Tomorrow-Land Read online

  2.

  Moses is a man you have to take as he is . . .

  —New York Times editorial on December 18, 1963, Moses’ seventy-fifth birthday

  The seeds of the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair were first planted by a poetry-loving, idealistic, and well-connected real estate lawyer named Robert Kopple. One night in May 1958, while dining at his Roslyn, Long Island, home with his wife and young daughters, Kopple turned the conversation toward current events. He was shocked to hear what his children had to say. “We were discussing the world,” he later explained, “and I found that my daughters, who were then nine and twelve, had very little contact with what was going on in it. Everything was in terms of black and white; everything was hate. And it occurred to me that I would like to bring home to them that people around the world were basically the same. And I thought it would be nice to bring the nations of the world together again.”

  Kopple’s notion of uniting people, breaking down racial and national barriers, was still considered forward thinking in 1958 America, but such ideas had slowly been invading mainstream thought from the nation’s political margins. The dinnertime conversation got him thinking. Kopple belonged to a monthly lunch club, which he organized, the Mutual Admiration Society, comprised of politically connected New Yorkers. At their next meeting at the New York University Club, he recalled his conversation with his daughters. He suggested to his associates that what was needed to educate children was another World’s Fair. All the men at the table fondly recalled New York’s previous World’s Fair in 1939–40 and its fabled “World of Tomorrow.”

  Kopple had even worked at that Fair, running a voice-recording booth located opposite famed entertainment impresario Billy Rose’s Aquacade exhibit. Despite two years of work, the booth hadn’t turn a profit, but it left Kopple a self-professed “Fair buff.” It also left him a true believer in the potential of such international exhibitions to foster understanding and mutual respect among the nations of the world—attitudes that were in short supply in the anxious years of the Cold War.

  Kopple’s insistence impressed his friends, and he immediately got to work: He read the complete minutes of the planning and assessment meetings from the earlier Fair and interviewed its president, the fast-talking, mustachioed showman Grover Whalen. He recruited important New York politicians he knew, like Joseph Carlino and Anthony Travia, the majority and minority leaders, respectively, of the New York State Assembly (both were members of the Mutual Admiration Society). Soon Kopple was traveling to Washington, DC, on his own dime and with New York’s Republican senators Jacob K. Javitz and Kenneth Keating. He also arranged introductions to officials at both the Commerce and State Departments.

  One of his lunch partners, Charles F. Preusse, a New York City administrator, got him his most important meeting: a sit-down with Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. If Kopple was going to organize the kind of world-class fair that he envisioned, he knew he needed City Hall’s support. Sitting in the anteroom at Gracie Mansion, waiting for the mayor, Kopple noticed the seal of the city of New York hanging on the wall; it featured a picture of a Pilgrim and Native American standing side by side with the date 1664 at the bottom.

  The Duke of York had conquered the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1664, and renamed the bustling port city after his own dominion. New York, as it was henceforth known, became an English-speaking colony of the British Empire; 1964 would mark the 300th anniversary of this historical event and, as Kopple soon found out, Wagner had been looking for a way to celebrate the city’s tercentennial. By the end of the meeting, Kopple was the city’s official representative to organize the forthcoming celebrations.

  In the meantime, Kopple sent feelers out to the Paris-based Bureau of International Expositions, or BIE, the ruling body that sanctioned World’s Fairs. Seattle had already petitioned the BIE for its Century 21 Exposition in 1962, and several other cities—Toronto, Vienna, Moscow, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC—were already angling to host exhibitions in the mid-1960s. According to BIE bylaws, a country could only host a Fair once every ten years, and the exhibitions themselves had to be spaced apart. New York was a contender but a dark horse.

  Kopple pressed ahead. He put together a group of power brokers to jumpstart New York’s bid. He enlisted public relations executive Thomas J. Deegan to be the Fair Corporation’s acting president, offered Whalen the position of honorary chairman (emphasizing the link to the earlier Fair), and would serve as executive vice president himself.

