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

by Caro, Robert A

  Since jobs were the fuel of Tammany's political machine, a disproportionate share of the rest of the budget went to purchase that fuel; between the day Hylan entered office and the day Walker left it, the number of city employees almost doubled, and their salaries, paid as political rewards at levels far above those paid for similar work in private industry, almost tripled. In 1932, they totaled $311,937,199.

  City officials acted as if they believed that the budgetary gyre could go on widening indefinitely. They based their optimism on the fact that the value of taxable real estate in the city, the base of the city's tax structure, was increasing almost as fast as city expenditures. As a result, even while the city's budget soared, there was only a slight increase in the real estate tax rate. If the Hylan and Walker administrations had erected a huge superstructure of city expenditures, that superstructure was nonetheless resting on a base that they thought was steadily broadening.

  Even before the Depression, however, the rate of increase in the base had begun to slow down ominously. The annual percentage of increase in the value of taxable real estate in the city was 12 in 1927 but only 9 in 1928 and 8 in 1929. The Depression forced this key percentage down to 6 in 1930, 3 in 1931, 1 in 1932. And the Depression forced up another key percentage, the percentage of real estate taxes which the city was unable to collect; in the years between 1928 and 1932 this percentage was, successively, 11, 13, 15, 18, 26. The uncollected balance of the 1932 real estate tax, the tax which had to finance the bulk of the city's debt service and current expenditures, was $137,613,213. The base on which the top-heavy superstructure of city finances teetered was shrinking, and it was shrinking fast. The superstructure began to topple.

  In desperation the city deferred its required annual payments to the Teachers Retirement Fund and expropriated Sinking Fund surpluses already obligated for small-scale public improvements. Unable despite these expedients to meet even its ordinary day-to-day expenses, it was forced to borrow to pay them—at interest rates set higher and higher by bankers increasingly leery of the city's ability to repay. By 1931, even Jimmy Walker was talking about "economizing."

  But the city's economizing capacity was limited because one-third of its budget was allocated for an all but irreducible debt service and because of political realities: the city payroll had become the payroll of the Tammany political machine, and while a city might reduce the number of its employees

  or their salaries, it was less easy for a political machine to throw its retainers off the payroll or substantially reduce their stipends. City construction contracts had become the main ingredient of the rich swill of graft to which the palate of Tammany leaders—including those party leaders who held high city office—had become accustomed; city officials could reduce a city's appropriations for construction, but men accustomed to feeding at a well-filled trough were far less ready to reduce their own portions. Even while talking economy, city officials made clear that they would not economize on construction appropriations or salaries. (There was one exception: one group of city employees—schoolteachers—were not part of the Tammany machine. In 1930 and 1931, the city fired 11,000 schoolteachers.) The 1932 city budget was the highest ever. The city proposed to finance it with a record increase in the real estate tax rate.

  But the day of reckoning for fifteen years of Tammany rule was at hand. When, in January 1932, the city attempted to float new loans to meet the payroll coming due at the end of the month, bankers, convinced that the loans could not be repaid if the city spent money during the coming year at the rate it proposed, refused to make them unless the budget was reduced. The city complied by virtually halting all repairs to its physical plant. It refinanced a quarter-billion dollars of subway bonds, which the city had planned to redeem out of current revenues, by selling long-term bonds in their stead—an expedient which loaded future generations of city taxpayers with a monstrous rapid-transit debt.

  Still the city's balance sheet reddened. By December 1932, it was forced to go hat in hand to the bankers again, and when new loans were made contingent on further budget reductions, it had no choice but to cut the salaries of city employees by 6 to 33 percent. And hundreds of millions of dollars in short-term revenue notes would be coming due in 1933 and there was no money in sight to pay them.

  Although Walker and O'Brien attempted to do so, it was a misleading oversimplification to blame the Depression for all of New York's problems. The truth was that the city had been falling further and further behind in the race to meet the needs of its people in good times as well as bad, and under reform as well as Tammany administrations.

