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

by Caro, Robert A

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  i the trades' hard hats were no harder than • wore them- There therefore existed areas of

  ' '-.'-' ' ' -. ' '■' z Irish— "- '--.:. ~r .V-- --"- :.z necessity :: i :iV.: :':::: - New York - . '■-- ' . ' - -'i ■ -.. :i.s. ;: was. mes Beach- Van Arsdale and Brennan soon itracts there would be none of the tiresome opening up the locals" that eventually became a condition of employment —usually circumventable to be sure, but irritating nonethe-

  identity of The hunger that drove the construction workers could

  be satisfied only by the satisfaction of the hunger that drove Moses.

  - vstwar pay in the construction industry was good. But construction worker rk. And it takes a lot of construction to

  keep 255,000 men working. When there is no work, construction workers blame their union officials. When there is no work for too long—and it is remarkable how short a period of time an out-of-work hard-hat can consider too lon^—': get themselves new union officials. So incumbent leaders are cor : about where ne md the next year's, and

  the f olio win t zoing to be coming from. Thinking as they must in

  terms of employment for tens of thousands of men. they think only peripherally of prn ate instruction pro;. ection of the largest private office building will require the labor of perhaps a hundred men for a year or so. And, most important, union leaders have little if any influence over

  ate construction.

  But the construction of a large public work—a suspension bridge or a highv. >.—wfll require workers in the hundreds, for substantial periods of time; the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge—just the bridge proper, aside from its access roads—employed a daily average of 1.200 men for five years.* And, thanks to their political muscle, union leaders have vast influence over public construction. Union leaders are therefore constantly pressing for the scheduling of new public works. When employment is low. they are pressing for immediate ground breaking for new projects When employment is high. even when employment is full—even, in fact, when employment appears likely to be full for some years to come—they are pressing, having learned how long a "lead time" a large-scale public work requires, for the scheduling, planning and contract letting for future public works. Of one thing a public official in New York can be sure: the building trades are always pressing for public works; in 1959. they were worrying that New York might not get the World's Fair, which, with planned Fair access highways, would employ tens of thousands of men. No sooner had the Fair been awarded to

  ■■■■ York than they were worrying about what would happen when, five years hence, the Fair was over; on the very day that the full five-vear schedule of Fair-connected highway construction contracts—the biggest most lucrative

  ♦A total of 10,000 men worked on the bridge at one time or another.

  schedule in the history of New York or any other metropolis—was released, a building trades official happened to be talking about another matter to -a reporter, who confessed himself puzzled about his lack of glee. "Jesus," the union official said, "just think when this is over—what's going to take up the slack then?" It was just as important to the union leaders as to Moses that government accomplish, build, Get Things Done—on a big scale.

  The city government couldn't build on that scale. It couldn't afford it. Neither, in general, could the state. And those projects that the city or state did decide to build were constantly being delayed by the red tape of bureaucrats and by what the Van Arsdales and Brennans regarded as the timidity of public officials so "scared" of offending voters that they listened to "the nuts, the protesters" instead of "pushing ahead" with the laying of concrete and the erection of steel that meant "progress."

  Only Moses—and the Port Authority and the federal government— possessed the financial resources to build on the desired scale. And the Van Arsdales and Brennans knew that Moses, as City Construction Coordinator, controlled the flow of federal funds into the city, and, for almost a decade after the war, possessed enough power so that the Port Authority needed his okay on most major projects within the city. And the Van Arsdales and Brennans were impressed not only by his money but by his will. In Robert Moses, they found a man who understood what was really important. Ask Pete Brennan what he thinks of him and out tumbles the clearest revelation of what he meant to New York's quarter of a million hard-hats.

  I wish he was seventy years younger! We need him! You need guys like him and they're not coming along. Look at his record! It's a very good record in the building field. And the relation with our industry is very good. He always thinks big—I mean, everything he does, nothing's done in a small potatoes way.

  Some people might say he's just a coarse old man, but it's just a question of getting things done. Moses always had the opposition—picketing and people lying down in the street and all that garbage—but Moses went ahead and did it. That's the trouble with all those politicians today: they worry about things like that.

  Sometimes people have to be tough with you. How the hell else you gonna get it done? Today they have fights over every park, every road, every playground—you say who the hell can be against a playground for kids, but the nuts, the protesters—they're against them. Playgrounds used to be like motherhood, but today they even attack motherhood. The thing about Moses is he's a guy who gets things done. [With him] things are getting done, and we're getting some benefit out of it.

  Benefit. On a Moses job it wasn't just fringe. There was little or no double- and triple-pay overtime to be made on city-, state- or federal-financed projects, but Moses not only liked overtime as an institution, since to this driven man the paying of overtime meant that his projects were being built faster, but, wanting all the political help the unions could give, he wanted to maximize their eagerness for his proposals to be approved. With plenty of money to spend and no necessity to account for how he spent it, he loaded his workers down with overtime.

  The power of Van Arsdale and Brennan and the construction unions was therefore at his command. And he used this power with his customary astuteness. "He wouldn't call me on something I didn't have any influence with," Brennan says. "He'd call me to exert some influence at the right spot where I could do it. And you knew he was calling other people to put influence on their right spots."

