Now was the time for the dossiers. Screvane knew what was going on. "On at least twenty occasions when we were on the same side, Bob would say, 'Well, goddammit, if he doesn't go along, I'll destroy the son of a bitch!' And sure enough, when the vote came, the fellow would go along." Other members of the executive committee were making money from the Fair concessions he had given them, and didn't want to chance upsetting the arrangements. Others may have recalled that, when the Fair was over, Moses would still be head of Triborough and the arterial program. They went along, too. Others supported Moses out of loyalty, or conviction that he was still the best man for the job—any job. Whatever the reason, Screvane says, "we wouldn't have the votes." The same reality that the press had failed to grasp about Title I was still at work here. Not public opinion—not even the opinion of a Mayor and Governor—but raw power would determine whether Moses stayed on as president of the Fair, and of power he still had more than enough. On the Fair board were dozens of the most powerful men in the city and state. Moses handled them like unruly children. At one meeting,
Senate minority leader Joseph Zaretzki tried to interrupt the Moses-dictated agenda by rising to a point of order. Moses smashed the gavei down. "You're out of order." "You can't do that," Zaretzki said. "I'm speaking to a point of order." Moses curtly nodded to the next-scheduled speaker, Fair executive vice president General William Potter, who began reading his report while Zaretzki was still speaking, drowning him out because he had a microphone while Zaretzki did not. Not one member of the board raised a voice in protest. On February 24, there were more than seventy-five reporters and photographers on hand for a meeting of the Fair executive committee, but there were also on hand scores of nightstick-wielding Pinkertons to herd them away from the Fair Administration Building and into the Press Building, where, it was announced, a briefing would be held later. At the briefing, Potter announced that the twenty-one-member executive committee had given Moses a "unanimous" vote of confidence. One reporter who checked found out later that only nine committee members had actually voted; five had not shown up and seven had abstained. But the nine votes had been for Moses; when the Fair's second season was opened, he was still in charge.
But holding on to the Fair did Moses little good. The second season was worse than the first. There was the continuing drumfire of audit revelations, and when the press managed to tear its attention away from those, it focused not on attractions but on attendance, and it was all too clear that in that area this Fair was to be no different from its predecessors; day after day, the gate count ran below that of corresponding days the previous year. The press headlined the attendance and wrote crisis stories about it and its consequences—failing exhibitors, increasing lack of maintenance—-which further discouraged people from attending, and, blaming it on Moses' decision to increase prices, laughed at it, a Newsday column saying: "In truth, Moses must be credited with a striking improvement over last year's World Fair. He has . . . done away with the Fair's most unpleasant feature—people."
He twisted and turned, seeking a way out of the nightmare that kept looming closer every day as the end of the Fair grew closer, cutting maintenance and security forces to the bone, firing employees by the hundreds, slashing salaries, eliminating expense accounts. He began arranging quiet Park Department allocations for Flushing Meadows Park, set Triborough executives to work figuring out how much of the Authority's money could be spent on the Fair site. But the damage had been done long before— when he had authorized the spending of the tens of millions collected before the Fair opened. It could not be corrected now. His worst fears were becoming reality. His auditors told him there would be no money to repay the city the $24,000,000 it had advanced, no money to create the great new chain of parks that had been the main reason he had taken the Fair job in the first place, no money even to create the "Robert Moses Park" on Rushing Meadows of which he had dreamed—he was, he realized, going to be in the same humiliating position in which that wastrel skirt chaser Grover Whalen had found himself: unable to repay more than a few cents on the dollar of the notes the Fair had floated, perhaps unable even to
demolish the buildings of exhibitors who had gone bankrupt and could not demolish them themselves, so that the principal monument to this enterprise which he had believed would resurrect his reputation and reburnish his name would be heaps of moldering wreckage and debris.
Absolute disaster was staved off by the last three weeks.
Going into those weeks, the total attendance for the second season had not been the 37,500,000 that would have enabled the Fair Corporation at least to break even for the season, but only 17,000,000. The Fair Corporation, practically penniless, was paying its bills from week to week. With schools back in session and the weather turning chilly, there was no logical reason to expect any dramatic change in the lack of public interest that had prevailed for two years.
