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

by Caro, Robert A

  Saturday and Sunday were among the most tense and exciting that I can recall as Secretary-General [Lie wrote!. Momentous conversations were taking place backstage: steps were being taken that might snatch victory from defeat and crown these fifteen months of effort with success. Ambassador Austin [was] now involved . . . There were secret consultations with the Rockefeller brothers and with their father, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. But what was happening then was known only to a selected few. . . . There was much to be done before so extensive a real estate transaction as this could be assured. Normally it would have taken months of business negotiations with batteries of lawyers.

  But in ninety-six hours, it was done. For every snag that arose, Moses had a knife. Teams of lawyers were prepared to research for days the details of city surrender of East River bulkheads; Moses called in a secretary and dictated on the spot without reference to a single law book a memorandum setting out the method—a memorandum lawyers later found to be correct down to the last comma. Legislative permission was needed for the city to close certain streets within the site and give the UNO the land—a few phone calls from Moses to Albany secured a guarantee of the permission. Late Tuesday night —about twelve hours before the Headquarters Committee convened—Zeckendorf, who had taken no part in the discussions following his offer and did not know if there was any chance of its being accepted, was celebrating his birthday in a private dining room at the Monte Carlo when Wallace K. Harrison, the distinguished architect and intimate of the Rockefeller family, walked in with a block-by-block map of the site bulging out of a jacket pocket, sat down at the table, tried to assume an air of nonchalance, failed and blurted out, "Would you sell it for eight and a half million?" Zeckendorf said yes, and the next morning at ten-thirty, as he sat in his office nursing a hangover, the phone rang and he heard Nelson Rockefeller say, "We've been up

  all night patching up the details, but it's going to work. The old man is going to give that 8.5 million dollars to the UN, and they're going to take your property. See you soon. . . . Good-bye." When, minutes later, the Headquarters Committee convened, Austin arose and announced the gift—which also included, on Rockefeller's insistence, a city commitment of $2,500,000 for property to round out the site and of additional city funds to ease traffic problems by widening Forty-seventh Street and building a half-mile-long north-south tunnel under First Avenue. And within three days, the General Assembly accepted it. A key factor in the acceptance had been O'Dwyer's promise of housing, and, thanks to Moses, O'Dwyer was able to keep that promise, through Metropolitan Life Insurance at Peter Cooper Village, through New York Life at Fresh Meadows Golf Course, through a Moses-conceived "Savings Bank Trust Company" formed to build Parkway Village in Jamaica—all housing projects arranged by Moses in which Moses was now able to reserve whole buildings for UNO personnel.

  Some elements in the city—Stanley Isaacs and other "radicals"—objected to a city unable to provide the necessities of modern life for its people spending millions on the UNO and giving tax exemptions on real estate that could bring the city millions more. Some members of the Board of Estimate, notably Lazarus Joseph, seconded those objections.

  But O'Dwyer could handle the radicals. He could handle the Board of Estimate, not that much handling of that body was necessary, since they were highly susceptible, as the Mayor had known they would be, to the argument that $8,500,000—and, as journalists were putting it, the chance to be "the permanent capital of the world"—was being given to the city for what was represented as insignificant city contributions. No one on the Board guessed that over the next ten years those contributions would total more than $32,000,000. He could handle the Board because he had the money—and Moses had given him that money.

  Letters from key figures in the negotiations revealed deep appreciation of the role Moses had played—and of the personal qualities that had made him perhaps uniquely qualified to play it. "My deepest thanks," wrote Trygve Lie, who was later to say—in the midst of a hot dispute with Moses over construction details: "I understand him and I understand what he has done for New York. ... It is marvelous. I regard him as one of the greatest men of our time." "My profound thanks," wrote John D. Rockefeller. "Your instantaneous approval of the offer, your broad vision as to the future possibilities, your quick appreciation of the necessary immediate steps, and your prompt action looking toward the city's cooperation, all played a vital role in bringing about the ultimate outcome. It has been a pleasure for me to be associated with you in this matter, so far-reaching in its implications, and I would have you know of my deep gratitude to you. . . ." But Lie and Rockefeller were no more appreciative than the Mayor, and a letter from him expressed gratitude in the way that, to Moses, was most important: the letter, dated January 13, 1947, gave Moses complete power over all details—including those normally handled by other city agencies—relating to the construction of the UNO headquarters. His fall from grace had occurred in

  July 1946. By January 13, 1947, it was over. The power of money had not only brought the Mayor to heel, but had made him like it.

