Corruption before Moses had been unorganized, based on a multitude of selfish, private ends. Moses' genius for organizing it and focusing it at a central source gave it a new force, a force so powerful that it bent the entire
city government off the democratic bias. He had used the power of money to undermine the democratic processes of the largest city in the world, to plan and build its parks, bridges, highways and housing projects on the basis of his whim alone.
In the beginning—and for decades of his career—the power Robert Moses amassed was the servant of his dreams, amassed for their sake, so that his gigantic city-shaping visions could become reality. But power is not an instrument that its possessor can use with impunity. It is a drug that creates in the user a need for larger and larger dosages. And Moses was a user. At first, for a decade or more after his first sip of real power in 1924, he continued to seek it only for the sake of his dreams. But little by little there came a change. Slowly but inexorably, he began to seek power for its own sake. More and more, the criterion by which Moses selected which city-shaping public works would be built came to be not the needs of the city's people, but the increment of power a project could give him. Increasingly, the projects became not ends but means—the means of obtaining more and more power.
As the idealism faded and disappeared, its handmaidens drifted away. The principles of the Good Government reform movement which Moses had once espoused became principles to be ignored. The brilliance that had invented a civil service system was applied to the task of circumventing civil service requirements. The insistence on truth and logic was replaced by a sophistry that twisted every fact to conclusions not merely preconceived but preconceived decades earlier.
Robert Moses was America's greatest builder. He was the shaper of the greatest city in the New World.
But what did he build? What was the shape into which he pounded the city?
To build his highways, Moses threw out of their homes 250,000 persons —more people than lived in Albany or Chattanooga, or in Spokane, Tacoma, Duluth, Akron, Baton Rouge, Mobile, Nashville or Sacramento. He tore out the hearts of a score of neighborhoods, communities the size of small cities themselves, communities that had been lively, friendly places to live, the vital parts of the city that made New York a home to its people.
By building his highways, Moses flooded the city with cars. By systematically starving the subways and the suburban commuter railroads, he swelled that flood to city-destroying dimensions. By making sure that the vast suburbs, rural and empty when he came to power, were filled on a sprawling, low-density development pattern relying primarily on roads instead of mass transportation, he insured that that flood would continue for generations if not centuries, that the New York metropolitan area would be—perhaps forever—an area in which transportation—getting from one place to another—would be an irritating, life-consuming concern for its 14,000,000 residents.
For highways, Moses dispossessed 250,000 persons. For his other
projects—Lincoln Center, the United Nations, the Fordham, Pratt and Long Island University campuses, a dozen mammoth urban renewal projects—he dispossessed tens of thousands more; there are available no accurate figures on the total number of people evicted from their homes for all Robert Moses public works, but the figure is almost certainly close to half a million; the one detailed study by an outside agency shows that in a ten-year period, 1946 to 1956, the number was 320,000. More significant even than the number of the dispossessed were their characteristics: a disproportionate share of them were black, Puerto Rican—and poor. He evicted tens of thousands of poor, nonwhite persons for urban renewal projects, and the housing he built to replace the housing he tore down was, to an overwhelming extent, not housing for the poor, but for the rich. The dispossessed, barred from many areas of the city by their color and their poverty, had no place to go but into the already overcrowded slums—or into "soft" borderline areas that then became slums, so that his "slum clearance programs" created new slums as fast as they were clearing the old.
When he built housing for poor people, he built housing bleak, sterile, cheap—expressive of patronizing condescension in every line. And he built it in locations that contributed to the ghettoization of the city, dividing up the city by color and income. And by skewing city expenditures toward revenue-producing services, he prevented the city from reaching out toward its poor and assimilating them, and teaching them how to live in such housing—and the very people for whom he built it reacted with rage and bitterness and ignorance, and defaced it.
He built parks and playgrounds with a lavish hand, but they were parks and playgrounds for the rich and the comfortable. Recreational facilities for the poor he doled out like a miser.
For decades, to advance his own purposes, he systematically defeated every attempt to create the master plan that might have enabled the city to develop on a rational, logical, unified pattern—defeated it until, when it was finally adopted, it was too late for it to do much good.
