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

by Caro, Robert A

  Was the tirelessness of his work and its duration comparable to a natural force? So was the result of that work—the sum total of the accomplishment, the Things he Got Done. As natural forces shaped the city and its suburbs east of the Hudson, the 2,100-square mile region on which by 1974 dwelt more than 12,000,000 human beings, so did he.

  He changed the course of rivers, filling in the beds of the Harlem and the Bronx and cutting new channels for them, shoving to one side the mighty St. Lawrence, making new curves in the swift Niagara. He filled in the city's frayed edges, transforming into solid earth Great Kills on Staten Island, the Flushing Meadows in Queens, a dozen other vast marshes. Nature gave the region one shoreline; he gave it another, closing inlets in the barrier beaches, cutting new inlets, reshaping miles of beach dunes. For mile after mile, the earth and rock that constitute the shoreline of Brooklyn and Queens, and of Manhattan's Hudson shore, are his, the cement and steel that hold them in place are his, the grass and shrubs and trees that adorn them are his—as are the concrete and steel of the marinas, the shoreline overlooks, the parking fields, the bicycle paths, the runways and airport terminals, and, of course, the shoreline parkways. Not nature

  but he put them there. His bridges bound together Long Island and the mainland of the continent, torn apart by glaciers eons before. His causeways reunited the Island with its barrier beach. He hacked out lagoons, filled lakes, made beaches, welded islands together, cut, at Inwood Hill, through a primeval forest substantially unaltered by the hand of man since the dawn of time. He altered the region's skyline, leveling great areas of the low, regular tenement foothills and replacing them with slim, tall spires two hundred, three hundred feet high—civic and cultural edifices, great groves of apartment houses. By the close of the Age of Moses, for example, the skyline along much of the eastern shore of Manhattan Island that was the heart of metropolis—a skyline that was, to a great extent, Governor Smith Houses, La Guardia Houses, Corlears Hook Houses, Baruch Houses, Lillian Wald Houses, Jacob Riis Houses, Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village, Bellevue Hospital, NYU-Bellevue Medical Center, the United Nations, Rockefeller Institute, New York Hospital, East River Houses, Woodrow Wilson Houses, Senator Robert F. Wagner, Sr., Houses, Abraham Lincoln Houses, Riverton Houses, North Harlem Houses, Harlem River Houses, Colonial Park Houses—was, for miles at a time, a Robert Moses creation. Do forces of nature—volcanoes, earthquakes, avalanches—destroy whole towns and villages, forcing populations to flee? What force destroyed Spuyten Duyvil, Sunset Park, the Syrian Quarter near the Battery, a dozen other neighborhoods as big as towns?

  Robert Moses believed his works would make his name immortal, and he may well have been right—and not just because some of them were named after him. "What will people see in the year 1999?" he predicted. "The long arteries of travel will stand out [and the parks]." Fly over New York in 1974, and the prediction seems likely to be true, not only for the year 1999 but, if New York endures in anything like its present shape, far, far beyond. For so many of the dominant features of the landscape are his— and those features seem likely to endure indefinitely. Some of his highways will probably be covered with housing—the sale of air rights above them, just beginning in the I970's, seems an innovation likely to gain favor—and thus invisible, no longer part of the landscape. Some may be rerouted or widened beyond recognition, although, given the cost and complexities of condemnation, the length of time it would take to cover or to reroute or reshape even some substantial fraction of the 627 miles of these arteries would have to be calculated not in decades but in generations and perhaps centuries. The roads of Rome stood for two thousand years and more; who would predict less for the roads of Moses? Who would predict less for his Shea Stadium, a structure consciously shaped to resemble Rome's Colosseum because he was afraid that his convention center-office tower "Coliseum" didn't make the comparison clear enough? As for the parks he created, fly over New York in the year 1999, and the two thousand acres of Brook-haven Park and the four thousand acres of Connetquot on Long Island, and the 21,000 other acres of park that Robert Moses wrested away from the developer's bulldozer to insure that the people of New York would always have green space will still be green, a tribute to his foresight. For

  how long will the great bridges that he built—the Verrazano, the Tribor-ough, the Whitestone, the Throgs Neck, the Henry Hudson, the Cross Bay, the Marine—endure? The life of a suspension bridge, engineers tell us, is measureless. Atomic attack or natural catastrophe could render all New York shapeless. Barring such monumental calamity in centuries to come discerning historians will, if they look for it, be able to see writ plain throughout the great city and its suburbs evidence of the shaping hand of Robert Moses.

