November 2024
by
Myron Magnet
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Robert Moses biography.
Robert Moses was a titan—the Napoleon of city building—and Robert A. Caro’s classic biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year and still sells forty thousand copies annually, is almost as titanic.1 In the three-quarter-million words that crowd the book’s 1,200 pages, Caro depicts in encyclopedic detail what Moses achieved in shaping Gotham and its environs in his forty-four years in office, and he brilliantly illuminates the political legerdemain needed to accomplish that. But with half a century’s perspective, Caro’s judgments look less sure-footed. Notwithstanding the book’s subtitle, New York did not fall, however badly it stumbled in the 1970s, when The Power Broker appeared, and later developments have advanced our understanding of what makes cities thrive. As for Moses himself, while time hasn’t shrunk his giant imprint on Gotham, it has made his faults, which Caro excoriates with the zeal of an inquisitor, seem merely human.
Born in 1888 and raised in high-bourgeois comfort on East Forty-sixth Street, alongside such richer “Our Crowd” families as the Seligmans and Lehmans, Moses seemed marked for distinction early on. He excelled in the Yale class of 1909 as a varsity swimmer and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. As an Oxford grad student, he had the high honor of election to the Union presidency, and his study of the British civil service confirmed the Progressivism he had learned from his imperious mother, a settlement-house philanthropist who behaved more as an institution’s proprietor than its mere benefactor. Back in New York, he worked his research into a Columbia Ph.D. thesis, arguing that Britain’s permanent government of highly educated administrators, motivated by noblesse oblige and rising by merit, was a model America should follow. His was a Progressivism of the patrician Woodrow Wilson or paternalistic Jane Addams stamp, not the more muscular trust-busting of Theodore Roosevelt or muckraking of Lincoln Steffens that Caro prefers.
Moses began his career theorizing in a Progressive think tank, but his appointment as chief of staff to a reform commission under Governor Al Smith in 1918 bumped him firmly down to earth. Caro’s riveting account of how Smith left school at thirteen to support his widowed mother and rose to become “the state’s greatest governor” is one of the set pieces that make the book so alive. As a novice state assemblyman, Smith, who became Moses’s mentor and friend, found the proposed laws piling up on his desk incomprehensible. Studying them at night, sifting through precedents to discern the hidden motives buried within the texts, he developed a legislative mastery that, joined to his legendary debating skill, vaulted him to Assembly Speaker. A champion of “the people” as opposed to “the interests,” writes Caro, he persuaded Tammany’s boss that backing government welfare programs was a natural progression from the machine’s old-style Christmas turkey baskets and patronage jobs, a way of keeping power by doling out benefits. Thus Tammany Democrats became Progressives, an evolution Caro approves of, but one that, after decades of welfarism, demoralizing to the recipients and burdensome to the taxpayers, looks less benign than he assumes.
Smith’s key lesson to his protégé was that practical politics—compromise, horse-trading, and brute pressure—is the way to get things done. What use is the idealistic purity of the good-government dreamers—the Goo Goos, as the cigar-chomping Smith dismissed them—and their faith in rationality and efficiency in government if they can never change anything? Government is a real-world enterprise aimed at real-world results. Its tool, Smith taught, is power. And from his teaching Moses also learned, with serious future consequences, to become the most artful bill drafter in Albany, especially for the purposes of misdirection.
Not that Moses ceased to dream. Now married, with two small daughters, he rented a summer house on Long Island and, commuting by train to Manhattan, wondered what lay in the woods beside the tracks. On exploratory treks, he discovered 3,500 acres that New York City had bought long before and forgotten about, and he envisioned it as parkland, with ballfields and tennis courts. He pictured too how Jones Beach, on the Atlantic twenty-five miles from Times Square, could be made a paradise for city-dwellers, if linked by a good road.
