Original subtitles

the contemporary city is profoundly menaced not by any outside danger but by

an evil shaping within itself this is

the evil of the machine because of the confusion of its different functions

it's growing mechanization the omnipresence and anarchy of the motorcar

the city is at the mercy of industrial

machines if it is to be saved its

structure must change and this change is inevitable whether it

comes through insight or catastrophe the

city must be changed or it will perish

and our civilization with it sacred Gideon

all through the 20s giddy upward rise New Yorkers had been pursuing another

kind of dream not only upward but out into the expanse of green and blue that

as f scott Fitzgerald had seen alone was

limitless propelled by the rising prosperity and restlessness of New

Yorkers and by the revolutionary invention that since the turn of the

century had become the shining emblem of both this fateful movement beyond the

boundaries of Greater New York would alter forever the relation of the city

and the country and challenge all previous assumptions about urban life

the car disaggregates the car unravels

tight closely knit interdependent urban regions because it makes place less

relevant with a car there's a matter where some places so this relatively static this

relatively rigid grid of streets and buildings and railroad tracks has to

somehow respond to this thing which is hungry and demanding forces changes on

the landscape so the car takes pride of place among the variables that are going

to place demands on the city the cars the whole story

in the decades to come as the city moved through Depression World War and beyond

New York would become the arena of a titanic contest between the automobile

and the pedestrian between the highway and the city block

between the compact if often congested urban neighborhood and the sprawling if

often anonymous commuter suburb

before it was over that contest would Alba tear the city apart and force New

Yorkers to confront the most elemental urban questions of all

what is a city what makes cities work

Why should there be cities at all

no city as complex as New York no city

that builds itself and rebuilds itself

so often and often so well as a Hoyt has

a magic moment New York is a constellation of magic moments what is

astonishing about New York is how many of the magic moments of the past have

managed to survive we have lost a lot when we saved an awful lot what are the

magic moments of the 19th century the optimism of the City Hall sophisticated

French inspired building what is another optimism the Brooklyn Bridge it's still

there what a leap the Brooklyn Bridge was what a leap commissioners plan was and

it's still intact pretty much what a vision Central Park was and it's there

it's more beautiful now than it's been perhaps since the time of Olmstead

add to that these incredible office buildings that were built which

concluded with some kind of visible symbol at the top so I don't think we

should think of New York is being a closed book I mean New York could be

said to be like one of those incredible things you see in a 4th of July

fireworks they're just gone boom boom and it keeps going how we don't know how

many layers of that explosion will happen before Arnold Peters out me of

course hope that it will never peter out New York is that explosion

by the autumn of 1929 as the most spectacular decade in the history of the

city came to a breathtaking close New York seem to have arrived at the

varies enos of its dazzling career in 300 years it had grown from a tiny

trading post on the far edge of the known world to become the undisputed

cultural and economic capital of the world gathering in money and people from

around the globe it had made itself one of the wealthiest and most densely

populated places on earth its population rising from fewer than 5,000 in 1776 to

nearly seven million a century and a half later consecrated as no place on

earth to the power of Commerce and money and unbidden to any outside force it had

made itself the supreme center of American life then in one last glorious

decade from 1919 to 1929 finished bringing into existence a ravishing

dream city on the island of Manhattan which had become the most modern place on earth

one is stunned at the sight of these

upright masses buildings 50 stories high

straight lines everywhere affirming the will to make room for millions

this is not an architecture for men it is an architecture for human masses

one cannot understand it without first having enjoyed the thrill of adding

enormous totals and of living in a

gigantic compact and brilliant world

in the end the fever pitch of the 1920s acknowledging no limits and building

higher and higher could never have been sustained as if like Icarus the city had

flown too close to the Sun and then come tumbling back to earth again

in the years following the crash of 1929 as the greatest depression in American

history plunged the city and nation into economic gloom two things would become

faithfully clear the city itself acting on its own could no longer meet the

needs of its own people and unfettered capitalism in New York in a century and

a half of relentless commercial growth had been carried to its very limit in

the years to come as the greatest domestic crisis of the 20th century

swept across the city and the nation New Yorkers would be forced to reinvent

their city once again on a massive scale moving as they did into uncharted waters

from which there would be no return

between 1929 and 1945 as immense new forces were unleashed in New York

altering forever the relation of the city in the country two of the most

remarkable New Yorkers of all time would come to the fore Fiorello LaGuardia and

Robert Moses and attempt to create in the darkest of times a bold new city of

the future it's strange to think how these two

powerful figures Fiorella Gordy and Robert Moses interacted I mean

physically so different allegory of celebrating difference loving the tumble

and the tide of the city Robert Moses trying to bring order to it but in some

ways they were able to work together and I think you can't help but look at New

York in the 1930s and marvel at the things that were built during the Great

Depression the new parks and playgrounds the swimming pools the roads the beaches

it was a time of achievement a greater period of achievement than what we have

seen at the end of the 20th century when we're so much more affluent in the

economy's booming new cities have always replaced old

cities by periods but today it is possible for the city of modern times

the happy city the radiant city to be born

Le Corbusier

we had immensely increased the range of our dreams for ourselves in the 20s and

that was why the Great Depression was a terrible psychological shock to people

it led to what amounted to enormous - a clinical depression on the part of the

American people they could not believe that we had stumbled and fallen

there had been downturns before boom times that went bust followed by years

of hardship want and misery but there had never been anything like the Great

Depression of the 1930s

on the eve of the crash fewer than two million people were unemployed in the

United States less than two years later the number had risen to more than eight

million and a year after that 213 million nearly a third of the nation's

workforce nowhere in the country were the effects more visible or more

heartbreaking than in New York where by 1931 the greatest economic engine on

earth had all but ground to a halt

what's fascinating is that the bottom doesn't drop out suddenly the crash

leads to a slow toppling effect no they they don't have a sense that the world

has transformed and that things have changed very complete but slowly it

takes home obviously one of the first things that gets hit is the financial

sector and then the ripple effect in terms of business services spreads out

from that the manufacturing sector has hit extremely hard and huge numbers of

people are either laid off in the garment business or in fact their wages

are cut in half an industry after industry from garment manufacturing to

construction I implode in some cases really almost totally cease economic

activity and you have to remember this is before unemployment insurance before

any systematic government will leaf a system and yeah it's already past the

year when people could go back to the land certainly in New York City very few

people had organic relationships with you know land the consequences are as

they always are that money isn't coming in people can't make the rent there are

massive evictions people begin to sort of crop up in encampments in parks the

river's edge in old auto dumps around

town red lines begin to form December

24th 1931 every day one sees the

degrading misery of bread lines every day one is told that this great industry

in that from railroads to publishing is collapsing

the building slump spreads in New York the most salient new structure the

Magnificent Empire state stands unlit and can only pay its taxes by collecting

dollars from the sightseers it was sent to its Erie for the stupendous view

stories of failing banks turned in motorcars despairing suicides are Dindin

to one's ears Mary Agnes Hamilton

you turn a corner and here is a surprising spectacle a line of men three

or sometimes four abreast a block long and wedged together so tightly that no

passerby can break through those at the head of this gray black human snake will

eat tonight those farther back probably

won't bruise flibben

1,600,000 people in New York after City's population of six million nine

hundred thousand 1 million six hundred thousand people were on relief roles

that's mothers fathers and children if you look down and Riverside Park which

we were talking about that's where the city dumped its garbage

and there were huge mounds of garbage at 96 and a hundred and twentieth history

and you would see scores hundreds of women and children whenever the trucks

would come and dump the garbage children and mothers would run to try and get

some kind of food out of there it was terrible in New York City in the

country at least you can usually find something to eat but they were

Hoovervilles in Central Park in fact my sheep that raised on the Sheep Meadow

that had been donated by my great great great grandfather named George Coghill

he'd given the Sheep to Central Park in the 1860s and the herd had saved their

till the 1934 when they were moved up state to the city's farm in the

Catskills because the city was afraid that the people living in the

Hoovervilles would look upon the sheep as lunch more than as a touch of the blue color

