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

by Caro, Robert A

  Com /. \--.r, Barnes learned shortly after coming to New York in

  1962. Sjnc. rrt traffic bottlenecks existed at the Manhattan

  end of the Oueensborough Bridge, he was staggered when he learned confidentially that the Triborough Authority was planning to condemn close to a square block of buildings at the bridgehead, evict their tenants and build a 2,000-car parking garage there. "I couldn't quite figure out why Triborough wanted to do it," Barnes was to recall with a grin several years later. 'The traffic would be backed up for miles." But at lunch with Triborough general manager Peter Reidy and Straus on another matter one day, the Traffic Commissioner heard Reidy—according to Barnes, under the influence of one martini too many—mention to Straus "this garage that we're working on with you people."

  Warned by a sharp glance from Straus, Reidy stopped talking, but Barnes had heard. "What are you talking about?" he asked. "They both squirmed around," he says, "and finally [Straus] said, 'Well, Bloomingdale's and Alexander's are up there. We feel we ought to have a branch up there, too/ " And then they revealed that atop the garage was to be built a seven-story department store which would be leased to Macy's. To his astonishment, Barnes realized that Moses was planning to use powers and funds of a public authority ostensibly set up to aid transportation to condemn a score of buildings, evict the tenants, and turn it over, complete with Authority-financed parking facilities right in the store, to a private business. And he further realized, as the conversation unfolded, that the planning had advanced to the point at which even the details of the lease—its term was to be fifty years— had been finalized, and that Moses had persuaded Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., to approve.

  "I stopped that one," Barnes recalls. Understanding the reason for the secrecy in which the deal had been surrounded—it might arouse even the dulled sense of outrage of the New York public—he returned to his office after lunch, telephoned Wagner and threatened to reveal it to the press unless the Mayor called it off. "I said, Til blow that one right open,' " Barnes recalls. And, within minutes after he had hung up, he recalls, "Wagner called me back and said, 'All right, it's dead.' "

  As for Gimbels, Moses pushed through a number of projects that Bernard F. Gimbel, Jr., felt would help business. He was a frequent guest at Hemic (umbel's Greenwich estate. When the support of the proprietors of Macy's and Gimbels was needed for one of Moses' projects, Moses told them what to do, and they did it.

  Several astute observers were to comment that it was through the telephone that power is exercised in New York. Men who felt the impact of Robert Moses' power often described it in terms of the telephone. "Shortly after I arrived in New York, I got into some big hassle with him," Barnes recalled.

  "And no sooner had it hit the papers than my phone started ringing. There must have been a half dozen calls stacked up. I remember that two of the first were from Straus of Macy's and David Rockefeller. They called me up and they said to me, 'Don't fight Bob Moses. You can't win. And we need you around this town.' "

  The dispute with Barnes was a minor one. That was why there were only a half dozen calls. When an official—commissioner, borough president, mayor—attempted to stand in the way of a major Moses public works proposal, the calls would pour in by the dozen, from contractors, architects, engineers, lawyers, bank presidents, presidents of bonding, title-insurance and building-material-supply companies, union leaders—from all those supporters of the official or leaders of his county organization in the best position to influence him. "It got so all Moses had to do was push that button," says one official. "Each of these groups—bankers, union people, whatever—all had their own interests at heart, but Moses succeeded in combining all these interests behind his own aims. He gave everybody involved in the political setup in this city whatever it was that they wanted. Therefore they all had their own interest in seeing him succeed. The pressure that interest all added up to was a pressure that no one in the system could stand against, because it came from the system itself."

  The proof of the irresistibility of this pressure was Moses' relationship with the officials through whom the city's five Democratic county organizations had for decades exercised much of their political influence—the city's five borough presidents—and with the body on which they sat and which was supposed to be the heart of its legislative system: the Board of Estimate. The borough presidents were, for decades, the keystone of the system by which the county machines held power; the five Borough Halls over which they presided were storehouses crammed with the public works contracts and individual jobs which during those decades could be translated into political clout. With the exception of the parks and parkways which were turned over to Moses by the Legislature in 1934, each borough president controlled virtually every public work in his borough, from bridge to catch basin. In addition to being able to tell contractors whom to hire, borough presidents' control of municipal services, such as snow removal and street cleaning and repair, gave them direct appointive power over thousands of laborers' jobs, as well as additional thousands of administrative and bureaucratic positions. The county machines were embedded in the community. On primary day, Democratic voters would find on the ballot the names of neighbors, for four or five county committeemen would be elected from each election district, and a district might be no larger than a single heavily populated city block: there were, in Tammany's heyday, more than 30,000 Democratic county committeemen in the City of New York. One of the committeemen from the district would be named district captain. At a meeting in the local clubhouse, he and other captains would elect a district leader. The district leaders would in turn elect the county leader, an Ed Flynn or

