I have been turning this essay over in my mind for months and started writing it over the Christmas holidays. So much as changed since I started. We are now just a few days past the insurrection at the Capitol, and I am struck with the feeling that the history I wanted to explore feels less consequential than what we have just lived through and what may be coming in the days ahead. I thought about postponing the finishing touches, but having invested so many brain cells and so much time decided to finish the work.
My belief is that the problems of America, especially those related to race, are too easily dismissed when they are ascribed to one or another narrow band of dead-enders, malcontents, or losers. This essay is my attempt to thread together the lives of Mayor Richard J. Daley who was the mayor of Chicago for more than 20 years, and Robert Moses who never held any elective office in New York, but who had as great or greater an impact on the city of New York. These men were the products of the liberal northern cities from which they sprang, but Chicago and New York are very much the places they are because of their influence. They used the canvas of these two great American cities to paint their vison of America with no less a spark of imagination than Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, or David Hockney. Moses and Daley and the lives they led tell us something about the very essence of our country. Their legacy is a list of accomplishments which is almost absurdly lengthy, massive public projects and expansive green spaces certain to be unmatched for decades to come, but shaded deeply in almost apocalyptic tones with the sickness of racism which has infected every public space in America, and about which we seldom speak, especially about political leaders in the North. Americans have been taught to think of the greatness of American exceptionalism and the putrid nihilism of racism as mutually exclusive, but in my view this has allowed many of us to excuse ourselves from responsibility for the devastating plight of our black and brown sisters and brothers. If we are ever to make progress in fulfilling Dr. King’s dream, I thought that rather than project our disapproval on others, we would be best served if we started looking closer to home.
Happy Birthday, Brother Martin. Peace and Love, Mike.
In the summer of 2020, it seemed that America was finally ready for the long overdue reckoning on race. According to the New York Times, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd 20 million of our fellow citizens took to the streets in protest and to demand change. Time will tell how this translates into meaningful legislative and legal reform. So far what we have seen aligns somewhat with our experiences in gun safety legislation. National efforts have lagged, but a few localities and states which experienced particularly egregious problems enacted new legislation. Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed diverted a small amount of money from the police budget to community programs, and Colorado discontinued the practice of offering qualified immunity to police officers, which means that going forward they can be held responsible for abuse. Potential penalties were capped at the rather modest sum of $25,000, and even that has caused some to leave police work, but these were at least small steps in the direction of reform. Even Louisville, where Breonna Taylor was murdered and her assailant went uncharged for her brutal murder, outlawed no-knock warrants. So far as I can tell all three localities seemed to have survived for now.
It was against this backdrop of discussions on our national reckoning on race that I read American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley – His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, written by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor. Just a few months earlier, in the fall of 2019, I had read The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, a book by Robert Caro. I’ve had the Daley book sitting on a shelf for a decade or more, but finally picked it up after I read “Power”. Something about Moses time seemed to mirror what I had known of Daley in Chicago, and I wanted to connect the dots between these two narratives. Together the books, epic in scope and detail, filled in important puzzle pieces in my understanding of America’s history, in particular as it relates to race.
Moses and Daley wielded immense power in their respective cities for a longer period of time than anyone has before or since, and the excess of their control was such that no one is likely to ever wield such power in a great American city ever again. But their stories in both their visionary grandeur and epic moral failure is both the American story, and as it turns out part of my story is as well. I have been thinking a lot about that through the season of elections, and especially these days when the possibility for renewal feels as near as the danger of a new civil war.
Much of America sees the Civil Rights struggle through the prism of King’s time, roughly 1956 to 1968. Our nation’s greatest achievements in truth, justice, and reconciliation are the fruit of sacrifices made in Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery. But it has long seemed to me that the focus on the Southern Civil Rights movement, in absence of any real study of the north, has distorted our perception of our current reality. Moderate and liberal whites have grown adept at convincing themselves that their psychological separation from George Wallace, the KKK, and southern segregationists has allowed them to achieve a similar disconnect from racism more generally. Obama’s election in 2008 was the pinnacle of our disassociation. How, people asked, could America still be racist if we had just elected our first black President? How could I be racist? I voted for him. The scattered wreckage of the post-Civil Rights era seems nearly invisible to millions of Americans.
