Robert Moses and the Rise of New York the Power Broker in Perspective
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ROBERT MOSES AND THE RISE OF NEW YORK THE POWER BROKER IN PERSPECTIVE KENNETH T. JACKSON Since World War II, America's northeastern and midwestern cities have been was everywhere known as the Steel City. But by 2000, the astonishing pro in both relative and absolute decline. Their once proud central business dis ductivity of those cities was a thing of the past. tricts have typically slipped into retail and business irrelevance; their neigh To an important degree, these changes affected all American cities, even borhoods have lost their once dense networks of bakeries, shoe stores, and those in the booming sunbelt, like Houston, San Diego, Dalla!!, and phannacies; and their streets have too often become dispiriting collections Jacksonville, if only because federal policies toward highways, income-tax of broken bottles, broken windows, and broken lives. After dark, pedestrians deductions for mortgage interest payments, and the placement of public retreat from the empty sidewalks, public housing projects come under the housing tended to follow a national patte'ro. In such places, the population sway of gangs and drug dealers, and merchants lower graffiti-covered metal rose because municipal boundaries were pushed out beyond the new subdi gates. Too often, no one is at home. Newark, for example, had 439,000 resi visions. But inner city neighborhoods suffered in those cities also. Thus, in dents in 1950; by 2000, that number had fallen to 272,000. In the same five Memphis, the total population grew from 396,000 in 1950 to 675,000 in decades, Buffalo fell from 580,000 to 292,000; Detroit from 1,850,000 to 2000. But because the area encomplUlsed by the city grew by about five 951,000; Pittsburgh from 677,000 to 335,000; Philadelphia from 2,072,000 times in those years, the absolute density of the community declined from to 1,600,000; Boston from 801,000 to 589,000; and Cleveland from 915,000 9,000 per square mile in 1950 to 2,000 per square'mile in 2000. and many to 478,000. The decline of Saint Louis was particularly astonishing. In 1950, once thriving neighborhoods seemed deserted, that once resplendent Mississippi River city had 857,000 residents; by New York was part of this larger story. In 1950, it was the unchallenged, 2000, only 348,000 persons called it home. center of American life, and its skyline was famous around the world. The To a large extent, the human exodus was fueled by a sharp decline in city was a virtual United Nations in miniature, its citizen!! drawn from every industrial employment. At midcentury, for example, Newark was a center of continent and almost every nation, Its five boroughs were renowned for paint, jewelry, apparel, and leather manufacture. By the end of the twentieth excellent public schools, pure and abundant water, spacious and well-kept century, those factories were forlorn and quiet; weeds and bushes were grow parks, and matchless mass transit. New York was also the world's leading ing where hundreds and even thousands of laborers once earned a family industrial city, and its many thousands of shops and factories produced most wage. Similarly, Detroit in 1950 was the Motor City in fact as well as in of the nation's women's clothes, one-fifth of its beer, most of its magazines name. All three great automakers made the Michigan metropolis their head and books, and many of its specialty goods. Its great harbor, protected from quarters, and all focused their manufacturing operations in the dozens of North Atlantic stonns by the narrow opening between Brooklyn and Staten plants in the metropolitan area. Meanwhile, Pittsburgh was so identified with Island-later the site of one of Robert Mo~es's great bridges-was by many the gr~at blast furnaces along the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers that it measures the largest and finest in the world. It was also the busiest port any- 67 where, and its hundreds of bustling docks and piers gave employment to tens ultimate barometer of urban health in a capitalist society-reached levels of thousands of sailors, longshoremen, tugboat operators, maritime workers, unequalled in any city in the history of the world. In the single decade of the and shipbuilders. Meanwhile, Wall Street was the heart of American finance, 19908, the official population of the five boroughs surged by 700,000. Madison Avenue of advertising, Seventh Avenue offashion, Fift,h Avenue of The reasons for New York's impressive turnaround since its nadir in the elegant .'!hopping, and Broadway of entertainment. 1970s are many and varied. Some credit Mayor Edward I. Koch's take But New York, imperial thoush it WM, ciluid not resist the larger nation charge attitude following his election in 1977. Others credit mayors Rudolph al pressure.'