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Robert Moses, Master Builder, is Dead at 92

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« Reply #15 on: December 19, 2009, 01:50:00 am »

He maintained several offices, one of which was in his limousine; so eager was he to use every minute that he often held meetings in his car, taking his guest along in whatever direction Mr. Moses happened to be going. When Mr. Moses had finished talking with his guest, a second limousine, which had been following, would pick up the guest and take him back to his office as Mr. Moses continued on to his destination in the first car.

Although he accepted a salary from only a few of his positions, Mr. Moses used expense accounts lavishly. He was the nation's first great builder of highways, but ironically he never learned to drive a car himself, and he maintained a staff of chauffeurs on 24-hour call. He had offices throughout the city and state, with personal staffs in each, and in many there were private dining rooms with chefs at the ready.

By the mid-30's, his output in the city alone had reached an extraordinary level. The Triborough Bridge, by far his biggest project up to that point, was completed in 1936, a crucial link in the Moses network of highways and regional parks. In the 1930's he built hundreds of playgrounds, 10 swimming-pool complexes, the Grand Central Parkway and the Interborough, Laurelton, Gowanus and Henry Hudson Parkways, among others. He built the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge and the West Side Highway and the 79th Street Boat Basin.
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« Reply #16 on: December 19, 2009, 01:50:15 am »

Badly Beaten in Election

The only break Mr. Moses took from his hectic building activity was in 1934, when he accepted the Republican nomination for Governor. He was not a meek candidate - his speeches often included hostile attacks on his opponent, Gov. Herbert H. Lehman. But he antagonized the voters, and lost by an enormous margin.

By the time of the election, Mr. Moses had moved sharply to the right, a political stance he was to retain for the rest of his life. Indeed, he often used his politics as a means of attacking the architecture and the planning professionals with whom he disagreed; he called Frank Lloyd Wright a man who ''was regarded in Russia as our greatest builder,'' said that planners, in general, were ''socialists'' and called Lewis Mumford ''an outspoken revolutionary.''

But Mr. Mumford, who was never a fan of Mr. Moses, nonetheless admitted that ''in the 20th century the influence of Robert Moses on the cities of America was greater than that of any other person.''
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« Reply #17 on: December 19, 2009, 01:50:39 am »

Built to His Own Tastes

If Mr. Moses' politics were conservative, so were his tastes. He was a cultivated man - he could quote liberally from Shakespeare by memory - and he often filled his speeches with quotations from the English poets. Once Mr. Moses subtly insulted President Roosevelt with a reference to an obscure remark of Dr. Johnson's about how patrons frequently tried to steal credit from the real creators of works.

But so far as the shaping of his own creations was concerned, Mr.Moses had a deep distrust of the avant-garde, and he sought traditional design in the architecture he built and in the sculpture he installed in his parks. And what was built was always decided on the basis of his personal taste; architects would often report that Mr. Moses rejected nearly finished schemes merely because their stylistic quirks did not please him.
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« Reply #18 on: December 19, 2009, 01:51:04 am »

Most of Mr. Moses' public housing was designed in the bland style of such architecture in the 40's and 50's, when monotonous, sterile towers in open space were the rule for low-income residences. The care Mr. Moses lavished on the design of Jones Beach and his early parkways tended not to show itself in the architectural plans for his public housing; as with many builders of public housing, he was concerned more with order and with numbers of apartment units than with making buildings that would relate to their occupants' ways of living.

The general model for such housing was the 1920's plan for the rebuilding of Paris by Le Corbusier, which called for a city of towers surrounded by parks and divided by highways instead of traditional streets. Mr. Moses, like so many American planners, came to the Le Corbusier approach not for reasons of esthetics but for reasons of efficiency.

An Architectural Plateau

But Mr. Moses' architectural taste did not change substantially with other kinds of projects in his later years. The New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle is a gray brick box of the sort of undistinguished design that suggests government buildings of the 50's, and neither Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium nor the New York World's Fair have ever been considered to have made major marks architecturally.
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« Reply #19 on: December 19, 2009, 01:51:22 am »

In the 40's and 50's, Mr. Moses' activities intensified. His Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority suffered one major defeat - his plan for a Battery bridge crossing was built as a tunnel because of public opposition to a bridge blocking the harbor view. But he expanded his activities into other areas. He played a crucial role in the negotiations to bring the United Nations to New York City and to convince John D. Rockefeller to obtain the organization's East River site; he was active on, and often controlled, the City Planning Commission; he came to dominate the city's Housing Authority, and he obtained for himself another new ''umbrella'' title: City Construction Coordinator, giving him authority over virtually every public construction project in the city of New York.

