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

by Caro, Robert A

  It was indeed, as Cathy Cadorine said, a "clean" world. The brickfronts and brownstones were immaculate; one could walk by them any morning and see the housewives sanding and scrubbing their stoops; even the sidewalks were swept; the little plots of grass that their owners proudly called "lawns" may have been tiny but they were lush green and neatly trimmed. But it was more than clean. It was quiet and peaceful—there were many trees lining the streets, but few cars; "Not many people around there had cars then," recalls Hertha Smalgo; "when people wanted to go to work or to the city, they took the elevated"—and warm and friendly: every summer brought a round of block parties, street lamps festooned with streamers, women and girls in gay peasant blouses from their native lands, folk singers with their accordions singing the old songs, long tables covered with tablecloths washed and washed again until they gleamed snowy under the lamps, and with heaping bowls of kalalatikko and hernierokka. In "Finn Town," the section of Sunset Park east of Fifth Avenue and south of Thirty-sixth Street that contained half a dozen public saunas, there were also half a dozen cooperative apartment houses, and many of the same families had been living in them for a quarter of a century. In the evening, families walked together to the bluff of Sunset Park to look out over ship-filled New York Harbor. Girls like Cathy Cadorine who grew up there, married boys from the neighborhood and raised their own families there because "we wouldn't want to live anywhere else."

  The heart of the neighborhood—the focal point that gave it unity and a sense of community—was Third Avenue. Lining it, along with newsstands off which 9,000 Nordisk Tidendes were sold every day, were seven movie theaters, dozens of tiny restaurants run by couples and featuring recipes from the old countries ("little restaurants, but good and so many you wouldn't know where to go for lunch," recalls Harold Benson, whose hardware store was on Third Avenue at Fifty-fourth Street), and scores of small, friendly "Mama and Papa" stores (the Northland Gift Shop, the Finnish Book Store, a hardware store that looked like a general store out of the Old West, a butcher shop that raffled off twenty-five big turkeys every Christmas)

  that occupied the grcund floor of three- and four-story brickfronts in which Mama and Papa lived upstairs with the children. "The avenue was always busy, people shopping or window shopping or just walking," Benson recalls.

  The El overhead was noisy, but, the shopkeepers say, "you got used to the trains and anyway when they built the new subway [under Fourth Avenue] we thought it was going to be torn down." The soot and cinders that wafted down from the El were annoying, but the shopkeepers kept the sidewalks clean—by sweeping them morning, noon and night. "Clean?" Cathy Cadorine recalls. "Those were the cleanest stores you ever saw!" And the El made Third Avenue even more of a focal point for a neighborhood in which "not many people had cars." "The husbands all took it to work," says Cathy Wylde. "So there were always people coming to Third Avenue to take it." This made the avenue even busier. Neighborhood girls didn't hesitate to walk down to the movies at night in pairs or to go shopping in the evening alone. "You would think the El would have been a divider [of the neighborhood], but it wasn't really," says Miss Wylde. "In a way, because everybody used it, it brought it closer together. Third Avenue was never an esthetic avenue. But it was a nice avenue."

  If Third Avenue was the heart of the neighborhood, Moses tore it out.

  Relocation began the procedure.

  The Board of Estimate had approved the Third Avenue route under the impression that because Moses was using an already-existing facility, the old El structure, no new right-of-way would be required—and hence no families would have to be evicted from their homes. But after the approval was given, the Board found that that impression was not quite accurate. It was off, in fact, by some one hundred stores—and 1,300 families.

  Some buildings had to be torn down because, while an El did not need entrance and exit ramps, a highway did, and a single entrance ramp took half a block of homes. But this need accounted for only a minor percentage of the relocations. Most of the buildings that were torn down—and every building on one side of Third Avenue between Thirty-ninth and Sixty-third streets was torn down—had to go because Moses would not allow trucks on his parkways, and so that he would build it instead of the city, he classified this elevated highway through a densely packed urban area, a highway unadorned by a single tree, as a "parkway." Since Moses' Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel would pour trucks as well as cars into Brooklyn just north of Sunset Park, and since trucks as well as cars would need a route south, he decided to make Third Avenue that route—by making that four-lane street under the parkway into a ten-lane highway.

