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

by Caro, Robert A

But Robert Moses did not see these changes. He did not see that reality had changed. Not only the sycophancy with which he had surrounded himself but also three hard physical facts of his existence insured this.

  Robert Moses had never, aside from a few driving lessons thirty years before, driven a car. He didn't know what driving was. His chauffeured limousine was an office, to him a peculiarly pleasant office, in fact, since in it he was away from secretaries and the telephone and in its upholstered confines he could bury himself in work without interruption. Traveling by car had been pleasant for him in the 1920's; it was still pleasant for him in the 1950's. The nature of driving might have changed immensely for the people of the metropolitan area; it had changed not at all for him.

  Robert Moses had never, since he had first come to power, allowed himself any time for reflection, for thought. Reflection, thought, is in a sense no more than the putting to use of a mind, and the unique instrument that was Robert Moses' mind could conceive wonders when it was put to work in that way. As a youth, he had never had enough to do; frustrated at the Bureau of Municipal Research, he had spent his evenings walking the city and thinking—and gradually his steps had led him more and more frequently to Riverside Park, and he had conceived a solution for problems for which no other man had been able to conceive a solution. As only a part-time aide to Al Smith, he had a lot to do—but not nearly enough to use up all his restless energy, and he had had time to sail and walk around the South Shore of Long Island. Living in Babylon and working in New York, he had had to ride the Long Island Rail Road for two hours and more a day; attempting an overview of Moses' career, it is difficult not to ascribe some

  of the credit for the stroke of genius that led him to see the potential for parks in the New York City watershed properties to the fact that the railroad not only carried him past those properties but trapped him on it for two hours and more a day so that he had to think about them. The following year, Robert Moses had come to power. In the years since, he had had piled upon him, and had grasped for, more and more power with each succeeding decade; the workload of executive responsibility he was carrying in the I930's was too great to allow time for reflection—a fact he mentioned worriedly to his aides. But in the logo's he had far greater executive responsibilities than in the i93o's, and in 1954, with his assumption of the chairmanship of the State Power Authority, he undertook in that one job, piled atop all his others, so much work that quiet, reflective thought was a luxury in which he could quite literally indulge almost never. Given a chance to work, Moses' mind might, despite all the handicaps, have come to grips with the new realities and fashioned a shaping vision to deal with them. But now it had no time to deal with the reality at all.

  Robert Moses was going deaf.

  His lieutenants first noticed about 1950 that the boss was having difficulty understanding what people were saying to him. His hearing deteriorated rapidly thereafter, and doctors apparently told him there was nothing to be done for the condition, a simple result of age—Moses was, after all, in his sixties—except for him to wear a hearing aid.

  Robert Moses wear a hearing aid?!? He refused even to consider the suggestion. The condition grew worse. More and more frequently, if he was asked a question at his big conference table, his reply would not be responsive—he would be answering the question he thought had been asked. In discussions over lunch with public officials he would misunderstand the thrust of their arguments, sometimes grasp only fragments of what they said. Several times, driving away with Shapiro from conferences with Wagner or Dewey or Harriman, Moses began exulting over some promise he believed he had wrung from Mayor or Governor—and Shapiro, who had been sitting in on the conferences, was certain, heartsick, that no such promise had been made. When it became unfeasible for him to talk over the telephone at all, he consented to have a powerful amplifier placed in the instrument. General Meyers took inspiration and attempted to install an amplifying system in Moses' offices—in such a way as to conceal it from visitors and thereby leave the precious legend of indestructibility intact. On the desk-conference table were placed two small microphones, which would pick up everything said in the room; the amplifier to which the microphones were attached was concealed in a small box and placed on a small table near his left ear, which was slightly better than his right. Any visitor who inquired about the microphones was told that they were there so that if the office was crowded for large conferences, the man speaking could use one and be heard more clearly. Ingenious as the device was, however, its utility lessened, for Moses' hearing degenerated to a level at which even the amplifier was of little use to him.

