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

by Caro, Robert A

  Comptroller's office; in April, one call from this source informed Gleason • that the Pratt "developers" weren't paying their real estate taxes to the city, hadn't been for almost three years and, now that they had milked the project for "millions," were planning to pull out and turn it back to the city. When Gleason ran this story, he had to include in it denials by Spargo and Leb-wohl, speaking for Moses, but it was soon confirmed by an announcement from the developers. Then Gleason's informant told him that other Title I developers were also not paying taxes. Presenting himself in the Comptroller's office, Gleason demanded to see the tax records, and on April 24, 1957, working from Gleason's notes, Cook revealed that while developers had reaped fortunes from Title I projects, "the city is holding the bag ... to the tune of nearly $1 million in delinquent taxes and inter-' est."

  The play of these stories was still not big. To Gleason's and Cook's disgust, the articles on Pratt ran only in the Brooklyn edition. And a giant must still be treated as a giant: there had been headlines for almost a year now in the World-Telegram on Title I exposes but Moses' name was seldom in those headlines. His name was seldom in the stories, in fact, partly because of his success in letting Spargo, Lebwohl and Brooks speak for him; it was not until the fourteenth paragraph of the April 24 revelations on the tax delinquencies of the developers selected by the Slum Clearance Committee that the name of the chairman of that committee was mentioned. The city's other dailies were in general picking up the Gleason-Cook stories only to allow Wagner to deny them, the Mayor soothingly reassuring the public that everything was going along fine in Title I. Even in the Post, Title I revelations were few and far between. And as for the Times, bellwether and fashion setter for the city's press, in January 1957, the day after Gleason had revealed that tenants on the Pratt site were freezing in their apartments, and that the Health Department was doing nothing about it because of a secret agreement with the Slum Clearance Committee, the Times, practically apologizing for running the story at all ("It became an issue yesterday because of allegations in a newspaper"), stated straight-facedly that "the Department of Health reported yesterday that tenants awaiting relocation from slum-clearance sites had been getting more heat and better sanitary services as a result of its crackdown on five developers"; and repeated without qualification the following lie:

  Robert Moses, chairman of the slum clearance committee, said his agency, which is in charge of Title I development, had made no deal with the Health Department. He said he had told all developers they must obey all city regulations.

  The Times did, on May 26, run one long story on Title I; the headline read:

  CITY LEADS NATION IN SLUM CLEARING.

  Then there ensued a development more difficult for editors to play small. In June, Moses was informed by Spargo and Lebwohl that Manhattan-

  town, Inc., whose tax arrears had now topped $600,000 and were rising every day, had, because its officers had been siphoning out the money as fast as it came in, none available to pay the taxes any time in the foreseeable future; that there was also no money in sight to pay the interest on the $2,000,000 mortgage Moses had persuaded the city to give them, let alone the amortization; that there was no money in sight to build any of the buildings the corporation had, more than five years before, contracted to build on the six-block site Moses had turned over to it—that, in short, there was no possibility at all that his "reliable bidders" could go ahead with the project. Moses had no choice. On June II, the Slum Clearance Committee asked the Board of Estimate to institute foreclosure proceedings and take back the property in the name of the city so that it could be turned over to a new sponsor.

  The move was made, through Corporation Counsel Peter Campbell Brown's office, as quietly as possible. The Times's initial play of the story was not designed to make any noise, either; the revelation that a corporation to which the city had turned over 338 buildings worth $15,000,000 for only $1,000,000, a corporation which didn't even bother to pay its city taxes, a corporation which had for five years been collecting rents on those buildings, was now saying that it could not develop the site after all, was found worthy by the Times's editors of five paragraphs on page fourteen. But the rest of the press was less discreet. Every charge Gleason and Cook had been making for so many months had turned out to be true, and most newspapers played it that way. As Cook was later to write: "The scandal that Moses and Wagner had kept denying for a year was there at last for everyone to see, confirmed in eight-column headlines." Gleason was even allowed a very personal moment of triumph. For months he had been trying in vain to obtain an interview with Wagner. Now Wagner had no choice but to hold a press conference on Title I, and Gene Gleason was there.

