I have always loved studying history. I love the stories of great men and women, of how we've become who we are. I also believe that to understand where we are today, you must understand where we've been. We've seen many stories lately about China building high speed rail, a solar energy proposal from Bernie Sanders, and nuclear energy policies expanded by President Obama. It's easy enough to say we are falling behind the rest of the world, that we are not doing enough to move forward. But the explanation of why we are in this position runs far deeper.
Robert Moses was the "master builder" of the 20th century. He changed shorelines; built bridges, tunnels and roadways; and transformed neighborhoods forever. He favored highways over public transit, and as a result he shaped the modern suburban culture we live with today. More importantly, his success influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners who spread his philosophies across America. His career can best be summed up by a single quote: "Cities are for traffic".
Moses' influence was aided by the Great Depression. His shovel ready projects were seen as vital to the recovery of our nation's economy. After earning a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, Moses became attracted to New York City reform politics. He developed several plans to rid New York of its patronage hiring practices, including being the main author of a proposal to reorganize the NY state government. None were successful, but Moses, caught the notice of Belle Moskowitz, a friend and trusted advisor to Al Smith.
Moses rose to power with Smith, and the duo set in motion a sweeping consolidation of the New York State government. This centralization allowed Smith to run a government with great autonomy, and was later used as a model for FDR's New Deal government. Moses also received numerous commissions that he carried out successfully, such as the development of Jones Beach State Park. At a time when New Yorkers were used to the corruption of Tammany Hall, Moses was a breath of fresh air, seen by some as a "savior" of government. Moses was one of the few local officals in the nation who had construction projects planned and prepared. For that reason, New York City could count on Moses to deliver to it WPA, CCC, and other New Deal funding.
At one point in time, a full one quarter of federal construction dollars were being spent in New York. Moses had as many as 80K people working under him. While he built many playgrounds across the city, almost none of them were located in Harlem. Similarly, the main aesthetic achievements of Riverside Drive and associated amenities were located south of 125th street, and a pattern of barriers to access for non-white citizens, such as busy highways, appeared repeatedly in his public projects. Close associates of Moses claimed that they could keep African Americans from using pools in white neighborhoods by making the water too cold. He actively fought the use of public transit, something that would have allowed those who did not own cars to enjoy the elaborate recreation facilities he built. After much litigation by private landowners, his highway projects on Long Island followed a circuitous path so as not to cross the properties of wealthy landowners such as J. P. Morgan, Jr., while those same highways demolished numerous working class neighborhoods throughout New York City. To be fair to Moses, he and Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, were responsible for the construction of ten gigantic pools under the WPA Program. Combined, they could accommodate 66,000 swimmers. One such a pool is McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn, now dry and used only for special cultural events.
Moses persuaded Governor Smith and the government of New York City to allow him to hold state and the city governments jobs simultaneously. At one point, he had 12 separate titles, maintained 4 palatial offices across the city and Long Island, and held control of all federal appropriations to New York City. For the city, he was Parks Commissioner, and for the state, he was President of the Long Island State Park Commission and Secretary of State of New York (1927–1928), as well as Chairman of the New York State Power Commission, responsible for building hydro-electric dams in the Niagara/St. Lawrence region. Moses had power over the construction of all public housing projects, but the one position above all others that gave him the lionshare of his political power was his chairmanship of the Triborough Bridge Authority.
The Triborough Bridge (since re-named the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge), connects the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens. The legal structure of this particular public authority made it impervious to influence from mayors and governors, due to the language in the bond contracts and multi-year appointments of the Commissioners. While New York City and New York State were strapped for money, the bridge's toll revenues amounted to tens of millions of dollars a year. The agency was therefore capable of financing the borrowing of hundreds of millions of dollars, making Moses the only person in New York capable of funding large public construction projects. Toll revenues rose quickly as traffic on the bridges exceeded all projections. Rather than pay off the bonds, Moses sought other toll projects to build, a cycle that fed on itself.
In the late 1930s a municipal controversy raged over whether an additional vehicular link between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan should be a bridge or a tunnel. Bridges can be wider and cheaper but tall ones use more ramp space at landfall than tunnels. A "Brooklyn Battery Bridge" would have destroyed Battery Park and physically encroached on the financial district. The bridge was opposed by the Regional Plan Association, historical preservationists, Wall Street financial interests and property owners, various high society people, construction unions (since a tunnel would give them more work), the Manhattan borough president, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and governor Herbert H. Lehman.
