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

by Caro, Robert A

  Avenue subway extension (for northeastern Queens), were advanced enough so that construction could have been begun immediately if funds were provided. But the Coordinator's monopolization of public funds made subway construction impossible. By building transportation facilities for the suburbs, he was insuring that no transportation facilities would be built for the ghettos. Therefore, planners saw, in the transportation field, the portion of the public helped by the use of public resources would not be the portion of the public that needed help most.

  For the well-to-do residents of the "suburban" areas of northeastern Queens, not having a subway nearby meant having to take a bus or drive a car to the end of the line in closer to Manhattan or having to drive all the way into Manhattan and back every working day. This was a hardship. But for the impoverished residents of the southeastern Bronx, not having a subway nearby and not owning a car meant taking a bus to the subway and that meant paying a double fare each way—twice a day, five days a week—and that meant paying money that many of these residents simply could not afford. And that meant that often these residents walked to the subway, walked a mile or more, in the morning and home in the evening when they were tired. And it meant that on weekends, families that would have liked to take their children on trips—to a museum or a movie downtown or Coney Island or some other park (particularly to a park, since Moses had built few in "lower-class" neighborhoods) or to visit a friend who lived in another neighborhood—stayed home instead. The Coordinator's policies were doing more than simply not helping these people. They were hurting them.

  They were even limiting their freedom to choose a place to live. His denial of funds for the extension of mass transit lines into outlying sections of the city and into the suburbs meant that the new homes and apartments there would be occupied only by car-owning families. Whether by design or not, the ultimate effect of Moses' transportation policies would be to help keep the city's poor trapped in their slums. They were in effect policies not only of transportation but of ghettoization, policies with immense social implications. "We knew we had to do something to halt this trend," reformer Leigh Denniston said in a letter-to-the-editor. "And we were asking how best to do it."

  The answer to all the questions raised about Moses' transportation policies was, of course, mass transportation. The problems involved in moving tens of thousands of commuters into and out of the center city in a couple of peak hours every weekday—problems so unmanageable in terms of highway lanes whose peak capacity was 1,500 cars per hour—were reduced to manageable size by rapid transit lines, a single track of which could carry between 40,000 and 50,000 persons per hour, and could bring them into the city without their cars, so that they wouldn't require parking spaces.

  Mass transportation was, moreover, the only answer. New highways had a vital function to fulfill: the transportation of people and goods that, for whatever reason, had no choice but to use highways, at a reasonable rate of

  speed. If you had a viable mass transit system in the region—fast, clean, reasonably inexpensive, modern subways and suburban commuter railroads

  you would attract to it a substantial share of the traffic that did have a

  choice, and by removing it from the highways, you would free the highways so that they would be able to fulfill this function. If residents of the region, particularly commuters, did not have a choice, if they were forced by the inefficiencies, inadequacies of service and high fares of mass transit to use highways whether they wanted to use them or not, the highways would never be able to fulfill their function. Build railroads at the same time that you were building roads, and solving the metropolitan transportation problem would be greatly simplified. Pour all available funds into roads without building railroads, and that problem would never be solved.

  Public exposure to this point of view was limited. Editorials such as the one in the Herald Tribune that so aroused Moses' ire were rare—nonexistent in the two newspapers most decisive in shaping public opinion in New York, the Times and Daily News; the News cheered Big Bob the Builder's "greatest highway plan." Watching traffic pile up in the city, New York's press was screaming for action—and Moses' plan promised plenty of what it considered action.

  The public, conditioned by prewar decades of acclaim for road building, accustomed to equating the value of a public work with its size, unaccustomed to critical analysis of public works programs, desperate for action, showed no greater understanding, no comprehension that there might be drawbacks to the biggest road-building plan ever. Writing in PM in May 1946, Lewis Mumford tried to explain some of the social implications of building without planning. "A large part of the money we are spending on highways right now is wasted because we don't know whether we want people where the highways are going," he said. But Mumford confessed to despair that the public would understand. "Highways are an impressive, flashy thing to build. No one is against highways."

  One did not have to be a Mumford, however, to grasp the fact that Moses' policies might be self-defeating. All one had to do was think about those policies for a while. And, sitting in their cars day after day in ever-lengthening traffic jams, New Yorkers were finding themselves forced to indulge occasionally in that activity. While Moses' plans enjoyed public support through the 1940's, there were signs that it was not as unanimous after the war as it had been before. Denniston's letter was only one of many in which people were trying to articulate new, disturbing thoughts. Within two months after the war's end, editorial pages—not the editorial columns but the letters-to-the-editor columns, in a number which strongly suggests that on this issue the public was ahead of the press—began to contain suggestions like that published on October 22, 1945, in the Times: "Why not bar all private cars from Manhattan?" By 1946, such letters were common.

