The Legacy of Robert Moses

Introduction

In 1914, Robert Moses stood along Riverside Drive on the west side of Manhattan looking out across a barren patch of grass and mud toward the Hudson River. The barren patches bordered the freight tracks of the New York Central Railroad. There was no way to get across the tracks to the river. As he stood there pondering the landscape before him, he dreamed of a magnificent park and a highway running along side the river, rather than railroad tracks. This was the beginning of Moses’ vision for highways and parks in the city.

For the next 20 years, Moses focused on building parks and roads on Long Island. At the time,  most of Long Island, particularly Suffolk County at the eastern end of the island, was in the hands of the wealthy businessmen such as J.P. Morgan and William Havermeyer, co-owner of Domino Sugar, who had large estates there. Other parts of Long Island were in the hands of land trusts set up for oyster fishing in small towns that dotted the shoreline. He discovered land owned by the city on Long Island preserved as water source

Moses had a home in Babylon, NY and spent much of the summers there exploring various parts of the island. He was also an avid swimmer. The more he went for long walks around the bays, the more opportunity he saw for developing state parks and beaches. To get to the parks, he would also need to build roads. At the time, there were few good roads on Long Island.

In the early 1920’s he began filling in the bays and building up a series of barrier islands along the southern shore of Long Island, which would eventually become Jones Beach State Park. Jones Beach is to this day one of the most well known and visited beaches in the New York City Metropolitan area. It first opened in August, 1929 and in the first full year of operation in 1930, 1.5 million people visited the park. Today, the park averages 5 to 6 million visitors per year.

He went on to build several other state parks on Long Island: Heckschler, Sunken Meadows, Orient Point, Montauk Point, Hither Hills, Wildwood, Bethpage, Massapequa, Belmont Lake, Captree, Hempstead Lake, Valley Stream, and Connetoquo.

In conjunction with building the state parks, he built the Wantagh Parkway, the Meadowbrook Parkway, the Southern State Parkway, the Northern State Parkway, and the Sagtikos Parkway. The Wantagh and Meadowbrook Parkways were built specifically to get motorists to Jones Beach. And, to get traffic quickly from New York City to his new parks and beaches he built the Grand Central Parkway, Belt Parkway, Laurelton Parkway, Interborough Parkway, Cross-Island Parkway, and the Long Island Expressway.

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia named Moses as New York City Parks Commissioner in 1934. At the same time, Moses also requested to be named Chairman of the Triborough Bridge Authority, which had been formed a few years ago to build a new bridge connecting Manhattan and Queens. LaGuardia obliged, primarily because Moses already had preliminary drawings already made up for parks and roads. Moses set to work right away.

Robert Caro writes in The Power Broker that, “In 1934, half of all engineers and six out of seven architects were looking for work. Moses sent out telegrams to engineers and architects across New York State. On January 28, 1934 a line of men waiting for an opportunity to work stretched along Fifth Avenue from the Arsenal, at the 64th Street entrance to Central Park, to 72nd Street. Moses needed blueprints completed immediately and hired 600 of those waiting.” Under the public works act, Moses was able to hire thousands of laborers to work on the projects.

By the beginning of May, 1,700 of the 1,800 renovation projects had been completed. In addition to renovating existing parks, he was constantly searching for places to build new parks by scouring city real estate deeds for abandoned lots or discontinued building projects and by simply walking around the city as he had done years before on Long Island.

In 1934, there were 119 playgrounds in the city. By 1960, there were 777. Robert Moses resigned as NYC Parks Commissioner in 1968, but his legacy of park development lives on. Today, the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation manages more than 1,700 parks, playgrounds, and recreational facilities. And, just as Moses did, the parks department is consistently building new parks in available lots across the city. The parks offer a welcome respite from life in the city.

With many of the parks on Long Island built, Moses needed a quicker way for people to get there by car. By the time he became chairman of the Triborough Bridge Authority in 1934, there were 804,260 cars registered in New York City, up from 273,435 in 1924. The Queensboro Bridge had opened in 1909 providing the first vehicular between Manhattan and Queens. But, the only access to the bridge was from local roads. The Southern State and Northern State Parkways were already built, but drivers still had to navigate local roads through Queens to get to the new limited access roads.

The Triborough Bridge, now the RFK Bridge, opened in 1936 along with the first section of the FDR drive from 125th Street to 96th Street. The Triborough Bridge is a series of three bridges connecting Manhattan, The Bronx, and Queens. The Manhattan span is a lift bridge over the Harlem River that separates Manhattan from The Bronx. The Bronx span is a fixed bridge over a small body of water called the Bronx Kill that flows between the East River and Harlem River, separating The Bronx from Randalls Island. These two spans converge on Randalls Island before connecting to the main span across the East River.

Toll revenues from the bridge, access to bank bonds, and federal money spurred the construction of bridges, roads, buildings, and parks for the next 30 years under the jurisdiction of the Triborough Bridge Authority. The Triborough Bridge Authority was renamed the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority when Moses lobbied in 1946 for control of the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, now the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel, and oversight of the already built Queens Midtown Tunnel. The company now operates under the business name of MTA Bridges and Tunnels from the same company headquarters, now called the Robert Moses Building, that Moses built under the Triborough Bridge on Randalls Island.

There is a total of 899 miles of roads and expressways that lead into and around New York City, Moses built 627 of them. Today, MTA Bridges and Tunnels oversees seven bridges and two tunnels. Moses built six of the bridges and one of the tunnels.

Despite the fact that Moses never had a driver’s license, his ideas for getting people around the city centered solely on the automobile. He had no interest in developing public transportation; he could enjoy the comfort of travel by car from the back seat of his black chauffeured limousine. Under Moses, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority was an empire that he controlled with an iron fist and in the utmost secrecy. He shared plans with only his most trusted advisers and few people could challenge him. He had little regard for the people who were displaced, the neighborhoods and environments that were destroyed by his construction projects.