The Battle for Gotham

by Roberta Brandes Gratz

  SoHo’s earlier history exposes the intentional destruction of New York’s industrial economy. This is little recognized. SoHo is only one example of this destructive path. The conventionally accepted view that industry died a natural death or spontaneously left town for suburban locations is contradicted by the SoHo story, as with other areas of the city, as we will see.

  5

  RECONSIDERING ROBERT MOSES

  What’s to Reconsider?

  Robert Moses’ legacy is highly overrated. If he hadn’t had FDR priming the pump with money, little that he did would have gotten done. And while Moses was pouring cement for highways, plenty of people elsewhere were building public buildings and other essential projects. WPA money flowed into socially useful projects of immense variety, such as schools, day care centers, hospitals, clinics, colleges, firehouses, police stations, libraries, and markets.

  MIKE WALLACE,

  historian, director, Gotham Center for

  New York City History

  Routine, ruthless, wasteful, oversimplified solutions for all manner of city physical needs (let alone social and economic needs) have to be devised by administrative systems which have lost the power to comprehend, to handle and to value an infinity of vital, unique, intricate and interlocked details.

  JANE JACOBS,

  The Death and Life of Great American Cities

  A growing kind of revisionism is apparent today, championed by some planners, developers, architects, historians, critics, and politicians who wish for a new Robert Moses “who could get things done in New York.” The crescendo of this call rises to its greatest pitch when a coalition of citizen and issue-based groups vigorously oppose or manage to delay some megascheme. Sometimes, in all seriousness, this suggestion comes with the caveat that this should be a “modified Robert Moses,” a little gentler, more benign, somewhat humane, and, even, with a dose of Jane Jacobs thrown in. This is a hilarious oxymoron. The assumption that the audacity of a Moses can be tempered by a dose of Jacobs is erroneous to the core. The writings and advocacy of Jacobs make this clear. Occasionally, a wishful speaker wants to demonstrate fairness to both Moses and Jacobs or to pick and choose from each. Not possible. This is an either-or, black-or-white condition.

  No matter that in his early good government career Moses was a legitimate reformer, no matter how noble one thinks Moses was because he amassed only unbridled power and not bags of money for himself, no matter how wonderful one might judge Moses’s parks, he was probably the most undemocratic, arrogant, ruthless, and racist unelected government official of the twentieth century.1 One can’t separate the man, his methods, and his monuments. This is a leopard with immovable spots.

  His most contemptuous quotes are the stuff of legend: “When you operate in an overbuilt [emphasis added] metropolis, you have to hack your way through with a meat ax.” Overbuilt? Back then? If overbuilt then, what would he say now? And: “To make an omelet, you have to break an egg.” And: “If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?” And, “Cities are made by and for traffic.”

  Take him in all his autocratic glory or reject him entirely. No in between is possible. Trying to blend Moses and Jacobs is like trying to push together the old black-and-white Scottie dog magnets: the harder you push, the more resistance you feel.

  THE PARK DEFENSE

  Some of the exuberant praise for Moses’s parks is even questionable, such as all the green grass around public housing—a legacy of the tower-in-the-park plan with the ubiquitous little black sign with white letters, “Keep Off the Grass.” The same was true in city parks. I remember as a child occasionally ignoring that prohibition in Washington Square Park and getting summoned off the green by some park official. Since then, some of the unused grass areas around public housing have been converted to parking lots or play areas. Some have just been left as fenced-in grass.2

  In the early 1960s, Central Park was under assault by Moses, notes Anthony C. Wood in Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect the City’s Landmarks. Robert Moses was pushing to let Huntington Hartford build a thousand-seat, two-story café, designed by Edward Durrell Stone, in the southeast corner of the park across from the Plaza Hotel. Only fierce citizen opposition stopped this plan. And, of course, there was the Tavern-on-the-Green episode related earlier in this book.