  In a way, of course, Moses' deafness was symbolic. He had, in a way,

  been deaf all his life—unwilling to listen to anyone, public, Mayor, Governor, deaf to all opinion save his own. But this new, physical deafness contributed in a nonsymbolic, very real way to his divorce from reality. As always, he would not attend public hearings or in any other way place himself in a situation in which he could hear the public's views. His insulation inside a circle of men who would offer no views that were not echoes of his own further insured that no outside voices would become a part of his considerations. Now, thanks to the deafness, he was unable to hear the views, get the thinking of those administrators and public officials who were invited to lunch with him or who sat with him in conferences. Surrounded by men who would not give him the new facts and figures he needed, with no time left to rethink solutions to changing problems—most important, with no feeling that there was any reason for him to rethink— the deafness made it impossible for him to learn about the new realities even if he had wanted to.

  The proof is a statement he made about golf. If there was any area in which the Robert Moses of the logo's had been truly expert it was in the area of recreation, in the active games which adults liked to play. But now he mentioned offhandedly that golf was not a game in which the masses were interested; it was, he said, played only by the "privileged few." Golf was now a game played by millions in all walks of life. But Moses didn't know this. His statement would have been true in the Twenties and he thought it was still true in the Fifties.

  Because he didn't know anything had changed.

  It was in transportation, the area in which Robert Moses was most active after the war, that his isolation from reality was most complete: because he never participated in the activity for which he was creating his highways— driving—at all. Insulated in the comfortable rear seat of his limousine, unable to experience even once the frustration of a traffic jam, unable, unless he made an effort and put his work aside and leaned forward to look out the window, even to look at a traffic jam, Robert Moses did not know what driving in the modern era was. He did not know that the sheer weight of numbers of new cars had changed the very nature of the activity for which he was creating facilities, had introduced—or, to be more specific, re-emphasized, since even before the war planners had seen the first signs of the change—new realities into the outlook for metropolitan transportation. He was making transportation plans based on beliefs that were not true any more. He was making plans that had no basis in reality.

  But because of the enormous power he controlled, power that was close to absolute in fields he had carved out for his own, such as transportation, he could impose these plans on the metropolitan region, and on its 12,000,000 residents.

  within ancient cities (some of the Roman highways ran right up to the golden milestone in the Forum, for example), but ancient cities did not have subways and gas mains. These were, moreover, cities on a different scale from modern cities—imperial Rome was one-eighth the size of New York; Athens at the height of its glory was never larger than Yonkers— so the problem of eviction was on a different scale. And since the traffic for which these roads were designed was different from modern traffic— not only in volume but in size and speed—they were constructed on a different scale. The major roads in Rome, the widest paved highways in any ancient city, were, even including th
eir "service roads," the margines to which carriages were restricted to keep the central portion free for infantry and pedestrians, only sixty-five and a half feet wide at their widest point; the highways Moses was proposing to build were two hundred feet wide. A horse-drawn carriage can turn fairly sharply; the monster tractor-trailers of the twentieth century require a turning radius so great that a single interchange connecting one highway to another can cover eighty acres. Not only did these roads of antiquity have no underpasses or overpasses to carry intersecting roads across them—access to these roads was not controlled; they could be entered from any intersecting thoroughfare— their very dimensions were so much smaller than those of modern highways that they were really comparable not to those highways at all but only to modern streets or avenues. Nor were the roads even of modern times—of the swollen cities of the nineteenth century and the Industrial Revolution. The greatest intracity road development of modern times before Robert Moses was the boulevarding of Paris envisioned by Emperor Napoleon III and carried out by his Prefect of the Seine, the "brawny Alsatian" Georges-Eugene Haussmann, between 1852 and 1870. But the roads of Haussmann, impressive though they were, were nonetheless still roads designed for the carriage rather than the car.

