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

by Caro, Robert A

  Moses had a citywide program worked out—right down to specific sites (among them, Welfare Island, air rights over the Sunnyside Yards of the Long Island Rail Road and a vast, unused tract of Bronx park land near the Whitestone Bridge) and costs: five billion dollars could clean up every slum in the city in ten years. It was a typical Moses plan: no consideration of the city investment required to provide facilities for these new, isolated communities, or of whether the city could afford such investment, no concern that by isolating low-income people by the tens of thousands he would be creating new ghettos. But he did not see these flaws. His plan was large enough in scope to deal with the immense slum problem, the only plan that was. He was sure it would work—he was as enthusiastic as a boy about it. And he could not restrain his impatience with those who criticized it: the "Lindsay people" have "had their chance to solve this problem with their

  scattered sites and vest-pocket things. None of these fancy words are going to solve the housing crisis—only lots of new houses will solve it, and this is the way to get lots of new houses ..." He was so anxious to be given a chance to prove he was right.

  Housing was not the only area in which he had plans. In every conversation now, as Vollmer put it, "there is this concern growing for so many things left undone, so many things to be done." What people didn't understand was that everything he had done was part of a plan, a dream—a plan planned and a dream dreamed decades before. Large parts of the plan were realized, but larger parts were not—including some of the most beautiful, some of the ones he most wanted to realize, some of the public works he had been trying to build for decades. His cottage might face the Robert Moses Causeway and Robert Moses State Park; these were two achievements that should have been enough to content any man. But what he saw when he stood on the porch of the cottage and stared out was not the bridge and the park but the road, the great Fire Island highway, that the bridge and the park had been supposed to bring closer to reality, the road still unbuilt. His dream had not been merely of an Ocean Parkway and a Belt Parkway that ran along the water for forty miles; his dream, dreamed so clearly in 1924, had been of a great Shorefront Drive all the way from Staten Island to Montauk Point—160 miles. A drive whose heart would be the Fire Island Road bordered on the one hand by bay and on the other by ocean, a highway along which people could drive almost literally among boats and waves—the most beautiful drive in the world. That road would be built one day; he had no doubt about it—and he wanted it to come while he could see it, he wanted to build it himself so that he could be sure it was built right. He had built parks in the city, but the greatest waterfront park—the Jamaica Bay Development that he had conceived of in 1924—was still not built. He had reserved for future generations so many great tracts of Long Island land—the Marshall Field Estate that had been renamed Caumsett State Park, the Southside Sportsman's Club that had been renamed Connetquot State Park—but it wasn't enough. There were so many more country clubs and big estates that must be saved from the developer's bulldozer and preserved for the public. And despite his pleas to his successor on the State Council of Parks, Laurance Rockefeller; to Duryea's successor as head of the Long Island Commission, A. Holly Patterson; to county officials of Nassau and Suffolk; to philanthropists—to anyone who would listen—no one was doing anything to preserve them. He had built great urban highways—more great urban highways than any man in history—but where were the greatest of the highways, the expressways across Manhattan Island, that would complete the expressway net and alone make it workable? There were a hundred big things left to do, and a thousand small: he had put Lincoln Center together for the Rockefellers and then they had goofed up by not providing ramps and wider roadways from the West Side Highway; "they don't grasp [the problem], they don't even remotely grasp it," he said one day; he could take care of it in a couple of months—and if it

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  wasn't taken care of, you were always going to have an access problem there. The walls of his office on Randall's Island were covered with pictures of his achievements—pictures of bridges and dams illuminated at night— and through the window behind him could be seen the solid concrete and steel of the Triborough Bridge. But the office was dominated by a huge map of New York City. And while that map was crisscrossed with the solid lines that represented achievements built—highways, bridges, tunnels—on it also were lines, many lines, that were not solid but broken: lines representing achievements not yet built, dreams yet to be turned into reality. As he sat at his desk, that map, its width wider than his armspread, its height taller than a man, stared back at him, reminding this man to whom accomplishment was so important that there was so much yet to accomplish. There was visible behind his urge to keep building an element almost of desperation; the public was doubting the wisdom of his creations—the way to convince them was to complete the system, to build more highways, more bridges, more housing—to build, build, build in a frantic attempt to rescue his reputation. But there was behind the urge also genuine creative drive, a drive undimmed by eighty years of life, the shaping impulse of the shaping man—and a drive supported by the arrogance which since his youth had told him in a voice that would not be denied that he had the answer to the problem, that he knew what to do. If only he were to be allowed to do it.