by 1931 tens of thousands of New Yorkers had been evicted from their homes those

that could doubled up with family and friends but thousands more unable to find any

housing at all sock bought shelter they could find in one of the dismal shanty

towns that had begun to spring up along the East River and the Hudson and in

Central Park called Hoovervilles an ironic tribute to the president

wellhe we're here because we there's no work to be found we came down to the

Hudson and seen up the lumber floating at the river so we tired of building a Shack so we

built one so we are not a burden on the

community we have month after month as

the economic situation continued to deteriorate calls for government action

grew louder in Harlem and in the Bronx where one in three workers in the

garment industry had been laid off thousands of protesters took to the

streets while across the city rent strikes broke out along with political

demonstrations of every kind sometimes escalating into pitched battles with the police

the devastation was so broad and reached so high that had had just been a

manufacturing crisis so that unskilled laborers were out of work I'm not

convinced that everyone would have noticed but everyone saw in the

depression either someone they knew or the likelihood that someone they knew

would end up there it seemed very clearly out of people's own hands and I

think that did propel a kind of communal commitment the temporary bureaucracies

of relief thrown up by the crisis have all the character of a frail

Expeditionary Force sent into a war that is expected to last only three months

and which has become instead a world war their theory is still essentially that

of charitably helping bombs and weaklings over the rough places rather

than masses cut down by a kind of

economic Massacre the New Republic

under Herbert Hoover federal authorities had all been washed their hands of

responsibility for the growing number of destitute Americans New York State

itself under governor Franklin Roosevelt had been among the first to respond with

large-scale relief programs but little of the money that passed through City

Hall reached the people for whom it had been intended as to how many officials

pocketed most of the funds then made sure most of the rest was distributed to

party regulars New York then was a city

utterly unable to meet the needs of its people in almost every respect the

Tammany machine was totally corrupt really shocking percentage of the Relief

dollars that came in to New York was siphoned off by the Tammany machine in

1931 and 32 and 33 New York was a city paralyzed and it seemed like a city

where there was basically no hope of it ever meeting the news you might say the

twentieth century the automobile age had arrived the city

was strangling on its traffic it was unable to build a single line of

arterial highway it had an idea of building what we now know is the Henry

Hudson bridge they've been talking about it for thirty years it wasn't built the

Triborough bridge had been started and stopped and there was no hope of

starting these things in any foreseeable

future for years rumors of official

malfeasance had swirled around City Hall which by 1931 had been occupied for more

than half a decade by a dapper and charmingly corrupt ex vaudeville

performer and Tammany man named James J Walker under whose reign Tammany system

of patronage and spoils had spiraled completely out of control well I'm sure

I would have liked him okay he must have been a marvelous person to spend time

with and he was a dreadful mayor he both who didn't show up until noon and it was

usually gone by 3:00 in the afternoon and he was a songwriter he wrote yeah

well you love me in December as you do in May still a famous song

I think he fitted his times very well was he a good mayor no you awful Mario's

as crooked as a dog's hind leg Robert Moses had the perfect expression for

Jimmy Walker hey F Beau Brummel AF guttersnipe Moses watch Walker walk into

the office in the morning you know he wore a single button suit perfect the

narrowest of cravat spats the highly polished shoes Robert Moses would see

him come into the morning a pile of mail on his desk and he'd say any checks in

there and if someone said no he'd sweep them all off the desk his mayoralty of

the city of New York you know sort of enshrine his ledge into something with

an overtone of fun but it wasn't fun for the people of the city the city was

doing nothing to help its people in the depths of the depression who was doing

remarkably the problem was that there was no money coming from the state and

there was no money coming from the federal government so he was left with

no recourse really but to borrow he borrow any barn and he borrowed and in

fact in the end he basically had to agree that the city would in fact make

tremendous cuts in public services stopped these Public Works programs

layoff workers and the rest of it and it was at this moment really that he ran

into even more serious trouble in the investigations of Walker began that lead

to his downfall the beginning of the end of Walker's reign came in the fall of

1930 when Governor Franklin Roosevelt obliged to distance himself from Tammany

Hall as he prepared his run for the presidency appointed a fiercely upright

reform-minded judge named Samuel Seabury to investigate corruption in city government

and they begin to find it's not too hard you know massive amounts of official

malfeasance and corruption particularly in the police department in the judicial

system one of the nastiest thing is that they're running of the spice

racketeering where not only did they arrest prostitutes and then you know

accept payoffs to let them off but increase things they'd be interested

resting women off the street respectable middle-class women and you know what's

rifting to sort of expose them unless they pay off it's really rampant running

amuck stuff and but Seabury does is he begins to sort of go up the chain of

command getting closer and closer to Walker

in the spring of 1932 Walker himself was called to testify on the morning of May

25th the immensely popular mayor pushed his way through a throng of 5,000

admirers outside the County Courthouse on Foley Square and strode confidently

into the courtroom informed of Walker's rousing reception Seabury said simply they gave one to

boss tweed - you know Walker was so charming that when Judge Samuel Seabury

was having his investigation he was advised by his aides he's so charming

don't look him in the eye which on you so when Seabury was cross-examining

Jimmy Walker understand he tried to stand sideways so that Walker couldn't

catch his eye once on the witness stand however there was little Walker could do

as Seabury marshaled evidence of the nearly 1 million dollars the mayor had

pocketed in kickbacks moneys Walker himself gamely tried to explain away as

beneficence 'as by the end of the summer it was clear to almost everyone but

Walker had to go and he abdicates he leaves office Seabury was not about to

actually bring formal charges he said I got lots of circumstantial evidence but

I don't have that smoking gun but it was Roosevelt behind the scenes that made

sure that Walker would in fact now take as much delay to exit

franklin roosevelt governor of new york gave him his choice of resigning or

being fired and he opted to resign to be replaced by this nobody named bubu

o'brien who's famous for his first press conference somebody asked him who the

new sewer commissioner was going to be and bubu o'brien said i don't know they haven't told me yet

- though we'll find the same company in the midst of criticism that comes from

an easy conscience and a knowledge within yourself but no matter whether

misunderstood or none you did the best you could

on September 1st 1932 Jimmy Walker left City Hall for the last time vote to run

again and clear his record then sailed for Europe to join his mistress the

actress Betty Compton in Paris that

dazzling theatrical an essentially absurd career has collapsed at last the

New York Herald Tribune the elimination of mr. Walker as mayor of this city is a

distinct victory for higher standards of

public life Judge Samuel Seabury

you

more than anyone realized the demise of Jimmy Walker and the devastating

depression that triggered it had set the stage for one of the most far-reaching

political transformations in American history before the year was out Franklin Delano

Roosevelt's deft handling of the Walker scandal had helped propel him to the White House

not to win votes around but to win in this protein

America people

in New York meanwhile with Tammany on the retreat for the first time in 15 years

reformers saw their chance of finally retaking City Hall pinning their hopes

on a brilliant young civil servant named Robert Moses who under Al Smith had

built the first state park system in the country and the first system of public

highways in the world the Reformed forces realize after Walker

is out the Tammany is a wounded beast and that there's a possibility for

actually winning power for reform candidate the question is who's it going

to be the person that most of the Reformers month is Robert Moses but

Samuel Seabury who is the cuspid role in the investigation the kingmaker here won't hear of it

why because Moses an L Smith man and Al Smith is a Tammany man and Seabury is

determined to keep Tammany out of City Hall he wants Fiorello LaGuardia he was

in many ways the least likely of candidates a short excitable 51 year old

ex congressman and failed mayoral candidate widely thought to be finished

in politics having lost to Jimmy Walker only four years before in one of the

biggest landslides in the city's history actually the idea of LaGuardia horrifies

mostly performers this guy had been the most radical congressman all through the

1920s and then when the depression came he was railing furiously against Hoover

his own party administration for not in fact helping the unemployed and he was

also attacking bankers you know those bastards broke the people's back with

their usually let them die the people will survive well you know the forces of reform

we're not exactly interested in this kind of rabble rouser but Seabury was

adamant he's absolutely honest the judge declared he's a man of great courage and

he can win why did Seabury want him

because in fact the guy was a scrapper because the guy knew how to really go

out campaign a lot of the good government types had never you know set

foot in the streets this guy could debate you know a nitish to get the

Jewish vote and very important he had a large disaffected Italian constituency

whom in fact had been kept out of access to power and jobs by the Irish Tammany

machines he was in a way reflective of New York City a one-person melting pot

mother's Jewish father's Italian he's an Episcopalian

speaks different languages but a person who's comfortable with the difference a

person who not only is comfortable with it celebrates I think he's also the

first man to embody in his Styles a kind of multiculturalism that really embraces

all New Yorkers that says the greatness of the city is precisely in its energy

nity that this is its richness not in its or Gus traditions not its great

wealth I think he was committed to the mess that was New York it wasn't

neat it was combative and it was energizing and it was complex and I

think he that's what he was trying to get it was allowing people to thrive

when that kind of equal opportunity community and to try to build that kind

of city on Election Day the largest turnout in the city's history over 2

million voters propelled the fusion candidate into City Hall by the narrowest of margins

at 12:05 a.m. on the morning of January 1st 1934 while the streets filled with

thousands of New Yorkers celebrating the repeal of prohibition

LaGuardia took the oath of office in the library of Samuel C burries townhouse on

