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

by Caro, Robert A

  This last point has especial significance for the construction of public works in a city. For in a city such construction requires the eviction of people from their homes. Even when the public agrees in theory that a work is needed, no members of the public want to lose their homes for it. People never want their neighborhood disturbed by it. If it is to be built, they inevitably feel, let it be built somewhere else. A totalitarian regime can ignore such feelings, which is why the great city rebuildings of history—not only Haussmann's of Paris but St. Peterburg's by Peter the Great, and Rome's first by Nero and later by Augustus—have almost invariably been carried out by such regimes, the notable exceptions being cases (such as the great London fire of 1666 or the saturation bombings of the German cities in 1944) in which a monumental catastrophe destroyed so much of a city

  that it had no choice but to rebuild—and in which the catastrophe had removed from the scene the people who might have objected.

  But Moses was not building under a totalitarian regime. Moses was building under a system in which permission to build could be granted only by officials who derived their power from the people. And, in that light, what was most significant about the Cross-Bronx Expressway was not that seven miles of brick and mortar and steel and iron had to be removed from its path but that seven miles of people had to be removed, removed from homes which in a time of terrible housing crisis in New York were simply irreplaceable. "People said that [the route] was so built up that you'd never get the politicians to say okay," Ernie Clark would later recall, and engineers who had built bigger roads even than Ernie Clark agreed. Farrell and Chapin's legendary Burma Road would symbolize to history the epitome of difficulty in construction. But Chapin understood political as well as engineering problems. Years later, he would recall the feeling that had swept over him when he had stood on Jesup Avenue staring down at that valley in the Bronx packed edge to edge with voters' homes. "I said to myself: The [Burma] Road was tough. But that was nothing compared to this son of a bitch.'" People—the people whose homes stood in the path of all Moses' urban expressways—were the most difficult problem of all.

  But Moses solved this problem, too.

  Democracy had not solved the problem of building large-scale urban public works, so Moses solved it by ignoring democracy.

  Critics who said the Coordinator simply ignored the people in his path oversimplified; he may have wanted to, but political considerations, the considerations that mattered to other public officials, made it impossible for him to do so—at least until after Bill-O had been safely returned to office in 1949, Moses tried to take the people into account—tried hard. It was he who, to persuade apartment dwellers (hitherto uncompensated for eviction since they did not own the land involved) to move, persuaded the Legislature to provide for their reimbursement: $100 per room and $100 for moving expenses. Finding that they still balked—for middle- and lower-class families in New York, no few hundreds of dollars could compensate for the loss of a comfortable apartment they could afford—he even moved a few apartment houses smaller than the one on the Van Wyck. He moved entire blocks of private homes—263 homes on the Van Wyck Expressway alone—where there was room to move them. But along most of his routes, there was no room. And, as even his admirer Jacob Lutsky puts it: "He thought about people. But if it came to a project or people, he'd take the project."

  He had the power to do so—to ignore or override the procedures democratic government establishes to govern the planning of public works. Was it mostly dictators who had built great urban public works of the past? In road-building in and around New York, he had a dictator's powers. And he used them.

  He enjoyed using them—for using them gave him what was his greatest pleasure: the imposition of his will on other people. One evening, he was

  sitting with Sid Shapiro and several other aides in his limousine parked on a side street in Queens, studying possible locations for the Clearview Expressway. Suddenly there appeared at the end of the street hundreds of citizens bearing torches and a scarecrow effigy labeled, in large letters, Robert moses. The aides realized that they had happened upon an anti-expressway torchlight rally. The big black car sat at the end of the street unnoticed in the dusk by anyone in the crowd as the effigy was hoisted to a lamppost and set afire. "I didn't dare look at RM," Shapiro recalls. But to his surprise, his boss threw back his head and roared with laughter. And when someone suggested they drive away, RM said no. He wanted to stay for a while. He didn't want to miss a thing. He sat there all through the speeches comparing him to a "dictator," "a Hitler," "a Stalin." And, says Shapiro, "he laughed and laughed. RM really got a kick out of it."

  When he replied to protests about the hardships caused by his road-building programs, he generally replied that succeeding generations would be grateful. It was the end that counted, not the means. "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." Once, in a speech, he said:

  You can draw any kind of picture you like on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.

  The metaphor, like most Moses metaphors, was vivid. But it was incomplete. It expressed his philosophy, but it was not philosophy but feelings that dictated Moses' actions. He didn't just feel that he had to swing a meat ax. He loved to swing it.

  it would cost millions upon millions of dollars—in condemnation costs for fifty-four apartment houses, in demolition costs for the tearing down of those buildings, in tax revenue that would otherwise be paid, year after year for generations, into city coffers by the buildings' owners.

  If the bulge in the expressway was puzzling to anyone studying it, it was tragic to those who didn't have to study it, to the people who lived in or near that right-of-way. For to these people, the fifty-four apartment buildings that would have to be destroyed were not just buildings but homes. That mile of buildings was the very heart of the neighborhood in which they lived, a section of the Bronx known as "East Tremont."

