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

by Caro, Robert A

  In the governmental institutions—Board of Estimate and City Council —established to insure that the voice of the city's people would be heard and obeyed, their voice had been drowned out by his voice. There were other governmental institutions—Planning Commission, Art Commission—set up to insure that physical changes to the city would be governed by rational, logical planning considerations and that their specific form would be determined by informed and educated aesthetic taste, not by capricious whim and passing fancy, and certainly not by the whim and fancy and personal taste of a single individual. But rational, logical planning considerations and informed and educated aesthetic taste had crumbled before his will. The explanation for the denouement of the Battle of the Battery Crossing was simply personal pique, the fact that a man who for years had hated Robert Moses had finally been given a chance to give that hatred a little venting. The battle had proven that the powers he had obtained as head of a new part-private, part-public entity, a "body corporate and politic," were vast enough so that in his spheres of activity he, not the formal democratic institutions of New York, would henceforth shape New York's destiny.

  published in the Herald Tribune inquired: "If the roof leaks, then it can be repaired; if the ventilation is poor, then it can be corrected, but why remove [the Aquarium] entirely?" The cost of such alterations might be expensive, but they certainly would not approach $2,000,000—even if $2,000,000 was an accurate cost estimate for the new Aquarium, and the reformers' friends in the Zoological Society soon let them know that the figure bore little relation to reality. Moses never attempted to answer this inquiry. Moses said that moving the Aquarium to the Bronx Zoo would "make it attractive to increasing numbers of people." The greatest attraction of the Aquarium was its accessibility; in comparison, the Bronx Zoo was rather inaccessible—what, the reformers asked, was Moses talking about? Moses never bothered to reply.

  When a storm of protest arose not only from the reformers but from the public—there were whole columns of letters-to-the-editor day after day; editors trying to "balance out" the selection they printed found it difficult to do so, so scarce were letters favoring Moses' proposal—Moses attempted to give additional reasons. But, upon the reformers' examination of these reasons, each turned out to be invalid.

  Moses stated that tunneling under Battery Park would "undermine" the Aquarium and cause its walls to crumble. Bill Exton checked with the two engineers who were doing the tunneling—Ole Singstad, in charge of the construction of the tunnel proper, and Walter Binger, in charge of the underpass approach from the West Side Highway—and Singstad and Binger just laughed at this argument; no tunneling—no construction work of any type on either the tunnel proper or the underpass approach—would come within 170 feet of the Aquarium.

  Then Moses declared that, whether or not there was any tunneling under the old fort, it was going to fall down. His engineers, he said, had discovered that some of its walls were tilted and in imminent danger of collapse, and that a massive reconstruction job, whose cost he put at $200,000, would be necessary to make it safe. This couldn't be true, could it? asked reformers. The walls of that fort, eight feet thick and solid sandstone, seemed as sturdy a structure as they had ever seen. Of course it wasn't true, said engineers who weren't on Moses' staff. "A joke. I thought it was a joke when he first said that," Binger snorts. "How could it fall down? What was it but an open ring of walls eight feet thick, six hundred feet around and two hundred feet in diameter? An annular [open] ring with a center that's been standing for two, three hundred years [sic—actually for 139 years] isn't going to just fall down. Fall down! Ridiculous! Absurd! .. . And suppose one piece showed signs of falling? You'd just brace it up! . . . A joke, that's what it was, young man! A joke!"

  Moses had an aesthetic as well as an engineering rationale for his decision; the fort was not beautiful, he said, but an ugly "large red wart." And as for its historic interest, he said flatly that it "has no history worth writing about." The only people who wanted to retain the Aquarium, he said, were "stuffed shirts." After he announced his plans, "there was not a dry eye at the Knickerbocker Club, all the shades were drawn at the Century

  Association and heart-rending sobs issued from the dusty diggings of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society. . . . but somehow the great popular uprising against the razing of this structure hasn't materialized."

