The Battle for Gotham (29 page)

The idea was to curb urban decay. . . . But what planners failed to realize was that freeways actually accelerated urban decay by destroying neighborhoods and sucking residents out to the suburbs.
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Resistance started with local residents of Southeast Portland in 1969 when the city started buying properties but was picked up and led by then Legal Aid lawyer Neil Goldschmidt, who was running for city council. Goldschmidt offered a totally different vision, inspired by Jane Jacobs. He won the election, went on to become mayor in 1972, led the effort to make federal highway funds convertible to transit, and launched a transit-building program that continues today and is the envy of cities across the country. Goldschmidt furthered the transit investment band-wagon as head of the U.S. Department of Transportation in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter.

HARTFORD, BALTIMORE, DETROIT

Hartford and Baltimore rejected plans designed by Moses. This was early. Hartford hired him in 1949 when, with a population of 177,000, “downtown streets were jammed with traffic all day long, much of it carrying shoppers to five big department stores,” reminisced Joel Lang in the
Hartford Courant
in 1983. Hartford may have rejected Moses’s specific proposals, but the highways that got built still plowed through and decimated the downtown.

In Baltimore in 1944 Moses was hired “to recommend a route for what was then known as the East-West Expressway (which still hasn’t been built),” wrote Gwinn Owens in the
Baltimore Sun
in August 1981, upon Moses’s death. Opposition was immediate in both West and East Baltimore and, like a dozen proposals that were to follow, Baltimoreans made it clear they weren’t going to have their communities plowed under for a Moses-type expressway. The routes selected as alternatives to Moses’s ideas still heavily damaged the central city. The idea of cutting
through
a city was now a widespread and accepted policy. If it wasn’t the Moses-designed route, it just as well could have been. The elements were all the same.

In 1942, at the request of Michigan’s commissioner of highways, Moses reviewed plans for Detroit’s crosstown expressway between Detroit and Willow Run that ran through established neighborhoods of the city. In a fifteen-page letter, Moses wrote that generally speaking, the plan for the expressway “seems to us to have been admirably conceived and laid out.”

PITTSBURGH

He also had a hand in the Pittsburgh urban renewal plan, one of the first in the country that erased a substantial part of the heart of the city’s industrial and downtown heart. In its place was a vast expanse of grass with a few stand-alone buildings placed at a distance from one another with the two sides of the triangle graced by the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. As Lewis Mumford noted in his book
The Highway and the City
, “One look at the cluster of skyscraper offices that now rise in the ‘rehabilitated’ area of Pittsburgh known as The Point should convince them of their error; a handful of skyscrapers standing in a glittering freight yard of parked cars is a contribution to neither business nor urban beauty.”

In 1957, one hundred acres of the Hill, the heart of the city’s black community and center for jazz-filled nightspots, was cleared for a Lincoln Center-style cultural island with an opera house, symphony hall, and theaters. It was never built, but eight thousand residents were displaced.

Clearly, highways halted in midconstruction or before construction—not necessarily designed by Moses—in communities across the country were stopped by citizen protests that usually included long, delaying lawsuits. Where highway projects were derailed completely or in midstream, downtowns and neighborhoods have held on or regenerated—if enough urban fabric was left to do so. In many cases, however, the highway fever did not cool with Moses’s departure. Alternative routes were selected, some implemented. Whether they were better or worse is hard to know, but too many cities have been crippled by highways through the city. Even more were started but never finished, leaving unnecessary cleared land in their wake.

SAN FRANCISCO

An earthquake in 1989, not common sense, took down San Francisco’s vigorously opposed and never-completed Embarcadero Freeway on the waterfront and redirected federal transportation funding into investment in the city’s subway system. The rejuvenation of that moribund waterfront is now a model of success with its seven-mile promenade of sidewalks, palm trees, and historic trolleys connecting to Fisherman’s Wharf, a restored ferry terminal, farmers’ market, and new hotel. Nearby property values have skyrocketed 300 percent.
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But citizens, led by a straight-talking Mayor Joseph Alioto, had stopped the freeway’s completion years before. He said during a 1974 Senate hearing on the cause of our transportation crisis that placing an interstate highway link along the San Francisco waterfront just to give cars access to the Golden Gate Bridge was unacceptable. “I wouldn’t let them complete it,” Alioto recalled. “I said tell everyone to slow up and enjoy themselves in this beautiful town. . . . There isn’t a view like this in the world. You don’t have to zip through it.” Alioto had wrestled long and hard with strong-arming highway builders. “That crowd would put a freeway through the Vatican if they had a chance and could save space or money,” he said.

Pittsburgh, Detroit, Portland, New Orleans, Hartford, Baltimore. These were significant cities in the 1940s. The country watched them, along with New York, and followed the path being forged by Moses. “In 1964, when Robert Moses completed his major highway building . . . no other metropolitan region in America possessed 700 miles of such highways. . . . Even Los Angeles, which presented itself to history as the most highway-oriented of cities—which was, in fact, not a city in the older sense in which New York was a city but a collection of suburbs . . .—possessed in 1964 only 459 miles of such highways. No city in America had more than half as many miles. . . . But nothing about his roads was as awesome as the congestion on them.”
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MOSES LISTENED TO NO ONE

In June 1955 urban critic Lewis Mumford wrote in the
New Yorker
, “Before we cut any more chunks out of our parks to make room for more automobiles or let another highway cloverleaf unfold, we should look at the transformation that has taken place during the last 30 years in Manhattan.” This, of course, did not happen.

