The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 207 | Loc. 3160-69  | Added on Wednesday, June 03, 2020, 01:32 AM

These were the men who, during the "Middle Ages of American industry," the half century of unbridled industrial expansion following the Civil War, had harnessed America's vast mineral resources and tapped its long-stored capital to create needed industrial growth but who, to turn that growth into personal wealth, had stationed themselves at the "narrows" of production, the key points of production and distribution, and exacted tribute from the nation. They were the men who had blackmailed state legislatures and city councils by threatening to build their railroad lines elsewhere unless they received tax exemptions, outright gifts of cash—and land grants so vast that, by 1920, the elected representatives of America had turned over to the railroad barons an area the size of Texas. They were the men who had bribed and corrupted legislators—the Standard Oil Company, one historian said, did everything possible to the Pennsylvania Legislature except refine it—to let them loot the nation's oil and ore, the men who, building their empires on the toil of millions of immigrant laborers, had kept wages low, hours long, and had crushed the unions. Their creed was summed up in two quotes: Commodore Vanderbilt's "Law? What do I care for law? Hain't I got the power?" and J. P. Morgan's "I owe the public nothing."
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 278 | Loc. 4260-62  | Added on Friday, June 05, 2020, 12:49 AM

"People on Long Island [are] afraid to go to bed for fear that when they wake up in the morning they would find their property seized by Robert Moses," another Republican senator shouted. Jumping out of his seat, a Democrat replied: "Is it not true that if they don't go to bed on Long Island it is because the bedsheets may be in use elsewhere?"—a reference to the Ku Klux Klan.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 302 | Loc. 4620-23  | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2020, 12:33 AM

This lesson Robert Moses would often recite to associates. He would put it this way: As long as you're fighting for parks, you can be sure of having public opinion on your side. And as long as you have public opinion on your side, you're safe. "As long as you're on the side of parks, you're on the side of the angels. You can't lose."
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 303 | Loc. 4634-46  | Added on Saturday, June 06, 2020, 12:36 AM

Misleading and underestimating, in fact, might be the only way to get a project started. Since his projects were unprecedentedly vast, one of the biggest difficulties in getting them started was the fear of public officials— not only upstate conservatives but liberal public officials as well—concerned with the over-all functioning of the state that the state couldn't afford the projects, that the projects, beneficial though they might be, would drain off a share of the state's wealth incommensurate with their benefits. But what if you didn't tell the officials how much the projects would cost? What if you let the legislators know about only a fraction of what you knew would be the projects' ultimate expense? Once they had authorized that small initial expenditure and you had spent it, they would not be able to avoid giving you the rest when you asked for it. How could they? If they refused to give you the rest of the money, what they had given you would be wasted, and that would make them look bad in the eyes of the public. And if they said you had misled them, well, they were not supposed to be misled. If they had been misled, that would mean that they hadn't investigated the projects thoroughly, and had therefore been derelict in their own duty. The possibilities for a polite but effective form of political blackmail were endless. Once a Legislature gave you money to start a project, it would be virtually forced to give you the money to finish it. The stakes you drove should be thin-pointed—wedge-shaped, in fact—on the end. Once you got the end of the wedge for a project into the public treasury, it would be easy to hammer in the rest.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 392 | Loc. 6000-6005  | Added on Sunday, June 14, 2020, 01:46 AM

Robert Moses had shifted the parkway south of Otto Kahn's estate, south of Winthrop's and Mills's estates, south of Stimson's and De Forest's. For men of wealth and influence, he had moved it more than three miles south of its original location. But James Roth possessed neither money nor influence. And for James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway south even one tenth of a mile farther. For James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway one foot. Robert Moses had offered men of wealth and influence bridges across the parkway so that there would be no interference with their pleasures. But he wouldn't offer James Roth a bridge so that there would be no interference with his planting.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 423 | Loc. 6484-90  | Added on Monday, June 15, 2020, 01:20 AM

The long-term costs to the public of Moses' accommodation include figures that cannot be prefaced with dollar signs. For one thing, the accommodation condemned users of the parkway to a perpetual detour of five miles around the Wheatley Hills. Coupled with the six-mile detour forced on parkway users by Moses' previous accommodation with Otto Kahn and the other Dix Hills barons, it meant that a commuter who lived anywhere east of Dix Hills and who used the parkway to get to his job in New York City was condemned to drive, every working day of his life, twenty-two extra and unnecessary miles. He had to drive no unnecessary miles per week, 5,500 per year—all because of Moses' "compromise." By the 1960's there were about 21,500 such commuters, and the cost to them alone of Moses' accommodation totaled tens of millions of wasted hours of human lives.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 434 | Loc. 6646-51  | Added on Monday, June 15, 2020, 11:56 PM

Patrolling the boardwalk, conspicuous in snow-white sailor suits and caps, they hurried to pick up dropped papers and cigarette butts while the droppers were still in the vicinity. They never reprimanded the culprits, but simply bent down, picked up the litter and put it in a trash basket. To make the resultant embarrassment of the litterers more acute, Moses refused to let the Courtesy Squaders use sharp-pointed sticks to pick up litter without stooping. He wanted the earnest, clean-cut college boys stooping, Moses explained to his aides. It would make the litterers more ashamed. He even issued the Courtesy Squaders large cloths so that they could wipe from the boardwalk gobs of spittle. His methods worked. As one writer put it: "You will feel like a heel if you so much as drop a gum wrapper."
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 447 | Loc. 6850-60  | Added on Tuesday, June 16, 2020, 12:17 AM

He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low—too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas. And Negroes were discouraged from using "white" beach areas—the best beaches—by a system Shapiro calls "flagging"; the handful of Negro lifeguards (there were only a handful of Negro employees among the thousands employed by the Long Island State Park Commission) were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 465 | Loc. 7116-19  | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2020, 12:31 AM

Although in 1932 the Queensborough Bridge had been open for a quarter of a century, the city had not yet gotten around even to marking lanes on it. At either end of the bridge were traffic lights; when they were red, bridge traffic stopped completely. A 1931 police study found that during rush hours the average driver, frantically shifting gears while trying to keep his car in an unmarked lane, spent forty-three minutes negotiating the 1,182 feet of the Queensborough span.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 658 | Loc. 10075-82  | Added on Sunday, July 12, 2020, 12:49 AM

"You've got to understand—every morning when a mayor comes to work, there are a hundred problems that must be solved. And a lot of them are so big and complex that they just don't seem susceptible to solution. And when he asks guys for solutions, what happens? Most of them can't give him any. And those that do come up with solutions, the solutions are unrealistic or impractical—or just plain stupid. And those that do make sense—there's no money to finance them. But you give a problem to Moses and overnight he's back in front of you—with a solution, all worked out down to the last detail, drafts of speeches you can give to explain it to the public, drafts of press releases for the newspapers, drafts of the state laws you'll need to get passed, advice as to who should introduce the bills in the Legislature and what committees they should go to, drafts of any City Council and Board of Estimate resolutions you'll need; if there are constitutional questions involved, a list of the relevant precedents—and a complete method of financing it all spelled out. He had solutions when no one else had solutions. A mayor needs a Robert Moses."
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 663 | Loc. 10156-61  | Added on Sunday, July 12, 2020, 01:00 AM

An appointed official not directly responsible to the electorate could never obtain power to defy the official who was responsible for his appointment, the Mayor had said. But Moses had nonetheless obtained a large measure of such power. Coupled with the power he had obtained from his use within the city of federal money, it gave him considerable independence of the city's mayor. He was using forces outside the city to bend its highest elected official to his will. By employing forces outside the city's control, he was remaking the city in certain crucial areas without allowing the city any say in that remaking.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 669 | Loc. 10250-51  | Added on Sunday, July 12, 2020, 11:09 PM

If Robert Moses was a pioneer in the fields of parks and highways, he was also a pioneer in McCarthyism, twenty years before McCarthy.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 673 | Loc. 10320-23  | Added on Monday, July 13, 2020, 10:53 PM

The lesson wasn't lost on Chanler. "If you stood right up to him, he backed right down," he says. "He was just a natural bully. So whenever he tried something, I'd pretend to lose my temper. And after a while, he didn't try any more." But the other commissioners didn't know Moses as well as Windels and they didn't have the benefit of his advice—and when Moses' harsh voice rasped over the telephone into their offices threatening to take them to the press and the Mayor, they thought the only way to avoid such a fate was to do what he wanted.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 693 | Loc. 10624-33  | Added on Monday, July 13, 2020, 11:35 PM

Dogs wandered into the playgrounds and urinated and defecated in the sandboxes and the sandboxes had to be removed. Drunks crept into the tunnel segments at night and fell asleep, to be discovered by children the next morning sleeping in their own vomit. The tunnel segments had to be removed. Drunks wandered into the striped guardhouse "play booths" during the day and urinated in them. Perverts used them as hiding places from which they could watch the playing little girls and boys at close range and masturbate. Vandals pried loose the light lumber out of which the play booths were constructed. The play booths had to be removed. Then the drunks slept and the perverts hid in the trees and shrubbery behind the benches, so this landscaping had to be removed. Still drunks kept wandering into the playgrounds at night; Moses tried to keep them out first by putting up bars between the bench groupings, and little gates at the playground entrance as a warning to stay out, but the drunks ignored the warning—and finally Moses felt he had no choice but to surround the playgrounds, now reduced to amenity-bare patches of asphalt, with high fences whose high gates could be locked at night; critics might rage that the playgrounds now resembled animal cages; Moses saw that resemblance himself; he just felt that there was nothing he could do about it.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 698 | Loc. 10695-97  | Added on Monday, July 13, 2020, 11:40 PM

If the city didn't provide parks, the reformers understood, that was a sign that society didn't care; the people who lived in the slums might not verbalize that concept, but they would feel it even if they didn't put it into words; and therefore the lack of parks could only increase their bitterness toward society.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 721 | Loc. 11042-55  | Added on Tuesday, July 14, 2020, 10:55 PM

