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

by Caro, Robert A

  ment leaders owned some of that re;: .. and they saw Isaacs" prophecy

  almost immediately when a corporation broke off negotiations for a entire floor at 2: Wesl S ben it suddenly realized that the

  from the windows would no longer be of the harbor but of the underside

  But even private considerations had public implications. Lower Manhattan real estate, quite possibly the most valuable in the world, was valuable not ori; owners, but to the c:: According to some estimates, the

  portion of the dry's total real estate tax paid bj Lower Manhattan was as high as 10 percent: large office builc :ributed hundreds of thousands

  of dollars annually to the city in real estate taxes. Reduce their light and air and they would be entided to a substantial reduction in taxes And Moses' bridge would reduce die for dozens of such buildings. Computing

  he depreciation in real estate values conserve S njsstad found that,

  luring the next twenty years alone, building the Battery Crossing as a bridge nstead of as a tunnel would cost the city more than $29,000,000 in real estate taxes.

  And many of the reasons behind the objections were not selfish at all. To these men who loved New York, the locale in which Robert Moses was planning to build his bridge—New York Harbor and Battery Park—contained many of the reasons they loved it.

  From the sea New York Harbor was a sight to make authors strain for adjectives. Writers had described the colossal staired and serried mass of towering skyscrapers, which seemed to be rising out of the water, as a giant ship (Melville had been reminded that the very name "skyscraper" had once been used by sailors to describe a sailing ship's topmost canvas); as a "structure of tiered decks," pointing at the watcher and "growing taller and taller" like the prow of a furiously onrushing vessel; as a medieval fortress, whose towers, rising out of swirling tides, at night were "blocked by darkness into a sentinelled medieval keep of enormous height and unscalable defense" that might have been inhabited more fittingly by dead kings than recent bankers; as a mesa, a petrified forest, a "giant's cromlech." And the very number of the metaphors proved the power of the scene to excite the imagination, proved, in fact, the truth of the one image used most frequently to describe it: that the view of New York from its harbor was one of the wonders of the world.

  The unique importance of Battery Park to New York City was obvious not from the sea but from the air—from a plane or from the observation platform of the Empire State Building a thousand feet in the sky over Manhattan Island. To the observer looking out over what has been called "the most significant panorama that modern civilization offers," the buildings in which 12,000,000 persons lived and worked in 1939 seemed to stretch out endlessly to the horizon. But from such vantage points it could be seen that they were not only stretching out but closing in, building up, pressing inward, crowding closer and closer together, until, as if the concentrating inward surge of humanity constituted a geologic force, in the epicenter of that surge the buildings of Manhattan were thrust upward and toward the sky. And it was near the island's southern tip, the tip jutting into the harbor, that the colossal upthrust had been greatest. In the upper part of Manhattan the masses of concrete were mostly sixty feet high, or seventy; in the center of the island, they were a hundred and fifty or two hundred. But as the island narrowed toward its southern tip, they were four hundred feet high, five hundred, cramming closer and closer together, bulking up higher and higher as they loomed southward pressing inexorably toward the island's tip—until at the very tip, at the very end of the most crowded island in the world, at the very spot in the entire world in which buildings should have been crowded most closely together, there were suddenly, with the exception of a tiny old fort converted into an aquarium, no buildings at all. At a point at which a single square foot of land was worth thousands of dollars, at which the value of an acre was computed not in the millions of dollars but in the

  tens of millions, there sat 967,032 square feet of land—22.2 acres—vacant except for grass and trees, pathways between them, benches, and a broad, breezy waterfront promenade.

  And it wasn't from either sea or air that the value of park and harbor was most apparent. It was from the ground, from the nearby streets of the city, from the bleak narrow concrete canyons of Lower Manhattan from which towering masses of concrete and steel had crushed sunlight and sky and green grass and trees and, by hemming between them the swirling concentration of humanity (half a million human beings worked in Manhattan's single southernmost mile), peace. If there was ever a place in which a man occasionally needed to be alone for a while, to sit in the open, in the sun, among grass and trees, for a minute or two, to escape from crowds and noise, that place was Lower Manhattan. And in all the streets of Lower Manhattan, there was no place to do so.

