John Delach

I look over at my copy of The Power Broker that I recently placed on top of a file cabinet in my office. A bit of bragging, my hard cover copy is a First Edition. Whenever I gaze at it, the first thing that strikes me is its bulk. The damn thing has over 1100 pages of text, 83 pages of notes and an index of XXXIV pages.

This piece you are reading has a type size of 12. The type size in my copy of Caro’s book must a eight at max. If I had bought that book today, I wouldn’t attempt to read it with that small a type size. As it was, when published in 1974, the print size combined with the sheer density of the content limited the amount of information I could absorb at any one sitting. Truth be known, it took me three years to finish Mr. Caro’s monumental study of Robert Moses, (RM.)

Curiously, it turns out that I am not alone. The New York Historical Society is celebrating the 50^th Anniversary of its publication with an extensive exhibit of RM, his power, glory, downfall  and his legacy, or as Caro put it, “the good the bad and the evil.” In an effort to insert a bit of humor into this serious exhibit, their gift shop is selling coffee cups that read: “I Finished The Power Broker.”

“Caro usually dislikes cracks about the book’s length.

‘Did you see this?’ he asked, holding up his coffee.’

 ‘I’m not supposed to say this’ he said, ‘but I kind of like it.”

In the mid-1950s, my mother began taking me on weekend trips from Ridgewood, Queens to Hempstead, Long Island where her best friend, Helen McBride, and her husband, Richard had re-settled. The McBride’s were the first couple we knew who abandoned Ridgewood for Long Island. Many would follow over the years.

But I digress; my first encounter with RM and his mandate came during a weekend visit to the McBride’s house in the late 1950s. Back then, they lived on Alabama Ave. close to the Southern State Parkway. I went for a walk with my mother and Aunt Helen. Helen steered us toward the parkway to point out the earth movers expanding the roadway from four to six lanes.

Proudly, Aunt Helen pointed out the new construction to Mom and noted, “Isn’t this amazing. Moses promised that the Southern State would one day, be six lanes wide and now that construction is underway.”

I was stunned, shocked and confused. “How is it possible that Moses is expanding highways on Long Island. Good grief, is this the same guy who  parted the Red Sea a very long time ago? But,  Aunt Helen was always right. Still, still, how is that possible?”

Eventually, I figured it out. I took to RM like he was my hero once I came to understand all of his accomplishments, especially those in New York City and Long Island.

But I did get a shocking glimpse of the harm that RM’s philosophy did to those unfortunate people who happened to live in the path of one of his projects. Like the Army Corp. of Engineering, RM believed in building a road in a straight line from points A to B regardless of what was in his way. The only exception was if the powers to be in that path had more clout than RM. He spoke about this in a documentary that aired on TV in the early 1960s.

He spoke of the Triborough Bridge’s Manhattan exit. “If the bridge had been built in a straight line across the East River from Astoria, Queens, it would have reached Manhattan at 86^th Street. That would have disrupted the heart of the Upper East Side and that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, he picked it’s landing at 125^th Street, where he could force through an exit into Harlem.

It was about 1955 when I saw what RM could do to a neighborhood. His target was Maspeth, Queens that wound up directly in the path of the new Midtown Tunnel Expressway that ran from Long Island City to Queens Boulevard and joined Horace Harding Boulevard in Elmhurst. The path cut through Maspeth on a diagonal and devastated blocks and blocks of semi-attached single-family homes. Hundreds of families were summarily evicted and were forced to move to other destinations while their former homes were destroyed.

I do remember walking with my mother through this devastation on my way to my cousin’s home and thinking what a terrible thing this was to see. However, I still believed that it was a necessary sacrifice to progress. I was young and naive.

Also, RM was at his apex of engineering the construction of New York’s transportation network. He extended the Long Island Expressway (LIE) to it’s intended destination, Riverhead, LI. He built the Throgs Necks Bridge across Long Island Sound and, his crowning glory, the Verrazano Bridge across the Narrows from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn to Staten Island framing the entrance to New York Harbor by this magnificent crossing.

In the early 1960s he managed the construction of Shea Stadium, the new home for the Mets and the Jets and was appointed as the tsar for the 1964-1965 New York Worlds Fair to be held in Flushing Meadows Park.

Meanwhile, opposition grew against the now older RM. John Lindsay the new mayor moved against Moses, Lindsay was instrumental in deleting plans for the Mid-Manhattan Expressway and the Lower Manhattan Expressway. The mayor also drove the plans for a new super transportation agency. The Metropolitan Transportation Agency (MTA) that would swallow RM’s personal gem, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, (TBTA).

Moses still had Governor Nelson Rockefeller on his side in support of his last big project, the Oyster Bay Long Island to Rye, New Rochell Long Island Sound crossing. But in the end, Rocky gave in to the intense opposition to this project and abandoned Moses.

RM was done. He couldn’t understand why. Instead, he asked, “Why weren’t they grateful?”