The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York
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And he had the $30,000,000.
He had all the money needed to complete Riverside Park. He had 6.7 miles of the dream, enough to get it all the way up to 192nd Street, in the bag.
There were three miles—and $15,000,000—to go.
North of 192nd Street the shoreline of Manhattan Island climbed steeply away from the Hudson River into the high bluffs of Fort Tryon and Inwood Hill parks. There was a sharp, quick break in the bluffs where the Harlem River sliced through to meet the Hudson and then the bluffs were part of the
Bronx, and perched atop them and on the slopes leading down to the two rivers was the residential community of Spuyten Duyvil, somewhat more thickly settled than Riverdale, which lay between it and 263rd Street, the city's northern border.
All previous plans for a through highway to the north envisioned the highway swinging sharply inland when it got to Fort Tryon Park so as not to disturb the wooded beauty of its hills, which formed a serene setting for the Cloisters that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was building atop them, or those of Inwood Hill Park beyond, which constituted Manhattan's last piece of unspoiled forest. Under these plans the highway would run along the easternmost edge of the two parks, taking a thin slice from the edge at the point where it sloped down to meet the rest of the city, and obtaining the rest of its right-of-way from the city streets adjoining the parks and from condemning the relatively few single-family houses that had been built along them. Besides leaving the two forest parks unspoiled, this route had the further advantage of allowing the Henry Hudson Bridge to cross the Harlem River not by leaping from high bluff to high bluff, which would require an expensive high-level bridge, but by crossing from the low land east of Inwood Hill Park to a low-lying section of the Bronx opposite it called Marble Hill that was the site of nothing except a filthy shanty town and some boxcars that had somehow been left on the site for years—no one was sure how they had gotten there—and were now serving as the home for about a hundred homeless men. Marble Hill could use a good cleaning up anyway. Once in the Bronx, the highway would run through Marble Hill and a corner of Riverdale until it reached Van Cortlandt Park, where it would take right-of-way from the park's westernmost edge so as not to disturb it any more than necessary.
Moses found that using this route would cause him problems—financial problems.
Avoiding Fort Tryon and Inwood Hill parks meant that Moses would not be able to use the "free" labor provided for him on "park access roads" by the CWA. The parkway would have to run alongside the parks, on city streets. Under existing federal legislation, it would therefore fall under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Public Roads—and the legislation establishing the Bureau specifically prohibited it from extending any aid, for laborers' pay or any other expenses, on any road leading to a toll facility. Since Moses was planning to finance the construction of the Henry Hudson Bridge through the sale of bonds of the Henry Hudson Parkway Authority he had had the Legislature create, he would have to have tolls on the bridge to pay off the bonds. The city would therefore have to pay for the parkway north of Riverside Park. Furthermore, there was the cost of condemning buildings needed for the right-of-way. Even if a state or federal agency had been willing to pay for the buildings, it could not legally do so; under one of the most fundamental provisions of the City Charter, only the city had the power to condemn property within its borders. Paying for both labor and land north of Riverside Park would cost the city about $5,000,000 more.
Robert Moses decided not to swing inland when he got to Fort Tryon Park.
