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

by Caro, Robert A

  making use of every available minute; there were no more minutes to be found unless he drove himself beyond the limit of his physical and mental and emotional strength—and the "almost nervous breakdown" of December 1934 had shown how close he was crowding that limit.

  It was lack of time more than any other single reason that accounted for an astonishing fact about many New York City park projects: they were banal.

  Richard Spencer Childs recalls visiting Moses at his office one day and having their conversation interrupted by the arrival of Aymar Embury. "Embury had a bunch of drawings of some buildings for the parks," Childs recalls. "He had brought them to show Moses. Moses went right through them—'Nope.' 'Okay.' 'Nope.' Throwing them to one side or the other if he approved them or not. . . . There were no hard feelings. Moses and Embury were good friends. There was lots of respect between them. Put here perhaps $100,000 worth of public business was settled on Moses' offhand taste." And, recalls Childs, when Moses finished with the drawings, Embury pointed to one he had rejected and said, "That one you threw away was the best of the lot."

  Embury may well have been correct: the offhand taste even of a genius is offhand taste. Working incredibly fast, Moses had managed to make the Long Island projects public works of genius. Now he was trying to work even faster—and he was working too fast to do even a good job.

  When there is no time for the thinking required for original creation, the tendency is to repeat what has proven successful in the past. Many of Moses' New York projects (not all; those in which he was particularly interested— and on which he spent substantial time—would be magnificent additions to the civic estate) began to reveal a conscious effort to duplicate aspects of his acclaimed Long Island parks. In this tendency lies the explanation for the otherwise inexplicable failure to make provision for baby carriages at so many New York parks: no provision for baby carriages had been necessary at the entrances to the Long Island parks because people got to them by automobiles. If there was a difference that should have been obvious to Moses—that the parks he was building now would be used by mothers who walked to them instead of drove—Moses was simply too busy to see it.

  At Embury's drawings, Moses at least had time to glance. For more and more small park projects, even a glance could not be spared. Moses found himself forced to delegate all authority for them to subordinates. Authority is delegatable; genius is not. Some of the men to whom the work was delegated were first-rank architects or engineers—many of them, in fact, for the Depression had driven into the Arsenal many brilliant young professionals who in ordinary times would have been making names for themselves in private commissions. But they were not Robert Moses. The further Moses' presence receded from individual small park projects, the less dis-

  tinguished these projects emerged. In designing the Central Park Zoo, the Seventy-ninth Street boat basin, Jacob Riis Park, Orchard Beach, the ten big neighborhood swimming pools, problems were solved with ingenuity and thoughtfulness. Perhaps if he had been able to take the same interest in all park problems—the problems involved, say, in the location and design of a neighborhood playground— all park problems would have been solved with ingenuity and thoughtfulness. But Moses was not taking the same interest in all park problems—and, in fact, as the number of park projects multiplied, spread by the hundreds across the face of the great city, he was able to take a substantial interest in only a very small percentage of them— in, for example, only a handful of the hundreds of neighborhood playgrounds. The inevitable result was made more striking by the need for haste— building hundreds of playgrounds as fast as possible is easier if a single basic design is used—and by the need for design approval by the WPA, an Army-engineer-staffed agency in which simple designs and cheap materials, rather than architectural excellence, were the order of the day. (Moses had to fight for every amenity, no matter how small; every improvement on the basic blocky comfort station design represented a victory, hard-won; because two-story structures required more expensive structural steel than one-story, Moses had to plead with the WPA for weeks for approval of Aymar Embury's masterful classic, colonnaded interpretation of his insistence that the Orchard Beach bathhouse blend in with the hilly, wooded landscape behind it. And when the structure was almost finished, at a cost of a million dollars, the WPA flatly refused to spend $2,500 more for two clocks that Embury had envisioned as grace notes on its towers; Moses obtained that money only by begging La Guardia for it. There was to be no Barbizon brick and Ohio sandstone in New York City parks; concrete— plain, unadorned concrete—and brick—plain, red brick, the cheapest made —were what the WPA had in mind; Moses was able to relieve the blankness of the concrete Orchard Beach bathhouse only by finding a mysterious source of terra cotta tiles, which, while cheap, at least added some necessary color, a chaste blue, to the unrelieved grayness. While Moses was willing to fight—endlessly and ingeniously—to make his big projects as perfect as possible, it was obviously unfeasible to battle over the details of every playground when one was building hundreds, especially since arguing about every design would have cost him his great advantage over other city departments with the WPA: the fact that when new funds became available, his plans were "ready to go.")

  A standard Park Department playground design was evolved and architects were given little leeway to deviate from it. If there was to be an indoor playhouse in the playground, there was a standard design for that, too, and if the architect wanted to make variations in it they had better be small ones.

  These designs were banal, containing for the most part nothing but benches for mothers and standard "active play" equipment—swings, seesaws, jungle gyms, wading pools, slides—for children. The equipment was surrounded by fences that only a mother could love: either dreary chain-link

  or high, black bars that made the playgrounds look like animal cages. And they were set in a surface that even a mother had to hate—a surface cheap to lay down and easy to maintain (that was why Moses' engineers had selected it) but hard on the knees and elbows of little boys and girls who fell on it. Comfort stations, squat and unadorned, looked like nothing so much as concrete or brick pillboxes. A neighborhood committee might request some particularly desired facility—a bocci court, for example, for an Italian neighborhood—but few substitv tions were permitted.

