The following year, Moses got the break he was looking for. Belle Moskowitz, a trusted aide to New York’s Democratic governor Alfred E. Smith, offered him a job, but Moses had his doubts. He didn’t think much of the bighearted and affable Smith, a former Brooklyn street kid with gold-filled teeth who spoke in classic New Yorkese. The governor had an incomplete formal education; when asked what kind of degree he possessed, Smith famously quipped “F.F.M.”—as in the Fulton Fish Market, where he had labored after he quit the twelfth grade to help support his family. The governor, it was well known, was a product of Tammany Hall. “What can you expect from a man who wears a brown derby on the side of his head and always has a big cigar in the corner of his mouth?” Moses complained to a friend. But he soon learned that Moskowitz shared his passion for reform, and she had the governor’s ear.
Moses got to work in impressive fashion. He wrote up a 419-page report on the restructuring and streamlining of 175 state agencies into 16 departments. The government, Moses firmly believed, needed to be efficient in order to effect lasting and significant change. Although Smith was voted out of office in 1920 before he could implement Moses’ plan, the pair became close. Together the unlikely duo—the Ivy League–bred, Latin-quoting Jewish Moses and the cigar-chomping, whiskey-swigging Irish Catholic Smith—would go for long walks, forming a bond that would last decades.
Smith lauded Moses’ skills and worth ethic. “Bob Moses is the most efficient administrator I have ever met in public life,” he said. “He was the best bill drafter in Albany . . . he didn’t get that keen mind of his from any college. He was a hard worker. He worked on trains anywhere and any time. When everyone else was ready for bed he would go back to work.”
Although Moses would go on to work for seven governors, Smith was the only man that he could ever bring himself to actually call “Governor”; to Moses, all of Smith’s successors were unworthy in comparison. His loyalty to his friend knew few bounds. In 1936, when New York’s hopelessly corrupt mayor Jimmy Walker—a smirking songwriting dandy whom Moses deplored—publicly embarrassed Smith, the Master Builder exacted revenge. Walker enjoyed carousing with his cronies at the Central Park Casino, a structure with a unique architectural style: On the outside it was a nineteenth-century cottage; inside it was a decadent modernist playground with black mirrors and huge glass chandeliers for the city’s moneyed elite. As City Parks Commissioner, Moses would later have the place razed and the vacant lot turned into a playground (Smith had a soft spot for children). Moses was nothing, if not loyal.
In 1922 Smith was voted back into office. Moses was now his aide-de-camp; his job was to do whatever the governor needed, whether it was writing legislation or speaking on his behalf with Albany insiders. While Moses was happy to be an important player in New York government, there was one job he truly wanted: the position of Parks Commissioner, which would enable him to reshape the landscape of New York and lead to his involvement in both New York World’s Fairs in the twentieth century.
He got the idea while vacationing in Babylon, Long Island, with his wife and young daughters. It was there that he encountered the beaches, bays, and untamed wetlands of Long Island’s South Shore, thousands of acres of gorgeous coastline with mesmerizing views of the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Southern Bay. Miles of it belonged to New York City and State, and yet there was no systematic way for New Yorkers to access these natural surroundings as well as no system in place for local government to develop the property. But Moses had a way to fix that. “He was always burning up with ideas, just burning up with them!” a colleague said. “Everything he saw walking around the city made him think of some way that it could be better.”
He proposed a new department—which he would head, naturally—that would create and build a vast system of parks, not only on eastern Long Island, but also in the Adirondacks and the Catskills, making the most of the state’s geological wonders. Devoting so much time, energy, and resources to the creation of a statewide park system was visionary; at the time, twenty-nine US states had no state parks at all.
When Moses presented his plan to Smith, the Irishman was suspicious. “You want to give the people a fur coat when what they need is red flannel underwear,” he complained. The cost wouldn’t be cheap: A parks system would require $15 million worth of bonds; land would have to be purchased, roadways built. But Moses highlighted the upside for the governor: The public loved parks, working families needed places to go on the weekend or for vacation. It would be a public relations boon for the governor, who would ultimately receive the credit and acclaim for giving the people the fur coat that they wanted (even if they really needed flannel underwear).
As long as you’re on the side of parks, you’re on the side of the angels. You can’t lose.
Moses got his appointment. In 1924 Smith made him the president of the New York State Council of Parks and chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission. (For a political reformer hell-bent on reducing state agencies, Moses had a knack for creating new ones when it fit his plans.) He went to work converting Jones Beach into a state park. For the first time, Moses came into direct contact with the public he so longed to serve; only this time he wasn’t a reformer, but a builder. His plans for Jones Beach called for the appropriation of private land, invoking the wrath of many Long Islanders, from the moneyed estate owners to small family farmers. “If we want your land,” he told one farmer, “we can take it.”
The opposition hardened. Rich Long Islanders complained that “rabble” from the city would flood the pristine oceanfront, creating “a second Coney Island.” But this ploy backfired after the New York Times ran a story with the headline A Few Rich Golfers Accused of Blocking Plan for State Park. When Jones Beach finally opened in 1930, it was hailed as a masterpiece of public planning, and millions flocked to its sun-kissed shores. “It is one of the finest beaches in the United States, and almost the only one designed with forethought and good taste,” wrote British novelist H. G. Wells after surveying Moses’ handiwork.
