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

by Caro, Robert A

  Italics added.

  been ruled out for years on the ground that he can't 'get along' with people. He can get along with honest and competent men all right, but not with parasites and grafters and fumbling slobs." Then there were the editorials. Most treated Moses' endorsement of O'Dwyer as proof of the Mayor's integrity and progressiveness. The Herald Tribune, supporting Morris, hastened to assure readers that Morris would also keep Moses in office. "If there is anything certain in the Mayoralty scrambles, it is this: no candidate on any ticket will risk announcing before election that he has plans to oust Robert Moses."

  Moses' support was probably not needed by O'Dwyer. The Mayor was immensely popular, and as had been the case in 1929, when La Guardia accused Jimmy Walker's administration of underworld ties, no one was listening when Morris made the same charges about O'Dwyer. But it was helpful. The Mayor's answer to these charges was to point to his programs— Moses' programs—as he did once when a reporter questioned him about Morris' latest attack and he replied scornfully, "While we are talking about housing . . . he's talking about bookmakers."

  Moses' help to the machine was, moreover, not limited to statements. The New York City campaign of 1949 was the quintessential ribbon-cutting campaign—with the ribbon cut by the Mayor and by the borough president candidates on his ticket. When Moses ran out of expressways at which opening ceremonies could be staged, he opened sections of expressways. There were frequent announcements of future public works that would "solve" the city's problems. Morris criticized the lack of recreational facilities in Harlem; Moses announced that the Triborough Authority would construct a footbridge across the East River to Ward's Island, thereby opening that island's recreational facilities to Harlem residents. Moses regarded O'Dwyer's re-election almost as a personal triumph. He had plenty of obvious reasons— and one known only to himself, O'Dwyer, Spargo and, at most, one or two others. Shortly after the election, Spargo had written to remind the Mayor that "during your first term in office, we stayed away from the projects and sections of projects where the tenant relocation problem was most difficult" —and to ask the Mayor if, with the election safely out of the way, those relocations could now begin. And the Mayor had said they could. Even as the inaugural ceremonies were under way, they were being carried out—with typical Moses dispatch. Many tenants were already out, their buildings already demolished. Once you get that first stake driven, Moses was fond of saying, no one could stop you. Now, with the evictions and demolitions, the first stake was driven—and driven deep—for the system of mighty highways he planned to lay across the face of the city. No one could stop them any more.

  There was one source of irritation at the inaugural.

  O'Dwyer had a thirty-three-year-old friend, a young, fast-talking reformer on the make named Jerry Finkelstein. Finkelstein understood that O'Dwyer's natural friendliness, his tendency "to go along with the last guy

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  in to see him." made the Mayor a man easily swayed, or. as Finkelstein put it, "played"'—and, as he says, "I knew how to play BUI 0"Dwyer"; he had already played the Mayor into the vending machine concession for the city's subway stations.

  Now the Mayor promised that at his inauguration he would appoint Finkelstein to succeed Robert F. Wagner, Jr., just elected Manhattan borough president, as chairman of the City Planning Commission.

  When Finkelstein arrived for the swearing in, however, "a newspaperman who was a friend of mine showed me the list—and my name wasn't on it." Finkelstein rushed in to see O'Dwyer and learned that Moses, wanting the commission under the gavel of a chairman he controlled, had had a chance to play him after Finkelstein.

  "J walked in to see Bill O'Dwyer/" Finkelstein recalls. "My wife and family were outside . . ."

  "He said, 'Jerry. Bob thinks it ought to be a great engineer or a great architect and I'll get you the biggest job . . .'

  "J said, The only job I want is the chairmanship of the City Planning Commission.'

  "He said, 'Oh, you want that?'

  "I said, That's right.'

  "He said, 'You have it.' " He took out a pencil and wrote in Finkel-stein's name at the bottom of the typed list, and Moses, confident that everything at the ceremony was going his way, saw with a shock the dark, balding, bespectacled young Jew he hardly knew walking up to take the oath.

