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

by Caro, Robert A

  And there was going to be a very substantial controversy in Central Park.

  In April, the leaves over the little glen were still only a pale-green haze, not yet thick enough to obscure the view of the ground from Elliott and Elinor Sanger's twelfth-floor apartment directly across from the glen at 75 Central Park West. And when, at about seven o'clock Tuesday morning, April 17, 1956, Elinor Sanger awoke and went into the bathroom and glanced out

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  her large bathroom window, she saw a large bulldozer ripping at the ground to tear out the roots of the trees.

  The Sangers were friendly with Stanley Isaacs, so Mrs. Sanger did what people who knew Stanley Isaacs always seemed to do when they were confronted with injustice: she called him for help. "Get the women out there, and call the newspapers and television," Isaacs said. "I'll be right over." "What are you going to do?" Mrs. Sanger asked. "I don't know," said the dignified, white-haired attorney, then in his seventies. "But if I have to, I'll lie down in front of the bulldozer."

  As it turned out, he didn't have to. Mrs. Sanger telephoned Augusta Newman, who began frantically calling other mothers, and telling them to call others. Within minutes, astonished doormen saw thirty or forty women running down Sixty-seventh Street and along Central Park West, yanking along dogs and little children and wheeling baby carriages. ("The baby carriages were my idea," Augusta Newman says. "I thought they would make a good picture. After all, we are in the business, you know. And anyway, most of the mothers had to bring their children. They didn't have maids. Their husbands were going to work. Who were they going to leave them with?") Running into the glen, where the bulldozer was snorting and grinding away, they began somewhat hesitantly—leaving plenty of room between it and them—to move to a position that would later be somewhat loosely described as "in front of it." The driver, an employee of a small private contractor to whom Moses had given the parking lot construction job, cut his engine. "He was a very nice man," Mrs. Newman recalls. "He told a policeman [who had just come running up to see what was going on], Tm not going to do a thing as long as those ladies are standing here.' " When Isaacs arrived, he saw, beneath the trees, the earth-moving machine stopped, its driver standing beside it, a line of mothers and baby carriages, and, moving up close to them, policemen who, summoned by the first, had sped up in several patrol cars.

  It was a tableau that—complete to Isaacs' presence—might have been lifted intact from a score of earlier Moses battles. But within a few minutes a new element had been added to it, an element that had been conspicuously missing from the earlier tableaus—and that was to make April 17, 1956, the watershed of Moses' career. Following Isaacs' instructions, Elliott Sanger had telephoned more than a score of newspapers, radio stations and television stations to ask them to send men to the scene. And they did.

  A hundred neighborhood representatives had asked radio stations, television stations and the big citywide daily newspapers to cover their protests against Robert Moses projects. If they were lucky, two or three sent a man; often only the Post did; often even the Post didn't bother. Lillian Edelstein had managed to get three mayoral candidates and an audience of four hundred people to the rally in JHS 44 in East Tremont; in that audience there had been not a single reporter or photographer. But on this Tuesday morning there came, driving into the Tavern-on-the-Green s parking circle, jumping out and running over to the little glen, shoving microphones and

  triple-folded copy paper into the faces of the mothers and the bulldozer driver, reporters and photographers from the Post —and from the Herald Tribune, the World-Telegram and Sun, the Journal-American, the Daily Mirror, from the Times, the newspaper with the greatest prestige in the country, and from the Daily News, the newspaper with the largest circulation in the world, even from the Brooklyn Eagle, from WMCA, WOR, WABC, WNBC, WHN, WINS, WNEW, from WCBS-TV, WNBC-TV, WABC-TV, WOR-TV and WPIX-TV. A hundred local protests against some plan or other of Robert Moses' had been carried out, so far as the public was concerned, in secrecy, the secrecy so necessary to Moses' success. This local protest against this Robert Moses plan would be carried out in a spotlight, the brightest spotlight on earth—the spotlight thrown by the massed mass media of the city that was the communications center of the civilized world.

  Within hours, every major radio station in New York was telling its listeners the story of the mothers, the baby carriages and the bulldozer. That evening, the story was on every major television newscast. The next day, a picture of mothers and children lined up defiantly between the menacing machine and a large tree was displayed prominently in every newspaper in town.

  By the weekend—with Moses trying to trick the protesters by taking no action on Wednesday, giving reporters the impression that he would await the results of a Thursday conference between Theobald and the mothers, and then ordering the bulldozer back into action Thursday morning, only to have it turned back again by sentries because the mothers had set up a rotating schedule that kept the glen guarded from 7 a.m. to dark, trying vainly again on Friday with a new bulldozer operator bearing assurances that ail he wanted to do was "move some topsoil around"—the story was on page one. It would stay there for weeks.