But as October began and the press began reminding the public that the Fair was in its last month, crowds suddenly began pouring in as if the populace of New York had suddenly realized that, despite all the adverse publicity, they wanted to see the exposition, and take their children to see it— and as if, having seen it once not through Fred Ferretti's eyes but their own, they liked it, loved it in fact, and came back during the short time remaining as many times as possible. For two years, Moses had been waiting—practically in vain—for "quarter million days." Now, suddenly, there was one such day after another, and then—for the weekends of three weeks—half million days, as on six triumphant Saturdays or Sundays, 500,000 persons paid their $2.50 and pushed through the turnstiles. During its final three weeks, 7,000,000 persons came to the Fair, pouring into the Fair Corporation's barren exchequers, through admission and parking fees and concession percentages, more than $13,000,000. If attendance had continued at its pre-October pace, the corporation would have had a deficit of more than $24,000,000; as it was, its deficit was reduced to only about $10,000,000. On closing day, his auditors informed Moses that there was $11,580,000 in the bank to be used either to repay the $23,000,000 in notes or for the restoration of Flushing Meadows Park.
The bankers and other noteholders expected that he would use this money to repay his debts. But Moses had other priorities—and he announced them with his usual flourish. At a post-Fair executive committee meeting attended by several bankers who were among the largest noteholders, a Fair official announced that the corporation had a surplus of $11,600,000. The committee applauded, the bankers looking rather relieved. But then Moses stood up. There was just one thing, he said. He wasn't going to use any of the $11,600,000 to pay them. The money was going to restore the Fair site and create the park. At least two of the investment bankers, W. H. Morton of W. H. Morton & Co. and Frederic H. Brandi, president of Dillon, Read & Co., leaped to their feet to protest. Moses favored them with one of his prize glares; the big head tilted back, and it was down his nose that he was looking at the bankers when he replied that he did not feel
any particular sense of responsibility to noteholders "who ride around in big limousines with telephones in the back."
By the bankers' code, Moses was committing the original sin: losing them money. They instituted legal action to compel him to use the money to pay his debts. But they were helpless. Eventually they were, in a compromise, to receive a total of $3,000,000—bringing the total return on their $30,000,000 investment ($7,000,000 had, of course, been prepaid) to $10,000,000—or about thirty-three cents on the dollar, ironically just about the same as Grover Whalen had repaid his investors.
The money left—$8,600,000—wasn't enough for the $29,000,000 chain of parks, of course, just as it wasn't enough to repay the city's $24,-000,000. But it was enough—together with $6,576,000 from Triborough coffers, various quiet Park Department allocations, and enough money from the Heckscher Foundation to create a zoo—to enable the Fair Corporation to demolish the pavilions of bankrupt or impoverished exhibitors, to clean up the Fair site and to do at least a little park
work on Rushing Meadows. The park he was able to build there may not have been the great park he had envisioned, but at least it was a park—with a Hall of Science, the Federal and New York State pavilions, the columned skating rink—and a Unisphere to remind future generations of Robert Moses' World's Fair.
Looming over the whole park from beyond its northern end was the Shea Stadium that was his answer to the Colosseum of the Caesars. And the park was of course surrounded by his great roads, the cloverleafs and broad ribbons of concrete that to him represented beauty and that were his trademark; they tied up the park with neat, clean, sweeping borders, delineating the outskirts so sharply that from the air the green was sliced off by gray as sharply as by a knife, nothing left over on the edges, nothing frayed, making it a landscape by Moses, bearing his signature as plainly as if he had scrawled it into the concrete in giant letters. And he considered the landscape beautiful. On the day, filled with pageantry, he gave the Flushing Meadows back to New York, he said in a statement entitled "Beauty for Ashes": "The Fair cannot entirely complete this great work so that nothing further will be required. Every step, however, follows an ultimate plan which is realizable in the not distant future. ... We believe it is no exaggeration to say that two World's Fairs have ushered in, at the very geographical and population center of New York, on the scene of a notorious ash dump, one of the very great municipal parks of our country."
