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

by Caro, Robert A

  lis out with Moses!' I tried to explain to him that there was nothing for ^ loses to get angry about, but he didn't even want to listen to what it was. le was in a real panic. He just didn't want to do anything to irritate Moses, /loses' word was law in the city."

  One proof that Moses' word was law was in the appointments Im->ellitteri made—and in those he didn't make.

  Tammany kingpin Frank J. Sampson, Impellitteri's old district leader, listributed the bulk of the administration's routine patronage, but for high-evel jobs in departments whose responsibilities in any way touched on vloses', Impellitteri almost invariably asked Moses for a recommendation —and should Impellitteri neglect to ask, Moses gave a recommendation any-vay, submitting so many that the Mayor's files were crammed with them. They were dutifully followed. By the end of Impellitteri's term, there existed vithin the upper echelons of the city government an extensive network of nen whose first loyalty was not to that government but to the man who ran :he independent government on Randall's Island.

  Off Randall's Island flowed, moreover, not only recommendations but disapprovals. Time and again, men being considered for key city posts were quietly blackballed by Moses—in most cases without their ever knowing about it—in cutting phrases ("Is there any evidence that he is worth $25,-000?" "Not heavy enough for the job." "Would certainly not impress ... the Albany educational authorities ... to whom the city looks for additional aid") that concealed the real reason for his disapproval: that they had not proven themselves sufficiently ready to swallow their pride and their independence, abandon their own theories and beliefs and unquestionably accept his. And Moses' negative counsel was followed by Impellitteri as slavishly as his positive.

  Another proof was in the policies to which Impellitteri put his signature.

  They were Moses' policies. During the Impellitteri administration, through a secret "understanding" with Governor Dewey largely engineered by Moses, the city was allowed to adopt a series of financial measures whose common denominator was the fact that they fell hardest on those least able to afford them. The city sales tax, earlier raised from 1 to 2 percent with Moses' backing, was now raised from 2 percent to 3; the subway and bus fare, earlier raised from five cents to ten cents with Moses' backing, was now raised from ten cents to fifteen—by a Transit Authority, created to bear the public's blame for the increase and thereby insulate politicians, whose creation, combined with a legislative mandate to run mass transit on a "self-supporting" basis, removed from the city's constitutional debt limit the $425,000,000 in transit debt service Moses had so long wanted removed so that the borrowing capacity could be freed for his own projects.

  And proof lay in the speeches the Mayor made. The voice was the voice of Impy, but the words were the words of Moses. By the time Impellitteri was running in the Democratic primary in 1953, Moses was giving

  point-by-point "suggestions" for his major television talks (one list was headed by the suggestion that the Mayor make "reference to records of heads of several important departments"—including, prominently, the head of the Department of Parks).

  Moses liked to keep the strings on his puppet short. During the summer, which he spent in Babylon, he kept the Mayor convenient to hand, inviting him to vacation in the handsomely furnished Shelter Cottage at Fire Island State Park just across the bay.

  More proof that "Moses' word was law in the city" was in what happened to the City Planning Commission and its Master Plan.

  When O'Dwyer retired, Jerry Finkelstein had four months remaining before his term expired. During those months, the young commission chairman fought for the Master Plan, pushing the consultants to finish the crucial rezoning proposal, issuing press releases trying to explain the value of establishing local neighborhoods as the basis for studying planning needs. But he was fighting against a master.

  The rezoning study—290 pages long, profusely illustrated, crammed with detailed maps and charts—was completed in September, ready for detailed study by city officials and the public, and for public hearings leading to its adoption. But, Orton says, "like dopes, we hadn't gotten enough money to publish the darn thing when we got our appropriation, and we had to go back to the Board of Estimate" with a new mayor sitting at its head. Trying to force Impellitteri's hand before the election, Finkelstein wrote the Mayor in October appealing for his support. There was no reply—and when, after he had written again, an answer did come, it came in the words of Moses. A letter over Impellitteri's signature said that the Mayor would "have no objection" to having the $9,750 printing item brought up for consideration at the next Board meeting—if copies were sent to him and other members of the Board "immediately" to give them time to study them. "Well, of course, we couldn't do that," Orton was to recall. "We didn't have copies. It was to make copies that we were asking for the money." Finkelstein, in a hospital suffering from exhaustion, attempted to take his case to the public by issuing a release stating that the failure to appropriate $9,750 for printing the report would mean that the $325,000 already spent preparing it would be completely wasted. Orton appeared before the Board in executive session to press the point. But when Orton finished, Moses got up and, Orton recalls, "argued that the whole thing was a bunch of tripe, nonsense, what a lousy job it was, waste of money, all the things that lawyers say—incompetent, irrelevant"—and the Board, with Impellitteri nodding placidly at its head (when Finkelstein had sent the Mayor a copy of the "local neighborhoods" proposal, he had sent it to Moses for an explanation, and Moses had sent it back with a note stating, "Dear Vince: Here's the answer—the attached is a silly idea"), refused to vote the additional funds,

  and the report for which Finkelstein had fought so hard had still not been seen by anyone outside the commission when, while still in the hospital, his term ran out on December 31.

