Adam J Bailey
Love him or hate him, Robert Moses left a lasting impact on New York City’s built environment and politics. As Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson outlined in “Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York,” through his dozen job titles and positions (all but one unpaid), Moses envisioned, facilitated, and completed an unprecedented number of public projects that have yet to be matched. Liberal politicians such as Al Smith, Fiorello La Guardia, John P. O’Brien, and Franklin D. Roosevelt tasked Moses with carrying out important public works which were broadly popular at the time with politicians and citizens alike.
Born in 1888, Moses was an offshoot of the Progressive movement that believed good government could and should improve the lot for average people. And as Joel Schwartz explains in “The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City,” like most Progressives and Liberals, Moses often favored the opinion and preferences of capital owners and was quick to deem working class neighborhoods as blighted and in need of redevelopment. While claims of overt racism driving major decisions have been disputed by Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post and urban planning historian Kenneth Jackson (such as Robert Caro’s claim about underpasses being made to limit bus traffic to Jones Beach), there is no doubt that the political milieu in which Moses worked was one that favored white, upper-class New Yorkers. Although some of his methods and outcomes are controversial now, without Robert Moses and his legacy New York City would be much worse off today.
Here are some ways in which a New York City without Robert Moses could have spelled disaster:
River Crossings
Triborough Bridge (Robert F. Kennedy Bridge):
In 1927, the City began planning the first bridge on the East River north of 59th Street with progress forced to a crawl during the Great Depression. At Mayor O’Brien’s urging, Moses drafted the state law that was ultimately approved in Albany to create the Triborough Bridge Authority, which oversaw construction of the bridge, hired relief workers, applied for federal relief funds to finance the bridge, and issued bonds to raise remaining capital. By 1936, the bridge was completed, making it the one of largest relief projects in the country. The bridge complex serves drivers, pedestrians and cyclists, connecting Queens, The Bronx, and Manhattan with Randall’s Island Park. The approaches all include parks or playgrounds, a common strategy by Parks Commissioner Moses to get the most public good out of private land taken for the project.
Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (Hugh L. Carey Tunnel): In 1936, while working on the construction of the Midtown Tunnel, Mayor La Guardia’s New York City Tunnel Authority was studying the possibility of a tunnel from The Battery to Brooklyn. The federal Works Progress Administration could not fund the project as it could not be completed in two years. Moses and others supported constructing another bridge, but after a lengthy public skirmish in the papers between politicians and The Department of War, Moses conceded and a tunnel was agreed upon. By 1940, the Triborough Bridge authority loaned the necessary funds to the Tunnel authority. At La Guardia’s request, Moses joined the Tunnel Authority and helped guide it through the construction and refinancing of the project, which ultimately opened in 1950. Today the tunnel receives approximately 54,000 vehicles per day and serves as an important route to keep through traffic off local streets in both Brooklyn and Manhattan. Like all Metropolitan Transportation Authority-managed crossings, a portion of the tolls are devoted to funding public transit.
Recreation
Beaches: Robert Moses had a hand in creating, rehabilitating, and improving access to some of New York City’s and Long Island’s most well-loved beaches. His first beach project, Jones Beach, was met by resistance from Long Island land owners. A special commission of local officials was formed to agree on the right-of-way for the highway reaching the beach. After local constituents approved of the plan, Moses created a model beach for public use, ensuring adequate highway access for city-dwellers to get there (even by bus). He would go on to oversee construction of Jacob Riis Beach, Orchard Beach, Manhattan Beach, and Great Kills Beach, and rehabilitate and improve access to Coney Island, Brighton Beach, and Rockaway Beach.
Parks and Playgrounds: Amid the turmoil of the Great Depression, New York City took hold of federal funds for public projects and put them, and tens-of-thousands of unemployed New Yorkers, to work. In 1933, Governor Herbert Lehman appointed Moses as head of the State Emergency Public Works Commission to manage the army of 69,000 Civil Works Administration workers and 1/7th of the nation’s outlay for relief projects. He put them to work constructing and repairing parks and playgrounds of all sizes. Existing parks were transformed from their original passive use design to active uses, including ball fields, playgrounds, running tracks, pools, and more. Between 1933 to 1957, the City’s Parks system grew from 119 playgrounds to 725. Eager to combine public works to make the most of taken land, Moses wisely placed parks adjacent to schools and housing projects, sharing their maintenance with Department of Education (DOE) and the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).
Pools: The vast majority of New York City pools were either constructed or renovated using funds and labor from the WPA during Moses’s tenure as Parks Commissioner. Before Moses’s time, New Yorkers had to pay to enter private baths or the few floating barge pools in order to take a swim. Once in motion, Moses oversaw a drastic and far-reaching pool building program, including 11 new pools opening in the summer of 1936 alone. Moses went on to adapt the former public baths into Parks pools, and continued expanding the pools program, including some shared with DOE and NYCHA.
Environment
Conservation: In 1924, Moses used eminent domain to save parkland at Montauk Point from developer Carl Graham Fisher, who aimed to create a “Miami Beach of the North.” In the 1930s, Jamaica Bay in Queens was polluted with sewage and a prospective site for a new incinerator when Moses stepped in to preserve it. The creation of Marine Park helped preserve Jamaica Bay, and Moses’s collaboration with the Department of Sanitation to cap landfills abutting the bay has helped Jamaica Bay become a thriving wildlife refuge.
Waste Disposal: With ocean dumping out, much of New York City trash was burnt in incinerators and dumped in open heaps, piling into the sky and often catching fire. Parks Commissioner Moses coordinated with the Department of Sanitation to create landfills that would be capped and put to productive use as parks, including Fresh Kills Landfill, which from 1948 to 2001 diverted tens-of-thousands of tons of waste per day from incinerators or long-distance export.
Adam Bailey is an urban planner, musician, and educator. He currently works for the New York City Department of Sanitation’s Solid Waste Management Planning unit.