Public monies spent under Robert Moses' direction during preparations for the 1939-40 World's Fair to make the Flushing Meadows a feasible park site came to $58,842,000. For the 1964-65 World's Fair, Robert Moses' Fair Corporation spent on permanent park improvements $22,256,-000. Robert Moses' Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority spent on
permanent park improvements $6,576,000. The City of New York spent $31,000,000. The State of New York spent at least $12,000,000 (and probably far more). The federal government spent $12,000,000. The public monies spent during this Fair on permanent improvements to make Flushing Meadows a park thus came to a total of at least $83,832,000. For the two Fairs, the total was at least $142,674,000. And no one even suggested it be named after him.
In computing the balance sheet for the 1964-65 World's Fair in relation to what its president had hoped to get out of it, its effect on his popularity must weigh heavily indeed on the debit side.
The methods he had employed in building and running the World's Fair were not new. He had been using them for forty years. The only thing different was that this time the world had seen them. Formerly he had employed these methods behind the cloak of public authorities which kept the public from seeing these methods. The Fair had given the world a look at his methods.
And by so doing, the Fair had destroyed what was left of the legend of Robert Moses. The great universal exposition that had been supposed to rehabilitate his popularity had instead destroyed the last of it—and destroyed it beyond repair. When the Fair came to a close on October 17, 1965, Robert Moses was revealed to the public in all his egotism, arrogance and ruthlessness. He was, in fact, portrayed, in the press's emphasis on the $100,000 a year in salary and expenses and the escrow account, as something worse than he was—greedy for money. He was in public disrepute so great that his name had become a symbol for things the public hated.
For the ordinary public official in a democracy, such a state of affairs would have meant loss of power. If he had been an elected official, he would have been ousted from office by the public at the next election. If he had been an appointed official, he would have been ousted from office by the official who had appointed him—probably not in a matter of months but in a matter of weeks if not days.
But Robert Moses was an official of a public authority. The public had no voice in whether or not he stayed in office. The power he wielded in the position to which the Mayor had appointed him made him, once in power, virtually immune to the Mayor's authority—as the new Mayor entering office shortly after the Fair drew to a close was soon to find out.
Mary Moses' worship of the husband who was her hero and her obsessive-ness with public recognition of his greatness had grown more noticeable. Once an architect, meeting her at a party, mentioned casually to her that he
The Great Fair HIS
had been one of the young architects who had worked for the Park Department under WPA. "Anybody who is of any importance in the city has worked for Mr. Moses at one time or another," she replied haughtily. Her response to the increasing criticism of her husband during the 1950's was violent, so violent that friends felt it helped worsen her fast-failing health. Says Becky Vollmer: "Her whole life was Robert. Once they went to dinner at the Sulzbergers—this was during the Fifties, when there first started to be criticism—and Iphigene got Mary to one side and said, 'Mary, why does Robert antagonize people so terribly?' Mary was wild! As if Iphigene Sulzberger thought Robert deliberately antagonized people! It was just that some people refused to understand!" Mrs. Moses was, in her early sixties, an old woman. Her "nervous troubles" had not been solved, leading to further hospitalizations in the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, and she developed severe arthritis, which led to her increasing confinement in a wheelchair.
"Someone had to order his shirts, see that he had money, take care of him," his daughter Jane says. For a while, Jane herself did so. She was now divorced and living at her parents' Babylon home. Moses, so youthful and vital, showed little sign of advancing age. One could mark the developments in Moses' career by the women he selected as companions. During his reforming, idealistic period he had been in love with Mary, an idealistic reformer. During his alliance-with-the-North-Shore-robber-barons period, he had been publicly affectionate with a North Shore robber baroness. As a politician involved with Tammany Hall, the relationship most subject to gossip among his aides and acquaintances was a canny, tough female city commissioner. Within the tight little Triborough empire, social affairs were commonplace; now, one of Moses' secretaries recalls, they began "getting Mary II to go along with the Boss." Mary Grady—Mary II as she became known in the empire—was a secretary twenty-eight years younger than Moses. Soon their friendship was an open secret. Joe Ingraham became aware that "at every party Moses attended, Mary Grady would be there in the background." Moses had never taken a vacation without Mary I, but in 1952 she was too ill to accompany him to Florida; after that he began taking Mary II instead.
