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

by Caro, Robert A

  walls ripped open by vandals who had torn the plumbing pipes out of them. Other doors, however, were closed and locked; on them, especially around the keyholes, were scratches and gouges that showed where someone had tried to break through them. And behind these doors the committee found people, not winos but respectable Irish or Jewish families like themselves.

  Some of the apartments were furnished, nicely, for the families living in them were the families who had always lived in them. In others, the families were living out of suitcases, and the only decorations were cheap curtains placed on the windows in the hope that proof that someone was living behind them would deter vandals from breaking them as they broke the windows of unoccupied apartments. And the horrified East Tremont housewives heard the housewives in these apartments inform them that they were living there only temporarily, that they had been moved into them "by the city" when their old homes were demolished and that they expected to be moved out of them—into other temporary quarters—when it came time for the city to demolish them. The expressway had pushed up to the very wall of one apartment building, concrete bellying right up to the brick. Going inside, the committee found one family—a middle-aged couple with two children—who had been moved into the building only a few weeks before, and who were obviously going to have to be moved out of it in another few weeks. Standing shivering in cold rooms—for in most of the remaining apartment buildings in Section 3 there was of course no heat—the committee from East Tremont heard women—respectable housewives like themselves, women who had always been proud of the homes they made for their families—state that they had been shunted ahead of the path of the expressway over and over again, forced to move—"like gypsies," one said—from one condemned building to another, each one further along the expressway's route, for years. Disbelieving, the committee heard the topper: these dispossessed families were forced to pay rent for their heatless hovels, and each time they were moved they were hit with a 15 percent rent increase.

  Section 3 had received the same assurances that Moses was now making to Section 2, they said—back in 1946, when the city had taken title to that section. "The city" had even set up a Tenant Relocation Bureau—supposedly to find them new, comparable living quarters. They were still living in Section 3 because the Tenant Relocation Bureau (an agency closely allied with Moses) had not found them such quarters. The only apartments she had been shown were apartments "not fit for rats," one bitter, middle-aged housewife said. And the rents asked for those apartments had been double what she had been paying for a nice, two-bedroom apartment— double what she could afford. One elderly widow, one of three tenants left in a twenty-family apartment house, had been ordered to put her furniture in storage and move into a single furnished room. She was desperately holding on to the apartment in the hope of something better because her son, an Air Force flier in Korea, was expected home soon. When he had left her, he had had a home, she said. "He has a right to expect a home" when he gets back, too.

  The Post had inquired about tenant relocation in Section 3. Moses had

  replied. -None of the families living in the path of the Cross-Bronx Expressway has been turned into the street. The city, through its Real Estate Bureau, has treated every family involved in a considerate, humane manner." From the tenants still living in Section 3—and from families who had moved out— the East Tremont committee heard about the Real Estate Bureau (another agency closely allied with Moses J.

  When you first went to the office the Bureau had set up at 1 Hugh Grant Circle, the committee learned, you were told that you had better try to get an apartment yourself. As an inducement to do so—and thus save the Bureau any work at all—you were offered S200 per room, little more than enough to cover moving expenses.

  When you returned to the office and said you had been unable to find one that you were willing to live in and that you could afford, the Bureau's first reaction was to tell you that there was nothing more it could do, implying it had washed its hands of your case entirely, and leaving you with a feeling that there was no help available for you from anyone in the city government. If you persisted, and insisted on being shown other apartments, you would be taken—eventually—to inspect, along with other people who had insisted, "comparable" apartments. Apartments that were indeed comparable—and you had to be one of a lucky few to be shown any of those, anyway—bore rents three and four times those you were currently paying. And there were hardly any of those available, anyway. Most of the apartments you were shown were ancient, filthy, cold, dark tenement and slum warrens.

  When, in desperation, driven to willingness to accept the "stigma," you asked if "the city" which was destroying your home could not give you another one in one of its public housing projects, you were told that there were tens of thousands of people ahead of you on the waiting list; one resident of the condemned buildings in Section 3 said she had been on the list for six years.

  And what if you tried to hold out, to insist on the comparable apartment that the city had promised you? When the time came, the city's Bureau had methods for discouraging you. It would set a deadline, and inform you that the $200 per room they were offering for moving expenses would be reduced to $100 if you did not get out by that date. Then, if you still had not moved, they might set another deadline—on which the amount would be reduced to $50, or to nothing. Then there was the barrage of threatening notices and directives, designed to make you feel that you might return home one day to find your belongings out on the street. One, sent out in 1949, told the recipients that the city required their premises "for the immediate purpose of demolishing. . . . You will please take further notice that upon your failure to remove from the premises within the time specified legal processes will be instituted to recover possession of the premises." When you protested —when you formed a committee to protest; yes, the DP's of Section 3 said, they had formed committees, too—all protests were referred to Moses, and Moses would never even reply to them. Insisting did no good. After interviewing the tenants left in Section 3, Mrs. Edelstein reported that "they knew of no one who was relocated by Mr. Moses." Some 325 tenants had

  moved out—been forced out—of the area by his tactics. But when the committee from East Tremont arrived in 1952—six years after "orderly tenant relocation operations" had begun—there were still living in those doomed, half-empty hulks in the expressway's path no fewer than 250. It was no wonder that when Mrs. Edelstein reported the results of the committee's investigation at a neighborhood mass meeting, they "were received as a nightmare."

