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

by Caro, Robert A

  Babylon's baymen had never forgiven him for his attempt to grab the town's "sacred birthright." When Mary went shopping in town now, the tradesmen eyed her coldly. Sounding out the Town Board members again about a referendum, Moses found them still fully aware of their constituents' feelings.

  Moses tried threats. Many of the thousand commission and Highway Bureau employees at Belmont Lake lived in Babylon, and therefore, Moses reminded the town's businessmen, much of the $400,000 monthly payroll was spent in the town. "Doubtless," he said, "more congenial headquarters for the state's work on Long Island can be found elsewhere." But the town was unmoved. The Town Board assured its constituents that there was not going to be any referendum. And without one, there was, under the State Constitution, simply no way in which Moses could get the town's land.

  But Moses at last found a weak spot in Babylon's defenses.

  "I heard about it by the sheerest kind of accident," he told the author decades later.

  "I was thinking then about learning to drive—I never really did—and I was practicing one morning in a Model T in the driveway of this big estate out in Babylon owned by a guy named Willard Reed, whose father, who had been dead for years at this point, had been a Democratic county court judge in Suffolk, the only Democrat on the county court, at the time Grover Cleveland was re-elected.

  "I saw Willard sitting on the porch rocking and drinking, and he called to me and said, 'Come on up and have a drink.' So we sat rocking away there and talking and after a while he said, T hear you're having some

  trouble getting some land.' I said, 'Yes, we are.' And he said, The Babylon fellows don't want to cooperate?' and I said, 'No.'

  "And he said, 'I remember a story my father told me once. You know the whole question of the ownership of the bay bottom in Babylon Town came up a long time ago and my father and another judge, a fellow in Amityville named Samuel Hildreth, were appointed to pass on it. And I think you'd be interested in what was found. You'll never find the decision in Riverhead [the county seat, where court records were kept] because the supervisors will have made sure it's missing. But Hildreth is alive.'

  "I said, Tell me more, Willard.' He said, 'I think I've told you enough. You go and see this [Hildreth] fellow in Amityville and you tell him I told him to talk to you.' I did, and Hildreth said that way back, in 1848 maybe or 1856, two bills had been introduced in the Legislature. See, before that, the underwater rights in the bay, the bay bottoms, had belonged to the state. But one of these two bills transferred the rights in Nassau County to the various towns in Nassau along the bay and the other transferred the rights in Suffolk to the various Suffolk towns. Well, everyone on Long Island always just assumed that both of these had passed, but Hildreth told me that when he and Judge Reed had looked into it, they had found that for some reason no one seemed to know, maybe just an oversight, only one passed—the Nassau one.

  "I said, 'Do I gather then that half the bay bottom belongs to the state? That Babylon doesn't own its bay bottom at all?' And I put all our bloodhounds on it and I found those bills, and I found that Hildreth's story was true.

  "Well, in all this time, the supervisors could have gotten the ownership of those lands transferred without any trouble, but I guess they had just decided to let things lie and had kept issuing licenses to fish the bay bottoms when they had no right to. And so I blackjacked them. We told them that we'd trade them the [Jones Beach] land for the bay bottoms. Well, they didn't want to trade. They didn't want to give the land. But we told them that if they didn't, we'd let the people know that the town didn't own the bay bottom after all, that they'd been issuing licenses when they had no right to, that in all the years that had been available to remedy the mistake, they had never taken the simple step of obtaining title to the bay bottoms, that they had been negligent in their stewardship of the town's 'sacred heritage.' " To be convicted in the public eye of such negligence would have been even worse for them than to give away the barrier beach. The bay bottoms were much more important to the baymen; that was what their livelihood depended on. "We blackjacked them, that's all. We threatened to tell. And we said, 'Now, there's one way to adjust this thing.' "

  The way—the ultimatum that Moses presented to the Town Board— was to authorize the referendum and to issue a ruling that would give Moses a real chance of winning it: the voting would not be restricted to the town's taxpaying property owners but would be open to anyone who lived there— including the several hundred state employees who had recently moved into

  apartments. This ruling would violate common sense and common practice— generally, only property owners, a town's taxpayers, were allowed to vote in referenda involving the permanent removal of town property from tax rolls— but Moses did not leave the board members much choice. If the referendum passed, giving the beach land to the state, he told them, the state would in turn quietly give the bay bottoms to the town, and they could go right on issuing licenses; if the referendum passed, he would never tell their constituents about their negligence. And if it didn't pass, he would.

