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

by Caro, Robert A

  . . . the parking lots around the Woodhaven Boulevard station are filling up rapidly as cars stream from the expressway. Buses filled to capacity pull up and disgorge their passengers. Now the subway platform is packed six deep with people waiting impassively. As the local arrives, they surge forward, merging, pushing, straining. Some clutch newspapers, but they cannot move, much less read. At Roosevelt Avenue, the express trains arriving from Jamaica, Kew Gardens and Forest Hills are jammed to the doors, but somehow more bodies squeeze inside. By eight-thirty the crowd at Woodhaven Boulevard backs up the stairs. Those in the rear files must wait for one and perhaps two locals before they can wedge themselves aboard.

  Crowded though they were, the Queens subway lines were not as crowded as the lines running down from the Bronx along the east side of Manhattan. Since shortly after World War I, the city had been promising to build a Second Avenue Subway to service those areas. Lying in the bottom drawer of the desk of a city engineer whose job dealt with subway design was a set of plans. "My father [a civil servant in the same department] gave me these plans when I came into the business" in 1929, he would tell friends. They would unroll the plans—and the friends would laugh at seeing

  they were plans for "The Second Avenue Subway." After World War II, the city, having torn down the old Second Avenue El, which serviced a portion of the same area, repeated its promise. In 1955 (in the process of tearing down the Third Avenue El, which serviced part of the same area), the city promised that construction was imminent. But in 1965, the subway would still not be built—or even begun. And the thousands of passengers who had used the two old elevated lines had to pack into the already crammed Lexington Avenue IRT line. By 1965, the average car in the southbound express, designed for an "absolute maximum" capacity of 120 passengers, was jammed during the morning rush hour with some 170 passengers, which, as one study indicated, "is just about the maximum short of suffocation."

  There were available in 1955, the year of the authorities' Joint Program, technological innovations which could have increased not only subway capacity but subway speed. Not one of any significance was instituted. The rides were as long as ever—longer, for the lack of available operating funds forced continual cutbacks in express service.

  The cars into which subway riders were crammed were cars thirty and forty years old in 1955, and due for replacement. Such replacement would have been possible with the authorities' surplus. They were not replaced— and in 1965, almost 20 percent of New York's subway cars had been in use for more than half a century. In winter, because of their ancient, malfunctioning heating systems, subway cars were cold; in the summer—particularly on the IRT, built in 1904, because in 1904, construction techniques to ventilate subway tunnels had not yet been invented—they were so swelter-ingly hot that one writer compared a ride on them to incarceration in the Black Hole of Calcutta.

  Not only were new cars not purchased; the old ones were not repaired. It was about 1956 that there was instituted on the New York City subway system, because of lack of funds, a policy of "deferred maintenance"—a phrase which, translated into practice, meant that brakes and signals and switches were inspected less frequently, that wheels were ground round to keep rides smooth less frequently, that electrical relays which should have been replaced every five years were replaced every thirty years, that the vast system was sometimes completely "out" of light bulbs to replace burnt-out signals, alcohol to keep switches from freezing, and other basic supplies.

  So superbly engineered and maintained had the system been previously (New York had once been enormously proud of its subways) that it took years for this systematic neglect to take its toll, but, every year after 1956, every criterion of subway performance—on-time runs, individual car breakdowns—disclosed that the toll was steadily mounting. By the late 1960's, the day of full reckoning had arrived: 17,070 runs had to be halted during a single eight-month period; forty-five cars were breaking down on an average day; forty trains were derailed in a single year.

  By the time Robert Moses left power, the Times could report that on a system that had for decades been called—accurately—"the safest subway in the world,"

  there have been more serious accidents ... in the last ten years than on any other major subway system in the world; in the last year, there have been more accident injuries than on any other system.

