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

by Caro, Robert A

  They watched RM set out to surmount it.

  Under one part of the 1927 agreement, the New York Central had agreed to pay the city $5,000,000—and the city had agreed that it would spend that money only on the West Side Improvement. Under another part of the agreement, the railroad had agreed to pay outright part of the cost of roofing its tracks in Riverside Park; $3,200,000 of the track-roofing cost was still outstanding—which meant that the railroad owed the city a total of $8,200,000.

  If Moses could get this money from the railroad, he would have taken at least a first step toward the realization of his $109,000,000 dream. But the railroad didn't have it. In order for him to get the money from the railroad, the railroad would have to get it from somewhere else first. Since the Central's own sources of credit were exhausted, Moses would have to obtain the money for the railroad himself—and he would have to give the money to the railroad's hard-eyed directors under conditions that would force them to spend it not on such urgent obligations as weekly payrolls (which the railroad, desperately short of cash, was finding it increasingly difficult to meet) but on obligations that in time of financial crisis the directors might well consider eminently deferrable: the beautification of a city park.

  There were, Moses saw immediately, reasons for the railroad directors to want beautification. For one, they, as well as the city, wanted the tracks in Riverside Park covered; that was the only way the long dies el-pulled trains

  could be assembled without interference from weather. For another, on part of its debt to the city, the $5,000,000 part, the railroad was paying 6 percent interest, compounded annually. The railroad had not been able to meet the interest payments since 1929 and they had therefore been added to the principal. By 1934, the principal—the amount on which the railroad was paying interest—was no longer $5,000,000 but $6,500,000. Its over-all debt was therefore no longer $8,200,000 but $9,700,000. And its 1934 interest payment on the $6,500,000 would be $390,000 for that year alone. Since the Depression had forced the cost of money—interest rates—down to well below 6 percent, the railroad was paying the city much more for its money than it should have been.

  Now, in the free moments of many days, Moses began to cover pages of yellow legal note pads with little clumps of figures. When aides looked over his shoulder, they saw that he was multiplying numbers together. The numbers being multiplied were millions of dollars; those he was multiplying by were percentages—the aides realized that they were interest rates. And one day the figures fit together into a pattern—a pattern that enabled him to obtain from the New York Central Railroad not $9,700,000 but $13,500,000.

  The key was obtaining new cash for the Central at an interest rate that would make it possible for the railroad to accept it, use part of it to pay off the $6,500,000 debt to the city, use another part of it to pay off its $3,200,000 debt to the city, have enough left over to give the city an additional, new contribution for the West Side Improvement, a contribution it was not required to make under the previous agreement—and still be paying an annual interest less than the $390,000 it was now being forced to pay. Such an arrangement would give the railroad the track covering it needed while at the same time saving it money.

  Moses needed a source that not only would loan money to a private business in precarious financial condition but would loan it money at a very low rate of interest. There was, he knew, such a source. It was the State of New York.

  At first, this source did not look like a promising one. The Depression had made the state's own financial position shaky; even if it were steady, Governor Lehman and the Legislature would shy away from spending money to bail out a railroad whose shadowy hold over public officials was legendary.

  But Moses knew that there was one source of state money that had been lying untapped ever since the Depression began: the sizable balance in the $300,000,000 Grade-Crossing Elimination Fund that had been created in 1926. No one had ever thought of using the fund to finance the West Side Improvement—Moses did not think of it himself at first—because "grade crossings" traditionally referred to the lifting of a highway over a railroad track at a single point, and the West Side Improvement, besides being as much a park as a highway project, consisted of building a highway beside or on top of a railroad track—for six and a half miles. But both a railroad track and a highway were involved in the West Side Improvement, and the best