  "A construction worker would pave over his grandmother if the job paid $3.50 an hour," Murray Kempton once wrote. The primary concern to the hard-hats—and their leaders—was jobs, and Moses provided jobs. And, in postwar New York, any public official—borough president, Mayor or Governor—who dared to oppose "progress" could be sure that it would not be long before the telephone in his office rang and the voice of the secretary on the other end said, "This is Peter Brennan of Building Trades."

  Whether or not, as legend has it, Pete Di Napoli had been forced to borrow a nickel for carfare during the 1930's, by the 1940's, he and his firm, Tully and Di Napoli, Inc., Contractors, were making money by the carload, and so were the cartel of other huge contracting firms—Turner Construction, Mackay Construction, Slattery Contracting, Thomas Crimmins Contracting, Corbetta Construction, Gull Contracting, Sicilian Asphalt Paving, Poirier and McLane—which monopolized mammoth construction projects in and around New York.

  The relationship between contractors and politicians was not as blatant in New York as on Long Island, where, whether or not it was true that Nassau Republican boss J. Russel Sprague indeed, as rumor had it, had a personal financial interest in the Hendrickson Brothers Contracting Company, it was a fact that key Republican committeemen were Hendrickson employees, and that their employer threatened to fire them if they did not support Sprague. But the relationship was, nonetheless, crucial in the city, too. There were two organizations to which the Irishmen who ran almost all the giant city contracting firms were the major financial contributors: Cardinal Spellman's Committee for the Laity (Thomas J. Shanahan, chairman, 1945-1960) and the Democratic Party (Thomas J. Shanahan, financial chairman, mayoral elections, 1945-1953)-

/>   The hard eyes of these contractors grew starry when they talked of Robert Moses. They thought of themselves as builders, and they thought of him as the greatest builder of all. One had only to sit once under the great chandelier of the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria at the annual dinner of the Building Trades Employers Association, a dinner at which, even in mod 1968, it was difficult to find a single dress shirt that wasn't white (or a single face), to see that to these men he was a hero—as well as to see the frame of reference that, to them, made him a hero. One had only to watch the packed ballroom, previously stirred to enthusiasm only by the rendition of the National Anthem, rise, table by table of burly, white-haired, red-faced men, standing and applauding furiously, after short, squat Roger Corbetta, a bull in a black tie, introducing him as the guest of honor, said: "This

  great master builder . . . Hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into the construction business by this great dirt mover as he likes to be called . . . Two power projects . . . one billion three hundred million dollars ... a great man, a great builder, a man of history . . . serving the public for years: the Honorable Robert Moses." One had only to watch them rise, cheering again, time after time, as the guest of honor, graceful and poised and easy in his tux, his presence filling the dais even at seventy-nine, delivered, in a monotonous, hard, harsh, nasal monotone, his diatribe against "crackpots" who oppose "progress."

  They admired—idolized—him, and they also needed him: urgently and continually. They had built up big organizations, and big organizations mean big overhead. Their towering cranes and mammoth earth-moving machines were so expensive that the purchase price was often borrowed from banks, using the equipment itself as collateral, so that in effect there was on each earth mover and crane a mortgage, on which payments had to be met every month. New York's big contracting combines needed to keep working and they needed to keep working on big projects. Moses controlled such projects, so he controlled the contractors. And he controlled their political contributions.

  As for the big architects, engineers, supply companies, bonding and insurance companies and a dozen other services used by contractors on big jobs, Edward N. Costikyan says:

  I didn't know much about Triborough. That was a pretty closely guarded operation. I did know that when I needed to raise money for the county [organization] I could count on them. At one dinner, before I knew this, I was having trouble selling tickets, and I called [a key Triborough official] and asked if he could help, not hoping for too much. The next thing I knew, people were calling me because of him—saying, "Put me down for two tables" or three or four. These were people like contractors, architects and engineers. You suddenly realized that here was a guy who had access to the people who were used to making contributions.

  Fees, retainers and commissions—the goodies of honest graft. Jobs and the endorsements, campaign labor and campaign contributions of organized labor. The contributions, untraceable and untaxable, of banks and contractors. These were the prizes that the individuals in the machine coveted and that the machine itself needed. And Moses controlled those prizes. Asked the secret of Moses' success, Lehman and Wagner adviser Julius Caius Caesar Edelstein replied: "My own theory? He was single-minded in his purpose, undeviating, merciless to those who opposed him—and he bought off everyone who might trip him up. He believed in buying, acquiring, by paying the most . . ." "Moses happened to be in the philosophy of replacing graft," says machine insider Charles Rodriguez. So little understood was Moses' importance to Tammany Hall that a 364-page history of the organization published in 1967 mentioned his name only twice, and then only in passing. But he had centralized in his person and his projects most of the sources of money on which Tammany depended for its very existence. Personally "money honest," he was interested rather in power and ac-

  complishment. But power and accomplishment meant Getting Things Done —and Getting Things Done in New York meant playing ball, paying the price, the money price. He played—and he paid. He gave the machine—the greedy, voracious machine—everything it wanted.

