Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  To the Master Builder, anything that distracted from this goal was an attack against the “Olympics of Progress.” He wouldn’t tolerate even the slightest criticism. By the fall of 1963, this meant he was in a state of open war with the media, whether print, television, or radio, and in particular the half-dozen metropolitan daily newspapers. Moses never passed up an opportunity to lodge his complaints in “URGENT” hand-delivered memos to the top brass of New York’s media, many of whom where long-standing associates, if not old friends. He constantly worked his personal connections to influence the news in his—and the Fair’s—favor, and he made a habit of disparaging the work of any reporter whose prose was not to his liking.

  On September 9, 1963, the New York Times ran a friendly front-page article—World’s Fair Gains Impetus Despite Snubs—that jumped inside to a full, eight-column story. Of the article’s thousands of words, Moses took umbrage with a few sentences that implied he doled out contracts to favored firms. He immediately fired off a memo to Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, the paper’s newly installed president and publisher. “Why this stuff about employing pets who have worked for me before and profited through me in the past?” he demanded. “The effect is to suggest to the average reader that there is considerable suspicion of patronage and private profit.” Moses denied any and all charges, insisting that nearly three-quarters of the Fair’s work was being done by subcontractors and almost all other contracts were related to the vast highway or park construction he was overlooking, leaving “perhaps 2 or 3%” to his discretion.

  The following month, when he found a WCBS radio editorial “totally inaccurate,” he immediately informed William S. Paley, CBS’s chairman of the board. He requested an investigation and lectured Paley, who was a member of the Fair’s Executive Committee, about his responsibility to the Flushing exhibition. “You are a Director of the Fair,” Moses chided him, “and I assume continue to be interested in its progress and success.”

  For all of his thin-skinned paranoia toward the press, Moses wasn’t completely off base. While on friendly terms with those at the top of the New York media world, his standing with the rank-and-file reporters who covered his various projects—almost all of them newsworthy—could hardly have been worse. “The mood of the media seemed against him, tired of him, not only the Times but the other newspapers as well, plus radio and television,” wrote author Gay Talese, who covered the World’s Fair as a young Timesman. “It was not that they reported the news incompletely or anything inaccurately. If anything they were too complete, too accurate, they overlooked nothing. . . . They had fun with Moses, this cranky old man trying to ballyhoo the Fair, and they picked it apart before its flimsy construction was complete, and they continued to downgrade it through the next two years.”

  Even if the reporters on the city’s metropolitan dailies largely detested Moses, the Master Builder still held sway with top editors and publishers of many newspapers, particularly the New York Times, where he was close with the Sulzbergers, who owned the paper. “Moses was a power and the Times is responsive to power and powerful people,” said Talese. The Times’ only potential rival, the New York Herald Tribune, however, could afford to take a more strident tone with Moses, since by the early 1960s it was “a sinking ship with declining ad revenue.” What the Trib, as it was known, did have were innovative writers like Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Dick Schapp, who would go on—along with Talese—to pioneer a new form of writing dubbed the “New Journalism.”

  Still, for a beat reporter covering the World’s Fair, there was no shortage of stories to report. Several controversies threatened to overshadow the Fair’s progress throughout the autumn of 1963; each was played out in the papers, and every story was helped along by Moses’ insistence to counterattack his enemies, therefore keeping the story in the headlines for weeks or even months.

  The first scandalous story had to do with the price of tickets for New York City’s 1.4 million schoolchildren. Tickets to the World’s Fair cost $1 for children age twelve years old and younger; adults paid $2. By February 1963 the World’s Fair Corporation had sold $28 million in discounted tickets. But now some officials—like labor lawyer and City Council candidate Paul O’Dwyer (and brother of Moses’ ex-boss, the former New York mayor William O’Dwyer)—picked up the rallying cry for a reduced fee for schoolchildren, first sounded by the Board of Education. O’Dwyer was soon joined by a chorus of politicos who found it all too easy to pontificate to newspapers, which loved a good Moses controversy, especially one that portrayed the septuagenarian Master Builder as a miserly bully who wouldn’t cut children—particularly poor schoolchildren—a break to come see his “Olympics of Progress.”

