rediscovering robert moses's true legacy

Sapienza Università di Roma Scuola di Dottorato in Ingegneria Civile e Architettura DOTTORATO IN PIANIFICAZIONE TERRITORIALE E URBANA Ciclo XXVII

Dottoranda: Alice Siragusa Tutors: Giovanna Bianchi & Pietro Garau

REDISCOVERING ROBERT MOSES’S TRUE LEGACY HOW PLANNING BUILT THE PUBLIC CITY

Cover: New York by Moses from Moses, Robert (1943): „What’s the Matter With New York?“ The New York Times. 1.8.1943, pp. 44, 128, 146, 147

Collegio dei docenti: Giovanna Bianchi (Coordinatore), Francesco Ciardini, Daniela De Leo, Paolo De Pascali, Giacinto Donvito, Walter Fabietti, Antonella Galassi, Pietro Garau, Bruno Monardo, Massimo Olivieri, Barbara Pizzo, Manuela Ricci, Saverio Santangelo, Massimo Sargolini, Paolo Scattoni, Michele Talia, Sergio Zevi Rome, Italy , 2015

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT

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PROLOGUE

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INTRODUCTION Box 1 Chronology: New York City, American Planning and Robert Moses Box 2 The Robert Moses’s Papers Archives

011.1 THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

10 17 19

A HISTORIC BACKGROUND OF NEW YORK FROM THE THIRTIES TO THE SIXTIES

23

1.1.1 The Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression 1.1.2 Facing the Crisis: Roosevelt and the New Deal

25 25 29

1.2 NEW YORK CITY IN THE THIRTIES: LIVING CONDITIONS AND MAIN TRANSFORMATIONS 1.2.1 The Economic Crisis and Living Conditions in New York City 1.2.2 Transformations In Infrastructures And Transportation 1.2.3 Mayor La Guardia And The New Deal

31 31 33 35

1.3 NEW YORK DURING WORLD WAR II

38

1.4 NEW YORK CITY AFTER THE WAR

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THE PLANNING THEORIES AND IDEAS THAT SHAPED ROBERT MOSES . 2.1 PLANNING THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN CITIES 2.1.1 The Chicago School of Urban Sociology Box 4 Jacob Riis and the Other Half Lives

51

2.2 NEW IDEAS COME FROM OVERSEAS

59

2.3 PLANNING AND HOUSING BECOME PART OF THE POLITICAL DEBATE

61

2.4 NEW YORK CITY: A PARADIGM FOR AMERICAN PLANNING 2.4.1 New York Discovers Zoning 2.4.2 Regional Planning and the first New York Regional Plan

63 64 66

2.5 THE 1939-40 WORLD’S FAIR AND ITS FUTURAMA

68

02

53 55 57

03 3.1 FROM REFORMER TO PLANNER ROBERT MOSES: A PUBLIC SERVANT

3.2 AT WORK FOR THE CITY OF NEW YORK IN THE NEW DEAL ERA: A SERIES OF SUCCESSES Box 5 Moses Praised by Other Cities

83 85 89 92

3.3 MOSES DURING THE POST-WAR ERA: FULL POWERS 3.3.1 Title I Projects in New York Box 6 Stuyvesant Town and “the New York Method” 3.3.2 United Nations Headquarters

94 95 99 102

3.4 MOSES’S LAST YEARS: BUILD AND BE DAMNED 3.4.1 Attacking Urban Renewal 3.4.2 The Battle for Greenwich Village 3.4.3 Lincoln Center Center for the Performing Arts 3.4.4 The 1964 World’s Fair and the End of Moses’s Career

103 104 106 108 110

044.1 THE WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION: AN OPPORTUNITY TO TAKE BUILDING NEW YORK PUBLIC CITY: THE CASE OF RECREATIONAL FACILITIES

129

4.1.1 A Federal Program with Two Goals 4.2.2 The Works Progress Administration’s projects in New York

131 131 134

4.2 PLANNING THE RECREATIONAL FACILITIES SYSTEM

137

4.3 THE WPA SWIMMING AND BATHING FACILITIES: AN INCREDIBLE SUMMER

142

THE LEGACY

179

055.1 THE REVALUATION OF ROBERT MOSES

181

5.2 THE TRUE ROBERT MOSES LEGACY 5.2.1 The Importance of the Planner as a Professional 5.2.2 The Value of Public Service 5.2.3 A City Model to Seek

188 190 192 194

REFERENCES

203

INDEX OF IMAGES INDEX OF VIDEOS LIST OF ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

221 226 230

Works Proposed and Realized by Robert Moses Title 1 Redevelopment Projects Adjacent NYCHA Projects

The Bronx

Selected Recreational Facilities All Green Space Pools: Proposed Only Built Pools Road &Bridges: Proposed Only Roads and Bridges

Manhattan

New Jersey

Brooklyn

Staten Island

Queens

Il primo e più sentito ringraziamento va ai miei tutors. Giovanna Bianchi mi ha guidato per mano nel mondo della ricerca. Con i suoi consigli e la sua premura mi ha mostrato il fascino di questo mondo e la bellezza del saperlo trasmettere agli altri. Le parole non bastano per ringraziare Pietro Garau, che più che un tutor considero un mentore. Grazie per le critiche, i consigli e le stroncature, perché so essere state sempre sincere e per il mio bene. Un caloroso ringraziamento va anche a Elliott D. Sclar che mi ha accolto alla Columbia University e mi ha guidato alla scoperta di New York. Grazie a Susan Zerad Garau per avermi aiutato a districare i misteri della lingua Americana. E poi un grazie alla mia famiglia newyorkese: Ska, Peppe, Stewie, Compa’, Caccola, Sara, Polpettone, Bob e Silvia, Josè e Maria e ai miei colleghi della Columbia. Ho vissuto un anno inteso e se mi sono sentita a casa, è grazie a voi. A quelli che ci sono sempre: Gio e Jac, Robertina, Dadda e Edo, le Ciccine e consorti, i Pippis, la familia de España, a quelli del 2° cancello - 5° palo. A quelli che ci sono da un po’, i Nai-Romans. Alla mia vera familia, ai Frat’cugini, a Sara e er Kiyo. A mio padre e mia madre, che sanno quando togliere l’ancora: un insegnamento di vita, in tutti i sensi. Il grazie più sentito alle mie Piante Grasse, senza le quali questi tre anni sarebbero stati molto più duri: the best is yet to come. Da questa tesi ho capito che in qualunque mestiere si attua una scelta politica. Spero che la mia prossima scelta sia quella giusta. Mi casa ambulante seguirá teniendo dos piernas y mis sueños no tendrán fronteras. ECG

Rediscovering Robert Moses’s True Legacy

ABSTRACT

La ricerca affronta la figura controversa del planner statunitense Robert Moses, che mantenne il controllo urbanistico di New York City dagli anni Trenta e la metà degli anni Sessanta del secolo scorso. Agli inizi della sua lunga carriera Moses fu acclamato per la creazione di un nuovo sistema di spazi pubblici e attrezzature ricreative ed il potenziamento delle infrastrutture stradali di collegamento e scorrimento. A partire dagli anni Cinquanta, tuttavia, Moses fu fortemente criticato come esecutore delle politiche dell’urban renewal. La parabola della sua popolarità coincise con quella delle politiche pubbliche per la città. Le sue epiche battaglie con Jane Jacobs, la paladina dei quartieri a misura d’uomo, lo hanno consegnato alla storia dell’urbanistica, almeno fino a qualche anno fa, come il prototipo dell’archvillain che racchiudeva in sé tutto ciò che di negativo c’era nel planning. In tempi recenti, una corrente di urbanisti americani ha riconsiderato la sua figura esaltandone le doti di efficienza ed efficacia, grazie alla sua capacità di costruire “big and fast”; ma questa rivalutazione di Moses si basa solo su alcuni aspetti della sua esperienza, di certo non marginali ma sicuramente parziali. La ricerca si pone l’obiettivo di riscoprire la reale eredità di Moses, tracciandola innanzitutto rispetto al contesto storico e disciplinare dell’epoca. La ricostruzione delle idee di Moses, attraverso le sue parole ed i suoi scritti, assieme allo studio del caso del recreational facility system di New York, permette di delineare nuovi elementi di questa riscoperta. Tale esperienza è particolarmente significativa poiché racchiude in sé tre elementi fondamentali necessari alla costruzione di una città pubblica efficiente: politiche urbane ben strutturate e finanziate, consenso sulla necessità di interventi pubblici, e pianificatori capaci di tradurre queste politiche in pratica. La tesi sostenuta è che la reale eredità di Robert Moses riside in tre elementi riscontrabili nella sua carriera: l’importanza della professionalità del pianificatore, il valore del ruolo del public servant (funzionario pubblico) e la necessità per il planner di perseguire un’idea di città, e quindi di saper sfruttare le occasioni che si presentano per raggiungere tale scopo.

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Prologue

PROLOGUE

A PhD thesis is never a straight path. Mine has been particularly eventful. During my master’s program, I read Jane Jacobs’s masterpiece “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”: I found a copy of an old edition in a small bookshop and it represented my first approach to American urban studies and Manhattan, but even more. It was like a fresh breeze, new glasses that I could wear to look at the city, its vitality, its different and amusing uses, and its streets. By the time I started my PhD Program in 2011, the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of that book was celebrated with new editions and many experts argued about Jane Jacobs’s legacy and influence on American planning (Flint, 2011b, 2011a; Mehaffy, 2011; Page, Mennel, 2011; Zukin, 2010). In many of those articles and books the figure of Jane Jacobs was compared to that of another urban planner whose name was totally unknown to me, Robert Moses. I found out that most, if not all, of these sources depicted him as “the villain of urban planning”, the “power broker”, that man that embodied the wrong principles of planning. But at the same time Moses was unanimously recognized as the creator of modern New York. I discovered that Jane Jacobs fought against one of Moses’s last and most important projects, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and despite the great power he had, she won that battle. She mobilized a group of citizens who were protesting against the construction of the elevated highway that, crossing Washington Square Park, would cut Greenwich Village, her beloved Manhattan neighborhood in half. At the beginning of my research, I was interested in comparing Jacobs and Moses: Jacobs was “the patron saint of old neighborhoods” (Husock, 1994), the mother of urban dynamism, an irascible but venerable champion of street-level vitality and neighborhood diversity, the one who “perhaps more than anyone else during the past half century, […] changed the way we think about livable cities” (Dreier, 2006); Moses was New York’s planning czar and perhaps the most powerful unelected city official of the Twentieth century, and the impersonation of the Federal Bulldozer (Anderson, 1964). The comparison between these two towering figures of American planning was fascinating. Jacobs was a journalist, a civil-rights activist, with no academic background, and a walkable-city enthusiast; Moses was a lifetime public servant, a PhD in Public Policies at Columbia University, and a strong supporter of the automobile (despite the fact he never held a driver’s license). I found literature about the “Jacobs vs. Moses” battle that took place at the beginning of the Sixties in New York: it was the story of David and Goliath in planning. The representation of Robert Moses as a powerful ruthless public official was celebrated in a famous book by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert A. Caro, “The Power Broker: Robert


Moses and the Fall of New York” (Caro, 1974). For the following forty years, Moses’s reputation remained the one that Caro had provided to the public. But when Jacobs died, many scholars began to reflect again about Moses from different perspectives. When I started the field portion of my thesis research at Columbia University in New York City, my plan was to compare Jacobs and Moses: to reflect about their legacies, both theoretical and practical, and to analyze new points of view fifty years after their celebrated confrontation. The established narrative of the journalist civic activist fighting the powerful unconscionable planner did not persuade me. I consulted the Robert Moses’s Papers Archive in the New York Public Library and I found much more than I expected. I discovered a complex figure: a tireless, overzealous worker; a powerful politician – despite the fact that he had never been officially elected to any position – who discussed his plans for New York with US presidents, governors, and senators; the leader of an administrative machinery of thousands of workers; an innovative communicator, a promoter of the culture of private mobility on the one hand, and the chief of the City Park Department that provided public facilities to low income citizens on the other. These traits had already been underlined and described in previous books and articles. I decided instead to focus my dissertation on Robert Moses when I discovered the first and lesser-known part of his career and the rehabilitation promoted by the New York administration and by some scholars: as far as I am concerned, the arguments of this rehabilitation were not satisfactory. Keeping in mind the criticisms and doubts about his work, I decided to focus on the beginning of his career in New York that corresponds to the New Deal Era and Fiorello La Guardia’s Administration. The results achieved by Moses during the Great Depression were amazing, especially if one considers the constraints and the short time in which they were realized. In short, I have been moving from an admiration of sainthood to the exploration of villain: from the uncontested champion of citizens’ needs to a public official’s points of view. I moved into the dark side of planning, and it has been a fascinating journey.

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Introduction

INTRODUCTION

For almost four decades, scholars and critics have been considering Moses as the symbol of all that was wrong with American planning in post-war. In recent years his legacy has been revisited and New York public officials released amazing declarations regarding Moses and Jacobs, his diametrical opposite. In 2013, the then Director for the Department of Urban Design Alexandros Washburn declared: “Today to be a good urban designer in New York, one must pay attention to nature as Olmsted did, to quality as Jacobs did, to quantity as Moses did.” (Washburn, 2013) In the last forty years, these three figures frequently recur in the debate about New York City planning: Frederick Law Olmsted, Jane Jacobs, and Robert Moses. They played different roles – designer, critic, and planner – and they operated in different periods of time: Olmsted operated during the second half of the nineteenth century; Jacobs published her first works during the Fifties, and Moses occupied the New York scene from the Thirties to the mid-Sixties. Olmsted is considered the first landscape designer, the father of city parks. Olmsted’s aim was to domesticate and romanticize the urban landscape by locating aspects of the country in the city (Harpman, Supcoff, 1999). He designed the most famous and celebrated park in New York, Central Park. Thanks to several projects in West Coast cities, he established a standard for city-park design. Jane Jacobs was a journalist who lived in the Greenwich Village, Manhattan. She wrote the book that would inspire generations of policy makers, community groups and planners to come, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (Jacobs, 1961). She was one of the very first to pay serious attention to neighborhood vitality, to promote walkability against private motorized mobility, and to elaborate the concept of “eyes on the streets”. And most important, Jacobs was against orthodox traditional city planning and rebuilding. This book actually changed the way we look at the city and it shook both scholars and planners. Jane Jacobs was a protagonist of the Fifties and Sixties movements that resisted urban renewal first in New York City, and then throughout the United States. She mobilized her neighbors against the project of the Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have crossed Washington Square Park. That was one of the greatest infrastructural projects designed by Robert Moses, and it was become his most searing failure. While the first two figures of New York City planning – Olmsted and Jacobs – are almost unanimously represented as positive figures and are well known worldwide, for many


years Robert Moses has been described as the example of the ruthless planner and he is virtually unknown in Europe. Despite that, Robert Moses (1888 – 1981) guided New York City planning for four decades. He created authorities for the management of public funds, then led them for many years, and centralized power. Among other positions he held, Moses was Park Commissioner (1934-60), member of the City Planning Commission (1942-60), and President of the New York World’s Fair 1964–65 Corporation (1960–67). He held several positions at the same time and he served under many mayors. His approach to planning was regional. The mid-Thirties represent a golden moment for Moses’s work: the construction of large infrastructural projects, such as the massive Triborough Bridge connecting three boroughs, Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, were his first successes in New York. In the same years a series of recreational facilities built by Moses – such as public beaches, parks, swimming pools, and sport fields – signaled additional milestones in the development of the public city. Moses added six hundred and fifty-eight playgrounds to the New York City park system. In Central Park, he completed the Conservatory Garden, the Great Lawn, and the Zoo. He created a new typology, the parkway, integrating highways and linear parks in the connection system of modern New York. Before and during World War II, almost no one criticized him or his methods and the press venerated Moses: he dominated the front pages of newspapers, and many publications celebrated his work (Irving, 1936; Rodgers, 1939; The New York Times, 1936g); Moses had been admired for his ability to use federal funds efficiently and rapidly. After World War II, taking advantage of new federal programs, Moses realized many urban transformations, in particular housing projects, like the first and most famous one, Stuyvesant Town, and great complexes like Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the United Nations Headquarters. Moses realized great works that some critics had considered visionary. But they also bore a high a human cost: half a million people were displaced and neighborhoods were demolished to realize the new infrastructures designed by Moses and his team (Powell, 2007). Forced removals and assignation criteria for the new residential units were considered obscure and discriminatory. He considered the removals collateral but unintended consequences. Moses’s popularity and power were dramatically reduced in the last years of his long career because of these criticisms, the loss of importance of public intervention in urban development, but mostly because of diminishing public investments in cities. The ’64-’65 New York World’s Fair was his last project, marking the end of his long career.

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Introduction

When he retired at the end of the Sixties, his reputation was highly compromised. The last and most powerful blow to Moses’s reputation was Caro’s “The Power Broker” (Caro 1974). The image of Moses – unseen, omnipotent – dominates Caro’s biography. For about thirty years the one thousand-page book “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” basically was the last word on Moses. “Caro’s indictment stood, and Moses remained a dirty word in the lexicon of urban scholars and observers. He was the Attila the Hun of urbanity, the symbol of all that was wrong with mid-twentieth-century urban policy. In New York City he was the public-sector bogeyman, a frightening specter haunting the metropolis, which continued to suffer from his misdeeds. Caro had assigned him to the pantheon of archvillains.” (Teaford, 2008: p. 444) But in more recent times, especially after Jacobs’s death in 2006, many scholars, historians, and planners began to revisit Moses (Gutman, 2008; Larson, 2011; Mennel, 2007, 2011). The first re-interpretation of Moses, and still one of most effective, was Ballon & Jackson’s book and the exposition “Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York”, held in New York in 2008. (Ballon, Jackson, 2008; Columbia University, 2007) Referring to Ballon and Jackson’s project, Powell underlined that: “That Moses was highhanded, racist and contemptuous of the poor draws no argument even from the most ardent revisionists. But his grand vision and iron will, they say, seeded New York with highways, parks, swimming pools and cultural halls, from the Belt Parkway to Lincoln Center, and thus allowed the modern city to flower. Looking forward, the revisionists assert a broader claim: A Moses-like vision is needed to guard against another slide toward obsolescence. The transformations of Williamsburg, the Atlantic Yards tract in Brooklyn and Long Island City in Queens are harbingers of this assertive mood.” (Powell, 2007) In 2007 Timothy Mennel wrote a novel about the story of Moses and the transformations in New York (Mennel, 2007), while in 2010 Samuel Zipp reconsidered urban renewal and Moses’s work in the historical framework of the Cold War, according to the political scenario of the time (Zipp, 2010). Many other works, such as “The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs” (Gratz, 2010) and Anthony Flint’s “Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City” (Flint, 2011b) compare Jacobs and Moses, but virtually none attempt to analyze Moses’s approach to the public city before World War II and his vision for New York.

This dissertation demonstrates that some aspects of the Moses legacy still need to be


explored. His recent revaluation is based only on his works and on his ability to build big and fast, but to truly comprehend the Moses legacy and his contribution to the public city, we need to look at his whole career and the full range of his intervention: up to now historians have mostly analyzed Moses’s transport infrastructures and urban renewal projects. My contribution to the debate covers more aspects: first, Moses’s idea about the future city and how it was linked to the planning theories of the time; second, how Moses pursued this idea to build the public city, with specific reference to recreational facilities and citizens’ need in the modern city; third, the verification of coherency between his works and his words.

Following this introduction is a chronology about New York City, American planning and Robert Moses (See Box 1 Chronology: New York City, American Planning and Robert Moses), which will guide the reader through the years, followed by a report of non-classified archival materials consulted (See Box 2 The Robert Moses’s Papers Archives). But for a deep comprehension of Moses and his contribution to the construction of the public city, a historical framework is needed. The first chapter explores the historical and economic evolution of New York from the Thirties and the Sixties. The aim of the first chapter is to provide a background regarding the period of time in which Robert Moses worked for New York City. Two important events in Moses’s career define this timeframe: the first one is the beginning of the Great Depression (1929) and the second one is the New York World’s Fair (1964). During those eventful decades, many processes took place in New York and influenced Moses’s projects and action. The first section of the chapter is dedicated to the Great Depression: how it affected urban policies, living conditions, and urban transformations in New York. The public response that the Federal Government put in place to deal with the economic crisis is discussed here. An in-depth understanding of New Deal policies in New York City is provided, considering the local political scene and the election of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia. Another section of the chapter is devoted to city events and economic phenomena during the war: surprisingly, very few sources can be found about this period, despite the fact that many social and economic transformations took place during those dramatic years. However the final years of the war are interesting to understand future plans for American cities. The last section of the chapter is dedicated to the post-war period and the economic boom in the Fifties and Sixties. This period represents a phase when urban transformations and the decline of public intervention in the city were more noticeable in New York.

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Introduction

The second chapter summarizes the main planning theories and ideas prevailing in the United States during the first years of Moses’s career. An outline of the theoretical framework in which Moses operated and which influenced him is provided. It is exemplified through the main theories, laws, plans, and expositions that took place during the first half of the century in the US. Specifically, the chapter focuses on those ideas of the modern city that took inspiration from and have been implemented in New York and, at the same time, are relevant to Moses’s work. The first part of the second chapter is dedicated to theories first developed in Europe and had great echoes in the United States, during the first decades of the twentieth century, in particular the modernist movement and the theories elaborated by CIAM. Indeed many scholars have recognized this strong connection. The second and main part of the chapter focuses on American urban planning theories and how they became part of the political debate. New approaches to the study of the urban environment were introduced before World War II. In particular, the Chicago School of Urban Sociology developed and published important work on city as an organism that would strongly affect the way planners look at it. Living conditions in cities became the center of the debate: overcrowding and congestion were the main issues to address and New York had become the emblem for the modern metropolis, as London had been in the nineteenth century. The chapter ends with consideration on the 1939 World’s Fair that took place in New York at the dawn of the war. This event marked a milestone in building a popular consensus on modern cities. This theoretical framework will be useful in order to understand Moses’s approach and ideas about city planning and a planner’s role in society. In chapter three the research focuses on Moses. Three main phases of his work can be identified. The first one was at time of the New Deal in the pre-war period, during which Moses realized many projects using federal funds – like public recreational facilities, which will be covered in the fourth chapter of the dissertation. The second phase covers the period from the mid-Forties to the mid-Fifties and coincides with the Urban Renewal Era, the last phase of large public investments in public housing. During the third and last phase of Moses’s career, both his popularity and political support declined. This reduction corresponds with the decline in public interventions in urban


development. Analyzing the third and last phase of Moses’s career, it is also possible to clarify the criticisms of his work. The three phases in Moses’s career correspond to the phases of public intervention in urban development: pre-war policies determined public intervention; after the war the role of public administration was drastically reduced and the collaboration with developers increased gradually; subsequently public intervention became very unpopular, especially in New York. We note that this decline coincides with the decay of the city which came very close to bankruptcy in 1974. Among the various fields covered by Moses’s projects, one has been particularly meaningful and can provide new elements for an exhaustive rediscovery of Moses: recreational facilities realized before World War II. Those facilities were financed by federal funds, through ad hoc agencies that operated quickly. Those realizations had two main goals: providing high quality public services and creating jobs. In particular, the case of eleven swimming pools built in 1936 is illustrated: these facilities are still open today and contribute to the vitality of the neighborhoods. Location in low-income areas, construction quality and size are their fundamental characteristics. These sports and recreational facilities, along with the public beaches located in the Bronx and on Fire Island, constitute an important part of Moses’s legacy in New York that has been neglected for many decades: the creation of an integrated city recreational system. The forth chapter of the dissertation demonstrates that Robert Moses efficiently applied the New Deal strategy: it had a great impact both in terms of realization and of effectiveness, and this strategy can inspire reflections about the roles of planning and urban development during an economic crisis. These realizations are an example of the overlapping of the three main factors to consider in the construction of the public city: strong public policies, efficient planners, and consensus on the role of public intervention. As mention at the beginning of this introduction, a new narrative in which Moses is revaluated emerged in the recent years: this revaluation looks superficial and based only on one Moses’s characteristic, his ability to build big and fast. The fifth and final chapter explores the possible reason of this revaluation and the true Robert Moses legacy through one element lacking in the narrative about him: his visions and ideas on planning, the civil service, and the city. His point of view is reconstructed, differently from the traditional literature, through his own words, which have not been previously studied adequately. The original documents consulted to frame Moses’s ideas – as explained in the Box 2 – permit verification of the coherency between Moses’s ideas and works and also are useful

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Introduction

in understanding the most recent revision of his figure sustained by a number of New York planners. Despite what has been promoted in the last decade, Robert Moses’s true legacy does not lie in his works, his power, or his proficiency in building big and fast: his legacy lies in his example of planner as a public servant, in his example as public servant and in his vision of the city. This work does not intend to deny the limits of specific methods of intervention, such as urban renewal, destruction of old neighborhoods, or forced eviction, that Moses used in the post-war era. The goal has been to provide useful new elements for a more complete picture of this significant figure of Twentieth century planning.

A collection of videos and short movies are attached to the dissertation. A list, which includes a short description of each one of them, is provided at the end of the work.

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Box 1 Chronology: New York City, American Planning and Robert Moses

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Box 2

Robert Moses’s Papers Archives

For this research different materials, which included original documents, speeches, projects, reports, photos and videos, were used. In the first phase, work materials available online and in Italian libraries were used. But in order to go into depth of the true Robert Moses legacy it was necessary to access primary sources, such as publications, writings, speeches, and reports by Moses himself. Unfortunately very few of these documents are available in Italy. Due to the enormous number of documents produced during the decades Moses worked in New York, they have been collected in various archives, hosted by different public authorities in New York. Probably the most complete and meaningful one is the Robert Moses’s Papers Archive. Robert Moses and the Agency now known as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (initially the Triborough Bridge and Tunnels Authority) donated this Archive to the New York Public Library. The Archive is hosted in the Archives and Manuscripts Division in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in Manhattan, New York. Advance notice by accredited researchers is required in order to access materials. Photocopying or photography is not allowed, while digital scanning of documents can be provided upon request (service fees are charged). The Archive consists of 200 boxes, containing from 4 to 6 folders each. Every researcher can access up to four boxes per day: to give an idea of the consistence of the Archive, it can be said that each folder contains between 50 and 300 documents. It is also important to realize that Moses’s activities were intimately intertwined, and the Archive reflects the way he worked: documents related to different authorities, years and projects can be found in the same box or folder. The collection consists of several types of materials, which include memoranda, press releases, plans, correspondence, reports and other printed materials that document the career of Robert Moses. Charles Kronick compiled an approximate catalog of the Archive in March 1986. A more detailed catalog has never been compiled due to the great number of documents that it contains. According to this catalog, the Archive has been subdivided in to sixteen principal series: | | | | |

Personal Correspondence and Library Files, 1912-1980 (Boxes 1-52); Triborough Bridge and Tunnel (TBTA), 1932-1966 (Boxes 53-71); Emergency Public Works Commission, 1933-1934 (Boxes 72-86); Office of the City Construction Co-coordinator, 1933-1953 (Boxes 87-89); New York Gubernatorial Campaign, 1934 (Boxes 90-91);

| | | | | | | | | | |

New York City Department of Parks, 1934-1958 (Boxes 92-96); New York Constitutional Convention, 1938 (Boxes97-102); Long Island State Park Commission, 1953-1962 (Boxes 103-106); New York State Council of Parks, 1953-1962 (Boxes 109-111); New York State Power Authority, 1954-1962 (Boxes 112-115); Committee for Slum Clearance, 1954-1959 (Boxes 116-118); 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, 1960-1966 (Boxes 119-133); “Housing”, 1924-1960 (Box 134); Speeches (Boxes 135-136); Printed Matter, 1934-1967 (Boxes 137-199); Photographs (Box 200).

Most of these materials are unsorted and research work can be long and time-consuming. Very often misfiled materials can be found in boxes classified under other topics. Most of the documents quoted in the fifth chapter belong to the Speeches and the Committee for Slum Clearance series. When possible, I have included the exact collocation in the footnotes (Box and Folder).

01

A HISTORIC BACKGROUND OF NEW YORK FROM THE THIRTIES TO THE SIXTIES

“New York is a town of a thousand faces, a place of sunshine and shadow, despair and rapture, always wearing the double mask of comedy and tragedy, a city of immense contrasts, appalling gaps, and strange, unlikely juxtapositions. Only those who love it can solve its problems.” (Moses, 1970)

For a full comprehension of Moses’s works and legacy, a historic background is essential. This background covers the time between the Wall Street Crack (1929) and the New York World’s Fair (1964). The timeframe includes mayor events of the history of the Twentieth Century that had important effects also in the city: the economic crisis, the New Deal Era, World War II, and the post-war transformation and changes. A background of the economic crisis and the national responses to it is needed to understand their consequences on New York City. Economic, social and political process influenced both policy and governmental set-up of New York, but also its urban development. If on the one hand, the economic crisis affected the population and ruined lives, on the other hand, the New Deal Programs offered a great opportunities for city like New York, where the newly elected Mayor La Guardia put many efforts to improve his fellow citizens’ live conditions. Despite the fact that the wartime is a period barely covered in the literature, many changes occurred in the social and economic structure of New York. These modifications had real effects only in the post-war era, and changed the nature of the city for the times to come.

