Tomorrow-Land (4 page)

To help finance this massive project, which would unite three of the five boroughs—Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens—Moses dreamed up the Triborough Bridge Authority,
*
or TBA, a public entity that was entirely outside the boundaries of government. The TBA could borrow money, issue bonds, and fund itself through the tolls it would collect; it had its own fleet of cars and boats, even a small police force; and it didn't have to answer to the public it was supposedly serving. Its Randall Island office space underneath the bridge was now Moses' headquarters, his own private island lair from which he could extend the boundaries of his growing influence.

Moses' influence grew again in 1933 when Fiorello H. La Guardia became the mayor of New York. Although a Republican, La Guardia was a progressive who aligned himself with Democratic causes such as Roosevelt's New Deal. The “Little Flower,” as he was known, turned to Moses to improve the city's infrastructure, and in return the mayor consolidated the Master Builder's power by making him New York City Parks Commissioner. Now all five boroughs were under Moses' aegis. La Guardia also made Moses the CEO and chairman of the TBA, giving him near total control of his own public authority.

The following year Moses switched his party affiliation to Republican and ran for governor against Herbert H. Lehman, who had replaced Roosevelt as New York's chief executive. The onetime reformer ran a nasty campaign, lambasting Lehman, a gentlemanly New Deal liberal (and close ally of the hated Roosevelt), in the press, calling him “stupid,” a “puppet” of Tammany Hall, and “a miserable, sniveling type of man . . . contemptible.” He was equally dismissive of the reporters who followed him around as a gubernatorial candidate. Attacking the press would prove to be a favorite pastime for the rest of Moses' life.

When he lost in a landslide to Lehman, Moses expected to get fired. But Lehman was in many ways the anti-Moses. Despite intense pressure from the White House—President Roosevelt got word to both Governor Lehman and Mayor La Guardia that unless Moses was dismissed, New Deal funds for New York would dry up—Moses was left in place. After the Master Builder discovered the president's plot to have him fired, he quickly informed reporters, who ran stories about the president's personal vendetta against him. Smith rallied to his friend's defense, calling the plot “narrow, political, vindictive,” and Roosevelt eventually backed off. Even the President of the United States couldn't touch Moses.
That
was power.

Throughout the 1930s, Moses continued to mold and reshape New York. He often had hundreds of projects, sometimes thousands, going at the same time; there was always more to do. Then in 1935, when a few local businessmen wanted to hold a World's Fair in New York, a major international exhibition, something to rouse the city out of
the Great Depression, he got his first opportunity to achieve a long-cherished dream.

The Flushing Meadow, a three-mile stretch of natural marshlands in the middle of Queens, had beguiled developers for decades. By the 1920s it had become a vermin-infested, mountainous heap of refuse and trash, brought daily from Brooklyn via private train, thanks to a shady Tammany Hall figure named Fishhooks McCarthy. The 1,346 acres of defiled marshlands had been described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in
The Great Gatsby
as “the valley of ashes a . . . fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke.”

Moses wanted to change that. Just as he saw the untamed wilds of Jones Beach and envisioned a world-class park that would serve millions, he saw Flushing Meadow and dreamed of a park that would surpass the grandeur of Central Park. In fact, as the city's population continued its steady migration eastward—partly due to the network of highways and bridges that Moses himself had built—this new park would be a truer “central park,” closer as it was to both the geographic and population centers of the city. In a bustling metropolis like New York City, the Flushing Meadow was the largest—one-and-a-half times the size of Central Park—blank canvas that nature would provide for him. When Moses heard about the World's Fair plan, he slammed his fist on a table and exclaimed, “By God, that's a wonderful idea!'”

He rallied behind the flamboyant Grover Whalen, the Fair's president, and quickly suggested Flushing Meadow could be developed—with some of the public funds that the Fair would be receiving—into a wonderful, elegant fairground. A lease was drawn up, and Moses, as City Parks Commissioner, became the Fair's landlord. In return he requested a piece of the profits to design and sculpt Flushing Meadow Park as he wished.

