Behind the Scenes Minis: Busses and Overpasses

Holly and Tracy unpack the accusation that Robert Moses purposely built overpass bridges too low for busses to drive under them as a way to keep Black New Yorkers away from Jones Beach.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and happy Friday. I'm Holly Frey. And
I'm Tracy B. Wilson. We talked about Robert Moses all
dang week. The whole week long. We sure did. I

(00:21):
have so many things to talk about. Okay. One, he
was really good at reports. I mean, there was almost
part of me where I'm looking at that almost 400-page report.
It is more than 400 pages. Thinking like, did you
just intend to bury people in such a big report
that they would not see what you had written and
they would just go, yes, clearly you know. I don't know.

(00:43):
He was, I will say, a very good writer. I
noticed that in a lot of the things I read
about him. And that was something that even came up
in that Bob Balm piece that we referenced a couple
times in part two. He wrote of him, quote, Though
personally kind and gentle, at least at public events and
social affairs, Mr. Moses becomes a violent, cutting fighter when

(01:03):
he sets words to paper. He does write his own stuff.
Any ghost capable of writing as well as Robert Moses
would have been in print long ago under his own name.
And he's not wrong. He really was a very good writer.
That Atlantic article is long and some of it really
makes me angry, but it's well written. I'll give him
that for sure. Yeah. He was very conceited. I also,

(01:26):
we didn't talk about it in either of the episodes,
but that quote mentions... that he was actually very charismatic.
I mean, people talk about him today in his public works.
And there is, I think, a tendency to envision him
as like just this, you know, bowl-in-a-China-shop-flavored jerk who was like, nope,
my way or the highway, and kind of barreled through things.

(01:48):
And he kind of did have the my way or
the highway thing, but he was really charismatic about it,
which I think helped get a lot of people on
his side over the years. It kind of goes back
to what we had talked about Bill Moskowitz kind of
coaching him on like, hey, don't make people angry that
you're going to need the support from later on. Be
judicious about when you decide to be a jerk or not.

(02:10):
I also think that's why he did not see it
coming when he gave his resignation to Rockefeller and Rockefeller
was like, cool, see ya. And Rockefeller was like, fine. Great. Thanks. Thanks.
Thanks so much. Here's a funny thing about the World's
Fair in 1964. Okay. The World's Fair had hours that
were like 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., except for one pavilion,

(02:30):
which was allowed to have somebody stay there 24-7, like
to look after it. Okay. Do you want to guess?
Of course, my first thought was, was it a human zoo?
But this was past the human zoo era of World's Fairs. No,
it was the Vatican. Oh. So I don't, I didn't
go down that rabbit hole to see if they had

(02:51):
relics or something that had to be carefully looked after.
But I was like, oh, somebody from the Vatican just
like slept at the fair all the time. Just going
to go live at the fair. Wow. There is another
whole thing that happens. We mentioned. in the episode, that
after his first wife died, he got married less than

(03:13):
a month later. But apparently, well, not apparently, I mean,
I did not read word for word everything in Kara's
biography because it's like 1,100 pages. It's so long. It's
a lot of book. I have read parts of it
over the years, but I didn't like sit down and
cover to cover it for this. But there is a
whole thing in there kind of accusing him of impropriety

(03:34):
with women. Mm-hmm. And one of the things that Robert
Moses wrote in response to it was, among personal, nasty, false, venomous,
and vindictive canards is one that I was romantically linked
with Mrs. Ruth Pratt, our first congresswoman, and that as
a result, my wife took sick, became an alcoholic and

(03:56):
a recluse, they virtually abandoned her, joined some kind of foursome,
and took a lady who subsequently became my wife to Florida.
My companion on the short Florida vacation was my daughter, Jan.
With respect to my family life, the author's innuendos are
wholly untrue and scurrilous. Okay. And it's like, this is

(04:17):
one of those things that then makes me go, okay,
Robert Caro. And this is where we get to the
question you had before we recorded. Yeah. Which is overpass bridges. Yeah.
I would say... overwhelmingly, when I see Robert Moses' name

(04:39):
on social media, it is about the overpass bridges and
whether buses could get to the beaches. Right. Yeah. Buses
could not get to the beaches, but whether that was
intended for the reasons that people suspect or not is
a matter of very hot debate. Here's what's up. So