  Every time the Mayor attempted to excuse the fiasco by blaming it all on the promoters, saying they had misled the city, Gleason would remind him that the facts had been in print—over and over again—for almost a full year; as Cook put it, "it had all been there in black and white for city officials to read, and they had done nothing except to deride the revelations. How did the Mayor explain that?" In the climactic moment:

  "We were misled," Mayor Wagner confessed, unhappily. "You mean to say you were conned for five years?" Gleason asked. "Well, if you want to put it that way—yes, I guess you could say we were conned for five years," the Mayor acknowledged.

  For a few days, the press focused on Title I—even the Times moved the story onto its front page—although in no newspaper was Moses linked directly and repeatedly with the scandal being unfolded. The Times article announcing that new sponsors were replacing the original "reliable bidders" of five years before on several Title I projects said: "The changing ownership ... is regarded in building circles as the squeezing out from the slum

  clearance program of some of the early promoters who had little construction know-how." Neither the Times nor any other paper asked why these "promoters" had been allowed into the program in the first place— or who had allowed them in. Nonetheless, Gleason and Cook were confident that there would be at least curtailment of Moses' powers and quite possibly the Mayor's acceptance of the resignation that Moses was continually offering him. Deep as they had probed into corruption in city government, they had not probed deep enough; they still did not understand the fundamental reality of Moses' relations with that government and the venal machine of which that government was in crucial respects no more than an extension. They did not understand the extent to which the machine depended on Robert Moses, the extent to which he was its feeder, the supplier of the raw meat of patronage and contracts, of premiums and fees, of the whole stew of "honest graft" on which it battened. They did not understand that he was the only feeder possessed of enough food to satisfy its ravenous appetite. They did not understand that the machine needed Robert Moses, needed him at least as much as he needed it, that the county organizations of which the borough presidents (and in 1957, the Mayor) were only representatives could not do without him. The two reporters' expectation was not unreasonable. Ordinarily, the tainting of a city program with scandal and failure—scandal of immense proportions, failure five years in duration— would result in at least curtailment of the powers of the mayoral subordinate heading that program, lest the public outcry turn against the Mayor. Their expectation was just based on a false premise: that Robert Moses was really the Mayor's subordinate. They did not understand that, as a matter of practical politics, the Mayor could not discipline, demote or remove Title I's administrator.

  And so they were surprised at ensuing developments.

  Moses—or, rather, Moses' spokesmen, Spargo, Lebwohl and Brooks; the Coordinator was keeping his lowest profile ever—announced that a new sponsor, William Zeckendorfs Webb & Knapp, Inc., was willing to take over all Manhattantown's debts, including its liabilities to the city, and build the project. Gleason and Cook realized that by changing owners without foreclosing on the old ones first, Moses was allowing Manhattantown, Inc., to escape from the project, which they had been milking for five years, with no
financial penalties whatsoever. But the advantages for the city were undeniable, not only because of the avoidance of lengthy foreclosure proceedings but because, in obtaining Zeckendorf, the city was trading in a promoter for a genuine developer. And letting Manhattantown go scot free was something that was only to be expected; whatever the nature of the political muscle that had allowed the corporation to milk a sizable slum for five years while the city turned a blind eye to tax arrears, that muscle was certainly strong enough to keep the city from taking any genuine punitive action against it.

  But then some of the details of the takeover arrangement to which Moses had agreed—and on which he had apparently sold the Mayor and the Board of Estimate—were leaked to light, not by Moses' tight-sealed

  Slum Clearance Committee, of course (as usual, that group deliberated in secret), but by City Hall.

