The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York
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THE BROOKLYN-BATTERY BRIDGE: A Difference in Perspectives. Moses attempted to persuade the public that the impact of his bridge on Lower Manhattan would be minimal, and had his artists draw the top rendering; others saw the bridge as a "Chinese Wall" that would block the view and blight the area (center); Ole Sings tad dramatized these effects in the bottom rendering.
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THE BROOKLYN-BATTERY BRIDGE: A Difference in Perspectives. Moses attempted to persuade the public that the impact of his bridge on Lower Manhattan would be minimal, and had his artists draw the top rendering; others saw the bridge as a "Chinese Wall" that would block the view and blight the area (center); Ole Singstad dramatized these effects in the bottom rendering.
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77/E BROOKLYN-BATTERY BRIDGE: A Difference in Perspectives. Moses attempted to persuade the public that the impact of his bridge on Lower Manhattan would be minimal, and had his artists draw the top rendering; others saw the bridge as a "Chinese Wall" that would block the view and blight the area (center); Ole Singstad dramatized these effects in the bottom rendering.
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T/f/?£E MOSES BEACHES: Orchard Beach (top left), Jacob Riis Park (bottom left), Jones Beach (above).
Stone carvings (the State Seal on the Water Tower), ships' funnels to conceal garbage cans, directional signs complete with wrought-iron figures, and the architectural elegance of the East (below) and West (right) bathhouses and of the famous Water Tower show the effect of Moses' imagination at Jones Beach.
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Robert Mcses Power Dam at Massena
Robert Moses Power Dam at Niagara
Part of the St. Lawrence Power Project: in the foreground, Robert Moses State Park; in the rear, the Moses-built Long Sault Control Dam.
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THE WEST SIDE IMPROVEMENT—AND AN ALTERNA TIVE. Below: The Henry Hudson Parkway (left) and Seventy-ninth Street boat basin in Riverside Park (right). Above: The Henry Hudson Bridge and Parkway as Moses built them through Inwood Hill Park and Spuyten Duyvil in Riverdale. The dotted line indicates the route that urban planners suggested to avoid harming the park and Riverdale: along the open corridor next to Inwood Hill, across the Harlem River on a less-expensive, low-level span, through Marble Hill Valley (uninhabited at the time except for a shantytown) to Van Cortlandt Park, where it could also have run along the edge. (The Harlem River now follows an essentially straight path to the Hudson because Moses in effect moved the light-colored land jutting into the river to the left, joining it to Inwood Hill Park.)
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LANDSCAPES BY MOSES:
Above: Moses' 1964-65 World's Fair and the Grand Central Parkway, Van Wyck, Whitestone and Long Island expressways. Below: Moses' housing projects in Harlem, East River Drive Extension, Manhattan arm of the Triborough Bridge, Ward's Island Pedestrian Bridge, Downing Stadium, Bruckner Expressway.
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United Nations Headquarters
New York Coliseum
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Shea Stadium
TTze Grand Central Parkway and the four-level bridge interchange with the Clearview Expressway.
77*e Cross-Bronx Expressway guts a neighborhood.
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J^O THAT NEVER HAPPENED:
One highway Moses did not get to build was his proposed Mid-Manhattan Expressway along Thirtieth Street; Moses, who never learned to drive and who never paid tolls, poses for a photographer.
opposite, or eastern, side of the Henry Hudson Parkway, and the only way across the parkway in the vicinity was the Kappock Street underpass, which was also set with steps. Unless she walked on the narrow pavement of the underpass roadway, in danger from every car that suddenly swung around its corner, "there is," as Bob Weinberg put it, "no way . . . whereby a mother with a baby carriage or go-cart can use this underpass" —or the park. Residents of the area noted that the park had been used by more mothers with small children before Moses had built the facilities for them than after. And, despite pleas by the Riverdale community for elimination of the steps to Henry Hudson Memorial Park, it would be twenty years before they were removed.
"Motorists launching gaily into the lovely new parkway have
been appalled to find that not all traffic problems have been solved," The New York Times said. "Because everyone wants to see it, on certain days and at certain hours there [is] a long procession of these eager citizens, enjoying the scenery but not getting anywhere."
