Robert Moses
Robert Moses (December 18, 1888 – July 29, 1981) was the "master builder" of mid-20th century New York City and its suburbs. As the shaper of a modern city, he is compared sometimes to Baron Haussmann of Second Empire Paris, and he was easily the most polarizing figure in the history of urban planning in the United States. Although he never held elected office, Moses was arguably the most powerful person in New York City government from the 1930s to the 1950s. He literally changed shorelines, built roadways in the sky, and transformed vibrant neighborhoods forever. His decisions favoring highways over public transport formed the modern suburbs of Long Island and influenced a generation of engineers, architects and urban planners who spread his philosophies across the nation.
Moses and his works remain strongly criticized in certain circles, to the point of tainting his legacy as a public figure. The most common criticisms include the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people in New York City, contributing to the ruin of the South Bronx and the amusement parks of Coney Island, the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the decline of public transport through disinvestment and neglect. On the other hand, Moses's projects were also considered by many to be necessary for the region's development, and Moses participated in the construction of two huge World's Fairs: one in 1939 and the other in 1964. Moses was also in large part responsible for the United Nations' decision to headquarter in Manhattan as opposed to Washington, D.C. To Moses's critics, however, he will always be remembered for believing that, "cities are for traffic," and, "if the ends don't justify the means, what does?"
Early life and rise to power
Robert Moses was born on December 18, 1888, to assimilated German–Jewish parents in New Haven, Connecticut. Moses's father was a successful department store owner and real estate speculator; his mother was a forceful and brilliant woman, active in the settlement movement, with her own love of building.
After graduating from Yale and Wadham College, Oxford and earning a Ph.D. at Columbia, Moses became attracted to New York City reform politics. At this time a committed idealist, he developed several plans to rid New York of patronage hiring practices. None went very far, but Moses, due to his intelligence, caught the notice of Belle Moskowitz, a friend and trusted advisor of Al Smith.
Moses rose to power with Smith and set in motion a sweeping consolidation of the New York State government. This centralization allowed Smith to run a government later used as a model for Roosevelt's New Deal federal government. Moses also received numerous commissions which he carried out extraordinarily well, such as the development of Jones Beach park. Moses knew the law better than most lawyers and quickly was known as "the best bill drafter in Albany", and he knew engineering better than most engineers. At a time when the public was used to Tammany Hall corruption and incompetence, Moses was seen as a savior of government. Shortly after President Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration, the federal government found itself with millions of New Deal tax dollars to spend, yet states and cities had few projects ready. Moses was one of the few local officials who had ready projects planned and prepared. For that reason, New York City could count on Moses to deliver to it the lion's share of Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and other depresion-era funding.
Influence
At one point, one quarter of federal construction dollars were being spent in New York, and Moses had 80,000 people working under him. Moses spent middle class money on the middle class. Unfortunately, many of Moses's projects were marked by what is now perceived as racism, and he largely ignored the concerns of the poorer citizens of New York City and New York State. He claimed that he could keep African Americans from using pools in white neighborhoods by making the water too cold.[1] After much litigation by private landowners, his highway projects on Long Island followed a circuitous path so as not to cross the properties of wealthy landowners such as J. P. Morgan, while those same highways demolished numerous working class neighborhoods throughout New York City.
During the Depression, however, Moses, along with Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, was responsible for the construction of ten gigantic pools under the WPA Program. Combined, they could accommodate 66,000 swimmers. Some attribute this generous social works program to the fact that Moses was an avid swimmer. An example of such a pool is McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn, now abandoned and in disuse.
Moses persuaded Governor Smith and the government of New York City to allow him to hold state and the city governments jobs simultaneously; at one point he had twelve separate titles, maintaining four palatial offices across the city and Long Island, and actually holding control of all federal appropriations to New York City. For the city itself, he was parks commissioner, and for the state, he was chairman of the Long Island Parks Commission and Secretary of State of New York (1927–1928), as well as chairman of the New York State Power Commission, responsible for building hydro-electric dams in the Niagara/St. Lawrence region.