But it never happened. Although Moses was able to bury “the valley of ashes”—ingeniously using the miles of refuse as landfill for what would become the Van Wyck Expressway—the 1939–40 World's Fair, the grandest and largest exposition of its time, was a financial disaster.
When it was over, the Fair that had offered forty-six million visitors a glimpse of “the World of Tomorrow”—a world of futuristic wonders like television and skyscrapers—only paid investors thirty-three cents on the dollar.

Thanks to Moses' protean efforts, there was now a Flushing Meadow Park, meticulously landscaped with two man-made lakes, an elaborate new drainage system, a new art deco–style civic building (the former New York City Pavilion), and the wide asphalt roads and pathways that serviced park-goers. However, it wasn't the grandiose public space he originally envisioned, which would have included everything from a boat basin, bike paths, and a nature preserve to both a Japanese garden and another modeled on the Garden of Versailles. His dream would have to wait.

Although World War II slowed down the pace of his building, Moses continued to plan for the postwar surge he anticipated. In 1943 New York City initiated its own plans to stem the tide of citizens who had already begun to eschew cities for the suburbs. The catchphrase for this process would come to be known as “urban renewal,” the systematic clearance of decayed and blighted slum areas—“cancerous areas in the heart of the city,” according to Moses—that could be redeveloped and turned into affordable housing for middle-class families.

By 1943 Moses, then the chairman of the Mayor's Committee on Slum Clearance, had “induced” the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to build Stuyvesant Town, a series of large, concrete-slab apartment buildings that would stretch along Manhattan's East Side from 14th Street to 20th Street between Avenue A and Avenue C. The complex would ultimately create nearly nine thousand affordable and comfortable apartments for twenty-five thousand people. Moses lauded Met Life's chairman of the board, Frederick H. Ecker, praising his “farsightedness and courage” to get involved in public works. Not everyone agreed.
The New Yorker
's architecture critic, Lewis Mumford, wrote that the buildings looked like “the architecture of the Police State.”

The project quickly caused a public outcry when it was revealed that Met Life had a whites-only policy. Ecker only added to the firestorm by
blatantly revealing his segregationist views. “Negroes and whites don't mix,” the Met Life chairman stated, and claimed that if Stuyvesant Town was integrated, it would be detrimental to the city because “it would depress all the surrounding property [values].” It didn't help, in the eyes of many progressive citizens—including the NAACP—that, at Moses' urging, Met Life was also creating a similar apartment complex uptown, the Riverton Houses, which had a blacks-only policy.

Lawsuits were filed, including one by three African-American WWII veterans. Moses dismissed any and all complaints, in particular any objections to Met Life's discriminatory policies, claiming that such lawsuits were the handiwork of citizens who were “obviously looking for a political issue and not for the results in the form of actual slum clearance.” In 1947 the New York State Supreme Court sided with Met Life; the insurance company, as the de facto landlord of the complex, could discriminate if they wished since, as the judge declared, “housing accommodation is not a recognized civil right.”

Moses was pleased with the decision. As early as 1943, he had added legislation to the city's 1942 Redevelopment Companies Act to make sure private companies, such as Met Life, could do as they pleased when it came to urban renewal. Moses also personally lobbied Ecker not to cave in to Mayor La Guardia, who pleaded with the Met Life chairman to soften his discriminatory stand. To do so, Moses believed, would cede decision-making control to the public and its elected officials, which in turn would curb his own power as the head of the Slum Clearance Commission. And that could not be allowed. When it came to racial issues, Moses was hardly on the side of the angels. While he was a public servant, the public could not be allowed to interfere with his work. He attacked his critics as nothing more than “demagogues . . . who want to make a political, racial, religious, or sectional issue out of every progressive step which can be taken to improve local conditions.”

With the passage of the Housing Act of 1949, America embarked on a new urban policy intended to restore the nation's neglected cities, which would dramatically increase Moses' power again. The laws introduced a controversial program known as Title I, a regulation that
enabled the government to claim private property—citing eminent domain—and develop the land in partnership with private companies for the benefit of the public good.

