The Battle for Gotham (28 page)

Probably no one, elected or not, in any other state held such vast power over such an extended period. He served under five mayors: Fiorello La Guardia, William O’Dwyer, Vincent Impellitteri, Robert F. Wagner Jr., and John V. Lindsay. “No law, no regulation, no budget stops Robert Moses in his appointed task,” La Guardia once boasted. Since Moses usually wrote the rules for the agencies he led, his task was usually his to define. And he served under six governors: Alfred E. Smith, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert H. Lehmann, Thomas E. Dewey, Averell Harriman, and Nelson A. Rockefeller.

With all the leaders under whom he served, Moses was famous for threatening to resign his position if he did not get his way. Each relented—until Rockefeller. In 1962 Rockefeller wanted Moses to resign as chairman of the State Council of Parks to make way for his brother, Laurence, long a member of the Palisades Interstate Commission and a known parks and conservation advocate. Rockefeller told Moses he could retain his Long Island parks chairmanship. Moses refused and resigned from both state park positions and the State Power Commission, fully expecting Rockefeller to back down. He didn’t. “For decades, governors had dreaded what would happen if they had to be the one to fire Bob Moses. Now one governor had fired Bob Moses. And nothing happened.”
²²

Because he created parks all over the state, he is most favorably known as a great park builder. “As long as you’re on the side of parks, you’re on the side of the angels. You can’t lose.”
²³
Caro quotes Moses here to illustrate how well Moses knew how to manipulate public opinion. And while his highways and urban renewal projects are sometimes considered inevitable, there is nothing inevitable about the routes and sites he chose that destroyed dozens of productive and vibrant residential and industrial neighborhoods and uprooted and undermined the lives of more than a million people and businesses. While the estimates of displaced residents and businesses are known for only some projects, a total seems impossible to calculate but is acknowledged to be
at least
five hundred thousand people. Some estimates exceed one million. There is no estimate for the displaced businesses. And there was nothing inevitable about his building only residential towers in the park without the traditional mixed uses of an urban neighborhood.

To assume improved roads, housing, parks, and expanded universities and other institutions would not have happened is foolish. They would indeed have happened but differently. Revisionists would have us believe that Moses was operating in the context of his time, doing what everyone else was doing. Evidence indicates otherwise. He shaped the context of his time. Others learned from him and followed his path.

THE IMPACT OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

Moses started the reshaping of the country for the car first through his facilitating the 1939 World’s Fair, then through his New York projects, and then by helping other cities plan and design their projects. It was a perfect combination since Moses’s vision of park creation always included—and sometimes started with—the necessary vehicular access.

In 1935 Moses took the suggestion that the city should hold a World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow and, as city parks commissioner, made it happen. He quickly recognized the immense potential of the project to enhance his own power and agenda, given the contracts and jobs involved in building the pavilions and the vast network of new Queens highways needed to reach the site and, of course, the enormous park to be created in the process. Nothing about the fair could happen without the approval and input of Moses.

The 1939 World’s Fair, with its theme, “The World of Tomorrow,” had a greater impact on the subsequent development of the country than most people realize. The fair is widely acknowledged as the icon of the Art Deco period of design. Less recognition, however, exists of its role in shaping urban planning and setting the nation on the car-oriented course that has existed ever since. “The story we have to tell,” critic Lewis Mumford said of the fair’s theme, “is the story of this planned environment, this planned industry, this planned civilization.
²⁴
If we can inject that . . . as a basic notion of the fair, if we can point it toward the future, toward something that is progressing and growing in every department of life and throughout civilization . . . we may lay the foundation for a pattern of life which would have enormous impact in times to come.”
²⁵
Indeed! Instead of being an enormous trade show at which manufacturers could discover the newest products and technologies, as in fairs past, this fair was directed at consumers. Manufacturers would have the opportunity to exhibit their products and persuade viewers how their lives would be improved.

Two major exhibits vied for and received the most attention. The first was the fair’s symbol, the Trylon and Perisphere designed by architect Wallace K. Harrison. Inside the Perisphere was the World of Tomorrow, designed by Henry Dreyfuss, in the form of a model of Democracity. Democracity broke with the tradition of looking for solutions to problems in existing cities and imagined a whole new configuration of highways linking bedroom communities for the middle class, industrial districts with workers’ housing nearby, and a business and cultural district at the center marked by a single skyscraper. The message was clear: the current city was no longer viable and its problems intractable. The solution: demolish and rebuild the city and provide alternatives outside of it for those who could afford it.

The more popular exhibit, in fact the most popular of the fair, was General Motors’ Futurama, created by industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, which actually dovetailed nicely with Democracity. Here, viewed from a moving platform, was the future with cities built from scratch around highway interchanges. Tiny cars—no congestion, plenty of space between them—on multilane roadways went over mountains and bridges and ran on liquid oxygen. A fantasy, yes, but an extraordinarily seductive one. Walter Lippmann wrote: “General Motors had spent a small fortune to convince the American public that if it wishes to enjoy the full benefits of private enterprise in motor manufacturing, it will have to rebuild its cities and its highways by public enterprise.”
²⁶

From then on, the cleverly crafted advertising campaigns of the car manufacturers equated cars with modernity and middle-class status, and the automobile industry became the foundation for our postwar economy. Caro notes in a similar vein:

The three automotive giants would later plow tens of millions of dollars into his World’s Fair at a time when other major companies were shying away from it. In the sense that he was America’s, and probably the world’s, most vocal, effective and prestigious apologist for the automobile, that he designed highway networks not only for New York but for a dozen cities, that by his success in building expressways in the city he did more than any other single urban official to encourage more hesitant officials to launch major highway-building programs in
their
cities, and that, by building them to new, high standards, he did more than any other single urban official to set the early standards for urban expressway design—he was the spearhead, the cutting edge, of this Panzer division of public works.
²⁷

The fair’s message seems to have altered even Moses’s vision for roads. Until then, he built “parkways”—the Taconic, Bronx River, Henry Hudson—all built to connect middle-class car drivers to parks for leisure-time enjoyment and some commuting. They were four lanes, beautifully landscaped “ribbon parks,” with graceful curves offering bucolic views. Roads went around cities. Early suburbs had evolved along rail lines. The car was an additional means of transportation, not a replacement for the enviable transit system that knitted neighborhoods together into one city and wove the country’s cities into a national fabric. That pattern remained until after World War II.