  To lull the town's baymen and property owners into overconfidence, the Town Board did not explode the bombshell about voting eligibility until three days before the election. Everything, in fact, was done so fast that the old-time residents never had a chance to organize. Without warning, at a routine meeting held on March 14, 1928, with few residents present, the Town Board, saying for the record that it was opposed to the beach ceding but felt "the people's voice" should be heard, authorized the referendum— and scheduled it for the same day as party primary elections—April 3, 1928, less than three weeks away. "Judases!" Judge Cooper cried.

  The Park Commission flooded the local post office with mailings seeking to reassure Babylonians on points that were worrying them. One reassurance concerned a rumor that tolls would be charged on the Wantagh Causeway, that Babylonians would have to pay to use their own land. Absolutely not, Moses said. In a letter he wrote to the Leader —and which was printed by Cooper, who made a noticeable effort to give space to his foe's views—Moses promised: "The state causeway and boulevard will be free."

  Nonetheless, the judge could not conceive that, even with the voter eligibility ruling, the referendum would pass. No politician, he didn't understand certain other tactics the Town Board had used; he saw, for example, no significance in the fact that while the hours for voting in the primary were noon to 9 p.m., the hours for voting in the referendum ended at 6 p.m.

  None of the older residents of Babylon were prepared for election day. As they strolled to the polls, they suddenly noticed cars bearing state shields and crammed with men racing through the streets of the quiet village. They were Park Commission and DPW vehicles carrying employees to vote. Undoubtedly, many of these employees were—under the suddenly relaxed eligibility ruling—eligible to vote. But opponents at the polls said that they recognized many as men who did not have even apartments in the town and were therefore ineligible. When, however, election inspectors tried to check their names against the list of eligible voters in the election registers with which election inspectors were customarily provided, they found that somehow the Town Board had neglected to provide registers this time, and the inspectors were unable to deny the state employees the right to vote. Realtors had cars out, too, rounding up voters known to favor the proposal and transporting them to the polls. But Moses' overconfident—overconfident because hoodwinked—opponents did not have a single car in operation. In addition, many potential "no" voters—one estimate said two hundred—were confused by the fact that the polls remained open until nine; they showed

  up after six, only to be told that while they could vote in the primary, voting in the referendum had been closed. The final tally showed that "Babylon Town" had ceded its portion of Jones Beach to the state by seven votes. Wrote Cooper: "The verdict was nothing short of a crime and the method by which it was obtained is scandalous." Moses issued a statement, too. He called the referendum results "a vote of confidence in th
e Park Commission."

  The sands were running out on Al Smith's Governorship. Moses' construction crews did not quit for the winter of 1927-28; their grading machines pushed aside snow as well as earth as they smoothed the path for the Southern State Parkway. The Great South Bay froze solid; the men stretching the Jones Beach causeway across it pitched tents on the ice and lived on it.

  Early in 1928, an astonished Hutchinson and Hewitt realized that the completion of the Southern State Parkway and Jones Beach causeway, on which they had hinged the beginning of the Northern State and which they had assumed was years, if not decades, away, was rapidly approaching. Frantically, they tried to delay it. In another year, Al Smith wouldn't be Governor. Out of Moses' $4,500,000 1928 budget request, they slashed $626,000. But Smith found the money in the departmental budgets, and the construction crews kept working.

