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

by Caro, Robert A

  If Moses was putting on one of the greatest engineering shows in the history of civilization, moreover, he made sure La Guardia had a ringside seat. For example, on the day that the 2,200-ton vertical-lift span that comprised the Harlem River arm of the Triborough Bridge was to be set into place, the Mayor was standing on Randall's Island in the very shadow of the tower that, along with its twin on the Manhattan shore, would hold the span. And when the span was finally set in place, he said breathlessly, "This is the most thrilling moment I have had since I became mayor. ... I congratulate the Authority, the engineers, the contractors and every man who has had a part in this magnificent piece of work. Moments like this make up for many heartaches and disappointments." The fact—which astonished him when he learned it—that Moses had never gone to engineering school did not prevent him from gushing on several occasions: "Robert Moses is the greatest engineer in the world."

  He wanted Moses' admiration. He was jealous of the only man who really had it. Moses recalls that "when the Mayor was mad at me, which was not infrequent, he would say, 'The only boss you ever had whom you really respected was Al Smith. What's he got that I don't have?' " (Moses recalls that "I always answered that I admired both of them, but thought Smith a better executive" because he always stood behind his subordinates.)

  La Guardia's predilection for pageantry, preferably with himself at its center, was obvious to anyone who noticed the yards of gold braid with which the Major outfitted his policeman bodyguard or his penchant for holding full-

  dress military-type inspections of anything that could conceivably be inspected—police or firemen with motorized equipment, snow plows, new garbage trucks, old garbage trucks—and for preening and strutting as he marched in front of them, literally swelling out his barrel chest as he bounced by at the salute. Moses played on this predilection. He gave the Major pageantry such as no mayor had ever enjoyed in democratic America.

  Moses was opening playgrounds at a fantastic rate: 60 in 1934, 71 in I935> 7 2 in 1936, 52 in 1937. La Guardia was present at most opening ceremonies. And these were ceremonies with the Moses touch.

  For the opening of a small playground on Seventeenth Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, for example, nearby tenements were draped in red, white and blue—not crepe-paper streamers but immense triangular pennons. Flowerpots containing 25,000 chrysanthemums made a bright ring around the playground fence. Flags were everywhere. The whole scene gleamed with the reflection of the hot summer sunlight off the polished bridles and curried satiny flanks of mounted policemen's horses, the polished brass and buttons of platoons of green-clad Park Department guards, the trumpets and tubas of Park Department and American Legion bands. As the Mayor's limousine pulled up to the curb between rows of rigidly erect policemen at the salute, a smartly uniformed Park Department guard swung open its door and as the Mayor bounced out—followed by the gold braid of his bodyguard—the bands broke into a tune: incredibly, "Hail to the Chief." And when he reached the white-painted, bunting-draped speakers' platform he found he was the only speaker, except for Moses, who confined himself to a very brief recitation of playground statistics and then said, "I now introduce the Mayor of the City of New York"—a performance that led La Guardia to comment later that Moses was the ideal master of ceremonies. At the precise instant at which the applause passed its crescendo and began to fade away after La Guardia's speech, which had been delivered at a lectern custom-built by Park Department carpenters so that the little Mayor wouldn't be forced to stretch to reach the microphone, it was punctuated by a hiss as the center fountain in the wading pool was turned on full blast, dramatically filling the air with sprays of water and eliciting a gratifying "ooooh" from hundreds of children waiting behind a ribbon. And when the Mayor advanced to cut the ribbon and allow the children to rush into the spray, he found that it was no ordinary ribbon but a braided and tasseled strand colored red, white and blue, and the shears held out to him by a little girl from the neighborhood were sterling silver shears resting on a cushion of royal purple velvet.

  Then the Mayor jumped back into his limousine for a trip that was an adventure in itself—Fiorello La Guardia's dashes across his city, limousine siren wailing, police on motorcycles clearing the path, were not trips for the fainthearted. And when the Mayor arrived at the other playgrounds, he found again chrysanthemums, flags, men on horseback, polished brass and buttons, bands, "Hail to the Chief"—every detail that had made the first opening so exciting—plus, often, new inspirations: at a playground being opened in Brooklyn's Red Hook section, whose most famous landmark

  was the "Gowanus House," around which a Revolutionary War battle had been fought, a large painting of the Gowanus House had been placed as a backdrop behind the speakers' platform; the neighborhood was predominantly Italian, and as the Mayor walked onto the platform two aerial bombs were shot into the air, releasing parachutes that floated above the playground site—and attached to one parachute was an American flag, to the other the tricolor of the House of Savoy.

