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

by Caro, Robert A

  Whether it was the temperature or the flagging—or the glowering looks flung at Negroes by the Park Department attendants and lifeguards— one could go to the pool on the hottest summer days, when the slums of Negro and Spanish Harlem a few blocks away sweltered in the heat, and not see a single non-Caucasian face. Negroes who lived only half a mile away, Puerto Ricans who lived three blocks away, would travel instead to Colonial Park, three miles away—even though many of them could not afford the bus fare for their families and had to walk all the way.

  The fact that they didn't use their neighborhood pool—and the explanation for this fact—was never once mentioned by any newspaper or public speaker, or at least not by any public speaker prominent enough to have his speech reported in a newspaper.

  Moses built an immense park complex on Randall's Island, one equipped with baseball fields, tennis courts and soccer fields. Only one item was needed to make it a great park: people. But this ingredient was not provided. Moses had said that the island was "easily accessible" to the slums. Trekking the two miles to the island once was evidently enough to convince most slum families differently. Even on weekends, the vast new facilities sat almost empty. As for the Randall's Island Stadium, Moses had demanded

  70,000 seats. The WPA had allowed him 22,000. Even this number was, during the stadium's first five years of operation, not sold out once. At most events, the attendance was not in the thousands but the hundreds.

  The Grand Central, Interborough and Laurelton parkways opened early in the summer of 1936, bringing to an even one hundred the number of miles of parkway constructed by Moses on Long Island and in New York City since he had conceived his great parkway plan in 1924.

  At the opening of one stretch of parkway, Fiorello La Guardia lavished praise on everyone connected with its construction except Moses, and then, reaching up and placing his hand on his Park Commissioner's shoulder, said earnestly: "I don't have to say anything to you, Bob. Those who came to cheer have stayed to cheer."

  The city's press had stayed. One editorial opined that the new parkways would, by relieving the traffic load on the Southern and Northern State parkways, solve the problem of access to Moses' Long Island parks "for generations."

  The new parkways solved the problem for about three weeks. "It wasn't more than three weeks after they opened that I decided to go out to Jones Beach on a Sunday," Paul Windels recalls. "I got on the Interborough and by God it was as jammed as the Southern State ever was."

  Moses announced that he had the solution: build forty-five miles of new parkways, including a great "Circumferential Parkway" around Brooklyn and Queens that would provide motorists of these boroughs (and of Manhattan if the proposed Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel was built and linked up with the parkway) with an easier way to reach the Island—and, since the parkway would run for twenty miles along the edge of the Brooklyn waterfront, with a wonderful view.

  Some city planners noticed that the traffic pattern on Long Island had fallen into a set pattern: every time a new parkway was built, it quickly became jammed with traffic, but the load on the old parkways was not significantly relieved. If this had been the pattern for the first hundred miles of parkways, they wondered, might it not be the pattern for the next forty-five also? Perhaps consideration should be given to trying to ease Long Island's traffic problem by other means, specifically the improved mass transit that the Regional Plan Association and other reformer-backed groups had been proposing for a decade. The RPA ventured to raise this suggestion again, and it was backed by other planners and by some reformers. But their voices were drowned out by the flood of praise

  for Moses' idea. Said the Sun of the Circumferential proposal: "When it's done, you South Brooklynites can hitch up the old buggy and be in the Bronx before a Harvard man could say Greenpernt."

  The Triborough Bridge opened on July n, 1936.

  Even men familiar with large-scale public works were awed by this one. "From the engineering point of view, it is one of the greatest in the world as it is one of the biggest," PWA Administrator Ickes wrote in his diary. General Hugh Johnson wrote in his syndicated column, "The Triborough Bridge in New York City is one of the greatest accomplishments of man in the most fascinating department of civil engineering—bridge building." Harry Hopkins said that "of 70,000 WPA projects in the United States . . . there is none of which we are prouder."