  For this story had everything.

  It had "names." Lillian Edelstein couldn't get one quote in the News; the News begged Fannie Hurst for a quote ("Central Park stands 'as a heartbeat of the asphalt city.' Yet 'we see trees sacrificed to a restaurant and a night club'"). And it had more than "names." It had trees, too— especially since the week in which Moses had chosen to cut down the ones in the glen happened to be National Arbor Week. Said a front-page World-Telegram box: "School children have been memorizing 'Woodman, spare that tree/Touch not a single bough . . .' And up in Central Park, Park Commissioner Robert Moses observed the week in his own unique way by sending ax-wielding workmen ... to chop down a stand of maples to make way for a parking lot." And it had more than "names" and trees—it had Central Park. By the second week, several papers had found the catch phrase they were looking for: "The Battle of Central Park." It had more than just names and trees and Central Park. It had bulldozers, a word that by the mid-1950's carried enough emotion-laden and unpleasant overtones to keep a story going all by itself. And it had more—much more. It had mothers. Parks and trees might be "motherhood issues," but this was more

  than a motherhood issue: this was MOTHERHOOD! The press saw this— and made the most of it. It was "Moms-vs.-Moses" in the News, and "The Brigade of Mothers'' in the World-Telegram, and "Park Moms" in the Post, and "Fighting Park Moms" in the Journal-American and "the embattled mothers of Central Park" in the Herald Tribune; as the headlines blasted out at New York five and six a day, day after day, the words that leaped from them, bold and black, were not only magic words like "parks" and "trees" and "bulldozer" but the most magic word of all. And the stories under the headlines were stories about mothers engaged in that most holy of mothers' wars, a battle to protect a place for their children (their "tots," their "kiddies") to play, a "mothers' battle to keep the grassy, wooded section a haven for their children away from the concrete and clatter of the city streets," as the World-Telegram put it. There was nothing unique or even unusual in the "Battle of Central Park." But because the site of this battle was Central Park, the press had begun looking at it—and had seen elements so sensational that it couldn't, even if it wanted to, tear its fascinated eyes away. The tactics Moses was using were the tactics he had been using for thirty years—but now the press was reporting them, and a whole city was watching them. The things Stanley Isaacs was saying now were the same things he had been saying for thirty years. The only difference was that now people were listening to them. Now, when he spoke, a dozen microphones were held up before his face, amplifying his words, as Moses' had been amplified for thirty years, until they were loud enough for a whole city to hear them. This time, his tightly reasoned letters-to-the-editor were quoted in editorials and in news articles, front-page news articles. When Moses replied with the arg
ument he had been using against Isaacs ever since he had helped drive him out of his borough presidency with it in 1938, the Daily Mirror picked up the attack as usual ("the claque complaining about Robert Moses is headed by Stanley Isaacs, who, when he was president of the Borough of Manhattan, gave employment to Simon Gerson, who was a Communist . . ."), but for once—the firs: time—the Mirror's voice was a lone voice. For once, when Isaacs tried to explain to the press the philosophy behind Moses' projects and what was wrong with that philosophy, the press paid heed to the explanation—even on the editorial page of the newspaper that had been Moses' staunchest defender for thirty years and whose principal stockholder believed "there has never been as great a public servant." Exactly what happened in the editorial conferences of The New York Times is not known, although certainly Mrs. Sulzberger's love for Central Park—the original concept of pastoral, serene Central Park —the love which she had previously subordinated to her admiration for Moses, had something to do with it, and possibly so, too, did the fact that by 1956 the brilliant conservationist John Oakes was taking a more active role on the editorial page; on April 20, the Times carried an editorial that, while it perpetuated the Moses myth, also contained statements that were, coming from the Times, especially remarkable, as remarkable as the editorial's

  title: ONLY A HALF ACRE BUT.

  If this were land somewhere else there would be nothing to get excited about. But Central Park is different. To New Yorkers, and especially those who live near the park, it is sacred land. To use it for anything but park is like insulting the flag.

  After fighting all these years against all the causes that were offered to invade it, why should New York at this late date give up a half acre for the personal convenience of eighty carloads of people having chicken dinner in the Tavern?

  Those who protest do so belatedly. We plead guilty, like the rest, to tardiness. This is regrettable. But the principle on which protest is based is no less valid, and ordinarily Mr. Moses would be its chief defender against those who would destroy a blade of park grass. Let the diners at the Tavern ride there in taxi-cabs. . . .

  Things had gone far enough. When the Coordinator struck again, he struck with picked troops, not some contractor's hired hands but uniformed Park Department veterans, men loyal to the Sycamore Flag (and to the promise of overtime pay for the unusual mission on which he was dispatching them), and he sent them into the field under the personal command of an aide whose enthusiasm for such missions was a legend in the Department: the hard-bitten commander whom other men called "Mustache."