This was, remember, the moment when the 1920s began to roar. As Henry Ford’s Model T caught on, U.S. car owners surged from seven million in 1919 to twenty-three million in 1923. Ford workers’ five-dollar daily pay and two-week vacations, thanks to their soaring productivity, epitomized a new American prosperity and leisure. The car-owning millions wanted a place to go on their days off.
This was Robert Moses’s moment, too. With his genius for seeing things whole, as if looking down from the sky—and he often surveyed the terrain from a chartered plane—he proposed a constellation of state parks and roads, a plan Smith adopted in 1923. He made Moses the head of the new Long Island State Parks Commission, with powers that Moses conjured up in two bills showing his skill at concealing vast authority in anodyne sentences. The commission would be a miniature administrative state, able to write its own rules for the parks, with its own cops and prosecutors to enforce them, and empowered to expropriate private land, a constitutionally dubious provision. Moses would have ultimate control over its budget, and he couldn’t be fired unless a public hearing proved him guilty of misconduct.
This antidemocratic arrangement is not an abandonment of his early Progressivism, as Caro scolds. Wilsonian Progressivism advocated rule by unelected experts, above the muck of democratic politics. This is what it looks like in action, making Moses untouchable and Caro understandably uncomfortable.
As Moses began to build parks and roads, experience deepened his understanding of the principles of power in ways that Caro catalogues with equal parts of fascination and repulsion. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” Moses would say. “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?” For instance, understating costs to get a project started is shrewd: “Once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up.” As a government official with limitless lawyers, you can break the law with impunity. “Honest” graft—awarding insurance contracts or legal retainers in exchange for political support—works well. “Would dreams of real significance and scope ever be realized by the methods of reformers and idealists?” he asked. “No.”
The ugly truth about government power, which Max Weber formulated more clearly than Caro does, is this: ultimately, that power rests on force, on the violence at the state’s command, so it is always an ethically dangerous tool, even though it accomplishes vital jobs. Anyone who uses “power and force as means,” Weber wrote, “contracts with diabolical powers” and flirts with evil, even if his goal is noble. If you want to remain pure and live by the Sermon on the Mount, Weber cautions, steer clear of government.
This can’t but make one queasy. But Weber’s unflinching formulation is all about the trade-offs between means and ends—and look what Moses accomplished in the 1920s alone. He built thirteen Long Island state parks, complete with lakes, bathhouses, baseball diamonds, bridle paths, and picnic tables. He constructed the beautifully landscaped parkways to Jones Beach. At the beach itself he created what one English designer called “the finest seashore playground ever given the public anywhere in the world,” conceiving every detail, from the Venetian campanile water tower and the employees’ sailor suits to the kinds of stones and bricks to face the vast bathhouses. The beach was soon drawing over three million delighted visitors a year.
Then the Great Depression hit, and hit New York City especially hard. The federal relief money that poured in gave Moses a colossal opportunity, which he seized with both hands. Before the Crash, he had been urging city officials to widen roads and build a bridge to connect to his Long Island parkways, and when Gotham’s prestigious Parks Association asked him for advice, he put state engineers and designers to work solving city problems, while he crisscrossed the boroughs in his state limousine, surveying the terrain as he had explored the Long Island woods.
The sweeping vision he presented to the Parks Association dignitaries in January 1930 amazed them. He proposed building a road system that could take Manhattan drivers across the Brooklyn Bridge, speed them south around the Brooklyn shoreline until they could either turn east onto his parkway leading further into Long Island, or north onto a new parkway heading up the eastern edge of Queens, crossing a new bridge to the Bronx, and on to Westchester and Connecticut. Other new roads would include a parkway along Manhattan’s western shore, leading north to the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey, and continuing north across a new bridge spanning the Harlem River and on to New England. Alongside the roads, ribbon parks would bloom.
So when Herbert Lehman became governor in 1933, naming Moses the state’s liaison to federal public works programs, and Fiorello LaGuardia became mayor in 1934 and made him, in addition, commissioner of all the city’s parks and parkways, plus head of the agency that would build the Triborough Bridge, he had 1,800 shovel-ready projects at hand, including these giant ones that would transform the city.
