New York, City Of Tomorrow

[Music] the contemporary city is profoundly menaced not by any outside danger but by an evil shaping within itself this is the evil of the machine because of the confusion of its different functions it's growing mechanization the omnipresence and anarchy of the motorcar the city is at the mercy of industrial machines if it is to be saved its structure must change and this change is inevitable whether it comes through insight or catastrophe the city must be changed or it will perish and our civilization with it Zeek read Gideon all through the 20s giddy upward rise New Yorkers had been pursuing another kind of dream not only upward but out into the expanse of green and blue that as f scott Fitzgerald had seen alone was limitless propelled by the rising prosperity and restlessness of New Yorkers and by the revolutionary invention that since the turn of the century had become the shining emblem of both this fateful movement beyond the boundaries of Greater New York would alter forever the relation of the city and the country and challenge all previous assumptions about urban life the car disaggregates the car unravels tight closely knit interdependent urban regions because it makes place less relevant with a car doesn't matter where some places so this relatively static this relatively rigid grid of streets and buildings and railroad tracks has to somehow respond to this thing which is hungry and demanding forces changes on the landscape so the car takes pride of place among the variables that are going to place demands on the city the cars the whole story in the decades to come as the city moved through Depression World War and beyond New York would become the arena of a titanic contest between the automobile and the pedestrian between the highway and the city block between the compact if often congested urban neighborhood and the sprawling if often anonymous commuter suburb before it was over that contest would Alba tear the city apart and force New Yorkers to confront the most elemental urban questions of all what is a city what makes cities work Why should there be cities at all no city as complex as New York no city that builds itself and rebuilds itself so often and often so well as a high point as a magic moment [Music] New York is a constellation of magic moments what is astonishing about New York is how many of the magic moments of the past have managed to survive we have lost a lot when we saved an awful lot what are the magic moments of the 19th century the optimism of the City Hall sophisticated French inspired building uh what is another optimism that Brooklyn Bridge is still there what a leap the Brooklyn Bridge was what a leap commissioners plan was and it's still intact pretty much lot of vision Central Park was and it's there it's more beautiful now than it's been perhaps since the time of Olmstead add to that these incredible office buildings that were built which concluded with some kind of visible symbol at the top so I don't think we should think of New York as being a closed book I mean New York could be said to be like one of those incredible things you see in a 4th of July fireworks they're just gone boom boom boom and it keeps going how we don't know how many layers of that explosion will happen before it all Peters out me of course hope that it will never Peter out New York is that explosion [Music] by the autumn of 1929 as the most spectacular decade in the history of the city came to a breathtaking close New York seemed to have arrived at the varies enos of its dazzling career in 300 years it had grown from a tiny trading post on the far edge of the known world to become the undisputed cultural and economic capital of the world gathering in money and people from around the globe it had made itself one of the wealthiest and most densely populated places on earth its population rising from fewer than 5,000 in 1776 to nearly seven million a century and a half later consecrated as no place on earth to the power of Commerce and money and unbidden to any outside force it had made itself the supreme center of American life then in one last glorious decade from 1919 to 1929 finished bringing into existence a ravishing dream city on the island of Manhattan which had become the most modern place on earth one is stunned at the sight of these upright masses buildings 50 stories high straight lines everywhere affirming the will to make room for millions this is not an architecture for men it is an architecture for human masses one cannot understand it without first having enjoyed the thrill of adding enormous totals and of living in a gigantic compact and brilliant world [Music] in the end the fever pitch of the 1920s acknowledging no limits and building higher and higher could never have been sustained as if like Icarus the city had flown too close to the Sun and then come tumbling back to earth again in the years following the crash of 1929 as the greatest depression in American history plunged the city and nation into economic gloom two things would become faithfully clear the city itself acting on its own could no longer meet the needs of its own people and unfettered capitalism in new york in a century and a half of relentless commercial growth had been carried to its very limit in the years to come as the greatest domestic crisis of the 20th century swept across the city and the nation New Yorkers would be forced to reinvent their city once again on a massive scale [Music] moving as they did into uncharted waters from which there would be no return between 1929 and 1945 as immense new forces were unleashed in New York altering forever the relation of the city in the country two of the most remarkable New Yorkers of all time would come to the fore Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses and attempt to create in the darkest of times a bold new city of the future [Music] it's strange to think help these two powerful figures Fiorella Gordy and Robert Moses interacted I mean physically so different allegory of celebrating difference loving the tumble in the tide of the city Robert Moses trying to bring order to it but in some ways they were able to work together and I think you can't help but look at New York in the 1930s and marvel at the things that were built during the Great Depression the new parks and playgrounds the swimming pools were roads the beaches it was a time of achievement a greater period of achievement than what we have seen at the end of the 20th century when we're so much more affluent in the economy's booming [Music] new cities have always replaced old cities by periods but today it is possible for the city of modern times the happy city the radiant city to be born Le Corbusier [Music] we had immensely increased the range of our dreams for ourselves in the 20s and that was why the Great Depression was a terrible psychological shock to people it led to what amounted to enormous - a clinical depression on the part of the American people they could not believe that we had stumbled and fallen there had been downturns before boom times that went bust followed by years of hardship want and misery but there had never been anything like the Great Depression of the 1930s [Music] on the eve of the crash fewer than two million people were unemployed in the United States less than two years later the number had risen to more than eight million and a year after that 213 million nearly a third of the nation's workforce nowhere in the country were the effects more visible or more heartbreaking than in New York where by 1931 the greatest economic engine on earth had all but ground to a halt what's fascinating is that the bottom doesn't drop out suddenly the crash leads to a slow toppling effect no they they don't have a sense that the world has transformed and that things have changed irrevocably but slowly it takes hope obviously one of the first things that gets hit is the financial sector and then the ripple effect in terms of business services spreads out from that the manufacturing sector has hit extremely hard in huge numbers of people are either laid off in the garment business or in fact their wages are cut in half and industry after industry from garment manufacturing to construction hi implode in some cases really almost totally cease economic activity and you have to remember this is before unemployment insurance before any systematic government will leaf a system and yet it's already passed the era when people could go back to the land certainly in New York City very few people had organic relationships with you know land the consequences are as they always are that money isn't coming in people can't make the rent there are massive evictions people begin to sort of crop up in encampments in parks on the river's edge in old auto dumps around town red lines begin to form [Music] December 24th 1931 every day one sees the degrading misery of breadlines every day one is told that this great industry and that from railroads to publishing is collapsing the building slump spreads in New York the most salient new structure the Magnificent Empire state stands unlit and can only pay its taxes by collecting dollars from the sightseers who ascend to its Erie for the stupendous view stories of failing banks turned in motorcars despairing suicides are dent into one's ears Mary Agnes Hamilton you turn a corner and here is a surprising spectacle a line of men three are sometimes four abreast a block long and wedge together so tightly that no passerby can break through those are the head of this gray black human snake we'll eat tonight those farther back probably won't bruce flibben 1,600,000 people in New York after city's population of six million nine hundred thousand 1 million six hundred thousand people were on relief roads that's mothers fathers and children if you look down in Riverside Park which we were talking about that's where the city dumped its garden and there were huge mounds of garbage 96 and 125th Street and you would see scores hundreds of women and children whenever the trucks would come and dump the garbage children and mothers would run to try and get some kind of food out of there it was terrible in New York City in the country at least you can usually find something to eat but they were Hoovervilles in Central Park in fact my sheep that raised on the Sheep Meadow that had been donated by my great great great grandfather named George coggle he given the Sheep to Central Park in the 1860s and the herd had save their till the 1934 when they were moved up state to the city's farm in the Catskills because the city was afraid that the people living in the Hoovervilles would look upon the sheep as lunch more than as a touch of the bucolic by 1931 tens of thousands of New Yorkers had been evicted from their homes those that could doubled up with family and friends but thousands more unable to find any housing at all