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

by Caro, Robert A

  Moses, do hereby resign as effective " and simply hand one

  to Moses whenever the commissioner threatened to resign. The technique worked; the next time Moses made the threat in person, La Guardia simply whipped out the pad, tore off the top form with a flourish and a broad—if forced—grin and handed it to him. Moses snatched the pad off the Mayor's desk, hurled it across the room, stamped out the door—and used the threat more infrequently thereafter. But it remained nonetheless implicit in confrontations between the two men, and while La Guardia won some of those clashes, more often it was the Mayor, rather than his commissioner, who gave way. In one typical episode, La Guardia ordered an investigation of two construction contractors he suspected of defrauding the city. Their attorney, the brilliant Jackson Dykman, recalls that while he was conferring with his clients in Moses' office, "I heard Moses give La Guardia the devil over the telephone." Describing that telephone conversation, Moses gives a wonderful imitation of the La Guardia snarl: "He said, "Yeahhhh, I hear you got a fancy lawyer.' I said, 'Yeahhhh, and he's gonna kick the shit out of you. You better leave him alone.'" And, as it turned out, La Guardia never had the investigation pursued.

  On July 23, 1936, readers of The New York Times were served with their morning coffee a headline reading mayor calls police to halt razing of ferry by moses. And as they read on, they found that the headline had not exaggerated. The Mayor of the City of New York had indeed called out the armed constabulary against his own Park Commissioner.

  At the beginning of his mayoralty, at the time of the renegotiation of the contract between the Triborough Authority and the PWA, La Guardia had agreed to mothball the ancient city-operated ferry, the Rockaway, which for sixteen years had been crossing the East River every twenty minutes between Astoria and the old green municipal ferryhouse at Ninety-second Street in Manhattan, so that the land on which the terminal stood could be used for the East River Drive approach to the bridge and so that the motorists who had been using the ferry would be forced to drive over the bridge instead and pay tolls to the Authority. For months, Moses had

  been pressing the city's Department of Plants and Structures, which operated the ferry, to discontinue the service so he could begin demolishing the ferryhouse.

  But some of the ferry's 1,700 daily riders felt sentimental about the old tub, its fog bell clanging away and its whistle sounding lugubriously to warn off other ships on mist-shrouded early-morning trips. They felt a genuine camaraderie for the men who ran it, contributing seeds to the small garden, divided into tiny plots by fences made of old bedsprings, that the captains and ticket takers cultivated next to the Manhattan ferryhouse, petting and fawning over Red, an Airedale who had wandered into the ferryhouse as a pup ten years before and had lived there ever since. And passengers not given to sentimentality and camaraderie hated to see the ferry go because a round trip cost only a nickel and a round trip on the bridge would cost fifty cents—and those who didn't own automobiles would have no convenient way to get to and from Manhattan. The passengers had petitioned Astoria political leaders to let the ferry remain, and the political leaders had called on the Plants and Structures Commissioner, Frederick J. H. Kracke, an old-line Republican leader and La Guardia supporter—and Kracke had delayed discontinuing the service. Then a new element was added to the picture when the city decided to construct a large low-income housing project on the Astoria waterfront; with the ferry, Housing Authority Commissioner Langdon Post pointed out, residents of the project would have convenient transportation to and from their jobs in Manhattan; without it, since most of them were too poor to possess automobiles, it would be torturous to commute back and forth across the river every day. Kracke had continued to procrastinate. On July 15, La Guardia had personally telephoned and had requested the Sinking Fund Commission to formally turn the ferryhouse property over to the Authority—although the Mayor said that the ferry service should not be stopped for sixty days so that the ferry riders would have time to find other means of transportation. The Sinking Fund Commission concurred.

  Moses was not willing to wait sixty days. Defying the Mayor, he decided to stop the service immediately—by tearing down the ferry terminal.