  The El had cast a shadow over Third Avenue, but the El had been forty feet wide. The Gowanus was ninety-four feet wide. Its shadow was more than twice as broad.

  And more than twice as dark. The gaps between railroad ties had made the El's shadow a Venetian-blind shadow; sunlight had come through as if through the slats of an opened blind. A highway was a concrete slab, without gaps. The construction of the Gowanus Parkway, laying a concrete slab on top of lively, bustling Third Avenue, buried the avenue in shadow, and when

  the parkway was completed, the avenue was cast forever into darkness and gloom, and its bustle and life were forever gone.

  And through that shadow, down on the ten-lane surface road beneath the parkway, rumbled (from before dawn until after dark after the opening of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel flooded the area with freight traffic) regiments, brigades, divisions of huge tractor-trailer trucks, engines gunning and backfiring, horns blasting, brakes screeching, so that a tape recording of Third Avenue at midday could have been used as the soundtrack for a movie of a George Patton tank column. And from above, from the parkway itself, came the continual surging, dull, surf-like roar, punctuated, of course, by more backfires and blasts and screeches, of the cars passing overhead. Once Third Avenue had been friendly. Now it was frightening.

  It was made more frightening by the absence of people.

  Stores, restaurants and theaters had brought people to Third Avenue. Now half the stores, restaurants and theaters were gone.

  The El had brought people through Third Avenue on their way to and from its stations. The parkway did not. Moreover, although the El had been a huge, gloomy structure, it was, as Cathy Wylde puts it, "one that people from the neighborhood related to; they traveled on it, they were familiar with it." The parkway was something unfamiliar and strange. There were no lights underneath it and it always seemed damp there—condensation on the tubular steel supporting pillars caused a constant dripping on the street. "The highway was something different," Miss Wylde says. "It was noise, dirt, accidents, not lighted, a garbage dump, drag races along it in the night, wild kids, something totally negative. It was a tremendous psychological barrier. In a way you could say the people feared the highway." It was something to stay away from. It was a physical barrier, too. Elderly persons and mothers with small children found Third Avenue frightening not only because it was negative but because it was wide. Crossing the ten-lane truck road, wider than a football field, was even more of a problem because the traffic lights never seemed to allow enough time for anyone not in the best of health to get across. Sunset Park families began to do their shopping in stores that were not on Third Avenue. Once the avenue had been a place for people; Robert Moses had made it a place for cars. And as the avenue's roadway became more crowded, its sidewalks began to empty.

  The vicious gyre of urban decay began—and widened. Because there weren't as many people shopping on Third Avenue, there weren't enough to support the avenue's stores and restaurants—not even the half of the stores and restaurants that remained after the widening. One by one they began to close. Because there weren't as many stores and restaurants, people began doing their shopping and dining out elsewhere, and then there were even fewer people on Third Avenue. Because the streets in the evening were no longer filled with people, more people who might have gone to Third Avenue in the evening stayed away. Fewer people meant
even less business. One by one the shops and restaurants closed. The shop that had raffled off twenty-five turkeys raffled off ten now and then one—and then it was gone. And since the owners of many of the stores had lived in the apartments over

  them, when they were forced to move their businesses out of the neighborhood, they were forced to move their families out, too, and those families had provided customers for other stores.

