The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

After losing the Battery Park project, Moses was still determined to close down the aquarium at Fort Clinton in an act of “revenge, pure and simple” (678). The aquarium was very popular and accessible to poor people as well as rich people. Thanks to his “possession of unlimited powers over park administrative decisions” (681), he simply declared the aquarium obsolete. Successive legal challenges only proved that “Moses had virtually absolute power in city parks” (683). The outrage succeeded in saving the historic building but not the aquarium. The cost of stopping Moses was also huge, while the replacement aquarium in Coney Island, Brooklyn, was expensive and difficult to reach.

During World War II, the Tunnel Authority struggled to generate revenue. Moses launched another attempt to wrest away its power, including trying to slander the reputation of the tunnel’s engineer, Singstad, with dubious claims about his political beliefs and morals. La Guardia, needing Moses’s support in an election year, finally relented and gave Moses what he wanted. Moses gained an “absolute monopoly” over all automobile transportation in New York City (695). With federal funds, toll revenues, bank bonds, and other revenue sources, Moses had access to billions of dollars to make his dreams a reality.

The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, which connected Manhattan and Brooklyn, was a success, even if Moses publicly disparaged it. Importantly, the merging of the two authorities expanded his power and access to funds.

President Roosevelt died in 1945. At the same time, Mayor La Guardia was dying. He announced that he would not run again for the mayorship and offered his support to an independent named Newbold Morris, who was running against Tammany Hall’s William O’Dwyer. O’Dwyer had promised Moses further control over the “construction of public housing” (700) and all major public works in the city. Moses supported O’Dwyer, who won the 1945 mayoral election. La Guardia passed away in 1947 and there was no one left who could “control” Moses.

Post-war America embarked on a campaign of urban renewal, an unprecedented program of investment in rebuilding derelict neighborhoods. Moses was appointed as the vaguely defined City Construction Coordinator. Since there was “no definition of the position’s powers, he could write the definition himself” (704). Moses took over all housing and renewal projects in the city, positioning himself as the only person permitted to negotiate between the city and the federal government. He filled every position with his allies. Moses was now working on parks, roads, housing, dams, bridges, and many more projects; anyone who wished to challenge him had to do so on many fronts. He also enjoyed positive press coverage and strong public support. Over the terms of three successive governors, he was given authority over the construction of “arterial highways which would do so much to shape the future [of New York City]” (711).

Under La Guardia, the corrupt influence of Tammany Hall had been pushed back. With La Guardia gone, however, corruption and greed fueled New York politics once again. Moses, in charge of so many contracts, awarded big projects (and the resulting massive profits) to favorable contractors in exchange for power and support. His spending was cloaked in secrecy, thanks to the nature of the authority he ran. The press has no interest in digging into Moses’s political empire. Moses might have seemed honest in a legal sense, but Caro asserts that “in terms of power, Robert Moses was corrupt” (722). He had close links to Tom Shanahan, a banker who shunned fame but orchestrated the complicated financial web of donations, fees, payoffs, loans, bonds, and everything else needed to fuel the corrupt system. Moses placed his vast funds at Shanahan’s disposal by using his bank. In turn, Shanahan used these deposits to make himself very rich.

Moses also used a team of detectives to dig up the “dark secrets” about anyone who opposed him. He always ensured that his associates were rewarded, especially the banks that bought the bonds issued by his authority. Among these beneficiaries was Chase Manhattan Bank, operated by the Rockefeller family, which Caro notes was “very probably the single most powerful financial institution on the face of the earth” (734). Moses also allied with labor unions, construction firms, and automobile manufacturers. He made deals with churches, politicians, and civic leaders. Whenever someone objected to his plans, he called in his favors, and the most powerful people in New York would telephone the objector and insist that they cooperate with Moses. In effect, Moses creates a new political system, “one which revolved around him” (748). He was no longer “responsible to the public” (753), holding the decision-making power to reshape the city at the most important time in its history. He became, as Caro calls him, “the supreme power broker” (754).

Over the course of his career, Moses worked with numerous mayors. His relationship with them illustrated his power in post-war New York City. O’Dwyer began his term by giving Moses even more power. He was stunned by the true cost of Moses’s projects, and as the city flirted with bankruptcy, he listened to Moses’s plans to avert a financial crisis. His proposals involved expanding his power, building new public works, and levying a series of taxes that “would fall heaviest on the city’s poorest inhabitants” (759). Meanwhile, the middle and upper classes—the city’s “car-owning classes” (760)—would benefit from the highways that Moses planned to build. O’Dwyer, in his desperation, ceded even “more power” to Moses.