  He ordered the contractor building the East River Drive approach, A. N. Hazell, to procure two barges and install a pile driver on one and a wrecking crane on the other. When they were ready, on July 21, he waited until the Rockaway had unsuspectingly pulled away from Manhattan for one of its early-afternoon trips to Astoria and then, without warning, ordered the barges towed into the ferry slip and lashed together there so that the Rockaway would have no place to dock when it returned. And he ordered the pile driver and the crane to pound and pull the slip to pieces. Attacking simultaneously from the land side, he dispatched crews of workmen to tear up York Avenue's cobblestones in front of the ferryhouse to cut off all access to the terminal by land.

  By coincidence, Jack Madigan was in Kracke's office, discussing another matter, when the commissioner received a telephone call about what was happening. "He threw me out," Madigan recalls with a grin, telephoned

  City Hall and, while he was trying to contact the Mayor, sent an aide, Deputy Commissioner Andrew Hudson, to the terminal to intercede with the contractors.

  Hudson could hardly believe what was happening. The fact that the boat was heading across the river while its dock was being destroyed behind it was the least of it; the ferry could dock at another pier—which, in fact, was what it did when its amazed captain, returning from Astoria, saw what was happening. (Its passengers disembarked at a downtown fireboat landing.) What was more important was that hundreds of regular ferry commuters, who had come to Manhattan by boat that morning, would be left stranded there—with their cars and homes on the other side of the river. But when, assuming there had been some mistake, he pointed this out to the contractors and asked them to stop work until matters could be straightened out, they told him that they had orders from Moses to continue working no matter who tried to stop them—and even while Hudson was arguing with them, the pile driver continued to smash away at the dock.

  La Guardia meanwhile contacted Moses and pleaded with him to call the contractors off. If the demolition stopped, he promised the Park Commissioner, he would call the Sinking Fund Commission back into session to shorten the sixty-day waiting period. Moses refused. Telephoning Police Commissioner Lewis J. Valentine, the Mayor—in a voice so choked with fury that it was barely coherent—ordered him to send a squad of patrolmen to the scene.

  Expecting the contractors to yield to a direct police order, the Mayor and Valentine had instructed the officer in charge at the scene, Deputy Chief Inspector Edward A. Bracken, not to use force. But the contractors knew whose orders they would have to follow if they wanted to keep working for Triborough. When the Inspector ordered contractor Hazell to quit, Hazell said, "I'm not going to." Moses had told him not to, he said. And the pile driver continued to smash away. By this time, much of the dock had been destroyed and the hundreds of rush-hour ferry passengers standing on York Avenue were watching the workmen on the barges pry away heavy boards that had been loosened on the rest of it. Only force would stop Moses and La Guardia finally realized it. Put through to Bracken on the telephone, the Mayor ordered the Inspector to "drag those men off the boats if they don't quit." Those of the workmen who didn't drop their tools when a fifteen-man police boarding party swarmed over the side had them struck from their hands and were shoved, along with the rest, onto what was left of the dock. Within minutes, a police launch was standing alongside the barges and when a launch carrying the night shift of contractors' men appeared, it was warned away. A city tugboat pushed the contractors' barges away downriver. As night was falling, a procession of barges bearing piles and lumber to repair the slip arrived and workmen worked all night under floodlights to rebuild the terminal and repave York Avenue. By morning, the Rockaway was back in service—under the protection of a squad of patrolmen—and La Guardia could tell reporters, with a smile o
f satisfaction, "All is quiet on the eastern front."

  But the last smile was Moses'. La Guardia waited a week for the story to fade from the front pages and then quietly had the Sinking Fund Commission transfer the terminal to Moses in another forty-eight hours. At 11:25 p.m., July 31, with Red gone from the ferryhouse—a night watchman had taken the Airedale home with him—fifty-two Astoria residents who had come down to the Astoria pier for old times' sake (plus twelve other persons who just wanted to get to Manhattan) boarded the Rockaway for its last round trip across the river. Mrs. Hattie Arnez of Astoria Boulevard played the accordion and they all sang the plaintive "Where Do We Go from Here?" As the Rockaway, having completed the round trip, bumped into the Astoria slip for the last time, they sang "Auld Lang Syne." Then, as the old tub left for the Brooklyn pier where she was to be laid up, her captain blew three long, dolorous whistle blasts of farewell. Hardly had the last note faded when it was succeeded by dull heavy thuds—the pound of Moses' pile driver, tearing the ferryhouse down again.

