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

by Caro, Robert A

  The opening presentation by Moses' architects and engineers took two hours but, to the reformers' surprise, provided none of the facts for which they had been asking. Aymar Embury described the bridge with the help of a large-scale model—the same large-scale model Embury had already privately all but admitted to the reformers was misleading. Othmar Ammann, noticeably ill at ease, repeated that the bridge would cost $41,200,000 and the tunnel $84,000,000—but again did not break down the figures, so that the reformers could not determine on what, if anything, they were based (although, with Ole Singstad present, Ammann did not this time attempt to maintain that some of the figures came from Singstad).

  Moses' opponents provided facts—in abundance. Stanley Isaacs, directing the opposition presentation, told the councilmen, who goggled over this unprecedented passing up of a chance for personal publicity (didn't he realize that it was only one o'clock, the perfect time for a speech to make the late editions of the PM's?), that he would not speak himself but would simply introduce a series of experts who would prove, through specific facts and figures, that, on almost every point of the bridge-tunnel controversy, a tunnel would provide greater benefits—and cause less harm—to the city.

  Major Henry J. Amy, executive director of the Citizens Budget Commission, analyzed Moses' contention that the bridge and its approaches "wouldn't cost the city a nickel," and then simply read the clause of Moses' proposed state legislation that would cost the city $11,000,000. A battery of municipal finance and real estate experts documented—block by block, building by building—Singstad's conclusion that a bridge would cost the city at least $1,500,000 per year in real estate taxes. Regional Plan Association experts testified that everything Moses hoped to achieve by building a new bridge could be achieved—at a small fraction of the construction cost and real estate tax loss—by their alternate plan. Isaacs had even commissioned an analysis of Moses' argument—never before analyzed during the decade Moses had been making it—that civil service architects and engineers were less efficient and therefore cost "twice as much" as the private consultants he employed. The analysis documented that one group did cost "twice as much" as the other—Moses' group. Even Moses' claim that a bridge would have "twice the capacity" of a tunnel was disproven— by Triborough's own traffic counts for its two suspension bridges, which showed that inclement weather (and inclemency for a Brooklyn-Battery Bridge would include not only rain, snow, ice and high winds but the fog which is frequently heavy over the Lower Bay), while not affecting a tunnel's capacity, significantly reduced that of a bridge. As to the relative cost of the two types of crossing, Isaacs' experts gave the detailed breakdowns Moses' had not, proving Singstad's claim that a tunnel would cost $65,000,-000, and disproving all Moses' claims; Moses had said that the total cost of the bridge, including approach roads, would be $41,200,000; RPA

  engineers found that the cost of the bridge proper—without approach roads —would be $56,625,000. Isaacs had insisted that all the figures used be conservative. But even conservative figures were devastating. When Isaacs' parade of witnesses, a parade that lasted more than four hours, was over, every Moses contention subject to factual analysis had been utterly demolished. And as for the side of the controversy not subject to mathematical analysis—the aesthetic side, the effect of the bridge on the beauty of Battery Park and New York Harbor—the old reformers felt the demolition job had been even more devastating. There was a pounding of canes on the Council Chamber's oaken floor and a chorus of "Hear! Hear!" out of another age when George McAneny said of Moses' proposal:

  What all this would do to the values of real estate, some of it the most valuable in the world, I leave to others. But that the city would permit its famous Battery to be dealt with in such fashion seems to me an incredible thing. I am in fact of the opinion that if the plans under discussion are seriously pressed, there will be an uprising of public opinion the like of which has not been known since, forty years ago, some well-intentioned gentlemen in office proposed that City Hall be torn down to make way for something more modern in the skyscraping line.

  Wrinkled, stooped old McAneny had lost none of his eloquence. And when he had finished summing up the reformers' arguments and pointed out to the Council that all they were requesting was a study—by impartial experts appointed by the Council itself—to determine the true facts in the case, to study the various alternatives and determine which one would really be best for the city, it was difficult for the reformers, wise though they were in the ways of politicians, to believe that the request would not be granted.

  And then, in the seventh hour of the hearing, Robert Moses stood up to speak.

  Reading from a yellow legal pad on which he had been scribbling furiously during the opposition speeches, he turned his attention first to the analysis of the relative efficiency of civil service architects and private consultants.

  "I want to warn my friends in the civil service that civil service can become a racket," he said. "It's getting to be so that nothing will please them but a Communist state, which we know is so pleasing to Mr. Isaacs. . . ."

  There was a moment of shocked silence in the Council Chamber. Then came a storm of boos and hisses, which Moses' lieutenants tried ineffectually to drown out with cheers and applause. But Moses was not to be deterred by boos. He directed his next remarks to the Regional Plan Association proposal.

