Robert Moses and the Shaping of New York, Part 1

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.
And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So recently, as I was
scrolling about on social media, as one does, there was a,

(00:25):
in my case, Instagram post by New York Mayor. Saran
Mamdani announcing that the city was going to start a
renovation of a one and a half mile section of
the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, known as the BQE to New Yorkers,
that runs between Atlantic Avenue and Sand Street. The whole
expressway does not that section. There is so much punditry

(00:46):
about this announcement and whether it's good or bad. We're
not weighing in on any of that. Uh, cause I
don't live in New York. I don't have, you know, this,
I'm in New York a lot, which is why I
keep getting fed these ads or these, uh, videos, but, um,
I don't live there. So I don't feel like I
have any gravity regarding the situation. But in that announcement, uh,
Mayor Mom Donnie mentioned Robert Moses and said like, oh,

(01:10):
that's a whole other video. And I was like, oh yeah,
there's a person that is controversial and intriguing and worth
talking about. Uh, because he is responsible for so much
of the infrastructure that is part of day-to-day life in
New York. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica account, his work

(01:30):
included 35 highways, 12 bridges, numerous parks, Lincoln Center for
the Performing Arts, Shea Stadium, many housing projects, two hydroelectric dams,
and the 1964 New York World's Fair. We're not going
to talk about all of that because we can't. There's
just too much. But we will talk about some of
the things that he worked on and the controversies that

(01:52):
played out and continue to. New Yorkers, I feel like,
and people who are into urban planning instantly know who
you're talking about when you say Robert Moses. But in
my casual survey of people in my life, a lot
of people did not seem to really know about him
or fully understand the breadth of his impact. And here's
the thing, when you look at his life story and

(02:13):
his career, it is a wild ride. And there is,
as I said, a lot of even pared down to
exclude a lot of his big projects. We're not talking
about Lincoln Center today. Sorry if you wanted that. But
even getting rid of some of those big projects, it's
still another two-parter because Robert Moses was busy. He's got
some problems in his career that we'd have to talk about.

(02:36):
And even though he has been dead for 45 years
at this point, he remains a divisive figure whose legacy
is probably going to be debated for another century or more.
And he really did, though, impact the city, and he
created that legacy, interestingly enough, without ever having held public office.
He was never elected to public office, although he did

(02:57):
manage to gain an awful lot of power through appointments
to government positions. Robert Moses was born December 18, 1888,
to Emanuel and Bella Moses in New Haven, Connecticut, where
Emanuel had a department store. The Moses home was just
a couple of blocks away from the Yale University campus,

(03:18):
and they lived there until Robert was nine years old.
Then the family moved to New York City at Bella's insistence.
Emanuel was already planning his retirement, so once he was
done with working, the Moseses moved to East 46th Street
in Manhattan. Once they were in the city, Bella worked
in a settlement house that helped Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

(03:43):
and that sounds like kind of a wholesome project for
her to do, but Bella had her own agenda at
work with this. She really thought immigrants had to be Americanized. Yeah, Bella,
I feel like, could be her own topic. I don't
know if there's enough information on her, but she sounds
like a very headstrong, very bossy woman with a lot
of ideas. She came from a lot of money. Bella.

(04:08):
That's all I got to say on that one. She
will come up briefly later in the episode. But after
going to prep school, Robert enrolled at Yale. And as
an undergrad, he was really active in a lot of sports.
He was a standout on the swimming and water polo teams.
He completed his undergraduate degree in 1909, and then he

(04:28):
went to Wadham College, Oxford for his master's degree. And
Moses made a really strong, positive impression on his fellow
students in England, and he was elected president of the
Oxford Union. That's the debating society. He is the only
student from the U.S. to have ever held that position,
as far as I could tell. I know he was

(04:49):
the only one at that time. Moses then went to
Columbia to get his PhD in political science, and his
dissertation for his PhD reflected the influence of his time
at Oxford. It was titled The Civil Service of Great Britain,
and he received his PhD in 1913. The months immediately
after the completion of his education were very busy for

(05:12):
Robert Moses. He had a job basically waiting for him
thanks to his mother's connections that was at the Training
School for Public Service, which prepared students to work in
government jobs. This job was apparently not something that Moses
especially liked. He thought it was really dull and unstimulating.
Working at the school did have some positives for him, though.

