxury which should not be permitted to exist in a park restaurant. Whereupon Solomon's attorney, the same Charles H. Tuttle, produced a paper, waved it in front of Moses and asked if he recognized it. It was a luncheon menu, approved by Moses, from the Tavern-on-the-Green, the restaurant Moses had installed in the sheepfold after renovating it and turning it over to a favorite concessionaire for a nominal rental, and the attorney read from it a long list of a la carte entrees for luncheon, all priced over a dollar, and concluded by reading the Tavern's price for coffee—twenty-five cents.

  The press, which had long used the Casino as a convenient symbol of the abuses of the corrupt "Walkerian Court," treated the trial as ah attempt to end those abuses. If there was a principle involved, the press ignored it. But some reformers did not. The Casino case marked the first significant defections from the solid ranks the city's Good Government movement had previously formed behind Moses in every encounter. Not all reformers disapproved of his attempt to demolish the building, of course. Most still believed that anything he did was right—apparently, judging from their comments, because they believed his motives were pure; when he said the building was structurally unsound and repairs were unfeasible, they believed him. And most of those who, having seen the Casino, found his contention difficult to believe, felt sure that he had simply made a mistake, one to which, in view of his past record, he was more than entitled. But some reformers, and among them some of the men and women who had played the most vital roles in persuading the Legislature to allow Moses to assume the city park commissionership, found it difficult to reconcile their idealized image of him with the fact that he was now contemplating "destroying property ... in Central Park which did not belong to him but to the entire city." And they were certain, they said, that he did not have the power to do so.

  But this last group of reformers was in for an awakening, the same kind of awakening that had been undergone ten years before by Trubee Davison, who had introduced a bill Moses had drafted without thoroughly studying it, and by upstate reformers like Ansley Wilcox and Alphonse Clearwater, who had been tricked by Moses into supporting the Davison bill. In outlining the powers of the New York City Park Commissioner, as in outlining the powers of the chairman of the State Council of Parks, Moses had proved again that he was the best bill drafter in Albany.

  The city reformers had supported the bill that had allowed Moses to become Commissioner despite reservations about some of its broader provisions. Now they looked at the bill more closely—and found that it was not only its broader provisions that they should have been worried about.

  Chanler startled them by arguing in court that the bill granted the City Park Commissioner absolute power "to raze or remove . . . buildings which had been erected as incidental to park uses, such as restaurants, boat houses

  and similar structures," and that it further provided, as additional insurance against any check on his actions, that "such changes will not be supervised by the judicial power unless palpably . . . abusive of the grant." The inclusion of such language in the bill, they realized, meant that not even the courts could stop Moses from tearing down any structure in the parks that he wanted to tear down. As Trubee Davison had done ten years before, they hurriedly began reading the law—and they found that the language was, buried within a mass of other legalese, indeed in it. And they found that some other language was not in it, language that had previously been included in city park laws at their request to insure against willful changes in the parks at the whim of a Park Commissioner. Under the old statute, the approval of a landscape architect, "skilled and expert," had been required for any major alteration in a park. Now there was no longer any such requirement. Moses had skillfully amended it out of the new law. Chanler said in court that the new law gave Moses the right to do whatever he wanted in parks as long as it was for a "proper park use" and that Moses was the only man who could determine what was, and was not, a proper use. And Chanler was right. As the reformers read the law, the law that they had helped pass, they realized that they had helped turn over the parks that were the priceless heritage of the city to the whim of one man.

  Before the issue was finally decided, a number of requests for injunctions against the demolition were argued before several different Supreme Court Justices. One, John F. Carew, allowed his emotions to boil over on the bench. Moses' contention that the Casino was in an irreparably bad state of disrepair, Carew said, was "obviously preposterous and contrary to the facts." Having thus called Moses a liar in legalese, Carew went on.

