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

by Caro, Robert A

  exactly one Negro). Mothers and their babies died in Harlem at a rate more than double that in the city as a whole; more than one out of every ten babies born in Harlem died at birth.

  Isaacs and other reformers saw that the swelling Negro population was not being assimilated into the city. Such assimilation was necessary, they said; if the influx continued and there was no base—no solid community that was part of the larger society around it—on which it could build, what would happen? 'The question of what will happen to the Negro in New York . . . is overlaid with shadows of tragic premonition," one wrote. Isaacs and others begged the city to make an intensified effort to meet the needs of these new immigrants. These people needed help, they said, and the city must give it to them. It was a civic duty to do so, they said. It was a matter of conscience. And if you weren't interested in duty or conscience, well, it was a matter of expediency, too. For neglecting Harlem's needs in the future as they had been neglected in the past could only lead to havoc in the city.

  Knowing how important small parks were to the city's poor, the reformers could hardly believe the implications of Moses' policies when they began to discern them. By banning public transportation, he had barred the poor from the state parks. In the same way, he was barring the poor from the best of the city parks, the big parks on the city's outskirts such as Jacob Riis and Alley Pond. And now he was saying that he would not provide the poor even with small parks. He was pouring tens of millions of dollars into creating new parks in New York—but he was creating almost none for the people who needed parks most. The philosophy that parks were only for the "comfortable middle class" had been outdated for at least ten years. But, they began to see, that was the philosophy Moses was following.

  The reformers were still influential in the city (although they were becoming less so as La Guardia gathered power unto himself), and, unlike other Moses opponents, they received a hearing for their views from the city's press; Good Government organization resolutions calling for small parks in the slums were at least printed, even if primarily on inside pages.

  But Moses simply shouted the reformers down. He replied—in replies that received better newspaper "play" than the statements he was replying to —that he was giving the slums parks—great parks. What, he demanded, was the great recreational complex he was building on Randall's Island? The great recreational complex he was building in Riverside Park? They were "easily accessible" to Harlem. As for small parks within the slums themselves, his "experience," he said, had taught him that they were just "too expensive" to be considered. Three acres, he said, was the smallest area that could be "controlled and managed" as a park. And since three acres is 130,680 square feet and land bearing profitable slum tenements was going in the 1930's for about $30 per square foot and a single park would thus cost the city about $4,000,000 for land acquisition costs alone, and since as many as 2,500 people might be displaced by the razing of the tenements involved and would have to be relocated, this was an unanswerable argument—if you accepted it.

  Many reformers—far more than had ever disagreed with Moses before —did not accept it. A park did not have to be three acres to help a slum, they said. It could be the smallest crevice in the grim wall of tenements; even a space the size of a single ioo-foot-by-20-foot building lot—or smaller— could if planted with grass and a few trees or if equipped with a few benches mean so much to the people of the block on which it was located. Something doesn't have to be big to brighten something that is drab, to bring pride to a place without any pride. Because they have nothing else to do, the people of the slums spend a lot of time looking out their windows; if there was a small park, even a tiny park, in the neighborhood, there would be a pleasant little scene to look at, something affirmative; even if there was no grass in the park there could be a few benches—and all at once the neighborhood would have a better place to rest than the fenders of parked cars; a vest-pocket park could be an elegant little plaza, but it could also be just a place for a kid to play or the elderly to relax—or for a pregnant mother to sit down for a minute on a walk home from the grocery store that suddenly seemed longer than it ever had before. The reformers, experts in parks, knew there were good small parks in other cities; they knew that Moses' argument was wrong.

  Furthermore, these reformers said, Randall's Island and Riverside Park were not "easily accessible" to the slums. The Triborough Bridge would make the island accessible by car, but the people of the slums didn't have cars. There would, by Moses' edict, be no bus service to the island; the only way to get there would be to walk—from the nearest point in Harlem or the South Bronx a good three-quarters of a mile.* And that was from the nearest point of the slums, the edge on the river. From most of the slums, you would have to walk much farther; from the center of Harlem, then 145th Street, say, more than two miles. Riverside Park along the Hudson River was a hike up a long, achingly steep hill from the nearest point in Harlem. People didn't want to hike long distances to parks; they wanted recreational facilities close at hand, so that every trip to sit under a tree or shoot some baskets didn't have to be an expedition. The people of the slums wouldn't use these parks, they said. Morningside, St. Nicholas and Colonial parks, the three parks which formed the western border of Harlem, were fine, they said, but there was no other park between them and the East River. In the entire three square miles of Harlem, an area which contained 300,000 people, there wasn't a single patch of green, f

  But while newspapers printed the reformers' resolutions, they did not support them editorially. And the reform front on the issue was not solid. The prestigious Park Association of New York City was dominated by elderly park fighters who clung to the old view of parks; its insistence that

  * Distance figured from the point in Harlem at which a pedestrian would mount the Triborough Bridge pedestrian walk to the nearest park facility on Randall's Island. The Ward's Island Pedestrian Footbridge would not be built for another twenty years. tMount Morris Park, between 120th and 124th streets, would become part of the Negro slums of Harlem later—when the slums expanded south. In the mid-1930's, their southern border was still 125th Street.

