Tomorrow-Land (5 page)

Moses was incensed. Mayor Wagner and Governor Rockefeller were under pressure to do something with the aging Master Builder, to strip him of some of his titles at least, which wouldn't be easy, as Wagner could testify. In 1954, right after taking the oath of office, Wagner swore in Moses as City Parks Commissioner and City Construction Coordinator. When he was done, Moses stood at attention waiting for Wagner to swear him in as Chairman of the City Planning Commission.

After all the other administration appointees took their oaths, the mayor still hadn't done so. Moses followed Wagner into his private office. What the Master Builder didn't know was that Wagner's aides had been pressuring the mayor not to allow Moses to head the Planning Commission. Holding all three positions would give Moses the power to propose and green-light public works projects with little to no oversight—far too much power in one man's hands.

Behind closed doors, Moses informed Wagner that if he wasn't reappointed the head of the Planning Commission, he would resign his other posts, immediately. Wagner froze. He said it was just a clerical oversight; give it a few days, he promised, and the situation would all be sorted out. Moses walked out, grabbed a blank application form from a nearby office, filled it out, put it on the mayor's desk, and stood there until Wagner signed it. Recalling the incident years later, Wagner said he initially hesitated just to let Moses know that he couldn't control him, the way Moses had dominated other mayors. “[Moses] had done some remarkable things for the city and state of New York,” Wagner said. “There was no question that he knew that field well, and that he was going to be retained.”

Throughout his twelve years as New York City's mayor, Moses would always be a thorny issue for Wagner, who could never come down hard on him, the way La Guardia would. Wagner grew up around the Master Builder—Moses was a good friend of his father, Senator Robert F. Wagner Sr.—and both Moses and his father would regale him with stories of Governor Al Smith, a beloved figure that all three held in the highest regard. While Wagner wasn't blind to Moses' faults, the elder Master Builder consistently got preferential treatment. “[He] was always a very controversial figure,” recalled Wagner. “He was rather arrogant, and he'd irritate you.”

Now six years later, in 1960, Moses wanted out. The Parks Commissioner had been following the news of the 1964–65 World's Fair closely. He had, after all, testified down in Washington, DC, earlier in the year on behalf of the exhibition. And the Fair's top acting executive, Thomas J. Deegan, was a Moses loyalist. There was little question that Moses desired the job and that he would move heaven and earth to create a Fair worth remembering; he had even met with members of the Executive Committee, urging them not to cave into the BIE's demands, to keep their autonomy, thus enabling them to control their own destiny. The 1939–40 New York World's Fair was remembered as a wondrous event in the lives of millions, but it was a financial failure. That wasn't Moses' fault; he didn't have complete control over the earlier Fair. The whole experience proved to be a valuable lesson, one he never forgot.

Nine months after the Title I mafia scandal first erupted, Moses resigned from several key positions, including his post on the mayor's Slum Clearance Committee and as Parks Commissioner to become the president of the World's Fair Corporation. Though Moses was “a great man and a good friend,” Wagner said years later, “this wasn't one of his great monuments, this Slum Clearance Committee operation.” Fate had given Moses his second chance at re-creating the Flushing Meadow. He wasn't about to waste it.

4.

I hold that if your natural weapon is the broadaxe, you should not affect the rapier.

—Robert Moses

 

In retrospect, it must have seemed like a fait accompli that Moses—the man who built New York into a modern metropolis—would spearhead the 1964–65 New York World's Fair. Not only did he have the credentials and the reputation, he had the backing of New York's ruling class.

Although Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. had empowered Robert Kopple to lay the groundwork for the Fair, the sullen-faced mayor had a habit of caving in to Moses. Governor Rockefeller had a much rockier relationship with the Master Builder, but must have seen the benefits that a great New York World's Fair would have for his national reputation, an important consideration since he was positioning himself for a presidential run. If the Fair, as Rockefeller declared, would have “lasting benefits as a magnificent showcase,” then who better to make that happen than Moses? Whatever his faults—and few members of the Empire State's ruling elite were blind to the political and personal baggage Moses would bring to the Fair—he had an undeniable and proven track record.