  Under the arrangement, Webb & Knapp would not merely insure Man-hattantown's principals against any liability to the city. It would buy out the two principal stockholders—Seymour Millstein and Jack Ferman (Caspert having prudently sold out before the company's collapse)—for $533> 2 50, and put them on Webb & Knapp's payroll as "consultants" for five years at a fee of $30,000 per year, a total of $150,000 more. These two men, key figures in Manhattantown since its inception, were not merely being allowed, after five years of delay—five years during which they had made fortunes— to slip quietly into the night without punishment. They were being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so. And this money was not for all their stock. Under the Moses-approved arrangements, Ferman and Millstein would be given sizable stockholdings—between them a total of 32 percent—in Webb & Knapp's Manhattantown subsidiary. "The developers who hadn't developed," Cook wrote, "would be entitled in the future to nearly one-third of the profits" of the developer who did develop.* The cast of characters in the Manhattantown story was, moreover, getting a significant addition. The Moses-approved contract did not, of course, contemplate any reduction in Democrat Samuel Rosenman's $250,000 retainer. But it added another $75,000 legal fee—to Daniel J. Riesner, president of the National Republican Club.

  Outcry in the press—the afternoon press, primarily—apparently panicked the administration. During the executive session of the Board of Estimate at which the new contract was scheduled to be approved (Moses was not present; he was presiding at a Long Island ribbon cutting at which Herbert Bayard Swope "conferred" on him the title of "Doctor of Human Betterment"), reporters waiting outside the closed doors heard voices raised in argument for three and a half hours after Spargo, Lebwohl and Brooks went in. Emerging harried, Wagner said the Board had refused to okay the contract—and when, in several days, it was resubmitted, Riesner's fee had been cut in half and Ferman's consultantship had been eliminated entirely. Gleason and Cook were not impressed by the fact that Ferman was now going to be paid "only" $300,000 and Riesner "only" $37,500, particularly after Gleason drew from a perspiring Wagner an admission that he did not know what legal services—if any—Riesner had ever performed for Manhattantown. "This was plain trafficking ... in huge square-block chunks of city real estate that had been made available to [favored insiders] at knock-down prices by the taxpayers' millions," Cook wrote. Attempting to put a better face on the arrangement, Wagner then declared with firm and earnest mien that Ferman and Millstein "will be out as sponsors of Title I projects"; they would, he said, never be allowed to benefit from the program in the future. "It sounded good if you didn't think," Cook was to recall, "but it seemed to reporters who did that the words, even as the Mayor uttered them, had a hollow ring. Weren't Ferman and Millstein going to benefit in the future?" Of course they were, to the tune

  * Ferman said he actually lost money.

  of 32 percent.* The developers who hadn't developed were still being rewarded for not developing; they were just not being rewarded as much.

  And as the various arms of the city government quick-marched through the various steps necessary to the formalization of this arrangement, Gleason and Cook realized that the arrangement was a fait accompli, no matter how diligently they and their fellow journalists alerted the public to its injustices. The total result of their torturously obtained exposes would be to give to the milkers of Manhattantown a substantial extra helping of pure cream. As for Robert Moses, as the revelations faded away it became apparent that his powers over slum clearance were to be curtailed not a whit. Their exposes— and the resultant action—had, really, changed nothing, Cook was to write. "It disturbed no fundamental realities. Robert Moses still ran the show. Projects still reeked of political influence."

  And if anyone had any doubt of the truth of Cook's observation, proof was not long in coming.