Most of us do not recognize in ourselves or our country what Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude in his book, Begin Again, calls our inability to reckon with the past. Glaude places the Trump reaction to the election of our first black president on a continuum with the rise of Jim Crow following reconstruction, and revanchist Reaganism which followed the Civil Rights movement. This particular Reagan strain has now carried on so long that it has metastasized into the cult of personality around Trump, birtherism, and the politics of virulent white grievance which seems bent on violent insurrection.
(It is surely fitting in this environment that Ted Cruz in his attempt to overturn democracy, and with it the votes of tens of millions of black votes, should reference as a fitting model for his proposal, the compromise of 1877 which settled another disputed election. Once concluded Rutherford B Hayes was awarded the White House, but only by agreeing to remove Union soldiers which had been protecting reconstruction and the black population in the south after the Civil war. This so called compromise opened the way for the dark cloud of Jim Crow apartheid to settle in the south. It would not be displaced for more than 90 years.)
In the whole of American history, every step in creating a more perfect union and a more just society has been met with a wall of bitter denial, but with all due respect to the most committed dead enders the retrenchment that has taken place each time would not have been possible if it was only kept alive in the hearts of a few Klansman or Proud Boys. America has acquiesced, and if we are to find a path towards justice, I believe that all of us must come to terms both with that truth and with our role in its perpetuation.
Jim Crow, following on the heels of Reconstruction, was largely a southern phenomenon. But the response to Civil Rights legislation– mass incarceration, the emergence of militarized police forces, the re-segregation of education, and the rise of a particular type of conservative Republicanism which has been openly hostile to blacks and other people of color for decades took place on a mass scale all across the country.
Shocking increases in the rates of incarceration, particularly among young black men, barely registered as a concern even when so called liberal states like New York and California diverted billions of dollars which could have gone to social uplift to a rapid expansion of their prison footprint. Even though we knew and often delivered platitudes about how improved educational opportunities from preschool to college could be a step out of endless cycles of poverty, we ignored the moral implications of study after study that indicated that a year in prison cost three times as much as a year’s tuition at a state run university. Whether liberal or conservative, most of us never saw the fact that one in four black men was in the grasp of the criminal justice system as our failure. Such concerns did not pierce the moral armor of whites who liked to think we were entering a post racial period in America. Throughout all of the last 40 years the list of things which would have provided uplift in our communities and which we were told we could not afford even as we were paying to lock up a generation of black men has only grown.
Poorer outcomes in black and brown communities in healthcare, education, and employment, were often charged off to class instead of race. Bernie Sanders stumbled into some hot water in his 2016 campaign when he tried to explain to black audiences that their problems were more a matter of class than race. White liberals projected empathy towards communities in need, but often layered in reprimands that those less well-off needed to do their part by picking themselves up from the bootstraps. King’s admonition against the cruelty of such expression when someone has no boots never registered.
But even if we include these little bits of dialogue so much remained the same. Trump has acted as if low unemployment rates, now obliterated in the black community by COVID, were singular proof of the economic advancement of African Americans, without ever speaking of the number of people working a full time job and still living in poverty, often with food security and inadequate healthcare. Almost any advance, even those like food stamps that helped millions of poor white people, could be undercut politically if a cynical politician was willing to play the race card to delegitimize it. Serious discussions about advancing policy to ameliorate decades of injustice, often soft pedaled by timid politicians fearful of being painted weak on welfare, code for soft on blacks, did not often rise to catch the attention of white Americans safely ensconced in their “I’m not like that” or “This is not who we are,” mentality. I think a lot of the reason for that is most people do not recognize the very nature of the communities in which they live. We do not experience racism in our local criminal justice system or police force, and so we do not allow for the possibility of its existence. Before George Floyd, even after a dozen high profile cases, 60% of Americans did not think there was a problem of bias in policing. I’m still mystified as to why Eric Garner’s brutal death for selling loose cigarettes [!], also captured on video, also scarred with the words “I can’t breathe,” did not capture the country’s imagination, while Floyd’s did.
There are often recriminatory comments when a conservative politician “gets religion” on gay rights because a son or daughter comes out, but the fact is that none of us are very enlightened or empathetic about the circumstances of lives that are not part of our own experience. Big progressive cities like New York and Chicago have huge blind spots in ways as large as any southern evangelical. We just can’t imagine the flaw in ourselves, and absent that imagination, we allow a lot to slide.
So I wanted to write about Chicago and New York. Perhaps if we can see, really see, how we arrived where we are, we might also find a way to plot a way forward. If America is to have a great reckoning on race, as Glaude said we must start in the past, not just in the south with its epic battles of good and evil, but also the north, perhaps unfamiliar to many of us, a place where leaders seen as progressive, liberal giants, especially in Daley’s case, sentenced their cities to decades of poverty and pain, dislocation and destruction.
I should say that I love American cities, particularly Chicago, where I was born, and New York, where I have made my living and my life since I arrived here more than forty years ago a few months shy of my 21st birthday. I have nothing against the great southern cities. I lived in Atlanta for a few years in the 80’s, and at the time I had a job that put me on the road nearly every week to nearly every city with a population of more than 100,000 in the southeast from San Juan to Nashville to Norfolk. But for me the gleaming glass towers which are emblematic of the great cities of the New South always felt sterile. Atlanta and Dallas are fine places, but I always been more attracted to the grit and substance of my first loves in the north.
I will be first to say that I tend to give cities the benefit of the doubt, and I give extra points for eccentricities. I have found that Shanghai, another city where I have spent much time and which I have come to love, shares something of the same cultural DNA as Chicago and New York. Great cities are often molded through their
engagement in the immigrant experience. 12 million people transited through Ellis Island, which sits across New York harbor. Chicago is legendary for its stew of ethnic neighborhoods, first Eastern Europeans, Germans, Poles, and Greeks, and then after 1910 or so becoming a home for millions of African Americans, immigrant refugees in their own country, seeking sanctuary from Jim Crow. Shanghai is a far more homogeneous city than either Chicago or New York, but immigrants, most notably Jewish refugees escaping the Nazis at a time when western capitals in Europe and America were not welcoming, played a major role in changing the human landscape of that great city.
I call myself a New Yorker, but I actually lived in the city itself for only a year. When I arrived in 1978 I first landed across the river in Hoboken, and I stayed there for more than a decade, and I have spent the last 30 years or so about 60 miles outside the city, so I am a New Yorker more by association than location. And yet, I like to think I know more about New Yorker than many people who have lived in the city for years.
I have certainly travelled more New York streets than most New Yorkers get the chance to do. On multiple occasions Mark, my brother, and I have cycled from one end of each of New York’s five boroughs to the other. Those trips have given Brooklyn a particularly special place in my heart. The best way to know any great city is on foot, but cycling is the next best alternative. Together Mark & I have travelled so many miles of New York streets that I know them much better than I could ever hope to similarly know Chicago.
For a place that always seems to be changing with restaurants and businesses, even successful ones, seeming to come and go without reason or notice, the enduring marrow of the many, many communities that make up New York, somehow endures. Each borough is ethnically stamped in one area or another, from Russians in Brighton Beach, to Dominicans in the Bronx, to Koreans in Flushing and Guyanese in Jamaica, Queens. Williamsburg is home to a unique blend of Hasidic Jews and hipsters. Black communities like Harlem, Bushwick, and Bed Stuy remain distinctive and vibrant, although in recent years gentrification has raised the percentage of whites living there.
I love, truly love, all of it. New York is home now. But call a place home and biases seep in. Some of them can be rather mild. Though I believe the quality of a Chicago hot dog is unmatched, I have long abandoned any interest in Chicago pizza, finding the New York variant far superior. Over time wherever we live we might come to believe the food is better, and if we are blessed to be in a town with a musical life, we may harbor a belief in the superiority of “our” music over all others. As it happens New York and Chicago are both blessed with an extravagance of musical talent, so I could never choose a favorite on that score.
Bias seeps into our perspective in other ways. I had not yet moved out of the hotel where I first landed in New York, then called the Statler across from Penn Station, and so had no permanent place to live, when I fell hard for the cacophony of noise: taxis, trucks, buses belching black smoke, street crews and their machinery, and always the voices, accented, often very loud, sometimes course, the music of New York streets. New York was and is an assault on your aural senses, and I rather liked the energy of all that noise from the start and I do to this day.
I found I easily rationalized the dirt, danger, and deterioration that seemed to ebb and flow like waves all around me in those days. Mark was mugged, and he and I escaped a crazy gang of kids on Eighth Avenue a few minutes after watching the ball come down one New Year’s Eve. We never went back to Times Square to watch the ball after that, but on that night we ended up at Maxwell’s, a favorite bar in Hoboken, which had two bands playing that New Year’s Eve: The Fast and The Most. One word names for bands were big in those days (see The The).
