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Re: Brooklyn Dodgers (on topic) |
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Posted by Michael549 on Fri Jul 27 13:06:58 2007, in response to Re: Brooklyn Dodgers (on topic), posted by GP38/R42 Chris on Thu Jul 26 12:21:49 2007. The Power Broker, by Robert Caro - pg 509-510Robert Moses built 255 neighborhood playgrounds in New York City during the 1930's. The adults and children who attended playground dedication ceremonies cheered when, at the end of the speeches, the fountain showers in the wading pools were turned on. and the cheers were echoed and amplified by the press. "Nothing Robert Moses has done is as great as what he has done with playgrounds," the World Telegram said. "He has bestowed an unqualified boon on the neighborhoods of this city." To dramatize the size of the achievement, Moses gave each playground a number, and the press counted along with him: Playground Number 189 Opens, the headlines said. Playground Number 194 Dedicated ... Playground 204 .... Playground 240... And he had his mapmakers prepare pairs of outline maps of the city, blank except for dots representing playgrounds. The map on the left would be labeled simply "1933," the year before he had become Park Commissioner, the one on the right simply "1937" (or "1938" or "1939"), and the contrast between the two maps was certainly spectacular, the one on the left almost empty, the one on the right covered thickly with dots. And public and press drew from the maps the conclusion that Moses wanted drawn from them: that his playground-building program was an unqualified improvement, an absolutely unalloyed benefit, to all people of New York City. A close inspection of the maps would have revealed some rather puzzling characteristics about the pattern formed by the dots. Their distribution, for example, was not at all even. The areas of the maps on which the dots were clustered most thickly corresponded in the main to those areas inhabited by families that were well-to-do or at least "comfortable". The areas of the maps on which the dots were sprinkled the most thinly corresponded in part to undeveloped outlying areas of the city that did not really need playgrounds, but they corresponded also to some of the city's most congested areas, to the tenements neighborhoods and slums inhabited by families that were poor -- to areas that needed playgrounds most. The areas of the maps on which the dots were sprinkled the most thinly of all corresponded to those areas of the city inhabited by its 400,000 Negroes. Robert Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City during the 1930's. He built on playground in Harlem. An overspill from Harlem had created Negro ghettos in two other areas of the city: Brooklyn's Stuyvesant Heights, the nucleus of the great slum that would become known as Bedford-Stuyvesant, and South Jamaica. Robert Moses built one playground in Stuyvesant Heights. He built no playgrounds in South Jamaica. [The rest of this section explains how those who noticed the difference in facilities were not listened to, even when the facts were plainly before them.] The Power Broker - Page 513-514 Moses built one pool in Harlem, in Colonial Park at 146th Street and he was determined that that was going to be the only pool that Negroes or Puerto Ricans, which classed with Negroes as "colored people" were going to use. He didn't want them "mixing" with white people in other pools, in part because he was afraid, probably wit cause, that "trouble" - fights and riots - would result; in part because, as one of his aides puts it, "Well, you know RM felt about colored people." The pool at with the danger of mixing was greatest was the one in Thomas Jefferson Park in La Guardia's old East Harlem congressional district. The district was white, but the pool, one block in from the East River, was located between 111th and 114th Streets. Not only was it close to Negro Harlem, but the city's Puerto Rican population, while still small, was already beginning to outgrow the traditional boundaries of "Spanish Harlem" just north of Central Park and to expand toward the east toward the pool. By the mid--Thirties, Puerto Ricans had reached Lexington Avenue, only four blocks away, and some had begun moving onto Third Avenue, only three blocks away. To discourage "colored" people from using the Thomas Jefferson Pool, Moses as he had gone so successfully at Jones Beach, employed only white lifeguards and attendants. But he was afraid that such "flagging" might not be a sufficient determent to mothers and fathers from the teeming Spanish tenements would be aware on a stifling August Sunday that cool water in which their children could play was only a few blocks away. So took another precaution. Corporation Counsel Windels was astonished at its simplicity, "We [Moses and I] were driving around Harlem one afternoon - he was showing me something or other, and I said, "Don't you have this problem with the Negroes over running you? He said, "Well, they don't like cold water and we've found that that helps." And then, