Sometimes, now, the laborers were even performing the construction phenomenon known as "working ahead of plans." By February, there were more than 800 architects and engineers in the Arsenal and they had become accustomed to working fourteen-hour days. But often, after they had finished a blueprint and it had been approved by Clarke, Embury, Andrews or some other supervisor and they rushed it themselves out to the project site, they would find that the work crews had already begun, or finished, digging ditches for pipes and foundations, or other preliminary work, and they would have to sit down on the spot and draw new plans to fit in with the work that had already been completed. The team of fifteen architects working at the Arsenal under Embury's personal direction to design a new Central Park Zoo—Moses didn't like the name "Menagerie"—were, Latham recalls, "working [while] looking out the window to see what had already been done." These men, Embury wrote in amazement, "had never seen each other before beginning work." They had to work "with little equipment,
crowded together two or three to the table, and moved about from one place to another every few days." They completed the plans for the entire new zoo in sixteen days.
Embury and Clarke-themselves, giants of their professions though they were, were caught up in the excitement. Once, going out to lunch together, they stopped at Bryant Park to review the reconstruction work, which was already well under way, and decided they didn't like the plan, already approved by themselves and Moses, on which hundreds of men were already working. Over lunch, they began to discuss new ideas and sketched them out on their tablecloth. When they finished their meal, they asked the head-waiter for permission to take the tablecloth with them, drove straight to 80 Centre Street to show it to Moses and, when he approved, gave it to another team of draftsmen to translate into blueprints.
By March, the economy was beginning to recover and optimism was rising —along with demands from the nation's press, heavily anti-New Deal, that the government begin phasing out the spending of "taxpayers' money" on such "socialistic" practices as work relief. Moses had been led to expect an extension of the act creating CWA, but at the last moment Congress changed its mind, and the agency went out of existence on March 31, on forty-eight hours' notice. With only a limited amount of funds from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration available for park work, half of Moses' men were abruptly dismissed. But he kept the remaining half working.
The harshness of the winter persisted into April, and every weekend was either cold or rainy. But on Saturday, May 1, 1934, the weather turned balmy, and, as they do on the first warm Saturday of every spring, New Yorkers poured into their parks.
Seventeen hundred of the eighteen hundred renovation projects had been completed.
Every structure in every park in the city had been repainted. Every tennis court had been resurfaced. Every lawn had been reseeded. Eight antiquated golf courses had been reshaped, eleven miles of bridle paths rebuilt, thirty-eight miles of walks repaved, 145 comfort stations renovated, 284 statues refurbished, 678 drinking fountains repaired, 7,000 wastepaper baskets replaced, 22,500 benches reslatted, 7,000 dead trees removed, 11,000 new ones planted in their place and 62,000 others pruned, eighty-six miles of fencing, most of it unnecessary, torn down and nineteen miles of new fencing installed in its place. Every playground in the city had been resurfaced, not with cinders but with a new type of asphalt that Moses' engineers assured him would prevent skinned knees, and every playground had been re-equipped with jungle gyms, slides and sandboxes for children and benches for their mothers. And around each playground had been planted trees for shade.
"Generations of New Yorkers," as the Times put it, "have grown up in the firm belief that park benches are green by law of nature, like the grass itself." But now, as New Yorkers strolled through their parks, they saw
that the benches had been painted a cool cafe au lait. Generations of New Yorkers had believed that the six miles of granite walls around Central Park were a grimy blackish gray. Now they saw that sand blasting had restored them to their original color, a handsome dark cream. Rare was the New Yorker who could remember when the Columbus Circle monument to the men who died in the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor had not been dingy, or when the boy standing in the prow of the monument's bow had possessed a wreath, or, for that matter, hands to hold it with. As soon as Moses had taken office, he had surrounded the monument with scaffolding and concealed it with drop cloths. Now the scaffolding and drop cloths were removed and the boy had his hands back, and a wreath was in them—and the entire huge monument behind him had been scrubbed clean and white. And a thousand plots in the parks, plots which as long as New Yorkers could remember had contained nothing but dirt and weeds, were gay with spring-blooming flowers.
