GABE PRESSMAN, host:

He's one of the most controversial figures in the history of New York. Robert Moses, a builder, dreamer, fighter. Reviled by his critics as a man who destroyed much of the essence of New York, praised by admirers as the man whose vision transformed for the better the metropolis we live in. His impact on the landscape tremendous. He built the major bridges that span the waters around New York in the last decades of the 20th century. The network of highways that opened the suburbs to settlement by millions of people in the post-war migration. Major housing projects serving middle class and working class people, swimming pools, parks, playgrounds within the city. And perhaps his greatest single recreational achievement, Jones Beach. In the 26 years since Moses' death, one book about him has had a great negative impact: Robert Caro's "The Power Broker and the Fall of New York." But now a group of scholars is taking another look at Moses and his legacy. In a new exhibition, "Robert Moses and the Modern City," the Moses era is examined anew. Caro wrote that Moses, his words, "tore out the hearts of a score of neighborhoods, communities the size of small cities, themselves communities that had been lively, friendly places to live." Moses himself denounced Caro's book as full of mistakes, unsupported charges, nasty, baseless personalities and random haymakers.

Announcer: From NewsChannel 4 HD, this is NEWS FORUM.

PRESSMAN: Good day. I'm Gabe Pressman. We invited Robert Caro to be here today to a representative. He turned us down. Our guests on NEWS FORUM are Hilary Ballon, an architectural historian and curator of the exhibition, "Robert Moses and the Modern City," which is being seen at three locations, the Museum of the City of New York on Fifth Avenue, Columbia University and the Queens Museum of Art, and Michael Sorkin, the director of the graduate urban design program at the City College of New York and the author of many articles on architectural issues. Welcome to both of you.

You've studied the man's life. Was he good or bad for New York, Ms. Ballon?

Ms. HILARY BALLON: On the whole, I think he was good and built legacy, which is the focus of the exhibitions, I think, is the demonstration of that. I don't quarrel with the notion that he was bad for neighborhoods. And we've learned a lot from the--from the trauma that he perpetrated on neighborhoods. But I think still, the large-scale work, the infrastructure, the recreational network that he expanded are remarkable contributions.

PRESSMAN: Mr. Sorkin:

Mr. MICHAEL SORKIN: I don't think that the answer is clear-cut. It's obvious that Moses was the greatest builder that New York City has ever seen. But I don't want to substitute for Robert Caro. I think the book against Moses has three components. One, as Caro puts it, he used the power of money to subvert democratic process. Second, he set priorities for the city that abide to this day. For example, favoring automobiles over public transportation, a question of priorities. And third, to put it bluntly, that he was a racist.

PRESSMAN: OK. We'll go into that in more detail. But Caro said, he built parks and playgrounds for the rich and powerful. True or false?

Ms. BALLON: He built parks and playgrounds, actually, for middle-class New Yorkers. It's, I think, quite clear that the 660 playgrounds that he built and the beaches, like Orchard Beach, were intended to serve the middle class, who simply didn't have other recreational outlets. And the goal was to make New York City a more livable place at a time of great suburbanization and urban decline. And that's one of the things, I think, that...

PRESSMAN: If you go to the parks and playgrounds now you see New Yorkers of all economic classes and ethnicities using them, so I don't know whether he had that vision in mind, but it certainly is pretty democratic now, isn't it?

Ms. BALLON: The uses of these spaces, absolutely. And I think they were of the times. Moses himself had no love of the people. He wasn't a populist. But the things that he built actually expanded the public realm for the wide range of people who lived in New York.

PRESSMAN: Mr. Sorkin, what about you? What do you think about parks and playgrounds for the rich and comfortable? Is Caro accurate when he says that that's what Moses did?

Mr. SORKIN: Well, there are two questions. I think without a doubt, as Hilary points out today, this legacy is available to everyone and it's an incredibly important part of the city's infrastructure. Moses' intentions, however, are somewhat clouded. I don't think that he was, as Hilary says, a man of the people. I don't exactly think that these were built for the rich and powerful. But he did have a vision of clean, whites, middle-class people who he identified with.

PRESSMAN: So Caro was inaccurate when he said that they were built for the rich and powerful?

Mr. SORKIN: I think that's a little hyperbolic but the general thrust of his remarks about Moses being somebody who identified middle and upper class white people as his constituency, as it were, I think is quite accurate.

PRESSMAN: I'd like to quote Moses on the very essence of public service, public life, s he saw it as a public official. And this is what he said: "I made up my mind long ago to get my reward from the tangible accomplishments from the dogwood, the tulip, the chrysanthemum, the curving parkway, the spiderwork of suspension bridges, the reclaimed waterfront, the demolition of slums, the crack of a baseball bat and the shouting of children." That's what he said. Poetic guy, in some ways, wasn't he?

