by James Mauro
A storm of protest ensued; Ickes was reviled in the New York press, and FDR was buried in an avalanche of letters and telegrams from various civic groups. Throughout the battle, La Guardia ran end runs down to Washington until finally the federal government caved. A predated letter was written stating that Order 129 was not meant to be retroactive and therefore did not apply to Moses. In the end he was allowed to stay, his influence apparently extending as high up as the office of the president of the United States.
“He acknowledged no one46 as his superior,” Kaufman stated. “In fact, he treated few as equals. For most, he showed only condescension, expecting their homage—and usually getting it.”
In March, he appeared at a court hearing to defend his decision to tear down a city landmark, the Central Park Casino, which had been built in 1864, arguing that its charge of forty cents for a cup of coffee was “too expensive47 to be justified at a public park.”
He took the case all the way to the state supreme court, and when they blocked his motion to demolish it, Moses promptly defied a restraining order and began digging up the trees and bushes surrounding the property, leading to a charge of contempt of court against him. In the appellate court, Presiding Justice Francis Martin warned that Moses had to be stopped from destroying public landmarks “before he becomes a Mussolini.48 Suppose he wanted to tear down City Hall?”
He followed that49 by decimating Inwood Hill Park at the northern tip of Manhattan in order to make room for the Henry Hudson Parkway, drawing the ire of the City Club. Nathan Straus, one of its members, accused Moses of treating public parks “as if they were his own personal property. Is Commissioner Moses the only wise man in the city?”
In June, Moses again threatened to quit all of his projects unless La Guardia immediately offered him a full three-year reappointment as parks commissioner, casting serious doubts about whether the Triborough Bridge would ever be completed on time.
“You tell him for me50 that’s just baby talk,” the mayor responded, calling his bluff. “He’s talking big, but all it amounts to is baby talk. If the law requires it, I was prepared to reappoint him. But if he wants to talk baby talk I’ll consider the appointment very carefully before I make it.”
Two days later, La Guardia reappointed him.
At best, he had a contentious but working relationship with La Guardia;* at worst, they took to rabid name-calling and outright accusations of misconduct in the press. In private, their relationship was even more virulent. Moses called the mayor “the little organ grinder” as a dig at his Italian ancestry. It was one of the nicer51 racial nicknames he invented for La Guardia; his three other favorites were “that Dago son of a bitch,” “that Wop son of a bitch,” and “that Guinea son of a bitch.” La Guardia responded by referring to Moses as “His Grace.”
Nevertheless, whether out of intimidation or awe at his ability to mobilize a wide variety of factions in the planning and building of each of his projects, the mayor respected Moses’s ability to get things done. And while La Guardia was a well-known hothead himself, in the end Moses almost always got his way.
The controversy continued. On November 20,52 1935, the board of directors of New York World’s Fair, Inc., held their first meeting and unanimously elected two bankers, George McAneny and Harvey Gibson, as president and chairman. But by the end of the year, Moses was growing ever more impatient with the corporation when it came to reclamation of the Corona Dumps. In December, he warned53 that any delay in preparing the site would be “fatal.” Then, as the new year came and went and the bulldozing Moses still wasn’t getting his way, he took his argument public, issuing a statement that accused the World’s Fair Corporation of dragging its feet.
In typical Moses fashion, the warning was paired with another of his trademark threats. In late January, he confronted Mayor La Guardia and presented him with two possibilities: He could proceed with the plans for a World’s Fair, or he could “adopt an alternative plan54 he has [already] prepared for development of the meadows as a park.” It didn’t matter at all to him one way or the other, he said; he just wanted to get at least one of the projects under way.
Moses was bluffing, of course. He and everyone else in city government knew that no park could be built without the funds the World’s Fair would generate. Still, it was an embarrassing situation all around, and even those who were aware of Moses’s tactics were surprised that he would shed doubt on the Fair’s much-anticipated existence to the public at large. The ultimatum had made the local papers, as Moses knew it would.
Five days later, McAneny reassured the borough of Queens that they needn’t worry. The Fair would proceed,55 he said, and it would draw “many, many more” visitors than Chicago had. The occasion was a dinner, given in McAneny’s honor by the local New York Board of Trade at the Kew Gardens Inn, and for good measure he brought along Joseph Shadgen, their neighbor, whom he now described as “the Father of the Fair.”
For Moses, the speeches and promises amounted only to words, not to action. Still unsatisfied,56 he took the fight a step further, asking the Board of Estimate to authorize the lowering of a portion of his Grand Central Parkway in order for it to be ready when the Triborough Bridge opened that summer. Naturally, the move would compromise most of his efforts in restoring Flushing Meadows for the Fair; moreover, it would in fact reduce the Fair’s overall size by eighty-five acres—an area just small enough for the planners to think he was serious and just large enough for it to be a real problem.