  The city's failure was most apparent, and the problems largest, in those categories of municipal responsibility in which the betterment of its people's lives required the construction of public works on a scale commensurate with the city's size. The concern of the people's tribunes during the Low and Mitchel reform administrations had been for the people's welfare, but that welfare had been conceived of primarily as a lessening of the burden on taxpayers through governmental economy rather than through the construction of civic improvements whose cost would increase that burden. And while Tammany administrations had spent the taxpayers' money with a lavish hand, the taxpayers had received in return surprisingly little increment in

  life-improving steel and concrete, because the disproportionate amount of the city's budget funneled by Tammany into salaries—into patronage—left little money available for construction contract appropriations.

  The quality of men added to the city payroll, moreover, did not match the quantity, thanks to Hylan's destruction of civil service safeguards. If there was a man less devoted to the merit system than Red Mike, it was his successor; when Beau James departed for Europe, he left behind him, on the rosters of the engineering staffs of the borough presidents, the staffs which alone under the existing City Charter were empowered to draw the plans for major public improvements, a group of "engineers" of whom a substantial percentage lacked a high school diploma. And the city's resultant lack of technical expertise crippled its ability to carry out, or even conceive, complicated public works.

  So did the amount of graft, the grease which kept the Tammany machine moving smoothly. From condemnation awards—"Every time the city built a school, a politician went into the real estate business," La Guardia growled —to certificates of completion, every step toward a public improvement required a payoff. Since contractors had to include the cost of such payoffs in their estimates of the cost of city construction work, their bids had to be inflated accordingly. The amount of steel and concrete that a city dollar purchased was correspondingly reduced, and the size of contracts the city awarded was not matched by improvements to the civic estate. "The city did not get what it paid for," commented Fusion financial expert Joseph D. McGoldrick. "Although it certainly paid for what it got"—several times over. For its single major public improvement, the construction of the Independent Subway System, the Walker administration paid $800,000,000—approximately twice what outside experts said the job should have cost. And when the $800,000,000 had been spent, substantial portions of the subway were still uncompleted.

  And since the hands which city inspectors held out, palms up, to contractors could not easily be doubled into hard fists of regulation, the quality of public works in New York City was more than slightly suspect. No fewer than forty public schools constructed during Walker's administration had to be closed for major repairs—for ceilings that fell, roofs that leaked, stairways that collapsed and plumbing that didn't work at all—within a year of opening.

  The gap between the city's physical plant and the increasing needs of its expanding population had, then, been widening in virtually all areas of municipal responsibility. The total accomplishment of the Walker administration in public housing, for example, consisted of the rehabilitation of some of the tenements on one block, and the number of public hospital beds when Beau James left office was precisely the same as when he entered it. But because of the sudde
n burgeoning in the use of the automobile and in the desire for active recreation, the city's failure to produce for its people was especially galling in precisely those areas in which Robert Moses had already produced, just outside New York City, so much: highways, bridges and parks.

  New York was strangling on its traffic. In 1918, when Hylan took

  office, there were 125,101 motor vehicles in the city; in 1932, there were 790,173. In all those fifteen years not a single usable mile of arterial highway had been constructed within the city's borders. Motorists were forced to travel through or around New York in 1932 on the same local streets that had existed in 1918, streets complete with intersecting traffic, traffic lights—and traffic jams reporters had long since run out of adjectives attempting to describe.

  In 1913, Robert Moses had stood on a high bluff overlooking the muddy wasteland that was Riverside Park and had envisioned a great parkway running through it. In 1932, there was still no highway. The city had begun construction in 1927 of a West Side Elevated Highway running along the waterfront from the Battery as far uptown as Seventy-second Street, the park's southern border. But the pace of construction had been so slow that, when the Depression brought it to a halt in 1931, substantial portions of the highway had not been built—not that that mattered much, since neither had the entrance and exit ramps that would make it usable. And since there were no plans to extend the highway through Riverside Park, motorists heading for Westchester and New England still had to make their way through—and add to—the congenital traffic jams of Manhattan and the Bronx before they could reach the broad Saw Mill River Parkway, which Moses had built down to the city line.

  Queens had once been the only borough with adequate through roads. Manhattan families heading for Nassau and Suffolk counties, once past the East River bridges, had not encountered serious delays until they reached the city line and the narrow roads beyond. But with the construction beyond the line of Moses' parks and parkways, the situation was now reversed; the lure of his creations had steadily increased the traffic flow through Queens, and its boulevards were inadequate to handle it. Furthermore, none of the boulevards linked up with a parkway, so drivers wanting to use one had to endure local streets before they got to it.

  As for Brooklyn, borough of churches, its inhabitants had been praying for a way out of it for decades. There was, in the entire borough, not a single major through thoroughfare. There was no way out of its vast center, no way to reach Manhattan or Queens or Nassau County, except via local streets. And the streets of Brooklyn, like those of Queens, were becoming more clogged every year; the population of the two boroughs increased by more than a million between 1920 and 1930.

  As for connections for automobiles under or over the water which separated the city's boroughs, there hadn't been one built in a quarter of a century.* Manhattan motorists bound for the Bronx, Westchester or New England, after crawling uptown through Manhattan's congestion, found when they reached Manhattan's northern boundary, the Harlem River, that the only way to cross it to get to the congested streets of the Bronx was the

  * Two connections had been built, by the Port of New York Authority, between the city and New Jersey: the Holland Tunnel, which opened in 1927, and the George Washington Bridge, which opened in 1931.

  Broadway drawbridge, only three lanes wide and so crammed with pillars that traffic tie-ups at either end often extended for blocks. On an average day in 1932, the bridge was raised fourteen times to permit the passage of ships. When one of these raisings occurred at rush hour, the tie-up could extend for miles.*

  The population of Long Island, concentrated in Brooklyn and Queens, was more than four million in 1932—greater than all except eight states. But except for a few small and ancient ferries that plied the East River, the only way on or off Long Island for motorists was the same quartet of "East River bridges" that had existed in 1909. Long Island still didn't possess a single vehicular link with the mainland United States. The Island didn't possess a single vehicular link with Manhattan Island north of Fifty-ninth Street, where the Queensborough Bridge touched down. The Queensborough, in fact, was the only link with Manhattan north of Corlears Hook, where the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg spans debouched traffic onto the already jammed thoroughfares of the Lower East Side.

  On an average weekday in 1933, 238,277 trucks and cars, three times what they were built to handle, poured onto the East River bridges. The Queensborough carried more cars than any other span in the country.

  The inadequacy of the approaches to these bridges was matched by the inadequacy of their roadways. Built for horses, not automobiles, they were too narrow for cars and so slippery that, according to a police report, on the Brooklyn Bridge alone, "a dozen accidents were not uncommon on a rainy day."

  City officials had been talking for years about repaving the bridges, but no repaving had been done. They had been talking for years about widening their roadways, but no widening had been done. Although in 1932 the Queensborough Bridge had been open for a quarter of a century, the city had not yet gotten around even to marking lanes on it. At either end of the bridge were traffic lights; when they were red, bridge traffic stopped completely. A 1931 police study found that during rush hours the average driver, frantically shifting gears while trying to keep his car in an unmarked lane, spent forty-three minutes negotiating the 1,182 feet of the Queensborough span. The city had created two additional lanes on the Queensborough upper roadway in 1931, but when the lanes were opened, it was discoveied that there had been a slight miscalculation: the lanes were too narrow; cars were constantly skinning their tires on the granite curbs. The lanes had to be closed while workmen laboriously chipped away the edges of the curbstones—and the workmen would be chipping, and the lanes would be closed, for three years.