(05:35):
It led him to meet his future wife, Mary Sims.
And he did pretty quickly find a way out of
the tedium of the training school, and that was in
a job working for John Perroy Mitchell, the mayor of
New York, as part of the New York City's Bureau
of Municipal Research. So this job still related, of course,
to government work, but this time Robert was reorganizing the

(05:58):
city's government, or at least making recommendations for it, and
he found that much more engaging. All of these moves
and meeting Mary, that all happened still in 1913, the
same year as his PhD. So it was, as we said,
a very busy year for him. Then after a two-year courtship,
Robert and Mary got married. That was in 1915, and

(06:19):
they would go on to have two daughters together. After
several years of working for the city, he met Alfred E. Smith,
the new governor of New York, and became part of
his team. The actual job came through Belle Moskovitz, who
was a progressive reformer who had become Smith's advisor, and
she could easily be an episode in the future. In 1919,

(06:41):
Moses became the chief of staff for the New York
State Reconstruction Commission. Smith had assembled this group, and Moskovitz
had brought Moses on to bring change to New York
through a government reorg. Moses learned a lot from Moskowitz
in this role, and she had a really deep understanding
of how to maneuver through the government to achieve goals

(07:05):
without angering the people who held power, an important skill. Yes,
she's really considered a mentor to him. And, like, there's
one example of him making a recommendation at one point
in an early draft of a report about having to
cut some of the workforce. And she was like, ah,
don't forget, every one of those people is a voter,

(07:27):
and we don't want to make them mad. We have
to figure out a way to cut costs without eliminating
this many people. Just little things like that that she
taught him to think about as he was doing his
government work. And in this new role, Robert Moses first
had to make an assessment report on the state of
the government, and then a plan for a state government reorganization,

(07:49):
similar to what he had done for the city. On
October 10th, 1919, Moses submitted that report to the governor.
It was titled Report of Reconstruction Commission to Governor Alfred E.
Smith on Retrenchment and Reorganization in the State Government. This
was a substantial document. The summary alone was 42 pages long,

(08:10):
and there were another 372 pages to it. Moses had
spearheaded an in-depth look at every single job in the
state government, and he made thousands of recommendations based on
that look. This really started things off on the right
foot for him, as the report was considered both comprehensive

(08:30):
and impressive. It gave Moses enough clout with the governor
that he stepped into an advisory role with the state administration.
The report was very popular with progressives. A lot of
the recommendations in the document required approval from the legislature
or even changes to the state constitution, and a lot
of that passed, but not all of it. Moses intended

(08:54):
to keep lobbying for the remaining recommendations, but in 1920,
he had a hiccup in this plan, and his career
was also having a little hiccup because Alfred E. Smith
lost the gubernatorial election. Moses got a new job with
the New York State Association, but he and Al Smith
kept in close touch after this. And then in 1922,

(09:17):
Smith ran again, and this time he won by a
huge margin. Once he was back in the governor's seat,
Moses was right back on track with his own career
and was once again a rising star in the state government.
In 1924, Governor Alfred E. Smith appointed Moses to a
role that he would parlay into a huge amount of power.

(09:38):
because he became the head of the New York and
Long Island Park Commissions. We will talk about why the
Park Commission job was so important after we pause for
a sponsor break. The significance of the New York and

(10:00):
Long Island Park Commission's position is really tied to shifting
socioeconomic conditions in the U.S. in the mid-1920s. So we're
going to zoom out for a second. In the first
quarter of the 20th century, there were a lot of
reforms and changes for the U.S. There were moves for
business regulation and better working conditions. And then after World

(10:21):
War I, economic prosperity reached a wider range of people
than ever before. A lot of households saw an increase
in their income, with working hours also being reduced in
many sectors. While the 40-hour workweek was still decades away
from becoming a federal law... a number of factories and
large companies had already adopted the eight-hour workday. And what

