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

by Caro, Robert A

  And the city's children weren't cheering any louder than its adults. Some neighborhoods may have gotten no playgrounds and others may not have liked the ones they did get, but many neighborhoods were thrilled with theirs—and grateful to the man responsible for their creation. The ceremonies opening Greenpoint's McCarren Park were preceded by a mammoth parade during which bluff old Pete McGuiness, a long-time Sheriff of Brooklyn and Boss of his beloved "Greenpernt," insisted that Moses, dressed in the white suit he invariably wore at daytime ceremonies, march at its head. And when, on the speakers' platform afterward, McGuiness pulled Moses out of his seat, raised both of his hands over his head like a boxer's second raising his hands in a victory gesture, and boomed, "Bob Moses— the Champeen Park Commissioner of the world," the crowd was so eager

  to touch the Commissioner that it surged forward against the park's brand-new wrought-iron fences and knocked them over.

  Some young reformers who had had the opportunity to observe Moses' work firsthand had become disturbed by both his policies and practices, but the city's most prestigious Good Government groups were still dominated by the old-line idealists like Richard S. Childs, George McAneny, William J. Schieffelin and Joseph M. Price, whose first impression of Moses had been of a young idealist and who felt, in Childs' words, that "basically he hadn't changed"; during the 1930's Moses received many tokens of their tribute—even the gold medal of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, whose leadership had passed out of the hands of the upstaters who had seen Moses trick them out of their control of their beloved state parks, force them to stop printing their annual report and try to strangle their secretary. So highly did the old-line reformers idolize Moses that they were willing to suffer snubs to be able to present him with an award in person: when he informed the Park Association that he was "too busy" to take time off for a luncheon at which Mrs. Sulzberger was supposed to present him with the association's Testimonial Award for "most outstanding service to parks," Mrs. Sulzberger and fifty other members of the association trooped off to his office with their illuminated scroll (to be rewarded with what one of the fifty recalls as "an attitude that I can only describe as utter contempt"). Joseph M. Price, who had fought so hard for Moses' mayoral candidacy, was reduced to coming to Moses' apartment one evening to present him with the City Club's annual award, a leather-bound hand-illuminated parchment stating that Moses' achievements "constitute the major contribution of our generation to the improvement of the conditions of life in our city." As for businessmen, their admiration for the man whose parkways had boosted real estate values and whose efficiency was giving New York big improvements at small cost, was cast in bronze and silver medallions from real estate organizations and Chambers of Commerce and from the One Hundred Year Association, a group of firms in business in the city that long. Three officers of the Irving Trust Company organized a Committee for Deserved Recognition whose "sole object is to name the West Side Highway the Robert Moses Highway"—an object that failed, as attempts to name Jones Beach after its creator had failed, because politicians were afraid that the public would shorten the name "Robert Moses Highway" to "Moses Highway" in usage and would thereby offend the sensibilities of the city's non-Jewish residents.

  If Moses' days were white-suit days, his evenings were black-tie. The city's hotels should have been grateful during those lean Depression years for his popularity; if it would have been difficult selling tickets for a block party honoring Robert Moses in Sunset Park or Harlem or Spuyten Duyvil, there was no difficulty in selling tickets to members of those organizations that honored their heroes in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria or the Baroque Suite at the Plaza; in fact, when the guest of honor at a formal dinner was the city's Park Commissioner, a full house could always be expected. (His biting "ad hominisms" were worth the price of

