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

by Caro, Robert A

  The clockings themselves were of less significance than the fact that the Times was making them. "We learn to tolerate intolerable conditions": press and public reaction to motor-traffic congestion in New York City documents the truth of Barbara Ward's statement. It was during the early 1920's that such traffic first overwhelmed New York; in 1924 and 1925 and 1926, the public reacted with indignation and protest against the jams in which— seated in the vehicles that had promised them new freedom—they found themselves imprisoned instead. Traffic was news, big news; clockings were a

  front-page staple. By the late 1920's, however, a kind of numbness— measurable by a slackening in angry letters-to-the-editor and campaign statements by both-ears-to-the-ground politicians—was setting in. Psychologists know what happens to rats motivated by mild electric shocks or the promise of a food reward to get out of a maze when the maze is made excessively difficult to get out of; for a while, their efforts to find an escape become more and more frantic, and then they cease, the creatures becoming sullen, then listless, suffering apathetically through shock or hunger rather than making further efforts that they believe will be useless. People caught in intolerable traffic jams twice a day, day after day, week after week, month after month, began after some months to accept traffic jams as part of their lives, to become hardened to them, to suffer through them in dull and listless apathy. The press, responding to its readers' attitude, ran fewer hysterical congestion stories, gave fewer clockings. A city editor seeing a couple of reporters with their feet up on their desks on a slow Friday afternoon found other make-work than sending them out to discover how long it took to get from the Queens-Midtown Tunnel to the Lincoln Tunnel. Only in editorial columns— written, it sometimes seems, by men selected through a Darwinian process in which the vital element for survival is an instant and constant capacity for indignation and urgency—did the indignation and urgency endure. Traffic was still news, but it was no longer big news.

  The same process was repeated during the middle and late i93o's, not because a new wound had been inflicted but because the scab on the old one had been ripped off. Moses' unprecedentedly ambitious traffic devices, together with his highly publicized promises that they would solve the traffic problem (and the easing in that problem that occurred for a few months every time a new facility was opened), raised hopes; with hope, motorists dared to look again at what they were being subjected to. And when, a few months after each new facility opened, the jams began to build up again, their consciousness, newly reopened, was rubbed all the more raw. In the last two or three years of that decade, with the Triborough Bridge and the West Side Highway and the Interborough and Grand Central parkways open and congestion worse than ever, there was another howl of public anguish.

  In contrast to the Twenties, however, in the Thirties the anguish was beginning to be coupled with awareness. As new bridges jammed up without easing the jams on the old, as every lane of gleaming white concrete was filled with cars as soon as it was opened to traffic, Lewis Mumford and the Regional Plan Association were no longer lone voices crying that no number of bridges and highways could alone solve the traffic problem. Before World War II, the numbness set in again. The howls died down. Motorists sank back into apathy. But before they did, letters-to-the-editor, speeches and articles by urban planners and resolutions of civic associations revealed a greatly increased understanding that something more—something different—was needed.

  The war kept people off the roads. It made them forget the pain. And when, after gasoline and rubber rationing ended, New Yorkers took to the

  highways again, the numbness had worn off. When the pain returned, it seemed sharper than ever. Even in late 1945 and early 1946, when it was no worse than it had been in 1941, people were complaining, and editorial writers calling for "action," far louder than they had in 1941.

  After a short while, they had, in fact, more to complain about. The pain didn't only seem worse; it was worse. Postwar traffic congestion was congestion escalated to an entirely new level. The problem was so immense now that it was difficult even to comprehend its dimensions. How come to grips in one's imagination with a situation in which a mighty expressway, a gigantic superhighway of dimensions literally almost unknown to history, could be opened one month—and be filled to absolute capacity the next, in which expressways opened in 1952 were by 1955 carrying the traffic load that had been forecast for 1985, in which, in this city and metropolitan area already congested to the breaking point, every indicator of traffic— auto registrations, commuting trips per day—was increasing in more than arithmetical, in almost geometrical, progression? The press did not in general come to grips with it, at least not in its deeper implications, but it did report thoroughly on its more superficial—and more dramatic—manifestations. Traffic was news again. The Times, which had once sent its reporters over the West Side Highway so that it could tell its readers how incredibly fast it made travel, now sent its reporters onto it to report that "at a peak period of evening travel, northbound vehicles took thirty-four minutes to cover four-and-a-half miles." Editorials argued in the Times and Tribune and screamed in the News and Mirror for "Action!"—now! As for the individuals caught in this colossal traffic trap twice a day, any psychologist knows that if he turns up the voltage of the electric shock enough, the rats will be shocked out of their apathy and begin frantically scurrying back and forth through the maze again, searching desperately for a way out; newspaper stories of this period document an almost frantic search by drivers for a way out of their trap; grim U-turns in the face of oncoming traffic to avoid huge jams seen ahead (reporting on one at the Third Avenue Bridge on a hot summer Sunday, in which "hundreds of cars were backed up over a two-mile radius," the Times reported that "the snarls were intensified as motorists tried to make U-turns to get out of the jam"); frantic lane switching that drove up accident rates on all major routes; attempts to find new ways through the maze (reported The New Yorker, never one of Moses' favorite publications, anyway:

  We've become increasingly aware that the best way to avoid highway congestion is to duck the proud network of parkways in Westchester and Long Island and take to the traffic-lighted, non-cloverleaf-intersected roads of our youth. . . . What have man and Moses wrought? Answer? A boomerang).

  With the numbness not yet having had a chance to set in again and the pain, still fresh, more intense than ever, there was an upsurge in the question of how best to alleviate it. Awareness was escalating, too. Now there was general awareness among urban planners and some segments of the public that something else might be just as important as roads—might, in fact, be

  more important. By 1952, there was in at least three New York newspapers, the Times, the Tribune and the Post, at least the beginning of emphasis on the need to improve and add mass transit facilities as well as roads. There was even a beginning of the realization that the construction of highways alone might be "boomeranging," defeating its own ends, a realization Lewis Mumford was later to summarize in a 1955 series of articles in The New Yorker, "The Roaring Traffic's Boom": "The prevalent conception" is that "the main purpose of traffic is to enable a maximum number of citizens to derive all possible benefits from the use of automobiles," Mumford said. But that isn't the purpose of transportation at all. "Transportation—I blush to utter a truism now so frequently ignored—is a means and not an end. . . . Like any other tool, it must be used for some human purpose beyond the employment of the tool itself. . . ."He said that "before we cut any more chunks out of our parks to make room for more automobiles or let another highway cloverleaf unfold, we should look at the transformation that has taken place during the last thirty years in Manhattan."

  Ever since the nineteen-twenties the municipal and state authorities have been plunging blindly from one grandiose traffic scheme to another, without showing any striking understanding of the problems they were trying to solve. . . .

  For a whole generation, New York has become steadily more frustrating and tedious to move
around in, more expensive to do business in, more unsatisfactory to raise children in, and more difficult to escape from for a holiday in the country. (The subway rides grow longer and the commuting trains carry their passengers from more distant suburbs, until as much time is spent in transporting the human carcass as is gained by diminishing the work week . . . the distant dormitory areas of New York describe ever wider arcs.) By 1975 . . . it will be impossible to build enough highways to accommodate the weekend exodus, just as it is already impossible to provide enough internal traffic arteries to handle Manhattan's present congestion. . . .

  But your one-eyed specialists continue to conduct grandiose plans for highway development, as if motor transportation existed in a social vacuum, and as if New York were a mere passageway or terminal for vehicles, with no good reasons of its own for existence. To these experts, a successful solution of the traffic problem consists of building more roads, bridges and tunnels so that more motorcars may travel more quickly to more remote destinations in more chaotic communities, from which more roads will be built so that more motorists may escape from these newly soiled and clotted environments. . . . Instead of curing congestion, they widen chaos.