  The RPA had always opposed progress, he said. It had sided with the "fox hunters and estate owners" to oppose the Northern State Parkway, Heckscher State Park and Jones Beach, and many of his other Long Island projects. In New York City, RPA planners "were in a dither about the Henry Hudson Bridge—they asked delay, and advocated

  a low-level bridge. They said the Henry Hudson Bridge would ruin the finest spot in Manhattan. . . . We built the bridge and a week after it opened the bankers confessed that they had been wrong. We said it would average 16,000 cars, they said 6,000—and we were . . . right." The RPA "has been wrong about all these things," he said, and therefore, "why should we suppose that it is right about this one?" Its current proposal is, in fact, "nonsense"; "every argument applicable to the Battery Bridge is applicable tenfold against the Brooklyn Bridge."

  The reformers sat hardly believing what they were hearing. Although the RPA had opposed the Northern State Parkway, it was just not true that the RPA had opposed Heckscher State Park and Jones Beach; it had supported them, as it had supported almost all Moses' Long Island projects; moreover, the parkway fight had taken place fifteen years before—what did it have to do with a discussion about the Battery Crossing? The RPA had thought the Henry Hudson Bridge would ruin the finest spot in Manhattan—and the bridge had ruined the finest spot in Manhattan; the bridge might be a success in financial terms, but it was a failure in any other terms; the heavy traffic and the resultant congestion proved that, not disproved it; how could "every argument applicable to the Battery Bridge be applicable" to the Brooklyn Bridge?—when the whole point was that the Brooklyn Bridge already existed, and therefore could be rebuilt cheaply and without further destroying real estate values or the harbor view. And then Moses turned his attention to the RPA's president.

  Only a man who wasn't going to run for public office would propose "slapping a toll on the Brooklyn Bridge," Moses said. "No man in his right mind would do that." It was, he said, "all right for Mr. McAneny" to make such a proposal. "He's not going to run for public office again." He turned and glanced at the wrinkled old man sitting behind him.

  "He's an extinct volcano," Moses said. "He's an exhumed mummy."

  This time there were neither boos nor cheers in the Council Chamber. There was only silence, unbroken until Moses began to speak again.

  "If there was an argument raised that he answered directly, I don't remember it," says one of the reformers present that day. "We had raised a lot of issues. He hardly mentioned them. All he did was lash out at individuals, at respected, public-spirited men, with a spitefulness, a viciousness, that was almost unbelievable to
see." There was no attempt to meet the RPA proposal logically. It was simply "nonsense," Moses said. Or to discuss the effect of a gigantic suspension bridge on the view of the harbor. "The most beautiful architecture wrought by man is a bridge, especially a suspension bridge, and the finest view in Manhattan is the view you get walking across the Triborough Bridge to the Bronx or Queens," he said, and that, apparently, was all that had to be said on that point. As for the argument that the bridge would ruin Battery Park, the park was "no beauty spot" anyway, he said. If McAneny was so interested in it, why hadn't he done "something for it when he was in office"?

  Those arguments that he did answer, he answered with lies. The proposal that the Tunnel Authority build the Crossing? Moses said that

  "the Tunnel Authority" had built the Queens-Midtown Tunnel so incompetently that "the Tunnel Authority will be busted when it is finished. Washington knows that and I know it." The city was going to have to "step in and rescue the tunnel." (The Tunnel Authority was actually bringing in the tunnel far under cost. When it was finished, the Authority would, far from being busted, have a surplus of more than $4,000,000. And Moses, who had been doing detailed analyses of its financing, must have known this.) The need for a city contribution for the West Side Highway and East River Drive extensions? "Colossal effrontery. . . . The Citizens Budget Commission fellow's figures are just beyond me. I don't know where he got them." But Moses must have known precisely where he had gotten them.

  The key arguments Moses didn't answer at all. He gave no explanation of where he obtained the disputed figures for the tunnel, and as for the bridge, all he would say was, "I have built many bridges, both over water and over land, and I know what the costs are. We are letting contracts every day for the same kind of work, and when we give you an estimate, it is accurate and our reputation is behind it." The councilmen could take his figures or leave them, he seemed to say.

  The councilmen—and the city they represented—could take or leave his whole proposal, he made clear. When one ventured to ask him why he objected to a delay to give time for the alternatives to be studied, he put it to them straight:

  "This is a showdown project. Either you want it or you don't want it. And either you want it now or you don't get it at all." He was giving the city an ultimatum. The city could either take his proposal or leave it. He wasn't going to waste his time discussing it.

  And the councilmen took it. Without leaving the Council Chamber, hastily putting their heads together, the men who had been contacted the night before by La Guardia or by Steingut or by Crews voted unanimously to release the home-rule message from the committee immediately, without even an hour's study, and to send it to the full Council for a vote the following morning.

  Moses snatched his yellow legal pad off the desk and stalked out of the room, his aides scampering behind him. There was a broad smile on his face.

  The rest of the audience left the Council Chamber more slowly. As they filed out, many of them came over to McAneny and touched his shoulder consolingly. Burlingham, hobbling over on a cane, put his arm around him and whispered something in his ear.

  But consolation was not easy. Years later, Comptroller Joseph D. McGoldrick, explaining why he was "afraid" of Robert Moses, would tell the author, "I was there that day, you know, sitting in the audience, when he said that to George McAneny. Mr. McAneny was old and wrinkled and very shrunken by that time, you know. And when Moses called him an 'exhumed mummy,' I saw the expression on his face. I saw it, you know. So I was afraid of him."

