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

by Caro, Robert A

  And when La Guardia "unlocked" the door in the bright-yellow picture book, after asking the Honorary Night Superintendent's permission, the crowd followed the two men through the door and through a short corridor erected for the occasion, its walls covered with picture-book inscriptions such as "A is for Ape," "B is for Buffalo." Emerging on the side of the Arsenal, they found there was nothing left of the old Menagerie at all. Where they had been accustomed to see ramshackle wooden animal houses, they found, to their astonishment, neat red brick buildings decorated with murals and carved animal friezes, connected by graceful arcades that framed park vistas beyond—and framing a sea-lion pool set in a handsomely landscaped quadrangle.

  Moses had wanted to use distinctive materials as he had used Barbizon brick and Ohio sandstone at Jones Beach, but the CWA's refusal to purchase any but the cheapest materials had forced him to settle for concrete, plain red bricks, and some cheap limestone, and to forgo dozens of imaginative little touches he had planned.

  But the eye of the visitor still found plenty to delight it. The sea-lion house in the pool was constructed of unadorned concrete, but it was constructed so that visitors could watch the sea lions even while they were inside. The paths to the pool divided a sunken landscaped quadrangle into four separate, neatly trimmed lawns. Each was surrounded by low hedges. In the center of each was a wonderfully gnarled and twisted Japanese ginkgo tree. The steps leading down to the quadrangle were flanked by fierce-visaged stone eagles big enough to glower eyeball to eyeball at many of the children walking past them. And in its four corners were huge Victorian flying cages from which glowered live eagles.

  On the far side of the quadrangle, at the animal-house level, past the cavorting sea lions, the stone eagles, the lawns, the shrubbery and ginkgo trees, the eye was startled by a large lioness proudly holding up for inspection a peacock she had killed, while her two cubs sniffed at the beautiful tail dangling limply to the ground—a bronze statue that had stood in some seldom visited corner of the park for seventy years until Moses rescued it. And behind the statue was a long, low terrace on which little tables topped with gay parasols sat in the shade of a bright, vertically striped awning eighty feet long—an outdoor dining terrace on which diners could sit and be entertained by the sea lions and by the crowds being entertained by the sea lions. And as the eye followed the vertical stripes of the awning upward, it abruptly found itself being stared back at by lions, tigers, elephants and hippopotami gathered under waving palm trees—for the cafeteria's eighty-foot-long clerestory had been covered with a droll animal mural.

  Throughout, the zoo was proof piled on proof that Moses had been able, to some extent at least, to make imagination take the place of money.

  The CWA had insisted that the animal houses be constructed primarily of common red brick and concrete, but Embury, an architect accustomed to working with the costliest of materials, nevertheless succeeded, under Moses' prodding, in making them attractive. Their proportions were exceptionally well balanced, their lines exceptionally clean. Some of the brick had been used to place charming ornamental chimneys on their roofs. Some more had been used for designs that broke the monotony of the concrete clerestories. Connecting the animal houses with arcades gave the whole scene unity.

  And the zoo buildings were adorned with little touches that, as at Jones Beach, scaled down the architecture "to the size of a good time." Tiny, delicate cast-iron birds perched atop the lamps that flanked the doors of the animal houses. Slender rods topped with little white balls held big white globes that cast light over the walk in front of the cafeteria terrace. The lamps hanging in rows in the animal houses were glazed balls, but around each ball was a slanted copper ring that made the fixtures look like a long row of Saturns whirling in the sky.

  No one had to wonder what was in each building. Around the top of each wall was a frieze, carved in low relief in limestone panels, depicting its occupants in marvelously lifelike poses; among the figures over the monkey houses, for example, were a monkey chasing butterflies and a gorilla chewing a twig with a wonderfully contemplative expression upon his face. And

  the weathervanes atop each building were comic depictions of one of the building's inhabitants, done by the unknown designers who had caused architects from all over the world to exclaim at the weathervanes at Jones Beach; the one over the bird house, for example, showing a spindly-legged heron jutting its long bill under water in search of food, was a miniature masterpiece of angularity silhouetted against the sky.

  The purpose of a park, Moses had been telling his designers for years, wasn't to overawe or impress; it was to encourage the having of a good time. Wheeling through the park were mcvable refreshment carts. But these weren't ordinary refreshment carts. They were adorned with painted animals and garlands of flowers in colors that were intentionally gaudy—replicas of gay Sicilian carretinas. Their operators were dressed in costumes that were extravagantly Sicilian. Even their wares were special; in addition to the standard peanuts, sodas and candy bars, each carried, prominently displayed on top, whirling silver-foil windmills, strings of brightly colored balloons, flags, banners, braided whips—and stacks of animal picture and coloring books. And to blow up balloons, the zoo was equipped with the latest in balloon-blowing devices—the "Kelly's Rocket," whose windy woosh delighted children. And the decision to build the zoo around a sea-lion pool was the crowning touch; the boisterous barking and slippery antics of these traditional circus clowns, the raucous enthusiasm with which they played tag under water, dove for the fish thrown to them by keepers and playfully slithered big-bellied and long-necked around their concrete home, insured that the central panorama would be one to delight any child—and any adult who had any child left in him. On a summer day, when the animals were all outside, and the central quadrangle in which the sea lions frolicked was lined with black-and-white-striped zebras, tan lions, furry brown monkeys and red-rumped baboons, the central panorama was, as near as any man could make it, given the CWA's stinginess, exactly what Robert Moses had envisioned—a scene out of a child's picture book.