The depression gave Moses an extraordinary workforce. With half the city’s engineers and six out of seven architects idled, he had his pick of talent from a line of applicants that on the first 1934 recruitment day stretched for eight blocks. He hired tough foremen to drive the unemployed who signed up to dig and build in the parks and on the beaches for $13.44 a week, clad in overcoats too thin for the winter wind. To refurbish dilapidated Central Park, Bryant Park, Prospect Park, and scores more, they worked in three shifts around the clock, under carbide lamps at night. Moses knew that federal relief money would vanish when the depression ended and that New York City, its budget strapped by paying for the patronage that Tammany-style democracy had accumulated, had nothing left for public works. So he had to seize the day.
The results were breathtaking. He created new land, five thousand acres of it in the 1930s and ten thousand more thereafter. At Orchard Beach in the northeast Bronx, for instance, he filled in Long Island Sound to join three islands to a mainland peninsula, creating a mile-long crescent beach, covered with fine white sand barged up from the Atlantic shore. He refurbished what was broken, repainting every city park structure, reslatting the benches, reseeding the lawns, pruning and planting trees, restoring the battered statues and fixing the plumbing, and outfitting every playground with slides, jungle gyms, and an asphalt gentle on tender knees. By the decade’s end, he had added 255 new playgrounds to the 119 existing ones. He built new golf courses, tennis courts, and ten swimming pools the size of football fields. He rebuilt the decaying Central Park Zoo with an architectural whimsy that tickled children and adults alike. “It is almost as if Mr. Moses has rubbed a lamp,” wrote The New York Times, “and actually made the jini leap out to do his bidding.”
Gazing at Manhattan’s west shore from a ferryboat back in 1914, Moses had mused to the future labor secretary Frances Perkins that the waterfront, then mostly mud flats, garbage dumps, and train tracks, could be “the most beautiful thing in the world,” with a modern riverside highway, bordered by a lush park livened by bicyclists, ramblers, and tennis players, and with a marina, whose boats would dot the Hudson. Two decades later, he began to bring that vision to life with a magic that was as much financial as horticultural or engineering. Caro, with narrative magic, recounts how Moses conjured up the needed $109 million as a thrilling, cliff-hanging adventure story: how he ingeniously refinanced the New York Central’s debt and fancifully redefined railroad-grade crossings to get millions to cover the tracks; how he got millions worth of landfill just for the cost of transporting it; how he wheedled from Washington money earmarked for other purposes; how he got free land from the city and free labor from a federal relief program by running the six-lane highway through Fort Tryon and Inwood Hill Parks and rebranding that stretch of it a “park access road.”
When finished in 1937, the new highway provided almost as unforgettable an experience of Gotham as sailing in past the Statue of Liberty. You gasp at the might of the George Washington Bridge as you pass under it to turn onto the highway, when suddenly all Manhattan materializes before you, the gothic spire of Riverside Church in the middle ground and the midtown towers massed beyond like the Emerald City, with the broad Hudson gleaming down to the horizon, a vision of metropolitan magnificence that comes more sharply into focus as you glide smoothly south without a stoplight. Any visitor must know at once that he has arrived at someplace special. As for Riverside Park, after six decades of my walking in it, the city on one side, the river on the other, the crab apples and cherries blooming exuberantly each spring, it seems to me as perfect as nature.
As New Deal funds began to dry up, a power struggle between Moses and LaGuardia over new federal money prompted the mayor, who won, to see Moses as a threat to be reined in rather than merely a dependable underling. Moses, smarting from defeat, set out to supercharge the power at his command, to shake off all control by any elected official.
It took political scientists thirty years to recognize just what he did, Caro marvels in the book’s most instructive chapter. Experts went on believing that New York was governed, as the City Charter then prescribed, by its elected mayor and Board of Estimate. Yet Moses had created a new institution, more powerful than the elected government but hidden in the shadows. It was “a new, fourth branch” of government, writes Caro, “independent of the other three”—exactly the same words that Franklin D. Roosevelt had used to describe the administrative-state agencies that his New Deal had created, the apotheosis of Progressivism.