  The awe—and the pride—was shared by the city. "The imagination with which the whole project was conceived, and the integrity with which it has been carried out, reaffirms our faith in the ways of democratic government," the Times editorialized. City officialdom and press assured the public that the project would, as Moses had promised, provide at a single stroke a solution to most of the traffic problems between Long Island and New York. "A tour over the Triborough Bridge yesterday by two newspaper reporters revealed that the huge structure ... is up to the expectations of the public and the promises of its builders both in beauty and in usefulness," the Times said. Trips from northern Queens to 125th Street in Manhattan, which previously had required "in the best of conditions" forty-five minutes via the Queensborough Bridge, would henceforth be negotiated in as little as sixteen minutes, reporters reported. Police Commissioner Valentine said that the opening of the bridge would sharply reduce traffic on all the East River spans, on the Queensborough "by from 40 to 50 percent."

  On August 17, 1936, a little more than a month after the Triborough Bridge opened, Long Island's parkways were the scene of what some observers called the greatest traffic tie-up in the history of the metropolitan area.

  Referring to it as a "cross-country traffic jam," the Herald Tribune was forced to conclude that the bridge had, at least indirectly, caused it. Apparently, a Monday-morning editorial quarterbacked, the "motoring residents of the Bronx" had all discovered at the same moment that the Triborough "brought them within easy time of Jones Beach and other cool and pleasant resorts on the south shore of Long Island" and had decided "at the same moment to head for the ocean by way of the new bridge and the Grand Central Parkway. And nearly all of them got stuck— as did countless other motorists going to and from . . . Long Island."

  Public officials responded with alarm. "The Interborough Parkway, barely opened, was already impossible," Brooklyn Borough President Ingersoll noted.

  Moses said he knew what to do: build more parkways in the Bronx and Westchester ("It's time we gave Westchester a break"), including the Hutchinson River Parkway Extension, and on Long Island not only rush the construction of the parkways he had already proposed but also build new roads that would not be restricted, as parkways were, to private automobiles, but would also carry commercial traffic. In particular, he proposed a road down the center of Long Island—the road that would, when finally built, be known as the "Long Island Expressway."

  Yes, agreed Ingersoll, that was what was needed. Yes, indeed, said the Herald Tribune —and the rest of New York's press.

  The Wantagh State Parkway Extension was opened on December 17, 1938, three montns ahead of schedule. Reminiscing in the brochure distributed at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Moses noted that in the nearly fifteen years since he had planned a metropolitan area transportation system, no miles of parkway, including 191 grade-eliminating bridges, had been completed in New York City and on Long Island, and so had the Henry Hudson, Tri-borough and Marine Parkway bridges. The "arterial system" he had created, he said, was "unparalleled"—and it had had to be, for so was the metropolitan area's traffic problem. And, he said, his program had been successful. "Today," he said, "we are well on our way toward a sensible solution of this problem in the metropolitan area." In his speech at a luncheon held afterward at Jones Beach, Moses repeated this theme. A thousand guests applauded enthusiastically.

  The Wantagh State Parkway Extension did not receive its first real test of traffic-easing capacity until the first warm weekend morning of 1939. On that morning, it was jammed bumper to bumper for more than three miles. Traffic experts could not unders
tand where those cars had come from. The other Long Island parkways, after all, were just as jammed as ever.

  Four months after the Triborough Bridge opened, Othmar Ammann gave a speech on its operation to the American Society of Civil Engineers. In it, Triborough's chief engineer announced that traffic on the span was running considerably ahead of estimates.

  The opening of a bridge was big news, but its operation was not. Most newspapers did not even bother to send a reporter to cover the speech. The Times did, and Ammann spoke with him after the meeting, and provided him with a further bit of information. Despite the heavy volume on the Triborough Bridge, Ammann said, "the relief of the traffic load on the Queensborough Bridge has not been as great as expected." But the

  Times editors evidently did not consider this fact particularly noteworthy. They devoted only four paragraphs to the story and buried it at the bottom of page 26.

