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

by Caro, Robert A

  As for building a new rapid transit line on Long Island, no man could predict with any certainty that it would ever be built. Most planners who had studied the prospects felt, as Lee Koppelman felt, "they'll never do it."

  And even if the mass transit lines were built, they weren't going to help the transportation situation on Long Island nearly as much as the public officials believed—or, to be more precise, nearly as much as they told the public they believed.

  Four-color brochures may have been assuring voters that if the mass transit improvements they had planned were built, they would, if not end, at least substantially alleviate traffic congestion on Long Island.

  But stark, unadorned black-and-white charts, graphs and computer print-outs stacked on tables or taped to the otherwise bare walls in a small cinder-block room, hardly more than a cubicle, in a red-brick building set

  back off the Veterans Memorial Highway in Hauppauge, Suffolk County, Long Island, told a very different story.

  The building contained the executive offices of the Nassau-Suffolk Regional Planning Board, and the little room, down a hall from Koppelman's, was the office of John F. (Jack) Sheridan, Koppelman's transportation analyst. And the charts, graphs and print-outs, thick stacks of numbers and lines, represented the first analysis of transportation on Long Island—how the 2,500,000 residents of Nassau and Suffolk counties got to work, to the supermarket, to school, to wherever they went when they left their homes; when they went there; how frequently they went there; why they went there by the transportation means they used instead of by some other means— ever done in meaningful depth.

  One of the charts, a map really, showed traffic levels on the nine major east-west routes in Nassau and Suffolk counties: from top to bottom (north to south) Route 25-A, the Long Island Expressway, Northern State Parkway, Hillside Avenue, Jericho Turnpike, Hempstead Turnpike, Southern State Parkway, Merrick Road and Sunrise Highway. Various levels were made graphic by different colors—purple for congestion. On the right-hand side of the map—the side showing eastern and central Suffolk County—the map was a blaze of different colors, but in the center of the map, western Suffolk and eastern Nassau, one—purple—was beginning to dominate. And in the left-hand section of the map—central and western Nassau County—there were eight purple lines. Only Jericho Turnpike was operating with any leeway at all. The other eight roads had no capacity at all left for additional traffic.

  Another chart showed—by means of curves representing the relationship between time and distance traveled during that time—the delays on those east-west roads at those levels of traffic. The curves rose terribly steeply on Long Island's pre-Moses roads—25-A, Hillside, Jericho, Hempstead Turnpike, Merrick Road, Sunrise Highway—on which traffic is slowed by traffic lights and intersecting streets. But they rose almost as steeply on Moses' roads, the roads built—at a colossal public investment—to free the public from traffic lights and intersecting streets. Moses' "modern" rebuilt Southern State Parkway, for example, paralleled the "obsolete" Merrick Road and Sunrise Highway. The curves showing time and distance covered in that time for each of those roads ran almost parallel, rising and falling together. "Until you get out to Wantagh," Jack Sheridan says, "there's no advantage to the Southern State Parkway over the Sunrise Highway [or Merrick Road]. Which is a pretty horrible thought."

  But those charts, graphic displays of the present, were not the most disturbing things in that cinder-block room. That distinction is reserved for computer print-outs giving projections of the future. Their figures were not transposed onto the charts and graphs. For in order to contain them, the charts and graphs would have to be too big. Some 560,000 cars a day went "through the Long Island corridor"—crossed the city line from Nassau into Queens—in 1968. By 1985, 1,400,000 cars a day will be trying to go through that corridor. The roads available to handle them were jammed to

  capacity and far beyond capacity. And the load they will be asked to handle will, just seventeen years later, be twice as big.

  There were print-outs more disturbing still. Some, for example, dealt with "modal split": planners' jargon for the percentage of travelers which can be persuaded to change, or split off from, their present mode of travel to another—in Long Island's case, from highways to mass transit. The print-outs show that, on Long Island, optimistic predictions to the contrary, there is little possibility of any significant modal split at all.

