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

by Caro, Robert A

  localized, six-block-square slum infection was instead causing that infection to spread over many more than six other blocks.

  Trying to figure out why, Fried began to have suspicions disturbing to this long-time admirer of Robert Moses. Federal law required families on urban renewal sites to be relocated in a considerate, humane manner. Every block of the area through which Fried was walking brimmed over with indications that the families on the Manhattantown site were simply fleeing from their homes into the nearest available shelter, no matter how inadequate. What was Moses doing on that site anyway?

  Fried's job required frequent tours of the city. Now, his eyes sharpened by the West Side experience, he began to realize that he had been seeing, in different settings, similar symptoms. Traveling through the Rockaway Peninsula one cold winter day, he had happened to pass the sprawling colonies of summer bungalows in Arverne. He had passed those bungalows before in winter, and they had always been vacant, for the flimsy little structures, each barely big enough to accommodate a single family, provided little protection from the cold and damp. This time, to his shock, he had found all the bungalows filled—there were several shivering Negro and Puerto Rican families in each. He had heard disturbing rumors about tenants from other Title I sites being dumped by the hundreds into vacant tenements in a section of Brooklyn called "Brownsville." What was Moses doing on all his Title I sites?

  By 1953, many New York liberals concerned with housing were asking that question, and some—such as Hortense Gabel and Stanley Isaacs— began going to the sites to see the answer for themselves. They returned horrified. "Stanley came back sick, just sick," an associate recalls. "He said, 'They're hounding those people out like cattle.' " These liberals began to understand that something terrible was going on on some of the Title I sites, not the sites turned over by Moses to organizations such as the Rockefeller-backed Morningside Corporation* or the ILGWU, but the sites he had turned over to corporations hastily set up by Democratic clubhouse politicians allegedly fronting for bigger politicians—something whose shape they were only beginning to dimly glimpse through the curtain of Moses' assurances, but something whose shape was huge and frightening in its implications not only for New York's poor but for the city as a whole. If Moses simply hounded the people living on those sites out of their homes without finding them new homes, these liberals realized, they would have no choice but to flee to other slums, to further crowd tenements already horribly overcrowded, to live in their cellars, their basements, in apartments without kitchens or bathrooms, in tiny rooms carved out of rooms that had been tiny before they had been made tinier to receive them. That would make conditions in the city's existing slums—conditions already bestial, inhuman

  * The Morningside Corporation had enlisted Orton's help to create a humane and compassionate relocation program.

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  —even worse. And the residents of Title I sites numbered not in the thousands but in the tens of thousands. Crowd as they would into slums, there would not be enough room in the slums for them. So they would move into areas adjacent to the slums, into areas in which landlords, without incentive to keep up their property anyway because of the slums' proximity, would see an opportunity for financial profit and take it by breaking up large apartments into small and by cutting down on maintenance and repairs. The slums would spill over their boundaries, spreading into blocks as yet untouched by blight. Moreover, some slum dwellers hounded from their homes would flee into "soft" areas of the city such as Brownsville, neighborhoods in which there were a large number of vacancies. These vacancies would now be filled in a rush by the dispossessed of the ghetto. The policy Moses might be pursuing would create new slums. The city must be alerted to what was happening, these liberals felt; the public must be educated to the facts about what was really happening; the people must be aroused.

  But the public was not educated or aroused, because the only medium through which it could be educated or aroused—its press—was not interested. The liberals wanted the press to get the facts behind Title I, but the press made no move to get them.

  It was the Times that counted, and Isaacs and other reformers with entree to its editors repeated the attempts made by reformers like Mc-Aneny and Windels in other generations: they attempted to persuade the Times to send out reporters to ascertain if the statements Moses was making —and that the Times was printing as if they were fact—were actually factual. And the results were the same that McAneny and Windels had achieved: a single entry in a log on Title I developments kept by a reformer with entree, Elinor G. Black, tells the story:

  Called N.Y. Times. Illson [reporter Murray Illson] called back Sat. Said it would be better if we made a "statement." Times not a "crusading paper. . . ."

  The Tribune or the Daily News would have helped. But when reformers talked to Tribune editors, they found that the paper's refusal to attack Moses, while, as Orton says, "not anything like the open secret it was at the Times" was just as firm. As for the News, it was to fulfill its responsibility to the public by exposing "Communists" in the Housing Authority; says Orton, "If you came in with any information that might be derogatory to Moses, the News wouldn't give you the time of day." Among the city's other dailies, only Dorothy Scruff's Post told readers there might be another side to the Title I story besides Moses'.

  All right, these liberals said. If the press refused to go out and get the facts for itself, they would get the facts for it.

