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

by Caro, Robert A

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  ---,-.- , ,-- ;. ■■ ~-• _ -.--.: :~^" ': --::~r: -~d ees were pi o po si ng lhat, after a four-year period in which he rom die $100,000 Ins mother had left him not one cent,

  1:5 d *aV<» no more. He could not contest the win—the provision l placed in it made it too risky for him to do that— but st what the trustees had done with the money left to him in it. rney, he asked the Surrogate's Court to order the trustees to housands of dollars of income from the trust that they had mid up the principal, t:

  d by pouring funds for repairs into the Bowery piope i ty whose riorating yearly, while at the same time insuring that be would

  -aul would tell the author: "I: was

  have been fair to me—a judge who had

  ally four-square with mine—to a judge my

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  ww that the case was originally scheduled to be heard

  ed in another case, similar :o Paul's, held the trusses sindling away of a fund's assets caused by a failure to :r.zizz : - - lento On Ju - Q41. however. Paul's otice stating, without explain ssues in this

  z re-:: refrre Hon Ja :- a Fc q " lames A Foley, 1 Surr::^ :t. was a kev Tammanv figure and one of sest friends. Whether the 2 matter of court

  ml was correct in seeing his brother's hand in it cannot hat is known happen. he hearing: while

  t several minor points, he ruled against him on the key rment of the us—and gave Paul a

  g. in words that caused the blood to rush to Paul's face ■ ~ ;-ea:s ia:e: "Y :he whir ; a w you

  *ow i did that : Paul would say.

  re in that? I don't know to this dav."^ To add a further

  im, Openhvm. a> .1 result of i had to do beca: g ncreased his fee

  :: Sr.ooo—and added on. to be ;:ed from the

  his cousin's tmr 17 in expend

  had been entrust -r with do ig ^ut a

  less brother He :00k pan of that pi:: v himself.

  He took away from a brother who was poor while he was well off, who was walking the streets with holes in his shoes and sleeping in a Salvation Army lodging house, who was almost literally starving for want of a few dollars, $750.90.

  Legally, he had a right to that commission. But the morality behind the request for it was the morality of Robert Moses.

  Foley's decision—all the circumstances surrounding the will—was unjust, Paul felt. Most of his mother's money had come to her from her mother, his grandmother, and her husband, his father. His grandmother and father would certainly have wanted him to have a fair share of their money: was it not unjust that he was not being allowed to have it? And why had she acted so unfairly? "I wasn't present, but I know Mr. Robert must have had something to do with that." Preying on him constantly, moreover, was the feeling that even if his brother had had nothing to do with his mother's injustice, he had compounded that injustice by his later actions. "What right have they to sit in moral judgment on me?" To refuse him even a photograph of his parents? Right or wrong, the feeling deepened into an obsession. Festering within him constantly now was the conviction that he had been the victim of a monstrous injustice—at the hands of his own brother. A single talk with his brother might have lanced that infection, but his brother would not grant him the favor of such a talk. The poison from the infection began to soak into his whole personality.

  He never spoke about the will to friends. He had too much of the need his brother had, to relate to others from a commanding position; he needed to pretend that he was set off from others by the fact that he still had money. Few of his friends and acquaintances knew his true circumstances. Windels and Kern and Lazarus would be shocked when they were told after his death of his poverty. "No, I'm sure you must be mistaken about that," says one acquaintance. "I remember quite clearly him telling me he had some sort of independent income, didn't have to work like the rest of us, you know. He said he had bonds, clipped coupons so he didn't have to pay taxes. And, oh yes, I recall quite clearly that he said he owned some real estate." But Paul talked incessantly about his brother: criticizing his policies and his treatment of the public. "Can't you see the settlement-house attitude in everything he does—this attitude of: 'You're my children and I know what's best for you'? " In hindsight, many of his criticisms would turn out to be perceptive ("You know who it was who first made me realize what this overde-pendence on highways was going to do to New York?" Lazarus asks. "Paul Moses, that's who") but he put forth the criticisms in a manner so harsh, became so enraged at disagreement, and, when the talk turned to his brother, acted so bitter as to seem almost irrational. (It is his way of talking about his brother that makes even more than the usual caution necessary in weighing his charges.) Acquaintances who saw him at wide intervals saw a man changing. Lazarus, who had once thought so highly of him, says: "He had a fixation. He hated Bob. Paul . . . was a good engineer, but to get him off balance all you had to do was mention Bob." As the symptoms of this fixation deepened, it was no longer necessary for someone to bring up Bob's