  The proof of the falseness of Moses' statement was on record day after day in the letters-to-the-editor columns; it wasn't only Goo Goos who were writing but men and women who could not possibly be classified as aristocrats but who wanted Fort Clinton saved because, as one put it, he had visited it so often that it seemed "an old friend," because, as another wrote, "without it Battery Park will be lonesome," because it was, in a word found in many of the letters, "beautiful" or because it was the place where they, or their parents or grandparents—where millions—had first stepped onto the soil of the United States. An elderly woman said that there must be many other Americans who, like her, were reminded every time they went to the old fort of how they had, years before, "felt their eyes fill with tears, and their hearts fill with thankfulness as they passed through the doorway of Castle Garden, the doorway to Liberty, a new life, a new world."

  All the reasons Moses advanced to justify his decision—engineering, aesthetic, historic—were misleading, not reasons at all but rationales, and transparently false rationales at that. And if the reasons Moses advanced were invalid, what then was the true reason? If, as Exton wrote to the Times in one of a series of eloquent letters, the very engineers building the tunnel said that they could build it without disturbing the old fort, "why, then, must this ancient and familiar thing be torn from us?"

  More to the point, why did it have to be torn from us now? Perhaps Moses did want to build a more modern Aquarium in the Bronx. But the plans were not ready, and the money for construction, as the Zoological Society readily confessed, was nowhere in sight. (As a matter of fact, although the reformers did not know this, Moses was not even certain where he wanted the new Aquarium to be located; he had simply thrown out the Bronx Zoo as the most likely location he could think of without study.) Even if the reformers accepted the argument that there was not room in a city of 7,000,000 for two aquariums, why was it necessary to demolish the existing Aquarium years before the new one could possibly be ready, thereby leaving the city for years without any aquarium at all? What was going to happen to the Aquarium's matchless collection of sea life, amassed over decades at fabulous cost in effort and ingenuity? What was the reason for Moses' insistence that this "ancient and familiar thing" not only be destroyed but be destroyed immediately? If the Aquarium was torn down, moreover, why did the fort beneath it also have to be torn down? Reluctant as the old Goo Goos had been to believe Exton's charge that Moses was motivated by nothing but a mean desire for revenge, many of them eventually concluded that the young man must be right. Years later, the few still alive would be asked about Moses' motivation. "If you knew Bob Moses, you wouldn't have to ask that," Paul Windels would say. "Bob Moses could hate. If you stood up to him, he would hate you forever. If you defeated him, he would try to destroy you. Here were guys he couldn't destroy. So he decided to do the next best thing: destroy something they loved." George McAneny

  would point out that Moses' claim that tearing down the Aquarium and fort had been made necessary "because of the tunnel" which they themselves had advocated was a particularly apt means of revenge.

  To destroy the Aquarium and fort on the spur of a base impulse would be a crime against the city, against history, the reformers felt. They determined to prevent it.