"One must wait until the evening . . ."In the evening of Robert Moses' forty-four years of power, New York, so bright with promise forty-four years before, was a city in chaos and despair. His highways and bridges and tunnels were awesome—taken as a whole the most awesome urban improvement in the history of mankind—but no aspect of those highways and bridges and tunnels was as awesome as the congestion on them. He had built more housing than any public official in history, but the city was starved for housing, more starved, if possible, than when he had started building, and the people who lived in that housing hated it—hated it, James Baldwin could write, "almost as much as the policemen, and this is saying a great deal." He had built great monuments and great parks, but people were afraid to travel to or walk around them.
For all these reasons, this book attempts to tell two stories at once: how New York, forty years ago a very different city from the city it is today, became
Wait Until the Evening
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what it has become; and how the idealistic Robert Moses became what he has become. It must try to be a book about what happened to the city and what happened to the man. For, to an extent few people have really understood, these two stories are one story. Would New York have been a better place to live if Robert Moses had never built anything? Would it have been a better city if the man who shaped it had never lived? Any critic who says so ignores the fact that both before and after Robert Moses—both under "reform" mayors such as John Purroy Mitchel and John V. Lindsay and under Tammany mayors such as Red Mike Hylan and Jimmy Walker—the city was utterly unable to meet the needs of its people in areas requiring physical construction. Robert Moses may have bent the democratic processes of the city to his own ends to build public works; left to themselves, these processes proved unequal to the building required. The problem of constructing large-scale public works in a crowded urban setting, where such works impinge on the lives of or displace thousands of voters, is one which democracy has not yet solved.
Moses himself, who feels his works will make him immortal, believes he will be justified by history, that his works will endure and be blessed by generations not yet born. Perhaps he is right. It is impossible to say that New York would have been a better city if Robert Moses had never lived.
It is possible to say only that it would have been a different city.
Amory labeled the Jewish Grand Dukes, who were not part of the Four Hundred but rather of their own One Hundred and who created in New York City their own, self-contained society that was known among themselves as "Our Crowd." By the time he was fifty, Bernhard, security assured, was leaving business affairs largely in Samuel's hands and taking an interest, unusual among Jewish businessmen in New York in the 1870's, in civic affairs. Becoming convinced of slum residents' need for more "breathing space," he launched a successful campaign to persuade the city fathers, who were not at all sure that they hadn't already made a gigantic mistake by removing a huge hunk of land from the tax rolls to create Central Park, t
o set aside other, smaller areas for more parks. Among his friends he gained a reputation as an incisive and visionary analyst of social problems. In 1875, Joseph Seligman resigned from the traditional "Jewish seat" on the City School Commission and Mayor William H. Wickham appointed a non-Jew to fill the vacancy. The German-Jewish community was outraged. "We want the unsectarian character of our public schools preserved," editorialized The Jewish Times. "We do not want to be delivered into the hands of disguised missionaries in the persons of principals who smuggle in sectarian prayers and hymns in our public schools." The German Jews decided to unite behind a single man and insist on his appointment to the commission, and the man they chose was Bernhard Cohen, who was appointed in January 1877. If not one of the richer or more famous members of Our Crowd, he was one of the most respected.
Yet, within the circle of his family, Cohen was almost pitied. His grandchildren, years after his death, remembered him as a tall, slim man, handsome with an aquiline nose and pale-blue eyes. They recalled that he was generous, very gentle and mild, a little absent-minded, and so unfailingly courteous in manner that when he visited his granddaughters he would kiss their hands rather than their faces. But what they recalled most vividly about Bernhard Cohen was how unmercifully he was bullied by his wife. "My grandmother had the reputation of being as hard as nails," one says. "She had that reputation because of the way she treated her husband."