  Central Park be kept for passive contemplation was the proof of the way it really felt. And while its president, Mrs. Sulzberger, was more liberal on the point than many of her colleagues, Mrs..Sulzberger was not criticizing Robert Moses.

  And Moses was not listening to criticism, anyway. When an alderman from Harlem wrote to Moses appealing for more playgrounds, Moses replied that he was, of course, "in entire sympathy with what you have in mind" but that "the sites you suggest are too expensive. We shall provide one playground in Harlem. ..." When the alderman ventured to write him again on the subject, Moses declined to continue the correspondence.

  In 1930, Moses, as head of the Metropolitan Park Conference, had led the fight to persuade the city to preserve parts of its fast-disappearing woodland in Queens and Staten Island by purchasing huge tracts for park land. Reformers had cheered him for that accomplishment; it had preserved open space—beautiful, wooded open space—for the city forever. But now Moses was filling that space with baseball diamonds and football fields and tennis courts—and the land for them could be cleared only by cutting down trees. And Moses was filling other parks with playgrounds and stadia and parking fields and handball courts. Throughout the city's park system, the reformers suddenly realized, grass was giving way to concrete.

  The reformers knew that grass had to be supplanted by recreational facilities and parking lots in many of the city's parks. But not, they were sure, in all the city's parks.

  But Moses' plans for parks did not include keeping them— any of them —in their natural state. His plans were not limited to repairing the ravages made in them by Tammany park commissioners so as to restore them to their natural state. His plans were to cram them—cram all of them—with bathhouses and tennis houses, baseball diamonds and tennis courts, restaurants and bicycle paths, zoos and asphalted playgrounds with ugly black iron
fences around them, as well as with that essence of the city, concrete—the concrete of access roads, through roads and parking lots—concrete instead of precious grass.

  It took a while for the reformers to realize what Moses was doing— first, because he kept his plans so secret that it was difficult for them to discern the over-all pattern beneath them until they had begun unfolding; second, because they had been so thoroughly convinced that he was a fighter for parks that they did not easily accept the realization that his definition of parks was much narrower than theirs, and perhaps not at all compatible with it, that where they saw in a towering stand of oak and elms and white pine a priceless bounty to a beauty-starved city, Moses saw a baseball diamond. Many of them, in fact, never came during the 1930's to realize this because they never took the time to study his over-all park plans and while they were distressed by what he was doing to a particular park in which they were interested, they accepted his assurances that he was preserving nature in the rest of the park system.

  But some of the reformers did come to realize the implications of Moses' park philosophy rather quickly, and were anxious to discuss it with him. They were anxious that room be found in the park system—which, after all, was a huge one and included thousands of acres of still undeveloped woods and fields and streams—for their values as well as his. They were sure that in a discussion they would have no difficulty explaining to him— for, they all agreed, he was brilliant; the most brilliant public servant, many of them said, that they had ever met—the crucial difference, which apparently he had not yet grasped, between the implications of his philosophy when applied to Long Island parks and parks within the city. On no point, in fact, were they more anxious for discussion. For the destruction of the natural values of a park was not a remediable mistake; it was one that could never be rectified. Destroy the delicate natural balance of a marshland to make a concrete-lined lagoon and it did not lie with the power of man to restore that balance. Before any changes were made in the parks, therefore, there must be sufficient discussion to insure that the changes made were the right ones.

  But Moses no longer had to discuss. He had long had great dreams for the city, and now he had learned how to make dreams come true. He had learned the technique of stake driving and of whipsawing. He had learned how to mislead and conceal and deceive, how to lie to men and bully them, how to ruin their reputations. And he used all these methods to bring the dream to reality.

  Or was it all for the dream?

  He seemed to be going out of his way to antagonize people. He could have simply ignored William Exton and Robert Weinberg when they began proposing changes in his West Side Improvement plan; the two young reformers had no chance of making him even consider the changes. But he agreed to the interview with Exton—and Exton recalls that when he arrived at Moses' office, "he said, 'Well, as [city] Park Commissioner, maybe I can see you have a case, but the state park commission says so and so and the Authority says so and so.' Well, he was the state park commission, and he was the Authority, and I knew it, and he knew I knew it. It wasn't particularly subtle. It was just thumbing his nose at you"—and, Exton says, he had the feeling that Moses had given him the interview just so he could have the pleasure of thumbing it.