The Triborough Bridge Authority looked no different on the surface after Moses had souped it up. It was one of a handful of workaday “public authorities”—agencies that the state legislature had empowered to issue bonds and take property by eminent domain in order to build a specific public work, in this case, the Triborough Bridge, which is really four great bridges linking Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx, and which, when Moses finished it in the summer of 1936, was, says Caro, “the greatest traffic-moving machine in the history of civilization.” Up until 1937 and 1938, when Moses wrote amendments to the acts creating these agencies, each authority had the power to build a single project, to operate it with its own officials under its own rules, to collect tolls until the bonds that financed that bridge or parkway’s construction were paid off, and then to end the toll, turn the project over to the state, and go out of business. But Moses’s deviously written new amendments, which legislators “would never approve . . . if they understood them,” writes Caro, made the authorities perpetual by allowing them to roll the bonds over into new bonds instead of paying them off. Thus the authorities would never have to turn the bridges or roads over to the government and could keep on collecting the tolls, which turned out to be vastly greater than predicted, enough to pay off the bondholders in ten years rather than the projected forty.
The authorities, in other words, were awash in money, and, since their rapidly mounting surpluses enabled them to issue yet more bonds, Moses wrote into the amendments the power to use those new bonds to finance roads “connecting” to his existing bridges and parkways, plus parks adjacent to them. Since all roads in the state ultimately connect to all other roads, that meant he could build anywhere.
In one final twist of devious genius, Moses, mindful that Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution prohibits states from interfering with the obligations of contracts, wrote into his bond covenants all of the powers granted him by the legislation that created the authorities: to set the tolls, to control the revenues and rules, and not to be fired at the will of any elected official. The state legislature that had conferred these powers could now not take them back. When, a month after the governor signed the amendments, LaGuardia tried to give Moses an order, Moses told the mayor, with some asperity, to read the bond contracts. LaGuardia never gave him another order, and Moses treated him thereafter as an equal, not a boss. Moreover, the mayor, ambitious to build significant projects in a city with no capital budget, needed Moses, who alone had the funds as well as the know-how to get those projects built.
He soon called upon Moses to do that, and Moses, flexing his new muscle, went too far. The mayor wanted to get the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel built, and Moses agreed to provide Triborough’s money for it—as long as he could run the authority slated to build it. LaGuardia said yes. But then Moses did a switch. The new tunnel, he announced, would be . . . a bridge, in his eyes more beautiful than a tunnel.
The outcry, led by Gotham’s grandees, was fierce. The bridge would wreck the famed view of Lower Manhattan from the harbor, they protested. Its approach ramps would shadow the lower floors of the world’s costliest office towers. The last traces of the historic city where the founding fathers had walked when New York was the capital of the new republic—where Washington took the oath as our first president, where the New Yorkers Alexander Hamilton and John Jay conceived The Federalist with James Madison—would be wiped away. Serene Battery Park would give way to steel and asphalt. Noise and fumes would banish not only the founders’ ghosts but also the memories of Melville’s seafaring New York and of the thousands of immigrants who had sailed past Liberty Enlightening the World to enter the land of opportunity through Castle Clinton, the park’s War of 1812 fort. Moses’s reply remained: a bridge, or nothing.
As a last resort, the venerable head of the New York Bar Association wrote to his friend Franklin Roosevelt that no New Yorker wanted this bridge “except Bob Moses,” and that the New Yorker FDR, as the commander in chief, could order the War Department to kill it. The president and Moses had detested each other ever since the ambitions of the two privileged young men had first clashed when they were chiefs of different New York State parks commissions in 1924, so Roosevelt took the hint gladly. In July 1939, the secretary of war vetoed the bridge on national-security grounds. When no city official felt able to stop Moses, Caro emphasizes, it took the president of the United States to do so.
