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

by Caro, Robert A

  If one tried to plan public works in New York City by the same simplistic formula by which the public works of Long Island had been

  planned, the public works thus created might well destroy what was good in New York even while it was supposed to be improving the city.

  Part of Moses' Long Island formula—the-vision and the viciousness, the imagination and the ruthlessness, the drive, the urgent, savage thrust, the instinct for the magnificent and the jugular that overrode purely selfish opposition, shortsightedness and red tape to turn vision into reality—was needed in the city, needed desperately, for without it the city would never be able to build parks and roads and bridges—or, for that matter, housing or hospitals, sewers or schools—on the scale its citizens needed. But Moses' formula could be successful in the city only as the basis of a new, vastly more complicated and subtle and sophisticated formula, one that would turn public works into a far truer reflection of the subtle and complicated human needs they had to serve in the city. A whole new input—a factor of humanity— would have to be added.

  And Moses would not allow it to be added.

  Moses had a genius for grasping the needs of people in the mass, of people in the tens and hundreds of thousands, of a city and a state as a whole, and for devising ways to meet those needs. But that genius could not help him grasp the needs of a specific city neighborhood in which he was building a small park or playground, for those needs might be shared by no other neighborhood in the world.

  In the first place, the people in the mass that he understood were people of particular social strata that his own background enabled him to understand: the classes he called "upper" and "comfortable middle." He had never had any interest in—and therefore had little understanding of—classes he considered beneath his own, the classes who made up so many of New York City's neighborhoods. Moreover, even a genius couldn't deduce the needs of a neighborhood—any neighborhood—until he knew and understood it. And the only way of knowing and understanding it was to study and learn about it, to find out how many children lived in it and how old they were, what games they liked to play, what games their parents liked to play with them on weekends, what games their parents liked to play among themselves, to find out whether the parents liked to play games at all or simply to sit quietly and talk, whether the neighborhood's teen-age boys wanted a place to walk after dinner and watch the neighborhood's teen-age girls walk or whether they wanted to spend their time after dinner playing basketball, to find out which streets the neighborhood's mothers considered safe enough so that their children could cross them alone and thus use a playground on the far side whenever they wanted and which streets the mothers considered too dangerous, to find out exactly how far the children were willing to walk to get to a playground in the first place. And there was only one way to learn about a neighborhood: listen to its people, discuss their problems with them. Unless Moses did that—not Moses himself necessarily; his lieutenants or the architect designing the specific playground in question—he simply wouldn't, couldn't, know enough about the neighborhood to satisfy its needs.

  On a broader scale, that was also the only way to study and learn how

  to plan larger public works for New York City. It was the only way to plan even those large parks—Central, Prospect, Van Cortlandt, Kissena, Alley Pond—that contained plenty of space in which there lived no people at all. Even these parks could not be developed successfully by a formula as simplistic as that on which the Long Island parks had been developed. For these parks were not just open space but open space within a city— within a city in which open space was becoming terribly scarce—and the space within them was therefore precious and must be utilized not just to advantage but to fullest advantage. And what was that advantage? What was it most important for those big parks to give the city? The city's facilities for active recreation were laughably inadequate. Therefore the park must provide them. They must be filled with baseball diamonds and football fields, tennis and handball and basketball courts, skating rinks and swimming pools. But the city was also growing—growing and spreading; in 1934, most of Staten Island, the entire central portion of Queens and much of southern Brooklyn were still free of intensive development, but real estate developers were already eyeing those areas too. Open space—quiet open space, natural settings in which city dwellers could find relief from gray concrete and congestion and noise—was precious in New York now. Parks must provide that, too. If they did not, there would soon be no place within the great city in which these values could be found. It was particularly vital that these values be preserved within the city because Moses' restrictive policies had made it difficult for the city's poor, who did not have access to private automobiles, to reach his Long Island parks; if these values were not preserved in the city's own parks there would soon be no place at all in which a poor family could find them. The city's parks had to serve both recreational and conservational functions, but designing the parks so that they could provide both functions would be immensely difficult. For the two functions were not compatible. Peace and quiet and solitude were in general obtainable only at a far remove from the shouts and frantic activity of the playing field. And while parks like Kissena in Queens were considered large, Kissena contained exactly 219 acres; 219 acres sounded big, but it sounded a lot smaller when one realized that a single baseball diamond took up two and a half acres and even a small parking field twenty-five. There was room in parks like Kissena either for peace or for parking fields—but not for both. With the exception of the two Marine Parks, which were not really parks at all but only undeveloped marshland, the only park of a thousand acres in the whole city was Van Cortlandt, and even in Van Cortlandt, you could have both active play facilities and natural, peaceful areas only if you exercised the greatest ingenuity and delicacy in laying them out.

  Therefore, choices had to be made—hard choices. And they could not be made intelligently without determining, in the case of each park, whether it was going to serve the neighborhood around it or the city as a whole, and which functions were most needed in that park by the people it was going to serve.