By midsummer, new construction projects in the parks were being completed. Ten new golf courses, six new golf houses, 240 new tennis courts, three new tennis houses and 51 new baseball diamonds were to be opened to the public before Labor Day. The Prospect Park Zoo was completely rebuilt and a new zoo erected at Barrett Park on Staten Island. Complete reconstruction jobs were done on St. James, Crotona and Ma-combs Dam parks in the Bronx; Owl's Head, McCarren and Fort Greene parks in Brooklyn; Crocheron, Chisholm and Kissena parks in Queens; and Mount Morris, Manhattan Square and Carl Schurz parks in Manhattan.
On a sunny Saturday, the fence around Bryant Park came down and thousands of spectators in a reviewing stand set up behind the Lowell Fountain saw that the weed-filled lot had been transformed into a magnificent formal garden. Two hundred large plane trees, grown in Moses' Long Island Park Commission nurseries, trucked to the city and then lifted over the fence and lowered into prepared holes by giant cranes, had been planted along its edges, and their broad leaves shaded graceful benches and long flower beds bordered by low, neat hedges. The four acres they surrounded were four acres of lush and neatly trimmed grass, set off by long, low stone balustrades and flower-bordered flagstone walks, that looked all the greener against the grayness of the masses of concrete stores and office buildings around it. As a newly formed sixty-six-piece Park Department band, outfitted in white duck trousers, forest-green jackets with white belts and white caps trimmed with green and gold braid, blew a fanfare, the great-granddaughter of William Cullen Bryant, the poet and journalist for whom the park had been named, and the sister of Mrs. Josephine S. Lowell, in whose memory the fountain had been built, walked together from the reviewing stand to the fountain, escorted by twenty youthful pages and Park Department attendants in uniform, and flung handfuls of petals into it. At that signal, water gushed from the fountain's five dolphin spouts for the first time in a decade, and a speaker said that Robert Moses had outdone his biblical namesake because while the Moses of the Israelites had smote a rock in the desert and brought forth water, Moses of New York had "smote
the city's parks" and brought forth not only water but trees, grass and flowers. In Central Park, Moses' men restored Olmsted's long-defaced buildings, replanted the Shakespeare garden, placing next to every flower a quotation from the Bard in which it was mentioned, and exterminated herds of rats; 230,000 dead ones were counted in a single week at the zoo site alone. While seven hundred men were working night and day to build a new zoo, another thousand were transforming the dried-up reservoir bed that had been called "Hoover Valley"—Moses had torn down the shanty town there—into a verdant, thirty-acre "Great Lawn," were laying flagstone walks around it and planting along them hundreds of Japanese cherry trees. Then, having satisfied those who objected to use of the reservoir bed entirely for active play, Moses constructed a playground and wading pool in the northeast corner of the bed, outside the lawn's borders, for small children and a game field in the northwest corner for older children. On the North Meadow he built handball courts, wading pools and thirteen baseball diamonds. He deported the deformed sheep and turned the old sheepfold into a "Tavern-on-the-Green," an old English inn-in-a-park complete with doormen wearing riding boots and hunting coats and top hats and cigar
ette girls in court costumes complete with bustles—and with the added touch of an outdoor flagstone terrace on which couples could dance among tables shaded by gaily colored umbrellas to the music of a twelve-piece orchestra costumed in forest green.
And Moses was not merely beautifying the city's parks. He was doing what generations of reformers had despaired of doing: he was creating new ones —in the areas that needed them.
In his first flush of enthusiasm following La Guardia's offer of the park commissionership, Moses had believed that by forcing landlords to dump real estate on the market at a fraction of its former value, the Depression had given the city at last a chance to acquire and tear down slum tenements and use the space thus gained for play space for the slum children who so badly needed it. But then La Guardia disclosed to him the extent of the city's financial crisis and told him that, because of the Depression, even fractions were beyond the city's ability to pay.