  But East Tremont's panic was soon replaced by hope.

  The hope was based on faith in Robert Moses, or, more accurately, in the Moses mystique. East Tremont's pious Jews still held the campaign of 1934 against him—"I hated him since the time he said he wasn't Jewish," one says—but they still believed in his image as a man above politics and bureaucrats. Believing in that image, the people of East Tremont were sure that if they could only present Moses with an alternate route through their neighborhood that was truly better than the route he had chosen, he would accept it. And it did not take them very long to find out that such a route was indeed available.

  Bronx Borough President James J. Lyons; Lyons' chief engineer, Moses' old Planning Commission ally Arthur V. Sheridan; and Sheridan's veteran aides had all been in on the laying out of the route Moses had chosen. But when the East Tremont committee asked for an appointment with Lyons, Lyons aide Charles F. Rodriguez recalls, "Lyons fobbed them off to Sheridan, and Sheridan fobbed them off to someone else"—and the someone else happened to be a recent addition to the staff named Edward J. Flanagan, who was, Rodriguez admits, "a capable engineer" but who had never, during a long engineering career, been associated with Moses and who was "very cocksure of himself" (by which Rodriguez apparently means he was not afraid to say what he thought). And when the housewives mentioned the possibility of an alternate route, Flanagan, without letting them finish, said of course there was, took out a pen, said, "There'
s no reason the route couldn't go this way," and sketched on a map before him the route through Crotona Park that was precisely what they had had in mind.

  Flanagan was silenced—no one from East Tremont ever got an appointment with him again—but he had given the housewives conviction that the alternate route was feasible. The Bronx County Chapter of the New York State Society of Professional Engineers agreed to make a formal study of it. And one member of the society had enough experience with large-scale highway construction to do so—experience garnered working, indirectly, for Robert Moses. Bernard Weiner, a refugee with a heavy accent, was the brilliant engineer who, after working during the 1920's on the Westchester parkway system, had gone to work for Madigan-Hyland and designed, among other Moses projects, all the concrete bridges on the Circumferential Parkway—although he could not pronounce "Circumferential"—and the revolutionary three-span skew frame interchange that carries the White-stone Expressway and Grand Central Parkway across each other in Queens.

  THE ONE MILE

  Then his independent outlook—he kept insisting that if Moses did not increase the grades on the Circumferential, it was going to flood in heavy rains—got him dropped from the team. Weiner, who had found it impossible, despite his experience and acknowledged brilliance, to get a good job since, had learned the price of opposing Moses, and he was not willing to pay it in full any more, but he was willing to pay part of it. When the Bronx Chapter asked him to do studies of the alternate route, he agreed only "on condition that I would be anonymous" (another engineer's name was signed to them), but he did do them—with his usual thoroughness, drawing up not just a sketch but a complete engineering study that demonstrated that the route through the park was not only feasible but met every federal and state standard for expressway design.

  The arguments in favor of the park route were clear. By making only a gentle alteration in the road's route—swinging it just two blocks (one block in some places) to the south, 1,530 apartments would be saved at no cost to anyone: the road would not be made longer, its curves would not be made sharper—its efficiency as a traffic-moving device would not be harmed in the least. "We were happy then," recalls Lillian Edelstein. "We had been worried, but when we found there was a feasible alternate route, we figured we were in business." The arguments in favor of the alternate route were so clear. Believing in the myth of Moses, the housewives of East Tremont were sure he would accept them. And it wasn't until they tried to present them to him that panic set in again. For neither he nor any of his aides would even listen to those arguments. There would be no point in any meeting, Moses' office told Mrs. Edelstein when she telephoned after letters and telegrams had gone unanswered. The Coordinator had already decided on the route. It would not be changed.

  Even then, East Tremont felt it had recourse. "I mean, we felt that Robert Moses might be powerful, but he wasn't the final say, was he?" says Mrs. Edelstein. Most of the money for the expressway was coming from the federal government. In some vague way they didn't understand, the state was

  involved, too. They had elected officials in the city to represent their views. The informal tenants' committee had by now become a formal group: ETNA, the East Tremont Neighborhood Association. And ETNA had found a leader.