With Moses running the World's Fair Corporation, there would be no question who was in charge. And there was no doubt that he would do his utmost to attract the seventy million Fairgoers from the four corners of the globe, as planners promised. To reach this goal, the Fair would require a daily average of 220,000 visitors over its two six-month seasons in consecutive years; this would yield nearly $100 million in estimated profits—plus millions of dollars in ancillary income to the city coffers from the tourists who would flock to see the spectacle. And with some of those profits, Moses could fund his nearly forty-year-old dream of transforming Flushing Meadow into New York's premier green space, the centerpiece of a string of parks he envisioned extending across Queens.

Despite Kopple's complaints about the Master Builder, he was voted down by the Moses loyalists in the room: William E. Robinson, Coca-Cola's chairman of the board; banker David Rockefeller (and the governor's younger brother); department store magnate Bernard Gimbel; and, of course, Thomas J. Deegan, who had called Moses about the job before the meeting even began. Moses happily accepted the $100,000-a-year position as president of the World's Fair Corporation. However, before beginning his new job in May 1960, he had one condition: Kopple must resign immediately. He explained to Deegan that he could not accept the position if Kopple was his executive vice president. “Having looked up his record, I find nothing in it that justifies his appointment,” Moses declared. For his services heretofore, Moses suggested Kopple be paid accordingly and dismissed.

The pair had a history. In 1958, just a few months before his World's Fair epiphany, Kopple had led a crusade of civic groups against one of Moses' pet projects: the Mid-Manhattan Expressway. The $88 million six-lane elevated expressway would have razed Manhattan's 30th Street—from east to west—creating a link from the East Side's Queens Midtown Tunnel to the West Side's Lincoln Tunnel uniting the roadways of Long Island with the highways of New Jersey. The Mid-Manhattan Expressway, the Master Builder promised, would solve “the worst problem of traffic strangulation in history.” It was also a missing link in the Master Builder's puzzle of arterial expressways and key to his vision of urban life.

Kopple disagreed. As the executive vice president of the Midtown Realty Owners Association, he said the expressway would be “a sword cutting through the city's heart,” destroying two vital Manhattan neighborhoods in the process: the West Side's garment district, a bustling area of small businesses, and the East Side's Murray Hill, an area teeming with historic brownstones and tenement buildings full of working-class families. “Thousands of residents now gainfully employed will be thrown out of work,” Kopple told the
New York
Times
. “In addition, $40 million in real estate will be taken off the tax rolls—a revenue loss to the city of more than $2 million a year.” He also ridiculed Moses' assertion that the
expressway would reduce traffic. “Every traffic expert knows that [the expressway] will create bottlenecks in mid-Manhattan that will make today's problems look like paradise,” he said.

Although the Mid-Manhattan Expressway wouldn't be stricken completely from New York City's Master Plan for another thirteen years, Kopple's opposition in 1958 dealt it a fatal blow. It was a huge defeat for Moses—a sin he would not forgive. When asked by reporters why he insisted on Kopple's dismissal, Moses was blunt. “These fellows that started [the Fair] had to get out, so I could have a free hand,” he said. “They were not the kind of people I would hire. They had to go, and they were paid.”

Moses and Kopple also had a mutual friend, whom they both held in particularly high regard: Charles Poletti, the longtime New York political insider, who briefly served as the Empire State's governor for twenty-nine days when Governor Herbert H. Lehman vacated the position early to head up the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration—a massive international effort to aid civilians in war-scarred Europe—in 1942. A Harvard man and world traveler who spoke multiple languages, Poletti had also been the US Army's reigning governor of Sicily during WWII, after the island was liberated by General George S. Patton's Seventh Army. Tapped by the Master Builder to run the Fair's International Division, even Poletti couldn't persuade Moses to keep Kopple. “I tried to dissuade him from it,” Poletti admitted years later. But there was nothing doing. Moses wouldn't budge.

And just like that, Kopple, who had first dreamed of a second New York World's Fair, an exhibition to foster “Peace Through Understanding,” was summarily dismissed by Deegan—the man whom he had hired and who all along had been a Moses loyalist. The man who had started the Fair for the most altruistic of reasons—“bringing the nations of the world together”—was reimbursed $35,000 for the expenses he had accrued and given free tickets for his family for the life of the Fair.

