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

by Caro, Robert A

  But the Manhattantown revelations hardly touched Robert Moses at all. The fear and awe in which he was held by reporters, rewritemen, copy editors and city editors was never more evident than on the day following the Senate hearing on Manhattantown and in the days that followed. Robert Moses had conceived the Manhattantown project. He had directed its planning. He had selected the cast of characters who ran it. He had shifted the cast around when the political winds in the city shifted. It was a Robert Moses project from beginning to end. The Times story on Manhattantown did not mention Robert Moses once. The other papers followed suit. His name was hardly mentioned; no editorials called for his removal. There might have been scandal in Manhattantown, but Manhattantown's creator was unscathed by it.

  And because he was, Manhattantown and the Title I program of which Manhattantown was a part were largely unscathed, too.

  The Times did not do another story on Manhattantown in the months that followed, but that might have been expected: the Times was not a paper of inquiry, and inquiry would have been necessary for follow-up stories. But what was not to be expected—from the customary behavior of the press in New York—was that no other papers would undertake any inquiry either. Not one investigative reporter was assigned to probe further into Manhattantown or Title I. Some reporters wanted to, but were refused permission,

  in some cases probably because of their publishers' admiration for Moses, in most cases simply because it seemed to editors a waste of time: where Moses was involved, they felt, there would be no scandal to be found; trying to find it would be a misuse of manpower that could be more profitably employed investigating politicians or bureaucrats. The creators of the Moses myth believed in what they had created. The myth still glowed, as strong as ever—with a glow that blinded New York to the shabby reality of what was going on on the Title I sites.

  During the following eighteen months—the rest of 1954, and all of 1955, and the spring of 1956—there were, as there had been since 1952, continual rumors about Title I, continual protests about individual Title I projects, continual questions about the whole shape and scope and direction of Title I and about the individuals to whom Moses had handed over so much of this program that was going to reshape the city. More and more people and groups were hearing these rumors, making these protests, asking these questions. The Women's City Club made a new, follow-up survey of relocation practices at Manhattantown, and other investigations were made by at least five other public and civic agencies: the 108-year-old Community Service Society, the one-year-old City Wide Committee on Relocation Problems, the Mayor's Committee on Housing, the City Administrator's office and Walter Fried's Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency. The results of all received only cursory treatment from the press. By the end of 1955, Stanley Isaacs was being joined in his repeated pleas for an investigation of Title I by several maverick city councilmen. All of those pleas were buried in Council committee, and in the newspapers. The myth that shielded Title I—and other Moses public works projects; 1953 and 1954 were, after all, the years in which he was ousting from their homes the 1,530 families of East Tremont who could find a voice for their cries only in the New York Post —from public view stayed firmly in place. The movement to reveal the truth about Moses' projects had been an underground movement, a movement led not by the City Planning Commission's majority but by the rebel commissioner Orton and his "fifteenth-story undercover" band of researchers, not by the city's reform housing "establishment" but by the new, boat-rocking Hortense Gabel. As late as April 1956, it was still an underground movement. "We were still voices crying in the wilderness," Orton recalls. "We couldn't get anyone to listen to us." A World-Telegram and Sun reporter managed to write a two-part series on relocation—a pallid, surface description that left the impression that all was generally well—without mentioning, even once, the man most responsible for relocation. Before the city could begin to see the truth about Moses' programs, his legend would have to be exposed for the lie it was. Before the people would be willing to look at Moses' programs straight on, they would have to look at Moses straight on, and before the public could do that, there would have to be an issue that would show him so clearly for what he was that there could be no mistake.

  as the kids played, their mothers sat chatting on a row of benches situated between glen and playground so that they could keep an eye on both at the same time—sat among trees and grass and quiet. "You know, at that time in your life, your life centers around your children," says one. "We lived in that little spot in the park. We took our kids twice a day—once wasn't enough, for God's sake! I remember once being in that playground in the snow—freezing! That little spot in the park was really the center of our neighborhood. And it was beautiful, tranquil. You know, in a city like New York, a spot like that is really precious."