  Then there was the difference in usage accorded parks in the city, a difference complicated by vandalism. Designing for hard usage was not always compatible with designing for beauty—as was demonstrated by the evolution of the marginal playgrounds in Central Park. At first, the playgrounds were equipped, in addition to the swings, slides and jungle gyms, with sandboxes, tunnel segments that children loved to crawl through, and with striped, turreted little toy guardhouses that served as "play booths"— and their peripheries were only a ring of benches backed by trees and shrubs that provided shade for mothers and that screened the noise of playing children from the apartment houses across the street. Dogs wandered into the playgrounds and urinated and defecated in the sandboxes and the sandboxes had to be removed. Drunks crept into the tunnel segments at night and fell asleep, to be discovered by children the next morning sleeping in their own vomit. The tunnel segments had to be removed. Drunks wandered into the striped guardhouse "play booths" during the day and urinated in them. Perverts used them as hiding places from which they could watch the playing little girls and boys at close range and masturbate. Vandals pried loose the light lumber out of which the play booths were constructed. The play booths had to be removed. Then the drunks slept and the perverts hid in the trees and shrubbery behind the benches, so this landscaping had to be removed. Still drunks kept wandering into the playgrounds at night; Moses tried to keep them out first by putting up bars between the bench groupings, and little gates at the playground entrance as a warning to stay out, but the drunks ignored the warning—and finally Moses felt he had no choice but to surround the playgrounds, now reduced to amenity-bare patches of asphalt, with high fences whose high gates
could be locked at night; critics might rage that the playgrounds now resembled animal cages; Moses saw that resemblance himself; he just felt that there was nothing he could do about it.

  Young architects like Robert Weinberg argued among themselves—their Park Department superiors wouldn't listen to them—that solutions to the difficulties inherent in intensive usage could be compatible with good design. All that was needed, they felt, was imagination, and an understanding of the basic needs of the neighborhoods in which the playgrounds were located. Including a bocci court in a playground instead of a row of swings was not, after all, a task requiring immense creativity. Weinberg was particularly incensed at one design defect that reduced the usefulness of many playgrounds and that could have been cured very easily indeed. Some playgrounds were situated atop hills and their entrances were set with flights of steps despite the fact that the most frequent users of these parks were mothers with

  baby carriages, which were difficult to maneuver up steps, and entrance to these playgrounds could have been made easier for them by simply making the entrances ramps instead of steps.

  But Moses no longer had much time for detail.

  His imagination was as vigorous as ever; the big projects in which he took a personal interest were innovative, ingenious, daring and bold, to a considerable extent as carefully thought out in both over-all conception and minute details as his Long Island parks; smaller projects which happened to fall under his gaze, Carl Schurz Park on the East River at Eighty-sixth Street, which he passed on his evening walks from his Gracie Terrace apartment, were just as carefully thought out; there are throughout the New York City park system small touches of beauty—comfort stations, for example, that are proof that even a bathroom can bring beauty to a cityscape— but inquiry reveals that most of these structures are the rare ones in which, for one reason or another, Moses took a personal interest.

  In building his state parks, Moses had been uninterested in building for the "lower classes." He was still uninterested—although now he was building parks in the city, where those classes lived.

  Moses had begun his park commissionership by enthusiastically gobbling up vacant city-owned lots in the slums with the intention of turning them into tiny parks. But this enthusiasm soon waned.

  The effort involved in creating such "vest-pocket" parks was immense. The land acquisition alone involved the approval of countless agencies and officials and, therefore, endless red tape. Designing something that would make a tiny lot attractive or useful was difficult. Because you couldn't afford to keep a full-time supervisor on duty in every vest-pocket park, those small parks located in slums quickly became filled with rubbish and winos.

  The rewards involved in creating vest-pocket parks were, moreover, not at all commensurate with the effort required. If the reward was a sense of achievement, what—to the creator of Jones Beach—was the achievement in creating a tiny bit of green space or a few benches or a seesaw or two? Moses had always thought on the grand scale—that was his genius: the ability to grasp the needs of a whole city or state and devise a means of satisfying them—and this quality of mind made it difficult for him to take much interest in something small. There was something inherently good in size itself, he seemed to feel. If the reward was public applause, the size of the reward for building a vest-pocket park was small indeed; editorial writers didn't get nearly as excited about a tiny park as they did about a Randall's Island or Orchard Beach; it was the great projects that awed them: size seemed to signify significance to them, too. Whatever the reasons, "RM," an aide would say, "just wasn't interested in anything small. He used to say, 'That's a little job. Give it to so-and-so.' And that attitude filtered down, so that the fellows weren't interested in small things either." Coupled with his feelings about the people for whom the effort would have to be made—the lower classes who didn't "respect" or "appreciate" what was done for them, in

  particular the Negroes who were "dirty" and wouldn't keep his beautiful creations clean—his lack of interest in "anything small" made him uninterested in small parks in slums.

