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

by Caro, Robert A

  were William S. Lebwohl, counsel of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority; Samuel Brooks, assistant director of the Mayor's Slum Clearance Committee; and Housing Authority chairman Philip J. Cruise—three of Moses' key aides.

  first man: After a lifetime, a piece of paper, an edict

  from the authorities, and we must all leave

  our homes. mendel: Rabbi, we've been waiting for the Messiah

  all our lives. Wouldn't this be a good time

  for him to come? rabbi: We'll have to wait for him someplace else.

  Meanwhile, let's start packing.

  — FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

  It must have been an accident that the "East Tremont" office opened by the "highly efficient" Nassau Management Company was located not in East Tremont but in West Farms, another neighborhood, inconveniently far away for the 1,530 families the office was supposed to serve. It must have been an accident that the office was open only a few hours a day, that those hours were constantly changing, that no notice was ever given of what those hours were going to be, and that inquiring about them by telephone was almost impossible since the single phone number listed for the office seemed to be always busy—so that often East Tremont housewives, having made the long trek over to West Farms, found waiting for them only a locked door. It must have been an accident that there were never enough company representatives in the office, so that the housewives waiting for help had to wait on long lines.

  But East Tremont's housewives soon found, as one put it: "They didn't want to help you, they just wanted you out. And they wanted you out fast." A series of incentives was placed before the tenants to accomplish this end. On her first trip to the office, a housewife was not offered any help in finding a new home. Instead, she was told that if Nassau Management had to find her one, she would receive only a hundred dollars for moving expenses, far less than would be needed to cover those expenses. If she found one herself, she was told, she would receive a hundred dollars for each room in her present apartment. If she found one fast, she was told, she would receive a flat "fee" of eight hundred dollars. And if she found one real fast, she would get not only eight hundred dollars but reimbursement for moving expenses—actual moving expenses. It was only if you refused to accept these incentives and insisted on the help that had been promised that you were

  given two cards, each bearing an address of an "available" apartment— "comparable" to the one you now occupied.

  "I went to one," a housewife recalls. "This was in the West Bronx. It was a walkup—four flights of stairs. The apartment was on the top floor. And there was already a line there of women that had been sent over. People were standing on the staircase—all down the four flights—and outside. What was the sense of standing on line? If the apartment was decent at all, someone else would have taken it. What was the sense of sending hundreds of women to look at one darn apartment? I went home."

  Lillian Roberts waited on such a line. "When I finally got to the apartment, it wasn't comparable at all. It was so dark and crummy. It was only three rooms, and I had told them I had four. And they wanted twice as much rent as I was paying. For that filthy thing! I still remember it. Horrible. I wouldn't go back to that office again." Some housewives were so desperate that they did go back. Women who would never have believed that they would ever be in such a position found themselves standing around a bare storefront office, hour after hour, day after day—"like beggars," one says bitterly—hoping that someone would give them a home.

  Sometimes, when a woman got to the address Nassau Management had given her, there was no one around to let her in. If she was lucky enough to find a superintendent or a janitor, he sometimes told her that the apartment was not vacant—hadn't been for months. Back they went, day after day, from the apartments they had been sent to see in the West Bronx or River-dale or Throgs Neck, back to the Nassau Management office and then out again in a search of something they knew now they were never going to find. "I remember that winter," says one of those women. "I got old that winter."

  If you still refused to accept either the apartments that were offered or the cash, other incentives were applied.

  "As soon as the city took over, the superintendents moved out," Lillian Edelstein recalls. "They got other jobs. You couldn't blame them. But you couldn't get any kind of services. The halls got dirty. There was garbage to take out. ... I went to fight," Mrs. Edelstein says, but Nassau Management said the city Real Estate Bureau was responsible for maintaining the buildings. The tenants protested to the Real Estate Bureau, but the only result, as Mrs. Edelstein recalls it, "was that they assigned one man to take care of six or eight buildings, and soon he was gone, too." And always the final answer was that on all matters pertaining to the Cross-Bronx Expressway the "final say" had to come from Robert Moses. Katz had asked Moses' representative "if that office would publicly agree to meet with the tenants' committee ... if the need arose to resolve problems," and Hodgkiss had made that agreement. Now they called Moses and Hodgkiss. "We never even got a reply." They telephoned Wagner's office. Wagner had "wanted the tenants' committee to know they could personally call upon the Mayor's office to help." "Ah, we never got him on the phone, or anyone else but a secretary," one ETNA member says. "They started bouncing us back and forth to the agencies again."

  The city formally took title to the 159 buildings in Section 2 on

  January i, 1954. Almost simultaneously, the heat and hot water in many of the buildings was mysteriously cut off. Eleven days later—eleven days of getting the same run-around from the city, and the same lack of response from Moses' office—they told their story to the Post. The Post got an answer from Benjamin Cymrot, executive officer of the Real Estate Bureau ("Repairs take time, and we are working as quickly as we can. . . . Essential services" will be maintained), but Cymrot's definition of "essential services" was evidently different from the tenants'. For many of them—for much of the winter—the only warmth in their apartments was provided by the little, inadequate electric heaters they purchased themselves, or by gas ranges they kept turned on all the time, and the only hot water was the water they heated in pots. There were a few desultory attempts at repairs, but many of the buildings had no heat or hot water for weeks at a time. One had none for three straight months.

