Eminence Domain

Robert Moses is the most reviled man in the history of American urban planning. Robert Caro’s 1974 The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York cemented in place a reputation for abuse of power that remained largely intact for decades. Largely, but not entirely. Now a trio of exhibits in New York City, mounted this past spring in coordination with a symposium at Columbia University and the publication of an extensive catalog of Moses’s public works projects, has summed up the extent to which historians’ perspectives on this brilliant and arrogant man have evolved.

Born into affluence, Moses received degrees from Yale, Oxford, and Columbia but then languished for a decade as a midlevel bureaucrat until he was taken under the wing of New York Governor Al Smith, who appointed him head of the Long Island State Parks Authority in 1924. He soon perfected the art of using of the autonomous, quasi-public agency to centralize control and limit public and legislative scrutiny. In 1934 he added the New York City Parks Commission and the Triborough Bridge Authority to his portfolio, and continued on that aggrandizing path until at one point he simultaneously held twelve separate state, city, and regional offices. As Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson observe in the introduction to Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, the catalog mentioned earlier, “Moses’s public works . . . are so indispensable it is impossible to imagine New York without them.”{1} In 1929 he built Jones Beach on Long Island and two parkways to connect it to the light- and air-starved masses of Gotham. He was directly responsible for the construction of the Triborough Bridge, the Henry Hudson Bridge, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, the Marine Bridge, the Throgs Neck Bridge, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Northern State Parkway, the Southern State Parkway, the Long Island Expressway, the Cross-Island Parkway, Orchard Beach, Jacob Riis Beach, New Rockaway Beach, Bethpage State Park, Sunken Meadows State Park, Marine Park, Pelham Bay Park, five hundred playgrounds, seventeen swimming pools, and the 1964 Worlds Fair. He played a major role in the development of Lincoln Center, the United Nations complex, Shea Stadium, and a dozen major housing projects. He assembled and cleared land for the Manhattan campuses of Fordham, New York University, and the Julliard School, and in Brooklyn for the Pratt Institute and Long Island University.

Fig. 1 McCarren Pool, Greenpoint, Brooklyn. (Photo copyright Andrew Moore, reproduced with permission.)

In a paper read on the first day of the symposium, the urban historian Robert Fishman argued that the beginning of the end for Moses came in 1952, with his plan to extend Fifth Avenue south under the Washington Square arch, across the park, and on downtown as a broad new urban arterial.{2} Residents objected, only to be denounced as malcontents, radicals, and subversives. The “Battle of Washington Square” lasted until 1958, when the city killed the project and closed the park to traffic. The conflict galvanized one of the locals, a minor figure identified in news accounts as Mrs. James Jacobs; three years later her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities would set the consensus view of cities and planning, embodied by Moses and his great public works, on its head. Moses did successfully build his most notorious project, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, in the 1950s and early 1960s, but two even more ambitious schemes, the Mid-Manhattan and Lower Manhattan Expressways, were never started. In 1968 Governor Nelson Rockefeller removed Moses from his last remaining post, as director of the Triborough Bridge Authority, and he withdrew into a resentful retirement made even more bitter by Caro’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book. He made an effort to counter his declining fortunes in a 1970 autobiography titled Public Works: A Dangerous Trade, but the book was as dry and detached as the man himself and sold poorly. He died in 1981, leaving an estate worth less than fifty thousand dollars.

The symposium, organized by Columbia professors Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson, was as much a reappraisal of Caro’s biography as an assessment of Moses’ forty-year career. A constant refrain was that while Moses was indeed a powerful figure and an astoundingly abrasive individual, he was less omnipotent and omniscient than Caro asserted, more a highly talented and astute administrator finely tuned to the shifting winds of financial opportunity. The Long Island parks and parkways of the 1920s used land stockpiled decades before for water reserves and made obsolete by newer aqueducts. The roads and playgrounds of the 1930s were built with Works Progress Administration dollars—in 1936 New York received one out of every seven WPA dollars spent nationwide—and in the 1950s his great expressways were paid for with federal highway funds allocated on a 90/10 matching basis. The feds had money and needed projects to spend it on. Moses provided the projects—the plans, the surveys, the blueprints, the local government approvals, the seed money, all the things Washington was prohibited by law from supplying, but that other cities couldn’t seem to cough up.

Fig. 2 Betsy Head Pool, Brownsville, Brooklyn. (Photo copyright Andrew Moore, reproduced with permission.)

