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

by Caro, Robert A

  The one mile of the Cross-Bronx Expressway through East Tremont was completed in i960. By 1965, the community's "very good, solid housing stock," the apartment buildings that had been so precious to the people who had lived in them, were ravaged hulks. Windows, glassless except for the jagged edges around their frames, stared out on the street like sightless eyes. The entrances to those buildings were carpeted with shards of glass from what had been the doors to their lobbies. In those lobbies, what remained of the walls was covered with obscenities. And not much remained. Plaster from the walls lay in heaps in corners; the bare wood which had been exposed was shattered and broken. The pipes which had been behind the wood were gone, ripped out, melted down and sold for the few dollars that would buy the next fix. Elevators no longer worked. Staircases were broken and shattered. Banisters had been ripped from their sockets, for scrap and a fix if they were iron, for malice, an expression of hatred and revenge on an uncaring world, if they were wood. Raw garbage spilled out of broken bags across the floor. The stench of stale urine and vomit filled the nostrils. One tried to look down only enough to avoid stepping on the piles of feces, whether mercifully dried or reeking fresh—animal and human. There was no heat in those buildings; if they were homes, they were homes as the cave of the savage was a home. And yet they were homes—homes for tens of thousands of people. They were homes for welfare tenants and for the poorest of the working poor, for families that drift from one apartment to another without, seemingly, ever paying a month's rent in full—urban gypsies—for mothers who say desperately to the stranger, when they can be induced to talk to the stranger: "I got to get my kids out of here," and for children who come to the door long after the knock is heard and peer around and ask the stranger, with fear in eyes and voice: "Are you the man from the welfare?"

  After seven o'clock, the residential streets of East Tremont are deserted, roamed by narcotics addicts in gangs like packs of wolves. Even on East Tremont Avenue, by nine o'clock most of the stores are closed, the lights out, huddled behind steel gates and iron bars.

  The streets of East Tremont are carpeted so thickly with pieces of shattered glass that they shine in the sun. Garbage, soaked mattresses, bits of broken furniture and, everywhere, small pieces of jagged steel fill the gutters. The sidewalks are full of holes, the streets—particularly the streets overlooking the expressway, for the expressway has made them dead-end, reducing traffic on them to a minimum—with the hulks of stripped automobiles. Once East Tremont, while the expressway was being built, had had the look of blitzkrieged London; now it looked as London might have looked if, after the bombs, troops had fought their way through it from house to house. It had the look of a jungle.

  Of the people who had lived in East Tremont, who had found in that neighborhood security, roots, friendship, a community that provided an anchor—friends and synagogue and Y—a place where you knew the people

  and they knew you, where you could make a stand against the swirling, fearsome tides of the sea of life, only the very old, too poor to move, still lived, almost barricaded in their freezing apartments. As for the rest of the people who had lived there, they were gone.

  Let's see. We have built and are building wide parkways and expressways, bridges and tunnels, without crossings and lights, with service roads for local use and parking, belt and crosstown systems which take through traffic off ordinary streets and enormously cut down congestion. . . . Then we have great new parking spaces in parks, at beaches and along parkways. ... We have eliminated railroad grade crossings which blocked traffic for miles on Atlantic Avenue and Rockaway, and substituted boulevards for tracks. Trolley tracks are being ripped up all over town to promote the flow of traffic. . . .

  Stick around, Mr. Editor, and continue to give us your support. Traffic will run pretty smoothly here within three years, the time needed to carry out our plans.

  Soon Moses was documenting the extent of those plans. Blueprints were ready, he said, for widening the city's old boulevards—Horace Harding, Queens, Conduit, Northern, Eastern—and his old parkways— the Belt, the Gowanus, the Cross Island, the Laurelton—and for building close to a hundred miles of new, broader roads, "expressways" to carry not only automobiles but trucks and buses. Soon New York's newspapers began to be filled with names like "Bruckner," "Van Wyck," "Major Deegan,"* "Cross-Bronx," "Brooklyn-Queens," "Harlem River," "New England," "Richmond," "Willowbrook," "Clove Lakes." Also on the agenda, he disclosed, were three monumental "crossings" of Manhattan Island: "Lower Manhattan," "Mid-Manhattan" and "Upper Manhattan" elevated expressways. And that was just within the city. On Long Island, the old parkways whose names were synonymous with his—the Southern State, the Northern State, the Wantagh, the Ocean—were to be widened and extended, the Northern State deep into Suffolk County, and new parkways—the Meadowbrook, the Captree—were to be built. In Westchester, the Cross County and Sprain Brook parkways were to be built, the Taconic, Bronx River and Saw Mill widened. The blueprints may, indeed, have been spilling over the floors. What Robert Moses was proposing was the widening or construction from scratch of no less than two hundred miles of roads. And the agenda did not include merely roads. There were also the facilities to carry traffic under and over the waters that divided the city. While completing Ole Singstad's huge Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, he had begun preliminary planning for two huge bridges, a "Throgs Neck" span two miles east of the Bronx-Whitestone, and a "Narrows Crossing" to Staten Island.

