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

by Caro, Robert A

  And it would be so easy to make provision for that rapid transit.

  Building rapid transit on the Van Wyck would provide advantages not only for New York City but for all Long Island.

  The expressway ran right underneath the Jamaica Terminal of the Long Island Rail Road; it was that terminal that Moses was planning to hold aloft while he slid the highway beneath it. Put rapid transit on the Van Wyck and Long Island residents would be able to get to Idlewild simply by taking the Long Island Rail Road to Jamaica and transferring to the rapid transit line below.

  Perhaps the city could not afford at the present time even the relatively small cost of the construction of three miles of surface rapid transit. McHugh doubted that this was true: the cost would be no more than $9,000,000; it made no sense to say that a city that was planning a $280,000,000 expressway program—of its own money, not counting federal and state contributions— could not afford $9,000,000 for an improvement that would make the expressways so much more pleasant to use. But even if it was true, he said, even if the city did not construct the rapid transit lines now, at least make provision for their future construction.

  The cost of providing the additional fifty feet of right-of-way would be less than two million dollars—about $1,875,000, McHugh estimated. The Van Wyck Expressway, whose function was to provide reasonably fast, convenient access to Idlewild Airport, was going to cost $30,000,000, anyway. For that amount, that road would probably never be able to fulfill its function properly. For less than two million dollars more, it would.

  Spend the two million now, McHugh saw, and the right-of-way would be available whenever the city wanted to use it. Don't spend it now, and if the city should want to acquire the necessary right-of-way for rapid transit in the future, after the expressway opened, the land would be many times more expensive than it was now. Nor would the cost be limited to the price of the land needed for the right-of-way. Because the land the city would have to acquire would no longer be within the expressway, it would abut three miles of buildings. Their owners would be entitled to substantial damages to compensate them for the noise and dirt of the trains. And land would have to be acquired not only for the tracks but for stations. If provision was not made now for right-of-way along the expressway center mall, the cost of that right-of-way would be not two, but tens of millions of dollars—so high that even if the city were to resolve to bear the enmity of thousands of protesting voters and build a rapid transit line, it might be financially unfeasible for it to do so. Reserve those three miles of right-of-way now, and it would be possible in future years for the city to solve the enormous problem of congestion on the Van Wyck Expressway—and a host of other transportation problems—quickly, simply and cheaply. Fail to reserve it now, and those problems might never be solved.

  McHugh was planning to include his suggestion in the airport "Master Plan," but he made the mistake of mentioning it first to his boss, Planning Commis-

  sion chief of staff Colonel William J. Shea, from whom Moses always received close cooperation.

  "I was called into [Shea's] office, and Spargo was there raising hell, that I was impeding progress, that this thing had to go through and stop this crap, that I was going to cost the city millions in federal money. The whole effect was, 'Why don't you shut up?' I was asked not to write any memo."

  Declining to accept that recommendation, McHugh wrote that rapid transit access should be provided for Idlewild and predicted what would happen if it wasn't. But his statements had been deleted when the commission approved the "Master Plan of New York City Airports." The only future on which his memo had any effect was his own. Although he was under civil service protection, there was a salary range to his position, and he had been at its upper limit. When the next city budget was adopted, he found he was at its lower limit: his salary—previously, he says, "just about enough to get by on" —had been reduced. He had, moreover, been fighting Moses for eight years now, and he was well aware he wasn't getting anywhere. His report on the rapid transit reservation might as well have not been written. He resigned.

  As for the Mumfords and other farseeing planners, Moses treated their predictions of disaster with the disdain he felt they deserved. Opponents who charged that he was unaware of the social implications of his transportation policies—that the ghettoization they caused and the commercial development they prevented on Long Island, for example, was inadvertent—underestimated him. He knew precisely what he was doing. He had formed his own vision of Long Island long ago, and all he was doing now was holding true to it—and that vision did not include poor people or jobs. In a 1945 speech before the Nassau Bar Association, which included most of the county's political leaders, he said:

  There seems to have been a good deal of sentiment in Nassau in favor of attracting more industry and business into the county. Let me warn you against too much enthusiasm for commercializing what nature has given you. Nassau should always be largely residential and recreational. Your land lies between the Bay and the Ocean. [These] are your greatest natural assets. Figure out what sort of people you want to attract into Nassau County. By that I mean people of what standards, what income levels and what capacity to contribute to the source of government.

