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

by Caro, Robert A

  Part of Moses' solution to congestion on his biggest road was to make it bigger. By 1962, while he was presiding over opening ceremonies on stretches of the expressway in Nassau County, Andrews & Clark were frantically redesigning stretches of the expressway that had been opened in Queens just a few years before. Even before its eastern stretches were laid down, its western stretches were being hacked up. In 1966, while state highway crews were building it deep into Suffolk County at its eastern end, other crews were rebuilding it at its western end: construction of a single, monster interchange—its cost $75,000,000, more than all the highways Moses had built before the war—at the most congested spot on the expressway, its intersection with the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, got under way in that year. "My God," Lee Koppelman told a friend one night in 1966, "they shouldn't be doing that. If they've got $75,000,000, they should be spending that $75,000,-000 on bus service—building a bus lane and parking areas where commuters could pick up the buses. Building that interchange isn't going to change a damn thing. If you eliminate one interchange problem, all you're going to be doing is shifting the bottleneck east of the interchange, further out in Queens. So then they'll probably decide to widen it east of the interchange

  in Queens. And all that'll do is shift the bottleneck east to where the widening stops." Koppelman was right. By 1970, on a five-mile stretch directly to the east of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway interchange, work had begun on carving four additional lanes of expressway out of the grass slopes bordering the expressway. Final blueprints were being prepared for a similar "widening" for the next five-mile stretch to the east—and for providing still more capacity by cantilevering service roads out over the highway.

  The continual construction made the traffic jams even worse while it was going on. And, the men planning the highway knew, it would be going on for decades. Not only was the expressway going to have to be widened deep into Suffolk; at every point where it intersects with another major road —Moses' Van Wyck and Clearview expressways or Grand Central, Cross Island and Northern State parkways, for example—giant new interchanges are going to have to be built. Although the public didn't know it, "improvements" under design in 1974 would not be completed until the end of the century "at the earliest." Men who had been suffering for years on Moses' road, who had been trapped every working day of their lives in those terrible, life-eroding traffic jams, would be freed from that trap only by growing too old to work.

  Long Island planners could tell when the Throgs Neck Bridge opened by their charts of traffic volume on the Island's highways: with the opening, the volume, climbing steadily month by month anyway, made a sudden, sharp jump. The bridge itself was jammed, and the traffic using it did not mean less traffic on the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge paralleling it across Long Island Sound two miles to the west. For two years, there was a substantial decrease in Bronx-Whitestone traffic, and then, inexorably, it began, even while traffic on the new bridge to the east kept climbing, to creep back to its former levels. Moses' solution: build another bridge across Long Island Sound to the east, a huge "Sound Crossing" between Oyster Bay and Rye. Presumably, when that bridge was completed, there would be another bridge to its east—and then another, and another. Moses would, if he had his way, cover the Sound with bridges as the Tiber was covered with bridges in Rome.

  (The Throgs Neck Bridge at least was two miles away from the Bronx-Whitestone. On the other, south, side of Long Island, Moses was building a "Captree Causeway"—a name later changed to "Robert Moses Causeway"— connecting Captree, the easternmost end of the Jones Beach barrier beach, with the Fire Island State Park—whose name would later be changed to "Robert Moses State Park." Traffic on that bridge was, immediately upon its opening, so intolerable that within two years Moses had begun building another bridge parallel and next to it—and exactly sixty-eight feet away.)

  With the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which within two years of its opening in 1964 was carrying 21,000,000 cars per year, a traffic level Moses had not believed it would attain until 1980, traffic vol-

  ume on Long Island experienced not a jump but a huge surge. With congestion reaching new levels, Moses said the solution was to build a huge new Cross-Brooklyn Expressway, starting near the point where the bridge touched down on Long Island. For that, of course, he needed state, city and federal approval. But no one's approval was needed to enable him to do what he wanted on the bridge itself. He built on it a second deck that would almost double its capacity.

  Robert Moses was, after all, mortal, Lee Koppelman kept reminding himself —"even if sometimes it didn't seem that way"—and, one day, either death or old age would end Moses' decades of power. And, Koppelman believed, it would not take long after that day for bus service to be instituted on all Long Island's major highways, not only on its expressways but on 200 miles of parkways.

  The young planner cherished that belief until, driving along the old Wantagh Parkway one day, he happened to notice something he had never noticed before.

  "I was coming up to one bridge across the parkway," he would recall, "and just as I was about to go under it, I noticed how low it seemed to be. I took a good look at the next bridge, and goddammit, it was low! I pulled over and measured it with my arm at the curb, and I could see that it wasn't any fourteen feet high. At the next exit, I got off and found a store and bought a yardstick and got back on the parkway and measured the next bridge. At the curb it was eleven feet high. And I didn't have to go and measure all the other bridges. I knew right then what I was going to find. I knew right then what the old son of a gun had done. He had built the bridges so low that buses couldn't use the parkways!"

