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

by Caro, Robert A

  made you feel you were little. And then he looked away. A horrible man. He was talking to each one of the borough presidents. He had Lyons first. He had each one of them separately. And the horrible thing was they were all listening to him. Whispering. No one was listening to us when we talked. When we were up there [speaking], they talked among themselves or with their assistants. They're having a ball. You're talking and presenting your case, and they're laughing about something else. They didn't even have the courtesy to show an interest." She had pinned her hopes on her borough president, and his promise. Therefore, Lyons' statement surprised her. He favored Moses' route, the borough president said. He had always favored it.

  Mrs. Edelstein was sitting beside Councilman Schwartz in the first row: "Everybody's poking me in the back and saying, 'Hey, Lil, what's going on here?' I said, 'I don't know.' I had reassured them—that was why they came down the way they did, because we had a possibility of winning. We had a meeting on Tuesday, and I said, 'Come down. He's with us. Show him we're behind him.' So I said to Bertha, I said, T think he's pulling a double-cross. Blast him.' She said, T can't, I'm a public official. But when you go up there, you blast him.' "

  She did. At the conclusion of her short, carefully prepared speech at the lectern at which speakers stood, the housewife looked up, pointed at Lyons and said, "As for you, Mr. Lyons, I have this to say: You've double-crossed the people."

  What happened then? "Flashbulbs. Impellitteri starts yelling, demanding that I apologize. I said I'm not apologizing." Jumping to his feet, red face redder than usual, Lyons bellowed that all he had promised the tenants was "a right to their day in court"; he had never, he said, given them any reason to believe he was on their side. Rudolph Halley then disclosed that the Board had held an executive session the day before at which Moses had been present—and that at that session Lyons had attempted to have the Board approve Moses' route secretly, so that the day in court would be meaningless. Whirling on the borough president, the Liberal Council President shouted: "Stop putting on a show!" "Demagogue!" Lyons shouted back.

  The uproar changed nothing, of course. Halley and Joseph stuck by their promise to the tenants, and their six votes kept Moses from mustering the twelve necessary to approve the maps on initial submission, but at the Board's next meeting, a simple majority of its sixteen votes would suffice. Three hundred housewives showed up at that meeting, bringing a new nickname for Moses' route—"Heartbreak Highway"—and a copy of the Bronx engineering society's detail map of the alternative. Impellitteri announced that the Board's chief engineer, Robert G. McCullough, would "study" the map. McCullough must have been a quick studier indeed. Within a few minutes, he announced that the alternate route was "unfeasible." William Chapin pointed out to the Board that great sections of the Bronx had already been torn up for other sections of the expressway and for other highways, which, the Moses Man said, had been approved by federal and state governments on the premise that they were all part of a single system—of which the Cross-Bronx Expressway, with the route drawn by Moses, was a vital

  part. If the Board refused to approve the route, he said, Washington and Albany would refuse to put any more money into the expressway—or, possibly, into the other Bronx highways. State DPW chief Tallamy had already sent Moses a letter threatening to do just that. If there was no money, the highways would remain unbuilt, and "somebody will have to put the Bronx back together." Halley accused Chapin of trying, on Moses' behalf, to "blackmail" the Board. "Demagogue!" Lyons shouted again. By a vote of 10-6, Moses' route was approved.

  "It was a farce," Lillian Roberts says. "It was like Mr. Moses runs the city."

  Understanding this, when the housewives of East Tremont fought now, it was with a sense of desperation. The poverty of their community made fighting all the harder. Years later, an acquaintance casually remarked to Lillian Edelstein that another group of housewives, Central Park West housewives, had, in a battle over expansion of the Tavern-on-the-Green parking lot in 1956, won a victory over Robert Moses—and was startled to see the eyes of the tall, dignified woman filling with tears of remembered frustration. "Do you know why?" she said bitterly. "Because they had the money for an injunction, that's why."

