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

by Caro, Robert A

  (and at which he said, "Every member of the Board will want to know the difficulties facing each family in the path of the expressway"), the Mayor interrupted one Board session—at which Moses had confidently expected the issue to be resolved—to order McCullough, who had done a "study" of the tenants' alternate route for Impellitteri in a matter of minutes, to give it a little more consideration. The engineer returned a month later with a report stating that while the alternate route would spare the protesters' homes, it would require the condemnation of almost as many homes belonging to other people. You see, Moses told the Board, it was just as he was always trying to explain to them: changing a route would just "trade in" one group of protesters for another; no matter where you tried to build a highway in the city, there would be protests, so the only way to handle them was to ignore them. ETNA's leaders, who had been certain that not a single home would have to be touched for the alternate route they had proposed, were shocked by McCullough's findings—until they realized the trick that the engineer had played. He had studied an alternate route, all right, but not their alternate route. Instead, he had selected a route that would require large-scale condemnation and studied that instead. Epstein explained this to Wagner. Over Hodgkiss' violent objections, the Mayor ordered McCullough to study the right alternate route this time, to let Epstein oversee the study to make sure it was fair, and to complete the study before the Board's next meeting when a final decision would be made.

  "A defeat for Moses," the Post reported. The tenants felt it was. "We felt we had won," Lillian Edelstein recalls. Epstein, trying to reassure her, had told her, in her words, "It's like a jury trial. If they stay out long enough, they won't convict you. Because it was dragging so—month after month, I figured something is happening to hold him and his crew."

  On the day of the final hearing before McCullough, assembled in his office in the Municipal Building was a full panoply of Moses Men: Arthur S. Hodgkiss, assistant general manager of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority; Stuart Constable, acting executive officer of the New York City Department of Parks; W. Earle Andrews and Ernest J. Clark of Andrews, Clark and Buckley, consulting engineers; Milton Goul, district engineer, State Department of Public Works District Number 10, designated to represent the State Department of Public Works by Bertram Tallamy, Superintendent; Arthur B. Williams, liaison engineer, New York State Department of Public Works—and, representing Lyons, Edward J. Flanagan, who, during the entire proceedings, would utter not one word. These engineers and a dozen assistants had been assembled for the occasion on the orders of Robert Moses.

  Moses had been active in other ways, too. He had no doubt that Wagner would fall into line—years later, asked if there had been no chance at all that the Mayor would overrule him, he would, with a touch of surprise in his voice that it should be necessary to ask such a question, say flatly, "Not the slightest"—but Epstein was delaying the Mayor's compliance with his marching orders. The Deputy Mayor had to be whipped into line. During the week before the McCullough hearing, he was.

  Arriving at 10:30 a.m., the time they had been told the meeting would

  ;er* representing the tenan surprised to find k

  oted, seemed "very uncomfortable."

  AJtbotlcl ■'--* engineers in his office, the city engineer

  D of theirs, backing down only after am

  angry pro

  I j; : . v . Moses' methods, the tenants had hired

  a court rcportci -*tim transcript. Convinced that any reasons

  riven lot turning down rte route could easily be disproved, they

  yygflted once ftnd fol all not only to find out what those reasons were bu: q yr them OH A ' I illougb ordered the reporter out of the room.

  Angrily the ETNA engineer! demanded to know why, pointing out that the city engineei had his own Itenotypist present, and that they were entitled to theil 0W11 record McCullougJl refused to give a reason. (Later, in his official report Oi the proceedings, he said, "We were holding an engineering Conference and nol fl public meeting"; his own stenotypist, he said, would

  record any "pertinent tacts which might develop.") "We said, 'If you're

  telling the truth, you should have no objection to its being recorded,'" one I'/I'NA engineei recalls. They refused to participate in the meeting unless llicii repoilei was allowed to he present; McCullough said flatly that there would be no meeting as long as the reporter remained in the room. The I'/I'NA engineers asked him to gel a ruling from Epstein. Certainly, McCullough said lit- telephoned the Deputy Mayor—and to their shock Epstein

  ruled that they had u<> right to have a reporter present, i in- ETNA engineers held a hasty huddle. "We were afraid to go <>n the record without a stenographer," one,