  name; Paul seemed to turn every conversation to his brother. Lazarus says Paul became "unstable"; Kern calls him "quite neurotic," capable of "violent hatred." Men sitting at a banquet at which his brother was speaking or being honored might notice him standing in the rear of the hall—he was standing in the rear, although they didn't know it, because he could not afford to buy a ticket for a seat—staring up at his brother on the dais with that look of contempt and hatred on his face, and they would nudge their friends and point out the lone, bitter figure standing back in the shadows. This too contributed to the impression of an unstable personality, and, ironically, made it easier for the crowd around City Hall to believe those rumors—the rumors whose source was never identified—that Robert Moses' brother was guilty of some heinous, if unspecified, crime.

  Fighting to hold on to the Llanerch Pool, needing every cent he could scrape up, Paul Moses was trying desperately to find a job now. But he couldn't. As, day after day, a man in his fifties, turning gray, he made the long, humiliating rounds of the job hunter, he found that although he had for years been a high-salaried, highly respected consulting engineer, now not one of the city's engineering consultant firms would offer him any job at all.

  Perhaps the explanation lay in his altered personality, or in the rumors that followed him. But there were those—engineers who had learned for themselves the hard lesson of what it meant to an engineer in New York to incur the displeasure of Robert Moses—who felt that that was not the real explanation. "You don't really think it was, do you?" asks Ole Singstad, a world-famous engineer who defied Robert Moses once and could not get another job in the city or state for thirty years.

  Paul did not ask his brother for a job. He would not. But, without his knowledge, friends tried to.

  They tried only once. Carl Proper knew Robert Moses well enough to get an interview without having to say in advance what he wanted to talk about. "Carl only went because it was so obvious that Paul wasn't getting enough to eat—we were worried about his health," Mrs. Proper says. But when Robert realized why Proper had come, Mrs. Proper says, "he was just fit to be tied. He was adamant and uninterested. It was a brush-off." And Paul not only was offered no job by his brother but did not find it any easier to find work for a private engineering firm, so many of which were supported by the contracts Robert Moses controlled. In 1942, unable to meet the real estate taxes, Paul lost the Llanerch Pool.

  During World War II, Paul obtained a wartime post as superintendent of construction at the U.S. Navy base in Bayonne, New Jersey, dedicated himself to the work so completely that for months he slept on a cot in his office— and became, to a large extent, his old competent, incisive self again.

  But when the war ended, so did the Bayonne job
—and Paul, upon his

  return to New York, couldn't find another one in even the most minor consulting or executive capacity in his field.*

  Paul's brother would, after the war, be placing with the private consulting engineering firms he controlled scores of engineers, often on the basis of personal or political considerations. His control of public engineering contracts was a byword in the profession. His brother was an engineer. But his brother could not find a job. "It was damned strange that a guy with his ability, a guy who had held really top jobs, couldn't find anything at all," says one engineer. In 1954, Robert Moses would become chairman of the State Power Authority, the body charged with creating hydroelectric power from the St. Lawrence River. This was the field of Paul's particular expertise; he had, in fact, spent months drawing up a St. Lawrence plan years before, as his brother was well aware—they had frequently discussed it at the time. Robert Moses would experience great difficulty finding engineers with expertise in the field, and he could hardly have approached the professional engineering societies involved without getting a recommendation for his brother. Paul Moses expected his brother to contact him about a job this time. But he heard not a word. And, year after year, for ten years, fifteen years, in a city in which his brother was handing out so many engineering jobs, Paul Moses couldn't get one.

