landingtree

(Or 'Having liveblogged The Power Broker, part 2'? I feel like at this point it's just normal blogging. Anyway.)

Robert Moses now seems to be a snowball rolling downhill. His power and money let him get more power and money. In the fifteen years after World War 2, he spent more money on New York infrastructure than the city did. He got it from bridge and tunnel tolls and from control of where federal funds went.

After the departure of La Guardia, who'd run as an independent – or as a fusion candidate? I am not solid on the distinctions here - and delivered a temporary end to the Tammany machine, corruption came back to the city. Moses had seven hundred million dollars in the Triborough Authority from tolls, and as a public authority, the press could not see its books. He could give that money easily and discreetly to anyone.

We get a title drop at last, at the end of a long chapter outlining the structure of Moses’ political machine.

Essentially the structure was: he had money, and could control anyone who wanted it. But the chapter goes into the different constituencies who did want money, and how they related to him - the politicians, the unions, the shop owners, the Catholic Church, the borough presidents.

(I may need to listen to it again when not making a cake, I zoned out for some parts.)

He was drafting plans for highway networks that not only weren’t effectively regulated, but which no authority outside his own organisation even saw before they were complete, and which no one could modify in any real way. These are the years of slum clearance and blighting highways, when no local body could make its voice heard to make recommendations.

…

And what does he want to do with his power? The next chapter goes through his dealings with the postwar mayors.

The first mayor, O’Dwyer, inherits a complete lack of public works budget, is overwhelmed. Moses immediately presents a plan of action involving doubling subway fare and using the resulting liquidity to build highways. He also raises various taxes unlikely to impact the wealthy, of course.

The Democrat leadership in the city hates this and suggests alternatives. (Such as getting the state to give some of its tax surplus back to the city.) Moses blackmails them with information he’s dug up about past dirty dealings, and they shut up.

Next, Robert Moses gets a mayor who has no idea what being a mayor means: a nice man who is absolutely controllable, who was put in the line of mayoral succession for demographic reasons (they wanted a reliable Italian to join Jewish and Irish holders of high office) and who is almost surprised to find himself actually winning the mayoralty when his predecessor O’Dwyer resigned, fleeing investigation for old mob connections. O’Dwyer had stood up to Moses now and then, or at least had his ear equally bent by a canny reformer; but most of those gains were lost under the new mayor, Impellitteri.

Moses was de facto mayor during Impellitteri’s term, and Impellitteri lost the re-election due to the public’s feelings about his policies. But the public did not know the policies were Moses’s, and couldn’t have done much about it even if they had.

…

At this point an ineffectual enemy of Moses is the City Planning Commission, whose long-ago-commissioned Master Plan for the city would shape land use in those areas not fully developed. Unless land was set apart early on for things like schools and colleges, there would be no land left to put those things in sensible places - a lot of the city already failed to do this and students were busing ridiculous distances to overcrowded schools. At the same time, the Plan might have prevented redundant or contradictory planning from multiple departments which didn’t talk to each other effectively. Moses did not want the Plan. The Plan mouldered.

Moses is also an opponent of maintenance. He is not even allocating funds to maintain the roads he has already built. It seems to be the building itself he wants - the new works. After that it can go to hell.

…

Yet another way Moses’ power is self-sufficient: engineers are trained by being on big projects. Moses appoints only people who will be unquestioningly loyal to his big projects. When the mayor wants to employ an engineer on something else a few years downstream, he finds a labor pool dominated by those who have come up under Moses and owe him everything comfortable about their lives.

…

Caro lists four reasons why Robert Moses’ planning got worse as time went on.

First, he surrounded himself deliberately with people who never disagreed with him.

Second, he never drove a car himself - he liked being stuck in traffic, because the back of his limousine was an office and he could get on with work. As car sales boomed and congestion grew, he had no feeling for what congestion was actually like for other motorists.

Third, he made himself so busy in the thirties and forties that he had almost no time to stop and think; Caro points out that a lot of the genuinely excellent ideas of his early career came about at times when he had too little work to do and plenty of time to stare musingly at parkland from the windows of trains.

And fourth, in the forties and fifties he went seriously deaf, and he refused all visible accommodations such as hearing aids; this was just about his first brush with physical frailties and he wasn’t going to let it get into his public image, or, presumably, his self-image, so he was increasingly unable to hear what the people he was meeting with were actually saying. Not that his early work was flawless - but his late work became a self-caricature, imposing plans onto New York in the forties and fifties which might have made sense in the twenties but didn’t anymore.