  He did not give the slightest indication of understanding that his transportation policies were doomed to failure.

  His thinking had been shaped in an era in which a highway was an unqualified boon to the public, in which roads were, like automobiles, sources of relaxation and pleasure. Changing realities could have changed his thinking, but he was utterly insulated from reality by the sycophancy of his yes men; by his power, which, independent as it was of official or public opinion— of, in fact, any opinion but his own—made it unnecessary for him to take any opinion but his own into account; by, most of all, his personality, the personality that made it not only unnecessary but impossible for him to

  conceive that he might have been wrong; the personality that needed applause, thereby reinforcing the tendency to repeat the simplistic formula that had won him applause before; the personality that made it possible for him to relate to the class of people that owned automobiles and that was repelled by the class of people that did not own automobiles; the personality whose vast creative energies were fired by the vision of cleanliness, order, openness, sweep—such as the clean, open sweep of a highway—and were repelled by dirt and noise, such as the dirt and noise he associated with trains; the personality that made him not only want but need monuments and that saw in highways—and their adjunct, suspension bridges ("the most permanent structures built by man")—the structures that would have a clean, clear ineradicable mark on history; the personality that, driven now by the lust for power, made him anxious to build more revenue- (and power-) producing bridges and parking lots (and highways to encourage their use) and that made him either indifferent or antagonistic to subways and railroads which would compete with his toll facilities not only for users but for city construction funds. He was insulated from experience. Most of the millions who used his roads were now using them primarily not for weekend pleasure trips but back and forth to work twice a day, five days a week, and driving was therefore no longer a pleasure but a chore; but for Moses, comfortable in the richly upholstered, air-conditioned, soundproofed rear seat of his big limousine, driving was still as pleasurable as it had always been. Robert Moses, who had never had to drive in a single traffic jam, really believed that his transportation policies would work. "Traffic will run pretty smoothly within three years," he had said in 1945. During those three years—and afterward— he repeated that prediction often, repeated it without hedging or qualification, spread it on the public record with the assurance of a man sure that he was right. He was confident that his roads would earn him applause now as they had always earned him applause before. Writing on "traffic relief" in a New York Times Magazine article, he said, "If we give this to our people, we shall deserve their gratitude." Applause not just of the age but of the ages; he was con
fident that his roads would bring him immortality. He had read Statius. He knew that, "in gratitude for the benefits bestowed upon them by" the construction of the Domitian Way, the Senate and the people of Rome had raised a triumphal arch to Domitian. He knew that the Via Appia had brought immortality to its builder, the blind Censor Appius Claudius, who, when public funds to build the road ran out, had advanced the difference from his private fortune. Democracies raised no triumphal arches to road builders. The Wantagh Causeway was still named the Wantagh Causeway, despite the fact that its builder had also advanced funds from his private fortune, or at least from his mother's. But he was confident history would remedy such oversights. In 1949, Times Sunday Editor Lester Markel commissioned him to forecast the city in the year 1999. "The great arteries . . . will stand out," he wrote.* On another occasion, he wrote: "Those who aim and plug away

  * The 1949 article was brief—1,140 words—but it provided ample evidence of the extent to which Moses identified his own works with the city as a whole. To the

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  at limited, near-by objectives and reach them, may in fact build better than they know. Their works may even last longer than those fashioned by more ambitious geniuses for immortality." If he was capable any longer of rethinking his policies, he gave no evidence of it. And because of his power, of course, there was nothing that could force him to rethink.