"But," the Times added, "the public should be of good cheer. . . . When Mr. Moses has got his parkway hooked up firmly to the remainder of the parkway and has double-decked his Spuyten Duyvil Bridge, we may look to see the arterial tension in our traffic arteries diminishing considerably."
By July 1938, the parkway was all hooked up and the double-decking of the bridge was completed. But the hardening of the arteries continued. Traffic on the bridge had been 10,300,000 cars in 1937. By 1939, it rose to 12,700,000; by 1941, 14,300,000; it would finally top out at 26,-000,000. In the face of such increases, double-decking a bridge hardly seemed to make any difference at all. Motorists pulling up to pay their tolls found themselves at the end of lines that seemed little, if any, shorter than the lines had been at the old Broadway bridge, whose congestion New York had considered intolerable. And there was another puzzling fact. Although the new bridge had been built to relieve the congestion on the old bridge, congestion on the old bridge had not been noticeably relieved. The lines of cars waiting to cross it were, in fact, almost as long as ever.
And traffic jams were not restricted to the bridge toll booths—or to certain days and certain hours. They extended the length of the West Side Improvement that led to and from the bridge, so that sometimes the three lanes of the Henry Hudson Parkway and West Side Elevated Highway that carried traffic in the direction of the rush—the southbound lanes into the city in the morning, the northbound lanes out of the city in the evening—were three lanes of bumper-to-bumper cars all the way from Canal Street to the city line. The rush-hour jams were just as bad as the rush-hour jams had been on Riverside Drive before the West Side Improvement was built; reporters escorted over the West Side Improvement before it opened had found it reduced the time required for the nine-mile trip from sixty-eight minutes to twenty-six; now one of those reporters made the trip over the
West Side Improvement at two rush hours—admittedly very bad ones—and found that on one trip it took fifty-eight minutes, on the other seventy-three. And looking at the situation that way. the total effect on traffic con-ion of the West Side Improvement had been to move the congestion one block west—and yet there was still congestion on Riverside Drive, congestion that had been eased only slightly by the construction of a parallel route. The Improvement had simply provided New York with two coned thoroughfares where only one had existed before—and, of course, had given the motorists using the new congested thoroughfare a nicer view. J, in fact, the drivers on the new thoroughfare were hardly in a position to enjov the view. Following another car bumper-to-bumper required the focusing of a driver's eyes not on "the Hudson waterfront celebrated bv Masefield and O'Neill" or "the matchless, unspoiled Palisades." bur on a bumper.
How about drivers using the Henry Hudson Parkway during off hours? Year by year—the situation would not change until 1956, when the opening of the parallel Major Deegan Expressway and the southward extension of parallel Bronx River Parkway cut traffic on the Henry Hudson Parkway in half—the number of "off hours" on the Henry Hudson Parkway smaller and smaller. During daylight, in fact, there was hardly an hour in which traffic on that parkway was not generallv heavy. Passengers could enjoy the view, of course. But Saturday and Sunday traffic was heaviest of all. And there must be some doubt whether many passengers were prepared to enjoy the view for as long as it took, stopping and starting, braking and accelerating, sweating under their car's hot tin roof, to negotiate the parkway on those da vs.
The West Side Improvement had had two purposes: to reclaim nhattan's waterfront for its people, and to alleviate Manhattan's traffic congestion. It was to achieve these purposes that Robert Moses spent an incredibly large sum of monev.
But despite that expenditure—all but inconceivable in terms of urban spending of that era—the first of the two purposes was achieved onlv in part. The West Side Improvement did create a park, but while it was a great park, it was not nearly as great as it could have been: instead of reclaiming the waterfront for Manhattan's people, the West Side Improvement deprived D of it.
And the second of the two purposes was not achieved at all.
The effect of the West Side Improvement on New York Citv was not limited to its effect on traffic or on Riverside Park, of course. The Improvement extended through several areas north of Riverside Park.
North of Riverside Park was Inwood Hill Park. On the afternoon on which the opening ceremonies for the West Side Improvement were held, Bill Exton went back to Inwood Hill Park.