(05:00):
in the Caro biography, Caro relays a story that he
says was told to him by Sidney Shapiro, who was
an engineer who worked on a lot of projects with
Robert Moses. Mm-hmm. And based on the hundred hours plus
of interviews that he got from Shapiro, Caro said that
Moses specifically had those overpass bridges built low to prevent

(05:23):
buses from passing under as a way to keep Black
and other minority New Yorkers from getting to Jones Beach specifically.
That is the thing that often gets repeated. Yeah, and
I feel like I've seen 1,000... social media videos on
such sites as YouTube and Instagram Reels and whatnot. Yes.
It gets repeated a lot, so much so that it's

(05:45):
kind of accepted as proven fact in a lot of cases,
but there have been some investigations into the veracity of
it that leave it very much open to interpretation. Don't worry,
I promise I'm not going to try to tell you
that Robert Moses was not racist. But there have been
Some additional details that have come up, a number of historians, architects,

(06:06):
city planners, historians who specifically work in city planning, and
a lot of them have come to the conclusion that
Caro either fabricated or exaggerated this story. So one thing
that has been noted is that the bridges in question
were basically carbon copies of existing bridges from Westchester County

(06:27):
with the same basic dimensions. So those already existed. Mm-hmm.
Some of Moses's overpass bridges through the state were unusually low.
Even those, though, have been debated with some analysts, concluding
that those lower dimensions were actually due to the land

(06:47):
and the conditions of the area. They weren't like... Also,
this is the one part that is a little sticky
for me that makes me go, oh, I don't know
where we put the blame. All commercial traffic was supposed
to have been prevented from entering leisure infrastructure. So the
idea of a parkway was to allow cars to enter

(07:10):
to keep vehicles like buses and trucks out because they
are noisy. This is like the Blue Ridge Parkway, which
we did an episode on previously in Skyline Drive. There's
not supposed to be commercial traffic on those roads. Right.
That's why it is called a parkway. We... There was
a moment we mentioned that was a quote from Moses

(07:32):
where he was talking about, you know, parkways or mixed-use highways. And, like,
he's specifying parkways are for parks. So there were ways
that buses could get to Jones Beach, but they were
a little bit roundabout. They would drop people at, like,
the far end of the park, and it wasn't a
convenient thing. But it is a little unclear about if Moses...

(07:56):
was thinking about, like, yes, this is good. It will
prevent Black and brown people from getting to the beach. Yeah.
Was he thinking, if I build these bridges too low
for the buses, then... Can I keep these people out? Yeah.
And again, he was racist, so that's possible, but... Yeah.
Here's the part that I get real sticky about, too. Okay.

(08:17):
Because this story is said to have come from... Sid Shapiro. So,
of course, the natural thing would be like, let's ask him.
He died two years before Robert Caro's book came out.
So nobody could verify anything that he did or did
not say. Right. it becomes like an unverifiable claim, which
is a little bit of a problem. Caro has said

(08:38):
in interviews, Robert Moses is one of the most racist
human beings I have ever encountered. And listen, that is
probably true because he was for sure racist. But it
is tricky to verify all of this. There has been
a lot of debate and analysis over it. Specifically, probably
you've seen a lot of it because Pete Buttigieg referenced
it in 2021. Oh, yeah. And that kind of kicked

(09:00):
off a whole thing. Here is where I net out
on this. I'm not sure that he did say, build
those bridges lower, it will keep these people out. But
what I am sure of is that he, if that's

(09:23):
the case... He also wasn't taking into account making sure
that beach was easily accessible for everybody in New York
that might want to access it, which is its own
kind of weird thing. And it's like, to me, that
suggests a short-sightedness that is not normally associated with him
or the way he ran his projects. So that's where

(09:45):
I'm kind of like, Either you dropped the ball super
bad because your racial bias just made you not even
think about those people's needs. Right. Or it was a
very convenient way to drop the ball. Yeah. Because you
would have thought through all of these possibilities and you just... went, okay.
Can I tell you where I net out, having not
been the person who researched this episode, but have gone

(10:06):
down some rabbit holes about the social media videos that
I have seen about Robert Moses and the Bridges. Where
I net out is that it's plausible, but not confirmed.
that it was an intentional effort to keep buses from
getting to the beach so that there would be fewer, quote, undesirable,

(10:27):
in his mind, people at the beach. Like, that's plausible,
but not confirmed. However, as appealing as it is to
find a figure who you can point to and say,
this person is the person responsible for this Even though

