Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  A leading force behind the legislation was Ohio’s powerful senator Robert A. Taft, the embodiment of the Republican Party’s conservative wing, who was both a Moses ally and a fellow Yalie. Moses kept a close tab on the housing law as it worked its way through Congress. When it finally passed, he made sure he had multiple projects that were “shovel-ready.” Moses would ultimately claim $65.8 million in Title I funding for New York—more than any other American city (his closest competitor was Chicago, which received $30.8 million in federal largesse). In the decades after WWII, urban renewal would become a much-reviled phrase—Mumford considered the term “a filthy word”—and in the minds of many, Moses would come to personify the expression.

  Of all Moses’ critics, his most vocal—and eloquent—was Mumford, who opposed nearly every public works project that the Master Builder embarked on. For nearly as long as Moses was a titanic source of power in New York, Mumford used his position at The New Yorker to combat Moses’ vision of urban America. A true Renaissance man, Mumford’s interests were even more catholic than Moses’; his nearly two-dozen books touched upon history, philosophy, architecture, science, art, and literature.

  Born in Queens but raised in Manhattan, Mumford celebrated urban architecture that lived in harmony with nature, practicing what he preached. In 1922 he moved his family to Sunnyside Gardens, Queens—the first planned “garden city” community in the United States—where he lived until 1933. Although at first he championed Moses’ work, particularly his scenic parkways and Jones Beach (a “masterpiece,” he called it), by the advent of the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair, the pair were at odds. Mumford was not in the least impressed by “the World of Tomorrow” or the Fair’s other attractions. “[The Fair] has no architectural character whatever,” Mumford wrote. As for GM’s much-celebrated Futurama exhibit, he felt that “what the Futurama really demonstrates is that by 1960 all [rides] of more than fifty miles will be as deadly as they are now in parts of New Jersey and in the Farther West.” Eventually, The New Yorker scribe would describe Moses as “the great un-builder.”

  In 1955, shortly after Moses had begun building the Long Island Expressway, Mumford launched a spirited attack on the project—and on Moses—in the pages of The New Yorker. Moses’ New York, Mumford thought, had “become steadily more frustrating and unsatisfactory to raise children in, and more difficult to escape from for a holiday in the country.” By now, both men were diametrically opposed in their core beliefs. While Moses famously claimed that “cities are created by and for traffic,” Mumford firmly believed and repeatedly stated that highways do not mitigate traffic; they create it. “A city exists, not for the constant passage of motorcars, but for the care and culture of men,” said Mumford, who in 1961 published his award-winning book, The City in History.

  Not that Moses cared. He lumped Mumford in with the academic critics “who build nothing.” In the meantime, Moses continued to accumulate positions—and power—like trophies; La Guardia’s successor, Mayor William O’Dwyer, added Construction Coordinator and Chairman of the Emergency Committee on Housing to his growing portfolio. By the 1950s it was impossible to build anything in New York without Moses’ consent. If he opposed a project—as he did when Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley wanted to build a new ballpark in Brooklyn—it never happened; if he wanted a project realized—a baseball stadium in his favored Flushing Meadow Park in Queens—it was built.

  But for all his power and influence, Title I almost proved Moses’ undoing. Each time he embarked on the construction of new housing, streets and neighborhoods had to be condemned, and the unfortunate souls who called those neighborhoods home had their lives upended. Over the course of his Title I reign, Moses uprooted tens of thousands of New Yorkers, old and young alike, replacing neighborhoods with concrete-slab towers. “There is nothing wrong with these buildings,” Mumford wrote after taking a tour of a few newly created housing projects, “except that, humanly speaking, they stink.”

  In 1959 a scandal revealed that notorious mob boss Frank Costello, button man Vinny “the Chin” Gigante, and other assorted mafiosi were involved in one of Moses’ Title I public housing programs. While Moses didn’t know of the mob connection, the incident stained his reputation and, most infuriating, allowed his media critics an opportunity to publicly tar and feather him. Costello Pal Got Title 1 Deal, roared the New York Post; Banker Had Warning on Costello Pal, clamored the New York World-Telegram.