  The lack of new interborough bridges and tunnels wasn't due to a lack of ideas; New York was littered with evidence to prove that there had

  * Northbound motorists could, of course, cross the Harlem River on one of seven bridges that had been built years before—the newest was finished in 1910—miles to the south. But these bridges debouched into the most congested section of the Bronx, miles from the parkways and other broad roads of Westchester.

  been plenty of those. But the evidence also proved how difficult it was, in New York, for ideas to become reality.

  In a weed-filled vacant lot in Riverdale just north of the Harlem River stood a marble column a hundred feet high with a strangely unfinished look about its top. There was supposed to be a statue up there, a statue of Hendrick Hudson, for the vacant lot had been purchased by the city as the northern bridgehead of a "Hendrick Hudson Bridge" that was supposed to ease the congestion on the Broadway drawbridge, and a statue of the Great Navigator was supposed to look down on the span that bore his name. But although the lot had been purchased, and the column erected, in 1909, in 1932 work had still not started on the statue—or the bridge.

  On the shoreline in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge section, at the edge of the Narrows, stood two rude wooden palisades, rotting from a decade's exposure to sea spray. The palisades had been erected to keep children from falling into two huge holes, each ninety-six feet deep. Directly across the Narrows, dug into the Staten Island shoreline, were two similar holes. The four holes had been the start of the shaft heads for a great "Narrows Tube" designed to link Brooklyn with Staten Island. Work on the tube had begun in 1921. The city had spent more than $7,000,000 on it. But digging had been stopped in 1923 and never resumed, and in 1932 the project was dead—the four empty holes the only evidence of the money spent on it.

  And marching across low-lying Ward's Island in the East River were seventeen massive masonry piers, each of them forty feet thick, eighty feet long, more than a hundred feet high. These piers had been erected to support the central span of the "triborough bridge," first proposed in 1910, that would link together at last Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens. But in 1932 the piers had been standing for more than two years, and there was s
till no bridge for them to support—and hope that there ever would be was rapidly fading.

  As for New York's parks, they were scabs on the face of the city.

  Parks were the city's legacy from reformers who had fought against long odds for their creation; under Tammany they had become fiefs administered for private gain. The Brooklyn Park Department paid for hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of landfill that it never received. It constructed a large restaurant and for a yearly rental of ten dollars turned over its keys to a restaurateur who was allowed to keep all profits. When a Brooklyn brick manufacturer needed ten acres for a new storage area, the department allowed him to rent ten acres of Dyker Beach Park—for a rental of $2.50 per year. And during his term as Brooklyn Park Commissioner, James J. Browne banked $1,071,713.

  Some of the city's choicest public beach front—in Wolfe's Pond Park on Staten Island and at Orchard Beach in the Bronx, for example—was rented to political insiders, who, for a fee of fifteen dollars, were allowed to erect private bungalows on it, and to form "civic associations" that promulgated regulations closing the beaches to the public.

  Because parks were a handy place to conceal drunks and loafers, Tammany staffed the park departments with the dregs of its barrel of ward

  heelers. Because skilled laborers' higher salaries would reduce the amount of patronage that could be distributed, Tammany balked at hiring skilled workers even for those jobs that required skills. So that most of the park department budgets could be devoted to salaries, Tammany scrimped on materials and equipment, spending exactly $225,000 of the total park budget of $8,576,319 on such luxuries in 1932—and in that year 90 percent of park department vehicles were still horse-drawn.

  By 1932, the paths, walks and roadways in New York's parks were miles of broken pavement. The lawns, seldom mowed, sometimes looked more like meadows. So many trees were dying that some of the loveliest tree-bordered walks were bordered mostly by stumps—the result of allowing unskilled and unsupervised workers to prune trees by simply climbing up to the top of their ladders and sawing trees off at that height, since they were reluctant to risk their own limbs by climbing out on trees'. According to a Park Association survey, there was not a single structure of any type in any park in the city that was not in need of immediate repair.