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  any ticket, even if they were delivered in a harsh, bored tone by a man who seldom bothered to glance up at his audience; at a dinner celebrating the opening of the $800,000 Hayden Planetarium, whose construction was financed by an RFC loan arranged by Moses with great difficulty and whose star-reproducing, dumbbell-shaped projector was purchased with a $160,000 gift from Charles Hayden, who made it, to Moses' scorn, only on condition that the entire building be named after him, the financier was preening himself on the dais when Moses, rising to speak, turned to him and said: "Charlie, never in the history of philanthropy has anyone earned immortality so cheaply.") On one evening, Moses, in black tie, might be at the Waldorf to be handed a gold medal from the Citizens Union; on another, at the Plaza in black tie to be handed a gold medal from the St. Nicholas Society; on still another, at the St. Regis to have a gold medallion—fourteen-carat, this time—hung around his neck on a blue-and-gold moire ribbon by the New York Rotary Club; then on to the Pennsylvania, where the plaque awaiting him was only bronze but inscribed with a description that Moses thought apt—"Dreamer-Planner-Doer"—and where the praise heaped on him in front of a thousand diners was so syrupy that Moses, rising to speak, said he was getting up to try and escape from a "Niagara of Molasses." He varied the bearnaise sauce circuit with trips to Carnegie Hall, also in black tie, to pick up medals, medallions, plaques and illuminated scrolls before audiences too large to be crammed into even Grand Ballrooms. So many organizations wanted to hold dinners in his honor that sixteen of them finally decided to combine. (The affair, held in the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center by the City Club, Park Association, Regional Plan Association, Architectural League of New York, Art Commission Associates, Central Park West and Columbus Avenue Association, Garden Club of America, Municipal Art Society, National Academy of Design, National Sculpture Society, New York chapters of the American Society of Architects and the American Society of Landscape Architects, New York Society of Architects, Outdoor Cleanliness Association of New York and the Fine Arts Federation of New York, was notable for the fact that the guest of honor did not show up; he was in the midst of a particularly heated battle with La Guardia at the time and when he learned that the Mayor had been invited to speak, refused to come; La Guardia did, and devoted his speech to reminding the audience that "the Park Department . . . could not have accomplished anything if it had not been for the sympathetic understanding and aid of the federal government; never in the history of the world did a Park Commissioner have the amount of funds that have been made available to Mr. Moses . . .") If, with his deceptions and innuendoes and breached promises, Robert Moses was seducing New York City into compliance with his desires, New York was loving every minute of the seduction—and begging for more.

  The media, whose amplification of his statements without analysis or correction played so vital a role in making the public susceptible to the blandishments of his policies, carried out the same effective if unintentional propaganda for his personality. Continually, in five- or six-part series or

  Sunday-supplement feature stories or long interviews, it said he was totally honest and incorruptible, tireless in working sixteen- and eighteen-hour days for the public, and it allowed him to repeat or repeated itself the myths with which he had surrounded himself—that he was absolutely free of personal ambition or any desire for money or power, that he was motivated solely by the desire to serve the public, that, despite unavoidable daily contact with politicians, he kept himself free from any contamination by the principles of politics. His flaws reporters and editorialists made into virtues: his vituperation and personal attacks on anyone who dared to oppose him were "outspokenness"; his refusal to obey the rules and regulations of the WPA or laws he had sworn to uphold was "independence" and a refusal to let the public interest be hampered by "red tape" and "bureaucrats"; his disregard of the rights of individuals or groups who stood in the way of completion of his projects was refusal to let anything stand in the way of accomplishment for the public interest. If he insisted that he knew best what that interest was, they assured the public that was indeed the case. If there were larger, disturbing implications i
n these flaws—they implied that he was above the law, that the end justifies the means, and that only he should determine the end—they ignored these implications or joked about them; columnist Westbrook Pegler dubbed Moses' technique of driving stakes without legal authorization and then defying anyone to do anything about them, the "Oops, Sorry" technique.

