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

by Caro, Robert A

  A man closer to the Governor, however, had guessed the futility of

  such attempts. "[Moses] got friends of mine to come to me and ask me to try to persuade Rockefeller to let him take it back," recalls Thomas E. Dewey. "I must have had a dozen phone calls from people I knew. But I had made a discreet inquiry, an indirect inquiry; Rockefeller wasn't going to let him take it back. I felt sorry for him." For what might have been the one reason for Rockefeller to let Moses withdraw his resignations—not his Parks Council resignation, perhaps, but his others—did not, to his surprise and that of political insiders, exist. The expected storm of protest had not materialized. Robert Moses had been fired. And hardly anyone had really cared.

  Citing "nepotism" as its cause, the Daily News reacted to the ouster with outrage, as did the Journal-American (we need him!) and conservative columnists. "No public official in any part of the country is comparable to Robert Moses in his devoted and unending and mostly uncompensated public service for nearly half a century," George E. Sokolsky declared. "No man can be trusted with major affairs who asks such a man as Robert Moses to resign. ..." But in the rest of the media there was only a brief flurry of editorials, and the editorial that mattered never came. Moses must have known he had lost when, on December 2, he turned at his breakfast table to the editorial page of The New York Times (which only three years before had said: "You don't bench Babe Ruth") and read: "The most incredible of all the prodigious qualities of Robert Moses has been his ability to sustain, long after most other men retire, a superhuman burden of responsibilities. ... He has conquered every obstacle in four decades of public service, except the ability to make himself immortal. . . . We hope that, after the verbal skyrockets sputter out, he will recognize the wisdom of the Governor's suggestion that it was time—indeed, past time—to begin planning for an orderly transition of authority. ... No government function can be made so dependent on a single individual that he becomes the indispensable man."

  The young reporter assigned to cover the otherwise vacant Newsday city desk Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning—the paper had no Sunday edition then—found waiting for him a memo from an editor telling him to compile a summary of all the statements that the editor was sure would be pouring in for a big story on reaction in governmental circles to be written by state political editor Stan Hinden Sunday night for Monday's paper. But all Saturday there was exactly one such statement—a brief one from Democratic state chairman William H. McKeon charging the Governor with "cavalier treatment." Telephoning around for comment Sunday evening, Hinden found politicians rather reluctant to make any, and those they did make were carefully hedged. Aside from a few Democratic county chairmen backing McKeon, of a score of public officials telephoned, only Newbold Morris ("I can't believe it") was willing to go on record with the type of public statement the editor had expected. Pragmatists all, politicians had grasped at once the basic reality of the situation: the Governor, the man with the power, was the man they didn't want to offend. As for the public at large, aside from a spate—a brief spate—of letters-to-the-editor, there was hardly any reaction at all.

  In political circles the illusion of Moses' popularity with the voters had lingered long after the reality was gone, partly because in those circles, many of whose members were making money off him, that popularity was un-dimmed, partly because politicians were close enough to him to be overawed by his personality so completely that they could hardly conceive of his falling into public disrepute. For decades, Governors had dreaded what would happen if they had to be the one to fire Bob Moses. Now one Governor had fired Bob Moses.

  And nothing had happened.

  The next meeting of the State Council of Parks was the first in thirty-eight years over which Robert Moses had not presided. It was the first meeting of the State Council of Parks ever over which Moses had not presided.

  At that meeting, his successor read a eulogy with, observers say, obvious feeling. Then resolutions were adopted unanimously to change the names of not one, but three separate state parks, one at Niagara, one at Massena and one on Fire Island, to "Robert Moses State Park."

  At a time at which the naming of public works after individuals had not reached the floodtide it was later to assume, this was an almost unprecedented honor. It is doubtful that any individual below the rank of President had ever had three separate major public works named after him at the same time. Coupled with the eulogy, it made the January 22, 1963, meeting of the State Council of Parks one of unparalleled tribute to Robert Moses. But Robert Moses had not presided over that meeting.

  More important, he had not been present. For only the heads of the various regional park commissions could attend, and he was no longer the head of the regional park commission he had headed for thirty-eight years, the park commission that represented his youthful, and cherished, and most nearly perfect dreams.

  During the following years, Robert Moses never admitted even once— not even to his closest friends; not even to Shapiro—how much the loss of the presidency of the Long Island State Park Commission meant to him. But people who knew him saw through his assumed indifference.

  His successor as commission president, Perry Duryea, Jr., son of an old associate and an admirer himself, speaks of the "great emotional strain" that the seventy-four-year-old commissioner went through when discussing the parks with him. "He always considered the Long Island State Park Commission as his base," Duryea says. "Long Island was, after all, the place he knew best. This was really the Moses baby above everything else." Says Joe Ingraham: "He would never let on, but you could see it in everything he said—they broke his heart when they took that away from him."