  Then, on April 9, 1956, a sunny spring Monday, one of the mothers, Roselle Davis, sitting on a bench watching her four-year-old son, Earl, play in the playground, noticed below her in the glen a group of men with surveying equipment and blueprints. The sight didn't disturb her. "I thought they were planning some sort of improvement for the playground," she recalls. But walking home at lunchtime, she noticed that although the men had gone for lunch, the blueprints were still spread out on the grass. Out of curiosity, she bent down to read them—and saw their title: "Detail Map of Parking Lot."

  Returning to the playground after lunch, Mrs. Davis related her discovery to other mothers—among them Augusta Newman, wife of Arnold Newman, a world-famous photographer who possessed a healthy sense of moral indignation. "I wasn't sure that anything could be done about it, and I sort of forgot about it," Mrs. Newman recalls. "But that evening we went to a party or something, and in the cab coming home, I said to my husband, 'You know, Roselle told me today that they're building a new parking lot for the Tavern-on-the-Green in that spot in the park where the boys play,' and he—unlike me—said: They can't do that!' " Although it was after midnight, he telephoned Mrs. Davis for more details and then telephoned Sixty-seventh Street's most famous resident, the elderly novelist Fannie Hurst, to solicit her help in writing a petition. In addition to his eye for social injustice, Newman had one for public relations. He was aware that because Sixty-seventh Street contained the literarily oriented residence hotel, the Hotel des Artistes, and a row of studio duplexes designed for artists, complete to two-story windows letting in north light, it was the home of a quota of "names" from the artistic, literary and show-business world high even for the West Side. Two of the most famous illustrators of the Thirties, Floyd Davis and Gladys Rockmore, lived in No. 1 West 67th Street, along with oceanographer William Beebe. Roselle Davis and her husband, painter Stuart Davis, lived in No. 15, as did dancer Pearl Lang. No. 33 housed, in addition to the Newmans, newscaster Raymond Gram Swing, publisher Jason Epstein, photographer Philippe Halsman, sculptor George Lober and illustrator Dean Cornwell. Ludwig Bemelmans lived in No. 39, the Yiddish actor Joseph Buloff and playwright Samuel Raphaelson in No. 40, violinist William Kroll in No. 50. Around the corner on Central Park West lived composer Harold Rome. The hotel's residents included Howard Chandler Christie, who had painted the nude-filled murals in its Cafe des Artistes (he took the sun every morning on a park bench near the glen, nodding politely to the mothers

  walking by), and Mae Murray, the Merry Widow herself: the woman who had once been Hollywood's most glamorous star lived in the hotel in an attic formerly a chambermaid's room. When the petition was written, Newman got a healthy number of high-caliber names on it—and then sent his wife and Mrs. Davis out soliciting signatures from mothers at the playground. Trying to telephone the Park Commissioner, he received a customary Moses brush-off, but he mailed him the petition, signed with twenty-three names, with a copy to Mayor Wagner. The newly appointed deputy mayor, educator John J. Theobald, just recently recruited from his Queens College presidency by Wagner, to whom the Mayor referred the matter, did nothing about it on Wednesday—and gave no indication that he was contemplatin
g doing anything about it ever. But another one of the mothers happened to be the wife of a Herald Tribune reporter, Richard C. Wald. By Thursday, Wald had realized that the story he had been told by his wife might be of interest to a wider audience, and even though Stuart Constable, the pompous Park Department executive officer whose bushy walrus soup-strainer had earned him the nickname "Mustache," tried to make him understand that this parking lot he was making such a fuss about would be less than an acre, a meaningless fraction of i percent of 843-acre Central Park, it was printed in Friday morning's edition. By eleven o'clock, Theobald had decided that the thing to do was to hold a meeting between representatives of the mothers and of Moses that afternoon, and, unable to reach Moses, asked one of the Commissioner's secretaries to have him call back and tell him what time would be convenient for him or one of his "top people."

