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

by Caro, Robert A

  The "Joint Program" was nothing more nor less than a business arrangement, with the businessman who could bring to the new partnership the most of the crucial material—power—getting the most out of it. The arrangements for the Narrows Bridge are one proof of this. Moses did not have the money to build the bridge that he envisioned as his supreme monument. But he had the power to build it. The Port Authority was as anxious as Moses to see the Narrows Bridge built, and the Port Authority had the money to build it. But it did not have the power. So under the "Joint Program," the Port Authority agreed to pay for the construction of the bridge— under a contract which said that although the Port Authority would pay for it, the Authority would have nothing else to say about it. The Triborough Authority would lease the great span from the Port Authority, operate it, maintain it and control it absolutely—and would have the right to buy it as

  soon as it had accumulated enough cash to do so. Moses would, in other words, be building the bridge with his erstwhile rival's money—which would leave him with the money to build another bridge, the Throgs Neck. To get the Narrows Bridge built, moreover, the Port Authority had to give up another bridge that it had been anxious to build; it had to allocate for the Narrows span the money it had been planning to spend on the 125th Street span, and formally agree to "defer" that span indefinitely.

  The "business" basis for the Joint Program is demonstrated more forcefully still by the program as a whole. As a result of the construction of the Narrows Bridge, use of the Port Authority's three Staten Island spans increased 172 percent—an increase that in terms of tolls collected came, in 1970, to about $5,500,000 per year. As a result of the double-decking of the George Washington Bridge, use of that bridge increased 75 percent—an increase that in terms of tolls collected came, in 1970, to about $11,000,000 per year. The Port Authority's profit from the Joint Program in hard cash was thus about $16,500,000 per year. By 1970, Triborough was collecting $11,000,000 annually in tolls on the Verrazano Bridge, $7,500,000 on the Throgs Neck Bridge—a hard cash profit of $18,500,000 per year. Given the added assets of power that Moses put into the partnership, both parties came out just about even. The two giant authorities were dividing the potential profits from the city's traffic as if congestion were a large and succulent pie. And Moses, who got the slice he wanted, was ecstatic. Talking to a reporter about the Narrows Bridge just before the Joint Program was released, he was again the young man "burning with ideas," unable to contain his enthusiasm. Unable to sit still, striding around his office with smiles breaking through the studiedly aloof mask he habitually wore now, forgetting to fold his arms and gesturing enthusiastically, he told the reporter that at last, after so many years, the Narrows Crossing is no longer "an academic dream."

  "There's going to be a bridge pretty soon—the bridge of my dreams," he said. "It's going to be the most important single piece of arterial construction in the world. It will be the longest suspension bridge in the world, and the tallest. ... It will be the biggest bridge, the highest bridge, and the bridge with the greatest clearance. It's all superlatives when you talk about this bridge . . ."

  Although he didn't talk to reporters about them, Moses had additional reasons for elation. The 1955 deal between the Port and Triborough authorities sealed, perhaps for centuries, the future of New York and its suburbs. And it sealed the future on his terms.

  In the background behind Moses marched a mighty division: the giant automobile manufacturers out of Detroit, the giant aluminum combines, the steel producers, the rubber producers, fifty oil companies, trucking firms in the hundreds, highway contractors in the thousands, consulting engineers, labor union leaders, auto dealers, tire dealers, petroleum dealers, rank upon rank of state highway department officials, Bureau of Public Roads bureaucrats,

  congressmen, senators—all the selfish interests whom author Helen Leavitt was to label "The Highwaymen." That coalition was always behind him; it was no accident that he was the recipient in 1953 of a $25,000 award from the General Motors Corporation for the best essay in a nationwide contest on "How to Plan and Pay for Better Highways," that some of Triborough's most lucrative franchises were held by oil companies, that the three automotive giants would later plow tens of millions of dollars into his World's Fair at a time when other major companies were shying away from it. In the sense that he was America's, and probably the world's, most vocal, effective and prestigious apologist for the automobile, that he designed highway networks not only for New York but for a dozen cities, that by his success in building expressways in the city he did more than any other single urban official to encourage more hesitant officials to launch major highway-building programs in their cities, and that, by building them to new, high standards, he did more than any other single urban official to set the early standards for urban expressway design—he was the spearhead, the cutting edge, of this Panzer division of public works. But thanks to the Joint Program, he was not forced to rely on any distant division. He was the spearhead of—he marched at the head of—his own elite local regiment. The Joint Program represented profit—profit from bonds, deposits, contracts, premiums, retainers, jobs, payoffs, bribes, grease. It enlisted behind him all those forces in the city—banks, unions, contractors, venal politicians, venal or shortsighted public officials—who put profit from public works above the public interest or the public trust. And in the New York of the mid-twentieth century, those forces could bend the city's government to their will. The Joint Program represented profit on a scale hitherto undreamed of by even the greediest among them. The highways and bridges recommended in the Joint Program represented not millions of dollars but hundreds of millions—in 1968, with some of the most expensive items in the program not yet underway, $1,817,701,607 had been spent on it.* Moses did not have to urge these men on. The Retainer Regiment followed him eagerly.

