Robert Moses and the Panorama of New York

Robert Moses was the master builder of New York.  He built bridges, roads, parks, beaches, housing and two Worlds' Fairs as an unelected public official who wielded power in a manner and quantity no longer imaginable.    Robert Caro, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Moses entitled The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Knopf, 1974), depicted him as an omnipotent monster who choked the city with automobiles, literally bulldozed the opposition, and out of racial bias deliberately built low bridges on parkways to prevent access to beaches by buses (and kept the water cold in swimming pools).  

Quite recently, Moses' reputation has been rehabilitated, not out of nostalgia but recognition that he got an awful lot done that New York is better off with than without.  In 2007, there was a large exhibition in three locations in New York, entitled "Robert Moses and the Modern City," curated by Hilary Ballon, then an architectural historian and professor at Columbia University (since stolen away by NYU).  I missed the exhibit on slum clearance at Columbia, but saw "Remaking the Metropolis" at the City Museum and "The Road to Recreation" at the Queens Museum.  There's a good overview of the subject in Paul Goldberger's concurrent piece in the New Yorker entitled Eminent Dominion: Rethinking the legacy of Robert Moses.     

I read The Power Broker some years ago, and found it an encyclopedic diatribe.  It is informative, but it is never even-handed.  Caro's hatred of his subject eventually made me weary, although I did finish the book.  It was probably written for an audience that is more anti-development than I am.  The most significant thing I learned from the book was Moses' genius in creating the modern governmental authority that issues bonds and builds infrastructure such as roads and bridges or otherwise pursues economic development.  With this extraordinary invention Moses freed himself and his public works from the otherwise crippling budget process and political forces in Albany, and gained enormous political power (and staying power) of his own.  Most of the vast array of what he built simply could not have been built otherwise.  That is why since that time public authorities have been created for everything, to the point that many of them suffer from bureaucratic sloth and inefficiency and need to be rejiggered themselves when the political winds allow (here's an example in Massachusetts).


If you are in the market for what I think is a more balanced appraisal of Robert Moses, get Hilary Ballon's book  from the 2007 exhibition.  Co-edited by Ballon and fellow Columbia professor Kenneth Jackson, it is entitled Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York  (Norton, 2007).  It's an excellent book in its own right, not just as an alternative to The Power Broker.  And if you aren't already familiar with Moses, you'll be amazed at the vast legacy he left in the built environment of New York.  Admittedly this was over a long career (some would say--and Caro certainly said-- too long a career), but it would be an impressive body of work for a dozen long careers.    

Finally, if you have the opportunity, I recommend taking the 7 train to Mets/Willets Point station (as if going to Citi Field) and visiting the Panorama of the City of New York at the Queens Museum.    Moses had the panorama built for the 1964 World's Fair.  It's a scale model of New York City (all 5 boroughs)--the Empire State Building is 15 inches tall.     When I was there in 2007, it had not been updated since 9/11 and the Twin Towers were still there.  Admittedly, it's a bit chilling to see them. But if you like architectural or planning models and are fascinated by the built environment of New York, you'll enjoy the panorama. 

The museum is in what was the New York City Building at the World's Fair, next door to the Unisphere and those observation towers that became spaceships in the film Men in Black.  

Photo: 1964 New York World's Fair by Doug Coldwell on Wikimedia Commons

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An interesting footnote is that a section of the museum (apparently now reverted to use as an ice skating rink) was the site of an assembly hall where the UN General Assembly met from 1946-50 while the present East River facility was being built.  It is where the partition of Palestine was decided.

Grand Central Terminal

A friend and I were in the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal recently, and as we paused to admire the soaring space, he wondered aloud why the ceiling is so incredibly high.  This is a good question.  An architect would probably have an answer that explains the powerful effect of the massive room's proportions (470 feet long x 160 feet wide x 150 feet high), and that's certainly literally the reason.  But the underlying reason the space is so grand (indeed!) is the rivalry between two railroads, the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central, in the Gilded Age.  I learned some of the history in Lorraine Diehl's The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996) and Jill Jonnes' Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels (Penguin, 2007), both of which I recommend. 

attribution: Grand Central by Muhammad on flickr, from Wikimedia Commons

licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

In our diminished era of Amtrak and Conrail, it's not easy to imagine just how enormous and powerful the railroads were more than a century ago.  Today, our airlines aren't as dominant, and they keep cycling through the bankruptcy courts.  Maybe a closer analogy would be Microsoft and Google.  In the 19th century, the railroads had cutting edge technology.  They were the preeminent business enterprises of a rapidly expanding country, their business methods and practices were highly sophisticated, and they engaged the energies of the most talented men of the age.  The results are still with us today in the form of modern corporations, regulatory structures, and the commercial law itself that was greatly developed by railroad lawyers nationwide (including Abraham Lincoln).