  If travel on the Long Island Rail Road was revolutionized—if the railroad was given modern rolling stock; if travel time was cut in half; if new, more convenient stations were strategically located throughout Manhattan —if all these improvements were accomplished, a highly unlikely feat because it would cost two and a half billion dollars—the modal split induced would be no more than 10 percent. Sixty-five percent of commuters from Nassau and Suffolk counties used the LIRR in 1968; spend two and a half billion dollars and you could increase that percentage only to 75 percent.

  The numbers are more depressing than the percentages. Some 85,890 Long Island-Manhattan commuters used the LIRR in i960; revolutionizing the railroad would increase that number to 156,700 by 1985, an increase of 70,810 riders. The Island's population was going to increase by 1,548,000 between i960 and 1985. The number of commuters to Manhattan was going to increase not by 70,810 per day but by 81,000 per day. The LIRR's additional riders would not be riders diverted from the highways. The expenditure of two and a half billion dollars would reduce the load of commuters the highways would have to carry not at all. The load would be increased— by more than 10,000 per day. Even after that expenditure, those nine east-west roads, already jammed so far beyond capacity, would be asked to carry daily almost 10,000 more cars.

  And far more than 10,000 more cars. For the above figures were only for Manhattan-bound commuters. Hundreds of thousands of other Nassau and Suffolk residents were going to be commuting to jobs on Long Island by 1985, hundreds of thousands more than in i960. The daily average of all "work trips by all travel modes" by residents of Long Island in i960—work trips to Manhattan or anyplace else—was 680,020. By 1985, it would be 1,225,500. And the modal split induced among the non-Manhattan trips by the modernization of the Long Island Rail Road would be infinitesimal. The number of daily work trips to non-Manhattan locations would be rising by 549,780. The number of those trips by rail would be increasing by 1,420. Long Island's east-west roads, already jammed so far beyond capacity, would —even if two and a half billion dollars were spent revolutionizing the Long Island Rail Road—be asked by 1985 to carry every day not only 10,000 more cars bound for Manhattan but tens of thousands of additional cars bound for jobs in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and within Nassau and Suffolk counties. Spending even the immense sum of two and a half billion dollars on mass transportation on Long Island would not help the highway problem on Long Island to any significant degree.

  No mass transportation improvement could help that problem to any

  significant degree. In 1963, for example, Nassau County undertook an in-depth study of the possibilities of fast and frequent bus service. The expense would be immense, the county found. And the over-all modal split accomplished in journeys to work—the proportion of transportation to and from jobs now accomplished by car that could be turned into bus trips—would be no more than 5 percent and perhaps as low as 2 percent. Nassau County could beggar itself to provide mass transportation—and still manage to lure off the roads perhaps no more than one car out of every fifty.

  And all the trips above represent only work trips. How about nonwork trips—all the other journeys (to supermarket, to bowling alley, to tennis or swimming or golf or bridge club, to school, to friends', to movies, to restaurants, to dinner, to doctor, to dentist) that when added together come to a total that dwarfs even the immense total of work trips and that are, on Long Island, to an overwhelming extent trips made by car? In Sheridan's office are maps covered by incredible masses of lines representing the total of such trips on highways and streets on Lo
ng Island, and computer print-outs totaling such trips for towns and villages and unincorporated areas. The complexity of such figures is immense, but the bottom line is clear: the modal split that would be effected by improvements in mass transportation on Long Island is infinitesimal. Highways and local streets in Nassau and Suffolk were handling a heavy load of traffic in i960. By 1985, the load those highways and streets would have to handle would be more than twice as heavy. And no improvements that could be made in mass transportation at any expense that could conceivably be borne by state, city, counties or public authorities could lighten that load much. "You see," Jack Sheridan says, "if we had had subway lines, or rapid transit lines, we would have had high density along those lines. But since there was no mass transit, the development took place according to the way the automobile dictated it. And that meant low density, very low density. To have feasible mass transit routes, you have to have sufficient density. And we don't. And, except perhaps in central Nassau, we're not going to for any foreseeable future. Because of the highway, because of the pattern of high highway use developed by the lack of mass transit before, we're faced with this problem now, and right now we just can't get around it." And it is a problem to which a solution— if there is a solution—lies only in a future distant enough so that sufficiently large areas of Long Island will have density high enough so that putting mass transit lines through them will make a difference in the Island's transportation picture. That day, in 1974, seems decades—generations—away.