  Irwin Steingut or Jim Roe. This pyramid was, of course, democratic only ostensibly. The county boss at its top could, for example, employ his power to force the district captains to elect the district leader he wanted. Power ran downhill as well as up. The democratic shape of the pyramid was further distorted by the fact that a principal ingredient in the mortar that held it together was graft; public considerations, of which the will of the people was the principal, that should have been the only voice heard at its different levels, were filtered through a host of private considerations. But there was a pyramid, and its base was the people. And, through the county committee-man-district captain-district leader-county leader-borough president system, the people's voice was heard—even on public works. The district captain had to produce votes in his district to keep his job, so he not only had to do small favors for voters—obtaining them jobs or small loans, interceding with a grocer who had cut off credit—but also had to be his district's champion at City Hall, to be able to obtain a neighborhood playground and to see that it was located where the neighborhood wanted it or to kill a plan to run a highway through the neighborhood. The district leader who wanted to remain a district leader had to be responsible to his people and to be willing to fight for them—and he had to be able to win. As Fred J. Cook points out:

  The machine might be totally corrupt, but it had its fingers on the pulse of block and ward and, when the pulse beat stepped up to angry tempo, it heeded the warning—or ignored it at its peril. It is hardly possible to overemphasize the importance of this old, basic relationship. If the people of a ward were aroused about a local injustice, the district leader carried their complaints to the halls of the mighty, and often enough something was done to pacify his constituents.

  The borough presidents, the titular heads of the Democratic county machines, had been placed in their jobs by the county bosses—Cashmore, who sat on the Board of Estimate for twenty-one years, by Kelly and Steingut; Lyons, who sat on the Board for twenty-eight years, by Flynn; Jim Lundy by Roe; Hulan Jack by De Sapio; and relying for their support on those bosses and on the district leaders, they had to be just as responsive to the people. Other pressures—private, subtle and strong—were, of course, always working upon them. But the pressure of public opinion was at least as strong as any of the others—and far stronger than most. And in the f
ield of public works, the city's highest legislative body, formed to represent the will of the people of the city, was, to a surprisingly considerable extent, responsive to that will.

  For two reasons—a desire for increased governmental erriciencv (which backfired) and a desire to curb the powers of the corrupt machines— the reformer-drafted Charter of 1038 shifted the responsibility for many municipal services, notably street cleaning and repairing, from the borough presidents to centralized city departments reporting to the mayor. This shift dealt a body blow to the small contractors who had played so vital a role in providing the jobs and campaign contributions the machine needed. As for large-scale public works, the borough presidents* authority was eroded by the

  Charter and by the new scale of construction made possible by the entrance into the field of the federal government, as, under the WPA and PWA, the emphasis shifted continually away from the block to the neighborhood, from the neighborhood to the borough, from the borough to the city. Because the federal programs were so big, they were administered on a citywide basis, so federal officials were predisposed to select as the local administrators of such programs officials who represented the whole city rather than one of its segments. In New York, this predisposition was reinforced by the Roosevelt-La Guardia alliance that resulted in the funneling of all federal public works contracts through City Hall instead of the borough presidents' offices. Handling the new scale of construction required a new scale of contractors, industrial giants with enough financial resources to fulfill cities' bonding requirements, and enough technical expertise to handle previously unprecedented engineering, architectural and construction problems. And since such corporations received their contracts through City, not Borough, Hall, they gave their campaign contributions to City, not Borough, Hall and hired outside architects, engineers and bonding firms that City Hall recommended. The 1961 Charter transferred most of what remained of Borough Hall's power over public works to the mayor, and Charter revisions step by step pared away to a relative handful the number of administrative jobs over which they had direct appointive power. The borough presidents found it increasingly difficult—in the postwar era impossible—to give satisfaction to their constituencies. They could not provide jobs for individuals, could not give work to local architects or engineers, could not oversee the dispensing of orders to local construction-materials suppliers or of policies to local insurance brokers and bonding firms. The imposing facades of the Borough Halls became empty husks behind which dwelt no real power.

  The borough presidents' constituents, uninterested in the complexities of Charter revisions, didn't understand that. They thought that a borough president was still what a borough president had always been. They approached him for jobs, contracts and insurance policies as they had always approached him. And when he couldn't provide them, they viewed the failure as that of an individual, not of a system. They resented the failure, so much so that it would have had to be an insensitive borough president indeed not to recognize the danger to his chances for re-election. "They were indicted for a failure," a failure for which they were not at fault, Rodriguez says. There was a gap— a huge gap—between what people expected of them and what they could do.

  In theory—the theories about government in New York that were believed, judging by their writings, by political scientists—the borough presidents, by sitting ex officio on the Board of Estimate, possessed (at least until the Charter revisions of 1961) substantial legislative as well as administrative powers: the power to control the city's departments and agencies by approving —or disapproving—every single agency expenditure; the power to control city employees by authorizing—or refusing to authorize—their hiring and their individual salaries; the power to make any changes they wished in the mayor's executive budget; as well as all "residual powers" not specifically delegated to mayor, City Council or Planning Commission. The most detailed

  and comprehensive analysis of the city's government ever written, Governing New York City, by Professors Wallace S. Sayre of Columbia and Herbert Kaufman of Yale, concludes that "on the chessboard of the city's politics, the Mayor may be King, but the Board of Estimate is Queen. ... the Board [is] the single most powerful participant in the distribution of the stakes of city politics."