  On some days, La Guardia would open as many as fifteen playgrounds scattered across the face of the great city, turning the occasion into a triumphal tour of his domain, speeding behind his helmeted outriders across the reaches of the bridge-connected boroughs and then leaping into a launch to bring his presence even to the colony on Staten Island. Each ceremony would be perfect in every detail. (Or almost every detail: at one dedication in an Italian neighborhood, held before Moses was acquainted with La Guardia's views on organ grinders, Moses had several, along with their hurdy-gurdies and monkeys, on hand to entertain the children, and La Guardia sat on the platform glowering out from under the brim of his big hat.) And the pageantry Moses arranged for the Little Flower was not limited to playground openings. It included the annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in City Hall Park, complete with a program of instrumental music and carol singing and a switch that the Mayor threw to light up a sixty-foot spruce. It included the dedication of the baseball diamond complex in Alley Pond Park at which La Guardia, after a series of fantastic contortions on the pitcher's mound, got to throw the first pitch—to a batter who happened to be Babe Ruth. (The Bambino, swinging with something less than his usual gusto, possibly because he was almost doubled over with laughter, hit a pop fly that dropped to the ground in the vicinity of second base.) Moses made a place for La Guardia in every major Park Department event.

  Nineteen thirty-six, Fortune magazine said in an article on Moses, was "the swimming pool year." The ten giant neighborhood swimming pools were completed that summer, and Moses opened one a week for ten weeks. Of a size previously unimagined in swimming pools—one was 330 feet long and 165 feet wide—they brought the joys of swimming to city-bound children—and parents—by the tens of thousands. Moses' passion for swimming led him to take a special interest in these pools, and he drove the engineers responsible for their design to invent filtering plants of new efficiency and underwater lighting that made them revolutionary developments in recreation—Harry Hopkins called the Astoria Pool "the finest pool in all the world." And Moses exerted all his genius as a showman to make each opening the most memorable event in the history of the neighborhood in which it was located: a parade led by local political leaders and local American Legion, high-school and Knights of Columbus bands would wind through the neighborhood beforehand—generally in the early evening, since the openings were held at night so that the underwater lighting would be more spectacular—attracting tens of thousands of residents. After neighborhood priests had blessed the clear waters—chlorinated—of the pools, there would be swimming races and diving competitions by neighbor-

  hood youngsters and by Olympic stars imported from all over the United States, as well as exhibitions by a team of "swimming clowns." Each opening, moreover, would be tailored to the neighborhood in which the pool was located: believing that what Negroes liked to do most was dance and sing, Moses arranged that the opening ceremonies for the Colonial Park Pool in Harlem include an exhibitio
n by Bojangles Bill Robinson (identified by the Times as a "negro tap dancer"); a rendition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic by "negro tenor" Roland Hayes, accompanied by the 369th Regiment band; and community singing. But center stage at each opening was reserved for Fiorello H. La Guardia. It was he who pulled the switch that turned on the underwater lighting, an event that never failed to bring a murmur of "oooohs" from the crowd, it was he who gave the word to raise the flag and it was he who got to cut the ribbon and shout to the waiting children: "Okay, kids, it's all yours!"

  Moses saw to it that one playground, at the Williamsburg Bridge Plaza, was named the "Fiorello H. La Guardia Playground." ("The best thing about this playground is its name," he wrote the Mayor.)

  If there were personal reasons why the Mayor wanted to allow Moses his independence, there were political reasons why he had to.

  The most important, of course, was public opinion and Moses' hold on it.

  Already predisposed to be friendly toward Moses because he was creator and defender of parks, the city's thirteen daily newspapers had that friendship cultivated with customary Moses thoroughness.

  As always, he went directly to the top, giving newspaper owners pre-opening tours of new bridges and free passes to them thereafter, inviting them to sail on the Long Island Park Commission's yacht, bathe in the reserved section of Jones Beach and dine in the private section of the Marine Dining Room—where he served them lavish helpings of his inimitable charm; Iphigene and Arthur Sulzberger of the Times, Helen and Ogden Mills Reid of the Herald Tribune (who never found out about Moses' plan to deceive him into making a contribution to the Yale University Minor Sports Association) and Roy W. Howard of the World-Telegram regarded him as a personal friend. He spent many weekends at their summer homes.

  Moses also lavished attention on top editors. He had easy access to the Herald Tribune's because his Yale classmate Harold Phelps Stokes was one of them, and he used that access; one of the Tribune editors was a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary who saw Bolsheviks in every bush, and Moses helped his vision, filling the editor's mail with leaflets mimeographed by left-wingers in the WPA to prove that any dissension among WPA workers in the Park Department was fomented by Communists. The chief editorial writer of the Times was Charles Merz, a Yale graduate who lived in the apartment building next to Moses'. "Just by happenstance," remarks Joseph C. Ingraham, a

  Times reporter (and later its transportation editor) who became friendly with Moses, "Moses would be waiting in the lobby [of Merz's apartment house] many mornings to ask him if he wanted a lift downtown—so he could plant an editorial."

  And while Moses went to the top, he did not stop there, wining and dining reporters as well as publishers, inviting key ones to his elaborate opening-ceremony luncheons, to an annual swimming and dinner outing at Jones Beach, to more intimate, and elaborate, luncheons at Belmont Lake State Park, to the Park Department's Christmas party at the Arsenal and to day-long yacht trips, which often ended with clam and lobster bakes on Fire Island. At all these events the food was superb, the liquor flowed freely and so did the charm.

  The most important newspaper in the city—and in the country—was The New York Times, and Moses had an especially strong hold over the Times: the devotion to parks of the woman who owned approximately two-thirds of its voting stock.

  Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, only living child of the imperious little patriarch of the. Times, who during the 1920's had purchased key parcels in Saratoga and reserved them for Moses' state park there, had been fighting for years for the expansion and improvement of New York City's inadequate and decaying park system, a fight whose frustration was summed up in one conversation with Tammany Manhattan Park Commissioner Sheehy, who unabashedly told her to her face that until he became commissioner he had never been in Central Park in his life. When La Guardia told her that he was giving Robert Moses power over parks, she had been "happy"—and the adjective had proved inadequate to describe her feelings about what Moses was accomplishing with that power. Elected president of the city's Park Association in January 1935, Iphigene Sulzberger's first official act was to present Moses with the association's annual testimonial award and, as she handed him the illuminated scroll, she said earnestly, "Commissioner Moses, you have made us feel that the projects for which we have striven can be realized." She would serve as president until 1963, heading the Park Association, therefore, for twenty-five of the twenty-six years that Moses served as City Park Commissioner, and during all that time her admiration for him would only increase. In 1963, the association would present him with another illuminated scroll; it closed with the words: "How wondrous are his works; how deep our gratitude."

  In private, moreover, Mrs. Sulzberger was, if possible, even more adulatory: in 1967, standing by a window in her Fifth Avenue apartment, looking out over Central Park, the gray-haired, dignified woman would tell the author: "There has never been as great a public servant. ... He was a man of vision ... a giant. ... He saw Nature as a whole. ... I had a feeling that he liked to fight, that if someone just agreed with him he was disappointed. He liked to beat them. He was a hero of old, always rushing into battle with Excalibur waving above his head. I thought of the Park Association as Aaron and Hur. Do you know who Aaron and Hur were? They were the soldiers in the Bible who stood behind Moses

  and held up his arms when he got tired [at the battle of Rephidim, at which 'Israel prevailed' so long as Moses held up his hands]. Well, that's how I thought of the Park Association, as upholding the arms of Bob Moses."

  Not that she always agreed with him. Mrs. Sulzberger possessed—years earlier than most urban planners—a very acute understanding that the values of engineers were not compatible with the values for which parks were created; "Engineers are straight-line crazy," she would tell the interviewer. She didn't want the unspoiled wilderness of Inwood Hill Park destroyed by the running of a road on a straight line along its crest. A believer in the old theory that the purpose of parks was primarily conservation, not recreation —although she might not have stated the theory in precisely those terms— she didn't like the idea that Moses' plans required the covering over of so many green spaces with concrete for playgrounds, basketball courts and other active play facilities, not to mention roads and parking fields. In particular, believing in the preservation of Central Park as a restful retreat from the abrasions of city life, she didn't want so many active play facilities there. "Iphigene gave us many arguments," Jack Madigan said. "And," he added, "some we walked away from"—a euphemism meaning they surrendered. Moses probably turned the abandoned reservoir site in Central Park into a "great lawn" instead of into the playgrounds and ball fields that he originally wanted there solely because of Mrs. Sulzberger's feelings.

  But while Moses may have walked away from some fights with Mrs. Sulzberger, he did not walk away from many; he would not allow—because of his nature, he could not allow—anybody, even an individual whose support was so important to him, to criticize his plans. His usual technique with Mrs. Sulzberger was not to walk away but to walk with—to take her himself, or have Madigan or Andrews take her—on a tour of the area in dispute to try to sell her on his idea of how it should be developed. These walks were planned with care; Madigan took her to Inwood Hill on a weekday when the park was deserted and told her that the public wasn't getting any use out of it—guessing, correctly, that she had never hiked up the steep hill on a weekend and hence had not seen the happy picnickers who crowded it then. (Madigan also played shrewdly on her sensibilities, which were firmly Victorian: "I told Iphigene if you walked up there at night you were likely to step on a couple and it might be a good idea to have lights—the headlights from cars, you know—up there.") And the walks usually worked— particularly since Moses' opponents did not know her well enough to take her on walks themselves and show her their side of the argument and did not have the facilities or manpower to compile the facts and figures that might have disproved Moses' facts and figures. Moses persuaded Mrs. Sulzberger
to persuade the Park Association to elect Andrews, a native Virginian who could be as courtly with women as he could be curt with men (Mrs. Sulzberger says he was "a remarkable man"), to its board of directors, and thereafter there was someone working for association support of his policies from within.

  Mrs. Sulzberger's dedication to the cause of parks was so complete, moreover, that she didn't want to do anything that would interfere drastically

  with what Moses was doing—even if she felt he was sometimes wrong. This man was rejuvenating parks at a rate she would never have believed possible; she didn't want him hampered by her disagreement with what she regarded as details: "I never did like the concrete floors on the playgrounds," she would tell the interviewer, but, she would note, before Moses came along, there were no real playgrounds at all, "no swings and no jungle gyms . . . hardly anything for children to play on, really."

  So sincere was Mrs. Sulzberger's dedication to parks and the new Park Commissioner that this proud and dignified woman even submitted to a public insult—quite possibly the only one she ever received—at his hands.