  Moses not only came back, but came back bigger than ever. Moses Man Farrell was appointed chairman of the Housing Authority, another Moses Man, Philip J. Cruise, was appointed Authority secretary—at double his previous salary. There was no more talk about enlarging the City Planning Commission. A confidential Moses memo told the Mayor which highway sections "we can complete ... by the Summer of 1949"—in time for O'Dwyer's reelection campaign—"if we . . . tolerate no further delays." O'Dwyer tolerated no further delays. Within weeks, families in the rights-of-way were being evicted and the State DPW was awarding construction contracts—to firms that did their banking with Federation (and that could be expected, through Federation's president, to contribute to O'Dwyer's re-election campaign). Moses was cocky enough to put his dominance over the Mayor who was supposedly his boss on public display. At one Board of Estimate session, Comptroller Joseph refused to approve $144,000 in design contracts for Andrews & Clark, engineers, and Eggers & Higgins, architects, for work on Ferry Point Park, contending that engineers already employed by the city could do the work for $41,000. Turning to O'Dwyer, Moses said, "If I don't have the sufficient confidence of this administration in a matter of this kind I don't want to be Parks Commissioner and I don't want to be Construction Coordinator. I'm tired of this sort of thing, and I mean what I say." O'Dwyer responded to this open threat by angrily lecturing Joseph. When the Comptroller protested, "I'm sorry, General, but it was not my fault," O'Dwyer replied, "It was your fault," and ordered the Comptroller to "patch things up" with Moses. (Joseph did.)

  Most important, Moses now had his entree to the Mayor back—on a regular basis. Every week at least two leisurely Gracie Mansion breakfast conferences were reserved for Robert Moses, who would come over from his apartment a block away. "Tuesdays," O'Dwyer would recall, "it was ... all United Nations business"—transacted by Moses and whomever he wanted to bring along, Trygve Lie perhaps. On Fridays, Moses would bring along guests who, to O'Dwyer, may have been more important than the Secretary-General of the world organization. "Every Friday morning," John A. Coleman recalls, "he'd set aside for Moses and whatever construction people Moses wanted to bring." There were, in fact, few mornings on which, appointment or not, when O'Dwyer descended the Gracie Mansion staircase at about ten o'clock, Moses wasn't waiting for him.

  Moses knew how to make the most of such entree. Says Lutsky: "He'd see [O'Dwyer] alone, without the Mayor having had an opportunity to hear the other side, and get him committed. And he had another device." By the time O'Dwyer came downstairs at ten, Moses would have been up working for three hours, if not longer. "He would have the papers ready, and if the Mayor said okay, he could get them signed right there." Despite his admiration for Moses, Lutsky saw the danger in this, a danger intensified by the fact that O'Dwyer, naturally friendly, "would always agree with the last man in" —the person right there.

  Moses got his commitments from the Mayor now
without ever again arousing his ire. Moses' smiling, hearty, arm-around-the-shoulders charm— charm that could disarm a roomful of listeners—was simply overwhelming to an individual who was sequestered alone with him morning after morning, particularly when combined with his intellect and vision and governmental ability. "You know the city's too big. It's too big for one government," O'Dwyer was to recall. "It's a tough battle, and everything falls on your head when you're Mayor. I remember the lonely nights and the snowy nights and the stormy nights up there at Gracie Mansion, and I would walk up and down the porch and look over at Astoria . . . and I would say, 'Good Lord, I'm Mayor of this town!' ... It was something. The job frightened me at times like that." But Moses, who, despite the bigness of the city, had built the great bridge to Astoria that dominated the view from that porch, would be there to lift the load, with answers, solutions, courses of action for which financing was available, courses of action that could be implemented if only the Mayor would sign right here.

  And the Mayor was now increasingly glad to get help from him. "If the two of them were together, it would be Moses doing most of the talking," Paul O'Dwyer recalls. "Bill was a good listener. Moses would be selling, as it were. The scene would be Bill sitting and Moses pacing and talking. My brother was essentially a reader of books, of plays, of history. Bill was essentially an artist. Bill was the dreamer in the larger sense. And Moses was the very practical—the antithesis of that. So from the standpoint of the Mayor and the Coordinator of Construction, they complemented each other very well." However Paul may have felt about Moses, moreover, he had to admit that his brother's feelings for his Coordinator went beyond professional complementation. "He liked Moses, maybe more than Moses liked him, because I don't think Moses liked anybody," he says. Soon, one of Moses' opponents recalls, "all decisions that mattered in the city were being made up at Gracie Mansion, with Moses alone with the Mayor." In December 1947, the Herald Tribune, for so long a Moses supporter, felt constrained to comment: "Plans for a future New York are being drawn up on Mr. Moses' personal drafting table and nowhere else. In the absence of adequate planning measures, without up-to-date zoning, without a Master Plan, the city is being re-planned in camera ... A dangerous measure of discretionary power has now been amassed in the hands of a single individual." But O'Dwyer's feelings—the only feelings that mattered—were spelled out in 1962 in his Oral History Reminiscences with a vividness that belied the passage of years.

  On contracts, I'd rely 100,000 percent on Moses, and sometimes on the question of art, the question of repairs to museums and the building of the Aquarium, for instance, and things of that kind—highways, the UN Building . . . that was all well within the Coordinator's job, and that was Bob Moses. Sometimes I didn't agree with him ... but in the main, I took—paid great attention to the recommendations of Mr. Moses. . . . One sure thing, there are very few people in this town that I think more highly of than Bob Moses. In fact, I don't think there is anyone. ... He gets the job done, efficiently and without extra cost. ... I made him the coordinator of all city contracts. I knew that would

  keep them clean. I also knew that it would be done with a view to giving the right kind of selection of what to do, you know . . . The thing is, what were the necessary things, and in what order should they be built . . . You have to have the very best brains on selecting what is good—what's the first thing that must be done, and the second and third, in an orderly way. That is where Moses came in. He was wonderful.