Robert Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City during the 1930's. He built one playground in Harlem. An overspill from Harlem had created Negro ghettos in two other areas of the city: Brooklyn's Stuyvesant Heights, the nucleus of the great slum that would become known as Bedford-Stuyvesant, and South Jamaica. Robert Moses built one playground in Stuyvesant Heights. He built no playgrounds in South Jamaica. "We have to work all day and we have no place to send the children," one Harlem mother had written before Robert Moses became Park Commissioner. "There are kids here who have never played anyplace but in the gutter." She could have written the same words after he had been Park Commissioner for five years. After a building program that had tripled the city's supply of playgrounds, there was still almost no place for approximately 200,000 of the city's children—the 200,000 with black skin—to play in their own neighborhoods except the streets or abandoned, crumbling, filthy, looted tenements stinking of urine and vomit; or vacant lots carpeted with rusty tin cans, jagged pieces of metal, dog feces and the leavings, spilling out of rotting paper shopping bags, of human meals. Children with white skin had been given swings and seesaws and sliding ponds. Children with black skin had been left with the old broomsticks that served them as baseball bats. Children with white skin had been given wading pools to splash in in summer. If children with black skin wanted to escape the heat of the slums, they could remove the covers from fire hydrants and wade through their outwash, as they had always waded, in gutters that were sometimes so crammed with broken glass that they glistened in the sun. Negroes begged for playgrounds.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 726 | Loc. 11123-46  | Added on Tuesday, July 14, 2020, 11:06 PM

The ingenuity that Robert Moses displayed in building swimming pools was not restricted to their design. Moses built one pool in Harlem, in Colonial Park, at 146th Street, and he was determined that that was going to be the only pool that Negroes— or Puerto Ricans, whom he classed with Negroes as "colored people"— were going to use. He didn't want them "mixing" with white people in other pools, in part because he was afraid, probably with cause, that "trouble"—fights and riots—would result; in part because, as one of his aides puts it, "Well, you know how RM felt about colored people." The pool at which the danger of mixing was greatest was the one in Thomas Jefferson Park in La Guardia's old East Harlem congressional district. This district was white, but the pool, one block in from the East River, was located between 111th and 114th streets. Not only was it close to Negro Harlem, but the city's Puerto Rican population, while still small, was already beginning to outgrow the traditional boundaries of "Spanish Harlem" just north of Central Park and to expand toward the east— toward the pool. By the mid-Thirties, Puerto. Ricans had reached Lexington Avenue, only four blocks away, and some had begun moving onto Third Avenue, only three blocks away. To discourage "colored" people from using the Thomas Jefferson Pool, Moses, as he had done so successfully at Jones Beach, employed only white lifeguards and attendants. But he was afraid that such "flagging" might not be a sufficient deterrent to mothers and fathers from the teeming Spanish Harlem tenements who would be aware on a stifling August Sunday that cool water in which their children could play was only a few blocks away. So he took another precaution. Corporation Counsel Windels was astonished at its simplicity. "We [Moses and I] were driving around Harlem one afternoon—he was showing me something or other—and I said, 'Don't you have this problem with the Negroes overrunning you?' He said, 'Well, they don't like cold water and we've found that that helps.' " And then, Windels says, Moses told him confidentially that while heating plants at the other swimming pools kept the water at a comfortable seventy degrees, at the Thomas Jefferson Pool, the water was left unheated, so that its temperature, while not cold enough to bother white swimmers, would deter any "colored" people who happened to enter it once from returning. Whether it was the temperature or the flagging—or the glowering looks flung at Negroes by the Park Department attendants and lifeguards— one could go to the pool on the hottest summer days, when the slums of Negro and Spanish Harlem a few blocks away sweltered in the heat, and not see a single non-Caucasian face. Negroes who lived only half a mile away, Puerto Ricans who lived three blocks away, would travel instead to Colonial Park, three miles away—even though many of them could not afford the bus fare for their families and had to walk all the way. The fact that they didn't use their neighborhood pool—and the explanation for this fact—was never once mentioned by any newspaper or public speaker, or at least not by any public speaker prominent enough to have his speech reported in a newspaper.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 733 | Loc. 11229-48  | Added on Tuesday, July 14, 2020, 11:20 PM

Moses was convinced he knew the solution to the problem: build another bridge. Within a year after Triborough had opened, he was proposing the construction, a mile to the east, of the Bronx-Whitestone that would, by tying directly into the Hutchinson River Parkway to the north, enable motorists from the East Bronx, Westchester, Connecticut and New England to get to Long Island without using Triborough. For the first time, one of Moses' transportation proposals met with less than unanimous support from Good Government groups. The Regional Plan Association said that such a bridge should not be built unless provision was made on it for railroad trains as well as cars—so that a rapid transit tie-in between Long Island and the Bronx, Westchester and Connecticut could be established. The tie-in did not have to be immediate, the RPA said. Construction of the rapid transit system could wait until the need for it had been proven and financing was available. But provision for it should be made immediately. All that was required was to make the bridge wide enough for two lanes of tracks as well as for automobiles or to build a second deck for the tracks—or, if Moses did not want to adopt either of these courses at the present time, to make the bridge foundations and towers strong enough so that, should at some later date the rapid transit link be desired, the bridge could support a second deck that would be built at that time. If provision was made now, while the bridge was being planned, the RPA said, it could be made cheaply, at a minor increase in the cost of the bridge. If it was not made, a whole new bridge would have to be constructed from scratch when the rapid transit link proved necessary, and the cost would be tremendous. It might even prove prohibitive, preventing construction of such a link entirely. Failure to make provision for a rapid transit link as part of the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the RPA said, could therefore condemn Long Island forever to be linked to the north only through roads —which would mean that no matter how much population increased in the metropolitan area, the only means of reaching the Island from the north would still be by automobile. And this would condemn Long Island to future inundation by larger and larger numbers of automobiles. But Moses refused even to consider its proposal, and the RPA received no editorial support. Without opposition from a single city official, he built the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge without any provision for a rail link, opening it three full months ahead of schedule, on April 29, 1939.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 768 | Loc. 11765-72  | Added on Sunday, July 26, 2020, 01:29 AM

A reporter who visited Spuyten Duyvil in 1935 wrote in surprise that it was a "village," a village in the midst of a city, a village straight out of "some remote part of rural England," complete to its four big, fieldstone-and ivy-covered English country churches. It was a village that possessed a beautiful view—many of its homes enjoyed a magnificent prospect of the Hudson and the Palisades—and an asset that was even more valuable in the city: quiet. Tucked into a corner of the Bronx as it was, it had no through traffic; the only thoroughfare wider than a country lane in all Spuyten Duyvil was "Spuyten Duyvil Parkway," a two-lane road whose right-of-way, lined by trees so big that their branches met over it umbrella fashion, was barely thirty feet. Moses' proposal to turn it into a 140-foot-wide Henry Hudson Parkway by tearing down hundreds of the trees and condemning lawns of the bordering houses horrified the community. The road would split the community in half, make it difficult to get from one side to the other, and would funnel through it a great stream of traffic. "It will be the end of beautiful Spuyten Duyvil," wailed one resident.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 772 | Loc. 11830-35  | Added on Sunday, July 26, 2020, 01:36 AM

Moses' had been formed in a different age, the age, twenty years and more in the past, when he had been a young reformer. To understand his dream for the West Side Improvement, one had to understand the age in which he had dreamed it. In that age, parks had been for the upper and "comfortable middle" classes and one of the things those classes wanted most to do in parks was to drive through them—at the slow, leisurely speeds of the era—and enjoy their scenery. In that age, therefore, it made sense for a road through a park to be placed at its most scenic location—in the case of Riverside Park, at the river's edge.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 821 | Loc. 12578-95  | Added on Tuesday, August 11, 2020, 12:43 AM

Robert's concept of help was that of the mother he imitated, the patronizing "Lady Bountiful" who never forgot that the lower classes were lower. It was the concept of rigid class distinction and separation that would later be set in concrete by Robert Moses' public works. Paul, doted on by Grannie Cohen (and by her husband, Bernhard; on Saturdays, the gentle old man and the bright-eyed, handsome little boy would walk from the Moses brownstone on Forty-sixth Street down to the tip of Manhattan Island, where the grandfather would reward him with a nickel), understood exactly what the nickname "Lady Bountiful" implied. "Don't you see that settlement-house attitude of hers in everything Mr. Robert does?" he would demand. "This 'You're my children and I'll tell you what's good for you'? " It was not his attitude. His brother wanted class distinctions made more rigid; Paul wanted them eliminated. His brother despised "people of color"; Paul's attitude, in Mrs. Proper's words, was "a genuine feeling of real indignation over the way Negroes were treated, and don't forget, this was at a time when it wasn't fashionable to have such feelings." His brother's attitude toward members of the classes Bella called "lower" was, like Bella's, markedly patronizing; perhaps in reaction, Paul, says a friend, "was a person who would talk to some menial and be on fine terms with him. He could be impossible—opinionated, arrogant—with people on his own social plane. But he would never, never, act like that with anyone who couldn't talk back to him. He was very much aware of the moral responsibility to the lower classes—he was like Robert in that. But his attitude towards these classes was genuinely friendly." He had the ability— which Robert did not—to see people not as members of classes but as individuals. When they were well into their seventies, the two brothers would be asked about the maids, cooks and laundresses who had worked in the Forty-sixth Street brownstone. Robert could remember exactly one: "old Annie." Asked to "tell me something about her," he responded by listing her duties— and stopped. About this woman whom he saw almost every day of his boyhood, he knew nothing more—not even whether or not she was married. Paul remembered an even dozen who passed through the Moses household at one time or another—and, fifty years after he had last seen most of them, he could relate details of their personal lives to an extent that revealed he had talked to them as a friendly equal.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 866 | Loc. 13278-82  | Added on Thursday, September 10, 2020, 01:05 AM

