Robert Moses – Against Mass Transit
Did you ever wonder how the mass transit situation in New York got so fouled up? A lot of the answer is from an unusual man named Robert Moses.
An in-depth look at this man can be found in a book called “The Power Broker” by Robert A. Caro. Robert Moses (sometimes referred to as “RM”) was born in 1888. His parents were well-to-do merchants. Although he was born in New Haven, his family was from New York City and moved back when he was a youngster. Moses graduated from Yale in 1909. An example of his arrogance involved the swimming team. A consistent benefactor of this team was Ogden Mills Reid. As a matter of fact, he paid almost all of the expenses of this team as Yale was then concentrating its funding on such projects as the Yale Bowl. Moses had organized a “minor sports association” in which each minor sport at Yale would share equally in donations. Moses approached Reid and got a contribution but didn’t tell him it was for all minor sports and not just swimming. When challenged by the team captain for deliberately misleading Reid, Moses offered his resignation the first of many times in his life. This time it was accepted. Other times it was refused by many mayors and governors. The next time his resignation was accepted was by Nelson Rockefeller almost sixty years later!
It can be argued that Robert Moses shaped New York in its present form. He built every major highway except the East River Drive, all seven bridges completed since 1931, Shea Stadium, Lincoln Center and the now-empty New York Coliseum. In addition, he cleared the obstacles to acquiring the United Nations land and built huge numbers of public and private housing units (Coop City for example). But he didn’t do much for mass transit.
Between 1924 and 1968 he held immense power. The base for this power was a public corporation named the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. In addition, he held several other titles such as New York Power Authority Chairman; New York State Parks Commission Chairman; New York City Construction Coordinator; New York City Planning Commission Chairman.
He controlled his empire from an unobtrusive building on Randall’s Island below the Triborough toll plaza. As a matter of fact, his authority administered all of Randall’s Island. The TBTA had its own flag; fleet of cars, trucks and boats; and private army of “Bridge and Tunnel Officers”. It had its own source of revenue in the coins dropped into toll booths.
Moses had a secret veto on all public works projects in New York City and had more power than the mayor. He kept secret files which he used to discredit his opponents.
He was the long-time New York City Parks Commissioner. When he took the job there were 119 playgrounds in the city. When he left there were 777. Outside of the city, he built power dams at Massena and Niagara Falls as well as many parks and parkways on Long Island. Since he built both Jones Beach and all roads leading to it, that explains why there is no mass transit to it.
In the 1930’s the Regional Plan Association proposed improved mass transit. Robert Moses didn’t listen to them; instead he built 100 miles of new parkways which filled up as soon as they were opened. RM was responsible for the West Side Improvements and wanted “the great highway that went uptown along the water”. He completed a long-stalled 5-mile elevated expressway from the southern tip of Manhattan to 72nd Street. He also built 6 1/2 miles north to the tip of the island. He then built a park on the river and the Henry Hudson Bridge.
The West Side project involved moving the New York Central Railroad. Details of this were set up in a 1927 agreement between the railroad and the city. The 30th Street and 72nd Street yards were built to replace track further downtown. Before 1929, the city had spent $25 million and the railroad $84 million. The Depression had halted all work but RM found money for the railroad by tapping the state grade crossing elimination fund.
The Bronx-Whitestone Bridge which was built in 1936 made no provision for mass transit. Earlier bridges in New York (not built by Moses) had subway lines as well as roads. Some of these are the Brooklyn, Queensboro, Manhattan and Williamsburg. Many of the parkways he built were designed with bridges too low to accommodate buses. This was very intentional as Moses wanted to make them for cars-only and to exclude trucks.
Between 1930 and 1950, rail commuters declined while highway commuters into New York increased. Every trainload of commuters shifting to automobiles required parking space about equal to the effective parking capacity of one side of Fifth Avenue from Washington Square to Sixty-eighth Street (3 miles).
The Van Wyck Expressway was built where 13 tracks of the Long Island Railroad cross Atlantic Avenue in Jamaica. While construction was underway, 1100 daily train movements (one of the busiest in the world) were maintained. One can’t help but wonder why a rail line from this point couldn’t have easily followed the parkway to Kennedy Airport. Cost to construct when the road was being built would have been reasonable – today it would be prohibitive.
You might have remembered the name Hortense Gabel from the Mayor Koch/Bess “Miss America” Myerson scandal in the late 1980’s. Hortense was by then a judge who had a flaky daughter that Bess hired in order to get a favorable divorce ruling. But years before, Hortense had been one of the most vocal opponents of Moses. She had organized groups in the 1950’s that began to pressure to limit the vast powers of Robert Moses.