Mr. SORKIN: This is certainly a very poetic description, and you know, I'm an architect. I share these sorts of dreams. He does dissemble a little bit. You know, Caro's argument, of course, was that he was a complete junkie for power and that his personal satisfactions came from wielding power and influence above all else.

PRESSMAN: You don't--you don't agree with that?

Ms. BALLON: Well, I think picturing Moses among the chrysanthemums requires a leap of imagination. But you know, my view is that Moses, though he looked autocratic and in many ways, behaved that way, was actually advancing projects for which there was considerable support. Part of that support is reflected in the fact that he got federal funding for these projects. And he was executing what were national priorities.

PRESSMAN: And he was trained at the feet of Governor Al Smith, who in many ways, was one of the most liberal governors New York ever had in terms of the legislation that he enacted, and he was his protege. So when he manipulated government to get money, he was really doing what Smith taught him, in a way, wasn't he?

Ms. BALLON: Well, one of his great skills was finding the financial resources to execute plans, which very often he did not originate but were on the books. And this is true of the Triborough Bridge, one of his first great successes. It was a bridge that had--construction had begun and there was no financing to advance it.

PRESSMAN: Yeah. So he created this authority concept.

Ms. BALLON: He didn't create the authority concept.

PRESSMAN: No. I mean, he used the authority concept.

Ms. BALLON: He did, and there was a great model, which was the Port Authority of New York.

PRESSMAN: And the Washington Bridge and so forth.

Ms. BALLON: Exactly.

PRESSMAN: So your thoughts about that?

Mr. SORKIN: Well, certainly, one of his great informa--innovations was to transform the authority concept in order to derive a stream of revenue that he could then use for his own purposes, to function, essentially, independent of government. You know, I think this continues to be one of the relevant criticisms, not simply of Moses, but of the way we now do business in the city. And it's clear that this renewed interest in Moses is provoked both by the recent death of Jane Jacobs, you know, his...(unintelligible)...in antithesis, on the one hand, and by a set of frustrations on the part of citizens both about being cut out of the democratic process and a frustration about government's inability to get things done at a large scale.

PRESSMAN: You know, last weekend, I went to visit the exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, and I was stunned when I saw--you don't see it there now, but when I saw the crowds of people that came, they were people of all ages, they were people of, you know, of every ethnicity, probably. And they were all there to see this exhibition. And I wondered to myself, why, suddenly, this widespread interest? Well, of course, you've been very effective, Ms. Ballon, in terms of getting publicity in print. But nevertheless, there seems to be a strong feeling among the population of New York that this guy's interesting, we ought to look at him again or something like that, which was your purpose, wasn't it?

Ms. BALLON: The time's clearly right to think about what Moses stands for. After he fell from power in 1968, there was an important and necessary correction and I mean, I subscribe to the Jane Jacobs view of things, too, about streets and neighborhoods. And when Moses fell, it was the fall not just of a man but of a whole approach.

PRESSMAN: Was he a hero or a villain, Mr. Sorkin?

Mr. SORKIN: I think this oversimplifies it a little bit. But he was a hero to some, a villain to others. But to comment on your earlier question...

PRESSMAN: But to you? But to you?

Mr. SORKIN: I think, since I'm sitting in the Robert Caro chair today, I'll come down slightly more on the side of villainy. But to answer the previous question, I think one of the great interest nowadays is the spectacle of the failure of the city to get it together at ground zero. A very big project that Moses would have handily dispatched in a few years time. I mean, this is one of the astonishing parts of his legacy. You know, the entire west side improvement, the improvement of Riverside Drive, it took him three years.

PRESSMAN: He wore so many hats in his lifetime, and many hats at the same time. He could have easily have taken a hat down there.

Mr. SORKIN: Absolutely, a hard one.

PRESSMAN: Let's talk about the neighborhoods and about that very basic criticism of Moses, that he tore out the heart of New York after this.

(Announcements)

PRESSMAN: And we're back here now with Hilary Ballon of the Museum of the City of New York, and Michael Sorkin of the City University of New York and particularly of City College, is that correct?

We discuss this man as though he's somewhere between a monster and a hero. And I did know him and I remember that he had a sense of humor. And we searched very hard in the archives, a lot of film from the era of the Moses era is gone. He didn't--he didn't parade on the public stage very much. Everything he did was more or less behind the scenes. But at ceremonies, he was there. Anyway, we found a piece that illustrates his sense of humor. There were some dinosaurs, rubber dinosaurs, I think it was the Sinclair Oil exhibition just before the World's Fair of '64, and I think this was--this tape was taken, this film was taken in '63. These dinosaurs are on a barge and they're coming up the Hudson River or down the Hudson River on their way to, I assume, to Flushing Meadow. And here it is, I hope.