  Local protest over a park "improvement" may have been a new story to Theobald, but it was an old one to Moses—old and boring. Ever since he had become Park Commissioner he had kept such protest to a minimum by keeping the "improvements" secret, so that, often, before the neighborhood concerned knew there was an improvement planned it was already under way, and by ignoring protest and going ahead with the "improvement" as if it didn't exist. Scores—hundreds—of mothers' committees and chambers of commerce and civic associations and taxpayers' associations and merchants associations and block associations had objected to one plan or another for a parking field or a baseball diamond or a playground or a highway in some city park, and Moses' method had almost invariably proven effective. Not a week before, in fact, Flushing mothers had begged him not to destroy "the only spot of green" anywhere near their neighborhood by cutting down about forty "fine old trees" to turn little Weeping Beech Park just south of Northern Boulevard into a paved playground. He had simply ignored the plea: the trees were down now and the paving machines complacently at work. On the seismograph on which Moses recorded public tremors, in fact, the Tavern-on-the-Green protest had barely registered. Twenty-three mothers? He had just finished evicting hundreds of mothers rather than shift a section of his Cross-Bronx Expressway a single block! He was at that very moment in the process of displacing five thousand mothers for Manhattantown, four thousand for Lincoln Center! A parking lot, and a tiny parking lot at that! He had just finished building a

  Coliseum! The only aspect of a protest that concerned him at all was the play it might receive in the press, and there seemed no reason for concern on that score. The city's big dailies seldom gave more than token coverage to local protest, anyway. Not one had carried so much as a line on Weeping Beech Park. His rapport with the press—the Post excepted, of course—was at one of its all-time peaks, now that the Coliseum Title I project in which publishers were so interested was completed: the editorial board of the one paper that had printed the story on the Tavern-on-the-Green protest was that very morning deciding to run the next day an editorial lauding the Coliseum as "stimulating evidence" of his "tremendous progress" in Title I. Most of the dailies were preparing to take the occasion of the Coliseum's formal opening in two weeks to heap encomiums on its creator; the Times, in fact, was going to publish a special 72-page "New York: Coliseum City" magazine section on opening day, with Moses commissioned to write an article on "What the City Means." Writers of letters-to-the-editor might be more and more critical, but as for editorial writers, the writers who counted, after thirty years of lionization by their pens, he was still their lion; just a month before, two key ones had taken time out from their ordinary duties to review his just-published Working for the People, and, perhaps because of the difficulty of finding favorable things to say about that nonbook, had devoted most of their reviews to its "author," the Trib's L. L. Engelking calling him "the selfless servant of the people," William Ogden of the Times calling him "one of the great public servants of our time." The only element of the protest worth noting at all was that Theobald had dared to suggest that it be given a hearing; this refugee from the campus needed a lesson. Not Moses but one of Moses' secretaries returned Theobald's call— by reading him a memo from her boss. Picking up his telephone expecting to find Moses on the other end, the startled deputy mayor heard a woman's voice saying: "We are not prepared to attend any conferences. I do not think the deputy mayor should get into matters of this kind which are the concern of commissioners until the commissioners have answered letters." The mothers' would be answered next Tuesday; until then, let them wait; "we would suggest to Dr. Theobald that he not see these people until after we have answered their letter." Even as Moses' secretary was reading his memo promising an answer, moreover, Moses was issuing an order that would make the answer—and the protest—meaningless. Early Tuesday morning— before the mothers would have received their mail—a bulldozer was to tear up the glen. His letter would not placate the mothers, of course, but that would no longer matter. By the time they read his explanation of why it was necessary to destroy the glen they were righting for, there would no longer be any point in fighting for it. It wouldn't be there. This protest would be disposed of as he had been disposing of protests for thirty years.

  But this protest was different.

  It was different partly because the protesters were well educated and heeled, possessed of both the sophistication to know the best methods of

  fighting Moses and the money to implement those methods. There hadn't been a single lawyer among the 1,530 East Tremont families in the path of the Cross-Bronx Expressway near Crotona Park, but there were plenty of lawyers—good ones—among the hundred or so families near Central Park West and Sixty-seventh Street whose children played in the little glen, and many of them were willing to take the case for nothing. And those families could afford to raise the money for the substantial other legal expenses for a full-scale fight against the city.

