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

by Caro, Robert A

  But things had changed. There had been 125,101 motor vehicles in New York City in 1914; there were 804,620 in New York City in 1934—and additional hundreds of thousands in the Westchester and New Jersey suburbs that would also pour cars onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. Heavy traffic on Moses' Long Island parkways was already beginning to make driving on them less and less a source of pleasure and more and more a source of pain— or at least irritation; their value as a source of beauty and pleasure in themselves was already clearly diminishing.

  At the same time, moreover, the need for providing and preserving other values was becoming more important. Cities were growing. Their people were being cut off more and more from nature. They needed every chance they could be given to see it and feel it around them. "Recreation" had been the key word among park enthusiasts when Moses had started building parks; now, "conservation" was being heard more and more. In a New York in which concrete was devouring green grass and trees more hungrily every year, nothing was more necessary of conservation than the last piece of natural woodland on Manhattan, or a beautiful and unique swamp in Van Cortlandt Park—and its waterfront.

  Moreover, as Weinberg had pointed out, the highway was going to be, inevitably, a part of neighborhoods. The West Side Improvement could give adjoining neighborhoods a priceless bounty—a great waterfront on which they could, without expense or travel, "walk abroad and recreate" themselves and their families. And if the river were ever cleansed of pollution—and this possibility should be considered, no matter how remote, for a public improvement such as Moses was proposing might well last for centuries and anything

  could happen in centuries—they could swim in it, swim almost at their very doorstep. Build a highway along that waterfront, erect huge viaducts of steel and pavements of concrete at the water's edge, and that waterfront would be gone, possibly forever, lost to the hungry city until the end of time. Build the West Side Improvement to Robert Moses' specifications and the city would undoubtedly gain in many ways, but it would lose in many ways, too—and it would lose in ways that could never be remedied.

  Moses might have seen these truths if he had been willing to listen to those who saw them so clearly. But he refused to listen, granting Exton only one interview, the one in which "he was just sitting there laughing at you."

  Other city officials who listened to Exton and Weinberg didn't laugh. From the edge of the high bluff in Fort Tryon Park on the north side of the Cloisters, Comptroller McGoldrick could see Inwood Hill Park and the community of Spuyten Duyvil spread out below to the north as clearly as if they had been parts of a diorama. With his eyes following Exton's pointing finger, McGoldrick could see at a glance how much lay in the path of Moses' route—thickly forested slopes in the park, quiet residential streets in the community—and how little in the path of Exton's. He could see how little harm would be done to the park if a narrow band was sliced off its eastern edge for part of the right-of-way, and how the city street alongside the park would provide most of the rest. Across the river, beyond the northern terminus for the low-level bridge Exton wanted, below the built-up slopes of Spuyten Duyvil to the left, there stretched dramatically straight north a valley occupied only by flimsy tar-paper shacks, a valley which might have been placed there as an ideal parkway right-of-way. "Their route would have added maybe three-quarters of a mile," McGoldrick was to recall, "but what's three-quarters of a mile to a motorist? A flick of the eye, that's all. And it would have saved the park and Riverdale and Fieldston from having a trench run through it."

  Some officials found flaws in Moses' plan that Exton and Weinberg hadn't thought of. Moses' ingeniously restrictive laws and ingeniously low-clearance parkway bridges had insured that buses would never be able to ruin the beauty of his Long Island parkways or carry poor people along them to his state parks. The Board of Estimate's Chief Engineer, Philip P. Farley, noticed that Moses was planning to low-bridge the city, too; enough of his Henry Hudson Parkway bridges were going to have a maximum headroom of thirteen feet and a headroom at the curb of eleven feet so that usage of the parkway by buses—which were exactly thirteen feet high— would be impractical. "One-third of the families in the City have automobiles," Farley reported to the Board. "The other two-thirds depend on buses. If they are to get any benefit from this improvement, buses must use [it]." Moreover, while the principal function of Moses' Long Island parkways had been to enable drivers to reach state parks, the principal function of the Henry Hudson Parkway would be to enable drivers from the Bronx and Westchester to commute to their jobs in Manhattan; his earlier roads had been roads for pleasure, but this would be a road for business.