Running the parkway straight through that park and Inwood Hill solved many of his financial problems at a single stroke. The land acquisition problem was solved instantly and completely; since park land was already owned by the city, no land would have to be acquired. As for CWA-paid labor, it couldn't be used on a road without approval from the Bureau of Public Roads, but it could be used on "park access drives"; in fact, the CWA looked favorably upon the building of such drives because they made parks more accessible to the public. The sections of parkway running into Fort Tryon and Inwood Hill parks certainly met the definition of "park access drives" and who was to say where they stopped; why could not the drive continue into the park itself—and, perhaps, across it? Moses had learned from his previous dealings with the CWA that once he got a project in a park started, once he got the first stake driven for it, it was almost impossible for the CWA to refuse to let him complete it. Run the parkway through Fort Tryon and Inwood Hill parks and the cost of the northern section of the West Side Improvement would be not $15,000,000 but no more than $10,000,000—which happened to be the amount that the Henry Hudson Parkway Authority—Robert Moses, sole member—was authorized to raise by the sale of its toll-revenue-secured bonds. Using the direct route through the parks would, moreover, have other financial advantages as well: Moses' preliminary discussions with bankers had demonstrated to him that they had no great enthusiasm for buying bonds for a toll bridge that would be located only a few hundred yards from a free bridge—the present Harlem River drawbridge on Broadway. They believed that drivers would not pay a toll if a free alternative was so close by, particularly if the parkway's drawbridge also had to be raised—if only occasionally—when a ship came through. Moses didn't feel their argument was correct—he was sure drivers would be willing to pay to get off jammed Broadway and onto a modern parkway— but placing the Henry Hudson Bridge on the high bluff a mile to the west of the Broadway bridge would make the bridge high enough to allow ships to pass underneath it. He was sure that the bankers would then have no possible reason for a lack of enthusiasm for the project. Amortizing the forty-year bonds he wanted to issue could be done if only 2,000,000 of the 14,250,000 cars that came into and out of Manhattan each year over the Broadway bridge used the Henry Hudson instead and paid a ten-cent toll on it—and he was sure that one out of every seven drivers would pay ten cents per trip for the added convenience.
But Moses found that vision was not in plentiful supply on Wall Street. He had felt sure that this $10,000,000, the last $10,000,000, all that was left between him and the realization of his dream, would be the easiest part of the cost of the West Side Improvement to obtain. Instead, it proved to be the hardest.
The Depression had ended the myth that the bonds of public authorities, even public authorities whose credit was backed by a municipality, were
risk-free investments. Since Black Thursday, more than two hundred municipalities across the United States had defaulted on their own bonds, turning them into worthless pieces of paper. And if the bankers needed an example closer to home—and bankers didn't—they knew how close New York City had come to default. Michael J. (Jack) Madigan, who was trying to persuade investment bankers to agree to purchase the bonds if the Authority put them on the market, had to report back to Moses that the bankers were afraid to make the investment.
The son of an impoverished bartender, Jack Madigan had come out of the Pennsylvania hard-coal country in 1907 at the age of thirteen to enter the construction industry as a waterboy lugging buckets for thirsty work gangs, and by the time, in 1928, he was promoted to supervisor for one of the Jones Beach contractors, he had spent his whole life with the gangs. With his ruddy, square face and grizzled hair he looked like one of them, and he was as boisterous as they as he crowded with them into South Shore taverns after work to wash the sand of the barrier beach out of his throat. His "dese, dose and dem" speech revealed his lack of formal education; he was addicted to awesome malapropisms: "From the standing point of finances," he would say of Tammany's handling of the Triborough Bridge project, "what a terrible finesco!"
But during the tension of the Jones Beach construction—the firm Madigan worked for was the one that went broke on the job—Moses came to know a different Jack Madigan, a deliberate, mild-mannered man who, when his opinion was solicited, would stand very still, his feet close together, his eyes staring into the distance for a long time before he was ready to give it—and who, when he wa
s ready, gave it in a voice that was quiet, firm and precise. When he quit his job and with a friend, Richard V. Hyland, formed Madigan-Hyland, Inc., Consulting Engineers, with "offices" in the furnished room they shared over a Rockville Centre restaurant and files stored in the back seat of Hyland's car, Moses gave them Long Island Park Commission contracts, contracts that made Madigan a millionaire.
And the uneducated Irishman filled an abandoned cigar factory in Long Island City with expensive, college-trained talent—among his employees, whom he called "my Phi Beta Kappa keys," was the brilliant Emil F. Praeger, who during World War II, as chief engineer of the U.S. Navy, would design the floating dry docks that were used in the Normandy landings.