  Unable to resist lashing out at his critics, or to engage in good-hearted negotiations with the enemy, Moses fell right into their trap. Deriding his critics as “assorted Santa Clauses” who didn’t have their facts or figures straight, he flatly refused any discount, claiming it would be detrimental to the Fair’s financial health. The World’s Fair, he claimed, could lose as much as $9 million if it cut prices. And he noted that it was his stated intention of using the exhibition’s profits to “leave a great legacy to the city—another Central Park for the future—wholly without cost to the public.” To create this post-Fair Flushing Meadow Park that he had dreamed of for so long would cost at least $23 million, according to Moses’ in-house figures.

  The war of words filled the pages of the daily papers. “It should be brought to the attention of Mr. Moses by the appropriate bodies,” O’Dwyer told reporters, “that the World’s Fair is not an exclusive club. Millions of dollars of our taxpayers’ money has gone into it.” Amos Basil, seeking the same City Council seat as O’Dwyer, out-quipped his opponent on the campaign stump. “Moses thinks he’s God,” Basil joked, “but fortunately he’s just Moses.”

  The brouhaha wouldn’t go away. Soon City Council passed a resolution demanding a price decrease for schoolchildren; eventually Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. joined the fray, and in a rare public instance sided with the anti-Moses forces. Moses, perhaps sensing that his hard-line stance was damaging the Fair in the eyes of New Yorkers, who after all were intrinsic to the exhibition’s success, put the matter to a vote by the Executive Committee. As he told Bernard Gimbel, a key ally and one of the committee’s eighteen members, this was no time for getting weak in the knees. “The Executive Committee will simply have to stand up and be counted,” Moses declared.

  On October 16 the committee voted and sided with their leader. Their counterproposal was to allow children age two to twelve to pay only twenty-five cents on Mondays in July and August. But their offer didn’t please the critics, who were growing in number—now the New York State legislature in Albany was considering a vote on the matter. By the end of October there were threats to revoke the Fair’s 5 percent state admissions tax exemption and a serious threat by City Council to have the Fair’s books audited (which Moses denied they had the authority to do).

  Moses kept a brave face publicly but privately sounded the alarm. He sent a telegram to top deputy Charles Poletti, who was in Jordan on one of his frequent international trips, asking him to return immediately. “There are serious threats to the integrity of the Fair,” Moses wrote. (Poletti, who had stipulated in his contract that his wife, Jane, could travel with him at the Fair’s expense, stayed put in Jordan.) By December, Moses sensed the tide of popular opinion turning against him. Wanting to avoid further damage to the World’s Fair’s image in a “rather pointless and destructive argument,” as one committee member put it, he conceded the fight: Groups of schoolchildren from the Tri-State area could purchase tickets for twenty-five cents throughout the school year.

  While Moses lost that battle, he played to his advantage another controversy that erupted. Back in 1961 the World’s Fair Corporation had sought the services of eccentric right-wing billionaire H. L. Hunt, reportedly the fourth-richest man in the world, to take over three
and a half acres of prime real estate at the Fair for a Tivoli Gardens–inspired children’s playground. The idea was a favorite of Moses, who held the Copenhagen park in the highest regard. The seventy-four-year-old Texas oil tycoon paid $1.1 million up front to seal the deal, but by October 1963 he was holding a press conference at the Waldorf Towers to announce that he was getting “evicted” from the Fair. The Dallas-based free-market fundamentalist, who during the 1950s had supported Senator Joseph McCarthy, the disgraced red-baiting demagogue, read a rambling eight-page statement, repeatedly referring to himself in the third person and announcing that he had been “pressured and taken in” by Moses, whom he referred to as “the ruler of the World’s Fair.”

