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

by Caro, Robert A

  Such an alternative might well have appealed to Exton and Weinberg. There was an immediate need for the bridge, of course, and there was a risk in delaying its construction, the risk that the city's financial position might worsen, or its will to do the job might fade, and the bridge would never be built. But such risks had to be weighed against the certainties entailed in construction of the bridge at the point the bankers wanted: the destruction of Manhattan's priceless last forest, and of Riverdale's priceless serenity. Weighing the risks, Exton and Weinberg might well have decided on delay. The city, represented by its elected officials, might have so decided, too. But such considerations did not weigh more than a feather on Robert Moses' private scales, unbalanced as they were by his desire for accomplishment, for achievement—for the tangible, physical realization of his dreams. For such dreams, as the man who echoed his thoughts, Jack Madigan, put it, "Money is a//." Now, at last, after two decades of dreaming of the West Side Improvement, he had the money for it, and he was not about to let that money slip away. "Yeah, I remember that," Madigan would say thirty years later

  when asked about the Exton-Weinberg proposal, and the hard, quiet voice would be filled with contempt and disgust. "I remember that as an asinine idea, brother." Robert Moses did not give the city a chance to decide.

  The Henry Hudson Bridge opened on December 12, 1936.

  The opening ceremony, which Moses combined with a birthday party for La Guardia, was not one of the Park Commissioner's more successful productions. A sudden wild rainstorm forced the celebrants to crowd into the tiny administrative building on the bridge toll plaza into which the bar had hastily been moved, and fierce gusts of wind kept blowing open the windows and dampening the spirits. King Edward VIII picked the same day for his announcement that he was giving up his throne for "the woman I love," and the Mayor insisted, to Moses' rage, on interrupting the ceremonies to listen to a rebroadcast of the abdication speech. In the evening the rain stopped, the skies cleared and Moses, taking Jack Madigan along, drove down to the shoreline below the bridge to view his handiwork by moonlight. Staring up at the slender arch flung across the gap between the two high bluffs, he was struck by its grace, but even this moment was spoiled for him, for the blunt Irishman was not the ideal moonlight companion. When Moses started rhapsodizing about the beauty of the scene, Cleveland Rodgers relates, "Madigan said that all he could think about was the dimes rattling in the toll boxes."

  Nothing, however, could dim Moses' pride in the fulfillment of the great dream of his youth. When, on October 12, 1937—in time for Election Day— the whole West Side Improvement was completed, he commandeered Madi-gan's yacht and ordered its captain to stand out into the Hudson so that he could view his creation in its full sweep. From the deck of a ferryboat in the middle of the river twenty years before, the six miles of Riverside Park had been six miles of garbage dumps and mud, of tar-paper shacks and stacks of rotting timbers, all shrouded in the dirty gray smoke spewed up by the trains that clanked everlastingly through it. Yet he had exclaimed to the woman beside him: "Isn't this a temptation to you? Couldn't this be the most beautiful thing in the world?" Now he felt that it very nearly was. The tracks were gone from the whole lower stretch of the park. So were the mud and the shacks and the garbage. In their place were the things he had seen only in his mind then, "the great highway that went uptown along the water" and the lush park beside it. From the river, the massive retaining walls trimmed with granite and marble, set with loopholes and embrasures, stretching for miles along the water, rising one behind the other up to Riverside Drive, were battlements, a fortification protecting the great city behind it. The loom from Riverside Drive behind the battlements not only of the sheer brick wall of apartment houses but of the turrets and watchtowers of mansions that resembled medieval castles (the central facade of Charles M. Schwab's, which occupied the square block between Seventy-third and Seventy-fourth streets, was reminiscent of the chateau of Chenonceaux, the wings of the castles of Blois and Azay-le-Rideau); the presence behind the battlements of the