  And the zoo was viewed as the triumph it was. Some zoophiles, ignoring the violet-ray baths Moses had installed so that monkeys would get their necessary quota of sun in winter, the specially designed scratching posts set up for the lions and the replacement of Tammany's rifle-toting keepers with trained animal experts and doctors, criticized the concrete floors of the cages, which they said would give the animals tender feet. But architects, as quoted in Fortune, found the architecture "gay and amusing and occasionally pointedly absurd." Architectural Forum called the view from the cafeteria terrace "the finest eating view in the city." The press cheered, too. And the public gave its own vote of confidence. The crowds that streamed into the zoo behind La Guardia and the Honorary Night Superintendent on opening day numbered 32,000, a figure that Moses found so unbelievable that he ordered the counters he had installed at the entrance double-checked. But the next Sunday, after word of mouth about the new zoo had had a week to spread, attendance was 57,000. By 1935, on an average Sunday, more than 100,000 visitors would come to the picture book in the park.

  And the Triborough Bridge was finally being built.

  Here was a project to kindle the imagination.

  In size, its proportions were heroic. For all Moses' previous construction feats, it dwarfed any other single enterprise he had undertaken. Its approach ramps would be so huge that houses—not only single-family homes but sizable apartment buildings—would have to be demolished by the hundreds to give them footing. Its anchorages, the masses of concrete in which its cables would be embedded, would be as big as any pyramid built by an Egyptian Pharaoh, its roadways wider than the widest roadways built by the Caesars of Rome. To construct those anchorages and to pave those roadways (just the roadways of the bridge proper itself, not the approach roads) would require enough concrete to pave a four-lane highway from New York to Philadelphia, enough to reopen Depression-shuttered cement factories from Maine t
o the Mississippi. To make the girders on which that concrete would be laid, Depression-banked furnaces would have to be fired up at no fewer than fifty separate Pennsylvania steel mills. To provide enough lumber for the forms into which that concrete would be poured, an entire forest would have to crash on the Pacific Coast on the opposite side of the American continent.

  Triborough was really not a bridge at all, but four bridges which, together with 13,500 feet of broad viaducts, would link together three boroughs and two islands.

  One of those bridges, the span over the Harlem River that would connect Manhattan with Randall's Island, would be the largest vertical-lift bridge in the world. Its two steel towers would have to be big enough to support the 2,200-ton steel deck—longer than a football field and wide enough to accommodate a six-lane highway, two sidewalks and a broad median safety island—that would hang between them. The towers would have to be big enough to contain drum hoists capable of raising that deck, together with its highway, sidewalks and median islands, eighty feet, keeping it perfectly horizontal all the time, to permit the passage of large ships.

  And the Harlem River span would be the largest vertical-lift bridge in the world only on sufferance from another of Triborough's four bridges, the eight-lane, triple-span, steel-truss affair over the Bronx Kills that would connect Randall's Island with the Bronx. Because the Bronx Kills was not navigable, the Navy had ruled that its span could be a fixed structure—but only if it were built so that its central span could be converted into a lift bridge if the Kills was ever made navigable. And the Bronx Kills span would be so large that if it were ever converted into a lift bridge, it would be a lift bridge half again as large as its Harlem River counterpart.

  And both the Harlem River and the Bronx Kills spans looked small beside the half-mile-long suspension bridge, one of the largest bridges of that type in the world, that would arc 135 feet in the air to carry Triborough's roadway across the turbulent rip tides of Hell Gate, the narrow, twisting, rock-lined passage between Ward's Island and Astoria in Queens. The steel towers

  of that bridge would each be higher than a football field standing on end, and it was that bridge's anchorages, in whose concrete would be embedded cables made up of enough wire to circle the globe twice around, that were as big as pyramids.

  The last of the four bridges—a causeway connecting Randall's and Ward's islands—would have stood alone as an engineering feat of no mean magnitude, but so huge was Triborough that the causeway was a mere incident in its construction, as was the "flying junction" on Randall's Island, the largest batch of traffic-sorting spaghetti ever concocted, a cloverleaf as big as a railroad switchyard and so ingeniously designed that although twenty-two lanes of traffic converge on, and radiate from, its long lines of toll booths, winding around one another on three decks, no one of those lanes meets or crosses another at grade and every driver using any one of them, no matter what his destination or point of origin, must stop at one, but only one, toll booth. Triborough was not a bridge so much as a traffic machine, the largest ever built. The amount of human energy that would be expended in its construction gives some idea of its immensity: more than five thousand men would be working at the site, and these men would only be putting into place the materials furnished by the labor of many times five thousand men; before the Triborough Bridge was completed, its construction would have generated more than 31,000,000 man-hours of work in 134 cities in twenty states. And the size of the bridge is also shown by the amount of money involved. With $5,400,000 already contributed by the city and $44,-200,000 promised by the PWA, the amount promised for its construction was almost equal to the combined cost of all the projects Robert Moses had built on Long Island during the previous ten years.

