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

by Caro, Robert A

  Part of the difficulty, Moses had learned while running the Reconstruction Commission, went back to the old question of organization. Fearing— knowing —that the state would let them run down, the parks' donors had turned their administration over to men or societies dedicated to the preservation of historic or scenic attractions. Montcalm and Spy Island "State Parks," for example, were administered by the Fort Oswego Chapter of the Daughters

  lobert Moses' Proposed Northern State Parkway

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  of the American Revolution. Having no authority over private individuals or organizations, the Legislature was reluctant to give them money. And since no central body of any type unified their activities, they presented to the Legislature the spectacle of separate agencies competing with each other for funds.

  This lack of unified administration also meant that a considerable potential source of power for parks was dissipated. In many cases, the trustees of the parks were political leaders in the upstate counties in which they lived and from which came many of the Republican legislative leaders. United, the park trustees could have exerted considerable influence in Albany, but, acting separately, they dissipated their influence.

  State park administration was one area in which the Reconstruction Commission's recommendations had been ignored. A group of the commis-

  sion's trustees, including many of the upstate park philanthropists, had begun making a "comprehensive study" of the state's park needs but had stopped when the commission was disbanded. Moses, not interested in parks, had given the report scant attention, anyway. But now he asked the philanthropists to complete the study under the aegis of the New York State Association. He toured their parks with them, urged them to make recommendations for their development, delicately urged the more conservative of them to think in terms of improved roads and enlarged accommodations. And he urged them to start thinking in terms of a unified state park system that would be a formal part of state government. They need not worry about losing control of their beloved parks to faceless bureaucrats in Albany, he assured them; control of each park could be left in the hands of the men then administering it, and to insure that future appointments to the commissions would not become involved in politics, the commissionerships could be unpaid jobs. But if there was a single state body controlling parks, the demands for funds from the different sources interested in parks could be funneled into it and focused, so as to put more heat on the Legislature. When their recommendations for their individual parks came in, he combined them in a report, A State Park Plan for New York, which he wrote himself and issued in the name of the New York State Association.

  The report was a seminal document in the history of parks in America. Its scope was in itself revolutionary: New York's park needs, it said, were so great that they could not be met by ordinary legislative appropriations; a bond issue would be required—and the amount of the issue should be $15,000,000. But it was not the scope that startled most; New York and other states had floated bond issues for parks before, even if none of the issues had been nearly so large as that Moses proposed. Rather, it was the philosophy. The expenditure of proceeds from previous bond issues had been restricted to land acquisition and in the word "acquisition" was embodied the philosophy that had always in the past governed parks in America, the belief that parks were only land and the trees and grass and brooks on the land, that their sole purpose was to serve as "breathing spaces" for the city masses and to enable them to relax and meditate among beautiful surroundings, to commune with nature, and that they should therefore be kept in their natural state. If the city masses no longer were content with communing, if they wanted space not only to meditate but to swing—to swing baseball bats, tennis rackets, golf clubs and the implements of the other sports that their new leisure time had enabled them to learn—this was a desire that had not yet been translated into governmental action in the United States.

  But Moses translated it. The $15,000,000 bond issue, he said, must specifically authorize the Legislature "to provide for permanent improvements as well as the acquisition of land ... for large facilities which make a park accessible and attractive to people." "Conservation"—the previous park ideal—had to be combined with "recreation," he said. Furthermore, he said, "permanent improvements" did not mean only improvements within parks; it also meant means to get to them—"parkway and boulevard connections between state parks and between state parks and neighboring centers

  of population." And state parks should no longer be talked of as separate entities; there should be a state park system; the state should be divided into eleven regions and all the state parks in each of these regions should be administered by a single regional "state park commission"—the Long Island parks he proposed, for example, by a Long Island State Park Commission. The presidents of those commissions should sit as a State Council of Parks, which would coordinate and unify park policy.

