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

by Caro, Robert A

  He did what he had never done—at least publicly—before. He backed down.

  Brown was anxious to drop the case. "Moses in the dock—that would be the number-one show in town no matter what else was playing," the Corporation Counsel would say years later. "What was number one in 1956

  My Fair Lady? My Fair Lady would be the number-two ticket if Moses

  was in the dock. And he was going to look bad. Everybody loves moms. You can't beat that. I had great respect for him, the greatest respect, for him and for his accomplishments. My regard for him was really without limits. And I didn't want to see that." To avoid that, Brown had worked out an arrangement under which Moses might save at least a little face, and by June 7 he had privately obtained Field's consent to it. The city would use a series of delaying tactics to keep the case from coming to trial, without announcing that it was being dropped, which would have been a formal admission of defeat. Then, after a suitable period of delay—long enough, hopefully, for the furor to die down a bit—Moses would announce that he had decided to give the mothers the play space they wanted by building another playground—on the site on which he had wanted to build the parking lot. This would enable Moses to avoid announcing that he was dropping the parking lot plan and simply leaving the park the way the mothers wanted it—and it would also enable him to avoid the charge that he had destroyed trees for no purpose at all. Field would be privately notified of what was going on so that he would not press the case.

  Walking over to Moses' office in the State Office Building at 270 Broadway, across City Hall Park from his own in the Municipal Building, Brown stopped by Wagner's for last-minute orders, but received only one: keep him out of it; the Mayor was almost frantically anxious to avoid any confrontation with his Park Commissioner. At 270 Broadway, Brown found that Wagner was not the only key figure in the dispute who wanted to keep involvement limited; Brown was accustomed to finding Moses surrounded by his retinue whenever he arrived at the Coordinator's office. This time, when he was ushered in, Moses was alone.

  'T just told him that a trial would be the kind of thing that wasn't going to do anyone any good," Brown recalls. "And I said if you do this [build the playground], it will show you're even a bigger man than people know you are." Then, according to a memo Brown sent Wagner the next day,

  Commissioner Moses agreed that if the litigation should continue, a trial would be held and unfavorable publicity would result. . . . Commissioner Moses was agreeable to an adjournment to avoid an early trial, with the possibility of ultimately disposing of the case without further litigation.

  Attempting to save face, Moses allowed no hint that the case was being dropped to sneak into the press. Instead, the Corporation Counsel's office kept requesting delays—none of which Field objected to. Then, six weeks later, on July 17, after an unannounced meeting in which Brown signed on behalf of the city a stipulation that the city would build the playground, and Field signed one that in that event the suit would be dropped,

  Moses' aides distributed a press release announcing that he had decided to build a playground rather than a parking lot. The Tavern-on-the-Green fight—"the Battle of Central Park"—was over. The man who never retreated had retreated at last.

  But he had not retreated in time.

  The amount of face saved was infinitesimal. The press treated his announcement as the barely conditional surrender it was: moses surrenders TO MOTHERS; MOSES LOSES HIS PARK BATTLE; MOSES YIELDS . . .

  mothers win —over a Post editorial, one for our side. The aura of invincibility, the aura that had been so important to him in the past, the aura that had lasted for thirty years, was gone, destroyed in a day just as the aura of infallibility had been destroyed.

  And this was the least of what the Battle of Central Park cost Robert Moses.

  He had allowed himself to remain too long in the glare of a spotlight strong enough to show him as he was. The city had finally gotten a good look at the man behind the legend. Part of the legend still remained un-illuminated. Even after the Battle, Robert Moses was still, in the public consciousness, a man uninterested in money, a man who ignored bureaucrats and politicians, who was above political considerations. He was still the Man Who Got Things Done. Those elements of the Moses myth remained untouched.

  But other elements had been destroyed. No one who had followed the Battle closely could believe any longer that Robert Moses was in public life solely to serve the public. It had been all too obvious that what he wanted was to be not the public's servant, but its master, to be able to impose his will on it.

  That was one crack in the image. There were others. Moses' public appeal had always been based largely on his identification with the magic word "parks." In the public mind, he had always, first and foremost, been the Robert Moses of Sunken Meadow and Jones Beach, the fighter for and defender of open space and grass and trees and sun and surf and brine for urban masses. The halo placed on his head by the Timber Point fight thirty years before had now been knocked off.