Image 1 | Times Square theaters by day, in New York City. The Times Building, Loew’s Theatre, Hotel Astor, Gaiety Theatre and other landmarks are featured in this January, 1938 / NYC Municipal Archives


1.1

The Great Depression and the New Deal 1.1.1 The Wall Street Crash nd the Great Depression

The Great Depression hit a country in rapid evolution: indeed, before World War II many internal processes were taking place in the United States. The whole country, but especially New York, experienced one of the biggest migration flows in the nation’s history: only in 1907 1.2 million immigrants arrived in New York City, primarily from Europe. In June of that year, New York’s Ellis Island gateway experienced the busiest single day in its history, registering 11,747 immigrants to the country in less than 12 hours. By then, 40% of the city’s population was foreign-born. During this era, the City was the center of a great cultural transformation, in which millions of people from different countries and cultures came into contact with one another. These were the years when New York City became synonymous of melting pot and modern city. The other main phenomenon that characterized this timeframe is the continuous process of urbanization that was taking place in the United States. During those years, Louis Wirth defined urban life as life in permanent dense settlements with socially diverse populations (Wirth, 1938), and this definition perfectly fits to New York . From 1900 to 1929, the incredible growth that had been the dominant trait of America was unabated. Populations spilled westward toward the Pacific Coast and the Southwest. The proportion of the nation’s population residing on the Pacific Coast and in the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas rose from 8 per cent to 14 per cent between 1900 and 1930. Still, in that era, the Middle Atlantic states (New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) managed to keep pace with the nation’s population growth and even to exceed that growth by a small margin. And the New York Metropolitan Region, lying nearly all in the Middle Atlantic States, also exceeded the national rate growth faster than the sections in which they were located. During the first three decades of the century, the Region’s population grew 111 per cent, while that of the middle Atlantic division grew 70 per cent and that of the nation 632 per cent (Vernon, 1960). Before the crisis, Laurence Veiller underlined how the urban life of Americans had been changing. “Because of the motor car and the ease and facility of getting around, everybody is on the go – the whole nation is in a state of motion. They are never still. Twenty years ago young people spent their evenings in their homes, today such a thing is almost unheard of. The young people are our until all hours of the night, speeding around in motor cars, attending dances, being amused going to the theatres, going to motion pictures, going to night clubs, going to hotels, dining, supping, dancing, doing everything but staying at home. This is particularly noticeable in the large cities.” (Veiller, 1929) In the first nine months of 1929, plans are filed for 709 new buildings in New York City at a

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A Historic Background Of New York From The Thirties To The Sixties

total cost of $472 million. By spring, there are 15 buildings over 500 feet high in New York. Despite the appearance of an economic boom during the Twenties, many economists “[…] focus on the inevitability of the bubble’s collapse and suggest several factors that could have exploded public confidence and caused prices to plummet. The vertical price drops on Black Thursday, October 24, and Black Tuesday, October 29, forced margin calls and distress sales of stocks, prompting a further plunge in prices. When the stock ticker ran late, investors panicked and sold their holdings. In the following weeks and months, the market bounced downwards erratically, propelled by and perhaps propelling the depression.” (White, 1990) The economic crisis hit the country and broke the illusion of American development. To represent the shock, Robert A. Margo claimed that: “The Great Depression is to economics what the Big Bang is to physics” (Margo, 1993: p. 41). On Tuesday October 29, 1929 the Wall Street Stock Exchange collapsed, panic spread and the Exchange had to shut down for several days. That day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 23 per cent and the market lost between $8 billion and $9 billion dollars in value. Only few weeks before the crash, Yale economist Irving Fisher had publicly announced that the market was solid, and a J.P. Morgan partner, Thomas W. Lamont, reassured President Herbert Hoover that there was no condition under which the economic forces should be changed (Ferguson, 1984). Indeed in the months following the Crash, political and industrial leaders continued to be optimistic regarding the national economy, but it was an illusion. American financial system rapidly collapsed and the economic crisis hit every manufacturing sector. The Great Depression advanced, consumers lost purchasing power, industries shut down, banks went bankrupt, agriculture collapsed, and unemployment rapidly increased. Following the crash market, havoc spread around the world, and by 1932 the situation worldwide had become desperate. Many currencies were floating and international finance had virtually collapsed. Financial institutions, one after another, collapsed from illiquidity; housing starts ground to a virtual halt; new orders for consumer durables evaporated; and industries laid off workers by the millions, with 2 million in the construction trades alone. By 1932–1933, the unemployment rate had reached a dire 25%, and gross domestic product fell back to the levels of the early 1920s (Heathcott, 2012: p. 362). The stagnation of the economy affected all sectors: finance, manufacturing, export, etc. “The stock market continued to decline despite brief rallies. Unemployment rose and wages fell for those who continued to work. The use of credit for the purchase of homes,


cars, furniture and household appliances resulted in foreclosures and repossessions. As consumers lost buying power industrial production fell, businesses failed, and more workers lost their jobs. Farmers were caught in a depression of their own that had extended through much of the 1920s. This was caused by the collapse of food prices with the loss of export markets after World War I and years of drought that were marked by huge dust storms that blackened skies at noon and scoured the land of topsoil. As city dwellers lost their homes, farmers also lost their land and equipment to foreclosure” (Taylor, 2008b). The Great Depression swept across most of the world like a blight or plague, swiftly and without warning. It produced much misery and suffering everywhere and eventually spread its poisons into every aspect of human existence into politics, into social organization and culture, even into man’s conception of himself (Garraty, 1976). Neo-liberal economist Milton Friedman called the phase of 1929-1933 the “Great Contraction”: he claimed that it was the most severe business-cycle contraction during the Nineteenth Century of the US history, and probably the most severe in the whole American history. He also affirmed that: “The Great Contraction, though sharper and more prolonged in the United States that in most other countries, was worldwide in scope and ranks as the most severe and widely diffused international contraction of the modern times. U.S. net national product in current prices fell by more than one-half from 1929 to 1933; net national product in constant prices, by more than one-third; implicit prices, by more than on-quarter; and monthly wholesale prices, by more than one-third.” (Friedman, Schwartz, 1971) But even more important than the financial crash, it is crucial to understand that the economic crisis had begun months before Black Tuesday. The reasons of the crisis laid in the gap between production and consume capacity. As Friedman claimed, the stock market crash coincided with a stepping up of the rate of economic decline. During the summer of 1929 production, wholesale prices, and personal income fell at annual rates of 20 per cent, 7.5 percent, and 5 per cent, respectively. In the year after the crash, they even decreased 27 per cent, 13.5 per cent, and 17 per cent, respectively. It can be said that the stock market crash was a symptom of the underlying forces making for a severe contraction of the economic activities. (Friedman, Schwartz, 1971: chap. 7) The banking crisis led the banks to deny long-term and later also short-terms bonds, and it paralyzed any kind of investment and development. Despite the fact that exact statistics are not available on the unemployment rate in the

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Thirties and that great part of the jobs were short-term, the best estimate of unemployment in late 1932 is about 13 million and it can be said that a great part of the American population suffered the economic crisis (Garraty, 1976). As in other cases that will follow the Great Depression, the crisis affected social classes in different ways and one result of increasing unemployment rate was the separation of the interests of workers and the unemployed and to some extent their conflict. The crisis divided income groups but also increased conflicts between the working class and the investors. One of the main consequences of the economic crisis was the decrease of the migrant flow toward North America. Indeed during the second half of the Thirties the flow of migrants from other countries consistently reduced and started to increase again before the second global conflict.


1.1.2 Facing the Crisis: Roosevelt and the New Deal When the democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt stepped into the Oval Office in March 1933, the unemployment rate had reached 24,9 percent. With his election as President, the country started to face the Great Depression with a series of acts and programs, commonly known as New Deal. New Deal acts had been drafted by a brain trust nominated by the neo-elected President which included technicians, scientists, managers and intellectuals. New Deal was based on the idea that the Federal Government, acting with extraordinary means, was able to re-activate the economic activities, stimulating the demand and increasing purchasing power of workmen and farmers (Teodori, 2004: p. 61). During the heady “Hundred Days”, with an intense legislative activity that followed Franklyn Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration, the federal government implemented a series of emergency relief bills for the unemployed; an Agricultural Adjustment Act for farmers (spring of 1933); a bill (the Glass-Steagall Act, also sometimes referred to as the “Banking Act of 1933”) to protect savings from speculative activities; a Securities Act to reform the Stock Exchange; and the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which in effect legalized cartels in American industry1. (Ferguson, 1984) These acts were an extraordinary new departure for the U.S. national government that abandoned its previous stance of minimal interference in the domestic market economy in favor of comprehensive attempts at administrative intervention. (Skocpol, Finegold, 1982) Along with these Acts addressed to contain the financial and bank crisis, like the Emergency Banking Act or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, President Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration (WPA). (See §4.1) This institution aimed at realizing public works and infrastructures that had the twin goal of providing public services and giving jobs to many of those that had lost their occupations during the Depression. Between 1936 and 1939, the WPA spent about 7 billion dollars throughout the country. These programs, especially the Public Housing Program, were criticized after the war: in 1953, Henry S. Churchill claimed that “there has been no new thinking, no acceptance of new ideas, no revision of approaches or concepts in the housing movement since 1937. […] 1 During its two-year life (1933-1935), the NIRA required American businesses to develop structures of “self-government” which were meant to stop the price deflation and bankruptcies of the Depression. In most cases the resulting “Codes of Fair Competition” embodied attempts at regulation of production levels, prices, and trade practices by trade associations. By mid- 1935, when the Supreme Court declared the NIRA unconstitutional, hundreds of “Codes” were in operation. (Alexander, 1994)

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The public housing program has transcended the old slum clearance program and become a part of a wider program of urban redevelopment.” (Churchill, 1953) On the other hand, others underline the high value of these programs in term of relief: in fact, Hopkins, who was the New York State’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administrator, claimed that in a society based on industrial work, the job was a key to a person’s identity, and relief without work corroded a man’s spirit. Therefore, the Roosevelt’s programs were also a way to preserve a man’s moral, save his skill and give him a chance to do something useful. The Civil Works Administration estimated providing a job to four million unemployed people (Kessner, 1989: p. 294). Many consider that the first hundred days of Roosevelt’s first term marked a turning point in the U.S. economy.


1.2 New York City in the Thirties: Living Conditions and Main Transformations 1.2.1 The Economic Crisis and Living Conditions in New York City We have seen that until the Thirties the population of the New York Metropolitan Region was growing faster than that of the nation. But at the same time, the Region experienced the growth of office activities, on finance, central offices, and other business services, and its comparatively slim commitment to agriculture and mining. (Vernon, 1960) When the crisis began the city was adapting itself to these new functions. New York City, particularly in the Thirties, showed a landscape in which many skyscrapers were half-completed, excepting the Empire State Building, inaugurated in 1931. More than 10,000 of New York’s 29,000 manufacturing firms, that constituted core of the city’s economy, had closed their doors. Many of those who were able to maintain their jobs were “underemployed”, meaning that they worked just two or three days a week or two weeks a month. The main part of the people worked in small and medium-size manufacturing, which constituted the main sector in the city. With the Depression, the situation for many of them got even worst than before. In the his second term inaugural address, President Roosevelt described in brief the housing condition of American families: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” (Roosevelt, 1937) The housing conditions in New York were possibly even worst than in other cities, due to congestion, overcrowding, age of tenements (see Image 2). As Thomas Kessner highlighted “In 1934, when La Guardia was elected, 1,300 tenements still had outhouses in the yard, 23,000 still had toilets in the hall and 30,000 had no bathing facilities. […] Between 1918 and 1929 there were four times as many fires and eight times as many deaths in these old-law tenements as the ones built after 1901. The incidence of diseases as tuberculosis was similarly disproportionate.” (Kessner, 1989: p. 322) In 1901, the legislature of New York had established the Tenement House Law (The City of New York, 1901), a milestone in the pathway of the regulation of tenement houses (Lohmann, 1931: p. 226). A couple of years before, housing conditions had been investigated thoroughly by a commission in New York City, with Lawrence Veiller and Robert W. De Forest in charge of the inquiry. Previously, the importance of the need for immediate remedial legislation was notably stressed by the writings of Jacob Riis and other philanthropists. The social cost of bad housing were the center of the investigation of pioneers of social sciences (see § 2.1) and its social costs were well-known, as Wood underlined: “Social costs [of bad housing] may be summed up in terms of sickness, injuries and deaths, delinquency and crime, decrease in industrial efficiency, lowering of the

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quality of citizenship, increase of family disintegration, and social unrest. “ (Elmer Wood, 1937) According to Lawrence Veiller, as many as one-third of the people of New York City (that is to say, 2,000,000) lived under unsatisfactory and disgraceful housing conditions. For thousands home was a mockery. It consisted of two or three small rooms of which but one was adequately ventilated; rooms that in the hot summer days and nights became an inferno of torture to little children, the sick and the weak. (Veiller, 1929) For instance, in the square-mile district of Lower East Side in Manhattan the immigrants lived packed upwards in five- and six-story tenements of six hundred people per acre. Their situation had changed dramatically by the Twenties. Thousands of families had managed to raise their living standards and to leave for roomy, elevator apartment houses in the outer boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Local settlement houses, having dealt for years with poverty and deprivation, adjusted to a growing white-collar clientele, while business leaders explored ways to make the district attractive to middle-income residents. But during the Great Depression shack towns – usually located in public parks and named “Hooverville” (from the name of President Hoover) – were the only shelters available for homeless. One of the biggest one in New York was a collection of self-built shelters located in the abandoned Central Park Receiving Reservoir behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see Image 3). But the crisis that hit the country since 1929, radically impacted also the political scenario, urban development, and urban policies as well, as Cleveland Rodgers highlithed: “Political developments were greatly accelerated following the Wall Street crash in 1929. Smith and Moses were out at Albany, capital of the Empire State. Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt was on his way to the White House, and James J. Walker was soon to be on his way out of City Hall, in New York City, where some familiar local history was being repeated.” (Rodgers, 1952) Al Smith, idol of New York City’s Democrats, endorsed Jimmy Walker, who was reelected mayor on the eve of the Wall Street debacle. Walker’s opponent was Fiorello H. La Guardia who charged that Tammany was back at tricks, that Walker’s Administration was corrupted and the city was in danger. When the scandal broke up, Moses was running his state park and parkway program and as the Depression deepened and unemployment increased, also confusion increased (see §3.1). At this stage, the politics and public officials seemed unable to cope with the economic crisis, financial stagnation and lost of jobs.


1.2.2 Transformations In Infrastructures And Transportation During the same era, the city continued to evolve itself, especially in infrastructures and transportation. Particularly from 1900, when the construction of the first subway began, to 1931, when George Washington Bridge opened to the traffic, the movement of people within the Region was transformed. In 1904 a nine-mile line with 28 stops started to run through Manhattan Island from City Hall to 145th Street. Other types of transit have been operating since a century before, at the beginning pulled by horses and then motorized. The first subway line inauguration was celebrated as great step forward (The New York Times, 1904): just ten days after the inauguration, more than 200,000 people per day was using this new mean of transportation. The subways and the els2 pushed across the Harlem River to the Bronx and across the East River to Brooklyn and Queens. The els were designed to run on tracks three stories above city streets, and they drastically changed the ways in which New Yorkers viewed their city and lived their lives. They permit to connect rapidly different areas, but they also blocked the sunlight from the streets below, they were noisy and dirty (see Image 4 and Image 5). Meanwhile tunnels were thrust under the Hudson River to New Jersey; and bridges proliferated, supplementing and ultimately displacing the ferries. The New York subway straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first route, the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) Company’s line, was conceived during the industrial depression of the 1890s, yet opened in the new century, at a time of prosperity and optimism. The subway was instituted by thousands of largely Irish and Italian immigrant laborers who worked mainly with their hands, not with machines, yet it became the world’s fastest rapid transit railway and a symbol of technological progress. It broke the transportation barriers at the industrial metropolis and stimulated the settlement of northern Manhattan and the Bronx. This immense physical expansion prompted planners to view the subways as an instrument for achieving the efficient city, where population would he dispersed from the overcrowded core, and when residential neighborhoods would be segregated from manufacturing and commercial districts. (Ward, Zunz, 1992) The new means of transport offered an escape for some people from the aging structures of the old cities where their parents had first settled. And this also permitted the expansion of the city up to the north. But meanwhile, since the beginning of the Twenties, the automobile has become a competing transport mode. Widely regarded as the embodiment of technological modernity because 2

“El” or Elevated Railway was the New York City’s earliest form of rapid transit.

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of its novelty, and viewed by many government officials and planners as neutral and nonpolitical because of its pattern of individual ownership, the automobile assumed mass transit’s old function of stimulating new settlements on the outskirts. But the failure of the effective realization of the integrated transit system in New York was also due to the lack of new political structures for rapid transit. Indeed Fiorello La Guardia tried to merge together different companies who owned and managed the public transportation railways, but at the same time during those years, semi-independent government corporations like the Port of New York Authority and later Robert Moses’ Triborough Bridge Authority were building vehicular bridges, tunnels, and highways. (see §3.1 and §3.2) During those years the automobile was definitely winning the battle against transit.


1.2.3

Mayor La Guardia And The New Deal

In 1933, during the last week of the campaign, Robert Moses endorsed Fiorello H. La Guardia, the Republican candidate who was running against Tammany’s candidate: half Italian and half Jewish; married first to a Catholic and then to a Lutheran of German descent; able to speak English, French, German, Croatian, Italian, Yiddish, and Hungarian fluently. This lawyer was practically a balanced ticket all by himself. La Guardia won the election for mayor of New York in 1933 and one week after the votes were counted he asked Moses to join the administration3. La Guardia identified the problem of the city under the previous administrations: a lack of vision and ability to see opportunities. In 1934, La Guardia wrote: “Too often life in New York is merely a squalid succession of days; whereas in fact it can be a great, living, thrilling adventure. The reason, I think, is plain. The government of the City of New York, with unparalleled opportunities, simply has not seen its opportunities; and when it has seen them, has not been able to make use of them. We need imagination at City Hall - imagination for the other fellow; and hitherto all we have had has been astuteness to find personal advantage. I have been accused of being an idealist in this matter; I propose to go right on with my idealism. Further, I know that now our ideals can be brought to reality.” (La Guardia, 1934) In 1934 more than 230,000 were unemployed; one in six New Yorkers subsisted on relief. And they had no confidence in government. The newly elected Mayor declared: “I am a captain of a broken ship who must patch and repair and struggle continually to keep it float” (La Guardia, 1934) Actually he kept the promise to seize the opportunities and under his administration the city was able to attract investments and properly use federal funds when these became available. In this process the role of Robert Moses has been fundamental, as it illustrated in the third chapter. (see §3.2) For many years, it was a common idea that New York City had failed to claim its portion of federal grants. Its applications were invariably weak, thrown together by hacks that inspired little confidence in Washington. La Guardia changed that. Teaming the best public planner in the nation, like Moses was considered at the time, with one of the brightest expert in public finance, he dispatched Robert Moses and Adolf Berle4 to Washington to deliver the message that New York was 3

The election took place in fall 1933, but Fiorello La Guardia came to office on January 1st, 1934

4 Berle was a member of the “Brains Trust” (with Moley and Tugwell), a task force that synthesized discussions and memorandums in the basic outline of New Deal legislation in 1932.

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prepared to compete for federal projects and prove that it could manage them with integrity and efficiency. (Kessner, 1989: p. 294) And the Mayor came up with a specific request for the team of engineers and architects: works that could be realized in few months and labor-intensive. The result did not come late. “Within weeks of his election, La Guardia brought home an allotment of 200,000 federally funded jobs, twenty percent of the entire federal CWA program. The new city administration initiated four thousand separate projects, ranging from the construction of covered municipal markets and refurbishing of city parks, to developing shelters for the homeless and clearing slums. Just a few weeks into Fusion, national studies described LaGuardia’s management of federal projects as the most honest and effective in the country, and a state report concluded that “New York City is remarkably free from political control or influence.” (Kessner, 1993) During the period of time in which La Guardia led the city, various projects were realized thanks to the federal funds distributed in accordance with the New Deal, in particular an ambitious program to rid the city of slums. He focused on eliminating tenements on the Lower East Side (Kessner, 1989). Indeed, another of his first acts as Mayor was approval of a law to carry out “the clearance, re-planning, and reconstruction of the areas in which unsanitary or substandard housing conditions exist” establishing a New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) to direct this public housing (February 1934). This Authority “may acquire real property by purchase and it may exercise the power of eminent domain”5. The creation of the NYCHA had mobilized the housing dreams of ordinary people: in 1935, 15,000 families, most of them living in Lower East Side, applied for the Authority’s 11 unit at First House (see Image 6). Other two projects have been developed under the Municipal Housing Authorities Law in the first years of implementation: the Harlem River Houses, and the Williamsburg Housing Development at Maujer Street, Bushwick Avenue, Scholes and Leonard Streets in Brooklyn. In Harlem, where most of the black people lived segregated, or in Lower East Side, that housed great part of the European new comers, the living conditions of poor people where harder than in other parts of the city. Many tenants paid high rent and landlords often refused to maintain and improve the buildings. If public housing offered a chance for some, it was not for all. Also if officially denied by public officials, the black population was strongly discriminated and segregated, both in 5

New York City, Law 1934 Ch.4

Watch Movie #1 We Work Again (1937)


accessing to the private market and to public housing. From New York and other big American cities, the clearance of slums became a national topic and was addressed with a national policy trough the Housing Act of 1937 and then the Housing Act of 1949 (see §2.3). Despite of the economic stagnation and crisis, other important works were completed during La Guardia’s administration. Probably the most astonishing was the Triborough Bridge, whose works began on Black Friday, was complete only in 1936. At that time, it seemed incredible that one of the biggest infrastructures in the history of US was built during the Great Depression. The Triborough Bridge had cost $63,000,000: the city furnished $20,000,000 and Federal relief Funds $43,000,000, of which $35,000,000 was a loan secured by a bond issue against tolls and $8,000,000 a direct grant. This was one of the first assignments that Moses received when he started to work for the City of New York. (see §3.2) However, not only public housing and transport infrastructures were built during those times. In New York City, thanks to the Works Progress Administration many other project where complete during the years 1935-37. (see §4.2)

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1.3

New York During World War II

During the Thirties and still for some decades, the economic base of the city was the manufacturing sector in which most part of the labor force was employed. The city adapted itself to the new means of transportation, automobile and mass transit, and the different areas became more specialized and segregated. Nevertheless, New York City arrived to face to war with a high unemployment rate and several problems to solve. Furthermore in the immediate years before World War II, at the end of the Thirties, many migrants arrived in New York City in consequences of the racial laws and the climax of discriminations in many European Countries. At the beginning it was must a trickle, mostly artists, writers, university professors, and scientists. Also if most of these members of the elites arrived in the New York Harbor in first class ships, living and working in New York City was not so easy as it seemed because the city was suffering because of the Great Depression. But in 1941, when the United States came into the war and all cities and many people got involved in war effort. The strong opposition to go to the war has been continuing until the Pearl Harbor attack, but almost everybody after December 7, 1941 – a day that President Roosevelt defined “a date which will live in infamy” (Roosevelt, 1941) – was in favor of intervention. The war required an enormous effort on the part of American economic forces, but it was also a great opportunity for the expansion of the power and influence of the United States in the international context. When the Pearl Harbor attack occurred in 1941, New York was not in the rage of the danger zone, but Mayor La Guardia in the same afternoon spoke to the citizens, ordering to “toughen up” and be on the alert for “murder by surprise” (Diehl, 2010: p. 63). The city prepared herself to face the war, brought to its east cost by the German aviation. Several sirens were installed in the city to alert the population in case of attack. For months, during the war, the entire eastern coastline, from Maine to Florida, had glowed in the dark; in New York City the lights also in Times Square and in the Theatre District were turned off. At the time, New York was the largest metropolis and had the busiest harbor in the world, and its soldiers and factories, its shipyard and piers, and its research laboratories and scientists played a formidable role in achieving victory over Germany and Japan. (Jackson 2012). But while at national level, World War II helped end the Great Depression by providing jobs for the unemployed, New York only took little advantages from it, because of the structure of its industries: most the manufacturing were small or medium and they were not able to respond properly to war needs.


At the same time, the New York Harbor was the center of the shipments of men and good toward European and African continents (see Image 7). But if the City did not take many advantages from the war, those years changed New York anyway. One of the main changes in the civil society was the increase of women’s employment in manufacturing (see Image 8) In fact, New York industries, especially those linked to harbor and docks activities, needed workers but many of the man were occupied in the army: this situation represented an opportunity of employment to the ones who always had been gotten left behind, women and colored people. In addition, since 1943 public day nurseries were set up in Harlem and Brooklyn, with the other boroughs quickly following, to give support to those women who were working in the war plants. Meanwhile other social barriers were broken: the Brooklyn Navy Yard was one of the factories that hired black workers during the wartime (see Image 9). Karen Anderson underlined how war was able to accomplish that which any law was not able to do before. “The war year were especially important for the blacks, who benefited from an expanding labor force, changing racial values, revitalized migration out of the rural South, and the attempted enforcement of equal employment opportunity under a presidential executive order. Labor force statistics support the contention that the war marked an important break with the historical allocation of work by race and sex.” (Anderson, 1982) Nevertheless, for the average of New Yorkers, the war meant rationing, shortages, blackouts, and separations. But at the same time, the theatres and bars near Times Square increased their activities during the wartime, especially because New York City was the last city that many soldiers visited before leaving to be embarked to Europe and they spend their last free days looking for entertainment (see Image 10). New York City was also the American city where the main efforts were done in terms of military assistance to the troupes to been sent to the front. When the war ended, the people invaded the streets of the theaters’ district and the celebrations culminated in Times Squares and in the following military parades held in summer 1945.

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1.4

New York City after the war

Many simultaneous processes, both economical and cultural, have characterized the postwar era in the United States: economic changes had a great impact on American population, which despite of many differences in social and racial groups, evolved into a middle class society very rapidly. Somehow the war has contributed to create a new environment that will led to the civil right movements in the post-war period: as it illustrated in the previous section, due to the lack of labor forces, many women began to work in the factories and, from the Forties on, thanks to the rapid diffusion of private transportation, innovative technologies, and achievements in civil rights, the United States became an industrialized and advanced country. Despite some improvements, at the end of World War II, the United States had to cope with a number of internal and external problems and issues, such as segregation of racial minorities, Vietnam war, Cold War, lack of access to adequate service for all, and inequality among different regions of the Country. While the basis of the economy changed, Americans adopted new lifestyles. The new lifestyle was based on the traditional family, a good white-collar job, a singlefamily house in the suburb and the car as only mean of transportation. Since 1940, the suburbs of the nation’s metropolitan areas have been growing several times as fast as the cities and towns they surround. Between 1950 and 1959, over 99 percent of the 16.1 million population increase in the nation’s metropolitan areas was reports outside the central cities (Vernon, 1960: chap. 1). Suburbanization process became stronger: suburbia would become both a planning type and a state of mind based on imagery and symbolism (Jackson, 1987). Economic and social forces drove the suburbanization of the United States, and it spread in all the country. Many of the biggest cities began to be the hubs of low-density and homogeneous suburbs, in which most working residents are forced to commute every day to go to work in the city center. “The single-family dwelling became the paragon of the middle-class housing, the most visible symbol of having arrived at a fixed place in society, the goal to which every decent family aspired. It was an investment that many people hoped would provide a ticket to higher status and wealth.” (Jackson, 1987: p. 50) As showed below, per capita income slowly began to grow after the end of the Great Depression and rapidly increased during World War II. After a setback, the economy began to grow again since 1950.

Watch Video #9 Give Yourself the Green Light (1954)


Per Capita Income in the United States between 1939 and 1963

In New York, after a period of economic growth in the Fifties and the early Sixties, the city faced a strong deindustrialization process that highly affected not only the industrial sector but also the economic and physical structure of the city. The port, which activities were linked to the harbor and its capacity to link North America to other continents, reduced incredibly its operations. In the short term, the war stimulated the local economy and highlighted the city’s centrality to American military machinery and Allied victory. In the long term, however, New York lost population, industry, and economic significance to other parts of the nation (Jackson 2012). Despite the fact that African American from the South and Puerto Ricans from the island arrived in grooving numbers, the manufacturing and transportation jobs they hoped for began leaving. Goods-making and -moving industries were reduced by completion from more efficient facilities inland; driven or zoned out by bankers and developers who saw more valuable uses for the land they occupied. The city lost population, particularly white population, as more and more whites left for the suburbs and beyond. (Moody, 2007) In New York, after World War II many parts of the city radically changed thanks to Robert Moses’ work: bridges and tunnels, parks, renewal projects, new developments. Recently Lorraine B. Diehl analyzed the history of the city and she claimed:

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“The end of the war changed the city. It loosened the umbilical cord that tied neighborhoods to “the old country”, making way for the new “international city” as defined by the complex of rising on the East River. The United Nations would set the tone.” (Diehl, 2010: p. xiii) Many of those changes and particularly the project for the United Nations Headquarter are illustrated in the third chapter (see §3.4). But also the political scenario changed in the city. After ten years with a Mayor coming from the Republican Party, La Guardia, the power came back to the Democratic Party. For the following decades, Democratic Mayors led the city: William O’Dwyer (1946-1950), Vincent R. Impellitteri (1951-1953) and Robert F. Wagner, Jr. (1954-1965). While prosperity spread allover the country, improvements in income and quality of life were not equally distributed among the entire population, especially in New York. After World War II, discrimination based on race was still very legal and commonly accepted and it was particularly evident in living conditions. This phenomenon was evident and studied already at the time. In 1960 Luigi Laurenti underlined that there was: “A marked and obvious association between no white residence patterns and areas of blight and decay” (Laurenti, 1960: pt. Preface). Indeed, black people lived segregated from whites in those areas more affected by poverty, lack of access to adequate public facilities and service, and crumbling housing. The majority of black New Yorkers concentrated in Harlem and Brooklyn’s downtown, where also unemployment rate was higher than in the rest of the city (see Image 11 and Image 12). Segregation was perpetuated in various ways in the post-war period. The way in which people of color and low-income communities experienced the city is marked by a long history of unequal distribution of environmental risks, exclusion from planning decisions, and lack of economic opportunities. (Flint, 2011b) In attempting to explain the reasons of the fiscal crisis that the city faced in 1974, Kim Moody claimed: “After the war, the city became the site od a complex web of class, gender, race and antiimperialist conflict, repplicating in the new form the old fight over space, resources, and wealth.” (Moody, 2007: p. 3)

IMAGES

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Image 2 | - A view down an alley, as rows and rows of laundry hang from tenements ca. 1935-1941. Seen looking west from 70 Columbus Avenue or Amsterdam Avenue at 63nd Street. / NYC Municipal Archive

Image 3 | Hooverville in Central Park, New York City (1932)

Image 4 | A Subway Road Comes up for air in Brooklyn — in background, a view of Manhattan from subway elevated tracks, 8th Street, Brooklyn, New York, on March 21, 1938 / NYC Municipal Archives

Image 5 | Ninth Avenue El trains with passengers on 2 levels of tracks, 66th Street El station in background, in October of 1933. Photo taken on Columbus Avenue, northwest of Lincoln Square & 65th Street. / NYC Municipal Archives

Image 6 | The First House: the corner of Avenue A (left) and East 3rd Street on February 11, 1935 / New York City Housing Authority

Image 7 | Towing USS Lafayette with view of Hudson River piers, 1945

Image 8 | U.S. Navy Official Photograph. Minerva Matzkowitz has already taken her place at an engraving machine in the Brooklyn Navy Yard Ordnance Machine Shop, 1944. New-York Historical Society

Image 9 | Brooklu Navy Yard / U.S. Navy via the New-York Historical Society

Image 10 | Committee for the Armed Forces of the Welfare Council of New York City. Welcome to New York! USO information center / NewYork Historical Society.png

Image 11 | Black Population - Census 1940 - Census 1970 Source Social Explorer.png

Image 12 | Unemployment rate - Census 1940 - Source Socialexplorer.png

02

PLANNING THEORIES AND IDEAS THAT SHAPED ROBERT MOSES

“I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE” Futurama’s motto printed on pins distributed at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair

When Moses began to work for the State and then for the city of New York, several new planning theories and ideas were circulating in the States and they certainly influenced his approach to urban problems. It is impossible to cover in deep whole planning history of the Twentieth Century here; but some milestones can be identified and most of them occurred before World War II and are strictly linked to New York City. Through the main theories, regulations, plans, and expositions of the period, the research offers a theoretical framework that shaped Moses and his ideal city model. These milestone are: the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, the Modernist Movement, land zoning, the New York Regional Plan, and the Futurama Exhibit at the New York World’s Fair. All these important contribution to the discipline occurred in a period (first half of the Twentieth century) in which Moses evolved from reformer to planner and are important to put his figure in the context of American planning of the time.