  By the end of the Thirties, praise of Moses was spreading across the country—fostered by the nationally circulated magazines published in New York. If it was possible to be more one-sidedly favorable to the Park Commissioner than the New York newspapers had been, the national magazines, whose readers were not interested in the details of local issues and who therefore provided those readers with only a broad outline of his career, without any close examination of his methods, accomplished the trick. An article in Harper's began: "This is the story of . . . the pride of a city in a man who brings beauty to a herded people," and ended: "New York presents an impressive exhibit of one citizen's building for the common good." In the fourteen intervening pages, the reader was assured that Moses was interested only in the people's welfare and that those who opposed him were "obstructionists" and "politicians" and that his temper should therefore be excused—"His rages are against those who would cheat the public interest" —and that he was so absolutely honest and incorruptible that the laws which governed other public officials should not be applied to him in any case:

  Moses knows his way through the mazes of the law. On Flushing Meadow he moved so swiftly that the 600-odd owners, the city, and the State never caught up with him. ... By May 15th [1936] Moses was in possession of the property, leaving it for the courts to decide later how much would be paid.

  . . . The city charter provides that contracts shall go to the lowest bidder . . . It takes a hardy commissioner in New York to reject the low bidder, a commis-

  the charge of graft would not stick... The Board of Estimate

  . of fi»«g and grading was begun on schedule—and finished on And at any hoar of the day or night Moses would appear to make _je was no dday. ffis only heartbreak was the fact that once t twentv-four hours the machinery was stopped twenty minutes for oiling. . . .

  Did Moses fed that accomplishment was all that mattered, that the end justified die means? Apparently Harper's agreed. 'Those familia New

  York's ways would have prophesied that these [600-odd condemnation] cases would keep die courts busy for years; but they would have reckoned without Moses," the article said. ^The docket was all cleared within ... six months.'' The article did not ask how the docket was cleared, or whether the rights of the 600-odd families being evicted from their homes were trampled

  There was an overblown, romanticized quality to Harper's recounting of the Commissioner's life story:

  At Yak they remember Robert Moses for his victory over Coach Walter Camp and the football enthusiasts who thought to monopolize the athletic money. . .

  Oxford they still speak of the avid vigor with which he studied the ways of government. . . . "Take a salary." said Smith No," Moses looked

  upon the grass, and it was moth-eaten. He brought fertilizer and the soured acres turned green. He turned to the trt :h his own hands multiplied seventy

  thousand times, he trimmed awav the dead branches, cut out the rotted sides, fed the abused roots, watered and tended . . . and brought shade to a dusty people. . . . He saw the streets filled with children, frantically seeking to make ballparks out of thoroughfares. We must bring the playground within reach of the baby-carriage pushers, said Moses. He searched the city for bits of land. ... It never occurs to him that he is noble. . . . What are the mainsprings of this man's single-minded-ness? Why does he drive himself, and others, in the public interest 1 Why does he forswear private gain for the public weal? ... Is it human sympathy which drives h a sense of the misery of the millions who breathe tenement

  house air? He knows that men must live and that their children should see the

  1 and sky. And he fights for the grass and skv with the devotion of an Amos.

  And there was an overblown, romanticized quality to the prose in which that life story, with its great battles—the Taylor Es:ate tight against the "selfish interests.'' the Triborough Bridge fight against the "politicians"'—was recounted in Time and The Saturday Evening Post and Current History ■'oses: Idealist in Action") as well as in the Architectural Forum, which, naming him its "Man of the Month." confessed that conferring another title on the man who "probably holds as many important jobs as anv other living American" was "preposterous" and that Us title was particularly inappropri-

  "What month? It is a lean thirty days on the Commissioner's calendar when he doesn't pop up with a new bridge or a flock of playgrounds or forty miles of parkways or a zoo or a proposed tunnel from New York to Brooklyn or a plan to reshape the Atlantic Ocean," and in Fortune, which said, tbcr men have built parks and roads and bridges in states and cities other than New York, and there were all of these things in New York before

  Robert Moses was born. But it is doubtful if any other man ever built so many of these things and on such a grand scale," and which added, after calculating that he had spent $552,000,000 in public funds, that his success in defeating opponents was due to "his scrupulous and unquestioned honesty" in money matters and "Thus, not only like a boy scout is Bob Moses always prepared; like Galahad, his strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure." It was in the national magazines that Robert Moses was first dubbed "the master builder" and "the master planner." If the city's press had made him a hero, the nation's magazines made him a folk hero, a figure larger than life, almost mythical, shrouded in the mist of his own legends, a Paul Bunyan of Public Works, a John Henry of Highways, the man who, in the phrase dreamed up during his gubernatorial campaign by some obscure GOP phrase maker and now spread, complete with capitalization, across the country, Gets Things Done.