  What made his situation more frustrating still was that the problems that needed solving were not being solved. His city, the city that he thought of as a product he had created, was, he felt, being destroyed by the men who had succeeded him in power. Hoving and August Heckscher, grandson of his early benefactor and Hoving's successor as Park Commissioner, had had their opportunity to institute their park policies designed to "return the parks to the people"; after five years of such a return, the parks were ruined, in as bad shape as he had found them when he took over from Tammany Hall. Little new housing was being built, the slums were getting worse. No highways were being built; supposedly this was because the money was being spent on mass transportation, but at the rate mass transit facilities were being built, they would never solve any transportation problems—if indeed most of them were built at all. Democracy had not solved the fatal dichotomy; he did not see the problem as a dichotomy but only as a failure on the part of public officials to understand the realities of the situation—that the public say on public works must be limited, and, in general, ignored, that critics must be ignored, that public works must be pushed ruthlessly to completion.

  Understanding this, convinced that he had the plan for the salvation of New York, he schemed and twisted and turned to get the power to do it: ass-kissing pompous double-chinned Ronan and his arrogant boss, asking allies—fewer each year as more and more architects, engineers and contractors were pulled into the Rockefeller-Ronan orbit—to "intercede" for him. Frantically he tried to get the United Housing Foundation interested in the "Atlantic Village" project—and to put him in charge. In one desperate ploy to do this, he planted an interview with the Daily News which appeared

  —under the hopeful headline greatest urban renewal ever: reenter bob moses —in a story favorable to the plan and closed with a broad hint of who should run it.

  Moses, whose only job at present is that of consultant, . . . was asked during the interview whether he might consider himself just the nonpolitical man for the job.

  "Will you take any direct part in this project?" he was asked.

  "Nobody has asked me," he replied.

  Nobody did. His agile mind, always so quick to find avenues to power, twisted and turned and darted at every one that he felt might open up— and, with the city's Mayor and the state's Governor unalterably opposed to him, found them all closed. Rockefeller and Ronan kept him firmly on the shelf; his impatience, the same terrible impatience he had had as a young man, turned into frustration, a deep gnawing, terrible bitterness. As this man, who had measured off his life in days each of which was vital, looked back on weeks in which nothing had occurred to advance his plans—as weeks turned into months—as he realized
that he had been seventy-nine when he lost power and that he was now eighty-two (or eighty-three or eighty-four), he fell into violent rages. His conversation revealed, more and more, foreboding of the ultimate. He had thought Oak Beach would be his Elba. Was it to be instead his St. Helena? Was he to die without ever getting the chance to build another bridge, to redeem his name?

  He could have used the time to write, and publishers approached him with substantial offers for an autobiography. But he had not the patience to write, nor the desire—and, it may be, other considerations militated against it as well: a key to Moses' ability to buy men had been his ability to keep the purchase secret, and the sellers' confidence that he would do so. He could hardly write a story of his life without going at least to some extent into the machinations by which he had obtained power, and were he to reveal them, men whom he would need to get power back might shy away from him. He did come up with a book, published in 1970 by McGraw-Hill: Public Works: A Dangerous Trade. But this was not really a book at all, and it was certainly not by Robert Moses. A vast volume—952 pages—90 percent of it consisted of documents already in the public record: reprints of speeches, press releases, brochures, reports, newspaper and magazine articles on his triumphs, letters to and from prominent persons. And most of the remainder was written not by Moses but by members of his staff. There was no triumph in its publication; it was extensively reviewed, but reviewers treated it for what it was—a nonbook.