  Within a year—in May 1937—the Mayor would again be forced to call out the cops against his commissioner, in another battle in which the commissioner eventually defeated him anyway. Advised that 2,000 WPA laborers assigned to Park Department projects would be reassigned at the beginning of the month so that work could begin on new nonpark projects (including three ultramodern firehouses for La Guardia's beloved Fire Department) and that 3,000 more men per month would be reassigned thereafter, Moses rumbled that if he had to lay off men, some among them would be playground supervisors; some playgrounds would therefore have to be closed, a step sure to touch off a furious public reaction. About to leave by train for a national conference of mayors in Los Angeles, La Guardia flatly ordered him not to do so, threatening to fire him if he did. Moses defied him. While the Union Pacific Streamliner was speeding the Mayor across country, the Park Commissioner struck: he didn't take some of the 2,000 men from playground duty; he took them all, and with them every piece of movable playground equipment, even the seats of the swings. And then he ordered 142 playgrounds padlocked. Telephoning frantically from pay phones at each Union Pacific stop, La Guardia ordered Police Commissioner Valentine to open the playgrounds—by force if necessary. The police were forced to cut the locks when Moses refused to surrender the keys to Valentine, and though the play areas were technically open, the Park Department was empowered by city regulations to hold on to the equipment it had removed, and the city's mothers, confronted by pistol-toting policemen instead of the familiar supervisory personnel—as well as by firmly locked toilets that were usually available to their youngsters—rallied behind the Park Commissioner. By the time the Mayor came home, he was confronted by a hostile public, to whom Moses had already taken his case. "We, mothers of the Chelsea District, want the 17th Street playground reopened and the WPA workers rehired," said one of the countless, hastily drawn petitions delivered to the Mayor. Said one of the letters that poured into his office: "As a mother of three small children, I ask you to take your petty squabble out of the parks and give Mr. Moses enough money to run the playgrounds." Lost in the tumult

  was the fact that it was the Park Commissioner, not the Mayor, who had designated playground personnel instead of construction workers to be dropped from the Park Department payroll. The public outcry, fanned by the pro-Moses press, forced the Mayor to ask the Board of Aldermen for an extra two and a half million dollars, so that the playgrounds could be properly supervised—and the Park Commissioner's construction projects could go on unabated.

  The explanation for Moses' independence of La Guardia was as complex as the Little Flower's many-petaled character and as simple—and ineluctable— as the basic realities of the political game at which the Mayor excelled.

  In a way, their vicious confrontations made La Guardia respect and admire Moses. The Mayor's intimates noticed that while he liked to push people around, he only respected those he couldn't push. "I think he put on a great deal of his brutalities to test people out," C. C. Burlingham observed. "If they could stand up against him it was all right, but if they couldn't they were in bad luck." And Moses could stand up against him better than anyone else.

  Moreover, if there was much in the characters of the two strong-willed, hot-tempered men to fan antipathy between them, there was also much to produce affection, and if intimates can remember moments when the air between the Little Flower and the Master Builder crackled with anger, they can also remember moments when it glowed with the mutual affection and admiration of two great warriors who felt they were fighting in the same cause.

  For, after all, in many respects they were indeed, at least for a while, fighting in the same cause. Against a panorama of politicians interested only in themselves, they stood out as two politicians who were also interested in accomplishments that they believed would benefit others. Robert Moses was, after all, not the only one of the two men who was spending his evenings and his weekends—the time that other men called spare and devoted to private interests—driving endlessly around New York City trying to think of ways to make it more beautiful. Robert Moses was not the only one of the two men to whom the realization of dreams in concrete was desperately important. (When "Fiorello . . . started to build La Guardia Airport," says his wife, "I think he spent every Saturday and Sunday out there watching every bit of sand that was put in. Just nurtured that like a plant.") And because accomplishment was desperately important to both men, while their disagreements may have been made fierce by personal characteristics—their blazing tempers, their arrogance, their dogmatism and their insistence on having their own way—the roots of those disagreements lay not in personal hostilities so much as in differences of opinion about what should be accomplished and how, and therefore their disagreements could always be resolved. So intensely interested were both men in their work, moreover, that often no resolutic n was necessary. "You'd see the two of them in the goddamnedest argument and then five hours later they could go and have a drink together