  The people of East Tremont did not have much. Refugees or the children of refugees from the little shtetls in the Pale of Settlement and from the ghettos of Eastern Europe, the Jews who at the turn of the century had fled the pogroms and the wrath of the Tsars, they had first settled in America on the Lower East Side. The Lower East Side had become a place to which they were tied by family and friends and language and religion and a sense of belonging—but from whose damp and squalid tenements they had ached to escape, if not for their own sake then for the sake of their children, whose every cough brought dread to parents who knew all too well why the streets in which they lived were called "lung blocks." Jews from the Lower East Side who made enough money to escape in style escaped to "the Jewish half-mile" of Central Park West, "the Golden Ghetto." Jews who made enough money to escape—but not that much—escaped to the Grand Concourse. The Jews of East Tremont were luckier than those who had to stay behind on the Lower East Side, but not so lucky as the Grand Concourse Jews. They were not the milliners or the cloak-and-suiters but the pressers, finishers and cutters who worked in the bare workrooms behind the ornate showrooms of the garment district. They were a long way from being rich, and their neighborhood proved it. There were no elevators in most of the five- and six-story buildings into which they began to flood (stopping at 182nd Street, southern border of an Italian neighborhood, as abruptly as if a fence had stood there) after the extension of the IRT elevated line just before World War I linked East Tremont to the downtown garment district. By the end of World War II, the buildings' galvanized iron pipes were corroding, causing leaks and drops in water pressure; a few still had bathtubs that sat up on legs. With some 60,000 persons living along its narrow streets, its "population density"—441 persons "per residential acre"—was considered "undesirable" by social scientists. "In moving through East Tremont one senses a feeling of crowdedness brought on by the lack of open space and close location of buildings," one
wrote.

  But the neighborhood provided its residents with things that were important to them.

  Transportation was important to the fathers who worked downtown, and the neighborhood had good transportation. With the Third Avenue El and the IRT White Plains Road line running right through it, it was only a few easy blocks from anywhere in East Tremont to a subway that took you right down to the garment district.

  Jobs were important to the fathers who didn't work downtown, and the neighborhood had jobs available—good jobs by East Tremont standards— in a miniature garment and upholstery manufacturing district that had sprung up around Park Avenue, just ten minutes away.

  Shopping was important to the mothers who stayed home and took care of the kids, and the neighborhood had good shopping. East Tremont Avenue, which ran conveniently right across its center, was a bright, bustling mile of bakeries which didn't bother advertising that they baked only with butter because all of them did, of groceries where your order was sliced and measured out and weighed ("You didn't get everything in packages like you do now"), of kosher butcher shops ("We weren't, but I bought kosher for my mother's sake. And it's the kind of meat you know in the pot"), of mama-and-papa candy stores, of delicatessens, filled always with the pungent aroma from the pickel barrels, whose owners got up before dawn to mix olives and pimentos and chives—or dates or caviar—into manufactured cream cheese to create individualized loaves they named "Paradise" or "Dark Jewel." You might go to Alexander's on the Concourse for clothes, but you didn't have to; Janowitz's on Tremont was just as good. You didn't even have to leave the neighborhood for a dress for a real "fancy" affair; "they had high-priced stores on Tremont, too; Held's [at the intersection of Southern Boulevard] was very expensive—as good as any store on the Concourse." If you didn't feel like going out, the "better" stores on Marmion delivered, and the stuff they delivered was just as good as if you had been there to feel it yourself, and for many items you didn't even have to pick up the telephone: a few pushcart peddlers still roamed the streets of East Tremont as if to remind the residents of where they had come from.

  Parks were important to the mothers, too. There were no playgrounds in the neighborhood—mothers' delegations had attempted in the past to talk to the Park Department about the situation but Moses' aides had never even deigned to grant them an appointment—but running down its length was Southern Boulevard, whose broad center mall had grass plots plenty big enough for little children to play on, and surrounded by benches so mothers could keep their eyes on them to make sure they didn't run into the street. And the southwestern border of the neighborhood was Crotona Park. "Beautiful. Lovely. Playgrounds. There was a lake—Indian Lake. Nice. We used to sit there—under the trees. We raised our children in Crotona Park." Social scientists, who had never lived on the Lower East Side, might consider East Tremont "crowded." The people of East Tremont, who had, considered it open and airy, wonderfully open and airy.

  Thanks to Crotona Park, young adults as well as children didn't have to leave the neighborhood for recreation. "It was a great park. Twenty tennis courts right there. Where you could walk to them. Baseball diamonds, magnificent playgrounds with baskets—three-man games would be going on all weekend, you know. A big swimming pool that Moses had built during the Depression. Indian Lake. And kept really clean then, you know. And safe. Sure people walked there at night. You never worried then. A great park!" And thanks to Tremont Avenue, you didn't have to leave the neighborhood

  for entertainment. On the avenue's one mile in the neighborhood were seven movie houses. The Bronx Zoo—with its animals roaming behind moats instead of bars—was one stop away on the White Plains El, the New York Botanical Garden was three; you could walk with your children to those two perfect places to spend a Sunday with the kids.