Image 13 | Eighty Years of American City Planning Collage by Scott Wise (Hall 1989)


2.1

Planning the Future of American Cities

In the Nineteenth Century social and economic changes in American cities have been enormous and many of them were related to technological innovations, applied both to building construction and transportation. New technologies allowed to improve building processes and to developed new typologies. One of the most famous case is the electric elevator, which first appeared in 1880 in Germany, and had great diffusion from the beginning the Twentieth Century. The availability of new technologies in construction, for instance the use of steel structures, allowed to produce higher buildings with more stories, and make them accessible thanks to the electric elevators. These are fundamental steps in the construction of skyscrapers and it would be impossible to image ideal cities, like le ville radiouse, without those technologies. At the same time, enormous changes in transportation were occurring too. As it illustrated first chapter, New York City was one of the first city in the world to have a subway line’s service (see §1.2.2). Transport innovations increased the distance that the citizens covered in a reasonable time to reach the business center or workplaces. And in New York that meant the expansion of the city towards the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. But changes in cities were not just due to technical innovations. In this chapter is illustrated how the awareness of the consequences of inadequate living conditions in cities emerged during the Nineteenth Century led to new laws and rules, both in Europe and in America. American city planning as discipline has been developed along with the process of urbanization occurred in the States at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The 1920 Federal Census revealed that for the first time in its history the majority of American population lived in cities (51.4 percent); of these, 58.5% live in central cities and 41.5% live in suburbs. Globally this peak of urbanization would be reached only ninety years later. And despite the fact that the federal bureau defined a city as a place inhabited by at least two thousand and five hundred people, data confirms that in the first two decades of the century United States had evolved into an urban society, where the city, and not the farm, had become the locus of the national experience (Chdacoff et al., 1975: p. 175). Historically, the East Coast was the area of North American continent that has been first colonized since the Sixteenth Century. And urban growth followed the same pattern of colonization, from east to west. When cities as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, were already metropolises, the Far West has being colonized by pioneers. At the time, urban theories developed in other countries have been imported to the States, some with more success than others.

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Planning Theories And Ideas That Shaped Robert Moses

One of the most significant example was the City Beautiful movement that, in the first decade of the new century, represented a deliberate and conscious attempt to impose on America’s greatest cities the kind of heavily formalistic urban reconstruction that Haussmann had carried through in Paris, and Cerda in Barcelona, between 1850 and 1870. But in addition to foreign theories, the great innovations in American planning include zoning resolutions, which will be adopted by many communities following the example of the 1916 New York Zoning Declaration (See §2.4.1). While on one side local authorities adopted zoning as tool to be used in order to regulate real estate market and urban growth, a group of scholars and planners – including Lewis Mumford, Henry Wright, Clarence Stein, Stuart Chase, Benton MacKaye, and Catherine Bauer – constituted the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) in 1923. Inspired by Howard and Geddes’s theories, they developed a vision of small, self-sufficient rural communities in ecological balance with their natural resources. Going beyond Howard’s plans for garden cities as solution for the ills of the congested metropolis, they wanted to reconstruct the whole foundation of American life, based on what they saw as the liberating effect of the automobile and the electric power plant. Peter Hall claimed that this idea never passed because it was too utopian and the forces lined up against it too strong. (Hall, 1989: p. 5) Many scholars belonging to this movement forecasted implications of technological diffusion in American cities in Twenties and the Thirties, far before than in Europe: authors as Clarence Stein and Benton MacKaye predicted phenomena such as the out movement of industry from cities and the resulting inner city problems that would actually took place forty years later, or the freeway and the dispersed settlement form of Fifties and the Sixties. While new planning theories and ideas, as well laws and regulation were developed, in Chicago a new approach to urban studies born. In the next section the School that radically changed the way planners looked at the city is illustrated.


2.1.1

The Chicago School of Urban Sociology

Certainly city planning has no official certificate of birth, but if a date has to be chosen, it is surely 1909: the year of the First National Conference on City Planning and Congestion and the publication of Burnham’s Chicago Plan (Hall, 1989). Daniel Burnham elaborated a plan for the city, which was one of the most populated and industrial of the country. The plan was aborted after the death of his author in 1912 and after two years the world’s first true school of urban sociology born in the same city. In a time during which not only American social experimentation, but also American social investigation were dominated by the central perceived problem of the immigrant socialization, the establishment of city planning discipline proclaimed urban America’s coming of age. The study of city life was formalized at the University of Chicago’s school of sociology: here Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, Roderick D. McKenzie and Louis Wirth joined the tradition of modern techniques of mass social observation developed in London at the end of the 1800s with the German theoretical sociology and developed the Chicago School’s approach to the city, now known as human ecology. Park and Burgess trained scholars to draw relationships between city people and their environment in much the same way that biologists examined the interactions between plants and animals and their surroundings. One central point of Park’s theory was that the simplest and most elementary form of association was the local neighborhood. These ideas were central to such studies as Burgess’s concentric-ring thesis, which depicted urban growth in terms of a series of concentric zones radiating out-ward from the urban core. (See Image 16 and Image 17) Around the center, there were areas called “Zones in Transition”: here was where phenomena such as social disintegration and delinquency took place. Frederick Thrasher described these areas in “The Gang”: “It is these regions that we find deteriorating neighborhoods, great mobility area of immigrant first settlement, corrupt ward politics, vice, crime, and general disorder. The basic reason however, for the development of gangs in these areas is the failure of customary social institutions to function in such a way as to organize the life of the boy.” (Thrasher, 1927) Despite the fact that the School elaborated theories generally on city and its growth, many members particularly focused their studies on slum. Harvey W. Zorbaugh, for example, in “The Gold Coast and the Slum” (Zorbaugh, 1929) outlined the life patterns of contrasting neighborhoods. Louis Wirth, in “The Ghetto” (Wirth, 1928) probed the development of a single residential type and later in the Thirties focused his attention on urbanism as a way of life (Wirth,

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1938). He underlined how, despite the dominance of urbanism in the modern world, a sociological definition of city was still lacking and deeper understanding of the city dynamics and phenomena was needed. Some argued that these scholars often failed to identify relationships within families and among neighbors that inner-city residents preferred to keep invisible to outsiders, and critics have charged that their emphasis on neighborhood looked nostalgically backward toward an imagined pre-urban village. Still, the Chicago school’s commitment to urbanism as a legitimate field of inquiry, like the census milestone, unmistakably marked the city’s importance in Twentieth-Century culture.

Box 3

Jacob Riis and the Other Half Lives

Jacob Riis, Danish anthropologist and photographer, was one of the first social workers. In 1890 he published a book that shocked the wealthy American middle class: “How the Other Half Lives. Studies Among the Tenements of New York” (Riis, 1890). He was also a Tribune reporter it was the first one to report housing problems in New York using photography. Looking at his pictures, public opinion seriously started to be concern about residential crowding, poor sanitation, and disease that affected New York slums, and quite suddenly, between 1880 and 1890, the respectable bourgeois urban world discover the slum city. His book, along with another remarkable piece of journalism, Andrew Mearns’s “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London” (Mearns, 1883), provoked a reaction of mixed fear and guilt. Riis’s vivid photographs and poignant accounts of “how the other half lived” caused progressive Governor Theodore Roosevelt to appoint a state Tenement House Commission at the turn of the century to study New York City dwellings. Suddenly New York discovered that three-fifths of its population lived in poverty.

Image 14 - Riis, Jacob. Interior. Poor men in his residence Bayard Street, New York (1890)

Moses, as many other before him, recognized the great contribution that Jacob Riis and other pioneers brought in creating the case of city slums and immigrant conditions in great American cities. In 1945 Moses wrote: “In this period the conscience of the community lives only in those outposts of civilization known as settlement houses. In these settlement houses Jane Addams, Jacob Riis, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Lillian Wald, Mary Simkhovitch, and other pioneers lifted up the tabernacle in the city wilderness and awakened the sleeping conscience of a generation too busy making money and enjoying it to give thought to their less fortunate fellow men. For much of the progress we have made in slum clearance we owe thanks to the early social workers, and it is therefore doubly hard to prove to them that their work is done, that the task is now one of engineering and management, and that they must turn the job over to administrators.” (Moses, 1945)

Image 15 - Riis, Jacob A typical tenement, ca.1890. (Jacob A. Riis, Museum of the City of New York)


2.2

New Ideas Come From Overseas

The first years of the third decade of the twentieth Century are crucial for the history of architecture and planning discipline, especially in Europe, where the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), a group that included personalities such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Sigfried Giedion, and José Luis Sert, published its famous Athens Charter in 1933 (Congress Internationaux d’Architecture moderne (CIAM), 1933). This document is the output of a long process: indeed, CIAM II (1929) was concerned with ‘Minimum Living-Standard Housing‘ and CIAM III (1930) on ‘Rational Utilization of Building Sites‘. The delegates agreed on the more and more urgency to deal with problems of town planning. Three preparatory meetings were organized before CIAM IV that wook place in July and August 1933. The results of these deliberations concerned ‘The Functional City‘. In the Twenties, Le Corbusier, Swiss architect, has been using conceptions of the garden city in order to advance this idea of the Radiant City. The Radiant City was an open area of twenty-four skyscrapers surrounded by lawns and where the circulation between pedestrians and cars was strictly separated. Residential and business functions were also separated and a precise order was given to the city. This formal order was necessary to achieve a high efficiency. It was an attempt to pally the standardization and efficiency of the Taylorism and Fordism to the city fabric and the building construction. As Paul Kidder underlined, Le Corbusier’s love of skyscrapers was inspired, in part, by the opportunity to cover huge portions of the urban landscape with parks and pedestrian paths, segregating motor traffic onto expressways (Kidder, 2008). New technologies and building materials permitted to build higher, occupy less ground space and leave open spaces to nature for recreation. This city model needed a prerequisite: it had to be built on clear site. This demanded the existing city center needed to be demolished. Both the need for open spaces and demolition are key issues in attributing the theoretical roots of Moses’s practices of demolition and reconstruction to the modernist movement. Despite the fact that the great majority of Le Corbusier’s planning schemes were never built, many of his theoretical doctrines were adopted and applied by planners and architects around the world. They required immense political resolve and financial resources and some claimed that few planners in the history had the possibilities to work under those conditions. One of them was Robert Moses. Recently, Themis Chronopoulos claimed that:

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“Robert Moses’s urban renewal projects followed Le Corbusier’s prescriptions of visual order. The gridiron street system was replaced with superblocks. Buildings and functions were separated from each other. Gardens surrounded buildings. Parking facilities were neatly integrated in the site. Playgrounds were placed within meaningful distance from the residential buildings and incorporated into the gardens. The streets surrounding the superblocks were widened so that automobile traffic could flow easier. Stores were limited to specific locations that were separate from the residential towers. The redeveloped sites appeared orderly especially from above and the comprehensive urban design established specific uses for each spatial subdivision. […] It was not only that Robert Moses’s modernist rebuilding plans resembled Le Corbusier’s proposals but also that his definition of the slum was influenced from platforms advanced by CIAM proponents. (Chronopoulos, 2013: p. 9) If on the one hand Moses largely accepted the idea that slums had to be demolished and there was no chance to revitalize or regenerate them, on the other hand he did not totally embrace modernist ideas. His thought is more complex and linked to several urban issues that he tried to face using different public works sectors (see §5.2.2 and §5.2.3).


2.3

Planning and Housing Become Part of the Political Debate

A key issue in twentieth-century American planning history is that the debate about city life, housing problems, and congestion crossed the border between academia and politics. Planning came under the spotlight of political agenda, not just at local but also at national level. In this connection, in 1922 Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce at the time and lately US President, made the following comment: “The enormous losses in human happiness and in money which have resulted from lack of city plans which take into account the conditions of modern life need little proof. The lack of adequate open spaces, of playgrounds and parks, the congestion of streets, the misery of tenement life and its repercussions upon each new generation are an untold charge against our American life. Our cities do not produce their full contribution to the sinews of American life and national character. The moral and social issues can only be solved by a new conception of city building.” (Hoover, 1922) At the beginning of the century, the main urban problems to solved were urban congestion and housing. Indeed, years later President Franklin D. Roosevelt claimed in his second inaugural speech that: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-olad, ill-nourished.” (Roosevelt, 1937) Both those problems had to deal with urban growth and new styles of life. In the first chapter, it has been illustrated how migration and improvements in life quality led to an unprecedented growth of inhabitants in American big cities, especially those situated on the eastern coast. In this context of urbanization and migration from other countries, access to affordable housing was conceived as a main concern by many parties and has been address since the early Thirties. Joel Schwartz claimed that in this phase, housing reformers championed massive slum clearance by public authority, which was considered the one and only solution. (Schwartz, 2002) One of the main characters in this story is Catherine Bauer, one of the first female urban planners, who strongly advocate for affordable housing. Her efforts on this topic culminated in the creation of the Federal Housing Association in 1934 and lately in the historic Housing Act of 1937 (Congress of the United States of America, 1937), also known as the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act.

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Peter Hall claimed that the Act represented an uneasy compromise between Bauer and the construction unions, who wanted public housing, and the real estate interests who had wanted anything but (Hall, 1989). Regarding this Act, Eugenie Birched commented that: “The new federal role was the product of the efforts of the American housing movement. Consisting in an amorphous, sometimes divided, coalition of social workers, economists, labor leaders, lawyers and municipal officials, the housers waged their battle between the 1914 and the 1937.” (Birch, 1978) Some scholars, like Bradford Hunt, claimed historians have wrongly portrayed the Housing Act of 1937 as hopelessly compromised by amendments originating from real estate and conservative interests. (Hunt, 2005) The Housing Act of 1937 established a federal public housing authority to make loans, grants, and annual contributions to local public housing agencies to develop, acquire, and manage housing projects. In addiction to that, because of the Depression, many workers were unemployed, but even in the best times, those who did have jobs were not able to purchase or rent adequate homes at reasonable prices. To address also this issue the Housing Act of 1937 was to have two goals: providing adequate shelter and creating employment. (Birch, 1978: p. 132) Conservative congressmen, concerned that public housing would compete with privately developed housing, limited the program to low-income people by placing a ceiling on the income of eligible tenants and the rents of public housing units. They also incorporated the goal of slum clearance into the law by requiring that one slum unit be demolished for every public housing unit built1. (McDonnell, 1957) But the program that the Housing Act of 1937 created had to cope with great economic difficulties due to the war efforts and the strains on the federal budget (Von Hoffman, 2000: p. 303) and for several reasons it would not be effective as hoped.2 Despite the fact that it did not have a huge impact but it was a first step towards the creation of a public housing system. Only after the war with the Housing Act of 1949 (Congress of the United States of America, 1949), the Congress would grappled with the issue, and it would sing the beginning of urban renewal era.

1 The Housing Act of 1937 defined a slum as “any area where dwellings predominate which by reason of delapidation , overcrowding, faulty arreangement or design, ventilatio, light or sanitation facilities or any combination of these features are detrimental to safety, health or morals.” (Congress of the United States of America, 1937) 2

The housing debate that took place during the Thirties is discussed in §2.3.


2.4

New York City: a Paradigm for American Planning

In order to understand the framework of planning discipline in which Moses began his work, the analysis should consider that New York had represented the testing ground for urban and regional planning. Being one of the biggest cities of the country in a complex regional context, a central hub of migration flows, and a fast-growing metropolis, New York also was a case of real estate dynamics to keep an eye on. In the nineteen-tens and the Twenties the two greatest steps forward in planning came from New York City: the first one was the approval of the Zoning Resolution (1916), that will be an example for resolutions to be adopted countrywide; the second was the Regional Plan for New York and its Environs (1929), that was the first consistent attempt to regulate and provide indications for the development of the region surrounding the city, mainly designing the infrastructural connections with its environs. During the New Deal Era New York approved the new Charter of 1936 (New York City, 1936). It instituted, among other organizational changes in the city administration, a strong and semi-independent City Planning Commission. This change was hailed as a great victory for city planning and served as an inspiration for other cities as well. In addiction to that, the Charter instituted one City Park Department head by Robert Moses until 1960, merging the existing borough park departments.

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2.4.1

New York Discovers Zoning

The greatest innovation occurred during the first half of the century in New York was the introduction of the new rules to be applies to all new residential buildings. In 1916 the City of New York approved the new Building Zone Resolution (The City of New York, 1916), the first real zoning resolution in the history of city planning. The adoption of the resolution was the outcome of a process initiated in 1911, when Fifth Avenue garment retailers, worried by the spread of the manufactory workshops that served them and damages for real estate, lobbied for the creation of a Committee on City Planning that produced a Report on Height of Buildings. The report contained the concept of police power: the idea, developed by English law, was that the State had the right to regulate the private use of property so as to guarantee “the health, safety, morels, comfort, convenience, and welfare of the community” (Hall, 2002: pp. 60–61). The city of New York adopted the final version of the Resolution in 1916 and it would be reformed only in 1961. Regarding the rationale and the elaboration of the resolution, Raphael Fischler highlighted that: “The new code was the product of a mixed set of actors who had tackled a variety of issues. What makes the case of the 1916 ordinance so important to planning history is not only the fact that it was the first city-wide ordinance of its kind; it is also the fact that in the debates going on in New York before and after its passage we find the same social, political and economic problems that have underlain zoning and planning controversies to this date. The law was comprehensive not only geographically but also conceptually.” (Fischler, 1998) Despite the fact that its original task was to regulate commercial activities, that powerful commercial interests supported it, and that it was also a way of protecting the value of existing real estate against undesirable invasions, more than 750 communities adopted it by the end of the Twenties. And this because everyone could see it was good for business, and it was a method much cheaper than others, such as the City Beautiful (Hall, 2002). Zoning was adopted by so many cities because it became a static process of attempting to set and preserve the character of certain neighborhoods, in order to preserve property values in these areas, while imposing only nominal restriction on those areas holding a promise of speculative profit. (Walker, 1950) Apart setting specific functions for each zone and creating area districts, the ordinance set height limitations for new building. Those produced a form of building known as setback architecture. The ordinance designed five height districts, each establishing a relationship between street widths and building height. (Ward, Zunz, 1997: p. 21) The resolution set new standards in construction: setback architecture became a characteristic of New York skyscrapers; but due to the need to build higher, the developers


were forced to reserve a part of the lots for public spaces. Regarding this new architecture, Weiss claimed: “The landmark 1916 law devised a compromise solution to the problem of real estate conflicts over the height and bulk of buildings in commercial districts by permitting tall buildings if they preserved a certain amount of light, air, and ‘open space in the sky’. Zoning prescriptions for setbacks and towers generated a new style in skyscraper architecture. In the 1920s many cities adopted the New York setback formula instead of flat building height restrictions that would limit skyscraper development.” (Weiss, 1992) The notion, as Peter Hall made clear, was to preserve real estate values in settled neighborhoods, while imposing only nominal restriction in areas that held out the possibility of profit. And, despite rare exceptions, zoning was usually divorced from city planning: the first was legally based, mandatory, and invariable, the second voluntary, advisory, nonmandatory, and irregular. It output, the City Functional, as Peter Hall called it, was low-key, unidealistic one, driven hard by demands of profit from land development, and almost totally bereft of vision (Hall, 1989).

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2.4.2

Regional Planning and the first New York Regional Plan

As happened for zoning, New York was the testing ground for another significant key topic, regional planning. But as it mentioned before, planning was non-mandatory and the first plan for New York was conceived only in 1929. During the Twenties planning debate was focused on regional planning, that born from the ideas of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), and, as Peter Hall pointed out: “through his meeting in the 1920s with Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), a sociologistjournalist who could make his thoughts coherent in a way he never could, this philosophy passed to a small but brilliant and dedicated group of planners in New York City, whence – through Mumford’s immensely powerful writings – it fused with Howard’ s closely related ideas, and spread out across America and the world; exercising enormous influence, in particular on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, in the 1930s and on the planning on the capitals of Europe, in the 1940s and 1950s.” (Hall, 2002: p. 143) Geddes and Mumford met in New York in 1923, and during the times they spent together Mumford elaborated the idea of creating a group that became the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA). The RPAA Manifesto, edited by Mumford, was published in 1925 and contained the idea of ‘regional city’: a ‘utopian urban form’ in which the variety of urban communities would be sited upon a continuous green backcloth of farms, parks, and wilderness areas. The concept had been considered an evolution of Howard’s garden-city/green-belt idea. The RPAA believed that new technologies – electric power, the telephone, the car – were liberating agents, allowing homes and workplaces to escape completely from the constriction of the nineteenth-century city. Mumford would later come to doubt about it and then reject that hypothesis, as he saw mass automobility did to post-World War II America; but at the end of the Twenties it was still possible to see the car as benign technology (Hall, 2002: p. 158) Until the Twenties planning was city planning, and very few attempts have been made to apply regional planning theories in America. The first significant effort to draft a plan for the development of one region was made in New York by Henry Wright. As president of the Russell Sage Foundation, he sponsored the elaboration of survey and the “Regional Plan for New York and its Environs” (Adams, 1929) since 1923. (See Image 18) Kessnet underlined that unexpectedly in this world class city the only authoritative master plan for metropolitan development was conceived by the privately organized Regional Plan Association of New York, and paid for by the Russell Sage Foundation (Kessner, 1993).


By the way Wright’s successor, Frederic A. Delano, confirmed the nominee of Thomas Adams as the head of the team, which included several kinds of professional profiles. The team worked since 1923 and the first version of the plan was published in 1929. MacDonald underlined that relevant issues are missed in the plan, in particular housing: The Russell Sage Foundation’s underwriting of “The Regional Plan for New York and its Environs” represented a major private sector effort to demonstrate the value of sound data. The Regional Plan was intended to expand the spatial and scientific boundaries of planning. It entailed a massive (and costly) data gathering effort over the course of more than nine years, resulting in eight volumes of studies on topics ranging from industrial location to traffic and public buildings (but omitting the more contentious topics of housing conditions and new towns). (MacDonald, 2008: p. 269) The proposal of the Regional Plan of New York was follow by an intellectual battle that would become epic among its author, Thomas Adams and Lewis Mumford. The battle was over what the RPAA saw as the failings of that plan. Mumford argued that document was pernicious, whose implementation would result in a multiplication of the failings it was suppose to address: congestion, overcentralization, uncontrolled growth: it was described the City Functional at the regional scale. Adams, on his side, replied that the issue was “whether we stand still and talk ideals or move forward and get as much realization of our idea as possible in a necessarily imperfect society, capable only of imperfect solutions to its problems” (Adams, 1932). It has been highlighted that much of this plan became reality, largely because of Robert Moses, who provided the needed arterial connections, thought the project of highways, crossways and parkways (Hall, 1989). In the third chapter, it is illustrated the importance of the connections within and outside the city in Moses’s approach.

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2.5

The 1939-40 World’s Fair and Its Futurama

Another milestone in the history of American planning is the 1939-40 World’s Fair in New York City. It is useful for a full comprehension theories and ideas that influenced Robert Moses for two main reasons: first of all, Moses would be the Commissioner of the following New York World’s Fair, held in 1964-65 on the same site, and second because the Fair was a fundamental step in the propaganda about the city of the future in US (see Images 20- 21). The Fair, which theme was “Building the World of Tomorrow”, was a tremendous success: over seven million visitors visited it. (see Images 19-20) One of the most influent legacies of that Expo was the “Futurama Exhibit” in the General Motors Pavilion, curated by Norman Bel Geddes (1893 – 1958). It remained in the history not just in planning, but also in the imaginary of the Twentieth century. Since then, the term “Futurama” has been used in many other fields to re-called the city of the future3. The General Motors Futurama exhibition captured the fancy of the public and critics alike, journalists competed to find adequate words to convey Bel Geddes’s “ingenuity”, “daring”, “showmanship”, and “genius”. Each day thousands of visitors waited for hours in line up to a mile in length for the opportunity to experience the Futurama. (Marchand, 1992) (see Image 22) Bel Geddes’s idea was, instead of showing the production process as happened in the 1933-34 Chicago’s World Fair4, of sharing a vision of the future, both socially and technologically. Bel Geddes’s Futurama portrayed the “City of 1960”, through a model (see Images 23, 25, 26, 27, 28) and a twenty minutes long movie, entitled “To New Horizons” (Jam Handy Organization, 1939). In his imaginary city, all the nagging problems of the industrial cities of the Thirties had been solved through good planning and modern solutions. Futurama broke the rules of the exhibition: the goal was not to show the product, but to share General Motor’s vision. Bel Geddes elaborated the model in 1937 and he tried to convince without success the Shell Oil to use it for its advertisements: the skyscrapers plus the parks and playground were connected thanks to a system of metropolitan express highways and elevated sidewalks to separate pedestrian and motor traffic (see Image 26 and Image 27). The model for Futurama was ready before Bel Geddes got the sponsorship by General Motors and it was clearly influenced by the modernist movement. This city model had several advantages: the control of circulation would reduce traffic 3

A videogame and an animated sitcom were entitled “Futurama”.

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For the 1933-24 exhibit, General Motors had constructed an operatin Chevrolet assebly line.

Watch Video #6 To New Horizons (1940)


accidents; the separated motor and pedestrian circulation would eliminate urban traffic congestion; the immense skyscrapers would allow for more health-promoting open space in urban area, while efficiency of highway system would allow for living in suburbs and commuting everyday (Marchand, 1992). Following the exposition, in 1940, Bel Geddes, that was a designer more than a planner, published a book, “Magic Motorways” (Bel Geddes, 1940), in which he clarified how the machine age innovations would improved the city life, concentrating planning’s efforts on solving traffic congestion. The building and open space patterns of Futurama, with different levels of circulation for each means of transportation, a regular urban grid and skyscrapers, strongly resemble Le Corbusier’s urban plans of the Twenties and the early Thirties. Despite the fact that Bel Geddes suggesting that “Perhaps there is no need for private cars to come within certain congested areas of a city. Many passenger cars driving in a city come from suburbs, and it would be more practical for these people to come in on a subway system” (Bel Geddes, 1940: p. 238) there is not doubt that Futurama, also because sponsored by General Motors, based its patterns on automobile. But another important feature of Futurama is that there is no hope for the contemporary city. Bel Geddes claimed that: “Hope for the future lies in our determination to rebuilt and redesign our cities to prevent the evils which have accumulated as a consequence of lack of planning. The success of the design, physical structure and economy of our future cities will depend on the enterprise and vision which we show today.” (Bel Geddes, 1940: p. 245) As Roland Marchand pointed out, there were no slums in Bel Geddes’s Futurama. “All had presumably succumbed to the bulldozers of the highway builders, never to replicate themselves elsewhere. Some admirers noted that he had prettified the future by eliminating such elements as billboards.” (Marchand, 1992: p. 40) It is interesting to understand the reaction of power brokers, such as Robert Moses, who considered the exhibit a mere ‘work of the imagination’. And this is unexpected, if one considers that Moses would be accredited to be the one who applied this model to New York City. But commenting Futurama exhibit, Moses told Bel Geddes: “you are simply taking a look into the future, that you don’t want your recommendations to be taken too seriously by practical work-a-day people who must live in their own time” (Ellis, 2005: p. 59)5. 5 source.

Moses is quoted in (Meikle, 1979), reported in (Ellis, 2005: p. 59) – I was not able to access to the primary

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Moses always disapproved imagery plans for the city, because he was a practical professional and considers these planners too visionary6. Despite few criticisms, Futurama was a great success exactly because it offered a vision. It was the second times in the history, after Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (Fritz Lang, 1927), that regular people could experience and visualize the city of the future. The city of the future pictured by Bel Geddes was freshly new, fascinating and charming. It was clean, tiny, and fast. Everything was possible thanks to technological innovations and private mobility. The function were concentrated and separated. There was no room for accidents, mistakes, and disorder. And incredibly, Bel Geddes’s future city was only 20 years far. The available souvenirs from GM’s Futurama were pins: coming out from the pavilion visitors proudly declared “I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE” (Hayden, 2012). But while Bel Geddes was imagining Futurama and making 28,000 people per day dream about the future, others advanced different proposals. During the Fair, other movie about the future city was projected: “The City” (Steiner, Van Dyke, 1939), a film scripted by Mumford. At the time, Mumford had reached a wide audience in the pages of The New Yorker where he was architecture critic and the author of a regular column on urban affairs, ‘The Skyline’. As it illustrated in the previous sections (see §2.4.2), Mumford was one of the most influencing figures of planning in the American and he contributed to found the Regional Planning Association, after the war continued to produce influential volumes on cities and technology throughout the Fifties and Sixties. His books became standard texts in city planning curricula and influenced several generations of American planners and architects. (Ellis, 2005) As part of its contribution to the Fair, the American Institute of Planners (AIP), newly renamed and reconstituted from the American City Planning Institute, produced this short documentary. It was shown to a much smaller audience than “To new Horizons” but it is equally relevant in American planning history. The film has five sections that trace a trajectory of declension and renewal: the scenes move from the ideal small town of the previous century to the contemporary city. Here all the consequences of bad planning are concentrated, congestion and unhealthy conditions. Carl Abbott underlined that in the film: “Manhattan turns human beings into frenzied denizens of an urban anthill, but there is no escape from New York on jammed highways that turn into weekend parking lots with the shoulder of the road being the only available spot for a family picnic. 6

This and other aspects of Moses’s ideas are discussed in the fifth chapter (see §5.2.1).