  The more informed sections of the public—businessmen exposed at their weekly Rotary or Kiwanis or Chamber of Commerce luncheons to guest speakers familiar with the problem, for example—were even better

  exposed to analyses of Moses' policies. It was no longer unusual to find in the back pages of the Times or Tribune articles like the one reporting that on January 23, 1947, Leslie Williams, of the American Transit Association, had, in an address to the New York City Safety Council, expressed the view that "it would be a whole lot cheaper for a community to subsidize public transit than to spend enormous sums for downtown expressways with no assurance even then that these expressways will relieve congestion."

  Rebuffed by O'Dwyer, who summarily referred their inquiries and suggestions to Moses, and forced to admit to themselves that they could suggest no immediate method of financing new mass transit lines, these planners pleaded for the city to take at least one simple, inexpensive step that would make construction of new lines possible in the future.

  Building transit lines underground was wildly expensive. Building them at ground level was cheap, so far as construction costs were concerned. It was only when the ground was filled with people that the cost of acquiring it became financially and politically prohibitive. And, planners said, there existed at that very moment an opportunity for obtaining the right-of-way for train tracks quickly, cheaply and with an absolute minimum of public hostility.

  The city was about to begin acquiring close to a hundred miles of strips of land between 150 and 250 feet wide, the right-of-way for the Coordinator's new highways. Some of these highways were to run through areas either empty or containing only single-family homes, in which land was relatively inexpensive; in 1945, 21 percent of the city was still undeveloped. Simply obtain another fifty feet of right-of-way, add it to the center malls of Moses' highways, and there would be enough room on those malls for a double-track surface mass transit line, a subway running at ground level. Build the six-lane highways just as you had been planning to do, they urged Moses, but make the center mall wide enough to accommodate those tracks. Then when, sometime in the future, the city was ready to build the subway lines, there would be no problem in acquiring the right-of-way. It
would be already available, just sitting there waiting for the tracks to be laid atop it.

  Seizing this opportunity would slash at a stroke the Gordian knot of difficulties in the way of providing mass transportation in New York.

  Residents of adjacent buildings naturally opposed the construction of noisy, dirty rapid transit lines, often in numbers sufficient to make construction a political impossibility. Build rapid transit lines in the middle of highways, and there wouldn't be any adjacent buildings. The nearest buildings would be cushioned from the trains' impact by a good hundred feet of space —and in the case of expressways depressed in open cuts, by their location below ground level as well. Highways caused noise and dirt and objections, too, of course, but the highways were going to be built anyway; trains on their center malls would add to such inconveniences only minimally. As long as the city must be provided with new mass transportation facilities, and as long

  as these facilities could not be built underground, building them on highway center malls was surely not only the cheapest way to build them but the easiest way to minimize political and aesthetic fallout.

  If there was any long-range prediction that could be made with any certainty about a city as volatile as New York, these planners felt, it was that such an opportunity would never come again. Expressways spawned intensive development—apartment houses, factories, office buildings—where there had been before only open fields or private homes. The city could afford to acquire open fields or private homes, even the long miles of fields and homes required for Moses' highways. It would probably never be able to afford to acquire long miles of apartment houses, factories and office buildings. And even if it were in some future decade to find the cash to do so, would it be able to find the will? Would not the protests of thousands of voters make the acquisition politically unfeasible? Acquisition of rapid transit right-of-way, so easy in conjunction with the current expressway program, would never be easy again. It might, in fact, be impossible. Fail to grasp the present opportunity and the city might never be able to build sufficient mass transit to significantly improve transportation.

  There were no logical reasons not to grasp this opportunity. No federal approval was necessary; the cost of land acquisition was split by state and city. The state was leaving absolute discretion over the design of Robert Moses highways to Robert Moses. The city's share would be so small that even impoverished New York would be able to afford it. The suggestion was not even revolutionary: plans were already under way for the placing of a mass transit route down the center mall of the proposed Congress Street Expressway in Chicago. The suggestion was so logical that it did not even require much imagination to grasp it. All that was required was common sense.

  F. (for Francis) Dodd McHugh asked Moses to grasp it in planning the Van Wyck Expressway.

  McHugh, a little, bright-eyed Scotsman, had, as chief of the Office of Master Planning of the City Planning Commission, previously aroused Moses' hostility by objecting to his refusal to make provision for schools, libraries and transportation facilities for the residents of his huge housing projects. Call ing McHugh a "smart aleck," and his objections "stupid, long-winded, contentious and impractical," Moses told his boss, Edwin Ashley Salmon, "We had better get rid of staff work of this kind." But McHugh had declined to take this subtle hint. Assigned to draw up a pro forma "Master Plan of New York City Airports," he ventured beyond the assignment and asked himself how people were going to get to these airports—and came up with some rather striking figures.

  By the most conservative estimates, when the immense new airport under construction on the marshes at Idlewild Point in southeastern Queens was in full operation, 40,000 persons would be employed there, and 30,000 passengers would pass through it every day—most of them during morning and

  evening "peak period" rush hours. If traffic patterns conformed to those at other major airports, during peak periods 10,000 persons would be trying to get to Idlewild every hour, some of them in multi-passenger buses but enough of them in taxis and private automobiles so that they would be traveling in 3,220 separate vehicles. And heading for Idlewild at the same time would be hundreds of trucks carrying air mail, express and freight.