  Over public works, the works which did so much to permanently shape a city and mold the lives of its inhabitants, the Board's powers were, on paper, particularly strong. "The Board of Estimate shall have the control of the streets of the city," the Charter states, and specifically the control—the "exclusive" control—of the street-opening permits for relocation of under-street "conduits or ways" without which, in a city whose underground was laced with a tangled network of sewers and utility mains, no major public work could be built. Moreover, under the theory on which the Charter was framed, a theory which did not take into account public authorities, the Board and the Board alone had control—exclusive control—over all real property owned by the city. It alone could authorize its acquisition; it alone could approve its use; it alone—through its power to draw up the capital budget—could decide what would be built on it. And, because it had the power to regulate the letting of all city contracts, it alone could determine how and when public works would be built.

  The votes on the Board jointly controlled by the borough presidents* enabled them, if they stuck together and cast them as a block, to prevent the Board from acting without their consent on the many public works decisions which required a two-thirds or three-fourths majority.

  And they did stick together, under an informal agreement by which none of them would vote for a public work unless the president of the borough in which it was to be located approved. So absolutely did they honor this agreement, year after year and decade after decade, that the pledge, which the borough presidents themselves called "borough courtesy," became known to frustrated agency administrators as "the unwritten law." Through both the formal and informal powers of their positions on the Board of Estimate, then, the borough presidents, in theory, enjoyed what Sayre and Kaufman call a "commanding position" in the field of public works.

  But new realities in public works made the borough presidents' legislative powers as meaningless as their administrative powers.

  One new reality was the wealth of Moses' public authorities and the Board of Estimate's lack of control over that wealth.

  The Board's authority over conventional city agencies rested ultimately on the fact that these agencies had no money except what the Board chose to

  ♦From 1938 to 1957, there were sixteen votes on the Board. The three "citywide" officials—Mayor, Comptroller, Council President—cast three each, for a total of nine, and the borough presidents cast a total of seven, two each by the presidents of Manhattan and Brooklyn and one each by the other three. A 1957 Charter amendment raised the number of votes on the Board to twenty-two, twelve of which—four each— were cast by the citywide officials, ten of which—two apiece—by the five borough presidents.

  give them, that the Board could dole it out to them item by item, scrutinizing every line in an agency's budget request, and the agency therefore had to obtain Board approval for every expenditure, no matter how small. But Moses' authorities had an independent income. They didn't need the city's money—and therefore they didn't need the city's approval in spending money.

  Another new reality was the poverty of the city's government, poverty both absolute (La Guardia's worst nightmares paled before the realities of New York's postwar finances) and relative—relative to the new needs created by its growth and by the fact that the growth consisted of an inpour-ing of impoverished immigrants in need of more help than the city was accustomed to give, and relative to the new needs of the county Democratic organizations that controlled its politics. The city simply did not have the money to build public works on the new scale required by the public—or by the greed of the political machines. But Moses' authorities—the authorities and the state and federal governments whose expenditures i
n the city he controlled—had the money. Through their seats on the Board of Estimate, the borough presidents had power—power to withhold street-opening permits, for example—to stop authorities from building. But the borough presidents did not have the power to build themselves. Their power was, therefore, negative only. They could deny, but they could not initiate. They could not provide what the people—and the county machines on which their own careers depended—were demanding. They became, in Rodriguez's words, "incapable of giving political satisfaction to their clientele." The old system by which they had lived was dead. In its place was a vacuum.

  And it was into this vacuum that Robert Moses stepped. To a borough president agonizing because he could see no way of providing the action to solve his borough's traffic or housing problem that his constituents were demanding or the jobs that his local unions wanted or the contracts, insurance premiums and "coincidences" of honest graft that his county organization wanted, the Coordinator would suddenly appear bearing wondrous gifts. He would present to him a proposal for a highway or an urban renewal development that would "solve" the problems. He could assure him that the financing was all arranged, that the BPR or FHA or DPW had agreed to provide it as soon as he asked them to. When the borough president asked how long it would take to draw up the plans, Moses could tell him that they were already drawn up, that the project was awaiting only one thing: his okay. The borough president would be able to see that the proposal would provide, at one swoop, jobs, contracts, architectural and engineering fees. Knowing Moses' reputation as a man above politics, he might wonder whom the contracts, jobs and premiums would be going to. But he would soon become aware—if not from Moses himself then from Stuart ("Mustache") Constable or sly little George Spargo—that, reputation or not, the jobs, contracts and premiums would go where he wanted them to go. And if he inquired among politicians who had previously worked with Moses, he would also be told that Moses was, as J. Russel Sprague had commented so many years before, "a practical guy, a guy you can talk to," a guy who, in other words, would have no objection if friends of the borough president began buying up