With his showman's flair for the spectacular, Moses made the opening
of each of his creations an event, a colorful civic celebration, and if the celebrations sometimes seemed more like morality plays (for Moses was careful to point out at each one that the creation had been possible because of the victory of the altruistic public servant over "old hack" Tammany politicians and "red tape" bureaucrats) the public was so enthusiastic that it didn't mind the moralizing. New York City cheered what Robert Moses was doing to it—cheered so loudly, in fact, that the thin cries of disagreement, of disagreement and despair, were all but completely drowned out.
Robert Moses built 255 neighborhood playgrounds in New York City during the 1930's.
The adults and children who attended playground dedication ceremonies cheered when, at the end of the speeches, the fountain showers in the wading pools were turned on. And the cheers were echoed and amplified by the press. "Nothing Robert Moses has done is as great as what he has done with playgrounds," the World-Telegram said. "He has bestowed an unqualified boon on the neighborhoods of this city."
To dramatize the size of the achievement, Moses gave each playground a number, and the press counted along with him: playground number 189 opens, the headlines said, playground number 194 dedicated . . . playground 204 . . . playground 240 . . . And he had his mapmakers prepare pairs of outline maps of the city, blank except for dots representing playgrounds. The map on the left would be labeled simply "1933," the year before he had become Park Commissioner, the one on the right simply "1937" (or "1938" or "1939"). And the contrast between the two maps was certainly spectacular, the one on the left almost empty, the one on the right covered thickly with dots. And public and press drew from the maps the conclusion that Moses wanted drawn from them: that his playground-building program was an unqualified improvement, an absolutely unalloyed benefit, to all the people of New York City.
A close inspection of the maps would have revealed some rather puzzling characteristics about the pattern formed by the dots.
Their distribution, for example, was not at all even. The areas of the maps on which the dots were clustered most thickly corresponded in the main to those areas inhabited by families that were well-to-do or at least "comfortable." The areas of the maps on which the dots were sprinkled most thinly corresponded in part to undeveloped outlying areas of the city that did not really need playgrounds, but they corresponded also to some of the city's most congested areas, to the tenement neighborhoods and slums inhabited by families that were poor—to areas that needed playgrounds
desperately. Most of Robert Moses' neighborhood playgrounds had, in other words, been built in the neighborhoods that needed playgrounds least. Few of the playgrounds had been built in the neighborhoods that needed playgrounds most.
The areas of the maps on which the dots were sprinkled most thinly of all corresponded to those areas of the city inhabited by its 400,000 Negroes.
Robert Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City during the 1930's. He built one playground in Harlem.
An overspill from Harlem had created Negro ghettos in two other areas of the city: Brooklyn's Stuyvesant Heights, the nucleus of the great slum that would become known as Bedford-Stuyvesant, and South Jamaica. Robert Moses built one playground in Stuyvesant Heights. He built no playgrounds in South Jamaica.
"We have to work all day and we have no place to send the children," one Harlem mother had written before Robert Moses became Park Commissioner. "There are kids here who have never played anyplace but in the gutter." She could have written the same words after he had been Park Commissioner for five years. After a building program that had tripled the city's supply of playgrounds, there was still almost no place for approximately 200,000 of the city's children—the 200,000 with black skin—to play in their own neighborhoods except the streets or abandoned, crumbling, filthy, looted tenements stinking of urine and vomit; or vacant lots carpeted with rusty tin cans, jagged pieces of metal, dog feces and the leavings, spilling out of rotting paper shopping bags, of human meals. Children with white skin had been given swings and seesaws and sliding ponds. Children with black skin had been left with the old broomsticks that served them as baseball bats. Children with white skin had been given wading pools to splash in in summer. If children with black skin wanted to escape the heat of the slums, they could remove the covers from fire hydrants and wade through their outwash, as they had always waded, in gutters that were sometimes so crammed with broken glass that they glistened in the sun.
Negroes begged for playgrounds.
The children begged silently. Recalls Father C. Edward Harrison, who during the 1930's served as assistant to Father Shelton Hale Bishop, rector of St. Philip's Protestant-Episcopal Church on 134th Street: "They wouldn't say they had no place to go. The need was unexpressed, inarticulate. But you knew that in their own way they were begging for somewhere to go, something to do. There weren't even basketball courts then, except at the 'Y' or in the big parks. There was nothing in the neighborhood. And you would see kids improvising basketball baskets, hanging a fruit basket against a lamppost or against a wall—you know, hanging it up on something, playing on the sidewalks or in the streets." In 1944, Father Bishop would persuade his parishioners to convert the old four-story parish house, which contained a gymnasium, into a community center with recreational facilities, and, Father Harrison recalls, "you should have seen the kids come in here, just because we
had a gym. The very fact that they came here in such numbers and were so happy to have something to do showed us how much they needed recreational facilities."
