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

by Caro, Robert A

  PUERTO RICO DROPS OUT OF '64 FAIR; VIRGIN IS. DROPS PLAN FOR PAVILION.

  The city's other papers were reluctant to pick up this new theme at first. As late as the spring of 1963, the general play given to the World's Fair in New York's press was still upbeat. But Moses took care of that.

  The first of a new series of press conferences on "the Fair's progress" was held on June 27, 1963. The prepared statement with which Moses opened it had evidently started out to be a plea for cooperation: "We are not shrinking violets or sensitive plants and constructive questions won't irritate us," he said. "Let's be working partners in bringing the world to New York." But it turned into a statement with the Moses touch: "We at the Fair build. The Press in its many manifestations reports. Who am I to explain our respective missions and to acknowledge our dependence upon you? . . . We are entitled to the support of all decent citizens. . . . Error is the besetting sin of journalism, perhaps occasionally acknowledged in the Confessional but almost never publicly."

  The reporters found, moreover, that their questions were not considered constructive. He had planned the main news of the day to be the fact that ground was being broken for a Sudanese Pavilion, and the fact that the Fair was coming along on schedule. "Do not, we ask, overemphasize the absentees," he had said in his statement. The reporters persisted in asking about the empty spaces on the map behind him and how much missing rental they represented. He began to get angry. The reporters asked him about the fees paid to Preusse. "That is not a subject that comes under the category of the Fair's progress," Moses said. The reporters walked out fuming, and the Herald Tribune's lead the next day was that the Fair's "economic prospects . . . were trimmed yesterday." Its article enumerated every unoccupied plot. The Sudanese Pavilion barely made the last paragraph.

  To attack, there was for Robert Moses only one response: counterattack. A few days later, a group of Queens civic leaders were touring the Fair. Greeting them, Moses noticed reporters nearby. "This is a highly critical community," he rasped. "I think we have more critics than we are entitled to for our size. They foul the city's nest and are always more interested in what is going wrong than in what is going right."

  A luncheon that had been planned to "clear the air" with the new editors who were taking over the places once held by his friends at the Times did little to convince them of his reasonableness.

  Public officials lunching with Times editors almost invariably do so at the Times; even Presidents come to them. Not Moses; if they wanted to see him, he told Ingraham, who was arranging the luncheon, they would have to come to him. They agreed to do so, and eight or nine—"the very top, Daniel and Salisbury were there," recalls Ingraham—journeyed out to Flushing Meadows one day. Ingraham says he was brought along "to explain things to them," but explanations were to prove superfluous. Moses made things perfectly clear.

  "Moses started sounding off and made some reference to his job as City Construction Coordinator and the power it gave him," Ingraham says. "So Frank Adams [Times city editor] asked, 'How far does your jurisdiction as Construction Coordinator extend—the way you put it, it would seem that if a road starts in Florida, you have jurisdiction over it as long as it ends up here.' "

  "I consider that an insulting question," Moses said. Leaping out of his seat, he stalked out of the room—"leaving nine top executives of The New York Times absolutely flabbergasted." For a while they sat there, stunned, waiting for their host to return. Gradually they began to realize that he wasn't going to. Says Ingraham: "After a while, we just got up and went home."

  Moses paid the price for the pleasure of giving his emotions rein.

  In every announcement, the press found something to carp at. When the Administration Building opened, they emphasized not that the first structure for the Fair had been completed, but that it had cost a million dollars instead of the expected $600,000. When landscaping on the site began, they noted that it began "well after the promised Spring of '62." Did

  Moses proudly announce that the city had agreed to construct a $3,500,000 Science Museum? "A far cry from the multimillion-dollar Federal Science Pavilion erected by the United States at the Seattle Fair."

  Press conferences were the stage for the most overt encounters, of course. At every press conference there would be mounted behind Moses a huge map of the Fair. He wanted to talk about the exhibits that had rilled in spaces since the last press conference—the new exhibits that had been signed up. They insisted on asking him about the spaces that remained empty. Why was the Fair having so much difficulty persuading states and nations to exhibit? He would get angry, and blast the press for making an issue out of something he considered unimportant; the blast would be the biggest news of the day.