  And when the interviewer inquired, "Was it his brains? His influence?" O'Dwyer replied:

  "He has the brains and he has the influence. He has both."

  Early in 1948, Moses apprised O'Dwyer about Senator Taft's plans for a new slum clearance or "urban renewal" program. In December, while Congress was still working out the details, O'Dwyer appointed him to the chairmanship of a new "Mayor's Committee on Slum Clearance"—his tenth post—and allowed him to name most of the other members.

  Newspapers, slow to grasp the significance of the pending federal "Title I" slum clearance legislation, were slow to grasp the significance of Moses' appointment. The Times buried the story—four paragraphs long—on page nine. But on the landscape of New York's history, that appointment stands out like a mountain. Moses had been campaigning to take over federally funded housing in New York for ten years, to the virtually unanimous dismay of those who believed in the social philosophy which underlay the government's decision to provide shelter for the impoverished among its people, and who feared that Moses' philosophy—so antithetical—would, even while he was in the process of building such housing, undermine the aims for which it was being built. By cutting Moses off the air in 1938, La Guardia had defeated Moses in the first battle of the campaign. A new mayor had, by appointing him Construction Coordinator and naming his aides to the City Housing Authority, given him a measure of the control he coveted, but the control had been indirect and hence incomplete. But now—as of December 17, 1948—his control was complete at last.

  Behind the control, moreover, was power of a new immensity. Title I of the Housing Act of 1949 extended the power of eminent domain, traditionally used in America only for government-built projects, so drastically that governments could now condemn land and turn it over to individuals— for them to build on it projects agreeable to government. Under Title I, whole sections of cities could be condemned, their residents evicted, the buildings in which those residents had lived demolished—and the land turned over to private individuals. Here was power new in the annals of democracy. And in New York, that power would be exercised by Robert Moses. "In my opinion," urban expert Charles Abrams was to say, "under present redevelopment laws, Macy's could condemn Gimbels—if Robert Moses gave the word . . ." Once, a quarter of a century before, Moses had, by deceiving the Legislature into giving him the power of condemnation by appropriation, obtained immense power—W. Kingsland Macy had testified, "Mr. Moses told me personally that his power was such that he could seize my house, put me out of it and arrest me for trespassing if I tried to get into it again"—and had obtained an extension of that power, hitherto exercised only in remote mountain

  forest fastnesses, to Long Island. Now, he had that power not only over farms and private estates but over the massed edifices, crammed with human beings, of a huge city.

  A Moses speech in May 1949—"If we can find a man who has a first-rate program* half-completed and is willing to go through the grueling business for a second term, let us . . . keep him on"—touched off a draft movement headed by John A. Coleman and including Robert Blaikie, John McCarthy, president of the Fifth Avenue Coach Company, William Mac-Cormack, president of the Transit-Mix Concrete Corporation, and Carmine De Sapio, who had just ousted Hugo Rogers as leader of Tammany Hall. Fusion was again in the field—the candidacy of Moses' admirer Newbold Morris was backed by men who had been Moses' allies and who were dedicated to the principles in which Moses had once believed. Moses threw the full power of his name into the scales on Tammany's side—with undisguised eagerness and enthusiasm. He appeared with O'Dwyer on campaign platforms to make campaign speeches, wrote newspaper ads "To Young Voters," issued statements and reports on park, traffic and housing "progress" under O'Dwyer's administration and predicted that the remaining problems in these areas were well on the way to solution. (An angry Paul Windels replied that "perhaps the quickest way to get action would be to take the limousines and chauffeurs away from them and make them go through the subway wringer twice a day like the rest of us.")

  The enormous strength of Moses' name and reputation as political weapons had been demonstrated by the prominence given his endorsements of La Guardia in 1933, 1937 and 1941. In 1949, there were a greater number of discordant notes in the chorus that greeted his statements. There were letters-to-the-editor complaining about aspects of his park or highway policies. One candidate, a young reformer named Oren Root running for Manhattan borough president, attacked Moses directly for continuing to build beaches while working against
allocations for municipal sewage plants that would keep the water at the beaches fit to swim in; the city's Liberal Party, at the insistence of state chairman Adolf A. Berle, Jr., publicly declared that his power should be "restricted" on planning matters.

  But even those few discordant notes were muted by the chorus of praise (the twentieth anniversary of Jones Beach was celebrated in July, with appropriate pageantry). Interrupting a diatribe on water wastage in New York—"For every pint saved by a good citizen, a Communist will waste a dozen bathtubs and there are hordes of Communists"—West-brook Pegler bemoaned the fact that the two nominees were "inferior men" and then turned to one who he felt wasn't: "There is available in New York one of the greatest administrators of public office that we have ever had who can't get nominated. That is Robert Moses. ... He would even make a good President of the United States. But there is no sense to labor the point, because the conspiracies and rivalries of sinister men and stupid, paltry hacks will deny us the benefit of Moses' ability, integrity and honesty. He has