  He even gave patronage, the patronage that, as a young man, he had called "the worst form of bribery." Tammany didn't have to ask him for patronage. He offered it himself.

  Every spring, the word went out from the Park Department to the Democratic machine's district leaders: "Get the names in." The "names" were those of ward heelers whom the leaders wanted to reward with "temporary" Park Department summer jobs, jobs that numbered in the thousands for which neither civil service examination nor training was necessary; only the district leader's recommendation counted. Costikyan, once a district leader himself, says: "Despite Moses' bullshit about politics, the summer jobs were handled right through the district clubs. We'd get application forms for them, we'd get them filled out and we'd process them through the party, through the county leader. We had some guys who had a lifetime summer job. They were seventy years old."

  Honest graft, endorsements, campaign contributions—even patronage. Robert Moses provided the machine with everything it wanted. And as a result, he bent the machine to his ends, mobilized its power and influence behind his plans. For twenty postwar years, almost all the city's elected officials were products of that machine, owing their election to its support and depending on that support for their re-election. Twice during that period, a mayor—O'Dwyer in 1948, Wagner in i960—attempted to break away from its hold on him and create his own machine. But each found that any new political organization in New York must, if it were to acquire and hold political power, depend upon the same forces as the old machine had depended upon, the forces that Moses controlled.

  Moses made allies of other forces which exerted powerful influence on the city's elected officials.

  His alliance with the Archdiocese of New York, which spoke so effectively for and to the Irish-Catholic voters who were, for decades, Tammany's most steadfast supporters, was ideologically snug, natural, even had he not come to power through Al Smith. ("I have no more sympathy with Communism than you have and regard your church as our greatest bulwark against it," Moses told the Catholic Youth Organization at the height of the McCarthy era.) There was only one difference between Moses' opinion of Eleanor Roosevelt and that of Francis Cardinal Spellman: the Cardinal's, except for occasional brief outbursts, was secret. The relationship between Church, Irish-Catholic contractors and the Irish-Catholic building trades unions had traditionally been close and directed toward pressuring the city for more public works, which provided simultaneously jobs for Catholic

  parishioners and, through the contractors' religious contributions, funds for Catholic parishes and charities. Moreover, the Archdiocese, perhaps the largest owner of real estate in the city, constantly needed favors from its government. Moses saw that it got these favors. Moses, in his rebuilding of the city, was continually needing its cooperation. The Archdiocese gave it to him. Sometimes he and the Church swapped pieces of land as casually as if they were playing Monopoly.

  Moses' favors to the Church were sometimes immense. In 1955, Ford-ham University, anxious to relocate and expand its "in-town" college, was unable to afford a big enough piece of land; Moses used his sweeping powers as Slum Clearance Committee chairman to oust hundreds of tenants from six prime acres of real estate adjacent to his Lincoln Center Title I development and turn them over, virtually as a gift, to the university (grateful Ford-ham named the central square of the Lincoln Center campus "Robert Moses Plaza"). The city's liberals, observing such favors and inferring from them that he would do anything to curry favor with the Cardinal, called him "Spell-man's Pet Jew." But they failed to understand that Moses was interested not in favor but in accomplishment and power. His close alliance, cemented by their adoration of Al Smith, with men such as John Aloysius Coleman, William J. Tracy of Tracy Tugboats, Eugene Moran, Sr., of Moran Shipping, George V. (the Fifth) McLaughlin, industrialist John A. Mulcahy, the founding father, Joseph P. Kennedy—and, of course, Tom Shanahan—meant much to New York (one of them
alone, John S. Burke, president of B. Altman & Co. and the Altman Foundation, gave Moses hundreds of thousands of dollars for such park improvements as the Central and Prospect Park carousels and the chimes in the Highbridge Park tower) and much to Moses. Time and time again, when a project he was sponsoring was stalled, the Catholic hierarchy—religious or secular—interceded with the politicians, providing the push that was needed to get it rolling again. And when it was completed, and the long line of official limousines rolled across the bridge or through the tunnel, in the first car, along with Moses and the mayor of the moment, would be the tiny, red-robed figure of the chief representative of His Holiness in the greatest city in the New World, gracing the event with his presence at the ribbon cutting, bestowing on Moses' latest work the blessing of Almighty God.

  Not only the Prince of the Church but the city's merchant princes, the royalty of retailing, were in Moses' camp—up to and including the inheritors of the great Herald Square rivalry, Bernard F. Gimbel, Jr., of Gimbels and Jack Straus of R. H. Macy & Co. "Growth, development, progress"—the words which meant so much to Moses in terms of his interests, power and accomplishment—meant just as much to these businessmen in business terms. And, again, Moses made certain that this identity of interest was bonded by firmer cement.

  Merchandising requires locations and, if successful, expansion, and, in New York, locations and expansion mean zoning changes, and big retailers

  ;' from the Moses-controlled City Planning Commission to frem. Zoning considerations aside, locations were not easy to come by, but could be of assistance there, too, as, quite by accident, Traffic