Once, in an executive session of the Board of Estimate, Moses presented the Board with a proposal for a project whose cost, he promised, would be borne almost entirely by the federal government and would cost the city practically nothing. He presented the Board with a set of extremely detailed "facts" to "prove" his point.
Most of the members of the Board were thinking the same thing, one of them recalls, but only Stanley Isaacs had the courage to give the thoughts voice. He said mildly:
"When Mr. Moses says something will cost 3.4 percent, he adds the .4 only to make you think it's accurate. It's really 6.2 percent." Moses' response was to take a violent swing with his fist in Isaacs' direction and say, "I'd like to punch you in the nose!"
"He wasn't close enough to hit him with a baseball bat," says Isaacs' borough works commissioner, Walter D. Binger. "It was just a motion of passion. But Moses was tall and athletic" and the mild-mannered Isaacs was fifty-seven years old. "Everyone in the room was shocked," Binger says.
He wasn't satisfied merely to defeat people who opposed his wishes. He had to try to destroy them, too. He wasn't content with ignoring Exton and Weinberg and he wasn't content with thumbing his nose at them, either; he had to attempt to damage their reputations beyond repair by charging— falsely—that the two young reformers wanted the location of the Henry Hudson Bridge changed because a change would increase the value of Weinberg's property. For years he had been stung by the caustic voice of the "Old Judge," James B. Cooper, whose Babylon Leader continued to remind the residents of Moses' summer hometown that Moses had broken his promise never to charge tolls on the Wantagh Causeway—and who in the 1930's was leading the opposition to Moses' proposal to build a highway on Fire Island, although, with scrupulous fairness, he always allowed plenty of room in the Leader for Moses' replies. Now Moses did everything he could to silence that voice.
"We had always carried 'legals' [the advertising—of contracts and new ordinances, for example—that governmental bodies are required by law to do in newspapers, and that is often the difference between profit and loss for small-town weeklies] from the state," recalls Cooper's son. "And then they just suddenly disappeared from the paper—he had some and then he had none. They never said anything directly—they'd be far too subtle for that"; the Leader was simply no longer included on the list of Suffolk County publications which shared in the legal advertising connected with state projects which were located in Suffolk and had to be advertised in that county. Says Cooper's son: "I grew up in a house where we knew that we weren't going to get any printing from the state because of the way my father fought editorially for what he believed in." There were hints from Long Island State Park Commission executives that Cooper could get the legals back—and lucrative state
printing contracts besides. "The inference was 'Behave yourself and you'll be taken care of,' " the son says. "But that sort of thing never appealed to my father. He had on his masthead 'I Have Never Known a Master and I've Never Worn a Muzzle' and he would rather be broke than lose his soul." Soon he was broke—the legals had been very important in the touch-and-go financing of the little newspaper (its circulation never reached 4,000 during Judge Cooper's thirty years as publisher), and the paper almost died before he did on May 30, 1940. But "what mattered more than the money involved in the legals," his widow says, "was the principle of the thing. His feelings were hurt that anyone would do such a thing."
A streak of maliciousness and spitefulness seemed to run through Moses' character, and he gave that full play, too.
The sole oasis in muddy and barren Riverside Park was the Columbia Yacht Club, which since 1888 had been occupying an acre at the foot of Eighty-sixth Street, paying only a nominal rental of $300 per year because it had created most of the acre itself by barging in landfill, had spent $50,000 building its own marina and three-story clubhouse, and because it maintained those buildings, and surrounding lawns, hedges and flower beds it had planted, at its own expense. The club's six hundred members had succeeded in making themselves semi-official city hosts to visiting royalty (the club's proudest boast was that the Prince of Wales had made it his headquarters on not one but two visits aboard the Renown) and club members seemed to regard themselves as the city's link with maritime glory; naval officers of all nations were always welcome and the club was "official host" for the squadrons of the U.S. Navy which anchored off Manhattan each summer.
In March 1934, three months after he had been sworn in as City Park Commissioner, Moses announced that the Columbia Yacht Club was in the way of his West Side Improvement and would be torn down.
Shocked as the members were, they didn't try to fight the eviction; they understood that the park belonged to the city. Their only request was that they be allowed to remain in the clubhouse through September, so they could fulfill their pledge to entertain the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet, which was arriving in July for the summer.