  Other great builders left their mark on physical New York. But the achievement of even the greatest—a Zeckendorf or a Helmsley or a Winston or a Lefrak, the Rockefellers of Rockefeller Center—is dwarfed by the achievement of Robert Moses. Not even the greatest of the public officials who, while not builders themselves, shaped the growth of the city—the almost forgotten "father of New York," Andrew H. Green, and "the greatest mayor New York ever had," Fiorello H. La Guardia—had a fraction of Moses' influence on the shape of New York. The shapers closest to him in total influence are probably the robber barons who built the railroads into the city and out through its suburbs and who erected monuments to themselves in great skyscrapers and terminals, but the influence of any one of them is dwarfed by his.

  To compare the works of Robert Moses to the works of man, one has to compare them not to the works of individual men but to the combined total work of an era. The yardstick by which his public housing and Title I feats can best be measured, for example, is the Age of Skyscrapers, which reared up the great masses of stone and steel and concrete over Manhattan in quantity comparable to his. The yardstick by which the influence of his highways can be gauged is the Age of Railroads. But Robert Moses did not build only housing projects and highways. Robert Moses built parks and playgrounds and beaches and parking lots and cultural centers and civic centers and a United Nations Building and a Shea Stadium and a Coliseum and swept away neighborhoods to clear the way for a Lincoln Center and the mid-city campuses of four separate universities. He was a shaper not of sections of a city but of a city. He was, for the greatest city in the Western world, the city shaper, the only city shaper. In sheer physical impact on New York and the entire New York metropolitan region, he is comparable not to the works of any man or group of men or even generations of men. In the shaping of New York, Robert Moses was comparable only to some elemental force of nature.

  But if in the shaping of New York Robert Moses was an elemental force, he was also a blind force: blind and deaf, blind and deaf to reason, to argument, to new ideas, to any ideas except his own.

  He made himself blind. He possessed vision in a measure possessed by few men. But he wouldn't use it. The arrogance which had been his characteristic from youth, the arrogance which was a most striking characteristic of his mother and grandmother, the arrogance that had led relatives to call

  him "Bella Moses' son," the arrogance that had gorged on power, swelling with each increase, had, now that his power in his chosen fields of activity was so absolute, become absolute itself.

  No rules, not even the most innocuous, could apply to him. Making one of his rare appearances at a public hearing on one of his projects—this one, in City Hall, before the Board of Estimate, on his proposed Verrazano Bridge—he declined to identify himself for the record by name and address as all other speakers had been required to do.

  "Make him give his name," a woman shouted, and then several men picked up the shout, and then the audience, which had filled the Board chamber to overflowing and had crammed the corridor outside full, turned it into a chant: "Make him give his name! Make him give his name!" Wagner, presiding, looked at Moses appealingly, but the Coordinator crossed his arms, locked his hands around his biceps, tilted back his head and, with his prognathous jaw jutted
out, stood in the face of that chant like some haughty Rameses, finally saying to the Mayor, who was, Shapiro was to recall, "shrinking down behind his microphone so you could hardly see him": "Well, what are you going to do about it?"

  "Now if you people can't be quiet, I'll have the room cleared," Wagner said. "You people know who this is; this is Robert Moses."

