Tomorrow-Land (30 page)

Things deteriorated from there. Alpert was courteous to his guests, but Leary mostly stayed upstairs, trying to recoup from his acid trip and the flu. He did make an appearance, and even talked with Cassady and Ginsberg on the bus. The Pranksters milled about the house. Some explored the ground's waterfall; others relaxed and ate a decent meal. But the Pranksters didn't dig the mystical vibe that surrounded the Millbrook crowd, preoccupied as they were with the metaphysical texts of Eastern spiritualism: the
Tao Te Ching,
the
I Ching,
and
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
. To the Pranksters, they seemed to talk another language.
What's all this nonsense about death?
Kesey and company were about
Life
and
Living
, the
Here-and-the-Now,
not what comes later. They dubbed Leary's scene “The Crypt Trip” for its gloomy outlook. Each group ultimately wanted the same thing—as Leary later said, “to weaken faith and conformity to the 1950s social order”—but each would explore their own ways of changing the culture.

As disappointed by the World's Fair and Leary as Kesey and the Pranksters were, Ginsberg, the poet of the Beat Generation, heir to the Whitmanesque tradition in American poetry, could see what was happening. He spoke both their languages: He understood the Pranksters' penchant for fun, but he was no stranger to mysticism or Eastern
philosophy. He understood what Kesey's search for a “kool place” was really about. “The real significance of Kesey's bus trip in the summer of 1964 was as a cultural signal that happened just as the nation was on the precipice of enormous awakening and change,” Ginsberg said. “It was like a very colorful flag going up a flagpole, signaling the news that something was about to happen, something was about to shake.”

Part Three

Bringing It All Back Home

26.

New York is frowning, tight-lipped, short-tempered. It is a city without grace. . . . It is a city that cries “Jump” to a would be suicide perched on a window ledge.

—“New York: A City Destroying Itself,”
Fortune,
September 1964

 

By August 1964 the New York media had reached the general consensus that the World's Fair was becoming a financial fiasco. They knew the Fair—which Robert Moses had described that month as “a summer university education, as well as a world tour”—would fall short of the forty million visitors Moses and company had predicted for its first six months. On August 4 the Fair celebrated its twenty millionth visitor; there was now less than eleven weeks left before the Fairgrounds closed for the year. The failure of the three biggest musical revues at the Fair—Radio City Musical Hall producer Leon Leonidoff's
Wonder World,
an “aqua-stage spectacle”;
the Texas Pavilion's
To Broadway With Love
; and Dick Button's Ice Capades—didn't help dispel the growing sense that Moses' Fair was in trouble.

A July 22
Gallagher Report,
a newsletter geared toward the advertising and marketing industries, had been tracking the Fair's attendance numbers and doing the math: There were “few winners” and “many losers” among exhibitors. More specifically, it saw Thomas J. Deegan's advertising campaign as “ineffective” and “inadequate.” Despite acknowledging that attendance was affected by New York's image problems—surging violent crime and race riots—the report was blunt in its appraisal of the real dilemma: “Robert Moses is mostly to blame.”

While dismissing such criticism out of hand, Moses knew that the Fair had serious obstacles to overcome. He had accurately predicted that business would boom during the summer while school was out and the tourist season was at its busiest; the same had happened with the 1939–40 New York Fair. Likewise, as soon as autumn stripped the trees bare,
the kids would go back to school and tourists would return home—and business would, inevitably, drop off. There was no way for him to get to a two-year total of seventy million visitors, and he knew it. The figure had been at worst wholly fictional, at best extremely optimistic. “Everyone knows the seventy-million figure had no real precedent—was a guestimate,” admitted one Fair executive in mid-July.

That had never stopped Moses from running with it, however, dropping the number in speeches, Fair literature, and his regularly issued Progress Reports. Politicians from New York to Washington had picked up on it, too: During his December 1962 speech at Flushing Meadow, President Kennedy had upped the figure to seventy-five million. Moses' plan called for forty million visitors in the Fair's first year, thirty million in its second, which would result in an estimated $100 million in profits. Then, after all notes and debts had been paid off, the World's Fair Corporation would have close to $23 million for Moses to transform Flushing Meadow into the world-class park that he had long dreamed about.

The financial health of the Fair had been a hot topic of debate inside the World's Fair Corporation for months. In mid-May the chairman of the Finance Committee, George Spargo, took exception to Fair comptroller Erwin Witt's rather sunny report on the Fair's balance sheets. Moses, however, wouldn't hear of such negative complaints. He insisted the Fair was “in the black” and would pay the remainder of the Fair's notes in October as planned. “I think [the] report is all right and I shall support it,” he informed Spargo, and accused the latter of being “consistently pessimistic.”