  And the regiment marched in lockstep. The incentives offered to it by the Joint Program insured against the slightest break in its ranks. With the release of the over-all program for the metropolitan region, protests from the ranks no longer concerned him. He could simply threaten, as he did again and again in the years to come, that if any part of the program was eliminated or even altered in any way whatsoever, he would see to it—by withdrawing from the program his Triborough Authority funds or his influence in Albany and Washington—that the entire program would be discarded. A borough president might be allowed to oppose a neighborhood-wrecking highway in public but in private, where it counted, he could

  * Moses and Triborough PR men referred to the study recommendations as a "$600,000,000 program"—although the cost of the major projects listed came alone to $740,000,000. The $740,000,000 figure may be discarded as safely as the $600,000,000 figure, however; none of the individual cost estimates bore more than a passing relationship to reality.

  not take the action that would have meant genuine opposition: the invocation in Board of Estimate executive session of his veto power over projects in his own borough. John Cashmore might publicly assail Moses' plan to run a twelve-lane approach to the Narrows Bridge through the heart of Bay Ridge instead of on a more logical route along the shore, but he had to privately okay Moses' route to the other members of the "Borough Presidents' Union." If he did not do so, Moses made clear, there would be no Narrows Bridge—and no $345,000,000 in bonds and contracts. Moses' technique may have been a bluff, but officials who remembered how he had once canceled $23,000,000 worth of projects in the Bronx because Jimmy Lyons balked at the Bruckner Expressway had too much at stake to call it. Occasionally—very occasionally—a public official might shy away from a politically dangerous proposal, but whether he was a borough president, a Mayor or a Governor, he was quickly reined back into line. Into his office would pour the phone calls from the other members of the regiment, the phone calls that symbolized the behind-the-scenes, subtle, selfish pressure that spelled power in New York City. After the release of the Joint Program, the city didn't have a chance of rejecting the deal that had be
en arranged. And that deal, worked out by this lover of the bridge and the highway, meant that the city would, for long years to come, build bridges and highways—and nothing else.

  In January 1955, the two authorities had a combined immediate fund-raising capacity of about a billion and a quarter dollars.

  A billion and a quarter dollars could have built a wonderful mass transportation system for New York and its suburbs. Triborough's share alone—the close to $500,000,000 that could have been raised from the sale of revenue bonds backed by its annual surpluses—would in 1955 have been more than enough to completely modernize the desperate Long Island Rail Road, giving it sleek, gleaming cars, new, powerful modern locomotives much faster than the old ones—and straighter tracks so that those locomotives could attain the speeds they were capable of. Triborough's share would, in 1955, also have been more than enough to build atop the tracks at central locations in Queens and Nassau County multilevel parking garages so that thousands of commuters could drive to them, park and simply take an elevator down to their trains, and in still sparsely developed Suffolk County to acquire sufficient land for, and to build at a number of central locations, entire huge modern commuter parking terminals. Triborough's share would have been more than enough to build not only new modern switching yards so that passengers would no longer be forced to change trains at Jamaica, but a new East Side LIRR terminal in Manhattan. It would have been enough also—especially if right-of-way was obtained along the median strip of the Long Island Expressway—to build a whole new rapid transit line to supplement the three existing Long Island Rail Road lines, a line with tracks so straight that trains could speed passengers

  into and out of the city at eighty miles per hour. It would have been more than enough, in short, to build what would in effect have been a whole new Long Island Rail Road, a modern railroad capable of meeting the mass transportation needs of a modern metropolitan area, and of attracting to mass transportation enough highway users to go a long way to solving the area's highway needs as well. The cost of such a system—impossibly expensive in 1974—would, in 1955, have been not $500,000,000 but $200,000,000.

  The Port Authority's share alone—more than $700,000,000—would have been more than enough to build a modern trans-Hudson rail loop that would connect New Jersey and Manhattan via two new under-river tunnels, one at the Battery and one at Fifty-ninth Street, and would provide transfer stations to all the New Jersey railroads and all major New Jersey highways in the area, speeding 140,000 commuters, shoppers and theater-goers per day not just into Manhattan but to wherever in those Manhattan business and commercial districts they wanted to go—there would be stops at Cedar, Canal, Houston, Eighth, Fourteenth and other streets all the way north to Columbus Circle—and removing tens of thousands of cars from New Jersey highways, the trans-Hudson vehicular tunnels, the West Side Highway and Manhattan streets, so that those commuters who still used them would have easier trips also. The cost of such a system would, in 1955, have been about $300,000,000.