At first, Moses agreed to this request without reservation; he certainly had no reason not to, for there was no prospect that work on the Improvement would have progressed far enough by September so that the presence of a single building in the six miles of park would interfere with it; in March 1934, he wasn't even sure where the Henry Hudson Parkway was going to run, no plans had yet been drawn for any substantial part of it, and money for the job was not yet in hand—or indeed in sight. But then Moses saw an opportunity of obtaining a valuable addition to the Improvement for nothing. He evidently decided to turn the clubhouse into a public restaurant on the waterfront, and he sent Ray McNulty back to the club officials with the message that he would allow the club to remain through September only if it then donated its clubhouse and marina to the Park Department. On April
18, club commodore John A. Harriss telephoned Moses to tell him that the board was agreeable and wanted only enough time to submit the proposition to the entire membership, which he expected would also approve it.
Unfortunately, in talking to Moses, Harriss somehow—he was never to be sure how—managed to irritate him. The next day the commodore received a letter from the commissioner, a letter he later characterized as "brutal," accusing the club of "stalling," ordering it to vacate its site by May i, in exactly twelve days—and warning that "if your property is not removed by that date, it will be treated as abandoned property" and confiscated.
Anticipating that the matter would become public knowledge, Moses went to the press—and he did so with his usual blend of demagoguery and deception: breaking the story himself to get his side of it before the public first; oversimplifying the basic issue to one of public vs. private interest; identifying the "private interests" with the sinister forces of "influence" and "privilege"; concealing any facts that might damage his own image. "The whole question," he said, "is whether public interest is going to yield to private," whether parks are going to be "for the people." The public needed the land occupied by the yacht club and it needed it immediately so that a great public improvement could be gotten under way, he said; he had advanced the date of eviction because the West Side Improvement was progressing faster than he had thought it would, and any delay in evicting the yacht club would slow the Improvement down. Moreover, the use of the public's property by the club was "a social racket," an "exclusive privilege," successful in the past only because of "the influence of certain members." The club had not the slightest legal right to be on the property in the first place; it has, he stated flatly, "no lease, no permit, no anything." He did not neglect to add a touch of class antagonism: "It is an interesting fact," he said, "that the yacht club in their talk of entertaining yachtsmen and officers say nothing about the entertainment of enlisted men." The tactics worked as successfully as usual. The headline on the Times article reporting one of his press releases was parks come first, moses declares, while the Herald Tribune headlined Columbia yacht club is "racket,"
MOSES REPEATS.
The club applied to the State Supreme Court for a temporary injunction restraining Moses from ousting it s
o quickly. And in that more impartial arena there emerged, as usual, some facts that Moses had somehow neglected to mention. The Park Commissioner had contended that the club had "no lease, no permit, no anything" for the use of the park land. The attorney for the club said that the club had had a permit since 1888, that the permit had been renewed by the Park Department annually each of the forty-six years since, including 1934—and that Moses knew it. And to prove his contentions the attorney presented the court with a photostat of a check for $ 150 for the first half of the 1934 rent, made out to and deposited and accepted by the Park Department.
Moses had also contended that the club had never done anything but occupy the public's property. Obviously, the attorney pointed out, the club
had done far more. It had improved the public's property, building $50,000 worth of structures on it. And now it was probably willing to give all those improvements to the public in return for only five more months of occupancy; the board of trustees was agreeable to such an arrangement, it was asking only for enough time to poll the membership. Moreover, even if the schedule for the West Side Improvement required the club to vacate in a hurry, its members, some of whom were in Europe, should be given more than twelve days to remove their property from the clubhouse, or have it confiscated as "abandoned." And the schedule did not require the club to vacate in a hurry; it was quite obvious that the Improvement was barely under way, and that even if money was made available, Moses had more than six miles of Riverside Park to work in and did not have to start immediately on the single acre that the club occupied.
Supreme Court Justice Aaron J. Levy found the attorney's statements accurate, noting dryly in the opinion he handed down that "the Commissioner was in error in asserting that the club was occupying the premises without a permit." And the judge went further. Even if Moses' motives were honorable, he said, he had allowed himself to be carried away:
I must observe that a burning zeal for the public interest should not dazzle a public official—no matter how well intentioned—so as to blind him to individual amenities. Even where the public authority is entirely correct in his legal position, he should maintain it without inflicting undue hardship or injury. Tyranny, whether it consists of oppressive measures or brutal severity, is never necessary.