  Not only Third Avenue was wrecked by the road; so were the side streets between it and the waterfront. With Moses' road and tunnel making Sunset Park more accessible to trucks, industries requiring truck traffic—including two large new plants, one a division of Bethlehem Steel, the other a division of American Machine & Foundry—moved onto Sunset Park's waterfront, already crowded with industrial activity. And the truck traffic for all these factories had no way to get to and from them from Third Avenue except through those narrow streets, between whose parked cars the children of the neighborhood had always played. "There was just so much traffic on those little streets that you wouldn't believe it," Cathy Cadorine recalls. The death of one little boy—hit by a huge tractor-trailer in the street right in front of his house—was enough. Faster and faster, the residents of the side streets began to move out. "The whole area died with the road," a resident would marvel. "And it died so quick." Soon it was, in his words, "a ghost town." Along the avenue and on adjacent side streets, rows of browns tone and brick-front buildings that had held stores and apartments, the stores and apartments that had stood as a bulwark between Sunset Park and the slum to the west, began to be vacated. Their rooms, the rooms that had been kept so clean and neat, stood empty.

  And into them came what the neighborhood had always feared.

  "Third Avenue became the place you could get sex," Cathy Cadorine recalls. "Everybody knew about it." Drunks as well as whores roamed the avenue, cadging drinks until they fell asleep in doorways. Cheap saloons opened in some of the abandoned stores. Soon there were street gangs, fighting gangs, Irish and Puerto Rican teen-agers, seeping down from the notorious Red Hook section to continue their racial warfare and prey on passers-by. The side streets off Third Avenue—streets whose apartments were now filled with families on welfare, families without fathers, and with poor Spanish-speaking families without clothes adequate for the cold New York winters —became places to dump and strip stolen cars; the streets began to be filled with their ravaged hulks. Rotting litter, rain-sodden mattresses and broken glass filled the sidewalks and gutters. Rats began to grow bold in the rubbish in vacant lots. There were even, to the horror of those residents who remained, drug addicts.

  With its heart gone, the neighborhood had no will to resist the invasion. There was nothing to hold its people—and as they saw the blight creeping closer, they simply moved away. For more than thirty years, the blight in South Brooklyn had been confined to the waterfront area. Now, thanks to Robert Moses and his parkway, it was on the loose, spreading across Sunset Park. The world of neat little houses and block parties vanished beneath it along the entire twenty-six-block length of the Gowanus Parkway, as far east as Fourth Avenue and, except for a few isolated blocks, as far west as Sixth—where the parkway was far enough away so that the community

  put up a stand, and won. Moses' steel and concrete, "lifted into the air" above a neighborhood for the convenience of motorists driving through the neighborhood to get somewhere else, had destroyed the neighborhood.

  Convenience? No sooner would Moses open the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel at one end of the Gowanus Parkway and the Belt Parkway at the other than the Gowanus would be jammed solid with traffic. At rush hours, the traffic trying to get up onto it would be backed up solid, spilling off the ramps and back into the neighborhood for blocks. Because there were no shoulders on the elevated road on which a disabled car could pull off, one disabled car could tie up a whole lane for hours.

  Moses knew what to do about that, he said: widen the Gowanus Parkway, creating six lanes instead of four, although there would still be no shoulders. That would bring the road right up to the windows of the apartments that were left along it. The cars would be so close to the buildings that on wet days the spray they kicked up would splatter the apartment windows. No matter, Moses said, the Gowanus would have to be widened.

  And he widened it.

  Residents of Sunset Park had pleaded with Moses to build the road along Second Avenue instead of Third. After it was built, and they saw what it had done to their neighborhood, they knew their suggestion had been correct. "That was an industrial area anyway. Building it over there wouldn't have changed anything in the area at all," Cathy Cadorine said.

  But no newspaper mentioned that fact.

  Of all the hundreds of public works that Robert Moses was building in New York City during the 1930's, the one whose creation most clearly manifested the same extraordinary capacities he had displayed on Long Island was the project that arose from the first and longest-held of his dreams, the dream of the "great highway that went uptown along the water" and of the great park alongside that had made him exclaim to Frances Perkins in 1914, staring from the deck of a Hudson River ferryboat at the muddy wasteland below Riverside Drive: "Couldn't this waterfront be the most beautiful thing in the world?"