East 63rd Street it was perfect timing

he was precisely the mayor that New York City needed to get through the

Depression and the world war he was the mayor of New York City during the most

difficult time ever to be mayor of New York City when we talk about fiscal

problems in New York City we're talking about ranges of unemployment that go

between four and eight percent he was talking about 50% unemployment a city

that was totally devastated so he took over New York City in 1933 probably at

the worst moment worst point in the history of this city determined to change the course of city

government as no mayor before or since he set right to work skipping up the

steps of City Hall on his first day in office he shook his fist at the hundred

and twenty-two year old building roared out in Italian a finito la ku Konya no

more free lunch then quickly showed he meant every word he said in a matter of weeks

LaGuardia had begun to dismantle the corrupt political machine that had run

New York for generations coming thousands of positions traditionally

reserved for Tammany Hall loyalists and putting in its place

a new system of scientific civil service

based on expertise and and in fact here

he was brilliantly effective he was gonna be in office for twelve years and

during that time he systematically starved Tammany of patronage and this is an

accrual moment because in fact it's the destruction of the Democratic Party

machine that was one of his biggest goals and those of his supporters and in

fact it was successful him and happening he was not without his limitations

theatrical autocratic and violently short-tempered he more than once had to

be physically restrained from striking other city officials if you were any

Dumber he once screamed at a hapless stenographer I'd make you a commissioner

but New Yorkers loved him anyway in part because he threw himself into the job

with reckless abandon racing two fires in a motorcycle sidecar accompanying the

police on official raids and once conducting the city orchestra at

Carnegie Hall where he insisted on receiving no special consideration from

the musicians just treat me like Toscanini he said he was everywhere he was everywhere

and he was distinctive because he was so animated and his qualities were that

he's got things done and that he related he shared himself

and his soul and his heart and his emotions as well as his ability he was

not afraid to be a human being as a politician he was a person of the people

and I have always believed that if you want to really represent people you

gotta act like a people they can't just be something above that and I think

LaGuardia understood that it's hard to say that LaGuardia has a single unified

vision for the city but he certainly got a series of goals and probably first and

foremost are there ones that he that he ran on one is war on crime he declares

extremely public war on racketeers and gamblers in particular and he loves

going around and collecting slot machines taking them out in the barge in

the harbor taking his axe you know chopping them and throwing them

overboard they're rounding up guns and he's very very conscious of media and

he's got the newsreels there he's got the radio there he's a very public

symbolic you know acting out clearly on the out of stage he races around in

police cars he appoints good tough honest cops you know like Valentine the

people who had been shunted aside under your Tammany regime right now running the show

but the man whom the newspapers called the little flower had even higher

ambitions even as the city lay sunk in the depths of the worst depression in

American history he dreamed of transforming into the most progressive

and modern metropolis in the world of rebuilding its tattered physical

infrastructure ruined by 15 years of looting and neglect through a series of

massive public programs and Public Works that would put tens of thousands of men

and women back to work and rebuild the pride and self-respect

of the city and its people I shall not rest he declared

until my native city is first not only in population but also in wholesome

housing not only in commerce but also in public health until it is not only out

of debt but abounding in happiness but the fact is that when LaGuardia

takes power he is up against the wall and he's got extremely limited

parameters the consortium of bankers who had been loaning the city money are in

essence saying listen LaGuardia we're gonna cut you off without a dime we're

gonna demand our money back unless you take a series of measures and those

measures are basically cut public services and concentrate on paying back

but you're the bank's now LaGuardia actually does carry some of this out and

we tend to forget this they we're mass layoffs of city workers and such not

that was part of him he was in fact a business oriented performer and yet very

short order LaGuardia is in a position to tell the bankers to take a hike and

not only does he not continue to shrivel municipal government and public programs

but he presides over the greatest expansion of government programs and

public services in the history of the city the extraordinary revolution that

would make that possible would issue from an unprecedented convergence of

local and national forces a unique alliance of personalities and events and

represent in the end the greatest single sea change in American government since

the early days of the Republic it was called the New Deal and in many

ways it would mark the very zenith of New York City's influence over American

life and the key to understanding the Guardia and the successes of his

administration and for that matter the role of Robert Moses is to understand

the New Deal for me the most fascinating thing about the New Deal is that it is

in large measure constructed in New York City that when Franklin Roosevelt goes

to Washington he is not going alone he is going with a set of ideas and

experiences which he is gleaned by working in New York City and New York

State politics for the previous decades and he is going with a platoon of New

Yorkers from various of aspects of New York life also have got programs who

have got ideas which had been tested and worked out on the streets of New York

City in essence I would argue that what happens in 32 or 33 is that New York

invades Washington New York boards and seizes Washington but instead of

treating it as a conquered country what they do is say Washington has got to do

what New York City has been doing for all these years and do it on a colossal

new scale but the resources the owned in the federal state can command it must

intervene in the workings of the economy must not in fact just sit back and be

laissez-faire in its attitude it must seize the moment and operate on a very

different set of parameters than the previous administration

when you look at the New Deal there are a lot of people from around the country

who are players but who's sitting at OSA veltz right hand it's Harry Hopkins who

comes up through the Social Work and the welfare bureaucracy in New York City and

is the guy who is sitting there and you know starts signing a zillions of

dollars worth of checks on his left hand is Eleanor who is in fact plugged into

the settlement house movement and a whole network of labor reformers there's

Francis Perkins who's going to be his Secretary of Labor she was back in the

triangle fire days she's in fact continuing and applying lessons that

were learned in that period on national level the list just goes on all along

there's this squadron of New Yorkers who are installed in high places and begin

to promote New York City of programs the

seismic changes wrought by the New Deal would reverberate for the rest of the

century as billions of dollars in federal aid were soon pouring out of

Washington affecting every aspect of American life there were funds for unemployment relief

for long-term initiatives in Health and Social Security for public housing and

labor reform and most surprisingly of all in the darkest hour of the

depression for the kind of large-scale public works that Fiorello LaGuardia had

made the centerpiece of his vision of a transformed metropolis

for better or worse it completely transformed the way people view

government and government's role in people's lives before the New Deal it

didn't occur to most people that government had any obligation to its

citizenry beyond the basics of military support and security and things like

that but the idea that government had a responsibility to intervene economically

to provide employment when necessary to keep people from starving even this was

simply not understood as social security something that's now sacrosanct and in

many ways was a novel idea that the people should actually enjoy security

and that government was obliged to provide it it changes the nature of the

relationship between citizens and government

and yet the tremendous irony is is that on the short term the New Deal programs

are going to be the salvation of New York City because Washington comes out

of this enormous they strengthen New York which had been the unofficial

capital and the financial capital and the cultural capital and the marketing

capital has now got a rival in a major league way that it had never had before

and something that you know it's not the center of the country it's just another

city on a very hard pressed city and it's dependent upon federal transfer and

Washington is going to apply the same New Deal tactics and strategies out west

where they're going to build huge public works projects you know dams

electrification systems water supply which is very largely going to be

drawing upon money garnered from the Northeast in New York in particular to

develop what's going to emerge a little bit down the road as a Sun Belt

competitor to New York City's economic primacy and can do the same thing in the

south the New Deal courtesy very largely of New Yorkers is in fact going to

equalize the relations between the regions but it is going to transform

forevermore New York City's Central T that was characteristic of it up till

that period

the full effects of that epic transformation would not be felt for

decades to come in the meantime no mayor in the country saw more clearly the

potential of the New Deal than Fiorello LaGuardia pioneering the use of the

airplane in government the indefatigable mayor would like to be addressed by his

old Army Air Corps rank of Major was soon flying down to Washington early in

the morning returning to New York by late afternoon with the promise of new

federal aid in hand thanks to his immense personal charm his reputation

Foreign Corrupt ability and his close personal ties to Franklin Roosevelt

our mayor is the most appealing man I know he comes to Washington and tells me

a sad story the tears run down my cheeks and the tears run down his cheeks and

the first thing I know is wangled another fifty million dollars out of me

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Fiorello LaGuardia is you know like this with