  During a single seven-month period, there were four major accidents; in one, an empty IND local—being operated from the third car because the brakes in the first two cars no longer worked—smashed into a crowded local near Roosevelt Avenue, killing two persons and injuring seventy others; in another, a clogged South Bronx catch basin—cleaning machines had not been replaced as they wore out—turned IRT tunnels into gigantic storm sewers as water cascaded down air shafts and stairways, trapping 30,000 passengers for up to three hours in subway tunnels where the temperature reached 100 degrees in a disaster in which one woman died and 150 passengers suffered heat prostration. During this same seven-month period, four separate fires in subway tunnels under the city—caused at least in part by equipment that an investigating grand jury was to call "inherently dangerous and defective"—sent thousands of "terrified, smoke-blinded passengers stumbling out into the subterranean murk to grope their way to emergency exits and reach the street above via manholes." One blaze—toll: one dead, fifty felled by smoke poisoning—went unreported for long minutes: the motorman's radio was out of order.

  Less dramatic than the injury toll—but wearing on the tens of thousands of subway riders who were never involved in a major disaster—was the daily toll imposed by calculated neglect. The floors of New York's subways were filthy, and the grime was mixed with scattered pages of newspapers, candy and gum wrappers and, for emphasis, an occasional blob of spittle or a smear of vomit that no one had yet wiped up. Subway walls were covered with verbal filth; the scenery amid which the New Yorker traveled around his city was a vast mosaic of fuck and suck and cock and cunt.

  Knowing that they could no longer rely for safety on brakes and signals, the operating authorities responsible for the subways responded to each major disaster by placing more and more of their reliance on caution; trains crept where once they could have safely speeded, and ground to a halt at the slightest possibility of danger ahead. Consequently, the time New Yorkers were forced to spend daily, shivering or sweltering on those bumpy, jolting, filthy trains, grew longer and longer. Where once the average trip from the city's outskirts to its center had been forty or forty-five minutes, now it was an hour or more. When Robert Moses came to power in New York in 1934, the city's mass transportation system was probably the best in the world. When he left power in 1968, it was quite possibly the worst.

  With money, you could buy almost anything in mid-twentieth-century New York. But you couldn't buy a decent trip to and from work. Wealthier families might move to the suburbs, but Moses' Joint Proposal of 1955 had sealed the fate of the metropolitan region's nine suburban commuter railroads. In 1955, some of those railroads were still healthy—the New Haven, profitable, clean and punctual, had just purchased scores of gleaming new

  cars; the Penn Central's Harlem and Hudson divisions were, one commentator said, "a model of how to keep 42,000 daily commuters happy"— but others were teetering precariously on the brink of financial disaster; the Long Island, the commuter line most directly in Moses' line of fire, had, in fact, been shoved over the brink; it had plunged into bankruptcy in 1949 and had been kept alive—barely alive—thereafter only by a series of state tax concessions.

  Moses' Joint Program expressways siphoned off the railroads' customers precisely as the planners had predicted. The railroads were private corporations, in existence for the sole purpose of showing a profit. To show one, they would have had to compete successfully with the public authorities that were their competitors. But while the authorities' toll-charging facilities were subsidized by hundreds of millions of dollars of connecting highways, by freedom from taxes on their hundred
s of millions of dollars of real estate and on their income, the railroads enjoyed no such subsidies, and were trapped as well by mounting labor costs, minimal to authorities operating only low-maintenance bridges and tunnels. Every railroad attempt during this decade to obtain meaningful subsidies was defeated by New York's local "highwaymen," the banks, construction unions, contractors, engineering and bonding and building-supply firms and politicians who reaped profit from Moses' highways, a coalition led by Triborough's chairman, who, as its prestigious public spokesman, on one occasion assured Congress that no subsidy was needed because "there is little need for an expansion of railroad commuter facilities in the New York metropolitan area," and, on another, when an impartial private study called a subsidy imperative, dynamited it by assuring the public that the major problem was simply that the railroads were not as efficient, prudent, practical and businesslike as the public authorities—stating: "These railroads have got to be more ingenious. . . . bailing out busted, lazy and backward private enterprises is [not] the business of government." (Moses added that mass transportation needs could be met on highways as well as on railroads. "A great deal of passenger traffic today consists of carpools," an "immeasurably more convenient" and less expensive system, he said.)