  columns and cannons of the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, erected to honor warriors of a civil war, and, farther north, of the massive granite sepulcher of the great general who had led them; the image, life-sized in the distance, of a girl warrior out of the fifteenth century, the bronze mount of the Maid of Orleans rearing at Ninety-third Street from a pedestal set with fragments from Rheims Cathedral, where she waited trial and death; the up-thrust of spires out of the thirteenth century, the spires of Riverside Church that were modeled on the Cathedral at Chartres; the stark outline atop a bluff to the north of the simple square watchtower of the medieval monastery of St. Michel de Cuxa that was now called the Cloisters—these only made more complete the effect for which Moses had been striving: that of a wall built to guard a city as walls had guarded cities during the Middle Ages, specifically the German cities whose walls, along with those of the medieval fortress-castles of the Raubritter, or "robber barons," had lined the Rhine and fired Moses' imagination when, as a romantic young student, he had so often cruised that river.

  Not that the West Side Improvement was just a fortification, of course. It was far more than that. Along its lowest level, at the edge of the water, were lines of moving vehicles and, once one realized they were part of the Improvement, one saw that to call it medieval was to slight it. The towering battlements were combined with an entranceway to the city, an entranceway whose Riverside Park portion alone was six miles long, an entranceway framed in marble and granite and flanked by the tombs of dead heroes—an entranceway of a size and grandeur that could only be Roman, a Via Triumphalis like those along which had ridden the conquering Generals of the Empire, on their way to receive the laurel wreath from the Caesar.

  A fortification? An entranceway? The West Side Improvement was also a park—a lovely park. The retaining walls formed a series of terraces rising from the water, and the terraces were lush, green, tree-shaded lawns. Through the shadows of the arches of the Seventy-ninth Street boat basin one could see a fountain splashing coolly. If the West Side Improvement was grandeur, it was also beauty. The scene was just as Robert Moses had envisioned it twenty years before, even to the bright white sails of the boats tied up in the gracefully curving marinas.

  Moses was more than satisfied with his handiwork. The sheer cliffs of the forest-topped Palisades, opposite the sheer cliffs of Manhattan's apartment houses, were "the most magnificent river wall anywhere," he felt, and the wall he had created was its match. Now that it was completed, the Hudson vista was the greatest river vista in the world. The Rhine? The Rhine with its "silly, quaint, Wagnerian castles"? Thanks to the West Side Improvement, the Hudson absolutely dwarfed the Rhine. Penning an introduction to a brochure describing the Improvement, he sounded like the Bob Moses of his youth.

  This, then, is the Hudson waterfront celebrated by Masefield and O'Neill, where the fabled liners and cargo vessels thrust their prows into the very vitals of the city. . . . Tycoons overlook the upper and lower bays and the Jersey piers. Droves of cars zoom or crawl through Riverside Park and down the West Side Highway and view

  the matchless, unspoiled Palisades. By comparison, the castled Rhine with its Lorelei is a mere trickle between vineclad slopes. I wonder sometimes whether our people, so obsessed with the seamy interior of Manhattan, deserve the Hudson. What a waterfront! What an island to buy for $24!

  The city's pride matched Moses'. The reporters chauffeured over the Improvement before its opening to the public were all too familiar with the previous route into New York from the north, the wearisome stop-and-go gear shifting over the narrow, bumpy streets of Yonkers, a traffic light on every coiner to increase the irritation, the trip through the Bronx down a Broadway made dismal and dingy by the small stores and grimy tenements that lined it and by the shadows and harsh rumbles of the IRT elevated tracks overhead. They, like other drivers, had had to wonder as they approached the Broadway drawbridge whether they would be in for an in
terminable delay there. And when they crossed the bridge, they had to resume the crawl downtown on Riverside Drive or Broadway in endless lines of traffic. The approaches to New York had been agonizingly slow, and ugly as well, a mean and meager entrance to a great city.