  There should, moreover, have been a sense of the sea in Lower Manhattan, which was, after all, the tip, the seamost tip, of the island that was the world's largest seaport. But there was no sense of the sea in Lower Manhattan; skyscraper walls blocked that out, too.

  There was no sense of history, either.

  Of all the qualities that the skyscrapers had crushed out of Lower Manhattan's streets, it was perhaps history whose disappearance was most poignant to New York's reformer-aristocrats. For, familiar as they were with the city's early history, and with the early history of the fledgling nation of which the city had been a part—especially familiar because many of them were direct descendants of the men who had made it—they were well aware how much of it had been made in those streets when those streets were the city. It was, for example, in Fort James at the foot of the island that Jacob Leisler in 1689 persuaded his fellow militia captains to sign, on the head of a drum, a document ousting the latest Royal Governor, thereby giving New York two years of self-government, and it was in that fort, with drums rattling, that, two years later, a new Governor hanged Leisler from a gallows. It was in a courthouse in Lower Manhattan that, in 1735, in a case from which the best New York defense attorneys had been barred, the famous lawyer Andrew Hamilton, smuggled in from Philadelphia, rose to startle the court by announcing that he would represent a printer charged with libel, told the jury that their verdict would determine whether men had the right to oppose tyrants by writing the truth, and persuaded them to acquit John Peter Zenger. Those streets echoed to the shouts of throngs led by the Sons of Liberty carrying the "liberty poles" that were erected on the Commons (later City Hall Park) as fast as British soldiers could cut them down; to the tramp of marching men—five dust-stained regiments George Washington had led south from Boston; and to the first public reading—on the Commons, to troops formed into a great hollow square around their general—of the Declaration of Independence.

  Those streets had seen despair. One morning the harbor that had been empty the night before was a forest of masts: the British fleet had arrived —130 ships bearing 31,000 redcoat and Hessian soldiers, veterans of a

  hundred battles; soon the hills of Staten Island were white with their tents. After the raw and ragged Continentals had been routed at the Battle of Long Island, and driven off Manhattan Island (Washington, watching from across the river, wept as the Hessians bayoneted the wounded at the last outpost at Fort Washington), the only troops that walked those streets until the end of the war seven years later were troops wearing the red coats of the oppressor. But those streets had seen triumph, too. At the end of the war, Washington returned. "The troops just leaving us were equipped as if for show, and with their scarlet uniforms and burnished arms, made a brilliant display," wrote one woman. "The troops that marched in, on the contrary, were ill-clad and weather-beaten, and made a forlorn appearance. But then they were our troops." It was in those streets—at Fraunces Tavern at Pearl and Broad—that their leader, having just refused a crown, took farewell of his weeping officers, weeping himself as he did so and then walking silently to the barge waiting at Whitehall Ferry. And it was to those streets that George Washington returned six years later—in a barge r
owed by thirteen ships' captains clad in white uniforms—to step ashore at Murray's Wharf at the foot of Wall Street as women threw flowers at him (he "read his history in a nation's eyes," wrote one) and be sworn in on the balcony of Federal Hall at the corner of Wall and Broad. And it was through those streets—the streets of the first capital of the new Republic —that there walked the three men—Hamilton, Jay and Madison—who together were "Publius," author of the eighty-five great essays urging ratification of the controversial new Constitution.

  To many of the reformer-aristocrats, the history of those streets was family history. The rolls of Citizens Union and City Club—and of groups such as the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society—were filled with names like Morris and Bayard and de Peyster and Van Rensselaer and Gerry and Hamilton. But as the Age of Skyscrapers had made land so valuable that history could no longer find a place on it, they had had to watch as cobbled slips and lanes had been paved over with asphalt, and as row after row of beautiful, sober, red-faced Federal residences, of buildings that housed sailmakers' shops and ship's chandleries behind Greek lintels and steeply pitched dormers redolent of the harbor's historic sailing age, had crumbled beneath the wreckers' iron balls. Before their eyes, the elegant townhouses that had stood on State Street in a neat, graceful row had been torn down one by one—even No. 9, where Lafayette had lived —until only one remained, the delicate ironwork of its balconies and the slimness of its tall white columns an ironic grace note in a cityscape without grace. By 1939 Fraunces Tavern was the only structure left associated with the hundred moments of triumphs and glory Washington had played out in those streets. In an area dedicated to commerce, in which men spoke in what Henry James called "the vocabulary of thrift," there was no interest in a more epic vocabulary. Once Lower Manhattan had been steeped in history. Now that sense of history was gone, vanished, crushed out of those streets as completely as the sense of the sea.