  At Moses' request, Impellitteri moved into Finkelstein's job— and into the office Finkelstein had so optimistically redecorated only a year before—Colonel John J. Bennett, who was shortly to be in the process of organizing, with Moses' approval, a Title I project that was to reap its organizers enormous profits. Orton hoped against hope that the new chairman, who certainly had a distinguished career resume (former State Attorney General, Democratic candidate for Governor, judge, noted attorney), would carry out the duties of his job. But he saw at the very first meeting that such hopes were useless. "Bennett was totally subservient to Moses."

  The two members of the commission who had strayed briefly from Moses' fold at the enticement of O'Dwyer and Finkelstein soon were back among the flock. Why cannot be said, but it was at about this time that Moses gave Cleveland Rodgers permission to do his biography and it was also at this time that Moses had Impy give John Reidel, chief engineer of the Board of Estimate, a hefty salary increase. Reidel and Rodgers, who had supported the Master Plan before, now switched their votes, combining with Bennett—and the caster of the decisive fourth vote: Robert Moses—to overrule the commission's three liberals, Orton, Francis J. Bloustein and Goodhue Livingston, and defeat all proposals to advance it.

  Under Bennett, the Planning Commission was in Moses' hands as firmly as it had been in the days when $i5,ooo-per-year Edwin Ashley Salmon wielded its gavel. Many of the eager young planners Finkelstein had brought in were forced out. Work on the Master Plan all but stopped. Eventually, the consultants' zoning report was printed, but the four-man majority on the commission saw to it that the public hearings Finkelstein had dreamed of were never held—and that the commission never adopted the report as its own, so that it remained without official status.

  The $325,000 spent on the rezoning was wasted completely. But $325,000 was an almost infinitesimal item compared to the real cost to the city of the return of Moses' control of its Planning Commission. In his one year as chairman, Finkelstein had—in compromises like that at Washington Square—subtly employed the commission's inferential powers to persuade large real estate developers to sit down with local residents and work out plans that would, while all
owing the developers their projects, save the fabric of the neighborhoods in which they would be built. He had moved to preserve neighborhoods from city as well as private "improvements" by establishing the principle that "local neighborhoods" must be the basis around which planning works. He had gotten the commission to work on a study of the UN area that might save the city from the enormous costs of having to expand the site if it were found too small, and that would have insured that surrounding private development would be not haphazard but based on some rational guidelines. He had started the commission developing playground criteria that might save the city the immense wastage of

  building and maintaining playgrounds that no one used. He had personally saved the city—even if accidentally—from the Mid-Manhattan Elevated Expressway. Most important, in that one year he had started the commission down the road—an astonishingly long way down the road—to the formulation of a rational plan for the development of the city as a whole. Manhattan might be largely lost—as O'Dwyer was to say: "Now the city's built up around the mistakes that were made . . . it's too late to tear down skyscrapers to put in things that you would have, if properly planned"—but there was plenty of almost empty canvas (most of Staten Island, the great central belt of Queens, huge expanses of Brooklyn, even bits of the Bronx) on which to draw from scratch, to insure that the people who moved into these areas would have schools, colleges, public libraries, parks, playgrounds —and shopping areas and jobs—close enough so that they would not have to waste a substantial portion of their lives getting to and from them. In all those areas of the city, the rule of reason could have been allowed to operate substantially unfettered—and Jerry Finkelstein had, by recruiting a master planning staff, organizing it and assuring it of his support, inaugurated a program that would have done just that. But now Finkelstein's year was over. Robert Moses was back in control. The rule of reason was over. The rest of the city was going to be built by the law which had governed the building of the earlier parts: the law of the jungle.

  And proof lay in Moses' relationship with the city's legislative bodies—the City Council and the Board of Estimate—already so effectively dominated by him through his use of the power of money. Council President Rudolph Halley, a liberal concerned with the social implications of governmental policies, began to question some of Moses' proposals; Moses' attitude— expressed at a lunch at Randall's Island to which Mrs. Halley was also invited—was, she says, "Oh, little boy, sit down. Father knows best."

  Halley did not believe so, but he found that most of his fellow council-men were reluctant to challenge Moses, and that he could do little to influence them. "It was a terribly frustrating period for Rudy," Mrs. Halley says. "He felt so strongly about things—the same things that people feel strongly about today. But then he was ahead of his time, and he couldn't get anything done." The Council President has no real power. When Halley persisted in closely questioning Moses, or, more usually, since Moses himself seldom deigned to appear, Moses' deputies, during their appearances before the Council, Moses adopted a simple solution: he not only refused to discuss his programs with the Council himself but would not allow his aides to discuss them. And to Halley's frustration, the Council's Tammany majority approved those programs anyway.