  Moses had not been given funds for his Long Island parks and parkways until the spring of 1926. By the end of the summer of 1928, in a period of less than three years, every foot of right-of-way for the Southern State Parkway was in his hands, a seven-mile stretch, from near the New York City line to and around the Hempstead reservoir, was completed. Long rows of newly planted elms and maples lined it and stone-faced bridges, every one different, were carrying crossroads over it so that nothing should interrupt the swift passage of its users. A second seven-mile stretch, from the reservoir to Wantagh, was completed except for the landscaping. A third seven-mile stretch, from Wantagh to Babylon, was graded and ready for paving. And the fill for the Wantagh Parkway had been laid, a pavement placed on top of the fill and three of the four bridges that would carry the causeway across the bay completed.

  When Moses had become president of the Long Island State Park Commission on April 18, 1924, there had been one state park on Long Island, the almost worthless 200-acre tract on Fire Island. By the end of the summer of 1928, there were fourteen parks totaling 9,700 acres. Because 6,775 of those acres had been acquired—from Hempstead. Oyster Bay and Babylon towns, the U.S. Department of Commerce, New York City and private individuals—as gifts, the Long Island parks had cost the state a total of about a million dollars. At 1928 land values, they were worth more than fifteen million.

  By the end of the summer of 1928, the watershed properties off Merrick Road had been filled with bathhouses, baseball fields and bridle paths. Picnic areas with thousands of tables sat under their trees. Slides, swings and jungle

  gyms spotted their clearings. Their lakes were decorated with floats, diving boards, sliding ponds, rowboats and canoes. Heckscher State Park contained miles of paved roads for cars and dirt roads for horseback riders, acres of athletic fields, bathhouses holding five thousand lockers, a boardwalk, a bathing pavilion with restaurants and snack bars, an inland canal for row-boating, and a marina at which sailboats could be moored. There were more bathhouses, more boardwalks, more playing fields, more snack bars, more picnic areas, more campsites at Sunken Meadow, Wildwood, Orient Beach, Montauk Point and Hither Hills state parks. On Jones Beach, two years before a desolate sand bar, there stood now, awaiting only the finishing touches that would be added in 1929, a bathhouse like a medieval castle, a water tower like the campanile of Venice, a boardwalk, a restaurant and parking fields that held ten thousand cars each. In the history of public works in America, it is probable that never had so much been built so fast. During the summer of 1928, park-seeking families heading out of New York City began to feel Long Island open up to them. Week by week, word spread. At the beginning of the summer, the bathhouse at Valley Stream State Park contained a thousand lockers. For a few weekends, these were sufficient. Then they were not. Another thousand lockers were added. Then another thousand. And, even so, by the end of the summer, thousands of would-be bathers were being turned away every weekend. By the end of the summer, attendance at Long Island's state parks had passed half a million.

  New Yorkers knew who was primarily responsible for the boon they had been given. It would have been difficult for them not to know. For the press was turning Robert Moses into a hero.

  The lionization was on a scale as vast as the achievement. The Twenties was an age for heroes, of course, and if 1927 was Lindbergh's year in the New York press, 1928 was Moses'. Albert Einstein, who announced his theory of relativity in that year, was all but ignored in the city's thirteen daily newspapers, but New York's reporters strove for new adjectives to describe the park builder, one writer concentrating on his physical attributes ("tall, dark, muscular and zealous"), another on the mental ("a powerful and nervous mind"), a third on the moral ("fearless," "courageous") to describe "Rhodes Scholar" Robert A. Moses, Robert B. Moses, most frequently Robert H. Moses (reporters could not seem to reconcile themselves to his lack of a middle initial).

  Editorial writers chimed in. "His labors have been unwearied and successful," said the Times, "his energy and persistence . . . great." "He has been a faithful, earnest and efficient incumbent," said the World. "He has done excellent work." Even the Herald Tribune was beginning to look on his works and find them good.

  And the praise, on front pages and editorial pages alike, continued day after day. If readers were reminded once during 1928 that Moses was serving the state without pay, they were reminded a hundred times.