  He was, moreover, identified by the Tavern-on-the-Green fight with the bulldozer. By the mid-1950's, the bulldozer had quite specific connotations in the public mind. Now the name of Moses had those connotations, too.

  The aura of infallibility was gone also. If Moses was the Man Who Got Things Done, implicit was the assumption that the things that he got done were things that should be gotten done. He had always been portrayed as a man who was right. Now, in a single, dramatic tableau, he had been shown to be utterly, unmistakably wrong.

  Most important, the aura of incorruptibility was gone. It was gone unfairly, for nothing he had done for the Tavern-on-the-Green was illegal, and by the standards by which the public judges morality in politics, what he had done for the restaurant was only faintly immoral. But it was gone

  nonetheless. The breath of scandal had tarnished this incorruptible public figure only slightly. But slightly was enough. His image had once dazzled even most of the reporters and editors hardest to dazzle. Now it no longer shone quite so brightly. The press could look at Robert Moses and at his operations and methods as they would look at the operations and methods of an ordinary public official.

  And they looked.

  "That Tavern-on-the-Green thing, that was such an insignificant thing," Sid Shapiro would say, years later, looking back on his idol's career. "It was such a meaningless little thing. I don't know to this day what the hell those people got so excited about.

  "But it was—I don't know—it was just never the same after that."

  were super-secret" and the ultimate documentation necessary for exposes— the records that confirm an investigator's hunches in black and white—would therefore be unattainable. Some groundwork had been done on Moses' Title I Slum Clearance Committee, however; Gleason's interest had been piqued some months before by a series on Manhattantown by the Posfs Joe Kahn, who, happening to pass the renewal site, had seen in the middle of it a large parking lot, had begun wondering, "Why should they have a parking lot if they were going to build housing?," had dug out the clips on the 1954 Senate "Caspert hearings" and had written a series pointing up the fact that almost two years after those hearings—and more than four years after Moses had turned over the site to Caspert's "reliable" developers, who had been milking it ever since—the only development was the parking lot. Reading the two-year-old transcript of the Senate hearings, the hearings all but ignored by the New York press, Gleason realized, as Cook put it, that "it had the makings of a scandal; it was obvious." The investigator told Mockridge that he wanted to look into Title I.

  His first look was not particularly searching or perceptive. He uncovered few facts not already in print somewhere else—in Kahn's series or in individual "human interest" features on the eviction of some impoverished tenant, in one-shot articles on the protests of the residents of Moses-threatened neighborhoods, in the relocation studies made by the Women's City Club and Lawrence Orton's "undercover" City Planning Commission unit.

  But n
ew facts were not necessary. Plenty to document the true shape of the Moses version of urban renewal were already available—had been available for years—in hearing transcripts or in club or commission pamphlets, rich nuggets of news just lying around waiting for someone to pick them up, put them together—show them not as isolated incidents but as part of a pattern—and print them.

  And on July 30, 1956, just a month after the conclusion of the Battle of Central Park, the World-Telegram and Sun began printing them.

  For all its omissions, this first series on Title I—researched by Gene Gleason and written by Fred J. Cook—painted a disturbing picture of the way New York City was being reshaped. It showed, as no one had previously shown, the relationship between the fact (previously written about in any real depth only by Kahn) that on many Title I sites no development had taken place in the four years since the city had handed them over to private interests and the fact (brought out in the Caspert hearings but never before documented in all its shocking details by anyone) that Moses' system financially encouraged failure to develop. It showed that the "slum clearance" program was clearing not just slums but healthy, pleasant residential and business sections—and was not building anything to replace them. If it did not contain the real "dynamite" that a little digging would have uncovered—the fact that Robert Moses, the man who allegedly refused to deal with politicians, had turned over a billion-dollar program to shady

  politicians—it contained ample documentation of Cook's disturbing conclusion:

  It is a system under which neighborhoods actually have deteriorated; it is a system under which the number of apartments, already inadequate, has been reduced for years to come. It is a system . . . beginning again the cycle of overcrowding and bad housing that creates slums.

  Most importantly, while previous media coverage had almost invariably referred to Title I as the "city's" program, Cook made sure that readers understood it was the city's Slum Clearance Committee, Robert Moses, chairman. If Gleason and Cook did not disclose—because they did not understand—that Moses was not only the official in charge of Title I but the official in sole charge, that neither Mayor nor any other elected official of the city but he and he alone made all final decisions in regard to this program that was supposed to reshape the city—they nonetheless nailed the responsibility for Title I's failures to his door more firmly than it had ever been nailed before. Moses' name may still not have been in headlines about the failures, but at least—at last—it was in print.