Spargo was considering taking the issue up with the Fair's Executive Committee—essentially going over Moses' head—but the Fair president issued a warning: “If the word were to get around that the Executive Committee has no faith in a balance to finish the park, it would be futile to make plans for this purpose, and a considerable part of my own interest in the Fair would disappear.” Moses was not about to blow his chance at creating his long-envisioned post-Fair park because one of his executives wanted to take a conservative approach to bookkeeping.

Three days later, when Spargo handed in his resignation, Moses had already tapped George S. Moore, president of First National City Bank,
as his replacement. He admitted to Moore that there were some “tough problems” involving several pavilions and various concessions, but overall the Fair was the picture of financial health. “The Fair as a whole is in no jeopardy whatever,” he noted casually, “because of these incidental emergencies which seem to be unavoidable.”

Defensive as ever, Moses mistook every article that wasn't lavish praise as a personal attack. When a
New York
Herald Tribune
reporter described the Fair as “Pop Art”—connecting the experimental architecture yet commercial nature of many of the pavilions with the experimental yet commercial aspects of the most important art movement of the day—Moses was livid, and lodged a complaint with the paper's editor. He was simply unable to see that, in many ways, his Fair
was
as contemporary and “of-the-moment” as an Andy Warhol silkscreen or a Roy Lichtenstein comic book panel. Moses wasn't interested in the here and the now; he built things—at least in his mind—for the ages, and the Fair was intended to help him build one more.

But even as he battled the press and warded off internal problems, Moses took a strong stance against any politician, regardless of party affiliation, who wanted too much from the Fair. When the Florida Pavilion was hurting for cash and Governor C. Farris Bryant, a segregationist Democrat, wanted a loan of $1 million, Moses balked, complaining to an aide that Bryant was a “fresh red-headed bozo.” In August, when the Democratic National Convention wanted free passage to the Fair to entertain its delegates during its Atlantic City convention—where President Lyndon B. Johnson would be nominated—Moses said no, noting that he had turned down the Republicans, too.

Moses did, however, bestow favors as he saw fit and for his own reasons. He had invited a contingent of nuns from Good Samaritan Hospital on Long Island to spread the word about the Fair—and through the auspices of the good sisters, incur a little friendly publicity—but their visit went awry. Afterward, the Mother Superior wrote him personally to complain that she and her group had waited three and a half hours for a horrible lunch at the Ballantine Beer Pavilion's Rathskeller and then were overcharged. Moses went ballistic, complaining that some Fair
workers “are expert at making enemies of decent people and getting me into trouble unnecessarily.” He had an executive drive out to the Mother Superior's convent, apologize in person, and pick up the tab for the nuns' entire afternoon in Flushing Meadow.

The incident revealed a serious weakness of the Fair: the deterioration of quality among many Fair employees at the lower strata. The Fair was, in many ways, too big, too unwieldy—too much of a top-down bureaucracy with no way of controlling itself. Ultimately, such problems were the result of Moses' management style, which, depending on the issue at hand, alternated between micromanagement (choosing the menu for a meeting of VIPs) and laissez-faire (refusing to be drawn into the Jordan mural controversy).

In early August, Dr. Arthur Lee Kinsolving, president of the Protestant Council of the City of New York, which had organized the Protestant Pavilion, accused Moses of allowing labor unions to overcharge his pavilion and others. Moses insisted that the high prices were for “emergency repair work at all hours and at night,” noting that he was only charging what were “going rates for union labor” in New York. Incensed at Kinsolving's complaints, Moses then instructed an aide to draft a reply blasting the Protestant rector. “We can't let this pious breast-beater get away with anything as raw as this,” he wrote.

If the Master Builder felt he was always under attack, particularly from the media, it was probably because not a single day went by when one of Gotham's half-dozen daily newspapers didn't run a story critical of either Moses or the Fair or both. Trying to broker a truce between the World's Fair and some of the New York papers, Bernard Gimbel lunched with A. M. Rosenthal of the
New York
Times
. The department store tycoon (and Moses confidant) was one of the movers and shakers that Rosenthal thought it was his business to know as the Metro editor for the Paper of Record.

Gimbel delivered Moses' message that the
Times
wasn't helping the Fair, at least as far as Moses saw it. Rosenthal was sympathetic but firm. “We are trying very hard to capture the spirit of the Fair ourselves,” the Timesman said, defending his paper's coverage. “Sometimes we have to
write articles that do not make very pleasant reading but this is part of our job, as I am sure you will agree. We try to balance by carrying articles almost every day on the stimulation to be found at the Fair.” As the man who had brought the ghastly Kitty Genovese murder story to light—he would publish a brief but poignant book on the case,
Thirty-Eight Witnesses,
just months after the murder—Rosenthal knew all about the unpleasant side of New York City.