Also notable, Caro adds, is the malice with which Moses answered this check. Wielding his power as parks commissioner, he set out to punish his opponents by “destroy[ing] something they loved,” according to LaGuardia’s corporation counsel Paul Windels—the fort and the much-loved aquarium built within it. Moses shipped the fish to the more distant Bronx Zoo and stripped the roof off the old fort, but before he could raze it, the start of World War II left contractors too shorthanded to tackle the job. So Moses needlessly walled off the park until the war ended, when Congress made the fort a protected national monument.
In other words, Moses didn’t just flirt with the evil that Max Weber warned lies latent within power. He embraced it, and Caro spills oceans of ink documenting how fully his career confirms Lord Acton’s familiar dictum that power corrupts. Back in 1934, he had spitefully bulldozed the Columbia Yacht Club in Riverside Park “because they were rude to me,” even though the airy Victorian building would have adorned the new park handsomely. He routinely hired private detectives to compile dossiers of dirt on people, whom he blackmailed or slimed if they opposed him.
Even though Caro knows that Moses’s post-war highway- and bridge-building program is “one of the greatest feats of urban construction in recorded history,” he faults him for running roads through the hearts of the vibrant working-class Scandinavian neighborhood of Sunset Park in Brooklyn and the close-knit Jewish enclave of East Tremont in the Bronx, whose gallant rearguard campaign Caro lovingly recounts. But though Caro had explained earlier that Moses, despite protests, had built the Henry Hudson Parkway through two parks instead of taking a less damaging route in order to get the needed financing, he doesn’t know what prompted these other choices. He simply presumes that Moses heartlessly intended the human turmoil he caused. As Frances Perkins once quipped, “He loves the public, but not as people.”
A sharper insinuation of malice suffuses Caro’s tendentious chapter on Moses’s alleged mistreatment of his older brother, Paul, a gifted electrical engineer whose life ended in failure. Over eleven interviews (of the 522 Caro conducted for the book over five years), Paul complained that his brother had usurped his birthright and blacklisted him among potential New York employers. He ended up “walking the streets with holes in his shoes and sleeping in a Salvation Army lodging house,” writes Caro melodramatically, “almost literally starving for want of a few dollars.” The details of what had happened Paul promised to reveal in the last interview, when he telephoned from a hospital bed, began his tale, collapsed after a few sentences, and died a few days later.
What looks to be true is that Moses asked LaGuardia not to hire his brother. The rest is speculation, both Paul’s and Caro’s. But even if Moses had blackballed his brother throughout the New York engineering world, could not Paul, with such valuable talent, have moved to another city? Without stopping to ask, Caro goes on to indict Moses as inattentive to his sister, insufficiently respectful to his parents’ memory, and unfaithful to his wife—bad to the core. Of the book’s many long-winded parts, this chapter needed drastic cutting.
Which of Caro’s more substantive criticisms holds up after half a century? That Moses emphasized highways at the expense of mass transit is certainly true, though the six hundred miles of metro-region parkways and expressways that he built were as transformative as the Erie Canal had been. They linked the city’s boroughs, opened up Long Island, and connected Gotham to the rest of the country with a transportation network that engineers from around the nation and the world came to study and that became the model for the federal Interstate Highway System. But running mass-transit tracks down the highway medians, Caro rightly notes, would have easily relieved the congestion that grew hand in hand with the road system. For instance, a subway line that already ran eight miles from mid-Manhattan toward the new Idlewild (later JFK) Airport that Moses was constructing could inexpensively have been extended aboveground directly to the planes, as one top planner urged at the time. But Moses wouldn’t even leave room on the median to build the tracks later.
