Talk of the Town

I am what one might call a child of Robert Moses. While ‘the Power Broker’ (as Moses was christened by Robert Caro in his 1974 doorstop biography of the same name) completed some of his most ambitious projects in the 1940s and ’50s, my 1970s and ’80s were dominated by the fruits of his massive revisioning of New York City and its environs. There were the swimming lessons at Jones Beach, the long drive along the Southern State Parkway, interrupted only by humid cries for ice cream and toilet breaks. Then, after a schism in the family, the Long Island Expressway between Manhattan and Nassau County became a weekly reminder of why the road came to be called the world’s longest car park. Outdoor Shakespeare at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park punctuated my teenage summers. As an adult, shuttling between a job in San Francisco and a boyfriend in Morningside Heights, the Cross-Bronx Expressway was my bleary wake-up call after the red eye into La Guardia. Moses came to dominate large portions of my – and countless New Yorkers’ – experience of New York to such an extent that it is nearly impossible to imagine a version of the city before him.

‘Robert Moses and the Modern City’ has done much to remind many of the sweeping influence Moses had on New York’s infrastructure and built environment during his 44 years working for the city. (At one point he held 12 job titles simultaneously.) He was politically savvy and parlayed his ambition into bold, large-scale public works projects. For many New Yorkers the trio of shows (at the Museum of the City of New York, the Queens Museum of Art and Columbia University’s Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery) has also prompted discussion about some of the lengthy planning deliberations the city is currently experiencing. (Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, Hudson Yards in west midtown Manhattan and the veritable impasse at Ground Zero are only the most obvious.) Thanks in no small part to the efforts of urban theorist Jane Jacobs in the 1960s, New York’s historical experience of Robert Moses’ work has led to greater community input and activism when it comes to major redevelopment projects, many of which raise the ugly spectre of one of the most reviled of Moses’ crusades – eminent domain. That experience also serves to remind a city in the throes of widespread change, an ever-rising housing market and neighbourhood ‘regeneration’ projects of the vast complications of wide-scale works, public and private, in a city as diverse and unwieldy as New York.

On the whole, the weak revisionist tone of these exhibitions doesn’t exonerate Moses from being a racist (Stuyvesant Town barred African Americans), from his vehement opposition to public transport (exemplified not only by the amount of highway he built but also by the fact that one of his greatest accomplishments, Jones Beach, on the south shore of Long Island, was marred by being inaccessible by anything but car) or from his indifference to what Jacobs called the ‘close-grained’ fabric that kept the city’s distinctive neighbourhoods intact (the Cross-Bronx Expressway sheared the vibrant East Tremont section of the Bronx right off the map). And it’s unfair to judge the man only on the tangible output of his years in power: what about the buildings he bulldozed, the thousands of people he displaced and the neighbourhoods that now exist only in novels and on historical maps?

But what about the benefits he bequeathed New York? The Queens Museum’s iteration of the exhibition (‘Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Road to Recreation’), in particular, shows that the mind responsible for measures as destructive as the reckless Title 1 slum clearance programmes and as disparate as the Stuyvesant Town houses and the 600 miles of motorway that hug New York was also responsible for a certain amount of greening of New York, beginning in his pre-‘Power Broker’ days. It’s without question, given the era and the man, that Moses’ motivation was not environmental in scope. But his almost unbounded vision of what recreation could encompass, even in the deeply urban setting of New York, and of the landscaped environment that was required as its foundation was surprisingly progressive at times: he rather arrogantly called it ‘enhancing nature’. For all the vitriol Caro delivered in the 1970s, even Moses’ harshest contemporary critics were awed by the scale of his sensitive and forward-thinking reshaping of the region’s waterfronts and the re-imagining of its parks.

Moses also viewed New York in a way that planners and residents alike have long neglected: as a water city. The improvement of the rail yards and dilapidated buildings that lined the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side was a gleam in Moses’ eye when he was still an idealistic college student intent on municipal reform. Caro writes that in 1914 Moses had already fully realized the six-mile-long project in its entirety, in his mind. From 1934 to 1937 he built Riverside Park, an ‘urban improvement on a scale so huge that it would be almost without precedent in early-20th-century America’. However, Lewis Mumford, the architecture critic of The New Yorker, writing in 1936 about a sentry line of benches in the northern reaches of the park that, strangely, faced away from the water, wondered whether New Yorkers were ‘people who like the smell of exhaust or the whizz of motorcars rather than great vistas of river and […] sky’.

It’s fitting and, of course, calculated that the portion of the exhibition devoted to parks and recreation takes place in what is essentially the ghost of a Robert Moses theme park: Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, where the museum is located in one the last remaining permanent structures Moses planned for it: the New York City Building, which also houses the Moses-commissioned, and recently restored, Panorama of New York. Moses initially envisioned a green space on the scale of Central Park for the former dump, rescued from a vast swath of landfill. But, unable to fund this vision from his own coffers, he proposed that it should become the site of the 1939 World’s Fair, which would literally lay the groundwork for the grand park he had in mind. After the World’s Fair, expansion was halted by the reallocation of funds to the war effort. In 1946 he tried to lobby for the park to become the United Nations’ headquarters but, in a rare defeat, was outnumbered by those who insisted on Manhattan (a planning project ultimately overseen by Moses in any case). Flushing Meadows once again hosted the World’s Fair in 1960, but this was followed by a long period of neglect that registered the park as one of Moses’ first realized failures. If Flushing Meadows–Corona Park’s spaces were never ‘evocative of those at Versailles’, as was the intention, today they are a vital green area for central Queens, the United States’ most ethnically diverse county, despite being within earshot of the rumble of the subway and the din of the expressway. During the summer a kind of vibrancy Moses may never have imagined permeates the park: its 1,200-plus acres brim with organized cricket and pick-up football matches, joggers and cyclists, and picnicking families – a different kind of idyll, perhaps, and one less appreciated than Moses dreamt, but an urban idyll nonetheless.

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s design for Central Park was, according to Mumford, ‘arranged primarily for the eye’, a place for nursemaids with prams and ‘middle-class poets’ taking the air. During the Depression its unruly woods and unpruned copses concealed a series of shantytowns, and it was rumoured that the sheep in Sheep Meadow were mysteriously disappearing. In 1934, under Moses’ direction, Central Park, as we know it today, was planted. With Works Progress Administration labour the park was restructured a bit to flatten some of Olmsted’s pastoral backdrop, creating a series of unexpected views in the process. More than a dozen peripheral children’s playgrounds were installed to protect his improved park from, in his words, ‘the little potential destroyers’. Twenty years later, when Tavern on the Green’s car park was to be expanded into what was an informal play area, a group of local mothers protested by forming a ring around the bulldozers, their children on their hips, halting work for two days. Early on the third morning, in one of the most legendary instances of Moses’ callousness, he had a work crew level the playground before the women arrived for another day of picketing. In the end the car park didn’t materialize, and the event marked the beginning of the whittling away of some of Moses’ authority.

Just in the last few weeks, on the far East Side of Manhattan, a small coterie of residents and parents has been fiercely trying to protect a small (and admittedly rather shabby) parcel of playground from the wrecking ball. Various developers have come and gone with visions of glass towers or luxury hotels for the site, which has been quarrelled over for many years. The latest prospector, the city of New York itself, would like to plant an office building on the riverside location. The planned tower is an attempt to corral hundreds of disparate offices of – ironically enough – the United Nations currently scattered across the city into one building on this one-acre plot … called Robert Moses Playground.