Watch Video #5 The City (1939)


Salvation comes at the end in the form of good planning, carefully explained and depicted in images of the new planned communities of Greenbelt and Radburn, where the summer sun shines again.” (Abbott, 2012) Both these classic American Planning movies revealed the vision of the time, in which the problems of modern city should be solved through proper planning and rebuilding. But in the one hand Bel Geddes’ Futurama provided a model were there are no slum and highways cross the city, on the other hand Mumford’s city offered an escape from the modern city, and the highways system is integrated with the landscape to favor the creation of communities located in the city region.

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IMAGES

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Image 16 | Urban Growth (Park et al., 1925)

Image 17 | Urban Areas (Park et al., 1925)

Image 18 | Key Plan for Regional Highway Routes (Adams, 1929).jpg

Image 19| Areal View of the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair

Image 20 | Opening Cerimony of the 1939-40 New York Wolrd Fair

Image 21 | An overhead view of the expansive fairgrounds in June of 1940 /© sfcoua 2015

Image 22 | General night view of the World’s Fair, New York City, September 15, 1939 /© sfcoua 2015

Image 23 | Designer Norman Bel Geddes (right) looks over an exhibit model.

Image 24 | Bel Geddes included 500,000 buildings and highrises “as they may be in the future.

Image 25 | Up to 28,000 people a day took the 15-minute “carry-go-round” Futurama “sound and scene” ride.

Image 26 | More than 550 sound-chairs of Futurama moved on a Westinghouse conveyor system traveling at approximately 102 feet per minute

Image 27 | In this iconic Fair image, workmen stand amid the buildings of Futurama

Image 28 | Futurama, the model city of 1960, designed by Norman Bel Geddes for the General Motors Exhibit at the New York World’s Fair in 1939

03

ROBERT MOSES: A PUBLIC SERVANT

“For the generation to come, the story of public building in New York City would be largely the story of that one man – Robert Moses, the superman who got big things built for the super city.” (Lowe, 1968: p. 47)

Moses did not receive a formal education in planning but thanks to his experience in the State’s administration, when he started to work for the city of New York he had already evolved from reformer to planner. Moses’s career as public servant for the City of New York began in 1934 and it can be divided in three main phases. In the first one, Moses served as City Park Commissioner during the New Deal Era; his astonishing results and the climb to powerful positions characterize this phase. In the second, Moses worked for the city in different sectors of public works such as housing, redevelopment projects, and infrastructures: this phase corresponds to the full powers and Moses gained a general consensus on his works during these years. In the third and last part, Moses put more efforts than others into urban renewal projects in New York: despite of his popularity he was strongly attacked and when he retired in the late Sixties, his reputation he was considered the villain of planning.

Image 29 | Mr. Moses, a man of many parts and many projects, in action on same crucial fronts by Carl Rose (Moses, 1959)


3.1

From reformer to planner

This chapter focuses on Moses’s work for the City of New York, but to understand his contribution to the construction of the public city, it is needed to contextualize those works in Moses’s entire life and career. Robert Moses was born in 1888 in New Haven, Connecticut, the second of three children of a German Jewish couple, Emanuel and Bella Moses. His father owned a department store and had just begun to invest in real estate in the area when the family decided to move to New York in 1987. Robert had been exposed to social and political issues during his early life, in fact his mother Bella found her philanthropic cause in the city: the Settlement House Movement, that helped “in the Americanization of Residents of the Lower East Side and especially of the younger generation” (Barkan, 2011: p. 78). Jewish migrants – who left Eastern and Central Europe because of discrimination and pogroms that were taking place there – mostly populated that area at the time: by 1915, there were about one million and half Jewish New Yorkers, about 28 per cent of the city’s total population. During his time at Yale University (1905 – 1909) Moses developed a great passion for sports, and in particular for swimming. In 1908 he created the Yale University Minor Sports Association and had his first experience in fundraising among alumni and in the makings of power. Then he moved to the UK, where he obtained a law degree from Oxford University in 1911. During the time he spent in Great Britain Moses developed his passion for public service and in several letters to his parents he reported his desire to make a career in government (Caro, 1974: p. 51). Once back in the States, Moses obtained a PhD degree in public policy at Columbia University in 1913. His dissertation was entitled “The Civil Service of Great Britain” (Moses, 1913). New York’s Municipal Civil Service Commission hired him one year after: this new Commission created by Mayor John Purroy Mitchel, the “Boy Mayor”, had the task of reforming the chaotic 50,000-employee machinery of the city. It was the first chance for Moses to put his ideas in practice. But when this experience failed for lack of strong political support in 1917, Moses had to look for a new job. Alfred E. Smith was elected new Governor in 1919: he was a Tammany man, and one of the Tammany men who most violently opposed Moses’s work to reform the Civil Service. But despite that, Belle Moskowitz, chief of the Reconstruction Commission of Smith’s administration, hired Moses as her chief of staff to help her to complete the reorganization of the state’s administrative machinery.

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Robert Moses: a Public Servant

This reform constituted a model for other states, as Benjamin and Keck stated: “With some bipartisan support, the statutory reforms recommended by the Commission were passed during Governor Smith‘s first term. When he was elected again in 1922, Smith resumed his efforts to achieve state government reorganization. By 1925, he had achieved the passage of two of the three previously proposed constitutional amendments. Thereafter, some of the more controversial issues – relating to a smaller number of single-headed departments – found their way into legislation. New York‘s reform efforts later served as a model for other state governments.” (Benjamin, Keck, 2011) During his first term, Smith appreciated Moses’s skills and in 1921 he assigned Moses the task of reforming the state park system. Thanks to this assignment he was able to gain a deep knowledge of the possibilities that the natural areas surrounding the city offered to provide recreational facilities to citizens. In particular, his focus was directed toward the east, toward Long Island. At the time, most of the coastal properties were privately owned, and few accesses to the beaches were available. Thanks to the barons and the baymen, the sandy beaches of the South Shore were as thoroughly closed off to New Yorkers as the rocky beaches of the North. (Caro, 1974: p. 155) Moses had been dreaming about the transformation of Long Island since the beginning of the Twenties. In 1922 Moses concentrated his efforts on the plan published by the Committee assigned to review the state park system (Committee on State Park Plan, 1922): in particular, the plan contained indications on the creation of one state park system authority – instead of separate entities – divided into eleven regional “state park commissions” that would operate in parallel. And most importantly, Moses stressed the purpose of the State park system in the plan: future recreational needs. “No conscious effort has been made to develop a unified state park program looking toward the future recreational needs of a rapidly growing community and toward the further development and unification of the existing state parks. We believe that the time has now come to take the first steps toward the development of a plan of this kind which will insure, while there is still time, the further extension of the Forest Preserve and recreational facilities for all the people of the state, beyond those which any one community or group of neighboring communities may be expected to provide for itself.” (Committee on State Park Plan, 1922: p. 5) The aim of the plan was to preserve the natural environment and landscape of the State, while offering recreational opportunities to all. One example is the proposed connection between the Bronx Parkway and the Bear


Mountain park in the North of the State (see Image 32). After the approval of the Bill that re-organized the state park system, also drafted by Moses, in 1924 Smith appointed him as Long Island State Park Commissioner, a post that gave him automatic membership in the State Council of Parks and assured his position for six years, twice as long as the governor’s own mandate. In his new post, Moses finally had the opportunity to transform Fire Island, as he was planning to do for years. Fire Island is the strip of land that stretches from Bay Shore in Babylon Township east to Moriches. Recalling the opposition he had to fight to implement his plan, in 1950 Moses wrote: “We have in our state park system a beautiful unspoiled salt meadow with a beach, a brackish creek, and sand dunes overrun by beach plum, cedar grass, bayberry, and stunted pines, and with a forested ridge running into it. We sought to protect it by zoning. The neighbors, who professed to love it, tried by every means to break down the restrictions and to fill, level, and minutely split it up. When we condemned more of it, they based their claims in court on what they would have made if their subdivision plans had succeeded.” (Moses, 1950) Moses and his team labored intensely on the creation of Jones Beach, a long portion of the south shore of Fire Island (see Image 32). The works finished a few months after the first engineer hired by Moses visited the site in 1926 – a remarkable feat, if one only considers the magnitude of the systems of street, buildings, and facilities. “Three years later, on August 4, 1929, Jones Beach State Park was opened to the public, with Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and Alfred E. Smith as the principal speakers.” (Rodgers, 1952: p. 52) Jones Beach was an instant success: on the day the causeway to Jones Beach opened, 25,000 cars rolled across it. During the first month of operation, 325,000 people visited Jones Beach. The press lavished praise after the inauguration of the new state park (The New York Times, 1929a, 1929b, 1929c, 1929d). In the following years, attendance increased from 1,500,000 in 1930, to 2,700,00 in 1931, to 3,200,000 in 1932. But it was not over, because Moses’s plan for Long Island State Park was incremental: every times he achieved a result and inaugurated new facilities, he asked the legislature for more money, because more work needed to be done. But his battles were not easy. Thirty years later recalling those times, Moses would write: “I remember the battle I had to keep politicians from turning Jones Beach, on Long

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Island, into political plums. I was able to stop this and other patronage raids, and political leaders have let me more or less alone for years. Sometimes, however, without a lot of public support it can’t be done, and the honorable public servant is made miserable” (Moses, 1966b: p. 6) But Moses’s interest was not focused only on beaches. During the Great Depression he developed a new vision for a state highway system: no highway network on that scale had ever been proposed before for any city in America, or, for that matter, any city in world. When the Great Depression was at its peak newly elected President Roosevelt agreed to fight against it with a state public works program of unprecedented size (see Chapter 1). This was the chance for Moses to fulfill his vision. But that vision needed to be realized from inside the city administration. That is why in 1934 Moses started his career as a public official in New York City. It would only end thirty-four years later.


3.2

At work for the City of New York in the New Deal Era: a series of successes

As anticipated in the introduction to this chapter, Moses’s career in the New York Administration can be divided into three phases. The first one coincides with the pre-war period and is simultaneous with the New Deal era. It is important to highlight that during the time Moses spent “[…] drafting laws for Tammany’s Smith and influencing legislators in Albany changed Moses from a reformer to a political realist and a practitioner, one who was more concerned with the actual process of government than legal, procedural improvements.” (Lowe, 1968: p. 53) And in this evolution from reformer to planner, one period of time is crucial in Moses’s career, and it corresponds with La Guardia’s Administration. La Guardia’ s plans for the city were huge and visionary, like Moses’s (see §1.2.3). A Republic mayor like La Guardia, elected with only 40% of the votes in a Democratic city, needed wider political support, which a good administration, able to achieve tangible results, would contribute to gain. Moses represented an important contribution in this direction: a nonpolitical expert, but most of all, an official successful in obtaining federal funds when money became available. After almost ten years spent in Albany and reforming the state park system, Moses finally had the opportunity to bring his vision of an vast integrated park and transportation system in New York City to fruition. The possibilities offered by the federal funds in New York were enormous. And so were the constraints. In an interview released a few years later, recalling the first period serving under La Guardia, Moses claimed: “I told Mayor La Guardia that I was not interested in taking the city job unless I had unified power over all the city parks and, even then, only as part of the unified control of the whole metropolitan system of parks and parkway developments, of which the Triborough was the hub.” (Irving, 1936) La Guardia agreed on unifying the five existing park borough commissions and appointed Moses as first City Park Commissioner. He would keep this seat till 1960. But Moses also unified the parkway authorities, and the key was the Triborough Bridge, the connection of several parkways. On April 7, 1933, the State created the Triborough Bridge Authority to complete the construction that had been stopped in 1929 due to lack of municipal funds. In 1934 Moses was appointed member of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority; in 1936 he became its chairman and he kept this post until 1968 (see Image 36).

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Moses was able to reactivate federal funds and to restart the construction of the bridge that was completed and inaugurated by President Roosevelt on July 11, 1936. The federal funds were expected to be re-paid in twenty years. The Triborough Bridge was an immense new transportation artery in the very heart of the city, connecting three of the five boroughs and reaching great distances to tap suburban arteries at the city’s borders (see Images 37 -38). Shaped as a huge Y, the upper arm connected Manhattan and the Bronx and the longer one Manhattan and Queens. At that time, the Triborough Bridge was considered a great achievement in the era of motor transportation, but it was appreciated even more because it was completed with recreational facilities. “A project of this kind would be of immense value to the city if only for the great convenience it provides for traffic in a motor age. But the Triborough goes far beyond this, to give the city not only new means of communication but new opportunities for rest and recreation. Its parkways have transformed one of the city’s most blighted areas into landscaped drives. […] From whatever point of view this project is considered, the result is satisfying. The engineering skill behind the enterprise commands admiration. Its finances are based on expert estimates which anticipate repayment within twenty years of the funds borrowed from the Federal Government. Its reclamation of areas long ignored opens an era in the development of a new waterfront. The imagination with which the whole project was conceived and the integrity with it has been carries out, reaffirm faith in the ways of democratic government.” (The New York Times, 1936l) But Moses, who at that point was already very successful and powerful, was still far away from completing his vision for the city. He had obtained the control of the independent agency charged with the construction of the bridge but also of the collection of toll fees, and that would ensure access to a steady flow of funds for a long time. The success of the Triborough Bridge came along with other successes obtained during the New Deal Era. The opportunities provided by the Federal Funds were enormous and Moses was ready when occasions presented themselves. This is specifically the case of the WPA swimming pools that will be described in the next fourth chapter. In 1939, the journalist Cleveland Rogers praised Moses: “In a period of prodigious public expenditures Robert Moses emerges as the most farsighted and constructive of public spenders. He has demonstrated in brilliant fashion that democracy can be made to work by skillful, resolute handling, and that

Watch Video #1 Triborough Bridge Opens: July 11, 1936


‘public improvements’ can be given a surprising amount of beauty.” (Rodgers, 1939) The vision Moses tried to realize was highly complex and related to specific expectation regarding the growth of the city and its expansions. Goldberger underlined that in the Thirties Moses was the only public official who both grasped regionalism as a concept and had the ability to do something about it, which meant not only transcending local politics but also figuring out ways to pay for huge projects. He worked to connect the island with the mainland in a regional view. (Goldberger, 2007) Other observers accused Moses of being the one who promoted urban sprawl and favored the creation of suburbs, thanks to the construction of the highway network. Many years later, the criticisms of this part of Moses’s work were never-ending. In fact in 2002, Peter Hall claimed that: “Deliberately, Moses built the parkway bridges too low not only for trucks, but also for buses. The magnificent bathing beaches that he built at the ends of the parkways would thus be strictly reserved for muddle-class car owners; the remaining two-thirds of the population could continue to ride the subway to Coney Island.” Even more sharply, Hall continued: “And, when in the 1930s Moses extended his system down the west side of Manhattan island to create the Henry Hudson Parkway, the world first true urban motorway, the same applied: Moses was now consciously planning a system for car commuters.” (Hall, 2002b: p. 298) A great part of his vision for the highway and parkway system would become reality during the Sixties, but not all plans drafted by Moses have been realized (see Image 39). For instance, the proposed Battery Bridge, that was to connect Lower Manhattan with Brooklyn, was never approved despite the detailed plans prepared by Moses and his team. (see Images 40-41) But during his first years serving the City of New York, Moses was focused not only on transport infrastructures, but also on public facilities. Indeed, other type of public services and amenities were needed to realize his vision for an integrated citywide recreational system. Also in this case New Deal Programs and Funds aided him in these endeavors. The specific case of sport and recreational facilities realized during the New Deal Era is studied in the forth chapter.

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Box 4

Moses Praised by Other Cities

During these years, Moses continued to accumulate official positions, although he would continue to draw a salary from only one of them, that of City Park Commissioner. The list of positions held after the war would become impressive. Robert Moses’s public roles for the City and the State of New York were: Chairman of the New York State Council of Parks, 1922–68 Chairman of the Long Island State Parks commission, Chairman of the Jones Beach, New York City Department of Parks, commissioner, 1934–60 Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, member, 1934–, chairman, 1936–38 Henry Hudson Parkway Authority and Marine Parkway Authority, merged into New York City Parkway Authority, sole member, 1934 City Planning Commission, member 1942–60 Mayor’s Emergency Committee on Housing, chairman, 1946 New York City Construction Coordinator, 1946–60 Mayor’s Committee for Permanent World Capitol, chairman, 1946 Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, chairman, 1946–60 Coordinator of Arterial Projects City of New York, 1960–66 New York World’s Fair 1964–65 Corporation, president, 1960–67. Moses’s assignments were unprecedented, and Goldberg reported that: At one point, Moses held twelve New York City and New York State positions simultaneously. He served under seven governors and five mayors, and a popular joke had it that Moses wasn’t working for them so much as they were serving under Moses. (Goldberger, 2007: p. 2) In 1944 former Gov. Alfred E. Smith awarded Moses for his achievements in the creation of the “greatest public park system in the world”. Smith, recalling the time they had been working for the State of New York, said that he could not think of a “single man more willing to take on work and give it hard, earnest attention than Bob Moses” (New York Times, 1944). But Moses’s popularity went beyond the city border and he became famous at the national and international level. In 1943 Portland, Oregon’s City Commissioner William A. Bowes chose Moses to map the post-war plan for the city because “[Moses] was a nationally known figure and the foremost city planner of the nation”. (De Graff, 1943)

At that time Moses had the power and experience to gather a group of experts – architects, engineers, and lawyers – to work with him on a plan of arterial highways, bridges, docks, parks, and markets, which should make Portland a model of post-war city (De Graff, 1943; The New York Times, 1943b) International acknowledgement of Moses’s skills came from other countries, as well. In 1950, Lineu Prestes, the then mayor of São Paulo, commissioned the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC), a commercial corporation headquartered in New York and owned by Nelson Rockefeller, to draw up a detailed report concerning the general planning of public works for the municipality of São Paulo. Robert Moses was appointed Director of Studies and another ten advisors were appointed to work in the ‘Program of Public Improvements’. (Da Silva Leme, 2010) This program marked an important step in the political and economic context of the postSecond World War period for the development of São Paulo and it was related to Nelson Rockefeller’s activities in Latin America and Brazil.

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3.3

Moses during the post-war Era: full powers

The second phase of Moses’s career covers the ten years between the mid-Forties and the Mid-Fifties and it corresponds with the beginning of the Urban Renewal Era, the last wave of public federal interventions in housing and urban development. During those years, Moses accumulated other official positions and directed new branches of the municipal administration. The role for which he would become notorius was the Chairman of Mayor’s Committee for Slum Clearance. This Committee was established in 1946 but its main activities started few years later and would be focused on the implementation Title I of the Housing Act of 1949. In 1946, Mayor O’Dwyer named Robert Moses City Constructor Coordinator and in the same year Chairman of the Mayor’s Committee for Slum Clearance. He was already a member of the City Planning Commission, established in 1938 in application of the Charter of New York City (New York City, 1936), whose aim was to reorganize the city administration machinery. In 1938, in fact, most New Deal programs were about to be phased out and new forms of city planning were in high demand. The Charter would become an example for American cities, just like the Zoning Act of 1916, as is illustrated in the second chapter. War-time was obviously a period of change in the city, as it explained in the first chapter, but during the last years of the conflict new plans for the city were prepared. And despite the fact that New York never suffered war-related destruction, the post-war plans had been in preparation since the early Forties. This phase was the most prolific of Moses’s career and he worked on several fronts simultaneously: housing and slum clearance, highways and parkways, the United Nations Headquarters; recreational facilities; tunnels and bridges. In the following sections, two of the most relevant sectors of Moses’ work in the post-era are illustrated: the Title I projects and the United Nations Headquarters. They have been selected because they both represent good examples of Moses’s ability to bend the rules and play on the opportunities offered by the social and political situation.


3.3.1

Title I Projects in New York

The Housing Act of 1937 (See §2.3) was continuously debated, even in wartime, and especially in New York, without finding an effective solution to housing shortage. This challenge not only concerned the number of housing units lacking in the city, but also patterns of segregation and access to public services and jobs. During the early Forties, the debate regarded specific sections of the city, especially those where low-income groups lived; in the fact Mayor La Guardia affirmed that housing would be the most important sector of public works in post-war era. But the selection of priorities in this field of intervention was not easy and community groups advocated for effective solutions. An emblematic example is Harlem. When the civic and welfare leaders of the Citywide Citizens Committee on Harlem asked La Guardia to consider the dispersal of the ghettos in his post-war plan, the city chose to enlarge Harlem as a racial preserve instead of considering different options (Schwartz, 1993), and this perpetuation of segregation and concentration of social issues would continue for many years after the war. Watch Video #8 For the Living (ca. 1949)

Throughout the Forties, the housing shortage remained a national concern. Despite the local situation, at the national level the immediate post-war period was the right time to face the housing problem and Congress approved a new Housing Act in 1949. The Housing Act of 1949 reiterated the same goal of the 1937 law: “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.” (Congress of the United States of America, 1949: p. 2 l.5–6) But despite its title, the main contribution of the Act to national policy was urban renewal. Title I in particular set a billion of dollars of grant money to cities to acquire lots occupied by slums and blighted areas. These could be in private ownership or owned by other public authorities. The Slum Clearance Commission led by Robert Moses concentrated on this portion of the Housing Act in New York. Thanks to this Act, the connection between housing and city planning became very strong in post-war New York’s urban policies. Indeed urban redevelopment has been considered the most important public policy in the city after World War II: by 1959 sixteen Title I projects had already been completed and 100,000 low-income residents displaced. Forty percent of them were black or Hispanic. Shortly after the realization of the first neighborhood financed through the Federal Urban Renewal Program, many attacked it. As Herbert J. Gans pointed out, these criticisms had mostly appeared in academic books and journals but had hardly been discussed publicly in the Fifties. (Gans, 1965) Only the local press had covered protests and the debate did not become national till many years later. In 1965, Gans also disclosed the procedures of the program and its critical aspects. If on the one hand the program provided local renewal agencies with federal funds and the power

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of eminent domain to condemn slum neighborhoods, tear down buildings, and resell the cleared land to private developers at a reduced price, on the other hand the law demanded that slum dwellers be relocated in “decent, safe, and sanitary” housing. But the program was also aimed at stimulating large-scale private rebuilding, adding new tax revenue, revitalizing downtown areas, and halting the exodus of middle-class whites to the suburbs. “Needless to say, none of the slum-dwellers who were dispossessed in the process could afford to move into these new apartments. Local renewal agencies were supposed to relocate the dispossessed tenants in “standard” housing within their means before demolition began, but such vacant housing is scarce in most cities, and altogether unavailable in some. And since the agencies were under strong pressure to clear the land and get renewal projects going, the relocation of the tenants was impatiently if not ruthlessly, handled. […] Renewal sometimes even created new slums by pushing relocates into areas and buildings, which then became overcrowded and deteriorated rapidly. This has principally been the case with Negros who, both for economic and racial reasons have been forced to double up in other ghettos. Indeed, because almost two-thirds of the cleared slum units have been occupied by Negroes, the urban renewal program has often been characterized as Negro clearance, and in too many cities, this been its intent.” (Gans, 1965: p. 30) It was also pointed out that urban renewal programs often picked clearance areas not because they were the worst slums in town, but because they were the best sites to be redeveloped with high-income housing. Later in the ‘60s attacks began to arrive from both sides of the political spectrum. One of the most important books published on the topic was Martin Anderson’s “The Federal Bulldozer. A critical analysis of urban renewal, 1949-1962” (Anderson, 1964). As a right-wing analyst, Anderson – an economist who would be Special Assistant to President Richard Nixon, and would serve under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. H. Bush – analyzed the failures of the program using official national statistics and attacked the principle that government could take away one person’s property and give it to another for private gain. Anderson opposed to the extensive involvement of the federal government in local affairs decried the fact that over eight hundred communities had participated in urban renewal activities by 1964 and aimed a comprehensive critique at the federal program, arguing strenuously for its cancellation. He charged that the federal government’s intrusive presence in the cities disrupted the private housing market, wasted millions of taxpayers’ dollars, and undermined hundreds of small businesses in neighbourhoods designated for redevelopment. Moreover, he contended, urban renewal projects devoted only62 per cent of new construction dollars to housing, and over 90 per cent of the replacement housing charged rents that proved


unaffordable to former area residents. (Biles, 2000) In the late Sixties Jeanne Lowe highlighted the contradictions of the federal program, in particular its goals and procedures. She underlined the critical points of administrative procedures used by planners to involve private developers in urban renewal projects (Lowe, 1968). Indeed Jeanne Lowe identified in New York City’s billion-dollar federally aided urban redevelopment project under Title I the Moses paradox. Jeanne Lowe identified the paradox in the fact that no one else in American history produced so much for local public improvement and urban reconstruction about $5,000,0000,000 worth by 1960, but no single person, in her vision, contributed more through his work and his methods to New York City’s problems. In particular the problems of the New York in the late Sixties were: fractionalized local government; the unplanned private overgrowth, the traffic congestion; the inhumanity and citizen discontents, the real estate ‘project’ approach to community building, and the abdication fo political and business leadership. (Lowe, 1968: chap. 48) In the Nonentities Joel Schwartz claimed that Moses 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. (Schwartz, 1993) During the next decades, urban renewal programs have been analyzed in depth and many different perspectives and explanations have been provided. One of the last and probably most original ones is Samuel Zipp’s idea about the aims of redevelopment projects in New York City and Moses’s role. Zipp wrote that: “Manhattan’s renewal boosters-led by Committee on Slum Clearance chair Robert Moses and a host of allies from the broad front of urban liberalism – also saw modern rebuilding projects as a way to make Manhattan a symbol of American power during an age of metropolitan transformation and the Cold War.” (Zipp, 2010: pt. Introduction)

It is certainly true that the post-war era in New York City means the blossoming of several projects and Robert Moses conducted most of them. But as it explained in the first chapter, the return to the main manufacturing activities was happing in the city, while at the same time, some other functions, such as the port, were abandoned. Samuel Zipp claims that post-war projects in Manhattan were also where the Cold War was fought on the internal front, demonstrating the capacity of the American city to regenerate itself and provide housing for citizens aspiring to a modern lifestyle. Zipp analyzed four flagship projects in trying to demonstrate that urban renewal was used

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to establish New York as the new megalopolis, and consequently the supremacy of the U.S.A. in the world scenario. (Zipp, 2010) From a similar point of view, Anthony Flint, explaining the story of Stuyvesant Town (See Box 5), claims that it represented more than just new housing or a wise investment; it became a symbol of the post-war world to come, standing for the promise of a new, modern, more humane way to live in cities that would transform old, seemingly outmoded Nineteenth-Century urban space. (Flint, 2011b) Between 1949 and 1968, the federal program razed 425,000 units of housing in the whole country but constructed only 125,000 units nationwide (the majority of which were luxury apartments). By the 1965, both conservatives and liberals assailed the program as a costly failure that spent exorbitant amounts of money while exacting an especially terrible toll on the city’s lower classes (Biles, 2000).