  They were able to do so, in large part, because Orton had "gone underground" with the City Planning Commission's "Master Plan unit" when Moses had eased Bennett in as the commission's chairman two years before. The unit's offices on the fifteenth floor of a Park Row office building

  were only just across City Hall Park from commission headquarters in the Municipal Building, but the distance was, apparently, sufficient for security; "Bennett never once set foot in the place," Orton says, smiling. More important, the chairman hardly ever inquired as to what the unit was doing, and never pressed Orton to expand on his uncharacteristically evasive answers. As a result, Orton says, "my boys just vanished so far as the rest of the city government was concerned. This was a subversive activity—a real, authentic, fifteenth-story job. No one gave us anything to do. So we could do whatever we wanted." And now they began doing what no one had ever done during the twenty years during which Robert Moses had been building public works in New York City: finding out how many people were being evicted from their homes to make way for them, what was happening to those people—and what was happening to the city as a result.

  The difficulties were immense. Moses' relocation statistics had always been accepted. No city agency or newspaper had ever computed them even roughly for itself. There were probably over-all statistics in existence, of course, and brought together in one place—but the place was Randall's Island, and Randall's ruler kept the long rows of filing cabinets there locked. Many of the statistics were kept in the City Bureau of Real Estate, but the Bureau was under Moses' thumb; it was after attempts to obtain its statistics—supposedly public records—that Orton, ordinarily so punctilious in speech, said with real passion one evening: "The Real Estate Bureau was a stench in my nostrils." What statistics were available—often in obscure files, in other city agencies, of whose existence the unit would never have known were it not for Orton's encyclopedic knowledge of every corner of city government—were patently too low; Moses kept them low by refusing to count the actual number of people being evicted (instead he multiplied each "dwelling unit" by an "average" family size so small as to bear no discernible relation to reality), and by simply ignoring the existence of "doubled-up" families and boarders (of whom there are always a significant number in low-income areas) as well as of people living in rooming houses or hotels. (There is considerable evidence to suggest that the counts thus arrived at even after these omissions were arbitrarily reduced still further when Moses felt they sounded too high.)

  Orton's unit could not repair these
deficiencies. With the buildings in which these uncounted tenants had lived demolished and the tenants moved away, there was no longer any way of obtaining a record of their existence. Yet the unit did come up with a rough compilation: during the seven years since the end of World War II, there had been evicted from their homes in New York City for public works—mainly Robert Moses' public works— some 170,000 persons.

  This total was almost certainly far too low. Orton, leaning over backwards as always to be fair and to make sure that the figures would "stand up" no matter what devices Moses employed to discredit them, leaned too far. He permitted his unit to make some adjustment in "official" figures, but not nearly enough to make them accurate. And he permitted his boys to include as "public works" only projects public in toto. He did not permit

  them to include projects such as Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village, Riverton and Concord Village although he should have, for though the money that built them was supposedly private money, the tax abatement that Moses arranged for them would, when totaled over the years, insure that the public investment in them would dwarf the private, and the powers that Moses utilized to make possible not only their construction but the assemblage of their sites—eminent domain, street closings, utility easements— were all public. (The number of persons relocated for Stuyvesant Town alone was, by Moses' own figures, 12,000.) But the 170,000 figure was eye-opening enough. Robert Moses had, in just slightly more than seven years, moved from their homes more people than lived in Albany, Phoenix, Little Rock, Sacramento, Tallahassee, Topeka, Baton Rouge, Trenton, Santa Fe, etc. In terms even of huge New York, the unit was to report, this was "an enforced population displacement completely unlike any previous population movement in the City's history."

  If the number of persons evicted for public works was eye-opening, so were certain of their characteristics.

  Their color, for example. A remarkably high percentage of them were Negro or Puerto Rican. Remarkably few of them were white. Although the 1950 census had found that only 12 percent of the city's population was nonwhite, at least 37 percent of the evictees (Moses' own figures) and probably far more were nonwhite.

  And their income. The income of evictees not only for slum clearance projects but for all Moses' public works including expressways was far below the citywide average. In 1951, the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics found that $4,083 was needed for a family of four to maintain a minimum standard of living for a year. Only one out of every four of the evicted families earned $4,083 per year; 20 percent earned less than $2,000 per year.

  Liberals had long suspected that most of the people evicted by Moses were poor people, and particularly poor Negroes and Puerto Ricans, hampered in apartment hunting not only by poverty but by discrimination. The "Orton Survey" confirmed these suspicions. Moses was throwing out of their homes precisely those people who were least able to find new homes.

  And the manner in which he was throwing them out was worth noting, too.