  But turn a corner and there was history and sunlight and sky and, stretching before you, the sea. For turn a corner—the corner at the bottom

  of Pearl or Front Street, for example, or the bend at the foot of Broadway —and there was Battery Park.

  Step into Battery Park and suddenly—remarkably suddenly—the city was all behind you. Walk down one of its winding paths (for its paths were winding then; under the leaves of the big old trees that lined them ffor they were lined with big old trees then) and the clamor of the traffic-jammed streets of Lower Manhattan faded away so quickly that within a hundred paces only an occasional particularly strident car horn remained as a reminder of what you had just escaped.

  Sit down on one of the benches under the trees and what you heard first was mostly quiet, as if your ears had become so attuned to the din you had left that for a minute or two they couldn't register more subtle sounds. But then you began to hear the sparrows and the orioles, and the harsh faraway scream of some sea bird. You began to notice the flutter of a waxwing from tree to tree, the soft swoop of gulls across the high sky.

  If, sitting there, you looked back at the tall buildings behind you, you saw them through leaves, and they didn't look so tall. They seemed, in fact, rather far away. Only a few steps out of the sunless streets, you had found sunlight. Only a few steps out of their colorless walls, you had found green lawns. Only a few steps out of their tumult, you had found peace.

  And if you got up and walked a little deeper into the park, suddenly, before you, there through the trees was the heavy blue-green swell of the sea, and that rhythmic, restless sound, at once peaceful and intense, was the lapping of waves against the shore, and all at once, only steps from the dead gray walls of Lower Manhattan, you were standing at the edge of a broad and busy harbor: crisscrossing the waves were stubby tugboats, freighters with derricks and masts a tall forest on their decks, speedy motor-boats skimming from crest to crest, gaily painted ferries, private steam yachts, white-painted and glistening, giant gleaming ocean liners, so big that their sides were moving cliffs. Everywhere there were bright flags—the pennons and burgees of the yachts, the tricolor of the Normandie and the Union Jack of the Queens, the colors of a dozen other foreign nations—and all fluttering against the blue of the sky. It was a panorama of vastness and beauty in the sun, of drama in storms, when the tossing whitecaps that stretched to the horizon, the howling of the wind that filled your ears and the smash of the waves against the piers at your feet made you remember with a start that Manhattan was only an island and that you were standing at its very tip. And at night, with the towering statue of Liberty Enlightening the World floodlit from pedestal to torch, and the rows of lamps on the ferryboats gliding across the dark waters, the view from the Battery was, as one of the reformers put it, "a thing of beauty never to be forgotten."

  Sunlight, serenity, a sense of the sea—and something more. For walk into Battery Park at its Broadway entrance and staring at you, at the end of a long, broad grande allee, was an odd-looking building.

  If you knew the history of New York City, you could read it in

  layers on that building. Architects remodeling it to make its appearance harmonize with its present purpose—for the last half century it had been the city Aquarium—had given it a three-story-high fagade that made it look like a toy fort, with rounded turrets at each end, a cornice crenelated to resemble battlements and flags along the top, and a white stucco finish that, shining in the sun, would have made it a perfect target. In that gay facade, the massive bolt-studded and iron-reinforced doors, set in an immense stone portal twenty feet high, loomed with an inappropriate grimness. But if you knew the history of New York, you knew why those doors were there—and you knew that if you stripped that layer of stucco away from the lower story, you would find behind it huge, rugged walls of weather-beaten sandstone, walls twenty feet high and eight feet thick, walls thick enough to withstand the bombardment of a fleet, walls through whose barred embrasures had glinted black thirty-two-pounders capable of sweeping the harbor from shore to shore. You knew that if the top two stories of that odd building were a fake fort, the bottom story, behind the facade, was a real fort—Fort Clinton, constructed during the War of 1812 to repel an expected British invasion.