  He could not sit still. Reading in the afternoon, he would jump up from his chair, yank on his old corduroy jacket and stride out onto the long wooden porch outside the Oak Beach cottage, pacing back and forth, sometimes for an hour and more, grim and restless. Urged on by desperate secretaries and associates and wife, he took vacations, but he didn't enjoy them. He was always anxious to get back—lest some chance for power pass him by. But upon his return, no chance would come. Things he had once

  enjoyed doing were less and less solace to him now. For qo matter what he did, he could not get away from himself. To this man who had consec his life to Getting Things Done, to the getting and exercising of power, hell was the continued urgent, desperate, insatiable need for accomplishment and power—combined with the inability to satisfy even a little part of that need.

  His muchachos did all they could to make life pleasant for him—most of his muchachos; most of them loved Robert Moses. Some of them loved Robert Moses only for what Robert Moses could do for them, and he couldn't do anything for them any more—he had made up with George Spargo after the World's Fair and given his engineering firm contracts, but the loyal Harold Blake was to comment bitterly one day that "Mr. Moses doesn't see much of George Spargo any more. And Spargo was closer to Mr. Moses than anybody."

  Thanks to Sid Shapiro, who was still general manager and chief engineer of the Long Island State Park Commission, the big corner table in the Marine Dining Room at Jones Beach was reserved for Moses and his party every Saturday and Sunday, and the chef would cook up something special (whatever Moses wanted; if it wasn't in stock at the restaurant, a patrol car would be sent screaming up to the mainland to get it), and whenever Moses went to the Marine Theater—which was frequently—there would be the introduction by Guy Lombardo and the spotlight and the unfailingly generous applause from the crowd above, and the opportunity for him to look unutterably bored by it all. The Sea-Ef was kept always ready for him, gassed, manned and stocked by the commission.

  Driving around the parks and parkways was still pleasant, for the senior officers at every facility were men who had served with RM when he had been the commission's president, and they treated him with the respect he remembered. Everybody connected with the commission, in fact, treated him with respect. When the author drove him down to meet Adam Carp, Moses told him to park in an area marked "No Thoroughfare." After he left, the author was sitting there jotting down notes when a Long Island State Park Commission patrolman loomed in his window. "Don't you see the sign?" he asked with the usual LISPC arrogance. "Well, you see, I drove Mr. Moses down . . . ," the author began. "Oh," the cop said, straightening, and started to walk away without a word. Then he returned. "Thanks for telling me," he said. "I'd be out of work and my children would be starving."

  There were bright spots in his life. On July 3, I97<>» a handsome monument in a large plaza on the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University was unveiled—a bronze bas-relief of Moses, executed by sculptor Albino Manca, mounted on a handsome three-sided slab of green marble over the words, chiseled and gilded in gold:

  ROBERT MOSES

  MASTERBUILDER

  FRIEND OF FORDHAM

  Terence Cardinal Cooke blessed the monument, Nelson Rockefeller gave the principal address, calling Moses a man who "built his own greatness," and as the Reverend Michael P. Walsh, president of Fordham, announced that the plaza would be named after him, long lines of state officials, Fordham priests and old Moses Men stood applauding with warm smiles on their faces until Moses had to bow his head to hide tears.

  To a man whose sensitivities had been rubbed as raw as Moses', however, there were unfortunate ironies even in this honor. In praising Moses, Rockefeller had, perhaps indelicately, alluded to the fact that up to now in the city "no public work has borne his name." Despite Fordham's touching and appreciated gesture, of course, that was still the case. This gesture wasn't an honor from the public, the public he had served so long and so selflessly at such great self-sacrifice, but from a private institution. His name was immortalized in concrete and steel and park land from one end of the state to the other. But it was on no public work in the city in which his efforts had been concentrated.

  It had been supposed to be on one, but it wasn't.

  And a plaza on a college campus wasn't quite the same thing as Flushing Meadows Park.