  The automobile age created in the twentieth century a need for roads of a new dimension, roads a hundred feet or more across, roads with underpasses and overpasses and with interchanges so immense that to create them hundreds of acres of earth must be covered over with concrete—gigantic roads, not highways but superhighways. But the greatest of these roads— Mussolini's autostrade and Hitler's Autobahnen and the Long Island parkways (which predated autostrade and Autobahnen), Belt Parkway and West Side Highway of Robert Moses—had been built around the edges of cities and between cities. Except for rare instances and short stretches, no superhighways had been built within cities. And even those short stretches of superhighways that had been built within cities had almost invariably followed open paths within them—undeveloped river banks, for example, or sparsely populated corridors—as if their creators had shied away from pushing huge roads through the city's dense fabric. The most noticeable exception had been the Triborough Bridge approach highways Moses had built through Astoria and the East Bronx—but the total length of these highways had been no more than eight miles. Now Moses was proposing to

  build through the heart of the city more than a hundred miles. No one had dared lay superhighways through a heavily populated modern city on anything like such a scale: lump together all the superhighways in existence in all the cities on earth in 1945, and their mileage would not add up to as many miles as Robert Moses was planning in 1945 to build in one city.

  The immensity of the physical difficulties in Moses' path could be grasped only "on the ground," and on the ground they made even engineers accustomed to immense difficulties quail.

  One of his proposed superhighways, for example, was the "Cross-Bronx Expressway," a seven-mile-long road that would run straight across that densely populated borough. The Cross-Bronx Expressway would be a huge trench gouged across a city. And it would have to be gouged across the city without disturbing the city's lifelines, the water and gas mains, electric cables and telephone wires, sewers and steam pipes, streets and subways, that supplied hundreds of thousands of residents of the Bronx with services too essential to be interrupted for the long months it would take to build each section of the expressway. General Thomas F. Farrell, builder of World War II's legendary Burma Road, did not fully comprehend what that meant until, now a Moses consultant, he was sent out to look over the proposed route.

  Standing on a bluff in Highbridge Park in Manhattan looking across the Harlem River at the Bronx, Farrell saw staring back at him from the top of the bluffs across the river a wall, a wall sixty and eighty and a hundred feet high, a wall of apartment houses. And crossing the river, entering the Bronx, Farrell saw that the wall was seven miles deep. Athwart the route Moses had chosen for his road stood literally hundreds of buildings, close to half of them apartment houses.

  And an engineer like Farrell, accustomed to grasping at a glance the essentials of even the largest engineering problems, could see on his first tour of the route that apartment houses were the least of those problems.

  Stepping out of his limousine at a high spot on Jesup Avenue to look out over a half-mile valley to the east, the general saw that apartment houses crammed that valley solid—a staggering panorama of massed brick and mortar and iron and steel. Looking down at the map Moses had given him, he saw that the Coordinator was preparing to gouge the huge trench of the expressway straight across the valley's heart. But what staggered Farrell most was not what was in the valley but what was on the other side of it, glaring down at him from the high ridge on its far side, a ridge even higher than the one on which he was standing.

  On top of that ridge was not only a wall of apartment houses, big, luxurious buildings of a notable sturdiness, for on top of that ridge was the Grand Boulevard and Concourse, the "Park Avenue of the Bronx," but, running along the top of the ridge, a steady stream of automobiles, toy-sized in the distance. For the Concourse—built at the turn of the century in

  imitation of Haussmann's boulevards with separate, tree-shaded lanes for pedestrians, bicyclists and horse-drawn carriages—was now a major automobile thoroughfare. Construction of an expressway would take years, Far-rell knew; the stream atop the ridge could not possibly be dammed for that long: the Cross-Bronx Expressway could not cross the Grand Concourse at grade. A glance told the general that carrying the expressway over the Concourse on a gigantic viaduct was unfeasible; the ascent up from the valley floor would be almost three hundred feet, far too steep for the big trucks that would be using the expressway. The expressway would have to avoid the Concourse by diving beneath it, by diving down through the ridge, tunneling through with dynamite while not disturbing the apartment houses and road above. And, from a cross-section map he had been given, Farrell knew what was inside that ridge—not merely a huge storm sewer and a maze of smaller utility mains, but another utility somewhat more formidable. What was inside that ridge was a railroad, the Concourse line of the Independent Subway. Tens of thousands of persons rode that subway every day; it, too, would have to be kept in operation. And its triple tracks lay sixty feet below the top of the ridge; to get beneath them while going through the ridge, the expressway would have to dive deep indeed. And "deep" in the Bronx, Farrell knew, as all New York engineers knew, meant Fordham gneiss, a rock that combined layers of unusual hardness, requiring intensive and prolonged blasting, with frightening instability that caused sliding and slipping of the rocks on even the simplest engineering jobs. The engineers building the expressway would have to blast it through the ridge while holding up above it—holding absolutely steady even while igniting dynamite blasts that would shake a mountain—not only a tangle of sewers and mains but a boulevard, a subway and a row of apartment houses. And they would have to hold boulevard, buildings and subway steady while trying to find a footing for the necessary massive supports in unstable rock.