"I remember one time he came back from talking to La Guardia and he told us this," said Bill Latham. "And I remember that he said then—I don't remember the words, really, but the idea was: 'All right, then, goddammit, we'll get land without money.' "
Moses instructed Latham to set his surveyors to making an "inventory" of every piece of publicly owned land in New York City, every tract or parcel owned by any city department, and to determine, not by asking departmental officials but by personal inspection, whether every piece of that land was actually being used. Within a month, he had learned that on the Lower East Side there were nine long-vacant strips of land along Houston Street that had been acquired by the Board of Transportation to store equipment during subway construction but that had been lying idle ever
since the construction was completed, ten elementary schools so old that they had been abandoned by the Board of Education for years and five vacant lots that were owned by the Park Department itself but that the Park Department had somehow not been aware it owned. Alongside the Williamsburg Bridge piers were pieces of land that had been acquired to store equipment used in the construction of the bridge and had been lying idle during the thirty-one years since the construction had been completed. On the other side of the East River, among other tenements, were more piers —and more pieces of land. In the Red Hook tenement slums, Brooklyn's version of Manhattan's "Hell's Kitchen," thirty-eight acres of land had been purchased for a public housing project, but no such project had yet begun. Among the flimsy shacks on the Gravesend Bay side of Coney Island, eight solid blocks of vacant waterfront property was owned by the Dock Department, but the Dock Department had no interest in it. And throughout all the city's slums were scores of small triangular "gores," where streets angled together or bits of land had been left over from street-widening condemnation proceedings, that were now just unnoticed pieces of dirt or concrete and that were too small to be used for play but that were, if planted with grass and a tree or two, large enough to add a touch of green to the drabness around them. Moses asked La Guardia to direct the city Sinking Fund Commission, the body which, under existing charter provisions, held the actual title to all city-owned land, to turn this land over to the Park Department. Often, the other departments involved objected to such incursions into their jealously guarded empires—the Tenement House Commission hastily began drawing up plans for the Red Hook housing project to prove that construction on it was imminent—and sometimes, as in the Red Hook case, La Guardia sided with them. But generally the new mayor backed Moses. Within four months after taking office, the new Park Commissioner had obtained, in slum areas in which there had been no significant park or playground development for at least half a century, no fewer than sixty-nine separate small park and playground sites.
And one that wasn't small. North from the Manhattan Bridge, through the very heart of the Lower East Side, through an area in which tenements were jammed solidly into every block, stretched a row of seven blocks that were completely empty. The "Chrystie-Forsyth Development," as it was known from the names of the streets which bordered it, was another monument to Tammany Hall and to one of its judges, Joseph Force Crater. Forty years later, Judge Crater's mysterious disappearance would still be unexplained, but contemporary speculation linked it with the judge's unexplained generosity to the owners of the disease-breeding tenements which had occupied those seven blocks before the city took them over in 1929. Jimmy Walker had announced with great fanfare that the city would raze the tenements and resell the land at cost to private developers who would erect on it a "model" housing development. But the astonishingly high condemnation awards Crater bestowed on the owners made the cost so high that the private builders who had previously expressed interest now expressed only dismay, and while the razing had been accomplished, the
replacement had not. For more than four years, with the lost taxes and interest on the award (the Depression, of course, prevented the city from paying it) costing the city almost half a million dollars per year, the tract had lain between the red brick walls that lined it solidly on either side as flat and featureless as an urban desert. Moses proposed that it be made an oasis of grass, trees, baseball fields, basketball and tennis courts, wading pools and playgrounds. La Guardia, trumpeting "Page Crater!" when reporters asked why the housing development would not be built, agreed.*
While studying the state government for the Reconstruction Commission in 1919, Moses had learned about "unappropriated state lands." A century before, to help tide the country over a time of financial uneasiness, the federal government had made loans to the states, which in turn loaned the money to individuals who pledged farms or other, smaller pieces of property in cities, as security. Some loans had not been repaid, and the states thereupon foreclosed. In most instances, the New York State Legislature later passed bills allowing the municipalities in which the land was located to "appropriate" it. But not, Moses had learned, in every instance. Some of the properties involved had seemed too small to bother about in an era in which property was measured in acres rather than feet, and as time passed, these pieces of land had simply been forgotten and had remained "unappropriated." Now Moses sent men to Albany to look up such pieces—and they found several in areas of Brooklyn that were now slums. The city could not afford to buy them, so—hastily, since the Legislature was shortly due to adjourn for the year—he drafted, and got passed, bills turning this land over to New York City.
