5.1 Ricardo Levins Morales designed this poster in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for the people left out of the rebuilding planning process in New Orleans. He could just as well have designed it for the people of New York City left out of Robert Moses’s construction process. (To view it in splendid color, visit his website www.rlmarts.com.)
Such a massive scale of social disruption would not have occurred if organic change and a different scale and form of progress had been allowed to take hold—the kind that Jane Jacobs identified as building up the fertility of the land instead of eroding it. So many dismembered lives could have been uplifted instead of undermined, given a different path of development. Voices advocating that alternative path were drowned out by Moses and stilled by the deaf ear of a press and the policy-making community enthralled with his message and accomplishments. Projects on the scale that Moses built inevitably and severely and destructively disrupt the social, economic, and psychological life of thousands. Destabilization is a given. The benefits cannot match the losses.
LEARNING BY LISTENING
Jacobs’s views about city development evolved. As noted in the introduction, she first learned in East Harlem how the delicate urban fabric worked to stabilize neighborhoods. By visiting the area, walking the streets, and talking to residents, she learned how the row houses, small apartment houses, tenements, stores, and local businesses created an intricate web, the whole of which gained strength from the complex, often invisible connection of the parts. Through the eyes of Union Settlement House director and Episcopal minister William Kirk and social worker Ellen Lurie, she also watched it being torn apart by one public housing project after another, wiping out an estimated tens of thousands of dwellings and 1,500 businesses.
Moses plowed through the South Bronx to build the seven-mile Cross Bronx Expressway, connecting the George Washington Bridge to I-95, as Caro vividly details.20 In just one mile, 1,530 families (more than 60,000 people) and businesses were dislocated and 159 buildings demolished.21 This occurred despite the existence of an alternate route a few blocks away that would have been quicker and cheaper. Only six tenements and nineteen families were in the way of the alternate route. Moses dismissed the thousands of Bronx residents and businesses pleading for the alternate route to save their homes, livelihoods, and community, saying only, “It was a political thing that stirred up the animals there.” Residents and businesses were given ninety days to leave. Like so many other wiped-out neighborhoods, it had solid schools with involved parents, local businesses, seven movie houses, synagogues, churches, old walk-ups with affordable apartments that had light and air, and all manner of social institutions and networks.
And what do we have there now? A traffic nightmare with four of the eleven worst bottlenecks in the country. Nineteen of the country’s fifty worst bottlenecks are either in the five boroughs or in nearby counties, as Tom Namako reported in the New York Post on February 26, 2009. On September 20, 2002, Alan Feuer in the New York Times described the truck-clogged, congested road as “arguably the most savage road in New York City.”
THE HUMAN TOLL
What is seldom mentioned in regards to any of Moses’s cataclysmic urban development schemes is the thousands of lives disrupted. Caro’s chapter “One Mile” recounts how this devastation undermined the South Bronx and is famously cited for detailing the resulting human pain and suffering. Rare is any similar examination of the human costs of other such disruptive projects. Moses and his public relations machine, along with the political leaders, did such a good job of selling the public on the false notion that these strategies cleaned up “slums,” cleared “blight,” and replaced “deteriorated” neighborhoods that most people today are unaware of the true condition and quality of these communities and the lives of the people in them.
The true mark of Robert Moses has to be the way he treated the people who stood in his way. Elizabeth Yampierre, a Brooklyn lawyer and citywide leader of the city’s environmental justice movement, recalls:
My family lived on the Upper West Side, in a blue-collar community. We had a family infrastructure that made it possible for the women in my family to work, for the children to be cared for, and although we were not wealthy by any means, we were doing okay. When we were displaced, we became “roadkill” in Robert Moses’ vision. Our family was scattered to the Bronx to Queens and throughout Manhattan. I went to five schools in eight years, and, in my family, some people went on to become drug addicts and some women went on public assistance. The entire fabric of my family was destroyed as a result of that displacement.
Yampierre told her story at a public celebration of Jane Jacobs’s life held in Washington Park after Jacobs’s death in 2006. Yampierre had not read Jacobs’s books.
A similar human tragedy unfolded in South Brooklyn when Moses ignored the pleas of residents of Park Slope and Windsor Terrace to move the Brooklyn/Queens Expressway to avoid razing five hundred buildings, mostly homes. An alternate route, again only a few blocks away, would use mostly vacant lots and “save money and heartache,” the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper reported in March 1945. Even the state legislature unanimously voted a resolution asking for relocation since the road was partially state funded. He ignored them all.
Moses became known as the country’s foremost “master builder,” an American Baron Haussmann, the man who shaped nineteenth-century Paris. But Moses didn’t start out in that direction.
