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The Master Builder

How planner Robert Moses transformed Long Island for the 20th Century and beyond

By George DeWan | Staff Writer

One day in 1926 Robert Moses took several architects and engineers across the bay and onto a deserted sandbar called Jones Beach, where the quiet was broken only by the harsh squeals of the seabirds and the rhythmic pounding of the Atlantic waves. They looked around in disbelief as the animated, 37-year-old Moses spun a magical, futuristic vision of what would be one of the grandest bathing beaches in the world.

``It was the scale of the thing -- nothing like this had ever been done in public recreation in America,'' one of the architects would recall later. ``Here we were on an absolutely deserted sand bar - there was no way even to get there except by boat -- and here was this guy drawing X's on the back of an envelope and talking about bathhouses like palaces and parking lots that held ten thousand cars . . . We thought he was nuts.''

He was not nuts. He was Robert Moses.

Decades later, in a quiet moment when his years were winding down and most of his monument-building was behind him, Moses was asked what he was proudest of. ``That's easy,'' he replied. ``Jones Beach.''

``Let us have no illusions about Jones Beach as we found it,'' Moses told the Freeport Historical Society in 1974. ``It was an isolated, swampy sandbar accessible only by small boats and infrequent ferries, inhabited by fishermen and loners, surf casters and assorted oddballs, and beach combers trying to get away from it all . . . The tales told of a lovely, primitive, paradised wilderness with indestructible dunes were fiction.''

Before there was Robert Moses, there was an emptiness. The master builder filled this void with billions of dollars worth of bridges, tunnels, parkways, expressways, power projects, public housing, sandy beaches, concert halls and tens of thousands of acres of parkland.

Moses did as much to promote the use of the automobile as Henry Ford. For this, commuters, nature lovers, sand-worshippers and passionate autoists are forever in his debt. And also for this, critics who promote public transportation will never forgive him.

Whoever lives on Long Island or in New York City has been touched by Robert Moses. He was a builder, and his monuments are everywhere. There are the magnificent state parks, the parkways and expressways, and the cat's cradle of superhighways that moves traffic in and out of New York City. There are the mighty bridges and tunnels that tie the metropolitan area together, allowing motorists to move -- sometimes at the pace of a snail -- through, in and around the metropolis. In addition, there are Shea Stadium, Lincoln Center, the United Nations and the New York Coliseum. Also, huge New York City middle- and low-income housing projects. And, of course, both the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs.

The public works projects that bear Moses' imprint -- including upstate dams, superhighways and state parks as well -- stagger the imagination. Between 1924 and 1968, according to Robert A. Caro's 1974 book, ``The Power Broker,'' Moses developed projects costing $27 billion, which, adjusting for inflation, is about $125 billion today.

``More than any other single individual, this one man shaped Long Island as we know it, in its modern form,'' Caro said last week in a telephone interview. ``He shaped it for the better, and a striking example is Jones Beach. And for worse, a striking example of which is the Long Island Expressway, which did not have to be built the way it was built. The building of the Long Island Expressway, the zoning policies with which he influenced communities, and the systematic starving of mass transit condemned Long Islanders to traffic jams for the rest of their lives.''

``He in a sense, created the park system for Long Island,'' Lee Koppelman, executive director of the Long Island Regional Planning Board, said in an interview. ``Certainly, the major jewel in the crown was Jones Beach, which is one of the finest beaches to be found in the world.''

Koppelman says Moses ignored the fact that the superhighways he was building to carry people to his parks were destined to become jam-packed commuter roads, contributing to suburban sprawl. ``Every time he extended a major road,'' he said, ``all it did was create more traffic.''

Moses has been criticized for not paying more attention to mass transit as an alternative to highways and automobiles, and is today blamed for much of the congestion on his own highways. He responded that mass transit was other people's business, not his.

The national flower is the concrete cloverleaf, city planner Lewis Mumford once said in derision. But Mumford, Moses' bitterest critic, knew success when he saw it. ``In the 20th Century, the influence of Robert Moses on the cities of America was greater than that of any other person,'' he said.

``Anyone in public works is bound to be a target for charges of arbitrary administration and power broking leveled by critics who never had responsibility for building anything,'' the 86-year-old Moses responded to Caro in 1974. ``I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without moving people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs.''

Born of prosperous Jewish parents on Dec. 18, 1888, in New Haven, Conn., Moses grew up in New York City, where the family lived on East 46th Street, just off Fifth Avenue. He received degrees from Yale University, Oxford University and a doctoral degree in political science from Columbia. By this time, at 6-foot, 1-inch tall, he was athletic and broad-shouldered, an outdoorsman and a fine swimmer.

Thus intellectually armed, Robert Moses was loosed upon the world. Cultured, educated, sophisticated and not in need of a wage-paying job, he moved into New York City life with the passion of an idealist and a reformer. Registered as a Republican, he would make his friends and his enemies not on political grounds, but on personal ones. In 1914, one of these new friends was Frances Perkins, who would later become U.S. secretary of labor under President Franklin Roosevelt.

``He was always burning up with ideas, just burning up with them,'' Perkins later said. ``Everything he saw walking around the city made him think of some way that it could be done better.''

Moses was then only 25. The big ideas about making things work better would keep coming for the next 60 or so years.

Just before his 30th birthday, Moses fell into an opportunity that would change his life. In 1918, Democrat Al Smith had just been elected governor of New York for a two-year term (the length of terms at that time), and Smith asked Moses to become chief of staff for a new commission that was to reorganize the state administration. In the process, Moses became notoriously expert at drafting legislation, especially at writing a bill in which he could hide clauses that would further his own interests.