  Landscape historian Betsy Barlow Rogers, who led the monumental restoration of Central Park starting in 1975, wrote in detail how Moses ignored the purpose and design of the park as a masterpiece of scenic, passive recreation to impose his notion of a site for monuments, active play facilities, and increased automobile convenience.3 While accepting some of his encroachments as worthy, Rogers notes that Moses created the twenty-two fenced-off playgrounds around the perimeter of the park “to preserve the surrounding scenery. To further discourage romping on the grass, he encircled lawns with pipe rail fencing, posted ‘Keep Off the Grass’ signs, and made infractions of this rule punishable by fine.”4 He should see the throngs sitting or playing on that grass today.

  Moses must be turning over in his grave looking at Bryant Park, with all the countless people every day sitting on movable chairs or on the grass itself.5 It was his rendition of that park as a walled-off sanctuary in the 1930s that made it so hospitable for drug users but hostile for everyone else. The current redesign, based on principles of sociologist and author Willian H. Whyte, returned the park to daily users by the thousands when it reopened in 1992.

  And Jones Beach? A masterpiece started in the 1920s with state bonding funds and continued during the Depression when the federal government thought it good policy to put people to work on great public works around the country. Building a public amenity with public funds was still an accepted notion. Most surviving Works Progress Administration projects built everywhere in the country still have similar enormous appeal.

  But as beautiful as it is, Jones Beach purposely excluded the poor. Moses engineered the Southern State Parkway and other roadways leading to it so that the overpasses were built too low for public buses to drive under. Moses’s key staff person revealed this to Robert Caro. Some of those bridges have since been rebuilt with higher vehicular headroom. But, for the most part, buses still can’t get through them with ease, according to Department of Transportation officials. Buses could fit under part of some of them but not entirely, thus rendering it improbable any bus would risk it. By his order, no mass transit could be built in the rights-of-way along the highway routes that would have made beach access available to the poor—then mostly immigrants or anyone without a car. Is that an appropriate public park design in a democracy, no matter how aesthetically appealing?

  If he could help it, Moses built only for the white middle class in cars. That what he built eventually benefited the poor and working class was surely not his intent. When the middle class left the neighborhoods in which Moses inserted desirable recreation sites, the poor moved in and benefited. Moses’s playgrounds are also a celebrated accomplishment—658 of them citywide, one in Harlem, none in Bedford-Stuyvesant. And La Guardia had to force Moses to landscape the ten blocks of Riverside Park he had cheaply created for Harlem from 145th to 155th Streets, after fierce resistance. As if in retaliation, he built there the only comfort station with a frieze of stone monkeys in the entire city.6 When he built Riverside Park by covering the open train tracks and adding 132 acres of landfill, Moses had stopped the park at 110th Street, leaving the black community with the noise and grime of the trains eliminated in the park below 125th Street and above 145th Street. Even a wide wharf at 125th Street, easily converted for recreation, was ignored, and the ten-block stretch above was left with difficult pedestrian access.7 The lush lawns and extensive planting that mark the park’s beauty did not appear on that omitted stretch covered by a roadway viaduct. In fact, few amenities grace the six miles of Riverside Park and parkway in the Harlem stretch. Only one of seventeen playgrounds in the park was built in Harlem, and only one of five football fields. He had spent $
16.3 million on the first 2 miles from 72nd Street and $7.9 million on the next 4.7 miles.

  HIS WAY OR NO WAY

  For decades, New Yorkers have cursed Walter O’Malley for moving the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles. But Michael Shapiro in The Last Good Season documents in gruesome detail O’Malley’s effort to stay in Brooklyn, an effort tenaciously thwarted by Moses. Moses refused to condemn land in downtown Brooklyn for a new stadium (as the state and city have been anxious to do for the Nets arena included in the Atlantic Yards project on that site), insisting that O’Malley take land in Bedford-Stuyvesant that O’Malley knew was too distant and inappropriate for the purpose.

