Memoirs

by David Rockefeller

  Attending school in the City also had a powerful influence on me. In the late 1920s, as part of a Lincoln School project, I delivered Thanksgiving food baskets to poor families living in “old law” tenements in Harlem, which lacked running water and adequate ventilation and lighting. As I climbed the stairs, it became darker and darker. The halls reeked of garlic, cabbage, and urine from the common bathrooms at the end of each floor. No doubt the residents were surprised when they opened the door to find a teenager accompanied by a liveried chauffeur in full uniform who helped me hand over a basket filled with a turkey, fresh fruit, and canned goods. This was a very memorable experience because I was faced for the first time with the reality that many people in the City were living in dire poverty and would not have had a Thanksgiving meal had we not brought it.

  On our weekend drives to Pocantico we often stopped to inspect one of the many construction projects that Father was sponsoring, such as Riverside Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan or the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan. Father also had a keen interest in providing decent and affordable housing without government subsidies. He financed the construction of both the Paul Lawrence Dunbar Apartments in Central Harlem and the Thomas Garden Apartments on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, demonstrating that there were innovative ways for the private sector to help solve this chronic urban problem. The projects he sponsored were undertaken before the New Deal housing program was initiated in the mid-1930s.

  My stint with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia during the early 1940s broadened my knowledge of the City. La Guardia’s charismatic personality and enormous popularity allowed him to tackle difficult problems that others preferred to avoid. The “Little Flower” enthusiastically deployed the powers of government to tackle the problems caused by the Depression. He secured funds from the federal government that put the unemployed to work building highways, schools, bridges, sewer systems, hospitals, airports, and public housing. As his aide, I often accompanied him in his oversized seven-passenger Chrysler on “flying tours” around town to open new housing projects or dedicate new public schools. My year and a half in City Hall gave me invaluable exposure to how effective a competent government could be in addressing important public issues.

  I also believed then, as now, that the private sector had much to contribute. A case in point was Father’s construction of Rockefeller Center during the Depression, despite formidable financial risks. His decision generated seventy-five thousand jobs at a time when there was virtually no other private construction in the City.

  Both Father and Mayor La Guardia showed me in their different ways that the most effective response to urban problems would result from intelligent public-private cooperation.

  LEADING AN UPTOWN TRANSITION

  My first opportunity to put these principles to work came in a neighborhood with which I was intimately familiar: Morningside Heights on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In the early twentieth century the Heights had become home to many of the City’s most prestigious educational and religious organizations—Columbia University, Barnard College, Union Theological Seminary, Jewish Theological Seminary, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Riverside Church, and International House, among them—and to a residential community of graceful town houses and elegant apartment buildings.

  By 1945 the so-called Acropolis of America faced an uncertain future. Harlem, located just to the east and north, had gone through a dramatic transformation during the 1920s and 1930s, changing from a predominantly middle-class Irish and Jewish community to a Black ghetto of more than three hundred thousand people. The quality of life had begun to deteriorate markedly during the early 1930s because of the lawlessness associated with Prohibition. During World War II, areas of Morningside Heights were even ruled off-limits to servicemen because of the high incidence of prostitution and crime.

  The leaders of the Morningside Heights institutions feared that they would have difficulty attracting and retaining faculty, students, and staff if conditions didn’t improve.

  Soon after I returned to New York, I was elected chairman of the Executive Committee of International House (I House), the residence for foreign students that Father had built in the mid-1920s at Riverside Drive and 124th Street. My first initiative was to hire Will Munnecke, a distinguished sociologist from the University of Chicago, to conduct a survey of the area. Munnecke had done a similar study for Chicago, which also confronted the challenge of adjusting to its changing Hyde Park neighborhood. As a university trustee I had been impressed with his work.

  Munnecke’s Morningside report identified the high crime rate and the scarcity of decent affordable housing as two preeminent issues that I House should confront. The board followed Munnecke’s recommendation, and in early 1947 the fourteen major institutions in the area created Morningside Heights, Inc. (MHI) and elected me chairman. In accepting the position I told my colleagues that personal participation by the head of each institution was essential if we were to deal effectively with the problems we faced. I promised that they would be required to attend meetings only when important decisions were being made, and I encouraged them to appoint representatives to handle routine matters. All of MHI’s constituents, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the president of Columbia, made this commitment and agreed to this approach, which worked well in practice.

  We soon realized that unless middle-income housing was developed, there would be little chance to stabilize the area. But land costs were high, and none of the institutions had funds to devote to residential construction. Moreover, private builders were unwilling to accept the risk of construction in such a transitional neighborhood. The situation was exacerbated by New York City’s invidious rent control laws, which persist to this day, long after any realistic economic rationale can be made for them. Builders feared they would not be able to recover their costs, and landlords lost any incentive to upgrade or even maintain their properties.

  As a result, by the end of the 1940s, New York had become the nation’s principal “housing laboratory,” experimenting with a series of publicly financed housing schemes.