  Not only pride but politics prevented Moses thereafter from displaying open resentment. Having had a taste of Nelson Rockefeller once, he was not anxious for another one. He was, shortly, to swallow his pride and make up

  with the man who had so grievously injured him. At the dedication of the Alexander Hamilton Bridge two weeks after the firing, reporters were watching to see Moses' reaction when Rockefeller appeared. Moses' reaction was to throw his arms around Rockefeller and to go out of his way to praise him during his speech. (Rockefeller threw his arms around Moses, and praised him, too.)

  on Riker's Island just beyond, glowed and flamed dramatically; during the day, the scene was ugly enough to inspire the creative mind. It inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald, who in The Great Gatsby described it as

  a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke, and finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-gray men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud . . .

  And it inspired Robert Moses.

  From the 1920's, the Flushing Meadows had fired Moses' imagination. Part of the inspiration had been their size, of course: they were 1,346 acres, a Central Park and a half. Part had been their location: they lay almost precisely at the geographic center of New York; as the city's population shifted, moving steadily eastward, its population center was moving steadily closer to those meadows, too—a park there, Moses felt, would be a true "Central Park" to the whole city. For a man with a vision so broad that it required vast open spaces for realization, here was a vast open space—at the city's geographic and population center. And in some way the very ugliness of the meadows seemed to furnish inspiration, too. They, and the Riker's dump beyond, were "a cloud of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night," he was to write. Rereading Isaiah, he came across "Give unto them beauty for ashes"—after that, his dream had a slogan. He would turn what may well have been the ugliest part of New York City into its most beautiful.

  As with all Moses' dreams, this one kept expanding. By 1930, on the maps he prepared for the Metropolitan P
ark Conference, there was green— the green that symbolized future park land—not only over the Flushing Meadows but, extending eastward from the meadows in a continuous corridor right along the spine of Queens all the way out to the city line, not just a park but a string of three parks (Kissena, Cunningham and Alley Pond) connected by strips of greenery—parks designed to serve not only the single-family-home Queens of the present generation but the high-rise Queens he foresaw for future generations.

  But it was to be a tough dream to realize. No project on which Robert Moses had ever embarked was to document more definitively his statement: "It takes more than a good idea to make a great public improvement. The fact is that such things happen when there are leaders available, ready and eager to take advantage of the logic of events. Even then the whole result is accomplished only by a series of limited objectives, over a surprisingly long period of years." No project was to demonstrate more dramatically that of all the qualities which enabled him to build public works of the first magnitude, none was more important than the simple fact that he endured, that he stayed in power not for years, but for decades.

  Because it took decades.

  He began trudging through the park, actively planning it in detail, in 1934, walking through the valley of ashes, trudging, as he put it, over "thirty years of the offscourings, the cans, cast-off baby carriages and umbrellas of Brooklyn," among the ash-gray men carrying spades, followed by a group of men without spades—Madigan, Howland, Andrews, Latham, Shapiro, Chapin. Soon there were transoms and plumb lines among the spades, and then blueprints, for, searching for a way to extend the Grand Central Parkway to the Triborough Bridge, he had determined—and the engineers had confirmed—that the way could be along the western edge of the meadows. For a while thereafter he hoped that the parkway could lead to the park, that the road might prove the key to unlocking the monumental expenditure of public funds necessary for the realization of so monumental a vision. With La Guardia in, Tammany was out—and so, too, was Fishhooks; state funds were available to build the parkway, and, cynical as he had become about the ability of the legislative leaders in Albany to see the public interest, he could not believe that even they would allow him to build a road along which motorists would have to drive through hills of garbage; he was sure that once he got the parkway built he could get state money to build a park around it. But he had underestimated Albany; the Legislature would give funds for a road and nothing else; the Grand Central Parkway and a narrow right-of-way on either side of it was all he was able to build on the meadows. He moved 50,000,000 cubic yards of rubbish, but they made in Mount Corona only a narrow pass; recalls Rodgers, "Motorists still had to pass through the dark wall of refuse before coming out on the broad prospects of meadow and bay." "For a while," Moses would recall ruefully, "we fondly hoped to cover" the garbage "with a thin layer of topsoil and to plant, at a price which would not subject us to indictment," but obtaining even the topsoil strained his ingenuity to the limit; planting was out of the question. As for the great park, "We studied every possible means of acquiring the whole meadow, but this dream seemed too big for the vision and means of the City in the face of competition of so many other urgent enterprises."

  Then, he says, in words that reveal that inside Robert Moses the Power Broker there was still a Robert Moses the Dreamer, "the miracle happened— the idea of a World's Fair."

  Not the 1964-65 World's Fair, the 1939-40. The mind that could grasp an idea in an instant, expand it, fill in its details, see its relation to other ideas, lunged at that idea of the Fair as it fell from George McAneny's lips. "By God that's a great idea!" he had said, pounding the table; he would sell it to La Guardia, and he himself "would stop at nothing to help"—if the Fair was held on Flushing Meadows, and if "from the beginning the project was planned so as to insure a great park" on the meadows after the Fair closed.

