New York City and the Legend of Robert Moses

New York City and the Legend of Robert Moses June Williamson Three astonishing exhibitions documenting the work of the mid- twentieth-century uber -public planner/builder Robert Moses stirred the imagination of New Yorkers this year. The shows, revisiting the career of a figure who has been largely demonized since his death in 1981, were curated by the Columbia Uni- versity architectural historian Hilary Ballon. “Remaking the Metropolis,” at the Museum of the City of New York, examined Moses’s big-picture schemes for restructuring the metro- politan region. “The Road to Recre- ation,” at the Queens Museum of Art, focused on the prodigious building of beaches, pools, playgrounds and parkways under his direction. And “Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution,” at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, examined his impact on federal Title I urban rede- velopment spending in the city. 1 With a built legacy of immense scope and reach as the result of thirty- four years in city government, from 1934, when he was appointed New York City Parks Commissioner, until 1968, when he was forced out of the chairmanship of the Tribor- ough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, an entity he created, Moses was (and remains) a riveting, controversial figure for New Yorkers. 2 The shows captured this legacy through archival photographs, documents, and majes- tic contemporary photographs by Andrew Moore. But the comprehen- siveness of the exhibitions also caused the red flag of revisionism to be raised, especially with regard to the accepted view of Moses as insensitive, tyran- nical, and corrupted by power, best expressed in Robert Caro’s exhaustive 1974 biography The Power Broker. 3 A plethora of prominent critics have already weighed in on this ques- tion. Arguing that the exhibitions breathed fresh air into a tired subject, the New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff called the shows “required viewing.” Michael Sorkin presented a “brief for the dark side” in Architectural Record, emphasizing the cautionary lessons of Moses’s history—a view seconded in the Wall Street Journal by Ada Louise Huxtable, who asserted that Moses “is not the man to emulate.” Meanwhile, Governing thanked the revisionists for returning “the concept of public authority to the center of the urban policy debate.” In the New York Times, Phillip Lopate stressed Moses’s “vision of sustaining New York as a middle-class city,” to which he in part attributes New York’s astonishing revival in recent decades. And The New Yorker’s Paul Goldberger took a middle road, concluding (apropos of the stark contrast between the legacies of Moses and Jane Jacobs) that “there is a price to pay for thinking small, just as there is for thinking big.” 4 Lost in the hoopla over whether the shows repudiate some of Caro’s damning claims of Moses’s racism and contempt for public process, however, are astonishing insights. • A new appreciation for the scope and grandeur of the public works projects of the 1930s. Among these were ten massive new public pools, built mostly on existing park property, accommodating thousands, which opened to great fanfare— one per week—in the sweltering summer of 1936. • Diagrammatic maps and a com- pelling description of Moses’s commitment to mixed-income housing (if not mixed-race) in the implementation of Title I-funded slum clearance in the 1950s. • A rich narration of the battle over Washington Square Park from 1952 to 1958, which radi- calized a “bunch of mothers” and resulted not only in blocking construction of a road through the park but also the birth of a countervailing movement that largely discredited the powerful forces of centralized, large-scale urban redevelopment. • A reminder of citizens’ horror over the extent of planned demolition in the old industrial districts of Greenwich Village, SoHo, and TriBeCa (comple- mented by irony, in light of the insanely high property values in these areas today). • Envy for a time when Moses was able to pull strings to ensure that New York City got far more than its fair share of federal money. In 1935 and 1936 he secured one-seventh of all Works Progress Administra- tion funding dispersed nation- wide. And in the 1950s New York received twice the Title I funding allocated to Chicago, its closest competitor. Clearly, these exhibitions struck a nerve with the general public. Atten- dance at all three was phenomenal, far exceeding the organizers’ expecta- tions. New Yorkers seemed genuinely moved by the opportunity to evalu- ate Moses’s controversial legacy on their own terms. In the models and photographs depicting his visions for a modern city, we could discern the origins of much of our individual, contemporary experience of New York: our patterns of daily existence, the routes we use to move from place to place, the recreational facilities our children enjoy. We could reflect on the old neighborhoods and places that Williamson / New York City and the Legend of Robert Moses