  And size was the least of it.

  From the air—and Moses spent hours over New York City as a passenger in chartered small planes in 1934 studying the city's contours—one could hardly fail to appreciate more significant implications of the Triborough project. The built-up streets of Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens rushed together at the bridge site but paused there, held apart by the tangle of water surrounding Randall's and Ward's islands. A procession of piers, erected by the old bankrupt Triborough Authority, was scattered at odd intervals across those islands as if to show how easy it would be to bring those massed streets together by building the Triborough Bridge. But until the bridge was built, the streets would remain separated, their inhabitants condemned to countless wasted hours of needless travel. The man who built the Triborough Bridge would be a man who conferred a great boon on the greatest city in the New World. He would be the man who tied that city together. In fact, since each of the three boroughs was as large as a city in its own right, the man who built the Triborough Bridge could be said to be performing a feat equal to tying together three cities. And he would also, of course, be the man who, patching together the rent torn in the earth millennia before by the glaciers rumbling down from Hudson Bay, reunited Long Island with the mainland of the United States.

  Other implications of the project were as dramatic as its size and setting.

  THE TRIBOROUGH BRIDGE COMPLEX

  (showing Moses 5 original approach routes) W m 0 1 ■£1 2 Miles

  ASTORIA BOULEVARD

  QUEENS

  I

  It would slash at a stroke the immense Gordian knot of the East River traffic problem by creating the first direct link between the Bronx and Queens. For Robert Moses, of course, this implication had special significance. He had built his parkways to make accessible Long Island's "healthy air," its "salty shore and breeze and brine," but millions of residents of northern Manhattan, the Bronx and Westchester—and New Jersey—still had no way of reaching those parkways, no way of reaching Long Island, except by traveling into midtown Manhattan, over the East River bridges and along the congested Queens boulevards. The construction of the Triborough Bridge would enable residents of northern Manhattan to reach Queens simply by traveling cross-town and then over the bridge; residents of the Bronx, Westchester, and New Jersey could reach Long Island without ever entering midtown Manhattan at all.

  Furthermore, Moses felt confident that, out of the $50,000,000 allocated for the bridge, enough would be left over to link it with the Grand Central Parkway, whose western terminus was stalled at Northern Boulevard because

  the Legislature would not and the city could not finance its construction any further into the city. Therefore, the Triborough project—and, perhaps, only the Triborough project—could provide the funds to finish the parkway and thereby enable motorists, once they reached the Triborough Bridge, to drive all the way to Jones Beach or the other Long Island state parks on modern parkways on which they would not be delayed by a single traffic light or intersection.

  Because the Legislature would not and the city could not extend his Westchester parkways into the city, the Triborough project was the only hope of doing that, also. Moses felt sure that money could be found in the Triborough allocations to link up the bridge at least with the Hutchinson River Parkway. And once that link was constructed, the Long Island parkways would be linked with a Westchester parkway. Build Triborough, he felt, and the Long Island parks would at a stroke be made easily accessible from the entire New York metropolitan area.

  Randall's and Ward's islands provided large stacks of additional fuel for Moses' imagination.

  Throughout the city's history, those islands had been used only as repositories for its refuse, inanimate and human. The site of garbage dumps, potter's fields and almshouses during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in 1934 they held—in addition to a municipal sewage-disposal plant— the City Hospital for the Feeble-Minded and Tubercular, the grim, barracks-like, Civil War-vintage "House of Refuge" of the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane, complete with black-barred windows, and a military hospital. The rest of the islands' four hundred acres—and an uninhabited fifty-acre sand bar to the east named "Sunken Me
adow" that was identified on maps as part of Randall's Island but was actually a separate body of land set apart by a hundred yards of water—was empty and barren marshland.

  But Moses didn't care about the condition of the vacant land on the islands. What was important to him was that the land was there—and that there was plenty of it.

  Obtaining land anywhere near the center of New York City was extremely difficult. When you talked about new parks in center city, you were talking about tooth-and-claw battles for a vacant lot that might with luck be big enough for half a basketball court. If you found a vacant lot that measured as much as a third of an acre, it was a bonanza. And here, at the city's very heart, were 450 empty acres. Join these islands to the city and you wouldn't have to talk about halves of basketball courts any longer. You could talk about football fields and soccer fields and baseball diamonds. And you could talk about them in the dozens. There could be boat basins and marinas, picnic grounds, tree-shaded esplanades overlooking the river and lined with benches on which people could sit and watch boats passing close by. Join islands to city and you would be creating a moated oasis at the city's core. The building of the bridge would, of course, accomplish the join-

  ing automatically. And Moses felt certain that, out of fifty million dollars, he could find enough left over to transform the islands into magnificent parks —especially if the institutional buildings were torn down, as he felt they should be so that they would not interfere with the beauty of the setting. The potentialities of the project, not only for transportation, but for recreation, were awesome.