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

by Caro, Robert A

  Hut McAneny persuaded Walter Binger to make a personal inspection. A day or two later, dinger was present at a mayoral reception at Gracie Mansion and noticed Moses talking earnestly to C. C. Burlingham. Later, Binger recalls, Burlingham said: "Bob Moses tells me that the fort is already largely demolished. He told me that so much of the fort has already been demolished that it carit be saved any more."

  "That's a goddamned lie, 11 Binger said.

  Burlingham replied, "That is very strong language for you to use, Waller. I'll have to sec it myself."

  "I got the key [to the fence around the park] and I took him out there the next day," Binger says. "It looked like a battlefield. There were great piles of debris, lie must have been all of ninety-five [actually eighty-eight]; he had a walking stick to help him along, but he jumped around like a goat. He was an amazing man. The fort was blocked from view by this pile of debris, He hail to climb this high mound, and he looked down and there was the whole damn fort below him! I said to him, 'All that was demolished was the Aquarium.'

  "CC was normally a great talker, but he didn't say anything for a while. He h.ui had great faith in Moses; he had believed in him. He was terribly sad." Finally, the old man turned away with a single sentence: "Weil, that's not what 1 was told." And the letter Burlingham wrote Moses the next da) also consisted of one sentence:

  "Dear Bob: MPavez trompc."

  "Two days latei/" Ringer says, "CC gets back a letter: 'Dear CC: Why pull tins Auatole Prance Stuff on me? It doesn't make it any better to be

  called a liar in French.' But he never attempted to deny it or anything." And he couldn't. To conceal his lie, Robert Moses had barred the city from its park for almost five years, but the lie had at last been uncovered. The fort stood—and McAneny's next trip was to the Herald Tribune, which sent an airplane over the site and published on its front page a photograph showing the fort intact.

  McAneny resumed his trips to Washington. One audience with President Truman was enough to enlist him on the side of the fort, and pressure on the new mayor, Democrat William O'Dwyer, was increased until he agreed to ask the State Legislature for an act enabling the city to deed the fort to the federal government. The Legislature refused. McAneny went to Albany every week for months.

  (He recalls: "Everyone up there would say when we approached them, 'Mr. Moses doesn't want this.'

  " 'Well, of course he doesn't want it.'

  " 'Well, we're going to stick to him,' etcetera and so on. 'He's a great man: he must know what he's talking about.' ")

  In 1946, Congress was ready to pass the bill designating Fort Clinton a national monument. But, recalls Binger, "this would take six or eight months." Moses moved faster. At four o'clock one Friday afternoon, he got a new demolition authorization from the Board of Estimate. (O'Dwyer betrayed the reformers; McAneny confided, "He's not a very solid sort of person.") Leaving City Hall, the reformers huddled desperately. Binger had been toying with the idea of bringing a new suit—on the grounds that the fort was a monument and hence permission was required from the Municipal Art Commission for its destruction.

  Says Binger: "I went to Paul Windels and I said, T have got to have some money right away to get a suit [started].' Paul suggested I call Robert [Dowling, president of the City Trust Company]. I said, T need money right away.' He said, 'How much do you need?' I said, 'How do I know? I need money for a top lawyer to take it through two or three courts. It'll cost a couple of thousand dollars.' He said, 'Okay, go ahead.' "

  Binger hired Frederick Van Pelt Bryan, who "called Windels and said, 'I'm going to court Monday on this.' And that's when Paul Windels saved the fort. He said, 'Are you crazy? There won't be anything left of this fort Monday morning. He'll demolish it over the weekend.' This was all on a Friday, remember. 'You bring this to court in half an hour.' " Bryan did, and persuaded a Supreme Court Justice to sign an injunction, which was handed to Moses that evening.

  How right Windels had been was proven when the reformers rushed to Battery Park the next morning to see if any damage had been done. In the brief hours before the injunction had been served on Moses, Binger recalls, he "had already burned those great doors." But McAneny showed again—year after year, in Washington and in Albany and in City Hall (and in one meeting with O'Dwyer in Gracie Mansion in which, upbraiding the Mayor for breaking his word on the fort, he spoke to him in words so eloquent that, Windels states, "if anything could have recalled that man to

  a sense of honor, George McAneny would have done it that day")—why young reformers had once stared at him with awe as he strode through the Bureau of Municipal Research. All Moses' lawyers couldn't outfox the old man; the purpose of the suit was delay—delay to stall demolition until Congress could pass a bill ordering the preservation of the fort as a "National Historic Monument"—and McAneny delayed, until, on July 18, 1950, almost ten years after Moses had announced that he was going to demolish Fort Clinton, the bill was passed, along with a $166,750 appropriation sufficient to restore it, including the doors Moses had burned. The old fort was saved.

  The successful conclusion of the effort to save Castle Clinton was a victory of wide importance and interest in the cause of historical preservation [said Secretary of the Interior Oscar L. Chapmanl. After . . . years of struggle and debate in New York City, in the courts, in the State Legislature and in Congress, the saving of Castle Clinton evidences a new and deeper recognition of the need of preserving the diminishing landmarks of our history as an essential part of our national heritage.

  If those words were bitter to Moses, they were sweet to George McAneny. Gentlemen of his school, however, did not forget their manners even in moments of triumph. To a reporter who telephoned him with the news and asked for comment, McAneny gave two words, "Most gratifying"—and a long list, which he asked the reporter to print, of the names of all the men who deserved credit for the victory.

  McAneny didn't list himself, but his friends rectified the omission. Stanley Isaacs said it most simply: "McAneny beat Moses."

  If the reformers had scored a victory over Robert Moses, however, its dimensions were rather narrow.

  Fort Clinton had been saved, but not the Aquarium. And the city therefore had to pay dearly for Robert Moses' revenge.

  It had to pay dearly even in dollars and cents. To persuade the Board of Estimate to let him demolish the old Aquarium, Moses had guaranteed that a new one could be built for $2,000,000, and that the New York Zoological Society could and would foot the entire bill. In truth, however, there was never any real chance that the Zoological Society could raise $2,000,000—not that $2,000,000 was the amount that really had to be raised, anyway; the Zoological Society would later disclose that the real figure was $6,500,000. After La Guardia had vetoed the Bronx Zoo site, Moses picked one at Coney Island—and persuaded the Mayor to spend $1,000,000 additional in public funds to acquire it. The Zoological Society still could not raise the cash. When a new Aquarium was finally built, the cost of its construction had risen to $10,000,000—and every cent was paid by the city, so that satisfying Moses' private grudge with the reformers cost the city's taxpayers $11,000,000. Since he placed high admission fees on

  the new Aquarium—the old one was free, of course—and there seemed no prospect that these would ever be removed, the people of the city would actually be paying for Moses' revenge forever—or at least for as much of forever as the eye could, in 1974, reasonably foresee.

  As for costs that could not be measured in money, the people of the city might be paying those forever, too. The Coney Island Aquarium wasn't opened until 1955, fourteen years after the Battery Aquarium was closed, so that an entire generation of New York children grew up without an opportunity of visiting any aquarium at all. As important as the exhibits in the old Aquarium, moreover, had been its ambience—a pungent and warm blend of age and familiarity and long affection and human scale, of busts of old singers and the flash of bright fish, of gloomy corners where one could neck with one's date, of being easy
to get to and free, so that people could simply walk in as if it belonged to them. One might admire the new Aquarium; one could never love it.

  For many New Yorkers, of course, the atmosphere in the new Aquarium wasn't going to matter very much. For the high admission fees Moses set for it insured that many New Yorkers were going to be able to visit it infrequently if at all. The poignance of this situation was accentuated by the location of the Aquarium at Coney Island, the lone bathing beach reachable by public transportation and therefore the one to which, because of Moses' class-separating policies, the city's poor were herded.

  The city's middle and upper classes found it easy to use the Aquarium, of course. Moses had built a large parking field next to it so that they could come without using the subway.

  But they didn't come. On weekdays and on non-beach weekends—on days when attendance at the old Aquarium had run, day after day, 7,000 per day—one can walk through bleak echoing halls and see only a handful of other human beings. Out of Robert Moses' grudge, the city got a new Aquarium, for which it paid $11,000,000. It did not, however, get an Aquarium it could use.