  Mrs. Edelstein had been informed at the very beginning of her fight that there were ample grounds for a full-scale legal, court battle, a battle which would, even if not successful in changing the expressway route, force the city to give tenants comparable new apartments. But, she was also informed, the legal fees could run to ten thousand dollars. Had a single one of the threatened tenants been a lawyer, with a personal interest in the case, legal help might have been available free, but not one was. In the Bronx of Ed Flynn and Charlie Buckley, there were no political dividends—and quite a few political disadvantages—to be reaped from opposing a project that Ed Flynn and Charlie Buckley favored. Several young attorneys did come forward with offers of legal assistance, but invariably their interest waned quickly.

  Ten thousand dollars? Lillian Edelstein had difficulty raising amounts far smaller than that. "The feeling among people was, what's the use," explains Arthur Katz. "You can't lick City Hall. And even if you could, you certainly can't lick Robert Moses. We were told by the politicians we saw that when Robert Moses wanted his way, that was it. For a while at the start—with Lyons, when he promised—they had hope. But now ..." "You'd think people would fight for their homes," says Saul Janowitz. But Mrs. Edelstein had to beg and plead to persuade families to chip in a dollar bill at a time, and each time the dollar bills were harder to come by.

  Nonetheless, a small band fought. Most of its members were businessmen who knew the mass evictions of their customers would destroy their businesses, but it was more than businessmen. Among the men and women of East Tremont were the sons and daughters of the revolutionaries who had preached socialism and Zionism in the Pale of Settlement, and on the Lower East Side, and some of them hadn't lost their faith in justice. "At that time there were a lot of lefts around here," recalls Saul Janowitz.

  But mostly, it was Lillian Edelstein who fought.

  Finding engineers willing to defy Moses, the housewife put them to work drawing maps detailed enough to prove from every engineering standpoint that their route was technically feasible. Then she put them to work obtaining hard figures: exactly how much more Moses' mile would cost than theirs. When they came up with those figures—Moses' route would require the demolition of fifty-four apartment houses, ninety one- or two-family homes and fifteen one-story "taxpayers" housing sixty stores, for a total of 159 separate buildings; condemning and demolishing them would cost more than $10,000,000 more than would be required if the road ran where they wanted it to, even without the cost of relocating 1,530 families and the loss of the real estate taxes (close to $200,000 per year at current rates) from the demolished buildings, income the city would be losing year after year forever—she undertook the harder fight of bringing those maps and figures to the attention of the public and of public officials.

  The press didn't help much. She took the maps to every daily newspaper in the city; exactly two—the World-Telegram and, of course, the Post — printed them. Only the Post displayed the figures with any prominence. She always found a sympathetic ear at the Post; Joe Kahn and Abel Silver dramatically documented the conditions in Section 3. But no other paper portrayed those conditions in any detail. The three papers that counted most in the city—the Times, the Herald Tribune and the Daily News —never mentioned them, and gave the whole Cross-Bronx Expressway fight scanty —and slanted—coverage. In attempting to enlist the support of other sections in the fight her own was making, she ran into the selfishness that Tallamy knew was one of Moses' greatest assets in New York (and that Moses of course fostered by releasing details of his projects only one section at a time). The East Tremont section of the Cross-Bronx Expressway—Section 2 —was the expressway's middle section. The eastern section—Section 3— had already been almost cleared. But there was a western section, Secti
on 1. Another 1,413 families were scheduled to be displaced there for the expressway. But Section 1 might have been in South America for all the interest it showed in her pleas for support.

  But she fought anyway. Teaching herself to type, she typed onto stencils and cranked out on the Y's mimeograph machine tens of thousands of handbills, as well as postcards and form letters to public officials. She persuaded the seven neighborhood movie theaters to show slides advertising the next rally or City Hall hearing. "They let us stand outside their lobbies for days with petitions and trying to raise money—we were grateful for that." She organized card parties—"Subscription $1." Learning that local radio stations such as WBNX were habitually in need of programs to fill up air time, she filled up that time with programs whose scripts she wrote herself.