  He struck in secrecy—in after-midnight darkness, when the enemy's sentries had been withdrawn for the night. At 0130 hours on April 24, when only a few scattered lampposts and a three-quarter moon broke the gloom of the battlefield—Constable had prohibited the use of any other lights—a hand-picked Park Department platoon headed by a gardener first class moved into the glen, hammered steel stakes into the ground around its perimeter and wired to them a "snow fence" of wooden slats, about four feet high, strung on wires. It was not until the fence was in place—and painted, to make it look all the more official—that the more easily spotted mechanized equipment was brought up, and then the bulldozer was moved into position inside the fence on a flat-bed truck so that its noisy treads would not have to be activated until the moment it went into action. To insure against leaks, not even the Police Department had been told what was going on; it was not until about 3 a.m., when a patrolman, summoned by a stroller on Central Park West who had heard a mysterious hammering coming from the park, arrived and saw—to his shock—shadowy figures moving about in the darkness, that a call was made by Constable to police higher-ups—and then it was made to request the immediate dispatch of reinforcements in sufficient force to repel any counterattack and of both sexes, so that newspaper photographers would not be able to take pictures of any mothers who had to be hauled away being hauled away by men. When, shortly before six, an early-morning horseman came cantering along the bridle path, he suddenly saw, through a mist that shrouded what had always been an empty glen—a bulldozer, a truck and a platoon of green-uniformed "parkies" inside a fence, and, in a ring around the fence, thirty-

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  one policemen and policewomen under the command of an inspector and two captains. (The sight so startled his horse that it reared and almost threw him.) By the time daylight revealed the scene to the apartments above, and the first of the mothers came running into the park, the bulldozer had pushed over a big maple tree and Park Department axmen were chopping it into small pieces. And when the mothers tried to reach the machine, the policemen joined hands and politely but firmly stopped them at the fence. These were not mothers to whom more violent protest would have been even a possibility; they did not even consider fighting the policemen; there was nothing they could do except stand outside the fence and cry as the trees came down.

  And the media went wild.

  "It was a dirty, lousy stab in the back," Mrs. Sanger said—and that was how the media played it. "The Brigade of Mothers lost their battle at the Tavern-on-the-Grccn in Central Park today after the city mounted a sneak attack under cover of darkness," said the lead in the World-Telegram. Other papers painted the Park Commissioner as a bully as well as a sneak; the lead in the Post said sarcastically that he "routed a small band of women and children. ... It was a brilliant victory." Rcwritemen rose to what for them was almost poesy in describing the "sylvan victims" felled on the "hillside on which he plans to build a beautiful asphalt-surfaced parking lot." "Sweet-smelling sticky sap ran as the chips flew," mourned the World- Telegram .

  On its editorial page, the Post raged ("Who else but Bob Moses would have been audacious enough to proceed in this fashion before the issue could even be debated before the City Council? . . . Who other than Moses would have been capable of so arrogantly saying, 'The public be damned'?") and added a prediction: "Politicians live in awe of him and journalists treat him with . . . nervous reverence. . . . But we think the man has finally overreached himself. Before this is over, at least a few more city dignitaries (and editorial writers) may finally say out loud that Robert Moses can be wrong." And the Post was right. For the first time, its outrage was echoed in other editorial voices.

  And the words didn't hurt nearly as much as the pictures.

  As the trees had begun tumbling before the bulldozer, a well-dressed, elderly woman, the hair beneath her stylish little cloche white, had run up to the fence and the policemen and stood there crying, trying to wipe the tears from her face with a handkerchief balled up in her white-gloved hand. Beside her stood a much younger woman, one of the young mothers, with the hands in her white gloves clenched and on her face an expression in which was mingled sadness and indignation. As the two women stood there, oblivious to everything but the trees falling in front of them, a dozen photographers snapped their picture—and the next day those women were weeping OH the front page of every newspaper in town except the Herald Tribune, in which they were weeping on the split page, and the Times,

  which limited itself to views of the over-all scene. As the Newmans had run out the door that morning with their four-year-old son, David, Arnold Newman had, at the last moment turned back, snatched up the boy's toy rifle and carried it to the park, where he had handed it to him. ("We were in the business, you know," Augusta Newman explains, grinning.) Other men in the business also knew a great prop when they saw one—and the next day the "little soldier in the park war" was sitting pointing his gun, which seemed longer than he was, through the fence at the bulldozer while, beside the small, pathetic figure, a burly policeman stood looking studiously away from him with genuine shame on his face, across five full columns of the front page of the Journal-American.