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

by Caro, Robert A

  In 1855, Castle Clinton was transformed into the landing station for the flood tide of immigrants from Europe; for thirty-five years, it would be "the Nation's Gateway," the place at which almost eight million human

  beings, in flight from persecution or poverty or famine in the Old Country, came ashore in the Land of Opportunity.

  Most important, though the old fort was, in 1939, well into the second century of its existence, part of the city's past, it was also, as the Aquarium, part of the city's present, very much part. Its walls were filled with history, but they were also filled with life.

  Some idea of the popularity of the Aquarium may be gleaned from its average annual attendance: 2,500,000. It was by far the most heavily attended public institution in New York. It was free, easily accessible to all the city, and with its giant turtles, spear-shaped, hideously spotted morays, grotesque toadfish, mammoth groupers, rainbow-hued tropical fish and sleek, barking seals swimming in its gloomy depths, it had delighted generations of New York children.

  Sunshine, serenity, a sense of sea, a sense of history—build the bridge that Robert Moses wanted to build and they would be accessible to the streets of Lower Manhattan no longer. Build that bridge and the vista of New York Harbor would be destroyed, the majestic harbor sweep thrown into shadow, the sheer-rising skyscraper mass slashed in half and blocked, one of the wonders of the world turned into mere, rather unimportant backdrop for just another East River bridge not very different from the three others just behind it. And plunk down in Battery Park a half dozen or more solid masses of concrete each as big as an office building, and set on top of them, on top of the park, a roadbed eight lanes wide (two lanes wider than the bridge), and there wouldn't really be a park any more. What had been a place of sunlight and grass would become a place of concrete and steel and shadows. Instead of quiet there would be, directly overhead, the roar of traffic. Instead of vistas of water there would be only glimpses snatched between pillars. There wouldn't even be a sense of history. The old fort would be partially hidden by giant road piers—one would, under Moses' plan, be placed smack in front of it—and thoroughly dwarfed, no longer a monument bulking impressively at the end of a broad mall, filling the park with its presence, but a tiny ornament, cute but unimportant, cowering beside the immense pillar, lost in the shadow of the giant roadway above, its silence not majestic but meaningless among the noises of a new age thundering down from the big highway above.

  Build the bridge that Robert Moses wanted to build and "a prospect unexcelled by any city view in the world," would become little more than an extension of the mean streets of Lower Manhattan. The park had once been an escape from those streets—the only escape; now there would be no escape from them at all. Only someone thoroughly familiar with Lower Manhattan could appreciate fully what would be done to the area—and to the half million people who spent their days in it—by the bridge that Robert Moses wanted to build. But New York's reformer-aristocrats possessed that familiarity, and they determined to stop him from building it.

  Because they did, the fight over the Brooklyn-Battery Crossing marked

  the end of Moses 9 long alliance with New York s Good Government movefile reformers in whose ranks he had, as a young man, once

  The identity of the two men who led the opposition to the bridge spotlighted this aspect of the confrontation.

  George McAneny was one of the heroes of Moses' young manhood, die early crusader for civil service reform who in 1909 had risked his hard-won business success (not one of the wealthy reformers, he was a poor boy from Jersey City who had left school at the age of fifteen to become a reporter on the old World) to lend the weight of his reputation and that of the Gty Qub of which he was president to a Bureau of Municipal Research expose, and thus persuaded Governor Charles Evans Hughes to oast corrupt Tammany officials. Borough president himself thereafter, a peppery, tart public official, he, rather than John Purroy Mitchel, could

  had the Fusion mayoral nomination in 19 17, but declined it because felt Mitchel, as an incumbent, had a better chance of defeating Tarn-Lack of funds later forced him to retire from public office, but he retired from public service: an early believer in city planning, he the moving force behind the city's adoption of the first comprehensive ilan in the United States. Some indication of the respect in which he was held was his appointment in 1916 as "executive manager"' of T>e Ve>. York Times: the title was meaningless, and during the five years he held the job he never had a specific function; Times patriarch ki.z~ 3 Ochs hired him, Ocha I Id friends, I act as "a lort of moral background" for the paper. He aged fast physically—in his sixties, he was strikingly wrinkled and shrunken; he had to hobble on a cane when he came to meetings. But he came. It was he who. in 1935, decided the city should have a World's Fair, and it was he who told Moses the location should be Rushing Meadows Park. ("Bob Moses was very amicable in ~.'.'-'.z days I s^:d :; him, We have a great :ara and we want your

  help.' Then I told him what it was, and he thumped the desk, and said, 'By God that is a great idea!' "j And in 1939, at the age of seventy, McAneny was president of the Regional Plan Association and a key member of a dozen other organizations.

  mley Myer Isaacs, a contemporary of Robert Moses, was born of the same stock: wealthy, Jewish, and dedicated to public service—what Moses' part .- to Madison House, Isaacs' father, a pious Orthodox Jew, was

  to the Educational Alliance and the Citizens Union. Like Robert Moses, Isaacs was a hiker, a mountain climber and a brilliant student (top man in his class at Columbia). And, like Moses, he was a leader of men. "I can talk my head off to a roomful of people, and when Stanley walks in, they melt away from me and surround him," a cousin said.

  In his youth, moreover, Isaacs apprenticed himself to the same principles to which Moses had apprenticed himself in his youth. As a young real estate lawyer, he spent evenings and weekends working for reform, doing legwork not only for his local Republican organization—he was elected district leader at twenty-two—but for a succession of Fusion tickets,

  as Moses had, in 1921, served as secretary of a Fusion campaign committee. As Moses concentrated on a particular field—civil service—and made himself an expert in it, Isaacs concentrated in his youth on public housing, and made himself an expert in it. And as Moses spent four years of his youth trying to accomplish something significant in his field, only to suffer bitter disappointment, Isaacs spent four years of his youth trying to accomplish something significant in his field—with the same results. From 1925 to 1929, as chairman of the Housing Committee of the United Neighborhood Houses, he led the campaign for a law that would require slum landlords to provide their tenants with such amenities as windows and toilets. When, in 1929, his pleading finally embarrassed the Legislature into passing a new Multiple Dwelling Law, the statute was so watered down that it was virtually meaningless.

  But Stanley Isaacs remained true to his stock and his principles. His loyalty to friends and family was legendary; when his brother Julian was desperately ill with tuberculosis, Isaacs spent months in Saranac, cooking his meals and nursing him. Proud of being Jewish, he was active in Jewish philanthropies for forty years. What social worker Helen M. Harris called "his passion for social justice" never burned low; neither private nor political career ever prevented him from working for the causes of his youth; he served as president of United Neighborhood Houses for twenty-five years. By carrying a workload of Mosaic proportions ("He has daily habits that would assassinate another man," a profiler wrote), he was active most of his life in twenty-three separate Good Government or charitable organizations. And he didn't abandon his fight for his first cause as Moses had abandoned the fight for his; Stanley Isaacs would be a leader in the fight for better housing for more than thirty years after his 1929 defeat. And although the techniques of the reformer—free and open discussion, persuasion, education—had caused him only disappointment (and were, over and over, to cause him disappointment again), he never abandoned them for the techniqu
es of the politician. Robert Moses may no longer have believed that "the principle is the important thing," but Stanley Isaacs did.

  In 1937, after Isaacs had been working for the public for thirty years without ever holding public office, he was nominated—against his wishes —on the La Guardia ticket for Manhattan borough president, McAneny's old post. And when Isaacs was elected, by more than 40,000 votes (after one quietly spellbinding campaign speech, La Guardia, hugging him, exclaimed, "I don't know where you've been so long, Stanley!"), he demonstrated that neither position nor power would change his belief in what was important. He refused—to the point where his feelings became a family joke—to use his official limousine except on official business. He fired scores of political hacks and replaced them with a team of crack engineers. And he proved that there might occasionally be other ways of Getting Things Done than Moses': it was Borough President Isaacs who built—without antagonizing the neighborhood—the East River Drive. Refusing to use his office for patronage himself, he refused to let anyone else use it for patronage, either. He faithfully cleared his appointments with La Guardia—

  but rejected the Mayor's suggestions if they were based on political considerations. Declining to fill positions he did not consider necessary, he reduced the borough president's staff by ninety positions, and his budget by more than 25 percent. (To avoid embarrassing the other borough presidents, the Board of Estimate each year gave him more money than he asked for; at the end of each year, he returned the surplus.) George McAneny was a man whom Robert Moses had once admired; Stanley Isaacs was the man whom Robert Moses had once been.

  Throughout Moses' career, McAneny and Isaacs had supported him, as had most of the other leaders of New York's Good Government movement— in 1919, when he had needed their money and the prestige of their great names to accomplish his reorganization of the state government; in 1924, when they gave him statewide power by electing him chairman of the State Council of Parks; in 1933, when, after their attempt to make him mayor had failed, they had helped persuade the man who did become mayor to bring him to power in the city; in 1935, when they had supported him against the President. In every great crisis of Robert Moses' twenty-year-long public career, in the face of every threat to his plans or to his power, the reformers had given him their support. They had done so because they had believed that Moses, who had been one of them once, was one of them still, because they believed that his aims were still their aims, that the Things he wanted to Get Done were still the Things they wanted to Get Done. They thought of him, in fact, as their champion, as the young recruit who had risen from their ranks to become the one among them capable of leading to victory the causes for which they all marched. They had refused to listen to the handful among them who had tried to tell them what Moses was doing to the city. The American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society had, in fact, just awarded Moses its highest honor, the Society Gold Medal. But the Battle of the Battery Crossing, staged on terrain familiar—and dear—to them, was to give them a close look at Moses' values and thus to show them that those values were no longer their values, that they were, in fact, utterly incompatible with the values they knew must be preserved in the city they loved.

  The Battle of the Battery Crossing was, moreover, to show them that the means Robert Moses employed were as incompatible with their principles as his ends.

  New York's reformers had never gotten a firsthand look at his methods. Before 1934, he had operated only outside the city; in the five years he had been operating inside, his projects had never directly affected more than a few of them at a time. When those few had tried to tell the others about their experiences, they had not generally been believed. "Maybe," one of the reform leaders was to say, "idolizing him like we did, we didn't want to believe."

