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

by Caro, Robert A

  Moses, already far too powerful, more power still. In a formal "Memorandum of Understanding" and an exchange of letters on September 7 and 8, 1938, Moses agreed to use Triborough's surplus to build the $12,000,000 elevated highway and to add $22,000,000 to the RFC contribution to build the tunnel. In return La Guardia agreed that the city would use the PWA's $12,000,000 for the Belt Parkway and would, over the next three years, complete the parkway with $16,000,000 of its own funds. And the Mayor further agreed to ask the Legislature to allow Triborough to take over the Tunnel Authority's Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the Tunnel Authority's authorization to build the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel—and the Tunnel Authority itself.

  With the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel firmly in his grasp, Moses made a slight modification in its design: It became the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge.

  The change reflected the importance Moses had come to place on bankers' values—a bridge could be built slightly more cheaply than a tunnel, would cost slightly less to operate and could, per dollar spent, carry slightly more traffic—and his eagerness to build impressive monuments to himself; a bridge was, after all, the most impressive of monuments ("the finest architecture made by man") as well as one whose life was "measureless"; a tunnel, he said in public, "is merely a tiled, vehicular bathroom smelling faintly of monoxide"; in private, an aide recalls, "he used to say, 'What's a tunnel but a hole in the ground?'—and RM wasn't interested in holes in the ground." And the change had the additional value of tying La Guardia even more closely to his agreement with Moses because it appealed to the Mayor's romantic, artistic conception of himself as a "painter" of New York —as well as to his own not inconsiderable interest in monuments. "RM took the Mayor out on Jack's [Madigan's] yacht into the harbor off Wall Street at sunset one day—and you know how beautiful it is there at sunset— and told him that he was going to use this setting for the biggest, most beautiful bridge in the world, and the Little Flower really ate it up," the aide recalls. And Moses soon found that he needed every tie on the Mayor that he could get. For the Brooklyn-Battery project aroused more opposition than any previous Moses proposal.

  The opposition came first from Joseph D. McGoldrick, the reformer-professor whom La Guardia had drafted out of his Columbia classroom to become City Comptroller, and who had previously been the unquestioning ally of the Mayor he idolized.

  "If you don't watch [Moses] he's going to bankrupt the city," McGoldrick's predecessor had warned him. By 1938 the Comptroller felt that that prophecy had been just about fulfilled, at least in terms of the city's ability to finance new large-scale public works or maintain old ones. Increases in the city's obligations for debt service to pay for such construction and maintenance—obligations made necessary to a large extent by Moses— had boosted the city's annual expenses to a level at which its annual revenues barely covered them. The capital budget situation was even more ominous.

  Not only was there little margin left under the constitutional debt limit, but commitments made for future public works projects—mostly Moses' projects—had insured that there would be hardly any money available in 1939 or 1940 either. The city would be able to pay its $16,000,000 share of Moses' tunnel-highway-parkway proposal only by eliminating most non-Moses public works and all large-scale maintenance jobs for both years; the canceling of the public works would be bad enough; the cancellation of the maintenance would inevitably saddle the city in later years with even larger bills for major repair work that preventive maintenance would have made unnecessary. McGoldrick felt that such a course did not make sense.

  During his interim appointment, in 1934, the Comptroller had listened to local delegations pleading for better hospitals, better schools, better libraries, and for the creation of desperately needed child health care centers in the slums. Now, back on the Board of Estimate after three years, he was listening to the same groups plead for the same things—and it was glaringly apparent to him that the city's progress in building roads and parks had not been matched in other areas in which physical construction was needed. Hospitals, he felt, were "a disgrace." "Many schools were fairly ancient; we had some that had been built right after the Civil War and were still in use. We had schools ninety years old. We had one school—PS 35— that was a hundred years old." In the wealthiest city of the wealthiest nation in the world, 290 schools were not even fireproof. Despite his admiration for La Guardia, he could not help noticing that, despite the Mayor's annual promises, in four years not a single child care center had been built. As for mass transportation facilities, the city's failure to build new subways to service rapidly developing outlying areas was only part of the problem. The subways already in existence were beginning to require extensive preventive maintenance. Without it, their deterioration would accelerate. The imbalance in the spending of city funds must be corrected, he felt, to meet other needs besides roads and parks. Taking $7,000,000 allocated for schools and hospitals and allocating it to a highway was not the way to do it.