  Other reformers would later describe their overriding emotion at Moses' philosophy and tactics as "shock."

  They had no justification for such an emotion. There was nothing new about that philosophy or those tactics. The insistence that his proposals be viewed only in isolation, that each be viewed strictly as an attempt to solve a particular, limited problem by creating a particular structure of concrete and steel, that it not be evaluated in terms of the needs of the city as a whole (the need for a bridge, for example, weighed against the need for schools and hospitals) or even as part of the larger problem of which the specific problem was only a part (a traffic-moving machine like a bridge evaluated in terms of the city's over-all traffic-moving problem) and especially not in terms of its impact on the surrounding neighborhood—was the same insistence that had underlain the public works he had been building in their city for five years. Moses had used these same arguments in arguing for a dozen other projects—most of which the reformers had enthusiastically supported. If they had ever taken a close look at those projects, had ever examined them with the same care with which they examined the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge, they would have seen that this philosophy lay behind them. They were shocked now only because they had never bothered to take such a look.

  As for the vicious personal attacks, Moses had been making vicious personal attacks for years. The only difference was that this time the target was them —and they therefore saw how unfair the attacks were. Previously they had laughed indulgently at Moses' propensity for personal vituperation, regarding it as a harmless idiosyncrasy; perhaps, when one took into account all the crooked politicians, hack bureaucrats and selfish private individuals with whom Moses had to deal, even admirable. In that laughter and that indulgence was a feeling that Moses' methods, however distasteful, however antithetical to their principles, were justified by the difficulties he had to surmount to Get Things Done.

  But in the Battery Crossing fight, the reformers could not avoid taking a good look at one of Robert Moses' controversies—and at Robert Moses. They could no longer avoid seeing precisely what kind of man they had for so long believed in. The Battery Crossing fight was the moment of truth in their relationship with Moses. After supporting him for years in a score of battles, after sacrificing, over and over again, the principles so dear to them in his support, after helping to raise him to power and helping to keep him in power, they saw him at last for what he was—and they realized that he was not the embodiment of everything they believed in but its antithesis. If, for the twenty years before the fight, the Good Government organizations of New York City had supported him, for the twenty years after the fight, those organizations would oppose him.

  The Battery Crossing fight was also the'moment of truth for the reformers in another respect. It made them see that their opposition no longer mattered to Moses. They had played a vital role in his acquisition of power

  in the city. Quite possibly, in fact, he could not have acquired that power without their help. But he had taken that power and used it to acquire more and more of it—and now, they suddenly realized, he had enough of it so that they could not take it back from him, could not, in fact, stop him from the absolutely untrammeled use of it. He no longer had to be concerned with their opinions—and he wasn't concerned with their opinions. They were the city's aristocracy. They had always had a voice—an important voice—in decisions vital to the city, a voice that was important to them because they cared about and loved the city. But in the areas that Robert Moses had carved out for his own, they would have a voice no longer.

  And neither would the city. For if the Battle of the Battery Crossing was a moment of truth for the reformers, it was also, although no one recognized it as such, a moment of truth for New York.

  It was not, of course, only the reformers who opposed Moses' proposal —or at least the haste with which he was trying to ram it through. Also in the opposition were most of the city's most important elected officials— right up to the Mayor—and, speaking with a virtually unanimous voice, the city's press. Always before, elected officials, backed by the press, would have possessed more than sufficient power at least to get a few weeks' time to study a proposal if they wanted to study it. But they possessed such power no longer. The city had a problem that desperately needed solution. It had no money to solve the problem itself. Moses had the money. And if the city wanted a solution, it would have to accept his solution—or none at all. That was the narrow limit of its
choices—which was really no choice at all. The ultimatum that Moses had delivered first to the Mayor and then to the City Council symbolized this reality—and so did the reaction of the Mayor and the City Council to that ultimatum.

  Less than twenty-four hours after the Council committee hearing, the full Council voted, 19-6, to endorse the Mayor's home-rule request to the Legislature for passage of the bills that would foreclose any possibility of study. (Moses watched the proceeding with what a reporter described as a "happy smile.") Less than twenty-four hours after that (with Steingut "wielding the bull whip") the bills were passed, 106-6 by the Assembly, 41-1 by the Senate. ("I'm not surprised," Moses told reporters with a smile.) And less than twenty-four hours after that, Governor Lehman announced he would sign the bill (not because he approved the bridge, he was careful to state—"I have no means of forming a sound judgment" on the project— but because it was a city affair and the city's elected officials had asked him to sign it). When the issue—in the form of a Triborough Authority request for Board of Estimate approval of a contract covering the relative city and Authority contributions to the project, a request worded in such a way that Isaacs said it constituted a "blank check" to Triborough—came before the Board, La Guardia ran the meeting with an iron hand, McGoldrick and Morris, despite their preference for a tunnel, voted for the bridge and