  Unable to compete with the authorities, the railroads grew poorer as their rivals grew richer. Even those which in 1955 had been showing profits, by 1959 or i960 were showing losses—bigger losses every year. By the early 1960's, those who still possessed any money in the bank were living off it just to stay alive—and were rapidly consuming the last of it. They had no alternative but to raise fares and cut back service, moves that touched off a self-defeating cycle: each fare increase and service cutback drove railroad passengers to the highways. (The Long Island Rail Road increased fares five times during ten years; after each increase, the railroad collected a million fewer fares per year.) A decade after the Joint Proposal, with millions of new potential customers, the commuter railroads were providing substantially less service: the Long Island Rail Road, which during the 1920's had run between fifty and sixty trains per hour into Manhattan, in

  1965, with Long Island's commuter population up more than 200 percent, ran between twenty and thirty.

  The service that was provided in 1965—or 1968, the year Robert Moses left power—should be chronicled in depth. Otherwise, future urban historians will dismiss oral and daily press descriptions of that service as exaggeration.

  The Long Island Rail Road, for example, was, in the words of one reporter, "the kind of train that, if smaller, would make your little boy cry if he found it under his Christmas tree." With its creaking, rickety 1900-vinta'ge coaches, it resembled the comic strip "Toonerville Trolley." Humorist Russell Baker, naming it "The Looneyville Trolley," said that it

  was nationally recognized as the worst railroad of any kind in the entire country. Railroad buffs from all over the world came to New York to look at it. A few would even have ridden on it in spite of the warnings of medical science, except that they made the mistake of going to the station when the time-table said the Long Island would be there and, therefore, could never find it.

  But if the Long Island was a joke, it was a bitter joke. Its riders laughed because, as one of them, Al Cassuto of Woodmere, put it, "What else can you do but laugh? If you don't you'll go crazy."

  Living standards on affluent Long Island were high even for America. The homes of many Long Island Rail Road commuters were large, luxurious, thickly carpeted, richly draperied, crammed with the most modern appliances for cleanliness and cooking. The vicissitudes of climate were eliminated for them not only in their homes—no county in America had so many centrally air-conditioned homes as Nassau—but in their automobiles, all of them heated, most of them air-conditioned. These automobiles—the automobiles out of which Long Islanders stepped every weekday morning to board the Long Island Rail Road—symbolized the degree to which the affluence and technological genius of America had given its people a life cushioned against physical discomfort.

  Then the train arrived, and the Long Islanders climbed aboard.

  The linoleum on the floors of the coaches into which they stepped was cracked and split, impacted with layers of grime. Paint was flaking off grimy walls. The windows, so thickly smeared with grime that you could hardly see through some of them, were filled with spider webs, and with the lacy spread of thin cracks radiating out from holes smashed in them and never repaired. Some of the holes were covered with bits of cardboard held on with tape; others gaped jaggedly.

  The seats were ripped and humped. Their springs were sprung. Their backs sagged limply backwards. Sitting in those seats meant sitting in dirt. If you rested your arm on a windowsill, your coat sleeve came away covered with dust. You sat with your feet among wads of chewed-up gum on which the spittle had long since dried, among gum and candy wrappers, sheets of newspapers, fragments of ice-cream cones and, occasionally, discarded hunks of food. It was a good idea not to let your eyes focus on the floor. You might

  see drobs of spittle, or fat bugs scuttling by your bright and shiny shoes. Yet men pushed and shoved for those seats, for those who didn't get them had to stand, and standing on the Long Island's swaying, lurching coaches wasn't easy.