Years later, as the Fair he originally conceived of was about to open, Kopple insisted it was his own outspoken nature that irritated Moses. “He simply can't tolerate independent strength in anything he runs,”
Kopple told a reporter. Even then, Kopple couldn't fathom that his 1958 victory over the Mid-Manhattan Expressway had played any part in the behind-the-scenes drama of the World's Fair. “I find it hard to believe that he forced me out because I fought him on the expressway,” he said.

Clearly, the man didn't understand Moses.

5.

We . . . are not subject to any rulings.

—Robert Moses

 

Robert Moses detested the executives of the Bureau of International Exhibitions. After flying to Paris in 1960, he arrived at the organization's modest office space—“a dingy attic,” he deemed it—and quickly clashed with the European bureaucrats. He spoke to the members of the agency in his usual imperial manner, as if they were his personal underlings. “Moses hated the idea that he now had to go over to Paris, ‘hat in hand,' and beg for approval of his fair,” recalled Bruce Nicholson, an executive in the Fair's International Affairs and Exhibits division. It wasn't personal: Moses resented having to ask for permission from
anyone
for
anything
.

Since its formation in 1928, the BIE had governed international exhibitions; without the bureau's approval, a World's Fair was not—technically speaking—a World's Fair. After the success of London's Great Exhibition of 1851, fairs were all the rage. In the nineteenth century, cities on both side of the Atlantic wanted to host exhibitions to attract business, display their industrial might, and tout their cultural achievements. Fairs were economic boosts
that could reenergize a city or announce its arrival on the world stage. Just two years after the London Exhibition, New York held its first World's Fair: the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1853, which featured its version of the famed Crystal Palace, on the current site of Manhattan's Bryant Park. (Imitative as it might have been, the metal and glass structure, shaped like a Greek cross, was beloved by New Yorkers, including Walt Whitman, who wrote about it in his masterpiece
Leaves of Grass;
it burned down in 1858.) The BIE took its job of controlling the selection of Fair cities and regulating exhibitions very seriously.

Despite the fact that the 1964–65 World's Fair violated a healthy list of BIE bylaws, history was on Moses' side: Unlike European exhibitions, most American World's Fairs weren't government-sponsored; the New
York Fair was officially being run by a nonprofit agency with the blessing of the US government, which would have to foot the bill for its own federal pavilion. Moses was adamant that the New York Fair run for two consecutive years and exhibitors pay for the lots they rented. How else could he generate enough profits to transform the Flushing Meadow into “the finest park in the city”?

A far more significant problem for Moses and his colleagues was the 1962 Seattle World's Fair; no country was allowed to hold a sanctioned fair twice in the same decade. The organizers of that exhibition were seeking the BIE's blessing and were likely to get it, since they were following the organization's bylaws as best they could. They even rented an office in Paris to work more closely with the Europeans. But one thing that neither Moses nor his Seattle counterparts had any control over was the fact that the United States wasn't a member of the BIE, having never ratified the organization's 1928 treaty; to do so would require an act of both the president and Congress, a process that could take years—“If it could be done at all,” noted Moses.

But getting it done had been Robert Kopple's intention. Before Moses insisted that he resign, Kopple had been working with New York's Republican senator Kenneth Keating to introduce legislation asking the government to consider signing the BIE treaty. The Master Builder was dead-set against that approach. For one, it would give Congress a voice in the Fair's business (never a good thing, as far as Moses was concerned), and it could potentially transform the Fair into a hotly debated political issue, maybe even poison the public against it. Lastly, an international treaty would have provided the Fair's congressional foes, such as Senator Fulbright, the powerful chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, plenty of ammunition. As soon as Moses took control of the Fair, he had the legislation squashed.

Despite a number of seemingly irreconcilable differences with the Paris-based organization, none of its bylaws were deal-breakers. Prior to the 1939–40 New York World's Fair, Grover Whalen had managed to finagle his way around each of these same rules and get the BIE's consent. That was what a flamboyant showman—known for his natty
suits, easy smile, and interpersonal skills—could do. But Moses was no Whalen; he wasn't interested in the BIE's rules—or anybody else's, for that matter.