Beginning in the mid 19th century, Commodore Vanderbilt combined several railroads to form the New York Central, and in 1869-71 built the largest railway station in the world at 42nd Street, known as the Grand Central Depot.  At the beginning of the 20th century, the New York Central was still the only railroad that had direct access to Manhattan--it came down the east side of the Hudson from upstate, crossed the Harlem River, and made its way south on tracks over which Park Avenue now runs.  But the Pennsylvania and nine other railroads stopped on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River and transported passengers to Manhattan on ferries. 

Alexander Cassatt, a Philadelphian viewed by his contemporaries as a brilliant railroad man but today much less well known than his sister the painter Mary Cassatt, had come out of retirement in 1899 to head the Pennsylvania Railroad.  He was determined to cross the Hudson and build a terminal in Manhattan.  At first the idea was to build an enormous bridge to be shared by multiple railroads, but the other railroads ultimately balked.  New technology presented an alternative:  in Paris, Cassatt visited the brand new Gare du Quai D'Orsay where powerful electric locomotives pulled heavy passenger trains.  Cassatt realized that electric traction might allow the Pennsylvania to cross the Hudson in tunnels.   The soft mud in the river bed would present severe technological challenges, but the tunnel plan succeeded--the same tunnels are in use today more than 100 years later.  (Incidentally, the Gare du Quai D'Orsay is now the Musee D'Orsay, where Mary Cassatt's work hangs with that of other impressionists.) 

The Pennsylvania secretly acquired four square blocks in the infamous "Tenderloin," a rundown and vice-infested district, and in December 1901 announced its plans for the "New York Tunnels and Terminal Extension" consisting of tunnels crossing the Hudson and East rivers and a gigantic terminal.  The financial, political and technological challenges involved were immense as well, but that's another story.

Cassatt chose Charles McKim, head of the preeminent firm McKim, Mead and White, to design a monumental station in the neoclassical style.  Pennsylvania Station opened in 1910.  Inspired by the Roman Baths of Caracalla, the station's general waiting room was the largest room in the world--two full city blocks long and 150 feet high.  

The magnificent train shed, below,  echoed the famous Crystal Palace:

Cassatt's ambitious plans for Pennsylvania Station spurred the Vanderbilts to build  the present Grand Central Terminal as a comparably monumental replacement for the Grand Central Depot.  This was shortly after a disastrous steam engine accident in the smoke-filled Park Avenue tunnel killed 17 people and injured 38 in 1902, leading  to calls to electrify the railway and passage of  legislation  that would outlaw steam engines within Manhattan beginning in 1910.  McKim, Mead and White lost the architectural competition to Reed and Stern, which was responsible for the overall design, including the advanced circulation system of ramps (see below).  The Vanderbilts then added Warren and Wetmore (the firm of Vanderbilt cousin Whitney Warren) as architects for the terminal's aesthetic details in the Beaux Arts style.  The terminal opened in 1913. 

Photo by Adam Jones adamjones.freeservers.com

licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

We are indebted to the Pennsylvania Railroad in one final respect for Grand Central Terminal today.   Despite having been built for the ages, Pennsylvania Station lasted barely fifty years.  It was demolished in 1963 and replaced by the Madison Square Garden arena, an undistinguished office building and the banal underground station that now bears the name Penn Station.  The loss awakened public support for preservation and led to establishment of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965 and designation of Grand Central as a landmark in 1967.  The two rival railroads, weakened by decades of decline amidst competition from airlines and interstate highways, merged in 1968 to form Penn Central.  As part of their plan for financial salvation, they proposed to build a 55 story tower in the airspace above Grand Central.  The Landmarks Commission rejected the proposal and Penn Central sued the city, ultimately losing at the US Supreme Court in 1978.   Grand Central Terminal was saved.  Metro-North took over operation of the Terminal on a long term basis in 1994 and has since renovated it beautifully. 

attribution: NYC Grand Central Terminal ceiling by Arnoldius on Wikimedia Commons

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