  If the editors of the World-Telegram and Sun realized the significance of the series, they concealed that realization well. Only one of its parts even made page one. And there were other indications that while the Moses image may have been tarnished, it still retained enough glitter to intimidate, that the editors were regretting having given Gleason the go-ahead on Robert Moses, that, having taken the plunge at last, they were trying to make an about-face in mid-air. Apprising Moses of the series' contents in advance, they gave the Coordinator space each day to attack—in a separate article— their own newspaper's stories. Moses' name was, moreover, conspicuous by its absence from the headlines over the Gleason-Cook revelations of faults in his program; it appeared only in the headlines over his own articles praising that program. Not only did the Telly's editorial writers not praise the series, they didn't even mention it.

  But still, the most significant fact about the series was that it ran at all. Investigative reporters quickly become aware of a phenomenon of their profession: information so hard to come by when they are preparing to write their first story in a new field suddenly becomes plentiful as soon as that first story has appeared in print. Every city agency has its malcontents and its idealists and its malcontent-idealists—officials and aides and clerks and secretaries unhappy with the philosophy by which it is being run or the payoffs that are being made within it—who have been just waiting, for years, for the appearance of some forum in which their feelings can be expressed. When they realize that there is one at last—when they see that first story— they cannot get their information to its writer fast enough. Scores of city employees—men and women angry for personal or philosophical reasons at the inside workings of the Moses empire—and hundreds if not thousands of city residents whose homes or neighborhoods had been destroyed for his

  Title I projects, and who then had watched vainly for years for the projects to be built, had been looking for such a forum. They had been desperate for one. They had almost given up their hopes of finding one. With the exception of the Post, they had never had one, and the Post had exposed his philosophy rather than his payoffs, the "scandals" on which so many officials and residents were convinced they had information. Now, with the appearance of the first Gleason-Cook series, these people were convinced that at last such a forum had appeared. And the two journalists' telephones began humming with calls—some anonymous, some not, some from private individuals, many from officials up to and including a liberal Bronx congressman—revealing the secrets of the Moses operation: the politicians who were the real interests behind his "front men" developers, the deals that had been made with city agencies to immunize those developers from health laws. Along with the calls came letters; out of one envelope fell a clipped-out newspaper ad for Pratt Institute Housing in Brooklyn with a name circled: "rental agent—Samuel Caspert." As soon as Gleason picked up the clipping, he realized what its sender was trying to tell him: Manhattantown was not the only development that Moses had turned over to that phony developer. On the day the series ended, Cook summarized future leads that should be dug into; Mockridge, passing the rewriteman's memo along to managing editor Richard Starnes, scribbled on it: "RS—Seems we've got some material for more stories—Shall we go ahead?" RS said yes, and Gleason was soon holding conferences with city officials.

  With virtually only one exception—Hortense Gabel—even the most cooperative of these officials were wary of Moses' power. All interviews had to be completely off the record, of course; Gleason could not find a single official willing to be quoted. Because most were afraid to have the reporter seen in their offices and many, believing their phones were tapped, refused to talk to him over the telephone, Gleason met them, after dark, in their automobiles or in out-of-the-way bars. One was so terrified that a key memo might find its way into print and thereby reveal his cooperation that he read the document to the reporter—but refused to let him touch it. Without access to the records of the Slum Clearance Committee, information about the involvement of key politicians could not be documented, and therefore could not be printed. But there was plenty of other material that could be checked. Finding that the newspaper clipping tip on Pratt checked out, Gleason reported on August 28, 1956, that the key figures in that operation were also Caspert and Company, and that instead of developing the site they were milking it as they had Manhattantown. Returning to the "bombed-out" Brooklyn neighborhood in January 1957, Gleason came back with notes from which Cook wrote a story about a ninety-two-year-old woman huddling in blankets and an overcoat in an apartment in which a thermometer registered 40.5 degrees and about a mother who hadn't been able to give her two little boys a bath all winter because there hadn't been any hot water, about complaints being ignored not only by the developers but by the City Health Department: "We have yet to see an inspector around here." Some of the anonymous phone calls were coming from an aide in the City