However, Moses’s failure to sell bonds for the development of Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy Airport) resulted in “significant gaps” in Moses’s popular support. Nonetheless, he kept his power. One of his biggest projects was securing the contract for the United Nations headquarters to be built in New York City. He secured a huge donation from John D. Rockefeller to fund the project.

This fueled his arrogance and his sense of domination over O’Dwyer, who appointed Moses as head of the mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance. The federal Title I legislation granted Moses the power of eminent domain, allowing him to seize properties from private individuals. He could evict people from their homes, taking over entire apartment buildings and city blocks in the name of urban renewal.

Moses withheld his support for O’Dwyer’s 1949 reelection campaign until he was granted yet more influence and power. When O’Dwyer won, Moses was locked in a power struggle with one of the mayor’s aides, Jerry Finklestein. The two eventually clashed over building the Mid-Manhattan Elevated Expressway, which would have built elevated highways connecting Manhattan to areas outside the city. Finklestein’s insistence that local communities have some say in their renewal was cast aside in favor of Moses’s supreme authority. At this time, O’Dwyer became increasingly beset by scandal as his previous associations with the criminal underworld came to light. In 1950, he resigned and fled to Mexico.

Despite their association, O’Dwyer’s resignation made Moses’s power even greater. O’Dwyer’s successor was an unremarkable Tammany Hall politician named Vincent Impellitteri, who was regarded as “amiable but slow-witted […] a joke among political insiders” (788). Since he needed to quickly secure public favor, he allied himself with the popular figure of Moses. The new mayor was timid and insecure, and he soon depended on Moses for everything. He adopted all of Moses’s suggestions, appointed Moses’s men to important positions, and imposed Moses’s desired taxes. Any desire to make a rational plan for the future of the city was crushed by Moses’s force of will. Moses was, in effect, the mayor in all but name. As before, Moses spent all the city’s funds on roads, bridges, and parks, forsaking any investment in schools, hospitals, or social programs. Impellitteri was defeated in the Democratic mayoral primary by Robert F. Wagner Jr. in 1953.

Wagner was elected mayor. Moses had known Wagner since he was a young boy, but he mistakenly believed that Wagner respected him. Instead, Wagner tried to check Moses’s power. He tried to skip over reappointing Moses’s Planning Commission membership during the mayoral inauguration, but (in the incident related in the Introduction) Moses bullied and humiliated Wagner into doing what he wanted. There was “constant tension” between Moses and Wagner, but Moses typically got his way.

Moses worked hard to execute his plans. He took occasional vacations but often turned these into work trips. He remained as “tireless” at 70 as he was at 30, even writing a trashy novel that remains unpublished. Though he worked hard and wielded immense power, he lacked personal wealth. He spent as much as he earned, and though people assumed he was a rich man, he was often cash-poor. Nevertheless, he used his jobs to live in “imperial style” (812). He threw lavish parties to entertain influential people, writing these expenses off in the authority’s books or charging them to the government. His parks had stadiums, theaters, and many facilities that he used to entertain foreign and domestic dignitaries. He loved to play the role of “most gracious host in the world” (822). His hospitality was a reward for those who pleased him, and he used “its withdrawal as a subtle punishment” (826). His hard work was his legacy, and he reshaped New York as he desired.

Each public work was a testament, he believed, to his legacy and greatness. In his creations, he felt he was “comparable only to some elemental force of nature” (830). He was arrogant, believing himself to be above the law. To Moses, World War II was “no more than an irritating interruption to his plans” (833). Since he would not listen to the opinions of other people, he failed to recognize the changing role of the car in American life. Having never driven, he did not care about traffic, seeing it only as an excuse to build more roads.

At the same time, he also lost his hearing. He refused to wear a hearing aid and eventually could not use the telephone. Caro uses his deafness as a symbol of his refusal to listen to anyone else.

Increasingly, Moses sought to build his highways through (rather than around) “the heart of the city” (838). To do so, he had to evict thousands of families from apartment blocks and destroy longstanding communities.

One such highway is the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which bisects the Bronx. The complexity of the Cross-Bronx Expressway in engineering terms was “immense” (842). Another project, the Verrezano Narrows Bridge, which would connect Brooklyn and Staten Island, was so large that “allowance had to be made for the curvature of the earth” (843). He began to cut through the “tangle of red tape” that would delay any ordinary politician (844), negotiating for blocks and roads “as if the city were a giant Monopoly board” (845). Moses gloried in finding solutions to these complex legal, political, and engineering problems in the manner of a totalitarian ruler. He was less concerned or interested in the people he displaced to do so. As Caro states, he solved these problems by simply “ignoring democracy” (848).