Franklin Roosevelt that's the critical connection and money billions of dollars

flow into a vast series Public Works programs that build things that are

socially useful they build highways they build airports that bill hospitals they

build schools they build colleges they build you know health centers a vast

panoply of expansion of things before it was over the unlikely alliance between

the patrician president and the diminutive populist mayor from one man

called a lowercase Franklin Roosevelt would turn New York into a showcase for

the New Deal in the darkest hours of the depression Fiorello LaGuardia would have the

resources he would need to turn New York into what he called a gigantic

Laboratory of Civic reconstruction all he needed was someone who knew how to

use them and within days of his inauguration on January 1st 1934 he had

turned to a man already universally known in New York as the man who could get things done

his name was Robert Moses the greatest builder of Public Works the city would

ever see and long after he had left the public stage people would still be

debating the meaning and consequences of his extraordinary career

Robert Moses was the single most important figure to emerge in New York

City in the 20th century he was a unique figure not only is there no counterpart

in New York City to Robert Moses neither is there any counterpart to Robert Moses

and Chicago or Los Angeles or Houston one person single handling over a period

of almost half a century reshaped such great metropolis in a democracy you

think of power in four-year terms or eight years of 12 years spans Robert

Moses held power for almost half a century and with this power he shaped

New York not for a term were not for a decade and not for a generation but for

almost half a century and you talk about New York in the 20th century the story

of New York is inseparable from the story of Robert Moses to an astonishing

extent they are one in the same but Margaret Moses did that had to be done

was to adapt really a 19th century City for 20th century circumstances

he was swimming with the tide of history the American people had essentially

voted with their pocketbooks and with their minds in favor of a more spread-out

environment one that was based really on automobile transportation Robert Moses

took that idea and ran with it like no one else in American history

of course there are great historical forces which make things the way they

are and to an extent every individual is subject to them but there are some

individuals who ride the crest of the social forces and turn them in their

direction Moses was that kind of a person because

of his personality the scope of his vision his energy and he had an

intensity of purpose I mean a savage will that he's going to get this done

you know he's saying then I hit him with a meat axe and the meat axe could be

anything he had to do to get his and accomplished he certainly did some

terrible things and tried to do some terrible things that he fortunately did

not get away with and I think the key to understanding Robert Moses is that he

didn't care about people he passionately cared about automobiles and moving them

Sophocles and one must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has

been when you look at what Moses wrought you say these are some of the greatest

creations of man and what did they create

what kind of a city did he leave behind

he'd begun his career one man later said as the very flower of New York's reform

movement the fiercely driven second son of wealthy German Jews fired by the

ideals of the progressive age and the dream of public service coming-of-age as

the era of horse and rail gave way to the era of the motorcar from beginning

to end the story of his life would be bound up with the automobile and its

fateful impact on the life of American cities at the turn of the century but it first

appeared to be a harmless little toy began puttering around on the streets of

the city and it wasn't a harmless little toy it was in fact the agent of

dissolution which was about over the next 20-30 years to unravel to

de-centralized this tremendous the integrated rail based system that had

been constructed nobody took it seriously at first because in fact it

was a toy and it was a rich man's toy no great surprise these early machines were

expensive and you had ever chauffeured and they were very fragile so they

needed an indoor garage so it's not a surprise that of the around 1900 the

8,000 cars that existed in the u.s. the clear majority of them were owned in New

York City and they were owned in engrossed Los John Jacob Astor had 32

one summer day in 1901 two-year-old Louis Camille was playing out in Lower

East Side streets son of Italian immigrants and it was run over by an

automobile driven by a chauffeur who was taking to Wall Street businessman down

to their office a huge crowd formed up and nearly in fact lynched all of the occupants of the car

this is the first critical clash the streets were playgrounds for the

working-class poor and the car is making a competing claim for rights of access

to this place and it makes it with brute force

Henry Ford changes the equation by mass-producing autos

he's turning out that Model T flippers are dropping in price they would in

Access range now a much larger middle class they're no longer exclusive bid

toys for the bridge the number of car ownership begins to soar throughout the

country but in New York City in particular they triple between 1915 and

1920 but it's nothing compared to what happens in the 20s the 20s in fact is

when the automobile explodes it's not just the spectacular presence of these

things in terms of the sheer number of people who are now driving them it is

the way the cities begin to be remade to suit the needs and convenience of automobile errs

convinced of the future of American life lay with the automobile Robert Moses was

among the first to sense that cities themselves would have to be dramatically

rebuilt to accommodate the reality of the motorcar appointed by Governor L Smith in the

boom years of the 1920s to reorganize New York state government he soon began

to conceive of a revolutionary project of his own a sweeping network of limited access

roadways the first of their kind in the world leading out to a vast system of

public parks and beaches that would open the hinterlands of Long Island to

millions of New Yorkers starved for open spaces and begin to fulfill the promise

of the automotive age nothing on a scale like this had ever

been conceived if he wanted people to drive to beauty to a park through a park

he called them Ribbon Park and every aspect of them was going to be beautiful

on April 18th 1924 Smith put Moses in charge of what was now officially called

the Long Island State Park Commission after decades of dreaming he would

finally get a chance to build and build he did with a single-minded Drive and

ferocity that stunned everyone who came in contact with him riding roughshod

over long entrenched interests bullying private landowners and millionaires and

when necessary swaying local political bosses by offering inside information on

the layout of his proposed roadways could say that the city was part of a

larger continuity that it was part of a slow and Cora's became a central

metaphor for him in the flow of traffic as opening up a new possibility for

cities maybe you could see him saying that cities and citizens or them didn't

have to be stuck that he would have seen the block the street the neighborhood as

obstacles and he felt that now you can overcome these obstacles you can get

into the flow and you know he he built the flow he created the flow and he had

great skill at putting this across to the public wouldn't you like to go with

the flow wouldn't you like to flow isn't it better than just hanging out

it took Moses six or seven years of fighting without Smith behind him to

hack out that Park and Parkway system for Long Island but when he did it when

Jones Beach opened in 1929 the whole world came to praise it no one had ever

seen anything like it and who came the young urban builders the people who

wanted to build roads who wanted to build Park Boys who wanted to build

State Park they came to Robert Moses to learn how to do it so he was not only

America's greatest road builder but he was the man who taught the other illa billah'

by 1929 Robert Moses had helped set in motion one of the most fateful

transformations the city and its surroundings would ever undergo opening

the region beyond the city's borders to the reality of the automobile

now as the private energies of the 1920s gave way to the public crisis of the

1930s he would finally get a chance to transform the city itself which for

better or for worse would never be the

same again up through the depression the

fell government has almost no involvement in funding urban functions

they just didn't pay for things that happened in cities but the New Deal

changes all that and they begin a whole new phase in American history in which

the federal government funds local enterprises because one main reason for

doing this is to get the economy going get cash flowing the Roosevelt

administration is very eager for things that can start quickly and one of the

geniuses of Robert Moses is that he understood that opportunities would

arise and he had plans in his back pocket sometimes just in the back of his

head but sometimes more than that they can be pulled out of the drawer and put

in place extremely quickly from the day he took office as New York

City Parks Commissioner on January 19 1934 Robert Moses would become the

epicenter of a whirlwind of public building reaching out to every corner of

the city he had accepted the job only on certain conditions that he be given

absolute control over every Park in the city that he retained the state post Al

Smith had given him and that he be granted still larger powers as head of

the moribund Triborough bridge authority an immense public works project that had