Moses found, moreover, that Madigan was talented with money as well as men—a fact the author learned during a series of three-hour private Madigan lectures on the financing of public works. (One lecture began and ended with the words "Money means all: unless you get it, you're going nowhere, brother.") "He had an extraordinary native shrewdness," Moses said, and when Moses had to select a representative for his first attempt to tap the sources of private funds that Wall Street bankers controlled—the sale of Henry Hudson Parkway Authority bonds—he selected the bartender's son. He selected right. A banker was later to say, "He can tailor a bond issue as neatly as an artisan assembles a stained-glass window."
But bankers, burned by the losses they had taken on municipal bonds
during the Depression, would not even try on the Henry Hudson bond issue for size. In the preceding twenty-four months, not a single new issue of such bonds had been successfully floated in the United States. The bankers informed Madigan that they were not interested in the Authority's bonds unless the "coverage" of those bonds (the earnings that would enable the Authority to pay interest on and amortize them) was at least 1.75 and preferably 2.00 (twice as much as would be needed for that interest paying and amortization). "They were scared, that's all," Madigan would recall.
Moses' own surveys had convinced him that not merely one out of every seven but one out of every three cars using the Broadway bridge would pay ten cents for an easier trip over the Henry Hudson Bridge. He did not have the slightest doubt of it; in fact, he considered that figure ridiculously conservative. And one-third of the Broadway bridge traffic was 3,560,000 cars per year—or, at ten cents per car, $356,000 in toll revenues. You could subtract the $70,500 annual cost of paying toll collectors and keeping the bridge painted and in repair and still have left over almost twice as much as would be required to pay the yearly interest and amortization on the $10,000,000 bond issue which would provide the funds needed to build a six-lane Henry Hudson Bridge across the Ship Canal, and to continue the parkway north to link up at the city line with the Saw Mill River Parkway.
But Moses' figures were not conservative enough for the bankers. "We were trying to sell them the idea that people would pay ten cents to avoid that terrible route up Broadway," Madigan recalls. "They couldn't see why you would pay ten cents when you could go the other way for nothing. The idea that people would pay for convenience hadn't yet been established."
All through the summer of 1934, Madigan-Hyland counted the cars traveling north and south on Broadway and Riverside Drive to show the bankers the tremendous volume on which the new bridge would be able to draw. But the bankers still balked. "They wanted illustrations of previous situations where a free—if less convenient—bridge was competing with a toll bridge and the toll bridge had been successful, and there weren't many," Madigan recalls. "Most toll bridges were built to give access to a place where there wasn't any other access. We finally found one in Miami [where the toll Venetian Causeway was highly successful although in competition with a free County Causeway]." But the bankers still balked.
Madigan finally had to report to Moses that their final decision was that they would purchase no more than $3,100,000 in Authority bonds, an amount for which the traffic they estimated would use the Henry Hudson Bridge would provide 1.75 coverage.
Moses worked frantically to get the cost down to that level. By persuading the CWA that the construction of the parkway through Fort Tryon and Inwood Hill parks could be called in its entirety a "park project," he got the labor for that section of parkway free. When he persuaded La Guardia to pick up the tab for hire of the construction equipment needed, the entire cost of that section—$700,000—could be knocked off the amount of bonds that had to be sold, reducing that amount from $10,000,000 to $9,300,000. On the northern, or Riverdale, side of the bridge, he had already planned
the parkway to run along Spuyten Duyvil Parkway for almost two miles, so that only limited condemnation would be needed. Now the Authority could no longer pay for even that condemnation. La Guardia said the city couldn't do it, either; an estimated $2,500,000 was required and there was no money around for it. The only solution was to run as much of the parkway as possible through the only city-owned land in Riverdale: Van Cortlandt Park.