  Now they skimmed down to New York along the broad Saw Mill River Parkway, all sweeping curves and spacious straightaways, lined with woods, underbrushy and shadowy and deep, that drenched them in autumn colors, and with clearings in which black boulders sat dramatically in the center of sun-dappled grass. The bridges that carried intersecting traffic over the parkway so that its users should not be disturbed were little Moses masterpieces, each faced with stone carefully selected to blend in with nearby rock formations, each subtly different in design from any other, mere hints in the midst of a natural setting of the shaping hand of man, mere hints of what the parkway was carrying them towards. Yonkers was just something off beyond the trees; slopes shielded motorists from even a glimpse of that unlovely municipality until the parkway had almost reached the Bronx line, where its name changed from Saw Mill River to Henry Hudson (the signs announcing the change were made gay by cartoon silhouettes, done in wrought iron, of Hudson's Half Moon), and while at that point there was an unavoidable minute or two of small houses visible atop the slope, the parkway ducked quickly into the shelter of Van Cortlandt Park and was back among trees and grass again. It was not until Van Cortlandt was behind the reporters that houses became a permanent part of the scenery, and then they were at first only on one—the right, or river—side of the road and they were at first just small, private homes, fieldstone-covered, for this was Riverdale, no more than another hint, just slightly broader than the bridges, of what was to come.

  Flashing through Riverdale toward the steep cliffs of the Harlem River, the hints became broader still, the private homes flanking the parkway on both sides now, crowding closer to it and closer together, three low apartment houses becoming part of the scene in Spuyten Duyvil, but there were still plenty of trees and grass. Leaping the Harlem on the Henry Hudson Bridge, the reporters saw the Broadway bridge far below them to the left, and, beyond it, a glimpse of the city, but the glimpse, cut short by the approaching bluffs of Inwood Hill, was fleeting and the city was hazy in the

  distance and hundreds of feet below them, and the bluffs were towering and filled with trees, and while the parkway might be in the city now, it was not yet of the city. Leaving the bridge toll booths, the parkway curved abruptly to the right, down and around a great craggy bluff that towered above it, and even that fleeting glimpse was gone and what was in front of the reporters as their car passed through the bluff's deep shadow was only trees and, seen through the trees, a bright river and beyond the river the Palisades.

  And then they were around the curve and there was New York.

  First there was steelwork and concrete in the sky, immense towers, thick cables, a roadbed above the water—the George Washington Bridge, looming above the leaves, casting a dark shadow over the parkway so that the reporters' limousine rolled across it as if it were a gigantic welcome mat to a gigantic city. Then, above the parkway to the left, there were apartment houses behind the leaves. And suddenly the city was beside the reporters, looming over them; atop the great cliffs of rock were cliffs of brick, the massed apartment houses of Riverside Drive. Far away to the left, there were the spires of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, their very visibility at such a distance an evocation of the immensity of the canyons of skyscrapers toward which the limousine was headed. Ahead of the reporters was the panorama of the harbor, serene water turned busy, churned by the giant screws of giant ships, dented by piers jutting out from shore.

  If there was drama in this entrance to the city, there was, even within the city's confines, beauty, too, and dignity. As the limousine headed downtown toward the reporters' offices, the parkway hugged the river's edge and the water was broad on the road's right hand. The Palisades across the river stayed largely unspoiled for precious minutes. Between the parkway and the apartment houses to the left were the terraces Moses had built and planted with trees and lawn, and the retaining walls of the terraces, the walls that flanked the parkway, were masonry and marble, and their copings were of granite, and above on Riverside Drive were Grant's Tomb and the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, friezes and colonnades. And even when there was no more beauty or dignity, there was still convenience. When the Henry Hudson Parkway became the West Side Elevated Highway and there were no more trees or terraces, and the Jersey shore, what could be seen of it through a dense industrial haze, was a panorama of all that was wrong with the Industrial Era, and the view to the left, toward the city, was of railroad yards and warehouses and traffic-jammed streets, the reporters could still realize that they were not on those streets, that they were speeding downtown without having even to pause.

