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

by Caro, Robert A

  "When I brought it in to Moses, he studied it a little bit before he said anything. And then he looked up and said, 'Now we have a chance!' "

  By the end of that week, the bankers had agreed to purchase $3,-100,000 of Henry Hudson Parkway Authority bonds, the money to be used to construct a one-deck, four-lane bridge. And they had agreed to incorporate in the purchase agreement a provision that if traffic on the bridge lived up to Moses' estimates and warranted further expansion, they would, as soon as the traffic reached that point, purchase an additional $2,000,000 of Authority bonds, which would enable the Authority to reinforce the two arches and the steelwork on the bridge and build a second deck on it. Although the lawyers for the Authority and the bankers would not finish dotting the /'s and crossing the /'s in the agreement until March 1935, Moses and Madigan knew the money was in the bag. The financing of the West Side Improvement was complete.

  * * *

  In later years, as he grew steadily richer, Jack Madigan would become addicted to the way of life of the rich. The living room of his Fifth Avenue apartment would be furnished in shades of gold—golden carpet, golden loveseats, golden armchairs. But over the long golden sofa, in the place of honor in the room, hung a simple engineer's sketch in black and white: a rendering of the arches—two arches, not three—that support the Henry Hudson Bridge.

  Robert Moses had envisioned the West Side Improvement with the eyes of a visionary. He had discerned a way to finance it with the eyes of a banker, a very astute banker. The financing of the West Side Improvement was a supreme example, perhaps the supreme example, of the practical side of Robert Moses' genius. For more than half a century, New York City had strained to find a way to build the West Side Improvement and had been unable to find sufficient funds to build it on even the most limited scale. In slightly more than one year, Robert Moses had found the funds to build it— on a grand scale. True, one source of his financing, the federal relief program, had not been available before in the dimensions it was available under CWA and WPA. But that was only one source out of more than a score that he pulled together. The catalyst that finally brought the West Side Improvement to fruition wasn't Washington's largesse but Moses' genius for turning a dream into reality, for accomplishment, for Getting It Done.

  But Robert Moses was in the city now, not on the Island. While on the Island his proposals had been opposed most vigorously by selfish interests, in the city his West Side Improvement proposal was being opposed vigorously by people whose interests were not selfish at all, who cared very deeply about the city and who felt that while an Improvement was needed, the form in which Moses was proposing to build it was not the best form—was in fact a form that might even bring the city harm, harm that might outweigh the good—and who also felt that it was not necessary to build it in that form at all.

  Among these men were two young reformers, Bill Exton and Bob Weinberg.

  Robert C. Weinberg was the Park Department architect whose early admiration for Moses had already been tempered by his refusal to take neighborhood preferences into account in the designing of neighborhood playgrounds. William Exton, Jr., was a witty young man-about-town whose tireless pursuit of romance (his list of girlfriends was legendary among his friends) was constantly being interrupted by his penchant for working night and day for reform causes that caught his eye.

  Although Exton and Weinberg were both still in their twenties, both Harvard graduates (the brilliant Exton had graduated at nineteen) and both active members of the Citizens Union, the City Club and the Park Association, they had never been close friends. But the West Side Improvement was to make them close. For Exton loved Inwood Hill Park and Weinberg loved

  Spuyten Duyvil. And each of the two young men felt that the "Improvement" would destroy the thing that he loved.

  Inwood Hill Park was not a park at all, but a wilderness, a wonderful wilderness, a last reminder, crowded into the craggy hills in the north-westernmost corner of Manhattan Island by the relentless spread of concrete, that once almost all of the island had been covered with lush green forests. To the east, the hills sloped down into a valley that opened on a beautiful, peaceful cove formed by a U-curve in the Harlem River. In the valley, the site of the old Algonquin village of Shora-Kap-Kock* ("in between the hills"), was a little museum operated by an Indian woman and a pottery studio, complete with kilns capable of the most delicate ceramics. In the cove, the last bit of natural waterfront on Manhattan Island and the reputed site of the landing of a longboat from Henry Hudson's Half Moon three hundred years before and of a battle between the longboat crew and the Algonquins, stood a giant tulip tree under which Hudson had held a powwow with the Indians. On the opposite, or Hudson River, side of the park's hills, two hundred feet below the steep escarpment that formed their western edge, was a narrow strip of landfill that held a New York Central roadbed. But in the three hundred acres covered by the hills themselves, there was hardly a sign of the hand of man. The Lords of Lord & Taylor had once lived in two mansions on the escarpment, but these had burned to the ground decades before. When Exton turned off the city's asphalt streets and wandered up the steep slopes—it was their steepness that had saved them from development—he found himself in a different world, a world of wild underbrush and towering trees. Hiking up to their crest, under foliage so thick that it all but blotted out the sun, he could pick wild hackberries and blueberries or, in spring and early summer, could stop and look for a while at the fragrant purple- or white-blossomed lilac bushes, some of them three times as tall as he. At the crest, out on the escarpment, was a view that guidebooks marveled over—"perhaps the finest Manhattan offers," said one: the broad sweep of the Hudson below and, looming above the river on its far shore, the endless miles of the Palisades, unmarred north of the George Washington Bridge by a single man-made structure. If Exton sat so that he couldn't see the bridge, there was nothing to remind him of what he had left behind at the foot of the hills except for the occasional passage, far below him, of a little toy New York Central train.