sought more shelter they could find in one of the dismal shanty towns that had begun to spring up along the East River and the Hudson and in Central Park called Hoovervilles an ironic tribute to the president wellhe we're here because we there's no work to be found we came down to the Hudson and seen that the lumber floating at the river the retarder building a Shack so we built one so we are not a burden on the community we have no rent to pay or whatever we have to work we can't come to work or look for work take in the work but we'll buy some day in the future month after month as the economic situation continued to deteriorate calls for government action grew louder in Harlem and in the Bronx where one in three workers in the garment industry had been laid off thousands of protesters took to the streets while across the city rent strikes broke out along with political demonstrations of every kind sometimes escalating into pitched battles with the police the devastation was so broad and reached so high that had had just been a manufacturing crisis so that unskilled laborers were out of work I'm not convinced that everyone would have noticed but everyone saw in the depression either someone they knew or the likelihood that someone they knew would end up there it seemed very clearly out of people's own hands and I think that did propel a kind of communal commitment the temporary bureaucracies of relief thrown up by the crisis have all the character of a frail Expeditionary Force sent into a war that is expected to last only three months and which has become instead a world war their theory is still essentially that of charitably helping bums and weaklings over the rough places rather than masses cut down by a kind of economic massacre the New Republic under Herbert Hoover federal authorities had Alban washed their hands of responsibility for the growing number of destitute Americans New York State itself under governor Franklin Roosevelt had been among the first to respond with large-scale relief programs but little of the money that passed through City Hall reached the people for whom it had been intended as time any officials pocketed most of the funds then made sure most of the rest was distributed to party regulars New York then was a city utterly unable to meet the needs of its people in almost every respect the Tammany Machine was totally corrupted really shocking percentage of the Relief dollars that came in to New York was siphoned off by the Tammany machine in 1931 and 32 and 33 New York was a city paralyzed and it seemed like a city where there was basically no hope of it ever meeting the needs of you might say the 20th century the automobile age had arrived the city was strangling on its traffic it was unable to build a single line of arterial highway uh it had an idea of building what we now know is the Henry Hudson bridge they've been talking about it for thirty years it wasn't built the Triborough bridge had been started and stopped and there was no hope of starting these things in any foreseeable future for years rumors of official malfeasance had swirled around City Hall which by 1931 had been occupied for more than half a decade by a dapper and charmingly corrupt ex vaudeville performer and Tammany man named James J Walker under whose reign Tammany system of patronage and spoils had spiraled completely out of control well I'm sure I would have liked him he must have been a marvelous person to spend time with and he was a dreadful mayor he often didn't show up until noon and was usually gone by 3:00 in the afternoon and he was a songwriter he wrote you know you love me in December as you do in May I'm still a famous song I think he fitted his times very well was he a good mayor no you awful mayor who's as crooked as a dog's hind leg Robert Moses had the perfect expression for Jimmy Walker hey F Beau Brummel AF guttersnipe Moses blacks Walker walk into the office in the morning you know he wore a single button sooo perfect the narrowest of cravat spats the highly polished shoes Robert Moses would see him come into the morning B pile of mail on his desk and he'd say any checks in there and if someone said no he'd sweep them all off the desk his mayoral to you the city of New York you know sort of enshrine his ledge into something with an overtone of fun but it wasn't fun for the people who decided the city was doing nothing to help its people in deficit that the pressure who is doing remarkable the problem was that there was no money coming from the state and there was no money coming from the federal government so he was left with no recourse ready but to borrow he borrowed any bar and he borrowed and in fact in the end he basically had to agree that the city would in fact make tremendous cuts in public services stop these Public Works programs lay off workers and the rest of it and it was at this moment really that he ran it even more serious trouble in the investigations of Walker began that lead to his downfall the beginning of the end of Walker's ran came in the fall of 1930 when Governor Franklin Roosevelt obliged to distance himself from Tammany Hall as he prepared his run for the presidency appointed a fiercely upright reform minded judge named Samuel Seabury to investigate corruption in city government and they begin to find it's not too hard you know massive amounts of official malfeasance and corruption particularly in the police department in the judicial system one of the nastiest thing is that they're running of this vice racketeering where not only do they arrest prostitutes and then you know accept payoffs to let them off but increase thing they'd be interested resting women off the street respectable middle-class women and you know threatening to sort of expose them unless they pay off it's really rampant running a much stuff and what Seabury does is he begins to sort of go up the chain of command getting closer and closer to Walker in the spring of 1932 Walker himself was called to testify on the morning of May 25th the immensely popular mayor pushed his way through a throng of 5,000 admirers outside the County Courthouse on Foley Square and strode confidently into the courtroom informed of Walker's rousing reception Seabury said simply they gave one to boss tweed two in a walker was so charming that when Judge Samuel C Barry was having his investigation he was advised by his aides he's so charming don't look him in the eye and charm you so when Seabury was cross-examining Jimmy Walker understand he tried to stand sideways so that Walker couldn't catch his eye once on the witness stand however there was little Walker could do as Seabury marshaled evidence of the nearly 1 million dollars the mayor had pocketed in kickbacks moneys Walker himself gamely tried to explain away as beneficence 'as by the end of the summer it was clear to almost everyone but Walker had to go and he abdicates he leaves office Seabury was not about to actually bring formal charges he said I got lots of circumstantial evidence but I don't have that smoking gun but it was Roosevelt behind the scenes that made sure that Walker would in fact now take as much delayed franklin roosevelt governor of new york gave his choice of resigning or being fired and he opted to resign to be replaced by this nobody named booboo o'brien um who famous for his first press conference somebody asked him who the new sewer commissioner was going to be and boo boo O'Brien said I don't know they haven't told me yet util we'll find out what criticism airs due to though will find the same company in the midst of criticism that comes from an easy conscience and a knowledge within yourself but no matter whether misunderstood or not you did the best you could on September 1st 1932 Jimmy Walker left City Hall for the last time found to run again and clear his record then sailed for Europe to join his mistress the actress Betty Compton in Paris that dazzling theatrical an essentially absurd career has collapsed at last the New York Herald Tribune the elimination of mr. Walker as mayor of this city is a distinct victory for higher standards of public life Judge Samuel Seabury [Music] more than anyone realized the demise of Jimmy Walker and the devastating depression that triggered it had set the stage for one of the most far-reaching political transformations in American history before the year was out Franklin Delano Roosevelt's deft handling of the Walker scandal had helped propel him to the White House give me your help not to win personal but to win in this proceed barrister damn people in New York meanwhile with Tammany on the retreat for the first time in 15 years reformers saw their chance of finally retaking City Hall pinning their hopes on a brilliant young civil servant named Robert Moses who under Al Smith had built the first state park system in the country and the first system of public highways in the world the Reformed forces realize after Walker is out that Tammany is a wounded beast and that there's a possibility for actually winning power for reform candidate the question is who's going to be the person that most of the Reformers month is Robert Moses but Samuel Seabury who is the cuspid role in the investigation the kingmaker here won't hear of it why because Moses is an L Smith man and Al Smith is a Tammany man and Seabury is determined to keep cabining out of City Hall he wants Fiorello LaGuardia he was in many ways the least likely of candidates a short excitable 51 year old ex-congressman and failed mayoral candidate widely thought to be finished in politics having lost to Jimmy Walker only four years before in one of the biggest landslides in the city's history actually the idea of LaGuardia horrifies mostly reformers this guy had been the most radical congressman all through the 1920s and then when the depression came he was railing furiously against Hoover his own party administration for not in fact helping the unemployed and he was also attacking bankers you know those bastards broke the people's back with their usually let them die the people will survive well you know the forces of reform we're not exactly interested in this kind of rabble rouser but Seabury was adamant he's absolutely honest the judge declared he's a man of great courage and he can win why did Seabury want him because in fact the guy was a scrapper because the guy knew how to really go out campaign a lot of the good government types had never you know set foot in the streets this guy could debate you know it it'sh to get the Jewish vote and very important he had a large disaffected Italian constituency whom in fact had been kept out of access to power and jobs by the Irish Tammany machines he was in a way reflective of New York City a one-person melting pot mother's Jewish father's Italian he's an Episcopalian speaks different languages but a person who's comfortable with difference a person who not only is comfortable with