And, the Justice said, he was not at all sure Moses' motives were honorable. His examination of the commissioner's plans for the West Side Improvement left no doubt that the club's land would not be needed that summer at all:
The precipitate notice gives the appearance of having been prompted by the Commissioner's pique at plaintiff's refusal to accept [his] terms. . . .
He issued a temporary injunction restraining Moses from ousting the club until a trial on the matter could be held.
But Moses was not to be restrained by a judge. Even as the club's attorney had been applying for the temporary injunction, two huge steam shovels were rumbling into Riverside Park and taking up positions north and south of the clubhouse. As club members watched in amazement, they began scooping out trenches all the way from the New York Central Railroad tracks in the middle of the park to the edge of the river. Their operators said they were "testing the fill," but the yacht clubbers realized with a shock that once the trenches were completed, the dirt roads from north and south would be cut, there would be no way for members' automobiles or delivery trucks to reach the clubhouse and the only means of access by foot would be along a narrow footbridge across the railroad tracks. Shouting to make himself heard above the thunderous chug-chug of the shovels, a club official told a reporter he had called to the scene, "They will have us dug out of here before the court can render its decision."
This occurred on a Friday. The next day, with the clubhouse crowded with men and women preparing for some weekend yachting or sipping drinks in the pleasantly shadowy clubhouse bar,, the shadows suddenly grew deeper. The club's electricity had been turned off. Hurriedly telephoning the New York Consolidated Edison Company to find out what had happened, the club superintendent was informed by an official there that "someone from the club" had asked that the current be shut off. The superintendent said he was sure there had been some mistake, and when the Con Ed officials checked, he found out that there had indeed. The man who had identified himself as being from the club was actually from the Park Department.
As the club's electricity was being turned on, its water was almost being turned off. Ten men drove up in a Park Department automobile and began digging near the clubhouse. When the club superintendent demanded to know what they were doing, they said they wanted to "repair" a leak in the water main. Only their inability to locate the main kept the club liquid.
"Sheer spite work," the club secretary termed Moses' actions, but reporters who telephoned the commissioner found him unabashed. As the Herald Tribune put it:
Mr. Moses said he knew nothing of this, but that it might easily be true. "I instructed my men," he said, "to go ahead with the construction work for the improvement of that part of the park and not to let anything get in the way. It is perfectly possible they did this."
Some of the city's elected officials attempted to restrain him, the Board of Aldermen passing a resolution demanding that Moses rescind his eviction order. One of the aldermen, Fusionist Lambert Fairchild, called the Park Commissioner's methods "steam-shovel government." But Moses was not to be restrained by elected officials. The Board's action, he said, was "just cheap politics. ... I don't take their actions seriously. I'm sure they didn't." He filled the press with his side of the story—"The whole question is whether private interest should yield to public interest"—and if the press saw that some other questions were involved, it didn't mention them. And by the time the temporary injunction halted his steam shovels, they had completed the trench to the north of the clubhouse, cutting off all access from that direction, and had completed all of the trench to the south except for a narrow gap described as "perilously close to the river"—and as a final touch Moses had stationed a guard at that gap to charge all vehicles using it a quarter toll. Club members felt that their continued occupancy of a clubhouse that seemed to be under siege was untenable and that they might as well stop fighting. In a stipulation entered into before the trial for a permanent injunction, they agreed to get out if Moses would just give them enough time to remove their property—until June 18. When the fleet docked in July, they were not there to welcome it.
And neither was their clubhouse. Moses had razed it to the ground, as he had the Central Park Casino, the physical structure on which he had vented his malevolence against Jimmy Walker. By destroying the Columbia
Yacht Club clubhouse, he deprived the city of a $50,000 structure which could have been turned into a waterfront restaurant with only the most minor alterations—or, if he didn't want to leave it on the waterfront, could have been moved to any other park in the city and used for any purpose he chose.
And while Moses had maintained that he had harried the club out of existence so mercilessly because its existence conflicted with the public interest, those close to the affair knew differently, knew that his actions were, as the club secretary had said, "sheer spite work." Recalls Assistant Corporation Counsel Chanler, who handled the case for Moses and drew up the final stipulation: "I spoke to Moses about it. He said they had to be evicted at once. I said, 'Why?'
