Blog: Robert Moses

A powerful New York City official decides to build a major public works project which would occupy a large amount of land in Manhattan, with questionable benefit, while a superior alternative exists, and motivated by a desire to leave a lasting visible legacy on the city. This official insists that his plan was the only way and strongarms many elected officials into supporting it. Organized community opposition is vociferous but unable to kill the plan until another powerful elected official uses his power to stop the project, but because of personal enmity. The right result is achieved but in the wrong way.

In 1939, this described Robert Moses' attempts to build a Brooklyn-Battery Bridge. Original plans called for a tunnel, but Moses changed it to a bridge because he wanted the grandeur of (another) lasting monument to his building. However, the bridge approaches would have completely obliterated Battery Park, while a tunnel would not. City officials were unable to muster the courage or organization to stop the plan. Ultimately, the only power that could stand in Moses' way was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose War Department blocked the plan because the bridge lay between the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the harbor. Even though there were already two bridges likewise downstream of the Navy Yard, they blocked this bridge. Many historians believe the primary motivation for this act was Roosevelt's personal feud with Robert Moses.

The drama played itself out once more in 2005, when Mayor Mike Bloomberg decided he wanted to build a stadim on the West Side of Manhattan. He negotiated sweeheart deals with the New York Jets and a developer, with the city paying most of the cost and assuming all of the risk. Never mind that stadiums are rarely worth public dollars, and that the area could be much better utilized as a new neighborhood with residential, retail, and commercial space. Bloomberg relentlessly pushed his plan, kept inventing deadlines in order to try to force city and state officials into accepting it, and refused to consider viable alternatives like Flushing Meadows in Queens, where there is a lot of space, already a stadium (Shea), and people actually would welcome the development. The City Council was unwilling to stand in the way. But State Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver was able to kill the plan by denying state funding. Did he do that because it was a bad idea and poor policy? No. He killed it because he represents Lower Manhattan, and the project would distract from efforts there, plus Bloomberg had been ignoring Lower Manhattan.

So a bad plan once again is killed for personal reasons, and meanwhile no adequate checks on the process exist to actually stop bad plans because they are bad. We need a better way for neighborhood activists to participate in the decisionmaking process. Plans should go forward if they are good for the city and be rejected if they are harmful, not because a President or an Assembly Speaker happens to dislike the plan's author.

And the upshot of the stadium plan's death? Less than a week later, Bloomberg has made a deal with the New York Mets to build a new stadium in Flushing Meadows after all, the place everyone else said it should go in the first place, and (as far as I can tell from the New York Times) almost overwhelmingly using private funding and at much lower cost.

Maybe if Bloomberg listened to people, he'd come up with better plans!