  The reformers' victory was not even complete in the case of the fort they had saved.

  The popular Aquarium within its walls had made the fort a busy, bustling place. Without the Aquarium, it was a circle of walls. As one perceptive observer put it, "Now it is [a monument]: to be looked at, but not used. Having achieved the status of Art (Architectural division), it is to be revered as a saintly relic, not involved in the life of the city." It is still history as it sits there in Battery Park, but it is dead history.

  In his "Moses-approved" biography of Robert Moses, Cleveland Rodgers wrote that "the ten-year battle was ended, as in the Battery Bridge vs. Tunnel fight, by the intervention of the federal government with its long-range guns and superior financial resources." That analysis was correct. No weapon the city possessed—not executive, legislative or judicial—had been powerful enough to stand off Moses' attacks on one of its most beloved

  Xlic Aquarium fight only reinforced the conclusion to which ~e : Ehe most perceptive reformers had come after the Crossing fight: tW m Moses' chosen spheres of activity, the city no longer had much

  ::.v:.. ;t: its :-' its::';.

  7 -Js conclusion was made all the more bitter to the reformers because of their new insight into the character of this creature they believed they lad played so large a role in creating.

  Some of the old reformers still admired Moses, mainly because they fdt that corruption, politics and red tape were so thick in the city that only a man of Moses' almost incredible en agj drive and strength of will could hack his way through it ''Bob Moses is an extremely capable man," Stanley Isaacs, always scrupulously even handed, would say in the same oral history in which he detailed so many of Moses r injustices and mistakes. "Properly :;i:;;::t: ite :: i zrtr ~se: :t :r.e :::;.

  But these reformers were now in a very small minor::;. The verdict of -_-.---- -;-':;-; :: ;-: :. '. - 1- .-"..-.t.-r.: rr.f. trr.en: :- Moses was more harsh. "He . :ie most inetirica] man I have ...: met," Walter Binger said He is a brilliant guy with a highly defective character." "He is the original smear artis:." Lawrence Orton said. "Like Hitler." Albert Bard had said of him because of his technique of making one demand, and as soon as it was met, making another, and. in years in which the name of the dread dictator glared blackly a: everj American from the front pages of the daily newspaper, this harsh comparison was drawn over and over again. ''He is a liar." Walter Binger said. ""And he is a liar the way Hitier was a liar. He doesn't lie because he can't help it. He lies as a matter of policy." The very overstatement in such remarks from men generally given to understatement reveals the intensity of revulsion many reformers felt for the man they had once idolized. William Chanler had used a word out of an earlier age— ;i bullyrag"" He was just a natural bully")—to describe one of his tactics, and many reformers, men out of an earlier age. now used that expression in talking about Moses. They understood at last the fallacy of believing that his lack of interest in money automatically signified interest in serving the pubtic—and that that was his only interest. Thev had come to see his other interest, and to understand that in the long run that interest might, when present in a public official with immense, all but uncontrollable power, turn out to be more inimical to the city than financial greed. Al Smith's close friend John A. Coleman, the multimillionaire "Pope of Wall Street" who came out of the Lower East Side with limited education but unlimited shrewdness, said: "Some men aren't satisfied unless they have caviar. Moses would have been happy with a ham sandwich—and power."

  and because the lining segments were not suitable for war production. But the WPB was understandably skittish about public reaction if the continuation of work on the tunnel was spotlighted. After Moses switched on the spotlight, a furious La Guardia declared that his recommendation "does not represent the policy of this administration. ... In the first place, that 'available steel' is not steel. It is cast iron." But Moses reiterated his recommendation, the press reprinted it and the WPB accepted it. "I'm glad to see that they're doing the right thing," Moses crowed.

  All through the war, the tunnel lay empty and unused, a vast, hollow, echoing cavern beneath the waters of the Upper Bay, and its toll booths stood silent, earning no revenue.