languished so long people had started calling it the bridge to nowhere eager

to begin rebuilding the battered City LaGuardia agreed and in the end Moses

himself drafted the special legislation creating his new position then within

hours of taking office swiftly fired all the old borough commissioners and their

staff and set to work the parks were in complete disrepair the Central Park Zoo

Tammany of course had let it go completely without repair so the cages

were so rotten that they were afraid that the lines and tigers might break

out but instead of repairing the cages they hired time any men to sit at the

entrances of the zoo with shotguns to shoot the animals in case there was a

fire or the cages broke armed with New Deal funds Moses exploded

into action turning first to the city's dilapidated parks within days he had

sent for the crack team of men he had used on Long Island then hired more than

600 unemployed architects and engineers along with a team of hard driving Irish

foremen who quickly whipped an army of newly recruited relief workers into a

disciplined construction force 80,000 strong all through the winter of 1934 triple

shifts of workers labored round-the-clock to meet the master-builders punishing timetable by

the first warm weekend in May Moses workforce had completely transformed every public park and green

space in the city more than 1700 renovation projects in all including

Central Park itself where before the year was up a magnificent new zoo had

arisen on the crumbling ruins of the old

there is completed one of these work

projects

as signs of life began to stir in the city for the first time in half a decade

hope began to rise in the hearts of New Yorkers and it was only the beginning

in little more than half a decade boldly stretching the definition of parks to

include limited access parkways and resting money from any source he could

Robert Moses would begin to construct the first urban highway system in the

world connected to a breathtaking network of tunnels viaducts causeways

and bridges that were begin to adapt the old city grid to the reality of the

automobile and knit the entire region into a single coherent whole the 30s of

course is all about concrete really it's the 30s that finishes off mass transit

as a possible contender for future transport based operations in the city

you know what the auto industry was able to do was to get public money pouring

into constructing the infrastructure that they wanted then with WPA money in

fact they've rip up miles and miles of streetcars in city after city around the

country run them into the ground shut them down it is true that LaGuardia does

maintain the subway system he picks up the bankrupt IRT he does push for new

lines but above-ground LaGuardia is a car man LaGuardia believes that this is

modern this is cutting-edge this is the wave of the future so what Moses is doing is the executor

of this program the federal government New Deal money just cascades into the

city and very much the Olmstead tradition he's going to build a series of connecting highways

before the decade was out a great circumferential Parkway had begun to

sweep around Brooklyn from the East River to the Atlantic a ravishing bridge

had left over the Harlem River connecting Manhattan and the Bronx and

the revolutionary Westside Improvement a gorgeously landscaped

six and a half mile long urban symphony park park and Park Parkway had begun to

sweep majestically down the west side of Manhattan along the Hudson River

covering over the old New York Central tracks and transforming Riverside Park

from an urban wasteland into a piece of urban poetry the seductively curving

drive gave motorists an experience of the city they had never had before the

ravishing towers of midtown Manhattan looming above the lush green nests of

the park in a shimmering landscape that as in a movie or a dream was constantly

shifting constantly changing and always in motion no one has ever been able to

know how much money Robert Moses spent on the West Side improvement I finally

concluded that the amount that he spent was at least 180 million dollars but it

was almost certainly well over 200 million dollars a quarter of a billion

dollars on a public work in 1930s America and you know the chorus of

praise for this highway was just fantastic and one editorial said the

railroad tracks are covered at last

and yet in scale and audacity even the west side improvement paled before that

of another giant public work the Triborough bridge an epic complex of

roadways and bridges that lay it's a very heart of Robert Moses new

transportation system and there it is very clear what we mean by Robert Moses

as the shaper of New York the glaciers that had rumbled down from Hudson Bay

eons before had torn Long Island which carries of course Brooklyn and Queens

loose from the mainland of the United States Robert Moses stitched it back

together again with the Triborough bridge if you look in New York from the

air you see an incredible fact that three great boroughs of the city

Manhattan the Bronx and queens rush together the streets appear to be

rushing together and all of a sudden at the point that they're rushing together

they're held apart by these narrow bands of water in the middle of which is

Randall's in Ward's Island by building Triborough and uniting these three

boroughs he was uniting the city he was repairing single-handedly what nature

had done despite its name Triborough was not

really a bridge at all but three giant bridges in one a rendezvous of bridges

one man later said together with 13,500 feet of elevated viaduct and 14 miles of

roadway a traffic machine another man said the largest ever built

mighty Triborough this is just one part of it it's the largest vertical lift

bridge in the world which means that that center span you're looking at has

to rise 80 feet in the air vertically between the two towers every time a

large ship passes if you were standing here in 1934 and 35 when they were

putting in the girders for this span each girder was as big as a 10 room

ranch house and it was so big that one barge where two barges couldn't carry it

four or five barges would be lashed together and they'd come up this river

pushed by a whole Covey of tug loads until they got it into position

remember this was in the middle of the depression there was so much concrete in

this bridge that they had a reopen cement factories from named to

Mississippi to make the wood for the forms to hold the concrete a whole

forest had to be cut down in Oregon five thousand men at the time

were working on these islands on the bridge and of course the five thousand

men we're only putting into place the materials that have been created to

steel etc by many times five thousand men 31 million man-hours of work went into

the Triborough bridge in a hundred and thirty four cities in 20 states in the

middle of the depression this one project really galvanized things across

the United States the Triborough bridge with its Art Deco detailing with its

cloverleaf arrangements of ramps connecting not only the three Burroughs

but the parks which he reclaimed on the islands below is an unbelievably

complicated and beautiful piece of engineering it's highway building lifted

to the art of sculpture in motion it's fantastic under his direction we got

some of the greatest public works the world has ever seen

the massive structure was finally opened on July 11th 1936 in an awe-inspiring

ceremony broadcast by radio across the entire nation it was one government

official said simply one of the greatest accomplishments of men President

Roosevelt himself gave the keynote address but it was Robert Moses who was

the undisputed hero of the day we are definitely in an era of building the

best kind of building the building of great public projects for the benefit of

the public and with the object of building human happiness Franklin Delano

Roosevelt

year after year as one immense public works project after another rose in New

York City the frenzy of construction became a heart-stopping symbol of civic

rebirth and renewal holding out the promise one man later said of a glorious

future just over the horizon not merely for the privileged few but for the people as a whole

Robert Moses himself was certain he held the keys to the city's future there are

people who like things as they are he declared I can't hold out any hope to

them they have to keep moving further away this is a great big state and there

are also other states let them go to the

Rockies well he's absolutely the right man at the right moment and there's no

question about it he has his own vision for what New York could be in what

cities can be and suddenly he has an opportunity to put that into practice

he's got manpower through the WPA he's got money he's got a city that is

devastated and needs an infrastructure and he's tremendously creative and smart

and gifted and he really has a vision that he really tries to implement

sometimes that came at the expense of other things sometimes it came with a

vision that we no longer have he built highways right on the river because in

his day you drove for recreation and that's what you saw now we have highways

blocking our views of the river but at the time it was a vision about how to

integrate the landscape and make it work for human beings that transformed the

city and people's lives in it in retrospect however the opening of the

Triborough bridge would seem to some to mark a fateful turning point in the

culture of the automobile in New York and in the career of Robert Moses in

ways New Yorkers themselves did not fully comprehend at the time and with

consequences that would not be fully felt for decades Robert Moses is the paradox of urban