  Leonard Swarthe, would say ''it seemed peculiar that [the] others seemed to be afraid Of" having What they s;iid set down in black and white; "it was ObviOUS the Cards were Stacked," s;iid Daniel J. O'Connell. They decided to

  w.iik out ( )nce they were safely gone, the meeting was held—"as scheduled,"

  McCullough blandly Stated In his report to Wagner—and its participants

  arrived at the conclusion that u the original plan was the only acceptable one"

  and that il WOUld be "impossible to accept the alternate route," a conclusion

  which maj possibly be explained in the Pact that the Moses Men again

  managed to avoid discussing the true ETNA- -alternate route by discussing .uun the pluM\ "alternate" Moses had put out as a smoke screen.

  (Epstein was SOOn to give the tenants who had trusted him another

  shock Repeatedly, month aftei month, after carefully examining the two

  Deput} Mavoi had said theus was the better. Now, he suddenly his iimul au he put his new opinion in writing in a letter to \ aguei ^

  Hie S sent I telegram to Wagnei appealing for an engineering

  >m undei "propei circumstances.* 1 There was no reply-—and of the

  ihowdiW ol t Minute meeting, Katl was tO write:

  Its ol the fiasco in the City Engineer's office. The

  nment I he permitted all to talk. They

  s asked uions. I he Mayor set a

  time limit for public debate and, at the end of it, called for the question ... for acquisition of funds to acquire property and for building demolition.

  Lyons moved the question, saying, "This is an engineer's problem, not a layman's problem, and all the engineers unanimously support this route." One by one the Board members voted—in the affirmative. The last man to vote was Robert F. Wagner, Jr. He voted in the affirmative, too.

  "It was so fast," Lillian Edelstein would recall years later. "I was positive at that last hearing that we would win. Because of Wagner. He had said so straight out that he would never let them do it. He had promised." Lillian Edelstein wanted to ask the Mayor what care had been taken for the families, what the relocation plans were. But she couldn't. She was crying. Katz asked instead. Lyons tried to stop him from speaking, but he went ahead anyway. Quoting Wagner's words that he would not vote for acquisition until he had been satisfied as to the relocation plans, he asked the Mayor what those plans were. The Mayor said he did not know.

  Turning to Hodgkiss, Wagner asked about the plans. Hodgkiss said a new approach had been decided on: instead of the city's own Real Estate Bureau handling the job, it had been decided to let the job to a private firm, the "highly efficient" Nassau Management Company, Inc. As Katz was to write: "The Mayor was assured that there would be few problems and that all families would be well provided for."

  Mayor Wagner asked [Katz] if this was satisfactory. [He] said no. [Katz] asked the Coordinator's representative if that office would publicly agree to meet with the tenants' committee as a group and instruct the Relocation Bureau to do the same, if the need arose to resolve problems. The Coordinator's representative pledged to do so. Wagner, at any time of difficulty in resolving problems around relocation, wanted the tenants' committee to know that they
could personally call upon the Mayor's office to help. He made this last statement for the record.

  And why did Henry Epstein change his mind, and, at the very last moment, betray the neighborhood which had counted on him for support?

  Years later—Epstein long dead now, his widow not even knowing what the author was talking about when he raised the subject of her late husband's change of mind—Robert Moses, sitting in a cottage he had rented at Oak Beach, staring out the big window from which one could see the Robert Moses Causeway and Robert Moses State Park, would be asked that question.