Box 5

Stuyvesant Town and “the New York Method”

Stuyvesant Town is considered the first American renewal project and it is also the most famous one. Stuyvesant Town is a housing development of 18 square city blocks in the heart of New York’s East Side, facing the East River between 14th and 20th Streets. It cost 110 million USD and it housed 25,000 people. In the early Forties the City, and Moses specifically, conceived and developed the project in partnership with one of the greatest private insurance companies in US, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (Met Life). Signing the contract with the city on August 4 1943, Met Life received tax exemptions (more than 55 million USD during the whole project’s life) for sponsoring the apartment complex. But this grant was not made to benefit low-income groups, since no limit on the income of Stuyvesant Town’s new tenants was set. The city also turned over to the company public streets amounting to about 19 per cent of the area and these streets remained under the control of the company. Despite the fact that the area is accessible to everyone, Met Life owned all the open space included in the area. On its side the city condemned the land, ousting some 20,000 low-income tenants from their houses and tearing down stores, churches, and a school. And in January 1945, 11,000 families living in the area were warned to vacate by summer and spot demolitions started in order to force tenants of nearby buildings to relocate. Despite the protests, removals ended by December 1945. Another important aspect of Stuyvesant project was racial discrimination: it was announced before the beginning of the construction and it was applied strictly in assigning the new apartments: Frederick H. Ecker, MetLife’s board Chairman, declared that Afro-American tenants were to be banned because “Negros and whites don’’ mix. A hundred years from now, maybe they will” and their presence “would depress all the surrounding property”. (Goldstein, 2010: p. 225) Three Afro-American veterans brought this case into the court accusing MetLife of discrimination , but their lawsuit was rejected. But Stuyvesant Town created a case: already in 1955, Charles Abrams noticed that the public reaction to Met Life’s policy was so intense that a city ordinance was unanimously enacted in 1944 barring racial discrimination in future projects befitting from city aid. (Abrams, 1955) In order to provide an idea of what was going on during the same years in other cities, a good example is the case of Chicago. The Chicago Housing Authority’s plan of 1949, for 40,000 additional units over six years, involved putting large numbers of blacks into white areas; as tried to do so, there were continued riots; the city’s ward politicians panicked; finally, CHA’s director Elizabeth Wood was dismissed. The attempt was abandoned; the CHA, in a deal with the city’s

Image 30 | Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village political leaders, became involved in a immense scheme of de jure segregation (Hall, 2002: p. 447). Urban renewal authorities usually invested little time and money on the relocation of uprooted slum dwellers (only one-half of 1 per cent of total federal expenditures between 1949 and 1964) so that poor blacks were frequently left to fend for themselves in a racially segregated housing market that charged prohibitively high rents. As a consequence, blacks shifted from one ghetto to another, often ending up in public housing, with the net effect being a worsening of crowded conditions. Angry civil rights leaders and their white liberal allies sardonically referred to urban renewal as “negro renewal” and “negro removal” (Biles, 2000: n. 155). Many scholars identified in Stuyvesant Town a milestone in Moses’s career: in particular, Joel Schwartz claimed that it “sets the pattern of Moses’s relationship with sponsors” and he described it as the “New York Method”. Regarding this project Moses himself wrote: “We finally persuaded the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to undertake the greatest slum clearance project in the country, known as Stuyvesant Town in the heart of the old East Side of Manhattan, and another to be known as Riverton in the Negro section of Harlem. Only the farsightedness, courage, and influence of Frederick H. Ecker, Chairman of the Board of the Metropolitan, brought about this achievement, and it is still a source of astonishment to me that the second-largest corporation in the United States, with endless opportunities for easier investments, ran the gamut of savage mudslinging to risk some sixty-five million dollars on these ventures. I have no doubt that these investments will pan out. The point is that they represent a complete departure from conventional practice.” (Moses, 1945). Although the federal funds were addressed to “slums and blighted areas” which should been mainly residential or to be “developed for predominantly residential uses” (Congress

of the United States of America, 1949: pp. 21, l.6), Moses freely interpreted the expression “predominantly residential uses” in order to attract private investments and renew neighborhoods. But these restrictions did not guarantee that the re-development projects included exclusively housing and even less social housing. While other public officials interpreted the 1949 Act only regarding the housing problem, Moses always claimed that this mechanism was not set up just to slum clearance, indeed, the Act allowed demolishing entire neighborhoods and substituting them with great commercial and institutional areas. New York and other cities took advantage by the ambiguity of the Act, using the loans to realize projects of urban renewal to built huge complex as universities, hospitals, and civic institutions. Moses was able to find the vague margins of the legislation to realize housings, but also other facilities and infrastructures. In New York, the selection of sites has been conducted in partnership with pre-selected private developers: although this operation was not illegal, it was at least suspicious. It seems that in most of cases, the same developers chose the project sites and proposed the areas to be re-developed using the Title I funds. The “New York Method”, as described by Schwartz, consisted in bypassing the rules: instead of demolish the buildings, buy the land, and the ask for the intervention of developers, Moses transferred whole block to be demolished and remove the tenants through the “Slum Declaration”, keeping the taxes during the all operation. In this case, Moses played the role of slum landlord until the residents have been evicted and the buildings demolished.

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3.3.2

United Nations Headquarters

During second phase of Moses’s career, one of his biggest achievements was to bring the United Nations Headquarters on the East River Side in Manhattan. Moses, as Chairman of the Mayor’s Committee for Permanent World Capitol since 1946, contributed to agree with the young international organizational, that was based in Geneva at the time, to bring its headquarter in New York. From the helm of the various city agency under his control, Robert Moses, spearheaded New York successful bid to be the world capital and, after a headquarters site was chosen, coordinated the city’s effort to make room for the UN in Manhattan’s crowded grid. At the beginning, Moses and his team proposed to host the new complex in the 1939 World’s Fair’s site in Flushing Meadows that was to be completed and re-used. From 1946 to 1950 the General Assembly regularly met in the converted City Building, built for the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens. Moses, always looking for opportunities to improve city parks, used the provisional home of the UN as a chance to restore the 250 acres park, repaving roads and walkways, replacing overgrown lawns and building new parking lots whose construction stopped during wartime. But in 1946, the idea to keep the UN Headquarters in Queens was rejected and it was agreed to build the Secretariat offices and the General Assembly building in the site on the East River, between 41st and 48th Streets. The final decision was taken by the Assembly in 1946, thanks to a last-minute offer of $8.5 million by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to purchase the site. Exercising his ability to turn defeat into victory, Moses led the city’s negotiations with the UN on improvements to accommodate traffic increase and to create an attractive approach to visitors from allover the world: these included improvements of the surrounding streets, closing a number of streets between First Avenue and the FDR Drive granting tax exception, and passing zoning legislation to restrict building type and height and the erection of new billboards in the area surrounding the headquarters. (Ballon, Jackson, 2008) The team of designers coming from different countries, which included French-Swiss Le Corbusier – who had already participated in the competition for the Palais des Nations in Geneva – and Brazilian designer Oscar Niermeyer, began to work in the last months of 1946 but the construction only began in 1949 and was inaugurated in 1950 (see Image 43 - 44) . Moses’s approach to the project was criticized for many reasons and on specific part of it, such as the playground, the plaza, the parking and the street changes he operated. The New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects encouraged the city to produce its own master plan. But Moses refused to compromise. In spite of theses various conflicts, Moses played an essential role in bringing the UN in New York, which contributes to New York as world capital.


3.4

Moses’s Last Years: Build and Be Damned

The third and last phase identified in Moses’s prolonged career was characterized by the decline of both his popularity and political support. Not surprisingly, it corresponds with the decrease in public funds addressing urban development in New York City. Criticisms against Moses became louder and, during and after the urban renewal era, many aspects of his approach were strongly criticized. New ideas became popular during those years: in particular advocacy planning, which Davidoff theorized in 1965 (see §3.4.1); Jane Jacobs’ theories of the “eyes on the street” (see §3.4.3); and more generally the political situation was evolving and the civil rights movement was gaining consensus and obtaining results. So, if during the first two phases of his career, Moses was esteemed by public opinion, politicians and planners, in the last one he had to fight several conflicts: the most famous one is the battle for Washington Square undertaken by Jane Jacobs and Greenwich Village’s residents; the Project of the Lincoln Center Area; the Lower Manhattan Expressway; and more in general the response to attacks against urban renewal projects. Many observers reported that the one and only Moses reply to these criticisms was the famous sentence: “You cannot rebuild a city without moving people, just as you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs.” (Hales, 2007) But this is not strictly correct. Moses replied to the criticisms he received on several occasions, as is illustrated in the next section and in the fifth chapter. In the following section we see some of the most important struggle fought by Moses in the last part of his career.

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3.4.1

Attacking Urban Renewal

Urban renewal evolved during the late Fifties and Sixties into a broader concept than the original bulldozer approach of Title I and it included a wide variety of projects and methods. It went from the small rehabilitation project to the development of public or private housing, office buildings, sport centers, art centers, or even parking lots. (Images 45-46) In the Sixties urban renewal was the meeting point of interests of local government and developers, in particular regarding downtowns. Along with appreciative comments for the revitalization of business districts and the promotion of cultural institutions, the urban renewal program came under increasing fire. Some scholars, like Herbert J. Gans, focused their criticisms on methods and models used in urban renewal since the end of Fifties (Gans, 1959, 1965). But even before, Charles Abrams – the father of the New York Housing Authority – underlined the problem of housing and the problems related to racial discrimination and forced removals (Abrams 1946; Abrams 1947a; Abrams 1947b). He noticed that no sooner had the federal law been enacted that two facts became plain: there were no houses available for the slum-dwellers to be displaced from the sites; and these slum-dwellers were large minorities to whom housing in new areas was banned. In his analysis of the Slum Clearance Program in New York, Abrams claimed that instead of administering the program to emphasize acquisition of vacant land or insisting on projects, which would favor rehousing of the displaced minorities, some officials and realty groups saw the program as an opportunity to get rid of the undesirables. Also other public officials, like Slum Clearance Committee’s Controller Laurence W. Gerosa criticized the Committee headed by Moses in 1959, claiming that it seemed that only certain stakeholders were able to participate at the renewal project and their benefits (Bennett, 1959). As well as the professionals and planners, also the press became skeptical and more critical after the forced removals in the Fifties. The New York Times was very attentive looking to what was happening in town and to Moses’ work. In some cases, the journalists underlined the discriminations that the AfroAmerican communities had to experience, as in the case of Rockaway (Phillips, 1959). The accusation of being racist and using discriminatory procedures came from many sides and in some occasions Moses replied. The evidence of the replies can be found in Moses’s correspondence. In replying to a letter from Mr. B. Haile, who accused him of discriminating ethnical minorities, Moses wrote: “You will be pleased to know that racial discrimination is not permitted in any government assisted housing and this practice does not exist in any Title I projects, to


be cooperative or straight rental. Unfortunately your suggestion that displaced people form their own cooperative groups to construct housing is not practical. Developing projects of this type requires recognized leadership and experience in the field of building by large organizations with the necessary financial support able to accomplish the job. At least one group of public spirited citizens interested in this problem organized a non-profit corporation ad have built projects for those interested.” 1 We can see that racial discrimination was formally not allowed, but certainly the rules could be blend in order to preserve certain privileges. Not only housing assignation was controversial, but also the entire redevelopment planning procedures. Indeed after acquiring the land, the urban redevelopment authority was authorized to turn it over to the private developer who would have freedom to pick the new occupants. The legal justification was established in the Stuyvesant litigation (Abrams, 1955). (See Box 5) Also timing was an issue. In other American cities, the renewal projects could take many years to be completed. “Most observers felt that urban renewal projects took an unconscionably long time to complete. According to the National Commission on Urban Problems, almost a third of urban renewal projects took 6 to 9 years to complete; more than a third took from 9 to 15 years. Local frustration grew in proportion to the time community residents had to stare at vacant lots with no signs of development” (Von Hoffman, 2000) Some argue that the main goal of renewal projects was to attract white middle class residents and not the low-income residents, and visitors, as in the case of Lincoln Center. But the attacks were not only academic or political. The oppositions to some projects became real: communities groups and local organizations tried to force the public authorities to throw up some of the proposals. One of these successful stories is the famous battle for Washington Square Park and the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway.

1

Robert Moses’ Papers, Box 116, Letter to Mr. B. Haile, November 14, 1957

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3.4.2

The Battle for Greenwich Village

During the same time when ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’ was published, in February 1961, the West Village had been designated for urban renewal. But the story of this neighborhood, which was to be similar to that of many other areas in New York, would be different. Shortly after the designation, a group of resident led by Jane Jacobs founded the Committee to Save the West Village (CSWV) to oppose the city’s plans that included massive demolitions. The CSWV and Jane Jacobs vigorously opposed the plan using all possible means: advocating attention from the press, running rallies, publishing articles and reports, and also physically disturbing the public officials appointed to writing the official reports of the public hearings. These official records were compulsory to be in compliance with the procedures. Indeed Jane Jacobs was arrested because she removed the stenotype during a public hearing whose real goal was not to listen to resident’s requests but to fulfill the terms of the law: public officials were instructed to give their speech, present the plans, and submit an official report of the meeting with the residents, but they never had the intention to establish a real dialogue with local communities. (Flint, 2011b) And actually the CSWV’s strategy had been to counter the city’s claims of blight and to totally refuse to engage in the planning process. Under the pressure of media and residents, Mayor Wagner withdrew his support to the plan: he was running the primary campaign for re-election and he was afraid of losing votes. After another contentious public hearing, the Housing and Redevelopment Board, the agency responsible for the renewal project, dropped its plans for the neighborhood in October 1961. Finally, in January 1962, the City Planning Commission removed the designation of blight, thus ensuring that the West Village would no longer be considered for renewal. Jacobs and the CSWV had won their battle with the city. In on the one hand, planners and academics often claimed that this high-profile campaign was an influential event and a landmark in the history of the larger popular movement against urban renewal, on the other hand, it actually represents one of the few failures in Moses’s plans and certainly one of the first major victories against an increasingly unpopular federal program. But some scholars, like Jennifer Hock, argued that a deeper study of the West Village battle reveals just how exceptional the West Village victory was, and just how limited its lessons were for other neighborhoods threatened by renewal. (Hock, 2007) This case was idealized and in the following years it became a myth, the main battlefield of the city planning of the Sixties (Flint, 2011b). I do not deny that those events and the defeat of Moses’ proposal did not have a great impact


on the media and on planning history. But I do argue that other examples can be provided about advocacy planning and struggles between communities and planners in the same period, such as underlined speaking about advocacy planning Davidoff theorized the advocacy planning and claimed that: “Advocacy in planning has already begun to emerge as planning and renewal affect the lives of more and more people. The critics of urban renewal have forced response from the renewal agencies, and the ongoing debate has stimulated needed selfevaluation by public agencies.” (Davidoff, 1965) But still today the Battle for Washington Square remains a milestone in planning history and certainly it contributed to Moses’s name.

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3.4.3

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts

One of the greatest projects completed by Moses in New York City was the Lincoln Center of Performing Arts (see Images 47 - 48 - 49). The Lincoln Center project had been conceived in the middle of the Fifties. It included a complex of concert halls and theaters, universities, and about 4,500 high-rent apartments. It had been planned under the Title I and it involved private developers, such as John D. Rockefeller. Also thanks to the Lincoln Center, one of the most important art centers in the United States today, Moses had seen realized his vision for New York as the center of the artistic and cultural scene in the States. But in recent times, scholars underlined that the project had more aims than just creating an art center. In 2000 Teaford claimed: “Not only would Lincoln Center become a hub for the performing arts in New York City, but it would also spur private investment in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, gradually transforming a blighted district into a fashionable neighborhood. Throughout the nation, urban renewal authorities hoped for such a ripple effect, and Moses achieved it with Lincoln Center.” (Teaford, 2000) Critics attacked Moses for using eminent domain to seize and clear the Columbus Circle area, where only a small part could be considered a slum. Then this area was sold and used to build the Lincoln Center and the New York Coliseum. Obviously also the attack regarding racial discrimination fueled the wrath of urban renewal’s detractors. Critics attacked Moses not just for the removals, but also for his dealings with private developers, especially regarding the resale price of the cleared land in the Columbus Circle Area2. At one point of the negotiation, the Federal Government also intervened. In 1957, the Mayor Wagner announced that the Committee on Slum Clearance had reached an agreement with Fordham University and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. on a resale price of $6.75 a square foot, but the Housing and Home Finance Agency demanded that the price be appraised by an independent study. Walter S. Freid, regional administrator of the Federal Agency, declared to the press: “Mr. Moses, as usual, is misrepresenting the facts. We told two of Mr. Moses’s aides six months ago that the Federal government would require valuations from an independent set of appraisers. The law requires that Federal and city taxpayers be protected by a fair resale price, regardless of who buys the land. 3 […] If the city wants 2 139

Regarding the long negotiation, specific information can be founded in Robert Moses’ Paper Archive. Box

3

The Federal governments made two-thirds of the resale price difference, the city one-third.


to make a contribution to these institutions, let it do so in some other way but not with Federal taxpayers’ money. The causes may be worthy, but we have a responsibility under the law.” (Grutzner, 1957) Watch Video #12 The Case Against Lincoln Center (1968)

No one attacked Moses before so straight. Not only Moses was accused of arranging an agreement with private partners that would damage the public, but a federal official also accused him of misrepresenting the facts. In the specific case, Moses declared that the third party appraisal would cause a six-month delay in the construction timetable. By the end of the decade, attacks were based not just on procedures, but also on the very aims of the project. Design aspects were highly criticized. The superblock that characterized the modernist style came under fire. One of Jane Jacobs’s most famous articles, Downtown is for People (Jacobs, 1958), contains many of the ideas that would be developed afterwards in The Death and Life, and singled out Lincoln center as an example of bad design. “The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York is a case in point. This cultural superblock is intended to be very grand and the focus of the whole music and dance world of New York. But its streets will be able to give it no support whatever. Its eastern street is a major trucking artery where the cargo trailers, on their way to the industrial districts and tunnels, roar so loudly that sidewalk conversation must be shouted. To the north, the street will be shared with a huge, and grim, high school. To the south will be another superblock institution, a campus for Fordham.” (Jacobs, 1958) But Moses’s idea of the modern city was linked to modernist architecture and his projects were islands of modern high-rises set on superblocks, oblivious to the surrounding buildings and neighborhoods and destructive of the existing street pattern. They were designed to be different and not to relate to the urban context. (Teaford, 2000) In this case Moses’s plans resisted the attacks and nowadays the Lincoln Center is a wellknown hub of the cultural life of New York.

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3.4.4

The 1964 World’s Fair and the End of Moses’s Career

One of the last big project he direct was the ’64-’65 New York World’s Fair, which ended its activities in 1967. Presenting the project in 1964, Moses wrote: “The New York World’s Fair of 1964-65 means a great deal to the City of New York. It is the first BILLION DOLLAR EXPOSITION. It is stimulating, educational and entertaining. It is an Olympics of Progress in which all nations compete on an equal bases.” (Department of City Park New York, 1964: n. 55–66) But the Fair was not the success Moses hoped. It initially did not capture his imagination, because two years, the total duration of the Fair, was not enough compare to Moses’s long-term plans. He saw the Fair as a mean to get other results: specifically to realize the biggest city parks in the area of Flushing Meadows. From the Twenties, this area had fired Moses’s imagination because of its size (1,346 acres) and location (in the geographic center of New York). But Moses also saw the opportunity in the Fair to got back his popularity and restore his popularity of the czar of city parks. With a significant budget Moses aspired to realize his masterpiece a huge park, and the Fair was just a tool to do it. (Images 50 -56) But remembering the bad experience in financial terms of the previous exhibition, the investors were reluctant to put money in the project. At the very end, the public money spent on the Fair come to a total of more than 83 million USD and the attendance was very below compare to what was expected to be. Neither the organization of Futurama II Exhibiton, by General Motors helped. (see Images 57-58) In computing the balance sheet for the 1964-65 World’ Fair to Moses, the effect on his popularity was negative as well. At the time, Moses’s decades-long honeymoon with the press of New York City was over, and the Fair destroyed what was left of the legend of Moses, since a lot of disputes happened with New York journalists, before and during the Fair. Robert A. Caro claimed that: “When the Fair come to a close on October 17, 1965, Robert Moses was revealed to the public in all his egoism, arrogance and ruthlessness. […] He was in public disrepute so great that his name had become a symbol for things the public hated.” (Caro, 1974: n. 1114) Few years later, in 1968, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority was merged into Governor Rockefeller’s new Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) that now manages also public transports and subways. Robert Moses was offered the role of ‘’consultant’’ to the new agency would permit him to maintain his offices, secretaries and chauffeurs, but gave him no real power He declined the offer and retired. His last significant hold on power was lost. Robert Moses died at 92 on July 29, 1981 in New York.

Watch Video #11 1964 New York World’s Fair Report (1961)

Watch Video#12 The Unisphere: Biggest World on Earth (1964)

IMAGES

03

Image 31 | Map showing proposed parkway connections between Bonx River Parkway ans Bear Mountain Park (Committee on State Park Plan, 1922).jpg

Image 32 | New beaches and highway system (Department of City Park New York, 1937

Image 33 Jones Beach (2013) / © Alice Siragusa



Image 36 | Robert Moses being congratulated after Mayor Fiorello La Guardia after swearing him in for a second term as Triborough Bridge Authority Commissioner (1935) (The Mayor Fiorello La Guardia Collection, 1935)

Image 37 | Triborough Bridge East 125th Street Approach. (Berenice Abbott, June 29, 1937) /@ Museum of the City of New York’s Collections

Image 38 | Aerial view of the Triborough and Hell Gate Bridges (ca. 1936) /@ Museum of the City of New York’s Collections

Image 39 | Roads and Bridge realized by Robert Moses (Proposed and Realized) (Columbia University, 2007)

Image 40 | Stieglitz, C. M. (1939). [Photo] Sponsor of Battery Bridge / World Telegram & Sun. New York City Park Commissioner Robert Moses with Model of Proposed Battery Bridge

Image 41 | Model of Proposed Battery Bridge

Image 42 | Verrazano Bridge (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 43 | The United Natiosn Headquarters ©Alice Siragusa (2013)

Image 44 | The United Natiosn Headquarters ©Alice Siragusa (2013)

Image 45 | Robert Moses, seated at left in 1959, used his position as head of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance to mass-produce thousands of units of public housing, often near the shoreline. (Mahler, 2012)

Image 46 | Title I Redevelopment Project and Adjacent NYCHA Projects Realized By Robert Moses

Image 47 | Lincoln Center for Performing Art (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 48 | Lincoln Center for Performing Art_2 (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 49 | Lincoln Center for Performing Art_3 (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 50 | Aereal view of New York World’s 1964 (Department of City Park New York, 1964 pp. 55–56)

Image 51 | The Unisphere, the 12-story stainless-steel globe at the heart of the 1964 World’s Fair, and its symbol around the world. /© sf.co.ua 2015

Image 52 | The Unisphere (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 53 | The New York State Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair (1964) /© sf.co.ua 2015

Image 54 | The New York State Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 55 | One of the Brass Rail lunch bars at the World’s Fair gives the appearance of a mass of balloons tied together on August 11, 1964. The towers at right are observation platforms, part of the New York State pavilion. /© sf.co.ua 2015

Image 56 | Observation platforms, part of the New York State pavilion. (2013) /©Alice Siragusa.

Image 57 | The city of the future, featuring automated roadways, landing ports for aircraft that can take off and land vertically, and 35-story parking garages, part of GM’s Futurama II exhibit at the World’s Fair. /© sf.co.ua 2015

Image 58 | View of the city of the future, where new and old architecture live sideby-side, part of GM’s Futurama II exhibit at the World’s Fair. /© sf.co.ua 2015

04

BUILDING NEW YORK PUBLIC CITY: THE CASE OF RECREATIONAL FACILITIES

“The New York park system is a monument to Mr. Moses and the depression. […] The combination of jobs made Mr. Moses czar of the parks.” (Irving, 1936)

As it illustrated in the previous chapters, Robert Moses began his career in the New York City administration during the New Deal, exactly when its most consistent programs became effective. One of the most significant was the WPA and Moses was proficient in taking advantage of the available funds to build the recreational system of New York. Clearly the creation of the system continued for many years after the end of the New Deal, but it can be said that it started off with some flagship projects, such as eleven WPA swimming pools and some public beaches, realized during the Thirties. Because of their location in the city, time of realization, affordability, design quality, and contribution to the improvement of quality of life of the neighborhood, they represented an entry point for the full understanding of city life Moses aspired to realize in New York City.

Image 59 | The Astoria Pool in Queens in 1936/©Parks Department Photo Archive 2.jpg


4.1

The Works Progress Administration: an Opportunity to Take 4.1.1

A Federal Program with Two Goals

As mentioned in the first chapter, President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs addressed mainly economic and financial issues, and they implemented projects in transportation, industry, and public services. (see §1.1.2) These issues were addressed through the institution of different programs, whose goal was to provide job to unemployed and unskilled workers affected by the crisis. The parks and forests program, called the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), was the first Work Relief Program that provided federally funded jobs. The CCC was created in March 1933 and in three months the program put to work 275,000 unemployed, unskilled young men (18-25) on rural and park improvements. More than three million men were enrolled in the CCC between 1933 and 1942. Few months later, Roosevelt created a short-term temporary jobs program under FERA in the winter of 1933–34 called Civil Works Administration (CWA), providing jobs to 4 million workers and building and repairing roads and bridges. The CWA hired unemployed directly to work on local projects. Unlike the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration (PWA), created in 1933 and closed in 1943, was not devoted to the direct hiring of the unemployed. The PWA administered loans and grants to state and local governments, which then hired private contractors to do the work. This mechanism aimed at increasing demand for labor and construction goods. Through this arrangement, state and local government took the lead in choosing which project should be implemented, in terms of location in their territories, design, and contractors. Usually the costs were shared roughly half-and-half between the federal government and the local authorities, but this aspect varied by project, place, and time.

Watch Video #3 Work Pays America (1937)

Unemployment, nevertheless, persisted at high levels. That led the administration to create a permanent jobs program, the Works Progress Administration (in 1939 it was renamed Work Projects Administration). In 1935, Roosevelt approved the presidential Executive Order creating the WPA which: “shall be responsible to the President for the honest, efficient, speedy, and coordinated execution of the work relief program as a whole, and for the execution of that program in such manner as to move from the relief rolls to work on such projects or in private employment the maximum number of persons in the shortest time possible.” (Roosevelt, 1935) While creating a maximum number of jobs, especially for unskilled workers, it also contributed to the improvement of health, art, culture, infrastructure, services and facilities. (See Image 61)

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Building New York Public City: the Case of Recreational Facilities

The WPA started in 1935 and lasted until 1943, employing 8.5 million people and spending $11 billion as it transformed the national infrastructure and created landmark programs in the arts, music, theatre and writing. WPA employment level reached its peaks in two occasions, in 1935 and in 1939, when 4 million workers were employed by the Administration during the year. To accommodate unions that were growing stronger at the time, the WPA at first paid building trades workers “prevailing wages” but shortened their hours so as not to compete with private employers. (Taylor, 2008b) The median age of WPA workers was 39.9 years in June 1936 and that highlights how the program contributed to alleviate the unemployment rate among those who lost their jobs during the Great Depression and had more problems finding a new one. The inclusion of African American workers was also promoted by the WPA through short movies. Like the CWA and the CCC previously, the WPA employed people directly, but the workers were hired to realize project promoted at local level. The process required three steps: a county or city authority elaborated a project proposal and sent it to a WPA state office; then it was forwarded headquarters in Washington, D.C.; finally, to the president for final approval. The proposal were elaborated voluntarily by the local authorities, assessing its employment need; those authorities had to provide about 12-25% to trigger federal funding of WPA projects. This mechanism required that the county or city government to be proactive and prompt in submitting proposals to the Administration. The list of WPA’s accomplishments is incredibility long: an inventory of Administration’s activities was produced in 1947 (Federal Works Agency, 1947). Among others results, it includes 8,000 new or improved parks, 16,000 miles of new water lines, 650,000 miles of new or improved roads, the production of 382 million articles of clothing, and the serving of 1.2 billion school lunches.1 Robert Leighninger noted that the New Deal Programs had an enormous and largely unrecognized role in defining the public space Americans use today (Leighninger, 1996). During their relatively short-lived existence, the PWA, the WPA, and the CCC built facilities in practically every community in the country and many of those facilities are still providing service more than seventy years later. They include the most traditional kinds of infrastructure such as bridges, roads, schools, 1 A wide recostruction of WPA’s projects coutrywide has been provided by the project Living New Deal, developed by the Department of Geography, University of Caifornia, Berkeley.

Watch Video #4 We Work Again (1937)


hospitals, post offices, public libraries, but also parks, museums, community centers, playgrounds, markets, zoos, botanical gardens, auditoriums, waterfronts, city halls, gyms, and many others spread all over the country. Obviously public works projects were built before the New Deal as well as after, but Leighninger underlined that, in scope and variety, there is nothing else like this in American history. (Leighninger, 1996)

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4.2.2

The Works Progress Administration’s projects in New York

Between 1933 and 1939 the State of New York was the one that received the highest amount of funds, a total of 4 million USD. Among all 48 States2 New York State also received the highest amount of loans, 1.3 million USD (Reading, 1973). In the State of New York in the first semester of 1934, relief workers employed by WPA averaged 46,000 monthly, with top somewhere around 70,000. The civil force counts up to about 3,000. Almost 2,000 outdoor recreational facilities, such as parks, playgrounds, athletic fields, swimming and wading pools, were built or improved thanks to WPA funds. In the Table below, the results of the program in New York State are illustrated in terms of projects started and completed.

Highway, roads, and streets and related facilities

Miles of highways, roads, and streets (new and improved)

9.727

Number of Bridges and viaducts (new and improved)

892

Number of culverts (new and improved)

Schools

Number of Public Buildings All Other

Outdoor recreational facilities

2

16.748

New construction and additions

23

Reconstruction of improvement

1.075

New construction and additions

1.498

Reconstruction of improvement

5.598

Number of Parks (new and improved)

576

Number of playgrounds and athletic fields (new and improved)

998

Number of swimming and wading pools (new and improved)

264

Alaska and Hawaii were admitted as States only in 1959.


If the results in New York State were good, they were even better in the City of New York. The WPA in New York City hired an enormous number of workers during the three-year period spanning from 1936 to 1938. The average number of people employed by the WPA in only New York City was about 217,000 in 1936 to 133,000 in 1938. The peak of employees was reached in 1936 with 248,474 of people employed (Works Progress Administration, 1938) and we see a direct relation between the peak of employment and the number of projects realized. Most of these jobs were seasonal, meaning that they were related to specific projects and lasted some months, but these numbers are impressive, if one considers the total population of the city at the time, just shy of seven million. About 3,5% of the total population - which includes no-working population, children, etc. – was working in relief programs at that time. Watch Video#2 A Better New York City 1937 (1937)

In New York City, WPA’s achievements were celebrated and publicized in several brochures, records, publications, and short movies, such as “A Better New York City” (1937), produced to promote and disseminate the achivements. A publication entitled “WPA in New York City. A Record of Accomplishment” (Works Progress Administration, 1938), enumerated the results of WPA programs in that city as follows: 931 miles of highways reconditioned; 159 miles of sewers repaired or laid; 205 miles of tracks taken up and disturbed area repaved; 400 public buildings renovated, repaired, or rebuilt; 89 public libraries renovated or built; 1774 building demolished for slum clearance; three flying fields modernized; 2,700 police traffic posts installed; 218 miles of water mains laid; 513,000 individuals, 369,000 of them children, benefited by educational programs looking forward school adjustment and better citizenship; 115 fire houses repaired; 16 new sanitation section houses built; 20 docks rebuilt, 45 repaired, and 6 demolished. Regarding recreation activities: 2,655 workers conducted programs in 350 locations, making more than 1,000,00 contacts each month with children and adults; 272 parks improved, 246 playgrounds opened; 460 tennis courts built. And it is important to notice that formally the WPA would be completed in 1943, so these data are not exhaustive.