  MHI took advantage of one such measure, the National Housing Act of 1949, which encouraged slum clearance or urban renewal by providing federal money to help defray the cost to private sponsors of land purchase and demolition to finance new housing. To take advantage of this new law we needed the approval of Robert Moses, the fabled “power broker” who headed Mayor William O’Dwyer’s Commission for Slum Clearance, for approval to replace ten acres of densely packed “old law” tenements with a cooperatively owned apartment complex on the northern edge of the Heights.

  Moses liked the idea. He had been looking for a reliable not-for-profit group to manage the City’s first urban renewal site and expeditiously ushered our proposal through the maze of federal and city bureaucracies. After the MHI institutions subscribed $500,000, the Bowery Savings Bank agreed to supply a $12.5 million construction mortgage, thanks largely to Earl Schwulst, its imaginative chairman, who was active on the board of MHI. This meant private funds would account for 80 percent of the project’s cost.

  In October 1951 we announced the plans for Morningside Gardens, a six-building cooperative apartment complex that would house almost a thousand middle-income families from all ethnic backgrounds. At the same time the New York City Housing Authority—also headed by Bob Moses—agreed to complement our project by building a two-thousand-apartment public housing project, the U.S. Grant Houses, just to the north of Morningside Gardens. The two worked well together in catering to different income levels in the community.

  Despite the obvious benefits of Morningside Gardens to the community, there was opposition. The most bothersome bunch, “Save Our Homes,” who claimed that MHI was purposely dislodging low-income people, even recruited Republican congressman Jacob Javits to their cause. We had some sharp exchanges on the subject, but Javits realized he had been misled and recognized the benefits the project would provide the com
munity.

  Morningside Gardens taught me some important lessons: the necessity of sound organization and planning, the indispensability of public-private cooperation, and the crucial role of delegation of responsibility to staff. In regard to the latter, I knew I could be effective in such a complex project only if I had a trusted aide to whom I could delegate responsibility. I convinced Warren T. (Lindy) Lindquist, my friend from the military attaché’s office in Paris, to come to work for me. Lindy’s first job was to assume day-to-day responsibility for Morningside Gardens.

  Lindy developed good relations with Robert Lebwohl, Moses’s chief of staff. Lebwohl would tell Lindy if the imperious Moses was upset about some real or imagined slight, giving me time to intervene in order to placate him. This division of labor saved me time, avoided possible blowups, and kept our uptown project on schedule. It also enabled me to play a leadership role by leveraging my time to the maximum.

  SPEARHEADING A DOWNTOWN REVIVAL

  Soon after we began Morningside Gardens, I approached Moses with a request critical to Chase’s future. In order to build our new headquarters in lower Manhattan we needed the City’s permission to “demap” or close a one-block stretch of Cedar Street, a narrow but heavily traveled thoroughfare. If the City refused, the modern skyscraper we envisioned would be a nonstarter.

  Permanently closing a city street was not a routine request, but ours was the kind of daring and visionary project Moses liked. He acceded to our request, but he also cautioned me: “You’ll be wasting your money unless others follow suit.” He pointed out that many Wall Street businesses had already moved uptown or were about to leave the City altogether. If any more left, Chase’s decision to remain would be viewed as a colossal blunder.

  Moses’s point was well taken. There had been almost no new construction in the Wall Street area since the 1920s. The Financial District was cramped, dirty, congested, and a ghost town after 5 P.M. It was easy to understand why so many banks, insurance companies, and other corporations had left the area.

  The construction of a new Chase headquarters could make a difference but by itself would not be enough. If the physical infrastructure and public services in lower Manhattan were not radically upgraded, the exodus from Wall Street would continue. Moses suggested that I put together an organization that could speak on behalf of the downtown financial community and offer a cohesive plan for the physical redevelopment of Wall Street to persuade the politicians to allocate the necessary resources.

  With this objective in mind I took the lead in organizing what became the Downtown–Lower Manhattan Association (D-LMA). To ensure a high-powered and influential board I personally recruited such influential downtown business leaders as Cleo Craig, chairman of AT&T; Henry Alexander, chairman of J. P. Morgan; Howard Shepherd, chairman of National City Bank; John Butt, chairman of the Seamen’s Bank for Savings; Ralph Reed, treasurer of U.S. Steel; Keith Funston, president of the New York Stock Exchange; Harry Morgan, senior partner of Morgan Stanley; and others of similar stature. Importantly, all of them accepted and took an active interest in the affairs and activities of D-LMA.

  I served as chairman, and Lindy became chief operating officer. We recruited experienced city planners to suggest practical ways to redevelop the entire area below Canal Street. Our first report proposed the comprehensive rezoning of the entire area, followed by a series of public sector projects to stimulate and encourage private redevelopment within the 564-acre zone from Canal Street to the Battery.