  With the name in the record, Wagner motioned for Moses to proceed, but when the Coordinator began his presentation, the crowd began to chant: "Make him give his address! Make him give his address!" Again Wagner looked at Moses, again Moses stared him down, and again Wagner had to intercede: "You all know where he lives; he lives across the street from me." And Moses was so furious that the Mayor had not ousted from the room this rabble trying to make him abide by the same rules that governed other men that despite a previous promise to the Mayor that he would this once give at least the appearance of participating in a public hearing—it was only because of that promise that he was present in the first place—he talked only briefly, describing a $365,000,000 project, for which an hour-and-a-half presentation had been prepared, in about ten minutes, snatched up his papers and stalked from the room, leaving the Mayor to sit alone listening to protests until four o'clock the next morning.

  As he was above rules, he was above the law. He had always felt himself above it, ignored its spirit whenever possible, but now there was a new depth to this feeling, a new intensity to this particular manifestation of arrogance.

  Confronted in building up the base for Idlewild Airport by the same problem by which he had been confronted in building up the base for Jones Beach—the sand he imported blew away because it was not anchored, as were Long Island's natural dunes, by the horizontally growing roots of beach grass—Moses, without bothering to obtain anyone's permission, dispatched teams to obtain the grass from public beaches owned by Suffolk County and from the beaches of summer homes owned by private families. W. Kingsland Macy, an ardent conservationist who knew the value of beach grass—and what would happen to dunes suddenly denuded of it—was enraged when he learned that scores of Long Island State Park Commission employees were

  out on their hands and knees illegally yanking it out of beaches that Macy wanted preserved in perpetuity for the people of his county. He ordered County Attorney Edgar L. Hazleton to order Moses to desist, on pain of arrest and imprisonment of any commission employee caught—and of Moses himself. Moses' reply was not long in coming. The next weekend, when the Hazletons arrived at their summer home at Westhampton, they discovered Moses' men yanking out the grass on their beach. (The practice was finally ended when Macy ordered local police to arrest thirteen of Moses' grass pullers.)

  The measure of his arrogance was taken by a dictator. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina was considering commissioning Moses to propose public works for his Dominican Republic when, after one long afternoon's discussion with Moses, he abruptly told him he had decided not to hire him after all. According to Moses, the dictator told him: "You'd want my job."

  His ego had become as titanic as his imagination. How did he think of his works? Let him answer in his own words. Jones Beach is "the finest public beach in the world," the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge "the most beautiful suspension bridge in the world." On "the saga of city waterfront reclamation ... I think it may be stated without fanfare or frantic boasting that no other city, faced with anything like our problems, has set about with so much boldness and determination to meet and down them." How did he think of himself? Let him answer in his own words. "The City Builder must have an odd mixture of qualities. He must have a basic affection for his community, he must hate what is ugly, barren and useless. He must have an instinctive dislike of things which are built or run wrong. He must have a healthy contempt for the parasite, the grafter, the carpetbagger, the itinerant expert, the ivory tower planner, the academic reformer and the revolutionary. He must have the barge captain's knowledge of the waterfront, the engineer's itch to build, the architect's flair for design, the merchant's knowledge of the market, the local acquaintance of a political district leader." He was fond of proclaiming, as he did in 1948, "the ancient truth that it is not knowledge but action which is the great end and objective in life, and that for every dozen men with bright ideas there is at most one who can execute them." Did detractors liken him to Hitler? He had another comparison in mind. Sometime around 1949, visitors first noticed in his office a bust of Abraham Lincoln, and talks with his aides soon made it apparent why he had selected it. "To me," Sid Shapiro would say at every opportunity, "Mr. Moses is a lot like Abraham Lincoln—a philosopher and a doer."