One particular mile of the Cross-Bronx Expressway passes through the East Tremont neighborhood. The neighborhood was home to working-class, largely immigrant people who had built a thriving and affordable local community in the city. To them, East Tremont was like a “family” (853). Though it was largely Jewish, the area was an “urbanizing and staging area” for recent immigrants and upwardly mobile people or color (857). The East Tremont community proudly welcomed these people and retained its identity among demographic changes.

Moses did not care about the community and issued eviction notices in 1950 so that he could begin work on his highway project. While his government bodies promised to help the residents find new accommodation, these promises were largely empty. Soon, Moses’s “army of grime-covered demolition workers” (860) was knocking down the apartment blocks as the residents struggled with moving to livable or affordable housing.

The residents mistakenly believed they could rely on Moses to help them. They knew him through his carefully curated public mythology as a “man above politics and bureaucrats” (863). If they just showed him a viable alternative, they hoped, they might be able to save their neighborhood. They presented him with a plan that would be cheaper and even easier to build, but Moses rejected it. A group of housewives, led by Lillian Edelstein, campaigned for the plan, but they could not overcome Moses’s power and influence. Moses won, and the East Tremont neighborhood was torn up to make room for his road.

Though Moses rushed to evict the people of East Tremont, the funding for the road was still not in place. Project costs were mounting rapidly and could no longer be concealed. At the same time, traffic congestion was becoming far worse than anyone predicted. While the community was destroyed and the road delayed, East Tremont became riddled with crime and poverty. Anyone who remained was subjected to constant loud noises, “battalions of trucks” (887), and the prospect of living next to a construction site. The people who moved into the neighborhood were largely “impoverished Negroes” (888), and the old identity of East Tremont vanished, replaced by poverty, noise, and pollution. The “spread of urban decay” (890) could not be halted; it was imposed on East Tremont by Moses.

The end of World War II caused cars to explode in popularity, and New York’s streets rapidly filled with cars. Moses responded with even more bridges and roads. Each time he built more, however, he only encouraged more cars into the city. At the same time, he was “destroying mass transportation facilities” (897) which was the only realistic way to alleviate such a problem. Soon, any empty land was being used to provide parking. The suburbs outside the city were shaped by the popularity of cars, creating spread-out, alienated communities that contrasted sharply with the densely populated urban areas, which were made possible by mass transit. Mass transit was “the only answer” (901) but Moses was steadfastly against it.

In the 1950s, the tide of public opinion began to slowly turn against cars and toward public transport. When city planners tried to plan anything resembling a future mass transit network, even when the costs were low and would save the city billions of future dollars, Moses refused to implement even the most sensible, most viable plan. Moses, still wedded to the thinking of a time when “roads were, like automobiles, sources of relaxation and pleasure” (908), refused to do anything other than build more roads and bring more cars into the city. Millions of cars caused chaotic scenes of congestion every single day, and people spent hours each day idling in traffic jams as they commuted to work. Whenever the city tried to plan for mass transit, however, Moses fought “such proposals to the death” (918).

The increased traffic meant increased revenue from the many toll roads and bridges operated by the Triborough Authority. The increased revenue gave Moses even more to spend on his projects, but even this was not enough for his ambitious plans. If his bonds were ever paid off, then the authority would be shut down. Moses, in the pursuit of profit and power, reached an alliance with his old rival, the Port Authority. He suggested “a plan of staggering scope” (923), building “a system of new arterial highways” (925) and bridges far beyond anything he had built so far. Moses also allied with “The Highwaymen” (927), a collection of interested parties who stood to benefit financially and politically from his projects. Car manufacturers, labor unions, construction firms, and many more supported Moses’s plans, typically at the expense of mass transit. Triborough and the Port Authority had more than enough funds available to build modern (and future-proof) public transportation in the city that would benefit millions of people, but Moses refused to even entertain the idea. Everything, instead, was spent on “facilities for the automobile” (930).

In the meantime, the archaic subway systems were left to fall into dangerous levels of disrepair. The New York train systems were actively harmful and depressing for those who rode them. The companies who ran them were all “either bankrupt or teetering on the brink” (939). As such, 1955 was a point of no return for New York City. This was the year when the city could have built a mass transit system but instead doomed itself—through Moses’s immense power—to spend everything on cars, roads, highways, and bridges. Even buses were deliberately excluded, as Moses insisted that many bridges (especially those to parks or wealthier neighborhoods) be designed at a height to prevent buses from passing beneath them. This prevented the poor people who rode the buses from using these roads. When public studies showed how even the lavishly expensive highways could include some cheap provisions to include future public transport systems, Moses rejected these ideas out of hand. Caro asserts that Moses condemned the people of New York “for generations to come” (954), even as his highways became even more congested.