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

by Caro, Robert A

  The people who lived in those buildings Robert Moses was tearing down were not just passing through. The Puerto Ricans, a small fraction of the area's population, were relative newcomers, of course (although by 1953 13 percent of its Puerto Ricans had lived there for more than ten years), but among the Negro and white families, more than half had lived in their apartments for several decades. Women's City Club members who had been taught that "slum" connoted "transients" sat and listened as one family after another informed them that they had lived in their building "since it was built"—thirty or forty (or, in one case, fifty-four) years before. The people of the area knew each other. Shopkeepers said hello to their customers

  when they happened to pass them on the street. The Manhattantown area was a slum area. Its people were poor; the average weekly income was sixty dollars per family. Its buildings were old; there hadn't been a new building constructed in it in twenty-five years. Most of them were overcrowded with families of five or six members jammed into apartments that should have held no more than three or four, and many were dilapidated. But the area also was stable, settled, friendly. Its people had a sense of community, of neighborhood, that some of the members of the Women's City Club realized, driving home at night to their luxurious homes in the sterile suburbs, they wished they had. The textbooks didn't speak of "advantages" in talking about slums, but, the more perceptive of these women realized, the Manhattantown "slum" had advantages. There were no playgrounds in it, of course, but there was Central Park. "Most families," the club's report would conclude, "seemed to be well satisfied with the neighborhood facilities—with the good bus and subway transportation, the good shopping facilities and nearness to the heart of the city." It was a racially integrated area—a fact very important to the Negro families, not only because they wanted their children to grow up with white children but because they knew, as the City Club was to report, that "services such as garbage and snow removal, schools and shopping were far better in non-segregated areas." And the area didn't have some of the disadvantages associated with slums. Drugs, for example, were already a scourge in slums like Harlem; the junkie was a rarity here. The buildings in which they lived might be dilapidated and overcrowded, but they were palaces compared to buildings in Harlem. Most important—to the families who lived here and were trying to bring up their children "decently"—rents were low, low enough so that they could do so. Three-quarters of the 400 families interviewed were paying less than $50 per month. The average rent per room was $10 per month. In other areas of the city—including most slum areas —rents were much higher, so high that low-income families had to skimp on clothes and food for their children in order to pay them. The more perceptive of the women learned that, while the people who lived in the Manhattantown area did not have much in life, what they did have their neighborhood gave them,

  And they learned about the helplessness of the poor in the city, a helplessness so much greater than even the helplessness of the lower-middle-class people of East Tremont.

  The old people—the old people alone—dreaded "the room," the single furnished box, four walls and no more, in which they might have to live out their days if they lost the tiny apartments with their own toilet and cooking facilities for which they now managed to scrape up the rent each month. "I would die if they put me in a room," one old man told the nice young woman in the well-tailored dress who had come to ask him questions. Parents of young children dreaded "Harlem," the name by which they referred not only to Manhattan's great black slum but to black slums not yet identified by names such as "Brownsville" or "Bed-Stuy"—the "Harlem" in which their children would have to sleep with them in the same room, the

  "Harlem" in which they would have to live with cockroaches and rats, the "Harlem" in whose schools their kids wouldn't learn, and in which the drug pushers would be waiting for them, the "Harlem" in whose streets the garbage lay piling day after day, the "Harlem" whose landlords would squeeze them dry. One question on the Women's City Club questionnaire was where the family being interviewed would like to live. Mother after mother, seeing the abyss before her and her children, answered with a reply that was a cry for help out of the depths of fear: Anywhere. But not Harlem. But, the club's volunteers knew, unless someone helped these people, unless someone kept the city's promise to find them "decent, safe, and sanitary dwellings . . . within [their] financial means," "the room" and "Harlem" were where they were going to have to go.

  For, the volunteers came to realize, these people had no choice.

  Color barred the Negroes and Puerto Ricans among them from most nonslum neighborhoods. Poverty barred the whites among them from most nonslum neighborhoods. Stated the Women's City Club report: "One tenant reported visiting real estate offices almost daily for the past year but whatever listings appeared were always prohibitive in price." The size of many of the area's families—25 percent contained five or more persons—cemented the bars in place. Said one tenant: "We have six children. I looked and looked everywhere, but apartments don't want so many children." Many landlords, able to pick and choose among tenants because of the housing crisis, didn't want any children. Asked one mother bitterly: "Am I supposed to drown them?" Most of the families interviewed—not all; a number which the interviewers found surprisingly large expressed real affection for their neighborhood—did not fool themselves into thinking that their neighborhood was ideal. They were living there because they had no place else to go. Their only alternative was the abyss.

  And it was because the volunteers realized this that they were filled with indignation when they found out how Moses was "helping" these people.

  Moses had stated that evicted families who wanted to move into the new apartments to be built on the site would be given "preferential status" in applying. In reality, Mrs. Black learned, they were being discouraged from applying at all. No applications were being accepted for Manhattan-town and none would be until most of the families now on the site were gone.