it celebrates I think he's also the first man to embody in his style uh a kind of multiculturalism that really embraces all New Yorkers that says the greatness of the city is precisely in its heterogeneity that this is its richness not in its own Gus traditions not its great wealth I think he was committed to the yes that was New York it wasn't neat it was combative and it was energizing and it was complex and I think he that's what he was trying to get it was allowing people to thrive and that kind of equal opportunity community and to try to build that kind of city on Election Day the largest turnout in the city's history over 2 million voters propelled the fusion candidate into City Hall by the narrowest of margins at 12:05 a.m. on the morning of January 1st 1934 while the streets filled with thousands of New Yorkers celebrating the repeal of prohibition LaGuardia took the oath of office in the library of Samuel C burries townhouse on East 63rd Street I do now we have a mayor in New York City thank you it was perfect timing he was precisely the mayor that New York City needed to get through the depression and the world war he was the mayor of New York City during the most difficult time ever to be mayor of New York City when we talk about fiscal problems in New York City we're talking about ranges of unemployment that go between four and eight percent he was talking about 50% unemployment a city that was totally devastated so he took over New York City in 1933 probably at the worst moment worst point in the history of this city determined to change the course of city government as no mayor before or since he set right to work skipping up the steps of City Hall on his first day in office he shook his fist at the hundred and twenty-two year old building roared out in Italian a finita la ku Konya no more free lunch then quickly showed he meant every word he said in a matter of weeks LaGuardia had begun to dismantle the corrupt political machine that had run New York for generations coming thousands of positions traditionally reserved for Tammany Hall loyalists and putting in its place a new system of scientific civil service based on expertise and merit will not only clean the streets of this city but I'm going to clean every department of every lasting Tammany politician and appoint honest men and women in their places and in fact here he was brilliantly effective he was going to be in office for twelve years and during that time he systematically starved Tammany of patronage and this is an accrual moment because in fact it's the destruction of the Democratic Party machine that was one of his biggest goals and those of his supporters and in fact it was successful in Manhattan he was not without his limitations theatrical autocratic and violently short-tempered he more than once had to be physically restrained from striking other city officials if you were any Dumber he once screamed at a hapless tonometry I'd make you a commissioner but New Yorkers loved him anyway in part because he threw himself into the job with reckless abandon racing two fires in a motorcycle sidecar accompanying the police on official raids and once conducting the city orchestra at Carnegie Hall where he insisted on receiving no special consideration from the musicians just treat me like Toscanini he said he was everywhere he was everywhere and he was distinctive because he was so animated and his qualities were that he's got things done and that he related he shared himself and his soul and his heart and his emotions as well as his ability he was not afraid to be a human being as a politician he was a person of the people and I have always believed that if you want to really represent people you got to act like a people it can't just be something above that and I think LaGuardia understood that it's hard to say that LaGuardia has a single unified vision for the city but he certainly got a series of goals and probably first and foremost are there ones that he that he ran on one is war on crime he declares extremely public war on racketeers and gamblers in particular and he loves going around and collecting slot machines taking them out in the barge in the harbor taking his axe you know chopping them then throwing them overboard or rounding up guns and he's very very conscious of media and he's got the newsreels there and he's got the radio there he's a very public symbolic you know acting out clearly on the other stage he races around in police cars he appoints good tough honest cops you know like Valentine the people who had been shunted aside under your Tammany regime are now running the show we're giving them no quarter but the man whom the newspapers called the little flower had even higher ambitions even as the city lay sunk in the depths of the worst depression in American history he dreamed of transforming into the most progressive and modern metropolis in the world of rebuilding its tattered physical infrastructure ruined by 15 years of looting and neglect through a series of massive public programs and public works that would put tens of thousands of men and women back to work and rebuild the pride and self-respect of the city and its people I shall not rest he declared until my native city is first not only in population but also in wholesome housing not only in commerce but also in public health until it is not only out of debt but abounding in happiness but the fact is that when LaGuardia takes power he is up against the wall and he's got extremely limited parameters the consortium of bankers who had been loaning the city money are in essence saying listen LaGuardia we're gonna cut you off without a dime we're gonna demand our money back unless you take a series of measures and those measures are basically cut public services and concentrate on paying back but you are the banks now LaGuardia actually does carry some of this out and we tend to forget this there were mass layoffs of city workers and such not that was part of him he was in fact a business oriented performer and yet very short order LaGuardia is in a position to tell the bankers to take a hike and not only does he not continue to shrivel municipal government and public programs but he presides over the greatest expansion of government programs and public services in the history of the city the extraordinary revolution that would make that possible would issue from an unprecedented convergence of local and national forces a unique alliance of personalities and events and represent in the end the greatest single sea change in American government since the early days of the Republic it was called the New Deal and in many ways it would mark the very zenith of New York City's influence over American life and the key to understanding LaGuardia and the successes of his administration and for that matter the role of Robert Moses is to understand the New Deal for me the most fascinating thing about the New Deal is that it is in large measure constructed in New York City that when Franklin Roosevelt goes to Washington he is not going alone he is going with a set of ideas and experiences but he is gleaned by working in New York City and New York state politics for the previous decades and he is going with a platoon of New Yorkers from various of aspects of New York life who also have got programs we've got ideas which had been tested and worked out on the streets of New York City in essence I would argue that what happens in 32 or 33 is that New York invades Washington New York boards and seizes Washington but instead of treating it as a conquered country what they do is say Washington has got to do what New York City has been doing for all these years and do it on a colossal new scale but the resources the owned in the federal state can command it must intervene in the workings of the economy must not in fact just sit back and be laissez-faire in its attitude it must seize the moment and operate on a very different set of parameters than the previous administration when you look at the New Deal there are a lot of people from around the country who are players but who's sitting at oza belt right hand it's Harry Hopkins who comes up through the Social Work and the welfare bureaucracy in New York City and is the guy who was sitting there and you know start signing zillions of dollars worth of checks on his left hand is Eleanor who is in fact plugged into the settlement house movement and a whole network of a labor reformers there's Francis Perkins who's going to be his Secretary of Labor she was back in the Triangle fire she's back continuing and applying lessons that were learned in that period on national level the list just goes on all along there's this squadron of New Yorkers who are installed in high places and begin to promote New York City of programs the seismic changes wrought by the New Deal would reverberate for the rest of the century as billions of dollars in federal aid were soon pouring out of Washington affecting every aspect of American life there were funds for unemployment relief for long-term initiatives in Health and Social Security for public housing and labor reform and most surprisingly of all in the darkest hour of the depression for the kind of large-scale public works that Fiorello LaGuardia had made the centerpiece of his vision of a transformed metropolis for better or worse it completely transformed the way people view government and government's role in people's lives before the New Deal it didn't occur to most people that government had any obligation to its citizenry beyond the basics of military support and security and things like that but the idea that government had a responsibility to intervene economically to provide employment when necessary to keep people from starving even this was simply not understood as social security something that's now sacrosanct and in many ways was a novel idea that the people should actually enjoy security and the government was obliged to provide it it changes the nature of the relationship between citizens and government and yet the tremendous irony is is that on the short term the New Deal programs are going to be the salvation of New York City because Washington comes out of this enormous least strength New York which had been the unofficial capital and the financial capital in the cultural capital in the marketing capital has now got a rival in a major-league way that it had never had before and something that you know it's not the center of the country it's just another city on a very hard pressed city and it's dependent upon federal transfer and Washington is going to apply the same New Deal tactics and strategies out west where they're going to build huge public works projects you know dams electrification systems water supply which is very largely going to be drawing upon money garnered from the Northeast in New York in particular to develop what's going to emerge a little bit