  There were other bright spots. He was Man of the Year for the Salvation Army and the Masons and the Society of Civil Engineers—for a dozen organizations—between 1968 and 1972. A junior high school in Babylon was named after him—the tenth structure to bear his name. There were the ceremonies attendant on the completion of the public works that had been launched before the end of his Triborough chairmanship—in 1968 the huge new park on the landfill he had added to Randall's Island, in 1969 the lower level of the Verrazano Bridge, in 1970 the reconstruction of the Cross Bay Bridge—ceremonies that gave him the opportunity to make speeches, and, now able to devote the necessary time to them, he delighted in writing them, so that their phrases had again the felicity and force of his speeches as a younger man. There were moments of triumph, such as his speech at the annual dinner of the Building Trades Employers Association in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1969, when, after Roger Corbetta of Corbetta Construction introduced him ("a great man, a great builder, a man of history . . . this great dirt mover . . . this master builder"), the hundreds of men in the audience rose to their feet and cheered and cheered for long minutes. The Daily News gave good play to his pronouncements; when, in 1969, former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, urging the infusion of "young blood" into city planning, criticized "the jaded planning of Robert Moses" and said it had made New York an example of how not to conduct urban planning, the News replied, "We'd just like to observe that when Udall can show a list of accomplishments—in power, transportation and conservation—one tenth as long as Moses', it will be time enough for him to shoot off his yap." During the mayoral election of 1969, he backed the ultraconservative Democratic candidate, Mario Procaccino (he preferred

  the more intellectual Republican candidate, John J. Marchi, also a conservative, but his endorsement, as always, was dictated by practicalities; be wanted a winner—someone who could return him to power—and he felt no Republican candidate could win in New York), jeering at Lindsay as "the glass of fashion and the mould of form"—and an utterly incompetent Mayor —and declaring, "We are sick of amateurs who are not dry behind the ears." And the endorsement was in headlines on page one of the Times as it had been
in elections past.

  But the bright spots became fewer and fewer.

  The Cross Bay Bridge rebuilding was Robert Moses' last major construction project, the last with which he could occupy even a little of his time; and its opening celebration was the last at which he would be a leading figure. The requests to have him speak slowed from a torrent to a trickle, and by 1972 had dried up almost entirely. The mail, once so huge a bundle three times a day, fell off to almost nothing. There were continual discourtesies and humiliations. On May 22, 1969, the city dedicated Damrosch Park at the Guggenheim Band Shell at Lincoln Center. Damrosch Park had been conceived by Robert Moses. He had battled for the inclusion of the 2.34-acre open space in the Lincoln Center project when everyone else involved had opposed such "waste" of land. He had persuaded the Guggenheim and Damrosch families to donate the necessary funds. But he received only a form invitation to the opening ceremonies. Not only was there no invitation to speak, there was no place for him on the platform. He watched the ceremonies (presided over by Park Commissioner August Heckscher, whose primary contribution to Damrosch Park had been the approval of plans calling for lampposts on which the bulbs would be set thirty feet above the ground, too high for any of the Department's bulb-changing equipment to reach) from a bench near the rear of the audience. (Noticing him sitting there, Heckscher asked him to come up and sit in a chair that happened to be vacant on the platform; no thanks, Moses replied.) He was preoccupied with immortality now; in one Newsday column, he said he was convinced that "the finest short story ever written" was Anatole France's "The Procurator of Judea," which ends with Pontius Pilate saying, "Jesus? Jesus? Of Nazareth? I do not believe I can recall the name." And what roused him most to fury was the attempt of Lindsay and his bright young men to paint him as responsible for all the city's ills. Some of that criticism was unfair—predicated upon the ignorance of the new administration about the city it was supposed to be governing. Once, for example, the Mayor criticized Moses for laying concrete through Alley Pond Park, which he implied had been a wonderful rustic nature spot before Moses came along and ruined it. Moses had ruined a hundred rustic nature spots in New York City, but Alley Pond Park wasn't one of them. There hadn't been an Alley Pond Park until Moses came along and built it up out of an inaccessible, reeking marsh; the concrete Lindsay was talking about, the Cross Island Parkway, had been put through it at the same time. On another occasion, Lindsay said, "The Moses approach, where you take a bulldozer and mow people's houses down, just doesn't work in this city any