  Within days, Finkelstein was proving much more than an irritation.

  Finkelstein knew little about city planning, but his first move—after redecorating his new office: "it looked cheap; it wasn't at all commensurate with the chairman of the City Planning Commission"—was to follow the advice of friends at the Citizens Union and call in Lawrence Orton to ask him about the Master Plan. Out came the huge maps that had been lying rolled up and out of sight behind Orton's desk for seventeen years, and out came the explanations of interim developments in the city's growth that proved so clearly the need for the Plan.

  It didn't take much intelligence to see that Orton was right, and no one ever accused Jerry Finkelstein of being stupid. And if he needed more proof, it flooded across his desk daily. One city department was planning for an eventual city population of 8,000,000; another for a population of 15,000,-000. One department was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars drawing plans for a sewage-treatment plant on a city-owned lot; another was planning to build a public library on the same lot; a third was planning a school—each in ignorance of what the others were doing. While schools in older areas of the city were half empty, schools in newly developed areas, due to lack of planning, were terribly overcrowded: forty or even fifty students being crammed into classrooms designed to hold twenty-five or thirty, and double and even triple sessions for hundreds of thousands of students. Many newly developed areas didn't have any schools—because no one had planned schools. Children from these areas had to spend part of each school day

  being bused—on crowded buses—to the nearest schools available, often already overcrowded themselves. Studying the reports which crossed his desk, Finkelstein could see all too easily how simple and cheap it would have been to acquire vacant land for schools in these areas before they had been built up—and how hard and expensive, perhaps prohibitively expensive, it would be to acquire school sites there now. And he could also see—one could hardly help seeing—how, as the tide of development continued to flow outward toward the city's outskirts, the same mistakes which were costing the city so dearly were being repeated, day by day.

  Taking up Orton's ideas, Finkelstein fought for them. A month after he had taken office, he asked for a 350 percent increase in the Planning Commission budget from $328,000 to $1,149,000—the bulk of the increase for an expansion in the commission staff to begin work on the Master Plan.

  Finkelstein accompanied his request with a statement that revealed that Moses wasn't the only public official who understood that public statements must be simple to be effective. The few figures it contained stood out all the more starkly: Detroit spent 18 cents per capita on city planning, Los Angeles 24 cents, Philadelphia 25 cents, San Antonio 39 cents, New York 4 cents; even with his proposed increase, New York would be spending less than 12 cents—about .001 of the city budget. Its brief summary argued the need for a Master Plan—the preparation of which, Finkelstein pointedly noted, was a duty specifically placed on the commission over ten years before but never carried out—as cogently as anyone ever had, both on economic grounds (duplication of planning by city departments was costing the city far more each year than the $800,000 increase that would provide a Master Plan and end the duplication) and on grounds that went beyond economy:

  New York is at present in a critical stage of its development. The precipitous increase in population since the beginning of the war, the rapid spread of development in the outlying areas, the demand for schools, traffic relief, slum clearance, housing, hospitals and transportation, all argue for effective planning now. . . .

  There is need for competent review of t
he work of all agencies by the one. . .. A city cannot be built economically without coordination . . .

  Without a Master Plan, there is no real hope left for the city. . . .

  We cannot go on hauling more and more people greater and greater distances to work and back again, each morning and evening. If the city is ever to catch up with these problems, and have any money left for other purposes, some more fundamental solutions must be found. . . .

  With a plan, there was hope—thanks to Title I urban renewal funds so un-precedentedly generous that with them a city could make a good start on reshaping itself—"if we take the fullest possible advantage of them" by planning the reshaping under a comprehensive, citywide development plan rather than on a haphazard, project-by-project basis. But the opportunity was fleeting. "In default of action now, the golden opportunity will be lost."