  Moses thought he had taken out every possible form of insurance. His park commissionership made him in effect the Fair Corporation's landlord; the lease he drew up—and, as additional insurance, embodied in legislation he had passed in Albany—provided that the improvements necessary to make the meadows usable be permanent, not temporary, improvements, and that they be installed in conformance with his plan for the park—right down

  to the creation of a boat basin at the north end of the site and two lakes at the south: thousands of trees were planted and thousands of yards of underground utility lines laid according to the landscape design for the park, not the Fair. The first $4,000,000 of Fair profits, moreover, were to be used —as a spark to kindle further state and city contributions—to create a park. Making the meadows usable proved to be immensely more difficult than even the most pessimistic of his engineers had foreseen—it was at the Flushing Meadows, for example, that there were encountered, for the first time on such a large scale in the metropolitan area, "mud waves" of a force that ripped loose foundations and pilings. A new drainage system for the entire Flushing area—which included placing a branch of the Flushing River in a conduit as large as a tube of the Holland Tunnel—had to be created; cleaning up pollution in Flushing Bay required two giant sewage treatment plants. Even for Moses, the list of other basic improvements required was "endless"; even he had to call their total cost—$59,000,000—"staggering." But Moses got the money from Albany and, with La Guardia's help, from Washington. He even got an additional million dollars—which La Guardia found somewhere in the city budget after Moses promised him that the building would have plenty of the Mayor's favorite architectural element, glass bricks—for an Aymar Embury-designed permanent, pillared New York City Building housing an ice- and roller-skating rink ("You could get a lot of building for a million then," Moses would recall ruefully). And then he saw all his precautions made meaningless by Grover Whalen's inefficiency; the $4,000,000 was supposed to come out of the Fair's profits, and there were no profits; the 1939-40 New York World's Fair ended with a deficit so large that it could repay its backers only thirty-three cents on the dollar. By 1940, federal funds had dried up; the city was broke; all during the five years of World War II the Flushing Meadows remained a park mostly in name only, littered with debris from the buildings of exhibitors who had had enough money to dismantle their structures but not enough to truck the remains away, grass and trees dying, rats starting to reappear— all that was left was a skating rink and, underground, invisible, tens of millions of dollars' worth of utilities that would provide a foundation for a park—if ever there should come another chance to build it.

  One "event" in which Moses saw the "logic of using it to progress a park" had been a highway, another had been a World's Fair. It took a leader with his single-mindedness to see such logic in the third, which occurred five years after the Fair; other men might see the formation of the United Nations in 1945 as a chance for peace, he saw it as a chance for a park. Persuading Secretary-General Trygve Lie to use the City Building until UN headquarters in Manhattan could be completed, he got $2,000,000 from the enthusiastic Board of Estimate to "remodel" it—and enough of that money found its way into remodeling around, rather than in, that building to develop scores of acres near it according to the park plans he had stored away for so many years now.

  Another five years, and another event—and the same Park Commissioner still around to take advantage of its "logic." With the population of

  Queens burgeoning in 1951, the Board of Estimate approved a huge new storm sewer for the borough. When Moses had finished taking a hand in its planning, it was running along a route linking Alley Pond, Cunningham and Kissena parks, enough land along it had been condemned so there could be at least a strip of park land all the way from Flushing Meadows to the city line, arrangements had been made to fill the gash made for the sewer with Sanitation Department fill according to plans drawn up by the Park Department—and after decades of dreaming about a Queens park corridor, the land for it was at last in his hands.

  And when, in 1959, he had first heard that men were planning ano
ther World's Fair, he believed that the chance had come to turn the great Queens dream—Flushing Meadows Park, the corridor, the three other parks along it—into reality at last. That was the key attraction for him in assuming the Fair presidency. He admitted this fairly frankly in public. "Visitors to such an exposition," he wrote, "carry away indelible impressions, lively lessons, enduring satisfactions and pleasant memories, but what finally remains in the ground when the pageant has faded, the brickbats have been removed by the wreckers and scavengers, and the park planners have gone to work is of more concern to the next generation than any spectacle, however gorgeous." In private, he was more frank. "I don't think RM really ever cared about the Fair—not in the sense he cared about Jones Beach, say," Sid Shapiro declares. "What he cared about—what he was always talking about—was what the Fair could do for parks."

  The Fair could do what he had wanted to do for so long. The "chain of urban parks," he said, would be "the ultimate residuary legatee of the Fair." And he was sure the legacy would be large enough. Hardly had he assumed the presidency when the engineering firms of his two most trusted park consultants—W. Earle Andrews of Andrews & Clark and Gilmore Clarke of Clarke & Rapuano—were costing out the full-scale development of the chain. The figure came to about $56,000,000, and his financial consultant, Jack Madigan of Madigan-Hyland, assured him the Fair's surplus would be far higher. He went on record with a confident promise: "The Fair will . . . finish the Flushing Meadow and Corridor program without cost to the city. . . . The Fair management is committed without reservation to . . . presenting to the City an integrated chain of urban parks which will serve as a model to rapidly growing municipalities everywhere. . . . We [will] build a heritage for all time." There was even a timetable, laid out park by park, and guaranteeing—unconditionally—completion by "the summer of 1967," less than two years after the Fair was to close. The Fair would be the instrument by which the dream he had cherished for almost forty years would be transformed into reality—reality grand enough and beautiful enough to bear his name.*