  As the publicity spread beyond New York, so did the cheering. Life was not all white suits and black ties; it was also academic gowns and mortarboards; it was during the Thirties that Moses began to spend his Junes traveling to out-of-town colleges to receive honorary degrees; he would eventually be a Doctor of Laws eleven times over, a Doctor of Engineering six times over, a Doctor of Humane Letters twice ("I never wrote a humane letter in my life," he protested), as well as Bachelor and Master of Arts (twice each) and a Doctor of Fine Arts and of Public Administration as well as Philosophy. Park and horticultural associations all up and down the eastern seaboard began to give him awards; the Boston-based Trustees of Public Reservations, for example, commended him for "distinguished service in conservation." So fast did the awards flow in, in fact, that he found that if he traveled to each out-of-town event at which he was to receive one he would have little time for work; he therefore made a practice of not attending, and of reading his acceptance speech over the telephone on his desk, which was hooked up at the dais at the event to an amplifying device that enabled the audience to hear it. For a time his wife and secretaries mounted the medals, medallions, plaques and illuminated scrolls on the walls of his office—along with one memento that Moses insisted be placed in a prominent position, a memento that Fortune described as "a letter of restrained commendation" dated 1930 and signed Franklin D. Roosevelt. The office walls were soon filled, and Mary Moses covered a long wall in the living room of their apartment with them. But they continued to pour in so fast that his secretaries finally just began storing them in packing cases.

  Other cities began to send their planners and engineers to New York to see what all the fuss was about. Buses chartered by the park associations of Boston and Philadelphia brought matrons by the score to see the new playground design. And the response was invariably that of the hundred members of the American Shore and Beach Preservation Society whose reaction following a day-long tour of Moses' works was summed up by a Herald Tribune reporter as "amazed." Arriving back at City Hall after a

  similar tour, Mayor William B. Hartsfield of Atlanta asked a rep
orter, "Where does New York get all the millions to do this?"* Urban improvements on such a scale had never been seen—had, perhaps, never been dreamed of—in America before; there were, for example, more miles of divided through highways uninterrupted by intersections at grade in the New York metropolitan area in 1940 than in the next five largest cities in the United States—Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles and Cleveland— combined.

  The Architectural Forum advised America's urban planners: "If you are thinking of designing a system of parks (and parkways) for your own cities, you might well go to New York for a few pointers." And, the Forum concluded, "while you are in New York, for best results kidnap Robert Moses." A score of American cities tried to take the advice, at least on a part-time basis; week after week requests to lay out, as a highly paid consultant if he would not accept a full-time job, highway and park plans for cities large and small poured into 80 Centre Street. During the Thirties, he accepted one such commission, to review plans for arterial highways for the Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association. He dispatched a team of aides to spend two months in Pittsburgh, reviewed their findings himself, and on the basis of their reports, submitted a plan laying out a comprehensive arterial highway program for the city. He had to refuse the others, but his mark was left on them, too, for their engineers came to New York and spent weeks—in some cases, months—watching Moses' men in action and, when they returned to their own cities, applied the principles Moses had taught them in building their own parks and roads.

  Nor was the cheering limited to America. Teams of park experts came to New York from countries all over Europe, even from Scandinavia, traditional leader in park design, and went home vastly impressed. As for roads, a survey of public works in America made for the British government by a team of British urban planners said: