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

by Caro, Robert A

  come involved in deficit-producing operations. (In that same year, the General Electric Company announced that its Urban Traffic Division had "costed out" rapid transit on auto-highway center malls and that if provision for tracks was made in the original highway design their cost would be one-tenth of providing them later. Moses' reply? "The cost of acquiring additional width and building for rapid transit would be prohibitive and hundreds of families would be dislocated.")

  Not all planners fully understood yet that if Moses' proposals were carried out, New York would become a place not for people but for cars, spread out by the hundreds of acres on monstrous parking fields, cars piled up seven stories high or more—to "whatever height they have to be"— cars that would bring their roar and the fumes of their "foul exhausts" into its every corner. But they did understand fully—by 1952 there was a general understanding among urban planners, an informed consensus—that Moses' plans made no sense unless they were supplemented by mass transportation.

  There was some applause in the press for Moses' proposals—these were the years in which he was enjoying general editorial support for a proposal to create a City Parking Authority with unprecedented power over the city's streets—and a rather remarkable lack of understanding of some of the subtleties of transportation politics. A Herald Tribune editorial said that Triborough's 1951 annual report

  ought to give every citizen of New York a bit of a thrill. Business is booming. . . . Traffic is everywhere exceeding the experts' predictions. ... If the present volume keeps up, all the bridge bonds will be retired by 1957 and all tunnel bonds by 1963. When that happens, every bridge and tunnel so successfully built and operated by the Triborough Authority will become the free and unencumbered property of the people of New York City. . . . Good work, gentlemen.

  Only the Post gave more than scant attention to the problems of the thousands of tenants being evicted for Moses' highways. While press applause was by no means as enthusiastic as it would once have been, and editorials more and more frequently expressed doubt about the city's transportation policies, they never linked those policies with the man responsible for them. There was no direct attack on Moses, no threat of any real seriousness to his power. And with that power, he laid out the new routes, obtained the state and federal commitments for them, had the blueprints drawn—started them down the road to completion.

  And in 1954 he took a further step—one that sealed the city's future.

  There was, however, a problem, a problem that could be solved only by rapprochement with his old foe, the Port of New York Authority. Vast as his resources might be, they were nowhere near as vast as his dreams. Ground was already broken for the Coliseum; he was going to have to pour $43,000,000 into that gaping hole at Columbus Circle. The Throgs Neck Bridge must get under way as soon as possible; for that span he would need $92,000,000. He had already allocated $90,000,000 to get work under way on the Long Island and Prospect expressways and the East River Drive extension up to the Triborough Bridge. Almost half the half billion was already committed. Then there were the other roads, envisioned decades before and still unbuilt. Their cost was measured now in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And the bridge which he had conceived of as the crowning glory of his career, the supreme monument to the life of Robert Moses, a bridge whose construction would take close to five years, was not yet even begun— and Moses was, after all, already sixty-five years old; who knew when time, so long on his side, might turn on him with the Narrows Crossing not yet begun? And the Narrows Crossing would (without approaches, just for the bridge structure alone) cost $345,000,000. And how about the new parks he wanted to create, the old parks he wanted to reshape? Jamaica Bay, which was to be his park masterpiece, Jamaica Bay, which was to be his creation, not merely his reworking of an Olmsted creation, Jamaica Bay, which was to be the greatest urban waterfront park in the world, was not even begun. There was so much yet to do! Even the monumental wealth of Triborough was nowhere near enough to do it. Wealth far greater was almost within his grasp. The proposal—even then in preparation in Washington— for a Federal Interstate Highway System, for which the federal government would pay 90 percent of the cost, a state only 10 percent, would make $50 billion available to construct 41,000 miles of such highways during the next ten years. Moses had been working quietly with top Eisenhower aide Sherman Adams and with General Lucius D. Clay, chairman of a key presidential committee studying highway needs, on details of the program—the scope of it, in fact, was his: $50 billion over ten years were his figures—and had succeeded in obtaining a key revision in the program: although Eisenhower was adamant that the new highways were not to be toll roads, Moses had obtained the inclusion of a clause saying they could link up with toll facilities; if he could build the bridges, the federal government would pay for the highways connecting with them. But to be eligible for inclusion in the interstate system, highways had to be interstate; they had not only to connect with highways in another state but to form with those highways a highway system interstate rather than local in character. Given the geographical location of New York City, that state could only be New Jersey—and in the portion of New Jersey closest to New York, the highway-building power was the Port Authority.