And the Tunnel Authority fight also revealed the lengths to which Robert Moses was now prepared to go to gain power. Wrecking the Authority would have cost the city not only $58,000,000. money which would provide a lot of jobs in Depression-wracked New York, but also the tunnel, a public work badly needed in terms of Moses' own aims—the elimination of tram congestion in New York City. But these considerations did not deter him. If he couldn't build the tunnel, his actions said, no one was going to build it. If he couldn't take it over, he would destroy it.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 868 | Loc. 13296-300  | Added on Thursday, September 10, 2020, 01:08 AM

The Mayor possessed an intense private interest in public housing, Fiorello La Guardia believed that it had been the dampness and congestion of the tenements in which she had been raised that had given his beloved first wife the tuberculosis that had killed her and their baby; he had vowed to friends that one thing he was going to do "personally" as mayor was to make sure that the city started at last to give poor people in the city a decent, healthy place to live. The vast amounts of money and power that were obviously going to be involved made him even more determined to keep the program firmly in his own hands.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 890 | Loc. 13640-44  | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2020, 01:46 AM

The existence of the Triborough Authority "shall continue only until all its bonds have been paid in full," the act said. But, because of Moses' amendments, the Authority no longer had to pay its bonds in full. Every time it had enough money to pay them in full, it could instead use the money to issue new bonds in their place. The amendments meant that unless it wanted to, the Authority wouldn't ever have to turn its bridges over to the city. It might, if it so desired, be able to keep the bridges—and stay in existence—as long as the city stayed in existence.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 908 | Loc. 13923-29  | Added on Thursday, September 17, 2020, 12:19 AM

With the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel firmly in his grasp, Moses made a slight modification in its design: It became the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge. The change reflected the importance Moses had come to place on bankers' values—a bridge could be built slightly more cheaply than a tunnel, would cost slightly less to operate and could, per dollar spent, carry slightly more traffic—and his eagerness to build impressive monuments to himself; a bridge was, after all, the most impressive of monuments ("the finest architecture made by man") as well as one whose life was "measureless"; a tunnel, he said in public, "is merely a tiled, vehicular bathroom smelling faintly of monoxide"; in private, an aide recalls, "he used to say, 'What's a tunnel but a hole in the ground?'—and RM wasn't interested in holes in the ground."
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 917 | Loc. 14055-60  | Added on Thursday, September 17, 2020, 12:33 AM

According to some estimates, the portion of the city's total real estate tax paid by Lower Manhattan was as high as 10 percent; large office buildings contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to the city in real estate taxes. Reduce their light and air and they would be entitled to a substantial reduction in taxes. And Moses' bridge would reduce the taxes for dozens of such buildings. Computing the depreciation in real estate values conservatively, Singstad found that, during the next twenty years alone, building the Battery Crossing as a bridge instead of as a tunnel would cost the city more than $29,000,000 in real estate taxes.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 942 | Loc. 14439-43  | Added on Monday, September 21, 2020, 01:13 AM

If the Mayor did not immediately guarantee that there would be no Battery tunnel, Moses was saying, he, Moses, would never give him the money for a Battery bridge. Either guarantee immediately that Moses could build the Crossing—and build the kind of Crossing he wanted—or there wouldn't be any Crossing. The telegram was not a request but an ultimatum, not an appeal from a subordinate to a superior, not a plea from a commissioner appointed by the Mayor that the Mayor change a decision, but a demand from someone who had the money to give the Mayor something he wanted.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 947 | Loc. 14510-14  | Added on Tuesday, September 22, 2020, 12:20 AM

And then, in the seventh hour of the hearing, Robert Moses stood up to speak. Reading from a yellow legal pad on which he had been scribbling furiously during the opposition speeches, he turned his attention first to the analysis of the relative efficiency of civil service architects and private consultants. "I want to warn my friends in the civil service that civil service can become a racket," he said. "It's getting to be so that nothing will please them but a Communist state, which we know is so pleasing to Mr. Isaacs. . . ."
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 952 | Loc. 14588-96  | Added on Tuesday, September 22, 2020, 12:33 AM

The Battery Crossing fight was also the moment of truth for the reformers in another respect. It made them see that their opposition no longer mattered to Moses. They had played a vital role in his acquisition of power in the city. Quite possibly, in fact, he could not have acquired that power without their help. But he had taken that power and used it to acquire more and more of it—and now, they suddenly realized, he had enough of it so that they could not take it back from him, could not, in fact, stop him from the absolutely untrammeled use of it. He no longer had to be concerned with their opinions—and he wasn't concerned with their opinions. They were the city's aristocracy. They had always had a voice—an important voice—in decisions vital to the city, a voice that was important to them because they cared about and loved the city. But in the areas that Robert Moses had carved out for his own, they would have a voice no longer. And neither would the city. For if the Battle of the Battery Crossing was a moment of truth for the reformers, it was also, although no one recognized it as such, a moment of truth for New York.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 954 | Loc. 14624-34  | Added on Tuesday, September 22, 2020, 12:38 AM

In the April 5, 1939, edition of her newspaper column, "My Day," Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt was enthusiastically discussing her grandchildren when she switched abruptly to one paragraph on a different topic. I have a plea from a man who is deeply interested in Manhattan Island, particularly in the beauty of the approach from the ocean at Battery Park. He tells me that a New York official, who is without doubt always efficient, is proposing a bridge one hundred feet high at the river, which will go across to the Whitehall Building over Battery Park. This, he says, will mean a screen of elevated roadways, pillars, etc., at that particular point. I haven't a question that this will be done in the name of progress, and something undoubtedly needs to be done. But isn't there room for some consideration of the preservation of the few beautiful spots that still remain to us on an overcrowded island? A single, small paragraph, on a subject she would not raise again. But revealing nonetheless, as the smallest ripple in a pond's still water reveals the hidden trout below. For that paragraph was the ripple, the only ripple, that revealed that far below the surface of the public controversy over Robert Moses' huge bridge, down in the quiet, murky depths, impenetrable to the public gaze, in which real power lurks, private passions were beginning to roil the water—and Robert Moses' great enemy was beginning to move against him.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 960 | Loc. 14706-10  | Added on Tuesday, September 22, 2020, 12:45 AM

Moses' rage over what he regarded as his greatest defeat never cooled, not even after the tunnel, years later, was incorporated into his Triborough empire. Any mention of the tunnel—even the most casual reference by a luncheon guest trying to make conversation—would cause the big jaw to jut angrily and the voice of Robert Moses to recite verbatim, as automatically as if the mention had triggered a tape recorder inside his head, the old slogans: "A bridge would have cost half as much as a tunnel, you know, carry twice the amount of traffic, could be built in half the time . . ."
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 962 | Loc. 14744-50  | Added on Tuesday, September 22, 2020, 12:49 AM

If the reformers had looked at the Battle of the Battery Crossing in a broader perspective, however, they would have been holding not a "Victory Luncheon" but a wake. For in such a perspective—the significance of the battle in the history of New York City—the key point about the fight and its significance for the city's future was not that the President had stepped in and stopped Robert Moses from building a project that might have irreparably damaged the city. The key point was that it had taken the President to stop him. The city's own mayor, the elected representative of the city's people, the personification of the city's will, hadn't been able to stop him. Neither had the city's other elected officials—or its most wealthy, prestigious and influential private citizens, the "in group" or "establishment" that could, when united, usually count on carrying the day on any issue about which it was particularly concerned.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 977 | Loc. 14969-77  | Added on Wednesday, September 23, 2020, 01:03 AM

For many New Yorkers, of course, the atmosphere in the new Aquarium wasn't going to matter very much. For the high admission fees Moses set for it insured that many New Yorkers were going to be able to visit it infrequently if at all. The poignance of this situation was accentuated by the location of the Aquarium at Coney Island, the lone bathing beach reachable by public transportation and therefore the one to which, because of Moses' class-separating policies, the city's poor were herded. The city's middle and upper classes found it easy to use the Aquarium, of course. Moses had built a large parking field next to it so that they could come without using the subway. But they didn't come. On weekdays and on non-beach weekends—on days when attendance at the old Aquarium had run, day after day, 7,000 per day—one can walk through bleak echoing halls and see only a handful of other human beings. Out of Robert Moses' grudge, the city got a new Aquarium, for which it paid $11,000,000. It did not, however, get an Aquarium it could use.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 979 | Loc. 15002-4  | Added on Wednesday, September 23, 2020, 01:06 AM

Al Smith's close friend John A. Coleman, the multimillionaire "Pope of Wall Street" who came out of the Lower East Side with limited education but unlimited shrewdness, said: "Some men aren't satisfied unless they have caviar. Moses would have been happy with a ham sandwich—and power."
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 987 | Loc. 15124-29  | Added on Thursday, September 24, 2020, 01:20 AM

For nine years, Robert Moses had been seeking control of the Tunnel Authority. Now he had control. He had been unable to prevent the construction of the Authority's Queens-Midtown and Brooklyn-Battery tunnels, but now those tunnels—and their revenues—were his. New York was a city divided by water, split by rivers and bays. Every modern water crossing within the city's borders, not only those above the water but those beneath it, not only every bridge but every tunnel constructed within the city's borders for the use of motor vehicles since 1909, was now under the control of authorities that he controlled. More important, all new water crossings would also be under his control.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1057 | Loc. 16196-211  | Added on Friday, October 23, 2020, 01:49 AM