down the road as a Sun Belt competitor to New York City's economic primacy as you can do the same thing in the south the New Deal courtesy very largely of New Yorkers is in fact going to equalize the relations between the regions but it is going to transform forevermore New York City's centrality that was characteristic of it up till that period the full effects of that epic transformation would not be felt for decades to come in the meantime no mayor in the country saw more clearly the potential of the New Deal than Fiorello LaGuardia pioneering the use of the airplane in government the indefatigable mayor would like to be addressed by his old Army Air Corps rank of Major was soon flying down to Washington early in the morning returning to New York by late afternoon with the promise of new federal aid in hand thanks to his immense personal charm his reputation for incorruptibility and his close personal ties to Franklin Roosevelt our mayor is the most appealing man I know he comes to Washington and tells me a sad story the tears run down my cheeks and the tears run down his cheeks and the first thing I know is wangled another fifty million dollars out of me Franklin Delano Roosevelt Fiorello LaGuardia is you know like this with Franklin Roosevelt that's the critical connection and money billions of dollars flow into a vast series of Public Works programs that build things that are socially useful they build highways they build airports that build hospitals they build schools they build colleges they build you know health centers a vast panoply of expansion of things before it was over the unlikely alliance between the patrician president and the diminutive populist mayor from one man called a lowercase Franklin Roosevelt would turn New York into a showcase for the New Deal in the darkest hours of the depression Fiorello LaGuardia would have the resources he would need to turn New York into what he called a gigantic Laboratory of Civic reconstruction all he needed was someone who knew how to use them and within days of his inauguration on January 1st 1934 he had turned to a man already universally known in New York as the man who could get things done his name was Robert Moses the greatest builder of Public Works the city would ever see and long after he had left the public stage people would still be debating the meaning and consequences of his extraordinary career Robert Moses was the single most important figure to emerge in New York City in the 20th century he was a unique figure not only is there no counterpart in New York City to Robert Moses neither is there any counterpart to Robert Moses Chicago or Los Angeles or Houston one person single-handedly over a period of almost half a century reshapes at great metropolis in a democracy you think of power in four-year terms or eight years or twelve years span Robert Moses held power for almost half a century and with this power he shaped New York not for a term or not for a decade and not for a generation but for almost half a century when you talk about New York in the 20th century the story of New York is inseparable from the story of Robert Moses to an astonishing extent they are one in the same what Barbara Moses did that had to be done was to adapt really a 19th century City for 20th century circumstances he was swimming with the tide of history the American people had essentially voted with their pocketbooks and with their minds in favor of a more spread-out environment one that was based really on automobile transportation Robert Moses took that idea and ran with it like no one else in American history of course there are great historical forces which make things the way they are and to an extent every individual is subject to them but there are some individuals who ride the crest of the social forces and turn them in their direction Moses was that kind of a person because of his personality the scope of his vision his energy and he had an intensity of purpose I mean a savage will that he's going to get this done you know his saying that I hit him with a meat axe and the meat axe could be anything he had to do to get his and accomplished he certainly did some terrible things and tried to do some terrible things that he fortunately did not get away with and I think the key to understanding Robert Moses is that he didn't care about people he passionately cared about automobiles and moving them Sophocles said one must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been when you look at what Moses wrought you say these are some of the greatest creations of man and what did they create what kind of a city did he leave behind he had begun his career one man later said as the very flower of New York's reform movement the fiercely driven second son of wealthy German Jews fired by the ideals of the progressive age and the dream of public service coming-of-age as the era of horse and rail gave way to the era of the motorcar from beginning to end the story of his life would be bound up with the automobile and its fateful impact on the life of American cities at the turn of the century but it first appeared to be a harmless little toy began puttering around on the streets of the city and it wasn't a harmless little toy it was in fact the agent of dissolution which was about over the next twenty thirty years to unravel to de-centralized this tremendous the integrated rail Bey's system that had been constructed nobody took it seriously at first because in fact it was a toy and it was a rich man's toy no great surprise these early machines were expensive and you had to ever chauffeur and they were very fragile so you needed an indoor garage so it's not a surprise that of the around 1900 the 8,000 cars that existed in the u.s. the clear majority of them were owned in New York City and they were owned in gross loss John Jacob Astor had 32 one summer day in 1901 two-year-old Louis Camille was playing out in Lower East Side Street son of Italian immigrants and he was run over by an automobile driven by a chauffeur who was taking to Wall Street businessman down to their office a huge crowd formed up and nearly in fact lynched all of the occupants of the car this is the first critical clash the streets were playgrounds for the working class poor and the car is making a competing claim for rights of access to this place and it makes it with brute force Henry Ford changes the equation by mass-producing autos he's turning out that Model T flippers are dropping in price they were in excess range now much larger middle class they're no longer exclusively toys for the rich the number of car ownership begins to soar throughout the country but in New York City in particular they tripled between 1915 and 1920 but it's nothing compared to what happens in the 20s the 20s in fact is when the automobile explodes it's not just the spectacular presence of these things in terms of the sheer number of people who are now driving them it is the way the cities begin to be remade to suit the needs and convenience of automobile errs convinced that the future of American life lay with the automobile Robert Moses was among the first to sense that cities themselves would have to be dramatically rebuilt to accommodate the reality of the motorcar appointed by Governor L Smith in the boom years of the 1920s to reorganize New York state government he soon began to conceive of a revolutionary project of his own a sweeping network of limited access roadways the first of their kind in the world leading out to a vast system of public parks and beaches it would open the hinterlands of Long Island to millions of New Yorkers starved for open spaces and begin to fulfill the promise of the automotive age nothing on a scale like this had ever been conceived he wanted people to drive to beauty to a park through a park he called them Ribbon Park and every aspect of them was gonna be beautiful on April 18th 1924 Smith put Moses in charge of what was now officially called the Long Island State Park Commission after decades of dreaming he would finally get a chance to build and build he did with a single-minded Drive and ferocity that stunned everyone who came in contact with him riding roughshod over long entrenched interests bullying private landowners and millionaires and when necessary swaying local political bosses by offering inside information on the layout of his proposed roadways could say that the city was part of a larger continuity that it was part of a slow and chorus became a sensual metaphor for him the flow of traffic that's opening up a new possibility for cities maybe you could see him saying that cities and citizens or them didn't have to be stuck that he would have seen the block the street the neighborhood as obstacles and he felt that now you can overcome these obstacles you can get into the flow and uh you know he he built the flow he created the flow and he had great skill at putting this across to the public wouldn't you like to go with the flow wouldn't you like to flow isn't it better than just hanging out it took Moses six or seven years of fighting with Al Smith behind him to hack out that Park and Parkway system for Long Island but when he did it when Jones Beach opened in 1929 the whole world came to praise and no one had ever seen anything like it and who came the young urban builders the people who wanted to build roads who wanted to build Park Boys who wanted to build State Park they came to Robert Moses to learn how to do it so he was not only America's greatest road builder but he was the man who taught the other of builders by 1929 Robert Moses had helped set in motion one of the most fateful transformations the city and its surroundings would ever undergo opening the region beyond the city's borders to the reality of the automobile now as the private energies of the 1920s gave way to the public crisis of the 1930s he would finally get a chance to transform the city itself which for better or for worse would never be the same again [Music] up through the depression the fell government has almost no involvement funding urban functions they just didn't pay for things that happened in cities but the New Deal changes all that and they begin a whole new phase in American history in which the federal government funds local enterprises because one main reason for doing this is to get the economy going get cash flowing the Roosevelt administration is very eager for things they can start quickly and one of the geniuses of Robert Moses is that he understood that opportunities would arise and he had plans in his back pocket sometimes just in the back of his head but sometimes more than that they can be pulled out of the draw I put in place extremely quickly from the day he took office as New York City Parks Commissioner on January 19 1934 Robert Moses would become the epicenter of a whirlwind of public building reaching out to every corner of the city it accepted