Of the three interlocking exhibits, Remaking the Metropolis, at the Museum of the City of New York, was the most successful.{3} Confined to a restricted gallery space, the exhibit still thought big, tipping visitors back on their heels with artifacts of Moses’s most spectacular successes and most colossal defeats. Its centerpiece was a thirty-foot long model of a road that never was: the Mid-Manhattan Expressway, slashing across town at a fourth-floor height from the Hudson to the East River at Thirtieth Street. An only slightly smaller model of the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge dominated the exhibit’s entry. That idea was killed by Moses’ nemesis Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 in favor of the current tunnel. These models and others were clearly the stars of the show, and it is ironic that nearly all illustrated abandoned projects. (Most had also been in badly deteriorated condition and needed extensive restoration; the preservation of these invaluable relics itself might have adequately justified the exhibits.)

Moses’s completed projects were represented through various wall hangings, including period photographs and documents and a series of new photos taken by Andrew Moore on commission for the exhibits; Moore’s photos are reproduced in the exhibit catalog as well. One noteworthy set in particular, a series of day and night scenes of the infamous Cross-Bronx Expressway, lends support to the contention of the symposium’s most astringent participant, SUNY-Buffalo’s Ray Bromley, that Caro’s extended story of the impact of the Cross-Bronx on the East Tremont neighborhood was selective and distorted. Caro describes an almost postapocalyptic scene, but East Tremont housing was already receiving the lowest possible rating from the federal Home Owner’s Loan Corporation before the highway started, and the neighborhood experienced a cycle of distress and revival in the forty years after construction comparable to others in the South Bronx much farther from the highway. Far from a Moses creation, the Cross-Bronx was first laid out in the 1929 Regional Plan for New York, and “from 1931 [when it was opened] on the George Washington Bridge was like an enormous cannon pointed at the mid-Bronx.” Had Moses not happened, Bromley concluded, the fate of both the expressway and the South Bronx neighborhoods would have been largely the same.

In some ways the Road to Recreation, at the Queens Museum of Art, was the most disappointing of the exhibits. Where the City Museum was cramped for space, Queens had room to spare, yet used it to little advantage. Everything, save for two small video monitors and one model, was hung on the walls. The numerous small photographs of small playgrounds were swallowed up by the huge expanses of wall. The only model, of the unbuilt Long Island Sound Bridge from Oyster Bay to Rye, was shunted off to a dim gallery that otherwise contained only a rather small and desultory display of roads and bridges out of sync with the show’s bright emphasis on beaches, pools, and playgrounds.

Fig. 3 Silver Towers and 110 Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan. (Photo copyright Andrew Moore, reproduced with permission.)

The Queens exhibit appeared to be the loser in a thematic tug-of-war over what should be shown where. The official explanation was that the City Museum exhibit covered Moses’ early career while Queens presented his later works, but I saw no evidence of this; rather, the spoils appeared to have been divided according to a mishmash of theme, geographic interest, and available floor space. The development of playgrounds was presented at Queens, but a display of Moses’s sometimes radical efforts to alter Central Park was placed at the City Museum, as was his still-unrealized attempt to turn Wards Island and Randalls Island into a “Central Park for the Twentieth Century.” The development of Long Island’s Flushing Meadows-Corona Park was discussed at Queens, but the construction of the United Nations Manhattan complex, which Moses originally wanted to put on a 310-acre campus in Flushing Meadows, was covered at the City Museum in a small display. It did include a bronze casting of a breathtakingly innovative playground by sculptor and landscape artist Isamu Noguchi that was favored by Secretary General Trygve Lie but vetoed by Moses in favor of a boilerplate parks department design. Had it been displayed at Queens, in juxtaposition to his creative 1930s playgrounds, Noguchi’s model would have provided stark testimony to the ossification of Moses’ later years.

It is likely that the decision to allocate most of the models to the City Museum came about because Queens already housed the grandest Moses model of them all: the New York Panorama, a basketball court–sized diorama of the five boroughs built for the 1964 Worlds Fair. (The building now housing the Queens Museum was the New York City Pavilion.) Moses, the fair director, ordered each of its bridges cast slightly oversize to make them appear more imposing, and his parks were painted florescent green and his housing projects brick red to make them stand out. The Panorama would have been the perfect tool to show how all the far-flung Moses creations evolved, over forty years, into a network of infrastructure that implemented his unique vision of the modern city, for better or worse. Inexplicably, the Panorama, a permanent exhibit, was completely divorced from the Moses show, with no references in one to the other. Lacking its orientation, the wall exhibits started to blur together.