  bill drafter in Albany found that there were provisions in the legislation establishing the Grade-Crossing Elimination Fund that would, by a broad interpretation, allow use of the fund for at least part of the Improvement. The interest rate on monies from the fund was, he realized, only 2 percent. Two percent of $9,700,000 was only $194,000 per year, almost $200,000 less than the interest the New York Central was now paying on its debt to the city. The railroad could accept far more than $9,700,000 from the state, give the balance to the city—and still be saving money. He suggested this course to the railroad and persuaded it to agree to accept $13,500,000 —an amount on which the annual interest would be $270,000, representing a saving to the railroad of $120,000 per year at the same time it obtained its track covering. Then, to reconcile Lehman and the Legislature to the loan by making it apparent to the public that it was no "giveaway," Moses conceived a complicated device which required the railroad to place all interest payments in escrow six months in advance, while making the loan what amounted to a tax lien against all the railroad's properties in the state, properties worth many times the amount of the loan. On a yellow legal note pad, he drafted legislation authorizing the loan and told Jack Madigan to take it up to Albany. If the legislation became law, the city would be getting $13,500,000 in improvements at no cost to itself. And Robert Moses would see his longest-held dream a long step closer to becoming reality.

  The legislative session was rapidly drawing to a close. Madigan painstakingly explained the bill's complexities to those legislators who had difficulty understanding them. Others—well, the railroad wanted the bill and the railroad could help persuade some of those others. When some legislators still yelled "giveaway," Moses toughened the tax-lien provision. The bill passed three days before the end of the session.

  Then there was the Governor. Moses received word that Lehman didn't want to sign. The Governor, he was informed, was leery about its legality and about the "giveaway" implications. And to make matters stickier, Lehman and Moses were in the midst of a bitter battle over another Moses maneuver. Since the bill was passed during the last three days of the session, it was a "thirty-day" bill. The Governor had to sign it within thirty days of the session's end or the bill was dead. And on the twenty-ninth day after the session's end, Lehman still had not signed it.

  "Moses sent me up to see him because he knew he liked me," Madigan recalls. "I was up in the Capitol at nine o'clock in the morning. And the Governor let me sit out in his outer office on my fanny from nine o'clock in the morning until five-ten in the afternoon. Twice I ran out and called Moses because I knew how worried he was. I told him, 'He's letting me sit.' Moses said something like 'Stubborn bastard!'

  "Finally I got in to see him. He jumped all over me. I told him how much the city was going to get out of this.

  "He says, 'Moses'll get all the credit for this.' I said, thinking fast, 'Governor, you should be able to share the credit.' He said, 'He's not the kind who likes to share much.'

  "I said, 'Governor, nobody in the world knows if you're going to veto this bill or not.' His PR man was Joe Canavan,* who was one of the very best. I said, 'Have Canavan write up your own release and give it to the Sunday papers. I have glossies right here that you can use.' I said, 'Governor, tomorrow's the last dayP "

  Madigan was offering to let Lehman instead of Moses announce that he would sign the bill and reveal the benefits it would give to the city, thereby gaining identification with the project and basking in the praise that newspapers would undoubtedly bestow on everybody connected with it. Madigan was reminding the Governor that the story would undoubtedly
get a good play because Saturdays are generally slow news days. He was even offering to let the Governor distribute the glossy, ready-for-newspaper-reproduction photographs of the improvements the $13,500,000 would buy.

  "The Governor said, That'd make Bob so goddamned mad.' He smiled. But then he said, 'I need a memorandum from the Comptroller' [a written opinion, which Lehman could use to justify his signing, that the bill was constitutional]. Bob had briefed Charlie Mullins in the Comptroller's office about the bill because he knew Lehman trusted him. I said, 'Governor, Charlie Mullins is over there right now and he knows all about this.' Lehman called over there and Mullins agreed that the bill was legal. So everything worked out all right."

  Of the approximately $109,000,000 that had stood between Robert Moses' dream and reality, $13,500,000 had been acquired.

  There was $95,500,000 to go.