the job only on certain conditions did he be given absolute control over every Park in the city that he retained the state post Al Smith had given him and that he be granted still larger powers as head of the moribund Triborough bridge authority an immense public works project that had languished so long people had started calling it the bridge to nowhere eager to begin rebuilding the battered city LaGuardia agreed and in the end Moses himself drafted the special legislation creating his new position then within hours of taking office swiftly fired all the old borough commissioners and their staff and set to work the parks were in complete disrepair the Central Park Zoo Tammany of course had let it go completely without repair so the cages were so rotten that they were afraid that the lines and tigers might break out but instead of repairing the cages they hired time and he meant to sit at the entrances of the zoo with shotguns to shoot the animals in case there was a fire in the cages broke armed with New Deal funds Moses exploded into action turning first to the city's dilapidated parts within days he had sent for the crack team of men he had used on Long Island then hired more than 600 unemployed architects and engineers along with a team of hard driving Irish Foreman will quickly whipped an army of newly recruited relief workers into a disciplined construction force 80,000 strong all through the winter of 1934 triple shifts of workers labored round-the-clock to meet the master-builders punishing timetable by the first warm weekend in May Moses workforce had completely transformed every public park and green space in the city more than 1700 renovation projects in all including Central Park itself where before the year was up a magnificent new zoo had arisen on the crumbling ruins of the old maid and gentlemen children you will find there and other of the actual living proof that New York City is giving something out of its relief expenditures we seek to put them to useful work and hardly a week passes but in the park department there is completed one of these work projects [Applause] as signs of life began to stir in the city for the first time in half a decade hope began to rise in the hearts of New Yorkers and it was only the beginning in little more than half a decade boldly stretching the definition of parts to include limited access parkways and resting money from any source he could Robert Moses would begin to construct the first urban highway system in the world connected to a breathtaking network of tunnels viaducts causeways and bridges that were begin to adapt the old city grid to the reality of the automobile and knit the entire region into a single coherent whole the 30s of course is all about concrete really it's the 30s that finishes off mass transit as a possible contender for future transport based operations in the city you know what the auto industry was able to do was to get public money pouring into constructing the infrastructure that they wanted then with WPA money in fact they rip up miles and miles of streetcars in city after city around the country run them into the ground shut them down it is true that LaGuardia does maintain the subway system he picks up the bankrupt IRT he does push for new lines but above-ground LaGuardia is a car man LaGuardia believes that this is modern this is cutting-edge this is the wave of the future so what Moses is doing is the executor of this program the federal government New Deal money just cascades into the city and very much the Olmstead tradition he's going to build a series of connecting highways before the decade was out a great circumferential Parkway had begun to sweep around Brooklyn from the East River to the Atlantic a ravishing bridge had left over the Harlem River connecting Manhattan and the Bronx and the revolutionary Westside Improvement a gorgeously landscaped six and a half mile long urban symphony part park and park Parkway had begun to suite majestically down the West Side of Manhattan along the Hudson River covering over the old New York Central tracks and transforming Riverside Park from an urban wasteland into a piece of urban poetry the seductively curving drive gave motorists an experience of the city they had never had before the ravishing towers of midtown Manhattan looming above the lush green nests of the park in a shimmering landscape that as in a movie or a dream was constantly shifting constantly changing and always in motion no one has ever been able to know how much money Robert Moses spent on the Westside improvement I finally concluded that the amount that he spent was at least 180 million dollars but it was almost certainly well over two hundred nine dollars a quarter of a billion dollars on a public work in 1930s America and you know the chorus of praise for this highway was just fantastic and one editorial said the railroad tracks are covered at last and yet in scale and audacity even the west side improvement paled before that of another giant public work the Triborough bridge an epic complex of roadways and bridges that lay it's a very heart of Robert Moses new transportation system and there it is very clear what we mean by Robert Moses as the shaper of New York the glaciers that had rumbled down from Hudson Bay eons before had torn War Island which carries of course Brooklyn and Queens loose from the mainland of the United States Robert Moses stitched it back together again with the Triborough bridge if you look in New York from the air you see an incredible fact that three great boroughs of the city Manhattan the Bronx and queens rush together the streets appear to be rushing together and all of a sudden at the point that they rushing together they're held apart by these narrow bands of water in the middle of which is Randall's and Ward's Island by building Triborough and uniting these three boroughs he was uniting the city he was repairing single-handedly what nature had done despite its name Triborough was not really a bridge at all but three giant bridges in one a rendezvous of bridges one man later said together with 13,500 feet of elevated viaduct and 14 miles of roadway a traffic machine another man said the largest ever built mighty Triborough this is just one part of it it's the largest vertical lift bridge in the world which means at that center span you're looking at has to ride 80 feet in the air vertically between the two towers every time a large ship passed if you were standing here in 1934 and 35 when they were putting in the girders for this span each girder was as big as a 10 room ranch house and it was so big that one board where two board just couldn't carry it four or five barges would be lashed together and they'd come up this river pushed by a whole Covey of tug loads until they got it into position remember this was in the middle of the depression there was so much concrete in this bridge that they had a reopen cement factories from Maine to Mississippi to make the wood for the forms to hold the concrete a whole forest had to be cut down in Oregon five thousand men at a time we're working on these islands on the bridge and of course the five thousand men we're only putting into place the materials that have been created to steel etc by many times five thousand 31 million man-hours of work went into the Triborough bridge in a hundred and thirty four cities in 20 states in the middle of the depression this one project really galvanized things across the United States the Triborough bridge with its Art Deco detailing with its cloverleaf arrangements of ramps connecting not only the three Burroughs but the parks which he reclaimed on the islands below is an unbelievably complicated and beautiful piece of engineering it's highway building lifted to the art of sculpture in motion it's fantastic under his direction we got some of the greatest public works the world has ever seen [Music] the massive structure was finally opened on July 11th 1936 in an awe-inspiring ceremony broadcast by radio across the entire nation it was one government official said simply one of the greatest accomplishments of men President Roosevelt himself gave the keynote address but it was Robert Moses who was the undisputed hero of the day we are definitely in an era of building the best kind of building the building of great public projects for the benefit of the public and with the object of building human happiness Franklin Delano Roosevelt year after year as one immense public works project after another rose in New York City the frenzy of construction became a heart-stopping symbol of civic rebirth and renewal holding out the promise one man later said of a glorious future just over the horizon not merely for the privileged few but for the people as a whole Robert Moses himself was certain he held the keys to the city's future there are people who like things as they are he declared I can't hold out any hope to them they have to keep moving further away this is a great big state and there are also other states let them go to the Rockies well he's absolutely the right man at the right moment and there's no question about it he has his own vision for what New York could be in what cities can be and suddenly he has an opportunity to put that into practice he's got manpower the WPA he's got money he's got a city that is devastated and needs an infrastructure and he's tremendously creative and smart and gifted and he really has a vision that he really tries to implement sometimes that came at the expense of other things sometimes it came with a vision that we no longer have he built highways right on the river because in his day you drove for recreation and that's what you saw now we have highways blocking our views of the river but at the time it was a vision about how to integrate the landscape and make it work for human beings that transform the city and people's lives in it in retrospect however the opening of the Triborough bridge would seem to some to mark a fateful turning point in the culture of the automobile in New York and in the career of Robert Moses in ways New Yorkers themselves did not fully comprehend at the time and with consequences that would not be fully felt for decades Robert Moses is the paradox of urban history in the 20th century every city in the United States wanted a Robert Moses every city wanted a Bob Moses building bigger roads faster expressways and more of them and Moses was extraordinarily good and actually shaping the physical city and getting things done I think the damage that Moses did is actually very real so that the other side of the coin is Bob Moses is actually an embodiment of the fact that in the 20th century we put the physical prominence of the city before its people we actually fetish t' the urban form and forgot the human beings who live there less than five weeks after the opening of the Triborough bridge built to decrease congestion in the city