  The neighborhood provided the things that were important to its old people. "The benches over on Southern Boulevard were beautiful, gorgeous. On sunny days, you could always find the girls over there, just chatting, you know, and having a good time. On weekends, they'd be so crowded, you couldn't sit down." Old men would sit there in the sun playing chess with men with whom they had been playing chess for thirty years. (Kibitzers had to stand.) There was a place to play chess—or cards—or just sit and talk over a cup of coffee in cold weather, too. The "Y"—the East Tremont Young Men's Hebrew Association—listed more than four hundred "senior citizens" on its active membership roles. "There was no reason for an older person to be lonely in that neighborhood," says one who lived there.

  "You knew where your kids were at night, too," says one mother. They were at the Y, which had 1,700 families as members. "There were so many programs out of the Y for kids. At night—before—you never used to know where they were, what they were doing. You always used to hear about gangs —you had to worry, was he with a gang? Now you always knew where your kids were at night." Children who lived on Central Park West might be sent to expensive day camps and, when they got older, to sleep-away camps in the Adirondacks; the Y provided inexpensive day-camp and sleep-away programs—the largest run by any single institution in New York City—for children who lived on Crotona Park North.

  Schools were terribly important to the people of East Tremont (a quarter of a century after their kids had graduated, some parents could still remember the precise student-teacher ratio in their classes), and East Tremont had good schools. They were old—PS 44, at 176th and Prospect, the neighborhood's junior high school, had been built in 1901, and the city said there was simply no money to replace it—but there were no double sessions and standards were high. PS 67, off Southern Boulevard, was the first elementary school in New York to offer lessons—and supply instruments—for any child who wanted to learn to play the violin. And all the schools were close, close enough for kids to walk to.

  To the people of East Tremont, East Tremont was family. In its bricks were generations. Raised in the neighborhood, Lillian Roberts married a boy from the neighborhood. They made their first apartment in a supposedly "nicer" section over on Fordham Road. When their first child was born, they moved back. "Why? Because my husband had—oh, we both had, I guess—nostalgic feelings. The reason we moved back to that area was that we loved it so much." Lillian and her husband moved into an apartment on the third floor of a walkup at 845 West 176th Street. On the first floor of that building, Lillian's mother, Ida Rozofsky, born in Russia, was living—with Lillian's grandmother. East Tremont was friends—real friends, not just acquaintances you happened to meet because they took their children to the

  same playground to which you took your children, or because they belonged to the same PTA as you, but friends whom you had grown up with and were going to grow old with, boys and girls—turned men and women—who knew and understood you and whom you knew and understood. Says Mrs. Helen Lazarcheck: "Everyone seemed to help one another. If there was trouble, everyone would do something for you if they could. They were always coming in and sharing what they had. If they were going away, they would give you food that you could use and they couldn't." East Tremont was a feeling of being known—in the streets and in the stores, where shopkeepers like big gruff Saul Janowitz, "the Mayor of East Tremont," had been selling to neighborhood families for decades. (The owner of one Crotona Avenue vegetable stand had been selling vegetables in Tremont when it still largely consisted of the three large "mount" farming estates—Mount Hope, Mount Eden and Fairmount—that had given "Tremont" its name; he had gone from house to house with a horse and wagon then.) East Tremont was a sense of continuity, of warmth, of the security that comes—and only comes— with a sense of belonging. Even families that could afford to have their "simchas"—weddings and bar mitzvahs—in the Concourse Plaza, generally had them instead in the neighborhood's little, somewhat shabby, social halls. No one would have called East Tremont a united community. It possessed, one study observed, a "myriad of social systems covering religious Landsmannschaft groups, fraternal, educational, political and fund-raising groups" engaged in "a co
nstant and shrill competition for loyalty," a competition which was not even resolved in the two areas where East Tremont might have been expected to be solid: politics and religion. FDR's hold was absolute—but only so far as FDR was concerned; in nonpresidential elections, men who once, long ago, had preached from soapboxes were loyal to an older faith: Socialist, Communist, American Labor and Progressive parties could all count on substantial votes in East Tremont. "In East Tremont," the study noted, "the Yiddishist and Hebraist each had his following with a supporting system of cultural clubs, bookstores, debating societies, etc." The neighborhood's seven synagogues were constantly competing for members and prestige. East Tremont may have been a loud community, a shrill community, a materialistic, money-conscious community. But it was a community.

  Robert Moses didn't think much of the apartments of East Tremont. The buildings were old, the plumbing was bad, most of them didn't even have elevators—he referred to them as "tenements," as "walkups" or, if those nouns didn't seem to be eliciting the desired horror from his listeners, as "slums." But Moses had never lived on the Lower East Side.