  During the 1920's, Robert Moses had announced a program—his statewide state park and parkway program—that had dwarfed any plan for the recreation of vast urban masses conceived anywhere in the world in recorded history.

  During the 1930% Robert Moses had announced a program—of New York City bridge and arterial highway construction and park reconstruction —which, taken as a whole, as the single, coordinated system it was, dwarfed

  * Major William F. Deegan was City Tenement House Commissioner and a former state commander of the American Legion. He died in 1932.

  any public work or coordinated system of public works built in any modern city, and, perhaps, in any ancient city as well.

  The program Robert Moses was announcing now—during the 1940's —would, if completed, dwarf those earlier programs. And, he said, there was no reason why it shouldn't be completed; it was, he said, no mere visionary dream; not only blueprints but money—mostly state and federal money, reserved during the war years through his efforts in Albany and Washington—were largely in hand; "the postwar highway era is here."

  But, strangely, the troops did not respond to this ringing trumpet call as they had to his trumpet calls of the past.

  Even before the war, of course, some urban planners had begun to see—largely because of the effects of Moses' creations—that building more traffic facilities would not in itself cure traffic congestion.

  These planners had said—the Regional Plan Association had been saying it since 1929 and, after the opening of Moses' creations during the 1930's, with increasing urgency—that the movement of people and goods in a great metropolitan region required a balanced transportation system, one in which the construction of mass rapid transit facilities kept pace with the construction of roads. During the last two or three years before the war, a few planners had even begun to understand that, without a balanced system, roads not only would not alleviate transportation congestion but would aggravate it. Watching Moses open the Triborough Bridge to ease congestion on the Queensborough Bridge, open the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge to ease congestion on the Triborough Bridge and then watching traffic counts on all three bridges mount until all three were as congested as one had been before, planners could hardly avoid the conclusion that "traffic generation" was no longer a theory but a proven fact: the more highways were built to alleviate congestion, the more automobiles would pour onto them and congest them and thus force the building of more highways—which would generate more traffic and become congested in their turn in an inexorably widening spiral that c
ontained the most awesome implications for the future of New York and of all urban areas. The only remedy that could check that vicious spiral was the coordination of new highways with new mass transit facilities—and not only was New York's Coordinator not planning any such facilities himself; his monopolization of construction funds and his hold over the city's government were making it impossible for anyone else to plan them either. He was, in fact, destroying some of the old facilities, not only the trolley tracks which he was boasting about "ripping up all over town" but the Third Avenue elevated mass transit line, which he was moving to have torn down. Viewed in this light, tearing tracks up and elevateds down was not an achievement but a disaster. And tearing them down was only one method of destroying mass transportation facilities. Moses—whether by design or out of ignorance of the effect of his policies—was employing other methods with equal effect. Highways competed with parallel mass transit lines, luring away their customers. Pour public investment into the improvement of highways while

  doing nothing to improve mass transit lines, and there could be only one outcome: those lines would lose more and more passengers; those losses would make it more and more difficult for their owners to sustain service and maintenance; service and maintenance would decline; the decline would cost the lines more passengers; the loss in passengers would further accelerate the rate of decline; the rate of passenger loss would correspondingly accelerate —and the passengers lost would do their traveling instead by private car, further increasing highway congestion. No crystal ball was needed to foretell such a result; it had already been proven, most dramatically perhaps in New Jersey, where the Susquehanna Railroad had lost over two-thirds of its passengers in the ten years following the opening of the George Washington Bridge, but also in New York, where the New York Central had been hit hard by the Triborough Bridge, and the Long Island Rail Road had watched more passengers drift away each time a new Moses parkway opened. No crystal ball was needed, therefore, to foretell the end result of Moses' immense new highway construction proposal, coupled as it was with lack of any provision whatsoever for mass transit: it could not possibly accomplish its aim, the alleviation of congestion. It could only make congestion, already intolerable, progressively worse. His program was self-defeating. It was doomed to failure before it began. It just didn't make sense.

  It made less sense still, these planners felt, because of certain implications peculiar to the Moses style of highway building.

  Roads opened new areas to development. (Moses' prewar parkways had caused a vast upsurge in population on Long Island before the war, both in Brooklyn and Queens, and in the suburban counties of Nassau and Suffolk.) Subways opened areas to development, too, but development in a different pattern. Because people arrived home from the subway on foot and didn't want to walk too far after they reached their stop, subway-inspired development was development close to subway stations: high-density, predominantly apartment-house development. There were suburban-type, single-family-home communities in New York City served by the subway—Sunset Park was one—but the single-family homes in these communities had been placed on small plots by developers who knew that to make these homes attractive to prospective purchasers, they would have to keep the radii of the communities, and the required walking distance within them, reasonable. People arriving home on parkways arrived home in automobiles. It was relatively easy for them to travel far longer distances from their "stops," the parkway exits. Realizing this, developers were able to take advantage of people's growing desire for open space to build on larger plots of land, to spread out the communities in which people lived. Even in Queens and southern Brooklyn, communities created by the opening of Moses' Cross Island and Belt parkways were characterized by larger lot sizes and lower population densities than those created by the opening of subways. Development beyond the city line, freed from the inhibition against large lots inherent in the city's rigid gridiron block pattern, spread more loosely—and widely —still, and as the open spaces of Nassau began to fill up and developers looked for fresh stretches of land to subdivide, they found themselves looking

  —and building new communities—much farther away from the center of the city than would have been the case if the impetus to such development had been not roads but railroads. Once, growth in the New York metropolitan region had been, to a great extent, upwards—people being piled on top of people in apartment houses. Now the growth was outwards. Not only was the population of the region growing rapidly (9,000,000 in 1920, it was 11,000,000 in 1930, and, despite the braking effects of the Depression, 12,000,000 in 1940), but it was spreading away from the traditional center of the region even more rapidly.