  Exton loved that world. "On the top, there was a big outcropping of granite on the north end, and I used to go up there in April and just lie on it in the sun and look down at the water. I was no great outdoorsman, I'm not trying to say that. But when I went into Inwood Hill, I really felt that I had gotten away from the city. And sometimes I needed that feeling."

  The idea of altering that world horrified him. "It was the only real woodland left on Manhattan," he would recall years later. "It was the last hunk of primeval forest in the whole metropolitan area. It was unique. It was irreplaceable."

  * Origin of the name of Spuyten Duyvil's Kappock Street.

  And to alter it with a highway! "When you were up on top there, you were away from the roar of cars and the smell of gasoline. It was the only place on Manhattan where you could still say that." Moses' proposed Henry Hudson Parkway would bring the roar and the smell right into that beautiful spot. In fact, it would, to a large extent, eradicate it, bury it under six lanes— 140 feet in width—of concrete, since Moses' plan was to run the highway right along the escarpment. Moses was saying that running the road through the park would destroy "only a few trees." Exton knew that couldn't be true: so thick were the towering elms, maples and oriental pines that no road 140 feet wide could be picked through them without cutting down hundreds. A highway would have values—Exton, having served on City Club committees studying the traffic problem, was aware of the need for a northern outlet—but this unique, irreplaceable forest offered the city other values that a highway would destroy, and "it just didn't make sense" to destroy them if there was any alternate route available.

  Weinberg saw other values in Spuyten Duyvil, the residential community located atop the bluffs that faced Inwood Hill across the Harlem River. The community was not a "prestige" area like Fieldston directly to the north; but it was proof that even within a large city even families without wealth could find peacefulness, seclusion and beauty. Its modest single-family hom
es—there were only three small apartment houses in Spuyten Duyvil then—were built on small plots. But they were built along ravines that led down to the Hudson and along lanes that rambled among flower gardens and picturesque rock formations and were shaded by lordly oaks and elms. A reporter who visited Spuyten Duyvil in 1935 wrote in surprise that it was a "village," a village in the midst of a city, a village straight out of "some remote part of rural England," complete to its four big, fieldstone-and ivy-covered English country churches. It was a village that possessed a beautiful view—many of its homes enjoyed a magnificent prospect of the Hudson and the Palisades—and an asset that was even more valuable in the city: quiet. Tucked into a corner of the Bronx as it was, it had no through traffic; the only thoroughfare wider than a country lane in all Spuyten Duyvil was "Spuyten Duyvil Parkway," a two-lane road whose right-of-way, lined by trees so big that their branches met over it umbrella fashion, was barely thirty feet. Moses' proposal to turn it into a 140-foot-wide Henry Hudson Parkway by tearing down hundreds of the trees and condemning lawns of the bordering houses horrified the community. The road would split the community in half, make it difficult to get from one side to the other, and would funnel through it a great stream of traffic. "It will be the end of beautiful Spuyten Duyvil," wailed one resident. Weinberg—whose work in city planning at Harvard and, after graduation, with the pioneering urban-ologist Werner Hegeman had taught him the importance of human values in a city—was interested in Spuyten Duyvil both because his family owned real estate there and because the community embodied so many human values. He began to study Moses' plan, and his conclusions were the same as Exton's: that "it made no sense" if there was any alternate route available.

  And as the two young men began to study Moses' West Side Improve-

  ment plan together, they realized immediately that there was an alternate route—the one that had been proposed before Moses, a route that, upon reaching the southern border of Inwood Hill Park, swung inland so that it would run not through the most beautiful portion of the park but along its eastern edge and adjoining city streets, that would cross the Harlem River on a low-level bridge, inland from the Hudson, whose northern terminus would not be Spuyten Duyvil but the Marble Hill shanty town in the hollow below it, and that would continue north not through Spuyten Duyvil but through largely uninhabited areas of Marble Hill until it reached Van Cortlandt Park, where it could run just inside the park's edges, taking just a thin slice from it, until it reached the Saw Mill River Parkway.

  There were, as Exton and Weinberg saw it, certain obvious advantages to this alternative: it would spare Inwood Hill and Spuyten Duyvil, eliminate the Marble Hill shanty town, and, because a low-level bridge costs less than a high-level, be less expensive than Moses' plan. (Condemnation costs would still be minimal because most of the right-of-way would be taken from the park edge and adjoining streetbeds; only a few single-family homes would have to be condemned.) Their route was only three-quarters of a mile longer, an inconsequential factor when weighed against the preservation of the city's last virgin woodland and a uniquely peaceful residential community.