  Soon after Hunt had gotten involved with the Fair, he had started to rub Moses the wrong way. For starters, he was concerned about the type of amusement rides Hunt was building; there would be absolutely no Coney Island–style entertainment at the World’s Fair—“Coney Island” being Moses’ oft-repeated catchphrase for low-end, déclassé amusement parks. He told Hunt that the Fair wouldn’t tolerate anything “gaudy” or high-priced. The Texan reportedly wanted to charge a fifty-cent entrance fee for each of his proposed eleven rides—at the exact time that the newspapers, the City Council, and Albany were pressuring Moses to reduce the entrance fees for schoolchildren.

  Hunt denied both charges, insisting to the reporters during his press conference that his rides would neither be expensive nor gaudy. In fact, he bragged that his mini amusement park would have included “a very ancient carousel said to be of 1900 vintage and something called a ‘Wild Mouse Ride.’ ” The New York Herald Tribune noted dryly, “Those last three words were not further explained.”

  The New York reporters didn’t know what to make of the rotund bow-tie-wearing billionaire who was apt to interrupt his speech with his outside-the-mainstream political views, which Moses described as “absolutely free old-fashioned, capitalistic enterprise, reminiscent of the late nineties of the last century.” Noting that the New York papers, including his least favorite of the dailies, the Herald Tribune, didn’t seem to take Hunt or his charges seriously, Moses, for once, let the matter fade into oblivion. “Old boy H. L. Hunt has gone down the drain,” he wrote a friend. “Thank God we seem to be rid of him.”

  But the most enduring controversy of autumn 1963 dated back to the earliest days of Moses’ tenure at the Fair: the amount of art—or the lack thereof, according to his critics—on display in Flushing Meadow. This controversy was rekindled when Emily Genauer, the highly regarded art critic for the Herald Tribune, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for her criticism, lashed out at Moses in August. An outspoken champion of modernism and artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Diego Rivera—precisely the kind of art that ran afoul of Moses’ more conservative tastes—Genauer had established herself in the 1930s as the art critic for the New York World-Telegram. In 1949, after a red-baiting congressman mentioned her by name, the paper’s conservative owner, Roy S. Howard, told her to stop writing about “Communists and left-wingers” like Picasso. Genauer quit on the spot, then used Howard’s phone to call an editor she knew at the Herald Tribune. By the time she hung up, she was the Trib’s new chief art critic, a position she still held in 1963 when Hugo Geller, a painter, printmaker, and activist, came to her office to discuss his attempts to create a pavilion for contemporary American artists at the 1964–65 World’s Fair.

  Geller was the chairman of the Committee of Artists’ Societies, a collective of more than a dozen groups. Their goal was to erect a forty-thousand-square-foot, $1.5 million pavilion designed by the architect August Sak and made of aluminum and rubberized plastic, which could be built in a mere ninety days, if only Moses would foot the bill. Instead, Moses was offering free rent but per Fair policy, he insisted exhibitors pay for their own pavilion.

  Geller had fought—and won—this battle before. A quarter of a century earlier, he had been part of another cooperative that successfully pressured Grover Whalen, the president of the 1939–40 World’s Fair, to create the Contemporary Art Building on the Fair’s dime. When he handed Genauer a yellowing newspaper article extolling his earlier efforts, it took her a few moments to realize that the February 5, 1938, clip she was reading was, in fact, her own. “If you want to see an art show,” Genauer had written twenty-five years earlier, “they will tell the millions who visit the Fair, you must leave this great exposition of everything important in contemporary American life and go eight miles away to the Metropolitan [Museum of Art].” Genauer recapped all of these details in her 1963 article and added, with derisive déjà vu: “Absolutely nothing has changed in twenty-five years.”

  While Genauer’s article didn’t provoke Moses—though it surely irritated him—Geller’s group did make some headway with August Heckscher, a former cultural advisor to President Kennedy. Heckscher requested a meeting with Moses at Flushing Meadow to discuss the matter. “Back of these Washington people and their associates are a number of critics and writers who have been anything but friendly to the Fair,” Moses complained to a top staffer. “They picture us as barbarians not interested in the finer things.”