New Yorkers got a glimpse of the future the automobile was beginning to usher in when on August 17th 1936 the biggest traffic jam in the history of the metropolitan region brought cars on the Long Island parkways to a standstill you know the lesson of New York if you look at modes of this career when a turns dog he refused to take into account the effects when we call today traffic generation of his facilities the fact that by building Road by building a bridge by building a tunnel you are in itself increasing traffic so whatever benefit you are expecting to get is going to be immediately reduced for example when he said the Triborough bridge will solve the traffic problem on the East River bridges the Queensboro etc he opened the Triborough bridge the traffic was far heavier than he predicted Triborough was crowded and so is the Queensboro Bridge so he said I'll solve that by building the Bronx white stone bridge for a while at work in two years the Queensboro is as full as it had never been and more Triborough is more full than ever before and the Bronx white stone bridge was full she's her I'll build the Throgs Neck bridge you know if Moses had had his way he would have built bridges the length of Long Island Sound not only polluting the sound changing the flow of the water and world but with each bridge he just would have generated more traffic in the 1960s or so some of Moses as critics understood that when you build highways you create more congestion and more pressure for highways Moses understood this much earlier I mean what he was trying to get money for highways he would say it's to relieve congestion but he knew that in fact it would create more congestion in the need for further always the hens would have to move the flow we'd have to move the map to create more flow and make it flow further on and further out in that sense that once you started the highway machine it was self-perpetuating you could stop even more troubling than the immense traffic jams his public works were generating though far less apparent to the naked eye was the power Moses was accumulating in the process of building through the instrument of the new public authorities you know we are taught in political science classes that in a democracy power comes from being elected it's the will of the people Robert Moses realized that he was never going to get power through that normal democratic process he had to figure out a different way to get it and he did it by creating what is really a fourth branch of government and one not responsive to the will of the people insulated from the will of the people the public authority empowered to sell bonds to create great public works public authorities like Treiber were meant to go out of business once the tolls they charged had paid for the structures they created but Robert Moses had no intention of ever closing his authorities down rewriting the legislation under which authorities were charted he made sure that the millions of dollars in nickels and dimes that streamed in every year remained a continuous flow of revenue upon which he could borrow still more for future projects a bedrock of power that would place him beyond reach of the mayor the governor or the people themselves in perpetuity the centerpiece of all his power was where he called Triborough mighty Triborough and that's where the headquarters were on Randall's Island in a little building underneath that toll plaza every driver who crossed this island across this bridge had to pay a toll in coin and of course almost none of the millions of motorists who pass over had any idea that the headquarters were down now the money that came in through the tolls was spent at his sole discretion he didn't have to do as mayor's do go to a board of estimate work or submit his will to the voters he could spend authorities money as he wanted to spend on his money so he created a system in which the voice of the people hardly mattered it and I think he was able to do an import because he was making so many people rich and they were there for him and he didn't have to pick up the phone so construction companies bond underwriters you know insurance men on every level lawyers I mean they were just phalanx as in fences of people and you know in the wheels within wheels we still don't really understand as the depression wore on Robert Moses would create more than a dozen public authorities integrating them into an immense self-perpetuating machine for building Public Works a system increasingly remote from the public in whose name they had been created and irony not lost on some of Moses closest admirers Francis Perkins who was Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor put it very well she was reacting to Moses having a tangent about the people in Jones Beach that they threw litter on the beach and didn't clean up Moses said I'll get them I'll fix them and Perkins said he loves the public but he hates people and I think that probably describes a lot of other public officials too including many who've done wonderful things but I think was Moses the hatred of people eventually began to trip him up [Music] by 1936 tensions had begun to rise between the city's highest elected official and the hard-driving bureaucrat who was his parks commissioner though they worked well together and shared many of the same goals it was becoming increasingly obvious that Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses embodied radically different values and attitudes towards the city and its people one of the things about LaGuardia is that he really he appreciated ethnicity he was hip to ethnic neighborhoods he was always going up to neighborhoods going into all the stores talking to people in their various languages and you know he would go and talk to Ukrainians and Ukrainian you know and they would love him for life and and you know who knows how many words he knew in Ukrainian but he could do that and he loved doing that you know and he loved being sort of on the ground he loved being on the street Moses on the other hand went out of his way to highlight his distance from those people his contempt for them and his sense that he was dedicated to a larger system to see in New York as part of a flowchart now as part of a flow that went or all through the country in which streets neighborhoods sense of place ethnic loyalties meant nothing the only thing that really mattered was the flow infuriated by his inability to rain Robert Moses in Fiorello LaGuardia raged constantly behind his back complaining that no law no regulation no budget stops Robert Moses from his appointed task Moses for his part who routinely referred to the mayor as that little organ grinder and that Dago son of a bitch chafed at the necessity of having to ask for money every time he wanted to build the some degree LaGuardia did control Moses and you see it in-house because Moses wanted to take over public housing Moses try to steal the housing money and Housing Authority from LaGuardia by mobilizing the real-estate forces of the city behind him but LaGuardia stops him he was in his own way just as tough as Robert Moses and what he basically did is as Moses is making this radio speech to mobilize public support over the municipal radio station LaGuardia actually has the engineers cut the station off the air so LaGuardia kept Moses out of housing in the end however even LaGuardia himself failed to grasp the sheer scale of the forces overtaking New York during the New Deal or how much the future of the city lay not with the street and the block and the neighborhoods he loved but with the car and the highway and with men like Robert Moses [Music] by the mid-1930s Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses had succeeded in turning New York into the gigantic Laboratory of civic reconstruction LaGuardia had dreamed of but all the new building could not disguise the fact that across the city terrible suffering and hardship remained nowhere was the suffering worse than on the densely crowded streets and avenues of Hartman we're little more than a year after LaGuardia took office three decades of relative racial calm in New York came to a tragic violent end what happens to a dream deferred does it dry up like A Raisin in the Sun or fester like a sore and then run does it stink like rotten meat or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet maybe it just sags like a heavy load or does it explode Langston Hughes [Music] more than anywhere else in the city Harlem the proud black capital that had arisen so spectacularly only two decades before had been all but devastated by the depression the Renaissance of the 1920s had been a cultural triumph not an economic one and long before the crash itself the district's fragile prosperity had begun to disintegrate it became as long it had been a ghetto before it becomes a real slum afterwards after the Depression rents evictions unemployment tuberculosis all the indicia of decay and dysfunction accelerate so that Harlem becomes a place in which the the opportunities that had brought it into being really become almost exceptional I think the major difference is that in the 1920s harlem really did believe in mobility and most people believe that concepts of american mobility applauded to harlem you had a population of people who were already depending upon rather menial jobs to sustain themselves the hope was that with regular employment and with it with the other opportunities that cities provided education better housing better living conditions better health care there would be mobility by the 1930s all of that gets challenged first of all that category that was referred to as negro jobs disappears because white New Yorkers desperate for work begin to demand positions that they formerly refused to take it's a truism but it's true that the Depression was far worse in Harlem than anywhere else the levels of unemployment are simply spectacular and remember there had already been discrimination even in good times I mean the hospitals would not hire blacks the drugstores would not hire blacks the insurance companies even though they wrote you know thousands of policies of low-cost policies to Harlem residents they wouldn't hire blacks and even when the Depression starts and there are relief programs in play the WPA discriminates as well in the 1930s Robert Moses built 255 new playgrounds in New York City he built two in areas that black children could use you know white children were given sliding boards and swings and beautiful little wading pools in the playground black children who could still play with your broomsticks in the streets if they wanted to play baseball still had a splash through the fire hydrant people know if a city cares for them or not a playground is a lot more than a playground a little vest pocket park is a little lot more than a little bit of green it's a sign that the city cares that it's willing to devote something to your neighborhood what did the mothers of Harlem think of the policies of the state when there was no place for their children to fight [Music] even more insidious for the city's black population in the end with a federal mortgage and loan programs promulgated by the New Deal which to revive the moribund housing market in the outer boroughs set in motion a fateful process that in the next two decades would systematically segregate neighborhood after neighborhood in New York by race african-american ghettoization really begins in the third decade of the 20th century it begins in the 1930s it begins with New Deal policy it begins with the federal government in the state government colluding with banks and insurance companies to solve New Deal problems by building building building building building we're building housing up the periphery of the city at an incredible pace and in order to create a market for that housing you've gotta force white working-class and middle-class families to move and in order to get them out there what we do is actually make it irrational to stay inside the city during the early years the New Deal the federal government established the homeowners Loan Corporation and homeowners Loan Corporation actually went out in Brooklyn and they began mapping out the borough into sixty six neighborhoods going block by block and finding every black Latino Irish Jewish Italian polish family that was there and assigning ratings to each neighborhood based on the racial and ethnic makeup then they distributed the maps to banks and held banks to a certain standard when loaning money for homes and rental the consequences of having your ratings go down is of course that your housing property goes down so for instance white Brooklyn Heights living in the old sections of North Brooklyn all of a sudden find out that their housing is less valuable not because they've done anything and not because their neighborhood has changed but because banks won't lend anyone money to move there unless those people are black after the homeowners Loan Corporation begins segregating on the federal level and working with local banks in Brooklyn Manhattan and the Bronx and queens the state gets involved in redlining they've also mapped out in Brooklyn they go block by block and this time they look for only black and Latino persons and a single black person living on a block is enough to redline a block the effect will be in fact to do extraordinary damage to black communities throughout New York all of a sudden black communities that had been scattered throughout New York City which had long traditions in certain neighborhoods in the southern part of New York and throughout Brooklyn and Queens and even on Staten Island were being physically segregated needed up when the homeowners Loan Corporation finishes its work in the nineteen forties it has dramatically altered the makeup of Brooklyn in 1930 when the depression starts black Brooklyn Heights are actually the least segregated group physically in the borough by 1950 the most segregated group the segregation is all in central Brooklyn in the bedford-stuyvesant district and that will become the largest black ghetto in the United States by the end of the 1960s in the 1930s Harlem goes from being an ethnic community with quite a bit of mobility and optimism to a racial swamp with very little optimism very little hope the federal government had armed banks and insurance companies and real estate dealers with the public authority to keep black people inside that physical space and to force new black migrants to the city inside similar physical spaces so there's Harlem expands in the 1930s and 1940s as Bedford Stuyvesant expands in the 40s and 50s what remains true about them is black communities no longer control their own destiny by the 50s and 60s they're being forced and physically quarantined inside the city at a time when white Americans are peculiarly mobile bias thira black ghetto in every city in the United States the answer is public policy the way we read map cities racially in order to solve economic crises year after year the walls of racial segregation and discrimination closed in around the city's african-american population to some the most infuriating bigotry of all was to be found in the heart of Harlem itself where almost none of the dozens of white owned shops and businesses that lined 125th Street the commercial spine of the district was willing to hire African Americans in any capacity in church groups and labor groups and socialist groups and black nationalist groups in the Communist Party among others begin to set up against on a one hundred and twenty-fifth Street in other places they march in front of these stores and say don't buy where you can't work and in fact this heartens the community there are some successes some job openings are created but then the forces of the law being but they are the store owners get an injunction passed in 34 and this kind of picketing behavior isn't that bad so having gotten themselves together having come up with a communal collective voice to attempt to redress long-standing racial / economic grievances suddenly that voice is cut off it's in that context that Harlem explodes in the winter of nineteen thirty five years of rising misery frustration and resentment erupted into violence on the streets of Harlem around 3:30 on the afternoon of March 19th a 16 year old Puerto Rican boy named lino Rivera was caught stealing a penknife from an SH crest store on a hundred and twenty-fifth Street a scuffle ensued and as a crowd of curious onlookers gathered on the sidewalk outside the shop owner called the police urging the patrolman when he arrived to avoid further trouble and let the boy go they actually let Rivera go out a back door and they didn't bother it for me anybody and rumors now shot through the street that he'd been killed and then in fact crowds begin to form by the evening people are arriving with placards and pickets and eventually somebody hurls rock through the plate-glass window and Harlem explodes and people pour out of the tenements into the streets and they not only attack and loot this particular store but up and down 125th Street and other areas except for stores that hastily tack up placards in their front window black owned business you know or it's a white store we hire black people and in fact they were relatively speaking spared there are also tangles with the police you have to understand it's a virtually entirely white police force it is seen as an Army of Occupation sitting on the discontent that's been building all through the night and on into the next day the riot went on by the time order was restored a hundred and twenty-five people had been arrested over a hundred had been injured and three killed all of them black this is the first black explosion up till this point when you talk race riots we're talking about whites pouring into a black neighborhood stomping on black people the draft riots of 1863 nobody for 20 years has been dreaming of invading black Harlem it's a huge stronghold but now you've got a whole new phenomenon I think one of the major things that the riot does is it actually forces us to seriously look at the condition of black Americans in major cities New York becomes sort of a harbinger for what's going to happen other places and you've got to take New York City seriously especially Harlem it's sitting right in Manhattan it's in the cultural and economic capital of the United States and what happens there is actually more important than what happens other places it does get attention it does force the administration to seriously look at the plight of black Americans but still the response is actually rather weak the repercussions of the riots would continue for months and years to come at the insistence of black leaders LaGuardia appointed a special commission to examine the social and economic conditions in Harlem whose report painted a bleak portrait of the city's racial divisions and inequalities but like most white politicians of his day the mayor whom the black owned Amsterdam News had praised in 1931 as one of the most fearless friends the Negro has ever had in or out of Congress was still not prepared to put racial equality at the center of his reform agenda speaking before a group of church leaders he had he said no illusion about the difficulties facing your people in New York but reconciling the disparities caused by American racism he said was a task beyond his abilities I think look water is a difficult person to describe especially his stance on race he endeared himself to many african-americans by standing up for people by standing up for a black congressman Oscar de priest and other folks who have been tossed out of Congress by demanding in fact that they be given equal treatment on the other hand when it came to real substantive changes that would affect African Americans in a positive way LaGuardia tended to in fact do what most mayors of New York City have done and that is side with separate and less equal because the ethnic algebra of the city allows you to over serve some people and underserved others and it's a very good formula for getting elected the question of what will happen to the Negro in New York is overlaid with shadows of tragic premonition the first race riot in New York was in 1712 the most recent was in 1935 the last is not yet come [Music] Fortune magazine bit by bit the New York of 1920 has rearranged and expanded itself new highway suite beneath its bold escarpment new housing and new playgrounds have been carved from its native rock giant new bridges soar above its two rivers and new tubes have burrowed beneath the waters for perhaps the first time in its ruthless headlong history some new impulse something apart from Commerce has been acting on the town some sense of community design and purpose has tempered the obsession with buying and selling out of the old demonic energy has come a new ambition to build the city more fit for human use and aspiration Claire Price on November 2nd 1937 Fiorello LaGuardia pulled off the simple feat that had eluded every reformed mayor before him he was reelected the largest majority in the city's history swept him back into office along with a host of reform candidates including the president of every borough except the Bronx LaGuardia himself took the landslide as a ringing endorsement of his policies and a mandate to lead New York into a still brighter future we're going to make the city a real heaven he said but when it was passed down to me by my mother my father by people in the neighborhood was his absolute exuberant optimism we're gonna get through the depression to hell with it we'll go the mob has everything fixed the hell will they'll throw their slot machines in the river you know like this the hell with it let's go do it anyway it's the