  ... the private motorcar [is] a method that happens to be, on the basis of the number of people it transports, by far the most wasteful of urban space. Because we have apparently decided that the private motorcar has a sacred right to go anywhere, halt anywhere, and remain anywhere as long as its owner chooses, we have neglected other means of transportation. . . . The major corrective for this crippling overspecialization is to redevelop now despised modes of circulation—public vehicles and private feet. ... An effective modern city plan would use each kind in its proper place and to its proper extent.

  Mr. Robert Moses . . . uses the word "regional planning" as a swearword, to indicate his abiding hatred of . . . comprehensive and forward-looking

  policies, just as he invokes the term "long-haired planner" to designate anyone who turns up with a proposal that does not fit into his own set of assumptions, most of them by now manifestly inadequate and badly out of date. . . . Think!

  A handful of thinkers like Mumford were even beginning to venture a revolutionary opinion: that automobiles—and highways—should be barred from certain central areas of the city, that some congested avenues and streets should, instead of having their roadways widened for cars, be closed to cars and turned into "pedestrian malls." Some, in fact, were beginning to postulate a more revolutionary opinion still: that major arterial through highways had no place in the interior of a city at all, that a city could not endure as a good place to live if they were built in any number within its borders.

  This awareness was by no means pervasive. If the Times, the Tribune and the Post were beginning to emphasize the importance of mass transit vis-a-vis highways, little of the same emphasis could be found in the city's other daily newspapers. For several of these, in fact, a frequent practice when the need for a transportation analysis was felt was to ask Moses to write it, his articles appearing in the News and Journal-American, for example. (The Journal-American was, of course, part of the Hearst chain, and in 1952 Hearst newspapers were conducting a nationwide campaign for "new and better roads.")

  But the awareness was spreading. After July 1951, when the Regional Plan Association published the results of "investigations ... to determine the amount, extent and trends of commuting ... to central New York," facts and figures were available to document the effect of two decades of neglecting mass transit facilities in favor of highways. A few months earlier, Moses, issuing a lavish four-color brochure, had boasted that in "our reports in milestones of progress . . . issued on important occasions . . . when something has happened which is worth telling about," "we rely on illustration rather than technical explanations" which "are bound to be dull, statistical [and] boring." The RPA's "Bulletin Number 77," black-and-white, was statistic-crammed—but to anyone interested in why New York's congestion was really increasing so rapidly, it was not boring but startling. The common assumption—previously held not only by Moses but by press, politicians and many urban planners—was that congestion was increasing because the population around New York was increasing at a tremendous rate, and therefore commuting into New York must be increasing at a tremendous rate. Estimates of the number of commuters had ranged from 500,000 to 1,500,000. The fact—a fact documented for the first time in Bulletin 77—was that although the population was increasing just as fast as people thought it was (the number of families in the counties surrounding New York had increased by 50 percent between 1930 and 1950), the commuting wasn't. There had been 301,000 commuters coming into the city daily in 1930; in 1950, there were 357,ooo—an increase of only 19 percent. The difference was not in the number of people coming into and out of New York every day, but in how they were coming. The number of rail commuters had actually de-

  clined, from 263,000 in 1930 to 239,000 in 1950; 38,050 persons had commuted by automobile in 1930, 118,400 persons commuted by automobile in 1950. While the number of commuters was up 19 percent, the number of automobile commuters was up 321 percent. And, the RPA statistics showed, the trend was continuing—and accelerating. The gap between use of rail and road was widening month by month. The failure to maintain existing railroad lines in a condition that would persuade even their present riders to keep using them, much less to attract new ones, the failure to construct new lines into newly developed areas, while building new highways into those areas, was driving more and more commuters off the railroad and onto the highway. The effect on the city of the widening gap could only be disastrous.

  The automobiles required to transport the equivalent of one trainload of commuters use about four acres of parking space in Manhattan, eight times the area of the Grand Central main concourse.

  Every trainload of commuters shifting to automobiles requires automobile parking space about equal to the effective parking capacity of one side of Fifth Avenue from Washington Square to Sixty-eighth Street [3 miles].