(Excerpt of news footage)

Unidentified Man: ...along the shores of the Hudson might have been forgiven at midday if they rubbed their eyes in disbelief. The dinosaurs were constructed of fiberglass in Hudson, New York, and were headed toward the Sinclair Dinoland exhibit, which will cover an acre at the New York World's Fair. Robert Moses is the embattled president of the World's Fair.

Would you say that some of your critics have likened you to that kind of prehistoric monster?

Mr. ROBERT MOSES: Well, I think he looks a little bit like some of the newspaper men I see around.

(End of excerpt)

PRESSMAN: And so there you have it. That's Moses in an unscripted moment in his life. He did have a sense of humor. He had great--on the personal side, he had great loyalty to his staff. He loved them and he treated them very well. He had no mercy, as you know, for his critics. One other thing that he said that I think, when he died, you know, a lot of people have said that he was for power but was he for money? He left about $50,000, that's all he left. Having built all these things and done all this. Apparently, money was not part of his objective. I think that's very interesting. When I was doing a little research for these questions, I noticed that when his will was probated, he left very little, actually, even for that era. His vision for the city. Let's discuss that for a minute. How...

Mr. SORKIN: If I can--if I can interrupt, I think that he was not--and the man was brilliant, he was not in it for personal gain, but he certainly knew how to wield the power of money...

PRESSMAN: Oh, yes.

Mr. SORKIN: ...to corrupt. So he was very intimately acquainted with money.

PRESSMAN: To corrupt?

Mr. SORKIN: Absolutely.

PRESSMAN: Who did he corrupt? Whom did he corrupt?

Mr. SORKIN: I think an entire culture, in some ways, in terms of...

PRESSMAN: You're saying this metaphorically?

Mr. SORKIN: Huh? I'm saying it both metaphorically and literally. But in terms of his relationship to private capital, in terms of the favors he was able to do, in terms of the extravagances he was able to visit on the people who he was loyal to or he was seeking to curry favor with, he prodigiously deployed public monies in order to achieve his ends.

Ms. BALLON: He built things under budget, he build things efficiently and on time. And one of the less glamorous aspects of this is that the--it revolves around the question of debt limit. And the Triborough Bridge Authority had debt capacity that unburdened the city of taking on certain tasks. I mean, I don't need to go into that...

PRESSMAN: By law, the city and state were restricted on how much money they could spend.

Ms. BALLON: Yes, and so there were a number of projects that...

PRESSMAN: He built an authority--or he created the authority, and the authority can spend anything and collect tolls to pay it off, pay off the bonds.

Ms. BALLON: All the--exactly. So there were a number of projects that all the officials were quite happy for Moses to take on through the Triborough Bridge Authority because he could finance it in ways that the city couldn't easily do.

Mr. SORKIN: There's a counterargument about the acreage of property that were removed from the tax rolls as well. So I don't think this is...

PRESSMAN: Yeah. What about this neighborhood thing? Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford were vehement in their criticisms of Moses for tearing apart neighborhoods, people of the Bronx, those people whose homes had to be leveled by Moses in order to build the Cross Bronx Expressway. Did he rip up the neighborhoods? Did that ruin the city?

Mr. SORKIN: It's estimated that in the course of his career, Robert Moses displaced as many as half a million people from their homes. This is part of his legacy. I don't think that he cared about neighborhoods. You know, on the other hand, you know, his vision was, in some sense, larger. He was one of the pioneers of seeing the city in the context of its region. A pioneer of the idea of infrastructure as being the most vital element of urban functioning. But he did run roughshod over neighborhood after neighborhood and displaced, as I said, hundreds of thousands of people.

PRESSMAN: Yeah, and yet many of those people, he said, 90 percent of them, of the people uprooted, say in the Bronx, for the building of the Cross Bronx Expressway, received better housing, ultimately, than they were living in then.

Mr. SORKIN: I think this is in dispute. And take Lincoln Center, for example, I've read estimates that approximately 75 percent of the people who were displaced for Lincoln Center were forced to relocate outside of their neighborhood, meaning the upper west side.

PRESSMAN: What about the dispute that's going on now? Some people criticizing the whole concept of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village that he helped create, Metropolitan Life, and they're selling this now, and once again, it's at the forefront?

Ms. BALLON: One of Moses' strategic goals with urban renewal was to create a place, create affordable housing for the middle class, and he directed a number of these urban renewal projects toward that end.

PRESSMAN: Did he destroy neighborhoods in order to build Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper?