  Without buses, commuting on it could be only by car. This might well prove impractical; not only would the parkway increase the flow of cars into traffic-clogged Manhattan, but, with the inevitable increase in the population of Spuyten Duyvil, Riverdale and Westchester, car traffic might well overwhelm the parkway. In some future generation, opening it to buses each able to carry forty or more car drivers might well become imperative. But, as Farley said, "the normal life of the parkway bridges is estimated at ioo years." Rebuilding them after the parkway itself had been completed would be enormously expensive. One of the thirteen-foot bridges, the one at 239th Street, was, by design, the centerpiece of a large traffic interchange, all of which would have to be rebuilt—at a cost of millions of dollars. If Moses was allowed to build low bridges, even if the city might in some future generation want to allow buses on the Henry Hudson Parkway, it might simply be financially impractical to do so.

  But Moses wouldn't listen to the city's officials. When McGoldrick tried to talk to him about the alternate route, he cut the Comptroller short. "He would brook no change," McGoldrick recalls. "It had to be straight." When Farley recommended that the Board disapprove the bridge designs, Moses called the recommendation "absurd in the light of the law [the parkway law he had written, of course]" and told the Board flatly that if the bridges weren't built his way, they would not be built at all.

  The old reformers who headed the city's Good Government organizations were products of an earlier era—many of them, of the same era as Moses—but they were willing to listen to the two young reformers, and, listening, they were convinced. "Once the Board of the Municipal Art Society had a debate," Exton recalls. "It took a view that Moses was ruining Inwood Hill. Old Electus D. Litchfield, a great and good architect, said what a beautiful view there was from the road. I said that from the road there is a beautiful view, but to the road there is a lousy view. And I still remember some of the old-time architects and beaux arts boys who were on that board saying, 'Hear, hear!' " Soon the Citizens Union, the City Club and the Regional Plan Association were all asking for a detailed examination of Moses' proposal. Moses stopped laughing. He wrote a letter to the trustees of the City Club charging that the two men were pushing the alternate route because it would increase the value of Weinberg's Spuyten Duyvil real estate.

  "There was no truth in what he said, none at all," Exton recalls. "Bob did own some real estate in Spuyten Duyvil. But it was a small property he had inherited from his parents, really insignificant when compared to other property he had inherited—he was quite wealthy, you know. And the property was undeveloped and near the route Moses wanted. If the parkway was put along Moses' route, it [the property] would have become quite valuable. Our route would have left it just as it was. Its value would have been increased by Moses' route, not ours. And Moses must have known that the alternate route wouldn't have done what he was saying it would [increase the value of Weinberg's property]. It was obvious. But he said it anyway. His only reply to everything we had proposed was an ad hominem attack on us, and it was all a lie, a goddamned lie."

  City Club president Eustace Seligman called Exton in, questioned him about the charge and then told the trustees that he was completely satisfied as to the young men's integrity. The City Club's park committee thereupon accompanied Exton to the high bluff at the Cloisters, and saw, as McG
oldrick had seen, the advantages of the alternate route. And when Moses refused even to grant the committee an interview, it issued a report—notable in that it was the first formal censure of Moses by any of the Good Government organizations that had long supported him—that called his plan a "violation of the principles of good planning." "While we are for Mr. Moses as a man, having bent over backward in our efforts to get the order [Order Number 129] of Secretary Ickes rescinded, his treatment here is high-handed and not in the best interests of the public," the report said. Other Good Government groups that investigated the West Side Improvement also agreed with Exton and Weinberg; the RPA even commissioned engineers to map out the alternate route.

  But the reformers' front was far from solid. The logical group to lead a protest about park plans was the Park Association and the president of the Park Association was Mrs. Sulzberger, and Jack Madigan was telling Mrs. Sulzberger that Inwood Hill was used only for necking. And in the middle of the fight, Mrs. Sulzberger sent Moses a letter which while not specifically mentioning the West Side Improvement said that the association had reviewed "the many developments which are taking place in the parks under your energetic leadership" and "decided that we ought to express to you officially our approval and delight in what you are doing." Even the City Club's board of directors ended up disowning its park committee's report—despite a statement by Director Nathan Straus: noting that "every organization that has studied the project has agreed that the lower route is the only practical one," he accused Moses of treating city parks "as if they were his own private property."

  Those reformers who still objected found that the powers they had been so instrumental in persuading La Guardia and the Legislature to give Moses were now turned against them. They appealed to the Board of Estimate to stop the Park Commissioner from chopping down the trees in Inwood Hill Park, but then remembered with a shock that under the Park Department Consolidation Act which they had supported, in violation of their own stated principles, the Board had no authority over the details of work within parks. Since Moses was not using city money for the work, moreover, he did not need Board approval for any work in Inwood Hill.

  Then they demanded that Moses hold a public hearing on his plans, and threatened to file a taxpayers' suit to obtain an injunction if he did not agree to hold one. Moses agreed. He set a date two weeks away. And then, during those two weeks, he cut down hundreds of trees for the right-of-way. "He knew how to handle them," Madigan would laugh years later, recalling the reformers' shock when they realized that the park they had wanted so much to save had been ruined. Moses himself regarded his move as a masterstroke; he devoted space in his memoirs to relating how his men invented "a new

  ingenious tree-pulling device equipped with a sort of electric donkey engine" that cut down trees even faster than he had hoped.

  The Board of Estimate did have power over the Riverside Park section of the project—because, despite the federal and state contributions, the city would have to furnish much of the money itself. Borough President Samuel Levy of Manhattan proposed preserving the waterfront for pedestrians by building the Henry Hudson Parkway not along the water but over the New York Central tracks. Moses replied by driving stakes: starting work in Riverside Park on the recreational facilities the public wanted, he asked the Board if they wanted the work wasted. He whipsawed the Board: he announced publicly that his plans were not only ready but approved by the federal government, which was prepared to give the city millions of dollars for them; if the Board accepted Levy's proposal, he said, new plans would have to be drawn up—that would take months; then the plans might or might not gain federal approval; even if they did, federal money might no longer be available; the city should not risk losing the chance of a century to get the job done. He misinformed the Board: he told it at one point that Levy's plan would cost $34,000,000 while his would cost only $6,000,000 (it actually was to cost the city four times that amount). He deluged the Board with attractively printed brochures showing the beauty of his plan. He invoked experience and past successes: when Levy tried to argue for an impartial engineering survey of the two plans, Moses said, "The problem is primarily for park, parkway and landscape experts, and not one of simple engineering"—and he reminded the Board that his men were park, parkway and landscape experts who had built Jones Beach.

  Levy was certain that his plan would not cost $34,000,000. And he was certain that Moses' would cost far more than $6,000,000. But without enough technically proficient engineers to cost out Moses' plans, without press support (not only did the press accept Moses' figures as truth, it did not even discuss at length such issues as waterfront preservation), with La Guardia against him (because the Mayor wanted the West Side Improvement built before November 1937, when he would be running for re-election) and exerting pressure on the Board members, the borough president was helpless. Hardly had he completed an acerbic exchange with Moses (Moses: "Do you think you know more about building parkways than I do?" Levy: "I didn't say so." Moses: "Well, this is a parkway") when the Board approved Moses' plan.

  If there was any desire for second thoughts, there wasn't time for them. The very day after approval was given, huge pile drivers were hammering bulkheads into the Hudson River off the shore of Riverside Park. Within a week, convoys of dump trucks—five hundred a day—were rumbling over the dirt roads leading into the park. Six thousand WPA-paid laborers were shoveling into place the rock and earth the trucks were delivering, and pouring over them cement that would harden into a new shoreline for Manhattan Island. Progress on the Henry Hudson Bridge was just as rapid. By the time the Board got around to considering whether the Bronx route should go