! toward dispersion, and post-World War II Gotham experienced Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg for restoring faith in the city's ability to the same malaise that gripped the other great cities of the Northe8.'lt and handle its own problems. Still others point to the "broken-window theory" of Midwest. Between 1950 and 1975, New York's population declined by crime prevention, the legalization of abortion in New York Ilnd adjacent almost a million persons, its factory employment plummeted by two-thirds, states, the tripling of the prison population, the decline in the numbers of its public schools deteriorated, its infrastructure sagged, its parks fell victim minority male teenagers, the passing of the crack epidemic, the growth of to vandals, and its public transit system lost half of its,riders. Around the neighborhood-watch associations, or the surge in foreign immigration QegHl huge city, crime rates rose, graffiti appeared on almost every surface. corpo and illegal). rations moved their headquarters either to the suburbs or to the Sunbelt, the Whatever the cause of the New York turnaround, it would not have been city fell toward bankruptcy, and President Gernld Ford famously told the· possible without Robert Moses. Had he not lived, or had he chosen to spend beleaguered metropolis, "Drop dead." his productive years in isolation on a beach or a mountaintop, Gotham would The Bronx became the poster child of the depressed metropolis. So many have lacked the wherewithal. to adjust to the demands of the modern world. landlords abandoned their apartment buildings that the city covered their Had the city not undertaken a massive program of public works between windows with decals of lampshades and curtains to camouflage the offend 1924 and 1970, had it not built an arleriai highway system, and had it not ing residences. Whole blocks emptied of residents and hahitable litructures, relocated 200,000 people from old-law tenements to new public housing and the results were compared unfavorably to bombed-out Dresden or projects, New York would not have been able to claim in the 1990s that it Cologne in 1945. Just east of Crotona Park, in a neighborhood once WIlS the capital of the twentieth century, the capital of capitalism, and the enlivened by thousands of Jewish and Italian residents, Charlotte Street capital of the world. hecame an international symbol of abandonment and ruin. Popular percep Moses W8.'l such a complex figure and hill accomplishmenlB so diverse tion associated shopping malls, corporate office parks, and suburban resi and numerous that it is necessary to break down his public career into a con dential subdivisions wilh the future; cities seemed dangerous and decrepit, ceptual framework that allows us to see him in a larger national context. For places where the problems of poverty, race, and crime came together in the the purposes of this discussion, let us consider the scope, price, and quality perfect stonn known as the South Bronx. of the things he built; the nature of his vision; the question ofhis racism; the It W8.'l in this context that Robert A. Caro's Power Broker: Rubert Moses quality of his housing; and the issue of his financial honesty. and the Fall of New York appeared in 1974. Extraordinary in conception and execution, the hook generated exceptional attention and won both the ROBERT MOSES IN THI NATIONAL CONTEXT Pulitzer and Francis Parkman prizes as the best book of the year. It was a page-turner: persuasively argued, beautifully written, and thoroughly By any definition, Robert Moses had an exceptional life. Even a simple list researched. It held that Moses was a brilliant and idealistic reformer who of his various pools, beaches, playgrounds, parks, parkways, expressways, ultimately soured on politics and ruthlegsly marshaled power to follow his bridges, public housing projects, Title I effortg, and Mitchell-Lama develop own muse and become the greatest builder the United States had ever seen. ments-not to mention Lincoln Center, the United Nations, and two world's Although The PO'Uler Broker is in many respects a monument to the awesome fairs-runs to'many pages. As Carn noted, Moses was the greatest builder in achievements of a dedicated public servant, its subtitle and overarching the American history. sis suggest that the builder almost destroyed the city he was tryillg to save But The Power Broker exaggerates Moses's influence on American life and that the desperation of Gotham in 1974 was partly the result of his mis and makes him too much of an evil geniua. For example, despite the many placed priorities. miles of roadway attributed to Moses, New York never became as hospitable I posit a diITerent hypothesis about Moses's impact upon New Yorlc.. to the motorcar as other American cities. In Caro's narrower context, we do Unlike most cities in the Frost Belt (except perhaps Boston), New York has not learn that Detroit voters chose the highway over public transportation in experienced a renaissance since 1975.