  As Exton and Weinberg had been thinking about the alternatives, moreover, they had come to realize that their route had certain other advantages, not so obvious but, perhaps, even more important. It was difficult for them to define these advantages, because in the early 1930's there was almost no literature to draw upon; it would not be for more than a decade, in fact, that terms to explain what they were thinking would come into common coinage—like "ecology" and "environment" and "human scale." Moreover, the defining might well not bring them much popularity, they knew, because a nation that worshipped the engineer was not yet ready to be told that the engineer's values might not be the last word in highway design. But they struggled to define them nonetheless.

  "I remember realizing that he [Moses] was thinking in terms of the view of the river, the view that the motorist would have—he was thinking in terms of the motoring public, of automobiles," Exton says. "Well, a motorist spends a few seconds at a spot and maybe he can't even look at it; maybe he has to be looking at the car ahead of him. But the pedestrian spends a long time at a spot. He can sit down and look at it. So it's the pedestrian we should be thinking of. And then there was the damage to the park itself. Cutting down the trees would probably interfere with the natural drainage system, and then you'd have to start building drains and God knows what else." Weinberg, putting his thoughts in writing, wrote Exton that building a parkway through Spuyten Duyvil would, simply by making Spuyten Duyvil more accessible, bring many new residents—and many apartment buildings—to the area and to all Riverdale. Therefore, before the parkway was built, plans to accommodate the new residents should be made. If apartment houses were simply plumped down helter-skelter onto Riverdale's narrow country lanes, their residents' cars would jam them, turning Riverdale

  into just another extension of the noisy, traffic-jammed city. If a few of the streets were widened, and if apartment-house building was restricted to those streets by zoning, and if areas near them were zoned for stores, the apartment residents would be able to walk to stores and would therefore not have to do so much driving within Riverdale, and the quiet, country serenity of the non-apartment areas could be preserved. But Moses refused to do any advance planning himself—he would not even allow Riverdale civic leaders to tell him where overpasses across the parkway should be built to be most convenient for the community—or to allow anyone else to do any: to minimize community antagonism, he kept the exact route of the parkway secret as long as possible, which made advance zoning changes impracticable. "These are not competition projects, but units in the living life of the people" that will "affect the daily life of the thousands of individuals and families who live within the adjacent neighborhoods," Weinberg wrote. "Before the West Side Improvement is built, its effect on those neighborhoods should receive greater study. . . ."

  Analyzing the rest of the West Side Improvement, Exton and Weinberg did what no one else in the city was doing: took a close look at Moses' plans. Moses had stated that the Henry Hudson Parkway would run through only "a corner" of Van Cortlandt Park. Actually, the two young reformers found, it would run through its center. And the location of a giant cloverleaf planned in the center to provide an interconnection with another parkway Moses was proposing—the Mosholu—was near the only fresh-water marsh of any size left in all New York. When biology teachers had protested to one of Moses' aides about the destruction of part of the marsh, the last spot in the city at which students could study marsh plants, birds and animals, the Moses Man had assured them that "destruction" was an inexact term; "beautifica-tion" was more suitable, for Commissioner Moses planned to "landscape" the marsh by dredging it to create a series of "lagoons" with formal shrubbery along their edges. And, the aide went on, they needn't worry that the job would be only half done; the Commissioner was always thorough: the marsh was going to be landscaped not only near the cloverleaf but along its entire length. One of the teachers begged Exton to fight for "one of the most beautiful spots, with a riot of plant life and birds. ... I wondered how shortsighted officials could expect any 'planted shrubs' would equal that dense thicket." The primeval wilderness of Inwood Hill Park was not the only priceless and irreplaceable natural asset that would be lost to the city and its people forever if Moses was allowed to carry out his plan, Exton realized.

  And as Exton and Weinberg proceeded with their study, they realized that there was yet another, vastly more important, natural asset that was going to be lost to the city: its waterfront.

  "It didn't require much brains to see that running the highway in Riverside Park along the water would have the effect of making sure the waterfront itself could never be used for a park," Weinberg was to recall. It "would forever eliminate for recreational purposes several miles of the most beautiful waterfront in the world." Except at scattered, difficult-to-reach locations, people would no longer be able to stroll beside the broad river
,

  play beside it, fish in it or picnic beside it. They would no longer be able even to look at it in peace; there would be a massive barrier of steel and concrete— and the roar of the motors of countless cars—between the watcher and the water. There should be a highway through Riverside Park—agreed. But why could the highway not run where every other planner wanted it to run— atop the New York Central tracks that ran either up the center of the park or close to the slopes leading up to Riverside Drive? That would leave the rest of the park free for recreation—all the way down to the waterfront— as well as free from automobiles, and overpasses or underpasses could easily allow pedestrians to cross the highway to get to it.

  What lay between the two young reformers and Moses was partly a question of values.

  Moses' had been formed in a different age, the age, twenty years and more in the past, when he had been a young reformer. To understand his dream for the West Side Improvement, one had to understand the age in which he had dreamed it.

  In that age, parks had been for the upper and "comfortable middle" classes and one of the things those classes wanted most to do in parks was to drive through them—at the slow, leisurely speeds of the era—and enjoy their scenery. In that age, therefore, it made sense for a road through a park to be placed at its most scenic location—in the case of Riverside Park, at the river's edge.