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The criteria used to select and evaluate the projects is illustrated in the pamphlet: “Some emphasis, however, has been placed upon what may be considered ‘demonstration projects’, that is to say, projects which are concerned with the future needs at the city. These have been carried on by WPA during the depression, but many of them are on their way now to incorporation with the city’s regular activities. Their value is being tested. When shown conclusively they will become integral parts of the city’s public welfare and educational program.” (Works Progress Administration, 1938) So from this perspective, New York and Moses took this chance offered by WPA to realized an integrated recreation system. Indeed it is during these years that it was consolidated and enhanced. (See Image 66) But surprisingly, while WPA’s contribution to the development of the country and to its way out of the Great Depression is largely recognized (Federal Works Agency, 1947; Ferguson, 1984; Life Magazine, 1940; Reading, 1973; Skocpol, Finegold, 1982; Taylor, 2008a; Wright, 1974), its contribution to the creation of a recreational system in New York was appreciated during the Forties and Fifties, but later neglected.


4.2

Planning the Recreational Facilities System

We have seen the possibilities offered by the New Deal Programs, but is has to made clear why it was chosen to use those funds for the recreation sector which could seem a secondary need especially in a period of economic crisis. Obviously Moses was not the first planner to reflect on the need for recreation. From the beginning of the Twentieth Century the need for parks and active recreational facilities had become popular. There was a general consensus on the idea that the modern city conditions and ways of life demand that public spaces be devoted primarily to active recreation. Historically recreation was reserved to the middle and upper classes, but the introduction of eight-hour workday and five-day workweek in the late Thirties rapidly changed habits of workers and their families.3 Moses started his plan as State Park Commissioner (see §3.1) realizing vast works such as Jones Beach (1929), that had a great echoes in media (The New York Times, 1929a, 1929b), but also in planning debate. In 1931, explaining the general principles of city planning and commenting the decision of the Board of Estimate of New York State to invest a great amount of funds in such facilities, Lohmann underlined the crescent interest for parks and its specific origin in New York City: “No previous appropriation has ever been made for a like purpose in New York history that has approximated such a figure, and the sum is expected to be spent within the next 3 years. The interest of the people in parks and playgrounds in the United States goes back, in the case of parks (if we exclude the early squares and commons), to the development of Central Park, New York, in 1854, which was the first of our typically American parks.” (Lohmann, 1931: p. 169) In several writings and interviews Moses explored the topic of recreational facilities. Describing the first housing projects of the Municipal Administration, he stressed the importance of provision for recreational facilities in each new neighborhood. “So far as possible the new housing developments have been grouped around existing parks which are proposed to be expanded around new play areas in sections conspicuously lacking of them. So far as possible the school question has been considered and also the need for health, fire and police stations. In all cases, marginal streets are proposed to be widened into boulevards and a 3 The forty-hour workweek was introduced in 1938 with the Fair Labor Standards Act that established minimum wage and prohibited employment of minors. The five-day workweek was already introduced by several companies since the 1920s (Henrie Ford standardized it in 1926) and it was incremented during the Great Depression.

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sufficient number of ulterior streets are closed to permit of construction of large units. The fact that recreation areas are provided and streets widened has been considered in the coverage of the plots for housing that is, a somewhat larger density of population and somewhat less court space is needed under these conditions.” (Moses, 1938) In an interview released in 1936, Moses explained the importance of a system of open spaces, playgrounds and recreational facilities: “I’d rather plan parks and parkway than build small playgrounds, which would be unnecessary if there were enough large neighborhood parks. […] The urgent need was playgrounds. There had to be small ones, convenient to the crowed districts, for small children, and big ones for older boys and girls. In both cases the essential is decentralization. The small playgrounds had to be spotted about where they were needed, within easy range of baby-carrier pushers.” Moses quoted in (Irving, 1936) Few weeks after he was nominated City Park Commissioner in 1934, he illustrated his vision of the city park system to be built and the importance of swimming and bathing facilities: “It is an undeniable fact that adequate opportunities for summer bathing constitute a vital recreational need of the city. It is no exaggeration to say that the health, happiness, efficiency and orderliness of a large number of the city’s residents, especially in the summer months, are tremendously affected by the presence or absence of adequate swimming and bathing facilities. We are providing additional wading pools for children as fast as we can by supplementing those already furnished by the park and other city departments. This, however, does not meet the problem of any but small children, and does not help the larger children and adults at all.” (Moses, 1934) As explained in the previous chapter, the Department of City Parks was created in 1934 merging the five boroughs departments, and Moses was its czar for more than thirty years. The map produced in 1958 shows the improvements of the system since its creation (see Image 60). The first innovative aspect of Moses’s work was that his departments, especially Park and Recreation, constantly reported the accomplishments in publications of different type containing plans, illustrations, and full description, useful to track the evolution of the system (see among others Department of City Park New York, 1937, 1958, 1964). Self-celebration, civic pride, and ability to achieve the results were constant elements in these publications. A pamphlet of 1938 entitled “Progress in the Park Department: 1934 – 1938” summarized his first years at work for the City of New York. “Without doubt the greatest achievement of the past five year period of the park


consolidation has been the increase, over three-fold, in recreational facilities and the general rehabilitation and reconstruction of park areas made possible by the relief program. While the number of relief workers in New York City parks has fluctuated since 1934, there has been a total of 200,000 man-years of labour provided to the park program. Naturally this figure, which is difficult to understand, has produced many improvements of lasting benefit. 119 playgrounds throughout the five boroughs were the heritage of the consolidated Park Department. Those old areas, while they were styled playgrounds, could not, by any stretch of the imagination, compare with the modern recreational centres built during the last five years. There are today 372 playgrounds, ranging from small neighbourhood plots of a quarter acre to large developments such as Macombs Dam Park in The Bronx, Red Hook and McCarren Parks in Brooklyn, and Randall’s Island, adjacent to the East Harlem section of Manhattan, all developed to take care of every type of recreation for both children and adults and modern in every respect. They are paved in great part with surfaces that make them usable throughout the year, shaded by a profuse planting of trees, and modern, hygienic wading pools, used for basketball in the spring and fall and for skating in winter, have been incorporated in their design. 100 recreational buildings have been constructed to house toilet facilities and to provide indoor activities during inclement weather. The needs of every age have been satisfied from the tiny playhouses and little swings for children of pre-school age, the baseball diamonds, handball and basketball courts for the adolescents, and the croquet lawns, horseshoe pitching, shuffleboard and bocci courts for the adults.” (Department of City Park New York, 1938) Because of its duration, Robert Moses’s work in the field of sport and recreational facilities went far beyond the WPA and PWA projects built during the Thirties. During the following three decades he improved the whole city park system integrating several components: sport field and tracks, parks, playgrounds, parkways, and beaches. His work became an example for American planners. Cranz and Boland identified five models4 in the evolution of American parks, and the third one is the model of Recreation Facility, developed between 1930 and 1965, which activities were based on active recreation, such as basketball, tennis, team sports, spectator sport, and swimming (Cranz, Boland, 2004). The promoters of this model were politicians, bureaucrats, and planners; and the beneficiaries were suburban families. Their order respected a rectilinear design and 4 (1) Pleasure Ground 1850–1900; (2) Reform Park 1900–1930; (3) Recreation Facility 1930–1965; (4) Open Space System 1965–?; (5) Sustainable Park 1990–present. (Cranz, Boland, 2004)

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it included specific elements: asphalt or grass play areas, pools, rectilinear paths, and standard play equipment. The two authors underlined Moses and park departments’ role in the definition of this model. “He [Moses, ed.] and park departments nationwide established uniform standards and extended service to the suburbs and urban areas that had not yet received parks or playgrounds. The major innovations were the stadium, parking lot, and asphalt ball courts—hence the term Recreation Facility.” (Cranz, Boland, 2004) With the new series of interventions in the Thirties for the first time New York City had a unified system of park, that included the sport facilities, playgrounds, and beaches able to supply the need of the seven million people living in the city. Celebrating the success of the public program, in an article published in 1936 in The New York Times Carter Irving highlighted the previous situation: “Three years ago New York City had parks -- a great many parks, little and big, green oases, more or less scarred, strewn about its five boroughs, dotted over its 300--odd square miles of territory and tucked about the ragged edges of its nearly 1,000 miles of waterfront.” (Irving, 1936) This unified system, beside the big old parks, like Central Park in Manhattan, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx and Pelham ones in Queens, had developed many open spaces that were largely waste public land before. In the same article Irving gave all the merit of the success to Robert Moses and claimed: “And to give credit where credit is due, the wielder of the magic wand is one man – Robert Moses. The secret of his magic is a composite of imaginative foresight, iron determination, indomitable persistence, stream shovels – and city and State funds, powerfully assisted by Federal relief money and manpower.” (Irving, 1936) The new facilities realized by Moses contributed to change the landscape of the city and changed the way citizens used those public spaces. The most important aspect to be noticed is that it was more that a single realization o a type of facilities: Moses was creating a system that included parks, pools, playgrounds, beaches, and parkways, inside the city fabric, giving access to recreation and leisure opportunities to working-class New Yorkers. And to realize this system the contribution of the WPA was fundamental. Moses submitted projects for recreational facilities to the WPA and, to give an idea of the achievements, only in 1938 the following projects have been realized. “Recreational facilities built during the year, exclusive of buildings, include 10 new athletic fields and the remodelling of eight others; and fourteen new parks, squares and triangles, adding 210.3 acres to the city’s park system, with renovation work on


25 existing park areas totalling 16,868 acres. Fifteen new school playgrounds were constructed during the year and repairs were made to twelve others. New playgrounds constructed for the Department of Parks totalled 43, with repairs to nine others. Fourteen new wading pools were built. On June 30, work was still in progress on seven more new athletic fields, one new park area of 9.7 acres and the repair of areas totalling 1,541.9 acres, three new school playgrounds and 24 Department of Parks playgrounds, twenty new wading pools, 82 tennis courts, 152 handball courts and eight skating rinks.” (Department of City Park New York, 1939) This is even more impressive if one considers the situation of those low-income areas before these projects. “In 1932 there were only four playgrounds on the Lower East Side and two playgrounds in Harlem. In all Brooklyn, there were only thirty-six playgrounds, in all New York, a city which in 1932 contained approximately 1,700,000 children under twelve years of age, there were only 119 or one every 14,000 children”. (Caro, 1974: p. 337) Furthermore, recalling parkway inspired by Olmsted’s projects in the 1860s, Robert Moses partially realized a complex network of parkways that connects Manhattan with the inland. This plan as well was conceived during the early Twenties when Robert Moses was State Park Commissioner (see §3.1). One of the most important elements of this plan was the Grand Central Parkway that crosses Queens and connects Long Island counties with the Triboro Bridge and the Bronx: it was partially built in several steps during the Great Depression (1931/33 and 1936). The realization of the parkway system required decades, and when Moses concluded his career it was not completed (see Images 102-103). If on the hand Moses’s projects aimed at providing recreational opportunities to New Yorkers, on the other hand, since 1934 they also faced the pollution on the shores of New York. In 1934, announcing his plan to implement, Moses reported the exploitation of the natural areas of the harbor, he especially mentioned the risk for the natural environment, and he directly accused previous planners and officials: “It is one of the tragedies of New York life, and a monument to past indifference, waste, selfishness and stupid planning that the magnificent natural boundary waters of the city have been in a large measure destroyed for recreational purposes by haphazard industrial and commercial developments, and by pollution through sewage, trade and other waste.” (Moses, 1934)

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4.3

The WPA Swimming and Bathing Facilities: an incredible summer

When the WPA Programs and funds have been approved in 1934, Moses’s plans for the construction of 11 big swimming pools were ready and he was able to submit his proposals. As City Park Commissioner, Robert Moses was in charge of the projects and had the responsibility to supervise design, works and operations of the facilities. Less than two years later, the eleven swimming pools were inaugurated in New York City, costing each one around 1 million USD (see Image 68). The following pools were opened in the summer of 1936: in Manhattan Hamilton Fish (24th June), Thomas Jefferson (27th June), Highbrigde (14th July), and Jackie Robinson 5 Pools (8th August); in the Bronx Crotona Pool (24th July); in Queens Astoria Pool (2nd July); in Brooklyn Sunset (20th July), MacCarren (31st July), Betsy Head (6th August), and Red Hook (17th August) Pools; in Staten Island Joseph Lyons Pool (7th July). By the end of July 1936, when only six out of eleven pools were already opened, more than 435,000 visitors had already used the facilities (The New York Times, 1936d): a huge number, if one considers the total population of about seven million. It means that one out of fourteen New Yorkers visited one New York’s WPA swimming pool by the end of July: a great success in term of citizens’ appreciation, for sure, but also an accomplishment of goals of the New Deal programs. At the end of the summer, the Park Commissioner asked for more funds to maintain the new recreational facilities built during the first year of the WPA (The New York Times, 1936e). The realization of these sport facilities in such a short time was celebrated on media as important accomplishments for the city (New York Times, 1938; The New York Times, 1936a, 1936f, 1936k, 1936i, 1936c, 1936h, 1936d, 1936j, 1936b). It seems hard to believe but these achievements and results were barely discussed by planners and historians till the second half of 2000s. In 2006, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the opening of the WPA swimming pools, an exposition promoted by the City Parks Department entitled “Splash” was organized. Very few similar celebrations followed it. Most recently some articles and essays published by Marta Gutman, professor of architectural and urban history at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York (Gutman, 2007, 2008). Marta Gutman was the first after decades to analyze the eleven WPA swimming pools and to explore the importance of public facilities realized by Moses in New York City. She specifically underlined the role of this public official in the context of New Deal. “Like other New Deal activists, Moses was nurtured on the Progressive Era ideal of 5 Jackie Robinson Pools was originally called Colonial Park Pool. In 1978 itwas renamed after Jackie Robinson, the first Afro-American player to play in the Major League Baseball in 1947.


paternalistic reform. He believed recreation ought to be organized for the public good, especially for children, and he sought to stem the commercialization of recreation and entertainment, which he staunchly opposed.” (Gutman, 2007: p. 73) But at the same time, Gutman claimed that: “The WPA pools—distinguished works of architecture, built in record time by relief workers and packed with people—were tangible proof of the efficacy of reform liberalism, physical evidence of the government at work for all the people.” (Gutman, 2008) A visit to the swimming pools, spread across the five boroughs, makes the visitor appreciate the variety of neighborhoods in which they are located, the different kind of users, the design quality, the perfect integration with the parks, and their functionality. The WPA swimming pools preserve their original characteristics and features. They are still today public facilities: now as before an affordable fee is required and reduces fees are available. The parks in which these pools and sport centers are located are well maintained and they have not been reduced or occupied by other uses. And it is important to highlight that those sport centers were designed to be in use during the whole year since the beginning, in order to strengthen their importance for the local communities. In a press release that announced the official dedication of the new Thomas Jefferson swimming pool, the Department of City Park underlined their possible use during the year. “During the spring, fall and winter when the pool is not in operation the bathhouse will be converted into a gymnasium and the outdoor areas will be used for basketball, volley ball, shuffleboard, handball and other active outdoor games. During freezing weather provision will be made for ice-skating. The use of the wading pool, playground areas and winter use of the pool and bathhouse plant will be free to the public.” (Department of City Park New York, 1936) The swimming pools keep intact their original features: large restoration projects have been completed in the most recent years and design details and characteristic have been preserved. The neighborhoods in which they are located are still inhabited by low and medium residents who highly demand for accessible sport facilities. Marta Gutman clarified their role in the city: “Today, most of the WPA pools remain open for public use and, despite signs of wear, are full of all sort of New Yorkers: families with children; summer campers, AfricanAmericans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and many others who have arrived in the city on the successive wavers o migrations that continue to enrich the social and cultural

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fabric of the city. Much as Moses envisioned in the 1930’s, new migrants and young people, especially, come to the pools year-round: to seek relief from the summer heat, to learn to swim, to play games on outdoor athletic fields and inside bathhouse changing rooms, which are still converted to gymnasiums after pools are drained for the winter. This continuing success, based on forging a progressive relation between citizenship, public health, public space, and the human body, should be inspirational in our time, when city’s interest in developing and maintain public amenities has waned and the spread of private indoor facilities supplant the New Deal goal of equipping the public realm with affordable outdoor recreation for all.” (Gutman, 2007: p. 83) LOCATION One of the most interesting aspects of the WPA pools is their location within the city (see Image 67 ) and it is important to underline that most of them have been located near existing schools or recreational centers and on underused sites. Four over eleven of the pools are located in Manhattan, the most populated borough at the time: among them, one is in lower Manhattan, the densest and oldest settlement of the city. Three over four of Manhattan’s new pools are in Harlem, the ghetto inhabited mostly by Afro-American residents, which would be at the center of the riots during World War II and that was divided in different sectors by ethnic groups. At that time that area was divide in Negro, Spanish and Italian Harlems (see Image 65). Respectively one pool is located in each one of the other boroughs: Queens, Bronx and Staten Island. In order to understand better why the location of the swimming pools is important, the distribution of population and its density in the Great New York area at the time has to be considered (see Image 64). Useful information are provided in the Progress Report drawn up by the Mayor’s Committee on City Planning in June 1936, that included a series of detailed maps, many studies, and observations (Mayor’s Committee on City Planning, 1936). This report, realized on the basis of the studies conducted by the WPA and published just one month before the inaugurations, is very useful to understand the contexts in which the swimming pools had been built. This Progress Report was drawn up, as many others, in close partnership with the WPA. In the report the distribution of the different ethnic groups in Manhattan it illustrated (see Image 63). The two maps show the situation of Afro-American and immigrant residents in Manhattan in the Twenties and the Thirties. During these ten years, significant changes took place in the distribution of those ethnic groups. The first and most evident aspect of emerging in this map is that at the most of the areas in Manhattan were populated by foreign-born or Afro-American population: very few areas remain uncovered. Another import aspect to be highlighted is that the distribution of the different ethnic


groups radically changed in just ten years: that demonstrates that the city was evolving very rapidly. Another aspect that is very clear is that the northern part of Harlem was not habituated during the Twenties and that the city expansion was going very rapidly up to north: this is the area where Jackie Robinson (see Images 93-94-95), Thomas Jefferson (see Image s 82-8384-85), and Highbrigde pools would be located in 1936. The other Manhattan pool was the Hamilton Fish Swimming Pool located between East Houston and Pitt Street (see Images 84-75-76-77). At the time Lower East Side was a low-income area, largely populated by Jewish EasternEuropean migrants. It would later become part of southern sector of Manhattan in which big public housing settlements would be built. This facility still today includes a swimming pool 100 ft. x 165 ft., a semi-circular pool 100 ft. wide for skilled divers and a wading pool 50 ft. x 100 ft. for small children. These three tanks can accommodate 1700 people at one time. (Department of City Park New York, 1934b) The worst connected swimming pool was the one in Staten Island. In 1936, when Joseph H. Lyons Pool was built, Staten Island was certainly the less populated New York’s boroughs, and it is still today. It was difficult for the residents to access to recreation and sport facilities at that time. Staten Island was not connect to the mainland: the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (see Image 72), one of last Moses’s projects, would be inaugurated only in 1964. At the opening ceremony, the Mayor described the pool as: “a monument to the progressive government which would not and could not see unemployed men on the breadline. This pool could not be completed at this time had it not been for the splendid work of Commissioner Moses.” (The New York Times, 1936k) If Staten Island was not accessible, other boroughs in which the pools were located faced other problems. Reporting the news of the opening ceremony of the Red Hook Pool (see Image 69) – Brooklyn, where also Betsy Head Pools (see Images 70-71-72-73) is located– the New York Times explains how more than 40,000 persons, many of them children, cheered Mayor La Guardia, who formally opened the eleventh and last of the city’s giant swimming pools constructed by the Park Department with WPA funds. Located in the heart of Brooklyn’s Red Hook section, a region of factories and slums, the swimming pool’s opening drew a large part of the population of the neighborhood. The subtitle of the article makes clear the nature of the areas in which these project was realized: “All Speakers Stress Benefits of WPA Spending in Making Slums More Livable” (The New York Times, 1936c).

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The notion of slum was different from the contemporary one, which was agreed after a long debate only in the late Nineties, but it is certainly clear that the areas chosen to host the new recreational facilities were low-income neighborhoods6. Sunset Sunset Pool (see Images 86-87-88-89), also located in Brooklyn, is one of the pools inserted in parks, which offers still today one of the best point of view on Manhattan. The McCarren Pool opening, held after the sunset, was incredibly successful. The press reported it in this way: “Under a clouded moon, but in an atmosphere of civic pride and achievement, Mayor La Guardia and other city officials formally opened last night the new McCarren Park swimming pool on Lorimer Street, between Driggs Avenue and Bayard Street, Brooklyn.” (The New York Times, 1936j) The McCarren Park Pool (see Images 90-91-92), closed in 1984, was restored in 2006 and it now can accommodate 6,800 bathers. It was reduced in size by about one third and reopened as an Olympic size pool7. Also Astoria, the area in Queens where the biggest pool hade been realized (see Images 78-79-80-81), largely hosted a population of migrants from different European countries, mostly Irish, Italian, and Jewish. Later on – in the ‘60s – Astoria would became a popular Greek area and later in the ’90s a Brazilian area. The Astoria Pool, located in Queens, few yards far from the Triborough Bridge, faces Randall’s Island, where the Moses’s Headquarters have been located for decades. On week before 200,000 cars a day started to cross the tool barriers on the Triborough Bridge, on the other side of the river, the Astoria Pool was inaugurated, on time to host the trials of the U.S. Olympic swimming and diving teams. On the inaugural speech of the Bridge, Moses had said that it was more than a bridge, it was an immense new artery of travel in the very heart of the city, connecting three of the five boroughs ad reaching far out too tap suburban arteries at the city’s borders. The bridge’s project include more than the transportation system: it was intended as a 6 In 1955 Charles Abrams looked back at the definition of slum in the American Society: “The word “slum” has meant different things in different eras. The NNinetecnth-Century definition placed emphasis on the people who lived in slums. Living in a slum was thought to be the fault of the inhabitants. The country’s frontiers were open and those who chole to rot in the cities’ wretchedness had nobody to blame but themselves. The protest against the slum was by the quick against the socially dead; by the hardworking and sober against the indolent and drunkard. There seemed no reason for poverty or squalor in those days except one’s own laziness.” (Abrams, 1955). 7

The work was budgeted at $50 million. (Williams, 2007)


combination of facilities for rest and recreation, with a stadium and playgrounds, where is possible to take a break for those “who live in the brick jungles of the city” (The New York Times, 1936l). From the terrace of the bathhouse, designed by architect John Matthews Hatton, the bridge, the Manhattan skyline, and the Hell Gate Railroad Bridge were perfectly visible: the complex had a capability of 6,200 visitors included a sport center, a main pool (four times the standard Olympic size), two semi-circular diving pools. The park’s 59.9 acres of rolling lawns and woods stretch along the western shore of Queens and offer views of the East River, Manhattan and Randall’s Island framed by two of the city’s great bridges. 20,000 people attended the inauguration that was extended into the evening and culminated when the Mayor La Guardia switched on the pool’s underwater lights.

DESIGN The quality design of the eleven swimming pools had been very important to accelerate both the design process and construction: it was a key factor in the realization of these facilities. Presenting the projects for the swimming pools, Moses explained: “Typical cross-sections will be used wherever possible so as to simplify this work and take advantage of standard plans.” (Moses, 1934) Marta Gutman, in an article published in 2008 (Gutman, 2008), underlined how it was possible to realize eleven swimming pools in less than two years. “The Moses team developed a standard bathhouse plan—usually a large symmetrical building, with a central entry open to the fresh air abutting separate locker rooms for men and women; a standard site plan, usually with three outdoor pools, enclosed by an elaborate wall, and at least one pool on axis with the bathhouse entry; standard construction details, using brick, concrete, and other modern materials that met federal requirements for durability and affordability; standard mechanical systems, including for water treatment; and a standard attitude toward location. To avoid delays and reduce costs, the pools were located on available open space, usually in parks from the Progressive Era8. […] The design was based on a standard solution and standardized design was key to 8 The Progressive Era is commonly defined as the period during which the movement called progressivism flourished in the years between the depression of 1893 and the United States’ entry into World War I. A complex, sometimes contractitory amalgam of social criticcism, popular protest, political restructin, econimc reulation, and social welfare legislation, progressive reform embodied a vast array of responses to the changer taking place in American society at the turn of the Twentieth Century. (Frankel, 1991)

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New Deal success.” Gutman’s essay focused also on the accusation moved to Moses of racial discrimination in WPA swimming pools. She reported Robert Caro’s accusation of racial discriminations from unconfirmed sources: the water of the Thomas Jefferson Pool would be intentionally unheated because that would discourage Afro-American residents to attend the facility. In her essay, Gutman explores those accusations and concludes that: “Moses did use public money to equip black neighborhoods with recreational facilities, especially when pressed by African –American protesters.” Gutman did not deny that occasional discrimination took place, but she also underlined that: “Robert Moses invested in extraordinary public buildings and outdoor spaces that celebrated new ideals of leisure and made clear that providing recreational space is responsibility of government.” (Gutman, 2007: p. 83)

Orchard Beach In 1936 another important and popular bathing facilities would be opened: Orchard Beach in Pelham Bay Park. In May 1934 the City Park Department announced the realization of this new beach in the Bronx. Orchard Beach in Pelham Bay Park was opened in 1936 and it is design and equipped for 25,000 bathers. This great opening followed of few years the inauguration of one of Moses’ masterpiece, Jones Beach in Long Island, opened in 1934 (see Images 97-98-99). This is still today one of the few possibilities for people living in the Bronx to access to bathing facilities in their own area. Orchard Beach is located in the northern part of the city, on the eastern shore of the Bronx. Still today, it is complicated to reach it. From the last stop of the green line, after a 15-minutes trip on a bus in a wood, the visitors arrive at the entrance of the bathhouse that is constituted by monumental stairs. An enormous structure surrounded by trees and playgrounds, picnic areas, and, obviously, a huge parking lot. The artificial beach that lies on the shores of the Pelham Bay faces east and looks at the City Island and Hart Island. The original buildings still remain, as in the case of Jones Beach. They consist in a tow-arms semicircular building that embraces the restoration area. On the ground floor a series of spaces hosts commercial activities. On the upper floor, a gallery


hosts restaurant and other facilities (see Images 100-101). The construction was not easy, in fact Orchard Beach was small strip of sand and it was transformed in a larger artificial beach that required long and expensive works in order to modify the natural bay (see Image 96). The plan was great and it required two years to be completed. “The development requires a parkway to be constructed through the peninsula to reach the privately owned development on City Island. This parkway will be laid out as the backbone of the vehicular traffic system in this area. Secondary parkway drives will provide access to the recreational units in the park. The whole stretch of shore northerly from the City Inland Road along Pelham Bay, over a half mile in length, will be rebuilt by cutting into the bank of the beach and adding additional hydraulic fill to widen the usable sand beach area to approximately 200 feet in width. A boardwalk the entire length of the beach will be constructed behind a masonry parapet wall. On the bank overlooking the middle section of the beach and the boardwalk, a brick bathhouse, to accommodate 5,400 bathers at one time, will be constructed. This bathhouse will follow the general scheme of development which has proven satisfactory at Jones Beach State Park. The dressing rooms and lockers will be built in open court areas to let in a maximum of light and air. A refreshment stand and open air selfservice restaurant will be built in connection with the bath house.” (Department of City Park New York, 1934a) In that case, Moses had the change to work on a natural environment that left him free to design magnificent infrastructures and facilities. As the same Moses admitted, the opportunities to work with the blank page, the untouched canvas, the raw land, as in the case of Jones Beach and Long Island Parkway were basically exceptions for a planner (Moses, 1944). The eleven swimming pools and Orchard Beach represented a case in which three factors allowed to realized useful public facilities in low-income and disfavoured areas: (1) strong public policies, such as the WPA that had specific goals and clear procedures; (2) proactive planners and public officials, committed to their specific mission, as Robert Moses was regarding sport and recreation; (3) general consensus on public intervention as mean to solve urban problems. The WPA programs was built to obtained big results, and fast; but in addiction to that, the mechanism let to local administrations the duty of the project selection, and assigned them part of the responsibility of the operations, because cities and counties had to co-sponsor those public works proposed.

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Robert Moses and his team were ready when the opportunity came up: he had a strategic plan about the future of New York and its environs and he used specific programs to add a piece to the puzzle. Indeed during the New Deal, there was confidence that only the government, both national and regional, had sufficient power and means to address the economic crisis and the city issues.

IMAGES

04

Image 60 | Playgrounds, swimming pools, golf courts, beaches, and parkways (1934-1958) (Department of City Park New York, 1958 pp. 3–4)

Image 61 | Works Pays America, WPA (1936)

Image 62 | Learn to swim campaign Classes for all ages forming in all pools / / Wagner (http//www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98516763/)

Image 63 | Predominant Nationalities in Areas with 30% or more foreing born or negro population - Manhattan - 1920 and 1930 (Mayor’s Committee on City Planning, 1936 p. 19)

Image 64 | Population Density based on analysis of real property invertory (Mayor’s Committee on City Planning, 1936 p. 16)

Image 65 | The Harlems (Federal Writers’ Project (N.Y.), 1939 p. 255)

Image 66 | Selected Recreational Facilities, Green Spaces, Proposed and Built Pools by Robert Moses (Columbia University, 2007)

Image 67 | Map prepared by Department of Parks – New York City, containing provision of swimming and bathing facilities, attached (Moses, 1934)

Highbridge

Crotona

Jackie Robinson The Bronx

Thomas Jefferson New Jersey

Astoria

Manhattan

Queens

Hamilton Fish Mccarren

Sunset Brooklyn

Joseph Lyons

Betsy Head

Red Hook

Staten Island

Image 68 | Location the WPA’s Swimming Pools inaugurated in 1936 / ©Alice Siragusa.

Image 69 | The Red Hook Pool in Brooklyn in 1940/©Parks Department Photo Archive

Image 70 | Betsy Head Pool (2013) / ©Alice Siragusa

Image 71 | Betsy Head Pool (1940) /©Parks Department Photo Archive

Image 72 | Betsy Head Pool (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 73 | Betsy Head Pool. Women’s Lockrooms Entrance (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 74 | Hamilton Fish Pool (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 75 | Hamilton Fish Pool (2013) 2 /©Alice Siragusa

Image 76 | Hamilton Fish Pool (2013) 3 /©Alice Siragusa

Image 77 | Hamilton Fish Pool / @New York Times (The New York Times, 1936a)

Image 78 | The Astoria Pool in Queens in 1936/©Parks Department Photo Archive

Image 79 | Swimmers on the starting block at an Astoria Pool swim meet, (August 17, 1943) /©Parks Department Photo Archive

Image 80 | Changing room, around 1940’s, at the Astoria Pool in Queens. /©Parks Department Photo Archive

Image 81 | A swimming contest at Astoria Pool Astoria Park Queens August 20 1936/@ Parks Photo Archive, Neg. 15492.3

Image 82 | Thomas Jefferson Pool (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 83 | Thomas Jefferson Pool (2013) 2 /©Alice Siragusa

Image 84 | Outside the Thomas Jefferson Pool, around 1940, in East Harlem (now free, adults previously paid 20 cents to get in) /©Parks Department Photo Archive

Image 85 | Thomas Jefferson Pool (1936) /©Parks Department Photo Archive.