  Moses was incensed. Mayor Wagner and Governor Rockefeller were under pressure to do something with the aging Master Builder, to strip him of some of his titles at least, which wouldn’t be easy, as Wagner could testify. In 1954, right after taking the oath of office, Wagner swore in Moses as City Parks Commissioner and City Construction Coordinator. When he was done, Moses stood at attention waiting for Wagner to swear him in as Chairman of the City Planning Commission.

  After all the other administration appointees took their oaths, the mayor still hadn’t done so. Moses followed Wagner into his private office. What the Master Builder didn’t know was that Wagner’s aides had been pressuring the mayor not to allow Moses to head the Planning Commission. Holding all three positions would give Moses the power to propose and green-light public works projects with little to no oversight—far too much power in one man’s hands.

  Behind closed doors, Moses informed Wagner that if he wasn’t reappointed the head of the Planning Commission, he would resign his other posts, immediately. Wagner froze. He said it was just a clerical oversight; give it a few days, he promised, and the situation would all be sorted out. Moses walked out, grabbed a blank application form from a nearby office, filled it out, put it on the mayor’s desk, and stood there until Wagner signed it. Recalling the incident years later, Wagner said he initially hesitated just to let Moses know that he couldn’t control him, the way Moses had dominated other mayors. “[Moses] had done some remarkable things for the city and state of New York,” Wagner said. “There was no question that he knew that field well, and that he was going to be retained.”

  Throughout his twelve years as New York City’s mayor, Moses would always be a thorny issue for Wagner, who could never come down hard on him, the way La Guardia would. Wagner grew up around the Master Builder—Moses was a good friend of his father, Senator Robert F. Wagner Sr.—and both Moses and his father would regale him with stories of Governor Al Smith, a beloved figure that all three held in the highest regard. While Wagner wasn’t blind to Moses’ faults, the elder Master Builder consistently got preferential treatment. “[He] was always a very controversial figure,” recalled Wagner. “He was rather arrogant, and he’d irritate you.”

  Now six years later, in 1960, Moses wanted out. The Parks Commissioner had been following the news of the 1964–65 World’s Fair closely. He had, after all, testified down in Washington, DC, earlier in the year on behalf of the exhibition. And the Fair’s top acting executive, Thomas J. Deegan, was a Moses loyalist. There was little question that Moses desired the job and that he would move heaven and earth to create a Fair worth remembering; he had even met with members of the Executive Committee, urging them not to cave into the BIE’s demands, to keep their autonomy, thus enabling them to control their own destiny. The 1939–40 New York World’s Fair was remembered as a wondrous event in the lives of millions, but it was a financial failure. That wasn’t Moses’ fault; he didn’t have complete control over the earlier Fair. The whole experience proved to be a valuable lesson, one he never forgot.

  Nine months after the Title I mafia scandal first erupted, Moses resigned from several key positions, including his post on the mayor’s Slum Clearance Committee and as Parks Commissioner to become the president of the World’s Fair Corporation. Though Moses was “a great man and a good friend,” Wagner said years later, “this wasn’t one of his great monuments, this Slum Clearance Committee operation.” Fate had given Moses his second chance at re-creating the Flushing Meadow. He wasn’t about
to waste it.

  4.

  I hold that if your natural weapon is the broadaxe, you should not affect the rapier.

  —Robert Moses

  In retrospect, it must have seemed like a fait accompli that Moses—the man who built New York into a modern metropolis—would spearhead the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair. Not only did he have the credentials and the reputation, he had the backing of New York’s ruling class.

  Although Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. had empowered Robert Kopple to lay the groundwork for the Fair, the sullen-faced mayor had a habit of caving in to Moses. Governor Rockefeller had a much rockier relationship with the Master Builder, but must have seen the benefits that a great New York World’s Fair would have for his national reputation, an important consideration since he was positioning himself for a presidential run. If the Fair, as Rockefeller declared, would have “lasting benefits as a magnificent showcase,” then who better to make that happen than Moses? Whatever his faults—and few members of the Empire State’s ruling elite were blind to the political and personal baggage Moses would bring to the Fair—he had an undeniable and proven track record.

