Luke Ford

I’ve been listening to the audio book The Power Broker (1974) by Robert Caro about Robert Moses.

According to Wikipedia:

In later years a more positive view of Moses’ career has emerged, in explicit reaction to his portrayal in The Power Broker.[10] This re-evaluation has included museum exhibits and a 2007 book (Robert Moses and the Modern City) described as having a “revisionist theme running throughout”.[11] In 2014, the author reminisced about his seven years’ labor on the book in The New York Times Sunday Book Review.[12]

The book remains highly regarded. In 2017, David W. Dunlap described The Power Broker as “the book that still must be read – 43 years after it was published – to understand how New York really works.”[13] In 2020, the book made frequent appearances as a status symbol on the bookshelves of U.S. journalists and politicians appearing in TV interviews from their homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.[14][15]

In the book Caro claims Moses made parkway bridges low to keep buses from bringing black people to the beaches. In 1999 German professor of sociology Bernward Joerges, pointed out that buses were not allowed on the parkway anyway and “Moses did nothing different on Long Island from any parks commissioner in the country” in designing bridges too low for buses to pass under.

Glenn Kessler writes in the Washington Post:

“I’m still surprised that some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a White and a Black neighborhood or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach — or that would’ve been — in New York was — was designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices.”

— Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, remarks at the White House, Nov. 8

When Buttigieg made these comments at the White House, some right-leaning Twitter users immediately cried foul…

Well, our knee jerked. This was obviously a reference to one of the most famous anecdotes in Robert Caro’s majestic biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker.” (A Transportation Department official confirmed that Buttigieg was referring to Caro’s Pulitzer-Prize winning work.)

The New-York Historical Society, which is currently featuring an exhibition on Caro’s reportage, also weighed in. “Bridges spanning #RobertMoses’ Long Island parkways had a clearance too low for buses to pass under,” the organization said in a tweet. “This meant anyone who could not travel by car — including lower income families and people of color — to a long journey over local roads, effectively barring them from Moses’ parks.” A spokesperson said the tweets were based on exhibition labels.

But then we heard from Peter Shulman, an associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University. He said that this story has been largely debunked. So we decided to look deeper. (Note: there is little dispute over the first part of Buttigieg’s comment regarding the building of highways, which is well-documented across the country.)

Few men have had as much impact on the design of a city than Robert Moses (1888-1981). He built the highways and bridges that crisscross New York City. He constructed hundreds of playgrounds, sports fields and urban pools. He built housing developments, such as Stuyvesant Town, Riverside Park, the United Nations headquarters and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. And he designed beautiful beaches and state parks on Long Island and across New York — and the parkways that led people to them.

At the peak of his influence, Moses was more powerful than any mayor or governor, even though he was not elected. Caro’s book, published in 1974, is mostly a study of power and how power corrupts, depicting the transformation of an idealist reformer into a tyrant who created slums and destroyed communities without remorse. The 1,200-page book, a feat of astonishing reporting and writing, is generally regarded as one of the 100 greatest works of nonfiction. It destroyed Moses’s reputation and shaped how people think about his legacy.

Caro also cast Moses as a racist who made it harder for people of color to visit his properties. Buttigieg referenced one of the book’s most famous anecdotes, which appears on pages 318 and 319.

This section of the book concerns the construction of one of Moses’s greatest achievements, Jones Beach State Park, which opened in 1929. Moses also constructed parkways, such as Southern State Parkway, in the 1920s that took people to the beach.

Moses “began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low — too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouraging long and arduous. For Negroes, who he considered inherently ‘dirty,’ there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, especially to Moses’s beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted off to parks many miles further on Long Island. And even in those parks, buses carrying Negro groups were discouraged from using ‘white’ beach areas — the best beaches — by a system Shapiro calls ‘flagging’; the handful of Negro lifeguards (there were only a handful of Negro employees among the thousands employed by the Long Island State Park Commission) were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out.”

(When then-governor Franklin D. Roosevelt “gingerly raised the matter” of the treatment of Black Americans with Moses, Caro writes that Moses put him off and FDR never raised it again.)