  The Wantagh Parkway had, of course, never been rebuilt since it had opened in 1929. Most of Moses' other parkways were being rebuilt to handle the greatly increased traffic loads on them. As he drove back to his office, Koppelman was hoping that the rebuilt bridges, the overpasses that carried intersecting local roads over the parkways, would be higher. But, at the office, when he pulled out the design drawings he had been sent by the Long Island State Park Commission, he saw at a glance that his hopes had been false. The new bridges were several feet higher in the center—over the two "fast" lanes, one in each direction, of the expanded six-lane parkways—than the original bridges, because, as Koppelman was later to realize, Moses didn't want unadorned straight overpasses over his beautiful early roads, and curving an overpass over a wider expanse necessitated greater clearance beneath it. But the clearance at the curb was precisely the same beneath the new overpasses as beneath the old: eleven feet.

  Most buses were about twelve feet high. They could not use the curb lane or, because the design of many overpasses kept the rise in clearance

  toward the center of the road very gradual, the lane next to it. They could in theory use the center lane, the "fast" lane in each direction, but not in practice: no practical bus-fleet operator would dare take the risk of hours of delay that would be involved in routing his buses down a road in which only one lane was available for their use. If an accident or an overheated car or repaving—or any of the hundred other causes that blocked lanes— blocked that one lane, any buses on the road would be trapped at the next overpass until it was opened again. In practice, no practical bus operator would run his buses on any road on which the clearance at the curb wasn't at least fourteen feet. "I sat there looking at that goddamned drawing—I'll never forget it," Koppelman says. "And I realized that the old son of a gun had made sure that buses would never be able to use his goddamned parkways."

  "The building of the bridges is an example of his foresight and vision," Sid Shapiro says in his quiet way. "I've often been astonished myself that he was so right in those days, and not only so right but so indispensably right. Mr. Moses had an instinctive feeling that someday politicians would try to put buses on the parkways, and that would break down the whole parkway concept—and he used to say to us fellows, 'Let's design the bridges so the clearance is all right for passenger cars b
ut not for anything else.' All the original bridges were designed with nine feet of clearance at the curb. Later we went up to eleven feet, but that has the same effect. Well, yes, buses could use the center lane, but that's an impractical thing. No bus would do that. Mr. Moses did this because he knew that something might happen after he was dead and gone. He wrote legislation [clauses prohibiting the use of parkways by "buses or other commercial vehicles"'] but he knew you could change the legislation. You can't change a bridge after it's up. And the result of this is that a bus from New York couldn't use the parkways if we wanted it to." A quiet smile broke across Shapiro's seamed face, and he almost laughed as a pleasant recollection crossed his mind. "You know," he said, "we've had cases where buses mistakenly got on a parkway—we had this on the Grand Central Parkway several times. I remember—buses from a foreign state, I suppose, and the first bridge stopped them dead. One had its roof rolled up like the top of a sardine can."

  "Foresight and vision." Apt. if the vision was one man's private vision. Building parkway bridges low was indeed an example of Moses' foresight in trying to keep intact his original concept, the bright and shining dream he had dreamed in 1924—of roads that would be not just roads but works of art. that would be "ribbon parks" for "pleasure driving." Building the parkway bridges low was indeed an example of Moses' foresight in trying to keep intact his original concept of the area through which those roads ran—lovely Long Island—as a serene and sparsely populated suburban setting, a home for the relatively small number of people wealthy enough to live there, a playground for the larger but still restricted number of people wealthy enough to drive there and play in the parks he had built there.

  The vision was no longer relevant. It no longer bore any relation to reality. Reality was no longer a Long Island that was a sparsely populated playground, but the residence of millions of people. Moses' parkways now had to perform a function, getting tens of thousands of commuters to and from work. The Southern State Parkway—4,000,000 cars in 1940, 20,000,-000 in 1950, 26,000,000 in 1955, 30,000,000 in 1957—was the most heavily traveled highway in the entire world—and probably the most congested: engineers clocking traffic in 1967 found that on the first five-mile stretch of road, from the toll booths in Valley Stream out to Lynbrook, the "speed range" at which traffic moved during a rush hour never, for more than the briefest of periods, got above sixteen miles per hour—and often was as low as three miles per hour, about as fast as the people driving could have walked. The parkways had a different function now from that of the great open road on which Moses had envisioned cars breezing along. But Moses still had absolute control over parkways. And whether or not that vision had any relation to reality, he used that control to insure that it would endure far beyond his own lifetime, long "after he was dead and gone." Thanks to his foresight, it was—as late as 1974, decades after the reality had changed—his vision and not reality that governed the shaping of the parkways, and that therefore prevailed over that portion of the lives of its users that they spent on it.

  For how long would it continue to do so?

  Well, Sid Shapiro had been overstating the case, of course, when he said, "You can't change a bridge after it's up" and that therefore buses would never be able to use the Long Island parkways. A bridge can be rebuilt. When, in 1969, a five-mile stretch of the Northern State Parkway was rebuilt, in fact, it was rebuilt with bridges with a fourteen-foot clearance because doing so would make the job eligible for federal funds, and, as Shapiro put it, "on that section, you have the Long Island Expressway right next to it, and buses wouldn't want to use a parkway where they have an expressway, so it doesn't really matter."

