Tomorrow-Land (3 page)

3.

In the twentieth century, the influence of Robert Moses on the cities of America was greater than that of any other person.

—Lewis Mumford

 

For Robert Moses, it all came down to parks. More than the bridges he built (the Whitestone, the Verrazano, the Throg's Neck, the Triborough, to name a few); or the vast interlocking network of expressways he erected above and below its streets (the Van Wyck, the Clearview, the Whitestone, the Cross-Bronx, the Brooklyn-Queens, among others); or the 416 miles of scenic parkways that course in and out of metropolitan New York and its outer environs; or even the hundreds of playgrounds, dozen or so public pools, amenities, tennis courts, or skating rinks that he created, what mattered most to Moses were parks. Fighting for parks, he said, was always a winning proposition for a public figure, even an unelected one such as himself. “As long as you're on the side of parks,” he would often tell his underlings, “you're on the side of the angels. You can't lose.”

More than all his other monuments of concrete and steel and feats of ingenuity and engineering, parks would be Moses' pathway to history. And history is what Moses intended to make. In 1960 he got the chance to build the park of his dreams, one that he had been envisioning for almost forty years. This would be his crowning achievement; and if his vision was carried out—and he would use all the power at his disposal to see that it was—this park would reshape the very geography of New York, improving upon Nature itself.

Considering his privileged background, it's a wonder that Moses was interested in parks at all. Born in 1888 in New Haven, Connecticut, Robert Moses was the son of an industrious German immigrant father, Emmanuel Moses, and a demanding mother, Isabella Silverman Cohen, known as Bella. Both families had fled the pastoral beauty of Bavaria, due to its systemic anti-Semitism, for America. Emmanuel Moses became
a successful businessman, owning and operating his own local department store. Bella, who doted on her youngest son, Robert, hailed from a well-connected and prosperous New Haven clan. By 1897 the family had moved to Manhattan and lived in a five-story brownstone inherited from Bella's father on East 46th Street, just off Fifth Avenue.

Young Moses wanted for nothing. He lived in a household with cooks and maids who prepared his meals, served his food on the finest china, and made his custom-built bed daily. He and his older brother shared a private library with more than two thousand books. Rembrandt prints hung from the home's oak-paneled walls. The family vacationed in upstate New York's Adirondack Mountains, imbuing Moses with a love of nature, and they summered on the Continent, fueling his intellectual and cultural appetites. As a Manhattanite, Moses never had to endure the subway or any other aspect of the public transportation system; he was driven everywhere he went by the family chauffeur. In his long life, he would never learn to drive.

Educated at prep schools and an excellent athlete—Moses disdained team sports, preferring swimming, a lifelong passion, and track—he began his studies at Yale while only sixteen. Unable to penetrate the top social clubs at the university as a Jew, he settled for less prestigious student organizations. Throwing himself into his studies, Moses read voraciously and developed a passion for Samuel Johnson, the learned eighteenth-century man of letters. He spoke Latin and recited lengthy poems from memory. He even wrote his own Victorian-style poetry, which got published in a Yale literary magazine.

The ambitious Moses had a gift for words, especially when motivated to defend a position or attack an opponent. He penned pointed editorials for the
Yale Daily News
and ran for student government. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1909. It was said by his fellow students that he could have graduated at the very top of his class if he had spent less time reading books that interested him but had nothing to do with his coursework.

After Yale, Moses earned his master's degree in political science at Wadham College at Oxford University. There he wrote his master's thesis on reforming government, creating a new paradigm based on meritocracy
instead of the crooked system of patronage and kickbacks that ruled big-city political machines like New York's infamous Tammany Hall. Back in New York, he earned his PhD in political science at Columbia. Thus armed with degrees from some of the best colleges in the world, Moses dedicated himself to public service.

Quickly aligning himself with the progressive movement, then a national force in politics, Moses worked for no pay—since he could afford to—at the Municipal Research Bureau in New York. When a young prosecuting attorney named John Purroy Mitchel swept into City Hall on an anticorruption, anti–Tammany Hall platform in 1914, Moses joined his administration. Only thirty-four years old, Mitchel was dubbed “the Boy Mayor” and was exactly the kind of university-bred man that Moses thought should hold the highest positions in government.