  Not that Moses' precaution was really necessary. The evicted families had been paying an average of $10 rent per room per month. The rent in Manhattantown was going to be—if Moses' figures could be believed—$34 per room per month, about $100 for even a small three-room apartment. Out of 400 families interviewed, exactly one said it could afford to pay $100 per month rent. The families being displaced "cannot even consider the possibility of applying for the new project displacing them. Where will [they] go?" '

  Not, in any numbers, into public housing. Moses had stated that Title I-displaced families would be given "first priority" in applying for such housing. Priorities meant little, however, because the public housing Moses

  was building had, with its lack of apartments for large families or single people ("Build, build, build! There was never any thought as to what he was building!") little relationship to the needs of the displaced people. As to whether any priority was in fact given to these people, almost 300 of the 400 families interviewed wanted to get into public housing—a check by the Women's City Club three years later would show that only fifty had made it. Promising "personal counseling," the compilation of a citywide list of available "decent, safe, and sanitary dwellings . . . within the financial means" of the families to be displaced—and "financial assistance," at least moving expenses plus a month's rent, to enable them to move into them— Moses had stated that "in order to set at rest any fears, 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." The notice to move that the families actually got was a little more curt. Not even mailed to the individual families but tacked up in the entrances to their homes, it said:

  DEMOLITION OF THIS BUILDING WILL BE STARTED AT ONCE.

  TENANTS MUST VACATE.

  FOR INFORMATION, CALL RELOCATION OFFICE, COR. OF WEST IOOTH STREET.

  When they called, or went in person, there were no "personal interviews," no "counseling." There was no information
on finding apartments. The citywide listing of vacancies? No listing of any vacancies was available. There was no help in finding apartments. "I looked everywhere and couldn't find anything," one man told an interviewer. "Now, I don't know where else to look. And when I ask them for help, they just say they can't help me." Maximum assistance? In that relocation office, there was not even minimum mercy. "I'm 74 and too sick to look and no one helps you," one woman said. The Women's City Club interviewer's report on the "T Family" reads:

  Mr. T was injured in accident and is now unable to walk stairs. He must attend the rehabilitation clinic daily. Mrs. T is disabled and has difficulty getting around. The son is recovering from polio and the boarder who lives with them is blind. They cannot look for other quarters. No one is helping them.

  Financial assistance? The assistance for which the developers were being given a million dollars by the city? Except in rare instances, these impoverished people could not even obtain reimbursement for the moving expenses which they were being forced to incur through no choice of their own. Not only were they forced to move out of their homes, they were forced to pay for the moving. What was available—for most of the people who had lived on the site—was a single piece of advice: Get out—and get out fast. Returning stunned from the "cor. of West 100th Street," one man said he had been told to "be out in ten days." The inducement offered them to move—not in ten days, of course; that was just a scare tactic, to soften them up and make sure they wouldn't be too insistent on their rights—was somewhat more subtle than those mentioned in Moses' glowing brochures.

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  The developers owned the tenements now—and they simply stopped maintaining them. Said the report:

  Typical of the statements made by . . . tenants were the following comments: "No repairs are ever made." "There are large holes in the walls and floors where rats come through." "The toilet bowl has been broken for a long time but they won't fix it." "The plaster is coming down over the stove. If I bake a pie, the plaster comes right down into it!" One interview carried the terse report: "Baby screamed. Rat in crib."

  Reading the filled-in questionnaires piled in her office, Elinor Black wrote "The bewilderment of people being forced out of their homes and their inability to cope with problems beyond their control was most evident." Also evident, recorded in the handwriting on those questionnaires, was apathy: "I have no money to move, so why should I waste time looking. I'll just wait—God and faith will find something for me." Despair: "I walked from 109th Street to 23rd Street and couldn't find a thing for us. The rents are too high. There's nothing to do." And, most of all, hatred and bitterness, hatred and bitterness at the vague, unseen force that was doing this to them, a force they identified only as "the city": "The city doesn't care about us. We're just nothing as far as they're concerned." Bitterness and hatred that would have been understood so well by Alfred E. Smith, who once, standing in the well of the Assembly Chamber in Albany, had asked, "What must be" the "feelings" of the widowed mother "when she sees these children separated from her by due process of law . . . ? What can be the feelings in the hearts of the children themselves ... to know what the State's policy was with respect to their unfortunate condition?"

  Now those feelings were understood by the Women's City Club. "God and faith will find something for me," an old Negro woman had said. God and faith would have to, realized the trim young matron who had interviewed her. The city wasn't going to. Robert Moses wasn't going to. And if any of the volunteer interviewers had any doubts as to whether the hatred and bitterness were justified, those doubts vanished when they moved on to the next step: finding out what had actually happened to the residents of buildings already demolished, people whose Title I-caused future was no longer a matter of conjecture but of reality.