Image 86 | Sunset Pool – Main Building (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 87 | Sunset Pool – Main Entrance (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 88 | Sunset Pool – Detail of the Main Entrance (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 89 | The Sunset Pool in Brooklyn on opening day in 1936/©Parks Department Photo Archive

Image 90 | McCarren Pool. Main entrance(2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 91 | McCarren Pool (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 92 | The McCarren Pool (no longer in use for swimming) under construction in Brooklyn in 1936 /©Parks Department Photo Archive

Image 93 | Bathers in 1937 at the Colonial Park, now the Jackie Robinson Pool, in Harlem /©Parks Department Photo Archive

Image 94 | Jackie Robinson Pool (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 95 | Jackie Robinson Pool (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 96 | Orchard Beach Transformation

Image 97 | Opening Day, Orchard Beach. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses preside at the beach’s grand opening, July 25, 1936 /© NYC Parks Photo Archive

Image 98 | Orchard Beach, Bronx (1939) /© NYC Parks Photo Archive Neg. 16024

Image 99 | Orchard Beach Pavilion in 1937/© NYC Parks Photo Archive

Image 100 | Orchard Beach (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 101 | Orchard Beach (2013) /©Alice Siragusa

Image 102 | The Arterial System (Department of City Park New York, 1964 pp. 62–63)

Image 103 | The Arterial System – Detail of Manhattan and Queens (Department of City Park New York, 1964 pp. 62–63)

05

THE LEGACY

“Perhaps there never will be a last word because the man and his career were so astonishingly complex. Whether the day of the charismatic bureaucrat is behind us, just dawning, or always with us, it will never cease to fascinate-and to alarm” (Kaufman, 1975) Despite the rehabilitation promoted by some planners in recent times, the true Robert Moses legacy does not lie in his ability to raise funds and complete mega projects. The recent revaluation of Moses has been based on superficial and stereotyped analysis of his works: indeed Moses’s vision of city and planning is one important point that has been neglected till now. The true Robert Moses legacy lies in three main elements: his example of planner as a professional able to solve city problems; in his strong believe in the value of public service, because he chose a public career and preserved his enthusiasm till the end of it, being certain that only public authorities have the responsibility to improve city dweller conditions; and in his ability to pursue a model of the city using public works, indeed through specific sectors, such as recreational facilities, he tried to shape the city in order to realize a vision. These three elements of Moses’ legacy can be found in his speeches and writings, in which Moses brings to light his idea for New York, good planning, and, in particular, for planning practice and public service. These sources reveal one side of Moses that has not been covered in the literature before, and that represent his true legacy. To the planners of today, the case of Robert Moses represents an example of the opportunity that public officials have when their skills and hard work meet political will to improve our city and achieve great results.

Image 104 | Robert Moses. Il Signore Segreteo di New York – Cover (Christin, Balez, 2014)


5.1

The revaluation of Robert Moses

In the narrative about Moses’s work for New York City, the period of time that the observers usually examine was almost exclusively the Fifties and the urban renewal era. But Moses had been shaping his idea of the city and the planner’s role long time before, during the Thirties and in the pre-war years. Certainly several planning movements and theories popular in North American before World War II explained in the second chapter influenced Moses’s vision. His concerns about city dwellers’ needs and tools for rebuilding the city have been shaped during his studies on governance and his first experiences working for the State of New York for Al Smith. In the third chapter his evolution from reformer to planner during the Twenties and early Thirties has been illustrated; and particularly, the relevance of his contribution during La Guardia Administration and his work till the early Fifties has been explained. Despite the relevance of these phases in the analysis of Moses’s figure, in planning literature the traditional approach to Moses has always been basically linked to Jane Jacobs. With the great exception of Caro’s book – in which Jane Jacobs is never mentioned – surprisingly, for a long time the rhetorical debate about Jacobs and Moses was a simplistic comparison of the two figures. The main argument in this debate was their different approaches to urban transformations. On the one side was the patron saint of the old neighborhoods, Jane Jacobs: journalist, with no academic background, the woman who wrote against the demolition of old neighborhoods, who promoted pedestrian use of street and mix of functions, represented as David who fights against Goliath. On the other side, was Moses, the czar of highways, bridges and urban renewal, the embodiment of the “Federal Bulldozer” described by Martin Anderson in 1964 (Anderson, 1964). Their struggle for the construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway has become a myth in planning history, as it illustrated in the third chapter. It is an example of how a group of residents with a good strategy, media support, and strong leadership can face an unfair and destructive project proposed by a public authority that, supposedly, does not take into account the consequences of the project for the local community. Certainly the construction of the elevated highways would radically change the livability of Greenwich Village and would destroy the social and recreational everyday life of Washington Square Park, which is still one of the most pleasant parks in Manhattan. But it has to be remembered that their struggle took place in the late Fifties and “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” was published in 1961, when Moses’ career was beginning to decline, and almost thirty years after his first and greatest successes. Jacobs’s attack was not only against Moses, despite the fact that she used examples from New York City and Greenwich Village.

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On his part, Moses considered the protests of Greenwich Village residents as inconsistent, a waste of time. The opponents were not technicians, not professionals, not able to understand the general plan for the future New York he had in mind. When his project for Greenwich Village was aborted, Moses affirms: “There is nobody against this. Nobody! Nobody but a bunch of … mothers!” (Larson, 2010) This event influenced scholars’ opinions on Robert Moses, and that its meaning and interpretation has changed in recent times. Indeed, after Moses’ retirement at the end of the Sixties, his legacy was mostly considered opposite to Jane Jacobs’s, but I argue that the battle “Moses vs. Jacobs” is a false dilemma. The juxtaposition of the two figures looks rhetorical and out of context because it places two completely different points of view and roles on the same level. The assumption of this battle is that a public intervention, which includes transport infrastructure or housing, realized either by public authority or developers, cannot include participative processes or concern about environmental, social and pedestrian issues. The idea behind the juxtaposition of Moses and Jacobs is that citizens know their needs better than planner and that planners do not defend the public interest but the private gain. The prerequisite of both their discourses is that phenomena such as poverty, segregation among social classes, racial discrimination, and housing problems take place in a society that is able to solve them through urban planning. The struggle between their ideas and visions about the city represents a battle among the privileged: both look at a city that grows constantly thanks to the capitalistic system. This is a very simplistic way to pose a problem that is relevant, because of its topicality in different regional contexts, but that cannot be represented as a battle between David and Goliath. Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs faced the urban renewal phase from opposite points of view. Moses looked at the process of renewal that was taking place in blighted areas from the view of the planner, or even better said, from the view of the public official that responds to public opinion and deals with public money and developers. Jacobs embodied the man in the street who is affected by the consequences of the process of renewal and who is forced to move from his own neighborhood and change his habits and lifestyle: she must also be considered a forerunner of NIMBY1 and New Urbanism movements. On the one hand, Jacobs looked at the neighborhood scale; on the other hand, Moses had a 1 NIMBY is the acronym for Not In My Back Yard and refers negatevely to opposition of residents to new project or develpment that would directly affect their neighborhood.


greater vision of the city, like a metropolis in its regional context that is unique in terms of economy and vitality, such as New York. Despite this, the few years ago this aspect of Moses’s legacy was the one and only took into account, with his ability to build big and fast. An exception in the mainstream is Schwartz’s “The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City” (Schwartz, 1993). In his controversial book, Schwartz argued that Moses was a mere executor of the Regional Planning Association’s plan of 1929 for the decentralization of the region. He claimed that: “The city – which is made up of three islands plus the Bronx – would be spanned by five crossing. Three of them the RPA conceived itself: the Bronx-Whitestone, Triborough and Lincoln Tunnel. In other words, just about every highway and bridge credited to Robert Moses was conceived and planned by the RPA. Moses simply poured on the dotted lines indicated in the plan.” (Schwartz, 1993) He also argued that Moses had too much power and collaborated with the Neoliberals to control the future development of the city. But the revisionist readings of Robert Moses strongly resurfaced just months after Jacobs died in 2006. Along with events and publications in her memory, the debate about Robert Moses arose again. One exhibition and one book, edited by Ballon and Jackson in 2008, introduced new points of view about the 30-year-long career of the man who led several agencies and departments in New York City (Ballon, Jackson, 2008). In 2007 during a symposium organized for the inauguration of the exposition, Daniel L. Doctoroff2 , the city’s deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding of the time, claimed: “We are in a period of time when we have finally overcome a fear of overdevelopment that was in part the result of Moses’ excesses. Part of the reason we haven’t been able to do as much is because people overinterpreted the lessons from that period of time.” (Pogrebin, 2007) Surprisingly the rehabilitation of Moses, which included new perspectives on urban renewal, led to a narrative in which the approaches of Moses and Jacobs were merged together: authors such as Flint, Gratz, Hall, Larson revisited the topic more than forty years after the battle for Washington Square Park (Flint, 2011a; Gotham Center Forum, 2006; Gratz, 2010; Hales, 2007; Jose, 2010; Larson, 2011; Mennel, 2011). 2 Doctoroff has been decribed as the chief architect of the mayor’s development agenda, emerged as the face of the new Moses (Wells, 2007).

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For instance, Anthony Flint analyzed three milestone events in the history of urban and community planning during which Moses and Jacobs clashed: the battle for Washington Square Park, the Greenwich Village Renewal Project, and the Lower Manhattan Expressway (Flint, 2011b). It seems surprising, but the revaluation crossed the borders of academia to enter into the planning debate. As it mentioned in the introduction, in 2013 during a public speech Alexandros Washburn, former director of the Department of Urban Design of New York, encouraged planners to merge the different aspects of Moses, Jacobs and Olmsted into professional practice. In Washburn’s vision New York planners should apply different skills in their everyday work inspired by the three figures: speed of realization and ability to involve private developers in big projects (Moses), attention to urban diversity, pedestrian needs, and peculiarity of each neighborhood and community (Jacobs), but also respect for the natural environment and sustainability (Olmsted). But even before, Amanda Burden3 , then Director of the Department of City Planning of the City of New York, claimed: “t is to the great credit of the mayor that we are building and rezoning today, once again, like Moses, on an unprecedented scale, but, with Jacobs firmly in mind, invigorated by the belief that the process matters and that great things can be built through a focus on the details, on the street, for the people who live in this great city.” (Burden, 2006) Some years later, when she was about to end her mandate, she affirmed: “I like to say that our ambitions are as broad and far-reaching as those of Robert Moses, but we judge ourselves by Jane Jacobs’s standards.” (Satow, 2012) On another occasion Burden claimed that were it not for Moses’s public infrastructure and his resolve to carve out more space, New York might not have been able to recover from the blight and flight of the Seventies and Eighties and become the economic magnet it is today. She also affirmed: “Living in New York, one is aware there has been no evident successor or successors to Moses. There aren’t master builders. Who is looking after the city? How do we build for the future?” (Pogrebin, 2007) 3 Chair of the New York City Planning Commission and Director of the Department of City Planning during the Bloomberg administration


It is almost unbelievable that the woman who rezoned most New York City land during the Bloomberg administration, publicly declared she was inspired by the man who embodied all the bad consequences of urban renewal till few years ago, Robert Moses. Larson claimed that: “As such, Burden‘s sense of design as a civic virtue capable of fostering urban dynamism represents just one of a number of selective ways in which Jacobs’ ideals have been incorporated into the Bloomberg administration redevelopment agenda and then synthesized with choice aspects of Moses’ legacy as a means of reconciling the fundamental differences and making the case for building like Moses with Jacobs in mind” (Larson, 2010: p. 165). The most recent revisionist thinking underscored the degree to which the two figures had become conjoined in the public imagination and further fanned the debates over their lasting legacies. Larson sustained that such thinking was endorsed by the Bloomberg administration, which came into office with a clear physical agenda and strategy and knew how they intended to implement it. From Larson’s point of view, the Bloomberg administration played an active role in informing and leading the public debate to promote an ambitious redevelopment agenda, to memorialize Jacobs and simultaneously to rehabilitate Moses: indeed praising Jacobs and re-envisioning Moses fostered the idea that New York would successfully build big again (Larson, 2010). Only a few years ago such declarations by New York’s public planners raising Robert Moses to the same level as Jane Jacobs would have been unbelievable. But New York’s planning scenario has changed radically since then Kim Moody observed that in the late 2000s a new type of urban renewal emerged, but with totally different means and stakeholder, compared to the one of the Fifties. “While it is common to say that the era of Robert Moses, the bulldozer, and urban renewal is long past, there is a sense in which what is occurring in many parts of the city is a new type of urban renewal for the well-to-do. There is no single force like a Robert Moses behind this transformation of the skyline. Indeed, there is no central urban planning behind all this development. The traditional powers of the city’s Department of City Planning and City Planning Commission have, like the city’s budgetary powers in the 1970s, been hijacked by the state in the service of private development. Nor is there nothing like a proven market for all of this high-priced real estate. Whether or not the market for this expensive development holds up in the end, billions will be spent and made in the process of building. The long line of interests who stand to profit from such construction will be enough to drive this development

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unless or until some other force, a movement of resistance or a real estate slump, slows it, stops it, or redirects it. On January 18, 2006, in a two-hour meeting, the sevenmember board of the ESDC approved the new Yankee Stadium, the improved Shea Stadium, the Brooklyn Bridge Park, and commercial development on Governor’s Island.” (Moody, 2007: pp. 217–218) Despite this revisionist thinking, few scholars have continued to stress critical points of Moses’s works also in recent times. For instance, Powell stressed that the price poorer citizens had to pay in order to realize Moses’s projects was too high: he calculated that about half million people were evicted because of renewal projects and new infrastructure (Powell, 2007) and that most of them were Afro-Americans. But, regarding the revisionist theories about Moses, Powell wrote: “New York has the feel of a boomtown — highways clogged, subways crowded, luxury condo towers rising — and an influential band of historians and planners have argued that Moses, who served as chief of public authorities and confidant to a half-century’s worth of New York’s mayors and governors, had much to do with the rise of the city and little to do with its (temporary) fall. […] The revisionist case for Moses has percolated for nearly two decades and goes something like this: he was a visionary who gazed upon the city and region from the perspective of an eagle. He saw wastelands that would become parks, bridges that would span rivers and bays, and a necklace of highways and parkways that would weave the city and region into one.” (Powell, 2007). We note that this switch in Moses’s reputation was taking place during an era in which the political and economic situation in New York is changing. A new awareness of the role of city planners was emerging and, at the same time, the Bloomberg Administration was very active in city planning. In 2008 the subprime mortgage crisis boomed, creating a better awareness of the link between planning, housing construction and finance. After decades of crisis of planning, particularly in a society in which the public sector has always reduced its role in everyday life, urban issues were in the spotlight again. Public officials strongly affirmed the importance of planning in the city administration. Recent catastrophic events – like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey – have underlined the importance of good planning for American cities in terms of resilience and adaptability to climate changes and natural disasters. Explaining this process, in 2007 Pogrebin wrote: “Economically and psychologically it has taken city planners decades to forge the resolve to break ground again on a substantial scale.” (Pogrebin, 2007) Robert Moses embodied the model of the strong planner to perfection. He was one who took


decisions and got results, and I think that this is the main reason why the rehabilitation of his figure has been taking shape in recent times. At the same time, the Bloomberg administration needed a positive example of an inspiring planner and that is the reason why Moses’s legacy has been revisited. Despite all considerations regarding his failures in certain aspects of his later works, the rehabilitation of Robert Moses seems to have been conducted superficially, and this new narrative is lacking in many aspects and many dimensions of the true Moses legacy.

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5.2

The True Robert Moses Legacy

I strongly object to the assumption that the true Moses legacy, as many have claimed, lies simply in his ability to build mega-projects in a short period of time, even if it is undeniably true. The question that today’s planners should be asked is not whether we should build like Moses, big and fast. And it is even less so whether if we should build “like Moses with Jacobs in mind”. The question is: do planners have the real opportunity to improve cities in a period of economic crisis, changes in social and economic forces, financialization of the economy, increase in inequality in our cities? Even if they have great visions, self-sacrifice, and excellent skills? I do not think that planners can improve cities unless they have political support, but most of all, unless they can base their plans on long-term public investment programs whose goals are to improve city life. The Moses case demonstrates that he was able to build quick, big and good as long as he based his works on well-financed national programs coordinated with public interventions in other sectors, whose goals were to improve city life. When public funds decreased and program goals were controversial and unequal, his work was affected in terms of both quality and appreciation. And I do argue that if a revision of his contribution to planning has to be made, it does not have to be based on his ability to build big and fast: other elements must be highlighted for an objective rediscovery and analysis. For many decades, Robert Moses was considered the one responsible for the decay of New York, and in the previous section his rehabilitation as the champion of efficient planning was discussed. The echoes of these criticisms have seemed to disappear in most recent times, but the new representation of Moses’s ideas is still vague. Indeed in the new narrative while Jane Jacob’s innovative point of view on planning is frequently explained, the same cannot be said for Moses’s. Few mentions of Moses’s idea of planning can be found: most of them refer to his admiration for Baron Haussmann (Chronopoulos, 2013; Flint, 2011b; Larson, 2010; Ouroussoff, 2007; Sorkin, 2007; Wells, 2007). And this is surprising especially if one considers that Moses was a prolific writer and speaker. Indeed many scholars compare Moses to Haussmann, claiming that Moses admired the Parisian planner. In fact, in 1942 he wrote an article entitled “What Happened to Haussmann” (Moses, 1942). Describing the great transformations that Haussmann realized in Paris, Moses highlighted


his admiration for Parisian parks but he also underlined some critical points in Haussmann’s actions: illegal procedures and high costs; lack of attention to public opinion; bizarre and unsound financial methods; unbalanced attention to the needs of all classes, and negligence of the lower middle class and the poor. At the very end of his article Moses concluded that: “It should be noted that, in spite of his eccentricities, Haussmann lasted seventeen years as head of the public works in Paris, and that this period was long enough to enable him to carry out a program which is the more astonishing as we realize how far he was in advance of his time, how great were the obstacles which he faced, and how boldly he faced them.” (Moses, 1942: p. 11) Ironically, many of these accusations that Moses aimed at Haussmann have been pointed at Moses as well. But it has to be highlighted that Moses was never formally indicted and he was never personally involved in any investigation on corruption. His family was never involved in his business and he did not have any financial profit except his personal wage, which was only one salary, despite the fact that he served in several posts at the same time. He was certainly interested in gaining power, but he probably did it to carry out his work, without political or legal restrictions. But more than a comparison with other planners, it is relevant to verify the coherency between Moses’s thoughts and actions. This verification can only be made by reviewing of his ideas and visions, and is possible only by rediscovering his own words. Thanks to the analysis of Moses’s entire career and with specific focus on his contribution to the New York recreation system, I argue that Moses’s true legacy lies in three main elements that have been essentially neglected till now, with very few exceptions. In the following sections the three elements of the true Robert Moses legacy are provided with the support of his own words.

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5.2.1 The Importance of the Planner as a Professional The first element of the true Robert Moses legacy is that he can be considered an example of the planner as a professional. In the third chapter his public career is illustrated: how he served under seven governors and five mayors from 1924 for the State of New York and from 1934 for the City of New York until he retired in 1968. Moses was unshaken in the belief that groundless and useless criticisms had been made to him and his team. Writing about the future of New York and the main problem of lack of adequate housing in the city, in 1943 he claims: “Unfortunately housing reform attracts crackpots and irresponsible enthusiasts almost as much as city planning, and sensible projects must run the gamut of hysterical attacks and insane criticism from perfectionists, daydreamers and fanatics of a dozen breeds. In planning we need practical idealists who have roots in this soil, who know the town, who have limited objectives and can reach them without endless technical chatter. We are fed up with ivory-tower philosophers and with their abracadabra about urbanism, function and rationale of cities, decentralization, resettlement, green belts, brand acres, and cultural health.” (Moses, 1943) The reference to the fight between practical idealists and ivory-tower philosophers also recurs in Moses’s other writings (Moses, 1944). Moses looks at professionals, “who have root in the soil, who know the town”, as practical idealists: this vision is quite interesting because, if on the one hand, Moses considers professionals, and then himself, as the only ones who had the skill and knowledge to understand the city and solve its problems, on the other hand, Moses qualifies them as idealists: in this sense, Moses recognizes that the planner needs to pursue a vision. In 1946, in the acceptance speech for the medal awarded by the National Institute of Social Sciences, Moses explains his work and underlines his view of the role of planner. In particular he focuses on criticisms to his work on the part of “non-professionals”. “What keeps a busy public official going? Best if I know. It is partly interest in the works and partly sheer stubbornness. Certainly there are no material rewards comparable to those which can be expected from similar devotion to private work. Made up my mind long ago to get my reward from tangible accomplishments, from the dogwood, the tulip, the chrysanthemum, the curving parkway, the spiderwork of suspension bridges, the reclaimed waterfront, the demolition of slums, the crack of a baseball bat, and the shouting of children in playgrounds. I have learned not to run up a high temperature and blood pressure over the intolerant off-scouring of minds inflamed by revolutionaries, the whining and complaining of those to whom every civil servant is a loafer and with both feet in the public trough,


the wisecracks of sophisticates who are the eunuchs of our metropolitan seraglio, the lofty disdain of ivory tower planners, the bitter, irresponsible mouthing’s of the radical press, the cheese spread of radio commentators, and the slip-cover advertising of former Mayors.” 4 During another speech that Moses gives in 1946, he underlines the difference among those smart aleck planners who disapproved of his projects and the officials who are on the ground and get the things done. He underlines the antithesis between the ones who have the courage to act and the ones who have only words to contribute. “What is it that we need here is New York and in other great cities to achieve these? Is it more vision? It is greater technical skill? Is it more knowledge? I doubt it. All these things are fine in their way. All of them are in some measure indispensable but what we need most of all is the courage to get the things done; the insistence upon performance as against promises; achievements as against slogans. There was never any shortage of talkers in this or any other big town and increasing educational opportunities and leisure have sharpened many tongues and media vocal and even eloquent thousands who have nothing to contribute but words.” 5 Most of all, Moses believed in the ability of planning to solve urban problems and he advocates for civic pride. In the following extract from a speech Moses gave at Harvard University in 1939, he makes his point clear: “Wise men were living before Agamemnon and there were planners before planning became a watchword of reform. Human selfishness has been the greatest cause of all these troubles – the unwillingness of the average citizen to consider his fellows and to place pride of citizenship before personal gain.” 6 The civic pride comes for the opportunity to contribute to the development of the city, in public service, which constitutes the second element of the true Robert Moses legacy.

4 Robert Moses’s Papers - Box 135. “Address of Robert Moses” in Accepting The Medal of the National Institute Of Social Sciences, May 22nd, 1946. Pag. 1 5 Robert Moses’s Papers - Box 124. “Cities and Civilization”. Address at Cooper Union Forum, October 15th, 1946 6 Robert Moses’s Papers - Box 135. “Further notes on theory and practice in politics.” Second Godkin Lecture at Harvard by Robert Moses, May 12th, 1939

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5.2.2 The Value of Public Service Moses based his practice as public servant on the firm belief that the public administration is responsible for providing good services to citizens and that an efficient organization of the public machinery is necessary in order to achieve this goal. Moses developed this belief from studying the English governmental system and he came back from England with the idea that the State machinery should be reformed in order to work properly and actually one of his first tasks was to re-organize the State Park system. Moses demonstrated with his action that he strongly believed in public service: in the great challenge that it represents and that the single individual can contribute to achieving great goals. Moses represented a professional who had rapidly climbed to the top of the public administration and had been gaining power that allowed him to manage funds, lead teams of technicians, and realize his vision. But in a period of deep economic crisis and discouragement, Moses represented the concrete example of the chance offered by the public works sector, not only in terms of personal and professional achievements, but also in terms of contribution to the improvement of the civil society and the everyday lives of his fellow citizens. Without neglecting the limits of his vision and his tools, we have illustrated how he agreed with the mainstream of the time, which had been shaped by ideas discussed in the second chapter. Despite that Moses always insists on the need to complete projects, to have an efficient and effective public administration, and to provide services to as many citizens as possible. In his speeches and writings, Moses highlights, much more than design quality, the size, the time of completion, and the impacts of the projects and he especially underlines the skills required to be a good civil servant. After thirty years of working for the city, Moses described the satisfaction he gained during his long career in an article published in New York Life. “”There’s nothing dull,” I told my friend, “about keeping impoverished families from breaking up, about fighting to halt an epidemic of polio, about damming streams and impounding water for reclamation, power flood control, navigation and other purposes. There’s nothing dull about locating, laying out, financing and building a housing development which will replace slums, or building great crossing like George Washington and Triborough Bridges and the Rapid Transit and vehicular tunnels and their arterial approaches and connections in New York City, making possible a civilization which more and more runs on wheels.” (Moses, 1966b: p. 3) In 1966, writing about the philosophy of Triborough, Moses writes in the book entitled “Public works and Beauty”:


“Why is it so necessary for us to deprecate our unquestionable achievements and stress your deficiencies, constantly crying peccavi, peccavi, as though we owed the rest of the country an apology for our metropolis and sought to confirm our detractors in their worst prejudices?” (Moses, 1966a) In the same publication he writes about the beauty of public works, and he claims: “Public works and beauty are neither in opposition nor are they Siamese twins or inseparable partners in a three legged races. They should work together in harmony, supplement each other. The precise terms must vary with the hours, the means, the intelligence of the community and the skill of presentation. Leadership, eloquence, courage, these are always the requisites for a satisfactory outcome.” (Moses, 1966a) During the same time, in 1966, describing the reasons why one should be a public servant, and promoting public career, Moses writes: “To boys and girls who are thinking of entering the public service, I say that it is both a frustrating and fascinating one [job, ndr] and that while the material rewards are small, the satisfactions are many. In my own case I have found public service enormously absorbing and stimulating. With all its risks, I endorse it as one of the greatest professions. And I want to see more good young people come to it. At all levels of government we need men and women of brains, courage, and ambition, whose vision encompasses something more challenging than money-making, if our expanding democracy is to survive and be vindicated.” (Moses, 1966b) Despite criticism, Moses preserves his appreciation for his role as a public servant, as well as its importance in society and its contribution to civilization.