  and you'd never know they had fought," Jack Madigan says. Finally, he says, he came to understand why this was possible: "Other people dealt with personal feelings and emotions, got emotional about personal feelings, see, but these two fellows here, they dealt with subject matter—that was what they got emotional about—and when the subject was over, they could be friends again—unless one of them brought up the subject matter again." Because accomplishment was so important to both of them, when one flew into a fury over opposition, must not the other have understood how infuriating opposition could be? In a posed, formal picture of the top officials of the La Guardia administration, there are thirty-one neatly dressed men—and two, the Mayor and his Park Commissioner, with ties askew and collar points jabbing out beyond their lapels. And their habitual lack of neatness was symbolic, for neither of the two men was at all interested in clothes or other material trappings of life. At times they had exchanges which indicated that although neither would ever admit it, they knew there were respects in which their spirits were kindred. City Court Judge Florence Shientag heard La Guardia shout at Moses, "You can't get away riding roughshod over things!" and Moses shouting back, "That's the way you get things done!"

  Other aspects of La Guardia's character also made the friendly drinks with Moses as inevitable as the wild altercations. There was the little Mayor's romantic streak, the side of him that was the dreamer, dreaming of making his city beautiful. His dreams for the beautification were vast but vague, and no one appreciated better than he the enormous difficulty in filling in the vague outline of a magnificent metropolis with specific plans and then in obtaining the money—the chisel and the brush—that would allow him to turn the plans into reality. And it was Moses who was enabling him to obtain the plans and the money. An astonishing number of La Guardia's dreams were being realized—by 1936, New York City was receiving one-seventh of the WPA allotment for the entire country—and the Mayor knew who was responsible. He must have known every time he went down to Washi
ngton for one of the frequent mayors' conferences called by the WPA. There would be hundreds of mayors there, and most of them would have come with grandiose plans—but when they were confronted with the blunt questions of the Army engineers WPA chief Harry Hopkins had brought in to screen proposed projects, they had to confess that the blueprints weren't ready, or the specifications weren't ready, or the topographical surveys weren't ready. La Guardia watched many of them walk out of the conferences humiliated and without the money they were asking for. But he had blueprints. He had specifications. He had topographical surveys. He had every piece of paper that even the hardest-eyed Army engineer could desire. And he had them because of Moses. Other municipalities were so unequal to the task of planning public works programs of size that in October 1938 the WPA would cancel more than one hundred major grants approved for eleven northeastern cities three years before—because the blueprints for those projects were still not ready. But Moses' engineers would come walking up the

  front steps of City Hall with blueprints piled high in their arms. President Roosevelt's friendship was indispensable to La Guardia's dreams, but no more indispensable than the tools Moses gave him to make use of it.

  And Moses, the skillful manipulator of men, found plenty in La Guardia to manipulate.

  There was, for example, the Mayor's boundless enthusiasm for engineering and engineers.

  Moses played on this feeling. He was constantly pressing La Guardia to accompany him on inspection tours of construction sites, and, with his great gift for words, his sense of drama, and his squads of engineers who would follow the mayoral limousine in a second car so that they could leap out at a project site, elaborate artists' renderings in hand, and show the Mayor what the project would look like when completed, he made these tours wonderfully exciting to a man who "stood like a child in front of the simplest engineering feat." Once the little Mayor was so anxious to see the work on the Thomas Jefferson Park swimming pool that when he found the gate locked and no one around to open it, he chinned himself on the fence like a little boy so that he could see over the top. "I could always tell when Moses had been taking him around," Windels recalls. "He would be absolutely bubbling over with enthusiasm—he was just thrilled."