During the 1920's Moses sparred with Franklin D. Roosevelt, then head of the Taconic State Park Commission, who favored the prompt construction of a parkway through the Hudson Valley, Moses succeeded in diverting funds to his Long Island parkway projects (the Northern State Parkway, the Southern State Parkway and the Wantagh State Parkway), although the Taconic State Parkway was later completed as well. [2] Moses is frequently given credit as the father of the New York State Parkway System from these projects. [3]
As the head of many public authorities, Moses's title as chair gave his entities the flexibilty associated with private enterprise, along with the tax-free, default-free debt associated with government agencies. Contrary to his public image, Moses horse-traded and dealt out patronage extensively, building support from construction firms, investment banks, insurance companies, labor unions (and management), and real-estate developers. Calling on these vast reserves of power, Moses quickly developed a reputation for "getting things done" and used his influence to fast-track projects in legislators' home districts, a tactic for which these same lawmakers repaid him by granting money for ever more ambitious projects. Since the major political force in New York state at the time was the Tammany Hall political machine, Moses may not have attracted much attention for patronage politics.
Triborough Bridge
Robert Moses had power over the construction of all public housing projects, but the one position above all others giving him political power was his chairmanship of the Triborough Bridge Authority.
The Triborough Bridge, a cluster of three separate spans, connects the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens. The legal structure of this particular public authority made it impervious to influence from mayors and governors, due to the language in the bond contracts and multi-year appointments of the Commissioners. While New York City and New York State were perpetually strapped for money, the bridge's toll revenues amounted to tens of millions of dollars a year, making Moses the only person in New York capable of funding large construction projects.
The battle of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel / Proposed Bridge
In the late 1930s a municipal controversy raged over whether an additional vehicular link between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan would be a bridge or a tunnel. A bridge required an enormous amount of space where it makes landfall and a tunnel very little. A "Brooklyn Battery Bridge" would have destroyed Battery Park and physically encroached on the financial district. The bridge was opposed by historical preservationists, Wall Street financial interests and property owners, various high society people, construction unions (since a tunnel would give them more work), the Manhattan borough president, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and governor Herbert H. Lehman.
However, Moses favored a bridge. It could carry more automobile traffic than a tunnel and would also serve as a visible monument. More traffic meant more tolls, and more tolls meant more money and therefore more power. LaGuardia and Lehman, as usual, had no money to spend and the federal government had by this point felt it had given New York enough. Moses, because of his control of Triborough, had money to spend, and he decided his money could only be spent on a bridge.
The United States Navy holds the power to block anything that spans a navigable waterway, so President Roosevelt ordered the Navy to assert that a bridge, if bombed, would block the East River. A dubious claim, it nevertheless stopped Moses. In retaliation for being prevented from building his bridge, Moses dismantled the aquarium that had been in Castle Clinton. Ultimately he was forced to settle for a tunnel connecting Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan, now called the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. A 1941 publication from the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority claimed that the government had forced them to build a tunnel at "twice the cost, twice the operating fees, twice the difficulty to engineer, and half the traffic."
Post-war city planning
Moses's power increased after World War II, when, after the retirement of LaGuardia, a series of politically weak mayors consented to almost all of Moses's proposals. Named city "construction coordinator" in 1946 by Mayor William O'Dwyer, Moses also became the official representative of New York City in Washington, D.C. Moses was also now given powers over public housing that had eluded him under LaGuardia. Moses's power grew even more when O'Dwyer was forced to resign in disgrace and was succeeded by Vincent R. Impellitteri, who was more than content to allow Moses to exercise his power over infrastructure projects from behind the scenes. Moses was now the sole person authorized to negotiate in Washington for New York City projects. He could now remake New York for the automobile. Before Moses, most housing projects in New York were small scale (like the Queensbridge projects on the Queens side of the Queensboro Bridge). With Moses, projects grew to be the spartan, featureless skyscrapers now widely associated with public housing. By 1959, Moses had built 28,000 apartment units on hundreds of acres. Ironically, in clearing the land for high-rises he often destroyed almost as many housing units as he built.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, Robert Moses was responsible for the construction of the Throgs Neck, the Bronx-Whitestone, the Henry Hudson, and the Verrazano Narrows bridges. His other projects included the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Belt Parkway, the Laurelton Parkway, and many more. He was the mover behind Shea Stadium and Lincoln Center, and contributed to the United Nations headquarters.