  Moses' body expressed his feelings about himself more eloquently than his words. With his first taste of power, he had begun to strike poses. Now, with more power, the poses were more striking. When the Sea-Ef was heading back into the Babylon dock, for example, he was given to standing at the very point of its prow, arms folded across his chest and jaw outthrust. A Bay Shore history teacher, seeing him one day, thought he looked "very impressive"—strikingly similar to pictures the teacher had seen in history books, pictures of Napoleon Bonaparte. His most frequent pose, of course,

  was the one he had first adopted during the 1930's and now used on every public occasion to express his lofty indifference to public acclaim; while introducing public officials at one of his ribbon cuttings, watching them cut a ribbon, or before speaking himself at such a ceremony or at a luncheon or dinner at which he was being honored, he would stand, while waiting for the applause to die down, with his arms folded across his chest, each hand grasping the opposite biceps, with his head tilted back. Taking a particularly important guest on a tour himself, he would speak in the imperial "we," but it was his gestures, sweepingly expansive, as, perhaps from a yacht offshore, he indicated the Belt Parkway sweeping off to the right and left, the park areas alongside, and then pointed upward to the Verrazano Bridge towering over the boat ("And then we built . . ."), that most strikingly suggested an emperor who looked on all he saw as his creation; standing on the deck of that yacht, he might have been Claudius looking proudly at Ostia.

  The most definitive measure of his egotism, of course, was the men with whom he had chosen to surround himself. The last of those who dared even occasionally to voice even a faintly independent opinion were gone now; perhaps the last had been Allyn Jennings, who, serving in the Coast Guard during the war, had dared to put his country ahead of his public authority. Regarding the war as he did, as no more than an irritating interruption to his plans, Moses was infuriated by Coast Guard orders which were designed to protect the Atlantic Coast from the threat of German attack but which Moses considered meddling in the beaches in whose control he had always allowed no meddling—he was, for example, enraged when the Coast Guard ordered the Jones Beach boardwalk lights dimmed; whether or not he ever complied with this order is a question to which Moses' aides reply only with chuckles—and Jennings reportedly remarked to another Moses Man who had chosen to remain in RM's service during the war: "Doesn't RM know there's a war on?" The remark was eagerly repeated to RM; "that," chuckles Shapiro, "was the end of Allyn Jennings." In the postwar years, Moses was surrounded by a solid wall of sycophancy—the only opinions voiced were his opinions, the only facts and figures presented those that would confirm those opinions.

  This, of course, need not in itself have been an insurmountable handicap. Genius—the innovative, creative, shaping impulse that was Robert Moses' form of genius—is to a great extent personal, internal, intuitive, subjective. The inspiration that led Moses to envision in an instant the great Long Island park and parkway system was not the facts and figures that he had to listen to at the endless reform conferences, but the creative flash.

  But genius—in particular, public works genius—must have some roots in reality. The purpose of public works is to meet public needs; the first requirement of public works genius—an inescapable requirement for which even vision, foresight and drive are no substitute—is a knowledge, an understandi
ng of those needs, of, in fact, the public, of the realities of the life led by the public for which the works are being built. Moses had had that knowledge when he created his great park and parkway system; he had had no choice but to have it; the role of liaison with reformer groups to which

  Al Smith had assigned him required him to sit through reform meetings; he could not have helped grasping the nature of the problem, the needs of the metropolitan area public. But Moses' position now in the center of a palace guard that walled him off from all contact with new opinions and facts meant that he did not have that knowledge any more. Reality had changed; the reality of the i92o's was not the reality of the 1950's. The metropolitan area that Moses was now attempting to shape was not the metropolitan area that he had begun shaping; there were more people in it, so many more that the very fact of their numbers alone changed all the dimensions of life in the area; they covered so much more of its land surface with their homes; they were, moreover, a different people: the population of the area had been transformed; to mention just one change, there had been fewer than 200,000 nonwhites in the area when Moses had begun his public career, there were more than 2,000,000 now; embarking on a recreational policy that deliberately excluded nonwhites from most parks may have had in Moses' mind some sort of rationale in 1923; it is difficult to believe that that mind would formulate the same policy in 1953; Moses was nothing if not realistic, and excluding so large a part of an area's population from parks was not realistic. Quality, Hegel said, changes with quantity. Automobiles had meant weekend excursions to the country, leisurely drives, pleasure, freedom, in the 1920's, when there had been relatively few automobiles. Automobiles meant something very different now.