Moses, whose ideas of motoring took shape at the start of the automobile age, when cars symbolized freedom and leisure, never grasped the later reality of traffic jams, Caro writes, because, beyond a few abortive driving lessons, he never drove. In his big limo, in which this workaholic toiled as intently as in the office, he couldn’t see outside without leaning far forward, so he scarcely noticed the changing reality of the road and could not fathom a need for integrated mass-transit solutions.
Caro thinks Moses should have granted City Hall’s plea for funds to improve and extend the fast-deteriorating subways. But Moses had no sympathy for the idea that the nickel fare was “sacred,” as redistributionist Gotham liberals preached. In 1946, a subway ride cost the city 6.7 cents. Doubling the fare, as Moses heretically advised, would have funded enough borrowing to let New York modernize all the equipment and stations and even build new lines, Caro writes. The fare did double in 1948, but clearly money was not the system’s only problem, and Gotham’s subways remain embarrassingly inferior to those of London or Paris.
Caro’s most sweeping criticism of Moses, that he is somehow responsible for “the fall of New York,” is preposterous, but it grows out of a sharp anxiety of the early 1970s, when Caro was writing The Power Broker. A run of feckless mayors, a featherbedding unionized workforce, and a counterproductive municipal welfare system funded by rising taxes and crushing debt had brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy. Crime, panhandling, and graffiti vandalism seemed out of control. Editorialists started labeling Gotham “ungovernable.” Corporate headquarters, small factories, the prosperous old, and the educated young began to flee. The physical fabric was crumbling.
The cause of all this was certainly not . . . traffic congestion.
But neither was it racism, a principal count in Caro’s indictment of Moses. To be sure, the Great Migration northward of poor blacks, which began in Moses’s youth and peaked when Caro was writing The Power Broker, made the race question increasingly urgent. The skyrocketing crime and disorder of Caro’s moment, for which blacks were disproportionately responsible, seemed to confirm long-standing fears that they might fail to blend into the urban melting pot and would remain “unassimilated, hostile, bitter aliens,” as Caro writes. Their assimilation, Caro believes, was the city’s responsibility, not theirs. They needed parks and playgrounds, “as a sign,” Caro writes sentimentally, “that society cared for them” and “was holding out a hand to help them to their feet.” As one of the teen gangbangers says in West Side Story, deftly satirizing such sociological and psychological claptrap that denied (and still denies) personal agency and personal responsibility to the minority poor, “I’m depraved on account I’m deprived.”
Doubtless Moses was a racist. He thought blacks dirty and disorderly. When Windels asked him whether he worried about “Negroes overrunning” a swimming pool near Harlem, Moses replied that, as blacks don’t like cold water, he didn’t heat that pool, to keep them out. Caro is likely right that racism went into his money-saving decision to leave unimproved the steep strip of Riverside Park bordering Harlem. It also may help explain why, in the 1930s, he built only one of his 255 playgrounds in Harlem, despite pleas for more.
But what is not true is one of the strongest impressions most readers take away from The Power Broker, Caro’s implication that Moses made the bridges over his parkways too low for buses to pass under expressly to keep blacks off his beaches, a charge that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently repeated. Caro’s slippery passage does not explicitly say that barring blacks was Moses’s reason for building the bridges as he did. Rather, he writes that Moses discouraged blacks from using his parks, and he limited access to the beaches by building the parkway bridges too low for buses, so that busloads of poor people (of any race) could get there only by painfully slow local roads. Those few that tried found entrance permits hard to get and valid only for outlying areas.
This passage is based on one of Caro’s many interviews with Moses’s chief aide, Sidney Shapiro. Examination of his notes from this conversation, displayed in the recent “Robert Caro’s The Power Broker at 50” show at the New-York Historical Society, suggests that Caro came to the meeting with preconceptions and did not fully grasp what Shapiro was telling him.2 Yes, Shapiro recounted, “poverty buses” carrying black kids from slums to beach outings—probably as part of some anti-poverty program—were sent to distant areas. But the low bridges were meant simply to guarantee that the parkways’ “passenger car only” rule banning buses and trucks could never be broken by future politicians. Any driver on these roads knows what a relief it is not to have eighteen-wheelers roaring alongside. But whatever Caro had in mind when he wrote this passage, readers see the charge of racism as its point.