There was an attempt in 1955 to use Triborough and Port Authority funds to modernize the Long Island Railroad, build a subway loop to New Jersey, build a new Queens subway and build the famous but still-born 2nd Avenue Subway. At central locations in Queens and Nassau Counties, multilevel parking garages could have been built atop commuter rail stops. There could have been a new East Side Long Island RR terminal and even a new rapid transit line along the median strip of the Long Island Expressway. The New Jersey tunnel loop would have not only given access to Manhattan where commuters really wanted to go from the Battery to Fifty-ninth Street. It would have prevented the current mess on New Jersey highways, trans-Hudson vehicular tunnels, the West Side Highway and Manhattan streets. The Nostrand Avenue Subway in Brooklyn could have been extended and the even-today bottleneck in train service between Brooklyn and Manhattan at DeKalb Avenue eliminated.
RM’s proposed highways were designed to help automobile-owning families. In 1945 two out of three residents of the city did not own automobiles. Subway fare increases hurt these people. While highways were being extended into areas of the city where they might or might not be needed, subways were not being extended to where they were vitally needed. His monopolization of public funds for highways made subway construction impossible. Even for car-owning families, no subway meant the hardship of having to drive into Manhattan – and park – and pay bridge tolls. It is also said that Moses’ transportation policies helped the poor stay trapped in their slums (“ghettoization”).
In the 1950’s, millions were spent on highways in New York City but only a fraction of that on mass transit. In 1974, New Yorkers were still riding on tracks laid between 1904 and 1933 – before Moses had come to power. Not another mile was built under Moses. Since shortly after World War I, the city had been promising to build a Second Avenue Subway to serve the East Side. Plans have sat in city engineer’s desks since 1929. The city repeated its promise when the Second Avenue El was torn down and again in 1955 when the Third Avenue El went. A Second Avenue Subway coupled to a dedicated East River tunnel could have been extended to Queens to provide subway lines to residents who were miles from the nearest station. The result was, and is, an overcrowded Lexington Avenue IRT line. Subway cars were not replaced (at one point, much of the fleet was a half century old) and a policy of “deferred maintenance” began to take its toll. Fortunately, the subway system had been well engineered and previously well maintained – but eventually it deteriorated.
The last great project Robert Moses was involved in was the 1964 World’s Fair. It was a financial disaster and, again, no gains for mass transit. In the meantime, the Long Island Expressway was built without provision for rapid transit. As each section opened, it was jammed to capacity (“The world’s largest parking lot”). For an extra 4 percent of the cost, it would have been possible to acquire the land to build a rail line.
New York City Mayor Lindsey and many others tried to throttle Moses, but only Nelson Rockefeller was successful. “Rocky” was one of the most dynamic and forceful governors New York ever had. Moses had always used financial protection of creditors as a defense against any takeover of “his” Authority. But his principal bondholder trustee was the Chase Manhattan Bank. Chase Manhattan was the only major bank still controlled by one family – the Governor’s! Rockefeller brought all the region’s transportation elements together under William Ronan and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
When “RM” came to power, New York City’s mass transit system was the best in the world. When he left, it was the worst.
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NOW Read Penney’s Blog
DO SUBWAY PROBLEMS GO BACK TO ROBERT MOSES?
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Tough Criticism of Moses
I don’t think Robert Moses was involved in any mass transit projects. He strictly built vehicular facilities such as highways, bridges, tunnels, and large state parks that could only be reached by car. He was part of and catered to the more affluent population believing that mass transit was for the unwashed masses, so to speak. In fact he often bulldozed poor and/or working class neighborhoods to clear land for his highways. Note that none of his roads were built with room for a rail line down the middle, like has been done in some other parts of the country.
The man was an absolute megalomaniac. He not only bulldozed poor neighborhoods, he also bulldozed anyone with differing ideas or anyone who got in his way. The Northern State Parkway takes a 90-degree detour to the south after passing Roslyn Road, and then curves another 90 degrees back toward the east around Jericho Turnpike, where the Meadowbrook comes in. Why? To avoid one of his golfing buddies’ estates. But he pushed the road straight through family farms, leaving farmers almost no way to get from the northern part of their property to the southern part. It was he who pioneered the idea of independent “Authorities” like the TBTA, which raised their money through bond issues, and whose board members were not elected, and so were not beholden to the taxpayers and could do pretty much what they pleased. He only got his commuppance when he tried to promote a plan to build an east-west expressway on Fire Island (!), part of a projected highway from the Verrazano Bridge to Montauk. There were enough moneyed interests on Fire Island with top political connections to put a stop to him. (Editor: it took the Rockefeller family to get rid of him!)