"He said, 'Because they were rude to me.' "
If Moses was indulging his enjoyment at hurting people not in order to help him with his aims but simply because he liked hurting, the indulgence nonetheless helped him achieve his aims. As Judge Jacob Lutsky puts it, "If you know that every time you get in a guy's way, he's going to kick you in the balls, you make pretty damn sure you don't get in his way—right?" Within a remarkably brief time after Moses entered the city administration, word had spread through City Hall and the Municipal Building that any time someone got in Moses' way, Moses kicked him in the balls. So the men who worked in those two buildings were in general exceedingly careful not to get
in his way. They went to great lengths to do exactly what he wanted—when he wanted. The great spongy mass of the city's bureaucracy, a mass of inertia and red tape and obfuscation and confusion, had absorbed and smothered the energy and the dreams of a thousand commissioners—but Commissioner Robert Moses sliced through the bureaucracy as if it were soft butter and he were a knife. And when at public meetings of the Board of Estimate, he would stride up to the little lectern reserved for city officials appearing before the Board and extend his hand behind him without looking, like a surgeon extending his hand for a scalpel, and an aide smacked a file folder into the hand, and Moses opened it and began, with the precision of a great surgeon, to dissect a man's character, the members of the Board, watching the reporters' pens and pencils avidly scribbling down his words, knew that those words would be appearing in headlines.
"He was terribly unfair to people," McGoldrick says. But, the Comptroller admits, the attacks served their purpose. Moses' methods "did intimidate people from debating with him. And it intimidated us, too, most likely." Soon, in the whole city government, from bureaucracy to Board of Estimate to mayor, there was no one to stand in the way of his dream, no one who would dare to tell the public the truth about the methods that were being used to make it come true, no one who would venture to examine—or to proclaim—its flaws.
* * *
And the dream unrolled.
During the 1930's, Robert Moses reshaped the face of the greatest city in the New World.
He gouged great gashes across it, gashes that once had contained houses by the hundreds and apartment houses by the score. He laid great swaths of concrete across it. He made it grayer, not only with his highways but with parking fields, like the one on Randall's Island that held 4,000 cars, the one at Orchard Beach that held 8,000 and the one at Jacob Riis Park that held 9,000, that together covered with asphalt a full square mile of the 319 in the city. And he made it greener, planting within its borders two and a half million trees, shrubs and vines, bringing a million others back to bloom, reseeding lawns whose area totaled four square miles and creating a full square mile more of new ones. He filled in its marshes and made them parks. He yanked railroad trestles off its avenues, clearing an even dozen from Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue alone as part of a grade-crossing elimination program he considered so minor that he seldom mentioned it. He brought the stars down to it, arranging, in a brief interval crammed in between more important projects, for the financing of Hayden Planetarium. He changed its very shape: the millions of cubic feet of rock and shale and sand and stone that the long convoys of his barges and the endless caravans of his trucks dumped behind the steel bulkheads that he rammed out away from its shoreline into the muck beneath rivers and harbors hardened into new land, more than 5,000 acres of new land, and thus expanded and transformed its physical contours, adding to Manhattan Island alone an area as large as the island from river to river between Fifty-ninth and Eighty-sixth streets. He joined together small islands within its borders with earth, blending Ward's Island into Randall's and Hunters and Twin Islands into Rodman Neck. He soldered together the larger islands that were its boroughs with steel, linking three of them together at once with the Triborough Bridge, tying the West Bronx to Manhattan with the Henry Hudson, drawing the far-flung Rockaways closer to the rest of metropolis with the Marine Parkway span. In the five years after he became Park Commissioner, in a city in which the parks had been barren for decades, he made the parks bloom. In a city in which there had been only 119 playgrounds, he built 255 new ones. In a city in which not a mile of new arterial highway had been built in fifteen years, he built fifty miles of arterial highway. In a city in which a new bridge had not been built in a quarter of a century he built not only the three new big bridges—Triborough, Henry Hudson and Marine Parkway—but no smaller ones to carry local streets across his parkways. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice, reads the inscription on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren. // you would see his monument, look around. By 1939, the same advice could have been given to a New Yorker asking to see the monuments of Robert Moses. They were everywhere in the great city.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 76