The crucial point, though, is that a lack of playgrounds and access to beaches is not what caused New York’s crisis in the 1970s. Yes, minority crime was central to that crisis, but these amenities, no more than the 1990s “midnight basketball” movement aimed at giving at-risk kids an alternative to nighttime mischief, could not possibly resolve that crisis. It took Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s broken-windows policing to stem the crime epidemic and allow the city to flourish once more, though even that success left the rest of the minority underclass problem—the fatherless families, the welfare dependency, the drug use, the devaluation of education and work—unsolved.
All the flaws Caro catalogues lead him to wonder if everything Moses had done on Manhattan’s West Side “was not, on balance, a tragic and irremediable loss.” And even though Moses was in Caro’s telling “America’s greatest builder,” in the final summation—adding in the clogged roads, the displaced tenants, the malice—who knows if “his works will endure and be blessed by generations not yet born,” or if “New York would have been a better city if Robert Moses had never lived”?
Really? Caro’s own narrative answers that question conclusively.
Finally, Caro’s account of a key post-war Moses success spends pages on a scandal it spawned but misses the prophetic vision at its center. Moses never fully spelled out that idea, but the architectural historian Hilary Ballon outlines it in Robert Moses and the Modern City, coedited with Kenneth T. Jackson.
When Congress created a subsidy for slum clearance and urban renewal in Title I of the 1949 Housing Act, Moses, as the chairman of the Mayor’s Slum Clearance Committee, instantly saw how he could use it, because he had employed an older New York slum-clearance law to help lure the United Nations to Manhattan three years earlier. After persuading John D. Rockefeller Jr. to donate funds to buy the proposed site for the UN headquarters—seventeen acres of slaughterhouses and packing plants along the East River that the developer William Zeckendorf wanted to sell—Moses, against a four-day deadline and in hot competition with three other cities, crafted the winning deal. He promised not only improvements to the site and surrounding streets but also housing for the delegates and employees, a condition on which the secretary-general had insisted. Fortunately, he had hundreds of apartments under construction, including Peter Cooper Village, on sites he had assembled under the city’s slum-clearance law.
Winning the United Nations “would make New York the center of the world,” Mayor William O’Dwyer crowed. Moses didn’t go quite that far, but he did see how a major institution—a university, a hospital, a cultural center—with housing for its employees could upgrade its surrounding neighborhood, brighten the city’s glamour, generate jobs and wealth, and keep middle-class households in New York, even with the suburbs now so accessible by his roads.
Accordingly, with Title I’s subsidy and constitutionally doubtful eminent-domain power, he cleared land below Washington Square for New York University’s new library, academic buildings, and housing for faculty and students, shifting the school’s center from the Bronx to Manhattan and jump-starting its transition from a commuter college to a first-rate residential one. He assembled the land and recruited developers to build housing for the doctors and nurses of NYU and Bellevue Hospitals at Kips Bay Plaza and Bellevue South, and he did the same uptown, creating Morningside Gardens for staff of Columbia University and other Morningside Heights educational and religious institutions. To provide housing that would keep what he called “the real ‘forgotten man’ with middle income” in the city, he masterminded Title I housing for government employees near city offices and for union members on the Lower East Side. Of course, he couldn’t foresee that the United Nations, NYU, and Columbia would someday trash their own prestige, dimming their city-enhancing powers.
The one part of his vision that Moses did voice was his certainty that Title I could generate “a reborn West Side,” a revival he sparked by razing eighteen blocks of shabby tenements to build a cultural and educational acropolis (see James Panero’s “Curtains for Lincoln Center” in The New Criterion of May 2024). Lincoln Center brought together such world-class institutions as the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the Juilliard School, plus the ballet and lesser theaters and concert halls. It provided a new campus for Fordham University along with four thousand middle- and upper-middle-class apartments in Lincoln Towers. A 1960 photograph in Ballon’s volume, showing Leonard Bernstein, Martha Graham, and other luminaries of mid-century culture gathered around a model of the new center, with a row of the drab tenements it would replace behind them, vividly captures the glamorous transformation that Moses wrought.
