Sublime

During his decades of power, the public works decisions that determined the city’s shape were made on the basis not of democratic but of economic considerations. During most of his reign—the post-La Guardia portion of it—the city’s people had no real voice at all in determining the city’s future.

New York was a city in which public office was, increasingly, a means to private profit.

For concentrating economic power in motor transportation within the city in one man would give that man a voice in all transportation policies within the city at least equal to that of the city itself.

Nowhere in the forty-nine chapters of the City Charter was there a single mention of a “City Construction Coordinator.” To some men, this might have represented an obstacle. To Moses, it represented an opportunity. For since there was no definition of the position’s powers, he could write the definition himself.

But free and open debate had not made his dreams come true. Instead, politicians had crushed them. And now he was going to make sure that, with the exception of Al Smith and Belle Moskowitz, no one—not citizenry, not press, not Legislature—was going to know what was in the bills dealing with parks that the Legislature was going to pass. The best bi

When Moses submitted a preliminary outline of suggested commission goals, he included a phrase straight out of the reform textbooks and his Municipal Civil Service Commission days: “Elimination of unnecessary…personnel.” Mrs. Moskowitz struck the phrase out. Personnel, she said, were voters. You didn’t antagonize voters.

But thereafter he treated La Guardia not as his superior but as an equal. In the areas of transportation and recreation, Robert Moses, who had never been elected by the people of the city to any office, was henceforth to have at least as much of a voice in determining the city’s future as any official the people had elected—including the Mayor.

And to the amazement of reporters who had smiled skeptically at the time, La Guardia kept his promise, slashing thousands of nonessential jobs from city payrolls, slashing the salaries of the employees who remained, balancing the city’s budget—and raising the moral tone of government in New York to new heights.

But, buried within the lines of convoluted legalisms, the amendment also contained an innocuous phrase—concealed, as was the custom of the man who had been the best bill drafter in Albany, at the end of a long sentence whose other clauses all purportedly limited his powers—allowing the Coordinator to “represent the city in its relations with cooper