Merchandising requires locations and, if successful, expansion, and, in New York, locations and expansion mean zoning changes, and big retailers need approval from the Moses-controlled City Planning Commission to get them. Zoning considerations aside, locations were not easy to come by, but Moses could be of assistance there, too, as, quite by accident, Traffic Commissioner Barnes learned shortly after coming to New York in 1962. Since one of the worst traffic bottlenecks existed at the Manhattan end of the Oueensborough Bridge, he was staggered when he learned confidentially that the Triborough Authority was planning to condemn close to a square block of buildings at the bridgehead, evict their tenants and build a 2,000-car parking garage there. "I couldn't quite figure out why Triborough wanted to do it," Barnes was to recall with a grin several years later. 'The traffic would be backed up for miles." But at lunch with Triborough general manager Peter Reidy and Straus on another matter one day, the Traffic Commissioner heard Reidy—according to Barnes, under the influence of one martini too many—mention to Straus "this garage that we're working on with you people." Warned by a sharp glance from Straus, Reidy stopped talking, but Barnes had heard. "What are you talking about?" he asked. "They both squirmed around," he says, "and finally [Straus] said, 'Well, Bloomingdale's and Alexander's are up there. We feel we ought to have a branch up there, too.' " And then they revealed that atop the garage was to be built a seven-story department store which would be leased to Macy's. To his astonishment, Barnes realized that Moses was planning to use powers and funds of a public authority ostensibly set up to aid transportation to condemn a score of buildings, evict the tenants, and turn it over, complete with Authority-financed parking facilities right in the store, to a private business. And he further realized, as the conversation unfolded, that the planning had advanced to the point at which even the details of the lease—its term was to be fifty years— had been finalized, and that Moses had persuaded Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., to approve.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1081 | Loc. 16571-76  | Added on Friday, November 06, 2020, 12:44 AM

Moses' proposal was a fiscal codification of his philosophy and his lust for personal power. Since a greater proportion of the poorer classes rather than upper rode the subways, doubling the fare was a financial burden that would fall heaviest on those of the city's people least able to bear it. Moses' taxing proposals left real estate taxes unraised and income taxes unmentioned, these being taxes that would adversely affect big real estate holders and the city's wealthier citizens, whose welfare Moses equated with the welfare of society. Instead he proposed doubling the i percent sales tax and imposing a 5 percent tax on all monthly telephone, gas, electric and other utility bills as well as on admissions to all places of amusement in the city—three regressive taxes that would fall heaviest on the city's poorest inhabitants.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1092 | Loc. 16741-47  | Added on Sunday, November 29, 2020, 10:36 PM

Stating in a speech that "progress sometimes involves some temporary hardships" was well and good; but some of the "temporary hardships" Moses was proposing to inflict were political suicide; thousands—tens of thousands—of families had to be evicted to create the right-of-way for Moses' giant expressways and Moses was proposing to go ahead with the evictions immediately, to tear down tens of thousands of apartments during a desperate apartment shortage. Each Board of Estimate meeting was jammed with hundreds of protesters begging the Board to stop the evictions, and these protesters spoke with a desperation new even to hardened BPs like Jimmy Lyons. Week after week, at these Board meetings, O'Dwyer was forced into the position of defending policies about which—for political if not humanitarian reasons—he was beginning to have doubts.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1122 | Loc. 17189-95  | Added on Tuesday, December 01, 2020, 02:04 AM

The Mayor's stand certainly seemed pro-Moses—much too pro-Moses— to Moses' opponents. But it wasn't pro-Moses enough for Moses. Angered that O'Dwyer had dared to give "permission"—even meaningless permission —for an independent study, he decided to teach the Mayor a lesson. The Triborough board approved a resolution stating that the Authority was no longer willing to build a mid-Manhattan crossing of any type and formally withdrawing the Authority's request for federal planning funds. O'Dwyer pleaded with Moses to reconsider. Moses refused. He had made the lesson all the harsher by communicating Triborough's change of plans to O'Dwyer privately. It was the humiliated Mayor who had to make the announcement that the expressway he had announced with such pride just three weeks before was now dead.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1129 | Loc. 17304-8  | Added on Tuesday, December 01, 2020, 02:23 AM

He disclaimed any influence over the Board of Estimate, telling reporters, "All I have is three votes on it, you know." Mayors were always telling reporters that—but City Hall insiders soon realized, to their astonishment, that this mayor believed it. Says one of his aides, Victor F. Condello: "Impy never understood that he had any power at all." Once Condello suggested that the Mayor call the five borough presidents to an executive session to discuss a thorny issue. "Yeah," the Mayor said, "that's a good idea." Pause. "You think they'll come?"
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1140 | Loc. 17471-78  | Added on Wednesday, December 02, 2020, 01:27 AM

The public never knew the extent of Moses' influence. One can search through the daily issues of the city's nine remaining daily newspapers— issues crammed, day after day, with "inside dope" on City Hall—without finding a single accurate analysis of that influence. There were, for example, hundreds of stories about the Housing Authority's construction plans and over-all policies. But because he had no direct connection with the Authority, in all these stories there is hardly a mention of Robert Moses, the man whose approval was needed for every plan and who personally set most of its policies and approved the others. The forty months that Vincent R. Impellitteri sat in the mayor's chair were a crucial forty months for the city. It was during them that—with the exception of those on Staten Island—the city's last vast open spaces disappeared. New York filled up, assumed a new shape. The shape Moses dictated.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1141 | Loc. 17494-97  | Added on Wednesday, December 02, 2020, 01:30 AM

With the exception of the rent increase, the policies that led to Impellitteri's defeat were Moses' policies. But the people couldn't strike back against Moses—even if they had wanted to, which they didn't since they didn't know that he was responsible for those policies. His state positions, and his authority chairmanships, put him beyond their reach. The result of Moses' policies was, for Impellitteri, defeat. The result of Moses' policies was. for Moses, more power.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1186 | Loc. 18185-89  | Added on Saturday, December 05, 2020, 02:26 AM

The working lifespan of the elemental force that was Robert Moses defied comparison with the working lifespan of other men. Robert Moses had been in power, shaping Long Island, in 1924. He was in power, tirelessly shaping not only Long Island but the great city stretching out toward it, in 1934, and 1944, and 1954, as he would be in 1964—until 1968, in fact. Other men hold real power—shaping power, executive authority—for four years, or eight, or twelve. Robert Moses held shaping power over the New York metropolitan region for forty-four years.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1189 | Loc. 18225-32  | Added on Sunday, December 06, 2020, 02:39 AM

Other great builders left their mark on physical New York. But the achievement of even the greatest—a Zeckendorf or a Helmsley or a Winston or a Lefrak, the Rockefellers of Rockefeller Center—is dwarfed by the achievement of Robert Moses. Not even the greatest of the public officials who, while not builders themselves, shaped the growth of the city—the almost forgotten "father of New York," Andrew H. Green, and "the greatest mayor New York ever had," Fiorello H. La Guardia—had a fraction of Moses' influence on the shape of New York. The shapers closest to him in total influence are probably the robber barons who built the railroads into the city and out through its suburbs and who erected monuments to themselves in great skyscrapers and terminals, but the influence of any one of them is dwarfed by his. To compare the works of Robert Moses to the works of man, one has to compare them not to the works of individual men but to the combined total work of an era.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1190 | Loc. 18239-45  | Added on Sunday, December 06, 2020, 02:41 AM

In the shaping of New York, Robert Moses was comparable only to some elemental force of nature. But if in the shaping of New York Robert Moses was an elemental force, he was also a blind force: blind and deaf, blind and deaf to reason, to argument, to new ideas, to any ideas except his own. He made himself blind. He possessed vision in a measure possessed by few men. But he wouldn't use it. The arrogance which had been his characteristic from youth, the arrogance which was a most striking characteristic of his mother and grandmother, the arrogance that had led relatives to call him "Bella Moses' son," the arrogance that had gorged on power, swelling with each increase, had, now that his power in his chosen fields of activity was so absolute, become absolute itself.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1194 | Loc. 18308-46  | Added on Sunday, December 06, 2020, 02:49 AM