(10:45):
all of this means is that New Yorkers had more
leisure time and a little more cash in their pockets.
So places like parks were becoming more and more important
as a place to spend those free hours. Robert Moses
really recognized this change, and he leveraged the growing role
that park spaces played in New York into expanding his

(11:06):
own prominence. And Moses reshaped the way the government approached
new park projects in the state. When he stepped into
the role, most of their plans for green spaces were
really about maintaining them in their natural state as like
a preserved wilderness. But Moses envisioned the addition of more

(11:26):
manicured and cultivated spaces with dedicated recreation areas. Moses also
used his work with the parks in a way that
changed New York's transportation infrastructure significantly. Because anytime he built
a new park, he also made sure that project included
access to the park in the form of roads that

(11:47):
connected new green spaces to the highways. He was building parkways.
That's why they're called that. From the beginning, he had
planned a large state park system for Long Island that
would all be connected together by new roadways. But that
also meant that landowners on Long Island were going to
have to give up their property. This was not popular.

(12:07):
A lot of those landowners were from old New York money,
and there was a lot of contentious back and forth.
But ultimately, Moses saw the majority of his plans come
to fruition. Over the course of just four years in
this position, Robert Moses added 13 parks to Long Island,
totaling about 9,700 acres. There had only been one there

(12:31):
when he started, so this was a massive increase in
park space, but also in roadways. He definitely felt that
advocating for park space, he would retain the favor of
the general public, once stating, quote, as long as you're
fighting for parks, you can be sure of having public
opinion on your side. And as long as you have
public opinion on your side, you're safe. In 1927, he

(12:54):
became New York Secretary of State, which is a role
that he filled for two years. It was one of
many times in his career that he stacked jobs. He
was serving in multiple positions at once. Yeah, he never
seemed to leave a job for a while. He just
kept adding, adding, adding. One of the biggest projects that
was undertaken by Moses in the 1920s was Jones Beach.

(13:18):
So this was actually named for a 17th century privateer
named Major Thomas Jones who who is said to have
built the first brick house on Long Island and whose
property included a stretch of land that included what would
become a park site. The project that Moses was plotting,
which is still today one of the most popular beach
spots on the East Coast, came to exist through sheer determination.

(13:43):
It started as a sandbar along the southern edge of
Long Island. And when Moses initially looked at it as
a potential park site, it was barely above sea level
and it was frequently completely underwater during inclement weather. Like
anytime there was a storm surge, that basically went away.
Moses said of the site later, quote, let us have

(14:04):
no illusions about Jones Beach as we found it. It
was an isolated swampy sandbar accessible only by small boats
and infrequent ferries inhabited by fishermen and loners, surf casters
and assorted oddballs and beachcombers trying to get away from
it all. The tales told of a lovely primitive paradise

(14:24):
wilderness with indestructible dunes were fiction. Jones Beach was in
fact a mosquito infested tidal swamp full of stagnant pools
flanked by shifting dunes. But Moses thought it could be
something else, and he started sketching out ideas for a
grand park. While a lot of people in the government
and the press wrote off the idea as completely unrealistic,

(14:46):
Moses continued to push for it. And once he got
through the endless red tape and political maneuvering that was necessary,
he still had a huge road ahead of him. First,
he had to make a sandbar into something more The
solution was a massive dredging project. A reported 40 million
cubic yards of sand were brought up from the ocean

(15:08):
floor to build up the sandbar into an actual island.
And the result was that it went from two feet
above sea level to 12 feet above sea level. And
then this project kind of looked like it was dead
when the money just ran out. Moses, though, was determined
to finish, and he did something very unorthodox to make

(15:28):
up the gap in funding. which is that he went
to his mother, Bella, and asked her for a loan.
He got $ 20, 000 from her to continue this project. This
is one of those things that the first time you
read it sounds utterly preposterous. And I was like, I
got to fact check this in several places. Moses verified
it later in his life, stating that if his mother

(15:50):
had not come through with that money, the contractors were
not going to return with their equipment to finish the job. Finally,
against all odds, Jones Beach opened on August 4th, 1925,
during a sandstorm. The dedication still happened, though, and Moses
gave a speech, as did Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt,