Not just because of the gym, of course. There were recreation supervisors there who cared about the children—"It's not just recreation that we're talking about, you know," Father Harrison says. "I guess you could call it an involvement of ourselves; they felt they belonged here and that they were wanted here, that someone cared about them; recreation has to go along with other things, you know"—but that was precisely what playgrounds were providing in other areas of the city. "In the Thirties," recalls Park Department official Melvin Daus, the Park Department playground supervisors were "young guys, bright young guys, all college-educated. There were no other jobs available then. We were trained in working with young people, supervising them, giving them leadership, giving them help. And what with WPA and all, there were so many supervisors—there were two or three at even the smallest playground—that we could really get involved with the kids, not just supervise their games but be around so that if one of them needed someone to talk to, he had someone. I mean a kid would never come around and say right out, 'I need some advice,' but kids were saying that in their own way. They were saying it silently, but they were saying it all right. They were begging for it."
Adults begged aloud—in letters-to-the-editor and resolutions to the mayor—and their voices sometimes grew shrill and desperate. "The police just keep the kids moving and there is no place to send them," one Stuy-vesant Heights mother said. "Harlem is a poor section," one civic organization wrote La Guardia. "Each day from morning to night those people who are trying to give their children a decent living and make them something in the world to be proud of, are . . . out at work trying to earn a living." It was impossible for them to stay home and care for their children at the same time. Therefore, they wanted to send them to playgrounds. Since there weren't any, the children had little choice but to "roam the streets while their parents are worried half to death wondering where they are. . . . Please realize and understand the conditions of Harlem in order that you might see what the children there have to contend with." Ministers and settlement-house workers attempting to alleviate the problem through their own efforts found a particular poignance in their inability to make any real dent in it—the crowds of children who tried to jam into Reverend Bishop's little parish house only impressed him the more with the fact that only the city could do the job on the scale required. "We knew the need," Father Bishop's assistant, Father Harri
son, says. "We couldn't understand why the city didn't. When you have to turn kids away, the feeling is one of anger, frustration—of Why? Why? Why?" And sometimes the anger and frustration would spill over in angry speeches. Reverend Bishop, who was to try for ten years to persuade Robert Moses to build one playground in his neighborhood—reading, almost every time he picked up a newspaper, it seemed, of another new playground being opened in some other neighborhood—addressed himself to the problem of Harlem crime by
telling an audience: "The children have no place to go. Day and night they must use the block on which they live for recreation. No wonder they are like caged tigers and, once loose, want to wreak havoc."
But the adults might as well have been silent, too. La Guardia, who was doing so much in other areas for the city's Negroes, was not interfering with his Park Commissioner, and he referred the resolutions to him. And his Park Commissioner flatly denied their contentions. "The fact is that Harlem and its adjacent neighborhoods have not been overlooked and neglected or discriminated against," Robert Moses said. "The tendency has been in just the other direction, that is to give more attention to Harlem than to other sections which are in just as great need of recreation." He had done this with all the Negro slums, he said. And he bolstered his arguments with floods of facts and figures compiled by his corps of statisticians. The facts and figures were misleading, but no one did the work necessary to disprove them; the first full-scale survey of recreational facilities by any organization other than the Park Department—a United Parents Association study which found "plenty of playground space" only "where the rentals are high"—was not conducted until 1941, and it was not until 1943, when a grand jury investigating the causes of the high crime rate in Bedford-Stuyvesant found lack of recreational facilities to be a contributing factor, that any even quasi-official body went on record about the effect of Moses' park policies on the Negro slums. (Moses' reply was the issuance of an eight-page release that termed the jury's report "without the slightest foundation.") The press, the instrument best equipped to investigate the situation and come up with independent facts and figures, never made any such investigation. It buried or ignored the recreation reports of the United Parents Association and the grand jury and the resolutions passed by the Negro community organizations, and reprinted only the barest handful of letters-to-the-editor (it took Reverend Bishop fourteen years to get one printed). In 1950, the Times would send a reporter to Harlem to make his own, independent tour, and he would report that playgrounds for many Harlem children were vacant lots, in which "bare-legged children" played "on dumps of broken glass, rusty cans and refuse. . . ." But during the 1930's the press was taking Robert Moses' word for what was being done for the slums. A day-by-day review of the Times, Herald Tribune and Brooklyn Eagle —and a more cursory review of the city's other major dailies—for the entire 1934-39 period did not turn up a single editorial even hinting that Moses' playground-building program might be neglecting the slums. A typical editorial was the one in the Times that said that Moses was sowing "playgrounds over the congested areas of the city ... as a sower might sow magic seed, bidden to flower in the slums."