  Incentive to get out was provided also by mortification of the mind. "[Nassau Management] said they were only obligated to show you two apartments," Mrs. Edelstein recalls. "If you turned down two apartments that they offered you, they said they were through with you. They said either you get out on your own, or they dispossess you. They said they'd put you out in the street." The threat was backed up by dispossess notices, all designed to look like court orders although they were not, each couched in language more urgent and ominous than the last. On May 1, a Friday, every tenant remaining in the area received one ordering him to vacate or be evicted by the end of the month. After a weekend of hysteria, a tenants' committee accompanied by Councilman Louis Peck was able to see Percy Gale, director of the city Real Estate Bureau. Luckily for them they had brought a Pest reporter along; Gale hastily explained that the notices were only "a necessary legal prerequisite" (to what he didn't say) and that "no one will be evicted if they do not vacate at the end of thirty days."

  The escalation of incentives produced the desired results. More than a thousand of the 1,530 families had stuck it out through the terrible winter because the alternatives were so shattering. "What choices did most of them have?" Lillian Edelstein asks. "Either to move to apartments for the same rent they were paying—which meant for most of them moving to the slums— or to move above their means, which would be a great, great hardship for these people." In the spring, however, they began to move out faster and faster.

  The old people clung hardest. "They were the ones I really felt sorry for," Lillian Roberts says. These were very poor old people—Social Security had come too late for many of them—and many of them were alone in their little apartments, the parents or
wives or husbands who had come with them from the little shtetls of their youth gone now. "There were a lot of widows in East Tremont." But as long as they could stay in their tiny apartments— on the first or second floor, mostly, because stairs are hard on old people —they had something: the Senior Citizens program at the Y, familiar places to sit and stroll in the sun and, most important, companionship. If they had to move, they would have nothing. Impoverished elderly couples were

  eligible for apartments in City Housing Authority projects. But although there were at the time a number of Authority projects under construction, the Authority's Moses-dominated board was deaf to these couples' pleas that a substantial number of them be allowed to move into the same project, so that they could stay together. Couples eligible for apartments in projects had no choice but to take them; they could not afford decent living accommodations anywhere else. Impoverished elderly men and women who were alone in the world were not eligible for Authority projects; the Moses-controlled Authority made no provision for single people. Such men and women had no chance at all to stay together. "Do you know how poor they were?" Lillian Roberts says. "They didn't have the carfare to visit each other." The old people of East Tremont were terribly frightened of moving. But Robert Moses had made certain they would be more frightened of staying. One by one, faster and faster, the old people moved out, too. By June, half the 1,530 apartments were vacant.

  Their emptiness made possible the application of new incentives.

  "As soon as the top floor of a building was empty, they'd start tearing off the roof and the top stories, even," says Mrs. Edelstein. "While people were still living in it, they were tearing it down around their heads!" As soon as an apartment was vacated, moreover, its windows were boarded up, which advertised to vandals defenseless premises available for the plundering. Watchmen were apparently a luxury neither the city nor Nassau Management could afford. The other tenants could hear the vandals at night, tearing the plumbing out of the walls for money, ripping the boards off the windows and breaking the glass for sheer malice, throwing bricks and other debris off the roofs to hear the crash when they hit the ground. "Then," Mrs. Lucille Silverstein says, "started the muggings." Soon the people living in those half-empty buildings—lonely, scared, many of them old and alone—weren't safe in their own lobbies or on the flights of stairs which suddenly seemed terribly long and dark. Terror, that most efficient of eviction agents, stalked through that boarded-up, half-empty neighborhood.

  Along that mile, now, most of the one- and two-family frame houses had been demolished. As the demolition crews worked, they had piled the lumber they were tearing apart in the back yards of those houses, and when they left, they had left the lumber there in piles twenty-five and thirty feet high, stacked as if for a bonfire. Soon, thanks to vandals, the bonfires blazed and the remaining apartment houses stood not only among these heaps of lumber but among gaping, debris-filled pits, some thirty feet deep—the basements of what had once been other apartment houses. Into one, someone had driven an automobile, and it lay there, stripped and abandoned, for months. To mark the site of other apartment houses there were jagged-topped brick walls, ten or twelve feet high, and the space between those walls was filled with bricks, sharp-edged shafts of steel and shards of broken glass. "The rats were running like dogs and cats in the street," Lillian Edelstein says. So thick was the grime hurled in clouds into the air by the demolition

  that Dominick Tesone, hanging desperately on to his three-family frame house, spoke of living in "dust storms."

  Unsupervised children walked single-file along the tops of those brick walls, trying, as children do, to see who could keep longest from falling— but if they fell, it was onto those shafts and shards. There were no fences around those gaping pits; parents lived in fear that their kids would fall into them. One mother, who normally picked her two little boys up at school every day, was late one day, and, hurrying along the route they took home, saw them jumping back and forth across a hole in the street. Rushing up to them, she saw that the hole was perhaps twenty feet deep.