  But they were going to have to believe now. For now Moses' methods were going to be used against them.

  Throughout his career, Moses had charmed people he needed—and then, as soon as he didn't need them any longer, had turned on them.

  He had always needed the reformers because he had always relied on public support, and they were in many ways the key to that support. But now, thanks to his discovery of the possibilities of the public authority, he didn't need public support any longer, and therefore he didn't need them.

  And now, when they decided to fight his bridge proposal, he turned on them.

  At first, not yet realizing with what they were dealing, believing that Moses had made an incorrect decision but that he could be made to see that the decision was wrong and would therefore correct it—feeling, in other words, that he would be amenable to reason—they tried to reason with him, requesting meetings at which they could explain their objections.

  He did not even reply.

  The reformers were disturbed, but not yet worried. The government of their city was, after all, a government of laws, not of men, and there were ample laws to insure against the construction of a public work on the whim of any one man, even if that man was supported by the Mayor. There were laws—procedures and public bodies—established to insure that the will of the public would determine whether a public work was to be built and, if it was, what its design would be. The will of the public might not be heard if the public most directly concerned was some local housewives' group or chamber of commerce, they admitted, but, they believed, their will would always receive the fullest of hearings. They had at their command the technical expertise to examine Moses' proposal in detail and determine the facts for themselves, and they had influence enough to insure that these facts would be published.

  The facts certainly deserved publication. According to Moses' attractively printed brochure, the Brooklyn-Battery Crossing should be a bridge primarily because a bridge, "with all necessary approaches," would cost less than half as much as a tunnel—$41,200,000 compared to $84,000,000. Thus, the brochure stated, "the bridge with necessary approaches can be financed by the sale of bonds to the public without the contribution of a nickel of City or Federal money." And, according to the brochure, these figures were indisputable because the estimate for the bridge had been prepared by its designer, Othmar Ammann, the estimate for the tunnel by its designer, Ole Singstad.

  Singstad had found that last statement interesting. No estimate he had ever prepared showed the cost of the tunnel to be $84,000,000. His estimate —an estimate he had given to Moses when Moses asked for it—showed the cost to be $65,000,000.

  The reformers had found Moses' statement incredible. He said the bridge—including "all necessary approaches"—would cost $41,200,000. One approach alone, the Elevated Highway in Brooklyn, was, they knew, going to cost $12,000,000. Even without figuring in the cost of the Manhattan approaches, that left only $29,000,000 for construction of the bridge proper. That figure was ridiculous on its face: the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, half as long, and four lanes instead of six, had cost $39,000,000. Moses stated he had gotten the bridge estimates from Ammann, designer of the Bronx-

  Whitestone. Knowing the famed Swiss engineer's reputation for integrity, the Citizens Union decided to find out if Moses' statement was accurate. Two representatives called on Ammann in his office. The engineer, normally so terse and positive, met their questions with finger-twisting silence. Finally, he told them that while, as one of them put it, "he didn't want to be involved," he would "give us some guidance"—"guidance" which enabled them to report to the Citizens Union's board of directors that the $41,-200,000 figure was not accurate at all. (The board asked Paul Windels, a personal friend of Ammann's, to ask him if he would confirm the report. The report was confirmed.)

  Moses' brochure had stated that the bridge and "all necessary approaches" could be built without "a nickel" of city money. Stanley Isaacs had read the brochure with care, and, as a result, he was not worrying about a nickel of city money. He was worrying about 430,000,000 nickels— $21,500,000. Isaacs had noticed that while the attractively drawn map in the attractively drawn brochure showed the indispensable connections bet
ween the bridge and the West Side Highway, whose southern terminus at the time was Duane Street, more than a mile away, and with the East River Drive, the cost of these connections was not included in the estimates. Walter Binger estimated the cost of the West Side extension at $11,000,000, that of the East River Drive at $7,500,000. Moses had stated that he would rebuild Battery Park after it had been torn up for the bridge approaches, but had not included the cost of the rebuilding in his estimates, either. Binger said it would be $3,000,000.

  The reformers also realized that there were other costs involved, such as the $29,000,000 loss in real estate taxes, that Moses had never mentioned. The land in Battery Park on which Moses was planning to place anchorages and pillars didn't have to be paid for, of course, because the city already owned it, but its worth—in an area in which each square foot of land was worth hundreds of dollars—ran into the millions. "On the basis of real cost," Singstad wrote, "it is obvious that the bridge would be by far the more costly of the two projects when all of the economic factors which should be included are considered." Add economic factors to the non-economic involved—the destruction of the park and the values it represented, the destruction of the once-bustling Syrian Quarter at the foot of Washington Street and the neighborhood values it represented, the destruction of the harbor vistas and the old fort—and there was a powerful case to be made for Singstad's tunnel, and against Moses' bridge. The reformers did not say they were unalterably opposed to the bridge. Possibly a full-scale impartial study of all the factors involved would prove that it was a better solution than the tunnel. But, they said, such a study should be made before a project of such magnitude was embarked upon—and such a study had obviously not yet been made, by Moses or anyone else.