Moses had direct influence outside the New York area as well. City planners in many smaller American cities hired Moses to design freeway networks for them in the 1940s and early 1950s. Few of these were built; initially postponed for lack of funding, projects still unbuilt by the 1960s were often defeated by the awakening citizen-led opposition movement. The first successful example of these freeway revolts was the blocking of New Orleans' Vieux Carre Expressway, an elevated highway which would have sliced through the French Quarter. Later, successful freeway revolts that saw highway projects either scaled back or cancelled outright also occurred in Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, San Diego, Washington, D.C., Baltimore and eventually even Los Angeles.
Car culture
Moses himself never learned to drive, and his view of the automobile was shaped by the 1920s, when the car was thought of as entertainment and not a utilitarian lifestyle. Moses's highways were curving, landscaped "ribbon parks," intended to be pleasures to drive in. While appearing utopian on its face, Moses's vision of towers, cities and parks linked by cars and highways in practice led to the expansion of wholesale ghettos, decay, middle-class urban flight, and blight.
Beginning in the 1960s and reaching a crescendo in the 1990s, public opinion and the ideals of many in the Planning profession shifted away from this strand of car-oriented thought, instead focusing on the more intimate Jane Jacobs-style approach to urban renewal. Smaller projects in numerous cities have proven that a refocus upon the pedestrian in architecture and city planning can better create an environment that is safe, productive and enjoyable for a variety of transportation modes.[neutrality is disputed] This new type of development is often seen as going hand in hand with modern-day gentrification, the process of displacement of poorer residents in neighborhoods experiencing rapid rises in housing and rental prices.
End of the Moses era
Moses's reputation began to wane in the 1960s, as the public debate on city-planning policy began once again to appreciate the virtues of intimate neighborhoods and smallness of scale. Moses around this time also started picking political battles he could not win. His campaign against the free Shakespeare in the Park received much negative publicity; his effort to destroy a shaded playground in Central Park to make way for a parking lot for the expensive Tavern-on-the-Green restaurant made him many enemies among the middle-class voters of the Upper West Side.
The opposition reached a crescendo over the demolition of Penn Station, which many attributed to the "development scheme" mentality cultivated by Moses (although a poverty-stricken Pennsylvania Railroad was actually responsible for the demolition). This caused many city residents to turn against Moses's plans to build a Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have cut through what is now Greenwich Village and SoHo. One of his most vocal critics during this time was the urban activist Jane Jacobs, whose book The Death and Life of Great American Cities was instrumental in turning public opinion against Moses's plans. Massive public protests broke out over the plan,[citation needed] and ultimately the city government rejected it in 1964.
Moses's power was further sapped by his association with the 1964 New York World's Fair. His assumption of aggregate attendance for this event of 70 million people proved wildly optimistic. Moses's reputation over the organization of the fair was tarnished by his disdain for the opinions of others, his high-handed attempts to get his way in moments of conflict by turning to the press, and the fact that the fair was not sanctioned by the Bureau of International Expositions, the worldwide body supervising such events, which ordered its member nations not to participate. (The United States had already staged the sanctioned Century 21 Exposition in Seattle in 1962. According to the rules of the organization, no one nation could host more than one fair in a decade.) The major European democracies, Canada, Australia and the Soviet Union were all BIE members and thus declined to participate, instead reserving their efforts for the Seattle fair to be used at Expo 1967 in Montreal.
It was further revealed that Moses's salary as head of the Fair Corporation was a guaranteed $1 million, which seemed to many to be extravagant for an event that was ostensibly being held for a public purpose, and at a loss. Moses was also linked in the minds of many to the Fair's accounting scandal when it was revealed that all advance ticket sales, even for those sold for use in 1965, were booked as 1964 revenues, even though there seems to be little if any evidence directly linking him to this error. The fair was seen as an attempt by Moses and his cronies to relive their glory days of the 1939 New York World's Fair, rather than as a useful project for the 1960s.
After the World's Fair debacle, New York City mayor John Lindsay, along with Governor Nelson Rockefeller, sought to use toll revenues from the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority's bridges and tunnels to cover deficits in the city's then financially ailing subway system. Moses, however, opposed this idea and fought to prevent it.
Lindsay removed Moses from his post as the city's chief advocate for federal highway money in Washington afterwards, a small victory in what was largely seen as a political misstep.