  There had been so much space on the Island that there had been no need

  to ask such questions in planning parks. Even after Moses had built all the baseball diamonds and tennis courts and bathhouses and parking fields that he wanted in Heckscher State Park, for example, more than 1,200 of the park's 1,657 acres remained in their natural wooded state, enough for green, quiet woods away from crowds. Moses himself had been uninterested in a park's "natural" functions. His mind saw people in the mass, running, jumping, swinging tennis rackets or baseball bats; one reason he wanted Tri-borough Stadium so big was that he wanted it large enough for mass calisthenics on the Third Reich scale. His vision never focused on the individual wandering alone through a forest or on the family sprawling in solitude in a meadow; in thinking of parks he did not, except incidentally, think of them as places of forests or meadows or solitude. And if the very breadth of his vision thus made it hard for him to think of parks as untouched nature, so did the very force of his creativity; he was a builder, a molder, a man who yearns to put his hand to and reshape—"improve"—whatever he sees. Therefore to him a park was not open space. The open space was already there. The "park" was that portion of the open space that he had filled with his own creations. (He referred to the portions of the Long Island parks without active play facilities as "undeveloped for park use.") His lack of interest in untouched nature had not mattered on Long Island. But it was to matter greatly in New York.

  And how small could a park be? What was the smallest number of square feet it was feasible to supervise and maintain as a public place of recreation? Five acres, the area of a standard city block? Three acres? Two? One? The 100 by 20 feet that was the size of the standard building lot in tenement sections—and that was often the only piece of vacant land anywhere around?

  This was a question of desperate importance. The recreational needs of city fami
lies that couldn't afford to own a car—and those families comprised a full two-thirds of the city's population—had to be satisfied within their immediate neighborhoods, and because it was too expensive to condemn buildings in these neighborhoods and the only land still vacant was small plots, the only parks that could be built in these neighborhoods were small parks. But even small plots were enormously expensive to maintain and supervise, far more expensive per square foot than large parks. Given the hard fact that the city would never be able to create nearly enough parks for its people, was there any sense in developing a large number of small parks? Where did you sink those resources that were available—into large parks that could be developed relatively economically or into small parks that alone could provide recreation for that portion of the city's people that most needed recreation? The needs of providing recreation for the city's poor must be weighed against the cost of that provision. What a later generation would come to call "priorities" must be established, and it would not be easy to establish them. The hard choices would have to be made. Only by the most intense analysis and discussion—discussion with the people most directly involved, the city's poor—could these choices be made intelligently. And,

  again, because the success of a neighborhood park depended so largely on intimate knowledge of that neighborhood, once the decision to establish a park in a neighborhood was taken, even more intense discussion with the residents of that neighborhood would be necessary.

  Then there was the question of roads in parks. Should there even be roads in parks and, if so, where within the parks should they be located?

  Once, in the days—a decade or even two decades before—in which the young Robert Moses had been planning parks and roads, the answer to that question had been quite clear. Driving in automobiles had then still been thought of primarily as pleasure, a pursuit for comfortable middle-class or wealthy fathers (the only fathers who could afford automobiles) taking their families for an outing, just as driving horse-drawn carriages had been a pursuit for pleasure. And it had therefore been important to insure that these families had the most pleasant surroundings possible to drive through, and within the city's limits the most pleasant surroundings were those provided by parks. The provision of pleasant scenery for drivers to enjoy was, in fact, a primary function of parks; that was why every great city in Europe had its great driving park, Paris its Bois de Boulogne, Rome its Pincian Hill, Florence its Cascine and London its Hyde Park. Roads had belonged in parks in the nineteenth century—so much so that, if necessary, other values of a park had to be sacrificed to provide the roads with the best of the park's scenery.

  But this was the twentieth century now. And the answer to the question —do roads belong in parks?—was no longer clear. For the nature of driving had largely changed. The automobile age, still in its infancy when Robert Moses had stood on Riverside Drive and planned his "great highway going uptown along the water" in 1914, still only in its adolescence when Moses had been planning his Long Island parkways in 1924, had come to full maturity by the time he came to power in New York City in 1934. There had been 273,435 motor vehicles in New York City in 1924; there were 804,620 now. And people no longer used their cars primarily for weekend pleasure trips but, increasingly, to get to and from work and to shop. Cars were part of people's daily lives. And they drove faster now; they had less time for scenery. What implications did these facts have for parkways?

  What was a parkway anyway?

  Was it still mainly a source of beauty and pleasure, or had it changed into a source of convenience—or at least intended convenience? Were people still interested in parkways primarily because of the scenery they could see along them or were they interested in them primarily as a means of getting from one place to another? And if the latter, what was the significance of that fact? Should the best of scenery still be reserved for the driver?

  But Robert Moses wouldn't allow any discussion.