And now I walk on, partway through a chapter about the engineering challenges of the things he built, full of comparison to things like the length of the Roman roads, the distance from the earth to the Moon, etc. He built more superhighways in 1945 in New York than there were everywhere else put together, Caro says. (I boggled a bit at that. The book doesn’t actually define superhighway, or hasn’t yet.)

And next comes the chapter about the people who used to live in the places the roads went, I suspect.

…

Chapter 37: 1500 families are kicked out of their homes by Robert Moses in order that a road shall be built with a slight bend in it instead of continuing straight.

Why? The author cannot determine. Several unprovable reasons are discussed.

But this chapter is told from the point of view of the residents of the neighbourhood being knocked down, East Tremont. They campaign for years to have the route moved. It is hard to overstate how nonsensical Moses’ route is, and no one in his circles is prepared to state a reason for it besides ‘The alternative you propose is impossible.’

This was a campaign of housewives, bussing to city hall in droves while their husbands couldn’t take a day off work. They could not afford the legal fees to oppose Moses in the courts, and every political ally they convinced to join them - including the incoming mayor, who made public promises of support - eventually caved to Moses’ demands and stopped giving them the time of day.

Moses’ road can be seen on Google Maps today, not proceeding through the available green space along the side of a park, but swerving as though aiming to maximise harm.

…

I consider the Ancient Greek hell, scarcely populated by punished sinners: only four or five were singled out for such fates.

(I consider that those four or five had mostly offended gods personally; I consider that late-career Robert Moses would probably have gotten on with Zeus just fine.)

…

I walk. I learn about Robert Moses now with a sense of grim completionism.

He knows exactly what he’s doing by excluding poor non-car-owners from his plans. That’s the effect he wants to achieve.

He does not know about induced demand, and sincerely believes that building more highways is the solution to congestion.

His circle of sycophants and his degree of power mean that no one can tell him this even though, the fifties, lots of other people have worked it out.

He has refused to bundle a light railway with his airport expressway. An engineer was demoted for pointing out the way the expressway without the rail would fail, the way it would clog and require umpteen new parking lots which would themselves create new kinds of congestion within the airport itself, and the inexorable growth of air travel which would compound these problems over time.

Now these things have happened.

…

Caro chronicles the rise and fall of public awareness of the traffic problem: how it crests, falls as people acclimatise, then crests again after WW2 ends and American car growth resumes, and as Moses’ timeline for fixing the problem fails completely. By 1952, even the newspapers generally favourable to Moses are beginning to have some coverage of the idea that maybe public transit matters as well as highways.

(Still waiting for the appearance of Jane Jacobs, by the way. She could arise at any time, perhaps even in the next few sentences, for I am reminded of her by a discussion of the idea of pedestrian malls.)

[Note: Jane Jacobs does not appear in this book at all.

ambyr told me the reason for this: she had a whole chapter in the first draft, but it was one of several chapters Caro had to cut for length. I boggle slightly at this thousand-page book being the short draft, while regretting both the loss of the Jacobs chapter and the loss of material on the Port Authority, a recurring character in the story which I never really felt I had a handle on. I’m pleased to learn this isn’t (only) because I zoned out during some necessary exposition.]

…

I circle the airport, listening to the terrible state NY public transit ended up in by the end of Moses’ reign - from one of the best and safest urban rail systems to one of the worst and most dangerous.

…

Meanwhile! Moses has gotten used to being able to chop down trees when he wants to build parking lots and tear up green space for paved playgrounds. Residents complain, no one listens, life goes on.

However, in trying to replace a half-acre of Central Park with a parking lot for the Tavern on the Green, he picks a very bad fight.

The start of his fall is not particularly just, but it makes so much media sense. The land he wants to pave is next to apartments inhabited by rich people, by artists, even by an old Hollywood star. It also - unlike the poor neighborhoods which tried and failed to fight him in the past - contains lawyers and media people who are willing to work for free.

He is paving the land for the sake of a private restaurant.

(A very expensive private restaurant, with Moses on record from decades earlier saying that the only concession food sellers in parks should be affordable ones.)

The people most offended by what he’s doing are mothers whose kids play in that particular bit of park.

…

And the New York press loves Central Park like nothing else. Moses has torn up parks in well-to-do neighborhoods before, and he thinks it isn’t different, but this is a story to which every New York paper and television news channel sends a reporter, and what they see is Moms vs. Moses.

Moses uses his usual underhand tactics to start tearing down the lovely old maple trees anyway - working at night, working quietly before bringing in the bulldozers - but this time the press reports on it in detail, angrily and sarcastically, and prints pictures of old women and young mothers looking sad, and young boys pointing toy guns heroically at sheepish-looking policemen. (‘We’re in the business, you see,’ says the man who handed the toy gun to the child; this is not his first brush with the media and he knows what will have pathos.)