(10:47):
Robert Moses was really good at clearing through bureaucracy and
moving things and getting things done, he was working within
a system. And the system that he was working within
was racist. And there was a lot of other racist
infrastructure going on all around New York, some that he
was involved in and some not. And when you really

(11:12):
put the focus on him and, like, point the finger
and say, Robert Moses, he did all of this, it's
kind of ignoring all of that other stuff that was
systemic and not just one guy. 100%. It is not
as though Robert Moses introduced racism to New York. Right.
Or even probably into, like, the public works sphere of

(11:34):
New York at this time. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I also
just think like when you do exactly what you're talking about,
when you make it about one person's faults, you're really
robbing the conversation of some of the avenues it needs
to explore to get to a better place. Right. The
obvious answer at that point, if you accepted that this

(11:55):
was all part of his mastermind scheme, is, like, we
can't have another guy like him in place, but I
promise you're still going to have problems with, like, policies
that are inherently racist or reflect an unconscious racial bias,
et cetera. So, like, you have to fix the bigger system,
as you said. I'm going to tell you something right

(12:15):
now that is going to perhaps blow your mind. Robert Moses...
infamous for prioritizing car traffic, didn't drive. That's funny. Oh,
it's funny. Like, he just was like, we need more roads,

(12:37):
more roads, roads, roads, roads, love the roads, roads, bring
you more roads. Yeah. I live in a city where
we desperately need more housing. One of the things that
has been, that has come up often in proposals to
build new housing is reducing the minimum number of parking

(13:00):
spaces that can be included in this new apartment building, right?
Because if you need 40 parking places, that's a lot
of land that could also be housing, right? And every
time there is like gigantic debate with some people who

(13:21):
just don't want there to be an apartment building, but
some people who are like, but how are people are
going to get around without a car? And that's a
genuine question because where we are is not as robust
in the public transportation infrastructure as other parts of the
area around Boston. And so sometimes I'm like, I'll see

(13:42):
people saying, how can a household live with only one car?
And I'm like, our household has only one car. And
it doesn't get driven all that often. So it's like,
I understand the comments. And I feel like, as we
said in the episode, like, this is something that was

(14:04):
not just a Robert wrote Moses problem all over the country. Yeah.
has prioritized cars and continues to prioritize cars and get
pushback when there are efforts to move away from the
cars a little bit and have more infrastructure devoted to
mass transit and bicycles. Boy, are there people in some

(14:28):
Metro Boston communities furious about bike lanes. Yeah. Was it...
I think it's still the case... This is one of
the few ways that the height of the pandemic did
some interesting things that were maybe good, which is that, like,
I remember, I know it happened in San Francisco, where

(14:48):
there was a very historically busy area where they just
closed the street to car traffic during that. Yeah. And
made it, like, a public space where people could just
walk around. And even after they reopened everything in the city,
that stayed closed down, and it's like... Yeah. Yeah. I
don't know if it still is, but I know for
at least a while it did. And it just became

(15:08):
like a new thing and like a great vibey, like
people just walking around, visiting restaurants, you know, patronizing the
various businesses because they weren't worried about getting run over.
Like just a cool. I mean, it makes it so
apparent when you see that happen. Like, oh, this is
actually how people could be living in cities. But we

(15:30):
all are car people, myself included. I'm a car person. I,
you know. I like sitting in traffic because I'm a weirdo.
Because it's one of the few times that, like, I
can't be answering email. You're not reachable. I can't be. Yeah,
I'm just, it's very zen for me. I'm in my
head with my thoughts. It's quite lovely. But yeah, it's

(15:51):
a very, I'm not a city planner because I don't
have the chops for it in a variety of ways.
But including that I would have a hard time struggling
with With those kinds of questions of like, OK, but
we do have a lot of people who have cars
and they got to put them somewhere. What are we
going to do? You know, private parking decks or even
city run parking decks get very expensive in a different way.