Genius—the innovative, creative, shaping impulse that was Robert Moses' form of genius—is to a great extent personal, internal, intuitive, subjective. The inspiration that led Moses to envision in an instant the great Long Island park and parkway system was not the facts and figures that he had to listen to at the endless reform conferences, but the creative flash. But genius—in particular, public works genius—must have some roots in reality. The purpose of public works is to meet public needs; the first requirement of public works genius—an inescapable requirement for which even vision, foresight and drive are no substitute—is a knowledge, an understanding of those needs, of, in fact, the public, of the realities of the life led by the public for which the works are being built. Moses had had that knowledge when he created his great park and parkway system; he had had no choice but to have it; the role of liaison with reformer groups to which Al Smith had assigned him required him to sit through reform meetings; he could not have helped grasping the nature of the problem, the needs of the metropolitan area public. But Moses' position now in the center of a palace guard that walled him off from all contact with new opinions and facts meant that he did not have that knowledge any more. Reality had changed; the reality of the 1920's was not the reality of the 1950's. The metropolitan area that Moses was now attempting to shape was not the metropolitan area that he had begun shaping; there were more people in it, so many more that the very fact of their numbers alone changed all the dimensions of life in the area; they covered so much more of its land surface with their homes; they were, moreover, a different people: the population of the area had been transformed; to mention just one change, there had been fewer than 200,000 nonwhites in the area when Moses had begun his public career, there were more than 2,000,000 now; embarking on a recreational policy that deliberately excluded nonwhites from most parks may have had in Moses' mind some sort of rationale in 1923; it is difficult to believe that that mind would formulate the same policy in 1953; Moses was nothing if not realistic, and excluding so large a part of an area's population from parks was not realistic. Quality, Hegel said, changes with quantity. Automobiles had meant weekend excursions to the country, leisurely drives, pleasure, freedom, in the 1920's, when there had been relatively few automobiles. Automobiles meant something very different now. But Robert Moses did not see these changes. He did not see that reality had changed. Not only the sycophancy with which he had surrounded himself but also three hard physical facts of his existence insured this. Robert Moses had never, aside from a few driving lessons thirty years before, driven a car. He didn't know what driving was. His chauffeured limousine was an office, to him a peculiarly pleasant office, in fact, since in it he was away from secretaries and the telephone and in its upholstered confines he could bury himself in work without interruption. Traveling by car had been pleasant for him in the 1920's; it was still pleasant for him in the 1950's. The nature of driving might have changed immensely for the people of the metropolitan area; it had changed not at all for him. Robert Moses had never, since he had first come to power, allowed himself any time for reflection, for thought. Reflection, thought, is in a sense no more than the putting to use of a mind, and the unique instrument that was Robert Moses' mind could conceive wonders when it was put to work in that way. As a youth, he had never had enough to do; frustrated at the Bureau of Municipal Research, he had spent his evenings walking the city and thinking—and gradually his steps had led him more and more frequently to Riverside Park, and he had conceived a solution for problems for which no other man had been able to conceive a solution. As only a part-time aide to Al Smith, he had a lot to do—but not nearly enough to use up all his restless energy, and he had had time to sail and walk around the South Shore of Long Island. Living in Babylon and working in New York, he had had to ride the Long Island Rail Road for two hours and more a day; attempting an overview of Moses' career, it is difficult not to ascribe some of the credit for the stroke of genius that led him to see the potential for parks in the New York City watershed properties to the fact that the railroad not only carried him past those properties but trapped him on it for two hours and more a day so that he had to think about them. The following year, Robert Moses had come to power. In the years since, he had had piled upon him, and had grasped for, more and more power with each succeeding decade; the workload of executive responsibility he was carrying in the 1930's was too great to allow time for reflection—a fact he mentioned worriedly to his aides. But in the logo's he had far greater executive responsibilities than in the 1930's, and in 1954, with his assumption of the chairmanship of the State Power Authority, he undertook in that one job, piled atop all his others, so much work that quiet, reflective thought was a luxury in which he could quite literally indulge almost never. Given a chance to work, Moses' mind might, despite all the handicaps, have come to grips with the new realities and fashioned a shaping vision to deal with them. But now it had no time to deal with the reality at all.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1198 | Loc. 18361-69  | Added on Sunday, December 06, 2020, 02:51 AM

In a way, of course, Moses' deafness was symbolic. He had, in a way, been deaf all his life—unwilling to listen to anyone, public, Mayor, Governor, deaf to all opinion save his own. But this new, physical deafness contributed in a nonsymbolic, very real way to his divorce from reality. As always, he would not attend public hearings or in any other way place himself in a situation in which he could hear the public's views. His insulation inside a circle of men who would offer no views that were not echoes of his own further insured that no outside voices would become a part of his considerations. Now, thanks to the deafness, he was unable to hear the views, get the thinking of those administrators and public officials who were invited to lunch with him or who sat with him in conferences. Surrounded by men who would not give him the new facts and figures he needed, with no time left to rethink solutions to changing problems—most important, with no feeling that there was any reason for him to rethink— the deafness made it impossible for him to learn about the new realities even if he had wanted to.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1209 | Loc. 18527-31  | Added on Tuesday, December 08, 2020, 01:06 AM

None of Moses' previous feats of urban construction—immense though they had been—compared with the roads he was planning now; as is demonstrated by the cost. Highways had always cost millions of dollars. In the whole world, only a handful had cost as much as $10,000,000. These new highways would cost $10,000,000 per mile. One mile, the most expensive mile of road ever built, cost $40,000,000. Their total cost would be computed not in tens but hundreds of millions of dollars. The total cost of the roads Robert Moses built within the borders of New York City after World War II was over two billion dollars.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1209 | Loc. 18533-45  | Added on Tuesday, December 08, 2020, 01:08 AM

The scale of these crossings made the mind boggle. No suspension bridge anywhere in the world would be as long (or expensive) as the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge; it would be the longest such bridge ever built, its towers so far apart that in designing them allowance had to be made for the curvature of the earth: their tops are one and five eighths inches further apart than their bases. There would be enough wire in the Verrazano's cables to circle the earth five times around at the equator or to reach halfway to the moon, enough concrete in its anchorages to pave a single-lane highway reaching all the way from New York to Washington, and more steel in its towers— taller than seventy-story skyscrapers—and girders than was used in the construction of the Empire State Building. No underwater vehicular tunnel in the Western Hemisphere—and only one underwater vehicular tunnel anywhere in the world—would be as long as the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. The tile used to line it would have tiled 4,500 bathrooms; to ventilate it adequately against the fumes of 60,000 cars and trucks per day, air would have to be driven through huge ducts at the velocity of a Force Twelve hurricane, and the fans which drove that air would consume daily as much electricity as is used daily by a small city. Among such marvels even a huge suspension bridge like the $92,000,000 Throgs Neck—itself an engineering feat that would make most cities proud—would hardly be noticed by New York. Comparisons among public works of different types are difficult. In terms of size, however, Moses' road-building program was certainly comparable to any public works feat in history. In terms of physical difficulty, his program would dwarf them all.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1213 | Loc. 18588-96  | Added on Wednesday, December 09, 2020, 12:55 AM

Robert Moses didn't merely solve these "physical" problems. He gloried in solving them. A reporter who was permitted to drive around with him on one highway inspection tour saw Moses "mentally readjusting houses as though they were so many toy building blocks." One of the blocks was a three-story factory—Moses turned it around and reset it on the same plot at a different angle. Another was a church—he turned it sideways. Another was an apartment house six stories high, which—with highway officials who had flown in from all over the country watching in awe, most of them expecting the structure to collapse—was inched a hundred yards out of the Van Wyck Expressway right-of-way with the possessions of thirty-five families still inside it. It cost at least as much—and possibly more—to move the building than it would have cost to demolish it, and in later years, Moses was quite frank about why he had decided to move it. "I moved it because everybody said you couldn't do it," he would tell the author. "I'll never do that again, broke a lot of gas mains . . . That was an absolutely crazy stunt, you know." But at the recollection, a broad, genuine grin spread across Moses' face, a grin of achievement and pride.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1214 | Loc. 18607-22  | Added on Wednesday, December 09, 2020, 01:00 AM

A technology for solving the physical problems had been perfected, but not the methods and machinery for the creation of large-scale urban public works in a democratic society; the American system of government almost seemed designed to make such creation as difficult as possible. It is no coincidence that, as Raymond Moley puts it, "from the pyramids of Egypt, the rebuilding of Rome after Nero's fire, to the creation of the great medieval cathedrals... all great public works have been somehow associated with autocratic power." It was no accident that most of the world's great roads—ancient and modern alike—had been associated with totalitarian regimes, that it took a great Khan to build the great roads of Asia, a Darius to build the Royal Road across Asia Minor, a Hitler and a Mussolini to build the Autobahnen and autostrade of Europe, that during the four hundred years in which Rome was a republic it built relatively few major roads, its broad highways beginning to march across the known earth only after the decrees calling for their construction began to be sent forth from the Capitol by a Caesar rather than a Senate. Whether or not it is true, as Moley claims, that "pure democracy has neither the imagination, nor the energy, nor the disciplined mentality to create major improvements," it is indisputably true that it is far easier for a totalitarian regime to take the probably unpopular decision to allocate a disproportionate share of its resources to such improvements, far easier for it to mobilize the men necessary to plan and build them; the great highways of antiquity awaited the formation of regimes capable of assigning to their construction great masses of men (Rome's were built in large part by the legions who were to tramp along them); at times, the great highways of the modern age seemed to be awaiting some force capable of assigning to their planning the hundreds of engineers, architects and technicians necessary to plan them. And most important, it is far easier for a totalitarian regime to ignore the wishes of its people, for its power does not derive from the people. Under such a regime it is not necessary for masses of people to be persuaded of an improvement's worth; the persuasion of a single mind is sufficient.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1262 | Loc. 19338-44  | Added on Friday, December 11, 2020, 12:50 AM

It must have been an accident that the "East Tremont" office opened by the "highly efficient" Nassau Management Company was located not in East Tremont but in West Farms, another neighborhood, inconveniently far away for the 1,530 families the office was supposed to serve. It must have been an accident that the office was open only a few hours a day, that those hours were constantly changing, that no notice was ever given of what those hours were going to be, and that inquiring about them by telephone was almost impossible since the single phone number listed for the office seemed to be always busy—so that often East Tremont housewives, having made the long trek over to West Farms, found waiting for them only a locked door. It must have been an accident that there were never enough company representatives in the office, so that the housewives waiting for help had to wait on long lines.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1282 | Loc. 19655-58  | Added on Friday, December 11, 2020, 01:28 AM

Of the people who had lived in East Tremont, who had found in that neighborhood security, roots, friendship, a community that provided an anchor—friends and synagogue and Y—a place where you knew the people and they knew you, where you could make a stand against the swirling, fearsome tides of the sea of life, only the very old, too poor to move, still lived, almost barricaded in their freezing apartments. As for the rest of the people who had lived there, they were gone.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1289 | Loc. 19760-67  | Added on Wednesday, December 16, 2020, 12:29 AM

In the decade after Moses opened the Southern State Parkway in Nassau County, 200,000 new residents—about 50,000 families—moved into the county, but only 12,000 new jobs were created in the county. This meant that about 38,000 family breadwinners plus tens of thousands of others from the parkway-opened areas of Brooklyn and Queens had to come back into the city to win that bread. Hardly had the war ended when the surge to the suburbs resumed its prewar pace, leaped beyond it and soared to hitherto undreamed-of proportions, spilling beyond Nassau into rural Suffolk. Every projection made by planners showed that hundreds of thousands of families would be moving to Long Island within the next few years. The vast majority of the family breadwinners were going to have to travel into the center city every day to work. To the drivers who had already crammed to capacity and beyond capacity all Moses' roads would be added tens of thousands of additional drivers. How could you possibly build enough roads to accommodate them?
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1291 | Loc. 19781-808  | Added on Wednesday, December 16, 2020, 12:32 AM