  If what was left over after the completion of the Long Island Rail Road modernization and the trans-Hudson tubes—about $700,000,000— was used on the city's subway system, it would have been more than enough to build the long-proposed and desperately needed Second Avenue Subway, and to build a tunnel across the East River through which a branch of the Second Avenue line would extend out to Queens to provide adequate subway service there, and to build extensions of the existing subway lines in Queens to provide service to the hundreds of thousands of residents of eastern Queens who were miles from the nearest subway, and to extend the Nostrand Avenue Subway in Brooklyn three miles along Flatbush Avenue to a new, modern terminal that would serve the growing Mill Basin area that possessed no rapid transit facilities at all, and to construct a new plaza and grade-crossing elimination project at DeKalb Avenue that would eliminate switching delays which caused the most severe bottleneck in train service between Brooklyn and Manhattan—the total cost of these improvements in !955 came to $600,000,000. And there were other alternatives. If, instead of spending part of it in the suburbs, the two authorities devoted their total revenue-raising capacity—$1,200,000,000—to the subways instead of commuter facilities, it would have been sufficient to give the city a completely modern subway system—the total cost of a complete modernization was estimated by the Transit Authority in that year as $1,187,000,-000. (Even if only that portion of the capacity left after commuter improvements was used for subways, it might still have been sufficient to give New York a modern subway system, for during the decade following the

  Joint Proposal, the two authorities' annual revenues from tolls rose so much faster than expected—for their forecasters never understood, and therefore never took fully into account, the phenomenon of traffic generation—that their wealth far outstripped even their most optimistic expectations, and the amount available for mass transit facilities, if their total resources had been devoted to such facilities, might well have been not a billion and a quarter dollars but more than two billion dollars.) The two authorities had it in their power in 1955 to make it possible for the people of the New York metropolitan region to travel around that region quickly, cheaply and pleasantly. They had it in their power in January 1955 to change the way the region's millions lived.

  Instead, as a result of Robert Moses' Joint Program, the two authorities, with three major exceptions—Triborough's Coliseum; the Port Authority's substantial expenditures for airports, and for a i960 takeover of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad—spent their money on facilities for the automobile. Triborough spent, once the Coliseum expenditures were subtracted, 100 percent of its resources on the automobile. During the decade following the formulation of the Joint Program, Triborough spent $755,000,-000 on the bridges, tunnels and highways advocated in that study—and not a cent on anything else.

  The authority funds that the Joint Program committed to facilities for motor vehicles widened more indirectly the disparity between public investment in such facilities and public investment in mass transit that was fostered by the Program. During the following decade—1955 to 1965—federal and state governments spent on new highways in the metropolitan area— the new highways recommended in the Joint Program—about $1,200,000,-000. They spent not a cent on mass transportation. New York City's own contribution to Moses' new highways is more difficult to calculate, hidden as so much of it is—owing to Moses' wiles—under hundreds of "sewer," "street opening," "gas" and "lighting" items that bear no indication that they would not have been necessary had it not been for highway construction —but the city's expenditure for new facilities for motor vehicles almost certainly tops $500,000,000. During the decade following presentation of the Joint Program, therefore, public investment in new highways in and around New York was about $2,700,000,000. The public investment in new mass transportation facilities was a small fraction of this amount. During this decade, 439 miles of new highways were built—and not one mile of new railroad or subway. In 1974, people using subways and railroads in and around New York were still riding on tracks laid between 1904 and 1933. the last year before Robert Moses came to power in the city. Not a single mile had been built since.

  Because there were no subways or railroads into many newly developed areas, their residents could use mass transit only by first making their way to the old rail lines—often a journey in itself. More than half of all suburban "rail commuters" and "subway riders" from outlying areas of the city

  had to take a bus or car ride—often of considerable length—to the nearest subway or railroad station.

  At rush hours, the scenes at subway stations in the greatest city in history's richest and technologically most advanced civilization were incredible. At a hundred stations, the traveler arrived each morning a the head of the stairs leading down onto the loading platforms to see beneath him, overflowing them, lapping precariously full to their very edges, a sea of humanity—a sea into which the traveler had no choice but to hurl himself.

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bsp; To get inside the trains, men and women pushed and shoved like irritable animals, rushing for seats as animals rush for a food trough, for without a seat they would have to stand—body crushed against body, strangers' smells in their nostrils, strangers' breath in their faces—in a press so dense that there could exist in it neither comfort nor dignity nor manners. Writers called subway cars "cattle cars"; they said people were crammed into them "like sardines"; and such nonhuman images were apt. For the crowding in New York's subways—crowding to which hundreds of thousands of human beings were subjected day after day, year after year, for all the years of their working lives—was inhuman. Although most office workers were not due at work until nine o'clock, on any weekday morning one could see around the subway stations in the outlying areas of the city—past the chain-link fences of the giant parking lots on Woodhaven Boulevard near the giant new Lefrak City housing development in Queens, for example—long lines of men and women, during fall and winter huddling in their coats against the too early morning chill, hurrying for the stations at seven forty-five or even seven-thirty, willing to forgo a half hour or more of sleep, willing to gulp down a coffee and danish at the office instead of breakfasting at home, to avoid the worst of that degrading ordeal. By eight, it was already too late. As one observer described the scene at that hour: