Ask urbanists who’s responsible for New York’s twentieth-century trajectory, and most will tell you: Robert Moses. Since the publication of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker five decades ago, the accepted wisdom has been that we live in the city that Moses built. “With his power,” as Caro writes, “Robert Moses shaped New York.” Whether forging the Cross-Bronx Expressway across dense neighborhoods or decreeing that bridges on parkways be so low that they would bar buses carrying poorer, minority residents to white suburbs, “for forty years nothing could stand in Moses’s way. No Mayor or Governor dared to try.”
Until the final years of his career, Moses went along with the public perception that, starting in the late 1920s—over decades of building beaches, playgrounds, parks, bridges, tunnels, parkways, expressways, and housing—he had dictatorial powers, jackhammering democracy. Moses was not just the chairman of the city’s Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, maker of cash-generating tunnels and bridges connecting Gotham’s five boroughs. After World War II, he held 11 titles simultaneously, from state parks chairman to city construction coordinator, in charge of highway and housing development. He was accustomed to receiving letters from supplicants praising him for good deeds or begging him to stop bad ones. Petitioners took for granted that he alone could help or harm them.
The reality was more mundane. Moses survived not through Machiavellian machinations to subvert political will but by smoothly delivering what the state and city’s governing class, business leaders, and editorial boards wanted him to accomplish. In the early twentieth century, New York’s elites sought roads and highways for that new contraption, the car. Starting in the 1930s—after he had made a name for himself with Jones Beach State Park on Long Island, debuting in 1929, and New York City’s Triborough Bridge, which opened in the next decade—Moses embodied this philosophy. But he was its creation, not its creator.
In 1929, prominent New Yorkers released a 416-page manifesto. Its dry title—Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, with volume 1 called The Graphic Regional Plan—didn’t do justice to the role that it would play in shaping New York City and beyond. The document represented seven years of work, overseen by enlightened men. The Regional Plan project’s chair was Frederic Delano, a railroad executive and uncle of Franklin Roosevelt, then governor. The board included George McAneny, a progressive reformer and onetime Manhattan borough president, and Lawson Purdy, a tax expert who had helped devise New York’s 1916 zoning resolution to protect light and air from tall buildings. This board could work independently as it pursued its goal: “an analysis of the physical needs of the New York region,” as the tristate region’s population surged from 10 million to a projected 20 million.
The Graphic Regional Plan—it included dozens of maps—explained the burgeoning dominance of the automobile. By 1926, New York City counted half a million vehicles, three-quarters of them cars. In the broader region, the number of vehicles per person had quintupled in a decade. The authors rendered no opinion on this trend. Rather, the report observed that “the motor car is too recent as a form of transportation to enable any final judgment. . . . It has helped to add to the congestion of the street while greatly aiding the movement of people and goods” and has brought “increased . . . dangers” and “problems.”
The report concluded that the city would have to accommodate cars and accepted as a “premise” that “it is essential for . . . business that movement should be fast, have the least possible degree of interruption, and have ample space for parking.” Cars and trucks should rule the urban road.
The report’s proposal: 2,548 miles of roadways, including expressways. The expressway, a multilane speedway separate from local traffic, was a new concept. “Uninterrupted movement requires the separation of grades at all important highway crossings,” the report noted. “Through intensively built-up areas this can only be accomplished by placing the express route on a viaduct above the existing street system”—that is, cutting off light and air; “in tunnel,” the seemingly victimless option often too expensive to pursue; or “open cut below the existing streets,” blasting a path near occupied buildings and leaving the depressed roadway uncovered to bisect neighborhoods.
The Graphic Regional Plan acknowledged the human cost of such roadways. The authors agreed that it was optimal to build through undeveloped areas. But disruptions would occur. “The central area of congestion in New York . . . has become so large that any comprehensive system of express roads must cross that area.” To that end, three express highways should traverse the densest parts of New York City: one from New Jersey, “across southern Manhattan,” via downtown’s Canal Street, through to Long Island; another from New Jersey, “across midtown” to Queens, via a tunnel underneath midtown; and one across northern Manhattan, through Washington Heights, east “across . . . the Bronx,” connecting northward to New England. Buses, trucks, and cars could travel through New York City over expressways without getting stuck in traffic.