The Coordinator's proposed highways and garages were designed to help automobile-owning families. But in 1945 two out of three residents of New York City belonged to families that did not own automobiles. Many of these families did not own them because they could not afford to. The Coordinator's subway-fare-increase proposals being advanced at that very moment in Albany would force poor New Yorkers to devote more— in many cases, more than they could afford—of their slender resources to getting around the city. The Coordinator's grabbing of the lion's share of public funds for highways and garages meant that public resources would be poured with a lavish hand into improving the transportation system used by people who could afford cars. Only a dribble of public resources would go into the transportation system used by people who could not—and who therefore rode subways and buses. While the city and state were providing car users with the most modern highways, they would be condemning subway users to continue to travel on an antiquated system utterly inadequate to the city's needs. While highways were being extended into "suburban" areas of the city in which highways were needed—and, in fact, into areas of the city in which highways were not needed, in which the need for highways would be created by the highways—subways would not be extended into areas of the city in which subways were needed. There were subway plans, too, just as there were highway plans; some, such as the proposals for a Second Avenue subway (for Manhattan's far east side and the Bronx) and the Hillside Avenue subway extension (for northeastern Queens), were advanced enough so that construction could have been begun immediately if funds were provided. But the Coordinator's monopolization of public funds made subway construction impossible. By building transportation facilities for the suburbs, he was insuring that no transportation facilities would be built for the ghettos. Therefore, planners saw, in the transportation field, the portion of the public helped by the use of public resources would not be the portion of the public that needed help most. For the well-to-do residents of the "suburban" areas of northeastern Queens, not having a subway nearby meant having to take a bus or drive a car to the end of the line in closer to Manhattan or having to drive all the way into Manhattan and back every working day. This was a hardship. But for the impoverished residents of the southeastern Bronx, not having a subway nearby and not owning a car meant taking a bus to the subway and that meant paying a double fare each way—twice a day, five days a week—and that meant paying money that many of these residents simply could not afford. And that meant that often these residents walked to the subway, walked a mile or more, in the morning and home in the evening when they were tired. And it meant that on weekends, families that would have liked to take their children on trips—to a museum or a movie downtown or Coney Island or some other park (particularly to a park, since Moses had built few in "lower-class" neighborhoods) or to visit a friend who lived in another neighborhood—stayed home instead. The Coordinator's policies were doing more than simply not helping these people. They were hurting them. They were even limiting their freedom to choose a place to live. His denial of funds for the extension of mass transit lines into outlying sections of the city and into the suburbs meant that the new homes and apartments there would be occupied only by car-owning families. Whether by design or not, the ultimate effect of Moses' transportation policies would be to help keep the city's poor trapped in their slums. They were in effect policies not only of transportation but of ghettoization, policies with immense social implications.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1303 | Loc. 19974-92  | Added on Wednesday, December 16, 2020, 12:48 AM

His thinking had been shaped in an era in which a highway was an unqualified boon to the public, in which roads were, like automobiles, sources of relaxation and pleasure. Changing realities could have changed his thinking, but he was utterly insulated from reality by the sycophancy of his yes men; by his power, which, independent as it was of official or public opinion— of, in fact, any opinion but his own—made it unnecessary for him to take any opinion but his own into account; by, most of all, his personality, the personality that made it not only unnecessary but impossible for him to conceive that he might have been wrong; the personality that needed applause, thereby reinforcing the tendency to repeat the simplistic formula that had won him applause before; the personality that made it possible for him to relate to the class of people that owned automobiles and that was repelled by the class of people that did not own automobiles; the personality whose vast creative energies were fired by the vision of cleanliness, order, openness, sweep—such as the clean, open sweep of a highway—and were repelled by dirt and noise, such as the dirt and noise he associated with trains; the personality that made him not only want but need monuments and that saw in highways—and their adjunct, suspension bridges ("the most permanent structures built by man")—the structures that would have a clean, clear ineradicable mark on history; the personality that, driven now by the lust for power, made him anxious to build more revenue- (and power-) producing bridges and parking lots (and highways to encourage their use) and that made him either indifferent or antagonistic to subways and railroads which would compete with his toll facilities not only for users but for city construction funds. He was insulated from experience. Most of the millions who used his roads were now using them primarily not for weekend pleasure trips but back and forth to work twice a day, five days a week, and driving was therefore no longer a pleasure but a chore; but for Moses, comfortable in the richly upholstered, air-conditioned, soundproofed rear seat of his big limousine, driving was still as pleasurable as it had always been. Robert Moses, who had never had to drive in a single traffic jam, really believed that his transportation policies would work. "Traffic will run pretty smoothly within three years," he had said in 1945. During those three years—and afterward— he repeated that prediction often, repeated it without hedging or qualification, spread it on the public record with the assurance of a man sure that he was right. He was confident that his roads would earn him applause now as they had always earned him applause before.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1336 | Loc. 20473-77  | Added on Thursday, December 17, 2020, 11:06 PM

During the decade following presentation of the Joint Program, therefore, public investment in new highways in and around New York was about $2,700,000,000. The public investment in new mass transportation facilities was a small fraction of this amount. During this decade, 439 miles of new highways were built—and not one mile of new railroad or subway. In 1974, people using subways and railroads in and around New York were still riding on tracks laid between 1904 and 1933. the last year before Robert Moses came to power in the city. Not a single mile had been built since.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1340 | Loc. 20536-40  | Added on Thursday, December 17, 2020, 11:12 PM

Less dramatic than the injury toll—but wearing on the tens of thousands of subway riders who were never involved in a major disaster—was the daily toll imposed by calculated neglect. The floors of New York's subways were filthy, and the grime was mixed with scattered pages of newspapers, candy and gum wrappers and, for emphasis, an occasional blob of spittle or a smear of vomit that no one had yet wiped up. Subway walls were covered with verbal filth; the scenery amid which the New Yorker traveled around his city was a vast mosaic of fuck and suck and cock and cunt.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1364 | Loc. 20907-9  | Added on Monday, December 21, 2020, 03:02 AM

The Long Island Expressway's designed daily capacity was 80,000 vehicles. By 1963, it was carrying 132,000 vehicles per day, a load that jammed the expressway even at "off" hours—during rush hours, the expressway was solid with cars, congealed with them, chaos solidified. The drivers trapped on it nicknamed Moses' longest road "the world's longest parking lot."
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1366 | Loc. 20944-53  | Added on Monday, December 21, 2020, 03:05 AM

Robert Moses was, after all, mortal, Lee Koppelman kept reminding himself —"even if sometimes it didn't seem that way"—and, one day, either death or old age would end Moses' decades of power. And, Koppelman believed, it would not take long after that day for bus service to be instituted on all Long Island's major highways, not only on its expressways but on 200 miles of parkways. The young planner cherished that belief until, driving along the old Wantagh Parkway one day, he happened to notice something he had never noticed before. "I was coming up to one bridge across the parkway," he would recall, "and just as I was about to go under it, I noticed how low it seemed to be. I took a good look at the next bridge, and goddammit, it was low! I pulled over and measured it with my arm at the curb, and I could see that it wasn't any fourteen feet high. At the next exit, I got off and found a store and bought a yardstick and got back on the parkway and measured the next bridge. At the curb it was eleven feet high. And I didn't have to go and measure all the other bridges. I knew right then what I was going to find. I knew right then what the old son of a gun had done. He had built the bridges so low that buses couldn't use the parkways!"
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1388 | Loc. 21279-88  | Added on Thursday, December 24, 2020, 01:23 AM

Robert Moses had, in just slightly more than seven years, moved from their homes more people than lived in Albany, Phoenix, Little Rock, Sacramento, Tallahassee, Topeka, Baton Rouge, Trenton, Santa Fe, etc. In terms even of huge New York, the unit was to report, this was "an enforced population displacement completely unlike any previous population movement in the City's history." If the number of persons evicted for public works was eye-opening, so were certain of their characteristics. Their color, for example. A remarkably high percentage of them were Negro or Puerto Rican. Remarkably few of them were white. Although the 1950 census had found that only 12 percent of the city's population was nonwhite, at least 37 percent of the evictees (Moses' own figures) and probably far more were nonwhite. And their income. The income of evictees not only for slum clearance projects but for all Moses' public works including expressways was far below the citywide average. In 1951, the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics found that $4,083 was needed for a family of four to maintain a minimum standard of living for a year. Only one out of every four of the evicted families earned $4,083 per year; 20 percent earned less than $2,000 per year.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1395 | Loc. 21383-94  | Added on Thursday, December 24, 2020, 01:34 AM

Moses had stated that evicted families who wanted to move into the new apartments to be built on the site would be given "preferential status" in applying. In reality, Mrs. Black learned, they were being discouraged from applying at all. No applications were being accepted for Manhattan-town and none would be until most of the families now on the site were gone. Not that Moses' precaution was really necessary. The evicted families had been paying an average of $10 rent per room per month. The rent in Manhattantown was going to be—if Moses' figures could be believed—$34 per room per month, about $100 for even a small three-room apartment. Out of 400 families interviewed, exactly one said it could afford to pay $100 per month rent. The families being displaced "cannot even consider the possibility of applying for the new project displacing them. Where will [they] go?" ' Not, in any numbers, into public housing. Moses had stated that Title I-displaced families would be given "first priority" in applying for such housing. Priorities meant little, however, because the public housing Moses was building had, with its lack of apartments for large families or single people ("Build, build, build! There was never any thought as to what he was building!") little relationship to the needs of the displaced people. As to whether any priority was in fact given to these people, almost 300 of the 400 families interviewed wanted to get into public housing—a check by the Women's City Club three years later would show that only fifty had made it.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1424 | Loc. 21821-43  | Added on Friday, December 25, 2020, 01:10 AM