  Moses set up the meeting and made sure that there was “a record of the proceedings” and a final report; he wanted to be able to use his critics’ words against them, if necessary. But like so many other of the various proposals from artist coalitions or wealthy patrons that had been discussed over the previous three years, nothing came of it. Moses had insisted all along that there was room for such a display of contemporary American art—albeit, a smaller one—in the Federal Pavilion. Not only was this pavilion the Fair’s largest, but Heckscher was also a key player in developing its exhibits. “He has had opportunities right along to take care of the art and cultural exhibits there,” Moses sniffed.

  On November 17 the Committee of Artists’ Societies fired another salvo. At a press conference held at the Whitney Museum, Heckscher, playwright Arthur Miller, conductor Leonard Bernstein, and others joined Geller and Genauer in denouncing Moses and the Fair. “It’s a disgrace that there is no pavilion for contemporary American art at the World’s Fair,” lamented Miller. “It shows the world that this is a nation of blind men without culture, that we just live for money, and that we are gross—without any spirit.”

  Genauer charged that Moses had wasted an opportunity for the World’s Fair to host the immense modern art collection of multimillionaire investor Joseph H. Hirshhorn—a Latvian-born, Brooklyn-raised immigrant who owned some of the great masterworks of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. According to Genauer, Moses insisted on breaking up the collection and distributing Hirshhorn’s abstract sculptures, including pieces by Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Serrano, and Henry Moore, throughout the Fairgrounds in an ill-conceived sculpture garden. “This shows what Moses knows about art,” she huffed.

  Heckscher, who was unable to secure any space for contemporary art in the Federal Pavilion, where real estate was as politically complicated as the US Senate, put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the man behind the Fair. “Mr. Moses,” he said, “was not interested in art.” If Moses, the president of the Fair, wouldn’t help them, then Geller insisted they would go over his head and petition President Kennedy, a vocal supporter of the World’s Fair.

  The next day, the story hit the papers. Not only did the New York Times give it prominent coverage, but it also ran another piece about art at the Fair, which only added fuel to the critics’ fire. According to the Times, there was a brand-new oil painting hanging prominently on a wall at the Top of the Fair restaurant in the Port Authority Building depicting various images of New York, including a number of Moses’ works, such as the Verrazano Bridge (which would open in 1964), the Robert Moses Dam, and Jones Beach, among others. It was seemingly an artistic tribute to the Master Builder, who regularly entertained VIPs there. Hanging in the same restaurant was a large-scale reproduction of a cartoon by Rube Goldberg, a fu
nny papers regular whose name would become synonymous with homemade contraptions.

  Neither was an example of high art or what his critics had in mind, but Moses insisted the cartoon—titled “How to Cure World’s Fair Tired Feet”—stay put, much to the dismay of the restaurant’s staff. “It is vulgar,” the eatery’s art director complained. “It is the most ugly comic caricature I have ever seen. . . . [Moses] is a genius in some ways but he knows absolutely nothing about art.”

  Moses’ counterattack appeared in the papers the next day. The New York Times quoted liberally from his statement addressing both articles, which he said didn’t possess “a suspicion of the truth.” While Moses insisted he knew nothing about the mural depicting his handiwork until after it was hanging on the Top of the Fair’s wall, he wasn’t about to move the Goldberg, for which he said, “I will go down the Times’ artistic drain.” Moses attacked the accusations one at time, calling Grenauer’s version of the Hirshhorn story “fiction.” He offered to print the Fair’s entire, voluminous correspondence with Hirshhorn, which he noted couldn’t have been any more “cordial.” Said Moses, “We begged him to come into the Fair.”

  In fact, he had. For more than two years, Moses had doggedly pursued Hirshhorn and his vast collection of art, hoping to lure the aging speculator to bankroll a pavilion that would eventually become “a permanent endowed building” in the future Flushing Meadow Park. Unfortunately, Hirshhorn and his people had balked at the notion of having his collection of sculptures, as well as his contemporary paintings by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Larry Rivers, plus works by Auguste Rodin and Henri Matisse, among dozens of others, permanently housed in a park in the middle of Queens. Instead, Moses noted, “Mr. Hirshhorn talked of Fifth Avenue.” (Eventually the collection and endowment would find a home at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.)