Robert Moses
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Robert Moses (December 18, 1888 – July 29, 1981) was the master builder of 20th century New York City and its suburbs. As the shaper of a modern city, one of his few peers is Baron Haussmann of Second Empire Paris, and he was easily the most polarizing figure in the history of urban planning. Although he never held elected office, Moses was arguably the most powerful person in New York City government from the 1930s to the 1950s. Moses 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 was not without his critics, however. These critics have pointed to many things that they say taint Moses's legacy. The most common criticisms of Moses 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. 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. 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, he was an idealist, and hatched several plans to get rid of patronage hiring in New York City. None went very far, but Moses, due to his intelligence, did catch the notice of Belle Moskowitz, a friend and trusted advisor of Al Smith.
Rising to power with Smith, Moses received numerous jobs which he did extraordinarily well, such as the development of Jones Beach as a public 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 had millions of New Deal dollars to spend, but states and cities had few projects ready. Moses was one of the only people to have plans prepared.
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. Unfortunately, many of Moses's projects were marked by racism and by disdain for the less wealthy citizens of New York City and New York State. He built hundreds of parks and recreation facilities, but just one pool in Harlem. He claimed that he could keep African-Americans from using pools in white neighborhoods by making the water too cold. 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 he demolished numerous middle 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 sized pools under the WPA Program. All 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.
Moses persuaded Governor Smith and the government of New York City to let him have jobs for the state and the city simultaneously, holding at one point twelve separate titles, maintaining four palatial offices across the city and Long Island, and even holding control of all federal appropriations to New York City. For the city, he was parks commissioner, and for the state, he was chairman of the Long Island Parks Commission and Secretary of State (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.
But much of Moses's power went even further than those outlined in his job. Contrary to his public image, Moses horse-traded and dealt out patronage to a startling degree, building hidden support from construction firms, 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.
Triborough
Robert Moses had power over the construction of all public housing projects, but the single position that probably gave him the most power was his chairmanship of the Triborough Bridge Authority.
The Triborough Bridge, actually three bridges, 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. Because New York City and New York State were perpetually strapped for money, but the bridge's toll revenues were in the tens of millions a year, Moses was the only person in New York who could fund large construction projects. (Triborough Bridge)
The battle of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel / Proposed Bridge
In the late 1930s it was decided to build an additional vehicular link between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. The decision was between a bridge and a tunnel. A bridge requires an enormous amount of space where it lands, a tunnel very little. A Brooklyn Battery Bridge would have destroyed Battery Park and (possibly) harmed the financial district. The bridge was opposed by historical preservationists, Wall Street financial interests and property owners, high society people, construction unions (since a tunnel would be more work for them), the Manhattan borough president, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and governor Herbert H. Lehman.
Moses favored a bridge, however, as it could carry more automobile traffic than a tunnel and would 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 has 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 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 when LaGuardia was in charge. Moses' 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 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, to clear the land for the high-rises, he often destroyed almost as many housing units as he built.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, Moses was responsible for the building 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 building.
Moses had direct influence outside the New York area as well. City planners in Portland, Oregon hired Moses to design a freeway network for that city in 1943; he responded by producing a design that called for nearly a dozen freeways crossing the city (which at the time had none). Only six of them were ever seriously considered, and four were built; two others were cancelled as a result of freeway revolts which occurred in Portland in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Car culture
Moses himself never learned to drive, and his view of the automobile was shaped by the 1920s, when the car was considered more for entertainment than utilitarian purposes. Moses's highways were curving, landscaped "ribbon parks," intended to be pleasures to drive through.
It is interesting to note that with all of this, Moses practically predicted the future of the automobile, and influenced it with his own way of design. He seemed to set a precedent for designers in the future in placing the automobile over the human (especially in his destruction of homes for his projects, but more indirectly in the size and scale of the projects). This type and scale has been reproduced time and time again, and is visible not only in the urban environment torn by highways and the sound of cars but also readily seen in suburbia and urban sprawl. While Moses did not start the age of the automobile, he certainly cleared the way (literally and figuratively speaking) for the mentality that both urban and suburban space are indispensable for the automobile.
Arguably, some American cities have begun to overturn this strand of thought, perhaps most important among them Portland, Oregon, which has shown that a refocus upon the pedestrian in architecture and city planning can create an environment which is safe, productive, and enjoyable for a more balanced variety of transportation. San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland also saw numerous freeway projects, planned to go through existing neighborhoods, scaled back or cancelled outright.
End of the Moses era
Moses's reputation began to wane in the 1960s, as people began to appreciate the virtues of neighborhoods and smallness of scale. Moses also started picking fights with the wrong people over the wrong issues. Moses's campaign against free Shakespeare in the Park received negative publicity; Moses's effort to destroy a shaded playground in Central Park to make a parking lot for the expensive Tavern-on-the-Green made him 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, and ultimately the city government rejected it in 1964.
Moses's power was further sapped by his association with the 1964/1965 New York World's Fair. His assumption of an aggregate attendance for this event of 70 million people proved wildly optimistic. Moses's record organizing 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 a sanctioned World's Fair 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 and the 1967 Montreal Expo.
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 very extravagant for an event that was ostensibly being held for a public purpose, and at a loss, yet. 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 from happening.
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 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, he was out of power.
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.
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, in 1974, there were many people who only knew the good Moses had done. Many people had come to see Moses as a bully who disregarded public input, but they had not known that he had stolen his brother's inheritance (in the 1930s, before Moses's rise to prominence), nor how cruel he was in the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, nor how he willfully neglected public transit. Moses's reputation today is in many ways how Caro left it.
Caro paints Moses as uniquely destructive to the urban fabric, but also was fair in leaving the defining question of the entire book as: the city would have been a very different place, maybe good, maybe bad, if Moses had not been around. 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 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 is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
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).
Aside from the sociological view of Moses's accomplishments, there lies the question of urban destruction and suburban mobilization. While not singlehandedly responsible for these things, of course, it seems Moses's work embodied many of the things which characterize the suburban revolution—making an inner city uninhabitable, and clearing the way for the vehicle instead of the human (and thus making it possible for those same inner city residents to travel outward). While at once positive (for it allowed those who were cramped in inner city spaces to flourish outward), it was simultaneously poor for the environment and for people in general (for it began the suburban "identity crisis," or lack of sense of place) and has since begun to be reversed to an extent in some locales by careful, planned steps by the government, private sector, and people alike. (Nowhere is this trend more notable than in Portland, Oregon.)
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.
Impact on landscape and urban design philosophy
Clearly, Moses's work contributed to the rash of expansion in the U.S. thanks to the spreading of the roadway. 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 a great destruction of both land and existing houses (not to mention in neighborhoods he deemed "lower," so to speak), he managed, especially in his later career, to foster great dissent amongst many New Yorkers.
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).
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 and W. Averell Harriman
- Because of his impact on the urban landscape, Moses is honored on Long Island with the Robert Moses Causeway, and Robert Moses State Park. 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
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.