In what I admit is a contradiction, this weakness is the catalog’s strength. Over half of its 336-page length is taken up by an illustrated portfolio of Moses’ parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, roads, bridges, and housing projects in the city. Presented as a row of pictures and labels on the wall, one after the other, they make the head swim, but laid out in a book according to a logical typology with a clear table of contents they comprise an invaluable reference and justify the claim of the curators that when it comes to Robert Moses the focus should be on the works, not the man. Let us hope that a companion portfolio of Moses projects outside of New York City, on Long Island and upstate, is somewhere in the works.

Of the three exhibits, Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution was the most self contained, the most technical, and the most revisionist. Moses’s work as chair of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance has widely been perceived as a failure, a conclusion the exhibit and the corresponding catalog essay by Ballon take issue with. Using funds provided through Title I of the Housing Act of 1949, Moses and his selected private developers cleared 314 acres and built over twenty-eight thousand middle-class apartments and co-ops, all of which continue to flourish. (Subsidized public housing was built directly by the New York City Housing Authority—NYCHA—under Title III of the act.) Although many of the high-rises were architecturally bland, others featured innovative designs by I. M. Pei, George Shimamoto, and Paul Lester Wiener. Moses warned that New York was becoming a divided city of the rich and poor, and Title I successfully provided housing for a broad middle class of blue-collar workers, municipal employees, and clerks.

On the other hand, it was beset by problems, many of which the exhibit touches on only lightly. Just fifteen percent of those displaced by the slum clearance program were relocated in the Title I or Title III units intended to replace the lost housing. Moses initially favored consortiums of small private developers, who often failed miserably, and it was the big players, such as William Zeckendorf and Herbert Greenwald, who eventually pulled the program out of trouble. Title I was not primarily a housing program; it was for slum clearance, and it was often used to clear land for university buildings and cultural amenities for the wealthy. The program was not race neutral. Although the extent of Moses’s racial feelings were the subject of considerable debate at the symposium, it is clear that he did not strongly object as the NYCHA and his private developers systematically denied applications from single-parent households and the dependent poor, and that he embraced a “separate but equal” doctrine by using two middle-class Harlem projects, Lennox Terrace and Delano Village, to meet federal fair-housing requirements.

When asked at a panel discussion if Columbia’s own recent plans for a large development in West Harlem influenced its decision to sponsor the Moses exhibits, Kenneth Jackson responded dismissively that “those decisions were made long before the Manhattanville project was announced.” This seemed somewhat disingenuous given that Columbia, reportedly the owner of 70 percent of the land in the area, has been quietly assembling parcels for years. Hilary Ballon was more philosophical, pointing out that for all the dislocation the Title I projects caused they led to “a renaissance in the academic life of the city, and the new in-town campuses acted as engines of revitalization for the neighborhoods around them.” One only has to walk around the campus of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to see proof of this. Circling the restored main building, it is easy to forget that that project, mired in mismanagement, financial irregularities, and massive relocation abuse, helped force Moses’s resignation as Title I director in 1960.

Although three parks, two bridges, a dam, a highway, a power plant, a middle school, and other monuments carry his name, the only public work carrying Robert Moses’s name within New York City itself is a tiny dog run south of the United Nations that, by the time you read this, will likely have been razed for an office building. (Fordham, a private university, named a small plaza at its Lincoln Center campus in his honor in 1970.) Robert Moses and the Modern City already appears to be touching off one of the most spirited historical debates since the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibit of 1995. It may be that the greatest legacy that “Big Bob the Builder” will leave in his adopted hometown is not the eponymous edifice he so badly wanted, but his name itself and the image of his scowling visage—the very personification of the benefits, the pain, the almost incalculable windfalls and wipeouts, and above all the clash of contending forces that make up the process of urban redevelopment in a city that is itself a cultural icon.

{1} Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007; $50/$35), 65.

{2} “Robert Moses: New Perspectives on the Master Builder” (symposium), Davis Auditorium, Columbia University, 2–3 March 2007.

{3} The three exhibits: Remaking the Metropolis, at the Museum of the City of New York, 1 February to 28 May 2007; The Road to Recreation, Queens Museum of Art, 28 January to 27 May; and Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution, Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 31 January to 14 April.