The Graphic Regional Plan also praised the parkway. Contrasting with an expressway, which sought to move drivers from point A to point B, a parkway meandered, giving drivers and passengers a bucolic view, and featured areas for picnics, cycling, and horseback riding. A parkway banned bus and truck traffic, giving car occupants relief from larger crash threats.
In admiring parkways, the Regional Plan looked to a recent example: Westchester County, the rural-turning-suburban region north of New York City. Between 1900 and 1930, Westchester had watched its population triple, to more than half a million. Grand Central Terminal had opened in 1913, allowing people to commute into midtown Manhattan via rail from outside the five boroughs. By the 1920s, however, affluent New Yorkers were purchasing cars, creating demand for roads.
Westchester County’s officials wanted to meet that demand. The state legislature authorized the Bronx River Parkway Commission in 1893, predating the car, with “a view to purifying the river and acquiring sufficient land on both sides” for carriages and “a pleasant park.” By 1914, the state legislature had approved a 15-mile “wide parkway” from the Bronx, New York’s northernmost borough, through Westchester.
Construction on the Bronx River Parkway was delayed as county leaders ensured that the design was scenic. Bridges—necessary to separate parkway traffic from local streets—were the “subjects of many conferences,” with multiple renderings. Architects revised proposed arches, fitting bridges with stonework, to “avoid marring natural features of the parkway,” as the New York Times reported. By 1920, the road was nearly complete and would be, the Times predicted, “magnificent.” In 1924, with much of the road operational, the Herald Tribune informed “automobilists” that the parkway was “free from heavy traffic,” with “only cars allowed.” Westchester was so pleased that its commission planned an extension. As with the Bronx Parkway, the Times said, “no commercial cars of any description” would traverse “the proposed Hutchinson River Parkway. . . . [The] absence of heavily laden and wide motor trucks will be a genuine relief.”
The Graphic Regional Plan’s authors lauded this “economy of parkways,” praising Westchester’s example for “attractive park strips along each side of the road, outside of which great increases take place in the value of the land. . . . [T]he parkway is particularly appropriate for the kind of traffic that serves residential areas because it is confined to passenger automobiles.”
City leaders applauded the Regional Plan. More than 1,500 people, representing 528 civic groups, attended the Manhattan unveiling. Among officials heaping praise were Mayor Jimmy Walker, Governor Roosevelt, and President Herbert Hoover. Labor unions and social-justice advocates approved, with Lillian Wald, head of the Henry Street Settlement, calling it a “milestone.” “Congestion in the central parts of the metropolis will diminish or disappear,” the Times maintained. Almost as an afterthought, the paper mentioned the two highways that would “pass under Manhattan.” In fact, this reporting was incorrect; one expressway, following Canal Street, would cross aboveground to the Manhattan Bridge.
Over the decades, many of the colored maps featured in the Regional Plan moved from paper to reality. They would become familiar to New Yorkers stuck in traffic or breathing in the fumes that the vehicles generated: the Cross-Bronx Expressway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway among them. Paul Windels—a former counselor to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who, mid-century, served as president of the nonprofit group that the Regional Plan analysts had formed, the Regional Plan Association—would later tally the successes: “four bridges, three tunnels, 11 parkways and expressways.”
Missing from these blueprints was the impress of the man who, for the next century, became identified with them: Robert Moses. In their acknowledgments, the influential Regional Planners thank the Long Island State Park Commission—which Moses chaired beginning in 1924, a position that then-governor Al Smith had rewarded him with for his state-government service—and list dozens of advisors by name. But they omit Moses, who had not yet built his formidable reputation. The first section of the Southern State Parkway, Moses’s first parkway, to the east of New York City across Long Island, opened in 1927, and Jones Beach in 1929, the year the report appeared.