(16:15):
There's no easy answer. I think all city planners are
kind of put upon in a variety of ways. But
here's the funny thing I would like to conclude with. OK, good.
It's sort of funny. It just tickles me a little.
So we talked about the huge pool initiative. Uh-huh. There
is actually a fun tie-in between that 1930s pool initiative

(16:36):
and the Muzak Corporation. Okay. Because Muzak was established in 1934. Mm-hmm.
Their whole thing is that, or their thing at that
time was that they would transmit music not on the radio, but, like,
kind of with the cable-style thing. Mm-hmm. Like, closed... closed

(16:57):
lane uh you know for public address systems and stuff
but the astoria pool when it opened in 1938 had
a musac contract so there was always musac playing at
the pool funny but then in 1939 that was like
their test case and people loved it but it was
going to be 115 a month per pool and that

(17:21):
was too much for the city and they were like
we can't actually do this yeah But if Muzak had
been cheaper, we could all have Muzak at our public
pools when we're in New York. Not that I ever
go to a public pool in New York, but you
never know. I just think that's funny. I was just thinking,

(17:45):
instead of having people playing their music on their phone
speakers and driving everyone else up a wall, I don't
know if that happens in New York. I know that
happens at It happens everywhere. It happens everywhere. Yeah. Everywhere.
At the airport. When I said I don't know if
that happens in New York, I meant I don't know
if it is explicitly not allowed in New York. Oh, yeah. No,

(18:10):
I see it happen. I mean, if it's not allowed,
people aren't paying attention to it because I see it
all the time when I'm in New York. I was
just there and it was like I saw it twice.
Once at the airport with a person just like. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
play in their tunes or they were like watching music
videos on I don't know YouTube I presume and I
was like I don't know when as a society people

(18:33):
suddenly decided that listening to things on their phones without
headphones was fine I mean it's a I think that
that has always been something that happens sometimes but it
seems a lot more prevalent now than it was in
1985 when the options for portable listening to things were smaller. Yes,

(18:59):
but I think you could trace it back. And again,
I'm just talking out my keister. I don't really know,
but I would trace it all the way back to like,
Not to vilify, but car culture and the idea of
blasting your radio in the car so everyone can hear
how cool you are. I hate that, too. Which goes
back way, way, way far. I mean, I did that
as a teenager. Listen, I can't judge too much, but...

(19:21):
I hate that, too. However, one time, the funny thing
that I will end on is that there was a
delivery driver driving down our street one time who was
blasting the soundtrack to Hamilton. And it was the... Specifically
the one where there is a loud call of Lafayette

(19:41):
happening at points in the music. And so this delivery
driver driving down the street blasting Hamilton. And at the
key moment some other person in the neighborhood yelled Lafayette
and it was glorious I love it I love it
yeah I don't I try not to judge listen again

(20:02):
we have all been there I have anyway I thought
everybody needed to hear the cure as I drove around
you know my dinky beach town that I grew up in.
I was just trying to counter all the mainstream stuff
that was going on because I was a jerk and
still am in many ways. But I don't make people
listen to my music. Anyway, Robert Moses, your legacy is confusing,

(20:28):
difficult to really grasp. I mean, I do feel like, though,
New York would not be what it is today if
he had not been in the positions he was in.
It would be something else. There are people who have
suggested that if it were not for Robert Moses, New
York would have had like a similar collapse to what
Detroit experienced. I don't know if that's true. You're kind

(20:50):
of like working in theoretical realm. But it is interesting.
And now whenever I'm there, I will think about it
in a different way, which I will be, I don't know,
in a month and a half, I guess. I'll look
at it then. In any case, if this is your
weekend coming up, And you hate traffic, which I know
is the norm. I know I'm the weirdo. But if
this is your weekend coming up, I hope you don't

(21:11):
have to sit in traffic. You don't have to be
in your car unless you want to. You can hang out.
You can do pedestrian things. I hope your neighborhood is
cool and has a sense of community and that you
aren't choking down car exhaust because everybody is driving instead
of conducting themselves around town other ways. I also just
hope you get time to do whatever it is that

(21:32):
makes you happiest. If that's reading a book, playing with
your dog or your cat, dressing your dog as a
hot dog, which I love, obviously. You know, prepping for Halloween,
the very important activity of this time of year. Whatever
it is, I hope it's relaxed. If you have to
work this weekend, I still hope you get to do
some of those things. It only takes five minutes to

(21:53):
dress a dog if it's cooperative. If you have other
things that you would like to do, I hope that's great.
I hope everyone that can and likes it has a
big bowl of ice cream because that's what sounds really
good to me right now. We will be right back
here on Monday with a brand new episode. And then
tomorrow we will be right back here with a classic.

(22:18):
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