  But they couldn't. Moses' possession of unlimited powers over park administrative decisions made it possible for him simply to announce an "administrative decision" on Battery Park and the Aquarium: for the "safety of the public" they would be closed as soon as intensive tunnel work began, on October i, 1941, the park for the duration of such work, the Aquarium forever. The ref
ormers would have had no opportunity to protest Moses' plans to demolish the Aquarium and the old fort to any official body if the Park Commissioner hadn't needed money—a $20,000 appropriation from the Board of Estimate—for tanks to house the fish in their new home in the Bronx. (The Zoological Society, which Moses had claimed had resources of $2,000,000, proved unable to raise $20,000.) His need for a Board appropriation meant that there would have to be a public hearing and, in theory, a Board decision. But, in reality, what choice did the Board have? The park around the Aquarium was going to be closed shortly, fenced off from the public. Disapproving the appropriation wouldn't keep the Aquarium open; it would only keep Moses from moving the fish to the Bronx Zoo, which would mean either that the fish would stay in the Aquarium for years with the public unable to see them or that Moses would carry out a threat to dump the fish into the sea. When the reformers attempted to raise the demolition question, Moses replied blandly that that wasn't the issue at all; he wasn't asking for approval of the demolition of the structure, he said, but only for moving the fish out of it (he himself had no objection to keeping the fort if the Board wanted to provide for its rehabilitation, he said; and anyway the Board would have a chance to decide the demolition question at some later date, after the completion of a study by Consultant Gilmore Clarke which he had commissioned). The choices open to the Board and the Mayor were further limited by Moses' popularity. In less than two months, the politicians' futures would be in the hands of the voters, and Moses' personal popularity with the voters was far too great to be appreciably damaged by an unpopular stand on a single issue—particularly since the city's press, as if to atone for its heresy in opposing him in the Crossing and Aquarium fights, was laying on the personal adulation in even heavier doses than usual. (It was during this pre-election period that the Times commented, on the occasion of the opening of the Gowanus Parkway: "When Commissioner Moses finds the surface of the earth too congested with his parkways, he lifts the road into the air . . .") No politician wanted to make himself the target of the Commissioner's public wrath. Joseph A. Palma, up for re-election as borough president of Richmond County, had stated in May that the Aquarium should not be torn down. "It's a landmark," he had said forthrightly. "We've been destroying too many of our landmarks recently." In Septem-

  ber, Palma said not a word—but voted for Moses' proposal. Newbold Morns ; up for re-election as Council President, had stated in May that "if

  to be spent ... I favor putting it into a tuberculosis hospital in Brooklyn." In September, Morris did not mention any tubercu-pjtal—and he voted for Moses' proposal. As for Fiorello H. La Guardia, who had supposedly mastered the city, he could have swayed Morris and the others if he had wanted to, and for a while he apparently wanted to. The Mayor agreed that the Aquarium's accessibility was a great chic ;t, and friends saw that he had more than a little affection for the old building himself. In May, he and Moses had both been speakers at the opening of a new waterhole at the Bronx Zoo; Moses had cockily predicted that the Zoological Society could schedule a "fish chowder" at the Aquarium on October I, for the valuable specimens would be up at the Zoo by that time; but La Guardia had stunned Moses by stating flatly, "He won't bring the fish to the Bronx. 5 ' Whether political considerations were influencing the Mayor's thinking on the Aquarium in September is unknown, but the following sequence of events occurred: the right-wingers who dominated the Bronx and Queens Republican organizations—along with some key Republicans in other boroughs also determined to deny the Mayor a third term— offered Moses the nomination. Moses didn't want the nomination—he knew it was worthless without Fusion backing, which only La Guardia could obtain, and his understanding of the power of his public authorities made him uninterested in elective office—but he did not turn down the GOP nod out of hand, telling the leaders he was taking it under consideration. La Guardia felt he could not win without the nomination. Moses turned the nomination down. The old-line leaders then nominated John R. Davies, who would run against La Guardia in the primary election September J 6. When the Moses proposal came before the Board, the Mayor's three votes were cast for it. Four days later, Moses announced his support of La Guardia, who won the primary by only 20,000. And a whole wave of park openings, at each of which Moses took pains to praise La Guardia, was then scheduled before the election, in which the Mayor narrowly defeated Democratic candidate William O'Dwyer. (There is no clearer proof of Moses' aura of invincibility than O'Dwyer's reaction to his loud support of the Mayor. Far from attacking the Park Commissioner, O'Dwyer assured the voters that he would continue him in office if he were elected.)

  By October i, after a September in which parents by the tens of thousands had brought their children to the Aquarium one last time, Moses could tell the Board of Estimate, "The fish are gone. . . . The Aquarium, therefore, as such, is a tale that has been told. We don't have to talk about that any more. The only question is . . . Fort Clinton." And, he said, consultant Clarke had found that demolition of the old fort was necessary for the complete reconstruction of Battery Park that he had in mind. The Board approved the demolition by an 11-5 vote. As in the bridge-tunnel con-

  troversy, no force in the city had been powerful enough to stand between Moses and his aims. There would, within a matter of months, have been— except for a plaque—no trace of the old fort had it not been for another force outside the city and beyond Moses' control: the Second World War.