  "urban renewal" program, the director of the Committee Against Discrimination in Housing, leaving her office—a tiny ten-foot-by-fourteen-foot cubbyhole on the top floor of an ancient loft building—attended meetings of Negro and Puerto Rican organizations in the evenings, and her ears picked up the first whispered rumors about what was going on on the Title I sites—rumors so terrible that she went up to visit the sites for herself, on a trip that would lead her to say years later:

  "I've visited a lot of bad slums, but I never saw any worse than the Title I slums when the developers started milking them. I remember I went into a building on the Godfrey Nurse site,* and, as any woman instinctively does, when I went into a bathroom, I glanced into a mirror to see if my hair was straight. And when I looked at the mirror, or where the mirror ought to be, I found myself looking straight into the next apartment."

  For Lawrence Orton, it was statistics.

  During his decades on the City Planning Commission, Orton had learned to cast a wary eye on Moses'. And he had a sense that there was something wrong—very wrong—with the statistics that the Coordinator was issuing (and that the press was reprinting without the slightest attempt at verification) to demonstrate that every consideration was being shown to families being relocated from Title I sites, that he was not only obeying but going beyond the federal requirement that these families be relocated in "decent, safe, and sanitary dwellings." "In order to set at rest any fears," Moses had announced in his brochure on the Manhattantownf project that would require the razing of six square blocks of tenements and old apartment houses on the Upper West Side, "families are assured that relocation help will be readily available and there is a frank desire to be of maximum assistance in carrying out the individual wishes of each family." If they wanted to move into the new, modern apartments being erected on the site, they would be given "preferential status" in applying, he promised. If they preferred to find their own new apartments, they would be assisted by "personal counseling" from a trained relocation firm, which, he said, was compiling a citywide listing of vacancies, and by "financial assistance" from the developers—at the minimum, "moving expenses plus the first month's rent in new quarters." And families still unable to find new apartments did not have to worry; they—all relocated Title I site families, in fact—could always move into low-income public housing projects, which would represent an improvement in their living quarters anyway; their applications would be given "first priority." Each of Moses' statements was backed up by columns of statistics in the stylish brochures issued in a steady stream by the Mayor's Slum Clearance Committee which the Coordinator headed. For example, the statistics on family income, family size and a

  * From 132nd to 135th streets, between Fifth and Lenox avenues. The name of the project was later changed to "Harlem."

  t Later renamed "West Park."

  half dozen other indices proved, he said, that more than a quarter of the families presently living on the site—998 out of 3,628—would be able to afford to live in the proposed Manhattantown development at anticipated rentals. Orton's years of dealing with housing problems told him that that statistic was false. No tenement tenants he had ever met could afford Moses' anticipated Title I rentals. Orton could not prove that statistic false without a detailed analysis of the financial situation of the Manhattan-town site tenants. But what bothered him even more were the statistics on public housing. Orton knew all too well that existing public housing was already fully occupied. Familiar with city building plans, he had been under the general impression that there was little new low-income housing scheduled for imminent construction, and checking, he found that his impression was all too correct: the total number of public housing units scheduled for construction during the next year or two was a mere fraction of the number of tenants Moses was telling the world that he was going to move into those units. Analyzing Moses' soothing statistics, Orton was able to see—all too well—how the Coordinator had arrived at them. "With every project—Title I or some expressway or whatever—he would say, 'Don't worry about the people living there. If they don't want to go anywhere else, we've always got room for them in public housing.' But what he was doing was using the same public housing vacancies for many projects. The same vacancies that were alleged to be available for one project had already been allocated for a previous project—or perhaps ten previous projects." Orton began to wonder exactly what Moses was planning. Tens of thousands of persons were now living on urban renewal sites. Where was the Coordinator planning to put them?