  Halley and Wagner, busy trying to ingratiate himself with the city's liberals in preparation for his own upcoming try for the mayoralty, offered opposition on the Board of Estimate. Moses adopted the same tactics there. Bronx Borough President Lyons, raging publicly, said: "We've seen very little of Mr. Moses at Board meetings, either open or executive. He does all

  his business at Grade Mansion." Says Moscow: "Under Impellitteri, it was taken for granted that Moses was Mayor. There was no question about it." If Impellitteri didn't know how to exercise a mayor's powers to whip Board members into line, Moses did—and the Board members knew it, well enough so that none of them dared with any seriousness or regularity to challenge him.

  During the forty months of the Impellitteri administration, the trends Moses had caused during the last forty-four months of the O'Dwyer administration—the forty-four months beginning in January 1947 in which Moses exercised near-absolute power over the construction of all public works— intensified. During the O'Dwyer administration, the city spent $3,102,000 on the construction of colleges, $1,169,000 on the construction of libraries —and $80,826,000 on the construction of highways. Before the war, the city's hospital situation had been desperate; $80,000,000 was more than twice as much as the city spent on hospitals during the O'Dwyer administration. It was more even than it spent on elementary and high schools.

  During the Impellitteri administration, the city spent $16,176,000 on colleges, $4,118,000 on libraries, $70,314,000 on hospitals, $137,290,000 on schools—and $172,294,000 on highways.* It built eighty-eight miles of new highways, but not one mile of new subways. Near the end of the Impellitteri administration, more than eight full years after the city had announced the start of a "crash program to replace all non-fireproof schools," there were still 182 non-fireproof schools in use. Some 38,777 elementary-school pupils were failing to get a full day's schooling because lack of new construction had caused such severe overcrowding that double or triple sessions were necessary. One out of every three of the city's schoolchildren sat in classrooms that were overcrowded by any educational standard. The four free municipal colleges—City, Hunter, Brooklyn and Queens— had a combined capacity so inadequate that a study showed that 46,000 students per year who would have gone to college had a municipal institution been available were unable to do so.

  Taylor had warned McGoldrick and McGoldrick had warned Joseph that Moses would "bankrupt" the city. One way in which the Comptrollers were afraid Moses would do this was by forcing the city to issue long-term revenue bonds to pay for the "negligible" city share of the costs of his public works, costs which, he assured the press and public and city officials not as familiar with city finances as the Comptrollers, were being almost entirely borne by state and federal government. Since most of these facilities were not revenue-producing—those that produced revenue he built under the auspices of his authorities so that they, rather than the city, would get that revenue—the only method of paying the interest on

  * The highway construction figures represent, of course, only the city's expenditures —not expenditures on highways by the federal or state governments or the public authorities.

  thoM bondl I take the money out of the city's current revenues, to

  Include debt lervice in the expense budget. Thanks to the wartime curtail-iiii 1,1 on Construction and hence on new bond floatings. at the beginning of the O'Dwyci administration the city's debt was down to $2,194,000,000— OH winch the annual debt service charges were $118,000,000. By 195: annual lervice charges were $211,000,000—up 78 percent in seven years Another, more lubtlc but, in the long run, more damaging way, was in draining away lor new construction so much of the city's resources that it Could not pay to keep up maintenance on its existing $12,000,000,000 physical plant, Not only subways but highways fell into this category; even Moiei f own roads could not be kept up. And the cost of neglected maintenance || astonishingly high: the West Side Highway, for example, could have been kept ill perfect repair during the 1950's for about $75,000 per yc.11. because virtually no repairing was done, by the i96o's, the cost of annual maintenance would be more than $1,000,000 per year; and in 1974 ilu highway had begun literally to fall apart—a condition that would take lens ol millions of dollars lo repair. By the time Moses left power in 1968, the city would be Utterly unable to make even a pretense of keeping its

  physical plant in repair.

  Ilu u- was B skewing ol expenditures away from service functions and low;iul public works construction. This was especially unfortunate because the nature Of the city's population was changing; each year, more of the Comfortable middle class, which required a minimum of services, left the Citj to be replaced by families from underprivileged Puerto Rico and from underprivileged s
outhern slates who required more services if they were to become truly part of the City and not just live within its borders as un-aSSimiltted, hostile, bitter aliens.

  Instead, here is what happened.

  .lust tO make the most minimal repairs on the outmoded school plants required between $15,000,000 and $2O,00O,OO0 per year. During the O'Dwyei administration less than $5,000,000 per year had been allocated toi this [mi pose, with the result that by the end of that administration, the

  backlog in minima] repairs, a staggering $30,000,000 at the beginning of