* The subway, of course, is the Concourse line of the IND under the Grand Concourse.
The railroads are two branches of the New York Central and one of the New York,
New Haven and Hartford.
t The Pelham, Lenox-White Plains Road, Dyre Avenue, Third Avenue and Jerome
Avenue rapid transit lines.
X The Harlem River Drive, the Major Deegan, Bruckner, Sheridan and Throgs Neck
expressways, the Hutchinson River Parkway Extension and the New England Thruway.
U buiJding the huge new highways was toughs tying them together was
tougher—for the knots, the interchanges between them, required so much
ice that . at looked like immense amounts turned out to be in-
ent.
immense was the mass of swirling, intertwined lanes of links betweea
thai had to be built between and up the sides of those rocky
)-foot-high cliffs along the Harlem River that the unassuming Clark once
to an engineering convention, in his quiet way, that a
gve to be in rented to inscribe it: " "interchange" does not
adequate the construction in this area. "
j ,. roads—the Major Deegan Expressway and the
Harlem Rivet Drive—prere being built by Moses along the two banks of the Harlem. They would have to be linked up with the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, which M u building 170 feet above them to carry the express-
a a'.lev—and both the bridge and the two river-bank high Mild have to be linked as well to local streets on both sides of
the river, as well as tc the old '•. -.- Bridge which crossed the river a
few hundred feet to the north of the Hamilton. A total of twenty-two separate ramps and eig ;parate viaduct structures would be required to carry the thirty-one lanes of roadwaj Decenary for the links. Making the rise in the links shallow enough so that huge tractor-trailers could negotiate them would have been simple if there had been sufficient room to work in: just start the climb far enough away so that the rise in grade could be gradual. But there wasn't nearly enough room. Two thousand feet south of the Washington Bridge was another nineteenth-century structure, the Highbridge Aqueduct, and the massive steel and stone piers of both these structures plunged down to the river banks, so the Hamilton Bridge—and its connecting links —would have to be built between those piers, and two thousand feet was a pittance in terms of the size required. On the Manhattan side of the river, moreover, was an existing roadway resembling an ancient Roman aqueduct, rising from the river to a tunnel cut beneath 178th Street as a connection under Manhattan to the George Washington Bridge. That roadway was supported on columns one hundred feet high. Knock out one of those columns and the roadway might collapse. The Cross-Bronx Expressway would have to be fitted between them, and the expressway's width was only five feet less than the space between the columns; there was practically no room for maneuver at all in the placing of those twenty-two ramps with their thirty-one lanes. The grades could not be kept shallow; to keep them from being impossibly steep, they would have to wind around and around each other; visualizing it in his mind's eye, Clark knew that the interchanges with which Moses would be filling the air on both sides of the deep valley would be the largest bowl of concrete "spaghetti" cooked up to that time by any highway builder in history. Some of the strands in the bowl would have to be almost incredibly thin and long. Because of the space limitations, normal-sized columns could not be used; the diameter of some, in fact, could be no more than 78^2 inches. And some of these slender columns, needed to support immense weights, would have to be 100
feet high! Radically new column designs would have to be evolved, Moses' engineers saw. The ingredients in the sauce, moreover, would have to be varied, indeed; as it turned out, no two strands of spaghetti curved exactly alike, so that each piece of steel for the dozens of columns involved, for the girders supporting the roadbeds which sat atop the columns, for the beams which formed the floor of those roadbeds, for the brackets which held those beams and girders in place, had to be fabricated individually.
The Cross-Bronx was one of thirteen expressways Robert Moses rammed across New York City. Its seven miles were seven out of 130. The physical problems presented by its construction were by no means unique. Even for the "easiest" of those monster roads, those traversing relatively "open" areas of the city, there were always private homes, small apartment houses—and whole factories—which had to be picked up and moved bodily to new locations. For most of these roads, Moses had to hack paths through jungles of tenements and apartment houses, to slash aqueducts in two and push sewers aside, to lift railroads into the air or shove them underground. For one expressway, the Van Wyck, he had to hold up in the air the busiest stretch of railroad in the world, the switching yard through which thirteen tracks and sidings of the Long Island Rail Road pass over Atlantic Avenue in Jamaica—hold it up and hold it steady enough so that during the seven months it took to slide the huge expressway underneath, the 1,100 train movements which took place daily in that yard could continue uninterrupted.
None of Moses' previous feats of urban construction—immense though they had been—compared with the roads he was planning now; as is demonstrated by the cost. Highways had always cost millions of dollars. In the whole world, only a handful had cost as much as $10,000,000. These new highways would cost $10,000,000 per mile. One mile, the most expensive mile of road ever built, cost $40,000,000. Their total cost would be computed not in tens but hundreds of millions of dollars. The total cost of the roads Robert Moses built within the borders of New York City after World War II was over two billion dollars.
The roads, of course, were not the largest elements in his transportation program. They were, in fact, in one sense only links between the water crossings he was planning to carry their users over or under the water that divided the city into boroughs.