  The arrangement with the New York Central soon gave Moses $4,000,000 more. As part of his plan to expand Riverside Park, he wanted to sink bulkheads out from the shoreline and fill the water behind them with rock and earth. Such fill was expensive—more than two and a half dollars per cubic foot. But Moses suddenly realized that the excavations that the Central would now be able to finish below Seventy-second Street would provide vast amounts of fill. Inquiring as to what was being done with it, he was told that it was simply being transported "somewhere on Long Island" and dumped there. He pointed out to railroad officials that if they let him send trucks to the excavations and haul it away and use it in Riverside Park, they would save the cost of transporting it. They agreed, and in this fashion he obtained 1,500,000 cubic yards of fill—$4,000,000 worth. There was $91,500,000 to go.

  "RM has this mind—he can read a piece of legislation and remember every darn thing in it," Sid Shapiro recalls. "He seemed to know the wording of every darn bill in Washington and in Albany that had ever been passed relating to public works. We were talking about the Seventy-ninth Street boat

  Joseph J. Canavan, former editor of the World.

  basin and he said, 'Let's build a real boat basin,' " the facade of the marina decorated with stone gargoyles and behind it a fountain with jets of water arching from the mouths of brass turtles. "Have you ever heard of a boat basin with gargoyles? Well, I hadn't either. But he remembered some obscure federal statute that had been passed—oh, years before—to encourage the use of artwork on public works." If we put on gargoyles, Moses said, not only would the boat basin be beautified, but the money from the fund could be used to build it. "One day, RM said, 'What happened to some fund I remember that was set up [by a private philanthropist] so that it could only be used to decorate a public project with ornamental friezes? Is there any money left in that?' Well, we looked it up and there was. So RM said, 'Well, then, let's have a frieze.' We told our boat basin guy about this. These guys are usually hard-boiled fellows, think in terms of jetties, groins, sheet metal, riprap. When you tell one of them gargoyles and friezes, he almost falls off his designer's stool." But the two funds contained a total of almost $100,000 for which the boat-basin phase of Robert Moses' dream would be eligible.

  And there was $91,400,000 to go.

  The Seventy-ninth Street boat basin was, of course, the magnificent structure Moses had envisioned for Riverside Park years before—a combination marina, riverside restaurant and pedestrian promenade. In the plans that Moses finally approved, throwing his arms around chief architectural engineer Clinton Lloyd in joy, the top level was a large traffic circle that allowed cars coming from the city's interior access to the "great highway along the water." The center of the circle was hollow. Down inside it, on the middle level, was a cool, shadowy interior courtyard. The center of the courtyard was the fountain, its murmur just loud enough to drown out the noise of cars and city above it. Around the fountain was a low marble bench for passers-by to sit on. On the river side of the courtyard were three high, wide arches. Beyond them was a broad outdoor terrace, overlooking the marina below it and the river beyond; designed to hold both the gaily canopied tables of the riverside restaurant and the broad, tree-shaded pedestrian promenade. And the bottom level of the structure, completely concealed inside it and reached by access roads circling down around its outside from the traffic circle above, was a two-hundred-car garage for the owners of boats docked in the marina. The structure did not resemble a railroad grade-crossing elimination at all, but by coincidence Harold Ickes, the PWA Administrator, perturbed that PWA expenditures were not generating enough immediate employment, had recently promised quick approval for projects for which plans were ready—and when a reporter had asked what kind of projects the administration had in mind, Ickes "said he thought that elimination of highway grade crossings over railroad tracks offered one means . . . that could be undertaken immediately." There were no highways over the ctracks around Seventy-ninth Street to be eliminated, but there were tracks to be covered and roads to be built—and Ickes sounded anxious for plans.

  Working night and day, Lloyd and a team of engineers from Madigan's consulting firm completed them in a week, and Madigan headed down to Washington with the blueprints under his arm. The first thing that PWA officials there noticed when they unrolled them was their new, very prominently displayed title: "Seventy-ninth Street Grade Elimination Structure." If the officials noticed that it didn't resemble any other grade-crossing elimination structure ever built, they didn't mention the fact, the only demurrer coming from one narrow-minded bureaucrat who commented that "the brass turtles and comfort stations were a little too much to be tacked on to a grade crossing" and slashed off the $154,000 cost of those items, and Madigan returned with a promise that the PWA would chip in the $1,766,000 that the materials for the rest of the structure would cost. Then Moses told La Guardia that for just $154,000 more the city could have not just a boat basin but a beautiful boat basin—and the Mayor scrounged up that money. Then Moses told the CWA that the materials for the project were paid for and he could put men to work immediately, and the CWA contributed more than $3,000,000 for wages on work on the boat basin, bringing the total money raised for the structure to more than $5,000,000. And there was $86,400,000 to go.