It was a tableau that—complete to Isaacs' presence—might have been lifted intact from a score of earlier Moses battles. But within a few minutes a new element had been added to it, an element that had been conspicuously missing from the earlier tableaus—and that was to make April 17, 1956, the watershed of Moses' career. Following Isaacs' instructions, Elliott Sanger had telephoned more than a score of newspapers, radio stations and television stations to ask them to send men to the scene. And they did. A hundred neighborhood representatives had asked radio stations, television stations and the big citywide daily newspapers to cover their protests against Robert Moses projects. If they were lucky, two or three sent a man; often only the Post did; often even the Post didn't bother. Lillian Edelstein had managed to get three mayoral candidates and an audience of four hundred people to the rally in JHS 44 in East Tremont; in that audience there had been not a single reporter or photographer. But on this Tuesday morning there came, driving into the Tavern-on-the-Green s parking circle, jumping out and running over to the little glen, shoving microphones and triple-folded copy paper into the faces of the mothers and the bulldozer driver, reporters and photographers from the Post —and from the Herald Tribune, the World-Telegram and Sun, the Journal-American, the Daily Mirror, from the Times, the newspaper with the greatest prestige in the country, and from the Daily News, the newspaper with the largest circulation in the world, even from the Brooklyn Eagle, from WMCA, WOR, WABC, WNBC, WHN, WINS, WNEW, from WCBS-TV, WNBC-TV, WABC-TV, WOR-TV and WPIX-TV. A hundred local protests against some plan or other of Robert Moses' had been carried out, so far as the public was concerned, in secrecy, the secrecy so necessary to Moses' success. This local protest against this Robert Moses plan would be carried out in a spotlight, the brightest spotlight on earth—the spotlight thrown by the massed mass media of the city that was the communications center of the civilized world. Within hours, every major radio station in New York was telling its listeners the story of the mothers, the baby carriages and the bulldozer. That evening, the story was on every major television newscast. The next day, a picture of mothers and children lined up defiantly between the menacing machine and a large tree was displayed prominently in every newspaper in town. By the weekend—with Moses trying to trick the protesters by taking no action on Wednesday, giving reporters the impression that he would await the results of a Thursday conference between Theobald and the mothers, and then ordering the bulldozer back into action Thursday morning, only to have it turned back again by sentries because the mothers had set up a rotating schedule that kept the glen guarded from 7 a.m. to dark, trying vainly again on Friday with a new bulldozer operator bearing assurances that ail he wanted to do was "move some topsoil around"—the story was on page one. It would stay there for weeks.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1434 | Loc. 21986-97  | Added on Friday, December 25, 2020, 01:24 AM

The second issue—discovered by Isaacs—was the nature of the financial arrangement between Moses' Park Department and the restaurant's owner, old Moses favorite Arnold Schleiffer. Schleiffer paid the city only 5 percent of his gross income to operate a restaurant in the renovated sheepfold. This was a pittance compared to the rent most restaurant owners paid their landlords—even if Schleiffer had paid it all. And, Isaacs discovered, he hadn't. Studying Schleiffer's contract, the councilman found a provision that allowed the restaurateur to "improve" (repair and renovate) his restaurant and deduct the cost of the improvements from his rent payments. Checking with the Comptroller's office, he found that the restaurateur had made full use of that provision. In one four-year period, for example, the gross income of the Tavern-on-the-Green had been $1,786,000. On that income, Schleiffer should have paid the city about $90,000—a low enough figure. Instead, he spent more than $80,000 on "improvements." On a gross income of $1,786,000, he had paid the city only $9,000—half of 1 percent. Out of every thousand dollars that he collected, he handed the city a lone five-dollar bill. Isaacs had heard rumors that Schleiffer, who had been operating on a shoestring when he was first taken into the Moses empire, was now a man of considerable wealth. After he saw those figures, the councilman had no trouble believing those rumors. Moses had made the concessionaire rich. And he had made him rich at the city's expense.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1443 | Loc. 22114-33  | Added on Friday, December 25, 2020, 01:39 AM

He had allowed himself to remain too long in the glare of a spotlight strong enough to show him as he was. The city had finally gotten a good look at the man behind the legend. Part of the legend still remained un-illuminated. Even after the Battle, Robert Moses was still, in the public consciousness, a man uninterested in money, a man who ignored bureaucrats and politicians, who was above political considerations. He was still the Man Who Got Things Done. Those elements of the Moses myth remained untouched. But other elements had been destroyed. No one who had followed the Battle closely could believe any longer that Robert Moses was in public life solely to serve the public. It had been all too obvious that what he wanted was to be not the public's servant, but its master, to be able to impose his will on it. That was one crack in the image. There were others. Moses' public appeal had always been based largely on his identification with the magic word "parks." In the public mind, he had always, first and foremost, been the Robert Moses of Sunken Meadow and Jones Beach, the fighter for and defender of open space and grass and trees and sun and surf and brine for urban masses. The halo placed on his head by the Timber Point fight thirty years before had now been knocked off. He was, moreover, identified by the Tavern-on-the-Green fight with the bulldozer. By the mid-1950's, the bulldozer had quite specific connotations in the public mind. Now the name of Moses had those connotations, too. The aura of infallibility was gone also. If Moses was the Man Who Got Things Done, implicit was the assumption that the things that he got done were things that should be gotten done. He had always been portrayed as a man who was right. Now, in a single, dramatic tableau, he had been shown to be utterly, unmistakably wrong. Most important, the aura of incorruptibility was gone. It was gone unfairly, for nothing he had done for the Tavern-on-the-Green was illegal, and by the standards by which the public judges morality in politics, what he had done for the restaurant was only faintly immoral. But it was gone nonetheless. The breath of scandal had tarnished this incorruptible public figure only slightly. But slightly was enough. His image had once dazzled even most of the reporters and editors hardest to dazzle. Now it no longer shone quite so brightly. The press could look at Robert Moses and at his operations and methods as they would look at the operations and methods of an ordinary public official. And they looked.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1454 | Loc. 22280-300  | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2020, 02:05 AM

Moses—or, rather, Moses' spokesmen, Spargo, Lebwohl and Brooks; the Coordinator was keeping his lowest profile ever—announced that a new sponsor, William Zeckendorfs Webb & Knapp, Inc., was willing to take over all Manhattantown's debts, including its liabilities to the city, and build the project. Gleason and Cook realized that by changing owners without foreclosing on the old ones first, Moses was allowing Manhattantown, Inc., to escape from the project, which they had been milking for five years, with no financial penalties whatsoever. But the advantages for the city were undeniable, not only because of the avoidance of lengthy foreclosure proceedings but because, in obtaining Zeckendorf, the city was trading in a promoter for a genuine developer. And letting Manhattantown go scot free was something that was only to be expected; whatever the nature of the political muscle that had allowed the corporation to milk a sizable slum for five years while the city turned a blind eye to tax arrears, that muscle was certainly strong enough to keep the city from taking any genuine punitive action against it. But then some of the details of the takeover arrangement to which Moses had agreed—and on which he had apparently sold the Mayor and the Board of Estimate—were leaked to light, not by Moses' tight-sealed Slum Clearance Committee, of course (as usual, that group deliberated in secret), but by City Hall. Under the arrangement, Webb & Knapp would not merely insure Man-hattantown's principals against any liability to the city. It would buy out the two principal stockholders—Seymour Millstein and Jack Ferman (Caspert having prudently sold out before the company's collapse)—for $533,250, and put them on Webb & Knapp's payroll as "consultants" for five years at a fee of $30,000 per year, a total of $150,000 more. These two men, key figures in Manhattantown since its inception, were not merely being allowed, after five years of delay—five years during which they had made fortunes— to slip quietly into the night without punishment. They were being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so. And this money was not for all their stock. Under the Moses-approved arrangements, Ferman and Millstein would be given sizable stockholdings—between them a total of 32 percent—in Webb & Knapp's Manhattantown subsidiary. "The developers who hadn't developed," Cook wrote, "would be entitled in the future to nearly one-third of the profits" of the developer who did develop. {* Ferman said he actually lost money.} The cast of characters in the Manhattantown story was, moreover, getting a significant addition. The Moses-approved contract did not, of course, contemplate any reduction in Democrat Samuel Rosenman's $250,000 retainer. But it added another $75,000 legal fee—to Daniel J. Riesner, president of the National Republican Club.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1461 | Loc. 22395-403  | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2020, 02:14 AM

Gleason and Cook knew that reporters on every paper in town wanted to dig into the Moses empire; they knew therefore that the decision not to dig—and to support Moses against the federal government—had been made at higher levels. Gleason and Cook could see that Moses' relationship with publishers and top editors was as close as ever. Not only had they been the recipients of his charm and his favors, they had been the key figures in making the Moses myth; they had a psychological vested interest in it. To dispatch investigators to dig into it would be an admission on their part that they had been wrong—had been wrong for years. That was not an admission that, in the absence of evidence a lot stronger than Gleason had been able to uncover, they were prepared to make. Some of them would permit their papers to print derogatory items about Moses if such items were breaking news; they would not allow their reporters to dig up such items and make them news. And without such digging beneath the surface of that image, the image would endure. They may have chipped it, they realized, but it was still there.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1470 | Loc. 22528-45  | Added on Thursday, December 31, 2020, 02:19 AM