Doing this reduced the cost of the right-of-way to $1,260,000. The Authority had been supposed to pay for the engineering plans for the northern and southern sections of the parkway. Moses persuaded State Highway Commissioner Arthur W. Brandt, one of his admirers, to have state engineers draw the plans. This saved about $200,000 more, and reduced the amount to be raised to $9,100,000. Then Moses got a break. In December 1934, Madigan returned from Washington with word that as soon as the new Congress convened, it would make a new appropriation to the PWA of $400,000,000—on which the agency would be allowed to waive the past requirement that grants for road-related projects had to be matched by state contributions. Rushing to Albany, Moses persuaded Lehman to use part of the new money the state would receive to construct the Riverdale portion of the parkway. Since this section had been expected to cost $2,750,000, the amount to be raised could be reduced to $6,350,000. Moses went back to La Guardia. Was the Mayor going to deny the city this $10,000,000 project for want of $1,260,000 worth of right-of-way? he asked. The Mayor agreed that he could not let that happen. He agreed that the city would purchase the right-of-way needed to widen Spuyten Duyvil Parkway, although at the moment he didn't know where he would find the money. The amount needed to be raised by the bond sale was reduced to $5,090,000.
Try as he would, however, Moses seemed unable to reduce the amount any further. He had already sliced from the Authority's obligation every cost except that of the bridge itself. Federal funds could not be used for the bridge because it was a toll facility; state funds could not be used because the Legislature would never authorize another highway expenditure in the city; the city had no money to help. Time and again, Moses sent Madigan back to his engineers; time and again, Praeger, whom Madigan had assigned to head the team working on the project, gave him the same answer: six lanes of traffic were needed on the bridge; a bridge with six lanes on a single level or deck was so wide that three arches running from one side of the river to the other were needed to support it; and a three-arch bridge could not be built for a penny less than $5,000,000. It certainly could not be built for $3,100,-000. Praeger had costed out a narrower, two-deck bridge built on two arches. But the weight of such a bridge was virtually the same as that of the wider bridge; since that weight had to be carried by two arches instead of three arches, the arches had to be made much stronger; the cost of the two-deck bridge was actually a little higher than the single-decker.
"He [Moses] was really totally discouraged," Madigan recalls. "I had never seen him so low." The two men had agreed that Madigan would hold one final meeting with the bankers, and on the Friday morning in December
on which that meeting was held, Moses kept looking up from his work in his 80 Centre Street office to ask his secretaries if there was any word from the Irishman.
Madigan arrived at Centre Street shortly before noon and told Moses that the last-ditch attempt had failed and that "we might just as well give up the idea that they would change their minds. Three-million-one was as high as they would go." The engineer recalls
that he had been scheduled to have lunch with Moses, but that "we didn't feel much like eating. I went out and g<5t into my car to go back to my office."
But then, Madigan recalls, as "I was driving along, I happened to think of a bridge I had once heard about in Havergrass [Haverstraw], Pennsylvania, across the Schuylkill River. It had been built by the Pennsylvania Railroad, but then the railroad didn't need it any more and gave it to the community, see? It was a narrow two-lane bridge because there was just enough room on it for a couple of railroad tracks. The community put a floor on it and used it for cars. But then, see, they decided they needed more capacity so they just strengthened up the steel and put a second deck on it.
"Well, it came to me just like that. I remember I leaned forward and I said to the chauffeur, 'Step on it, goddammit!' We hurried up to the office and I had a great chief engineer—Emil Praeger—and he was there and I said to him, 'Suppose we left out one of our archways [arches], strengthened up the other two of them and made the bridge only four lanes wide—how much could we possibly reduce the cost?' So the office worked all day Saturday and all day Sunday, and all night, too, see, and by Monday noon we knew that everything was working for us. There was rock on both sides of the river, see, so you could put the weight we had been going to put three arches on on two and the rock would hold it. And we knew that we could build what you know as the lower deck of the Henry Hudson Bridge for $3,-100,000, and we were able to show that if the traffic was to be up to our estimates, and we needed more lanes, we would be able to strengthen up the steel on the archways and build a second deck on top of the lower deck at a future date when more money was available.