  It was Lillian Edelstein who arranged the rallies and mass meetings to pressure public officials, who chartered buses to take East Tremont housewives down to City Hall for every official hearing on the expressway. Most difficult of all, it was she who persuaded the housewives to take those buses. The people of East Tremont, who believed as gospel that "you can't fight

  City Hall," had made one trip down to City Hall on the assurance that, if they went, they would win—and their loss had convinced them that the gospel was gospel. Trying to keep up enthusiasm, Lillian Edelstein scheduled weekly meetings at the Y but found that now, "if you got twelve tenants coming every week, you were lucky." As for spending more days traveling down to City Hall and sitting there for hours waiting for the Board of Estimate to get to the Cross-Bronx Expressway item, "that was torture," she says. "If the bus left at ten o'clock, at nine-thirty you had to go around and kick in the doors," Janowitz says. But, time after time, she kicked them. In an era in which picket lines in front of City Hall were not yet commonplace she even managed to have picket lines of middle-aged Jewish housewives marching outside City Hall, carrying signs she lettered herself at night.

  And after a while, it appeared that Lillian Edelstein's efforts were paying off. For one key public official seemed to be listening.

  During the committee's earlier interviews with members of the Board of Estimate, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., had appeared receptive; to their argument that motorists' convenience should not be put ahead of people's homes, the plump young Manhattan borough president had responded with a nod that seemed to indicate agreement, saying sincerely, "So they'll get to the Catskills twenty minutes faster." He had left the stormy public hearing early, leaving his two votes, two votes that, if added to Joseph's and Halley's, would have killed Moses' route, to be cast by his Borough Works Commissioner and key strategist, Warren Moscow. Although he had voted in favor of Moses' route, Moscow had stated before voting that although Wagner was voting for the first step toward condemnation, he would not vote for the last—authorization for the city actually to take title—until "every one" of the 1,530 families was properly relocated. Now, running hard for mayor, Wagner had Moscow put that promise in writing in several letters to ETNA and, on August 5, himself put in writing an even stronger promise. In a letter to ETNA signed by Wagner and released to the press, Wagner wrote:

  As you know, I have consistently taken the position that I would not vote for the acquisition of the property for the Cross-Bronx Expressway. I want to assure you that I will vote against any resolution before the Board of Estimate seeking to authorize acquisition of that property.

  On October 14, he made the promise in person, repeating it in essentially the same words—"I will vote against any resolution"—to more than a thousand cheering and applauding East Tremont residents packed into the assembly room at PS 44 for one of Lillian Edelstein's rallies.

  October 14, 1953, was quite a night for East Tremont. Lazarus Joseph, retiring as Comptroller, was present, and said movingly that "human values" were more important than a highway. The Democratic candidate for Joseph's position, the Bronx's own Lawrence Gerosa, agreed. Bertha Schwartz, running not for the Council this time but for a Municipal Court judgeship, moved the audience to cheers and delighted nods by reminding them of Moses' threat to resign and then slyly adding: "Well, no one is indispensable,

  you know." When Halley, Wagner's Liberal Party-backed opponent, vowed his determination to continue the "fight to save the homes," both of the two favorites for the mayoralty were firmly on record against Moses' route. "Wagner promised," Katz would recall. "There was nothing vague about that." It was no wonder that Lillian Edelstein was confident. Writing to thank Wagner, she said the tenants would like him to get together with the engineers who had drawn up the alternate route so he could see it was truly feasible. Why, certainly, Wagner replied—just as soon as the hubbub of the campaign was over. There seemed little reason to worry about a remark one of Joseph's aides had made to her as he stood beside her listening to the speeches: "Will they love you in December as they do in October?"

  Wagner may have intended to keep his promise. According to at least one of the aides familiar with his thinking at the time, he did. Meeting with a few ETNA representatives shortly after the election, he repeated it—along with his crack about the Catskills. But Wagner was a politician who dealt in realities, and as mayor he was to have a better look than as borough president at the over-all realities governing politics in New York City. No mayor who wanted to continue his political career could buck Robert Moses, and Robert Wagner badly wanted to continue his political career. Just as Moses hadn't bothered bargaining with the new mayor on his Inauguration Day over the question of reappointment to the City Planning Commission, so Moses didn't bother bargaining with him now. He gave him a direct order. In his memoirs, Moses recalls what happened when Wagner protested that he had promised East Tremont that he would move the expressway.