In any assessment of their motivations, their age is important. Everyone in the circle was in his late twenties or early thirties. Recalling those days, years later, Haddad would say with a rueful smile: "Our motives? It was us against the world, us against them—the city, corruption, unmovable forces. We were young enough to breathe that kind of air then." Moreover, these young idealists hadn't even been born when Robert Moses had been on the front pages battling the robber barons to open Long Island to the masses. They had been only infants when Jones Beach was dedicated. In 1934, when Robert Moses had revitalized New York City's park system, to the city's cheers, Gleason had been only seven years old, Haddad six. The Robert Moses they knew was not the Robert Moses of the beautiful parks and the beautiful parkways—the parkways that were going to solve traffic problems. The Robert Moses they knew was the Robert Moses of the Tavern-on-the-Green and Manhattantown and those damned expressways he insisted on building even though everybody knew the city should be building subways instead, and for which he evicted thousands of helpless families; their impression of him was of an arrogant, dictatorial old man who, if not corrupt himself, had certainly managed to surround himself with a lot of corrupt people; like the Newmans, they were too young to have seen him as great; they saw him only as crotchety, old—and wrong; their perception of the Coordinator was unclouded by the preconceptions that had clouded reporters' eyes in the Twenties and Thirties, that he was the selfless, incorruptible, apolitical public servant sans peur et sans reproche. They saw him as he was. The members of this journalistic cabal were also too young to be afraid. Those rare reporters of the Thirties and Forties who might have contemplated investigating the Moses empire had been very conscious of what had happened to reporters who had tried it before. But it had been a long time now since Robert Moses had broken a reporter, so long that Haddad and Gleason didn't even know that he ever had. Haddad, the spiritual heir of Milton Racusin, a Herald Tribune reporter who a decade earlier had investigated the Moses empire and written a series on it but had seen the series killed (and had been forced to personally apologize to Moses to boot), had never even heard Racusin's name, much less the story of how his career had been wrecked.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1494 | Loc. 22894-900  | Added on Saturday, January 02, 2021, 01:32 AM

But the Second Battle of Central Park was not one of the best things that ever happened to Robert Moses. Occurring at a time when Moses' reputation was trembling in the balance, it helped tip that balance against him, not only by again demonstrating his contempt for the public but by demonstrating, even more clearly than the First Battle of Central Park, his dominance over the Mayor who was supposedly his superior, his exemption from the normal democratic processes. Stanley Isaacs had been asked on television, "Do you feel that the Mayor allows Moses to have his own way?" "Does anyone doubt it?" the elderly councilman had replied. The public had never understood before which one of the two men was really boss. But after the daily barrage of headlines dramatizing the Mayor's inability even to persuade his Park Commissioner to return a telephone call, the public understood now.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1507 | Loc. 23098-102  | Added on Tuesday, January 05, 2021, 01:43 AM

The band of eager young reporters was meeting at the corner table in Bleeck's Artists and Writers Bar almost every evening now. They had it down to a system. "The only way to keep it going was to keep the papers goosing each other," Haddad would reminisce years later. "If nobody picked it up, we were dead. So we'd leave a little piece out of a story, and give that piece to Gene or Woody so they'd have a new lead, and they'd do the same for us. Sometimes, I'd even give them carbons of my stories, so they'd have it right in their desk. Their editor would say, 'Check this out,' and they'd have it right there."
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1514 | Loc. 23204-15  | Added on Tuesday, January 05, 2021, 01:53 AM

Moses was soon taking the fight to the press on a dozen different fronts. But fighting the press is a battle that no public official can win, for the battleground is not just of the press's choosing—it is the press. His attacks would be played as the media wanted them played. Moreover, attacking a particular newspaper—and because the articles were to a great extent exposes that were breaking in one paper at a time, his attacks were often against a specific newspaper—was practically the surest guarantee that that newspaper would attack him again in its turn. The story that had enraged Moses may have been written by an individual reporter, but it was not the reporter alone who would have to bear responsibility for it and defend it to the publisher or chief editor. Lower-ranking editors—with stories of such significance, editors on several levels—would have had to approve it. Therefore, when Moses attacked a newspaper publicly or in a private letter to its publisher, a lot of people on that newspaper had to justify themselves. And the most effective method of justification was to find other things wrong with the Title I program—and to write more stories. Many key newspapermen in New York had previously had a vested interest in preserving Moses' image; now many of these same journalists had a vested interest in destroying it. What was needed was discreet silence—the wait until the storm was over— and silence was one commodity it had never been within Moses' power to deliver.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1518 | Loc. 23261-74  | Added on Tuesday, January 05, 2021, 01:58 AM

The Incorruptible, Uncorrupting, Apolitical, Utterly Selfless Public Servant Moses had been a synthetic character, largely puffed up by the press. That character had endured for thirty-five years. But in 1959 the process of deflation by the press—a process that had been going on intermittently for several years—had begun in earnest. In that process there had been a large amount of unfairness. But that process had in the end arrived at the truth. At the beginning of 1959, the Moses image had stood in most of its glory, intact except for a few small chips. At the end of 1959, it lay in unsalvageable ruins. Popularity, Al Smith had warned him, was a slender reed. Now the reed was broken. But popularity was no longer a significant factor in Moses' power equation. His power rested not on a reed but on a rock. Unaware of the full extent of the power of the public authority, the press did not understand this. It assumed that he could be fired or forced to resign like any other mayoral appointee. But Wagner couldn't do that Personality made it difficult, both because of the Mayor's respect for men of his father's generation ("You don't fire your father," he was to tell a young anti-Moses aide, Tim Cooney. "Never forget that, Tim. You don't fire your father") and because of other Wagnerian traits. Paul Screvane, asked if the Mayor might not have done it, just laughs. "Do you know Wagner?" he says. "Wagner never fired anyone in his life unless the fellow was convicted of a crime. And when you think of him firing a giant like Moses, it's just inconceivable. . . . Moses might have been a thorn in his side. Wagner may have wanted him out. He may have wanted to get the press off his neck. But Wagner would never have fired Moses." Politics made it impossible.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1537 | Loc. 23567-78  | Added on Monday, January 11, 2021, 12:54 AM

Nelson Rockefeller was rough, all right. He was a threat to Robert Moses far more dangerous than any that had previously existed in Albany. Moses had defied and overawed all Al Smith's successors in the Executive Chamber. The threat to resign—his ultimate ultimatum—had brought them all to heel. But the man in the Executive Chamber now was not a man who would be willing to heel. And, perhaps most important so far as Moses was concerned, Rockefeller would, moreover, be an opponent—the only opponent Moses had met, since he conceived and gained the powers of the public authority—on whom there was no handhold. Governor Dewey had deeply resented both his power and his arrogance, and Dewey had been ruthless and shrewd. But Russ Sprague and King Macy and the banks had been the way to exert pressure on Dewey, and Moses had been in a position to make Sprague and Macy and the banks exert that pressure. Governor Harriman had sought at first to curb him. But De Sapio and Rosenman and the unions had been the way to exert pressure on Harriman, and Moses had been in a position to make De Sapio and Rosenman and the unions exert that pressure. But when Rockefeller had come to the Governorship, there had been no way to exert pressure on him except through the unions, and the Governor had early struck up his own alliances with them to make himself exempt even from that pressure. "In the Empire State," Theodore White writes, "Nelson Rockefeller was beholden to no one; no crevice of weakness or obligation could be found. ..." "Moses could push a button," Lutsky says, "and in would come the calls"—from men who wielded immense power. But there was no power that Nelson Rockefeller could not 
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1540 | Loc. 23614-17  | Added on Monday, January 11, 2021, 01:00 AM

Nonetheless, tension began to build between Moses and the Governor. Observers who saw them both frequently believe it could not be avoided. Two men so arrogant, so accustomed to getting their own way in everything, could not long be in contact without friction—particularly when both men were grand-scale builders. So acute an observer as Perry Duryea says he "could just see Rocky thinking that there wasn't enough room in one state for a Robert Moses and a Nelson Rockefeller both clicking on all six."
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1581 | Loc. 24241-50  | Added on Friday, January 15, 2021, 12:45 AM

Public officials lunching with Times editors almost invariably do so at the Times; even Presidents come to them. Not Moses; if they wanted to see him, he told Ingraham, who was arranging the luncheon, they would have to come to him. They agreed to do so, and eight or nine—"the very top, Daniel and Salisbury were there," recalls Ingraham—journeyed out to Flushing Meadows one day. Ingraham says he was brought along "to explain things to them," but explanations were to prove superfluous. Moses made things perfectly clear. "Moses started sounding off and made some reference to his job as City Construction Coordinator and the power it gave him," Ingraham says. "So Frank Adams [Times city editor] asked, 'How far does your jurisdiction as Construction Coordinator extend—the way you put it, it would seem that if a road starts in Florida, you have jurisdiction over it as long as it ends up here.' " "I consider that an insulting question," Moses said. Leaping out of his seat, he stalked out of the room—"leaving nine top executives of The New York Times absolutely flabbergasted." For a while they sat there, stunned, waiting for their host to return. Gradually they began to realize that he wasn't going to. Says Ingraham: "After a while, we just got up and went home."
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert A. Caro)
- Highlight on Page 1658 | Loc. 25412-21  | Added on Monday, February 01, 2021, 01:50 AM

The walls of his office on Randall's Island were covered with pictures of his achievements—pictures of bridges and dams illuminated at night— and through the window behind him could be seen the solid concrete and steel of the Triborough Bridge. But the office was dominated by a huge map of New York City. And while that map was crisscrossed with the solid lines that represented achievements built—highways, bridges, tunnels—on it also were lines, many lines, that were not solid but broken: lines representing achievements not yet built, dreams yet to be turned into reality. As he sat at his desk, that map, its width wider than his armspread, its height taller than a man, stared back at him, reminding this man to whom accomplishment was so important that there was so much yet to accomplish. There was visible behind his urge to keep building an element almost of desperation; the public was doubting the wisdom of his creations—the way to convince them was to complete the system, to build more highways, more bridges, more housing—to build, build, build in a frantic attempt to rescue his reputation. But there was behind the urge also genuine creative drive, a drive undimmed by eighty years of life, the shaping impulse of the shaping man—and a drive supported by the arrogance which since his youth had told him in a voice that would not be denied that he had the answer to the problem, that he knew what to do. If only he were to be allowed to do it.