  On the basis of its previous behavior, New York's press could not be expected to take much interest in the relocation details of Lincoln Center, the Title I project that best revealed the vast breadth of Moses' creative, city-shaping imagination. (With his first realization of the possibilities in Title I had come what he was later to describe as a "vision of a reborn West Side, marching north from Columbus Circle, and eventually spreading over the entire dismal and decayed West Side.") The Coliseum at the Circle had been the first encampment in that march, and no sooner had he built it than three coincidences had combined to show him the next leg. Sitting beside him on a dozen daises, Fordham president Father Laurence J. McGinley was repeatedly mentioning to him that the university desperately needed a mid-town campus but was unable to afford midtown real estate prices; Ruth Baker Pratt and other opera lovers kept mentioning to him at dinner parties that forcing the Metropolitan Opera to perform in its ancient, inadequate building on Thirty-ninth Street was scandalous; and then he read in the papers one morning that Carnegie Hall had just formally notified the New York Philharmonic that its lease would not be renewed after 1958. From the three coincidences, his mind leapt to a grand conception: razing eighteen square blocks of slums stretching north from the Coliseum and rearing on their ruins a huge, glittering cultural center that would house—in grandeur—not only university, opera and Philharmonic but a dozen other related institutions. By 1957, his plan for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts included not only a four-square-block Fordham campus, a Philharmonic Hall and a new Metropolitan Opera House but a ballet center, a repertory theater, a high school of the performing arts, a library and museum of the performing arts, a new home for the famed Juilliard School

  * Wrote Cook: "Asked how he squared this indubitable fact with his new [statement], Mayor Wagner showed a little irritation and answered a bit peevishly: 'Well, I think Webb & Knapp was lucky to get that much interest [a 68 percent stockholding] in it. They have control.'"

  of Music, and such related facilities as 4,400 units of housing, a public school and playground, an underground parking garage, a firehouse, a park with bandshell for outdoor concerts, a headquarters for the American Red Cross and the Fiorello H. La Guardia High School, "not to speak," as Moses put it, "of the neighboring offices of The New York Times." Newspapers were filled with artists' renderings of the magnificent cultural institutions to be erected where, for the most part, shabby tenements now stood; by its traditional standards, the press could not be expected to be very interested in the fact that 7,000 low-income families and 800 businesses were going to have to be displaced from the site—or in the charges being made that despite the fact that, as reformer I. D. Robbins put it, "there ... are plenty of funds available" under various housing acts "to enable the planner to establish the first truly balanced neighborhood in New York," Moses was not making even a pretense of creating new homes for the families displaced; to replace the 7,000 low-income apartments being destroyed, 4,400 new ones were being planned— 4,000 of them luxury apartments.

  By its traditional standards, however, the press might be expected to be interested in several financial facts about Lincoln Center: although Moses had received an offer from certain reputable housing developers of $9.58 per square foot for land, he was selling the land to other,
favored, developers for $7.00 per square foot; while the city was acquiring the rest of the huge site by blanket condemnation proceedings, it had for some unexplained reason found it advisable to take the building at 70 Columbus Avenue, owned (under a trust established by Democratic moneyman and Charles Buckley intimate Joseph P. Kennedy) by Robert F. Kennedy and three of his sisters, Jean Kennedy Smith, Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Patricia Kennedy Lawford, not by condemnation but by purchase—for $2,500,000, a price so high that while the land under the buildings adjacent to the one owned by the Kennedys was worth $9.58 per square foot, the land under theirs became worth $62.88 per square foot.

  And those facts were to be brought to the press's attention—by public statements by a public official. For Housing and Home Finance Agency Administrator Albert M. Cole, over-all federal administrator of Title I, who had been chafing for years over Moses' administration of Title I in New York, Lincoln Center was the last straw. In April, Cole had attempted to go over Moses' head, refusing to provide funds for the giant cultural complex until the city's Mayor and Board of Estimate met with him to decide "broad policy questions" about Title I's future in New York. Wagner let him know who would decide that future: "Would suggest your representatives meet with Slum Clearance Committee," the Mayor telegrammed. The press had backed Moses, and Cole had been forced to back down. Now, with the Manhattantown mess spread on the record, Cole, believing that some of the glitter might have rubbed off the Moses legend, and that the time might be ripe to curtail his powers, decided to try again. He demanded new appraisals of the Lincoln Center real estate, by "independent" appraisers. And when Moses refused, Cole charged publicly that during the HHFA's ten-year existence "the agency has had more trouble with Mr. Robert Moses