Modernism in the Streets. Marshall Berman

Wagner—would come through and take care of us in the end. And yet, before we knew it, trucks and cranes and immense machines were there, on top of us, and people were getting notice that they had better clear out fast, or else; they looked numbly at the wreckers, at the disappearing streets, at each other, and they went. Moses was coming through, and no political or spiritual power could protect the Bronx from him. For seven years, the center of the Bronx was pounded and blasted and smashed. When the dust of construction finally settled, and the exhaust fumes began to rise, our neighborhood was depopulated, economically depleted, emotionally shattered—as bad as the physical damage had been, the inner wounds were worse—and ripe for all the dreaded spirals of urban blight. Thus Moses gave me, and thousands of other New Yorkers, a crash course in the dynamics of power: what got built, and how, and for whose benefit, and what happened to the people who happened to be in the way. Moses was in the fullness of his power in those days.

      Everywhere you looked, he was building something: A dozen expressways all over the state, slashed through the heart of the city and the country, leveling both; high-rise housing for literally hundreds of thousands of people, austerity barracks for the poor, opulent whited sepulchers for the richest of the rich; dozens of schools; a convention hall that loomed over Central Park; the biggest cultural center in the world at Lincoln Square; a new World’s Fair rising on the ruins of the old; Shea Stadium; at the mouth of New York Harbor, the city’s gateway, the world’s largest suspension bridge; far upstate, along the Canadian border, reaching a climax at Niagara Falls, the world’s greatest complex of dams and power plants. And all these projects were little more than beginnings for Moses, foundations on which to build more.

      BIGGER THAN LIFE

      What kind of man was this Moses? What made him tick? Where were the springs of his colossal energy and audacity, his monstrous pride and arrogance, his insatiable will to build up and tear down? I found myself obsessed with the man and his works. As I grew up and got a liberal education, my head filled up with a gallery of titanic builders and destroyers from literature and myth and history, in whose company Moses might belong; Gilgamesh; Ozymandias; Louis XIV, creator of Versailles; Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, the enormous statue of Peter the Great that loomed over the Imperial Capital he had built, and that, generations after his death, menaced Petersburg’s citizens and drove them mad; Ibsen’s Master Builder; Baron Haussmann, who razed so much of medieval—and revolutionary—Paris and created the boulevards and vistas of our romantic dreams; Bugsy Siegel, master builder of the underworld, who created Las Vegas and was killed for it; “Kingfish” Huey Long; Mr. Kurtz; Citizen Kane. It was a strange but genuine Great Tradition. The paradigm that struck me most forcefully was Goethe’s Faust, that bible of the German bourgeoisie from which Moses sprang. Goethe’s Faust is an intellectual who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for superhuman powers, but who feels fulfilled only when he gains the power to build—to irrigate and develop an arid and barren coast, to make the wasteland bloom and open it to human life—and to murderously do away with the people in his way. It was hard to think about Robert Moses without mythicizing him: Like the immense hulks he built, he looked and felt bigger than life.

      Moses himself was always glad to supply the public with archetypes in case our imaginations should run dry. He could come on like a great American gangster, racing around in fleets of black limousines, going out of his way to transgress speed limits, street lights, rules of the road, boasting that “Nothing I have ever done has been tinged with legality.” Or he could appear as an unreconstructed Soviet Commissar, proclaiming to the world that “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs!”¹ He could even sound like the legendary oriental despots, serene in the totality of their power, free to let their magnificent malignity hang out. Thus, unlike most men of power, who characteristically use language as euphemism and smokescreen, Moses would bluntly say that “when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.” You could make no mistakes about that. But Moses could also mobilize self-images that were beneficent and benign. When he planned to turn the city dump in Flushing Meadows into an enormous park, he dressed himself as the prophet Isaiah and asserted Jehovah’s mandate to “give unto them beauty for ashes.” After his park was underway he would often say that he was the man who had seized Scott Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes—the ash heaps between Long Island and New York City, which became, in The Great Gatsby, a brilliant symbol of our civilization’s industrial waste and human hell—and transformed it into a symbol of natural beauty and human delight.

      Over the years, I came across many New Yorkers who were as haunted by Moses as I was. We would watch his projects being built, trade rumors and references along with fantasies and myths. Where did his vast power come from? How had he begun? What demonic inner forces drove him on? There was one incredible story about what might be the Rosebud of this Citizen Moses. The rumor was that he had never learned to drive—and had taken his revenge by making himself Detroit’s man in New York and forcing everyone around him to drive everywhere. (I never believed it but The Power Broker discloses that the story was true after all.) What was he going to do next? We wracked our brains to anticipate his next move, before this Great Dirt Mover (as he liked to call himself) literally grabbed the ground out from under our feet. But he kept himself miles and years ahead of us, because we never learned how to “think big.” Could people be aroused to fight him? Was there any way he could be stopped? As the fifties ripened slowly into the sixties, we schemed and dreamed.

      LOOKING FOR A MYTH