A few months before he took over the World's Fair Corporation, Moses asked if anyone had inquired if “the so-called international body has any real jurisdiction or control.” He urged the Executive Committee to confront the BIE about hosting a two-year World's Fair in New York. A two-year gate-receipt formula was an issue, Moses argued, that “can't be ducked, dodged or left open . . . the entire financing and revenues plans are dependant on this decision.” Moses was not about to let a group of aging French bureaucrats derail his plans for Flushing Meadow Park.

Publicly, the Fair's planners played it cool. In February 1960 they announced their intention of hosting a two-year exposition, and tried to downplay the potential clash with the BIE. Behind the scenes, Moses was gearing up for a fight. He firmly believed that Whalen's handling of the BIE was one of the many missteps his predecessor had taken. “Grover promised a lot of things [to the BIE] which didn't happen,” he told one of his executives, “and the whole thing ended with correspondence between the BIE and the Department of State. The tone of which was far from friendly to say the least. It appears we are heading in the same direction.”

And so, with all that in mind, Moses had flown to Paris, but not before he had hired a Wall Street law firm to analyze the BIE's treaty to see if it was applicable to an American Fair. The law firm, Whitman, Ransom & Coulson, reported that the European treaty “had no application at all to a free enterprise exhibition.” From that moment on, Moses staked out his positions. He would seek an official sanction from the BIE but wouldn't compromise to get one; if they refused his request, then at least they could look the other way—a “gentleman's agreement,” as it were—while he and his team appealed to private corporations of BIE member nations to represent their countries on an “unofficial” basis. And, of course, should they oppose him, then he would treat them like he did anyone—politicians, community activists, private citizens—who got in his way: He would steamroll over them.

It didn't take long for Fair executives to understand that Moses' meeting with the BIE hadn't gone well. Still they hadn't anticipated the BIE's vote—twenty-three to zero (with four abstentions)—to officially sanction the Seattle exhibition. The BIE's statement announcing the vote didn't specifically mention the New York Fair, but it reiterated that no country could host two exhibitions in the same decade, nor could BIE members participate in a non-sanctioned exhibition. The message was clear: Thanks to Moses' ham-fisted handling of the situation, the bureau and its thirty member-states were now effectively boycotting New York and Moses, which would make it difficult for foreign nations to sign up for the Fair.

New York's spin machine then went into overdrive, issuing a rebuttal dripping with condescension and contempt. “We could not possibly obey directives of the BIE and allow it to control a private, free-enterprise fair in New York,” read the release, which also called the notion of “a one-year fair in New York . . . impossible.” Moses' statement openly, albeit subtly, mocked the BIE's authority, declaring “the absurdity of operating a fair here [in New York] under control from a bureau in Paris,” and cast its ruling as inconsistent and arbitrary by recalling how the earlier New York Fair was officially sanctioned yet did not “follow [the BIE's] rules and orders.” And in one last—and poetically poignant—dig, the statement noted that signing a BIE treaty “would surely do nothing to promote peace and harmony.”

Even though the New York planners downplayed the BIE's boycott, within months America's closest allies, such as Britain, France, and Italy, all abided by the bureau's decision. While publicly nonchalant about the brouhaha—“The Fair is going along nicely and does not require the support of the BIE,” Moses told the
New York Times
—behind the scenes it was another story.

In the weeks following the BIE's decision, Moses suggested to one friendly newspaper editor that he should assign a reporter and photographer to the bureau's Paris office to give the public “a visual impression of the organization” that wants to run a New York Fair on a shoestring budget. The picture of the bureau's simple offices, Moses suggested, “would
be worth 10,000 words.” A short while later, he told William Berns, the vice president of the Fair's PR machine, that “the great BIE explosion proved to be a very wet firecracker lighted by punks . . . I don't underestimate the BIE zombies, but they never get far.” Either incapable or unwilling to hold his mouth or his temper, Moses even described the Parisian organization to reporters as “three people living obscurely in a dumpy apartment” and “that bunch of clowns in Paris.”