Robert Moses built ten new community swimming-pool complexes in New York City during the 1930's.
Because of his fascination with water in general and swimming in par-
ticular, Moses gave each of the pools, for which he had obtained a special WPA grant of $10,000,000, his personal attention. Under his prodding, his architects adorned them with masterful little touches; over the entrance which divided men from women as they entered the bathhouse at the Corona Pool complex sat a stork wearing an expression that made him look as if he were puzzling over the physical differences in the creatures he had brought into the world. Under his prodding, his architects produced dozens of innovations that would set a new standard for swimming-pool construction, public and private, from pool bottoms of wood-float rough enough to prevent slipping and smooth enough to permit games during the off season, when the pool was drained, to a totally new type of scum gutter wide enough to let in sunlight that would kill the bacteria whose formation had been a problem in older public pools. He himself solved a problem that had always baffled designers—how to force swimmers to wash their feet before entering the pool—by building what the Architectural Forum called "tactful depressions"—hollows too wide to be jumped—clear across each corridor leading from the locker room to the pool so that swimmers had no choice but to walk through them and through the special foot-cleansing solution with which they had been filled. Despite the WPA requirements that only the cheapest materials be used, each pool turned out to be a municipal marvel of the first magnitude.
And they were hailed as such. "Simple materials simply disposed" in designs that were "always sound and sometimes brilliant," the Forum said. As for their size (the main pool at the three-pool Corona complex is 365 feet long), the Forum said, "The openings were marked by the publication of statistics which seemed to the reading public all but incredible. The Astoria Pool, for instance, was reported to have accommodations for 6,200 bathers. Nobody had heard anything like that before, but it turned out to be literally true. The ten new pools erected last year plus two old ones that had been remodeled, now have a combined capacity—as measured by their locker-room facilities—of 49,000!"
The ingenuity that Robert Moses displayed in building swimming pools was not restricted to their design.
Moses built one pool in Harlem, in Colonial Park, at 146th Street, and he was determined that that was going to be the only pool that Negroes— or Puerto Ricans, whom he classed with Negroes as "colored people"— were going to use. He didn't want them "mixing" with white people in other pools, in part because he was afraid, probably with cause, that "trouble"—fights and riots—would result; in part because, as one of his aides puts it, "Well, you know how RM felt about colored people."
The pool at which the danger of mixing was greatest was the one in Thomas Jefferson Park in La Guardia's old East Harlem congressional district. This district was white, but the pool, one block in from the East River, was located between 111th and 114th streets. Not only was it close to Negro Harlem, but the city's Puerto Rican population, while still small,
was already beginning to outgrow the traditional boundaries of "Spanish Harlem" just north of Central Park and to expand toward the east— toward the pool. By the mid-Thirties, Puerto. Ricans had reached Lexington Avenue, only four blocks away, and some had begun moving onto Third Avenue, only three blocks away.
To discourage "colored" people from using the Thomas Jefferson Pool, Moses, as he had done so successfully at Jones Beach, employed only white lifeguards and attendants. But he was afraid that such "flagging" might not be a sufficient deterrent to mothers and fathers from the teeming Spanish Harlem tenements who would be aware on a stifling August Sunday that cool water in which their children could play was only a few blocks away. So he took another precaution.
Corporation Counsel Windels was astonished at its simplicity. "We [Moses and I] were driving around Harlem one afternoon—he was showing me something or other—and I said, 'Don't you have this problem with the Negroes overrunning you?' He said, 'Well, they don't like cold water and we've found that that helps.' " And then, Windels says, Moses told him confidentially that while heating plants at the other swimming pools kept the water at a comfortable seventy degrees, at the Thomas Jefferson Pool, the water was left unheated, so that its temperature, while not cold enough to bother white swimmers, would deter any "colored" people who happened to enter it once from returning.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 77