Moses goes on holiday while all this is happening assuming it will be a flash in the pan. In his absence, it worsens. The strange financial connection between him and the concession restaurant - which is in fact entirely legal though not exactly sympathetic - appears in headlines with a lot of words that say ‘scandal’ to the public. The press begins to realise that nobody is stopping it covering Moses as though he were a normal human, something that had been off the table for his entire career due to a combination of pressure and his still-intact image of incorruptibility.

The court hands down an injunction to stop the development, despite having made the opposite call in a Moses case decades earlier which had all the same precedents but wasn't as big in the newspapers. And Moses backs down. A deal is arranged where the case won’t proceed to a court challenge and after as many routine delays as can be arranged to let the newspapers get bored, Moses will build a nice new playground instead of the parking lot.

But: in the media (except one hostile paper, the Post) he had always been virtuous and incorruptible, and he had never made a bad call, and he had been synonymous with making new green space in the city. Now he would never be those things again.

And in the following chapter a reporter at a loose end asks if he can start looking into Moses, because the concession contract thing is surely only one part of a much bigger story. Instead of saying ‘Don’t be silly, the man’s a recognised public saint,’ his boss says ‘sure, go ahead.’

(This part is novelistically satisfying, just like the early parts of the book were. I don’t think that means it’s more valuable, but I am having more fun than I was during the chapters where Moses just endured like an evil boulder.)

…

The editors who okayed this story - an investigation into Title One housing projects, i.e. the slum clearance plan designed to make more slums and rehouse no one adequately - don’t give it weight. It runs on back pages, and they let Moses rebut every article in an equal amount of space.

But Caro describes a phenomenon that mainly rings bells for me about sexual abuse and harassment reporting: it is hard to get information to put in the first investigative story, but once people read that, once it’s actually been printed, everyone who had wanted someone to tell the truth to for years is suddenly ringing the reporter.

…

Journalists keep digging on Moses. Their papers aren’t too keen on it but neither will they quite stop printing it. Title One gets an ongoing expose, though Moses’ own name does not ring as loudly as it might in that connection.

Then Moses gets another Central Park battle he can’t win, one he doesn’t even seem to want to be fighting: he ends up taking a stand against free Shakespeare.

Joseph Papirofsky - later ‘Papp’ - starts Shakespeare In The Park, a series of free public performances that draw huge crowds and critical acclaim. Moses likes the young man and is happy to work with him, and even seems delighted by the ways Papp gets around some of his own rules.

But Constable, a subordinate of Moses, taking charge of the project of financing Papp’s next season while Moses is on vacation, discovers that Papp had earlier refused to testify to never having been a Communist in front of the Un-American Activities Committee.

Constable blocks funding for Papp, and Moses, who had made it a policy to treat his subordinates as extensions of himself and always back them, isn’t willing to change this.

Papp is another talented goer-to-the-media, though, and once again Moses is fighting on the front pages against something everyone loves.

More troubling to his image still, Papp goes to the Mayor, and it also becomes front-page news that the Mayor is unable even to get Moses to have a conversation about the issue.

In the end, a work-around is reached in the courts; Moses doesn’t appeal, probably because he likes both Papp and Shakespeare; and Papp’s career is more or less made by all the publicity. Moses however- well I’m just about to learn, but I think for him the fight has worse consequences.

…

Reporters from different papers are now sharing the Moses story out between them, keeping it alive by feeding each other scoops so that each paper feels the need to match the other. Moses opens some of the filing cabinets of Title One. His staff fails to entirely clean out incriminating details from them. First some rather minor mob connections are made; these are splashy enough to keep the story on the front pages until reporters can turn up the real secret of the story: that Title One is an instrument of political corruption, that non-slums are being knocked down if it will mean political allies can profit off the purchase of the land or from the subsequent rebuilding contracts.

The press keeps expecting the Mayor to fire Moses, and keeps portraying them as fighting for dominance. Something no reporter understands at this point is that the city’s political machine is Moses’s machine, that the head of each borough profits from Title One, and that the Mayor relies on him completely.

Moses leaves the administration of slum clearance of his own free will, because most of the juice has been squeezed from it, because it’s been tarnishing his name - and because he wants to run the upcoming World’s Fair, which a city employee cannot legally do.

…

Moses resigns as Park Commissioner but leaves a stooge in his old shoes who keeps taking his orders. He has lost public opinion, but doesn’t need it: no one can fire him from his public authority positions, and the books of his authorities are still closed - as the books of private corporations - to the press, their deeper scandals concealed.