  In May 1959 Kopple invited thirty-five prominent businessmen for drinks at New York’s famed “21” restaurant. He asked them to sit on the Mayor’s Committee for a proposed World’s Fair—and to fork over $1,000 apiece for seed money. Deegan soon got another fifty high rollers to do the same. Now all the pieces were coming together: Kopple’s nonprofit World’s Fair Corporation had cash in hand (up until now, he had been paying expenses out of his own pocket) and had secured the services of advertising firm Doyle Dane Bernbach, whose groundbreaking work for Volkswagen and Polaroid was upending Madison Avenue. The corporation had also acquired rent-free office space in the Empire State Building for one year thanks to Kopple’s connections. They even found a site for the Fair itself. Robert Moses, as City Parks Commissioner, offered Flushing Meadow Park in Queens—site of the 1939–40 World’s Fair—for an unbeatable rental fee of $1 a year.

  The next step for the New York organizers was to secure the support of President Eisenhower. Of the other American cities in contention—Los Angeles and Washington, DC—the nation’s capital was the clear frontrunner. Without the consent of the federal government, city and state officials could not invite foreign nations to participate in an exhibition on American soil. As it happened, Senator Fulbright, the powerful head of the Foreign Relations Committee, and others were lobbying hard for a DC fair. The deck seemed stacked against New York. However, in early October 1959, Eisenhower appointed a three-man commission to consider the various bids. New York’s delegation, headed by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, Mayor Wagner, and Moses—who had no official connection to the Fair at this point (but without whom, nothing in New York got built)—traveled to Washington to make their case.

  Moses, in his usual heavy-handed style, laid out the reasons why the Fair should be held in “the World Capital” of New York: The city already had an abundance of hotel rooms, cultural offerings, a vast transportation system, and, of course, the ready-made fairgrounds of Flushing Meadow Park—1,257 acres of green space that he reminded the committee he had created from a “dump” into New York City’s second-largest park. He also noted that a state-of-the-art major-league baseball stadium—soon to be the home of New York’s new National League team, the Mets—was going to be built in the park, an enterprise, Moses argued, that would “supplement” the World’s Fair.

  Moses’ case was convincing. By the end of the month, Eisenhower gave New York the green light for its World’s Fair. Kopple’s dream would now become a reality. With the blessing of the White House and the full support of New York’s political and business classes, the only obstacle left was to address the “slight diplomatic problem” of the BIE in Paris. There were specific bylaws of the organization that conflicted with Kopple’s plans: For starters, there was the 1962 Seattle exposition. Second, the New York planners insisted foreign governments pay rent for their pavilions, whereas American state governments would pay nothing (the BIE insisted that all land be provided for free). And finally, the New York Fair would be held for two six-month seasons in both 1964 and 1965 (World’s Fairs were supposed to be held for only one six-month period).

  The European bureaucrats in the BIE were quick to point out that the United States had never joined the organization, which counted among its thirty member-nations almost all of Europe, the Soviet Union, Israel, and several countries in South America and Asia. Back in 1939, Whalen had promised the BIE that he would lobby Congress to ratify the organization’s treaty
, but as Europe fell to Hitler’s Wehrmacht, the deal was promptly forgotten. In fact, a deal was completely unlikely in 1939 or ’40 given the strong isolationist bent of American policy at the time. Many in America wanted the United States to steer clear of any international treaty that would bind the country to the war-prone nations of Europe.

  Despite these seemingly insurmountable roadblocks facing the New York organizers in 1959, pragmatic solutions were rather simple: Seattle’s exposition was, technically, a “second-category” affair; its very size, no more than 74 acres, was completely dwarfed by the 646 acres that New York’s exhibition would occupy. The rents that the city would charge could be shifted around to different columns on the official accountant spreadsheets (the 1939–40 Fair had also charged rent). And finally, if need be, the BIE could sanction only the first year of the Fair, while informal arrangements could be made with BIE members for the second season in 1965.

  Before any deals could be struck, however, the World’s Fair Corporation had two internal problems to solve. One was to secure the services of a president, someone with a name that resonated with the public but who was not a politician (or who would be running for office in the future). They wanted someone with impeccable credentials, the toughness to maneuver through New York’s bureaucracy, and yet the diplomacy to work with foreign governments.

