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

by Caro, Robert A

  There comes a time, H. L. Mencken said, when every normal man is tempted "to spit on his hands, haul up the black flag and begin slitting throats." The LIRR's conductors were not responsible for conditions on the railroad. The commuters knew that—rationally. But the conductors were a visible symbol of the railroad's management on which the commuters could vent their frustration. Men normally rational found themselves snarling and cursing conductors, refusing to show them their tickets; as a result, men who would not have been able to conceive of themselves being arrested suddenly found themselves in that state. "Arrested!" as one reporter put it: "Portly, balding, mild-mannered, 53-year-old Seymour Cummins, district sales manager, commuter, family man. Seymour Cummins, of all people, being led off the train by two policemen, one on each arm, as his wife watched in disbelief." By 1968, the year Robert Moses left power, commuters were, as one writer put it, "so . . . surly that the conductors occasionally choose, like prudent lion tamers, not to enter the cage." One freezing evening, at Jamaica, while commuters huddled in downstairs waiting rooms because the waiting rooms near the tracks upstairs were unheated, a malfunctioning public-address system prevented them from hearing announcements of incoming

  trains. Storming upstairs in sudden senseless fury, 250 commuters began pounding on the glass walls of the announcer's booth, trying to get at the terrified occupant—they had broken the glass when police arrived to pull them away. On another freezing night, a train broke down some miles from the nearest station. Its passengers got off and began throwing rocks at it. Similar incidents occurred again and again. One evening in Penn Station— with 150 rush-hour trains running late—a fifty-eight-year-old bank employee from Bayside, enraged because a conductor would not open the doors to let him on a train that had loaded but had been standing for close to half an hour on the platform, reached through the window to the engineer's booth, grabbed something and refused to let go. And when the railroad police rushed up to pull him away, suddenly, as one police sergeant put it, "this place was wall-to-wall people, thousands of people"—pulling at the policemen, punching them. "It was a riot down there," the sergeant said. "It was actually a riot." And it was testimony to the rage to which conditions on New York's railroads could drive men.

  Actual physical violence was, of course, unusual, and therefore it is not in violence that the true toll of commuting on the Long Island Rail Road should be computed. It is in the norm—to which the violence is only occasional, violent punctuation—the norm that endures day after day, week after week, year after year, for tens of thousands of commuters (the LIRR carried 80,000 daily), that the toll of commuting should be computed.

  The true extent of this toll can perhaps be described in psychiatric terms. The chairman of the Nassau County Mental Health Board, in one of the first detailed studies of the subject, discovered a "commuter syndrome," "a mild state of chronic stress resulting from internalized rage and frustration due to the uncertainty of disrupted schedules." It was most serious in commuters who were "business executives, overly worrying, driving, ambitious and aggressive types. . . . Such a person, who preserves his valuable time by living to a tight schedule, is tremendously vulnerable, psychologically speaking, to transportation failures." But the commuter syndrome, the study found, was not present only in executives. Three out of every four commuters tested suffered from its symptoms.

  Chronically.

  But it did not take a psychiatrist to compute the toll. A layman could do it—by asking commuters in a relaxed setting—a cocktail party, perhaps— about commuting and then taking note of the contrast between the answers he gets from young men—or men recently moved to a new home on Long Island—and those he gets from older men.

  A young man might say, as twenty-six-year-old Michael Liberman of Dix Hills did one evening, "People's lives revolve around the railroad. You can spend five hours a day on it, and then you're just too tired to work." He might say, as thirty-six-year-old Allen Siegal of Roslyn did one evening, "I think we're out of our minds to do this. The trip home is worse than eight or nine hours at the office." Men who have been commuting for years, however, generally do not go into detail. Nor do they complain much. Their standard reply—one so standard that the questioner can hear it a dozen

  times in a dozen conversations—apparently sincere, is: "Oh, you get used to it after a while."

  The implications of that reply should be considered.

  "Get used to it!" Accept as part of your daily existence two or three— or more—hours sitting amid dirt, crammed against strangers, breathing foul air, sweating in summer, shivering in winter. Accept that you will be doing this for a substantial portion of every working day of your life, until you are old. "Get used to it!" One has to think about what those words, so casually uttered, really mean. One has to realize that the man uttering those words has accepted discomfort and exhaustion as a part—a substantial part—of the fabric of his life. Accepted them so completely that he no longer really thinks about them—or about the amount of his life of which they are, day by day, robbing him. We learn to tolerate intolerable conditions. The numbness that is the defense against intolerable pain has set in—so firmly that many of the victims no longer even realize that the pain is pain.

  One should listen to the wives of these men—to be more precise, the younger wives—say, as Mrs. Mary Severine of Huntington, whose husband, Louis, was general manager of advertising for the American Broadcasting Company, says: "We never plan anything during the week. There's got to be something more in life than Saturday night." Older wives do not talk much about it. After enough years, they don't complain that "there's got to be something more in life than Saturday night." They just forget that there ever was.