In retrospect some of my romance for the city, especially in the late 70’s and early 80’s is not really defensible. What was adventure tinged with danger to me, an amusement park ride of sorts, was often mostly danger to people living in the heart of the New York in the chaotic days in late 70’s and early 80’s. It didn’t take long to figure that out even across the river where we lived. When Mark and I arrived, Hoboken was in its downtime. In those days fire was a primary method of “urban renewal” by landlords eager to chase higher rents than their mostly Hispanic tenants could afford to pay.
But in so many ways I was thrilled with my experience in New York from the very first day, as I am to this day. What was I to do? I had been raised in the isolated and almost completely white suburbs of Chicago. As children we had seen the harsh conditions on some of Chicago’s streets (mostly from the back seat of my parent’s car), but we didn’t know anything about that really. My grandparents on my father’s side, were put out of their home when so-called Urban Renewal swept Chicago during the extended mayoralty of Richard Daley, something that took place in New York in a similarly destructive way. Grandma and Grandpa’s new place seemed nicer to us kids. It was in a modern, though somewhat sterile, high-rise building with expansive views of the city. Their old place was impossibly dark. We had no idea what they had left behind from their perspective, or the forces that were then remolding Chicago, but when I came to New York I was very clear that I was making a decision to escape the normalcy and quiet of my suburban upbringing, and that meant all of it. I didn’t seek it out, but if forced to choose between staying and going back for me it was danger good, quiet bad.
It has taken decades for me to regain perspective, and through the years I have wrestled with the biases which informed my view of Chicago and New York. Nicholas Lehman’s ground breaking book on the Great Migration, The Promised Land, was the first big eye opener. I read Promised Land some time in 1992 or 1993, and by then I had more than a decade of distance from Chicago. In the book Lehman writes about the black refugees from Clarksdale Mississippi and their migratory path to Chicago. I would recently learn how common it was for people from one southern city, such as Clarksdale, to relocate en masse to one very specific northern city, in this case Chicago. Muddy Waters, born and raised in Clarksdale, made his way to Chicago along the same route with dozens if not hundreds of other American refugees from that small Mississippi hamlet.
Lehman did not gloss over what happened in Chicago. His book was the first place I read of the racial bias at the heart of Mayor Daley’s urban renewal that had also swept up my Grandma and Grandpa. I have a rather vivid memory even now of reading about Daley’s decisions in which he sited highways as a means to create physical and psychological barriers between Chicago’s black and white communities.
The impact of city sanctioned racial barriers resonated with me. When I first arrived in New York, I mentored a city kid, Calvin, with whom I remained friends until his passing last year. Calvin’s mom, brother, and two sisters lived in public housing, the Amsterdam Houses, on 62nd Street just west of Lincoln Center.
Sometime in the late 1980’s or 1990’s, the magnificent view they had of the Hudson, still breathtaking at sunset, was obscured by rows of apartment buildings to their west. After that the Amsterdam Houses which were already hemmed in on three sides, especially to the east by Lincoln Center, a magnificent space that Robert Moses had a personal hand in developing, were now shut like a vault. Those new buildings which rose on the Hudson and went north for 20 blocks or more would all eventually come to be branded as “Trump” properties. That branding was largely removed after he became president.
Ta-Nehesi Coates piece in the Atlantic, The Case for Reparations, which focused on Chicago, broke any illusion that I might continue to see Chicago the way I did as a child. I had already known that Daley had reneged on deals made with Martin Luther King, and the dean of Chicago’s Civil Rights activists, Al Raby. Working in coordination with Chicago’s real estate and financial powers and following a pattern that was well established and much trod earlier by Southern segregationists, Daley agreed in writing to reform discriminatory practices. Then when King and SCLC went onto other struggles, Mayor Daley and the city’s real state, financial and insurance interests, quietly reneged on the deals.
Coates essay offers a detailed analysis of the cost of Daley’s betrayal, a price that Chicago continues to pay to this day. The Case for Reparations explains how African Americans, including professionals and people of means were redlined out of neighborhoods of choice, and segregated into pockets of the city, where poverty became concentrated, city services went undelivered, community concerns went unaddressed, and a dangerous culture of mistrust mutated into the violent situation which persists in Chicago today.