  The lesson to be gleaned from the statistics was clear even though they did not include statistics on the intracity shift in subway to automobile use, statistics that would have made the lesson even more dramatic. The trend must be reversed. Emphasis must be shifted from road building to railroad building. The lesson was scanted by most of the press—the RPA report received one-day play in most of New York's papers—but in 1954 it was repeated in more popular form by a Times series, and thereafter there was at least a general awareness of it in most of the more detailed transportation stories in the New York press. And, as in the previous decade, it sometimes seemed—from the sharp tone of letters-to-the-editor compared to editorials —that awareness was growing faster among the public than in the media supposed to educate the public or among the politicians supposed to lead the public: almost as if the people of New York and its suburbs—forced to spend hours daily being exposed to the harsh lessons of urban transportation, trapped daily in a classroom on the realities of urban transportation, a classroom in which the reality of what was being taught was worsening so fast that numbness had not yet caught up to it—were learning the lessons for themselves. Mumford was not the only person pleading with public officials to Think! Many men and women who had never opened a planning textbook in their lives were, by the early 1950's, repeating in their own words the great planner's plea. People were learning for themselves. By 1940, most urban planners had come to understand that roads were not good per se, that a highway was not an unqualified boon for mankind. By the early 1950's, much of the general public appeared to understand this, too, even if the press did not. There was general awareness of the need for a dramatic change in the region's transportation policies. Mumford, unsatisfied though he was at the rate of mobilization of public opinion ("The majority of the American people . . . remain strangely quiet and passive about the matters

  that should concern them most"), saw hope now that Moses' "irrational" plans could be changed. Pointing out that "th
e things that spoil life in New York and its environs were all made by men, and can be changed by men as soon as they are willing to change their minds," he now saw hope that men would do so.

  But for New York, only one mind mattered, and that mind would not change.

  As Moses' first postwar mileage had been opening, he had been as confident of the wisdom of his policies as he had been when he announced them in 1945. "Today we are well underway to a solution of the traffic problem," he had boasted in 1948. Now, in 1954, with considerable new mileage open, the problems were worse than ever, but the confidence was diminished not a whit. All that was necessary, he said—and believed —was more of the same.

  The roads he had been building had all been conceived by him in 1930. Now, for the first time, he expanded his highway plan. New arterials should be built paralleling old arterials already built, he announced—a Sheridan paralleling the Major Deegan and Bronx River and Harlem River and Hutchinson River and Henry Hudson that already ran down through the Bronx, a Nassau paralleling the Van Wyck southeast through Queens. Arterials should be built into sections of the city into which no arterials now ran, a Prospect and Cross-Brooklyn Expressway into the teeming heart of that borough, for example. And arterials should reach out from the city into its suburbs, a Long Island Expressway all the way out deep into still-rural Suffolk, for example. And, of course, the "series of east and west crossings in Manhattan" which he had so long advocated should be begun; it was during this period that he was forcing the Port Authority to start the Lincoln Tunnel link that would give him a wedge on the Mid-Manhattan Crossing along Thirtieth Street. As to what to do with the cars when they got to the city, he had no doubt that his proposed multistory, "off-street" parking garages—"two, three, four stories or whatever height they have to be"—would solve that problem; the "success" of the first "publicly financed" off-street garage in the city's history, Triborough's seven-story Battery Park Garage—it was filled to capacity almost from the day it opened —proved that. "When we get the expressways . . . you will see how they will take care of most of this through or cross-town traffic," he said in a lengthy 1952 question-and-answer session with U. S. News & World Report, which identified him as the "recognized authority" on the future of America's cities. ("Q. But in city streets ... are off-street garages the answer? A. Yes . . .") As for the use of city money for mass transit construction, he fought such proposals to their death, and when, in 1952, some state legislators suggested that Triborough take over the city's subways and use its surplus to improve them, Moses rushed back from a Virgin Islands vacation to declare that there was no surplus because "all our future revenues are pledged to our bondholders"—who, he said, would never permit the Authority to be-