Moses, however, favored a bridge. It could carry more automobile traffic than a tunnel and would also serve as a visible monument. More traffic meant more tolls, more tolls meant more money, and more money meant more power for public improvements. LaGuardia and Lehman had no money to spend, and the federal government, by this point, felt it had given New York enough. Moses, because of his control of Triborough, had money to spend, and he decided his money could only be spent on a bridge. He also clashed with chief engineer of the project, Ole Singstad, who also preferred a tunnel in place of a bridge.
Only a lack of Federal approval thwarted the bridge scheme. FDR ordered the War Department to assert that a bridge in that location, if bombed, would block the East River access to the Brooklyn Navy Yard upstream. While it was a dubious claim for a river already crossed by bridges, it nevertheless stopped Moses. In retaliation for being prevented from building his bridge, Moses dismantled the New York Aquarium that had been in Castle Clinton and moved it to Coney Island in Brooklyn. He also attempted to raze Castle Clinton itself, on a variety of pretenses, and the historic fort's survival was assured only after ownership was transferred to the federal government.
Ultimately, Moses was forced to settle for a tunnel connecting Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan, now called the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. A 1941 publication from the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority claimed that the government had forced them to build a tunnel at "twice the cost, twice the operating fees, twice the difficulty to engineer, and half the traffic," though actual engineering studies did not support this conclusion.
Moses' power increased after World War II, when a series of politically weak mayors consented to almost all of his proposals. Named New York City "construction coordinator" in 1946, Moses also became the official representative of New York City in Washington, D.C. Moses was also given powers over public housing that had eluded him under LaGuardia. His power grew even more when Vincent R. Impellitteri became mayor. Impellitteri was more than content to allow Moses to exercise control over infrastructure projects from behind the scenes. One of Moses' first steps after Impellitteri took office was killing the development of a city-wide Comprehensive Zoning Plan, underway since 1938, that would have restrained his nearly uninhibited power to build within the city. He followed this by removing the existing Zoning Commissioner from power. Moses could now remake New York for the automobile. By 1959, Moses had built 28,000 apartment units on hundreds of acres. Ironically, in clearing the land for high-rises in accordance with the tower in a park scheme, he sometimes destroyed almost as many housing units as he built. Moses was the mover behind Lincoln Center, and contributed to the United Nations headquarters being placed in New York rather than Philadelphia.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, Robert Moses was responsible for the construction of the Throgs Neck, the Bronx-Whitestone, the Henry Hudson, and the Verrazano Narrows bridges. His other projects included the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Belt Parkway, the Laurelton Parkway, and many more. Notice the importance now given to the automobile. How would a few new public transit line in this time changed the course of neighborhood development? We'll never know.
Moses' view of the automobile was shaped by the 1920s, when the car was thought of as entertainment and not a utilitarian lifestyle. Moses' highways in the first half of the 20th century were parkways, curving, landscaped "ribbon parks," intended to be pleasures to drive in and "lungs for the city". While appearing utopian on its face, critics contend Moses' vision of towers, cities and parks linked by cars and highways in practice led to the expansion of wholesale ghettos, decay, middle-class urban flight, and blight.
Sports fans should also know Moses. He is viewed as the man directly responsible for the move of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles. Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley wanted to build a new stadium to replace the outdated Ebbets Field. O'Malley determined the best site for the stadium was on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn at the end of the Long Island Rail Road. O'Malley pleaded with Moses to help him secure the property in a cost effective manner, but Moses wanted to use the land to build a parking garage. Moses envisioned New York's newest stadium in Flushing Meadows on the former (and as it turned out, future) site of the World's Fair in Queens. O'Malley was vehement in his opposition, but Moses would not be persuaded. After the Dodgers left for Los Angeles, and subsequently, the New York Giants to San Francisco, Moses was able to build Shea Stadium in Queens on the site he planned for stadium development. Construction began in October 1961 and the stadium opened in April 1964 to house the National League's New York Mets. As if Moses hadn't done enough, he gave America Shea Stadium and the Mets!
Moses's reputation began to wane in the 1960s as public debate on urban planning began to focus on the virtues of intimate neighborhoods and smallness of scale. Around this time, Moses also started picking political battles he couldn't win. His campaign against the free Shakespeare in the Park received much negative publicity, and his effort to destroy a shaded playground in Central Park to make way for a parking lot for the expensive Tavern-on-the-Green restaurant made him many enemies among the middle-class voters of the Upper West Side.
The opposition reached a crescendo over the demolition of Penn Station, which many attributed to the "development scheme" mentality cultivated by Moses. The casual destruction of one of New York's greatest architectural landmarks helped prompt many city residents to turn against Moses' plans to build a Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have gone through Greenwich Village and what is now SoHo. This plan and the Mid-Manhattan Expressway both failed politically. One of his most vocal critics during this time was the urban activist Jane Jacobs, whose book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" was instrumental in turning opinion against Moses's plans; the city government rejected the expressway in 1964.