  Particularly because one might have to stand for quite a long time. Even when it was running on time, the Long Island Rail Road was slow—incredibly slow. And the railroad seemed almost never to be running on time. There were days, in fact, on which, because of equipment malfunction in the LIRR's main Pennsylvania Station terminal, every Long Island train was late. There were days on which every Long Island train was hours late; some commuters couldn't remember when last they had been on time. In tabulating the number of delayed trains, the LIRR did not even bother counting those delayed less than ten minutes. Even so, the daily figures were not unremarkable. Here is one day's record:

  Trains canceled yesterday—one; commuters affected—1,000. Trains more than ten minutes late—187; total time lost—74 hours, 15 minutes; commuters affected —140,250.

  Getting a seat was not total victory. Getting an end seat was what counted. Many of the LIRR seats had been designed for three people—but they had been designed half a century before, when people were smaller. There wasn't enough room for three people. Sitting in even an end seat was indignity; it was sitting with your shoulder and thigh tight against a stranger's shoulder and thigh, pressing into him at every lurch, pushing against him while opening a newspaper or reaching into a pocket for your train ticket, surreptitiously taking advantage of shifts in his position to gain an extra quarter inch of room for your leg or arm. But sitting in the middle was indignity doubled. The person sitting there was crushed from both sides, leaned into from both sides, without room to make an unrestricted movement of any kind. "Of all the things I hated about the Long Island Rail Road," says one woman, "the worst was sitting in the middle on those seats. You'd have men pressing against you on both sides. They didn't mean anything by it. Some of them were sleeping and lying all over you. But it made me feel dirty. Standing at rush hour—it was the same thing. There'd be men leaning all over you. But being stuck in the middle on those seats was worse. There was never a time it happened that I didn't get off the train feeling dirty." It was no wonder that the first two persons to reach the three-man seats took the two end positions, and that when a third arrived, invariably the one sitting on the outside, closest to the aisle, would, instead of politely sliding over to make room for the new man on the outside, stand up and let him by to take the middle seat, careful not to look him in the eye.

  In winter, the trips were cold. Heating equipment half a century old and haphazardly maintained could not be expected to work well. Not that even modern, well-maintained equipment could have kept heated a coach in which it seemed that eveiy other window either had a hole in it or could not be shut tightly. A reporter who took a thermometer onto an LIRR train one

  winter day—not by any means the coldest day of the winter—fou
nd that the temperature aboard was 29 degrees. Men who in home and office enjoyed temperature controlled to the precise degree, had to travel between home and office huddled shivering in their coats.

  And winter was, perhaps, better than summer. The crush in the cars kept the temperature up, and in winter that was a help. In summer, it was not, and help was needed, since 70 percent of the LIRR's ancient rolling stock did not have air-conditioning equipment. Men who tried frantically to open windows—one could watch them tug on them furiously every few minutes on a long summer ride home—found them stuck fast. A reporter who took a thermometer onto a jam-packed LIRR train one summer day—not by any means the hottest day of the summer—found that the temperature aboard was 98 degrees. Men who would not have dreamed of living in a home or working in an office that was not air-conditioned, rode each day between home and office sweltering, the sweat forming in their armpits and crotches and running down their backs and legs.

  Long Island Rail Road trains did not always run late. Sometimes they did not run at all. Year by year, as already old equipment grew older, the number of trains that simply broke down on the track increased. It was no longer unusual to see a train arrive in Jamaica being pushed along by another train. The number of trains that didn't even make it out onto a track increased. By 1964, it was not unusual for the railroad to cancel ten trains per day. One train, the 7:45 a.m. from Babylon to Brooklyn, did not appear for 102 consecutive days; would-be passengers named it "the Phantom."

  Long Islanders' lives were cushioned—approximately twenty-two hours out of every twenty-four—by all the material wonders the twentieth century could provide. For those other two hours—two hours that could with accuracy have been called "Robert Moses' Two Hours," for he had made them what they were—they lived like nineteenth-century Russian peasants.