"Or what was left of Inwood Hill Park." the young reformer was to recall. -Even before I got up to the top. it was al'l changed. There were
concrete staircases where there used to be dirt paths, and drinking fountains and a whole drainage system—cutting down the trees on top had destroyed the natural drainage, you see, so now they were laying a new one."
At the top, there had once been the wonderful view of the river and the Palisades, and there had been peace in which to enjoy it. "Now," he was to recall, and his voice would turn bitter, "there was a view all right, a view of the road, a great roaring concrete gut through the forest. They still called it Inwood Hill but it wasn't Inwood Hill any more."
Suddenly, Exton recalls, "I don't know, I just wanted to get out of there, I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could." Turning, he walked back down Inwood Hill—and he never went back again.
Years later Exton would recall that "I wished that day that there was a reporter up there with me, someone who would listen to me. I would have given him a little footnote about the great West Side Improvement."
But there were no reporters up on Inwood Hill that day. They were all down at the Seventy-ninth Street Grade-Elimination Structure, listening to the speeches.
As for Spuyten Duyvil and all Riverdale to the north of Inwood Hill, Weinberg had predicted that if the parkway were run through it without planning and zoning for community growth first, it would be turned from a peaceful, quiet place to live, one that could have absorbed a degree of apartment development while still remaining a quiet place to live, into a formless, shapeless mass of high-rise apartment houses with neither adequate nor convenient shopping, jobs or recreational facilities for its residents. World War II staved off this outcome for five years, but after the war, that is precisely what once-beautiful Riverdale became.
North of Spuyten Duyvil, at the north end of Riverdale, was Van Cortlandt Park, where once there had been the only fresh-water marsh left in New York City. When the Henry Hudson Parkway was finished, the marsh was, too. Once botany and biology students by the thousands had come every year to study salamanders and polliwogs and flowers and shrubs and insects— and a dozen species of birds who would nest only in a fresh-water marsh— in their natural habitat. Henceforth, as long as New York City might exist, its botany and biology students would be able to study them only by looking at their pictures in books.
Biology and botany teachers wrote letters-to-the-editor. A few were printed. Aside from them, no public notice was taken of the city's loss.
Robert Moses had spent $109,000,000 of the public's money on the West Side Improvement. Counting the money expended on his advice by other city agencies on the portion of the Improvement south of Seventy-second Street, the Improvement had cost the public more than $200,000,000.
But the total cost of the Improvement cannot be reckoned merely in dollars. The West Side Improvement also cost the people of New York City their most majestic waterfront, their most majestic forest, a unique residential community, and their last fresh-water marsh.
When the Improvement was finished, all these things were gone forever.
Adding them to the cost of the West Side Improvement, one might wonder if the Improvement had not cost New York City more than it was
worth. Adding them into the cost, one might wonder if the West Side Improvement was really, on its total balance sheet, an "improvement" at all. One might wonder if it was not, on balance, a tragic and irremediable loss.
But, with a few lonely and unheard exceptions, at the time the Improvement was built, no one was adding.
"Two, Four, Six, Eight—Who Do We Appreciate? Robert Moses! ROBERT MOSES!! ROBERT MOSES!!!"
Little children in New York City during the i93o's cheered the Park Commissioner that way—and by parading to 80 Centre Street to present him with tokens of their esteem, such as two scrapbooks containing the names of "thousands" of boys and girls from the summer day camps run in his parks by the WPA and the Board of Education. Older children, many of whose high-school civics and social studies classrooms were decorated with pictures of his bridges and parks distributed broadscale by the Park Department, cheered him at "special assemblies" at which he received their tributes; the president of the Richmond High School Arista, awarding "Commissioner Moses" the honor society's annual medal, called him "the ideal civic leader" because he possessed "the following qualities: Intelligence, efficiency, conviction, personality, culture, incorruptibility, sense of humor, perseverance, foresight, tolerance, knowledgeable unselfishness, idealism and modesty." Children off to college took their enthusiasm along. He was voted "America's most useful public servant" at Manhattan College, "the ideal public servant" at Fordham University.