Robert Moses was a bundle of contradictions: He never held political office but for almost half a century he was the most powerful man in New York State who routinely ignored the phone calls of the four mayors and five governors he outlasted.
A man who built 627 miles of highway – more than anyone in history – he never drove a day in his life preferring to be chauffeured everywhere in his Cadillac which doubled as a mobile office.
Not personally corrupt – in fact for many years he claimed to have never taken a salary – he created and presided over a corrupt system of autonomous and unaccountable authorities which awarded construction and other contracts to politically favoured individuals, banks and companies.
A cultivator of the Fourth Estate he lavished reporters with paid junkets in exchange for slavish coverage while also describing those who dared to question him as “jackals” “vultures” “yellow journalists” and keeping private files on many of them.
He attracted the most talented architects and engineers to his projects but eventually was surrounded by yes-men and lackeys.
Tall and handsome he could turn on the charm whenever he wanted, but he was described by almost all who crossed him – in private while he still was alive – as being a thoroughly vindictive and petty human being who not only wanted to beat you but destroy you too.
He built public beaches (Jones Beach being the most famous), playgrounds and municipal swimming pools but he slyly excluded African Americans and other minorities from accessing them.
Robert Moses simultaneously built and destroyed modern New York turning it into an ugly tangle of highways that demolished whole neighbourhoods before them, sometimes on routes simply chosen to demonstrate the power he held. If you wonder why the Cross Bronx Expressway is a deep wound gashed across that borough, why the Van Wyck seems to be permanently congested, or why you pay tolls on a 90-year old-bridge, thank Robert Moses.
The influence of his works spread far beyond New York, infesting the American cityscape, encouraging its car culture and spawning its present day soulless, sprawling suburbs that fuel its people’s current alienation from each other and indeed from themselves. We are where we live.
But boy could he get things done!
Robert Caro’s 1974 masterpiece “The Power Broker”, is a fittingly long (1130 pages) biography of Moses that reads like a novel, covering not only his life and works but also the changing culture of New York and America through two world wars, a depression and the boom of the fifties.
Born in 1888, into a wealthy, secular Jewish family, he attended Yale and then Oxford before returning to New York fired up with the reformist ideas fashionable in the early 20th century to make government a force for social good. Instead he got a rude awakening when he butted up against the state’s Tammany Hall political machine with its entrenched interests and jobs for the boys. He realised that to get anything done he needed friends with power including Lower East Side political bruiser Al Smith who took Moses under his wing and to Albany when he was re-elected governor in 1922.
A quick study and incredibly hard working, Moses soon learnt the dark arts of crafting legislation which included innocuous sounding clauses that were overlooked by politicians. These would over the ensuing decades bring him the enormous power and independence he needed to access the financing and authority to achieve what were politically fraught and very costly infrastructure projects.
Among his first were a series of parks out on Long Island connected through highways or “parkways” that would bring New Yorkers out to them on the weekends. Objections from landowners, many poor, some very rich and powerful, were bulldozed aside as he aggressively asserted eminent domain. Simply nothing or no one could get in his way.
His biggest early triumph was Jones Beach State Park (1930) which made him a celebrity and gave him power. From then on politicians both in Albany and Washington seldom dared refuse his requests for money. He became a darling of the New York Times in part through his friendship with its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger. The paper aided and abetted many of his most controversial projects while ignoring his more sinister practices. These included his insistence that the bridges over his parkways leading out to the Long Island parks be so low that public buses could not go under them, thereby excluding minorities. While that claim has been disputed somewhat, it is a fact that he built 255 playgrounds in New York City in the 1930s, and exactly one in Harlem.
And woe betide the publisher who objected to his projects. The Long Island Babylon community newspaper The Leader which had been reminding its readership of Moses’ broken promise not to charge tolls on the Wantaugh Causeway suddenly found its government advertising withdrawn. Word got back if the paper behaved itself the ads might return. But the publisher James Cooper was having none of it, especially since his masthead proudly read “I have never known a Master and I’ve never worn a Muzzle” .
By the 1950s, Moses’ bridges and highways were fast becoming expensive exercises in futility. The problem was the more roads and bridges he built the more the cars came. It was a never ending cycle even as he scorned the very notion of public transportation that might have relieved the traffic jams.
Take for example his Triborough Bridge which opened in 1936. By 1946 it was carrying 13M vehicles annually and by 1951 this had increased to 32M. Worse yet the bridges it sought to relieve had also increased their traffic – 129% on the Bronx Whitestone, and the toll free Queensborough Bridge was also seeing record vehicles. Even the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (1951) was swamped with traffic 64% above the prediction of 8.4M cars per annum, with no relief for the Midtown tunnel and the other East River bridges. And all the highways leading to these bridges and tunnels were jammed.
As for Manhattan itself, one study found on average it took 40 minutes to cover the 2.5 miles from one side of the island to the other. Commuters on Moses’ beloved Westside Highway took 34 minutes to travel 4.5 miles.
Critics began raising what were then radical proposals to limit or discourage cars from entering New York City by charging for street parking for example and even of creating pedestrian-only malls. These are all quite standard and accepted practices in well planned cities these days.
As one of his most outspoken critics Lewis Mumford declared, “the private motorcar is a method that happens to be on the basis of the number of people it transports, by far the most wasteful of urban space… the major corrective …is to redevelop now despised modes of circulation -public vehicles and private feet…”
But Robert Moses was a man who simply refused to listen. He thought he knew it all and without him nothing could be done. His boneheaded arrogance might have helped him earlier on in his career but by the end it was a liability. His management of the 1964 World Fair, which he hoped would be his final triumph, only exposed all his flaws.
He was long estranged from his brother Paul, himself a brilliant engineer, who claims he was cheated out of his inheritance and blacklisted by his brother from urban works in the New York area.
His wife died in 1966 sent to an asylum, worn down by his relentless schedule.
He died alone in 1981, still perplexed at how his once adoring public had become such ingrates.
What remains of Robert Moses are his works. Some unequivocally great – the many parks, the eponymous Niagara Power Plant, the United Nations headquarters on the East River, the graceful Verrazano Bridge. But many are ugly monuments to his blinkered focus on the automobile, and some to his outright cruelty.
The problem is there are so many that it is hard to even imagine what New York might have been like without him.