  While the search proceeded, Kopple and Deegan had to secure funding for their Fair. Like the 1939–40 World’s Fair, they planned on issuing bonds and would pay the bondholders back with some of the Fair’s estimated $100 million profit. But as Kopple knew, the earlier Fair, albeit a cherished memory for a generation of Americans who grew up during the Great Depression and the war years, was a bust business-wise. In fact, Whalen had sold more than $26.8 million in bonds, while only paying back $8.2 million to his investors: a whopping thirty-two cents to the dollar. And to make things worse, many of the bankers who were stiffed twenty-five years earlier occupied the same seats on the current boards of New York banks. “We found that the same people who had been policy-makers at the banks in those days were still the policy-makers twenty-five years later,” complained Deegan. “There hadn’t been much turnover.”

  Initially, Deegan hoped to offer $500 million in bonds, but the Fair’s economic forecast made him hedge his bets. By early 1960 he downgraded the figure to $150 million. It wasn’t nearly enough money, but the banking community still balked. Enter David Rockefeller, the powerful vice chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and brother to New York’s Republican governor—and soon-to-be presidential candidate—Nelson Rockefeller. The younger Rockefeller put up $3 million to settle the Fair’s finances, for the moment.

  Rockefeller became a consultant to the Executive Committee, which continued to seek a new president. Names were tossed around, among them General Lucius D. Clay, the architect of the Berlin Airlift and Eisenhower’s deputy during WWII, as well as John J. McCloy, the former US High Commissioner of West Germany and World Bank president (his insider status would later land him on the Warren Commission). Both were serious men with international reputations and impeccable credentials. Neither was interested.

  In March the group met at Rockefeller’s Manhattan office to go over a list of eight names. As they deliberated over their choices, one member, William E. Robinson, the chairman of the board at Coca-Cola, suggested that there was a very powerful New Yorker whose name hadn’t been mentioned yet: Robert Moses. Kopple immediately voiced his opposition. Moses, he said, lacked style and grace. He reminded his colleagues that the Master Builder wasn’t a showman but a dictator who steamrolled over people like they were asphalt. Moses’ authoritarian techniques might work in New York but would hardly win the Fair any friends among foreign governments or American corporations. But Kopple’s concerns were the exact reasons why Robinson nominated the Master Builder. “I suspect that his arbitrary and dictatorial method may be necessary in the organization and operation of a World’s Fair of this kind,” Robinson would later say.

  Kopple tried a different tactic: He suggested that given Moses’ advanced age—he was already seventy—he was too old for the job. That comment irritated Bernard Gimbel, the seventy-five-year-old department store tycoon and Moses’ confidant, who argued that he was in the prime of his life. Some members of the committee backed Moses; others, like Rockefeller, sat silently.

  The real estate lawyer hadn’t seen this coming. The tide of the room soon turned against him. Trying to defuse the situation, Kopple mentioned that the whole conversation might be premature. He suggested to the room that Moses, who already held more than a dozen positions in New York, might not even be interested in the job. That’s when Deegan spoke up. Actually, the public relations executive nonchalantly informed the committee, “I took the liberty of calling Bob just before we met.”

  If suddenly Kopple felt that he had been set up, no one who knew Moses would have been surprised.

  3.

  In the twentieth century, the influence of Robert Moses on the cities of America was greater than that of any other person.

  —Lewis Mumford

  For Robert Moses, it all came down to parks. More than the bridges he built (the Whitestone, the Verrazano, the Throg’s Neck, the Triborough, to name a few); or the vast interlocking network of expressways he erected above and below its streets (the Van Wyck, the Clearview, the Whitestone, the Cross-Bronx, the Brooklyn-Queens, among others); or the 416 miles of scenic parkways that course in and out of metropolitan New York and its outer environs; or even the hundreds of playgrounds, dozen or so public pools, amenities, tennis courts, or skating rinks that he created, what mattered most to Moses were parks. Fighting for parks, he said, was always a winning proposition for a public figure, even an unelected one such as himself. “As long as you’re on the side of parks,” he would often tell his underlings, “you’re on the side of the angels. You can’t lose.”