Moses’s relationship with the Regional Plan began with supplicating and not power brokering, as his papers, held by the New York Public Library, reveal. In 1923, not yet an official state employee but working closely with Governor Smith as a government reformer, he wrote Delano, the project’s chair, to ask the committee for “an appropriation of $750” to his own nonprofit group, the New York State Association, so that he could finish a survey on Staten Island, New York’s least-developed borough.
Moses’s stature grew as the 1920s progressed, but he was in no position to set the agenda for the Regional Plan. Moses may later have “built every one” of New York’s roads, as Caro wrote, but he did not conceive them. Politicians, planners, business interests, and the press all thought, independently of Moses, that building thousands of miles of highways through, around, above, and below a dense city was a good idea.
Moses also did not receive—or deserve—credit in the Regional Plan for the parkway concept. In 1914, when Westchester planned the state’s first parkway, Moses was a young man with a Ph.D. at the Bureau of Municipal Research think tank, advising New York City on workforce reforms. The true parkway innovator was Jay Downer, chief engineer of the Westchester County Park Commission and Bronx Parkway Commission. “I have been building parkways for . . . twelve years,” Downer testified before the state assembly in 1925, noting that he had used “not State money, but County money, our own money.”
Throughout the 1920s, Moses asked for, and got, the older Downer’s support for his own projects as he followed Westchester’s example, devising Long Island parkways to lure New Yorkers eastward, including to Jones Beach, for recreation. In helping to get lawmakers to approve Moses’s parkways, Downer observed of his Westchester parkway that New York City residents “come out on Sunday, go back again, enjoy the country, and we have not been harmed.” Downer gave civic support, too. In 1928, the Exchange Club, a group in Rockville Centre, a Long Island village, invited Downer to speak about parkways. Downer wrote to Moses that “it will about kill the whole day” but that he would make the trip, “if it would be of any material benefit.” Moses replied that it “would be very helpful,” indeed, if Downer explained “to these people that our right of way for the Southern Parkway is too narrow.”
As Moses expanded Downer’s prototype, building parkways throughout New York, he hewed to the veteran planner’s rules, banning large vehicles with an enthusiasm bordering on the fanatic. In 1946, an official at the city’s marine and aviation department wrote to Moses, inquiring whether a bus operator could use the Moses-built, car-only Belt Parkway, recently threaded through Brooklyn and Queens, to transport people to the airport. “This is the second time Mr. Carey has tried to get his buses on the parkways,” Moses fumed, as documents preserved by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Bridges and Tunnels special archive (which inherited the Triborough Authority’s papers) reveal. “Use of the parkways by commercial vehicles is prohibited.” Moses’s anti-bus argument was no different from that of The Graphic Regional Plan: small and large vehicles don’t mix. Buses and trucks, Moses insisted, could travel on “new, modern mixed traffic express arteries.”
In 1946, one of Moses’s deputies at the Triborough Authority, George Spargo, sent a memo to an underling. “I think you ought to talk to the police about the Army and Navy trucks,” he instructed. “They still seem to be going strong” on parkways, despite the ban. In February, a city parks official working for Moses sent a letter to another deputy: “Herewith are reports of Bridge Officers on Army and Navy trucks turned back at Henry Hudson Bridge,” which, as part of the parkway network, nixed large vehicles. In response to these complaints, Moses received an apologetic letter from Colonel John S. Roosma of Army headquarters on Governors Island. “I regret very much that our Army vehicles continue to violate regulations on . . . parkways,” Roosma, a World War II hero, wrote. “We will notify all provost marshals. . . . We will do everything within our power to curb these violations.” That Moses’s deputies were unafraid of taking on a decorated war veteran to regulate military transport six months after the end of World War II shows Moses’s own ease with power by then.
These incidents cast doubt on the idea, popularized in The Power Broker, that Moses designed parkway bridges too low for buses because he disliked the poor people whom the buses tended to transport, and wanted to keep them out of suburban parks and neighborhoods. He just didn’t like big vehicles—at least on his parkways.