  Within weeks of the opening of the Van Wyck Expressway—at which Moses proudly boasted that "no network of major urban vehicular arteries comparable to the one on which we are busily working here in New York City

  will be found anywhere else on this or any other continent"—the road was as jammed as F. Dodd McHugh had predicted. At rush hours, when— as McHugh had predicted—10,000 travelers trying to get to Idlewild were forced to share the road space with tens of thousands of commuters trying to get home, the four miles of roadway which Moses had hacked across Queens looked like a four-mile-long parking lot, so closely were the vehicles on it packed together and so slowly were they moving. "Traffic will flow freely," Moses had promised. Inappropriate adverb. Drivers were chained to the Van Wyck; men who, commuting daily to jobs at the airport or in New York, had taken twenty minutes to cover the four miles paralleling the Van Wyck, had looked forward to the opening of the publicized new road; now, clocking their first trips on it, they could hardly believe their watches; where it had taken twenty minutes to cover the four miles on local streets, it took thirty minutes on the expressway—if conditions were good. And, so often, they were bad. The new road had not freed them from the trap of daily travel; it had closed the trap on them more firmly than ever, for new traffic, generated by the new road, was also jamming the local streets.

  With every passing year, congestion on the expressway worsened. Mc-

  question "What Will New York City Look Like in the Year 1999?" he replied mainly by listing his own works, writing: "Nature, not man, will still be predominant, and the air photographer in his blimp or helicopter will still see the rolling ocean, the relatively unspoiled ocean beaches, Jamaica Bay, the Long Island Sound, the lordly Hudson, and their tributaries, and Liberty guarding the magnificent harbor. The great arteries of travel will stand out. The hills of Revolutionary fame will still boast their monuments and citadels; the parks, large and small, will still be conserved for all the people. Tfre great Palisades reservation will still be five times as large as all of Manhattan Island; Jamaica Bay and its shores, reclaimed and dedicated to recreation and air travel, 'will constitute one-third of Brooklyn; a fourth of the Bronx will remain field, forest and stream. Queens will still be suburban, and Staten Island largely rural. ... In ten years, one person out of ten will be living in public or other subsidized housing. In fifty years, it may be one out of six or seven—not an altogether pleasant prospect for those who must pay not only their own way but that of their less fortunate or hard-working brothers. Traffic will flow freely in 95 per cent of the city and suburbs. . . ."

  The article also provided ample proof that Moses was failing utterly to comprehend that his policies might not be working for the city. "As to the spirit, the enterprise, the magnetism which made the metropolis great," he wrote, "there is not a shred of evidence that their force will lessen. There is no sign of decrepitude, decay or resignation."

  Hugh had calculated that during "peak periods" 10,000 persons would be trying to reach Idlewild every hour. As air traffic burgeoned, that figure became 15,000, and then 20,000. New parking fields were built within the airport at a frantic rate: 500 acres of marshland were paved over, then 1,000, then 2,000, then 4,000, then 8,000. And still there was never enough room to park. At peak periods, the paved space within Idlewild—parking fields and internal roadways—was often so jammed that the torrent of vehicles oozing down the Van Wyck could enter the airport only at a trickle; sometimes, the airport had to be closed to new traffic—it was not infrequent for vehicles waiting to get into Idlewild to be backed up on the expressway for a solid mile.

  Inside the airport, of course, the scene was chaos. Drivers searching for parking spaces milled around and around on the roadways, mingling with drivers trying to get to the airline terminals. By one estimate, at a normal weekday rush hour, a traveler arriving at Idlewild by private car had to allow a full thirty minutes for travel after arriving at the airport.