  With Moses running the World’s Fair Corporation, there would be no question who was in charge. And there was no doubt that he would do his utmost to attract the seventy million Fairgoers from the four corners of the globe, as planners promised. To reach this goal, the Fair would require a daily average of 220,000 visitors over its two six-month seasons in consecutive years; this would yield nearly $100 million in estimated profits—plus millions of dollars in ancillary income to the city coffers from the tourists who would flock to see the spectacle. And with some of those profits, Moses could fund his nearly forty-year-old dream of transforming Flushing Meadow into New York’s premier green space, the centerpiece of a string of parks he envisioned extending across Queens.

  Despite Kopple’s complaints about the Master Builder, he was voted down by the Moses loyalists in the room: William E. Robinson, Coca-Cola’s chairman of the board; banker David Rockefeller (and the governor’s younger brother); department store magnate Bernard Gimbel; and, of course, Thomas J. Deegan, who had called Moses about the job before the meeting even began. Moses happily accepted the $100,000-a-year position as president of the World’s Fair Corporation. However, before beginning his new job in May 1960, he had one condition: Kopple must resign immediately. He explained to Deegan that he could not accept the position if Kopple was his executive vice president. “Having looked up his record, I find nothing in it that justifies his appointment,” Moses declared. For his services heretofore, Moses suggested Kopple be paid accordingly and dismissed.

  The pair had a history. In 1958, just a few months before his World’s Fair epiphany, Kopple had led a crusade of civic groups against one of Moses’ pet projects: the Mid-Manhattan Expressway. The $88 million six-lane elevated expressway would have razed Manhattan’s 30th Street—from east to west—creating a link from the East Side’s Queens Midtown Tunnel to the West Side’s Lincoln Tunnel uniting the roadways of Long Island with the highways of New Jersey. The Mid-Manhattan Expressway, the Master Builder promised, would solve “the worst problem of traffic strangulation in history.” It was also a missing link in the Master Builder’s puzzle of arterial expressways and key to his vision of urban life.

  Kopple disagreed. As the executive vice president of the Midtown Realty Owners Association, he said the expressway would be “a sword cutting through the city’s heart,” destroying two vital Manhattan neighborhoods in the process: the West Side’s garment district, a bustling area of small businesses, and the East Side’s Murray Hill, an area teeming with historic brownstones and tenement buildings full of working-class families. “Thousands of residents now gainfully employed will be thrown out of work,” Kopple told the New York Times. “In addition, $40 million in real estate will be taken off the tax rolls—a revenue loss to the city of more than $2 million a year.” He also ridiculed Moses’ assertion that the expressway would reduce traffic. “Every traffic expert knows that [the expressway] will create bottlenecks in mid-Manhattan that will make today’s problems look like paradise,” he said.

  Although the Mid-Manhattan Expressway wouldn’t be stricken completely from New York City’s Master Plan for another thirteen years, Kopple’s opposition in 1958 dealt it a fatal blow. It was a huge defeat for Moses—a sin he would not forgive. When asked by reporters why he insisted on Kopple’s dismissal, Moses was blunt. “These fellows that started [the Fair] had to get out, so I could have a free hand,” he said. “They were not the kind of people I would hire. They had to go, and they were paid.”

  Moses and Kopple also had a mutual friend, whom they both held in particularly high regard: Charles Poletti, the longtime New York political insider, who briefly served as the Empire State’s governor for twenty-nine days when Governor Herbert H. Lehman vacated the position early to head up the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration—a massive international effort to aid civilians in war-scarred Europe—in 1942. A Harvard man and world traveler who spoke multiple languages, Poletti had also been the US Army’s reigning governor of Sicily during WWII, after the island was liberated by General George S. Patton’s Seventh Army. Tapped by the Master Builder to run the Fair’s International Division, even Poletti couldn’t persuade Moses to keep Kopple. “I tried to dissuade him from it,” Poletti admitted years later. But there was nothing doing. Moses wouldn’t budge.

  And just like that, Kopple, who had first dreamed of a second New York World’s Fair, an exhibition to foster “Peace Through Understanding,” was summarily dismissed by Deegan—the man whom he had hired and who all along had been a Moses loyalist. The man who had started the Fair for the most altruistic of reasons—“bringing the nations of the world together”—was reimbursed $35,000 for the expenses he had accrued and given free tickets for his family for the life of the Fair.

  Years later, as the Fair he originally conceived of was about to open, Kopple insisted it was his own outspoken nature that irritated Moses. “He simply can’t tolerate independent strength in anything he runs,” Kopple told a reporter. Even then, Kopple couldn’t fathom that his 1958 victory over the Mid-Manhattan Expressway had played any part in the behind-the-scenes drama of the World’s Fair. “I find it hard to believe that he forced me out because I fought him on the expressway,” he said.

  Clearly, the man didn’t understand Moses.

  5.

  We . . . are not subject to any rulings.

  —Robert Moses

  Robert Moses detested the executives of the Bureau of International Exhibitions. After flying to Paris in 1960, he arrived at the organization’s modest office space—“a dingy attic,” he deemed it—and quickly clashed with the European bureaucrats. He spoke to the members of the agency in his usual imperial manner, as if they were his personal underlings. “Moses hated the idea that he now had to go over to Paris, ‘hat in hand,’ and beg for approval of his fair,” recalled Bruce Nicholson, an executive in the Fair’s International Affairs and Exhibits division. It wasn’t personal: Moses resented having to ask for permission from anyone for anything.

  Since its formation in 1928, the BIE had governed international exhibitions; without the bureau’s approval, a World’s Fair was not—technically speaking—a World’s Fair. After the success of London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, fairs were all the rage. In the nineteenth century, cities on both side of the Atlantic wanted to host exhibitions to attract business, display their industrial might, and tout their cultural achievements. Fairs were economic boosts that could reenergize a city or announce its arrival on the world stage. Just two years after the London Exhibition, New York held its first World’s Fair: the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1853, which featured its version of the famed Crystal Palace, on the current site of Manhattan’s Bryant Park. (Imitative as it might have been, the metal and glass structure, shaped like a Greek cross, was
beloved by New Yorkers, including Walt Whitman, who wrote about it in his masterpiece Leaves of Grass; it burned down in 1858.) The BIE took its job of controlling the selection of Fair cities and regulating exhibitions very seriously.

  Despite the fact that the 1964–65 World’s Fair violated a healthy list of BIE bylaws, history was on Moses’ side: Unlike European exhibitions, most American World’s Fairs weren’t government-sponsored; the New York Fair was officially being run by a nonprofit agency with the blessing of the US government, which would have to foot the bill for its own federal pavilion. Moses was adamant that the New York Fair run for two consecutive years and exhibitors pay for the lots they rented. How else could he generate enough profits to transform the Flushing Meadow into “the finest park in the city”?

  A far more significant problem for Moses and his colleagues was the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair; no country was allowed to hold a sanctioned fair twice in the same decade. The organizers of that exhibition were seeking the BIE’s blessing and were likely to get it, since they were following the organization’s bylaws as best they could. They even rented an office in Paris to work more closely with the Europeans. But one thing that neither Moses nor his Seattle counterparts had any control over was the fact that the United States wasn’t a member of the BIE, having never ratified the organization’s 1928 treaty; to do so would require an act of both the president and Congress, a process that could take years—“If it could be done at all,” noted Moses.

  But getting it done had been Robert Kopple’s intention. Before Moses insisted that he resign, Kopple had been working with New York’s Republican senator Kenneth Keating to introduce legislation asking the government to consider signing the BIE treaty. The Master Builder was dead-set against that approach. For one, it would give Congress a voice in the Fair’s business (never a good thing, as far as Moses was concerned), and it could potentially transform the Fair into a hotly debated political issue, maybe even poison the public against it. Lastly, an international treaty would have provided the Fair’s congressional foes, such as Senator Fulbright, the powerful chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, plenty of ammunition. As soon as Moses took control of the Fair, he had the legislation squashed.