  He wouldn't allow discussion because discussion would have slowed down his building programs, and he felt that he couldn't allow them to be

  slowed down. And he wouldn't allow discussion because he had no respect for the opinions of the public that he would have had to admit to the discussions. And even if he limited discussion to the experts who were interested in the various fields, he had no respect for their opinions, either. Robert Moses had no respect for anyone's opinion but his own.

  Once Moses had at least listened to his own aides, allowed them to argue with him, tested his opinions against theirs. But now that had changed, too. In the first days of his power, he had hired aides whose opinions were worth listening to. He had selected men for ability, engineering ability, legal ability. The aides he was hiring now had also to possess an additional ability: the ability to say, "Yes, sir."

  "Lunches at Moses' office were really starting to get pretty sickening," recalls one top La Guardia official. "Even if he only had one guest, he would always have six or eight of his 'Moses Men'—'my muchachos,' he used to call them—at the table and it was all 'Yes, sir, RM,' 'No, sir, RM,' 'Right as usual, RM!' When he laughed, they laughed, only louder—you know what I mean. Christ, when he made a statement, you could look around the table and see eight heads nodding practically in unison. It was like a goddamned Greek chorus."

  Reuben Lazarus, invited by Moses to become chief counsel for the Triborough Bridge Authority, refused—"I didn't want to be a doormat for any man"—and when Moses asked him to recommend one of his assistants, Lazarus selected the one who, he had noticed, "doesn't answer back," and in the taxi taking William Lebwohl to lunch with Moses, told him what was going to be expected of him: "You're going to have to be able to bend over and take a kick in the ass and say 'Thank you, sir,' with a smile." At the luncheon, Lazarus recalls, "Lebwohl did not answer back." Moses hired him—and kept him on as Triborough counsel for more than thirty years.

  The effect of such a hiring policy was predictable. The aides he had hired in the 1920's, the Art Howlands, Sid Shapiros, Bill Lathams, Bill Chapins and George Spargos, became legendary throughout state and city government for their ability, drive and indefatigability. The aides he hired in the 1930's were quite another story. "The older guys—tops!" says William Zeckendorf, who had a keen eye for men himself. "But some of the others he had working for him—I wouldn't have hired them to sweep my lobbies!"

  Moses' sensitivity to criticism had impressed itself on such men. They didn't criticize anything he said. They saw he was less than receptive to suggestions—and they didn't make suggestions.

  If Moses refused to accept ideas from public, experts or aides—from, in general, anyone at all—the source of his ideas, his concept of public works for New York City, could be only his own mind. The mind was brilliant, but even a brilliant mind is only as good as the material—the input—fed into it. It was at about this time that Lazarus, planning to write a book about

  government and public figures and keeping a card file of impressions, wrote on a card he filed under the name "Robert Moses":

  Bob Moses has climbed so high on his own ego, has become so hidebound in his own arbitrariness, that he has removed himself almost entirely from reality and has insulated himself within his own individuality.

  This difficulty could to some degree have been overcome by sheer mental ability. Robert Moses' mind was supple, resourceful. Even without input of social and human considerations, it could have deduced some of these considerations simply by thinking about the problems involved.

  But Robert Moses no longer had much time to think.

  Building a state park system had been an immense job, but he had brought to it not only immense energy but immense ability to discipline that energy. He had found time— made time, to be more precise, made it by devoting to his work the hours when other men play or relax or sleep, or lunch, made it by working fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year—he had found time to oversee every detail of design, to present his architects
and engineers with the basic concepts he wanted followed, to insist during the fleshing out of those concepts on a standard of excellence, of boldness and daring far above that common for public works and to inspire the architects and engineers ("I know you can do drawbridges. Can you do beautiful drawbridges?") to raise their work to that standard. And besides furnishing inspiration, he furnished ideas; many of the most brilliant touches at Jones Beach had been his ideas. He had found time— made time—to infuse the brick and concrete and sandstone of that park, and of other Long Island parks from Valley Stream to Montauk—and of other state parks from Palisades to Niagara—with his personal genius.

  But when Moses expanded his sphere of activity into New York City he did not stop his work on Long Island or in the rest of the state—in 1934, on Long Island alone, he built Bethpage State Park and Bethpage State Parkway; in 1935, he built the Meadowbrook Causeway; in 1936, he built great new bathhouses at Sunken Meadow and Heckscher state parks as well as the Heckscher State Parkway Spur, and during all these years he was extending the Northern and Southern state parkways and building literally scores of smaller park structures. Instead he simply added to his state park work, itself enough to tax the strength of even the strongest of men, work in the city that was not limited to the direction of 80,000 men in the rebuilding of a huge park system but that also included the building of four parkways and three bridges, with each of the bridge-building jobs in itself a job that would have been considered a full-time job for any other man. It was not possible for him to make for himself any more time than he had already made. There were no more days in a week than seven or weeks in a year than fifty-two, and he was working all those days and weeks already. He had already sloughed off all social life and most family life; there was nothing more in his life that could be sloughed off. He was already, with his use of his limousine as an office and conference room,