  But that was one stretch of parkway out of 200 miles of parkway on Long Island. And on the rest of those 200 miles, it would not be true that "it doesn't really matter"—and Shapiro said, sitting there complacently on the terrace in the bright sun, there were no plans in existence to rebuild bridges along the rest of those 200 miles, and he felt that probably they would never be rebuilt. Asked what would happen if bus operators did decide that they wanted to use the Northern State instead of the expressway, he said, "Well, they can use it for a five-mile section. But then they'll have to get off."

  Never? Shapiro was probably overstating the case. Sometime in the future, surely, the Long Island State Park Commission would be in the hands of men with a different philosophy from that of Robert Moses and Sid Shapiro, and they would want the bridges rebuilt. Maybe not in the near future, for Shapiro's successors as the commission's top administrators were

  already hand-picked and groomed, but sometime in the future. Well, Sid Shapiro said, you see, those bridges cost about $750,000 per bridge. "And," Sid Shapiro said slowly, in his quiet, sly voice, "there are 204 bridges on those parkways, you know." Robert Moses had condemned to monstrous traffic jams not merely the present generation of users of his parkways but generations to come.

  He had condemned all Long Islanders—for generations to come.

  In the 1970's, after the fall of Robert Moses, public officials would be talking about modernizing the existing mass transportation facilities on Long Island and building new ones. Handsome four-color brochures—designed to win voter approval for the bond issues in the billions that would be required to finance these improvements—assured voters that the expense would, if not end, at least substantially alleviate traffic congestion on Long Island.

  But building them wasn't going to be that easy.

  Moses had been asked to reserve space on the Van Wyck Expressway. Reserving it would, at the time, have cost only $1,750,000. And if Moses had spent that money, it would now, in the 1970's, be possible to construct all (he high-speed rail links involved for less than $10,000,000.

  In 1968, with congestion on the Van Wyck and at Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy) Airport even more intolerable than F. Dodd McHugh had predicted, no sooner was Moses out of power than the decision was taken to build a rapid transit line to the airport. But because Moses had not reserved space, that line would now cost—not in official estimates but in truth—$300,-000,000. And even for that amount, it would not be possible to obtain many of the advantages McHugh had envisioned. The cost could be kept down to $300,000,000 only by eliminating from the plans the subway linkup between downtown Brooklyn and central and northern Queens, as well as all local service that would have increased the rapid transit capacity of the Queens-to-Manhattan line; the astronomical cost of local stations made it impossible even to contemplate including them. Moses' refusal to listen to McHugh had probably deprived New York of those advantages forever.

  The cost of the airport link even in its stripped-down version was so high that no man could say with any certainty when it would be built. The Official charged with building it announced in 1968 that construction would be completed by 1071. In i960, he announced that construction would be completed by 1972. In 1970, he admitted that, as the Times put it, "his agency had no funds available" to build it. "When asked when the line would be completed, he said that he hoped it would be built in 1973, but that it would be safer to say 1074." It would have been safer—and more accurate —to say that he didn't have any idea when it would be built, for that was m fact the case. The money to begin construction was still not in hand.

  It was possible to predict with some certainty that the airport rapid transit line would, eventually, be built—if for no other reason than that the cost

  was within the ability of the Port Authority to pay, and the Port Authority, losing money because of traffic congestion (travelers' eagerness to avoid the airport was considered the primary reason for a year-by-year decline in patronage beginning in 1969), could be expected to come up with the money if no one else would. It was not possible to make such a prediction about the other desperately needed Long Island mass transportation improvements, projects that could have been built with such relative ease years before, if, at that time, Moses had consented to reserve space for them or to allow Triborough Authority funds to be spent on them.


  The increase in the cost of the land needed for parking areas and terminals of new dimensions had added tens of millions of dollars to the cost of modernizing the Long Island Rail Road. The further improvements made necessary in the intervening years if the railroad was to attract new passengers from the mass of automobile users on Long Island had added tens of millions of dollars more. And inflation had caused these additional costs to multiply. In 1954, when, before the imposition of the Joint Program, Triborough funds for the modernization had been available, the modernization would have cost $200,000,000. In 1970, after Moses' fall, the cost was $1,500,000,000. While public officials talked vaguely about that sum being raised by a combination of bond issues and contributions from new mass transit allocations that would hopefully be made someday by the federal government, in fact money that would allow expenditures of that dimension on a single rail line was nowhere in sight on Capitol Hill—and even while local officials were trying to find it, inflation and further land development were causing that cost to rise by more than $50,000,000 per year. Home construction on the land around the LIRR lines meant that certain of the changes indispensable for a true modernization program—straightening and elevating the tracks to permit high-speed train operation—were, politically, immensely difficult. No man could predict with any real certainty that improvements of significant scope—not the patchwork supplying of new cars and improvement of repair and maintenance facilities that was going on in the early 1970's, but the transformation of the LIRR into a truly modern eighty-mile-per-hour carrier—would be carried out during his lifetime. No man could predict that they could be carried out within his children's lifetime.