His wife was affected with heart trouble and what a friend calls "all the ailments of old age." She was confined more and more to the Thompson Avenue house in Babylon now; he lived more and more in the Gracie Terrace apartment in the city. It wasn't, emphasize the Vollmers who had known them for years, that he was "mean" to her—whenever he saw her he was as courteous and friendly as ever; he would often drive out to Babylon on a Sunday to have lunch with her. And it was for her that he made what for him was a supreme sacrifice: his reputation for being above money; it was, after all, at least partly to pay for her round-the-clock nursing care that he had subjected himself to public criticism by accepting the "$100,000 a year" World's Fair post. The Vollmers feel that there was a reason why Mary entered her final decline in 1959: "it was quite noticeable that she got worse when the real criticism of him began," Becky says. "I don't think she could
stand it. . . . It was just that he turned his back on her. He was able to withdraw, to turn his back, on personal problems. ... He withdrew from Mary—she could be at a hospital and he would be at a party someplace at the same time acting the same as ever, as if nothing was wrong."
Mary Sims Moses was virtually completely bedridden after 1962. She lived in Babylon, her husband mostly in New York. She died on September 5, 1966, at the age of eighty-one. Her obituary in the Times said—accurately— "From the day she exchanged a reformer's role for that of a housewife 51 years ago, Mrs. Moses was content to remain in the shadow of her husband . . ."
Less than a month later, her husband, seventy-seven, married Mary Grady, forty-nine.
ing Lindsay come to him—but returning he
was smiling and relaxed. "If you elect a matinee-idol Mayor," he told aides, "you're going to get a musical-comedy administration."
Lindsay had talked about "the power brokers in our city" but, when pressed by reporters, had never identified them ("Who are the power brokers? They know who they are" was his reply)—possibly because, as he was to demonstrate during his mishandling of the first crisis to confront him, a transit strike, he didn't really know who they were. He was going to find out though—the hard way. During the pre-inaugural period, his bright, eager young aides had been working out the transportation merger that his Transportation White Paper had so blithely proposed during the campaign. It sounded so easy to these articulate, cocky young men. The Transit Authority had a deficit which was imposing an intolerable burden on the city's financial structure, the Triborough Bridge Authority had a surplus— what could be more logical than to use the one to offset the other? The philosophy of the new administration was, at the time, militantly pro-mass transit, anti-automobile—taking away Triborough's funds with which the Authority would otherwise build new automobile facilities and using them to improve the subways dovetailed with that philosophy, particularly if the new agency were to raise tolls on Triborough's bridges and place them for the first time on non-Authority bridges so as to further discourage automobile traffic into the city, a proposal toward which the new administration was leaning. All they were doing, Lindsay's aides could feel, was finally putting into force the proposals reformers such as Citizens Union and City Budget Commission study groups had been advocating for years. What was hard about it? Both authorities, Transit and Triborough, were controlled by the city, weren't they? And John Lindsay was the city now. The ignorance of some of these men concerning the true nature and powers of public authorities would have been ludicrous if it had not been the city's future that that ignorance was jeopardizing. Lindsay was, moreover, full of confidence— overconfidence—and optimism about his ability to run the city; he was going to be another La Guardia, with one exception—La Guardia had never gone on to be President as he was sure he was going to; lest anyone miss the comparison with the Greatest Mayor New York Had Ever Had, Lindsay had hardly been inaugurated when he had La Guardia's portrait moved out of another spot in City Hall and into his office, along with La Guardia's desk,* and was, in an interview with A. M. Rosenthal of the Times, making "it clear that he doesn't intend to be the chairman of the board. He intends to run the city. T would call it a style not of tight control but of total supervision . . .'" Lindsay was going to be in complete charge. A man who stood in their way, who was a dinosaur out of another age—how old was
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 172