(16:11):
who was the governor of the state at the time.
And people literally flocked to the new place, which offered
a gorgeous view of the Atlantic Ocean. An estimated 1.5
million people visited the park in its first year alone.
During that time, construction had begun on additional facilities for
the park, swimming pools and the West Bath House. In

(16:32):
its final form, it is the largest public recreational bathing
park in the world at 2,413 acres with 6.5 miles
of ocean beach frontage. And Robert Moses had overseen every
aspect of all the facilities right down to the design
elements on the buildings. By the end of 1931, just

(16:53):
two years after opening, traffic to Jones Beach had gotten
so bad that land from the town of Hempstead was
given to the state to make another causeway to try
to handle the load. If you are familiar with the
story of Jones Beach and you're wondering right now, are
you going to mention the overpass bridges? Because Tracy asked
me when she read this outline. We're going to talk

(17:14):
about it in the behind the scenes because that is
a very complex topic all on its own. It's kind
of a whole thing. Sure is. And it would derail
the narrative of this story. So a construction project that
began after Jones Beach was the Grand Central Parkway. That
runs from the Triborough Bridge out to the county line
that separates Queens and Nassau counties. And it offers up

(17:36):
a good example of why the work that Moses did
remains debated today. So the Grand Central Parkway was initially
intended as a scenic drive through Queens. That was back
in 1922, pre-Moses for the most part. And at that time,
the Queens Topographical Society had actually had its engineers go
out and survey the area, and they proposed a roadway

(17:58):
that would run from Queens Boulevard in Kew County to
Nassau County. But it took nine years to get it
to the construction phase, and Robert Moses came onto the
project in 1924. Moses thought the plan could be expanded
so that Manhattan residents could use the roadway to access
parks and beaches on Long Island. And this was supported

(18:21):
by his bosses. During the opening ceremonies of Jones Beach,
Governor Roosevelt said he wanted the parkway that connected Long
Island to Triborough Bridge, quote, so that we who live
up on the Hudson will be able to get more
easily to Long Island and for us to have more
visitors from Long Island. So at that point, it was
obvious that Jones Beach had become a new reason to

(18:44):
expand that original project. Moses showed off his expanded plan
to civic leaders in a meeting the following year at
the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. And as this project was being developed,
Moses wanted the roadway to be much wider than the
existing space would allow. That would have required the destruction

(19:04):
of quite a number of homes. A county official fought
him on this matter, asking if Moses was going to
relocate the displaced residents. And when Moses said he couldn't
do that, that county official did everything in his power
to save those residences, and Moses, as a consequence, had
to build a narrower road. But that actually created a

(19:25):
problem later on. We're jumping ahead just a bit. We're
going to come back to it mostly in part two,
but when the 1964 World's Fair was on the horizon...
it became apparent that that initial parkway was not wide
enough to accommodate the traffic that was expected. So Moses
got his way some years later, and those people did
still lose their houses. Moses had also been made chairman

(19:49):
of the New York... Park Association's Metropolitan Conference on Parks
in the 1920s, which enabled him to prepare plans for
park spaces in Manhattan. In 1930, he submitted a report
that called for the city to acquire as much remaining
undeveloped and rural land as possible. As he had done
with his Long Island plan, he had envisioned both park

(20:12):
spaces and parkways to connect everything. The recommendations in this
report were put into practice, and the Belt, Grand Central,
Cross Island, and Henry Hudson parkways were all created as
a result. Coming up, we're going to talk about Roosevelt's
New Deal and a long treatise about slums that Moses
wrote for the Atlantic. But before we get into all

(20:33):
of that, we're going to take a sponsor break. When
FDR implemented his New Deal program in 1933, it offered
an opportunity to Robert Moses in the form of federal
funding for his plans through the Works Progress Administration. After

(20:58):
that massive success of the Jones Beach Project, Moses had
a reputation unlike almost anyone else who worked in government.
On January 1st, 1934, Fiorello LaGuardia began his first term
as mayor of New York City. And in his first
weeks in that position, LaGuardia made Moses head of the

(21:19):
New York City Park Commission. And just as the mayor
had moved quickly to appoint Moses, Moses moved quickly to
make updates to the parks. Over the course of just
a few months, the city's parks had a lot of improvements.
They had fresh lawns. The tennis courts were all resurfaced.
Bathrooms and drinking fountains were all clean, and they had

(21:39):
been repaired as needed. That same year, LaGuardia expanded Moses'
power when he also appointed him chairman of the Triborough
Bridge Authority. More than a decade later, it would be
renamed the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. He was still
head of the Park Commission. And this is something that
was very much a part of the power Moses accumulated.