  He couldn't let anything alone. He had to fight with everybody, and fight publicly.

  Negotiations with H. L. Hunt, the eccentric Texas oil magnate who had offered to rent 152,000 square feet and erect a complex of thrill rides and the other amusement attractions the Fair so badly needed, together with several restaurants, were probably doomed from the start, since Hunt was as accustomed as Moses to having his own way. But since the negotiations had never been a matter of press interest, their termination did not have to make the front page of The New York Times. Moses put it there—after disagreements over the "standards" of the rides, which Moses felt might be too "gaudy," had reached the point where Moses ordered Hunt's check for more than a million dollars returned—with a full-scale statement to the press that arrangements had been "mutually terminated." Hunt, who had previously been happy to go quietly, felt called upon to make his own— eight-page—statement denying that there would have been any gaudiness and that there had been anything mutual at all about the termination, saying that he would have been happy to be part of the Fair despite Moses' "vacillating and capricious moods and . . . emotionally-arrived-at decisions" until Moses had flatly declared he was "out." All of which not only increased the air of controversy around the Fair, but emphasized the difficulty Moses was having in providing traditional amusements for the Fair. Moses wanted a $25,000,000 Federal Pavilion at the Fair, but his reaction—in public statements, press releases and testimony before congressional committees—was one of such outrage that anyone, even a United States senator, should raise any questions at all about a Robert Moses demand, that Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois called him "one of the most competent and irritating men in the history of the United States." Before Moses arrived in Washington, the request, with President Kennedy solidly behind it, had been regarded as assured of passage. By the time Moses left, it was all but dead, and only White House intervention saved it in scaled-down dimensions. Not satisfied with what he had thus wrought, Moses proceeded to make new public attacks on congressional stinginess.

  In a dozen such incidents, Moses created controversy where none was necessary, handing reporters fuel, fuel he had made them anxious to use.

  And when they used it, turning it into stories, he attacked them for using it—thereby making more stories. It was attack and counterattack, and attack and counterattack, in a war of words that escalated and escalated and escalated again. As opening day grew closer, the Fair, thanks to its president, was surrounded by furor. There was the racial controversy—there was, of course, not a single Negro or Puerto Rican on the Fair's 200-person administrative staff, and not many more even in menial posts around the Fair Administration Building until Screvane managed to ease some in, and the protests of Negro civil rights groups were met by Moses with scant courtesy. And there was the religious controversy: every one of the major religions in America was represented at the Fair, save one, and Jewish leaders were increasingly perturbed by the absence of any representation of their faith (some of them seeming to feel that the Fair was not especially anxious to have any); their feelings were not especially assuaged by the fact that when Israel decided it could not afford a national pavilion (after learning that the cost of its pavilion was more likely to be $3,000,000 than the $1,250,000 Moses had prom
ised), Moses attacked Premier David Ben-Gurion. There was the controversy over unions—the press dubbed it "The Great Garbage Controversy"; foreign exhibitors were shocked by $i7-an-hour-per-man garbage-collector rates; after enraged Spanish Pavilion officials refused to hire Allied Maintenance crews and tried to hire their own, teamsters refused to pick up the pavilion's garbage, and the Spaniards threatened to dump it into the Unisphere pool. And then the controversy over art; Moses turned down repeated requests by artists' societies for a pavilion to display American art because no one came up with the high rental he demanded. Then there was the opening-on-time controversy. Instead of simply admitting that a few exhibits and some landscaping would not be ready on Opening Day, which would have made this a not-very-newsworthy item, Moses kept insisting— although he knew differently—that everything would, which allowed the press to do daily stories on the items which were behind schedule.