By 1928 when Smith launched his presidential campaign—marking the first time a Roman Catholic was nominated by a leading party for the nation’s highest office—Moses was New York’s Secretary of State, yet another position he could use to achieve his goals. As Smith toured the country by train, he listed his administration’s achievements—parks, hospitals, roads, and amenities for the public, many of which were built by Moses.
It was there, traveling through the country with the governor, that Moses witnessed the hatred and bigotry that Smith faced, particularly in states where the Ku Klux Klan held sway. Moses never forgot those experiences or the affect it had on his friend. Decades later, he would recall those memories in a letter to a Smith biographer. “I don’t think you have stressed enough the cross burning and bigotry Smith ran into during the 1928 campaign,” he wrote, “an experience from which he never really recovered.” It was anti-Catholic fervor that ensured Smith, the quintessential “Happy Warrior,” would lose to the Republican free-market fundamentalist Herbert H. Hoover. Smith’s lieutenant governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, won the former’s gubernatorial seat and became Moses’ boss.
It must have been gut-wrenching for Moses to see his beloved Smith in political exile while Roosevelt, whom he utterly detested, moved into the Governor’s Mansion in Albany. Moses was the only member of Smith’s cabinet that Roosevelt did not retain (the animosity was mutual). When Moses learned of his imminent dismissal as Secretary of State, he quit before Roosevelt could fire him. Still, Moses continued on as Parks Commissioner. His parks were popular with the public, who had just handed Roosevelt the governorship of New York, a well-established launching pad to the White House at the time. Roosevelt, happily or not, was politically savvy enough to leave the Parks Commissioner where he was.
Whatever their personal differences, the two worked together when required. When Roosevelt swept into the White House in 1932, he launched the New Deal
, a massive spending stimulus package meant to jumpstart an American economy ravaged by the Great Depression. Moses made the most of the situation and lured millions in New Deal funds to New York for his projects. He quickly dusted off plans for what would consolidate his reputation as America’s premier builder: the Triborough Bridge.*
* Renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge in 2008.
To help finance this massive project, which would unite three of the five boroughs—Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens—Moses dreamed up the Triborough Bridge Authority,* or TBA, a public entity that was entirely outside the boundaries of government. The TBA could borrow money, issue bonds, and fund itself through the tolls it would collect; it had its own fleet of cars and boats, even a small police force; and it didn’t have to answer to the public it was supposedly serving. Its Randall Island office space underneath the bridge was now Moses’ headquarters, his own private island lair from which he could extend the boundaries of his growing influence.
* Later renamed the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority.
Moses’ influence grew again in 1933 when Fiorello H. La Guardia became the mayor of New York. Although a Republican, La Guardia was a progressive who aligned himself with Democratic causes such as Roosevelt’s New Deal. The “Little Flower,” as he was known, turned to Moses to improve the city’s infrastructure, and in return the mayor consolidated the Master Builder’s power by making him New York City Parks Commissioner. Now all five boroughs were under Moses’ aegis. La Guardia also made Moses the CEO and chairman of the TBA, giving him near total control of his own public authority.
The following year Moses switched his party affiliation to Republican and ran for governor against Herbert H. Lehman, who had replaced Roosevelt as New York’s chief executive. The onetime reformer ran a nasty campaign, lambasting Lehman, a gentlemanly New Deal liberal (and close ally of the hated Roosevelt), in the press, calling him “stupid,” a “puppet” of Tammany Hall, and “a miserable, sniveling type of man . . . contemptible.” He was equally dismissive of the reporters who followed him around as a gubernatorial candidate. Attacking the press would prove to be a favorite pastime for the rest of Moses’ life.
When he lost in a landslide to Lehman, Moses expected to get fired. But Lehman was in many ways the anti-Moses. Despite intense pressure from the White House—President Roosevelt got word to both Governor Lehman and Mayor La Guardia that unless Moses was dismissed, New Deal funds for New York would dry up—Moses was left in place. After the Master Builder discovered the president’s plot to have him fired, he quickly informed reporters, who ran stories about the president’s personal vendetta against him. Smith rallied to his friend’s defense, calling the plot “narrow, political, vindictive,” and Roosevelt eventually backed off. Even the President of the United States couldn’t touch Moses. That was power.
Throughout the 1930s, Moses continued to mold and reshape New York. He often had hundreds of projects, sometimes thousands, going at the same time; there was always more to do. Then in 1935, when a few local businessmen wanted to hold a World’s Fair in New York, a major international exhibition, something to rouse the city out of the Great Depression, he got his first opportunity to achieve a long-cherished dream.
The Flushing Meadow, a three-mile stretch of natural marshlands in the middle of Queens, had beguiled developers for decades. By the 1920s it had become a vermin-infested, mountainous heap of refuse and trash, brought daily from Brooklyn via private train, thanks to a shady Tammany Hall figure named Fishhooks McCarthy. The 1,346 acres of defiled marshlands had been described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby as “the valley of ashes a . . . fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke.”