  Moses attempted to fight—using his customary tactics. "He invited me up to one lunch," Finkelstein recalls. "I didn't go along with him, and I was never invited again. If I was a part of his team, I could have had anything. But I wasn't on his team." (Orton, who at a recent Moses lunch had rejected a

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  lucrative Moses "consultant-ship," would have been proud of himj Moses tried ■ behind the scenes, first sending Hodgkiss to try to persuade the budget advisers to eliminate some of the proposed additional personnel, then going directly to the Mayor: "J want to make a last protest against not only a waste of City funds but an accumulation of crackpot planners . . . *C appointment lends color to the stories which have been put out that we have no intelligent planning at present, that all our improvements are hastily and ill conceived, located at the wrong places, and therefore prodigiously stupid and wasteful." Then he went public, writing, mimeographing and distributing to his vast mailing list, and to the press, a letter charging that Finkelstein's statement "that he would save a great deal of money if his budget were trebled, belongs in the funny papers." Finkelstein's suggestion that he "needs a new staff to advise him on arterial improvements is a piece of impudence. . . . What is needed is to get some work out of the present staff," the Coordinator said.

  A lot of old men around New York, however, still remembered the Master Plan and what it was supposed to do, and the days when the Charter in which the Master Plan was embodied had been the banner behind which they marched toward their dreams for the city they loved. A traitor from their own ranks, a traitor they had helped to raise to power, had knocked the banner from their hands and, for ten years and more, had been trampling it into the dust. But now a young Lochinvar—or at least Finkelstein—had appeared and had snatched it up. They fell into rank behind him. Finkelstein's supporters represented a cross-section of Moses' past—and an index of individuals who had helped raise him to power in the city, and to keep him there. They included Burlingham, ninety-one, with the exception of the senile Seabury the last of the old giants of the reform movement; Isaacs, who embodied in his courtliness and integrity and devotion to principle everything that was fine in the movement; Bruere, the "B" of the "ABC's" of the Bureau of Municipal Research in which Moses had begun his career; Pros-kauer, the "Proskie" of "Proskie and Moskie," who had been one of Al Smith's inner circle along with Moses; Nathan Straus, who had fought for many bills giving Moses power; McGoldrick, who had entered the Fusion administration with him during the days when Fusion thought Robert Moses was a Fusionist; and, of course, George McAneny. These men had once believed that Moses was New York's great hope. Now they believed that he was the greatest threat to the city's future—and they formed a committee, "A Committee for an Adequate City Plan," to save New York from the power they had helped to give him. Within a week, letters from them were pouring in to the press, including one with Burlingham's old clarity of logic and succinctness of phrase: "Much as we may admire great buildings and engineering works as monuments to the ingenuity and ability of man, we can now recognize that they cannot perform their functions properly unless they are related to their developments."

  Planning was, moreover, rapidly becoming almost as much a "motherhood" issue as parks; prestigious civic organizations and the press lined up behind the proposed budget increase; the logic behind it was so clear that

  even the Times managed to grasp it; while managing to avoid criticizing Moses, a Times editorial stated: "The noble purpose set forth in the Charter of 1938 . . . has never been realized. The 'primary duty' of preparing a Master Plan for the city has never been performed, although more than a decade has passed. We support without reservation the principle involved. . . . City Hall just cannot allow itself to accept without investigation conflicting demands of various departments." Finkelstein was constantly at pains to identify O'Dwyer with every favorable planning development, and to flatter the Mayor; introducing O'Dwyer at a public hearing on the completed zoning study, he gushed, "The final result will be a tribute to Mayor O'Dwyer. . . . Mayor O'Dwyer's legacy to the City. Time will prove that it is the richest legacy any mayor could have bestowed on the people." O'Dwyer pushed the Board of Estimate into giving Finkelstein a hefty chunk of the additional funds he had requested to hire scores of talented young planners, and publicly went on record in support of the Master Plan, promising that "everything will be integrated within it."

  Finkelstein made the most of his opportunity.