“Only Robert Moses could lose Robert Moses his power,” the chapter ends. “And he did.” I listen on, interested to see how Moses manages to shoot himself in the foot badly enough to hurt.

…

Catchup on Moses: basically, he ended up working under Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a stubborn man over whom Moses could get no leverage (partly because he was ridiculously rich.)

By this time Moses was 70, and needed special permission every year or two to be reappointed to his state posts. Rockefeller wanted to talk about moving him on from one of his minor park posts, to begin seeing about an orderly succession for when Moses should actually retire.

Moses flew into a rage at the suggestion - partly because, increasingly deaf and unwilling to ever admit the fact, he may not have heard exactly what Rockefeller said.

He threatened to resign from all his state posts if he were not reinstated in his park posts. And he managed to do this in an arrogant enough way that Rockefeller changed his mind and said, "Yes, sure, your resignations are accepted."

Moses had relied on a media outcry if this sort of situation ever arose: something he could leverage. But the papers were silent.

…

I am still able to feel a bit sad for early impassioned Moses who is finally losing his beloved Long Island park job, since this harks back to the early parts of the book before I hated him so much. But it is satisfying to see someone who has used resignation threats constantly throughout his career actually get taken up on them.

…

Moses resigned his city jobs to run the World’s Fair, and the fair was a disaster: he knew nothing about running fairs, appointed his old cronies who didn’t know either, spent the fair’s money to buy power, and pissed off people from all around the globe. Worst of all, he couldn’t refrain from replying to any insult the press offered him, and the fair’s coverage was thus mainly about empty stalls, overrun expenses, and scandal. So the Fair couldn’t do the job he wanted it to: end up with enough surplus cash to fund the construction of a park on its site that he'd been working towards gradually for forty years.

Moses had already resigned his state jobs. This left him with only two posts: he was still the head of the public authority Triborough, and he had another minor roads job.

The new mayor of New York tried to merge Triborough with another authority and oust Moses. The mayor thought this would be easy, and wandered blithely into a meeting of the state legislature where his bill was demolished by a complete slate of Moses’ political allies. They took joy in the degree to which he’d never had a shot.
But this was the last hurrah. The reason Moses couldn’t be gotten out of Triborough was the bond contracts stipulating how Triborough’s money was to be used. Anyone who broke those contracts could be sued and would have no leg to stand on.

But who would sue? Not the bond holders themselves: it would be too expensive and complex a suit for any individual to carry through alone. The bond holders thus had a representative who pledged to sue on their behalf if necessary.

In this case, the representative of the bond holders was the Chase Manhattan Bank. The Chase Manhattan Bank was controlled by the Rockefeller family. Nelson Rockefeller was the governor of New York who had accepted Moses’ state resignations, and a transit planning enthusiast in his own right: he had no love for Moses.

This was an unlikely chink in Moses’ armour, and one he had no way to block. Rockefeller made it clear that there would be no suit against him as he took control of Triborough. And where in earlier years Moses could have attacked anyone who made a move like this against him using his umpteen other power-bestowing jobs, he was now down to only one. (The mayor had been able to fire him from the minor roads role.)

Moses had enough leverage to insist on being given a job on the board of the new merged authority Rockefeller was creating - he threatened to campaign against Rockefeller’s transit plans in the media. But the job Rockefeller gave him, having promised him an ongoing role in things, was a sinecure with no decision-making power. Moses waited and waited, schemed and schemed for new ways he might get into position to build, but he never did. By this point, he was seventy-nine.

He took to retirement angrily. He swam, he sailed his boat as he’d seldom had time to do. And he filled up with new dreams. By the end of the first year, he had solved - to his own satisfaction, at least - New York’s housing crisis. Build a new development on empty land, move the residents of a slum into it as a unit, demolish the slum, build a new development in its place, move people in from the next slum along… He had the plans all ready to go.

Some of his children and grandchildren prospered. Some died. Some groups still revered him - he was Man of the Year to various organisations. The press mentioned him less and less, and usually as an example of what not to do.

The new administration didn’t get much done. They built in five years less housing than Moses had been having built every year.

Moses watched from the sidelines, fuming. He had built more than anyone ever had, and none of his building was finished to his satisfaction.

There is no postscript that sums up the book or restates what Caro thinks of Moses. The book ends on words whispered between some of Moses loyal supporters, as they gather to hear him speak. “Couldn’t people see what he had done? Why weren’t they grateful?”

Which is a good way of making me take a few steps up out of the pathos of an old man to look back over the rest of the book.