  Sam Edelstein's wife Lillian had never led anything. Ask her to describe herself and she says, "I was just a housewife"—and that was what she was, at thirty-nine a strikingly handsome one. But Lillian Edelstein had a big stake in the fight. Not only would she lose her apartment—which she loved and whose $56 rent she could afford even on the $75 per week Sam brought home from his job as a blocker of women's hats—if Moses' route was chosen, but her mother and her sister would lose their apartments, too: they all lived at 867 East 176th Street, Lillian in 2F, her sister in 3F, her mother in 3G. It was important to Lillian Edelstein that she be close to her mother. Her father had died just a little more than a year before, leaving Anna Cohen, born in Russia and able to speak English only haltingly, alone. It was all right as long as her children were close by. "But what if we were separated? What would Mom do?" And it was wonderful that she could be close to her sister—and to all the East Tremont girls with whom she had grown up. Her younger daughter, Janet, was only five, but her older girl, Carol, was fifteen and a junior at Roosevelt High School, and when she heard she might have to leave all her friends, she began to cry. "I was fighting for my home," Lillian Edelstein says. "And my mother. And sister. And daughter. I had a lot to fight for." In fighting she displayed not only energy and determination but an indefinable quality of command. Soon ETNA was turning to her for leadership, and she was providing it. She organized mass meetings and rallies and invited East Tremont's elected officials to them, and, refusing to be turned away by secretaries and assistants, secured appointments to talk to them in person.

  And their reaction was encouraging. East Tremont's congressman, Isidore Dollinger, pledged his support. East Tremont's legislators, State Senator Jacob H. Gilbert and Assemblyman Walter H. Gladwin, pledged theirs. Most encouraging of all was the reaction of the city officials who would play the most direct role, not only of East Tremont's councilman, Bertha Schwartz, but of higher-ups, men who to these housewives had been only names in the newspapers—names they associated with enormous power. When ETNA'S executive committee went down to City Hall for the first time, more than a little in awe of their surroundings, Comptroller Lazarus Joseph put them at their ease, told them that Moses' new highways "are making a jigsaw out the Bronx," said that their alternate route was certainly worthy of a full study, promised to vote against condemnation of their homes until such a study was made and said that if the study showed the alternate route to be feasible, he would vote for it. Borough President Lyons received the delegation "cordially and warmly," one member wrote. He promised that his engineering staff would make a formal study of the alternate route. "The delegation left feeling that he was very much on their side." Two weeks later, those feelings were seemingly confirmed. Lyons

  told the Post that his engineers had decided that the tenants' route was not only "humane" but "feasible," that it would "save the city money, and that he was in favor of it." Noting that Lyons had previously approved his route, Moses angrily charged that the borough president was raising objections now only because it was an election year and there was "local opposition." Any local hardship will be "mitigated," if not entirely removed, "by the elaborate steps which we have taken to move tenants in an orderly way into public, quasi-public and other housing," and should be disregarded anyway, he said. "This route will be the backbone of traffic for centuries after a few objecting tenants have disappeared from the scene. . . . You have from time to time remarked that I do not have to be elected to office. Perhaps that is why I am in a position to protect the really long-range public interest." He used his old threat—"Only recently you lost a substantial amount of . . . money in the Bronx" by "blocking the Bruckner Expressway"; the Cross-Bronx "will cost more than thirty million dollars additional. . . . Would you like to see the project, now half completed, abandoned and remaining state and federal monies spent elsewhere?"—and then escalated it by threatening to resign as Construction Coordinator ("I should not care to carry this responsibility any further if borough politics are to be injected into it"), but Lyons replied that any insinuation that he would allow himself to be influenced by the imminence of an election was "a damnable lie." "This is not Russia. Here we have democracy, and the people should be able to speak out in order to save their homes." Councilman Schwartz had told the tenants about the "Borough Presidents' Union," and they understood that, if Lyons stood firm, Moses' route would not be approved. And so it was with a sense of victory in a righteous cause that, on Thursday, April 23, 1953, more than two hundred East Tremont housewives—East Tremont husbands could not afford to lose a day's pay by skipping work—traveled by chartered buses down to City Hall, to hear the Board of Estimate decide whether to give Moses' draft damage maps the approval that would be the first step towa
rd condemnation, and saw the Board members file out of a door on the raised platform—and then saw, striding out among them, right behind Mayor Impellitteri, the legendary Coordinator.

  "He came in and everybody hushed," says Lillian Roberts, "even the men around the Board of Estimate. He wielded power, you could see, a powerful man and you could see it. Arrogant. The big T am. Me!' Chest out. He came out of the private room and stood behind the Mayor, and behind him were two of his men. And the way he talked to the Mayor! He practically ordered him around. And when it came time for him to talk" (Mrs. Roberts wrinkles up her face to indicate the disdain and scorn on Moses'): " 'This is going through, and this is going through, and that's all there is to that!' —that's the way he talked." Says Barney Lambert: "He dominated— -it was like he had inherited a crown. This sense of superiority was there." It took Lillian Edelstein only a few moments to start losing the hopes with which she had come to City Hall. "Handsome, tall, dark—a distinguished-looking man he is. But a mean face. A mean person. When you looked at him, you saw he was a sour person. He looked right at us—like we were little people. He