Ms. BALLON: The premise was, yes, you needed to clear a large area. This was a premise that many people subscribed to. And it was the premise of the urban renewal legislation that the federal government passed. And you know, Moses has become--he's a larger than life figure. He embodies a great many things that he personally wasn't responsible for. And this clearance number that you cited, I think it's probably collapses a great number of clearance projects. For example, public housing, which cleared much, much more acreage than these urban renewal projects that Moses was responsible. Handled relocation in precisely the same way Moses handled relocation on urban renewal. But it all gets dumped into the same category because of his own myth-making. He came to personify an approach that many people pursued.

PRESSMAN: And thanks to Robert Caro, a lot of people grew up thinking that Moses was the supreme villain in all of this, and actually, there were other villains, too, if they are villains>

Ms. BALLON: Well, he was a victim of his own success. And as much as he used the newspapers and the press and publicity in general to promote himself, I think as a tactic of advancing his goals, also, he could then detach himself from the way in which these procedures, which I think there was broad buy-in for, was executed by others.

PRESSMAN: Do you agree with that?

Mr. SORKIN: Well, yes and no. It's clear that, you know, Moses had his collaborators. But take, for example, the question of highways. Moses' relationship to highway building was psychopathic. I mean, look at the plans to drive expressways across Manhattan, the experience of the Cross Bronx Expressway. But the argument is made that because of the interstate highway legislation, Moses was simply the creature of this vast trough of federal funding that was simply irresistible. And it's true that many cities have committed suicide in order to get that 90 percent federal money. On the other hand, at the time the legislation was being drafted, Moses was arguing very strongly that interstate highways should not go around cities but it was vital that they come right through the hearts of cities. So he was instrumental...(audio difficulties)...this legislation, not simply its creature.

PRESSMAN: Let's talk about his legacy after these messages.

(Announcements)

PRESSMAN: And we're back now to talk about the legacy of New York's master builder, Robert Moses.

I'd like to just quote a couple of things. Moses was a master of the diatribe. He was a good writer, and right after Caro's book was published, he quote Victorian poets Gilbert and Sullivan, Chaucer, Leo Durocher, and said the book was "full of mistakes, unsupported charges, nasty, baseless personalities and random haymakers." That's what he said. And Caro retorted, "It's slightly absurd, but typical of Moses to label as without documentation, a book that has 82 solid pages of single-space, small-typed notes and that is based on seven years of research." Anyway, that's what they've said, those were their parting shots. Moses is no longer with us. What's his legacy as you see it, Mr. Sorkin?

Mr. SORKIN: I think it's very mixed. You know, I don't want to get into this rhetoric of yes, but he built the autoban. But to some degree, this is true of Moses. He has an incredible legacy, positive, in the parks and bridges and parkways that he built, but he has an incredible negative legacy in terms of the way in which he subverted the democratic process in planning, the way in which he distorted the priorities for the construction of the city and the way in which he reinforced the prejudices of the time.

PRESSMAN: And looking at the pyramids, you could say the same thing, couldn't you, that the pharaohs, they were a pretty nasty lot of people but they got the pyramids built.

Ms. BALLON: I don't think it's quite analogous, since Moses was not working with slave labor. But what I would say is that the challenges Moses--the legacy of Moses today is to remind us that we need to think about citywide problems and that not all problems can be thought about or solved on the scale of a neighborhood. And so I think that's the urgency and relevance as we look forward. How do you think about building across the city as a whole and...

PRESSMAN: But when you say legacy, you look at this whole metropolis, and you see evidence of Moses everywhere, from Jones Beach to a little playground in the Bronx. So that legacy is around us, the physical legacy.

Ms. BALLON: Yes. It's vital, it's dynamic. I think it keeps lots of city neighborhoods, actually, happy and...

PRESSMAN: And the issue for the future, as you see it?

Ms. BALLON: How do you knit back together, thinking about the city globally, holistically, and take care of the neighborhoods.

PRESSMAN: And you, Mr. Sorkin? What do you think the lesson is?

Mr. SORKIN: The lesson is that people have to have a share in determining their own destiny as urban citizens.

PRESSMAN: The book that can be bought at the museum or in bookstores that you put together with the other scholars is called "Robert Moses and the Modern City," is that correct?

Ms. BALLON: Yes, it is.

PRESSMAN: Well, thank you both for joining us today.

And if you want to learn more about all of this, read "The Power Broker" by the missing Mr. Caro, and check out "Robert Moses and the Modern City" at the Museum of the City of New York at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 AM to 5 PM. Admission is $9 for adults and $5 for seniors and students. Present your receipt for this exhibition and you'll be admitted free to the Moses exhibitions at Columbia University and the Queens Museum of Art.

Have a good day.