  La Guardia had told McGoldrick that he agreed with the need for more balance, and that he was planning to act on it. Now, however, when Moses suddenly requested Board of Estimate approval for the Circumferential Parkway, La Guardia supported him. And McGoldrick, who had suppressed previous doubts about Moses' proposals on "an assumption that he was almost always right," found himself, during "some long nights of soul searching," re-examining that assumption. At first he suppressed his doubts; he gave the PWA the certification required from the city's chief financial officer of the city's willingness to pay any unexpected costs on the project. But late on the evening of October 11, less than thirty-six hours before the Board vote, the pudgy, bespectacled, mild-mannered little Irishman issued a public statement that was the closest thing to a cri de conscience uttered by a top city official since Moses had come to power within its borders:

  Reluctant as I am to suggest that we consider postponement of the Circumferential Parkway ... it is my duty to point out that [if it is built] the city will be brought to

  the virtual exhaustion of its debt-incurring capacity, with no margin remaining for normal capital growth of its existing facilities. . . . No one can dispute the vital need for keeping the city's plant in efficient condition. We have a stupendous investment in public buildings, bridges and equipment which must be protected. Unless this plant is properly maintained we will undergo a repetition of the era when broken-down equipment and neglected buildings cost the taxpayers many needless millions in increased costs of operation and maintenance.

  As for new construction:

  Not a single new school, not a single new hospital, not a new police station or flrehouse, not even a baby health station, would be provided [in either 1939 or 1940].. . . These are essentials, and in my considered judgment, we cannot embark upon new ideas until we have met these basic needs.

  McGoldrick could cast only three of the sixteen votes on the Board of Estimate. The next day, however, La Guardia's two other Fusion allies on the Board, City Council President Newbold Morris and Manhattan Borough President Stanley M. Isaacs, announced they would vote with the Comptroller. Together the trio could cast eight votes—enough to keep the parkway from being approved.

  Employing his usual strategy, Moses attacked not McGoldrick's arguments but McGoldrick. "What has happened since the application [certification] was signed, sealed and delivered by the Comptroller himself?" he demanded the next day. "What is behind the Comptroller's move and his swift change of front?"

  It was the kind of attack that McGoldrick was later to admit "did intimidate people from debating with him—and intimidated me, too, quite likely." Moses knew perfectly well why he had changed his mind, the Comptroller was to tell the author. He had explained his feelings to the Park Commissioner at length. Moses knew there was no corrupt or sinister motive. But, he says, Moses certainly made it sound as if there was.

  Nevertheless, McGoldrick refused to back down. So the next morning, as City Hall bustled with preparations for the crucial Board of Estimate session, c
ars crammed with Park Department and Triborough Authority employees began pulling up outside. A rumor suddenly swept the Hall: Moses himself was in the building—closeted with the Mayor in secret conference. The Mayor had not attended a Board session in months, always sending a deputy in his place, but now, as McGoldrick, waiting nervously for the meeting to begin, sat in his high-backed, burgundy leather chair near the center of the Board's raised horseshoe, watching Moses' claque pack onto the benches below him, the figure that dropped into the empty chair right beside him at precisely 10:30 a.m., with a fierce sideways glower, and opened the meeting with a pound of the gavel that to McGoldrick's ears sounded like the crash of fate, was that of the Little Flower himself.

  Moses had not overestimated the need for the Mayor's presence. With his supporters—overflowing the Board chamber and jamming the corridors outside all the way back to the "hanging staircase"—cheering his every point, he pulled out all the old arguments, telling the Board—falsely—that

  the $12,000,000 would not be made available by the PWA for any other purpose and that therefore the "real issue" was whether or not the city was going to lose $12,000,000 in federal money. When McGoldrick, his voice almost lost in vicious booing, tried to explain that he was suggesting postponing the project, not killing it, the Park Commissioner, pounding his fist down on the lectern, shot back:

  If this thing goes down now, it is dead, and it is dead for a long, long time. I don't know who will revive it. Don't kid yourself about this. You are not putting this off. You are settling it one way or another. No member of this board will see this project started if it is not done now. That is because the federal government has given its promise for a $12,000,000 grant, because the engineering staffs of the city, state and federal government have been sitting up day and night working on the plans and because those plans, approved and in official form, are lying on the Mayor's desk right now.

  But McGoldrick refused to yield—and neither would Morris or Isaacs. La Guardia had to call the Board into executive session behind closed doors.

  The doors remained closed for more than four hours. When they opened, and the Board filed back onto the horseshoe dais, it approved unanimously the expenditure of $16,000,000 for the Circumferential Parkway—and, to enable the city to spend the money, eliminated from the list of previously approved projects $8,000,000 worth of schools and hospital improvements, $5,000,000 in subway extensions and $3,000,000 in other projects.

  What had happened behind the closed doors? Asked years later, McGoldrick said that La Guardia had placed the issue on a personal basis, telling the three Fusion officials flatly: "You've got to go along with me on this." Refusing such an appeal would, McGoldrick said, have meant a complete split with the Mayor, after the new Fusion administration had been in office only ten months. And that, McGoldrick felt, was something New York could afford even less than a Belt Parkway, for such a split would make impossible the truly sweeping reforms which a united Fusion administration might accomplish.

  "We changed because—you know, La Guardia was very intolerant of differences. We knew him well enough to know this would blow things right up. [We] knew that we couldn't at that early stage have a break with the Mayor—it would have thrown the whole administration into chaos."