  Because it was so difficult for these people to find decent homes on their own, the government of their city—the government which had authorized their eviction from their old homes—had solemnly promised them help. Its highest legislative body had pledged that "tenants will not be evicted from the site of a public improvement unless and until quarters equivalent to those occupied are available." Moses, ostensibly the instrument of that government, had, for seven years, created the impression that he was honoring that pledge; he had stated that a "minimum of inconvenience" was involved in relocation. Orton's staffers found that a substantial number of families had been moved "two or more times" to other buildings "within the site"—had been shuttled from one building about to be demolished to

  another, and then to another, and perhaps yet another. For seven years, Moses had been giving the impression that the bulk of the low-income families displaced by his public works had been accommodated in public housing projects. In reality, the unit found, the percentage of displaced families that had been admitted to public housing was pathetically small. Moses had been giving the impression that he had taken great pains to insure every evictee "decent, safe, and sanitary" living quarters. When the Planning Commission staffers obtained access to files on tenants for whom relocation responsibility had been "discharged," they found that more than a third of the files—for some projects, more than half—were marked: "Disappeared—whereabouts unknown." Disappeared! Moses couldn't know that the living quarters into which his projects had forced tens of thousands of persons were "decent, safe, and sanitary." He couldn't know what the new living quarters were like. He didn't even know where those living quarters were.

  Orton's handful of staffers, without sufficient time to trace the individual families involved in relocation, were unable to locate those missing families. But ic was all too obvious that they had moved either to other sections of the ghettos, doubling up with other families, causing further overcrowding in those already intolerably overcrowded slums, or to adjoining areas, creating slums out of once decent neighborhoods. Robert Moses' slum clearance program might be creating new slums as fast as it was clearing the old.

  If this picture of the past was disturbing, it paled before the picture of the future. Orton's staffers had assembled—for the first time—"statistics on the volume of tenant displacement we may expect in the foreseeable future." During the previous seven years, 170,000 persons had been evicted: a rate of about 24,000 per year. But Moses' slum clearance program was only now moving into high gear. During the next three years, 150,000 persons were scheduled for eviction: 50,000 per year. These people were mostly low-income Negroes and Puerto Ricans. If future relocation was carried out as past relocation had been carried out, it would increase overcrowding in existing slums, and create new ones faster than before. The city's relocation practices should be changed—taken out of the hands of the Moses-dominated Slum Clearance Committee and Housing and Triborough authorities—in the name of common humanity, Orton's report said. And these practices should be changed in the name of the city's own interest. If they were not, the vast urban renewal programs, the unprecedented expenditure of public funds, which the city was undertaking to improve its future, would wreck that future instead. Orton's statistics proved that without a doubt.

  The Women's City Club went beyond statistics.

  Even Moses could hardly call these civics in skirts "radicals." Charter members could recall that during the national debate on women's suffrage, opinion within the club had by no means been unanimous. In 1953, the club's "liberalism" was still the narrow-gauged, less militant liberalism of the 1930's. But its membership rolls included women who had been campaigning for better housing for decades, and they were worried because, under Moses' procedure, relocation was being handled not by the city but by a

  private real estate firm. The club decided to do what no newspaper, government agency or other civic group had done before: study relocation on a Title I site (they selected Manhattantown) in detail—on the site.

  No whispers prepared the club's young women for what they found. As one observer was later to describe it:

  Manhattantown looked like a cross section of bombed-out Berlin right after World War II. Some of the tenements were still standing, broken windows gaping sightlessly at the sky, basement doors yawning uncovered on the sidewalks; and surrounding them were acres strewn with brick and mortar and rubble where wreckers and bulldozers had been at work.

  And in the buildings—the ruins of buildings, the shells of buildings—people still lived. Visiting those people—entering those shells of buildings, shrinking perhaps past the huddled wreckage of a man that lay in the doorway, stepping into a dim hallway filled with the stench of urine and vomit and, in its shadows, a vague menace, stumbling up unlit flights of stairs that had steps missing, grasping for a banister that wasn't there—was an unnerving experience for these women. Mrs. Elinor Black recalls a man on the street shouting earnestly as she opened the door to one tenement: "Don't go in there, lady! It'
s not safe to go in there!"

  But it was an educational experience. For the people living in the ruins of Manhattantown taught the good ladies of the Women's City Club something about slums that they hadn't learned in their textbooks. In the textbooks, "slums" were synonymous with "dirt" and "blight." But, recalls Mrs. Black, "the thing that hit me was that most of the apartments you went into were well kept, clean." Time after time, City Club volunteers would walk off the filthy street, up the filthy stairs, down a filthy hall, and knock on the door of an apartment—and when the door to that apartment was opened, behind the frightened face peering out ("Oh, they were always frightened," one of the volunteers said. "They always thought you were from the developer or the city") was a room neat and clean. "What hurt the most," Mrs. Black says, "was just the feeling of people trying to make a decent place for their family to live in these conditions." It is possible to read through scores of textbooks and tracts on housing conditions written in the 1940's and early 1950's without finding even a hint of the fact that many of these women volunteers, who had read the textbooks, now learned for the first time: to the people who lived in them, slums were home.