But the corruption that marred several Title I projects is what Caro emphasizes. The worst case was Manhattanville, six Upper West Side blocks worth $15 million but sold to a development firm led by a Tammany hack for $1 million in 1952. Two years later, as a Senate hearing disclosed, that firm had razed only fifty-eight of the site’s 338 buildings and had begun none of the promised construction. Instead, it had been milking the buildings for their rents and for hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional fees. The same group, reporters learned, had also been exploiting a Brooklyn Title I project, whose tenants had had no heat or hot water for months. The upshot was that Manhattanville owed $600,000 in back taxes and couldn’t even pay the interest on its city-provided mortgage, much less build the new apartment blocks.
Newspaper stories about the Title I follies led to demands in 1959 for inspection of the Slum Clearance Committee’s books. They revealed deep corruption, including the fact that two of Moses’s top aides and the vice chairman of his Slum Clearance Committee, his banker Thomas Shanahan, were themselves profiteering from Title I. At the very start of his Title I yarn, Caro writes that Moses was “in sole charge” of the program and that “he and he alone made all final decisions” about it. But forty pages later, that turns out not to be true. “Moses was up in the clouds as far as Title I was concerned,” one reporter told Caro. “Gradually we began to find out that Shanahan was making all the decisions,” choosing who would build each project. But Moses was the responsible official, and—though this is hardly the main story—Caro rightly censures him for letting corruption flourish under his nose.
For four decades, Moses had basked in press adulation. Now he chafed under its scorn, and he needed money for family school and medical bills. So in 1959 he agreed to take the high-paid presidency of the 1964–65 World’s Fair, even though ethics rules would require him to resign his city posts (but not his state jobs helming $2.8 billion in projects). His interest wasn’t so much in the fair, Caro notes, but rather in the power of its patronage and the chance to build parks in Flushing Meadows, where the fair would rise, and elsewhere in Queens. Sadly, his lack of interest took a toll. He made mistake after mistake. The fair flopped and sunk Moses’s reputation further.
Also in 1959, Nelson Rockefeller, as ambitious as Moses to make his mark as a master builder and transportation wizard, became governor. Conflict between the two arrogant and ruthless alpha males was inevitable, Caro writes. When, in late 1962, Rocky suggested that Moses should give up one of his state park posts, Moses snapped he’d be happy to resign all his state jobs, with ample publicity. That threat, which had made mayors and governors back down over four decades, didn’t work this time. Having just given up his four city jobs, he now inadvertently gave up five state ones, leaving himself only the World’s Fair and the Triborough Authority.
Then, in 1966, the governor wanted the Triborough funds to finance his now-complete transportation plan. He envisioned merging Triborough, along with the region’s money-losing bus and railroad lines, into the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, headed by his closest advisor, William Ronan. That would oust Moses from his last job, now that the fair had ended. Moses launched a lawsuit—along with the Chase Manhattan Bank, the trustee for the Triborough bondholders—to halt any such merger as a violation of bond covenants. But he never pressed the suit, partly because the governor had promised him that he’d have “something substantial” in the reorganized mta and partly because the man who ran the Chase Manhattan Bank was the governor’s brother David. At a February 1968 meeting, with Moses in attendance, the two brothers, one representing the state, the other the bank, signed a stipulation withdrawing opposition to the merger and its supplanting of Moses.
As for Rocky’s promise, what Moses got was a “consultancy,” not the MTA board seat he expected. The consultancy let him keep the trappings of power: his lavish office and dining room, his limo and drivers, his cabin cruiser and its captain. But the power itself was gone, every speck of it.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 43 Number 3, on page 27
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