  "RM never seemed to run out of ideas," Shapiro would recall. "He said to us, 'We'll build the highway part of the way along the New York Central tracks, so we'll be eligible for state aid to railroads.' Because there were boat basins along a river involved, he found clauses in the [federal] Rivers and Harbors Act under which we could get money. There was federal highway money available, of course, so he said, 'We'll tie it in with the George Washington Bridge, so it'll be an interstate highway and we can get funds that way.' Because he had to demolish some buildings ["You'd have to tear down a few buildings at Seventy-second Street and bring the highway around a curve," he had told Frances Perkins twenty years before, and that was just how it worked out], he even found a way we were eligible for federal housing funds. On that one project, we had housing, interstate highway, rivers and harbors, and railroads." Moses obtained a total of more than $12,000,000 from such sources.

  And there was $74,000,000 to go.

  Still $74,000,000 to go. And much of this money was needed for materials and equipment which could be obtained in no other way than by putting up hard cash, cash that Moses didn't have. He had to economize.

  And he knew where to do it. The cost of the Riverside Park he had envisioned as a young man, a park in which the ugly railroad tracks were covered—covered with lush lawns and trees, a park crammed lavishly with marinas and waterfront promenades and tennis courts and playgrounds— was running about $8,000,000 per mile. He continued to develop the park lavishly for the first two of its 6.7 miles, the two miles bordered by a neighborhood inhabited by the upper and "comfortable middle" classes he

  liked to develop parks for. But for the rest of its length—from about i ioth Street, where the neighborhood was becoming perceptibly poorer—he scrimped, putting in few improvements and doing those in a cheap, slapdash style. One Hundred and Twenty-fifth S
treet was the southern border of Negro Harlem. Already, in 1934, black faces were appearing on many of the side streets behind Riverside Drive. From 125th Street north, Robert Moses put almost no improvements into Riverside Park, designing its northern 3.3 miles with one aim in mind: to do them as cheaply as possible.

  The aim was accomplished. The development of the southern two miles of Riverside Park—the stretch south of 110th Street—cost $16,300,000, or about $8,000,000 per mile. The development of the northern 4.7 miles of Riverside Park—the stretch north of 110th Street that included Negro Harlem—cost $7,900,000, or about $1,700,000 per mile, and thus saved Moses about $6,300,000 per mile, or a total of $29,000,000 less than it it would have cost if he had built it to the same standards as the southern section.

  And there was $45,000,000 to go.

  Of this $45,000,000, about $15,000,000 represented the cost Moses was figuring for the section of the Improvement above 192nd Street, so that only about $30,000,000 stood between him and the completion of his dream the length of Riverside Park. He informed the Board of Estimate that $20,000,000 of this amount would be for labor, and he could get the labor free from the CWA if only he had the $10,000,000 for the rest of the materials and equipment. Were they going to let the money be wasted for want of $10,000,000? The Board caved in and gave it to him—or, rather, since it didn't have the money to give, it authorized a $10,000,000 assessment on Riverside Drive property owners. At the same time that he was telling the Board that he could get the $20,000,000 worth of labor from the CWA if only they gave him $10,000,000 worth of materials, he was telling the CWA that he could get $10,000,000 worth of materials from the Board if only they gave him $20,000,000 worth of labor. The CWA authorized the rehabilitation of Riverside Park. It authorized the building of the Henry Hudson Parkway through the park; since the CWA was not allowed to build highways or parkways, it called the parkway "a park access road" on the report it submitted to Washington.