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5.2.3 A City Model to Seek The third element useful in rediscovering Moses’s true legacy is his idea of the city. Moses’s own words showed that he was a strong supporter of the city and its growth: he believed that its transformations have to be managed and obviously that planners have to forecast future city needs. One the most revealing contributions in understanding Moses’s vision is certainly an article published during World War II in the New York Times, entitled “What’s the matter with New York?” (Moses, 1943)7. In this article Moses deals with many of urban issues that characterize the city after the war, such as housing, financial problems, suburbs and parks. He obviously has plans ready and clear ideas about the development of the city, and he proudly underlines it: “We are proud to be first among American States and municipalities to prepare detailed plans for post-war public works which will insure needed repairs and improvements, provide jobs for the returning members of the armed forces and for those to be discharged from war plants, and give the basic industries a bill of materials to look forward to.” (Moses, 1943) In this quote, Moses expresses his concern about providing new jobs for the returning soldiers, but he is also aware that the flow of federal funds will decrease after the war. And in fact Moses follows his piece explaining that, despite the fact that many observers considered New York a special case – an exception in the American scenario – Moses looks at New York as an example for American cities: “I want to talk about New York, as an integral part of the United States, whose postwar problems are in a very deep sense the problems of the nation. The prosperity of a great seaboard city, over three centuries old, housing one-twentieth of all of our population and having ties with every other sections, is something of vast national interest and concern.” (Moses, 1943) Moses underlines the fact that New York had always been a magnet drawing ambitious people from the entire country and that the survival of the city as a national center depends on the continuity of the process. 7 Regarding this article, the New York Times editor wrote on the same day: “Some undertones in Mr. Moses’ remarks will displease some readers, and are meant to do so. Mr. Moses has scant sympathy with those whose feet, as he thinks, are not on the ground. One can’t catch him being sentimental or dreamy, except, perhaps, in his last sentence. But New York is the kind of town that can chuckle over a good diatribe or a well-polished innuendo, and it can forgive Mr. Moses an occasional sharp word because it has so much brave accomplishment for which to thank him. And because he is interesting.” (The New York Times, 1943a)


The aim is to put New York in the spotlight, not as a special case but as an example. Then as now, New York had two faces: the high rise areas, the downtown financial center, one of the densest and most populated city center, and also the great metropolitan area, with several suburbs in the other four boroughs characterized by the geographical or ethnical origin of their inhabitants and located. Talking about these suburbs, Moses writes that they did not consist merely of satellite dormitories inhabited largely by commuters, but in an endless variety of greenfield, much of it in public ownership, and all of it incrementally accessible. In the suburbs there was an opportunity to realize big parks and other recreational facilities, in particular public beaches. As City Park Commissioner, obviously Moses advocates for improving access to parks and beaches, and in the same article Moses underlines that the health and the sanity of city dwellers depends in large measure on “vacations in the suburbs”, where those facilities were located. The notion of the sanity of city dwellers could be probably linked to a vision of the city dweller affected by consequences of phenomena such as congestion, bad housing conditions and the lack of adequate open spaces in highly dense residential areas, that derives from the School of Chicago and from the Regional Planning theories. The programs for the creation of the New York park and recreational system illustrated in the forth chapter, in particular parks and swimming pools, define one of the ways in which Robert Moses contributed in providing services in poor areas of the city. Particularly, the sport centers were used as community centers during the whole year and are still working today. Despite the fact that some claimed that Moses was not interested in design feature, the architectural quality of those facilities was very high; and this is impressive considering that they were built during an era of deep economic and social crisis, the Great Depression. Park and recreational facilities were an entry point of Moses’s global vision, a tool to build the public city and respond to its future needs. Moses believed that public recreation was fundamental to providing a good quality of life in cities, and he definitely contributed to the public space system in New York. These amenities constituted hubs in a more complex system of urban public spaces. This network includes different levels of recreational facilities, from beaches to vast state parks, from parkways and city parks to small neighborhood playgrounds. Despite the several fields of public works in which Moses operated we can say that this is his main and most successful one, but also the one which he directed for the longest time. It could be argued that he also had time and power, often creating the legislative tools to do it on his own, to complete a vision, and this general plan was influenced neither by political changes in the municipal administration nor by the timing of the electoral cycle that often

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influences policy choices. At this point it is important to understand Moses’s vision of the ideal city, or the one that fits better with New York City. Surprisingly in 1943 Moses writes against high-rise buildings: “The age of the skyscraper is past. There are not likely to be any more very tall buildings. They make for a wonderful skyline, but they bring too many headaches in their train.” (Moses, 1943) More references to the most appropriate residential model to replace slums can be found in his other writings. Just few years later, in the article “Slum and City Planning” (Moses, 1945) published in The Atlantic, Moses stresses his aversion to urban sprawl, a model that had been charactering the American urbanization process in the Twentieth Century. “If in New York City we had refrained from building so many miles of subways at twenty million dollars a mile and had put some of this money into rehabilitating and making livable and attractive the older and central parts of town, millions of people would not today be crowded like cattle into hurtling trains during the rush hours. […] To begin with, those who advocate the abandonment of the older cities, the creation of satellite towns, decentralization by whatever name, and other revolutionary plans which in effect mean tearing up the city and reconstituting it on a different scale, must be eliminated from the picture.” (Moses, 1945) Moses advocates for the compact city as a model to seek, and in the following excerpt – from the article published in the Herald Tribune Forum entitled “Community Planning” – he clearly makes his point and derides the urban model proposed by rationalists. “Why worry about city planning anyway? We are reliably informed by long range planners that there aren’t going to be any more cities. Smart people, we are told, will abandon the crowed metropolis and move to the country, where they will live in centrally heated, completely mechanized and electrified prefabricated glass houses with movable waterproofed walls and floors” […] Which can be hosed down daily, fluorescent lighting and plastic furniture. There will be helicopter landing platforms on the roof and special kitchens for warming up dehydrated foods. The housewife will have plenty of leisure for books, radio, movies and visiting. Her husband will work in the city under a roof of shatterproof glass in a vast air-conditioned space where the climate will always be the same and the elements can be ignored. These long range planners say our program in New York lacks vision and scope. Let us examine this criticism first from the point of view of accomplishment. The Belt


Parkway around the city was discussed for twenty years before we mapped it in 1929. We opened ten years later. […] What are sane plan for the future? Every municipality in the country has public facilities which have been hard hit by the war and priorities. Machinery, cars and tools are worn out. No one will deny that holes in pavements must be filled and that neglect has been so long that major reconstruction is often required. It is not easy to reduce to a formula the principles which should govern municipal improvements. Let us assume that tests of necessity, desirability and economy will be imposed, as well as requirement that the projects afford a substantial amount of employment on the scene and back on it.” 8 The same year when Title I of the Housing Act of 1949 came into effect, in a speech at the New York Building Congress entitled “Rebuilding New York”, Moses explains his plans, why and how he is going to rebuild the city. The most surprising element in this speech is that Moses explains the difference between two different approaches: rebuilding, which he supported, and revolutionizing, that others preferred. From his point of view, the “quiet planner” Moses worked without melodrama, orderly. The basis of construction is housing: the aim is to provide better housing conditions to New Yorkers, also if it implied the slum clearance. And most of all, his action is led by a solid pragmatism. “You have asked me to talk about our current municipal public improvements. What is happening here today is something quite different from progress on a comprehensive program of public works. You are experiencing something more significant than the minor discomforts, inconveniences and adjustments which go with accommodation of a larger population, elimination of our worst slums, widening of our most constricting bottlenecks, and modernizing of our most obsolete facilities. We are rebuilding New York. I say rebuilding, not revolutionizing. We are not tearing it up, decentralizing, and dispersing it on untried theories of slaphappy, inexperienced, irresponsible, smart aleck planners; we are not abandoning what is good before we know what is better; we are not ruthless, reconstructing huge areas on the basis of carefully integrated plans, and if some people do not realize what is going on, it can only be because our work is orderly, smooth and without melodrama. […] 8 Robert Moses’s Papers - Box 135. “Community Planning” in Herald Tribune Forum – November 17th, 1943

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Our basic construction is housing, housing involving slum clearance, reconstruction on vacant land, financed by Federal, State, city, quasi-public and private funds, individual homes, row houses, rental and sale apartments, emergency veterans accommodations, and every other variety of residential building adapted to our climate and within the scope and knowledge of our most ingenious architects, engineers and builders. […] The tests of what government should do, and of what branch of government should do it, must be pragmatic. The first is this: is the enterprise under consideration a natural government monopoly? The second is: can government do it better that business? The third is: if government do it better, should it be Washington, the state capitol, or the town or city hall, or all of them? There are many things which a state or a locality cannot afford without federal aid. These are practical questions, not to be settled by roots democracy, and other clichés. Why must we have a battle of political extremists, where the middle road is so straight before us and so clearly in the American Tradition?”9 Moses expounds on why rebuilding is paramount to solving New York’s problems which come from urban growth. Moses often replies to criticism of his projects, and he insists on the need to rebuild New York. “The critics by and large build nothing. There will always be new problems in a spreading metropolis. Problems are in a very real sense signs of growth. Without them we would stagnate. Some of them to be sure, represent lags which have grown so aggravating that they can no longer make some sacrifices for the common good. We have the tools. We have the means. We have the men. Give us respected leadership that will breathe confidence, not dismay into the people of New York and give loyal support and we will rebuild the city.” 10 It can be said that Moses continued to defend his works throughout his entire career. Interesting notes can be found in another article of his published few years after the completion of his first redevelopment project. In 1962 Moses publishes an article entitled “Are Cities Dead?” (Moses, 1962). He replies to criticisms about redevelopment projects, in particular the labeling of many 9 Robert Moses’s Papers - Box 125. “Rebuilding New York”. Talk at Luncheon of the New York Building Congress. Hotel Astor, Tuesday, October 18th, 1949 10 Robert Moses’s Papers - Box 117 - Folder 4 of 6. “The critics built nothing”. An address by Robert Moses at the luncheon meeting of the New York Building Congress. Hotel Astor, NY. Tuesday, November 10th, 1959. Pag.13


neighborhoods as slums11. But more specifically, Moses is certain that old neighborhoods cannot provide certain minimum living standards to residents: he sees it necessary to demolish and rebuild old neighborhoods. The rebuilding process is needed in order to promote modernization and ensure innovation. The same motivation that pushes Moses to rebuild of many city areas is the same one that the Housing Act of 1949 was based on. If it is certainly true that Moses did not support the idea of suburbanization city model, it can be said that the American model of housing and settlement that had became popular at those times was precisely suburbia: new settlements, single family houses with mod cons, located in areas were there was enough land to provide community facilities adequate to new comers. Simply, the American dream. Another important element to be considered is that, at that time, urban density was associated with overcrowding, criminality and poverty. From this point of view, the reluctance to move from old neighborhoods could seem inexplicable. Moses expressed his frustration with this problem: “The incredible affection of slum dwellers for the old neighborhood and their stubborn unwillingness to move are the despair of experts.” (Moses, 1962: p. 5) Indeed the conflict generated by redevelopment plans and the resistance of slum dwellers led forced removals, carried out in many New York areas, as in other American cities, during the renewal era. In this sense Moses’ vision did take in account the disadvantages and difficulties that evicted people had to face in finding new accommodations. Public authorities provided very few opportunities to facilitate relocation. The most controversial aspect of Moses’s legacy was clearly slum clearance. On many occasions Moses underlined the need to rebuild the city and to eradicate the slum problem, and explained why urban renewal was the one and only possible solution. Despite the difficulties that public institutions faced in acquiring the land, especially when divided into different parcels, Moses advocated for the use of eminent domain. In the following abstract Moses explains why it is needed and what kind of constraints the public administrations had to face when a development plan was designed. “Everything possible should be done to encourage semi-public housing12 and the 11 It has been explained in the third chapter as the slum declaration or declaration of blighted areas had been very controversial. 12 Several options in realizing housing were possible at the time: they included totally public-

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investment of funds of fiduciaries such as insurance companies and savings banks, as well as private capital, in slum clearance. The difficulty here lies in the fact that the land is almost always too expensive and building costs too high to keep the rent down to a figure within the reach of the second and third income groups. Another difficulty lies in the impossibility of acquiring numerous parcels of land in private ownership at anything like reasonable prices. As a few lots are bought and the existence of the project becomes noised about, prices rise, speculators intervene, promoters get busy, and selfish individuals figure that they can make a killing if they only hold out. In this situation the power of eminent domain is the only salvation. Condemnation must be exercised for the private limited-dividend or redevelopment company by the city, state, or Federal government.” (Moses, 1945) During those years the preservation of historic buildings and old neighborhoods was not a priority in planning, innovation and modernization of the city was. For instance, the famous debate about the demolition of the old Pennsylvania Station would occur many years later (1961) and only after that, would the shock from the destruction of one of the historic buildings force the municipality to institute the Landmark Preservation Commission (LPC). While favoring the compact city, Moses also maintained that the increment of private mobility was inevitable. Moses was in charge of the construction and maintenance of highways, tunnels and bridges, and in fact another criticism of Moses was his embrace of the automobile as the means of transportation of the future. Commenting on the completion of several parkways in New York, Moses claims that was impossible to avoid the constant increment of cars and, therefore, he underlines the need to build new modern highways: “This is a motor age, and the motorcar spells mobility.”(1962: p. 4) On other occasions, such as in the TV interview released in 1953 to CBS, Moses reports data about highway projects and advocates the need to follow federal programs to complete the highway network (Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 1953). As is explained in the second chapter, the idea that private mobility, because of its affordability and comfort, would be the privilege means of transportation was commonly accepted. funded housing, housing cooperative (co-op), and Title I projects realized in partnership with private developers.

Watch Video #8 Longines Chronoscope Robert Moses (1953)


Moses’s ideas about mobility was indeed in line with all models and visions presented at the 1939 World’s Fair, entitled “Building the World of Tomorrow”. Those ideas became mainstream. There was consensus that the cities of the future would look like the ones shown in the video screened at the Fair – “To New Horizons “ (1940), produced by General Motors for the “Futurama” exhibition- and that the progress and improvement of city life would be the main change in American life. In this sense, Moses were not a visionary, but he generally agreed with the mainstream. If one considers the contemporary mobility policies which intend to promote public transportation, Moses’ vision could certainly be considered obsolete. The echoes of this aspect of Moses’s work are not lost in more recent times: in 2007, Michael Sorkin – great expert on New York City, author of famous books such as “All Over the Map: Writing on Buildings and Cities” (Sorkin, 2011) and “Twenty minutes in Manhattan” (Sorkin, 2013) – claims that: “His very success was formative in creating the culture in which the automobile was seen as the irresistible alpha in the traffic hierarchy and in which public transportation was invisible. To the degree that he held a theory of the city, it was thoroughly Modernist in its priorities, and -- like Corbusier and CIAM -- Moses saw cities primarily as a conductive medium for speedy circulation.” (Sorkin, 2007: p. 57) Despite the commonly held opinion that Moses was in favor of functionalism, in the article published in the New York Times in June 1944 entitled “Mr. Moses Dissects the ‘LongHaired Planners’. The Park Commissioner prefers common sense to their revolutionary theories”, he hurls abuse at Gropius and claims: “If this strikes you as pretty strong stuff, have a look at another distinguished foreign figure in our midst. Walter Gropius. In his biography in “Who’s Who” Professor Gropius describes himself as born in Berlin, founder of the Bauhaus School at Architecture, which he moved from Weimar to Dessau in Germany and thence to Harvard and Chicago Universities. The Bauhaus School is known for functionalism, abstract art and other brilliant and revolutionary ideas. Intelligent Americans are just beginning to realize that Gropius is hurting our architecture by advocating a philosophy which doesn’t belong here and fundamentally offers nothing more novel than the lally column and the two-by-four timber.” (Moses, 1944) In the same article, Moses follows with his criticism of Eric Mendelsohn, city congestion, and its solutions. Mendelsohn, the designer of the popular Einstein Tower in Potsdam and whose influence

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during his time was often underlined (Benevolo, 1966: p. 456), suggests that the master plan of motor traffic town should by-pass the city area, or run as part of an independent speed network from end-stations and flying fields, underground to the focal points of industries and main complexes, in order to solve traffic congestion. Moses defines this proposal a “cute trick” (Moses, 1944). Also if Moses’s renewal projects were certainly influences, both in architectural and urban design by the modernist model of the tower in the park, it is debatable that Moses saw the city only in terms of circulation and transportation: in this section it has been demonstrated that Moses had a citywide vision that included several elements and issues. He had both a city- and region-oriented vision of New York, which included transportation, but also parks and recreation, housing, public facilities and natural environments.

A Last Word This work demonstrated that Robert Moses is a towering figure in American planning and his works covered almost every sector of city planning, that charismatic public official’s signs can be found in every borough of New York, the city par excellence. His long career crossed different phases and he experienced elating successes and searing failures and, despite that, Moses never lost confidence that city lives can be improved thanks to professional planners’ work and that this challenge is a responsibility that public authorities cannot delegate. It has been proved that his legacy does not lie only in the facilities or infrastructures that he realized, but also in his experience as a planner, related to his historic and socio-political context. Still today his experience as a planner is very controversial and perhaps there will never be a last word because other elements on his work can be studied and more perspectives can be provided. Despite limits and controversial aspects of his works for the City of New York, his figure will continue to be debated: on the one hand Moses fascinate generations of city planners for his wide work and on the other hand his legacy alarm for the risks that come with such a great power. To the planner of today, Moses’s experience leaves important elements to be considered in the profession: but not because of his power and methods, but because in his ability to performer the best from his team and himself, in his forecasting mindset in seeing opportunities in times of economic and social crisis, but mostly because of his confidence in public interventions in city.

REFERENCES

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Index of Images

1 | Times Square theaters by day, in New York City. The Times Building, Loew’s Theatre, Hotel Astor, Gaiety Theatre and other landmarks are featured in this January, 1938 / NYC Municipal Archives 2 | A view down an alley, as rows and rows of laundry hang from tenements ca. 1935-1941. Seen looking west from 70 Columbus Avenue or Amsterdam Avenue at 63nd Street. / NYC Municipal Archive 3 | Hooverville in Central Park, New York City (1932) 4 | A Subway Road Comes up for air in Brooklyn — in background, a view of Manhattan from subway elevated tracks, 8th Street, Brooklyn, New York, on March 21, 1938 / NYC Municipal Archives 5 | Ninth Avenue El trains with passengers on 2 levels of tracks, 66th Street El station in background, in October of 1933. Photo taken on Columbus Avenue, northwest of Lincoln Square & 65th Street. / NYC Municipal Archives 6 | The corner of Avenue A (left) and East 3rd Street on February 11, 1935 / New York City Housing Authority 7 | Towing USS Lafayette with view of Hudson River piers, 1945 8 | U.S. Navy Official Photograph. Minerva Matzkowitz has already taken her place at an engraving machine in the Brooklyn Navy Yard Ordnance Machine Shop, 1944. New-York Historical Society 9 | Brooklu Navy Yard / U.S. Navy via the New-York Historical Society 10 | Committee for the Armed Forces of the Welfare Council of New York City. Welcome to New York! USO information center / NewYork Historical Society 11 | Black Population - Census 1940 - Census 1970 Source Social Explorer.png 12 | Unemployment rate - Census 1940 - Source Socialexplorer 13 | Eighty Years of American City Planning Collage by Scott Wise From Peter Hall 1989.png 14 | Riis, Jacob. Interior. Poor men in his residence Bayard Street, New York 15 | Riis, Jacob A typical tenement, ca.1890. (Jacob A. Riis, Museum of the City of New York) 16 | Urban Growth (Park et al., 1925) 17 | Urban Areas (Park et al., 1925) 18 | Key Plan for Regional Highway Routes (Adams, 1929) 19 | Areal View of the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair 20 | Opening Cerimony of the 1939-40 New York Wolrd Fair 21 | An overhead view of the expansive fairgrounds in June of 1940 /© sfcoua 2015

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Index of Images

22 | General night view of the World’s Fair, New York City, September 15, 1939 /© sfcoua 2015 23 | Designer Norman Bel Geddes (right) looks over an exhibit model. 24 | Bel Geddes included 500,000 buildings and high-rises “as they may be in the future. 25 | Up to 28,000 people a day took the 15-minute “carry-go-round” Futurama “sound and scene” ride. 26 | More than 550 sound-chairs of Futurama moved on a Westinghouse conveyor system traveling at approximately 102 feet per minute 27 | In this iconic Fair image, workmen stand amid the buildings of Futurama. 28 | Futurama, the model city of 1960, designed by Norman Bel Geddes for the General Motors Exhibit at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 29 | Mr. Moses, a man of many parts and many projects, in action on same crucial fronts by Carl Rose (Moses, 1959) 30 | Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village 31 | Map showing proposed parkway connections between Bonx River Parkway ans Bear Mountain Park (Committee on State Park Plan, 1922) 32 | New beaches and highway system (Department of City Park New York, 1937) 33 | Jones Beach (2013) / © Alice Siragusa 34 Jones Beach (2013) / © Alice Siragusa 35 | Jones Beach (2013) / © Alice Siragusa 36 | Robert Moses being congratulated after Mayor Fiorello La Guardia after swearing him in for a second term as Triborough Bridge Authority Commissioner (1935) (The Mayor Fiorello La Guardia Collection, 1935) 37 | Triborough Bridge East 125th Street Approach. (Berenice Abbott, June 29, 1937) /@ Museum of the City of New York’s Collections 38 | Aerial view of the Triborough and Hell Gate Bridges (ca. 1936) /@ Museum of the City of New York’s Collections 39 | Roads and Bridge realized by Robert Moses (Proposed and Realized) (Columbia University, 2007) 40 | Stieglitz, C. M. (1939). [Photo] Sponsor of Battery Bridge / World Telegram & Sun. New York City Park Commissioner Robert Moses with Model of Proposed Battery Bridge 41 | Model of Proposed Battery Bridge 42 | Verrazano Bridge (2013) /©Alice Siragusa


43 | The United Natiosn Headquarters ©Alice Siragusa (2013) 44 | The United Natiosn Headquarters ©Alice Siragusa (2013) 45 | Robert Moses, seated at left in 1959, used his position as head of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance to mass-produce thousands of units of public housing, often near the shoreline. (Mahler, 2012) 46 | Title I Redevelopment Project and Adjacent NYCHA Projects Realized By Robert Moses 47 | Lincoln Center for Performing Art (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 48 | Lincoln Center for Performing Art_2 (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 49 | Lincoln Center for Performing Art_3 (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 50 | Aereal view of New York World’s 1964 (Department of City Park New York, 1964 pp. 55–56).png 51 | The Unisphere, the 12-story stainless-steel globe at the heart of the 1964 World’s Fair, and its symbol around the world. /© sf.co.ua 2015 52 | The Unisphere (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 53 | The New York State Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair (1964) /© sf.co.ua 2015 54 | The New York State Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 55 | One of the Brass Rail lunch bars at the World’s Fair gives the appearance of a mass of balloons tied together on August 11, 1964. The towers at right are observation platforms, part of the New York State pavilion. /© sf.co.ua 2015 56 | Observation platforms, part of the New York State pavilion. (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 57 | The city of the future, featuring automated roadways, landing ports for aircraft that can take off and land vertically, and 35-story parking garages, part of GM’s Futurama II exhibit at the World’s Fair. /© sf.co.ua 2015 58 | View of the city of the future, where new and old architecture live side-by-side, part of GM’s Futurama II exhibit at the World’s Fair. /© sf.co.ua 2015 59 | The Astoria Pool in Queens in 1936/©Parks Department Photo Archive 2 60 | Playgrounds, swimming pools, golf courts, beaches, and parkways (1934-1958) (Department of City Park New York, 1958 pp. 3–4) 61 | Works Pays America, WPA (1936) 62 | Learn to swim campaign Classes for all ages forming in all pools / / Wagner (http//www. loc.gov/pictures/item/98516763/) 63 | Predominant Nationalities in Areas with 30% or more foreing born or negro population - Manhattan - 1920 and 1930 (Mayor’s Committee on City Planning, 1936 p. 19)

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64 | Population Density based on analysis of real property invertory (Mayor’s Committee on City Planning, 1936 p. 16) 65 | The Harlems (Federal Writers’ Project (N.Y.), 1939 p. 255) 66 | Selected Recreational Facilities, Green Spaces, Proposed and Built Pools by Robert Moses (Columbia University, 2007) 67 | Map prepared by Department of Parks – New York City, containing provision of swimming and bathing facilities, attached (Moses, 1934) 68 | Location the WPA’s Swimming Pools inaugurated in 1936 / ©Alice Siragusa.ai 69 | The Red Hook Pool in Brooklyn in 1940/©Parks Department Photo Archive 70 | Betsy Head Pool (2013) / ©Alice Siragusa 71 | Betsy Head Pool (1940) /©Parks Department Photo Archive 72 | Betsy Head Pool (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 73 | Betsy Head Pool. Women’s Lockrooms Entrance (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 74 | Hamilton Fish Pool (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 75 | Hamilton Fish Pool (2013) 2 /©Alice Siragusa 76 | Hamilton Fish Pool (2013) 3 /©Alice Siragusa 77 | Hamilton Fish Pool / @New York Times (The New York Times, 1936a) 78 | The Astoria Pool in Queens in 1936/©Parks Department Photo Archive 79 | Swimmers on the starting block at an Astoria Pool swim meet, (August 17, 1943) /©Parks Department Photo Archive 80 | Changing room, around 1940’s, at the Astoria Pool in Queens. /©Parks Department Photo Archive 81 | A swimming contest at Astoria Pool Astoria Park Queens August 20 1936/@ Parks Photo Archive, Neg. 15492.3 82 | Thomas Jefferson Pool (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 83 | Thomas Jefferson Pool (2013) 2 /©Alice Siragusa 84 | Outside the Thomas Jefferson Pool, around 1940, in East Harlem (now free, adults previously paid 20 cents to get in) /©Parks Department Photo Archive 85 | Thomas Jefferson Pool (1936) /©Parks Department Photo Archive 86 | Sunset Pool – Main Building (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 87 | Sunset Pool – Main Entrance (2013) /©Alice Siragusa


88 | Sunset Pool – Detail of the Main Entrance (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 89 | The Sunset Pool in Brooklyn on opening day in 1936/©Parks Department Photo Archive 90 | McCarren Pool. Main entrance(2013) /©Alice Siragus 91 | McCarren Pool (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 92 | The McCarren Pool (no longer in use for swimming) under construction in Brooklyn in 1936 /©Parks Department Photo Archive 93 | Bathers in 1937 at the Colonial Park, now the Jackie Robinson Pool, in Harlem /©Parks Department Photo Archive 94 | Jackie Robinson Pool (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 95 | Jackie Robinson Pool (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 96 | Orchard Beach Transformation 97 | Opening Day, Orchard Beach. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses preside at the beach’s grand opening, July 25, 1936 /© NYC Parks Photo Archive 98 | Orchard Beach, Bronx (1939) /© NYC Parks Photo Archive Neg. 16024 99 | Orchard Beach Pavilion in 1937/© NYC Parks Photo Archive 100 | Orchard Beach (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 101 | Orchard Beach (2013) /©Alice Siragusa 102 | The Arterial System (Department of City Park New York, 1964 pp. 62–63) 103 | The Arterial System – Detail of Manhattan and Queens (Department of City Park New York, 1964 pp. 62–63) 104 | Robert Moses. Il Signore Segreteo di New York – Cover (Christin, Balez, 2014)

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Videos And Short Movies

Videos and Short Movies

Video #1

Triborough Bridge Opens: July 11, 1936

Producer: MTA Audio/Visual: sound, B&W Length: 03’05’’ Description: film celebrating the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority’s 30th anniversary in 1964. The full video is the property of the MTA Bridges and Tunnels special Archives and has been edited by the La Guardia and Wagner Archives.

Video #2

A Better New York City 1937 (1937)

Producer: Federal Works Agency. Work Projects Administration Audio/Visual: sound, B&W Length: 08’30’’ Description: On Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects in New York City. Shows warehouses and streets under construction in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Wharves are repaired, sewer pipe laid, and street car tracks removed. Buildings are razed along East River Drive. The New York Public Library is reroofed. Relief maps of the city are made. A stained glass window is placed in the West Point Academy dining hall. Children receive instruction in handicraft. Retarded readers receive instruction. Shows nursery school activities. National Archives Identifier: 12339. Local Identifier: 69.23

Video #3

Work Pays America (1937)

Producer: U.S. Work Projects Administration Sponsor: U.S. Work Projects Administration Audio/Visual: Sd, B&W Length: 32’06’’ Description: On Works Progress Administration (WPA) public works. A showcase of project is provided: highways and streets, airports, Buildings are razed in slum clearance projects, sewerage projects, traffic control studies, WPA nursery schools, and adult education classes. Reel 5 shows park and playground areas that have been improved by WPA projects. Includes shots of Fort Niagara, restored colonial forts, and Abraham Lincoln landmarks in Springfield, Illinois.


Video #4

We Work Again (1937)

Producer: U.S. Work Projects Administration Sponsor: U.S. Work Projects Administration Audio/Visual: Sd, B&W Length: 32’03’’ Description: On the employment of African Americans in Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects. Reel 1: Contrasts scenes of African American workers waiting in breadlines with those employed in Federal work programs such as public building construction, nursery schools and land record indexing. Shows household and health care training programs and general adult education classes. Reel 2: Shows programs available for African American artists, musicians, writers and actors. William Lawrence directs an art song group, Juanita Hall leads a spiritual choir and the Negro Theater Unit of the Federal Theater Project presents a scene from Macbeth.

Video #5

The City (1939)

Producer: American Documentary Films, Inc. Sponsor: American Institute of Planners, through Civic Films, Inc. Audio/Visual: Sd, B&W Length: 32’06’’ Description: the American Institute of Planning produced the movie for the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. Lewis Mumford wrote commentary. A plea for community planning, which contrasts the awesome conditions of human living in a modern industrial city with (1) the serenity of life in an eighteenth-century New England village and (2) the architect’s and engineer’s concept of the model community, as typified by the federal government’s resettlement experiment at Greenbelt, Maryland, and the privately developed one at Radburn, New Jersey.

Video #6

To New Horizons (1940)

Producer: Handy (Jam) Organization Sponsor: General Motors Corporation, Department of Public Relations Audio/Visual: Sd, C Length: 23’01’’ Description: Definitive document of pre-World War II futuristic utopian thinking, as envisioned by General Motors. Documents the “Futurama” exhibit in GM’s “Highways and Horizons” pavilion at the World’s Fair, which looks ahead to the “Wonder World of 1960.”

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Video #7

Longines Chronoscope - Robert Moses (1953)

Producer: New York, NY Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) / Longines-Wittenauer Watch Company Audio/Visual: Sd, B&W Length: 14’40’’ Description: Frank Knight interviews Robert Moses, on highways and transport.

Video #8

For the Living (ca. 1949)

Producer: New York City, Television Production Unit Sponsor: New York City Housing Authority Audio/Visual: Sd, B&W Length: 21’10’’ Description: Improvement of living conditions in 1940s New York City through the construction of public housing.

Video #9

Give Yourself the Green Light (1954)

Producer: Handy (Jam) Organization Sponsor: General Motors Corporation, Department of Public Relations Audio/Visual: Sd, color Length: 24’14’’ Description: expresses need to modernize America’s antiquated highway system. Shows frustrated drivers (who turn into sheep), excellent street and highway driving sequences. City skylines and country scenics. Well-made corporate propaganda advocating better roads and highways; part of the lobbying process that led to the passage of the federal aidhighway act of 1956, the authorization for the interstate highway system.

Video #10

1964 New York World’s Fair Report (1965)

Producer: Campbell Films Sponsor: New York World’s Fair 1964-65, Inc. Audio/Visual: Sd, B&W Length: 24’14’’ Description: Preparation, planning and construction for the Fair, under the imperious direction of Robert Moses.


Video #11

The Unisphere: Biggest World on Earth (1964)

Producer: MPO Productions, Inc. Sponsor: U.S. Steel Co. Audio/Visual: Sd, C Length: 14’10’’ Description: Designing and building the symbol of the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

Video #12

The Case Against Lincoln Center (1968)

Producer: Newsreel Production Company: Newsreel Audio/Visual: Sd, C Length: 24’14’’ Description: On the Lincoln Center redevelopment project and the destruction of community on New York City’s Upper West Side. With many shots of Puerto Ricans and their neighborhood, seemingly with direct sound. (From Roz Payne archives) To keep the well-to-do from continuing to flee the city and depleting its tax base, city, state, and federal government, and the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Mellons finance the prestigious Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. It was built in the middle of a Puerto Rican ghetto, displacing thousands of families and a lively street culture. Upper-income families move into high-rise apartment houses and gourmandize the “humanities,” financially inaccessible and culturally irrelevant to the lives of the former residents.

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List Of Acronyms And Abbreviations

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

BRT

Brooklyn Rapit Transit

CCC

Civilian Conservation Corps

CIAM

Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne

CSWV

Committee to Save the West Village

FERA

Federal Emergency Relief Administration

GI

Government Issue, used to indicate US Army soldiers

HOLC

Home Owners Loan Corporation

IBEC

International Basic Economy Corporation

IRT

Interborough Rapid Transit

LPC

Landmark Preservation Commission

NIMBY

Not In My Back Yard

NRA

National Recovery Administration

NYCHA

New York City Housing Authority

PWA

Public Works Administration

RPAA

Regional Planning Association of America

WPA

Works Progress Administration