A REFORMER TO START
Moses started out as an advocate of government reform and rose to power under Governor Alfred E. Smith, who in 1919 assigned him the task of reorganizing state government, heavily centralizing it and shifting considerable power from the legislature to the governor. As Moses filled an assortment of appointments, he learned how to navigate that governmental power better than anyone. He didn’t override the political system; he used it. With each agency and authority he created and then took over, he began building, first with the Long Island Park Commission, then the New York City Parks Department, the New York State Power Commission, and eventually twelve state and city positions at one time.
The concept of the public authority—an independent agency separated from normal government process of checks and balances and with the ability to issue its own revenue bonds—was Moses’s. Proceedings are secret, and records are not public. Authorities were purposely designed to be impervious and impregnable to outside voices and impacts. The public authority, Caro notes, “became the force through which he shaped New York and its suburbs in the image he personally conceived.” To this day, the public authority remains a favorite government device “to get things done” and to avoid a genuine public process that includes community input, real negotiation, and compromise.
Probably no one, elected or not, in any other state held such vast power over such an extended period. He served under five mayors: Fiorello La Guardia, William O’Dwyer, Vincent Impellitteri, Robert F. Wagner Jr., and John V. Lindsay. “No law, no regulation, no budget stops Robert Moses in his appointed task,” La Guardia once boasted. Since Moses usually wrote the rules for the agencies he led, his task was usually his to define. And he served under six governors: Alfred E. Smith, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert H. Lehmann, Thomas E. Dewey, Averell Harriman, and Nelson A. Rockefeller.
With all the leaders under whom he served, Moses was famous for threatening to resign his position if he did not get his way. Each relented—until Rockefeller. In 1962 Rockefeller wanted Moses to resign as chairman of the State Council of Parks to make way for his brother, Laurence, long a member of the Palisades Interstate Commission and a known parks and conservation advocate. Rockefeller told Moses he could retain his Long Island parks chairmanship. Moses refused and resigned from both state park positions and the State Power Commission, fully expecting Rockefeller to back down. He didn’t. “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 happened.”22
Beca
use he created parks all over the state, he is most favorably known as a great park builder. “As long as you’re on the side of parks, you’re on the side of the angels. You can’t lose.”23 Caro quotes Moses here to illustrate how well Moses knew how to manipulate public opinion. And while his highways and urban renewal projects are sometimes considered inevitable, there is nothing inevitable about the routes and sites he chose that destroyed dozens of productive and vibrant residential and industrial neighborhoods and uprooted and undermined the lives of more than a million people and businesses. While the estimates of displaced residents and businesses are known for only some projects, a total seems impossible to calculate but is acknowledged to be at least five hundred thousand people. Some estimates exceed one million. There is no estimate for the displaced businesses. And there was nothing inevitable about his building only residential towers in the park without the traditional mixed uses of an urban neighborhood.
To assume improved roads, housing, parks, and expanded universities and other institutions would not have happened is foolish. They would indeed have happened but differently. Revisionists would have us believe that Moses was operating in the context of his time, doing what everyone else was doing. Evidence indicates otherwise. He shaped the context of his time. Others learned from him and followed his path.
THE IMPACT OF THE WORLD’S FAIR
Moses started the reshaping of the country for the car first through his facilitating the 1939 World’s Fair, then through his New York projects, and then by helping other cities plan and design their projects. It was a perfect combination since Moses’s vision of park creation always included—and sometimes started with—the necessary vehicular access.
In 1935 Moses took the suggestion that the city should hold a World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow and, as city parks commissioner, made it happen. He quickly recognized the immense potential of the project to enhance his own power and agenda, given the contracts and jobs involved in building the pavilions and the vast network of new Queens highways needed to reach the site and, of course, the enormous park to be created in the process. Nothing about the fair could happen without the approval and input of Moses.
The 1939 World’s Fair, with its theme, “The World of Tomorrow,” had a greater impact on the subsequent development of the country than most people realize. The fair is widely acknowledged as the icon of the Art Deco period of design. Less recognition, however, exists of its role in shaping urban planning and setting the nation on the car-oriented course that has existed ever since. “The story we have to tell,” critic Lewis Mumford said of the fair’s theme, “is the story of this planned environment, this planned industry, this planned civilization.24 If we can inject that . . . as a basic notion of the fair, if we can point it toward the future, toward something that is progressing and growing in every department of life and throughout civilization . . . we may lay the foundation for a pattern of life which would have enormous impact in times to come.”25 Indeed! Instead of being an enormous trade show at which manufacturers could discover the newest products and technologies, as in fairs past, this fair was directed at consumers. Manufacturers would have the opportunity to exhibit their products and persuade viewers how their lives would be improved.
Two major exhibits vied for and received the most attention. The first was the fair’s symbol, the Trylon and Perisphere designed by architect Wallace K. Harrison. Inside the Perisphere was the World of Tomorrow, designed by Henry Dreyfuss, in the form of a model of Democracity. Democracity broke with the tradition of looking for solutions to problems in existing cities and imagined a whole new configuration of highways linking bedroom communities for the middle class, industrial districts with workers’ housing nearby, and a business and cultural district at the center marked by a single skyscraper. The message was clear: the current city was no longer viable and its problems intractable. The solution: demolish and rebuild the city and provide alternatives outside of it for those who could afford it.