history in the 20th century every city in the United States wanted a Robert

Moses every city wanted a Bob Moses building bigger roads faster expressways

and more of them and Moses was extraordinarily good and actually

shaping the physical city and getting things done I think the damage that

Moses did is actually very real so that the other side of the coin is Bob Moses

is actually an embodiment of the fact that in the 20th century we put the

physical prominence of the city before its people

we actually fetish the urban form and forgot the human beings who lived there

less than five weeks after the opening of the Triborough bridge built to

decrease congestion in the city New Yorkers got a glimpse of the future the

automobile was beginning to usher in when on August 17th 1936 the biggest

traffic jam in the history of the metropolitan region brought cars on the

Long Island parkways to a standstill you know the lesson of New York if you

look at most of this career when a turns door he refused to take into account the

effects when we call today traffic generation of his facilities the fact

that by building a road by building a bridge by building a tunnel you are in

itself increasing traffic so whatever benefit you are expecting to get is

going to be immediately reduced for example when he said the Triborough

bridge will solve the traffic problem on the East River bridges the Queensboro

etc he opened the Triborough bridge the traffic was far heavier than he

predicted Triborough was crowded and so is the Queensboro Bridge so he said I'll

solve that by building the Bronx white stone bridge for a while at work in two

years the Queensboro is as full as that had never been and more Triborough is

more full than ever before and the Bronx white stone bridge was full she saw

build the Throgs Neck bridge you know if Moses had had his way he would have

built bridges the length of Long Island Sound not only polluting the sound

changing the flow of the water and water but with each bridge he just would have

generated more traffic in the 1960s or so some of Moses as

critics understood that when you build highways you create more congestion and

more pressure for highways Moses understood this much earlier I mean when

he was trying to get money for highways he would say it's to relieve congestion

but he knew that in fact it would create more congestion in the need for further

Airways and hence would have to move the flow would have to move the map to

create more flow and make it flow further on and further out in that sense

the what's you started the highway machine it was self-perpetuating you

could stop even more troubling than the immense traffic jams his public works

were generated though far less apparent to the naked eye was the power Moses was

accumulating in the process of building through the instrument of the new public

authorities you know we are to it in political science classes that in a

democracy power comes from being elected it's the will of the people

Robert Moses realized that he was never going to get power through that normal

democratic process he had to figure out a different way to get it and he did it

by creating what is really a fourth branch of government and one not

responsible to the will of the people insulated from the will of the people the public authority

empowered to sell bonds to create great public works public authorities like

Triborough were meant to go out of business once the tolls they charged had paid for

the structures they created but Robert Moses had no intention of ever closing

his authorities down rewriting the legislation under which authorities were

charted he made sure that the millions of dollars in nickels and dimes that

streamed in every year remained a continuous flow of revenue upon which he

could borrow still more for future projects a bedrock of power that would

place him beyond reach of the mayor the governor or the people themselves in perpetuity

the centerpiece of all his power was what he called Schreiber on lady

Triborough and that's where the headquarters were on Randall's Island in

a little building underneath that toll plaza every driver who crossed this

Arthur across this bridge had to pay a toll and coin and of course almost none

of the millions of motorists who pass over at ner idea that the headquarters

were dining now the money that came in through the tolls was spent at his sole

discretion he didn't have to do as mayor's do go to a board of estimate of

course submit his will to the voters he could spend authorities money as he

wanted to spend on his money so he created a system in which the voice of

the people hardly mattered little and I think he was able to do an import

because he was making so many people rich and they were there for him and he

didn't have to pick up the phone so construction companies bond underwriters

you know insurance men on every level lawyers I mean they were just phalanx as

in Fair Lance's of people and you know in the wheels within wheels we still

don't really understand as the depression wore on Robert Moses would create more than a dozen public

authorities integrating them into an immense self-perpetuating machine for

building Public Works a system increasingly remote from the public in

whose name they had been created and irony not lost on some of Moses closest

admirers Frances Perkins who is Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor

could it very well she was reacting to Moses having a tantrum about the people

in Jones Beach that they threw litter on the beach and didn't clean up Moses said

I'll get them I'll fix them and Perkins said he loves the public but he hates

people and I think that probably describes a lot of other public

officials too including many who've done wonderful things but I think was Moses

the hatred of people eventually began to trip him up

by 1936 tensions had begun to rise between the city's highest elected

official and the hard-driving bureaucrat who was his parks commissioner though

they worked well together and shared many of the same goals it was becoming

increasingly obvious that Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses embodied

radically different values and attitudes towards the city and its people one of

the things about LaGuardia is that he really he appreciated ethnicity he was

hip to ethnic neighborhoods he was always going up to neighborhoods going

into all the stores talking to people in their various languages and you know he

would go and talk to Ukrainians and Ukrainian you know and they would love

him for life and and you know who knows how many words he knew in Ukranian but

he could do that and he loved doing that you know and he loved being sort of on

the ground he loved being on the street Moses on the other hand went out of his

way to highlight his distance from those people his contempt for them and his

sense that he was dedicated to a larger system to see New York as part of a

flowchart now as part of a flow that went our all through the country in

which streets neighborhoods sense of place ethnic loyalties meant nothing the

only thing that really mattered was the flow infuriated by his inability to rain

Robert Moses in Fiorello LaGuardia raged constantly behind his back complaining

that no law no regulation no budget stops Robert Moses from his appointed

task Moses for his part who routinely referred to the mayor as that little

organ grinder and that son-of-a-bitch chafed at the necessity

of having to ask for money every time he wanted to build the some degree

LaGuardia did control Moses and you see it in-house because Moses wanted to take

over public housing Moses tried to steal the housing money and Housing Authority

from LaGuardia by mobilizing the real-estate forces of the city behind

him but LaGuardia stops him he was in his own way just as tough as Robert

Moses and what he basically did is as Moses is making this radio speech the

mobilize public support over the municipal radio station LaGuardia

actually has the engineers cut the station off the air so LaGuardia kept

Moses out of housing in the end however even LaGuardia himself failed to grasp

the sheer scale of the forces overtaking New York during the New Deal or how much

the future of the city lay not with the street and the block and the

neighborhoods he loved but with the car and the highway and with men like Robert Moses

by the mid-1930s Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses had succeeded in turning

New York into the gigantic Laboratory of Civic reconstruction LaGuardia had

dreamed of but all the new building could not disguise the fact that across

the city terrible suffering and hardship remained nowhere was the suffering worse

than on the densely crowded streets and avenues of Hartman we're little more

than a year after LaGuardia took office three decades of relative racial calm in

New York came to a tragic violent end

what happens to a dream deferred does it

dry up like A Raisin in the Sun or

fester like a sore and then run

does it stink like rotten meat or crust

and sugar over like a syrupy sweet maybe

it just sags like a heavy load or does it explode

Langston Hughes more than anywhere else

in the city Harlem the proud black capital that had arisen so spectacularly

only two decades before had been all but devastated by the Depression the

Renaissance of the 1920s had been a cultural triumph not an economic one and

long before the crash itself the district's fragile prosperity had begun

to disintegrate it became Islam it had been a ghetto before it becomes a real

slum then afterwards after the Depression rents evictions

unemployment tuberculosis all the indicia of decay and dysfunction

accelerate so that Harlem becomes a place in which the opportunities that

had brought it into being really become almost exceptional I think the major

difference is that in the 1920s harlem really did believe in mobility and most

people believe that concepts of american mobility applied to Harlem you had a

population of people who were already depending upon rather menial jobs to

sustain themselves the hope was that with regular employment and with it with

the other opportunities that cities provided education better housing better

living conditions better health care there would be mobility by the 1930s all

of that gets challenged first of all that category that was referred to as

Negro jobs disappears because white New Yorkers desperate for work begin to

demand positions that they formerly refused to take it's a truism but it's true that the