Rosalie Silverman had been a beautiful girl, tall, statuesque, with a whiteness of skin that made her black hair and full red lips all the more striking. She aged early, however, and she aged hard, becoming terribly wrinkled and gaunt—her eyes sunken, her long thin nose jutting out sharply from the wrinkles. Only her hair remained youthful, and the fact that it stayed jet black until her death at the age of ninety-three led her family to believe she dyed it. She bore five children—Bella, three other girls and a son, David—but she was not the stereotype Jewish mother. In fact, when two of the girls—Emma, who had married banker Adolph Openhym, and Lydia, wife of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. partner Abraham Wolf—became fatally ill while still in their twenties, wasting away for months before they died, it was Bernhard, not Rosalie, who visited them every day and helped with the nursing. Rosalie, a relative recalls, "seemed to want to forget about them."
Rosalie's bent was intellectual rather than maternal. She was a voracious reader of philosophy and history as well as fiction. Her hobby was crossword
puzzles and she made a practice of racing through several of them every day in both English and German newspapers. A sharp mind was coupled with a sharp tongue, which she used on those who disagreed with her opinions. And she was unusually frank for a Jewish—or Gentile—housewife of her era. Once one of her granddaughters was amazed to realize that Old Grannie Cohen was about to give her an unsolicited lecture on sex. "One must be very much in love to enjoy it," Old Grannie began, and she proceeded, with none of the delicacy ladies usually attached to such discussions at the turn of the century.
With underlings, Grannie Cohen was flashingly imperious. After her husband died, she moved with her maid, Susan, into a suite in the fashionable Windsor Hotel, on Fifth Avenue between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh streets, and sent out invitations to a "suite-warming" luncheon. On the day before the luncheon she decided she didn't like the chandelier in her living room. Marching down to the front desk, she ordered a new chandelier, told the clerk it must be installed by the following day at 10 a.m., cut off his protestations with a curt "I won't take 'no' for an answer!" and swept out the door without waiting for a reply.
Grannie Cohen's definition of underlings, moreover, apparently included the general public. When buying tickets for a railroad trip or a play, her practice was to eye the queue of ticket buyers disdainfully and then stride up to the first man on it and simply elbow him out of the way.
And the definition appeared to include her husband. "The way Grannie Cohen treated Grandfather Cohen was quite striking," the granddaughter recalls. "She absolutely sat on him." Many of the more intellectual members of Our Crowd became impressed during the 1870's with the philosophy of a German rabbi's son named Felix Adler, who was talking about substituting ethics for religious piety. Rosalie Cohen became one of Adler's most enthusiastic supporters. When the Society for Ethical Culture was formed in 1876, with Joseph Seligman as its first president, she became a member—and so did Bernhard Cohen, who previously had been one of the most devout members of Temple Emanu-El, the stronghold of Reform Jewry in New York. On May 13, 1897, after absent-mindedly taking a walk in the rain without an umbrella, Bernhard caught pneumonia and, four days later, died. His funeral services were conducted by Dr. Adler.
Old age did not change Grannie Cohen. In her nineties, she still walked almost every day to public and lending libraries to obtain books, and Robert's college friends who were present when she dropped in on the Moses family were astonished at the range of her knowledge. In summers, at the Moses summer home at Lake Placid, she would arise early, open an imposing stack of German- and English-language newspapers to their crossword puzzles, sit down on a porch overlooking the lake and begin working on puzzles in two languages. Within an hour she would be back inside, chatting with the college boys animatedly about the latest trends in art or science, and one of the boys, happening to glance through the pile of papers she had left on the porch, noticed that every word of every puzzle was completed. Age certainly did not wither her independence. Until she died, she did her own marketing every
day. She refused to allow herself to be examined by doctors, even by her grandson Nathan E. Brill, an official of Mount Sinai Hospital and discoverer of "Brill's disease," a form of typhus fever. And, despite the entreaties of her children, she would not allow the bell pull in her hotel room to be moved from the door to a spot near her bed so that she could summon Susan more easily in case of emergency. "I'll never be too sick to walk across the room," she said. In fact, although she became very hard of hearing, she was seldom sick at all—until a night in July 1919, a month after her ninety-third birthday. On that evening, she went to bed with a German crossword puzzle. At midnight, with the puzzle almost completed, she arose, walked across the room, rang the bell pull and, when the maid arrived, said calmly, "Susan, call Dr. Brill. I'm dying." When Dr. Brill arrived, she was dead.