  Had jobs followed the people out into the suburbs, the implications of this spread might not have been so serious. Given the advantages of "open space," they might in fact have been desirable. And normally, because land was relatively so cheap on Long Island, businesses and industries would have followed the people out.

  But Moses' policies made it impossible for them to do so. Most roads foster commercial as well as residential development, but his parkways were barred to commercial traffic. His behind-the-scenes persuasion of Long Island politicians to zone residential almost all the adjacent land may have kept the parkways pristine and beautiful, but it also kept the land most desirable for commercial development on Long Island closed to such development. Industries and businesses which could have imported raw materials and shipped out finished products by rail instead of truck shied away from Long Island because the Long Island Rail Road, whose lines should have formed the hub of industrial development, was a rickety "Toonerville Trolley" line, and because without a rail connection to New Jersey the rail lines which brought the goods and commerce of the nation into New Jersey could transport it to Long Island only by expensive lightering. So industry and business stayed back in New York City.

  In the decade after Moses opened the Southern State Parkway in Nassau County, 200,000 new residents—about 50,000 families—moved into the county, but only 12,000 new jobs were created in the county. This meant that about 38,000 family breadwinners plus tens of thousands of others from the parkway-opened areas of Brooklyn and Queens had to come back into the city to win that bread. Hardly had the war ended when the surge to the suburbs resumed its prewar pace, leaped beyond it and soared to hitherto undreamed-of proportions, spilling beyond Nassau into rural Suffolk. Every projection made by planners showed that hundreds of thousands of families would be moving to Long Island within the next few years. The vast majority of the family breadwinners were going to have to travel into the center city every day to work. To the drivers who had already crammed to capacity and beyond capacity all Moses' roads would be added tens of thousands of additional drivers. How could you possibly build enough roads to accommodate them?

  And what about city streets? Once these tens of thousands of additional cars reached the center city, how were they supposed to move around in it? Above the streets? The blighting effect of elevated structures had long since been documented; "We did not tear down the . . . elevated [mass transit]

  lines to have them replaced with a maze of overhead motor highways which would rob the city of light and air," said Manhattan Borough President Edgar J. Nathan, Jr., a reformer. Below the streets? The maze of underground subways and utility lines made underground construction prohibitively expensive. On the streets? The streets were already crammed with all the vehicles they could possibly hold.

  And where were these cars supposed to park? To Moses' highway trumpet call Nathan quickly added a low-key but penetrating counterpoint: "Mr. Moses explains everything beautifully but not where the motorists are going to put their cars." Planners and reformers picked up the theme. Curbs in the city's central business district were already crammed bumper to bumper—and so were off-street private parking garages. Long Island, of course, was not going to be the only source of additional cars. What about the cars that would be attracted into the city by the new roads Moses wante
d built in Westchester County—and by the new roads being built in New Jersey, roads leading to the Lincoln Tunnel, to which the Port Authority was planning to add a third tube, and the George Washington Bridge, to which it was planning to add a second deck? Moses' answer was municipal construction of off-street, multistory parking garages; the answer caught the fancy of headline writers, but planners, costing them out, saw at a glance that no expenditure the city—or even a new public parking authority—could possibly afford could build enough garages to accommodate more than a small fraction of the load Moses was planning to dump on them.

  Planners and reformers were raising other questions about Moses' policies.

  The Coordinator's proposed highways and garages were designed to help automobile-owning families. But in 1945 two out of three residents of New York City belonged to families that did not own automobiles. Many of these families did not own them because they could not afford to. The Coordinator's subway-fare-increase proposals being advanced at that very moment in Albany would force poor New Yorkers to devote more— in many cases, more than they could afford—of their slender resources to getting around the city. The Coordinator's grabbing of the lion's share of public funds for highways and garages meant that public resources would be poured with a lavish hand into improving the transportation system used by people who could afford cars. Only a dribble of public resources would go into the transportation system used by people who could not—and who therefore rode subways and buses. While the city and state were providing car users with the most modern highways, they would be condemning subway users to continue to travel on an antiquated system utterly inadequate to the city's needs. While highways were being extended into "suburban" areas of the city in which highways were needed—and, in fact, into areas of the city in which highways were not needed, in which the need for highways would be created by the highways—subways would not be extended into areas of the city in which subways were needed. There were subway plans, too, just as there were highway plans; some, such as the proposals for a Second Avenue subway (for Manhattan's far east side and the Bronx) and the Hillside