Say what you will about the man, it is difficult to go anywhere around the NYC metropolitan area today without encountering the effects of his vision (right or wrong) of what a 20th century urban/suburban environment should look like. He also laid out the parking areas and roadways on the beaches to be unfriendly to buses and those without cars, to keep the “coloreds” away.
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The Driver’s waiting for a fare–notice the “availability” of the cab, by the white lite-lit Medallion on the cab roof!
Is Mass Transit available to you!!!
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Robert Moses in Retrospect
The Museum of the City of New York has an exhibit on Robert Moses and what he did for the city. Although it didn’t directly discuss rail, he had an impact.
I recommend the exhibit to any rail history or modeling buffs in the area. It shows many of the scale model’s he used to propose their projects, including a very large one for a midtown expressway which was never built. It shows all the rail on the far west side during the mid 20th century.
Many feel the only effect Robert Moses had on railroads was stifling them, along with all modes of mass transit.
He is the sole person responsible for the traffic hell that the NYC metro area has become since the majority of highways, parkways, and water crossings in the NYC metro area were built by him. He never drove a day in his life yet all his road/bridge projects were built to accomodate private cars, not mass transit. Mass transit was for the poor and his public works projects were not for the poor but for those who owned automobiles.
He was a genius…..but as he acquired power he became more removed from the reality of what NYC was becoming.
Robert Moses and the Modern City: Remaking the Metropolis focuses on the extensive physical transformation of New York City guided by Robert Moses from 1934 to 1968. Believing that “the city must be saved,” Moses built a network of roads and bridges, including the Triborough Bridge, to bring people to the city, initiated attractions such as Lincoln Center, and revitalized city parks, including Central Park. At the same time, his projects disrupted neighborhoods and increased the city’s dependence on the automobile. The exhibition explores the controversial vision of this important force in planning and development and considers his legacy in the context of the urban issues of his time. Documents, photographs, publicity brochures, and never before exhibited three dimensional models of Moses’ projects – both realized and failed – trace the complicated history of this complicated figure.
Robert Moses was a double-edged sword. He built a lot of great things and destroyed a lot of great things at the same time.
Moses was one of the contributing factors to the rapid decline of commuter rail in the New York City metropolitan area in the 1950’s and 1960s. Just when state governments were starting to warm up to the idea of subsidies, Moses would use his power to block funding of any type to the railroads. To understand his attitude towards commuter rail, his mantra was more or less, “The public should not be providing funds to benefit private for-profit corporations.” Never mind that the private for-profit corporations were providing a necessary service. There would be no direct subsidy until he was out of power.
When Moses was removed from power by Rockefeller, they made Moses chairman of the World’s Fair committee, a position that would make him look bad if he turned it down. Since you can’t be chairman of more than one committee at a time, he lost his powerful position, and his voice. By 1968 he was a “consultant” to the MTA, and he passed away in 1981.
Let’s look at what happened immediately AFTER Moses was gone.
1965 – Governor Rockefeller proposes to purchase the LIRR from the PRR. Some commuter rail equipment purchases are funded for NYC lines out of Grand Central.
1966 – The Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Authority purchases the LIRR from PRR.
1968 – Five transit authorities are created across New York State, MCTA becomes MTA.
1970 – MTA contracts with Penn Central to subsidize Harlem and Hudson Line operations out of Grand Central.
1971- New equipment arrives on LIRR and PC lines… and so on and so on…
Was Moses the catalyst of all evil directed towards the railroads? The jury is still out, but he was certainly a major factor.
In reading about Moses, you see that Moses was a creature of his particular time, and that in that time, the things he did were fashionable politically and popular with the public. At the time, for example, everybody wanted expressways — these were the answer to all congestion problems — and few people seemed to realize the problems they would generate. The Moses projects were the projects that the politicians wanted to spend money on, so he was successful in getting it. The dreary housing projects he built later in his career are examples of the same thing.
Moses has to be judged by the standards and fashions of his time, and not in hindsight. He was no more or less foresighted than most others then.
It would be interesting to speculate what a young Moses would be doing now, with mass transit in fashion and lots of public money available.
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Who brought Robert Moses down?
It was Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York State
He also formed the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and saved the Long Island Railroad
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Penney Vanderbilt and KC Jones: All About Railroads 
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