  To Moses' rage, the war stripped the city of manpower and heavy construction equipment so completely that no demolition company would bid on the job of leveling those massive solid stone walls. He let a smaller contract for the less difficult demolition of the circular sheet-iron roof that covered the fort, and by the fall of 1942 the roof was gone, and the interior of the fort, as well as the ground in front of it, was littered with debris. He was attempting again to get the rest of the job finished when the war gave the reformers another opportunity by halting work on the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. The reformers, realizing that neither the executive nor the legislative branch of the city government could stop Moses, made a last, desperate try to persuade the judicial branch to do the job, bringing suit to enjoin him from demolishing the rest of the building on the grounds that he had induced the Board to grant him permission through "false and fradulent representation"—namely, that the demolition was required by work on the tunnel. The judiciary could not restrain Moses—the reformers pressed the appeal to the Court of Appeals, but each court found, in effect, that Moses had virtually absolute power in city parks. But the last appeal was not heard until April 1943, and by that time the equipment and manpower shortage had reached a stage where even Moses realized it was useless to attempt any further demolition until the war was over.

  It would be more than five years before work on the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel was resumed. There was no reason why Battery Park should have been closed during those five years. But closed it was. The gates in the high wooden fences that Moses had erected around it, fences too high for passers-by to see over, remained locked.

  The city's press had assumed that the fight over the old fort was ended —had been over, in fact, from the moment Moses had made his decision about it. Commenting on one of his fierce attacks on the reformers, the Herald Tribune had said, "With the unleashing of that dread artillery, it is clear that Castle Clinton, along with the traditionalists, are done for." But the writer of that editorial must have been a young man; he must never have seen the "traditionalists"—in particular George McAneny—fighting for something they believed in. The old fort had become even dearer to the old man since Moses had proposed tearing it down. Shortly before his death in x 953> at the age of 84, McAneny was invited to contribute a memoir to the Oral History Research Collection at Columbia University. Most memoirs deal largely with the speaker's own life, and many display a desire for personal immortality. McAneny devoted the bulk of his memoir to a painstakingly detailed history of Fort Clinton; the immortality he desired was not for himself. "If I can
save [the fort]," he said, "I'll feel I haven't lived in vain." Time and again during the war, the old man led groups of old men down to Washington to try to persuade the city's congressmen to persuade the National Park Service—skeptical of the fort's historic value because

  Moses had gotten to them first—to designate the fort a national monument. He laid out the facts of the fort's history to literally scores of federal officials, all the way up to Harold Ickes fand possibly higher: whether Roosevelt . personally intervened is unknown, although there are indications that the President may have taken a moment out from the war effort to do so), and the facts were irrefutable. No sooner had the war ended than Ickes told La Gliardia that the National Park Service would take over the fort, restore it and maintain it forever if the city allowed it to do so. Moses could no longer argue that the structure would be too expensive to restore and maintain. But, thanks to the high fence, he had a new argument ready. The demolition already accomplished, he said, had left nothing of the fort except two walls, which were caving in. The question of restoring the fort was now academic, aid; there was too little of the fort left to restore. The public could not, of course, determine for itself if this was true; those occasional reporters whom Moses had his aides escort over the site saw no reason to doubt his Story the sheet-iron roof of the Aquarium was gone and so was much of the two-story stucco facade, the pillars that had held up the facade had been torn down, the only remnants of the fish tanks were piles of broken glass, and the debris from the roof and facade had been heaped all around the site (with a particularly large pile in front, blocking it off even more effectively from anyone trying to see it). The scene looked like the site of a typical and almost completed—demolition job.