  This protest was different because the issue behind it was unusually clear-cut. Protests on housing invariably involved arguments based on differing and involved philosophies to which there were always two—and often twenty—sides. Protests on highways were complicated by a myriad of arcane engineering considerations. Protests involving parks were generally simpler, but usually when Moses tore up part of a park for a nonpark purpose, the purpose was clearly a public one—a highway, for example—so that the issue was complicated, and in presenting it the press was also hampered by its necessary reliance on "expert opinion," most of which was controlled by Moses. But there was nothing complicated about this issue. No expert opinion was necessary to decide the rights and wrongs of tearing up a park for a parking lot that would benefit only a private restaurant—an expensive restaurant at that. New York's press was enthusiastic only on clear-cut issues—and here was one that was very clear-cut.

  This protest was different because Moses' responsibility was unusually clear-cut. Because of the nontraditional role, a role outside the normal democratic processes, that he played in Title I and highways, his responsibility was difficult for the public to understand—particularly because the press, which did not appear to fully grasp it either, never explained it adequately. But his responsibility here was clear and direct; no newspaper had to make the connection.

  But the primary difference in this protest had nothing to do with philosophy or governmental roles; it was due to the simple physical fact of the parking lot's location: the park in which it was located was Central Park.

  Central Park was something very special to New York. It was special because it sat, spacious and green and beautiful, at the very heart of the concrete city, because more New Yorkers used it than any other park, because it was practically the back yard for an astoundingly high proportion of the city's wealthiest and most influential individuals, because for most of these users—and for hundreds of thousands of others, inhabitants of the otherwise all but greenless center of the most densely inhabited island in the world—it was their only park. It was special to New Yorkers interested in park history because of its beauty and historic significance as the first and most i
nfluential of American landscaped parks. It seemed little less than a miracle to them that in this greediest of cities 843 acres of the most valuable real estate had somehow been set aside—and preserved for a hundred years—as a public resource.

  It was special, also, because journalists had made it special. For a hundred years, newspapers had paid more attention to Central Park than

  to all the city's 710 other parks, large and small, combined. Central Park had, like a President, become news in itself. Central Park had become a symbol, a symbol that evoked universal and positive emotions in New Yorkers; it had become the symbol of beauty, open space, peace, fun— of everything parks meant to a city. "Of all the city's wonders," the city's historians said, "Central Park ranks first in the affection of New Yorkers." If all parks were holy to New Yorkers, Central Park was the holy of holies—a thing that must be preserved. Every attempted "invasion" of Central Park for a nonpark purpose, no matter how small, was a cause to which an editorial writer's response was almost Pavlovian; in the hundred years since its creation, a thousand editorials had proclaimed that every foot of it was "sacred." Even during the 1930's, when it had been all adulation for Moses in the press, protests over Moses' remaking of parts of Central Park had been treated with seriousness. That they hadn't been more serious was due to Moses' success, because of his ability to use great forces of WPA workers without going through normal city governmental channels, in rushing through his remaking in secrecy; to the fact that Tammany-induced decay in the park had reached a point at which any change could hardly help being an "improvement"; to the fact that his baseball diamonds and playgrounds were, after all, "park purposes," even if not the purpose for which Central Park had been intended. But these conditions no longer existed. There was no WPA and no Tammany—and not even Robert Moses could make the city believe that the Tavern-on-the-Green parking lot was a "park purpose." Moses' reputation as a defender of parks, the keystone of his whole image, had endured because what he was doing to parks—like paving over the beautiful Van Cortlandt Park marshes for the Major Deegan Expressway—had been carried out largely in secrecy because the press had never focused public attention on it. Only a year or so earlier, a group of Sutton Place mothers, every bit as well educated and quite a bit richer than the Central Park West mothers, had been unable to get any publicity for a baby-carriage picket line they threw up to protest his rape of their East River Drive playground at Forty-ninth Street. But there could be no secrecy about anything he did in Central Park, a half acre of which meant more to the city's press than 150 acres of Van Cortlandt. Moses' image as park defender was still intact only because the public had never been given a close look at his park controversies. But at any substantial controversy in Central Park, the press would give the people a very close look indeed.