Home · Maps · About

[ Read Responses | Post a New Response | Return to the Index ]
[ First in Thread | Next in Thread ]

view flat

Re: Brooklyn Dodgers (on topic)

Posted by WillD on Tue Jul 24 15:42:20 2007, in response to Re: Brooklyn Dodgers (on topic), posted by GP38/R42 Chris on Tue Jul 24 11:23:37 2007.

     [Moses] had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit acess by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low - too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it ver difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island.

     Moses' ingeniously restrictive laws and ingeniously low-clearance parkway bridges had insured that buses would never be able to ruin the beauty of his Long Island parkways or carry poor people along them to his state parks. The Board of Estimate's Chief Engineer, Philip P. Farley, noticed that Moses was planning to low-bridge the city, too; enough of his Henry Hudson Parkway bridges were going to have a maximum headroom of thirteen feet and a headroom at the curb of eleven feet so that usage of the parkay by buses - which were exactly thirteen feet high - would be impractical. "One third of the families in the city have automobiles," Farley reported to the board. "The other two-thirds depend on buses. If they are to get any benefit from this improvement, buses must use [it]." Moreover, while the priciple function of Moses' Long Island parkways had been to enable drivers to reach state park, the principle function of the Henry Hudson Parkway would be to enable drivers from Bronx and Westchester to commute to their jobs in Manhattan; his earler roads had been for pleasure, but this would be a road for business. Without buses, commuting on it would only be by car. This might well prove impractical; not only would the parkway increase the flow of cars into traffic clogged Manhattan, but, with the inevitable increase in the population of Spuyten Duyvil, Riverdale, and Westchester, car traffic might well overwhelm theparkway. In some future generation, opening it to buses each able to carry fourty or more car drivers might well become imperative. But, as Farley said, "the normal life of the parkway bridges is estimated at 100 years." Rebuilding them after the parkway itself had been completed would be enormously expensive. One of the thirteen foot bridges, the one at 239th Street, was, by design, the centerpiece of a large traffic interchange, all of which would have to be rebuilt - at a cost of millions of dollars. If Moses was allowed to build low bridges, even if the city might in some future generation want to allow buses on the Henry Hudson Parkway, it might simply be financially impractical to do so.
     But Moses wouldn't listen to the city's officials.

     Robert Moses was, after all, mortal, Lee Koppelman kept reminding himself - "even if sometimes it didn't seem that way" - and, one day, either death or old age would end Moses' decades of power. And Koppelman believed, it would not take long after that day for bus service to be instituted on all Long Island's major highways, not only on its expressways but on 200 miles of parkways.
     The young planner cherished that belief until, driving along the old Wantagh Parkway one day, he happened to noticed something he had never noticed before.
     "I was coming up to one bridge across the parkway," he would recall, "and just as I was about to go under it, I noticed how low it seemed to be. I took a good look at the next bridge and goddamnit, it was low! I pulled over and measured it with my arm at the curb, and I could it wasn't any fourteen feet high. At the next exit, I got off and found a store and bought a yardstick and got back on the parkway and measured the next bridge. At the curb it was eleven feet high. And I didn't have to go and measure all the other bridges. I knew right then what I was going to find. I knew right then what the old son of a gun had done. He had built the bridges so low that buses couldn't use the Parkways!"
     The Wantagh Parkway had, of course, never been rebuilt since it had opened in 1929. Most of Moses other parkways were being rebuilt to handle the greatly increased traffic loads on them. As he drove back to his office Koppelman was hoping that the rebuild bridges, the overpasses that carried intersecting local roads over the parkways, would be higher. But at the office when he pulled out the design drawings he had been sent by the Long Island State Park Commission, he saw at a glance that his hopes had been false. The new bridges were several feet higher in the center - over the two "fast" lanes, one in each direction of the expanded six-lane parkways - than the original bridges, because as Koppelman was later to realize, Moses didn't want unadorned straight overpasses over his beautiful early roads, and curving an overpass over a wider expanse necessitated greater clearance beneath it. But the clearance at the curb was precisely the same beneath the new overpasses as beneath the old: eleven feet.
     Most buses were about twelve feet high. They could not use the curb lane or, because the design of many overpasses kept the rise in the clearance toward the center of the road very gradual, the lane next to it. They could in theory use the center lane, the "fast" lane in each direction, but not in practice: no practical bus-fleet operator would dare take the risk of hours of delay that would be involved in routing his buses down a road in which only one lane was available for their use. If an accident or an overheated car or repaving - or any of the hundred other causes that blocked lanes - blocked that one lane any buses on the road would be trapped at the next overpass until it was opened again. In practice no practical bus operator would run his buses on any road on which the clearance at the curb wasn't at least fourteen feet. "I sat there looking at that goddamn drawing - I'll never forget it," Koppelman says. "And I realized that old son of a gun had made sure that buses would never be able to use his goddamn parkways."

     "The building of the bridges is an example of his foresight and vision," Sid Shapiro says in his quiet way. "I've often been astonished myself that he was so right in those days, and not only so right but so indispensably right. Mr. Moses had an instinctive feeling that someday politicians would try to put buses on the parkways and that would break down the whole parkway concept - and he used to say to us fellows, 'Lets' design the bridges so the clearance is all right for passenger cars but not for anything else.' All the original bridges were designed with nine feet of clearance at the curb. Later we went up to eleven feet, but that had the same effect. Well, yes, buses could use the center lane, but that's an impractical thing. No bus would do that. Mr Moses did this because he knew that something might happen after he was dead and gone. He wrote legislation [clauses prohibiting the use of parkways by "buses or other commercial vehicles] but he knew you could change the legislation. You can't change a bruidge after it's up. And the result of this is that a bus from New York couldn't use the parkways if we wanted it to." A quiet smile broke across Shapiro's seamed face, and he almost laughed as a pleasant recollection crossed his mind. "You know," he said, "we've had cases where buses mistakenly got on a parkway - we had this on the Grand Central Parkway several times, I remember - buses from a foreign state, I suppose, and the first bridge stopped them dead. One had it's roof rolled up like the top of a sardine can."