  The people still left along the mile were the last holdouts against what they regarded as injustice. Tesone was informed that he could receive only $11,000 for his three-family frame house because Moses had established that as the price for all the frame buildings along that mile. "They gave $11,000 for a one-family shack, they gave the same to all the houses along the way," Tesone says. "Mine was a good house. It wasn't fair." The appraisal he commissioned set its value at $18,000; the city representative said that appraisal might well be fair, but that didn't matter; $n,ooo was the price. Tesone had hired a lawyer and was going to fight on. Other people were still left along the mile because they had no place else to go. The family with eleven children, for example, had been unable to find any landlord— at any price—who would give them an apartment. The City Housing Authority had promised them one, but kept saying that no apartment large enough was yet available. The people who were left were still hoping that the city, and Robert Moses, would keep the promises they had made.

  They tried to protest. They called the city agencies pleading that watchmen be assigned to the area, and that fences be erected to keep children from falling into the pits. Surely, they said, with hundreds of workmen in the area, a few could be spared to put up fences. But always, after being shunted from one agency to another, they were eventually told that the State Department of Public Works was in charge of all physical arrangements in the area, and when they called the State DPW, the answer was that while the DPW was technically in charge, the actual work was being carried out under the direction of the City Construction Coordinator, and he was the only one who could help them. And when they called the Coordinator's office, they were never able to speak to anyone except secretaries who told them that someone would call back, and no one ever did. Water and electricity were suddenly and mysteriously cut off and when, after protests to city agencies were publicized by the Post, they were restored, they were suddenly and mysteriously cut off again. Tesone's home shared a fire wall with the adjoining building. One day, while Tesone was still living on one side of that wall, demolition began on the house on the other side of that wall. He could see his wall being weakened by vibrations. "One day, it'll come right down on us," he said. Telling his lawyer to drop his appeal, he moved out.

  And always, there were the threats. Speed was essential, the Nassau Management Company kept saying. Work on the expressway itself was

  going to begin any day. And as soon as it did, anyone left in 4he area would be put out in the street with no further warning. 'That was all I heard," one holdout remembers. "If you don't get out, we'll put you out in the street." Out in the street! Out in the street! As the Tsar had harried them—or their fathers or their grandfathers—out of the shtetls of the Pale, the Coordinator harried them out of East Tremont. By November, the Nassau Management Company could proudly announce: "In less than ten months, we have relocated 90 percent of the 1,530 occupants of Section 2."

  over the Harlem, would be the most expensive road constructed in all history, would cost not the $47,000,000 that Moses had originally "estimated" but $250,000,000. Now that Moses had cleared the right-of-way for the expressway, he had no money to build it—and, in fact, was not able to get it under way again except on a token construction scale until 1957, after the Federal Interstate Highway Act of 1956 had authorized an increase in the federal contribution from 50 to 90 percent. Even then, moreover, there would be continual delays. Bids came in far over contract estimates; new estimates would have to be prepared and new rounds of bidding held. Construction of the final segment of the Cross-Bronx Expressway—the Bruckner traffic circle near its eastern end—would not be completed until 1973. The rest of the Cross-Bronx Expressway would not be completed until 1963. And the one mile of the expressway in East Tremont would not be completed until i960 —five years after Moses had removed from that mile the people who lived in it.

  Five thousand people had been remo
ved from East Tremont, but that was 5,000 out of 60,000. There were still 55,000 left. Chance, moreover, had spared East Tremont the fate of other communities disemboweled by a Moses highway operation—the heart of this community, bustling East Tremont Avenue, had escaped the Coordinator's scalpel.

  But the thuds of the "skullcracker," the huge swinging wrecking ball, the crash of crumbling walls and the rumble of trucks carrying the walls away had been merely a prelude, the rattle of rifle fire from a skirmishers' picket line before the battle is fully joined and the big guns come into play. For Moses' Cross-Bronx Expressway had been designed by a single criterion: its efficiency as a traffic-moving device. This meant keeping the expressway as level as possible, and East Tremont was a neighborhood of hills. "To keep the grade down, we had to go down," Ernie Clark explains. Going down meant going under the surface of East Tremont. And under that surface was solid rock, and there is only one way to get rid of solid rock.

  "First you heard the sound, and then, a few seconds later, you felt the tremor, like a rumbling in the earth, a shaking under your feet," recalls Barney Lambert, whose office was seven blocks away. The sound of the explosions of the huge masses of dynamite required "was a boom, a real boom —like a bomb." Says Mrs. Silverstein: "The whole neighborhood seemed to be shaking."

  It was shaking. The blasting found out every flaw in the earth under East Tremont. It caused the bed of a subterranean river beneath Southern Boulevard to shift. Mortar and brick were jarred loose from one end of the neighborhood to the other. As apartment houses settled or were pushed up as the earth beneath them heaved, huge gaping fissures began to appear in their walls and ceilings. Tenants were hastily evacuated—some in the middle of the night.