A leading force behind the legislation was Ohio's powerful senator Robert A. Taft, the embodiment of the Republican Party's conservative wing, who was both a Moses ally and a fellow Yalie. Moses kept a close tab on the housing law as it worked its way through Congress. When it finally passed, he made sure he had multiple projects that were “shovel-ready.” Moses would ultimately claim $65.8 million in Title I funding for New York—more than any other American city (his closest competitor was Chicago, which received $30.8 million in federal largesse). In the decades after WWII, urban renewal would become a much-reviled phrase—Mumford considered the term “a filthy word”—and in the minds of many, Moses would come to personify the expression.

Of all Moses' critics, his most vocal—and eloquent—was Mumford, who opposed nearly every public works project that the Master Builder embarked on. For nearly as long as Moses was a titanic source of power in New York, Mumford used his position at
The New Yorker
to combat Moses' vision of urban America. A true Renaissance man, Mumford's interests were even more catholic than Moses'; his nearly two-dozen books touched upon history, philosophy, architecture, science, art, and literature.

Born in Queens but raised in Manhattan, Mumford celebrated urban architecture that lived in harmony with nature, practicing what he preached. In 1922 he moved his family to Sunnyside Gardens, Queens—the first planned “garden city” community in the United States—where he lived until 1933. Although at first he championed Moses' work, particularly his scenic parkways and Jones Beach (a “masterpiece,” he called it), by the advent of the 1939–40 New York World's Fair, the pair were at odds. Mumford was not in the least impressed by “the World of Tomorrow” or the Fair's other attractions. “[The Fair] has no architectural character whatever,” Mumford wrote. As for GM's much-celebrated Futurama exhibit, he felt that “what the Futurama really demonstrates is that by 1960 all [rides] of more than fifty miles will be as deadly as they are now in parts of New Jersey and in the
Farther West.” Eventually,
The New Yorker
scribe would describe Moses as “the great un-builder.”

In 1955, shortly after Moses had begun building the Long Island Expressway, Mumford launched a spirited attack on the project—and on Moses—in the pages of
The New Yorker
. Moses' New York, Mumford thought, had “become steadily more frustrating and unsatisfactory to raise children in, and more difficult to escape from for a holiday in the country.” By now, both men were diametrically opposed in their core beliefs. While Moses famously claimed that “cities are created by and for traffic,” Mumford firmly believed and repeatedly stated that highways do not mitigate traffic; they create it. “A city exists, not for the constant passage of motorcars, but for the care and culture of men,” said Mumford, who in 1961 published his award-winning book,
The City in History.

Not that Moses cared. He lumped Mumford in with the academic critics “who build nothing.” In the meantime, Moses continued to accumulate positions—and power—like trophies; La Guardia's successor, Mayor William O'Dwyer, added Construction Coordinator and Chairman of the Emergency Committee on Housing to his growing portfolio. By the 1950s it was impossible to build anything in New York without Moses' consent. If he opposed a project—as he did when Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley wanted to build a new ballpark in Brooklyn—it never happened; if he wanted a project realized—a baseball stadium in his favored Flushing Meadow Park in Queens—it was built.

But for all his power and influence,
Title I almost proved Moses' undoing. Each time he embarked on the construction of new housing, streets and neighborhoods had to be condemned, and the unfortunate souls who called those neighborhoods home had their lives upended. Over the course of his Title I reign, Moses uprooted tens of thousands of New Yorkers, old and young alike, replacing neighborhoods with concrete-slab towers. “There is nothing wrong with these buildings,” Mumford wrote after taking a tour of a few newly created housing projects, “except that, humanly speaking, they stink.”

In 1959 a scandal revealed that notorious mob boss Frank Costello, button man Vinny “the Chin” Gigante, and other assorted mafiosi were involved in one of Moses' Title I public housing programs. While Moses didn't know of the mob connection, the incident stained his reputation and, most infuriating, allowed his media critics an opportunity to publicly tar and feather him.
Costello Pal Got Title 1 Deal,
roared the
New York Post
;
Banker Had Warning on Costello Pal,
clamored the
New York
World-Telegram.