  And then, to comprehend the full toll of commuting, one should try to imagine—for no one has yet arrived at an objective method of measuring it—the total human cost, individual cost times 80,000, of commuting under such conditions. It may be that the cost—the total toll in human terms—is too large to be imagined. But if one makes the effort nonetheless, and obtains even a glimpse of its dimensions, one can get a glimpse of the true cost of Robert Moses' transportation policies on Long Island.

  And Long Island was not the only New York suburban railroad on the track toward chaos. It was only the first of many making that journey. When Moses had first come to power in the suburbs—in 1924—New York's suburban railroads had been in good shape. As late as 1955, when he formulated his Joint Program, most of them had still been in fair shape. By the time he left power in 1968, they were all as much of a bitter joke as the Long Island. The New Haven Railroad had in 1955 been a model of punctuality, cleanliness and profitability. In 1968, as one headline put it, on the new haven, l.i.r.r. looks good. By 1968, moreover, with the annual surplus of Moses' Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority running more than $30,-000,000 per year, every suburban railroad in the New York metropolitan area was either bankrupt or teetering on the brink.

  The massive migration to the city's outlying precincts and to the suburbs beyond had created hundreds of thousands of new commuters. Had the subways and railroads been extended into these regions and improved with the Authority funds available in 1954, they would have been used by many

  of these commuters. Had they been merely maintained at even their old levels, with their old fares—not improved, just maintained—they would at least have kept those riders they already had. But, disintegrating, they did not. After the Joint Program, the number of rides taken annually on New York's subways and commuter railroads declined by almost two million per year. Commuters by the tens and hundreds of thousands had been forced onto the highways and bridges Robert Moses had laid out under the Joint Program and had been building ever since. And it was on those highways and bridges—the creations of a single individual, public works sprung from that individual's private creative vision, financed and approved as a result of his unique political genius, driven to completion by his savage drive and unswerving will—that the effect of that single
individual's policies on the 12,000,000 individuals who lived in the New York metropolitan region was most clear.

  Those highways and bridges were awesome. The transportation network built by Robert Moses after World War II ranks with the greatest feats of urban construction in recorded history. Possibly it outranks them all. Possibly it is history's greatest feat of urban construction. The longest tunnel in the Western Hemisphere, the longest suspension bridge in the world, the largest and most complex traffic interchanges ever built—these were all merely segments of that achievement. Its over-all scale can perhaps best be grasped by a single statistic: mileage. The "urban" highways—controlled-access through roads within cities and the heavily populated surrounding suburbs —built in America during the quarter century following the Second World War dwarfed any urban highway or system of highways built in any country in the world any time in recorded history. In 1964, when Robert Moses completed his major highway building, there were completed or well under way in the New York metropolitan region 899 miles of such highways—627 built by him, many of the rest, most of which were in New Jersey, built as a result of the Joint Program he worked out with the Port Authority. No other metropolitan region in America possessed 700 miles of such highways. No other metropolitan region possessed 600 miles—or 500. Even Los Angeles, which presented itself to history as the most highway-oriented of cities— which was, in fact, not a city in the older sense in which New York was a city but a collection of suburbs whose very existence was due to highways— possessed in 1964 only 459 miles of such highways. No city in America had more than half as many miles of such highways as New York. But nothing about his roads was as awesome as the congestion on them.

  Nineteen fifty-five was also a turning point for New York and its suburbs because that was the year construction started on the Long Island Expressway.

  Long Island, that vast, empty, beautiful open area beyond the city line that Moses had looked upon in 1923, had since been covered—thanks largely to his parkways, his starving of its railroads, his initiation and encouragement of industry-excluding zoning—with a formless, unfocused

  sprawl of subdivisions, mile upon endless mile of land-gobbling, single-family, large-lot developments that were not only destroying the very assets that he prized—its openness, its spaciousness, its beautiful North Shore hills and South Shore marshes and wetlands, its ocean and bay and sound—but were replacing it with communities that were not communities, that had no "downtowns," none of the focal points that alone make meaningful community development possible and that were so spread out that a trip to anywhere—store, church, school, movie, business—generally required a car, so that the lives of its residents were eaten up by the difficulties in getting from one place to another. The construction of the expressway offered a chance to reshape the Island, to free its people from the tyranny of the automobile.