  Other roads were jammed, and created by their opening more traffic than had existed before. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel opened on May 25, 1950, with blessings from Cardinal Spellman ("one of man's greatest achievements!"), what may have been the longest cavalcade of official limousines ever assembled outside Washington (338 long black Cadillacs), the highest toll ever charged on a Moses project (thirty-five cents)—and a traffic count almost twice as high as Madigan-Hyland had predicted. Moses' engineers had forecast that the tunnel would carry 8,400,000 cars during its first year of operation. By the end of a month, it was carrying traffic at a 13,000,000-vehicle-per-year rate, 64 percent above their predictions. George Spargo explained that the count had been swelled by an influx of tourists who had come from all over the eastern seaboard to see this new wonder of the world, and that the influx was over now. By the end of three months, the tunnel was carrying traffic at a 14,000,000-vehicle-per-year rate. At the end of six months, it was carrying traffic at a 15,000,000-vehicle-per-year rate, and not only the increase but the rate of increase was increasing every month. "Another pleasant surprise," Spargo said. But the tunnel was engineered for a capacity, rush hour, load of 2,000 vehicles; by 1952, it was being asked during rush 1 hours to handle 5,000, even 6,000 vehicles per hour. Traffic backed up for blocks at its entrances. Moses had expected it to draw off traffic from the parallel Queens-Midtown Tunnel and three free East River bridges. But traffic on the bridges remained "normal," which meant jammed. And traffic through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, fed now by the widened Queens-Midtown Expressway, increased instead of decreasing. In 1951, while the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel was carrying cars at a rate of 79.3 percent above estimates, traffic through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel was 26.3 percent higher than ever before. Previously, 10,967,000 cars per year had been trying to use one tunnel. Now there were two tunnels—and 28,445,668 cars were trying to use them. The situation at the southern portion of the East River was duplicated at the northern. In Triborough's annual report for 1951, Spargo wrote

  happily, "The Triborough Bridge had its fifteenth birthday on July nth. There were no birthday cakes, presents or ceremonies, just more automobiles." In 1946, the first postwar year, the bridge had carried 13,000,000 vehicles. In 1947, it had carried 16,000,000 vehicles; in 1948, 19,000,000; in 1949, 23,000,000; in 1950, 27,000,000. The count in 1951 had been 32,000,000. And the trend was more striking than the figures. The increase had been two million in 1946, three million in 1947 and 1948, four million in 1949 and 1950, five million in 1951. And this situation was being duplicated on the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, which Moses had built to drain off traffic from the Triborough. W
hile traffic was increasing 138 percent on the Triborough between 1946 and 1951, it was increasing 129 percent on the Bronx-Whitestone. And traffic volume on the free Queensborough Bridge was also increasing. In the last prewar year, cars had been crossing the East River into Manhattan at the colossal rate of 122,500 per day; in 1951, they were pouring across the river into Manhattan at the rate of 135,000 per day. And what of the roads leading to and from these facilities? Four lanes of Belt Parkway had been jammed before the war. Now six lanes of Belt Parkway were jammed. Prewar congestion on old Atlantic Avenue had been intolerable. Postwar congestion on a new—widened, modernized—Atlantic Avenue was more intolerable. And it wasn't only bridges and highways that were jammed. As seen from the air, at rush hours, every street in neighborhoods near the approaches to the East River crossings was a crawling mass of cars. (On the other side of Manhattan, where, since 1930, the Port Authority's George Washington Bridge and Holland and Lincoln tunnels had been opened to vehicular traffic while New Jersey railroads had been allowed to deteriorate, this situation was being duplicated. Since 1930, railroad commutation from Jersey had declined slightly; commutation by motor vehicle had quadrupled. In the evenings, when 80,000 daily commuters were heading home to Jersey, all of Manhattan between 175th and 181st streets was solid with cars, trucks and buses moving toward the George Washington Bridge. Downtown, the typical line of cars waiting to enter the Holland Tunnel plaza was, at 5 p.m., eight blocks long. The Times, clocking travel time to the Lincoln Tunnel, found on one evening that it took a truck twenty-seven minutes to make a one-block-square circuit to the entrance plaza.) Within the city, it seemed that there was not a crevice into which cars did not cram; traffic was piling up everywhere; on the crosstown side streets in midtown Manhattan, the Times found, motorists frequently spent forty minutes traversing the two and a half miles from one side of the island to the other.