(22:02):
He held a lot of offices concurrently, and that offered
him a significant breadth of power over a lot of
public works projects. Yeah, he also had a lot of
overlap in the various commissions, agencies, and offices that he
was in charge of. So he could kind of play
a little bit of chess. We're going to talk about,
in part two, a lot about how problematic that was

(22:24):
for people. There was a brief moment when it seemed
like Robert Moses might be thinking bigger than heading up
city and state commissions. We mentioned in the opening to
this episode that Robert Moses was not an elected official,
but he did run for public office just once. In 1934,
he ran for governor of New York, and he got trounced.

(22:46):
The incumbent Democratic governor, Herbert H. Lehman, got more than
2.2 million votes in the popular vote, and Moses got
less than 1.4 million. In the announcement of Lehman's win
at the New York Times, the paper noted, quote, Meanwhile,
his redoubtable and militant opponent, Robert Moses, will remain free
to go on with his work as a great park commissioner.

(23:09):
Starting in the 1930s with this expanded power, he launched
an ambitious plan to add parks, playgrounds, bridges, tunnels, and
highways to New York. He expanded the city's playgrounds significantly.
He built 235 new ones, and that sounds excellent, but
Another pattern in his career was really starting to emerge,

(23:30):
and that is one in which he just disregarded the
needs of areas of the city with predominantly non-white populations.
So of those 235 playgrounds, for example, only one of
them was in Harlem. In the summer of 1936, he
opened 11 new swimming pools. Four were in Manhattan, which

(23:51):
did include one in Harlem and another in West Harlem.
There were four in Brooklyn and then one each in
the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. These pools were considered
cutting edge. They had new filtration and chlorination systems, and
they were heated and had underwater lighting. Per the New
York Parks Department, quote, the influence of the pools extended

(24:12):
throughout entire communities, attracting aspiring athletes and neighborhood children and
changing the way millions of New Yorkers spent their leisure time.
But they weren't used only for swimming. The pools were
also designed to be drained in the cooler months and
used for other activities ranging from shuffleboard to roller skating. Yeah,
they could be kind of adapted into being tennis courts,

(24:35):
basketball courts, etc., as needed. Starting in the 1940s, Moses sought,
he said, to get rid of New York slums. He
was obviously not the first person to want that, but
because he had amassed a great deal of clout and
power at that point, his very strong opinions on the
matter held a lot of weight. And he was named

(24:56):
chairman of the mayor's slum clearance committee. And this is
one of his initiatives that really remains hotly debated today,
and rightly so. In 1945, he penned an article for
The Atlantic that opened with, quote, the general pattern of
the development of slums is almost always the same. They
begin with the overcrowding of existing buildings and the addition

(25:19):
of tenants built by consciousness speculators to a considerable height
on little land without reference to light, air, sanitation, and
other standards of decent living and safety. The place of
a single family in a reasonably comfortable house is taken
by a number of families, and in the tenements, people
are packed in like chickens in a coop. Wave after

(25:41):
wave of newcomers inhabit these rookeries. As soon as one
generation achieves enough prosperity to get out, it moves on
and another with lower standards and income takes its place.
So that's just the opening, and we're going to spend
quite a bit of time with this article today. because
it really evidences some of the reasons that Moses and

(26:01):
his approach have continued to be controversial. So he goes
on to explain that the gap between politicians and social
and civic workers of how this cycle plays out leads
to years of trying to get everybody on the same page.
And during that time, those neighborhoods continue to decline. He states, quote,

