quickly, before even a word of the proposal had leaked to the papers, the land that would have to be condemned, a guy who would accept the borough president's recommendations on who should get the contracts. "What he was doing was giving them a package," Rodriguez says. "He was giving them a finished product. If a borough president accepted the proposal, there would be a resolution of every demand." And when the county organization gave its annual dinner, the borough president would be able to look down from the dais and see that all the tables were filled, and the dinner program lying beside his plate would be satisfyingly thick with ads. What Moses was doing, of course, was creating a new system—one that revolved around him, that substituted his public works for the traditional means by which political machines existed and grew fat. Whether the politicians with whom he was dealing understood this or not is doubtful. "But," Rodriguez says, "they knew it was an advantage." They may have simply seen it as a "package." But they knew it was an attractive package.
It was even more attractive because it would be popular with the public. "There was nothing in the public mind that was unpopular about Moses' performance then," Rodriguez says. "He was a giant." There would be a resolution not only of the demands by the unions for jobs and by the contractors for contracts but of the demands by the press and the public for action. The borough president "would be able to go back to his community as an accomplisher, an accomplisher of really big things." And, perhaps just as important to some men as any of this, they would know that when the time came, during a campaign or at the end of a career, or over a Thanksgiving dinner table, perhaps, with one's grandchildren sitting listening, for summing up one's accomplishments in life, for saying what one had done for his borough, one could say that during his administration had been built this great road.
There was, of course, a price on the package: if you wanted it, you had to take it as is. You couldn't ask for alterations. The borough president knew his borough better than did Moses or Moses' engineers. He knew its people, and where they went to shop, and to worship, and to play and walk in the evenings. He knew the communities in which they lived. Therefore he might know that putting a highway where Moses wanted it would isolate a neighborhood from its shopping area or its churches, while a route just two blocks away would neatly divide two neighborhoods, which had little social intercourse anyhow. Moses didn't know—and he didn't care to learn. He would not even discuss such considerations. He would allow no analysis of community feelings, of planning considerations—no discussion of alternate routes based on such considerations. Moreover, there could be no discussion —although the Board of Estimate on which the borough presidents sat was the key body in which such discussion was supposed to take place—of the worth of the citywide program as a whole or of whether your borough might not need other projects—schools, perhaps, or babies' health clinics, or neighborhood public libraries—and whether those should not be built first. What happened when a borough president sought to raise such considerations is described by an official who spent many years working for one who
occasionally did. "All Moses had to do was push a button and the phone calls and telegrams would pour in: You were holding up work, you were holding up progress. 'We need jobs—do you have any other jobs to offer us? Have you got a better idea for solving the transportation problem? Where is the money gonna come from? You're holding up progress.' Let me tell you—until you've sat on the other end of those phone calls for a while, you have no idea how hard it is to stand in the way of 'progress.' "
When, as occasionally happened, a borough president persisted in raising such considerations, Moses used the power of his money to discipline him—so effectively that he was not likely to try it again. In I953> for example, Moses proposed an elevated expressway along sixteen miles of Bruckner Boulevard. It would cost $23,000,000. Triborough would pay. Bruckner Boulevard, drawing customers from the residents of pleasant residential neighborhoods nearby, was one of the most thriving commercial areas in the Bronx. Businessmen who owned stores along it were aghast. It had been proven that elevated structures brought ineradicable blight to the streets along which they ran; the city had only recently finished tearing down the elevated Third Avenue subway line for that very reason. Could not the expressway be built below the surface of the boulevard, in a tunnel preferably, but, if this were to be shown by engineering studies to be too expensive, in an open cut? There might be some additional cost, but surely it would be worth some to avoid the destruction of one of the borough's most thriving areas. At least, should not the below-surface solution be considered?
Under intense pressure from the merchants, who together comprised a formidable lobbying bloc, particularly in an election year, Bronx Borough President Lyons made the mistake of insisting that Moses consider the alternative plan. Moses' response was to call in reporters and announce that he was reallocating $3,000,000 of the $23,000,000 for a highway project in Manhattan, $10,000,000 for a highway project in Queens, the remaining $10,000,000 for a highway project in Brooklyn (the Brooklyn project, ironically, was the widening of Third Avenue beneath another Moses elevated highway, the Gowanus Expressway, which had destroyed another pleasant neighborhood without alleviating any traffic problems; Moses wanted to widen Third Avenue now because traffic along it was worse than ever). "Borough President Lyons lost some $23,000,000" for the Bronx, Moses said. And, he added, "precisely the same thing will happen with" other Bronx highway projects "if Mr. Lyons does not change his tactics."