  Fort Clinton, named after Erie Canal builder De Witt—the fort that in 1939 stood in Battery Park under a coat of white stucco and two stories of fish tanks—had never fired a shot in anger. The expected British invasion never came (probably, historians believed, because the British were deterred by the presence of Fort Clinton and its sister fort on Governor's Island, Castle William), and no enemy fleet was ever again to threaten New York. The only ships ever sunk by its twenty-eight thirty-two-pounders were hulks sunk for target practice. But the broad circle—a full two hundred feet in diameter—of its massive walls was an evocation in weathered red sandstone of the nearly two centuries when men ran for forts at the news of Indians or the French. Walk down beside it, stand beside one of its embrasures and see where its cannon bore, then look out across the harbor and see, across a mile of water, the massive hulk—un-stuccoed, grim, cannon still mounted, so that through its embrasures the sun still glinted off black metal—of its sister fort, and you were back in another, more heroic age. Walk down beside it, and that city behind you, that city without history, had a history again.

  And in that building there was the history of still another era to read. For behind that stucco facade was also a domed roof that, built in 1824, transformed Fort Clinton, its guns still in place, into "Castle Clinton," or "Castle Garden," circular auditorium and theater.

  If Fort Clinton was heroism, Castle Garden was the glory heroism earned.

  It was at Castle Garden on August 16, 1824, that, in the words of one historian, "it was proved that republics are not always ungrateful," for it was at Castle Garden on that date that Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, who as a rich young nobleman had defied his King and fought for America, returned to it, sixty-seven years old and penniless.

  "Many of the spectators doubt
less had in mind a gallant, boyish figure

  in the buff and blue of the American Revolution, with powdered hair tied in a queue," the historian wrote. "What they saw was an old civilian, in a short-haired brown wig." But when the old civilian stepped onto the Castle Garden landing stage—after a trip up the harbor on which his ship was escorted by a huge flotilla—to begin a visit on which he was to receive from the government and citizens of the United States gifts of bonds and land worth almost half a million dollars, the Castle's cannon roared out a hundred times. When the old man walked slowly into Battery Park, "to the incessant huzzas of the multitude that packed the waterfront," he walked between the weeping ranks of the Lafayette Guards. When he rode up Broadway, men and women on rooftops threw flowers in his path. A month later, a tall spar was raised in the center of the fort, a vast awning of sailcloth was spread across its entire ceiling, "the white banner of France was entwined with the Stars and Stripes, trophies of arms glittered from the walls"—and when Lafayette appeared at the ball, "the gay sets dissolved" and the dancers formed a long lane, and as the old man walked along it, he saw that each man and woman was wearing a medallion bearing his likeness, the women's entwined with roses.

  And it was at Castle Clinton that, ten years later, the handful of Lafayette Guards still alive drew up in a hollow square, in the center of which was a riderless black horse—spurred boots, reversed, slung across its empty saddle—to hear the funeral oration for their dead hero.

  Lafayette was only one of a hundred heroes for whom the old fort and Battery Park were the setting for the spectacles honoring them in triumph or in death. Troops were drawn up in the park by the thousands to greet Dewey after he defeated the Spaniards at Manila (the astrakhan busbies of cavalry hussars shook in the sea breeze), Pershing after he defeated the Germans in France, and TR after he returned from safari (conspicuous among the regiments out in full dress to greet the ex-President were a handful of men in khaki and campaign hats: the Rough Riders). Most of New York's great triumphal processions began there; it was at the Battery that Wiley Post came ashore, and Admiral Byrd, and Gertrude Ederle, and Amelia Earhart, and Coste and Bellonte—and, of course, Lindbergh, slim, bareheaded Lindbergh—to be greeted by Grover Whalen and to ride in an open car between mounted policemen "the short, glorious mile" up a Broadway whose canyons were swirling with confetti. The fort's cannon boomed at solemn one-minute intervals as the body of young Captain James Lawrence, who had earned immortality by crying "Don't give up the ship!" as he lay dying on the deck of the Chesapeake, was carried ashore and as Washington's riderless horse—and Hamilton's and those of a score of other heroes of the Revolution—were led out from it up Broadway. In New York in which the old was ruthlessly demolished to make way for the new, the fort was pricelessly rich in ghosts of the city's great past.