  Moses' park report was soon being read—and hailed—by park planners all over the United States. But if its recommendations were to become reality, they would have to become reality through a man who didn't read reports and who seemed highly unlikely to be a parks enthusiast.

  Al Smith "somewhat lacked," as one writer put it, "Theodore Roosevelt's zest for 'the strenuous life.' " If there was a sport in which the Governor was interested, his friends didn't know it. He refused to go with them to football or baseball games or even to boxing matches. When he took his family swimming, he watched them from the beach, his little pot belly protruding through his bathing suit, a cigar clenched firmly in his teeth, eyeing the ocean warily. Smith's childhood, moreover, had not prepared him to appreciate Moses' insistence on active sports for the masses.

  When Moses began explaining his park plan, the Governor was dubious. Its cost astounded him. "You want to give the people a fur coat when what they need is red flannel underwear," he said once.

  But Moses had one advantage. Smith's mind was the type that responded most enthusiastically to what Frances Perkins called "the graphic presentation." The Governor, she said, "wanted you to tell him what it looked like. ... He got more information out of people who would tell him the exact thing they'd seen, [who] described the detail. . . . Then he saw what it was like." Anxious to improve the lives of the urban poor, he was especially anxious to improve them through things he could actually see improving them; his Governorship was distinguished by his emphasis on works of physical construction, solid and visible. Nothing was more visible than the physical entity that was a park, and no one was a more vivid describer, a more graphic presenter, than Bob Moses. After Smith's election in November 1922, Moses persuaded him to visit the New York City watershed properties. They were barren in winter, but with his gift for words Moses made the Governor see them as they could be in summer, with leaves on the trees and people sitting at picnic tables under them. Day after day, pacing restlessly back and forth before the Governor's desk, he poured out his ideas in a continual flow of words. Sometimes the other members of Smith's inner circle had to smile at Moses' vehemence and earnestness. Once, as the torrent of words flowed over him, the Governor gradually began sinking lower and lower in his chair, and, with Moses still talking, disappeared at last under his desk. But when he poked his head up, he was smiling.

  Moses persuaded Smith to attend a meeting of the New York State Association park committee at the Whitehall Club and made a lengthy,

  passionate speech. At its end, Smith arose. "Bob, you win," he said. He directed Moses to draft a special message to the Legislature asking for passage of legislation establishing a State Council of Parks and authorizing submission of the $15,000,000 proposal to the people in referendum. On April 18, 1923, two weeks after Moses finished the message, Smith delivered it.

  Under state law, only one bond issue could be submitted to the voters each year. Smith had also proposed an issue for new hospitals and mental institutions. Moses pleaded that parks should come first, but Smith disagree
d. When the Governor delivered the message Moses had drafted, he announced he would not push for adoption of its proposals until 1924. It was clear to his advisers that the Governor was worried about public reaction to an expenditure for parks of such unprecedented dimensions.

  The reaction was not long in coming. Smith's secretaries reported a most remarkable upsurge in the volume of his mail. It came from the City Club of New York ("Congratulations!" club secretary Raymond Ingersoll wrote delightedly) and from Pomona Grange Number 416 ("God bless you! Sincerely, Matilda Hunt, secretary-treasurer"). It came from slum dwellers and suburbanites. And unlike the mail on most issues, this mail did not contain letters on both sides of the issue. There was, the Governor's secretaries reported, apparently only one side to this issue: everyone was for parks.

  There was hardly a newspaper in the state, moreover, that did not write an editorial supporting the message. And the praise did not stop at the state's borders. From all over the country, letters were sent to "Governor Smith, Albany" expressing hopes that the writers' own states might follow his example. Wrote the chairman of the National Conference on State Parks: "The New York program . . . will stimulate valuable work in other states. . . . You are rendering a real service not only to your own state, but to other states of the Union which will have the advantage of following your experience."