  All the qualities that made Robert Moses a genius of public works were needed for the realization of this dream. Its scope was all but unprecedented in urban America—the "West Side Improvement," as he named it, included not only the completion of the long-stalled, five-mile elevated express highway from the southern tip of Manhattan Island to Seventy-second Street; but also the design and construction of the extension of that highway six and a half miles north to the northern tip of Manhattan Island; the transformation

  of six and a half miles of muddy wasteland into a park that would make beautiful the city's western waterfront; the throwing of a "Henry Hudson Bridge" across the Harlem River that separated Manhattan from the Bronx; the continuation of the highway through the Bronx to the city line and, beyond the line, to the Saw Mill River Parkway, so that the city would have at last a true outlet to the north. And the problems in the way of its realization were unprecedented as well. At last, twenty years after he had dreamed the dream, he had the power in the city that was half of the elixir needed to transfer the dream into reality. But he still didn't have the other half of the elixir—money.

  The amount needed was staggering. The work below Seventy-second Street had been carried out under a 1927 agreement between New York City and the New York Central Railroad, which was anxious for an enlarged freight yard at Thirtieth Street and longer covered train-assembling tracks further uptown because of the introduction of diesel locomotives, which could pull longer trains than steam locomotives. Under the agreement, the city gave the railroad land for an enlarged yard and for depressed tracks leading to it, the railroad in return surrendered its permanent right-of-way through Riverside Park and down Eleventh Avenue, and the railroad and city, under an incredibly complicated arrangement, were to share the cost of constructing a West Side Elevated Highway from the Battery north to Seventy-second Street, the southern border of Riverside Park, as well as the cost of covering the railroad's tracks through the park and through its northerly extension, Fort Washington Park, which ran to 192nd Street.* By 1929, the city, proceeding with the highway in typical Tammany fashion, down to its adornment with millions of dollars' worth of granite, had spent $25,000,000 as its share of the job, and the railroad had spent $84,000,000, for a total of $109,000,000. And when the Depression brought both railroad and city to the brink of bankruptcy and forced the halt of work, the job was not nearly done; out of 120 blocks in the park, for example, the tracks had been covered for only the first seven, between Seventy-second and Seventy-ninth streets. Twenty million dollars might be needed to complete the highway and track-depressing operations below Riverside Park alone, and Moses' preliminary estimates of the rest of the work indicated that the amount of money needed to finish the whole "West Side Improvement"
might well equal the $109,000,000 already spent.

  And the immensity of this amount was only part of the problem. From a political point of view, what seemed to make obtaining it almost impossible was the 1927 agreement, which provided that a substantial part of the cost of the Improvement was to be borne by the New York Central. The city's taxpayers had been aroused by decades of questionable dealings between the railroad and complaisant city officials, dealings such as the one that

  * The public used the name "Riverside Park" to refer to both parks and so, for the sake of simplicity, will this book.

  had given the railroad the permanent right-of-way through a city park and down a city avenue in the first place. They obviously would view any attempt to use their money to relieve the railroad of its obligation as another "giveaway." No sensible politician would dare to suggest such an arrangement. The railroad's share of the West Side Improvement was going to have to be paid by the railroad—or there wasn't going to be any Improvement. But the railroad was in no position to pay—and obviously wasn't going to be for years to come.

  One hundred and nine million dollars was a terrible obstacle to place between a man and his dream. Since the turn of the century other men had been attempting to obtain just a small portion of that sum—enough to build the bridge over the Harlem River and short approach roads; no one but Moses had come up with a fully-thought-out plan for the reclamation of Riverside Park—and had never come close to obtaining funds for even those limited improvements. On five separate occasions since 1904, the city had drawn up plans for a "Henry Hudson Bridge," and when Moses drove up to the Harlem in 1934, the only trace of the plans he could find was the hundred-foot-high column without a statue on top of it and a number of faded billboards, one, it seemed, for every city administration of those thirty years, proclaiming the imminent start of construction. Couple the amount needed with the fact that a substantial part of it had to be provided by a near-bankrupt railroad, and, even to Moses' aides, who had watched RM work fiscal magic before, the obstacle looked insurmountable.