But by the 50's, while Mr. Moses' remarkable energy was far from exhausted, many of his ideas - which had not changed substantially in all the years he had been active - were no longer convincing. He lost a bitter battle in 1959 with Joseph Papp, head of the New York Shakespeare Festival, over permitting free Shakespeare performances in city parks. And community protests occurred over the route for his Cross Bronx Expressway, which required the demolition of at least 1,500 apartments in a one-mile stretch alone.
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« Reply #20 on: December 19, 2009, 01:51:37 am »

Mr. Moses did not bow to the Bronx protests; he refused to switch to an alternative route that would have taken away only a few dozen buildings. But the fight was seen by many observers as an early chink in Mr. Moses' armor.

A smaller, but more successful, protest had been mounted by wellto-do residents of West 67th Street in 1956 against a Moses scheme to replace a tree-filled play area in Central Park with a parking lot. The event was a severe blow to Mr. Moses' image: the man who began his career as a champion of parks was being attacked as a destroyer of them.

Projects Run Into Snags

At the same time two more Moses-conceived projects - a mid-Manhattan Expressway and the Lower Manhatan Expressway - began to run into snags. Ultimately they would never be built at all. Neither would another favorite Moses scheme that came up against the objections of a later generation of environmentalists, his plan for a bridge to cross the Long Island Sound between Rye, N.Y., and Oyster Bay, L.I.

Mr. Moses' reputation was also damaged by the Manhattantown urban renewal scandals of the 50's, in which private developers, to whom the city had sold tenements at a reduced rate with the understanding that their sites would be cleared and new housing erected, simply continued to operate the tenements, milking them for high rents. While Mr. Moses was never himself charged with profiteering, associates of his were implicated in the scandals. And connected to the scandal was a growing public resentment of relocation of tenants from slum clearance sites - a process that Mr. Moses was also in charge of.
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« Reply #21 on: December 19, 2009, 01:51:57 am »

The Manhattantown scandals also gave Mr. Moses his first major taste of press disapproval. Most of the city's newspapers had been staunch Moses supporters over the years, and editorial support for Moses park and highway projects had played a significant role in keeping the public, and hence the state's politicians, on Mr. Moses' side in many a controversy. But editorial writers were taken aback by the urban-renewal scandals, and the nearly universal support that Mr. Moses had been receiving was sharply curtailed.

He did nonetheless get an enormous amount of housing actually built in those years - as well as start other slum-clearance projects that would have almost total public support, such as the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on the Upper West Side. But the urban renewal scandals were perhaps his most serious setbacks, and in 1959 an opportunity arose for a graceful exit: the presidency of the 1964-65 New York World's Fair was offered to him.

The fair was Mr. Moses' last major accomplishment, and it was done in typical Moses style, with lavish public relations and elaborate new buildings. The fair was not, however, a total success either esthetically or financially, and Mr. Moses' dream of converting its Flushing Meadows site into an elaborate permanent park had to be scaled down considerably.

Mr. Moses had been required to give up all of his official positions with the City of New York in 1959, when he assumed the presidency of the fair. He lost most of his state jobs in 1962, when Governor Rockefeller, to Mr. Moses' surprise, accepted his resignation, which had been offered merely in protest over a disagreement.
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« Reply #22 on: December 19, 2009, 01:52:15 am »

His last significant hold on power was lost in 1968, when the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority was merged into Governor Rockefeller's new Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Mr. Moses was offered the role of ''consultant'' to the new agency, which permitted him to maintain his offices, secretaries and chauffeurs, but gave him no real power.

The Curtain Comes Down

And thus, quietly, the active career of one of the nation's most powerful public officials came to an end. Mr. Moses' name was virtually a household word, not only in New York but also around the nation, first as a fighter for parks and open space and later as a name that had come to symbolize the sweeping, total approach to urban renewal that he favored.

In 1915 Mr. Moses married Mary Louise Sims, a secretary at the Bureau of Municipal Research, his first place of employment. They had two daughters, Barbara Olds of Greenwich, Conn., and Jane Collins of Babylon, L.I.
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« Reply #23 on: December 19, 2009, 01:52:46 am »

After his first wife's death in 1966, Mr. Moses married Mary Grady, who had been a staff member at the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. The Moseses lived at 1 Gracie Terrace in Manhattan and in a small house in Gilgo Beach, L.I., which he had obtained years before when he first began to lay out the park and parkway system of Long Island.

A funeral service will be held at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Bay Shore, L.I., at 11 A.M. tomorrow.


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