By late 1960 he had instructed his staff that “the BIE announcement was a dead issue.” Nevertheless, when Moses was preparing for an upcoming meeting with President Kennedy, Charles Poletti urged him to remind Kennedy to have the State Department “put some pressure” on European ambassadors to ignore the BIE's edict. And almost a year later, Moses was still waging a covert war against Leon Barety, the venerable director of the BIE, suggesting that Poletti “take steps to have our friends” in the organization vote him out of office. The truth is, Moses wanted an official sanction for his World's Fair—he just wasn't willing to do anything to get it. Just as Kopple had predicted, Moses was no diplomat.

Moses' real strengths were his organizational skills and his sheer desire to succeed where the 1939–40 World's Fair had failed. He dedicated himself to avoiding the mistakes made by his predecessor, Whalen, who, Moses thought, had been more interested in creating a wondrous event than a profitable one. If someone had a fantastic idea for a pavilion, Whalen would build it and figure out how to pay for it later; he built no less than twenty pavilions with Fair money and then rented them to exhibitors (often taking a loss). Ironically, Moses—New York's Master Builder—would build precious little himself, just a handful of permanent structures including a ten-thousand-seat outdoor theater, the Hall of Science, and the Port Authority Building, which featured a helipad on the roof and a top-floor restaurant with a panoramic view where VIPs could be entertained. Nor would Moses create a large bureaucracy, staffing his World's Fair Corporation with approximately two hundred employees (Whalen's organization had had 3,700 on the payroll).

Another major decision Moses made was to dismiss the World's Fair Design Committee, which was composed of five well-known
architects: Henry Dreyfuss, Emil Praeger, Edward Durrell Stone, Gordon Bunshaft, and Wallace K. Harrison. Traditionally international exhibitions had a central plan to create a sense of architectural unity among the dozens of pavilions. Headed by Harrison, who had been chief designer for the 1939–40 World's Fair, the committee proposed one massive square-mile circular structure—essentially a gigantic doughnut-shaped pavilion—1,800 feet in diameter. Exhibitors would rent “slices” of the doughnut. Moses wouldn't hear of it.

The idea was an old one, actually. It had been utilized in the 1867 Universal Exposition in Paris—“That's how new it was,” Moses noted dryly—and designed by no other than Baron Haussmann, the legendary urban planner who rebuilt Paris for Napoleon III and whose life and work Moses had studied closely. The Master Builder not only dismissed the committee's idea—“constipating and stultifying” was Moses' take on the plan—he also derided its members as unimaginative. “Such a single giant doughnut would have discouraged all freedom, originality, experiment, color and boldness in form and design,” he later wrote, “precisely the qualities which my avant-garde associates in the architectural field and their friends, the critics, always insist must be given free rein in expositions which will determine the pattern of the future.”

Moses declared that his Fair would have no central plan. Instead, pavilion creators were free to build whatever they liked, as long as it adhered to the Fair's building codes, which retired Major General William E. Potter, the Fair's executive vice president and Moses' building czar, rigorously enforced. By building little, Moses thought he could save the Fair money, which meant more funds for his park, $23 million or so of which he would use to build his grand playground—“a new sort of super Central Park,” he claimed—that would be his “gift to the city.” Moses had a thing for Queens. Maybe because it was the direct link between his Manhattan home and his beloved Long Island, where he would go to relax and swim at the state park beaches that he had created; maybe because compared to the steel-and-glass towers of Manhattan and the old winding streets of Brooklyn, full of historic brownstones and church steeples of every denomination, Queens was
something of a blank slate, an empty canvas upon which he could draw his master plan.

He even readily admitted that, to him at least, the post–World's Fair Flushing Meadow Park was, ultimately, the “main attraction.” And the park he envisioned would be the centerpiece of a seven-mile stretch of parks that would cut across the borough of Queens, the largest—geographically—of New York's five boroughs. “Parks are the big thing in my life, and I decided to turn this dump into a great park,” he told an interviewer in 1964. “When they started planning the 1939 World's Fair, I saw my opportunity. Well, I made the fairgrounds all right but the fine park never materialized, because we didn't have the money.” Naturally, with the new Fair's profits, he would build the park himself, rather than hand the money over to city coffers. “With all due respect to City Hall,” he noted, “if we hand over our profits to the city government and ask them to make the park, the park will never be built.”