(26:21):
in the meantime, local political hacks satisfy the customers or
at least prevent an open revolution by handouts of coal
and wood, groceries and Christmas baskets. Property owners, real estate
developers and their allies, banks, estates and even churches are
content to collect their rents and close their eyes to

(26:42):
the implications of their investments. He praises the work of
settlement houses. He name-checks Jane Addams, among others at this point.
But he also states that their work is done and that, quote,
the task now is one of engineering and management and
that they must turn the job over to administrators. Yeah,

(27:03):
that one is so wild to me. Like, oh, that's
great that you helped people. We'll take it from here.
We're done helping. You're done helping. Yeah. Moving on. We're
going to administrate the heck out of this problem. He
also blames rapid transit for the speed of decline in
these neighborhoods. This is something that he has been criticized
about since the 1940s, that he was very against transit

(27:28):
in cities. He states, quote, If in New York City
we had refrained from building so many miles of subway
at $ 20 million a mile and had put some of
this money into rehabilitating and making livable and attractive the
older and central parts of town, millions of people would
not today be crowded like cattle into hurtling trains during
the rush hours. He also chastises the people who made

(27:52):
their money in New York real estate at the end
of the 1800s and early 1900s, citing their malignant influence.
And he says the stories of how they created slums
should be repeated periodically so that people do not do
the same things over and over. He cites the praise
these speculators received in their time as, quote, one of

(28:13):
the saddest commentaries on our urban civilization. Of all the
things that he says in this article, I mean, I
have problems with a lot of them, but the part
about transit makes absolutely no sense to me. No, he
just thinks, like, if you make the center of town pretty,
nobody will want to go anywhere. I don't know. It's like, oh, doodles.

(28:35):
You know what would cause there to be fewer people
crammed into trains on transit? More trains. More of them.
That would be great. Anyway, when Moses offers what he
calls a cure, it's a whole other thing. He notes
that what he calls endless wranglings over the way to
fix such problems... often lead to stalemates and then nothing improves.

(28:59):
He wrote, quote, slums cannot be cleaned out all at once,
except in campaign oratory and the familiar literature of social agencies.
There has to be a time schedule as well as
a program. There must be limited objectives. There must be compromise.
This is so fascinating to me because, as we'll talk

(29:20):
about later, and particularly in part two, he kind of
contradicts himself in his behavior here. regarding all of these
things that he's preaching in this article. He also gets
in some digs at the groups that he blames for
the slowdowns in progress. He's like, I have all the
right ideas if you just listen to me, but these
guys want to argue about it. He says, quote, the
pinks and reds who never get their roots down anywhere.

(29:42):
And then he cites, quote, the perfectionists who are not revolutionaries,
but will agree to no compromise. And then he kind
of gets to at least what feels like his point
in that section, that getting rid of slums in most
cities has been done indirectly, quote, through clearance not for public, semi-public,
or private housing, but for parks, playgrounds, parkways, expressways, boulevards,

(30:06):
and other public improvements. And then he crows about what
he believes to be his achievement, quote, that my particular
little group of demolition and building demons is have without
fanfare and social worker abracadabra pulled down more old rookeries
than all the housing experts and authorities put together. And

(30:27):
the best thing about it is we have substituted nothing
for the rookeries, but broad highways lined with landscaping and
recreation facilities open to the sun and the elements, affording
the very best incentive to further slum clearance and improvement
on their boundaries. Yeah, just put a road there. It'll
be fine. It's fine to just not have the housing

(30:49):
that the people were living in. If there's going to
be a road, I hate it. Yeah, I mean, I
think everybody does. This is the really rough part of
his legacy, is that he just had this short-sightedness that
is really grounded in racism. Yeah. He then states, quote,
I am a strong believer in subsidized public housing within
proper limits and have worked hard to support it, but

(31:11):
I intend to be honest about it. And then he
outlines what he believes the obstacles are. One is, of course,
the funding source. He explains that public money has been
used for funding such projects, but that, quote, a constitutional
amendment is required to permit states and municipalities to enter
this field. And that legislation introduced up to that point