  And the Tunnel Authority needed revenue. If the war-caused traffic drought could bring even Triborough, with five years of profitable operations behind it and the combined income of six toll-producing facilities to draw upon, to the verge of economic collapse, its impact was even more damaging on an authority whose single usable facility had been completed barely a year before Pearl Harbor. The Tunnel Authority's income did not cover the interest on its bonds. Because the Authority had $4,000,000 (the $4,000,000 Singstad had saved on the cost of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel) in the bank to help pay the interest until the war ended, and because the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which had purchased the bonds, was willing to wait for the balance ("This is a forty- or fifty-year project," RFC officials told Authority general manager Fearson Shortridge), the interest shortfall would not have been significant—had it not been for Moses. He used it as an opening to employ with La Guardia the technique he had so often been accused of employing against anyone who stood in his way. His own experts' analyses, Moses said, showed that the Queens-Midtown bonds, purchased by the RFC for $48,000,000, would never be resalable at face value. Even after the war, no one would pay more than $20,000,000 for them. And when the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel opened, he told the Mayor, the situation would be even worse; that tunnel, he said flatly, "cannot sustain $57,000,000 in bonds." "Someone, presumably the federal government, will have to stand a loss on the two projects of close to $50,000,000," if, indeed, the second project could ever be finished at all without tremendous new financing, a prospect about which he had serious doubts. And, Moses told the Mayor, he had ascertained that the reason for this impending disaster was Singstad's lack of engineering ability, combined with management so inept that its disclosure would cause a scandal. The Tunnel Authority, he said—hammering home the word repeatedly in confidential memos to the Mayor—was in a real "mess." And by 1944 he was beginning to hint strongly that there was only one way out of the mess: to "rescue" the Tunnel Authority by letting Triborough take it over.

  "Mess? What mess?" Ole Singstad demanded when the author used the word during an interview. "I didn't know we were in any mess at all. I didn't hear anything about it." Told about Moses' memos—he had never known of their existence before—he shouted, pounding his desk, "There was no mess! We didn't have to be rescued at all. We were not in financial

  difficulties! Certainly not!" Though Singstad's statement is an exaggeration, so was Moses'; the Tunnel Authority's difficulties were no worse than Tri-borough's, were due not to mismanagement—its operations were actually far more economical than Moses'—but to war, and were obviously curable by the same medicine that would cure Triborough's: peace. Letters fro
m RFC Chairman Jesse Jones to Singstad, moreover, indicate that Jones had no doubts about this.

  Even had he known about Moses' innuendos, however, Singstad did not possess the entree to La Guardia that would have enabled him to disprove them, and the Mayor, racing around the country as national civil defense head, had no time to spend learning the truth for himself. Mayoral memos began to display marked irritation with the Tunnel Authority.

  And then Moses was presented with even juicier grist for his mill.

  Try as they would, his bloodhounds had not been able to come up with even a hint of wrongdoing by Singstad. But in 1941 someone did bring to Moses a hint of wrongdoing by Singstad's brother-in-law—and that was all Moses needed.

  Twelve years before, while the Port Authority, for which Singstad was then chief consulting engineer, was considering plans for the Manhattan entrance plaza of the Lincoln Tunnel, the brother-in-law had purchased eight tenements in the area finally selected. Singstad swore that he had no financial interest in the purchase, that he had never heard of the purchase until after it was completed, that when he had learned about it—during a casual conversation—he had violently disapproved, and in fact had forced his brother-in-law to reduce his asking price from $365,000 to $165,000. The conclusive piece of evidence, to an impartial observer, may have been the fact that Singstad did not want the plaza located in the area in which his brother-in-law's tenements were located; his recommendation, for which he fought for two years, would have left them uncondemned—and his brother-in-law with no profit at all. The tenements were condemned only because the Authority overruled Singstad and decided to locate the plaza where its chief engineer, Othmar H. Ammann, wanted it. Two intensive investigations —one by the Port Authority, one by the Tunnel Authority—turned up not a single piece of evidence to prove that the peppery little Norwegian's statements were anything less than completely true. The single damaging fact was his failure to tell the Port Authority when he learned his brother-in-law owned the property, and, says Windels, his attorney, the engineer had a reason for not telling: "He was afraid that someone like Moses would find out and smear him with it."