The car culture was
emerging
, not yet
booming
. The auto industry was to be the vehicle to put the nation back to work. An assortment of postwar national policies, including the 1956 Interstate Highway Act, purposely spurred that emerging car culture and industry. Those highways would be designed for practical use by commuters and truck traffic, even though many of Moses’s roads were still routed to connect parks. Some roads actually sliced through parks, like Upper Manhattan’s Van Cortlandt and Inwood. Moses’s roads created more traffic, as all new roads do. Experts told him this. They strongly urged him to build transit, too. He refused to listen.

Moses set his own course. One massive clearance project followed another in what former Random House editor Jason Epstein called “periodic paroxysms of self-destruction in the name of renewal.”
²⁸

THE COUNTRY FOLLOWS MOSES

As the first big highway builder, he created the vision and then the template for the nation. He helped craft the funding and authorizing legislation in Washington for urban renewal and highways nationwide. Then he was first in line to get funding for local projects, with the growing strength of the highway lobby behind him.

Aides to President Eisenhower consulted with Moses about national highway needs as they crafted the 1956 Highway Act. One of the early managers and the de facto head of the Interstate Highway System, Bertram D. Tallamy, had formerly served as superintendent of the New York State Department of Public Works. He revered Moses. In the 1920s, Tallamy used to come down from Niagara to attend lectures given by Moses on the art of “Getting Things Done.” Tallamy told Caro that “the Interstate Highway System was built by principles he had learned at those lectures.”
²⁹

After the ’56 act was proposed, University of Michigan professor Robert Fishman notes, “Moses became the principle spokesman of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in urging that interstates ‘must go right through cities and not around them,’ contrary to what President Eisenhower advocated. The president envisioned a road network between cities, like Germany’s autobahn, with short connections to city centers.”

Moses did not confine his strategy to New York. Other cities hired him to design freeway networks in the 1940s and ’50s. Few were built. Funding was usually difficult, so many were postponed. Some were scaled back or simply canceled. Portland, San Francisco, San Diego, D.C., Baltimore, Los Angeles, Detroit, and others had Moses’s help or influence. The first was New Orleans.

NEW ORLEANS

The French Quarter of New Orleans survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005 better than most of the city. But in the 1940s it narrowly missed being hit by a planning disaster engineered by none other than Moses. “A progressive spirit flourished in New Orleans after World War II. The desire for progress was reflected in the decision . . . to hire Robert Moses, the great freeway builder . . . to introduce 20th century thinking to New Orleans . . . Moses had done more to change the face of New York . . . than any other person in the 20th century. In 1946, expressways were considered avant-garde in America and Moses, with his faith in the automobile to move people in cities, was the acknowledged leader of this approach to urban-transportation planning.”
³⁰

So the battle to preserve New Orleans’s French Quarter involved defeating a proposed Moses-designed elevated highway for the waterfront, which would have demolished as much of the Quarter as his New York highways did back home. But while the waterfront route was changed, the idea of a highway through the city remained. A decimating highway did get built instead in New Orleans that cut through Treme, one of the oldest black neighborhoods in the country. Claiborne Avenue, a glorious boulevard of live oak trees and thriving local retail, restaurants, and the Capitol Theater, was the heart of this historic community. “Black people’s Canal Street,” one remembers it, “the large neutral ground for family barbecues, the central artery for Mardi Gras Indian parades.” It was replaced by I-10. As one elderly citizen recalled for
Times-Picayune
columnist Lolis Elie, “Claiborne Avenue had gorgeous oak trees from one end to the next, not like now with a piece of concrete over people’s heads. Treme was a neighborhood of white and black. They didn’t go to the same school or church but the kids played together on the street and everyone sat outside together having fun. Claiborne was the heart of the business community and in 1963, I-10 ripped out the heart of hundreds of families’ homes. Then they built black and white housing projects and separated the people.”
³¹
Nearly five hundred homes were removed.

PORTLAND, OREGON

Portland is today considered the nation’s best model of a popular livable city whose balanced transportation system has helped rejuvenate the city way beyond expectations. It was the first city to aggressively reinvest in public transit after World War II. In a 2005 article in
Willamette Week
, Bob Young wrote:

If there was one event that defined Portland in the past 25 years, it was killing the Mount Hood Expressway, a six-mile, eight-lane asphalt behemoth that would have vaulted across the river from Johns Landing to Interstate 205. . . .

Indeed, the godfather of the freeway was none other than Robert Moses, the fearsome architect of modern New York City. . . . In 1943, the power brokers of Portland—the five white men of the City Council and the city’s utility, banking and insurance executives—brought Moses west to modernize their little town.

Moses’ vision called for new freeways slicing up Portland like a pizza. His plan would triple the mileage of blacktop. . . . “It was a grid of freeways with a school and church within each grid cell,” says Ethan Seltzer, director of the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies at Portland State University. . . .