Lyons, red-faced and sweating beneath his plastered-down shiny black hair, changed them in the very next Board of Estimate executive session. Although he had been delaying approval of the other highways because of local protests, promising consideration of alternate routes, he approved every route Moses wanted—and he never again, during his remaining eight years on the Board, seriously questioned any Moses proposal.
And what if a borough president, despite the advantages that would accrue to him from a Moses proposal, decided to fight it? What would he fight with? His borough had no money to build highways. The city had no
money to build highways. The city couldn't get state or federal money without Moses' approval. In effect, only Moses had the money to build highways. Without sufficient engineering expertise on his own staff or sufficient money to hire outside expertise—even if any outside highway expert of stature could have been persuaded to defy Moses—not only couldn't a borough president finance a highway, he couldn't even plan an alternate route. He couldn't even examine Moses' proposal to ascertain its accuracy. He had no realistic choice but to accept it.
Political scientists read the Charter, and they believed what it said. Public authorities, they said—it was not until the late 1960's, more than thirty years after Triborough had been created, that they began significantly modifying their statements—were mere instruments to carry out policy created by the cities' elected representatives. The existence of public authorities growing larger and larger did not in any substantial way lessen the city's control over its own destiny. Governing New York City, published in i960, went far beyond most analyses by admitting that authorities are "insulated" from many of the pressures that influence "line" departments. But the book nonetheless states that "the Board of Estimate occupies the center of gravity in the city's political process" and adds:
Land use in the City of New York is under the control of the Board of Estimate. The City Planning Commission plays a large part in zoning and land-use regulation, and Borough Presidents individually have important roles also. But the ultimate decisions, the "last say," rest with the Board as an entity.
All the authorities are engaged in construction affected by land-use regulations—particularly the Port and Triborough Authorities, whose bridges and tunnels require elaborate networks of approaches as well as the erection of the central facilities themselves. The Board of Estimate is in a position to obstruct their proposed projects. . . . The Board, a body composed entirely of elected officials, thus possesses a st
out stick for its dealings with all the authorities. . . .
The Board of Estimate must approve the acquisition (as well as the use) of property in connection with a large-scale arterial highway program . . . and it is empowered by state legislation to require redemption of Triborough bonds . . . prior to maturity. (The Board promptly used this power to force Triborough reconsideration of some of the approach routes to the contemplated Narrows Bridge.) .. .
There is a chapter in the consolidated laws of New York State called Public Authorities Law. . . . While the legislature may be under some restraints because it is bound by the Constitution of the United States not to violate the obligations of contracts (and bonds are contracts), the authorities are quite vulnerable through their legislation. And legislators, as elected officials, are responsive to the insistent demands of their constituents.
The city's politicians, however, understood the realities of the situation —and acted accordingly (one result of which was that, even as Governing New York City was being printed, Moses was refusing, despite protests from large sections of Brooklyn, every city planner who took a position on the issue—and members of the Board of Estimate—to reconsider "some of the approach roads to the contemplated Narrows Bridge," and was
forcing the Board to approve the approach routes exactly as he had planned them).
The single most powerful participant in the distribution of the stakes of city politics? In relation to stakes of the size that their constituencies and county machines were demanding, the Board hardly had any to participate in without Moses' generosity.
Require redemption of Triborough bonds? Certainly! All the Board had to do was to raise the money necessary to, in effect, purchase all the Authority's bridges and tunnels, a feat which, by the mid-1960's, would have cost roughly—no precise figure is available—$2,000,000,000, or about $2,000,000,000 more than the city had available, or was likely to have available in this century—or the next.*
The Board of Estimate shall have the control of the streets of the city. An unequivocal statement. But in practice that control ended where Moses' ambitions began.
On paper—the paper on which the Charter was written, the paper on which the press reported the activities of the government established by that Charter, the paper on which professors' theories were enshrined in the form of books—the Board of Estimate possessed many powers over public authorities. But in reality a single power—the power of money—could render all those powers meaningless. And thanks to his public authorities, Robert Moses had the money. A borough president, searching desperately for a means of obtaining large-scale public works for his borough, could find only one way: to cooperate with Moses. He had no choice in the matter. Supposedly the servant of these elected representatives of the sovereign people of the city, Robert Moses was in reality their master.
The proof was in the way he treated them—and in the way they accepted that treatment.
When he attended Board meetings, Moses "was always threatening to resign," Paul R. Screvane recalls. "He used to say, 'I don't need this job.' And then he'd go and stand off in a corner with his arms folded and sort of sulk. And people would say, 'Come on back, Bob,' and it'd be worked around."