The bluffing and bullheaded tactics were getting him nowhere, but Moses may have had an alternate motive in mind when he stated over and over again that he was backing away from the World’s Fair idea. That same month, Bronx borough president James Lyons, ever the critic and definitely no friend of Moses, revealed some interesting news: Engineers conducting a secret survey of the land on Flushing Meadows had found it so boggy that no buildings could be erected on it safely. Whether or not it was true,57 La Guardia immediately denied it and insisted that there was “nothing secret” about the report. Moses backed him up, saying that a full technical analysis “had found the Flushing Meadows entirely suitable for proposed World’s Fair purposes.”
Still, just to be sure, he ordered additional borings into the muck.
To the vast and forceful impatience of Moses, “Mañana Mac” was living up to his name. The World’s Fair Corporation was indeed dragging its feet left and right, and something had to be done before the whole situation turned dire. Six full months had elapsed since the Fair was formally announced, and to date nothing more than a few maps and surveys had been conducted. The three-and-a-half-year deadline had collapsed into just three years; what had at first seemed unlikely now seemed utterly unrealistic.
By now completely fed up, Moses alternately watched the days tick off the calendar and his blood pressure rise up the charts. At the end of March58 1936, the board of directors of the Fair corporation actually voted unanimously to suspend all meetings until “adequate appropriation by the public authorities has been made for the preparation of the site for the 1939 Fair and the general enabling legislation now pending at Albany enacted.”
Essentially, the corporation had declared, in a terse, forty-eight-word statement that had taken them two hours to write, that it was going to sit with its arms folded and hold its breath until some money came through. This childish behavior stemmed from a disagreement between the city and the state as to who would benefit more from this Fair. The state legislature argued against providing funds for an event they felt would strictly benefit the city; the city responded by saying that it wouldn’t cough up the agreed-upon $5 million for sewers and landfill until the state came through with an additional $5 million for a boat basin and roadwork leading to and from the fairgrounds.
Reading the resolution, Moses became incensed. Enough was enough; it was time to remove the procrastinators and replace them with someone who was a mover and shaker, a proven executive who could get the job done without sittin
g on the details for months on end. He knew who that man was, and he knew that his talents were currently being wasted on an underling’s job with the executive committee.
So on April Fools’ Day, perhaps as a subtle dig at what he perceived as McAneny’s and Gibson’s utter incompetence, Moses issued a do-or-die challenge. He submitted a letter to the Fair’s directors stating in no uncertain terms that he now believed the Fair would not open until 1940.
Moses wrote:
The loss of time,59 due to … weaknesses in the World’s Fair management, have raised a serious question in my mind as to whether the Fair can be held in 1939. The original schedule was a very tight one, and I have repeatedly called attention to the fact that only the utmost cooperation from the very beginning on the part of all concerned would make it possible. I think the contingency should be faced now that the Fair may have to be postponed until 1940. I do not say that the 1939 opening is impossible. It is improbable.
The warning set off alarm bells throughout the city. (Although Moses later declared he meant it as a “confidential” letter to the World’s Fair Corporation and not intended for public perusal, it had nevertheless “somehow” managed to leak out.)
Acting quickly to soothe the swelling controversy, and Moses’s outrage, on April 22, 1936, the directors voted Grover Whalen60 chairman of the board of New York World’s Fair, Inc., replacing Harvey Gibson, who assumed the more appropriate role as chairman of the finance committee. Whalen now had full rein over the Fair’s executive decisions. His first duty, he stated, was to get all the city and state difficulties settled; afterward, “nature would take its course.”
Whether or not he meant the double entendre, Whalen knew that the main objective for his coup was to solve the land reclamation problems of Robert Moses. A reporter, citing Whalen’s reputation, asked if he would be taking charge of the Fair’s promotion.
Whalen reluctantly shook his head no. “Execution,” he said, “rather than promotion.”61
At the time Moses was elated with the choice, but still he had no intention of backing down on his threats, despite Whalen’s promise to speed things up. He had already switched gears,62 Moses said, proceeding with his original plans for extending the Grand Central Parkway through the Flushing site, all but giving up on the possibility that the Fair would be completed on schedule. But again he left open at least some hope that his mind could be changed, even at this late date.
Moses also laid out an agenda for what must be done in order to get the project back on track—for not only the World’s Fair Corporation, but also the city government, the state of New York, and the Queens borough president to follow if they wanted him to remain on board. All he needed, he said, was authorization to spend an initial $7 million. And he needed it right away.
Whalen, living up to expectations, saw that he got it. Before the month was out, the corporation fully approved all of Moses’s suggestions: The city would acquire the remaining land for $1.5 million and spend another $2.75 million for the reclamation of it; another million and change would be spent for building sewers, and an extra $1.5 million was even tacked on for construction of the city’s exhibit buildings. The total city expenditure approved equaled $7 million, exactly what Moses had asked for.
But it didn’t stop there. The state of New York finally caved in and agreed to invest some $4 million to construct bridges and highways, using mostly manpower from its Department of Public Works.
The next day, nearly every major player came out to reassure the wary public that the Fair would open on time in 1939, “despite scare headlines,”63 as La Guardia put it. Moses himself stated that “there was nothing now to impede the opening on schedule.”
“Do you mean that64 the management has since improved?” James Lyons asked.
“Yes,” he said, smiling broadly.