  One can’t ignore how ruthlessly Moses took funding from upstate parks to finance the Long Island parks he favored. Nor can one minimize how he moved the Northern State Parkway 3 miles and then curved it to preserve the property of well-connected wealthy estate owners like Otto Kahn, or the Long Island Expressway for J. P. Morgan. Yet he had no compunction about splitting the working farm of James Roth, covering his most fertile soil with asphalt and making it impossible for the struggling farmer to get his tractor across the highway.

  The New York-born Moses never learned to drive, but he set about trying to create a spaghetti network of highways on a scale the country had not yet seen. Most significantly, Moses’s roads went through cities versus around them. In retrospect, it is difficult to realize how far ahead of the rest of the country Moses was in highway projects. Other cities’ officials watched and followed, going so far as to borrow construction contracts and loan documents he created as models. The erroneous, actually false, assumption is that Moses improved transportation in New York City and the region. What he did was improve only automotive transportation while undermining or killing some transit and preventing its future expansion.

  Moses’s highway construction was infinitely more destructive of the functioning city than most people recognize. It boggles the mind to consider how much of that functioning city was in the way of the 130 miles that went through New York City and then to imagine the damage that rippled out from each roadway’s path like stones tossed in the water. No real calculation has ever been done of homes, businesses, social institutions, and churches lost.

  THE URBAN RENEWAL BULLDOZER

  Moses was equally influential in shaping the country’s urban renewal policies. Caro notes that Moses’s Yale classmate Senator Robert A. Taft reached out to him to discuss “details of a new type of federal slum clearance program—‘urban renewal’—that he was considering sponsoring.”8

  Moses was not alone in his vision for a new urban form. “The era’s leading housing reformers, Henry Wright, Clarence Stein, and Lewis Mumford of the Regional Planning Association of America, wrote off tenements as relics of nineteenth-century industrialism. The metropolitan future, they argued, lay in towns planted in regional ‘greenbelts’ where there was room for a new communal civilization.”9 This was clearly the idea of the moment, but only Moses had the power to make his version of the vision come true.

  Title I of the 1949 Housing Act was the primary vehicle for building middle-income housing on cleared land, which Moses aggressively pursued. 10 While Congress was working out the details of this program with Moses’s help, Moses persuaded Mayor William O’Dwyer in 1948 to appoint a Mayor’s Slum Clearance Committee of which Moses was made chairman.11 O’Dwyer had already appointed him construction coordinator and chairman of the Emergency Commission on Housing. Understandably, New York was first in line with the most urban renewal proposals of any city in the country and, in the end, gained the largest share of funding.12 Moses was the master all others emulated. Joel Schwartz describes what this incredible program meant:

  Title I’s impact proved enormous. Projects removed 100,000 people from Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, and, with their accompanying public housing, generated a diaspora of at least twice that number. Site clearance forced out at least 5,000 businesses of all sizes, and public housing forced out thousands more. Municipal experts declared that these losses . . . were negligible. But in Central and East Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant, and other minority ghettoes, these enterprises nurtured a sizable portion of the black and Hispanic middle class. In other neighborhoods, redevelopments wiped out larger businesses or forced their ruinous shift to other quarters. Job loss as a direct result of redevelopment was between 30,000 and 60,000 in the postwar period. By the late 1950s, the number had risen to several hundred thousand.13

  These were direct impacts. No way exists to measure the ripple effects of the lost businesses, residences, and institutions near the newly formed gaping hole. It is safe to say, however, that once the undermining began in one area, fraying of the larger surrounding fabric took on its own momentum.

  Gay Talese described how a big project’s clearance spreads deterioration beyond the specific cleared site. In a 1964 New York Times story about the massive dislocation impacts in Bay Ridge following the demolition of five hundred homes and the dispossessing of seven thousand people for the expressway leading to the new Verrazano Bridge, Talese wrote:

  In all, it took 18 months to move out the 7,000 people. Eventually, even the most stubborn—or out-of-touch residents of Bay Ridge abandoned their homes because of resignation or fear—fear of being alone in a spooky neighborhood; fear of the bands of young vagrants who occasionally would roam the area smashing windows or stealing doors, picket fences, light fixtures or shrubbery; fear of the derelicts who would sleep in empty apartments or hallways; fear of the rats that people said would soon be crawling up from the shattered sinks and sewers because, it was explained, “rats also are being dispossessed from Bay Ridge.”14

  The federal official in charge of the program in the early years told Caro, “Because Robert Moses was so far ahead of anyone else in the country, he had great influence on urban renewal in the United States—on how the program developed and on how it was received by the public—more than any other single person.”