  Among other proposals we recommended rehabilitating the rim of lower Manhattan by removing rotting piers and bulkheads and replacing them with parks, a heliport, and a boat basin; reducing traffic congestion through street widenings and closings, improvements in mass transit, and building the Lower Manhattan Expressway, an elevated highway that would link the Manhattan Bridge with the West Side Highway; relocating the old Washington Square Wholesale Fruit and Vegetable Market that extended for a dozen blocks along the waterfront on the West Side, and clearing the long-abandoned warehouse and tenement district on the East Side, to create an expanded financial services industry; and promoting Wall Street as an “around-the-clock” community (while four hundred thousand people worked there, only about four thousand lived in the area) by building affordable housing in Coenties Slip and in the run-down blocks south of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Mayor Robert Wagner loved our plan, as did The New York Times, which called me the “billion dollar planner” in a page-one article. Our infrastructure proposals would require the investment of more than half a billion dollars of public funds, but they were essential for the future of Wall Street. While it took substantial arm twisting with City budget and planning officials, eventually expenditures were approved, and the process of revitalizing Wall Street began.

  CREATING THE WORLD’S TALLEST BUILDING

  Two years after our first report, D-LMA proposed the construction of a World Trade Center that would firmly establish lower Manhattan as the world’s trade and financial capital. In those days moving beyond the core of Wall Street meant entering a veritable commercial “slum.”

  On the west side, squat, low-rise buildings and warehouses built in the late nineteenth century were now occupied by hundreds of stores whose dirty windows featured hand-lettered signs for cheap electronic gadgets. The east side was even worse. A defunct elevated railway, slowly rusting away and home to thousands of pigeons, loomed over a neighborhood of abandoned piers and warehouses. Just north, the Fulton Fish Market added a unique redolence to the area, especially on hot summer days.

  We concentrated first on revitalizing the east side, which offered the greatest opportunities. It was Lindy who suggested that we capitalize on lower Manhattan’s historic strengths as a hub of international commerce by creating a trade-oriented center along Water Street. D-LMA commissioned Skidmore, Owings and Merrill to develop a plan for a 13.5-acre site that included a seventy-story hotel and office building, an international trade mart and exhibition hall, and a central securities exchange building where we hoped the New York Stock Exchange would relocate.

  It would be a costly undertaking. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey—an independent agency chartered by both states to manage New York’s maritime shipping, the area’s three airports, and regional transportation—seemed to be the only entity capable of financing such a massive project. Lindy and I discussed the matter at considerable length with Austin Tobin, executive director of the Port Authority, who enthusiastically agreed with our proposal and the Port Authority’s role.

  With the Port on board, we presented the proposal to those government officials whose endorsement was required. Mayor Wagner was supportive. So, too, was the governor of New York—my brother Nelson. But Governor Robert Meyner of New Jersey, who liked the idea in principle, balked at locating it on Water Street. He argued that New Jersey commuters arrived through the “tubes” on the west side of Manhattan and would be inconvenienced if they had to walk across town to work. Meyner’s objection could have torpedoed the project, so as a compromise Tobin suggested moving the trade center to the west side and building it above the existing train terminal for New Jersey commuters. This gave the project a closer link to New Jersey and quieted complaints from that side of the river. With that issue resolved, I was optimistic that the project would move ahead immediately.

  Alas, we hadn’t considered the “special interests” who would be adversely impacted by the trade center. Midtown real estate developers saw the downtown trade center as a threat to their rents and property values. Organized by Larry Wien, who owned the Empire State Building, this group posed as “valiant defenders” of the small downtown merchants threatened with relocation. They backed a series of legal challenges to the trade center, which held up the project for several years.

  The trade center plans called for 10 million square feet of office space, mostly in two 110-story buildings (taller than the Empire State Building, which may explain Larry Wein’s opposition) situate
d on a large plaza that would also include a number of smaller structures. Critics insisted the space would never be fully rented and demanded the project be scaled back. Nelson immediately rode to the rescue by announcing that New York State, which wanted to consolidate its operations in the City, would lease 1 million square feet of office space, becoming the largest tenant. In 1965, after excavation for the “twin towers” (dubbed Nelson and David by the New York tabloids!) had begun, Nelson decided to take an additional million square feet of space. Nelson’s announcement elicited another chorus of jibes—some claiming I had interceded with Nelson to ensure sufficient tenants. In point of fact, neither I nor the D-LMA had anything to do with the construction or rental of the trade center once the Port Authority assumed responsibility for the project.

  Years of litigation and delays added dramatically to the trade center’s final price tag of $1.5 billion, an amount five times the original estimate. The buildings were completed and fully occupied in stages between 1970 and 1977. The towers, at least for a time, would be the world’s tallest buildings and provide office space for more than fifty thousand people. They used as much electricity as a city of four hundred thousand, and their forty thousand tons of air-conditioning were enough to cool refrigerators for a city of one million.

  The World Trade Center soon became one of the City’s greatest assets. Like Chase Manhattan Plaza before it, the trade center helped anchor the financial community more solidly in lower Manhattan. It provided new homes for Wall Street’s commodity exchanges and office space for all manner of large and small businesses. It was an essential public investment that brought immense benefits.