  But Ammann's statement was a hint,* the only published hint New Yorkers were given during all of 1936, of certain developments that were puzzling—and beginning to worry—the city's traffic experts. Traffic on Triborough was indeed running ahead of estimates—far ahead. Before its opening, Moses, on the basis of Jack Madigan's figures, had estimated that eight million vehicles would use the bridge during its first year of operation. Within four months the estimate was increased to nine million. Three months later, it was ten million—and the counts at the Randall's Island toll complex showed that traffic was rising more sharply every month. There began to be reports of traffic tie-ups on the huge new structure.

  But traffic on the four other East River bridges was not falling off at anything near a comparable rate. The eight million cars and trucks that Moses had forecast would use Triborough each year were supposed to be cars and trucks that had previously used the other bridges, particularly the Queensborough. Not only Moses but all traffic experts who had studied the problem had agreed on that. Otherwise, where would these cars and trucks come from? Yet traffic on the other bridges, down about 15 percent immediately following Triborough's opening, was creeping higher again month by month—back, within two years, almost to the pre-Triborough level. Traffic between Long Island and New York had, before Triborough's opening, flooded the twenty-two lanes available on the four old bridges; suddenly the traffic between Long Island and New York had become so heavy that it was also flooding eight new lanes, the new lanes of the Triborough Bridge— and it was hardly any lighter than before on the old bridges. Traffic between the Island and the city had been increasing before, of course, increasing steadily. But never had it increased at this rate. If traffic between the Island and the city was a stream, something had suddenly opened the sluice gates much wider than they had ever been before—and the more the traffic experts studied the problem, the more difficult it was for them to avoid the conclusion that the something was the only new element in the situation—nothing other than the Triborough Bridge itself. Somehow, in ways they did not even pretend to understand, the construction of this bridge, the most gigantic and modern traffic-sorting and conveying machine in the world, had not only failed to cure the traffic problem it was supposed to solve—but had actually made it worse.

  Moses was convinced he knew the solution to the problem: build another bridge. Within a year after Triborough had opened, he was proposing the construction, a mile to the east, of the Bronx-Whitestone that would, by tying directly into the Hutchinson River Parkway to the north, enable motorists from the East Bronx, Westchester, Connecticut and New England to get to Long Island without using Triborough.

  For the first time, one of Moses' transportation proposals met with less than unanimous support from Good Government groups. The Regional

  Plan Association said that such a bridge should not be built unless provision was made on it for railroad trains as well as cars—so that a rapid transit tie-in between Long Island and the Bronx, Westchester and Connecticut could be established. The tie-in did not have to be immediate, the RPA said. Construction of the rapid transit system could wait until the need for it had been proven and financing was available. But provision for it should be made immediately. All that was required was to make the bridge wide enough for two lanes of tracks as well as for automobiles or to build a second deck for the tracks—or, if Moses did not want to adopt either of these courses at the present time, to make the bridge foundations and towers strong enough so that, should at some later date the rapid transit link be desired, the bridge could support a second deck that would be built at that time. If provision was made now, while the bridge was being planned, the RPA said, it could be made cheaply, at a minor increase in the cost of the bridge. If it was not made, a whole new bridge would have to be constructed from scratch when the rapid transit link proved necessary, and the cost would be tremendous. It might even prove prohibitive, preventing construction of such a link entirely. Failure to make provision for a rapid transit link as part of the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the RPA said, could therefore condemn Long Island forever to be linked to the north only through roads —which would mean that no matter how much population increased in the metropolitan area, the only means of reaching the Island from the north would still be by automobile. And this would condemn Long Island to future inundation by larger and larger numbers of automobiles.

  But Moses refused even to consider its proposal, and the RPA received no editorial support. Without opposition from a single city official, he built the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge without any provision for a rail link, opening it three full months ahead of schedule, on April 29, 1939.