After proposing the government operating system that he had detailed in his master's thesis, Moses quickly became a target of Tammany Hall. At raucous Board of Estimate meetings in 1917, dressed in a white suit and tie, he publicly defended his plan, citing facts and figures, while the rough-and-tumble Tammany faithful crowded the back of the hall, hurling insults and curses at the PhD Ivy Leaguer. Unfortunately, 1917 was an election year, and Mayor Mitchel buckled under pressure from the political bosses and failed to support Moses' plan. When Mitchel lost his reelection bid, Moses lost his job.

The following year, Moses got the break he was looking for. Belle Moskowitz, a trusted aide to New York's Democratic governor Alfred E. Smith, offered him a job, but Moses had his doubts. He didn't think much of the bighearted and affable Smith, a former Brooklyn street kid with gold-filled teeth who spoke in classic New Yorkese. The governor had an incomplete formal education; when asked what kind of degree he possessed, Smith famously quipped “F.F.M.”—as in the Fulton Fish Market, where he had labored after he quit the twelfth grade to help support his family. The governor, it was well known, was a product of Tammany Hall. “What can you expect from a man who wears a brown derby on the side of his head and always has a big cigar in the corner of his mouth?” Moses complained to a friend. But he
soon learned that Moskowitz shared his passion for reform, and she had the governor's ear.

Moses got to work in impressive fashion. He wrote up a 419-page report on the restructuring and streamlining of 175 state agencies into 16 departments. The government, Moses firmly believed, needed to be efficient in order to effect lasting and significant change. Although Smith was voted out of office in 1920 before he could implement Moses' plan, the pair became close. Together the unlikely duo—the Ivy League–bred, Latin-quoting Jewish Moses and the cigar-chomping, whiskey-swigging Irish Catholic Smith—would go for long walks, forming a bond that would last decades.

Smith lauded Moses' skills and worth ethic. “Bob Moses is the most efficient administrator I have ever met in public life,” he said. “He was the best bill drafter in Albany . . . he didn't get that keen mind of his from any college. He was a hard worker. He worked on trains anywhere and any time. When everyone else was ready for bed he would go back to work.”

Although Moses would go on to work for seven governors, Smith was the only man that he could ever bring himself to actually call “Governor”; to Moses, all of Smith's successors were unworthy in comparison. His loyalty to his friend knew few bounds. In 1936, when New York's hopelessly corrupt mayor Jimmy Walker—a smirking songwriting dandy whom Moses deplored—publicly embarrassed Smith, the Master Builder exacted revenge. Walker enjoyed carousing with his cronies at the Central Park Casino, a structure with a unique architectural style: On the outside it was a nineteenth-­century cottage; inside it was a decadent modernist playground with black mirrors and huge glass chandeliers for the city's moneyed elite. As City Parks Commissioner, Moses would later have the place razed and the vacant lot turned into a playground (Smith had a soft spot for children). Moses was nothing, if not loyal.

In 1922 Smith was voted back into office. Moses was now his aide-de-camp; his job was to do whatever the governor needed, whether it was writing legislation or speaking on his behalf with Albany insiders.
While Moses was happy to be an important player in New York government, there was one job he truly wanted: the position of Parks Commissioner, which would enable him to reshape the landscape of New York and lead to his involvement in both New York World's Fairs in the twentieth century.

He got the idea while vacationing in Babylon, Long Island, with his wife and young daughters. It was there that he encountered the beaches, bays, and untamed wetlands of Long Island's South Shore, thousands of acres of gorgeous coastline with mesmerizing views of the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Southern Bay. Miles of it belonged to New York City and State, and yet there was no systematic way for New Yorkers to access these natural surroundings as well as no system in place for local government to develop the property. But Moses had a way to fix that. “He was always burning up with ideas, just burning up with them!” a colleague said. “Everything he saw walking around the city made him think of some way that it could be better.”