  Mark Antony, shrewd politician, knew the potency of parks as an issue. Rousing the mob to fury against Caesar's "honorable" slayers, he reserved for a climax the reading of Caesar's will. "Let but the commons hear this testament," he cried, "and they would go and kiss dead Caesar's wounds." And it was not the revelation that Caesar had left each Roman citizen, "every several man," seventy-five drachmas that sealed Antony's victory over the citizens' emotions but rather his revelation that

  . . . he hath left you all his walks, His private arbors and new-planted orchards, On this side Tiber; he hath left them you, And to your heirs for ever; common pleasures, To walk abroad and recreate yourselves.

  Al Smith, shrewd politician, had risen to the Governorship on great issues, and he was not slow to recognize a new one when it came along. An

  Albany reporter watched the awareness grow on the Governor and his circle. "You could see them beginning to realize that doing what Moses wanted would be politically advantageous," he recalls. "One of them told me that supporting parks meant that the Governor would be helping the lower- and middle-class people, and thereby winning their support, and that the intellectuals would be for him because they saw parks as part of the new pattern of social progress. So you'd have all three groups supporting you. And besides, 'parks' was a word like 'motherhood.' It was just something nobody could be against." During the spring of 1923, Smith assured Moses he would push for adoption of the park program in 1924.

  And in the summer of 1923, Moses went back to tramping around Long Island.

  "I went with him once," a friend says. "We walked all day through one piece of beautiful wild country after another. And he never slowed down. He was tireless." Generally, Moses preferred to be by himself. He walked alone through vast, empty shuttered mansions, through potato fields where farmers worked peacefully, not knowing that the man looking at them was planning to take their fields away. Walls and guards kept him from getting a good look from paved public roads at the route he was considering for the northern parkway, but he discovered unpaved back roads through many of the estates, and he spent days walking along those deserted paths, a solitary figure with a long stride. Through the trees he could see the great castles; at their gates, on little black and gold signs, he could see the names of the great barons who had built them. And the barons, private behind their walls, did not know that staring at those walls was a man determined to tear them down.

  Few men had ever viewed Long Island entire. One who had was Walt Whitman, who saw it as a "Sea-Beauty! stretch'd and basking! Isle of sweet brooks of drinking water—healthy air and soil! Isle of the salty shore and breeze and brine!" Now Moses saw it entire, and if he had written poetry once, he wrote park reports now, and brooks, healthy air, salty shore and breeze and brine meant parks. Standing on Montauk Point, where Long Island's southern fluke ends in the steep bluffs plunging abruptly into the Atlantic, Whitman had said, "I stand as on some mighty eagle's beak." Now Moses went to see Montauk, not with the eyes of the poet but with those of the park planner. "The Montauk peninsula," he wrote, "is an extraordinary mass of clay, gravel and rock with high bluffs on the south shore and, back of the bluffs, kettleholes and rolling hills clothed with bay-berry, shrubs and gnarled and twisted trees. The irregular shore line and a number of small islands . . . form a veritable patchwork of smaller peninsulas, straits and bays which afford many miles of beaches, dunes and varied waters for cruising, fishing, swimming, golfing and other forms of recreation."

  Driving back from Montauk along the southern fluke, Moses discovered endless other miles of unused beaches in Hampton Bays. He found still more on Long Island's northern fluke at Orient Point, where farmers lived in farm-

  houses built in the seventeenth century. Searching out deserted estates, he found two in the center of the Island, one owned by the son of financier August Belmont, the other by a family named Yoakum. And roaming one day far out in Suffolk County, near Wading River, he stumbled upon a magnificent brick and stone mansion, set upon a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound, that was not only deserted but looked as if it had never been lived in. Inquiring later, he found out it never had. The man who commissioned the famous architect Stanford White to design it and who named it "Wildwood," financier Roland G. Mitchell, had died just as it was being finished in 1906, and the spacious, high-ceilinged rooms had remained shuttered and unfurnished ever since.