Fairness, however, didn't factor into Moses' conception of how the media should treat his great exhibition. He wanted good publicity, period, even if the first months of the World's Fair coincided with some of the worst crimes and urban unrest in New York history. Richard J. Whalen, then a rising star at the Henry Luce–owned monthly, captured the scene in his September 1964
Fortune
magazine cover story, titled “New York: A City Destroying Itself.”

Whalen, who also authored a warts-and-all biography of Kennedy patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. despite protest from the family, wrote about New York as only a native could. Born and raised in Queens, and a graduate of Queens College, Whalen named names, making a case that New York's lackluster political class was an abject failure. None of the mayors who had followed in Fiorello La Guardia's giant footsteps could equal “the Little Flower” he wrote; instead, New Yorkers had elected a parade of “midgets” who had failed its citizens time and again.

Whalen's litany of complaints was long and undeniable: Violent crime was soaring—a 13 percent rise overall, with a 52 percent rise on the subway—water and air pollution was horrific
(sneezing in New York could leave one's handkerchief stained with black soot); traffic was paralyzing, overbuilding and bad urban planning out of control. Meanwhile, race relations had sunk to a new low. The growing militancy among some of the city's underclass wasn't to blame for the riots; instead Whalen believed the true cause was the “alienation and hopelessness in the ghettos, and apathy in the city at large.” The very existence of ghettos in a city of such material opulence was an indictment of “the indifference of the powerful.” New York City, he declared, was on “a death march.”

According to the
Fortune
piece, one of the architect's of New York City's self-destructive impulses was the man who had alternately built and demolished so much of the five boroughs: Moses. Although Whalen admired Moses' administrative prowess, he wrote what so many politicians were afraid to say; namely, the Master Builder wielded “too much authority for one man. . . . [Moses] rules as an absolute despot, beyond the reach of public opinion.” Since Mayor La Guardia left office in 1946, no one could control Moses; that is, if any of the mayors and governors—ostensibly his bosses—had even bothered to try. “Moses was a law unto himself,” said Whalen, who charged Moses with building not because it was in the interest of New Yorkers, but simply because he could. For Whalen, Moses' worst offense was his attempt to erect the Lower Manhattan Expressway, or Lomex, by razing sizable chunks of downtown Manhattan.

Similar to the aborted Mid-Manhattan Expressway—the elevated six-lane highway that would have sliced Manhattan in half from one side of 30th Street to the other, which Robert Kopple had helped derail in 1958—the Lower Manhattan Expressway was a 1.5-mile long, elevated eight-lane highway that was nearly the width of one city street. Lomex would have decimated a half-dozen downtown districts, including parts of Little Italy, Chinatown, SoHo, and Greenwich Village—vibrant, living, diverse neighborhoods filled with working-class families, unique architecture, and small businesses that contributed to the health and diversity of the city's economy. “That road could never have been created by someone who loved New York City,” said Whalen. “It would have been a Great Wall of China cutting the city in two.”

By 1962 Jane Jacobs and others, like
New York Times
architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, were waging a powerful campaign against Moses and Lomex, rounding up a diverse assortment of working-class immigrants and downtown denizens: bohemians, activists, intellectuals, small business owners. However, Moses had his allies, too, including organized labor—who loved the Master Builder for the abundance of jobs he created. When one white New York City union leader was informed that Lomex would damage the city's economy by destroying
ten to twelve thousand jobs, mostly held by blacks and Puerto Ricans, he replied, “I can't be worried about them.”

It was exactly projects like Lomex—imposed on New Yorkers without their consent by Moses and with the backing of those who would benefit, like the city's building trade unions—that were, in short, killing New York City. “In New York, the voices of special interest are never still, while the voice of common interest is seldom raised,” Whalen wrote in
Fortune
.

The public battle over Lomex came to a head at a December 1962 Board of Estimate meeting. Carmine DiSapio, a sharp-tongued, sunglasses-wearing Greenwich Village assemblyman, denounced Moses—a “cantankerous and stubborn old man”—and his Lower Manhattan Expressway in a rousing speech. To the elation of the activists and the New Yorkers whose lives and livelihoods were at risk, the Board of Estimate voted unanimously against the expressway. (As per his style, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. let others take the tough stand, then sided with the majority.) It was an ignominious defeat for Moses; the Lower Manhattan Expressway was one of his most cherished dreams. To the Master Builder, both Lomex and the Mid-Manhattan Expressway were the personification of “the World of Tomorrow” promised by the Futurama exhibit of 1939–40 World's Fair: a city created by and for the automobile.