Moses And Monolithism

ROBERT MOSES was never very well known to people who lived outside of New York City, and as time passes fewer and fewer New Yorkers will remember the man who, more than anyone else, built the city around them. Moses was responsible for building every major parkway, highway and expressway in New York City with the single exception of the East River Drive; he built every one of the city's bridges constructed since 1909; he built, in addition to more than a quarter of a million anonymous public housing units, Lincoln Center, the U.N. headquarters, and Shea Stadium.

Moses's name appeared constantly in the press, but the news media were generally content to echo his press releases and confine themselves to orgies of adulation every time Moses cut the ribbon for a bridge or a playground. Robert A. Caro's The Power Broker is only the second book-length study of Robert Moses to be published--but it almost singlehandedly makes up for this lack of biographical information about a man whom Lewis Mumford called the greatest influence on American cities in this century.

Caro spent six years interviewing everyone he could find who had known Moses well, who had served under him, or who had had his career destroyed by him. Caro waded through forty years of Moses's press releases and examined the hitherto closed books of Moses's Port of New York Authority. The Power Broker is a 1200-page monstrosity that is a mirror of its subject--oversized, uncompromising, and ruthlessly partisan.

Caro's treatment of Moses is a fine blend of appalled contempt for the man himself and grudging respect for his enormous achievement. The only way to build things on the scale Robert Moses wanted to build them was by wielding political power on a commensurate scale. But after years in office, Moses became, predictably, less and less concerned with building and more and more concerned with power. Governors came and governors went, mayors were able to govern New York City or they were not, but Robert Moses remained in control of the fiefdom he had built.

"Triborough" had its own flag, its own police, its own island and a constitution in the form of "obligations to bondholders" which made it independent of city, state or federal control. With his uncanny ability as a drafter of legislation, Moses tricked mayors and governors into giving him power on a scale they never intended to and making sure that they couldn't take it away. In the end, it took the extraordinary coincidence that Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York and his brother David controlled the Chase Manhattan Bank, which was the trustee of the Triborough bondholders, to make him vulnerable. And the Rockefellers were only able to depose him because, in the course of putting together the 1965-6 New York City World's Fair, he had lost the support of public opinion and the press, which for forty years had allowed him to blackmail public officials by simply threatening to resign.

Moses got things done by hook or by crook. He blackmailed politicians into supporting his proposals by threatening to reveal dirt his "bloodhounds" had dug up--his dossiers were the terror of state politics. Triborough's vast patronage in the fields of construction, engineering, banking and insurance were doled on the basis of loyal support. Moses's opponents were ruthlessly blacklisted. His own brother--whose existence he never publicly acknowledged--was refused work as the qualified engineer he was because Moses had conceived a grudge against him. As the guardian of his brother's trust funds, Moses saw to it that he hardly received a cent from the family millions.

The support Moses enjoyed from the public was at least partly based on the reputation for reforming liberalism he earned in his early youth. While always calling himself liberal, Moses was a staunch conservative, even a reactionary, underneath. Moses had nothing but contempt for the filthiness and stupidity of the masses for whom he built parks, playgrounds and beaches. He starved mass transit because he was concerned chiefly with the welfare of those citizens substantial enough to own cars. He refused to let the subway system build an extension to Jones Beach--because he didn't want the great unwashed to bathe there. And of the 255 playgrounds he built in New York City during the thirties, exactly two were in black neighborhoods.

IF MOSES'S methods were devious and his pride revolting, his achievements remain impressive. Even in their self-conscious pomposity, Moses's works were on a scale none of his contemporaries in city planning could visualize. Moses didn't start out building in the sterile, boring style of architecture that New York City's public schools and park benches typify. When it opened, Jones Beach was the most carefully and creatively designed public work of its size in the country. Moses personally selected all the building materials, and many of the smaller touches--wrought-iron direction markers, for example--came from his imagination. But it was one thing to give Moses unlimited power to transform a deserted sandbar like Jones Beach and another to allow him to extend it over previously inhabited regions. Moses's expressways tore the guts out of neighborhoods and his urban renewal projects forced a quarter of a million New Yorkers out of their homes.

It is impossible to conceive of New York muddling its way through the automobile age without Robert Moses. For most of his 40 years in power, Moses was the only man in New York with the expertise and the influence to build large public works. Only Moses had the teams of designers ready with blueprints, the muscle to get appropriations and the independent organization that allowed him to circumvent corrupt contractors. None of Moses's bridges are built with oatmeal-adulterated cement. None of Moses's bridges ever fell down, and--barring catastrophe--none will.

Caro's book comes close to being a history of New York from the first decades of the century to the present. If Caro tends to see Robert Moses behind every brick, well, he was there almost always. But Caro's attack on the Moses myths is nearly as overblown, at least in style, as the myths themselves. He writes breathlessly, and sometimes The Power Broker sounds more like a harangue against a political opponent than a well-researched biography:

The official records of most public agencies are public records, but not those of public authorities, since courts have held that they may be regarded as the records of private corporations, closed to scrutiny by the interested citizen or reporter.

This was very important to Robert Moses. It was very important to him that no one be able to find out how it was that he was able to build.

Because what Robert Moses built on was a lie.

CARO sometimes writes as if he were lecturing his readers about very difficult subjects, and leads them through the not-very-complicated reasons why New York banks were anxious for Moses's Port Authority bonds (they were tax-exempt, very safe, and paid higher interest than similar bonds) as if he were explaining the Federal Reserve System to a group of ten year olds. But The Power Broker is one of the most interesting books to appear recently on the tired subject of New York. Caro concludes that a democratically-biased system of checks and balances is unable to build vast public works without the warping influence of a demon like Moses. Caro tends to underestimate the extent to which Moses himself created the difficulties that surrounded public construction by the the "checks and balances" sector. But at a time when there are people on the loose who go on building things like the World Trade Center, Caro's book is good medicine. After all, it was the same Nelson Rockefeller who threw Moses out who built Rockefeller Center and Albany Mall.

Caro's indictment of Moses is devastating and, for the moment, unanswerable. But all this cannot obscure the fact that New York State enjoys some 45 per cent of the total acreage of state parks in all 50 states--because, in part, Moses was powermad. Now that Moses is gone, and we don't have to worry about him running an expressway through our living-rooms, we can safely acknowledge that some of his projects are of a magnitude of imagination and execution that requires extraordinary quantities of visionary imagination as well as raw power.