  Again and again, Moses returned to the lonely strand, not only to Jones Beach but to Fire Island, where a state park, the only one on Long Island, was located, on the two-hundred-acre grounds of the hotel the state had purchased in 1892 to house the passengers from the cholera-ridden Norman-nia.

  In 1918, fire had destroyed the hotel, as well as the boardwalks and comfort stations that the state had erected, and when Moses stepped out of the Bob, he found "Fire Island State Park" deserted. Charred ruins lay on the sand. The only undamaged structure was the nine-story-high wooden Fire Island telegraph tower, from which the sighting of arriving clipper ships had once been flashed to Manhattan.

  Studying maps, Moses was puzzled. They showed the park as comprising the westernmost portion of Fire Island, except for a little enclave on the island's tip which was occupied by an unmanned Coast Guard station. The telegraph tower, which stood on the station, was shown at the very tip. But as Moses stood alongside the tower, the island stretched westward as far as he could see.

  Then he remembered what the baymen had told him about the set of the ocean. Since 1892, the waves had been piling sand on Fire Island's western end. He began to walk along the new land—and he walked for four miles. The Coast Guard station wasn't a little enclave any more; its area, he calculated, was at least six hundred acres. And the station was deserted. No one even knew the added six hundred acres were there.

  By the end of the summer of 1923, Moses knew that his plans for Long Island had been far too small. Now he wanted not just a state park on Jones Beach but another one, which would include the unmapped six hundred acres, across the inlet on Fire Island. He wanted state parks on the South Shore not just at the Taylor Estate but in Hampton Bays and at Montauk Point. He wanted parks on the Sound not just at Sunken Meadow but at Wildwood, Lloyd Neck and Orient Point. And he wanted two in the center of the Island, at the Belmont and Yoakum estates. He wanted forty thousand acres of parks. He wanted not just a parkway along the South Shore and one along the North Shore but a parkway connecting them far out on Long Island so that families from New York City could drive out on

  one, loop around and drive home on the other without retracing their path. He wanted another parkway—he wanted two more parkways—linking both the northern and south
ern parkways with two causeways running to Jones Beach. He wanted still another parkway linking them with Fire Island. He wanted 124 miles of parkways. And he wanted the parkways to be broader and more beautiful than any roads the world had ever seen, landscaped as private parks are landscaped so that they would be in themselves parks, "ribbon parks," so that even as people drove to parks, they would be driving through parks.

  Near the latter part of the summer, Alfred E. Smith found himself being chaufTeured around Long Island, with Moses sitting beside him, pointing and talking. Smith became enthusiastic about the plans. He asked Mrs. Moskowitz to look into the situation, and Moses gave her the full tour. She approved, and Smith told Moses that when the park program was submitted to the Legislature in 1924, it could be expanded.

  "Why don't you take the whole thing over yourself?" the Governor asked. "Why don't I make you president of the Long Island State Park Commission?"

  Years later, Moses could recall his thoughts. "I had always had an interest in physical construction, anyhow," Bella's son would remember. "And I had always had an interest in the outdoors; I had done a lot of hiking and fishing and swimming in the Adirondacks, remember. And I was very interested in parks, particularly in the Long Island work."

  He said he would like the job.

  the State Council of Parks." Precedents had established the statutory meaning of the word "prepared." In this context, it meant that the Council Chairman—not the Conservation Commissioner—had the authority to screen the financial requests of the eleven regional park commissions, weigh one against the other and decide which should be included in the council's budget request. The Conservation Commissioner would get to see the regional commissions' requests only after the Council Chairman had finished with them. He would not even know about the requests made by regional commissions which the Council Chairman had turned down. All he was really empowered to do, therefore, was receive a completed park budget and hand it to the Governor exactly as he received it, and, the bill provided, the Council Chairman from whom he would be receiving the budget would be elected by the council—not appointed by him or by the Governor. Within the reorganized framework of state government, therefore, parks would be a separate, self-governing, very independent duchy.