Queens borough president George Harvey, understanding what was at stake for his district and attempting to smooth the ruffled feathers of all involved, got in the last word:
“From the beginning65 I have felt that the World’s Fair was too important to the people of the city,” he said. “Once the order for full speed ahead is given I am sure that Commissioner Moses will forget his troubles and join with the corporation in securing for New York and its people a Fair worthy of the city’s dignity.
“The World’s Fair is now on its way,” he continued. “Nothing can stop it.”
The date was May 1, 1936, exactly three years minus one day from the Fair’s opening.
* Their calculations were startlingly specific: $250 million for food and drink; $250 million for entertainment; $200 million for hotels; $140 million for merchandise; $100 million for transportation; and $60 million for what they called “personal services and communication.”
* This estimate included repeat visitors, each of whom it was hoped would return at least three times.
† The official theme was actually “Building the World of Tomorrow.” But most failed to understand its larger implications—that the Fair was created as a model for future America to build on continually after its gates were closed. Once the Fair was constructed, it seemed more appropriate for most journalists and visitors to shorten it to simply “the World of Tomorrow.”
* Moses’s parkways were no ordinary thoroughfares. He considered them “ribbon parks” and ordered that there were to be no traffic lights, grade crossings, commercial traffic, or signs of any kind other than exit designations. Likewise there could be no hot dog stands or gas stations, and absolutely no left turns.
* As governor of New York, Roosevelt, it was said, refused to reappoint Moses as secretary of state because Moses did not give his personal secretary, Louis Howe, a job in the Council of Parks. Howe was a close friend of both the president and Eleanor Roosevelt and was revered by both as one of the few who supported FDR throughout his political comeback after he had been stricken with polio.
* In fairness, La Guardia fought with all his commissioners, many of whom resigned in the face of his disrespect. “If you were any dumber, I’d make you a commissioner” was one of his favorite statements, usually employed after he’d berated an underling for one infraction or another.
Whalen swearing in graduates of his new “police college” in 1930 (© New York Daily News LP)
6
THE $8 MURDER
Reluctant as he may have been to join the police force, Joe Lynch reaped an early benefit from his family’s former nemesis, Grover Whalen. In the waning months of his career as police commissioner, Whalen had created a “police college” in order to better train recruits for a career in what he considered to be the future of law enforcement.
“I started that,”1 Whalen said, “because I saw as soon as I took things over that there was a crying need for education of the men in the department. Detective work is a science nowadays…. In the old days a plain cop was thought to be good enough, but in these days … real executives are needed.”
Lynch, with his Fordham University degree, entered the officers training school—a monthlong program that put him on the fast track for promotion—in 1936. Within a year, Joe had been promoted to detective, third grade. Things were going well again as he and Easter celebrated the birth of their fourth child, another girl whom they named Martha, after Easter’s mother.
Then, in the late fall of 1937, tragedy struck. On Thanksgiving Day, the Lynches and the Hores gathered in the Bronx to celebrate their growing family and Joe’s continued success in the department. Along with his promotion to detective, Joe had been offered a post with the Bronx District Attorney’s Office, a plum assignment that allowed him to work near home in order to be closer to his wife and children.
With the exception of Joe’s father-in-law, Jeremiah, they were all in a festive mood. The old man was brooding, however; he’d been drawn for jury duty that week, leaving his wife, Martha, to fend for herself in their little luncheon counter in Greenwich Village. It was a two-person operation: One usually made the sandwiches and se
rved the customers while the other manned the cash register and handled the candy, cigarette, and newspaper trade that had lately made up the bulk of their profits.
Jeremiah didn’t like leaving his wife alone to handle all the business, especially during the busy lunch hour. Moreover, the meat slicer was on the fritz, which meant that the cold cuts would have to be carved by hand. But since he would have a break for lunch and the courthouse was only a few blocks away, he supposed he could skip out for an hour and help her in the noontime rush.
The next morning, November 27, Easter’s parents boarded an early train to take them into Manhattan. They opened the store promptly at eight, and when Jeremiah was satisfied that his wife was settled in for the morning crowd, he left for the Reade Street Municipal Court to spend a long, dull morning performing his civic duty.
At a little after one o’clock,2 he came back to help with lunch, but there weren’t many customers—too many holiday leftovers to be eaten, probably. At five minutes before two, he unlocked the cash register under the counter and checked the day’s receipts: only $8 and some small change. It had indeed been a slow morning, so Jeremiah left the store and headed back to court.
It was an even slower afternoon. At three-thirty, Martha Hore had only two customers, one of them a little boy who was enjoying his school holiday by lingering over a soda, the other a neighborhood kid she may have known by name and probably by reputation. He was a familiar figure in the neighborhood, a blond and twitchy teenager named Joe Healy, and Martha most likely regarded him with equal measures of pity and disapproval. Out of work and uneducated, Healy had been the product of a familiar tale of downtown West Side woe: He’d grown up near the corner of Canal and Hudson streets, where first the mighty Hudson Dusters ruled, to be followed by the Marginals and other “Paddy Irish” gangs. After giving birth to ten children, Healy’s mother had died when he was only nine years old.