He proposed a new department—which he would head, naturally—that would create and build a vast system of parks, not only on eastern Long Island, but also in the Adirondacks and the Catskills, making the most of the state's geological wonders. Devoting so much time, energy, and resources to the creation of a statewide park system was visionary; at the time, twenty-nine US states had no state parks at all.

When Moses presented his plan to Smith, the Irishman was suspicious. “You want to give the people a fur coat when what they need is red flannel underwear,” he complained. The cost wouldn't be cheap: A parks system would require $15 million worth of bonds; land would have to be purchased, roadways built. But Moses highlighted the upside for the governor: The public loved parks, working families needed places to go on the weekend or for vacation. It would be a public relations boon for the governor, who would ultimately receive the credit and acclaim for giving the people the fur coat that they wanted (even if they really needed flannel underwear).

As long as you're on the side of parks, you're on the side of the angels. You can't lose.

Moses got his appointment. In 1924 Smith made him the president of the New York State Council of Parks and chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission. (For a political reformer hell-bent on reducing state agencies, Moses had a knack for creating new ones when it fit his plans.) He went to work converting Jones Beach into a state park. For the first time, Moses came into direct contact with the public he so longed to serve; only this time he wasn't a reformer, but a builder. His plans for Jones Beach called for the appropriation of private land, invoking the wrath of many Long Islanders, from the moneyed estate owners to small family farmers. “If we want your land,” he told one farmer, “we can take it.”

The opposition hardened. Rich Long Islanders complained that “rabble” from the city would flood the pristine oceanfront, creating “a second Coney Island.” But this ploy backfired after the
New York
Times
ran a story with the headline
A Few Rich Golfers Accused of Blocking Plan for State Park
. When Jones Beach finally opened in 1930, it was hailed as a masterpiece of public planning, and millions flocked to its sun-kissed shores.
“It is one of the finest beaches in the United States, and almost the only one designed with forethought and good taste,” wrote British novelist H. G. Wells after surveying Moses' handiwork.

By 1928 when Smith launched his presidential campaign—marking the first time a Roman Catholic was nominated by a leading party for the nation's highest office—Moses was New York's Secretary of State, yet another position he could use to achieve his goals. As Smith toured the country by train, he listed his administration's achievements—parks, hospitals, roads, and amenities for the public, many of which were built by Moses.

It was there, traveling through the country with the governor, that Moses witnessed the hatred and bigotry that Smith faced, particularly in states where the Ku Klux Klan held sway. Moses never forgot those experiences or the affect it had on his friend. Decades later, he would recall those memories in a letter to a Smith biographer. “I don't think you have stressed enough the cross burning and bigotry Smith ran into during the 1928 campaign,” he wrote, “an experience from which he
never really recovered.” It was anti-Catholic fervor that ensured Smith, the quintessential “Happy Warrior,” would lose to the Republican free-market fundamentalist Herbert H. Hoover. Smith's lieutenant governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, won the former's gubernatorial seat and became Moses' boss.

It must have been gut-wrenching for Moses to see his beloved Smith in political exile while Roosevelt, whom he utterly detested, moved into the Governor's Mansion in Albany. Moses was the only member of Smith's cabinet that Roosevelt did not retain (the animosity was mutual). When Moses learned of his imminent dismissal as Secretary of State, he quit before Roosevelt could fire him. Still, Moses continued on as Parks Commissioner. His parks were popular with the public, who had just handed Roosevelt the governorship of New York, a well-established launching pad to the White House at the time. Roosevelt, happily or not, was politically savvy enough to leave the Parks Commissioner where he was.

Whatever their personal differences, the two worked together when required. When Roosevelt swept into the White House in 1932, he launched the New Deal, a massive spending stimulus package meant to jumpstart an American economy ravaged by the Great Depression. Moses made the most of the situation and lured millions in New Deal funds to New York for his projects. He quickly dusted off plans for what would consolidate his reputation as America's premier builder: the Triborough Bridge.
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