When he attended Board meetings. Frequently Moses took the easiest
* The chances of the city finding $2,000,000,000 within its perennially exhausted debt limit were so remote as not to be worth considering. So were its chances of obtaining a sizable raise in that debt limit, for a raise of that size would have toppled the city's already shaky credit edifice. And permission to raise the limit to redeem the bonds would have had to come from a State Legislature that had its own, compelling, reasons for not wanting those bonds redeemed. If by some strange concatenation of circumstances—so unlikely as to be unforeseeable—the city had obtained permission to sell so unprecedented an amount of bonds—and had been able to find buyers for them, it would have had to pay in interest, not the 4 percent that Triborough was paying, but 5V2 percent, which meant that the city would have to raise $110,000,000 per year just to pay the interest costs.
way of showing his contempt for the authority of the city's dominant legislative body. When it asked him to come to City Hall, he refused.
His refusals with the Board were not as absolute as with the Council— the invitations of whose president he often declined even to acknowledge. In the first years after the war, in fact, while Moses was still testing the limits of his new-found strength, he did, while refusing to appear at public hearings of the Board, attend many of its closed-door executive sessions. But once he had ascertained the extent of his power, he began to make even his closed-door appearances more and more infrequent, notifying the Board that the press of time made it necessary for him to send "delegates" to represent him: Spargo if the matter under discussion concerned the Triborough Authority, William Lebwohl or Samuel Brooks if it concerned urban renewal, Stuart Constable if it concerned parks, Arthur Hodgkiss or Harry Taylor if it concerned arterial highways. By 1950, one Board staffer recalls, "he wouldn't come down to City Hall except on rare occasions. He would communicate by written communication or by telephone, or by sending ambassadors instead—like he was a foreign, sovereign state."
About some of Moses' programs, the Board was vouchsafed no information at all until the planning of the programs had been completed beyond any realistic possibility of alteration. "The Board of Estimate never knew what was going on in the Slum Clearance Committee," Judge Lutsky recalls. "He wouldn't come in there with [a Title I project] until it was all wrapped up"—the site selected, the replacement projects chosen, mapped and blueprinted, the "sponsors" who would be given the projects lined up, the federal financing assured, everything ready to go, in fact, except for their okay. And they had no choice but to give their okay. During the decade and more that Robert Moses ran the Slum Clearance Committee, drawing up without consultation with the Board projects that would throw tens of thousands of the city's people out of their homes and that would transform a substantial portion of the city's face, not one Moses slum clearance proposal was turned down—or even modified in any significant way—by the city's elected officials. In 1954, the Board became aware that Moses was presenting to the Federal Bureau of Public Roads a vast new program calling for the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge near the southern end of the city, the Throgs Neck Bridge at the northern end, and miles of connecting arterial highways in between—exactly where, the borough presidents did not know and, despite repeated requests to Moses, were not able to find out. And when Moses, having completed the program, slapped it down on the table in front of the Board, they made no attempt to disapprove—or even modify—it. The city's arterial highway program was, in all essential respects, the program drawn up in the privacy of Moses' Randall's Island offices.
Imperfect as New York's old political system may have been, the public will was never insignificant within it. The borough presidents and other elected officials who had exercised power under it were kept in power only by the public's votes, and they were therefore responsible and responsive to the public. Such responsiveness was built into the old system's innermost core.
But Robert Moses was not responsible to the public. Its votes had not put him in office, and its votes could not remove him from office. He despised its opinion. The considerations that he took into account were the considerations that mattered to him personally: the project, in and for itself; the engineering considerations that would Get It Done the fastest and cheapest way; and the considerations—economic considerations, whether the economics of honest graft, or of bonds, or of paychecks to union men—that mattered to the forces he was using to impose his will on the city. By giving the leaders of these economic forces—the bankers, the union leaders, the politicians—what they wanted, he did not have to give the people what they wanted. The old system, imperfect as it was, was responsive to the public. The new system—Moses' system—was not. Robert Moses, who replaced corruption in New York City, was wor
se than corruption for the democratic processes. In the postwar era many forces were coming together to destroy those processes in New York.
But he was the most important force of all.
The building of a public work shapes a city perhaps more permanently than any other action of government. Large-scale public works shape a city for generations. Some public works—most notably the great bridges and highways that open new areas to development and insure that these areas will be developed on the low-density pattern fostered by highways as opposed to the high-density pattern fostered by mass transportation facilities—shape it for centuries if not, indeed, forever.
During Moses' reign over public works in New York—a thirty-four-year reign that not only was significantly long in a city that had, after all, existed as a consolidated entity in its present governmental form only since 1898, but also occurred at the most crucial point of time in the city's history, the decades during which its vast open spaces were filling up and being shaped on a significant scale—it was not the shouts of the people but the whispers of banks, labor unions, insurance companies, big construction combines, big business and, of course, the Retainer Regiment that determined what public works would be built in New York. He centralized in his person and in his projects all those forces in the city that in theory have little to do with the decision-making process in the city's government but in reality have everything to do with it, and by such centralization he made them strong.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 115