(31:32):
had been quite vague and that the people crafting that
language did not fully understand the situation. Basically saying like,
if we want to go in and, and run new places,
new livable multifamily facilities, like we got to get a
bunch of permission from the state, but like the people
trying to write the laws to even give us that permission,
don't understand any of this. He does come off as

(31:54):
very conceited all the time. Um, Additionally, most of the
government subsidized housing that was built around the country only addressed,
in his opinion, the housing itself and not community features
like recreation, school, utilities, and services like fire and police.
His own writing placed recreation first on that list. This

(32:14):
is another thing that I find slightly, I don't even
want to say infuriating, but it's like you see how
easily he has become a figure of controversy because he
says things in some ways that sound reasonable. Of course,
communities should have all the things that support them. But
then he also says things like, just put a road there.

(32:34):
So it's a problem. Another issue that he mentions in
these plans is that tenants in subsidized houses that pay
a reduced rent just don't provide enough money for the
upkeep of those facilities, let alone the to maintain the community,
so there's an ongoing financial problem. As he put it, quote,
Moses wanted the income from partially subsidized housing invested so

(32:58):
that it could, in the long term, provide some sort
of fiscal growth. His next point is that the problem
only continues to grow because the definition of low income
continues to expand, which means that more and more people

(33:20):
qualify for subsidized housing and the financial imbalance of income
versus expense only gets worse. Additionally, he expresses frustration that
if federal and state governments fund subsidized housing, bureaucrats want
to be the boss of the program without understanding it.
The issue of land cost is also addressed in this article,

(33:40):
and this is one of the most controversial aspects of
the Moses approach. He states that acquiring a lot of
land at a reasonable price becomes impossible and that this
is the solution. Quote, in this situation, the power of
eminent domain is the only salvation. Condemnation must be exercised
for the private limited dividend or redevelopment company by the city, state,

(34:04):
or federal government. So basically just condemn those places and
we can just seize them. But there is still a
need for investment, and he cites an agreement that the
state actually came to with Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to
invest in slum clearance projects as a great achievement that
required courage on the part of the company to buy into. Next,

(34:26):
he addresses rehabilitation and its place in improving troubled areas
of the city. This is another instance where he talks
about how perfectionists ruin everything because they won't usually agree
to just adapting old tenements to be sanitary and fireproof.
They want to build brand new buildings. He notes that, quote,
this situation can be measurably improved by cutting through new

(34:49):
streets and pedestrian lanes and by establishing small neighborhood parks
and playgrounds. The average brick tenement has a good deal
of life left, and people can live decently in crowded
quarters if they have heat, hot water, bathrooms, fire escapes,
as well as light and gas. And then he goes
after the unions, calling organized labor, quote, a serious obstacle

(35:13):
in the way of financing slum clearance. He talks about
the union's insistence on preserving its right to hourly wages,
how dare, strikes, and, quote, resistance to inventions and improvements
in the building field, all being things that are causing problems.
He writes, quote, the notion that every effort to reduce
building costs, every advance in building technique is an attack

(35:36):
on unionism and a conspiracy against the laboring man is
so deep-seated that there seems no possibility of dislodging it.
This attitude makes no sense, but it will not change
until we deal with another generation of union officials educated
in a better school. I might be misreading, but this
sure sounds like he wants to ditch all the protections

(35:57):
of a union and everything that a union exists for
in the name of faster and cheaper construction. That was
how it read to me, too. I was like, I
puzzled over this yesterday for a long time going, am
I am I taking crazy pills? Is he basically saying
the union stinks because it won't let me make people
work for 80 hours a week for two bucks an hour? Right, right.

(36:21):
Then he concludes the article by noting that the other
need to consider is preventing slums from forming by raising
zoning standards. He believes that real estate promoters, banks, and
other entities at the financial stake in the slums all
bear some blame for the problem as they have all
used their influence to keep standards low. See, that's one
of the moments where I'm like, that part makes sense.