  Charm flooded away from that window. Dressed in the L. L. Bean corduroys, a larger size now to cover the ample paunch, and an old button-down plaid shirt, the papers that signified completed work already piled high by his armchair although it was only 9:30 a.m., a big cabin cruiser waiting down the Ocean Parkway at the Captree Basin for an afternoon's fishing, he was the easy and gracious host. The powerful face—still so young at eighty—was relaxed. Oh, that's not important, he said easily. Let's talk about something else.

  The author said he had come to talk about Henry Epstein. The expression changed only slightly, the head swung just a little, but all of a sudden the author saw not the paunch but the big shoulders and the big jaw and, beneath the big eyebrows, the eyes. Then he could see Robert Moses remember that the author was a guest in his home. Moses began to talk, seemingly at a tangent, at first choosing his words, with pauses, and then, warming up, as fast and fluid as usual.

  "It happened to be a very, very complicated thing. ... A lot of personal stuff got into it. . . . They had a couple of agitators up there . . . including a woman who was running for judge . . . and Epstein got personal and nasty about it and he finally got licked. ... I said, 'This woman, this chum of yours.' He said, 'She's not my chum.' I said, 'Oh, yes she is. She's your chum all right.' I said, 'What's going to happen if we change the route— which we'll never do as long as I'm alive—we'll just be turning in these objectors for another set.' And you know what he said? He said, 'Well, that's in the next district [not Miss Schwartz's].' He made an issue of it with the Mayor to see who had more influence. . . ."

  He stopped as if that was all there was to say. The author prodded him.

  "Epstein was a very able lawyer," Moses said. "Outstanding lawyer. I had known him a long time."

  Well, the author said, prodding some more, he did write that letter saying your route was best.

  "Sure," Moses said. "After he was hit over the head with an ax."

  What kind of an ax? the author asked. What exactly did you do to him? But there are limits to even a host's obligations. "I won't tell you what We did to him," Robert Moses said.

  Reviewing the conversation carefully, however, it is possible to wonder if—without meaning to—Robert Moses had.

  About the Cross-Bronx Expressway as a whole, Moses was more expansive. Asked if he had not felt a sense of awe—of difficulties of a new immensity—when, beginning active planning of the great road during the war, he had first seen the miles of apartment houses in his way, he said he had not. "There are more houses in the way [than on Long Island]," he said, "there are more people in the way—that's all. There's very little real hardship in the thing. There's a little discomfort and even that is greatly exaggerated. The scale was new, that was all that was new about it. And by this time there was the prospect of enough money to do things on this scale." Asked if he had ever feared that the tenants might defeat him, he said, "Nah, nobody could have stopped it." As a matter of fact, the East Tremont opposition hadn't really been much trouble at all.

  "I don't think they were too bad," Robert Moses said. "It was a political thing that stirred up the animals there. Jim Lyons didn't know which way to turn. But I just stood pat, that's all."

  New York's press also didn't see much significance in the East Tremont fight. The Post gave it complete coverage, of course, and the World-Telegram

  occasionally devoted a fairly detailed story to it, but, aside from Moses' single personal appearance before the Board of Estimate (on the occasion of which the Times put his picture on page one), the rest of the city's big dailies all but ignored it. When they did devote space to it—a paragraph or two at the bottom of a round-up of Board activities—the attitude they displayed is of interest. This, for example, was the Times's description of the final, climactic hearing at which Lillian Edelstein sat crying in City Hall.

  Five years of opposition and delay to the Cross-Bronx Expressway came to an end when the Board of Estimate unanimously voted to acquire land for a one-quarter [sic] mile segment of the middle section. The fight put up by the tenants resulted in a virtual stalling of the overall Cross-Bronx Expressway project, since the two ends of the artery are now finished.

  Why wouldn't Moses shift the route of the Cross-Bronx Expressway slightly, thereby saving 1,530 apartments, millions in state and city money, months of aggravation and delay—and making his expressway straighter as well?