  The Casino, he said, "has long been an honorable, useful, beloved, admired, valuable and even historic monument. . . . The Park Commissioner has no more power to destroy the Casino than he has to destroy the Obelisk, to fill in the reservoir, or the lake, to tear down City Hall, the Arsenal [or] the many historic buildings, monuments, structures, statues in the many other parks of the City, the treasured relics of generations here. He is only to hold office for a brief term. He is the passing creature of a day. He will in time, and that not long, be superseded. He may not 'waste' the heritage of New York. In the meantime ... he must restrain his extravagant, excessive energy and zeal or he must be restrained." He issued the injunction.

  But Moses wasn't worried. He knew what was in the law. "I think the higher court will take care of Justice Carew," he told a reporter airily. And he was right. When Chanler appealed Carew's decision to the Appellate Division in Albany, the five justices of that court, sitting together in their high-backed chairs, said that the powers the Legislature had granted to Moses were far too broad and indicated that they wished the Legislature would revoke some of them. But for the present, they said, the law was passed, and it was unfortunately clear; they had no choice but to overrule Carew's decision. If Moses had the power to destroy the Casino, Carew had said, he had the power to destroy the Obelisk, the Arsenal, City Hall or any other structure, no matter how historic, no matter how beautiful, no matter

  how treasured, in any park in New York City. Carew was wrong about City Hall; it lies just outside the northern boundary of City Hall Park; Moses couldn't tear it down. But Carew was right about everything else.

  Moving quickly to forestall any further appeals, Moses had crews of workmen tearing down the Casino within twenty-four hours after he received a copy of the Appellate Court decision. Within two months, the building was gone and its site was covered with a playground. Except for its stained-glass windows, which were used in the new police station being constructed on the Eighty-sixth Street Transverse Road, Robert Moses had succeeded in eradicating every trace of the spiritual home of the man who had publicly humiliated Alfred E. Smith.

  orial; to a large extent, in fact, the GOP was the barons and the "Interests," a fact made clear when H. Edmund Machold, stepping down as Assembly Speaker in 1925, became, simultaneously, state GOP chairman and president of the gigantic utility holding company Niagara-Hudson, and by the fact that among the downstate GOP congressmen were Robert Low Bacon, stipendiary of the House of Morgan, Ogden Livingston Mills, son of Darius Ogden Mills of the San Francisco "bank ring," and willowy millionairess Ruth Baker Pratt, widow of one of the six sons for whom Rockefeller partner Charles Pratt had built manor houses on the Glen Cove peninsula.

  It was important to the Interests that they control the state GOP. It was important for business reasons—the party was the Interests' traditional protector in Albany—and it was important for reasons that went beyond business: the conservatism of these men of prope
rty, to whom property rights were sacred, was not only financial but ideological, and they viewed their party as a bulwark against heresy, against the increasing emphasis on human as opposed to property rights that characterized the philosophy of the three Democrats—Smith, Roosevelt and Lehman—who had usurped the Executive Chamber. Public reverence for their beliefs might be dying, but they would never surrender them. Not for nothing had journalists dubbed them "the Old Guard."

  From the standpoint of both philosophy and pocketbook, in 1934 control of the state GOP was more important to the Old Guard than ever. Their fury at the New Deal—"the purpose of the Roosevelt administration is the imposition of a Russianized form of government," snarled upstater Bertrand H. Snell, House minority leader*—had led them to resolve that the presidential election of 1936 would be a Holy Crusade to oust "that man" from the White House, and they intended to make New York, with its forty-five electoral votes, the crusade's embarkation point. Moreover, most of the Old Guard—"anybody who amounted to anything in the GOP," Warren Moscow said—owned Niagara-Hudson stock, whose value would be immensely increased by the finalization of the scheme that had been the party's grail for almost four decades: the turning over to private utilities such as Niagara-Hudson of the immense water-power resources of the St. Lawrence and Niagara rivers. Smith had established a State Power Authority to keep those resources in the hands of the state's people. Roosevelt had pointed out dramatically that only two heartbeats, his and that of Lieutenant Governor Lehman, separated the "Power Trust" from the state's water power —and millions of New York families from higher monthly electric-light bills. Lehman, as Governor, had proved even more effective, undramatically but stubbornly shoving down the Legislature's throat bills giving the State Public Service Commission authority over utility rates, forbidding the use of