  through Spuyten Duyvil (its approval was required for that because its money was required for the condemnation necessary there) the northern bridgeheads were fixed in place, in Spuyten-Duyvil. There was no choice but to approve the Spuyten Duyvil route. And Moses did not let the pace slacken; the speed with which the West Side Improvement was driven to completion was symbolized by the construction of the bridge that carried the Henry Hudson Parkway over Broadway at 253rd Street in Riverdale, a job that would normally have taken at least a year to complete. The legislation authorizing construction of the bridge (by the State Council of Parks) was signed at 1 p.m., May 1, 1935. At 5 p.m. that same day, Moses opened bids on the job and let the contract; at 7 a.m. the next morning, laborers were working on the site; one midnight a few weeks later, while most River-dalians were asleep, the six seven-foot-wide steel spans that would hold the roadbed of the bridge rumbled up Broadway on huge flat floats pulled by tractors and at 5:55 a.m. the last rivet securing them in place over Broadway was set; when Riverdalians went to work in the morning there before them was a bridge where none had existed the night before.

  Moses' reluctance to discuss his plans for the northern section of the West Side Improvement was understandable. He could not, after all, tell Exton and Weinberg the real reasons he wanted the approach to the Henry Hudson Bridge to be through Inwood Hill Park instead of along the street at its edge: if word ever leaked out that a six-lane highway was being classified as a "park access road," the CWA and WPA would have to reclassify the project. Moses could not explain to Exton and Weinberg that while it might be better to build the bridge on a lower level near the existing drawbridge and therefore avoid Inwood Hill Park and Spuyten Duyvil, his idea of the proper location didn't matter; only the bankers' ideas mattered because it was the bankers who had to put up the money for the bridge. Moses could not, in fact, allow any discussion of the bridge location at all, because discussion generates controversy, and controversy frightens away the timid, and no one is more timid than a banker where his money is concerned. "The market was so skittish that any little thing could have gotten them to back out," Jack Madigan recalls. "A lesser fellow wouldn't have understood the importance of killing off this agitation right at the start before it began raising up some publicity and getting people arguing," but Moses understood perfectly. The financin
g of the northern section of the West Side Improvement had been made possible only by remarkable ingenuity on Moses' part, an ingenuity that bent rules and regulations—twisted them, in fact, until they were all but unrecognizable—into a shape that permitted the participation in the financing of the project of bankers and twenty-two separate city, state and federal agencies. Exposure of that ingenuity to the public would tumble in an instant the house of cards he had so laboriously erected. He could not allow it.

  And what good would discussion do anyway? The city had been trying to build the West Side Improvement for decades—generations, in fact. It had never, even in the free-spending Walkerian era, been able to find the funds to do the job. It could only be done now because of the federal relief pro-

  gram—and that program might be curtailed at any time. If the job was ever to be done, it had to be done at once, without delay. Discussion meant delay, and therefore discussion could not be permitted. "There was no alternative, see—no alternative," Madigan says.

  Madigan's statement was not accurate. There was an alternative—it just was not an alternative that he, or Robert Moses, would even consider. There might be no alternative if the bridge had to be built immediately, but why did it have to be built immediately? If the bankers refused to finance its construction unless it was located on the escarpment, a location which required the destruction of Inwood Hill Park and Spuyten Duyvil, why was it necessary to accept their terms? The city could simply refuse them, and wait until it could build the bridge itself—in the place where it should be built.

  And it might not have too long to wait. The situation now was significantly different from the past. Construction of the approach roads was— thanks to Moses—well under way at last, to the south from the Battery to 193rd Street, just a mile from the Harlem River, to the north all the way down through Westchester and into the city down to 249th Street, a point only about a mile from the river. More than sixteen miles of the through route was under construction; only two miles, including the bridge, remained to be built. This was no longer a project not begun. It was a project largely completed. With La Guardia in City Hall, the city's government had the will to complete it. With more than 90 percent of the cost already paid, moreover, this was no longer a project whose cost was $109,000,000. It was a project whose cost—the cost of its uncompleted two miles including bridge—was less than $10,000,000. The city might not have $10,000,000 to spare at the moment, but it was not unrealistic to suspect that, with La Guardia running city finances with an iron hand, it might have it someday—someday soon (as, in fact, was going to be the case; by 1936 the city had sufficient leeway in its capital budget to build the bridge itself).