(36:42):
I understand, like, these people that are, you know, in
it for the money are leveraging the people they know
in government. to not make them clean anything up. That's
all true. That sounds reasonable. And then he keeps talking. Okay,
so we have shared a lot from this very opinionated article,

(37:04):
and it represents a sort of midpoint in the career
of Robert Moses for a lot of people. So we're
going to stop here, and we are actually going to
continue his story next time. And in the meantime... Is
there listener mail? Well, here's one. This is from our listener, Kristen.
She mentions that this is from the behind the scenes

(37:26):
where we were talking about Mary Mallon, but she's talking
about a thing I specifically mentioned. She writes, Dear Holly
and Tracy, I was listening as I was driving. I
actually paused this episode and pulled over because I did
not want to forget my comments. First, I had my
gallbladder removed two years ago. I went to the ER
thinking I was having a heart attack. Heart disease runs

(37:48):
in my dad's family. One of the doctors working the
ER was at the check-in desk, and he was pretty
confident it was my gallbladder, but ordered an EKG due
to family history. My kids are in their late 20s,
so memory of childbirth pain has faded, but the gallbladder
pain was awful. Ended up having it removed, then spent
months getting my body to adjust to how it processed

(38:09):
certain types of food. Spice, caffeine, cream, stuff I cook
with regularly. Me too. I will say, and I don't
mean to be braggy, my body has been much cooler
than a lot of other people's in dealing with post-gallbladder life.
I have not had the same limitations that many people
have had to live with. Secondly, she says, I agree
with Holly about Anthony Bourdain. I read Kitchen Confidential shortly

(38:32):
before his food travel series aired and my opinion of
him plummeted. He had berated TV chefs and now he
was basically doing the same thing. It took me a
long time to come around as well. Love the show.
Pet tax pictures are the three voids that keep me busy. Stella,
long-haired female and complete diva. Even the 80-pound dog bows

(38:52):
to her. Stella looks a lot like our cat, Marva,
which means I'm in love with her. She is absolutely beautiful.
She is a long-haired, gorgeous black cat. She and Marva
could probably get into some legal trouble together. I always
joke I'm going to wake up one day and find

(39:12):
out that The D-dar house has somehow been transferred to
the cat, and it's because Marva went to law school
in the night. There's also another absolutely beautiful, it looks
like a solid black kitty, but it could have some coloring,
kind of wedging itself through the opening in a sewing
machine between the main machine and the needle underneath the arm.

(39:35):
I've had cats do that as well. They're so cute. Oh,
says Garibaldi, youngest, loves fabric and my embroidery machine must
always be supervised. Looks all black in the second picture.
Absolutely adorable. I don't even let my cats in the
sewing room when the embroidery machine is going because I'm
scared someone will stick their paw in there. And it's

(39:55):
running automatically. So I'm not there to just take the
pedal off. I would have to run over and stop it.
And I'm too scared to. So and then the beautiful
80 pound dog, which is a big white fluffy. It
looks like a Samoyed. Not positive. Could be a great peer.
Not clear based on this picture. And then she signs off.
That dog is very beautiful, though. It's lying down, which

(40:17):
is why it's really hard to tell, to gauge the
size and the They look very similar to me. Also,
I don't know as much about dog breeds as I
do cat breeds. I know a fair amount, but not. Anyway, Kristen,
this email is terrific. I also really just wanted to
read it because it was another instance of someone who
has had a child saying that gallbladder pain was pretty
darn bad. Thank you so much for writing this. I'm

(40:42):
kind of obsessed with these cats, most especially beautiful Stella,
of course, because she is a supermodel. If you would
like to write to us and share your supermodel pets
or anything that you think is of interest or your
stories of going to the hospital, whatever it is, I'm
down to read it. You can do that at HistoryPodcast
at iHeartRadio.com. You can also find show notes for today's

(41:06):
episode or any of the shows that we have done,
at least in the past. I want to say recent past,
but it's been like a decade. Those are at Missed
in History. If you just click into any of the episodes,
you'll see the show notes with all of the things
we use to research. And we hope that you enjoy
those if you want to continue to read about anything
we talk about. You can also subscribe to the show

(41:29):
if you haven't done that yet. That is very, very simple.
It's an easy operation of clicking a thing on your
phone on the iHeartRadio app. Or really, you can do
that anywhere you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts

(41:49):
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Robert Moses and the Shaping of New York, Part 1