But Moses could not so easily fend off Rockefeller, the only politician in the state who had a power base independent of him. The legislature's vote to fold the TBTA into the newly-created Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) could technically have led to a lawsuit by the TBTA bondholders, since the bond contracts were written into state law and under Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution states may not impair existing contractual obligations.
However, the largest holder of TBTA bonds, and thus agent for all the others, was the Chase Manhattan Bank, headed then by none other than David Rockefeller, the governor's brother. No suit was filed, or even discussed.
So, on March 1, 1968, the TBTA was folded into the MTA and Moses was forced to give up his post as chairman of the TBTA. He eventually became a consultant to the MTA but for all practical purposes was now out of power.
Moses had thought he had convinced Nelson Rockefeller of the need for one last great bridge project, a span crossing Long Island Sound from Rye to Oyster Bay. Rockefeller did not press for the project in the late 1960's through 1970, fearing public backlash among suburban Republicans would hinder his re-election prospects. While a 1972 study found the bridge fiscally prudent and environmentally manageable, the anti-development sentiment was now insurmountable and in 1973 Rockefeller cancelled all plans for the bridge. In retrospect, leaving densely populated Long Island landlocked may not have been an optimal policy decision. [4] [neutrality is disputed]
During the last years of his life, Moses concentrated on his lifelong love of swimming and was an active member of the Colony Hill Country Club. He also continued his tradition of swimming daily.
Caro
Moses's image suffered a further blow in 1974 with the publication of The Power Broker by Robert Caro. Caro's 1,200-page opus (edited from over 3,000 pages long) largely destroyed the remainder of Moses's reputation. Caro was deliberately intensely critical of Moses because the author felt that the negative aspects of Moses's planning practices were not sufficiently known to the public. [citation needed] Many people had come to see Moses as a bully who disregarded public input, but they had not known how he had stolen his brother's inheritance in the 1930s before his own rise to prominence, or how cruelly insensitive he was in the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, or how he willfully neglected public transit. Moses's reputation today is in many ways attributable to Caro.
Caro paints Moses as uniquely destructive to the American urban fabric. Yet the author is more neutral in his central premise: the city would have been a very different place -- maybe better, maybe worse -- if Moses had never existed. Other U.S. cities were doing the same thing as New York in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Boston and Seattle, for instance, both built highways straight through their downtown areas. The New York City architectural intelligentsia of the 1940s and 1950s largely believed in such prophets of the automobile as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe and supported Moses. Many other cities, like Newark, Chicago and St. Louis, also built massive, unattractive public housing projects.
Death
Moses died of heart disease on July 29, 1981 in West Islip, New York. The title of his New York Times obituary package is both a found poem and a thumbnail sketch of his life and influence: "Robert Moses, Master Builder, Is Dead at 92; Robert Moses, Builder of Road, Beach, Bridge and Housing Projects, Is Dead; Associate of High Officials; The Grand-Scale Approach; Not a Professional Planner; Part of 'Our Crowd'; Into the Orbit of Power; Fur Coat or Underwear?; An Overwhelming Success; Long Court Fights; Drafted Park Legislation; Moses' Tactics Were Both Extolled and Criticized; Badly Beaten in Election; Built to His Own Tastes; A Sampler of Quotations by Moses; The Face of a Region; and How One Man Changed It." Moses, born Jewish but an adult convert to Christianity[citation needed], was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx following services at Saint Peter's Episcopal Church in Bay Shore, New York.
Legacy and lasting impact
The bridges of Robert Moses are an exemplary and disputed topic in the sociology of technology. The main question is, how much ideology and politics can be built into technology and infrastructure such as bridges? (Cf. Langdon Winner, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" in Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Winter 1980, and reactions on that article, e.g., by Bernward Joerges). For example, the construction of low overpasses on parkways, and the veto of extension of the Long Island Railroad to Jones Beach, were allegedly part of a scheme to prevent the poor and racial minorities (largely dependent on public transit) from accessing the beach while providing easy car access for wealthier, white groups.