  There were additional incentives for rapprochement. Since O'Dwyer had handed it Idlewild in 1946, every ensuing confrontation between the two giant "public benefit corporations" had resulted in a Moses victory; during the reign of Impy, in fact, he had forced the Port Authority to agree

  to reserve $13,000,000 for his Mid-Manhattan Expressway as the price for permission to enlarge the Lincoln Tunnel. But the situation had changed. Wagner Junior ("For a man who's been a friend of your father's, you have ... a sense of humility, of respect") had just become mayor, and the Port Authority's chairman had been one of his father's closest friends, campaign treasurer for his 1926 senatorial race, in fact. Howard S. Cullman was as adroit as Moses at playing on the Mayor's feelings. Wagner, astute judge of men that he was, was fully aware of what Cullman was doing. "I always knew when he wanted something," the Mayor would recall years later of his fellow Yale graduate. "He'd take me to lunch at the Players Club and he'd talk about the '26 campaign and about Yale." But Wagner let him do it anyway; nothing—not even an awareness of how men used it to play on him—could lessen the "respect," and Wagner was not the man in any case to offend, or even confront, a Port Authority board that included, besides tobacco tycoon Cullman and tugboat tycoon Eugene F. Moran, banking barons S. Sloan Colt of Bankers Trust and Bayard F. Pope of Marine Midland Trust. For Austin Tobin, Wagner had little use; the Mayor's keen eye saw through his attempt to act as arrogant as Moses. ("Moses and Tobin? Oh, Moses is tougher. And smarter. Once you get away from standing at the bridge and taking in quarters, what Tobin has is that board. When I first came in, Austin used to go around calling me 'stupid.' Then I ran in to him at a party, and I said—with a smile—'Austin, you wanna get anything through, you better stop calling me "stupid." ' He never called me 'stupid' again, and Howard apologized to me for his behavior.") But the board—coupled with the "respect"—was enough. Cullman's hold over the Mayor was quickly apparent to City Hall insiders—and to Moses. Without the Mayor in his corner, the Port Authority was too big and too powerful to fight. Fighting such a foe could be not only bloody but unprofitable. Cooperation might be profitable. With Port Authority help, he would be able to get there first for the federal cash in the 1950's as he had in the 1930's. Immediately upon passage of the Interstate Highway Act, he would be able to present to Washington a proposal for a complete, unified system of highways joining, across authority bridges and tunnels, New York and New Jersey and, through New Jersey, linking up with other highways and other states, a proposal ready to go, planned, blueprinted, costed out, approved, ready for ground breaking, while the proposals of other cities were still in the talking stage, years away from even a possibility of implementation.

  Cooperation might, moreover, allow him to tap not only the federal but
the Port Authority cashbox.

  That cashbox, so long empty, was full now, thanks to the postwar traffic boom, fuller even than Triborough's; its 1953 surplus—its real surplus, not the one reported to the public—was $29,000,000; Triborough's surplus was worth $500,000,000 in new bonds; the Port Authority's was worth $700,000,000. Long on cash, moreover, the Port Authority was short on dreams. The visionaries who had created it were long gone from its councils; Julius Henry Cohen had been replaced by money men like Cullman and Colt and Pope whose eyes were brightened by the balances in

  the Authority's ledgers, not by the potentialities for improving the common weal that those balances represented. The purpose for which the Authority had been created—the development of an over-all transportation system to knit together a great port—had been lost sight of for years. Plans the Authority had aplenty, of course, but unrelated plans, plans for individual projects, joined by no link other than the fact that their construction would return the agency profit. It had more money than Moses but no more than a fraction of his creative vision. As Wagner put it, "Once you get away from . . . taking in quarters, what Tobin has is that board"—and the board's first concern was that Tobin take in more quarters each year than the year before. What Moses had after the quarters was dreams. Moses may have seen—his actions suggest he saw—an opportunity to put the Port Authority surpluses at the service of those dreams, to persuade his erstwhile rival to build first those of its planned projects that would help to realize his vision. The stakes were too high—the chance for profit in both accomplishment and power too big—not to cooperate with his old enemy.

  Sometime late in 1953 or early 1954, over luncheon at Randall's Island, he broached to the Port Authority board a plan of staggering scope. At succeeding luncheons at which Tobin represented the board, all did not go smoothly. The plan was Moses' plan—what he was proposing they build would turn out to be the bypass route around New York which he had conceived in 1930 and which he had been building in bits and pieces ever since —and he lost no opportunity to make clear that it was his plan, and that anyone who questioned any of its details didn't know what he was talking about. At one luncheon, Tobin jumped up from the table, said, "I don't have to sit here and be insulted like this," and stalked out. But, as it turned out, Tobin did have to sit still and be insulted; his boss, Cullman, persuaded by a super helping of Moses' charm that they were again the close friends they had been in the Al Smith era, ordered him to. For, if Moses had reasons to be anxious to cooperate, so did the Port Authority's businessman board.