  ... I said, "I am sorry, Bob, but you will have to tell them you can't move it. The city is not going to make that decision. The city pays only half the cost of land. It is federal and state money that's involved and I represent these officials. If you try to move this Expressway you'll never get another nickel from us. You will have to explain that it was all a mistake."

  Wagner was not a man to move quickly. It took him almost a year to come around. But he came around.

  When, now, ETNA asked for the interview he had promised them, he was suddenly evasive. And when, finally, the housewives and storekeepers, awed, were ushered into the Mayor's office at City Hall and reminded him of his promise, Wagner, in Katz's words, "said he didn't remember saying exactly that, and he turned to someone and asked him to look it up." Recalls Lillian Edelstein: "He tried to tell me Robert Moses knows what he's doing because he's an engineer. We argued, and his aide said, 'Excuse me, Your Honor—he's not an engineer.' He was always the same —friendly, very polite, a good listener, he said he would look into it and let you know." But, says Katz, "we knew by the time we had left the office that he was not going to be supporting us." Halley and Joseph, East Tremont's allies, were gone from the Board of Estimate. Halley's replacement, Abe Stark of Brooklyn, indicated he would go along with whatever Moses and the Mayor wanted. Gerosa, of the Bronx Chamber of Commerce, "as a public official seemed less dynamic than Gerosa as a businessman," Katz was to

  write. "As far as the . . . Tenants Committee was concerned, he seemed never to have heard of them." Bertha Schwartz, a Municipal Court judge now, was no longer active in politics. Lyons would not grant them another audience. They had no one to whom they could turn.

  Proceedings dragged, however. Possibly because Wagner, in his anxiety for election, had made a rare, flat promise and Joe Kahn persisted in reminding the Post's readers of it—once reprinting prominently the letter stating "I will vote against any resolution . . . seeking to authorize acquisition of that property," in other stories conceding that while Wagner had sometimes modified that promise by stating only that he would not vote for acquisition until all tenants had been relocated, so far no tenants had been relocated. Possibly because Wagner, taking even a cursory look at the problem now, could not understand what the ten
ants could not understand: why the route couldn't be changed—at one hearing before the Board of Estimate, when Moses Man Hodgkiss was answering all questions about the possible route change by saying flatly and arrogantly, "It's impossible," the Mayor, with an unusual overtone of irritation in his normally placid tones, demanded curtly: "Why is it impossible?" (Hodgkiss replied that Moses felt "it's just impossible"; Wagner did not press the point.) Possibly because the state had temporarily run out of highway funds, so that no new contracts could be let—and Wagner therefore had both an excuse to offer the Coordinator for not speeding relocation proceedings as well as an opportunity to allow the exact wording of promises to grow a little vague in the public's mind. A key element was the attitude of the aide the Mayor had delegated to deal with the tenants, Deputy Mayor Henry Epstein, a distinguished attorney and older man whom the Mayor respected. Epstein—a former Moses ally for philosophical, not financial, reasons—now, moved by the tenants' plight, made the mistake of making his own survey of the two proposed routes. There was, he told Wagner, not the slightest rational reason why the expressway could not be moved over two blocks.

  The City Planning Commission gave the tenants the type of public hearing that might have been expected from a body controlled by a man who, if given his way, would have abolished public hearings. A large delegation had taken the day to ask the commission not to approve the Moses route—a long day. Commission chairman John J. Bennett, at that moment secretly negotiating a Title I transaction for which he needed that man's approval, refused to let even one tenant speak, saying that no public hearing was required. But there was a whole series of hearings before the Board of Estimate. Sometimes Moses was present himself. "He always looked surprisingly young and vigorous," Katz recalls. "He was very cool and detached. He didn't say anything. He had his assistants to do the talking for him. He sat and listened. He made some notes. My greatest anger at him was that he didn't seem to be affected by all this—people were getting up and telling these stories of hardship." But, despite Moses' presence, the Board kept postponing a final vote on his request to have the city authorize condemnation proceedings. After an emotional meeting with the ETNA group and several Bronx councilmen in Wagner's office at which the Mayor was visibly moved