  Within a year, the vest-pocket park program was all but dead and he was determined that it wouldn't be revived; he flatly refused a 1936 offer of small, abandoned Transportation Board plots, calling them "of no use to this Department . . . because they are all too small." The program never really got off the ground except in two areas—the Irish-Catholic slums of the Lower East Side in which Al Smith, and hence Moses, still took an interest, and La Guardia's old "Little League of Nations" East Harlem congressional district. In other slum areas there was almost no park development at all after 1935, and the lack was particularly marked in Negro Harlem and in the South Jamaica and Stuyvesant Heights tenement districts in Queens and Brooklyn into which a steadily mounting overflow from Harlem had begun to creep.

  The protests about this policy from the slums themselves were faint and few: slum dwellers—particularly slum dwellers with black skins— weren't making many protests in the 1930's. But some reformers raised their voices on their behalf.

  These reformers were in the main those associated with settlement houses; Stanley Isaacs, president of United Neighborhood Houses, was notable among them. Working in the slums, they knew the needs of their people, and, knowing, they knew that those people, forced to depend for beauty and recreation on what they could find in their neighborhoods, were particularly desperate for precisely those things that parks provided. Trees, a small plot of grass, a few flowers, anything that would provide a contrast to the concrete and red brick that surrounded the slums' people with bleakness, that trapped them in stone—these people hungered for them; one had to do no more than walk along a block of tenements and look up and suddenly notice that fire escapes and window sills were sprouting rusty cans filled with vines and flowers to realize that, as one observer was to put it, "The poor have every bit as much interest in green growing things as the well-to-do, . . . [in] open space or natural beauty." Mothers and fathers in the slums hungered for play space for their children. They couldn't afford to send the children to summer camps; they couldn't afford to take them on weekend or vacation trips: because they didn't have cars, they couldn't take them to the parks Robert Moses had built on Long Island; because they seldom left the slums, they were only vaguely aware that there were large parks in other sections of the city which the children could reach by subway; children who went to these parks often returned to say that the white people there had made them feel unwelcome or that gangs of white teen-agers had chased them away—and they did not go again. Any playing that the children of the slums did would have to be done in the slums; kids have to play: that is what being a kid is—and if there were no parks in the slums for them to play in, they would have to play in the streets; if there were no jungle gyms, they would have to swing on rusty fire escapes; if there were no indoor playhouses in which they could play on rainy days, they would have to find

  shelter somewhere else, and that meant deserted or burnt-out tenements, the lair of the winos and the junkies and the perverts.

  And parks meant more in the slums than even beauty or play space; they had other values more intangible but also more important.

  They were a sign to the urban poor, the reformers said, that society cared for them, that the city in which they had been trampled so brutally low was holding out a hand to help them to their feet. In a way they were a symbol of what Alfred E. Smith, who had understood the urban poor because he was one of them, had been talking about when, fighting for widows' pensions, he had stood in the well of the Assembly Chamber, a trumpet in his voice, and asked the legislators to consider the penniless widow whose children were taken away from her—"What must be her feelings? What must be her idea of the State's policy? . . . What can be the feelings in the hearts of the children themselves . . . when they must in after years learn to know what the State's policy was with respect to their unfortunate condition? . . . What new policy does this bill inaugurate? The State of New York reaches
out to them, 'We recognize in you a resource of the State and we propose to take care of you, not as a matter of charity, but as a government and public duty.' " If the city didn't provide parks, the reformers understood, that was a sign that society didn't care; the people who lived in the slums might not verbalize that concept, but they would feel it even if they didn't put it into words; and therefore the lack of parks could only increase their bitterness toward society.

  This last intangible was even more important in terms of the Negroes, whose influx into New York was beginning to assume the proportions of the previous Jewish, Irish and Italian waves of immigration. (There had been only 60,000 Negroes in the city in 1900, but there were 327,706 in 1930— and by 1940 there would be 458,000.) The society from which the Negro was alienated was the one that kept the black man confined so low on the economic ladder that in 1939 half of all Negro wage earners in New York were receiving less than $850 per year. It was the society that forced black women to line up every morning in the "slave market" in the East 160's in the Bronx so that white housewives could bid for their services (the pay was between ten and fifteen cents an hour, with the cost of lunch deducted). It was the society that made sure that Negroes would have to work for such slave wages by closing to them its trade unions, thus adding to their handicap in competing with white men for better jobs, and by denying them the capital necessary to go into business for themselves (there was not a single bank in Harlem north of 125th Street). And as for that embodiment of society that was government, the city government that was supposed to represent them as well as the white man, the attitude of that government was symbolized by public works. When La Guardia came to office in 1934, there hadn't been a new school built in Harlem in twenty-five years (La Guardia's administration didn't get around to building one for four more years), and in all Harlem the city provided, to serve 300,000 people, exactly one clinic, built—with WPA funds—in 1937, equipped with substantial facilities for child care, and exactly one hospital (on whose executive staff there was