  Paul Moses did not ask his brother for a job; Paul Moses could not d that. But he did want to ask him again to sell 168 The Bowery, a move th; Paul felt would give him more of an income from the trust fund than the $550 he was receiving. (His second wife was, as a result of their separation agreement, receiving the same amount.) But his brother's secretaries told him they had been instructed not to put him through. At one point, he tried for a year and a half without getting him to come to the phone even once. And when his brother finally did consent to talk to him, it was to curtly refuse even to consider Paul's ideas. Then he cut off communications again. In his seventies, Paul had to eke out a living as a salesman. Finally, this gay, gallant man whose natural habitat was the opera and Delmonico's went to ground in an $86.50-per-month "apartment" that was not an apartment at all but a single large room, converted from what had been a storage space, with an area in a corner of the room that served as a kitchen, on the top floor of a five-story walk-up loft building at 105 South Broad Street that could be reached only by climbing long, steep flights of stairs. And there, in the city in which his brother lived in luxury, Paul Moses lived out the last ten years of his life in a terrible poverty brightened only by the last of his women, a small, pleasant, gray-haired lady about his own age whose devotion to Paul impressed everyone who knew them. Paul's friends—she appears to have had none of her own—knew her only as "Millie." Not one person could be

  * Why Paul returned to New York, the city in which his brother was in power, instead of trying to make a new life somewhere else, may be explained in part by his age: in 1945, Paul was fifty-eight. There may have been another reason also. When the author asked him why, Paul replied: "What! Let him drive me away?"

  found in New York who knew her last name—she and Paul, although they lived together, could not, because of his wife's refusal to give him a divorce, ever get married. But there are indications that she may have been the same woman with whom, decades before, Princeton freshman Paul Moses, in defiance of his mother, had fallen in love during his glittering youth.

  The building in which Paul Moses lived out his life, located at the last stop on the subway, was almost at the very end of South Broad Street, almost the very end of Manhattan Island—as if he had almost, but not quite, been driven off it. In the evenings the area was all but deserted, the streets empty. Millie put curtains on the windows of the top-floor loft that was their home, and curtained off the little kitchen, but there wasn't much that could be done to make the big bare space pleasant—particularly without money. (Of all the things that were missing from it, Paul felt most the absence of books. "I had had all sorts of reference books," he told the author. "Now I have no books.") And it wasn't the bareness of the room that was the worst thing about it; it was its location at the top of those steep stairs. The few visitors he invited up there—"It was the kind of place you wouldn't want to invite a lot of company, I'll tell you that," one says—all remarked on those stairs; "it was technically only four flights but they were so long it was like seven or eight, and they were very steep, old wooden stairs," says a friend, Louis Schulman. And Paul Moses, while remarkably vigorous, had his seventieth birthday in 1957. Those stairs were very hard for Paul, particularly at the end of a long day trudging around Manhattan as a salesman. In his late seventies, he would be stricken by a serious illness. Thereafter climbing those stairs would be very hard indeed. Any apartment in an elevator building would have been a blessing to him. His brother was creating tens of thousands of such apartments: low-income, middle-income. He gave out such apartments as favors to innumerable persons. Any politician with a relative who wanted one had only to ask; Robert Moses would provide. But he wouldn't provide one for his own brother. Paul Moses was to struggle up those stairs until 1967, when, at the age of eighty, he died.

