talent and hard work isn't enough

Convinced he was right, he had refused to soil the white suit of idealism with compromise. He had really believed that if his system was right — scientific, logical, fair — and if it got a hearing, the system would be adopted.

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But Moses had failed in his calculations to give certain factors due weight. He had not sufficiently taken into account greed. He had not sufficiently taken into account self-interest. And, most of all, he had not sufficiently taken into account the need for power.

no excuse for no delight

As always, it was on Jones Beach that Moses’ imagination focused. He thought himself of many little touches to make people feel happy and relaxed there. The dunes, he said one day, were a natural protective wall for an archery range, so archery should be included as one of the sports offered at the beach. And why just have ordinary targets? he said. Why not let kids shooting arrows feel they were really in the Middle Ages, when archers stormed castles? Let some of the targets be cutouts in the shape of enemy bowmen crouching behind castle turrets. Why just have signs directing people to various activities? he asked. Why not decorate the signs with ironwork showing the activities — and showing them in humorous fashion? One day, a designer rather hesitantly showed him a design for the directional signs to the men’s rooms. The design was the silhouette of a man, obviously in a desperate hurry, rushing to a bathroom so fast that the little boy he was dragging behind had his feet pulled off the ground. It was, of course, a little daring, the designer began. Daring! Moses said. He wanted his designers to be daring. This was a great design, he said. It would be used.

a system that outlives you

Building parkway bridges low was indeed an example of Moses’ foresight in trying to keep intact his original concept, the bright and shining dream he had dreamed in 1924 — of roads that would be not just roads but works of art, that would be “ribbon parks” for “pleasure driving.” Building the parkway bridges low was indeed an example of Moses’ foresight in trying to keep intact his original concept of the area through which those roads ran — lovely Long Island — as a serene and sparsely populated suburban setting, a home for the relatively small number of people wealthy enough to live there, a playground for the larger but still restricted number of people wealthy enough to drive there and play in the parks he had built there. The vision was no longer relevant. It no longer bore any relation to reality. Reality was no longer a Long Island that was a sparsely populated playground, but the residence of millions of people. Moses’ parkways now had to perform a function, getting tens of thousands of commuters to and from work.

the numbness trap

Psychologists know what happens to rats motivated by mild electric shocks or the promise of a food reward to get out of a maze when the maze is made excessively difficult to get out of; for a while, their efforts to find an escape become more and more frantic, and then they cease, the creatures becoming sullen, then listless, suffering apathetically through shock or hunger rather than making further efforts that they believe will be useless. People caught in intolerable traffic jams twice a day, day after day, week after week, month after month, began after some months to accept traffic jams as part of their lives, to become hardened to them, to suffer through them in dull and listless apathy. The press, responding to its readers’ attitude, ran fewer hysterical congestion stories, gave fewer clockings.

the social trap

The setting at such luncheons was relentlessly social: friendly, easy, gracious. For most men, this setting made disagreement difficult. It is more difficult to challenge a man’s facts over cocktails than over a conference table, more difficult to flatly give the lie to a statement over a gleaming white tablecloth, filet mignon and fine wine than it would have been to do so over a hard-polished board-room table and legal pads. It was more difficult still to disagree when most if not all of the other guests agreed: there was strategy as well as ego in Moses’ stacking his luncheons with a claque of yesing assistants; he may have felt that their presence heightened his stature but he also knew that their presence created an atmosphere in which the dissenter felt acutely that he was representing a distinctly minority view.

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And Moses carefully kept the atmosphere social, even while using it for business ends. He would present a problem and his proposed solution to it, and then call on various of his engineers to present facts and figures supporting his arguments. Then he would say, with an easy, charming smile, “Well, since we’re all agreed about this…,” and move on to the next item. “Well, maybe everyone there didn’t agree,” Orton says. “But in that setting, who could get up and start arguing? This was an exercise of power by assumption or inference. And it was damned effective.”

mind the gap

Living in Babylon and working in New York, he had had to ride the Long Island Rail Road for two hours and more a day; attempting an overview of Moses’ career, it is difficult not to ascribe some of the credit for the stroke of genius that led him to see the potential for parks in the New York City watershed properties to the fact that the railroad not only carried him past those properties but trapped him on it for two hours and more a day so that he had to think about them. The following year, Robert Moses had come to power. In the years since, he had had piled upon him, and had grasped for, more and more power with each succeeding decade; the workload of executive responsibility he was carrying in the 1930’ s was too great to allow time for reflection — a fact he mentioned worriedly to his aides. But in the 1940’ s he had far greater executive responsibilities than in the 1930’s, and in 1954, with his assumption of the chairmanship of the State Power Authority, he undertook in that one job, piled atop all his others, so much work that quiet, reflective thought was a luxury in which he could quite literally indulge almost never. Given a chance to work, Moses’ mind might, despite all the handicaps, have come to grips with the new realities and fashioned a shaping vision to deal with them. But now it had no time to deal with the reality at all.

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[Aymar] Embury may well have been correct: the offhand taste even of a genius is offhand taste. Working incredibly fast, Moses had managed to make the Long Island projects public works of genius. Now he was trying to work even faster — and he was working too fast to do even a good job.

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Moses’ had been formed in a different age, the age, twenty years and more in the past, when he had been a young reformer. To understand his dream for the West Side Improvement, one had to understand the age in which he had dreamed it.

In that age, parks had been for the upper and “comfortable middle” classes and one of the things those classes wanted most to do in parks was to drive through them — at the slow, leisurely speeds of the era — and enjoy their scenery. In that age, therefore, it made sense for a road through a park to be placed at its most scenic location — in the case of Riverside Park, at the river’s edge.

But things had changed. There had been 125,101 motor vehicles in New York City in 1914; there were 804,620 in New York City in 1934 — and additional hundreds of thousands in the Westchester and New Jersey suburbs that would also pour cars onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. Heavy traffic on Moses’ Long Island parkways was already beginning to make driving on them less and less a source of pleasure and more and more a source of pain — or at least irritation; their value as a source of beauty and pleasure in themselves was already clearly diminishing.

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It was in transportation, the area in which Robert Moses was most active after the war, that his isolation from reality was most complete: because he never participated in the activity for which he was creating his highways — driving — at all. Insulated in the comfortable rear seat of his limousine, unable to experience even once the frustration of a traffic jam, unable, unless he made an effort and put his work aside and leaned forward to look out the window, even to look at a traffic jam, Robert Moses did not know what driving in the modern era was. He did not know that the sheer weight of numbers of new cars had changed the very nature of the activity for which he was creating facilities, had introduced — or, to be more specific, re-emphasized, since even before the war planners had seen the first signs of the change — new realities into the outlook for metropolitan transportation. He was making transportation plans based on beliefs that were not true any more.

just do it

By the time the higher courts came to rule on the question of whether the Taylor Estate was a park, it was a park. What was a judge to do? Tell the state to tear up the roads and tear down the buildings, to destroy what hundreds of thousands of dollars of the public’s money had been spent to build? Tell the people who had visited the Taylor Estate that they could visit it no more? In theory, of course, judges should not be influenced by such considerations. But judges are human. And their susceptibility to such considerations was undoubtedly increased by Moses’ willingness to attack publicly those of them who ruled against him, as he had done to the “local judge,” thereby letting the public know exactly who it was who was closing the park to them.

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Once you did something physically, it was very hard for even a judge to undo it.