One day—Sid Shapiro can recall the moment—Moses suddenly remembered that in 1922 the State Division of Canals had filled in swampland near the Gowanus Canal in Red Hook to provide a foundation for a grain elevator it was building there. And he seemed to recall, he said, that there had been some land left over. An investigation proved that he was right: there had, in fact, been eleven acres left over. He had a bill passed in Albany allowing the state to give the land to the city for recreational purposes.
On another occasion, chatting with aides, Moses suddenly asked, "Wasn't there some kind of fund set up about fifteen years ago for a war memorial that was never built?"
There was indeed. In 1918, a public subscription had been held to finance construction of a million-dollar World War Memorial Arch. But the subscription raised only $210,000 and the drive's sponsors, already squabbling over which borough the arch should be located in, were unable to agree on details of a smaller memorial and in 1922 turned the money over to the City Chamberlain's office for safekeeping until the dispute was resolved. It never was, and during the intervening twelve years the sponsoring committee stopped meeting, and the existence of the money, which the Chamberlain had deposited in banks, was all but forgotten—and when Adolf Berle, appointed Chamberlain by La Guardia, looked for it at Moses'
* This park is now known as "Sara Delano Roosevelt Park.'
request, he found that accumulating interest had swelled it to $338,395.
The people who had contributed the money had intended it to be used for a war memorial. But Moses persuaded Berle that the definition of "war memorial" could be extended to mean "War Memorial Pla
ygrounds" and he persuaded the surviving members of the sponsoring committee not to oppose the use of the money for this purpose, a persuasion made easier by Moses' agreement that each playground would contain a bronze plaque honoring the memory of World War veterans—and that there would be at least one playground in each borough. With the money, Moses purchased in congested areas of the city eight pieces of property big enough for playgrounds.
He seemed to see opportunities everywhere. While being chauffeured around Harlem, he noticed two tennis courts belonging to a Roman Catholic church on 138th Street. Telling his chauffeur to stop, he jumped out, ran into the church, found the pastor and asked if the courts were much used. When the pastor said they were not, Moses asked him to give them to the city for a playground, and when the pastor told him that such a gift could be arranged only through Cardinal Hayes's office, Moses sent a representative to see a representative of the Cardinal, and the gift was arranged. Noticing a two-acre vacant lot on Eleventh Avenue between Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth streets, he learned it was owned by the Consolidated Gas Company, which had no "present plans" for using it, and persuaded the company to give him a temporary permit to put a playground on the site. In "Middle Queens," the dreary belt of cemeteries, small single-family homes and shabby little factories sprawling northeast from the oily waters of Newtown Creek, there was still one large vacant tract, 127 acres formerly owned by murdered gambler Arnold Rothstein. Learning that Rothstein's estate owed the city $334,000 in back taxes, Moses asked Surrogate James Delehanty if the city could buy the property if it forgave the back taxes and paid $68,000, the difference between the taxes and the assessed valuation. Delehanty agreed, but La Guardia was not able to find even $68,000 that the city could spare. Moses recalled that there was usually several hundred thousand dollars kept in a special "emergency account" of one of the more obscure Sinking Funds. City attorneys informed him that legal restrictions prohibited the expenditure of any of this money except on genuine emergencies. Moses informed them that if they restudied the law, they would find there was one exception— money could be removed from the fund temporarily for "first instance" appropriations, appropriations to be repaid out of the next city budget, for a single specific purpose: the purchase of undeveloped real estate. But La Guardia, while agreeing that the acquisition of 127 acres for $68,000 was an unprecedented bargain, was afraid to obligate the city even for that amount. So Moses returned to Surrogate Delehanty and worked out another arrangement under which the city "bought" 74 of the 127 acres for $334,000 but the estate paid the $334,000 back to the city to clear the tax deficiency on all 127 acres, leaving the estate with 53 acres free and clear—and the city with a 74-acre "Juniper Valley" park which it had acquired without a cent of cash outlay.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 56