The more popular exhibit, in fact the most popular of the fair, was General Motors’ Futurama, created by industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, which actually dovetailed nicely with Democracity. Here, viewed from a moving platform, was the future with cities built from scratch around highway interchanges. Tiny cars—no congestion, plenty of space between them—on multilane roadways went over mountains and bridges and ran on liquid oxygen. A fantasy, yes, but an extraordinarily seductive one. Walter Lippmann wrote: “General Motors had spent a small fortune to convince the American public that if it wishes to enjoy the full benefits of private enterprise in motor manufacturing, it will have to rebuild its cities and its highways by public enterprise.”26
From then on, the cleverly crafted advertising campaigns of the car manufacturers equated cars with modernity and middle-class status, and the automobile industry became the foundation for our postwar economy. Caro notes in a similar vein:
The three automotive giants would later plow tens of millions of dollars into his World’s Fair at a time when other major companies were shying away from it. In the sense that he was America’s, and probably the world’s, most vocal, effective and prestigious apologist for the automobile, that he designed highway networks not only for New York but for a dozen cities, that by his success in building expressways in the city he did more than any other single urban official to encourage more hesitant officials to launch major highway-building programs in their cities, and that, by building them to new, high standards, he did more than any other single urban official to set the early standards for urban expressway design—he was the spearhead, the cutting edge, of this Panzer division of public works.27
The fair’s message seems to have altered even Moses’s vision for roads. Until then, he built “parkways”—the Taconic, Bronx River, Henry Hudson—all built to connect middle-class car drivers to parks for leisure-time enjoyment and some commuting. They were four lanes, beautifully landscaped “ribbon parks,” with graceful curves offering bucolic views. Roads went around cities. Early suburbs had evolved along rail lines. The car was an additional means of transportation, not a replacement for the enviable transit system that knitted neighborhoods together into one city and wove the country’s cities into a national fabric. That pattern remained until after World War II.
The car culture was emerging, not yet booming. The auto industry was to be the vehicle to put the nation back to work. An assortment of postwar national policies, including the 1956 Interstate Highway Act, purposely spurred that emerging car culture and industry. Those highways would be designed for practical use by commuters and truck traffic, even though many of Moses’s roads were still routed to connect parks. Some roads actually sliced through parks, like Upper Manhattan’s Van Cortlandt and Inwood. Moses’s roads created more traffic, as all new roads do. Experts told him this. They strongly urged him to build transit, too. He refused to listen.
Moses set his own course. One massive clearance project followed another in what former Random House editor Jason Epstein called “periodic paroxysms of self-destruction in the name of renewal.”28
THE COUNTRY FOLLOWS MOSES
As the first big highway builder, he created the vision and then the template for the nation. He helped craft the funding and authorizing legislation in Washington for urban renewal and highways nationwide. Then he was first in line to get funding for local projects, with the growing strength of the highway lobby behind him.
Aides to President Eisenhower consulted with Moses about national highway needs as they crafted the 1956 Highway Act. One of the early managers and the de facto head of the Interstate Highway System, Bertram D. Tallamy, had formerly served as superintendent of the New York State Department of Public Works. He revered Moses. In the 1920s, Tallamy used to come down from Niagara to attend lectures given by Moses on the art of “Getting Things Done.” Tallamy told Caro that “the Interstate Highway System was built by principles he had learned at those lectures.”29
After the ’56 act was propo
sed, University of Michigan professor Robert Fishman notes, “Moses became the principle spokesman of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in urging that interstates ‘must go right through cities and not around them,’ contrary to what President Eisenhower advocated. The president envisioned a road network between cities, like Germany’s autobahn, with short connections to city centers.”
Moses did not confine his strategy to New York. Other cities hired him to design freeway networks in the 1940s and ’50s. Few were built. Funding was usually difficult, so many were postponed. Some were scaled back or simply canceled. Portland, San Francisco, San Diego, D.C., Baltimore, Los Angeles, Detroit, and others had Moses’s help or influence. The first was New Orleans.
NEW ORLEANS
The French Quarter of New Orleans survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005 better than most of the city. But in the 1940s it narrowly missed being hit by a planning disaster engineered by none other than Moses. “A progressive spirit flourished in New Orleans after World War II. The desire for progress was reflected in the decision . . . to hire Robert Moses, the great freeway builder . . . to introduce 20th century thinking to New Orleans . . . Moses had done more to change the face of New York . . . than any other person in the 20th century. In 1946, expressways were considered avant-garde in America and Moses, with his faith in the automobile to move people in cities, was the acknowledged leader of this approach to urban-transportation planning.”30
The Battle for Gotham Page 20