  During 1940, its first full year of operation, 6,317,489 vehicles passed through the Bronx-Whitestone's toll booths, cramming its four lanes to capacity and causing massive tie-ups on it. Traffic on the Triborough was reduced by 122,519 vehicles. Traffic on the other four East River bridges was reduced not at all. In fact, it rose slightly. Somehow, the new bridge had generated, in a single year, more than 6,000,000 new on-and-off-Island motor trips. It had not improved the traffic situation on the old bridges at all. What had been the net effect of its $17,785,000 construction —or, in fact, of the construction of both it and the Triborough Bridge—on the traffic problem these bridges were built to solve? Before they existed, four bridges had connected Long Island with the rest of the world, and they had all been jammed. Now six bridges connected Long Island with the rest of the world. And they were all jammed.

  By dumping a tremendous new load on the Long Island parkways, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge made the traffic tie-ups on them noticeably worse.

  Shortly after the bridge opened, Moses completed the road linking the bridge with Westchester County, the Hutchinson River Parkway. Soon, that was jammed too.

  The Gowanus Parkway, the elevated highway Moses placed atop the pillars of the old BMT Elevated Line on Brooklyn's Third Avenue, was opened on November i, 1941, just in time for another mayoral election.

  "When Commissioner Moses finds the surface of the earth too congested for one of his parkways, he lifts the road into the air and continues it on its way," the Times editorialized. "A busy, crowded, region lay in Mr. Moses' path, too heavily built up for a leisurely, landscaped parkway. The problem was solved successfully. . . . Beginning today . . . Brooklyn reaps a new, incalculable highway benefit." Brooklyn's borough president called Moses an artist who, in his own field, ranked with Leonardo da Vinci.

  The canvas on which Moses had drawn the Gowanus creation was a neighborhood known as "Sunset Park." Its residents had pleaded with Moses to build the parkway not along Third Avenue but along Second, one block to the west, near the waterfront; Second Avenue ran not through a neighborhood but through the middle of Bush Terminal, a 200-acre agglomeration of piers, railroad sidings, lofts and factories that was already so noisy with the clatter of trucks and freight cars that the noise generated by a few more lanes of traffic would hardly be noticed. Comptroller McGoldrick, a resident of Sunset Park, had agreed with them; he pointed out that the city had been planning to tear down the elevated line bec
ause a new parallel subway had recently been built under Fourth Avenue, and "the elevated at least let some light in. The parkway would be solid and it would be wider than the El. It would come right up to the windows of the buildings." The Comptroller— along with non-Moses engineers—doubted Moses' contention that using the El pillars would be much cheaper than building a whole new parkway, particularly since it would hc.ve to swing back to the shore after only one mile —a distance long enough to "permanently blight" a neighborhood but not to make a substantial difference in cost. Moses had replied by telling the Board of Estimate that Sunset Park wasn't particularly worth saving because it was a "slum."

  "A slum! That wasn't a slum!" says Cathy Cadorine, who lived in Sunset Park. "That was a very nice neighborhood. It was poor, but clean poor."

  Actually, part of the area was dirty poor. Blight spawned in the dirt and noise of the Bush Terminal piers, warehouses, factories and railroad sidings along the waterfront had oozed inland along the side streets, forcing

  "clean poor" families to flee before it and leaving the old brownstone and red brickfront houses to derelicts, winos and whores.

  But that was just part of the area. And it wasn't what families like the Cadorines thought of as "the neighborhood" at all. What they thought of as "Sunset Park"—the area extending from west of Third Avenue all the way to Eighth and from Thirty-sixth Street south to Sixty-third and containing some 70,000 people, half of them Norwegians, the rest Finns, Danes, Irish and Germans—had been menaced by that blight for at least thirty years. But they had always stood it off: although it had spread inland as far as Second Avenue by the time of World War I, that was where it stopped; in 1940 it had not gotten even a foothold on the side streets between Second and Third. And despite the Depression, which hit especially hard at a neighborhood of skilled carpenters and housepainters and plumbers (60 percent of Sunset Park men were members of trade unions), they had made a world of their own.