  Finding out wasn't easy. The developer—Moses' "reliable bidder"— refused to talk to them, as did the Relocation Office, as did, for weeks, the director of the city's Real Estate Bureau, the official charged on behalf of the city with the responsibility for seeing that the developer and the relocation firm gave the evicted tenants the "decent, safe, and sanitary dwellings" that the city had promised them. And when he finally consented to see them and they asked him where the tenants had moved to, he said he didn't know. He had never checked, he said.

  They checked. Fifty of the 400 families, of course, had been placed in public housing, although they found that many of these "lucky" evictees, desperately lonely for their friends from the old neighborhood, felt as did one aged woman who said, "If they put the old house back, I'd move in again,

  even though I had to make my own hot water and heat." The others were more difficult to trace. Some had left no forwarding address deliberately, "to avoid creditors or payment of rent, or because of fear of the law or governmental agencies," as the Women's City Club report put it; others because, unable to speak English and inexperienced in even the basics of city life, they had left one not with the Post Office but with a neighbor or with the building superintendent—who had later also moved. The club's volunteers tried to trace them. They walked the streets of the bombed-out Manhattantown site trying to find someone who knew the family for whom they were searching, combed school registration records throughout the city, hunting for the names of the family's children. But "after all feasible tracing methods had been exploited," the club said in a follow-up report, new addresses could be obtained for only 167 of the original 400 families.

  These were probably the people among the 400 who were best off. But even among them, the circumstances in which they were found were illuminating.

  The volunteers found some of them on the West Side, in the area around Manhattantown, in the brownstones-turned-tenements. Wrote one volunteer:

  Some places were much worse than what the family had left. For example, a family of two moved from a four-room standard apartment with all utilities, central heating and hot water, private bath and toilet into a three-room apartment in poor condition, with no central heating, no refrigeration, tiny bath in kitchen and a hall toilet. Another family of three moved from four standard rooms to a six-room "railroad flat" with not a single enclosed room, holes in the floor and ceiling plaster falling.

  The volunteers found many of these families in the cellars of these tenements —in dark and dampness. "It's all right," one woman said when asked about her "present quarters," "but I have arthritis now, which is not good, living in a basement." The volunteers found many of the old people in the furnished rooms of these tenements—the "rooms" that the old people had dreaded; some of them had been living with their children and grandchildren when the volunteers had met them before, but they were living alone now because the "new quarters" their family could find were too small.

  For such apartments, moreover, the tenants were almost invariably forced to pay more rent than they had been paying before—often much more, often enough more to "seriously affect" the family's "standard of living."

  These people were the lucky ones among the evictees that the club's volunteers could locate. They had managed to stay out of Harlem. Others had not. It was "Harlem" these families had dreaded. But it was in Harlem that the volunteers found them.

  Seeing these people, perhaps the best off among the evicted families, the volunteers could picture the others. They could picture the basements in which they must be huddled, the railroad flats into which they must be crammed, the loneliness in which they must be living, deprived of the friends

  of years. During their visits to these families, they had gotten to know some of their children—and the fears their mothers had harbored for their future if they had to bring them up in Harlem. They could picture the lives of the children now.

  And, the volunteers found, it was not the evictees who had moved to Harlem who were worst off. It was those who had moved— who had, utterly unable to find apartments, been moved—to new apartments "on-site," to the shells of buildings in the bombed-out Manhattantown site to which the developer would not send a painter or plum
ber, much less an exterminator; one volunteer recalls glancing into a kitchen and recoiling in disgust from the sight of a ceiling literally alive with vermin. Moses' "reliable" developer had moved some of these families not once but several times, shoved them from one building that was about to be torn down into another whose demolition was still a while off, and then, when it came time for that building to be demolished, moved them again—hitting them with a rent increase each time. The Women's City Club volunteers saw very clearly the implications for the city of such relocation tactics. After months of research, they knew with absolute certainty that the Title I program as being administered by Robert Moses was creating new slums as fast or faster than it was clearing old ones. But, after the exposure to concentrated human misery which they had undergone, it was the implications not for the city but for individual human beings that tore at their hearts. In writing the report, Elinor Black leaned over backwards to keep it fair and understated—leaned over backwards so far that at times the stance of the report was almost ludicrously tilted. But, despite the understatement, at times the emotion these women felt seeped through. The Moses-approved relocation policy, Mrs. Black wrote, "does not adequately meet" the demands either of the law or "of human decency." The City Planning Commission's Master Plan unit had uncovered the statistics that disproved Moses' claims. The Women's City Club volunteers had gone beyond the statistics to document the falseness of the claims in terms of human misery. The misery was now documented, quantified, broken down into individual cases and, with the issuance of the first Women's City Club report in March 1954, printed in black and white, as was the draft of the Master Plan unit report. A complete picture of what was really happening in Title I was ready for presentation to the city at large.