The scale of these crossings made the mind boggle. No suspension bridge anywhere in the world would be as long (or expensive) as the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge; it would be the longest such bridge ever built, its towers so far apart that in designing them allowance had to be made for the curvature of the earth: their tops are one and five eighths inches further apart than their bases. There would be enough wire in the Verrazano's cables to circle the earth five times around at the equator or to reach halfway to the moon, enough concrete in its anchorages to pave a single-lane highway reaching
all the way from New York to Washington, and more steel in its towers— taller than seventy-story skyscrapers—and girders than was used in the construction of the Empire State Building. No underwater vehicular tunnel in the Western Hemisphere—and only one underwater vehicular tunnel anywhere in the world—would be as long as the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. The tile used to line it would have tiled 4,500 bathrooms; to ventilate it adequately against the fumes of 60,000 cars and trucks per day, air would have to be driven through huge ducts at the velocity of a Force Twelve hurricane, and the fans which drove that air would consume daily as much electricity as is used daily by a small city. Among such marvels even a huge suspension bridge like the $92,000,000 Throgs Neck—itself an engineering feat that would make most cities proud—would hardly be noticed by New York. Comparisons among public works of different types are difficult. In terms of size, however, Moses' road-building program was certainly comparable to any public works feat in history. In terms of physical difficulty, his program would dwarf them all.
Immense as were the physical obstacles in Moses' path, however, the Coordinator was equal to them.
A technological system—engineering and construction techniques and equipment—capable of solving those physical problems was already in existence. The methods and machines required to build mammoth highways even within a congested city had been perfected, even if they had never been used to the capacity Moses was planning to use them.
As for the tangle of red tape in his way—every main and cable and sewer relocati
on, for example, required approval by several city departments —that was sliced through with his customary directness. Moses' aides were under standing orders to go straight to the department head at the first sign of resistance from any underling. Most city agencies closed up tight at five o'clock—or earlier. Working weekends was unheard of. But hours and weekends meant nothing to men who knew that when their boss wanted something done, "he wanted it done—period—he didn't care how it was done." Commissioners were routed out of bed at midnight—and long after midnight—by their telephone calls. Watching a Broadway play, a commissioner would feel a tap on the shoulder, and, in the flickering darkness of the theater, would see the tall form of Arthur Hodgkiss or Bill Chapin beckoning him peremptorily to the rear of the theater. One refused to leave his seat; he found himself signing forms on his lap in the third row of a darkened theater. And if some commissioner balked at overruling an underling who had refused, say, to O.K. a Chapin-proposed sewer relocation, his secretary would soon be telling him: "Commissioner Moses is on the line—himself!" And if—as almost never happened—some commissioner remained recalcitrant, the next call his secretary would announce would probably be from the Mayor. Frustration might be piled on frustration; Moses faced them all down. After he had whipped into line behind the vast over-all expressway program—after years of effort that can only be guessed at—Mayor, Governor, Legislature, Board of Estimate, City Council, Federal Bureau of Public Roads, State DPW and
an army of city bureaucrats, after all agreements were signed and the bidding for contracts under way, inflation of unforeseen dimensions raised the bids to levels beyond the state's ability to pay its share. Painstakingly, he worked out and obtained legislative and voter approval for a $500,000,000 bond issue which allowed him to get many of the expressways under way and even to finish a few. But costs continued to soar. He had underestimated the city's share so drastically that it could not even assume those minor costs that, by law, neither state nor federal government could assume. For years the expressways lay stalled—until the Federal Interstate Highway Act of 1956 allowed the feds to pick up 90 instead of 50 percent. Working through his banking allies, Moses persuaded Congress to include in the Act—despite the fact that it would circumvent its drafters' original intent of creating a toll-free system—clauses allowing roads linked to toll bridges to be included in the system, thus making his expressways eligible. Then, through a dozen ingenious subterfuges, he persuaded the state to use some of its own highway building funds, freed by the reduction in the share of the costs it was to assume, to pick up some of the city costs. There were other minor—but irritating—inconveniences: wars, for example. The Korean conflict was a source of real irritation. Steel was the precious metal to the highway builder, and the National Production Administration was obstinately insisting that available steel should go first to the war effort. Other cities accepted the situation without protest; Moses fired off telegrams to and pulled strings in Washington. Federal officials believed they would placate him by allocating his highways well over 10 percent of all steel available for civilian use, but they didn't know their man. Moses fired his next shot on the front page of The New York Times, charging that the officials were turning civilian defense efforts into a "monstrous joke" by sabotaging construction of arterials needed "to prepare for bombing evacuation, troop and supply movements." When federal officials tried to counter his charges with facts, Moses termed their statements "gobbledygook," the Times editorialized that roads are "essential in wartime . . . [the federal decision] mustn't be the last word"—and New York's allocation was quickly increased by another 10,000 tons. Next it was copper. Another attack, another victory. Then a strike kept the copper he had been allocated in the warehouses. But he intervened—and the warehouse doors opened.