Aside from the sociological view of Moses's accomplishments, there lies the question of urban destruction and suburban mobilization. Did Moses's work degrade the quality of life in the inner city? Does increased accessibility from the suburbs improve the quality of life by enabling commuting? Was the general direction of Moses' work a damaging trend which is now being corrected, or a natural part of urban evolution? While Caro and others attributed the urban decay of New York neighborhoods to Moses's aggressive road building, it may be noted cities with far less aggressive postwar highway construction such as Philadelphia and Baltimore suffered similarly negative--or even worse--social trends.[citation needed]
A testament to the enduring nature of his impact can be found in the various locations and roadways in New York State that bear Moses's name. These include two state parks (one in Massena, New York, the other on Long Island), the Robert Moses Causeway on Long Island, the Robert Moses State Parkway in Niagara Falls, New York, and the Robert Moses Hydro-Electric Dam (the source of the majority of New York City's electricity), also in Niagara Falls. Moses also has a school named after him in North Babylon, New York on Long Island. A statue of Moses was erected next to the Village Hall in his long-time hometown, Babylon Village, New York, in 2003, as well as a bust on the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University.
Impact on landscape and urban design philosophy
Clearly, Moses's work contributed to the expansion and spreading of the urban US road network. While definitely having its advantages in some manners as a growing network—physical, governmental, mental, and metaphysical—there were ways in which his work actually went great distances to separate people as well. Given that the majority of his projects involved the destruction of existing structures (not to mention in neighborhoods he deemed "lower"), he managed, especially in his later career, to foster great dissent amongst many New Yorkers.
 | The neutrality of this section is disputed. |
Because of this, however, those aspiring city planners, landscape architects, designers, and all manner of civil engineers know what not to do in terms of designing causeways and parks. There should (at least in a city planning spectrum) be no bias toward corporate or otherwise higher-class citizens, as he showed in the planning of Riverside Park. There should be shown interest and great care when dealing with already existing neighborhoods in planning and design—especially in reference to the lower class. And last, but certainly not least, planners need to discern what place is the automobile's and what place is designated the person's. This conflict, above all, Moses epitomized with his many beltway projects. He made driving enjoyable, and thus spurred the use of the automobile (not that its use would have died out without Moses's contributions).
His particular view on the landscape and automobile has gone on to influence other planners to this day. While there is not the same distribution of the particularities of his design (intense urban destruction in favor of auto routes, revitalization of the auto route for the pleasure of driving), one is able to see a residual effect. Roadways are planted and beautified. So the "necessary evil" that driving has become today could become that much more tolerable (for sitting in a traffic jam with nothing but concrete surrounding is certainly not something many desire).
It is still worth considering, whatever the individual merits of Moses's development projects, their sheer scope against the urban landscape, and the fact many were constructed during the economic travails of the Great Depression - particularly in contrast to the lack of progress New York officials had made by mid 2006 in redeveloping the Ground Zero site of the World Trade Center. Also, none of his many projects were beset with the technical failures of the 2000 era "Big Dig" highway project in Boston. http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/commentary/hc-plcbigdig0730.artjul30,0,5100631.story?coll=hc-headlines-commentary
Some Facts
- Robert Moses held power through five mayors of New York City: Fiorello La Guardia, William O'Dwyer, Vincent Impellitteri, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., and John V. Lindsay
- Moses held power through six Governors of New York: Alfred E. Smith, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert H. Lehman, Thomas E. Dewey, W. Averell Harriman and Nelson A. Rockefeller
- Because of his impact on the urban landscape, Moses is honored on Long Island with the Robert Moses Causeway, and Robert Moses State Park - Long Island. At Niagara Falls there is the Robert Moses Power Dam, and Robert Moses State Parkway follows the Niagara Gorge to Lewiston, New York and beyond.
- In 1945 Moses received a LL.D. from Bates College.
See also
- Car culture
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities
- Transportation in New York City
- Urban sprawl
Further reading
- Caro, Robert A., The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York, New York: Knopf, 1974.
- Lewis, Eugene, Public Entrepreneurship : toward a theory of bureaucratic political power--the organizational lives of Hyman Rickover, J. Edgar Hoover, and Robert Moses, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1980.
- Rodgers, Cleveland, Robert Moses, Builder for Democracy, New York: Holt, 1952.
- Krieg, Joann P. Robert Moses: Single-Minded Genius, Interlaken, New York: Heart of the Lakes Publishing, 1989.