  Moses was raging at the press now. If these jackals and hyenas thought they could attack with impunity, he'd show them how wrong they were. Blasting the "assorted dyspeptics, grouches, grumblers, hit-and-run writers and talkers who hint broadly that our fair will be artless, boycotted, funless, food-less, constipated, strangled and tasteless," he told 1,400 members of the Fifth Avenue Association gathered to honor him in October 1963 that he had decided that "if your natural weapon is the broadax, you should not affect the rapier"—and, dropping the more delicate weapon, he swung the ax more and more frequently; by the start of 1964, it seemed that every speech on whatever occasion—the opening of a new pavilion, the dedication of the Unisphere, welcoming a delegation of New England Governors to the Fair—was an occasion for a vicious denunciation of the news media. Some of the controversies he won and some he lost, but all had the same result: more publicity about strife and disunity at an event whose slogan was "Peace Through Understanding." He had turned a skirmish with the press into a full-scale war—and he had been its leading casualty.

  Out of the Flushing Meadows—an expanse of flat, barren, almost unadorned land not two years before—there took shape now a square mile of forms out of the past like the thatched replicas of African tribal huts housing tree-house restaurants, of forms out of the future like the hulking massive-ness of the United States Pavilion and of traditional fairground adornments such as the curving, looming dark walls of the Hall of Science, the little, brightly colored cable cars swinging in procession overhead and the clusters of white balloons that marked the Brass Rail hot-dog stands scattered throughout the grounds—a flag-lined, fountained scene that may have been disorganized and hodgepodge but that was also somehow vital and vivid, not trend-setting certainly but gay and alive, a scene certainly not boring, a scene that may not have titillated the sophisticated taste of New York intelligentsia but that would have thrilled the general public. But in the public perception of the Fair—the perception created by the media—this scene was not foreground but background. There loomed before it the figure of its creator, dominating the scene, muting its gaiety, casting a dark shadow across its brightness, a figure not inviting but hostile, a figure of arrogance and controversy and rage. With the opening—on time—of the Fair, the wind of controversy died away for a while. But the whirlwind was still for the reaping.

  The first hint of the great storm to come was the daily attendance figures. Every day that the Fair was open, its expenses were $300,000—on top of the $30,000,000 it had spent prior to Opening Day. To pay these expenses—and to fulfill his promise to repay the city its $24,000,000 loan, and to have the necessary $29,000,000 left over for his great chain of parks —the daily attendance had to average 220,000. Moses had confidently predicted it would. There would, he boasted, be many "quarter million days." But the controversies he had spawned had come home to roost. Attendance on Opening Day, April 22, 1964, was 49,642. Moses ascribed that to over-dramatization of a civil rights protest auto stall-in and to chill, drizzly weather. But attendance the next day, clear and warm, was 88,130. On the first weekend there were crowds each day of 170,000. But during the following week, the fatal figures read: 45,000; 53,000; 38,000.

  Wait until May, when the weather turns warm, Moses said. During the entire month of May, there was not a day on which attendance reached the break-even 220,000. On only seven days did it reach 200,000. On five days it did not even reach 100,000. Attendance for June was scarcely higher.

  Wait until July, when the schools let out, and parents can bring their kids, Moses said. All through July, the Fair waited—in fair weather—for its first quarter-million day. It never came. On only five days did attendance reach 200,000. By the end of July, according to Moses' "conservative" forecasts, 25,000,000 persons should have paid their way into the Fair. The actual number was 15,000,000. With attendance thus off by 40 percent, so was revenue from admissions and parking fees, and from the Fair's percentage of concessions and restaurant income. The Fair was not earning the profit Moses had expected. It was not earning enough even to pay its bills.

  It took Moses a long time to realize the implications of those attendance

  figures, partly because for a long time no one told him about them. His shrewd money men, Spargo and Madigan, were not part of the team handling the Fair's day-by-day financial administration. That team had been brought over from Triborough; its head, Erwin Witt, the Fair's Comptroller, had been Triborough's comptroller. Comptrolling for Triborough had been a notably undemanding job. The monopoly enjoyed by the Authority made its revenues easily predictable and inevitably increasing; during Witt's years as comptroller, the Authority had never once been in serious financial straits. The extravagance and wastefulness of its spending— extravagance not only condoned but encouraged by its chairman—had bred within the Authority an attitude toward money of carelessness and disregard.