Even the Triborough Bridge, a megaproject to which he would be inextricably linked, wasn’t Moses’s idea. This four-mile steel-and-cement structure linking the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens would become evidence of his prowess, as well as the base of the fiscal power that, Caro maintains, made him independent of elected officials—the “capital” of Moses’s “empire.” Yet, already by 1917, business groups in Manhattan and Queens were clamoring for a multi-borough motor-vehicle connection. Fitful attempts to build one fell prey, though, to the Great Depression and the general incompetence of the Jimmy Walker era. At Mayor La Guardia’s request, Moses took responsibility for the $60 million Triborough venture in the 1930s.
Moses solved the Triborough project’s two problems: financing and execution. In 1933, he proposed to the state legislature that it create the Triborough Bridge Authority, a nonprofit “public benefit” corporation. The TBA could issue bonds, insulating itself from investors’ fears over strained city finances. Bondholders could depend on repayment from driver tolls, a more predictable revenue source than taxes, which had to fund competing needs, from hospitals to schools.
Moses borrowed the public-authority concept from the Port of New York Authority (later the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey), as well as Great Britain’s London Bridge Authority. In 1934, one of the Triborough Authority’s board members was caught taking a bribe; Moses, appointed by La Guardia, joined the authority and became its chair. In two years, Moses got the bridge back on schedule, following the orders of the mayor, who wanted it “built in the shortest time.”
The human costs of the project were no secret. In 1934, 600 Queens families found themselves in danger of homelessness. More than 250 apartment buildings “are to be razed for approaches to the Triborough Bridge,” the New York Times reported. “Eviction orders have brought a storm of protests from the tenants, who mostly are so poor that they . . . cannot obtain quarters elsewhere.” Two years later, as the bridge neared completion, the Times focused on the “plight” of 1,227 Bronx families, 285 of whom depended on Depression-era relief funds. Even though officials would help them find housing elsewhere, “the families [were] reluctant to move out of the neighborhood in which many of them have spent most of their lives.” Landlords, knowing that buildings were condemned, had added to their distress, “shutting off heat, hot water, and other essential services.”
New York was unfazed. Evictions were necessary because drivers didn’t materialize at one side of a bridge and dematerialize at another. An eight-lane bridge needed miles-long highways across three dense boroughs to bring people to and from the bridge. All this required the construction of parkways through Brooklyn and Queens to bring drivers to the approach roads. “Everyone who knows anything about the Triborough project knows that its success depends upon the parkway connections,” Moses wrote. The Triborough was fated from its construction to be a linchpin of hundreds of lanes of highways, in line with The Graphic Regional Plan. The city’s Board of Estimate—peopled by New York’s major elected officials, from the mayor to borough presidents—accepted this argument, approving condemnations and dislocations.
When the Triborough opened in July 1936, it filled up with cars—11.2 million in its first year. Traffic proved that people wanted more bridges, and it meant that Triborough had the revenue to finance them. Through the mid-1960s, Moses used the surpluses from the Triborough’s toll collections to construct more crossings, all planned and approved by state and city elected officials. This wasn’t some conspiracy to subvert democracy: it was exactly what New York State and City intended.
Nobody ever deems the Triborough Bridge an example of city-killing urban planning that destroyed neighborhoods and displaced innumerable vulnerable residents; when they want to do that, they point to the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Just as the Triborough Bridge had imposed miles of highways on Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, the construction of the first deck of the Port Authority’s George Washington Bridge in 1931—not a Moses project—committed the Bronx to its own highway. Most New Jersey drivers on the GWB weren’t aiming for the Bronx. They had to navigate the northern borough from the west, only to take bridges farther east and north of the city. Even before Congress approved the interstate highway program in 1956, these bridges and supporting highways were forming a high-capacity interstate—later called I-95—running from Florida to Maine.
But a 6.5-mile gap existed within New York City. In 1942, the Times echoed the 13-year-old Graphic Regional Plan, calling for “a direct cut across the Bronx.” In 1950, the newspaper again editorialized for this “direct cut.” With the New England Thruway to the northeast under construction, and “New York’s traffic problem as serious as it is, the construction . . . would merely add to the city’s grief if something were not done.”