  Moses' lionization in the press had a practical benefit. It insured that he would be allowed to finish the job he had started. No one would dare stop it now.

  The Long Island dream was safe.

  If the press erred in its description of Moses' achievements, it erred on the side of under-, not over-, statement.

  Long Island was only one segment of his state park system. The $14,000,000 allocated for upstate parks in the bond issue was not nearly enough for the system he had in mind. Many of his hurried trips around the state were, therefore, attempts to persuade wealthy men who owned undeveloped land in scenic areas to give their land to the public.

  Luckily, many of these men were the old park patriots. The state had never bothered to buy a single foot of Lake George's hundreds of miles of shoreline, and cheap resorts and rooming houses were proliferating on its shores. Lumbermen had stripped the surrounding mountains of their softwood forests and were starting on the hardwoods. The denuded soil was being washed away by rains. But midway along the lake a branch of water jutted out to the northwest, and of the eleven thousand virgin acres on the tongue of land thus formed—most of it called Tongue Mountain—six thousand were owned by a group of wealthy men who were also public-spirited. He persuaded them to donate their land to the state. The remaining five thousand acres on the tongue were owned by a family that was about to sell it to a lumbering company, but the family's attorney was Captain N. Taylor Phillips, a key figure in that stronghold of the park patriots, the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society. Working through Phillips, Moses persuaded the family to lower its asking price from forty dollars per acre to fifteen—and when he bought the whole tract, he had succeeded in preserving for posterity a substantial part of the Lake George region for a total cost of $75,000.

  With the money he had saved, Moses preserved the historic battlefields at Fort Stanton and Oriskany and, with Adolph Ochs's help, at Saratoga. He purchased the 10,692 still untouched acres of Whiteface Mountain, which he had so often climbed as a youth, thus insuring that generations of youths who came after him would also be able to climb it. By the end of the summer of 1928, the scattered little historic reservations that Moses had inherited had been expanded into a system that included seventy parks totaling more than 125,000 acres. And he had used $5,000,000 of the bond issue to beat the lumbermen to great untouched tracts in the Adirondacks and Catskills and build up the state's forest preserve to 2,218,000 acres.

  When he had the parks, Moses built roads to link them with the nearest highways, and suddenly families in Rochester and Syracuse and Albany were visiting places they had hardly heard of before—not only Letchworth Gorge and Watkins Glen but Boonville Gorge, Rudd Pond, Roaring Brook and Ore Pit.
If they simply wanted to drive through these parks, there were

  gravel roads they could do that on. If they wanted to hike, there were hiking paths and nature trails through the woods; if they wanted to swim, there were paths down to beautiful, hidden mountain lakes and bathhouses in which they could change into swimming outfits; if they wanted to picnic, there were picnic grounds of which every detail was designed to preserve the fresh, virgin quality of the woods; if they wanted to camp out, there were campsites, designed with equal care, laid out next to cool mountain brooks. Newspapers in Rochester rhapsodized over Letchworth State Park, newspapers in Albany over Thacher State Park, newspapers in Buffalo over the park on Devil's Island that overlooked Niagara Falls. But these newspapers had little interest in the Long Island parks, and New York City newspapers had little interest in the upstate parks. So no newspaper, no matter how enthusiastic it was over what editorial writers called "Robert Moses' great park program," comprehended the full extent of the program's magnitude—or the full extent of its greatness.

  Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of these parks and parkways that were becoming physical realities in 1928 was that they were, for the most part, the parks and parkways he had proposed in the New York State Association park reports he had written in 1922 and 1923. They were located in the places he had proposed, and the details of their development—down to the facades of their bathhouses and how many lockers and parking spaces each would have—followed the plans Moses had made for them.

  Robert Moses had dreamed a dream immense in scope. By the end of the summer of 1928, the dream—all of the dream, even Jones Beach, which had seemed doomed to diminution in reality—was either reality or well on its way to becoming reality.