  Because the expressway had to dive under the subway, it couldn't go over the valley on a viaduct; that would make the dive beneath the subway too steep. It couldn't cross the valley at grade; that would mean closing the north-south streets in it that cut across the expressway's path, and among those streets in the valley were no fewer than five major thoroughfares that couldn't be closed for long. It would have to burrow across the valley, and that meant holding up those streets while struggling through another maze of mains. And atop one of those streets, Farrell saw a distant skeleton of steel, the girders and tracks of the Jerome Avenue elevated rapid transit line, that would have to be kept running. While building the expressway under Jerome Avenue, Farrell realized, Moses would somehow have to hold up, for months if not for years, not only the broad, heavy avenue but the spindly elevated structure above it—and hold it steady enough for the trains to run along it in safety.

  The ridge a
nd valley, in fact, were only a microcosm of the physical difficulties in the way of the Cross-Bronx Expressway. The path of the great road lay across 113 streets, avenues and boulevards; sewers and water and

  utility mains numbering in the hundreds; one subway and three railroads;* five elevated rapid transit lines,t and seven other expressways or parkways, some of which were being built by Moses simultaneously, i All had to be kept in operation while the expressway ran below or above them. This would be a difficult enough engineering task if the engineers had sufficient space in which to work. But on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, there was, Farrell could see, never going to be enough room. Blasting a tunnel and building a road while holding up above it a major street that itself is holding up a transit line is difficult enough. But holding it up when the girders which held up the transit line turned out to be resting on the spots—seemingly the only spots—capable of holding the weight of the tunnel required the fastening to those girders of "needle beams" of immense strength, beams built with legs stretching out to either side that could be sunk into the next available firm rock to hold the weight. The rock was blasted and chiseled out from under the girders so carefully that the road's designer, Ernie Clark, would recall years later that "we took the stuff out with a teaspoon." In one 466-foot section, the expressway ran under four major avenues and an elevated rapid transit line. Working with girders some of which were a hundred feet long and weighed nineteen tons, the engineers were constantly hemmed in on either side by the foundations of apartment buildings that could not be condemned because the condemnation would add additional millions to the cost and that were in constant danger of being damaged—some of them were damaged—by the blasting. Blasting a tunnel under a rapid transit line is difficult enough. Building a viaduct over the street and under the rapid transit line is less difficult—if there is thirty feet, the required clearance for streets and expressway, between the top of the asphalt of the street and the bottom of the steel of the transit line. When there isn't, the room can be created only by lifting the rapid transit line into the air—so delicately that its operation is not disturbed—by jacking it into the air, three-tenths of an inch at a time, with immense hydraulic jacks and holding it solid, until new girders of the right height can be installed, with timbers so huge that one man who lived near the Third Avenue jacking operation said, "I never knew there were trees like that in the world before." Throughout the construction of the massive superhighway, Ernie Clark says, "we were always figuring in inches and tenths of inches." In the face of such difficulties, moving a river five hundred feet, a job required where the expressway crossed the Bronx River, was a feat so insignificant that in the speeches Clark made to the delegations of engineers who came from all over the United States and Europe to hear him describe the expressway's engineering, he hardly bothered to mention it.