  "O'Dwyer loved Moses," Finkelstein would recall. "He respected Moses. But I knew how to play Bill O'Dwyer. Moses would go to see him on something and win him around to his way of thinking, but after he left, I went up there. I'd say, 'Bill, the Citizens Union is behind me on this, the papers are behind me. I know how you feel about Bob Moses, but on this, Bill, I'm right.' " O'Dwyer would agree. And Finkelstein would race straight back to his office, and write and distribute a release announcing O'Dwyer's approval —so that before Moses had heard about the Mayor's switch, and could get him to switch back, O'Dwyer's pro-Finkelstein stand would be on the record, and therefore almost impossible for Moses to change.

  Time and again, Finkelstein took on Moses in this way—and won. In a series of clashes in the Planning Commission the vote was 6-1, with Moses, who no longer showed up at any commission meetings, casting his lone vote through Hodgkiss. Orton proposed a study of proposed developments around the UN site. "Irresponsible . . . ill-conceived," said Hodgkiss, reading his master's words. "Mr. Moses is not the Planning Commission but only one member," Finkelstein replied, and the 6-1 vote proved him right. Soon, to Moses' rage, the commission was even embarking on a study of criteria for playgrounds to insure that they were built where they were most needed.

  But, with one exception, these were only studies—no immediate threat to Moses' plans. And in the exception—the single study which posed such a threat, the only confrontation of immediate, practical significance between Moses and Finkelstein and the forces Finkelstein represented—Moses used the power of money on O'Dwyer again.

  The crunch came over the Mid-Manhattan Elevated Expressway.

  On December 30, 1949, the Board of Estimate authorized Triborough to apply in the name of the city for federal funds to study the "most feasible plan" for an express crossing of the middle of the most crowded island in the world. On June 2, 1950, O'Dwyer announced that Triborough's study had been completed, that it had "proven" the most feasible plan to be the

  highway among the skyscrapers proposed by Triborough's chairman, that the chairman had already persuaded the federal government to pay the cost— the first installment alone would be $900,000—of plans for the 160-foot-wide road, which would run in the air along Thirtieth Street, using the 60-foot street width and 100 feet created by tearing down the buildings lining the south side of the street, that the chairman had persuaded the Port Authority to pay the cost of planning and building a linkup with the Lincoln Tunnel, that Triborough had agreed to pay $26,000,000 for the rest of its construction—and that the preparation of detailed blueprints would begin at once.

  There was ecstasy in the editori
al columns—the Herald Tribune: "New York shows again the capacity of doing things in a big way . . . Those big builders, Bob Moses and Howard Cullman, sat down with Mayor O'Dwyer in staff session at Gracie Mansion, and the result is that New York is moving ahead at once. . . . Big men got together and made a big decision for the common good." But there was agony among trade and civic associations; they charged that the Board of Estimate had directed Triborough to study all proposals—including one for a tunnel less destructive to Manhattan real estate and aesthetics—but that Triborough had studied only its chairman's. Representatives of twenty associations, along with Finkelstein and Manhattan Borough President Wagner, visited O'Dwyer to ask that the tunnel study be made—by Finkelstein's Planning Commission.

  O'Dwyer's response was frank. He himself would prefer a tunnel, the Mayor said; "I don't like overhead structures." But his preferences were not important. "I'm sure you can draw me a satisfactory plan for a tunnel, but all the talk in the world is no good if there isn't anyone to build it. . . . You've got to show me someone who'll put up the money to build it." There was only one man who had that kind of money—and he would put it up only for an overhead crossing, not for one underground.

  Pressed hard by his visitors, the Mayor finally said that he would permit the Planning Commission to make its own study, but, he said, such a study would be a useless waste of money—and he wasn't going to provide any city money for it. Finkelstein pointed out that the Mayor's "permission" was therefore meaningless, since the commission had neither personnel capable of making such a study nor the funds to hire such personnel. He and his allies were not saying that an overhead crossing should not be built, Finkelstein said. They all agreed that some solution to the mid-Manhattan traffic problem was necessary. All they were asking was a chance to find out which solution would really be best for the city. Could not he have even $50,000? The Mayor simply threw up his hands without even replying.