  And, McGoldrick admitted with a quiet candor, there was also "the personal factor." "Both the Mayor and Moses were really angry that day," he recalled. Standing up to Moses in a rage was intimidating enough. Standing up to Moses and La Guardia simultaneously—in a room outside whose doors hundreds of their cheering supporters were waiting—was, when coupled with the other considerations involved, a lot to ask of any man.

  Moses' disclosure that the Brooklyn-Battery Crossing was going to be not a tunnel but a bridge came on January 22, 1939, three months after the Board of Estimate's approval of the parkway. (More precisely, according to

  the announcement, there were to be two bridges, a pair of giant suspension spans in tandem, linked in the middle of mile-wide Upper New York Bay by a joint anchorage pier near Governor's Island, descending to street level in Brooklyn on Hamilton Avenue, near the terminus of the planned Elevated Highway, sloping down in Manhattan into Battery Park, where a series of giant piers planted in the park would carry a low-level causeway above the park to meet a planned southward extension of the West Side Highway.) For three days after the disclosure there was silence; not a word of comment was uttered for publication by any citizen or public official.

  And then, on January 25, the storm broke.

  This was no protest that was going to go unheard. This was no circulating of petitions by a group of housewives out in Flushing, no attempt by some neighborhood chamber of commerce in the Rockaways to persuade their local assemblyman to use all his influence to induce one of Moses' lower-ranking aides to grant them the boon of a ten-minute hearing. This was a cry, first of disbelief and then of sheer outrage, from New York's most prestigious and influential private citizens, from "Gotham's gentry," the aristocracy—of wealth and talent both—of the greatest city in the New World. This was a cry of outrage, moreover, from that segment of the city's aristocracy which held the city in deepest affection, from those individuals who formed the backbone of New York's legendary Good Government movement, who had proven in long days attending Board of Estimate sessions and long evenings studying statistics or writing reports for the Citizens Union or the City Club that "men are moved by things other than just narrow self-interest," whose influence in city affairs was therefore not only practical but moral—and political, too, since their very names symbolized reform and were, therefore, valuable not only on checks for campaign contributions but in headlines. This was a cry of outrage from men whose influence on New York's affairs could be measured by the fact that, four times since the turn of the century alone, they had, through the "fusion" movements that were the political embodiment of the reforming ethos, defeated an awesomely powerful political machine and had seated a candidate of their own choosing (most relevantly, in the present context, Fiorello Henry La Guardia) in the Mayor's chair; these were men who, in the affairs of the great city, had for decades held power such that they could regard it as no more than a footnote in their story that they had played a vital role, perhaps the decisive role, in making one Robert Moses Park Commissioner.

  Exton and Weinberg and other young reformers had attempted to explain to these men that Moses' projects were destroying many of the values that made life in the city livable, but these old generals of reform had, as a rule, not been familiar with many of the locales in question and therefore had not been able to appreciate the objections to projects that were certainly worthwhile according to the theories in which they had been schooled. But many of these leaders—most of them, in fact—worked near the Battery. Many of them had real estate interests in the area. Some lived across the bay in Brooklyn Heights. They were very familiar indeed with the locale of the Battery Crossing—with Battery Park, the Wall Street and Lower Man-

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  to see what tins Moses project would destroy.

  Some of the reasons behind their protest were selfish.

  Moses" announcement had been accompanied by an "artist"s rendering"

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  - , ; - - -_ , , - . -. - - ; ; : - :'■; .'. ;' ' '.-' ' v -~ ,-. :■ ;ir-j as extra lamppost. This impression had been created by "rendering** the from directly overhead—way overhead!—as it might be seen by a jmg and myopic pigeon. From this bird's-eye view, the bridge and its roaches, their height minimize d and only their flat roadways really visible, blended inconspicuously into the landscape. But in asking for Board of Estimate approval, Moses had to submit to the Board the actual for the bridge. Isaa: :opies to Ole Singstad and to Walter D.

  m engineer and reformer whom Isaacs had brought into city govern-Manhattan Commissioner of Borough Works. And after they had the plans called in reporters and told th
em what the bridge

  look like not to a bird but to a human being. The public might be interested to know. I ^id, that the proposed

  jb anchorage in Batter sible on Moses" rendering, would

  solid mass of stone and concrete equal in size to i :ry office

  ting. The approach ramp linking the bridge to the West Side Highway, up depicted on the rendering as a narrow path through Battery Park, d actually be a road wider than Fifth Avenue, a road supported on mse concrete piers, and it would cross the entire park—the entire lower f Manhattan Island—and curve around the . e of the island al-

  to Rector Street at heights ranging up to a hundred feet in the air. Not only would anchorage and piers obliterate a considerable portion of Battery Park, they—and the approach road—would block off much of the light not only from what was left of the park but also from the lower floors of every large office building they passed: because the approach ramp was really an elevated highway that would dominate the entire tip of Manhattan, it would depress real estate values throughout the er Many Good Govern-