  The reporters rhapsodized. "The most beautiful drive in the world," wrote one from the Daily News. "Always the man in the car has the river in full view," marveled one from the Times. Simeon Strunsky said in "Topics of the Times": "The West Side Highway as a name . . . utterly fails to do justice to the . . . new masterpiece out of Robert Moses' atelier. . . . The traveler comes and goes in a setting of beauty which [it] is not too much to call intoxicating." (Strunsky was also to write: "The poet Wordsworth stood

  on Waterloo Bridge and said about the Thames view that earth had no finer sight; but Wordsworth should have stood at the north end of the Henry Hudson Bridge and looked south and west*.")

  Moses had promised that the new road would "eliminate" the West Side's north-south traffic jams. He announced that the trip from Canal Street to the city line, which had previously required sixty-eight minutes, would henceforth take only twenty-six. And none of the journalists had the slightest doubt that Moses was correct. "It is a veritable motorist's dream," said the Journal-American. The Times marveled that "the gleaming new concrete ribbon" would not only "afford immediate and measurable relief to traffic congestion on Riverside Drive" but would enable motorists to drive all the way from Canal Street "nearly to Poughkeepsie without having to stop for a traffic light or slow up for an intersection."

  And journalists understood that Moses' project was not just a view or a road. "The West Side Improvement is much more than that," the Sun editorialized. "It gives the island not only a new major highway and a new shore line along part of its length but park land and . . . playgrounds." The Journal-American said it provided "a fountain of health and pleasure from which New York's people and their children and guests will be drinking long years to come." The Brooklyn Eagle emphasized that "after decades of fruitless effort, the railroad tracks are covered at last." In fact, said the Times, "all that has been unsightly along the Hudson—the railroad, the ash dumps, the coal yards—has been swept away or completely disguised."

  The statistics in the thick packets of press releases that Moses' men handed to the reporters were, even to men accustomed to press releases filled with statistics, almost too big to grasp. To create the Riverside Park portion of his dream alone, Robert Moses had poured into the six miles of muddy wasteland 1,250,000 cubic yards of stone riprap, 3,000,000 cubic yards of hydraulic fill, 296,400 linear feet of steel and concrete piling, 6,800,-000 pounds of reinforcing steel, 1,912,000 bags of cement, 120,000 pounds of lead, 12,500 cubic yards of stone masonry, 1,600 cubic yards of granite and 220,000 cubic yards of topsoil and humus.

  But the reporters did their best to make the city grasp them. They pointed out that, as the Times put it, Moses had, in "the most extensive alteration of Manhattan's topography in recent history, put ... a highway . . . through an already overcrowded park with a substantial gain, instead of a loss, of recreational space"—a gain that amounted to the incredible total of 132 acres, an addition to the land area of crowded Manhattan Island worth, at current land values, $23,760,000. They pointed out that he had filled that space with fifteen tennis courts, seventeen playgrounds, twenty-three softball fields, thirty-ei
ght basketball courts, forty handball courts, 13,000 trees, 140,000 feet of footpaths and 350,000 shrubs.

  The most incredible statistic of all was not included in the press release. That was the cost of Moses' dream. His press releases stated that the cost was $24,000,000, but this figure bears no discernible relationship to reality, since even the most cursory examination of the cost—all that is possible, since Moses took care never to reveal it and its components are concealed in such

  a multitude of appropriations, citywide property assessments, borough property assessments, special Board of Estimate appropriations and federal contributions from twenty-two separate sources that thirty-seven years later it is unfeasible to attempt to compute them—reveals that the total cost of the West Side Improvement (including the elevated highway) was at least $180,-000,000 and perhaps as high as $218,000,000, an immense figure in Depression dollars. (The famous Boulder Dam, always cited as an example of spectacular New Deal expenditures, cost $76,000,000.) But New York's press did not attempt to analyze the cost, accepting, instead, Moses' $24,000,000 figure—and coupling it with the comment that for this expenditure the city had received in return land worth $23,760,000. Out of thirteen daily newspapers, not one had the slightest doubt that the West Side Improvement was anything but an "improvement," an unalloyed improvement, an absolutely unmitigated blessing, to New York City.