To obtain his precious rights-of-way, Moses dealt with other giant city real estate holders—insurance companies, railroads, banks, the Catholic Church—as if the city were a giant Monopoly board, shuffling properties as casually as if they were playing cards, giving the Catholic Church, for example, space for an addition to a Fordham campus in the Bronx in exchange for an easement in Queens, handing Con Ed half a square block for a new gas storage tank (complete with guarantees of Board of Estimate easements for the concomitant underground pipeline) in exchange for two hundred feet of right-of-way through a Con Ed open storage area. At Randall's Island luncheons he made himself the broker between a dozen disparate interests, reaping, always, the commission in right-of-way that he wanted. At one location
near Fordham Road, for example, the path of the Major Deegan Expressway was blocked by both a housing development being built by the Equitable Life Assurance Society and a 217-foot-tall Con Ed gas storage tank. Negotiations were stalled—until a luncheon. By dessert, in a complicated land exchange, Equitable had been served up even more land for its development, Con Ed had agreed to "rearrange its distribution facilities" to "eliminate the necessity of the tank/ : and Moses was savoring the taste not only of the necessary right-of-way but of sufficient additional land adjoining it to create a park and playground for the residents of the Equitable development.
Robert Moses didn't merely solve these "physical" problems. He gloried in solving them. A reporter who was permitted to drive around with him on one highway inspection tour saw Moses "mentally readjusting houses as though they were so many toy building blocks." One of the blocks was a three-story factory—Moses turned it around and reset it on the same plot at a different angle. Another was a church—he turned it sideways. Another was an apartment house six stories high, which—with highway officials who had flown in from all over the country watching in awe, most of them expecting the structure to collapse—was inched a hundred yards out of the Van Wyck Expressway right-of-way with the possessions of thirty-five families still inside it. It cost at least as much—and possibly more—to move the building than it would have cost to demolish it, and in later years, Moses was quite frank about why he had decided to move it. "I moved it because everybody said you couldn't do it," he would tell the author. "I'll never do that again, broke a lot of gas mains . . . That was an absolutely crazy stunt, you know." But at the recollection, a broad, genuine grin spread across Moses' face, a grin of achievement and pride. He was overflowing with pride at his construction feats. The reporter painted a picture of a man happy as he played with his toy blocks. When the limousine reached Van Cortlandt Park, the reporter wrote, Moses began chuckling over reminiscences of the attempt by "the bird lovers" to stop him from running the Major Deegan Expressway through a swamp in the park that they had wanted preserved as a bird sanctuary. They had tried to obtain an injunction, he said, "but we just filled in a little faster." During construction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Moses rented the penthouse floor of the Marguerite Hotel—an old, sedate establishment right next to the expressway's route—and used it as an office. It had two advantages: only a very few people knew of its existence, so he was interrupted by few telephone calls, and he could look down on the construction as he worked. And he spent a lot of time looking down at it, watching the cranes and derricks and earth-moving machines that looked like toys far below him moving about in the giant trench being cut through mile after mile of densely packed houses, a big black figure against the sunset in the late afternoon, like a giant gazing down on the giant road he was molding. "And I'll tell you," says one of the men who spent a lot of time at the old hotel with him, "I never saw RM look happier than he did when he was looking down out of that window."
It was not the physical problems that were the most difficult to solve, however, but the political.
A technology for solving the physical problems had been perfected, but not the methods and machinery for the creation of large-scale urban public works in a democratic society; the American system of government almost seemed designed to make such creation as difficult as possible.
It is no coincidence that, as Raymond Moley puts it, "from the pyramids of Egypt, the rebuilding of Rome after Ne
ro's fire, to the creation of the great medieval cathedrals... all great public works have been somehow associated with autocratic power." It was no accident that most of the world's great roads—ancient and modern alike—had been associated with totalitarian regimes, that it took a great Khan to build the great roads of Asia, a Darius to build the Royal Road across Asia Minor, a Hitler and a Mussolini to build the Autobahnen and autostrade of Europe, that during the four hundred years in which Rome was a republic it built relatively few major roads, its broad highways beginning to march across the known earth only after the decrees calling for their construction began to be sent forth from the Capitol by a Caesar rather than a Senate. Whether or not it is true, as Moley claims, that "pure democracy has neither the imagination, nor the energy, nor the disciplined mentality to create major improvements," it is indisputably true that it is far easier for a totalitarian regime to take the probably unpopular decision to allocate a disproportionate share of its resources to such improvements, far easier for it to mobilize the men necessary to plan and build them; the great highways of antiquity awaited the formation of regimes capable of assigning to their construction great masses of men (Rome's were built in large part by the legions who were to tramp along them); at times, the great highways of the modern age seemed to be awaiting some force capable of assigning to their planning the hundreds of engineers, architects and technicians necessary to plan them. And most important, it is far easier for a totalitarian regime to ignore the wishes of its people, for its power does not derive from the people. Under such a regime it is not necessary for masses of people to be persuaded of an improvement's worth; the persuasion of a single mind is sufficient.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 130
