I hate the Cross Bronx Expressway and its seven miles of deadly sins. I’ve spent 40 years on that miserable non-expressway, inching my eight automobiles toward my Westchester and Long Island hometowns, trapped for at least a half-hour countless times on a clogged artery attached to other clogged arteries. All in all I’ve wasted more than a few full days in a toxic corridor of lousy pavement, ugly buildings, grumbling trucks, angry air, and angrier motorists.
In my worst moments I’ve imagined breaking down, abandoning one of my ancient cars to the Cross Bronx graveyard of stripped, burned carcasses. In my best moments I’ve cursed Robert Moses, who designed the Cross Bronx and 620 other miles of new roads that made New York City and its suburbs more accessible — and more of a pain in the ass to access. “Eff Moses!” is the best way I can express myself, safely and sanely, on an expressway that’s anything but fast.
I discovered many other ways to hate the Cross Bronx in “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Moses’s 44-year reign as New York City’s parks commissioner and infrastructure emperor. The chapter “One Mile” is a brilliantly we-were-here dissection of Moses blasting a Cross Bronx section by bending landscape, rules, and wills. East Tremont residents received grossly premature eviction notices, continued living in their apartment buildings while the top floors were being demolished, and suffered immeasurably as their beloved, perfectly decent neighborhood became a slum plagued by rats, thieves, and muggers. More than 1,500 families lost their homes because Moses refused to destroy a bus terminal used as a cash cow by political bigwigs. He curried their favor by designing an absurd Cross Bronx curve around the terminal.
Moses was, to quote the musical poet/pilgrim Kris Kristofferson, “a walkin’ contradiction: partly truth, partly fiction.” The power broker engineered the building of noble complexes — Lincoln Center, the United Nations headquarters — and soulless low-income high-rise ghettos. He made great beaches — Jones, Sunken Meadow — for the masses and beautiful playgrounds for mostly well-off white residents; African-Americans and Latinos struggled to play on his 673 baseball diamonds. His seven bridges and 14 expressways quickly became mobile parking lots because he refused to add rapid-transit lanes. Noisy, smelly buses, he insisted, make driving unpleasant.
Moses not only shared a biblical ambassador’s last name, he broke several of the ambassador’s commandments. He sealed deals through secret alliances and threats of exposing scandals, by lying, cheating, and stealing. Nothing he built, he liked to boast, was “tinged by legality.” He fortified one of his eroding beaches with grass removed illegally from his other beaches. The larceny ended when the Suffolk County attorney complained of a raid on a dune near his Westhampton Beach retreat.
“The Power Broker” appeared in 1974, when Moses was no longer infrastructure emperor. For 50 years it’s been a bible for urban planners and presidents, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Yet I avoided reading it for a good 30 years, even though I’m a New York City history junkie. I wasn’t bothered by the 1,200 pages; after all, I’ve been speed-reading three books a week for forever. I just wanted a rock-solid reason to devote two weeks to circling the massive cloverleaf created by Caro, an East Hampton resident who regularly signs his books and attends fund-raising dinners during Authors Night, the East Hampton Library’s annual benefit. I needed something that engaged my heart as well as my head.
I finally plunged into “The Power Broker” because I missed Robert Moses’s New York, which happens to be my New York. I haven’t visited my birthplace in eight years, mainly because I can’t stand the gridlock. Absence made my heart grow fonder, which made me wonder more about wandering my metropolitan paths. I needed to investigate my favorite triangle of New Rochelle, the suburb where I grew up, Wainscott, the hamlet where I grew out, and Manhattan, where I grew into an urban explorer. I needed to study how Moses shaped my traveling life.
“The Power Broker” proved that Moses’s arteries are mine. The following list of junctions proves that I could be his vehicular grandson.
F.D.R. Drive: My sister, Meg, and I were born in a hospital overlooking the Manhattan road Moses initially designed to connect to the equally new Triborough Bridge, also his baby.
Henry Hudson Parkway: This West Side river road allowed me to chauffeur my Irish cousin to his first New York skyline experience, an epiphany he pronounced “bloody incredible.” It was certainly less bloody than a 1964 trip disrupted by a brick shattering the front window of my family’s Chevy Impala, sending my sister to our birth hospital to remove glass splinters.
The 1964-65 New York World’s Fair: A financial and political fiasco for Moses; a marvelous merry-go-round for me. In Queens I fell for Belgian waffles, the Ford Mustang, and an animatronic Abe Lincoln.
Shea Stadium: In 1964 I attended my first pro baseball game at the Mets’ brand-new home, which Moses conceived to resemble a Roman coliseum. Nine years later I watched Bud Harrelson and Pete Rose engage in a fabled fight during a Mets-Reds playoff game. That afternoon Yogi Berra and Willie Mays joined a peace delegation that convinced Mets fans to stop trying to pelt Rose with batteries and other missiles.
Co-op City: Opened in 1968, four miles from my New Rochelle house, the world’s largest co-op apartment complex replaced the ruins of Freedomland U.S.A., a fantastic, tragic history theme park where I enjoyed a stagecoach robbery, Civil War battles, and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Long Island Expressway: My 52-mile main drag to the East End for 56 years. In 1981-82 I used the L.I.E. to commute on weekends from my Pennsylvania home to my then-girlfriend’s home in Commack. One Friday evening I passed Exit 40 hours after Harry Chapin, the singer, songwriter, and anti-hunger activist, died after a truck rammed his car.
Even the Cross Bronx has hosted memorable episodes. In 1975 my 92-year-old driver — a church friend who brokered my mother’s stocks — narrowly missed slamming a bus on the way to a football game at Columbia University, his 1906 alma mater. In 2000 my sister and I moved our mother from New York to Pennsylvania in a three-vehicle convoy, shotgunning Mom to protect her during her first drive over the dreaded George Washington Bridge, which she had avoided for 30-plus years.
Hell, the Cross Bronx even made me a better driver. Thanks to that miserable non-expressway, I’m more aware of assholes, more likely to detour around crushing rush hours, calmer in crises. Last year I didn’t freak out when my 2009 Honda Fit broke an axle accelerating into a huge pot hole during a blown merge onto a dangerous curve on an already tricky highway outside White Plains.
The accident and tow-truck rescue took place on Route 287/87, which four years ago replaced the Cross Bronx as my go-to route to New Rochelle and Wainscott. The trip is 30 minutes longer, but who the hell cares when it’s cheaper, prettier, and happier? Besides, it’s faster when there’s a 45-minute logjam on the Cross Bronx, where I constantly worried about blowing an axle, or worse.
Of course all roads lead to Moses’s empire in greater metropolitan New York. My 287/87/Tappan Zee Bridge/New England Thruway trio eventually joins the power broker’s triumvirate of Throgs Neck Bridge, Cross Island Parkway, and L.I.E. The excursion is made easier by H.O.V. lanes and electronic tolls — consumer concessions that Moses would have vetoed as Communist conspiracies.
One day Mosesville — Mosesiana? — will take me to my first stay in Hither Hills State Park, a Moses crown jewel I’ve wanted to share for half a century. I’ll camp by the dunes, salute the sea of stars, celebrate Montauk as a per-capita capital of public sanctuaries. And I’ll finally praise Robert Moses, the imagineer of a lovely marriage between nature and human nature.
Geoff Gehman is a former resident of Wainscott, a journalist, and the author of the memoir “The Kingdom of the Kid: Growing Up in the Long-Lost Hamptons” (SUNY Press). He lives in Bethlehem, Pa., and can be reached at [email protected].