  Once he apparently went all the way to the Rock away s just to antagonize a local civic association which had invited him to speak because they were concerned about the effect his proposed Marine Parkway Bridge might have on Floyd Bennett Field, the airport that was the Rockaways' pride. He could have declined the invitation—he seldom spoke before civic groups— but he accepted and made the long trip across Jamaica Bay, mounted the stage and informed the audience, "That airport of yours isn't so hot. It never should have been built in the first place." And then, as the Times reported, "he smacked his hand down [and] glanced up at the ceiling" to indicate that he was through discussing the topic. If Moses had any motive for the trip— to enlighten the audience, educate them, persuade them, convince them, conciliate them, listen to them or answer their questions—other than his enjoyment at insulting them, and showing them that he could thumb his nose in their faces and there was nothing they could do about it, that motive eluded the audience.

  Power is being able to ruin people, to ruin their careers and their reputations and their personal relationships. Moses had this power, and he seemed to use it even when there was no need to, going out of his way to use it, so that it is difficult to escape the conclusion that he enjoyed using it.

  He may have felt it was necessary to turn the power of his vituperation on men whom he felt posed a threat to his dreams, but he turned it also on individuals who posed no such threat.

  Pearl Bernstein, for example, was a young Barnard College graduate whom La Guardia, for some inexplicable reason, had had appointed secretary to the Board of Estimate. "She was a naive girl and the job was utterly beyond her," Kern recalls; it was common knowledge that she made no decisions on her own but simply carried out La Guardia's orders, relayed through Kern.

  Moses must have known this, but when, in 1934, La Guardia, infuriated by the Park Commissioner's cooperation with Democratic members of the Board, issued an order that no matter was to be placed on its calendar at the instance of any commissioner until he had personally approved it, and Miss Bernstein, who was in charge of the calendar, therefore refused to place on it some of Moses' unapproved requests, Moses attacked her, writing Kern a letter—with copies sent simultaneously to Miss Bernstein's

  associates and to officials throughout City Hall—attacking her "amateurishness, delay and pettiness" and "complete absence of willingness to cooperate with people who are trying to get something accomplished."

  Kern, who was at this point still a "Moses fanatic," was startled because he knew that the Mayor, not Miss Bernstein, was the source of the order; Kern had, in fact, heard Moses arguing with La Guardia about it. Just in case the Park Commissioner had forgotten, Kern reminded him of this fact—but to his surprise the attacks continued, escalating in viciousness; one, also circulated throughout City Hall, referred to the order as "one of Pearl Bernstein's new wrinkles" and added, "If it were merely a question of casting swine before Pearl, I should be glad to have a standing order at any slaughter house—but these are really important construction matters with which she is interfering." Kern began to realize—reluctantly—that his idol, angry at the order and unwilling to argue further with its originator, had decided to vent his spleen on Miss Bernstein instead—apparently for no other reason than that she was handy and too small to fight back. Moses' attacks, Kern was to conclude, were "an example of his irresponsible brutality, a wantonness almost, a sadistic joy in hurting other people," as well as of his "willingness to beat little people" on occasions when he was reluctant to "go to the mat with big people" like the Mayor.

  The number of defenseless minor officials on whom Moses unleashed his vituperation was legion. The officials least able to fight back were those on his own staff, and to those he was, if possible, even more viciously abusive. Once, when one of his aides, at a luncheon meeting attended by a dozen men, ventured to offer a suggestion which he hadn't cleared with Moses first, Moses whirled on him and said, "Now, you're just a swabbie on this ship—do you understand?" And while the others present squirmed in embarrassment for the man being humiliated, Moses repeated to him, "Do you understand?" "Do you understand?"—refusing to be satisfied with a nod, making the aide say out loud, "Yes, sir."

  And the bullying was not just verbal. City Hall was whispering about Moses' physical encounters with other men.

  The two-hundred-pound Park Commissioner had had at least two such encounters during his governmental career prior to entering the city administration, and, as in the case of scrawny little "Slat" Johnson, the roommate he knocked down at Yale, neither of them was his physical equal. Raymond Torrey, whom he tried to strangle at a State Council of Parks meeting and at whom he then hurled a heavy smoking stand, was a pudgy little bird watcher. Moses had also staged a fi
st fight with WPA administrator Hugh Johnson in Bernard Baruch's apartment, and Johnson, at the time, was fifty-two—eight years older than Moses—and exceedingly drunk. Now Moses had additional physical encounters—and the pattern continued.

  "This was at the opening of a section of the West Side Highway," Joseph Ingraham of the Times recalls. "It was raining and we had to go into some kind of tent. Some little old character—just a minor functionary in government—was there and Moses said to me, 'Wait'll you see what I do to this guy.' He went over and grabbed him and almost literally picked

  him up by the scruff of the neck and shook him. It was very embarrassing. I said, 'What did he do?' He said, 'He hasn't done anything yet, but I just wanted to head him off.' " Other City Hall observers recall other Moses fist fights but not one with a man to whom he had a chance of losing.