“Shapiro” was Sidney M. Shapiro, a close Moses associate and former chief engineer and general manager of the Long Island State Park Commission. He was a major source for Caro. The source notes say that Shapiro granted 100 hours of interviews with Caro, with the understanding that nothing could be used unless he died — and he passed away in 1972, two years before publication.

In the endnotes, Shapiro is listed as the only source for the order to keep the bridges of the parkways low. Shapiro, along with Paul Kern, a law secretary at City Hall under Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia, are listed as sources for Moses believing Black Americans were “dirty.” Kern and Paul Windels, LaGuardia’s corporation counsel, are the sources for the details on the bus permits and pool temperature.

But since “The Power Broker” was published, as always in history, there has been some revisionism and Moses’s achievements are now viewed in a better light. In particular, the anecdote about the parkway bridges has been increasingly questioned, along with other details in Caro’s book.

Bernward Joerges, a German professor of sociology, in 1999 carefully examined the saga of the bridges. In an essay, he acknowledged Moses was an “undemocratic scoundrel” and a “structural racist” but argues that all parkways at the time had low bridges.

“How, then, should one understand that Moses built some 200 overpasses so low?” he asked. “U.S. civil engineers with whom I have corresponded regularly produce two simple explanations for the rationality of the low-hanging bridges: that commercial traffic was excluded from the parkways anyway; and that the generally good transport situation on Long Island forbade the very considerable cost of raising the bridges … Moses did nothing different on Long Island from any parks commissioner in the country. … In sum: Moses could hardly have let buses on his parkways, even if he had wanted differently.”

He also believes Caro overstated the reasons Black Americans did not go to Jones Beach.

“The fact remains that Blacks could gain physical access to Long Island beaches via many routes. And yet Jones Beach remained a white strand,” he observed. “Even today, when many more Blacks drive cars, and when no politician tries to exclude them from the beaches, not many poor Blacks seem to gather on Jones Beach. There existed then, and there exist today, many reasons for Black families to go elsewhere.”

Kenneth T. Jackson, a Columbia University historian who has said that generations of his students have failed to confirm episodes in Caro’s book, also says the overpass story is not true.

“Caro is wrong,” he wrote in an email. “Arnold Vollmer, the landscape architect who was in charge of design for the bridges, said the height was due to cost.” He added: “Also, you can still get to Jones Beach by train and bus, as you always could.”

(Here are images of a 1937 bus schedule to Jones Beach and a state promotional photo showing buses parked in front of the famed water tower.)

But more recently, Thomas J. Campanella, a Cornell University historian of city planning, had a change of heart when he measured the height of the bridges on the Southern State Parkway. “I’ve always had doubts about the veracity of the Jim Crow bridge story. There is little question that Moses held patently bigoted views,” he wrote in an article for Bloomberg News in 2017. But then he recorded clearances for 20 bridges, viaducts and overpasses on other parkways built at the time and compared them to measures of the 20 original bridges and overpasses on the Southern State Parkway. It turned out clearances are substantially lower on the Moses parkway.

“The verdict? It appears that Sid Shapiro was right,” he wrote.

“I do believe it is true,” Campanella said in an email to The Fact Checker. “The parkways I looked at were built in roughly the same era as the Southern State — especially Sawmill and Hutch. In fact, the Westchester parkways set most of the standards for parkway design for years in the United States. The lower overpasses on the Southern State parkway are a substantial deviation from precedent.”

Joerges suggested there was a reason for this. “True the bridges were low, but each had to be low differently,” he wrote. “Moses took great care that each and every bridge was individually fitted into its natural context: standardized unicity, as it were, was part of an artfully laid out nature. One can show more generally that, when it came to parkway building, bridge-building culture was connected to a specific politics of nature.”

Shulman, the professor who brought this debate to our attention, said Campanella’s measurements do not confirm the story. “I don’t know what average bus heights were in the 1920s, but today they appear to be about 118″ (9′ 10″), so I’m not sure how meaningful these different heights even would be in practice,” he said in an email. “Vehicles have to have a clearance of less than 7′ 10″ to travel on NY parkways at all. The Saw Mill, the one with the greatest height cited by Campanella, is over 10′ (123.2″), but the safe clearance is obviously lower, and surely lower than 118”.”