  Paul's room was within walking distance of City Hall and the Municipal Building, and he seemed irresistibly drawn to those buildings, perhaps because he was drawn to see in public the brother he could not see in private, perhaps because it was the only way he could obtain even an outsider's glimpse of the public life of which, with its concern for great problems, he had always wanted so much to be a part. He not only attended public hearings of the City Planning Commission, but was continually dropping in uninvited to the offices of its staff members, an elderly but erect man still with traces in his bearing of the old arrogance, still dressed, because he carefully preserved the couple of good suits he still possessed and saved them for such visits, with an elegance out of another age, still with a crisp, biting

  way of talking and an air of impatience when, as so often happened, a commission staffer turned out to know less about a problem under discussion than he did. It was quite obvious that he came because he wanted—needed desperately—to have someone to talk to about these problems that had fascinated him all his life.

  Staffers who took the trouble to be courteous to the elderly man found it well worth their while. Schulman, one of the most knowledgeable of all civil servants in the arcane mysteries of municipal finance—he was at the time director of the Planning Commission's Division of Capital Budget— and a kindly man as well, met Paul one evening at an engineering society meeting and realized immediately that he was in the presence of a remarkable intellect. "You don't often get an opportunity to talk to someone like that, so well-versed, so fluent," he says. Thereafter, when Paul dropped in to his office ("He was lonely, you see"), Schulman would find time to talk to him; at lunchtime, they would often walk together in City Hall Park. Schulman found Paul "off his rocker" whenever he talked about his brother. But about any other subject, Schulman found him "a wonderful conversationalist, very bright, brilliant, refreshing. My wife found him that way, too. My wife won't invite anyone to the house for dinner, but she insisted on inviting him. My wife was very fond of him." Another official who was always glad to see him was Charles Hand, the canny old New York World editor and later PR man for Jimmy Walker, who in the early 1950's was an adviser to young Robert Wagner, Jr., then Manhattan borough president. "Paul used to hang around City Hall in the corridors," Wagner recalls. "If Hand saw him, we'd say, 'Come along to lunch.' "

  But with every passing year, there were fewer men in City Hall who had known Paul when he had been regarded as a brilliant engineer. Busy young planners considered the old man just another one of the "nuts" who hung around the Hall, particularly if he began talking about his brother. "He'd go into other offices and start to yak away and talk and people wouldn't put up with it," Schulman says. "They would throw him out."

  Nonetheless, he continued to hang around. He became a familiar, funny, almost pathetic figure around City Hall, an elderly man with
an arrogant air and a sharp tongue, wandering the corridors, talking to strangers.

  Telling this story about his brother—the hero of New York, the public servant who didn't care about money—that no one believed.

  In 1962, Robert Moses got his brother, then seventy-five, a job.

  Climbing the stairs to his apartment one day, Paul collapsed. Taken to the Veterans Administration Hospital in the Bronx, he was believed dying, and in some way word was conveyed to his brother, who came to visit him. It was the first time Robert Moses had seen him in about twenty years. He brought Paul, who had been so anxious to work on the St. Lawrence Power Project but whom he had given no chance to do so, two gifts: a recording of the opening ceremonies of the Robert Moses Power Dam on the St. Lawrence and a copy of his memoirs.

  When he emerged from the hospital Paul had two hundred dollars in the world. He had thought he was dying, and he had become terribly frightened that Millie would be left not only alone but penniless. In the most gallant of all his gallant gestures, he did for her what he would never do for himself: he wrote a letter to his brother—who, once he knew Paul was recovering, would not favor him with his presence again—asking him for a job. His brother arranged with the engineering firm of Andrews & Clark to give him one—as little more than an errand boy, at $96.16 a week.

  Whether or not his brother had given Robert Moses cause to treat him the way he did no one will ever know for certain. But his sister certainly never gave him cause to treat her the way he did.

  The plain, quiet, serious, withdrawn girl grew into a plain, quiet, serious, withdrawn woman—utterly cowed by her mother, with whom she lived until, late in her thirties, she married the purser on a British ocean liner on which she was taking a cruise, and by the brother she idolized. According to the testimony of all who knew Edna Marion Moses, she would do whatever Robert Moses wanted.