Moses' power was further sapped by his association with the 1964 New York World's Fair. His assumption of aggregate attendance of 70 million people for this event proved wildly optimistic, and generous contracts for Fair executives and contractors did not help the economics. His repeated and forceful public denials of the Fair's considerable financial difficulties in the face of the evidence eventually provoked press and governmental investigations, which eventually found accounting deceptions. Moses refused to accept the requirements of the Bureau of International Expositions (BIE), including a restriction against charging ground rents to exhibitors. The BIE in turn instructed its member nations not to participate. The United States had already staged the sanctioned Century 21 Exposition in Seattle in 1962. According to the rules of the organization, no one nation could host more than one fair in a decade. The major European democracies, as well as Canada, Australia and the Soviet Union were all BIE members and they declined to participate, instead reserving their efforts for the Seattle fair to be used at Expo 67 in Montreal.
After the World's Fair, New York City mayor John Lindsay, along with Governor Nelson Rockefeller, sought to use toll revenues from the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority's (TBTA) bridges and tunnels to cover deficits in the city's then financially ailing agencies, including the subway system. Moses opposed this idea and fought to prevent it. Lindsay removed Moses from his post as the city's chief advocate for federal highway money in Washington.
Moses could not so easily fend off Rockefeller, the only politician in the state who had a power base independent of him. The legislature's vote to fold the TBTA into the newly-created Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) could technically have led to a lawsuit by the TBTA bondholders, since the bond contracts were written into state law and under Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution states may not impair existing contractual obligations, and the bondholders had right of approval over such actions. However, the largest holder of TBTA bonds, and thus agent for all the others, was the Chase Manhattan Bank, headed then by David Rockefeller, the governor's brother. No suit was filed or even discussed. Moses could have directed TBTA to go to court against the action, but having been promised certain roles in the merged authority, Moses in turn declined to challenge the merger. On March 1, 1968, the TBTA was folded into the MTA and Moses gave up his post as chairman of the TBTA. He eventually became a consultant to the MTA, but its new chairman and the governor froze him out. The promised roles did not materialize, and for all practical purposes Moses was out of power.
While the bridges built by Moses are exemplary from an engineering perspective, the sociological impact of his work cannot be ignored. Robert A. Caro, author of the pulitzer prize winning biography "The Power Broker", was fortunate enough to be able to interview Moses on seven occasions. He was also able to conduct 19 interviews with Sidney M. Shapiro, Moses's General Manager and chief engineer of the Long Island State Park Commission, who worked for Moses for forty years and was the man who carried out Moses's instructions to build the bridges on his parkways too low for buses. In his notes on sources Mr. Caro writes: "It is thanks to Shapiro, more than any other source that I came to understand Moses' attitude towards Negroes...."
For example, the construction of low overpasses on parkways were made purposely too low for buses to clear, and the veto against extending the Long Island Rail Road to Jones Beach, was made to prevent the poor and racial minorities (largely dependent on public transit) from accessing the beach, while providing easy car access for wealthier white groups. Caro also notes the provision of numerous park amenities on the West Side highway below 125th Street (the main street of Harlem) versus the provision of few (if any) amenities north of 125th Street. Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters (both of which sit in the northern part of Manhattan Island) were built in Inwood, then an Irish Catholic neighborhood, rather than Harlem which is predominantly black.
Aside from the sociological view of Moses' work, there are the questions of urban destruction and suburban mobilization. Did Moses's work degrade the quality of life in the inner city? Does increased accessibility from the suburbs improve the quality of life by enabling commuting? These are questions we wrestle with to this day.
I know this has been a long diary, with some dry information and writing. But it is important to understand this history if we are to understand where we are now. If Moses had built faster rail lines in New York, if he had spent more money on any kind of public transit, would the rest of America have followed suit? If he had spent more money improving the neighborhoods filled with minority populations, would this have spurred more equality throughout the nation?
I would contend that much of the lack of technological advancement in this country with regards to high speed rail comes not from a lack of desire, but from a car oriented culture that was created by men like Robert Moses. We are frustrated by this inaction, but our nation's obsession with cars is not something easy to overcome. This obsession has helped increase our dependence on oil, which has increased the damaging affects of climate change. This is not to say Moses is solely responsible for these problems we face. In fact, Moses got things built at a time when our nation needed the jobs necessary to build such marvels. Our nation could use a Robert Moses for public transit and green energy today. This diary is meant more to shed light on an incredibly influential man in who few Americans remember. Whether his influence was for better or worse is still up for debate.