Depression was far worse in Harlem than anywhere else the levels of unemployment

are simply spectacular and remember there had already been discrimination

even in good times I mean the hospitals would not hire blacks the drugstores

would not hire blacks the insurance companies even though they wrote you

know thousands of policies low-cost policies to Harlem residents they

wouldn't hire blacks and even when the depression starts and there are relief

programs in place the WPA discriminates as well

in the 1930s Robert Moses built 255 new

playgrounds in New York City he built two in areas at black children could use

you know white children were given sliding boards and swings and beautiful

little wading pools in the playground black children who could still play with

your broomsticks in the streets if they wanted to play baseball it still had a

splash through the fire hydrants people know if a city cares for them or not a

playground is a lot more than a playground a little vest pocket park is

a little a lot more than a little bit of green it's a sign that the city cares

that it's willing to devote something to your neighborhood what did the mothers

of Harlem think of the policies of the state when there was no place for their

children to fight

even more insidious for the city's black population in the end with a federal

mortgage and loan programs promulgated by the New Deal which to revive the

moribund housing market in the outer boroughs set in motion a fateful process

that in the next two decades would systematically segregate neighborhood

after neighborhood in New York by race african-american ghettoization really

begins in the third decade of the 20th century it begins in the 1930s

it begins with New Deal policy it begins with the federal government in the state

government colluding with banks and insurance companies to solve New Deal

problems by building building building building building we're building housing

up the periphery of the city at an incredible pace and in order to create a

market for that housing you've got to force white working-class and

middle-class families to move and in order to get them out there what we do

is actually make it irrational to stay inside the city during the early years

of the New Deal the federal government established the homeowners Loan

Corporation and the homeowners Loan Corporation actually went out in

Brooklyn and they began mapping out the borough into sixty six neighborhoods

going block by block and finding every black Latino Irish Jewish Italian polish

family that was there and assigning ratings to each neighborhood based on

the racial and ethnic makeup then they distributed the maps to banks and held

the banks to a certain standard when loaning money for homes and rental the

consequences of having your ratings go down is of course that your housing

property goes down so for instance white Brooklynites living in the old sections

of North Brooklyn all of a sudden find out that their housing is less valuable

not because they've done anything and not because their neighborhood has

changed but because banks won't lend anyone money to move there unless those

people are black after the homeowners Loan Corporation begins segregating on

the federal level and working with local banks in Brooklyn Manhattan and the

Bronx and queens the state gets involved in redlining

they've also mapped out in Brooklyn they go block by block and this time they

look for only black and Latino persons and a single black person living on a

block is enough to redline a block the effect will be in fact to do extraordinary damage to black

communities throughout New York all of a sudden black communities that

had been scattered throughout New York City which had long traditions in

certain neighborhoods in the southern part of New York throughout Brooklyn and

Queens and even on Staten Island were being physically segregated heated up

when the homeowners Loan Corporation finishes its work in the 1940s it has

dramatically altered the makeup of Brooklyn in 1930 when the depression

starts black Brooklyn Heights are actually the least segregated grouped

physically in the borough by 1950 they're the most segregated group the

segregation is all in central Brooklyn in the bedford-stuyvesant district and

that will become the largest black ghetto in the United States by the end

of the 1960s in the 1930s Harlem goes from being an ethnic community with

quite a bit of mobility and optimism to a racial swamp with very little optimism

very little hope the federal government had armed banks and insurance companies

and real estate dealers with the public authority to keep black people inside

that physical space and to force new black migrants to the city inside

similar physical spaces so that as harlem expands in the 1930s and 1940s as

bedford stuyvesant expands in the 40s and 50s what remains true about them is

black communities no longer control their own destiny by the 50s and 60s

they're being forced and physically quarantined inside the city at a time

when white Americans are peculiarly mobile bias thira black ghetto in every city in

the United States the answer is public policy the way we read map cities

racially in order to solve economic

crises year after year the walls of

racial segregation and discrimination closed in around the city's

african-american population to some the most infuriating bigotry of all was to

be found in the heart of Harlem itself were almost none of the dozens of white

owned shops and businesses that lined 125th Street the commercial spine of the

district was willing to hire African Americans in any capacity in church

groups and labor groups and socialist groups and black nationalist groups in

the Communist Party among others begin to set up against on 125th Street in

other places they march in front of these stores and say don't buy where you

can't work and in fact this heartens the community there are some successes some

job openings are created but then the forces of the law being but they are the

store owners get an injunction passed in 34 and this kind of picketing behavior isn't that bad

so having gotten themselves together having come up with a communal

collective voice to attempt to redress long-standing racial / economic

grievances suddenly that voice is cut off and it's in that context that Harlem explodes

in the winter of nineteen thirty five years of rising misery frustration and

resentment erupted into violence on the streets of Harlem around 3:30 on the

afternoon of March 19th a 16 year old Puerto Rican boy named lino Rivera was

caught stealing a penknife from an SH crest store on a hundred and

twenty-fifth Street a scuffle ensued and as a crowd of curious onlookers gathered

on the sidewalk outside the shop owner called the police urging the patrolman when he arrived to

avoid further trouble and let the boy go they actually let Rivera go out of back

door and they didn't bother informing anybody and rumors now shot through the

street that he'd been killed and then in fact crowds began to form by the evening

people are arriving with placards and pickets and eventually somebody hurls

rock through the plate-glass window and Harlem explodes and people pour out of

the tenements into the streets and they not only attack and loot this particular

store but up and down 125th Street and other areas except for stores that

hastily tech up placards in their front window black-owned business you know or

if it's a white store we hire black people and in fact they were relatively

speaking spared there are also tangles with the police they have to understand

it submerge the entirely white police force it is seen as an Army of

Occupation sitting on the discontent that's been building all through the night and on into the

next day the riot went on by the time order was restored a hundred and

twenty-five people had been arrested over a hundred had been injured and

three killed all of them black is the first black explosion up till this point

when you talk race riots you're talking about whites pouring into a black

neighborhood stomping on black people the draft riots of 1863 nobody for 20

years has been dreaming of invading black Harlem it's a huge stronghold but

now you've got a whole new phenomenon I think one of the major things that the

riot does is it actually forces us to seriously look at the condition of black

Americans in major cities New York become sort of a harbinger of what's

going to happen other places and you've got to take New York City seriously

especially Harlem it's sitting right in Manhattan it's in the cultural and

economic capital of the United States and what happens there is actually more

important than what happens other places it does get attention it does force the

administration to seriously look at the plight of black Americans but still the

response is actually rather weak the repercussions of the riots would

continue for months and years to come at the insistence of black leaders

LaGuardia appointed a special commission to examine the social and economic

conditions in Harlem whose report painted a bleak portrait of the city's

racial divisions and inequalities but like most white politicians of his

day the mayor from the black owned Amsterdam news had praised in 1931 as

one of the most fearless friends the Negro has ever had in or out of Congress

was still not prepared to put racial equality at the center of his reform

agenda speaking before a group of church leaders he had he said no illusion about

the difficulties facing your people in New York but reconciling the disparities caused

by American racism he said was a task beyond his abilities

I think look water is a difficult person to describe especially his stance on

race he endeared himself to many african-americans by standing up for

people by standing up for a black congressman Oxford to priests and other

folks who had been tossed out of Congress by demanding in fact that

they'd be given equal treatment on the other hand when it came to real

substantive changes that would affect African Americans in a positive way

LaGuardia tended to in fact do what most mayors of New York City have done and

that is side with separate and less equal because the ethnic algebra of the

city allows you to over serve some people and under serve others and it's a

very good formula for getting elected a question of what will happen to the

Negro in New York is overlaid with shadows of tragic premonition the first

race riot in New York was in 1712 the

most recent was in 1935 the last has not

yet come

Fortune magazine bit by bit the New York

of 1920 has rearranged and expanded itself new highway suite beneath its

bold escarpment new housing and new playgrounds have been carved from its

native Rock giant new bridges soar above its two rivers and new tubes have

burrowed beneath the waters for perhaps the first time in its ruthless headlong

history some new impulse something apart from Commerce has been acting on the

town some sense of community design and purpose has tempered the obsession with

buying and selling out of the old demonic energy has come a

new ambition to build the city more fit

for human use an aspiration clear a

price on November 2nd 1937 Fiorello

LaGuardia pulled off the simple feat that had eluded every reformed mayor

before him he was reelected the largest majority in the city's history swept him

back into office along with a host of reform candidates including the

President of every borough except the Bronx LaGuardia himself took the landslide as