  More than all his other monuments of concrete and steel and feats of ingenuity and engineering, parks would be Moses’ pathway to history. And history is what Moses intended to make. In 1960 he got the chance to build the park of his dreams, one that he had been envisioning for almost forty years. This would be his crowning achievement; and if his vision was carried out—and he would use all the power at his disposal to see that it was—this park would reshape the very geography of New York, improving upon Nature itself.

  Considering his privileged background, it’s a wonder that Moses was interested in parks at all. Born in 1888 in New Haven, Connecticut, Robert Moses was the son of an industrious German immigrant father, Emmanuel Moses, and a demanding mother, Isabella Silverman Cohen, known as Bella. Both families had fled the pastoral beauty of Bavaria, due to its systemic anti-Semitism, for America. Emmanuel Moses became a successful businessman, owning and operating his own local department store. Bella, who doted on her youngest son, Robert, hailed from a well-connected and prosperous New Haven clan. By 1897 the family had moved to Manhattan and lived in a five-story brownstone inherited from Bella’s father on East 46th Street, just off Fifth Avenue.

  Young Moses wanted for nothing. He lived in a household with cooks and maids who prepared his meals, served his food on the finest china, and made his custom-built bed daily. He and his older brother shared a private library with more than two thousand books. Rembrandt prints hung from the home’s oak-paneled walls. The family vacationed in upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains, imbuing Moses with a love of nature, and they summered on the Continent, fueling his intellectual and cultural appetites. As a Manhattanite, Moses never had to endure the subway or any other aspect of the public transportation system; he was driven everywhere he went by the family chauffeur. In his long life, he would never learn to drive.

  Educated at prep schools and an excellent athlete—Moses disdained team sports, preferring swimming, a lifelong passion, and track—he began his studies at Yale while only sixteen. Unable to penetrate the top social clubs at the
university as a Jew, he settled for less prestigious student organizations. Throwing himself into his studies, Moses read voraciously and developed a passion for Samuel Johnson, the learned eighteenth-century man of letters. He spoke Latin and recited lengthy poems from memory. He even wrote his own Victorian-style poetry, which got published in a Yale literary magazine.

  The ambitious Moses had a gift for words, especially when motivated to defend a position or attack an opponent. He penned pointed editorials for the Yale Daily News and ran for student government. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1909. It was said by his fellow students that he could have graduated at the very top of his class if he had spent less time reading books that interested him but had nothing to do with his coursework.

  After Yale, Moses earned his master’s degree in political science at Wadham College at Oxford University. There he wrote his master’s thesis on reforming government, creating a new paradigm based on meritocracy instead of the crooked system of patronage and kickbacks that ruled big-city political machines like New York’s infamous Tammany Hall. Back in New York, he earned his PhD in political science at Columbia. Thus armed with degrees from some of the best colleges in the world, Moses dedicated himself to public service.

  Quickly aligning himself with the progressive movement, then a national force in politics, Moses worked for no pay—since he could afford to—at the Municipal Research Bureau in New York. When a young prosecuting attorney named John Purroy Mitchel swept into City Hall on an anticorruption, anti–Tammany Hall platform in 1914, Moses joined his administration. Only thirty-four years old, Mitchel was dubbed “the Boy Mayor” and was exactly the kind of university-bred man that Moses thought should hold the highest positions in government.

  After proposing the government operating system that he had detailed in his master’s thesis, Moses quickly became a target of Tammany Hall. At raucous Board of Estimate meetings in 1917, dressed in a white suit and tie, he publicly defended his plan, citing facts and figures, while the rough-and-tumble Tammany faithful crowded the back of the hall, hurling insults and curses at the PhD Ivy Leaguer. Unfortunately, 1917 was an election year, and Mayor Mitchel buckled under pressure from the political bosses and failed to support Moses’ plan. When Mitchel lost his reelection bid, Moses lost his job.