Robert Moses

A Tribute To The Man And His Impact On The Borough

’If there is one person who has left his impact on this century, it’s a man named Robert Moses," Debbi van Cura, president of the Greater Astoria Society, said as she introduced John Kriskiewicz, a local architect and historian at a recent meeting. Kriskiewicz spoke about Moses, on whom he is an authority.

"When you say Robert Moses, it’s like waving a red flag," he said in opening.

He gestured to his first set of slides, both photographs of Moses. In the earlier slide, a youthful Moses sported a white suit and a smile of hopeful confidence. The later slide, in contrast showed an older man dressed in a black suit. Kriskiewicz laughed. "Good guy, bad guy."

He noted that Marshall Berman, author of All That’s Solid Melts Into Air, seemed to agree. Berman wrote, "In his first 20 years [Moses] would do more than any man in American history to nourish the romance of construction and bring it to a climax: in his next 20 years, he would do more than any man to poison that romance and tear it down."

Moses, who at one time simultaneously held 12 municipal offices while receiving only one salary, was responsible for myriads of major construction projects in and around the city, including the Triborough Bridge, the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, the United Nations Complex, both World’s Fairs, the Bronx Expressway, Jones Beach and Lincoln Center.

"This man changed the way we live in New York City," Kriskiewicz said.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1889 to German Jewish parents, Moses was educated at Yale, Columbia and the University of Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. He has been praised for his amazing writings, sharp wit and ingenuity.

But his true education was given him by a New York City native, the self-educated Governor Alfred E. Smith, who joked that the initials after his name should be FFM, for Fulton Fish Market.

Having grown up in the city, Smith understood the importance of accessible public recreation and his opinion was corroborated by the social scientists of the day, who noted the increase of leisure time in America with the end of World War I and the advent of the five and a half day work week. Smith formed the State Parks Commission and made Moses the head of the Long Island branch.

Soon, Jones Beach emerged from the romantic imagination of Moses and the drafting boards of promising young architects, landing on Long Island the crown jewel of the State Parks Department, a tremendous recreation area "scaled to the size of a good time" at the end of well planned parkways from the city.

Kriskiewicz noted that Moses was meticulous in his attention to detail. The parkways were parks in themselves, rights of way having been purchased before the beginnings of any development in the area. Even now, a drive out to Jones Beach feels like a drive out to the country. Rustic bridges were made of large blocks of stone and wooden signs directing the traveler seemed old-fashioned.

Once the traveler arrived at Jones Beach, he was greeted with opportunities to swim in both ocean and pool, to exercise or practice archery. Again, the signs were fanciful, often depicting the activity they advertised in metal along the top of the sign. Even the trash cans were fun, their nautically influenced shapes making visitors feel as though they were walking along the deck of a ship. Instead of building a traditional water tower to store water for the pools, Moses had architects design a bell tower-shaped structure that added to the European look of the park.

In his 1974 criticism of Moses, The Power Broker, Robert Caro argued that the designer of Jones Beach discriminated against New York’s poor by building overpasses that were too low to accommodate buses, thereby limiting access to all but automobile owners.

But Kriskiewicz’s slide, taken directly from Caro’s book, showed no less than five buses, (nearly cut off in the upper right hand corner of a photograph of the Jones Beach prodigious parking lot). It is true, Kriskiewicz said, that some of the overpasses were too low to allow buses. But photographic evidence proves that not all of them were so prohibitive.

When Fiorello LaGuardia became mayor, he and Moses forged a love–hate relationship. LaGuardia called Moses "His Grace" because of his arrogance, and Moses returned the compliment, referring to the Little Flower as "Rigoletto" in deference to his dramatic flair. Despite Moses’ high-handed manner, in 1934 LaGuardia made him city Parks Commissioner.

By 1936, in the spirit of the public works movement of the Depression, Moses was building playgrounds all over the city. During that summer, a scorching record-breaker, 10 beautiful new city pools opened, their designs products of architects who usually spent their time drafting mansions.

Caro criticized this move as well, noting that few parks were located in or near slum neighborhoods.

True, Kriskiewicz said, but purchasing land in developed areas is much more difficult than putting parks in areas where development has been limited. Moses had to rely heavily on his ingenuity to acquire any land in the inner city. And, he pointed out, we still reap the benefits of the parks scattered through the New York City area today.

As time wore on and Moses acquired more titles, the new commissioner of the Triborough Bridge Authority took on the challenge of a new bridge to handle the traffic that clogged the existing pre-automobile bridges. Moses, an automobile enthusiast, commissioned a redesign of the archaic blueprints. He emerged with a traffic-sorting wonder that handled cars from three directions and served not only as a passage from Manhattan to Queens and Brooklyn, but as a conduit to New England, Philadelphia and New Jersey.

In addition, he extended the tolls on the bridge indefinitely, so that when it finished paying for its own construction, more projects, such as the later Gowanus Expressway, could be financed from the windfall. This was the first time such a plan had been written into the covenant of a public structure.

There were a few holes in Moses’ romantic vision. For example, he didn’t think about the people who lived in the buildings alongside the new Triborough Expressway, which was built on the old elevated train tracks. Their windows were constantly splattered with the mud of car wheels, and those on lower floors were deprived of light. Businesses did not benefit from the expressway because unlike train riders, automobile drivers didn’t walk past stores. Few exits were even in business districts.

In contrast, Moses’ Belt Parkway acted as a conservation tool, saving Jamaica Bay from its earlier role of a large harbor and creating a large wildlife preserve instead. In Kriskiewicz’s words, the Belt Parkway, designed by Gilmore Clark, combined transportation, recreation and conservation.

Caro entered the debate again at this point with more criticism. Moses is racist because of his designs where the highway passed through Harlem. Instead of the landscaped parkways of Long Island, Harlem residents, who were not, at the time of construction African–Americans, received a steel viaduct that went over their heads. In Kriskiewicz’s estimation, the real purpose of the elevated highway was to skirt the area factories, which were in full production during wartime, not to put the lives of Harlem residents in shadow.

The romance Kriskiewicz continually referenced is found in the Parisian style promenades along the East River bank, set back far enough that the stench from the river (into which the city was still dumping raw sewage) was not discernible. Moses also found loopholes for funding construction projects, building colonnaded grade crossings with parks and restaurants underneath, hooking roads to interstate bridges. He paid attention to every detail and the Belt Parkway was a stretch of road unified by its design.

He acquired land in what was then the Corona dumps, but became "The World of Tomorrow" as the site for both the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs—the site that we now know as Flushing Meadows–Corona Park and the home of the Hall of Science.

Inside the Perisphere, fairgoers looked down on a futuristic democracity, where workers would go from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. returning home to various suburban Pleasantvilles via limited access roads. Emerging from the sphere, they found themselves in a landscaped setting not unlike the one viewed inside the futuristic sphere.

In the World War II years, Moses’ plans, like those of so many others, were put on hold. But like the GIs at war, he planned. They planned for homes, he for roads. After the war, Moses’ roads began to encircle the city and to cut through it. In some cases whole neighborhoods were displaced by the roads. He envisioned clean new high-rise apartment buildings over the highway where tenements had been. It was the perfect solution, he thought, restoring families to housing in the same location where he preserved neighborhoods.

Moses was a lover of the automobile and a believer in green space, Kriskiewicz said. He had an artistic and romantic vision for New York City which while improving the quality of life for some, seemed at times to depend more on aesthetics than cultural pragmatics. Moses’ beautiful details were starting to seem less and less important.

In the words of social scientist and critic Jane Jacobs, "To approach a city or neighborhood as though it could be contained as a work of art is to make the mistake of substituting art for life. The result is neither art nor life, but taxidermy."

Kriskiewicz added, "Planners only saw dirt and lack of facilities in tenement communities. They didn’t see social interaction. Social interaction couldn’t take place in high-rise buildings."

In another, unpredictable result of the buildings which were eventually constructed above expressways, the children living there were found to have lower reading scores than their companions who lived in more traditional housing. Noise, thought experts, must be the cause, noting that children on lower floors performed more poorly than those on the higher ones. The real cause of the low scores? Lead poisoning.

In response to the social criticism that was assaulting him on all fronts during the 1950s, Moses said, "I raise my stein to the man who can plan a city without moving people, as I would to the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs."

The Verrazano Narrows Bridge was constructed during this time, as were expressways through Brooklyn and Staten Island. But Moses’ golden luck had started to run out. FDR vetoed a proposed bridge from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn, calling it a target for enemy war planes. His plans for midtown and lower Manhattan expressways were also lost in the scuffle, though the Harlem Expressway was built. Lincoln Center went up, construction started on the United Nations complex, and one of the most controversial projects of his authority, the Cross Bronx Expressway, plodded along as it had since 1946, clearing a path through the most populated section of the Bronx.

An excruciating 19 years in the execution, the Cross Bronx Expressway not only razed seven miles of homes, it came within inches of other buildings and wormed under elevated train tracks and roadways. One affected resident was Marshall Berman, the earlier quoted author of All That’s Solid Melt Into Air, who had enjoyed the European-style promenades that lined boulevards of Moses’ earlier projects, some of which ran right over the new expressway. He wrote wryly, "Thanks to Robert Moses, the modernity of the boulevard is being destroyed by the modernity of the interstate highway."

Though Moses’ construction ideas were for the most part original only in execution and ingenuity, not in conception—in the case of the Cross Bronx Expressway, he was, according to one historian, "pouring the concrete on the dotted lines"—Moses got the brunt of the blame for the social consequences of his projects. Perhaps that was proper for the Commissioner of Slum Clearance, Housing, City Planning and Coordinator of Construction.

Ironically, though, it was not the Bronx project that kickstarted Moses’ plunge into unpopularity, but a staged photograph called "Little Soldier in Park War." The photo drew attention to a Central Park West community mothers’ protest of the Parks Department expansion of the Tavern on the Green parking area. Titles began slipping away form Moses, even as he scrambled to organize the 1964 World’s Fair.

Times were changing faster than Moses, who was still caught up in a 1920s vision of the city. A different public attended the fair, a public caught up in protest of Vietnam, one of protesting mothers.

Life magazine wrote, "The fair is all candy colored bright in a world that is in fact harsh."

In 1968, Moses lost his last position, that of Triborough Bridge Commissioner.

He was held in low regard, and as a consequence, his projects were neglected and his aesthetics were not retained. No one took over responsibility for the expressways and bridges, parks and buildings that Moses had lovingly created.

Kriskiewicz called once again for a reassessment of prevailing views on Moses. "We shouldn’t go back to an undemocratic way of building, but it is so hard to get big projects such as the Second Avenue subway or the subway to the airport done," he said.

Kriskiewicz asked the audience not to view Moses in black and white. "He was a complex individual doing complex things in a complex time in a complex city," he said.

Jeff Koessler, a society member and fellow Moses expert in attendance, smiled when asked at the end of the program if he could contribute any more information. "John did a great job," he said, "I wouldn’t add a thing."