So great was the bias and the power of the red line, that black professionals such as doctors, lawyers, teachers, municipal workers, and other people of means found they were unable to even buy their way out of segregated communities. Those that tried were often confronted with violent mobs and firebombs. In both Chicago and New York, segregation and lack of opportunity that always attends it became a force multiplier of poverty, and poverty as it turns out is a very expensive proposition. Food and housing, in particular, often cost more in poor segregated communities. Locked into substandard housing by rigid red lines, the pool of tenants had few other choices and this gave landlords increased leverage in the rents they charged. They often charged more for an apartment in a decrepit building without services, than they could or would for a nicer apartment in a neighborhood reserved for whites with good schools, shops, restaurants, medical establishments, and other services. As time went on and the housing stock in poor neighborhoods fell into disrepair, landlords often abandoned those buildings leading to the decay and despair with which so many of us are familiar.
In the past 20 years or so whites in search of cheaper rents have returned to these neighborhoods. Large big box retailers have followed, implanting themselves in neighborhoods in both cities where they were seldom seen in the past. Food deserts, a word coined to describe urban neighborhoods where high quality low cost food is not available, have started to turn green.
Try to imagine if you can, that you are black man or women in your 60’s. You have seen your neighborhood abandoned to neglect, and you have experienced the subsequent pathology of poverty: crime, drugs, and hopelessness. City leaders like Daley and Moses barely acknowledged you, and national leaders like Ronald Reagan came around only at election time, using your community as a prop, only to depart quickly in a whisk of limousines after the cameras were turned off, never to return again. Then, by and by middle class whites started to see investment opportunities or at least the benefits of lower cost housing in your community. Slowly they started to return. With them came the shops, restaurants and services. Can you believe they opened a Starbucks on 125th Street?
In her profoundly moving book The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of three such people, one of whom, Ida Mae Brandon, ended up in Chicago, and another, George Starling, in New York. Refugees from Jim Crow, they were participants and witnesses to this entire American saga from oasis to deterioration to gentrification.
Ida Mae even had a brush with Obama during his years as a community organizer. Imagine the sweep of history, from the depths of segregation in the deep south, then the journey north no less fraught than Syrian refugees escaping across the Mediterranean Sea, to one day land in the Chicago which offered a modicum of dignity. Then to watch it all go to hell, and then slowly, slowly, climb back. Eventually Ida Mae pulled the lever for Obama, only to see him followed by the ugliest racism since the Civil Rights era.
Robert Moses and Richard Daley for better or worse had a more profound influence on the cities that Ida Mae Brandon and George Starling escaped to than anyone else in the history of either. Moses, born in 1888, became the President of the Long Island State Park Commission in 1924 and that same year assumed the Presidency of the New York State Council of Parks. He held both positions for 39 years, until 1963. Though Moses started his career as a reformer and a champion of green space in the city, he derived much of his extraordinary power as Chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, a role he held until his death in 1991. Daley, born in 1902, rose up through the Democratic Machine in Cook County, where Chicago is located, taking his first position with the party in the early 1930’s. He assumed the role of Chairmen of the Cook County Democratic party in 1953, and was elected mayor 2 years later. He remained in both positions until his death in 1976. With the exception of the last two years before I left for New York, in the time I was there I did not know a year in Chicago when Daley was not mayor.
Though the two men were contemporaries at a time of extraordinary change in their respective cities, Moses, in my view had the more consequential impact, both on his city, New York, and the nation as a whole. He was already a man of immense power, during the depression years, when Daley was still scuffling for a patronage job as a tax collector. Moses was the most important man in the development of Parks, first on Long Island then New York City, and then the state as a whole. His influence was not limited to the large parks like Jones Beach which he supervised building, or Robert Moses State Park, named in his honor which he also supervised. Until the 1960’s, Moses had a heavy hand in the procurement of land, the design, and the creation of nearly every piece of green space, including those uniquely New York City institutions, little screen squares, sometimes no more than a few hundred square feet with a couple of park benches and a little green plaque.
In the early days nearly every new large public park which opened under Moses’ watch created ancillary traffic problems and this usually meant bad press. He realized early on that the key to providing greater access to the great green spaces he built in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and better support in the public mind, was building roads. He was visionary in the use of local materials which meant the roads he built felt organically integrated into the communities they served.
On Long Island in particular, the test of whether the new parks and elaborately designed beaches would be accessible to city dwellers depended on wresting control of road building and land from the rich Long Island barons which controlled nearly every valuable piece of land of east of the city. Operating largely without a charter or supervision, Moses interpreted his role as President of the Long Island Park’s Commission as being responsible for solving the problem of access to build roads. He would go on to to site, design, often to the finest detail, and build almost every major traffic artery on Long Island, including the Northern State, the Southern State, the Cross Island and the Long Island Expressway. If you have ever driven on Long Island, morning or night, weekend or rush hour, you have seen the product of all this construction. There is little pleasure in clogged roadways even those with overpasses made of local stone.
As Chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, Moses oversaw the building of that great monolith. In a precursor to what would come, Moses, in his role as master builder, took it upon himself to oversee the purchase, condemnation by eminent domain (which through similar tactics and administered by the Daley administration ensnared my grandparents in Chicago), or manipulation or coercion of local businesses and homeowners for whatever property he needed or wanted to build on. Though funded through a combination of federal and state dollars, once the Triborough was completed, the authority which Moses headed, a quasi-governmental but independent body, controlled the massive revenues the bridge generated. Moses went on to build the Throgs Neck, Bronx-Whitestone, Henry Hudson, and Verrazano-Narrows Bridges, among others, using much of the same methods, always accruing more and more power from the tolls the crossings generated.
This money, far in excess of the cash either the city or state had to spend, was unencumbered by taxpayer oversight or political control, giving Moses immense power. As a result Moses, who never held elective office, acted as if his authority exceeded that of any of the mayors or governors and certainly the taxpayers that he nominally served. Then, finally, in the early 1960’s Moses was given control of construction and site selection for public housing. The Amsterdam Houses where Calvin and his family lived were built on Moses watch as was the Lincoln Center which abutted it.
Taken in total Moses’ record of development, only part of which is mentioned here, is and will remain unparalleled, not only in New York history but that of the country at large. Civil engineers from around the country and the world came to Moses’ office on Randall’s Island to study at the feet of the master builder.
That is part of his legacy. Here is the rest.
Having never held elective office, Moses was not accountable to the citizens of New York or the politicians they elected to represent them. With unencumbered power, he rode roughshod over a series of mayors and two New York governors in particular: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who otherwise wielded power masterfully in one term as governor, and four as President, and Nelson D Rockefeller, who was Governor from 1959 until 1973. Without political accountability Moses decimated large swaths of the city. He is singularly responsible for the Cross Bronx Expressway monstrosity. Intensely opposed by community groups before it was built, the roadway cuts through the heart of the heart of the borough, severing the economic and social connections from the northern section of the borough and turning the area to its South, the South Bronx, into a national symbol of urban blight often blamed on its residents. Moses overruled community activists who proposed a less destructive route along the northern edge of Crotona Park. He was responsible for similar projects in northern Manhattan, Brooklyn, and other parts of the city. All of which had similarly devastating effects.
On the parkways Moses built to his Long Island jewels of greenspace, sand, and blue Atlantic water, bridges over other streets and roads were limited in height according to Moses instruction so that buses could not traverse under them. This meant that cars, which were expensive and mostly only accessible to the city’s well to do white residents could reach the parks, but poorer, often black people who relied on public transportation like buses, could not.
To get a sense of the scope of his building and his neglect, Moses was so skilled and effective in lobbying Washington that he secured about 25% of all Works Progress Administration (WPA) money dispersed by the Federal government during the depression. During the height of economic despair Moses was singularly responsible for the construction of dozens of parks built with money from the WPA. In one year under his directions the city opened a new park nearly every week. Moses built exactly one park that year in a community which was primarily black.
Though Moses projects were frequently criticized by civic organizations, some with well-connected and powerful patrons, New York City mayors and the press, lavished him with praise. This had the effect of making the city and its financial powers– banks, construction and insurance firms, often segregated building trades unions, and the papers– complicit in every step Moses made.
Finally, Moses is as responsible as any other individual or government entity for the tangle of traffic which exists to this day in New York. He eschewed public transportation and muscled his vision for an ever expanding maze of roads, bridges, tunnels, and snarled traffic exchanges well into the 1960’s and 1970’s. For four decades Moses single minded vision was that any traffic problem could be solved by the construction of another road or bridge. By the time other urban planners and civil engineers were strong enough to confront him, the transportation grid that Moses demanded and built, and on which everything moves, had already been so deeply embedded in New York City that any moves towards balance with public transit would prove to be economically unfeasible or dangerous to the equilibrium of already challenged communities.
(One of the great merits in Caro’s book is the way he helps the reader understand the ways in which the strength of a community is so intricately intertwined with its people. You are meant to understand that a neighborhood and its residents survive together, but like a healthy lake lost to algae if one goes the other may not survive.)