  Just laying two rapid transit tracks down the expressway's center mall would have done the job. Without them, expressway-fostered development would follow the same pattern as the development fostered previously by Moses' parkways, and for the same reasons: its users would be arriving at their exits in the evenings in cars; it would not make that much difference to them if their homes were located miles from an exit; having been driving for an hour or more, it wouldn't matter much to them if they had to drive for another fifteen or twenty minutes. They would be accustomed to driving, oriented to cars—and their homes would therefore spread out widely over the land. But men arriving on high-speed rapid transit would feel as men arriving home on the subways felt. Many would want to be able to walk home; more important, they would not be car-oriented in general; they would want to live in neighborhoods rather than subdivisions— you would therefore have, as you had in New York City, high-density development—apartment houses, private homes on small plots—in the central corridor up which the expressway was to run. (As was proven by Long Island's existing apartment-house development: concentrated almost exclusively within a block or two of major LIRR stations in communities such as Great Neck, Roslyn, Mineola, Hempstead, Rockville Centre, Free-port and Baldwin.) Higher population densities make feasible the construction of theaters and large department stores, of museums and reference libraries, and people living in or near the central corridor would therefore be able to reach these facilities—and their churches, doctors, dentists and their son's Boy Scout troop meetings—on foot or in buses (for high densities support convenient local bus service). For people living in the central corridor, it would not be necessary to get into cars every time they left the house. Automobile usage for the Island as a whole would, at a stroke, be dramatically slashed. In terms of transportation alone, building rapid transit on the Long Island Expressway would immensely improve the lives of millions of people.

  And there were other terms of improvement as well. Long Island's central corridor also contained both the Northern State Parkway and the LIRR's central line. Building the expressway would lure industry to that corridor; industry was already attracted to it because of the LIRR line. (Planners had long been urging that that lure be strengthened by improving

  the LIRR and linking its Brooklyn terminal to the New Jersey railroads, a move that would make it immensely more attractive to freight shippers; their hopes would finally be dashed by Moses' refusal to consider an alternative location for the Verrazano Bridge that would have made such a link feasible.) As industry moved to Long Island's spine, so would its workers, and there would be enough of them who wanted to live close to their jobs to further increase those densities—and the apartment houses and variety of services those densities would support. The Island, now without a focus, would be given one. Its over-all development would, at a stroke, be made more orderly: people who wanted to live in apartments or near stores or jobs or rapid transit to New York would live in the center of the Island instead of having to live like everyone else in sprawling subdivisions. People who preferred larger homesites to convenience would live farther away from the center. Densities would therefore get lower and lower the farther one moved from the center. People who wanted open space would have been able to find more of it—larger lots for their houses, more parks and woods preserved, for they would no longer be so valuable to developers; people who wanted open space, in other words, would be able to find more of it on Long Island at the same time that people who wanted a more urban type of life could have found that, too. The concentration of population down the center of the Island would preserve at least some of the Island's beauty away from the center.

  Building rapid transit on the Long Island Expressway was not only the best way to rescue Long Islanders from the automobile but the only way. The Island's transportation problem was complicated by one unblinkable geographical fact: Long Island was an island, connected by Moses to the mainland at only one end. Its other end stuck out into the Atlantic Ocean, connected to nothing. It was a cul-de-sac, a dead end. It might be a gigantic dead end—116 miles long, an average of 12 miles wide, it contained 1,404 square miles—but it was a dead end nonetheless. Manufacturers wanting to import raw materials or ship out finished products had only one way to go, and so did commuters heading for the great corporate headquarters lumped together on Manhattan Island, housewives heading for Manhattan's museums, art galleries and theaters—anyone who wanted to leave the Island for any purpose whatever. As an industrial mortgage broker put it: "You can't think east; it's got to be west. Your raw materials have to come in from the west; your finished products have to go out to the west. And the west is New York, and New York is congestion." In 1955, Long Island's population was already 6,200,000, greater than that of forty-one states. But forecasters were predicting that by 1985 the population would be at least 8,500,000. Forecasters agreed, moreover, that little of this increase would come in Brooklyn and Queens, the part of the Island within the city limits, and relatively little in western or central Nassau County—most of the land on Long Island for a distance of thirty miles out was already substantially covered with
homes. The increase was going to come in the rest of Long Island—the eighty additional miles stretching out to the east, eighty miles that were in 1955 still to surprising extent the scrub-oak and pine barrens

  and far-stretching potato fields they had been in 1923 but into which Moses was planning to lay, not only for the expressway but for extensions of the Northern and Southern State parkways, broad swaths of concrete, giant cloverleafs among the potato fields. The Regional Plan Association was predicting conservatively that the population of Nassau and Suffolk—less than a million and a half in 1955—would be more than four million in 1985. Onto Long Island's potato fields was going to be dumped a population the size of Philadelphia. Without local jobs, this population was still going to be largely dependent on Manhattan, on the west. There would not only be many more people living on Long Island; these people would have to travel much farther to their jobs. The intracounty roads—local roads, mainly north-south roads—of Long Island's two suburban counties were already clogged with their present traffic. How were they supposed to handle the traffic generated by two and a half million more people?

  And it wasn't on the north-south roads that the most serious problems were going to occur but on the roads to the great city to the west. In 1955, there were an estimated 600,000 individual car trips across the city line eastward or westward every twenty-four hours. In i960, the RPA was predicting, there would be an estimated 800,000; in 1970, an estimated 1,000,000; in 1985, the last year for which projections were made, an estimated 1,400,000. How were roads ever going to handle such traffic?