depression you can't build an airport this is New York you got to have an airport in 1934 LaGuardia takes a flight from Chicago to New York says on his ticket and as usual the airplane lands in Newark Airport and she refuses to get out my ticket says New York this is not New York this is New Jersey and after everybody else gets off the airplane takes off with only LaGuardia in it and lands at Floyd Bennett Field and from the first day that he's mayor he is pushing for the construction what is going to be LaGuardia Airport and again it is the New Deal money that makes this possible the biggest program that the WPA undertook anywhere in the country was the construction of LaGuardia Airport and he is out there every day he is you know hands-on he is watching the construction of this thing because he understands that this is the next link you know that the city has always thrived on linkages on connectivity there has been the blackball line you know connection the Erie Canal line connection and Atlantic cable connection and the steamboat the steamer connection this is the 20th century's great linkage to be made and he sees it [Music] but for all the accomplishments of laguardia's first term no one was more aware than LaGuardia himself how much remained to be done and five years into his tenure in City Hall he continued to drive himself but a pace that amazed and increasingly worried his closest associates of them all none was closer than Charles II Burlington a legendary 81 year old lawyer and civic reformer widely known as New York's first citizen the distinguished barrister was as proud as anyone in the city of the progress LaGuardia had made in turning New York into what the mayor himself called the world's greatest experiment in social and political democracy but he had come to fear for the health and well-being of the driven little mayor who had come to identify himself so completely with the people of New York City you're a very tired man and must get some rest Burlingham wrote in a confidential letter to the mayor when I Drive through the vast reaches of the Bronx and see the swarming myriads I say to myself can it be that one man is responsible for the welfare of these people the world is in chaos struggling to master its own inventions we are in danger of being annihilated by forces which we ourselves set up the world calls for an answer to this problem of mastering our own inventions and we propose in 1939 to contribute to that answer Michael hare secretary of the World's Fair by the spring of 1939 excitement was building all across New York for nearly three years an army of men working under Robert Moses had been laboring to transform a 1200 acre ash far out on the northern edge of Queens into the site of one of the most breathlessly anticipated collective enterprises of the decade a hymn to progress forged in the searing crucible of the Great Depression the monumental fare would when complete project the image of a bold new city of tomorrow but in 1939 seemed just around the corner the 1939 World's Fair was a special moment in time on the one hand it was a culmination of almost everything that it transformed in New York in a century and a quarter since the opening of the Erie Canal a creation of this incredible world metropolis it was a technological breakthrough the opportunities for the future the automobile what will the future look like it was a wonderful General Motors exhibit for example all these kind of gleaming aluminum buildings Robert Moses of course was at the center of this it was a gigantic World's Fair bigger I think than any World's Fair that ever taken place up into that point in terms of numbers of people coming through the turnstiles incredible event an exhilarating sense of wonder and a kind of serene ambivalence presided over the New York World's Fair which from the day it opened on April 30th 1939 touched a deep chord in the consciousness of the American people and proved to be an enormous success day after day week after week the immense crowd streamed through the sleek Art Deco gates and on into the shimmering dreamlike interior of the fair drifting through scores of international exhibits and dozens of corporate pavilions bristling with consumer products and modern devices of all kinds the promised a streamlined chrome-plated future where machines of all kinds delivered ordinary people from the drudgery of housework and physical labor I think the fair itself has a sublime quality to it because it's the end of American innocence not just New York innocence somehow it's the last time maybe the 50s was an afterglow I think it's the last time we believed we could save the Republic with a dishwasher but that vacuuming would somehow transform all American life if we only had a dishwasher if we only had a vacuum cleaner our family life would be happy we would be healthy if we had a car it's the last time we really believed that the car was liberating because by the end of the Second World War the car was nothing but a traffic nightmare whereas in the 30s who dreamed of having a car to be able to go out on one of those Robert Moses parkways out to Jones Beach or someplace like that in the end the futuristic city within a city that was the World's Fair was itself a celebration of the great city shimmering on the horizon and yet in many ways in eerie repudiation of everything it stood for at the very center of the fair stood the ravishing pure white trial on and Paris fear the last and most sublime of New York's great Art Deco icons every day huge crowds thronged into the sphere to gaze in wonder at the immense diorama that had been constructed inside called democracy tea a radiant vision of the city of tomorrow wiped clean of the complexity congestion and disorder of New York but the largest crowds by far gathered for the General Motors exhibit called Futurama where once inside visitors in moving chairs circled a 36 thousand square foot model showing the United States as the designers envisioned it 25 years hence in the Year 1960 they would never forget what they saw there and what you see there you sit in your little cushion two-seater sofas and you roll along it's the early pretty Disney enterprise and you go over a scale map of the United States and what do you see what is the vision of tomorrow the vision of tomorrow is highways and you central cities with soaring skyscrapers and little small satellite cities and such General Motors is in fact as the New York Times said selling us the world of tomorrow and the world of tomorrow means that the public has to foot the bill to develop the infrastructure which will make in fact the triumph of the automobile possible at the very center of the park General Motors had created an eerie blueprint for New York's destruction and its replacement by a different kind of world entirely gone were the crowded streets and neighborhoods and to a large extent the streets themselves in their place in an inner city eerily empty of human beings rose tall towers widely separated by broad swaths of green and bisected by highways 14 lanes wide those highways carried people out of the city and into an American landscape where people lived mostly in single-family houses accessible only by car a landscape built not around the needs of people but around the needs of automobiles this is not a vague dream of a life that might be lived in the far future but one that could be lived tomorrow morning if we willed it so the relation between these units of stone and steel highway and green is a symbol of the new life of tomorrow that life will be based on a contribution of all elements to a new and living democracy Robert corn the denim textured plays against the backdrop of the darkness that was coming over the world 1939 summer of 1939 the world war 2 had really not started there was an ominous feeling around the world Hitler course his soldiers were marching Luftwaffe was regarded as this new threatening thing there was an uneasy about things and so I find what's fascinating about that World's Fairs on the one hand all the promise of the future the celebration of the past and how far we've come we're coming out of the depression we're creating this new wonderful space we're celebrating in a sense the achievements of the world knew all this is cloud then we can see in retrospect but they could see and feel almost themselves at the time which makes it just such a poignant moment to them more than 30 million people passed through the gates of the New York World's Fair in the last perfect summer of 1939 before the first season of the fair was out however ominous news came from abroad on September 1st 1939 word reached New York that Hitler had invaded Poland within days England and France had declared war on Germany and the battle for Europe had begun the fair itself would lumber along uncertain for a few more months before closing in the fall of 1940 with barely enough money left over to demolish the exhibits and clear the land in the end the 4000 tons of structural steel that had gone into the trial on and Paris fear would be donated to the United States military and used to make instruments of war America itself was still at peace but it was hard to block out thought one man said of what might really be in store for the World of Tomorrow for 18 more months the United States stayed out of the fighting but the storm clouds were drawing near in New York Robert Moses and Fiorello LaGuardia raced to complete as many public works projects as they could before federal resources were diverted to the war effort then in the dwindling days of 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the city and country mobilized for war with civilian needs indefinitely deferred the New York Housing Authority's blueprints were rolled up and stored away the unfinished steel and concrete tubes of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel would sit empty beneath the harbor sealed and forgotten for the duration of the war in the strange eventful and eerily suspended years to come time itself often seemed to stand still in New York while beneath it the forces of change ran faster than ever before is it New York online jump into a taxi and play a quiz game visit a virtual New York and for teachers and parents take your kids on a learning adventure through your town PBS online at pbs.org e america online keyword PBS [Music] you [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Geography Video

Views: 88,801

Rating: 4.8322582 out of 5

Keywords: New York

Id: SRG7690Kn4A

Length: 113min 26sec (6806 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 28 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/scrumptiouscakes]

It's O mio babbino caro from Puccini's opera Gianni Schicchi.

[u/KelMHill]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0Kcg7WEJME

[u/[deleted]]

This is actually quite an interesting documentary. Post this in /r/Documentaries