Political and press support notwithstanding, the Cross-Bronx posed headaches for Moses. No elected officials had worried about the Triborough Bridge’s displacements of families a decade earlier. Now, they cared. By 1946, Gotham’s elected officials, via the Board of Estimate, had approved the $47 million Cross-Bronx in concept. That year, though, 400 Bronx residents, representing some of the first of 3,000 families to face removal, crowded a board hearing necessary to approve land condemnations for the easternmost part of the Cross-Bronx. Backed by a city council resolution, families demanded postponement, unless the city could assure that 540 households would receive replacement housing. Mayor William O’Dwyer, a Democrat, gave the assurance. In 1947, as a goodwill gesture, Moses spent $54,620 to relocate a three-story apartment building, complete with new foundation and electrical, water, and sewer hookups, 130 feet north. Construction began.
By 1953, as Moses prepared to ask the Board of Estimate for permission to acquire land for the central part of the road, opposition had hardened. Some 1,400 families across a 1.25-mile segment, largely working-class Jews in Tremont, would have to leave. Bronx borough president James Lyons offered a compromise, condemning a slice of parkland and a bus terminal instead of homes. Moses resisted. Relocating a bus terminal would raise costs. In April, the Board of Estimate did what it often did when it couldn’t decide: delay. Moses threatened to abandon the half-built project.
Moses—or, rather, the elected officials who almost universally supported the Cross-Bronx—had outwitted mid-borough residents. “The two ends of the artery are finished,” the Times reported, “with only traffic-choked local streets in between.” By approving condemnation in separate phases, the city had effectively prevented one neighborhood in the Bronx from coordinating with another. As Lillian Edelstein, who lived in the path, told Caro, she and her neighbors knew that a separate section of the highway was under construction years before it would displace them (“over in the East Bronx somewhere,” as Caro paraphrased her). But “it had gone on so long, and you keep hearing and hearing and nothing happens, and after a while it doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “It was in the wind for a long time that he was going to come through the apartment houses. But we just didn’t believe it.”
Bronxites were understandably too busy commuting, working, and raising families to organize against a highway project then distant in both time and space. By the time they mobilized, the city was not going to leave two halves of the interstate connection with a gap in the middle. Robert Wagner, running to succeed Mayor O’Dwyer in 1953, promised residents that he would consider the alternative route. But once in office, he did what La Guardia had done a generation earlier to those in the path of the Triborough: he ignored them. A year later, the Board of Estimate approved land acquisitions, overriding “vociferous and sustained efforts”—sustained, by then, for over half a decade.
Moses recognized that the public’s mood toward mega-highways would stiffen further. He mused, “You can’t take down a solid row of twenty- or thirty-story buildings without an uproar. . . . When we get through with the present program . . . I think that’s going to be the end. . . . Nothing short of an earthquake or atomic attack would clear the path.”
As Moses completed the Cross-Bronx Expressway, though, his approach to the two unbuilt highways across lower and midtown Manhattan was to speed up, before criticism increased. In 1956, his deputy, George Spargo, told him that he was “rushing it” on the Mid-Manhattan Expressway, pointing out obstacles: “(1) Because we have previously asked the Board [of Estimate] to approve this project several years ago and were turned down. (2) We have no funds.” (Triborough revenues were not unlimited.) Moses scrawled: “No. I don’t expect to be around forever.”
Moses would never build those two cross-Manhattan highways because he had no magical powers to overturn political will when it turned against him. For decades, he had done what elected officials, newspaper editorialists, business leaders, and the public wanted. The body politic was changing its collective mind. Even as construction on the Cross-Bronx was under way, a Greenwich Village homemaker, Shirley Hayes, was cracking the code to stopping Moses: don’t pressure him to cancel a project, but target the elected officials who had always controlled everything that he built, or didn’t build.
Top Photo: Moses in 1938, at the height of his powers (Bettmann/Getty Images)
