I'm about halfway through the Power Broker and I'm just realizing how much of Robert Moses' early vision (Riverside Park and parkway, Triborough Bridge, and many of the playgrounds that he judiciously meted out to everywhere except Black neighborhoods) was only doable because of federal money that was available through the WPA and other Depression-era programs.
Essentially, if there hadn't been a Depression (or within the Depression, those massive programs under FDR's administration), Moses wouldn't have been able to do a lot of what he did.
Exploiting the availability of federal money to extract money from city sources is one of Moses' manipulation methods that Caro identifies, but the federal money was real, and the projects wouldn't have happened without it.
For the Riverside Park and parkway, the total amount the project finally cost was completely hidden from view, not just from the public but from elected officials and high-ranking city staff. That was possible because of another one of Moses' techniques, which Caro calls stake-driving. It was essentially lying about the cost of a project on the extreme low side, then going back later with requests for more and more money, since the original investment couldn't be put to waste. He was exploiting the sunk cost fallacy, though I doubt he had that term for it.
Moses also was known for saying that the city's share would be a small amount relative to another source (the state's or the federal government's), only to come back to the city later for more.
Robert Moses' huge infrastructure projects like Triborough and the highways wrote the book on induced demand (which I mentioned at one point earlier), but the Riverside parkway — built in the mid-1930s — also introduced the idea of car infrastructure cutting off a city's people from its riverfront, and on using highways for overtly racist purposes:
Robert Moses had "reclaimed the city's waterfront for its people," [a newspaper] editorial said.
Not exactly.
Robert Moses had indeed built a big, beautiful Riverside Park. But the park was not on the riverside. For much of the six miles or Riverside Park, the road, not the park occupied the land nearest to the river. And that meant that the park, and the people who used it, were separated for the river by six lanes of concrete filled with rushing automobiles....
And therefore, in much of the park, its users were hardly conscious that there was any river here at all. From much of Riverside Park in fact, they could hardly see the water....
By turning six miles of wasteland into the parkway and park he had envisioned, he had added an immense asset to the city. But he had deprived the city of another asset: its waterfront.... And the loss may not be replaceable. With his usual thoroughness, Robert Moses had done the job too well. When he finished with the city's Hudson River waterfront, the waterfront was gone. And it was quite possibly gone forever.
The 5,500 benches Moses had installed in the park were said to have "fine views of the river," but instead many of them looked at a barrier wall and behind that, the tops of cars. This photo is from 1940, taken around 113th Street looking north to Riverside Church. (It comes from the history page of the Riverside Park Conservancy website.)
The part of Riverside Parkway (Henry Hudson Parkway) north of 125th Street, where Harlem begins, is even worse because there is no park adjacent. No land was reclaimed from the river west of the new highway next to Harlem, and the highway was built on an ugly elevated steel viaduct — it's not a "parkway" in any sense of the word. The New York Central railroad tracks that Moses covered south of 125th Street were not covered, either, so Harlem residents were still subject to the noises, smells, and grime of the trains that all New Yorkers nearby had formerly been subject to. He specifically excluded Black people from that positive change.
The one park that did get built along the river, west of the highway between 145th and 155th, could only be reached on foot through an unlikely and physically draining route, which Caro describes in detail. And the comfort station in the playground was decorated — unlike any other playground Moses built in the city — with wrought-iron monkeys.
This is the only photo of one of the monkeys that I could find online. It was taken by a Flickr user in 2012... The monkeys were finally removed from the park in 2023.
And all that with federal tax dollars.
No comments:
Post a Comment