  And it showed.

  At the Fair, Witt had made a mistake worthy of a first-year accounting student. He had credited all the advance discount sales to the first year's income, thereby making the Fair's balance sheet look far better than it should, for the balance sheet did not reflect a fact that would become apparent during the second season—that 15,000,000 persons who would be attending during the second season would not be paying to do so. Had attendance been as high as predicted, there would have been so much money that the mistake would not have been fatal. But it was fatal now: the money had been spent, and no more was coming in.

  And after Moses' aides finally did realize the implications of the attendance figures, they still took a long time to tell RM about them. For they were afraid to tell him. Knowing the blind, punishing rages—and, in some cases, the ostracism, the severance from power and prestige and money—with which RM greeted bad news, not only Witt but the executives to whom Witt reported, the Constables and Shapiros, stalled for weeks before breaking the news. The only one of Moses' aides with enough guts (and money) to tell the Boss the unpleasant truths was George Spargo, then chairman of the Fair's finance committee. Spargo had been working for Moses for thirty years and was closer to Moses than any other aide. Unlike the other Moses Men, he was close to the Boss personally as well as professionally; they double-dated together; Spargo had introduced him to the woman who was to become his second wife. By any standard—including the one that, in the Triborough empire, really mattered: the money that Moses had let him make—Spargo was Moses' favorite. When Spargo told Moses the truth about the Fair's finances, Moses fired him on the spot. "We don't want any negative thinking around here," he said in an explanatory memo to the staff. Then he summoned Witt to his office. The comptroller was a short, mild-mannered, white-haired man of sixty-five with a history of heart trouble whose wife had recently died. His session with Moses lasted for almost three hours and he returned from it pale and trembling. "He was never the same again," one of his secretaries says. Within days, he had suffered a heart attack—from which he never recuperated. He underwent open-heart surgery, did not recover from it and died.

  When—sometime in late August or early September, it appears
from

  his memos—Moses at last began to realize the seriousness of the situation, it was too late to remedy it. The money had been spent—$30,000,000 before the Fair opened and perhaps $30,000,000 more since April 22, a total of perhaps $60,000,000. He had expected the Fair to have earned $90,000,000 by this point. It had earned perhaps $35,000,000. He had been able to spend the extra money because he had also had in the till about $25,000,000 worth of tickets sold but not used. But because these would be used during the Fair's second season, income during that season would be very small. There would be very little new money coming in—and so much had already gone out. Frantically, he tried to cut back expenses, but what could he cut? The contracts with the insurance companies, with Deegan and the engineering firms, were already signed, and had to be paid by the month. So did the annuity contracts. Interest on the notes was mounting daily. He took some measures, issuing a memo—perhaps the first of its kind ever sent out of Robert Moses' office—ordering a "drastically reduced budget" for maintenance and security, and an effort to reduce expenses in all areas. The Allied and Pinkerton forces were cut back to levels at which they should have been all along—about half of what they had been. But other areas resisted economy; as Peter Brennan puts it, "The unions had been built up to this high level. They resisted cutbacks." And the economies were, simply, too late. He had paid out $60,000,000. He couldn't get it back.

  Attempting to conceal the truth from the press, Moses' aides consistently inflated daily attendance figures. A special handsomely—expensively —printed Interim Report announced that the Fair had been a "financial success" and as of August 31 had a balance of $12,700,000 cash on hand. But when he tried to sneak an $8,600,000 appropriation through the Board of Estimate, Mary Perot Nichols of The Village Voice spotted it, and began to speculate publicly that the Fair might be in financial difficulties. Following her lead, other reporters spotted other clues, although the conclusion drawn was only that the Fair was not making as much money as Moses had predicted; no one, all through 1964, guessed the truth in its full extent.