But equally significant, Moses and the highway lobby starved the subways, bus, and railroad systems of funding. Even before the war, Caro points out, the realization emerged that more roads breed more traffic, that building more roads would not solve traffic congestion, and that the only answer was coordinating mass-transit improvements with highways. Moses adamantly opposed this idea in every way possible and controlled all possible funding to thwart it. Worse, he designed every road in such a way that transit cannot be added either on the highway median or parallel to the road, as many planners advocated, even passing up the opportunity to cheaply buy the land adjacent to highways for future transit.

City planner F. Dodd McHugh, working on a master plan for New York airports in the 1940s, urged Moses to provide space along the Van Wyck Expressway to JFK. In the 1950s, Moses ignored studies demonstrating economic value by providing mass transit along the Long Island Expressway. When the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, under Moses’s firm control, piled up surplus after surplus, Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Lindsay tried to spend some of that surplus on mass transit. Instead, Moses refused to let that happen and instead just planned another road.

The Moses image of being above politics was a myth; he fed the political machine with lucrative contracts, fees, and all kinds of favors to ensure support for his projects, especially, as Mumford wrote, from the well-placed “real beneficiaries of the system to whom it means jobs and prestige, contracts and profits.” As Joel Schwartz points out, “Behind closed doors, he handed choice locations to redevelopers, allowed them to occupy sites at their leisure, and encouraged them to build luxury high-rises without regard for city plans. At Manhattantown, Moses allowed redevelopers with Tammany ties to squeeze rent from the black occupants of condemned tenements. Manhattantown showed Moses’s consort with the powerful, his contempt for the helpless, and his racism.”
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If anyone deigned to oppose or seriously question one of his projects, those contracts instantly dried up. He so mesmerized the New York press for decades that it turned a blind eye to his ruthless manipulations and the scandals and inequities his policies fostered. He conducted government in secret and by fiat and showed nothing but contempt for critics. He often did more than that. As Caro discovered:

And if Moses possessed no derogatory information at all about an opponent or his forebears, this was still no guarantee against attack. For Moses was an innovator in fields other than public works. He practiced McCarthyism long before there was a McCarthy. He drove Rexford G. Tugwell out of his City Planning Commission chairmanship—out of New York, in fact—helped drive Stanley F. Isaacs out of his borough presidency and destroyed public careers of a dozen other officials by publicly, and falsely, identifying them as ‘Pinkos’ or ‘Planning Reds’ or ‘followers of the Ogpu,’ the Soviet secret police.
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There were two widespread Communist witchhunts in New York City, one in 1938 and one in 1958. Both relied heavily on ‘information’—much of it innuendo and outright falsehood—leaked to newspapers by Moses.
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He went after Joe Papp, trying to cancel his already extraordinarily popular Shakespeare in the Park. In 1958 Papp had been called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He refused to say whether he had been a communist but denied he presently was one and refused to identify friends who were or had been. Moses only learned about this a year later through one of his key assistants. He sought to cancel Papp, spreading lies that Papp was a “communist of long-standing” who “took the Fifth Amendment again and again.” But, as Caro points out, the Senate hearings that brought McCarthy’s downfall were in 1954, and this was 1959. Papp was a street fighter and knew how to play to the press as well as Moses and, in this case, better.

MOSES IS BUILT INTO THE SYSTEM TODAY

But as much damage to urban America that I believe Robert Moses wrought, I, too, long for a new Robert Moses. Why? Because then we would have an easy target to fight as new oversized, heavily public-financed, isolating “demolish and rebuild” projects are proposed and continue to erode our cities.

In New York, if Moses or a look-alike were in charge, it would be a lot easier to fight such plans as the oversized Atlantic Yards development with thirty-three hundred parking spaces at one of the best transit hubs in the city,
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new Yankee Stadium parking garages replacing local parks, the Ground Zero separateness, the shopping mall and office-park mentality, and the Willets Point and Columbia University clearance plans. What we actually have is the ghost of Moses haunting the “system.” Most big schemes—including new waterfront parks and big developments—bypass the local review process. Instead, they proceed under the auspices of the Empire State Development Corporation, a state authority that makes all decisions and holds public hearings but is not subject to the same local approval standards, just as Moses invented.

Private developers now get public dollars and tax incentives with impunity. Eminent domain—or just the threat of it—is used more for private profit than legitimate public purposes; Moses used it for what he, at least, defined as a public purpose even if his definition of “slum” was self-serving. Planning departments today are powerless in the face of well-placed developers, assuming those planners even object to the oversized and inappropriate development overwhelming all corners of the city today. Often those planners seem to see their mission as expediting new development, confusing development and planning. Some projects exhibit design appeal, but a well-designed, wrongheaded project is just that—a wrongheaded project well designed. Good design is never enough to overcome inherent urban weaknesses.

Except where public opposition succeeds, citizen participation is a mirage. Scores of public hearings occur, and negotiations are well publicized. In the end, final agreements reflect what the developer and politicians wanted in the first place, with givebacks built in as sops, creating the illusion of compromise. The final plan has no relation to what a complex, organic addition to a particular place might have been. And the public participation never comes until the plans and designs are set, not in the beginning when the agenda is formed. At that point, public input can only tinker, not really shape, any plan. In fact, the process today might just as well be designed by Moses. “We have a development czar in New York State now who can override any local control issue,” says Kent Barwick, former president of the Municipal Art Society, referring to the Empire State Development Corporation. “Robert Moses would be deeply jealous of that authority. It has the power to go in and do what it wants with the vague requirement that it consult with local officials with no public input required.” Now, if Robert Moses were here leading all these movements, what a field day we critics would have.

Despite what Moses believed, the end does not justify the means. “Getting Things Done” in a democracy is not as important as
what
gets done and
how.
And on both counts, alternative methods and programs to Moses’s would have done New York better, along with the cities that followed its course. Revisionists view him as more constructive than destructive, more builder than demolisher, more a creature of his time than the shaper of his time, and the man we have to thank for the modern city. I disagree.