  "I asked George Spargo that," says Joseph Ingraham, the Times reporter who was occasionally on Moses' payroll and who spent so much time socializing with the Moses team that he sometimes seemed to be one of its members. "On the day of the ribbon cutting they were opening a whole bunch of sections of different expressways, and it was raining, really pouring. George said, 'Let's sit this out, and we'll catch up to them at the next stop.' We went into a small bar in the Bronx and I asked him there. He said, 'Oh, one of Jimmy Lyons' relatives owns a piece of property up there and we would have had to take it if we used that other route, and Jimmy didn't want it taken, and RM had promised him we wouldn't.' At the time, George even told me the piece of property involved, but I've forgotten."

  The people of East Tremont also wondered why Moses wouldn't shift the route. "I mean, we heard lots of rumors about the bus terminal," Lillian Edelstein recalls. "The politicians were always trying to tell us that was the reason. But we could never find out anything about it. And, I mean, I never believed that. I could never believe that even Robert Moses would take fifteen hundred homes just to save a bus terminal."

  Spargo's statement may have been untrue. So may the rumors. If any relative of Bronx Borough President James J. Lyons owned property along either the alternate or actual expressway route, the author was unable to find evidence of that fact—although, since, in the Bronx, politicians' ownership of property was habitually concealed through a many-layered network of intermediaries and bag men, a network baffling even to contemporary investigators and all but impenetrable twenty years later, his failure is not conclusive. Moses' refusal to alter the route—unexplainable on the basis of his given reasons, all of which are demonstrably false—may have had nothing to do with the fact that the "bus terminal" of which Lillian Edelstein speaks —actually the "Tremont Depot" of the Third Avenue Transit Company, at the northeast corner of Crotona Park—lies in the path of the alternate

  route and would have had to be condemned if that route was adopted. It is possible that Moses' selection of the original route—it was he, not any engineer, who selected it—was based on no more than whim, and that his subsequent refusal to alter it was due to nothing more than stubbornness, although if so it was a whim quite inconsistent with Moses' customary whims: almost invariably over a period of forty years, whenever he had a choice of routes, he selected the one that would keep his road straight, not the one that would make the road curve.

  However, in attempting to find an explanation for Moses' refusal to change the route, the Third Avenue Transit depot stands out. With the exception of six old, small, dilapidated brownstone tenements, housing a total of nineteen families, it was the only structure of any type that would have had to be condemned if the alternate route was used. (See map, page 864.) In effect, for whatever reason, Robert Moses elected to tear down 159 buildings housing 1,530 families instead of tearing down six buildings housing nineteen families—and the terminal. It is a fact that the Third Avenue Transit Company secretly told Moses it was very anxious
not to have the terminal condemned, for its location was strategic for its buses. And it is also a fact that for twenty years it was considered an open secret in Bronx political circles that key borough politicians held large but carefully hidden interests in Third Avenue Transit. And it is also a fact that, in Bronx politics of the period, what Third Avenue Transit wanted, Third Avenue Transit got.

  But the unfortunate element in searching for the explanation of Moses' refusal is that in the perspective of the history of New York City it is unimportant. Whether Moses refused to change the route for a personal or political reason, the point is that his reason was the only one that counted. Neighborhood feelings, urban planning considerations, cost, aesthetics, common humanity, common sense—none of these mattered in laying out the routes of New York's great roads. The only consideration that mattered was Robert Moses' will. He had the power to impose it on New York.

  "Highly efficient" was the only description of the Nassau Management Company given at the Board of Estimate hearing. A more detailed description would have been instructive.

  Nassau Management had been founded three years before on a shoestring with virtually no financial resources behind it. But it was almost immediately to obtain immense tenant relocation contracts for several Robert Moses highway and housing projects. One contract alone netted the firm more than two million dollars.

  The men who owned stock in Nassau Management thus made fortunes without risking more than a token investment. The ostensible key men behind the company—its founders of record—were two low-echelon City Housing Authority employees who quit the Authority to form the firm. But they were only front men. The key figures behind Nassau Management, men who would profit from the relocation of the East Tremont tenants,