  Having plumbed, in a ten-year series of disputes, the depths of Moses' power in Albany, the Port Authority knew that, deep though theirs ran, his ran deeper. Having attempted to get a string on Hulan Jack, the puppet borough president of Manhattan, the key borough in their plans, they had learned that all the strings were firmly in Moses' hands. Wherever they wanted to go in Manhattan, moreover, they found running along its shore, like a barricade in their path, the Henry Hudson Parkway, over which, as Park Commissioner, Moses had absolute control. They wanted to build a new bridge across the Hudson at 125th Street—such a bridge required connections with the parkway, and, for maximum effectiveness, with Moses' proposed Upper Manhattan Expressway across 125th Street and, via that expressway, with Moses' Triborough Bridge on the other side of Harlem. They wanted to double-deck the George Washington Bridge—double-decking required new connections to the parkway. Moreover, with bridge traffic already cramming the streets of Upper Manhattan near the bridge, the 75 percent increase double-decking would generate could be handled

  only by construction of a Trans-Manhattan Expressway to the Bronx— with, at its far end, a bridge link to the Cross-Bronx, and with links to the Major Deegan and Harlem River expressways running along the banks of the river far below. City and state had given Moses a veto power over all such bridges and expressways. A power struggle would be bloody. Asked years later who would have won, Wagner would tell the author with a slow smile, "It would have been a hell of a struggle—with that board." And what businessman wants blood when he can have profit? What businessman wants blood when he can end loss? Three Port Authority bridges— the Goethals, Bayonne and Outerbridge spans connecting Staten Island and New Jersey—had been losing money every year for twenty years, earning, in 1953 alone, half a million dollars less than the interest on the bonds that had been floated to build them. Only the construction of the Narrows Crossing that would connect Staten Island to the rest of the city and open it up to large-scale traffic would turn those money losers into money makers. And Moses, thanks to his takeover of the Tunnel Authority, held sole legislative authorization to build the crossing.

  Triborough's surpluses were, moreover, not the only surpluses being eyed by politicians. The pressure on the Port Authority to aid mass transit was, in fact, even greater than the pressure on Moses, because the five near-bankrupt railroads whose lines ended at the Hudson were pleading for rail connections across the river, and because the Port Authority's refusal to spend money on such connections was weakened by its original legislative mandate, which clearly envisioned it doing so. The New Jersey Legislature was, in fact, even then in the process of establishing a Metropolitan Rapid Transit Commission, with a prestigious board of its own, and the Legislature had pointedly given the MRTC the responsibility of producing an "over-all coordinated plan for transportation." The Port Authority had to get its surpluses committed—and it had to get them committed fast. Doing so was difficult on the basis of individual projects. A far-reaching road and bridge program would obviously be easier.

  Lastly, the Port Authority saw, as Moses saw, that, in the broadest view, they had an identity of interest. In the terms used by Dun and Brad-street—the terms in which the Port Authority board and Austin Tobin thought—"the success of toll facilities ... is largely dependent upon the adequacy and convenience of the approaches and connecting highways. Thus, like the ever widening ripples from a stone dropped in the water, every improvement in this system of highways, even at some distance from the . . . facilities, is likely to increase to some extent the traffic on those facilities." A huge new metropolitan region highway network would increase traffic on all bridges and tunnels, theirs as well as Moses'. And such a network could be obtained most easily by—probably, given the immensity of its cost, only by—making it part of the Interstate Highway System, and it could most easily—perhaps only—become part of that system through cooperation. In February 1954, the Port Authority agreed to work with Triborough on a "Joint Study of Arterial Facilities," and on January 16, 1955, the results— sixty-two pages long, hard-bound, four-color, glossy paper, summed up

  by Moses, who wrote its introduction and whose name, not by coincidence, was listed first among its sponsors—were released to the press.

  The "Joint Study" announced that the two authorities "recommend and are prepared to proceed" immediately with three "bridge projects": building the Throgs Neck and Verrazano and double-decking the George Washington. It laid out a system of new arterial highways extending to and from these bridges: a "Bergen County Expressway" on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge and a depressed "Trans-Manhattan Expressway" (really a westward extension of the Cross-Bronx Expressway) on the New York side; a "Clearview Expressway" on the south or Queens side of the Throgs Neck Bridge and a "Throgs Neck Expressway" and "Cross-Bronx Expressway [Eastern] Extension" on the north or Bronx side; a "Clove Lakes Expressway" on the Staten Island side of the Narrows Bridge to link it up with the Goethals and Bayonne spans, and a "Seventh Avenue Expressway," really an extension of the Gowanus Parkway (which was itself now incorporated into the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway), on the Brooklyn side. It recommended that these roads be built immediately with federal and state funds, along with the long-discussed "Mid-Manhattan Elevated Expressway" linking the Lincoln and Queens-Midtown tunnels and the long-discussed "Lower Manhattan Expressway" linking the Holland Tunnel with the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges. And it recommended for "
future construction" a vast new system of expressways across every borough of the city and stretching out into the suburbs, some that Moses had advocated previously and some that he had only recently envisioned: in Queens, a "Long Island," "Ridgewood-Maspeth" and "Nassau"; in the Bronx, a "Sheridan" and "Bruckner"; in Brooklyn, a "Bushwick," "Prospect" and "Cross-Brooklyn"; in Staten Island, a "West Shore," "Richmond" and "Willowbrook"; and, finally, an "Upper Manhattan Expressway" that would cross the island "in the vicinity of 125th Street" to link the Triborough Bridge on the island's east shore with another bridge, a "Hudson River Bridge," which would touch down at 125th Street on the island's west shore, consideration • of which should be "deferred until the George Washington Bridge, Narrows Bridge and Throgs Neck Bridge projects have been completed and the traffic patterns at that time can be studied."