  Most of these vehicles would undoubtedly be using the Van Wyck Expressway; Moses' stated purpose in proposing it was to provide a direct route to the airport from mid-Manhattan. But the Van Wyck Expressway was designed to carry—under "optimum" conditions (good weather, no accidents or other delays)—2,630 vehicles per hour. Even if the only traffic using the Van Wyck was Idlewild traffic, the expressway's capacity would not be sufficient to handle it.

  And Idlewild traffic was going to be only a fraction—a small fraction— of traffic using the Van Wyck. The new expressway would be the most direct route not only to the airport but to all southeastern Queens and to the Southern State Parkway leading to fast-growing Long Island. During highway rush hours—which coincided with airport rush hours—the Van Wyck was going to be flooded with thousands of cars heading for these destinations. The new road Moses was building could not—even under optimum conditions—possibly come anywhere near fulfilling the purpose for which Moses was building it. And McHugh, who estimated all this traffic conservatively, could not help knowing that his conservatism was not realistic. The air age was just beginning: air traffic was obviously going to boom to immense dimensions. If the Van Wyck Expressway could not come anywhere near handling Idlewild's traffic when that traffic was 10,000 persons per hour, what was going to happen when that traffic increased to 15,000 persons per hour? To 20,000?

  Moses' answer was that he was going to widen two other routes to southeastern Queens, the Belt Parkway and Conduit Boulevard. But parkway and boulevard were already jammed far beyond capacity; widen the two roads and they would still be jammed—even without Idlewild traffic. Widening roads could not possibly solve the Idlewild access problem. You'd have to pave over most of southeastern Queens to do that. Building the Van Wyck Expressway was going to cost $30,000,000. The principal result of the expenditure of that staggering sum would be the condemnation of most of the drivers using the Van Wyck—of generation after generation of drivers using it—to the frustration of being trapped, some of them twice a day for every working day of their lives, in staggering traffic jams.

  Building the Van Wyck would raise other questions. Once the cars using the expressway got to the airport, how were they supposed to get around in it? An internal road network of enormous cost and size would be required—and even then congestion inside Idlewild might be even worse than the congestion outside. Where were they supposed to park? Parking lots covering hundreds of acres, thousands of acres, expanses of concrete stretching endlessly over the marshland, would be required. Since the marshland would have to be filled in before it could be paved, the construction of such lots would be enormously

  expensive. If the lots stretched for miles, parts of them would be miles from the airline terminals. How were the drivers—and their luggage—supposed to get to the terminals after they parked?

  Only by building the Van Wyck with rapid transit could all these questions be answered. Three lanes of this particular expressway (not engineered up to later design standards) could, under optimum conditions, carry each hour 2,630 vehicles, most of them bearing a single passenger. One lane of rapid transit could, under optimum conditions, carry 40,000 persons per hour. And with rapid transit, conditions would be optimum far more often than on a highway, whose capacity was reduced far more severely by rain or snow or fog or by blockage by an accident or breakdown. Build the Van Wyck with rapid transit, and you would be insuring that, for generations, persons traveling to Idlewild would be able to get there with speed—an express trip from Pennsylvania Station in mid-Manhattan to the airport would take exactly sixteen minutes—and comfort. And, since the long lines of cars would melt off the expressway, those drivers who still wanted to get to Idlewild by car would also be able to get there with speed.

  Building the Van Wyck wit
h rapid transit would, moreover, be easy. The north-south expressway was going to cross Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens. A subway—the IND east-west line running out from mid-Manhattan eight miles away—crossed that very intersection. When it reached the intersection, moreover, it slanted south—by coincidence, toward Idlewild—for about a mile before heading east again. During that mile, its tracks lay almost precisely beneath the right-of-way that Moses was even then acquiring for the Van Wyck. For a mile of its four-mile length, therefore, the expressway would be running almost right on top of the subway. All that was needed to complete a rapid transit link between mid-Manhattan and Idlewild was to bring that subway up to the expressway's center mall and extend it for another three miles. Nine miles—nine expensive miles—of rapid transit link between mid-Manhattan and Idlewild were already completed. All that was needed to complete the link were three miles—three inexpensive miles— more. Moreover, another subway—the IND's Fulton Avenue line, coming out from lower Manhattan through downtown Brooklyn—ran close to Idle-wild's western edge. Build a branch of that line into the airport, a simple, inexpensive job, and travelers from lower Manhattan—including the Wall Street business district from which would come so large a proportion of the airport's users—would also be able to reach it by train.

  Within the airport, McHugh noticed, the two subways would be running within a few hundred feet of each other—in fact, might even intersect. This, he saw, would enable the city to solve a problem which had plagued it for generations: providing a subway link between downtown Brooklyn and central and northern Queens, two areas connected only by automobile. Link up the two subways within the airport, and the connection between the two areas, so long sought but so long despaired of because of the large expense, would be accomplished at small expense. Rapid transit on the Van Wyck Expressway would solve not only the Idlewild access problem but a host of other transportation problems.