Moses wanted to change that. Just as he saw the untamed wilds of Jones Beach and envisioned a world-class park that would serve millions, he saw Flushing Meadow and dreamed of a park that would surpass the grandeur of Central Park. In fact, as the city’s population continued its steady migration eastward—partly due to the network of highways and bridges that Moses himself had built—this new park would be a truer “central park,” closer as it was to both the geographic and population centers of the city. In a bustling metropolis like New York City, the Flushing Meadow was the largest—one-and-a-half times the size of Central Park—blank canvas that nature would provide for him. When Moses heard about the World’s Fair plan, he slammed his fist on a table and exclaimed, “By God, that’s a wonderful idea!’”
He rallied behind the flamboyant Grover Whalen, the Fair’s president, and quickly suggested Flushing Meadow could be developed—with some of the public funds that the Fair would be receiving—into a wonderful, elegant fairground. A lease was drawn up, and Moses, as City Parks Commissioner, became the Fair’s landlord. In return he requested a piece of the profits to design and sculpt Flushing Meadow Park as he wished.
But it never happened. Although Moses was able to bury “the valley of ashes”—ingeniously using the miles of refuse as landfill for what would become the Van Wyck Expressway—the 1939–40 World’s Fair, the grandest and largest exposition of its time, was a financial disaster. When it was over, the Fair that had offered forty-six million visitors a glimpse of “the World of Tomorrow”—a world of futuristic wonders like television and skyscrapers—only paid investors thirty-three cents on the dollar.
Thanks to Moses’ protean efforts, there was now a Flushing Meadow Park, meticulously landscaped with two man-made lakes, an elaborate new drainage system, a new art deco–style civic building (the former New York City Pavilion), and the wide asphalt roads and pathways that serviced park-goers. However, it wasn’t the grandiose public space he originally envisioned, which would have included everything from a boat basin, bike paths, and a nature preserve to both a Japanese garden and another modeled on the Garden of Versailles. His dream would have to wait.
Although World War II slowed down the pace of his building, Moses continued to plan for the postwar surge he anticipated. In 1943 New York City initiated its own plans to stem the tide of citizens who had already begun to eschew cities for the suburbs. The catchphrase for this process would come to be known as “urban renewal,” the systematic clearance of decayed and blighted slum areas—“cancerous areas in the heart of the city,” according to Moses—that could be redeveloped and turned into affordable housing for middle-class families.
By 1943 Moses, then the chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, had “induced” the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to build Stuyvesant Town, a series of large, concrete-slab apartment buildings that would stretch along Manhattan’s East Side from 14th Street to 20th Street between Avenue A and Avenue C. The complex would ultimately create nearly nine thousand affordable and comfortable apartments for twenty-five thousand people. Moses lauded Met Life’s chairman of the board, Frederick H. Ecker, praising his “farsightedness and courage” to get involved in public works. Not everyone agreed. The New Yorker’s architecture critic, Lewis Mumford, wrote that the buildings looked like “the architecture of the Police State.”
The project quickly caused a public outcry when it was revealed that Met Life had a whites-only policy. Ecker only added to the firestorm by blatantly revealing his segregationist views. “Negroes and whites don’t mix,” the Met Life chairman stated, and claimed that if Stuyvesant Town was integrated, it would be detrimental to the city because “it would depress all the surrounding property [values].” It didn’t help, in the eyes of many progressive citizens—including the NAACP—that, at Moses’ urging, Met Life was also creating a similar apartment complex uptown, the Riverton Houses, which had a blacks-only policy.
Lawsuits were filed, including one by three African-American WWII veterans. Moses dismissed any and all complaints, in particular any objections to Met Life’s discriminatory policies, claiming that such lawsuits were the handiwo
rk of citizens who were “obviously looking for a political issue and not for the results in the form of actual slum clearance.” In 1947 the New York State Supreme Court sided with Met Life; the insurance company, as the de facto landlord of the complex, could discriminate if they wished since, as the judge declared, “housing accommodation is not a recognized civil right.”
Moses was pleased with the decision. As early as 1943, he had added legislation to the city’s 1942 Redevelopment Companies Act to make sure private companies, such as Met Life, could do as they pleased when it came to urban renewal. Moses also personally lobbied Ecker not to cave in to Mayor La Guardia, who pleaded with the Met Life chairman to soften his discriminatory stand. To do so, Moses believed, would cede decision-making control to the public and its elected officials, which in turn would curb his own power as the head of the Slum Clearance Commission. And that could not be allowed. When it came to racial issues, Moses was hardly on the side of the angels. While he was a public servant, the public could not be allowed to interfere with his work. He attacked his critics as nothing more than “demagogues . . . who want to make a political, racial, religious, or sectional issue out of every progressive step which can be taken to improve local conditions.”
With the passage of the Housing Act of 1949, America embarked on a new urban policy intended to restore the nation’s neglected cities, which would dramatically increase Moses’ power again. The laws introduced a controversial program known as Title I, a regulation that enabled the government to claim private property—citing eminent domain—and develop the land in partnership with private companies for the benefit of the public good.
Tomorrow-Land Page 3