  For Walter Fried, it was garbage cans.

  Strolling the brownstone-lined side streets of his neighborhood—the neat, solid, stolid, middle-class West Side around Ninety-fourth Street and West End Avenue, where he lived—during the winter of 1952 and the spring of 1953, the regional counsel of the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency had had a sense that it was changing somehow. "Some of the buildings began to seem a little seedy, a little run-down," he recalls. But it was a vague sense. "There wasn't anything really dramatic that you could put your finger on. You had a feeling that the whole neighborhood was beginning to show signs of disrepair, but there was nothing specific."

  And then one day, Fried suddenly realized that, without taking note of it, he had, for some time, been seeing something quite specific indeed: in front of some of the brownstones "there were more garbage cans than there should have been." And Fried's housing expertise told him the significance of that fact.

  "You'd walk past a four-story brownstone," Fried says. "Those brown-stones had always been inhabited by—at most—four families. But in front of that brownstone now there might be four large garbage cans. The garbage for four families is not anywhere near four large cans, not when the garbage

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  was being picked up every day, as it was at the time. So you knew that there were many more people living there now than there had been before. And you knew what that meant: the landlords were breaking up the apartments inside into smaller apartments, so the same space that had been occupied by a family of five might now be occupied by twelve people. When you saw that many garbage cans you knew that this building was being run now as a tenement for very poor families, or even as a rooming house."

  When the heat of the New York summer arrived, expertise was no longer required to tell what was happening. The evidence of change was out in the open: leaning on the windowsills of the brownstones-turned-tenements, sitting on their stoops, crowding the benche
s on the islands in the middle of Broadway, people, poor people, Negro and Puerto Rican people, people in such numbers that the Broadway benches, long crowded anyway with Jewish grandmothers and grandfathers, were now crowded as never before. It wasn't just the fact that these people didn't have white skin that disturbed the older residents of the West Side; it was that they obviously didn't have money either; it was that so many were obviously drunk or on drugs. And it was that there were so many of them. With the first hot day of 1953, the West Side was—all at once—not just a racially mixed neighborhood, but a much poorer neighborhood, and a much more crowded one. And, month by month, its deterioration accelerated. "Ninety-fourth and Ninety-fifth streets between West End and [Riverside] Drive—nice, quiet blocks before—became a shambles," Fried recalls. "It had been happening for months, probably, but in the heat it was intolerable to stay inside those places, so now it began to spill out into the streets. You began to notice the hopheads, the alcoholics. Every night, the city ambulance was out. The cops would come screaming down the streets . . ."

  Trying to think back and determine what major change on the West Side had caused so drastic a crumbling of a neighborhood that for decades had stood so solid, Fried could think of only one: the $54,000,000 Manhat-tantown urban renewal project between Central Park West and Amsterdam Avenue and between Ninety-seventh and 100th streets. And recalling dates, he realized that the deterioration of his neighborhood, some blocks away from Manhattantown though it was, had begun not long after Moses had turned over the six-square-block site to the developers. Fried began to direct his walks toward the site, and with every block that he drew nearer, conditions worsened. Blight was obviously spreading out from Manhattantown. In little more than a year, the streets immediately adjacent to the development— always poor and predominantly Negro but, previously, with well-maintained buildings—had become a slum, a teeming, seething hive of humanity—a place of squalid, run-down, dilapidated tenements so overcrowded that children had to sleep in shifts, of doorways filled with drunks and narcotics addicts and gutters filled with garbage. Obviously, Fried saw, the area had been inundated with a flood of new residents. And there was no place these residents could have come from so suddenly and in such numbers but Manhattantown. A project designed—at immense cost—to clear up a