One example of Moses’ folly, the Van Wyck expressway, was designed as a transportation artery to ease travel time to Kennedy Airport, Idlewild in those days. Moses designed and built it completely as a surface road without a public transportation element against the pleadings of community activists and civic groups, even those that had the financial resources to design and propose highly detailed alternatives. Like the Cross Bronx, the Van Wyck scars miles of residential neighborhoods, primarily populated by people of color. It would be nearly 20 years after the expressway was built that the Train to the Plane, a subway line linking Manhattan with JFK, was finally built at a price tag billions in excess of what it would have been if Moses allowed it to be built in his time. The final project has such limited access to the airport that ridership continues to be low to this day.
Daley’s impact on Chicago, is not nearly as extensive as Moses’ on New York, but it is has proven to be as deleterious to the lives of Chicago’s communities of color. It is profoundly important to note that unlike Moses, Daley’s actions were taken as an elected representative of the people of Chicago. Daley’s greatest impact is in the area of housing and transportation, but we cannot speak of his record without acknowledging O’Hare International Airport, the Sears Tower, McCormick Place, the University of Illinois campus, and the total renovation of the loop, all of which have in part made Chicago the great city it is today.
Chicago’s forays into public housing and transportation under Daley were as flawed as Moses designs. The first such notable project was the construction of North South artery known as the Dan Ryan Expressway. The original plan for the expressway carved a line through Bridgeport where Daley lived, but according to the Encyclopedia of the City of Chicago, “In 1956 Mayor Richard J. Daley and the city council moved the route to Wentworth Avenue along the eastern edge of Armour Square and Fuller Park. The new route displaced residents and businesses in neighborhoods adjacent to the neighborhoods that had already been displaced by the new housing projects.” Such preferential sighting to protect a powerful politician’s interests is not unusual, but like the Cross Bronx the Dan Ryan, completed in 1961, carved a line between the city’s minority communities and white middle class neighborhoods, turning somewhat soft lines of demarcation into a hard line between two segregated neighborhoods.
On the eastern edge of that line, Daley oversaw the construction of a series of public housing projects. Just one such project, the Robert Taylor Holmes, was designed for 11,000 Chicagoans, but at its peak housed 27,000 residents. The Taylor Homes, later demolished, opened in 1955. It was just one of a series of similar projects, all high rise and densely populated, lined up like dominoes on a line on South State Street inside the Dan Ryan corridor. Together the roadways and the projects resulted in the de facto segregation of Chicago, firmly reinforced by redlining practices carried out by Daley’s financial supporters in the banking, insurance, and real estate industries.
The impact of redlining is not limited to housing and education. As a good friend pointed out to me a few years ago, there a relatively small number of precincts which account for the majority of gun crimes in Chicago. Many precincts in Chicago have almost no experience with the ongoing gun violence which has made Chicago a national symbol for malfunctioning government. Though violent crimes and the trade in guns have long since leaped over the Dan Ryan border, an overlay of the two maps indicates a great concentration of the current problem is inside that corridor.
Chicago has passed very strict gun safety laws, and the steady stream of illegal weapons has far more to do with lax federal regulation and laissez faire enforcement policies in the counties that ring Chicago and Cook County, but similar situations of uneven enforcement exist in medium and large cities all over the country. I have often wondered what makes Chicago’s problems so extreme and so chronic. One unique variable is the problem of policing.
Like many northern cities, Chicago’s police force was overwhelmingly white well into the 1970’s. Though they have made strides towards integration, like many other cities, Chicago’s police force has a history of abuse that goes back decades. It encompasses the “police riot” which took place under Daley’s watch at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, the assassination under questionable circumstances of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, and the shooting of Laquan McDonald in 2014. In 2015, The Guardian reported that Chicago Police had maintained a secret facility, Homan Square, which over a ten year period had detained 7,000 people, all but about 1,000 black, without charging the detainees or allowing them access to lawyers. New York’s Police force has a similar legacy of violent, lethal, encounters with their black and brown citizens. The names Eric Garner, Eleanor Bumpurs, and Amidou Diallo are synonymous with the most egregious forms of police abuse, as is the legacy of former mayor Rudy Giuliani.