  Urban renewal became a favorite of mayors across the country because of the lava flow of federal funds that came with it, especially if coupled with a highway project. Few cities resisted like Savannah, where, a local resident reports, “it was resisted as a communist plot.” Where the demolition derby got started, it was hard to stop. Each massive project inevitably led to further decay and an accelerated cycle of clearance. The holes in the urban fabric of American cities are still visible today from Buffalo to Cleveland to St. Louis and beyond.

  Title I was, indeed, producing middle-income housing, as progressive Democrats, Regional Plan advocates, the press, and all Moses’s supporters wanted. Between June 29 and July 2, 1959, the New York Times published a series of articles, “Our Changing City,” surveying the state of public housing and urban renewal. Barren looking, devoid of hope, and overwhelmed with relocation problems are how the articles found public housing. Ford Foundation staffers “became convinced that Title I had aggravated the city’s housing shortage, destroyed many Old Law tenements that could have sheltered low-income residents, and created sterile, crime-ridden environments.”15

  Deborah Wallace and Rodrick Wallace wrote a very important book, A Plague on Your Houses: How New York Was Burned Down and National Public Health Crumbled, that shows the enormous impact all this dislocation had on the mental and public health of the distressed population and the entire city and region. They wrote:

  Many poor neighborhoods simply collapsed from the spatial concentration and temporal peaking of these modes of housing destruction. Health areas of the South-Central Bronx, for example, lost 80 per cent of both housing units and population between 1920 and 1980. About 1.3 million white people left New York as conditions deteriorated from housing overcrowding and social disruption. About 0.6 million poor people were displaced and had to move as their homes were destroyed. A total of almost two million people were uprooted, over 10 percent of the population of the entire Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (25 counties).

  Just thinking ab
out the magnitude of this forced migration helps focus on why, by the 1960s and ’70s, New York was a collapsing mess. As Moses said, it was the “meat ax” approach to city building.

  THE HUMAN TOLL

  What is not recognized sufficiently in regards to any of Moses’s cataclysmic urban development schemes is exactly what the Wallaces were referring to: the thousands upon thousands of lives disrupted, the downward spiral of so many lives often jump-started by such massive demolition projects, the endless tales of social dislocation. The Wallaces have provided additional insights not often discussed.

  Based on years of study, they document how the fires of the 1970s continued to destroy what Urban Renewal started. What they shockingly outline is that this occurred within a framework of deliberate city policies that were based on erroneous information, pseudoscience, manipulated data, and malevolent policy goals.16 The Wallaces effectively show that the closing of firehouses, guaranteeing inadequate responses, and the withdrawal of other municipal services in the most vulnerable neighborhoods purposefully continued the clearance that Moses started.17 This all occurred under the post-Urban Renewal policy of “Planned Shrinkage” with the overt goal of killing off “sick” neighborhoods.18

  What was often destroyed, the Wallaces note, were, in fact, “stable ‘slums,’ i.e. poor neighborhoods of old, mildly overcrowded housing that are not experiencing rapid deterioration physically or socially, are true communities, often with a history decades long.” They then quote a 1977 book on public health and the built environment by Loren Hinkle, published by the Centers for Disease Control. It goes to the heart of the issue: “It is the social environment and not the physical environment which is the primary determinant of the health and well-being of people who live in cities. . . . The importance of the social milieu is such that the dislocation and disruption of social relations that are produced when one moves a family from a dilapidated dwelling [within a functioning community] to a modern apartment [outside that community] may have adverse effects upon health and behavior that are not offset by the clean, comfortable, and convenient new dwelling.”19