Robert Caro writes in The Power Broker:

Roosevelt wouldn’t interfere even when he found out that Moses was discouraging Negroes from using many of his state parks.
Underlying Moses’ strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with “shock,” deep distaste for the public that was using them. “He doesn’t love the people,” she was to say. “It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people. . . . He’d denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. ‘I’ll get them! I’ll teach them!’… He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just the public. It’s a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons—just to make it a better public.” Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road’s proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low—too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently “dirty,” there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult
to obtain permits, particularly to Moses’ beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas. And Negroes were discouraged from using “white” beach areas—the best beaches—by a system Shapiro calls “flagging”; the handful of Negro lifeguards (there were only a handful of Negro employees among the thousands employed by the Long Island State Park Commission) were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out. When Negro civic groups from the hot New York City slums began to complain about this treatment, Roosevelt ordered an investigation and an aide confirmed that “Bob Moses is seeking to discourage large Negro parties from picnicking at Jones Beach, attempting to divert them to some other of the state parks.” Roosevelt gingerly raised the matter with Moses, who denied the charge violently—and the Governor never raised the matter again.

* …believing that what Negroes liked to do most was dance and sing, Moses arranged that the opening ceremonies for the Colonial Park Pool in Harlem include an exhibition by Bojangles Bill Robinson (identified by the Times as a “negro tap dancer”)

* Moses built one pool in Harlem, in Colonial Park, at 146th Street, and he was determined that that was going to be the only pool that Negroes— or Puerto Ricans, whom he classed with Negroes as “colored people”— were going to use. He didn’t want them “mixing” with white people in other pools, in part because he was afraid, probably with cause, that “trouble”—fights and riots—would result; in part because, as one of his aides puts it, “Well, you know how RM felt about colored people.”

To discourage “colored” people from using the Thomas Jefferson Pool, Moses, as he had done so successfully at Jones Beach, employed only white lifeguards and attendants. But he was afraid that such “flagging” might not be a sufficient deterrent to mothers and fathers from the teeming Spanish Harlem tenements who would be aware on a stifling August Sunday that cool water in which their children could play was only a few blocks away. So he took another precaution.
Corporation Counsel Windels was astonished at its simplicity. “We [Moses and I] were driving around Harlem one afternoon—he was showing me something or other—and I said, ‘Don’t you have this problem with the Negroes overrunning you?’ He said, ‘Well, they don’t like cold water and we’ve found that that helps.’ ” And then, Windels says, Moses told him confidentially that while heating plants at the other swimming pools kept the water at a comfortable seventy degrees, at the Thomas Jefferson Pool, the water was left unheated, so that its temperature, while not cold enough to bother white swimmers, would deter any “colored” people who happened to enter it once from returning.
Whether it was the temperature or the flagging—or the glowering looks flung at Negroes by the Park Department attendants and lifeguards— one could go to the pool on the hottest summer days, when the slums of Negro and Spanish Harlem a few blocks away sweltered in the heat, and not see a single non-Caucasian face. Negroes who lived only half a mile away, Puerto Ricans who lived three blocks away, would travel instead to Colonial Park, three miles away—even though many of them could not afford the bus fare for their families and had to walk all the way.
The fact that they didn’t use their neighborhood pool—and the explanation for this fact—was never once mentioned by any newspaper or public speaker…

* Robert Moses had always displayed a genius for adorning his creations with little details that made them fit in with their setting, that made the people who used them feel at home in them. There was a little detail on the playhouse-comfort station in the Harlem section of Riverside Park that is found nowhere else in the park. The wrought-iron trellises of the park’s other playhouses and comfort stations are decorated with designs like curling waves.
The wrought-iron trellises of the Harlem playhouse-comfort station are decorated with monkeys.

* It is thanks to [Sydney] Shapiro more than to any other single source that I came to understand Moses’ attitude toward Negroes, toward “that scum floating up from Puerto Rico” that was befouling his parks, toward what “RM” called the “lower classes”…