a ringing endorsement of his policies and a mandate to lead New York into a

still brighter future we're going to make the city a real heaven he said

but when it was passed down to me by my mother my father by people in the

neighborhood was his absolute Zuber and

optimism we're gonna get through this there's a depression to hell with it

will go the mob has everything fixed the hell will they'll throw their slot

machines in the river you know like this the hell with it let's go do it anyway

it's the depression you can't build an airport this is New York you got to have an airport

in 1934 LaGuardia takes a flight from Chicago to New York says on his ticket

and as usual the airplane lands in Newark Airport and he refuses to get out

my ticket says New York this is not New York this is New Jersey and after

everybody else gets off the airplane takes off with only LaGuardia in it and

lands at Floyd Bennett Field and from the first day that he's mayor he is

pushing for the construction what is going to be LaGuardia Airport and again

it is the New Deal money that makes as possible the biggest program that the

WPA undertook anywhere in the country was the construction of LaGuardia

Airport and he is out there every day is you know hands-on he is watching the

construction of this thing because he understands that this is the next link

you know that the city has always thrived on linkages on connectivity

there has been the blackball line you know connection the Erie Canal line

connection and Atlantic cable connection and the steamboat the steamer connection

this is the 20th century's great linkage

to be made and he sees it but for all the accomplishments of laguardia's first

term no one was more aware than LaGuardia himself how much remained to

be done and five years into his tenure in City Hall he continued to drive

himself but a pace that amazed and increasingly worried his closest

associates of them all none was closer than Charles C Burlingham

a legendary 81 year old lawyer and civic reformer widely known as New York's

first citizen the distinguished barrister was as proud as anyone in the

city of the Progress LaGuardia had made in turning New York into what the mayor

himself called the world's greatest experiment in social and political democracy

but he had come to fear for the health and well-being of the driven little

mayor who had come to identify himself so completely with the people of New York City

you're a very tired man and must get some rest Burlingham wrote in a confidential

letter to the mayor when I Drive through the vast reaches of the Bronx and see

the swarming myriads I say to myself can it be that one man is responsible for

the welfare of these people the world is

in chaos struggling to master its own inventions we are in danger of being

annihilated by forces which we ourselves

set up the world calls for an answer to this problem of mastering our own

inventions and we propose in 1939 to

contribute to that answer Michael hare Secretary of the World's

Fair by the spring of 1939 excitement was

building all across New York for nearly three years an army of men working under

Robert Moses had been laboring to transform a 1200 acre ash far out on the

northern edge of Queens into the site of one of the most breathlessly anticipated

collective enterprises of the decade a hymn to progress forged in the searing

crucible of the Great Depression the monumental fare would when complete

project the image of a bold new city of tomorrow but in 1939 seemed just around

the corner the 1939 World's Fair was a

special moment in time on the one hand it was a culmination of almost

everything that had transformed in New York in a century and a quarter since

the opening of the Erie Canal a creation of this incredible world metropolis it

was a technological breakthrough the opportunities for the future the

automobile what will the future look like it was a wonderful General Motors

exhibit for example all these kind of gleaming aluminum buildings Robert Moses

of course was at the center of this it was a gigantic World's Fair bigger I

think than any World's Fair that ever taken place up into that point in terms

of numbers of people coming through the turnstiles incredible event

an exhilarating sense of wonder and a kind of serene ambivalence presided over

the New York World's Fair which from the day it opened on April 30th 1939 touched

a deep chord in the consciousness of the American people and proved to be an

enormous success day after day week after week the immense crowd streamed

through the sleek Art Deco gates and on into the shimmering dreamlike interior

of the fair drifting through scores of international exhibits and dozens of

corporate pavilions bristling with consumer products and modern devices of

all kinds the promised a streamlined chrome-plated future where machines of

all kinds delivered ordinary people from the drudgery of housework and physical labor

I think the fair itself has a sublime quality to it because it's the end of

American innocence not just New York innocence somehow it's the last time

maybe the 50s was an afterglow but I think it's the last time we believed we

could save the Republic with a dishwasher but that vacuuming would

somehow transfer all American life if we only had a dishwasher if we only had a

vacuum cleaner our family life would be happy we would be healthy if we had a

car it's the last time we really believed that the car was liberating

because by the end of the Second World War the car was nothing but a traffic nightmare

whereas in the 30s who dreamed of having a car to be able to go out on one of

those Robert Moses parkways out to Jones

Beach or someplace like that in the end

the futuristic city within a city that was the World's Fair was itself a

celebration of the great city shimmering on the horizon and yet in many ways in

eerie repudiation of everything had stood for at the very center of the fair

stood the ravishing pure white trial on and Paris fear the last and most sublime

of New York's great Art Deco icons every day huge crowds thronged into the

sphere to gaze in wonder at the immense diorama that had been constructed inside

called democracy tea a radiant vision of the city of tomorrow wiped clean of the

complexity congestion and disorder of New York but the largest crowds by far

gathered for the General Motors exhibit called Futurama where once inside

visitors in moving chairs circled a 36 thousand square foot model showing the

United States as the designers envisioned it 25 years hence in the Year

1960 they would never forget what they saw there and what you see there you

were sitting your little cushion two-seater sofas and you roll along it's

the early pre Disney enterprise and you go over a scale map of the United States

and what do you see what is the vision of tomorrow the vision of tomorrow is

highways and huge central cities with soaring skyscrapers and little small

satellite cities and such General Motors is in fact as the New York Times said

selling us the world of tomorrow and the world of tomorrow means that the public

has to foot the bill to develop the infrastructure which will make in fact

the triumph of the automobile possible at the very center of the park General

Motors had created an eerie blueprint for New York's destruction and its

replacement by a different kind of world entirely gone were the crowded streets and

neighborhoods and to a large extent the streets themselves in their place in an

inner city eerily empty of human beings rose tall towers widely separated by

broad swaths of green and bisected by highways 14 lanes wide those highways

carried people out of the city and into an American landscape where people lived

mostly in single-family houses accessible only by car a landscape built

not around the needs of people but around the needs of automobiles this is

not a vague dream of a life that might be lived in the far future but one that

could be lived tomorrow morning if we willed it so the relation between these

units of stone and steel highway and green is a symbol of the new life of

tomorrow that life will be based on a contribution of all elements to a new

and living democracy

Robert corn but they don't took place

against the backdrop of the darkness that was coming over the world 1939

summer of 1939 so the world war two had really not started there was an ominous

feeling around the world Hitler of course his soldiers were marching

Luftwaffe was regarded as this new threatening thing there was an uneasy

about things and so I find what's fascinating about that World's Fairs on

the one hand all the promise of the future the celebration of the past and

how far we have come we're coming out of the depression we're creating this new

wonderful space we're celebrating in a sense the achievements of the world new

offices cloud that we can see in retrospect but they could see and feel

almost that themselves at the time which makes it just such a poignant moment in time

more than 30 million people passed through the gates of the New York

World's Fair in the last perfect summer of 1939

before the first season of the fair was out however ominous news came from

abroad on September 1st 1939 word reached New York that Hitler had invaded

Poland within days England and France had declared war on Germany and the

battle for Europe had begun the fair itself wood lumber along uncertain route

for a few more months before closing in the fall of 1940 with barely enough

money left over to demolish the exhibits

and clear the land in the end the 4000

tons of structural steel that had gone into the trial on and Paris fear would

be donated to the United States military and used to make instruments of war

America itself was still at peace but it was hard to block out thought one

man said of what might really be in

store for the World of Tomorrow for 18

more months the United States stayed out of the fighting but the storm clouds were drawing near

in New York Robert Moses and Fiorello LaGuardia raced to complete as many

public works projects as they could before federal resources were diverted to the war effort

then in the dwindling days of 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the city and

country mobilized for war with civilian needs indefinitely deferred the New York Housing

Authority's blueprints were rolled up and stored away the unfinished steel and

concrete tubes of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel would sit empty beneath the

harbor sealed and forgotten for the duration of the war

in the strange eventful and eerily suspended years to come time itself

often seemed to stand still in New York while beneath it the forces of change

ran faster than ever before

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