While the historical legacy of police abuse in both cities is powerful and impactful, the police did not create the public housing and road construction projects that resulted in concentrated poverty. Nor did they oversee the redlining of neighborhoods which resulted in segregation as rigid as any southern city. The police did not ignore the pleas of their communities for decentralized public housing or expansive low cost public transportation, which would integrate black, brown and white residents across the arc of each city. Though increased levels of police funding impacted school budgets, the police did not foreclose the possibility of breaking the cycle of poverty by letting schools in poor minority communities lag their white counterparts in other parts of the city. In every city in America where we have seen police violence, police have been asked to maintain order in communities often viewed with neglect and ignored for decades. Until the George Floyd Killing, a majority of Americans looked the other way when order was maintained and the law ignored. Like the Amsterdam Houses poor black communities are locked in on all sides, and still their residents are told to find their bootstraps and start pulling.
We should challenge and confront every incident of police abuse, and seek the redistribution of funds from militarized police forces to projects for community renewal, but we should place the responsibility for the pathologies of crime and despair that have gripped portions of both cities where it belongs, at the feet of two men most responsible for the creation of their cities as they exist today—Robert Moses and Mayor Daley. This is not to excuse either the citizens of Chicago or New York who resisted any movement towards decentralization and democratization, or the subsequent leadership in both cities that has perpetuated the practices those men put in place, carrying their biases into their own development plans. But if there is a root of the root, these two men are it.
There are those that can look past their failures. They will point to the gleaming towers and amazing, vast, public spaces. They will say, “Well, what about this?” I see it, but I also see past the glass towers. I love New York for many reasons, but none more than that tree lined stretch of Bedford Avenue which starts just east of Coney Island, running north into the heart of Brooklyn, passing through a collage of communities of different ethnic backgrounds. With the exception of Bridgeport where Daley lived, the neighborhoods in Chicago and New York which today form the life blood of each city were in many ways beyond the interest of either man.
For all of their brilliant accomplishments and the many beautiful public spaces they built in the cities we love, the legacy of what these men left behind, particularly the impact of their polices in communities of color, especially black communities, is the history with which we must now reckon right alongside slavery, Jim Crow, and genocide against our native population.
Phrases like “Defund the Police” and calls for “reparations” are considered charged language and so they are. They have been used as a cudgel to frighten the very same white moderate voters who have overlooked, ignored, misunderstood, or disputed the legacy of Moses and Daley for decades. But for me, the reckoning Eddie Glaude called for in his book is the reckoning we must have. Reasonable people can argue about the politics of such language, but the policy requirements embedded in these words are not open to dispute.
If the Black Lives Matter movement is to have any meaning at all it must be about more than addressing ongoing police abuses. In many American cities police violence against citizens of color, especially black citizens, is a symptom of neglect, not the cause. Political leaders from Miami, to Los Angeles, to Minneapolis, to New York, have deployed increasingly militarized police forces to keep the peace in minority communities that they have neglected in every other way. For decades.
On a national level, every step forward has been met with vociferous opposition. We are now in what is perhaps the most dangerous moment when a cadre of dead-enders is so desperate to upend an election decided by a multi-racial collation of voters perhaps unprecedented in our lifetime, that they want to overturn the very idea of democracy itself through violent means if necessary.
There will always be those that argue that we must not rock the boat, not run the risk of upsetting such reactionaries. It has always been so. Small, moderate, steps which mask the truth, largely leaving legacies of failure intact are too often presented as more desirable than real change which threatens the status quo. We have been all too easily seduced by calls to be reasonable by moderate politicians more concerned with their next election than the uplift of those they are elected to serve. What moderation offers to challenge truth and reconciliation is half-truths which perpetuate the narcotic comfort of the way things are.
I firmly believe that our nation is poised to take on the best possible outcome in the next four years. We still could go either way, but if we are willing to consider who we are and how we got here, and the history, both good and bad, that brought us to this moment, perhaps we can see that the choices are fewer than and not as difficult as some may suggest and we may think.
More than 50 years ago, Martin Luther King, after the long March Voting Rights March from Selma arrived on the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery. In 1965 George Wallace occupied that capitol. Today Montgomery has a black mayor. Historical markers indicate the path of the marchers through the city. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice sites on a sight overlooking the capitol. But Confederate statues can still be seen everywhere including the grounds of the capitol. On that cloudy March day in 1965, King slowly began an epic call and response with the crowd that had joined him. He asked, How Long? To which King first, and then the people stretching for blocks in front of him responded, Not long! King told the crowd that day that the truth crushed to earth would rise again, and indeed it has. At long last perhaps we have arrived at that far end of the arc of the moral universe of which he also spoke that day. It will not bend towards justice on its own. Which side are you on?
Zen Canoe 