The striking features that had been Rosalie's portion as a girl were passed on to her son and three oldest daughters, all of whom were considered to have made "good" marriages. "Looks ran high in the Cohen family," friends say. But Rosalie's youngest daughter, Bella (she never used her real name, Isabella), was a slim girl and young woman of less than medium height whose features, except for a too prominent, rather high-bridged nose, were, under brown curly hair, exceedingly plain. So were her clothes. Unlike her mother, Bella had a quiet, unassuming manner that combined with her slimness and curls to give her the appearance, even in her twenties, of a sweet little girl. She also possessed a kindliness that is not remembered as one of Rosalie's most noticeable attributes. "Bella was always doing nice things for people, little thoughtful things," recalls one of her cousins, Hilda Hellman. When Hilda's young son Geoffrey broke a leg in an automobile accident and had to spend time in Mount Sinai, he could be sure of an almost daily visit—and present—from his "Aunt Bella."
Nonetheless, of Rosalie's five children, Bella was the one most like her mother. If her looks weren't as impressive, her mind was. Educated by private tutors and then at Charlier, the exclusive finishing school, she could speak both French and German fluently and had a wide acquaintance with the literature of both countries. And if her appearance was that of a quiet and sweet little girl, quite different from her mother, people who bothered to talk to the little girl found that the appearance was deceiving. In discussing her opinions, Bella was mannerly and soft-spoken, but the opinions delivered in that soft voice were direct, forceful—and not particularly susceptible to alteration. In fact, people who tried to alter them came to realize rather quickly that while Bella's voice was
soft, the things she might say with it could be sharp indeed. "After you had talked to her," recalls an acquaintance, "you began to observe her more closely. And it didn't take you long to realize that under that quiet manner was an astonishing amount of arrogance. She was her mother's daughter."
In 1886, at the age of twenty-six, Bella married Emanuel Moses, a thirty-five-year-old department-store owner from New Haven. He was a dark, tall, shaggy man, with warm, kindly eyes, a soft mustache and a gentle, slow
manner. Born in Cologne of a family in which was mingled blood of both German Jews and Sephardic Jews from Seville, he had started out in America as a lace merchant and then had opened a little department store in New Haven and built it into a successful business. But he was too slow and quiet for the Cohens; they felt that Bella had not made a very good marriage in comparison with her sisters; they felt, in fact, that Bella had married beneath her.
Emanuel and Bella moved to New Haven, which in 1886 was a quiet, charming little town celebrated for its elm-lined streets, a meticulously manicured sixteen-acre Central Green and beautiful public buildings and parks. They settled down in 83 Dwight Street, a big, rambling house with a broad, shaded porch and a generous helping of the gingerbread that characterized the architecture of the period, and it was in that house that their three children were born, Paul Emanuel in 1887, Robert in 1888 and Edna Marion in 1891.
Dwight Street, two blocks from the Yale University campus, was a wide, sleepy, dirt street shaded by some of the biggest of New Haven's elms. The houses along it were substantial, if not elegant, and they were built close to the wooden sidewalk, so that most of the big lots consisted of back yards, and in those yards, because the families on the street were well-off manufacturers and businessmen, were well-tended grape arbors and stables—and inside the stables were horses and carriages. The numerous children of Dwight Street rode up and down the street on those horses, with coachmen or house servants leading them and carefully holding them in to a walk, and played on the shady porches or in the spacious back yards under the tall trees, and there were so many servants in the big houses that mothers didn't scold if boys like "Mr. Paul" or "Mr. Robert," who slept in the same bedroom on the second floor of No. 83, got their Eton collars and Little Lord Fauntleroy suits dirty. To the end of their lives, the three Moses children would remember New Haven with fondness. Searching for an adjective to describe Dwight Street, Robert Moses would say "comfortable"; Paul would say "shady, well-kept, nice."
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 4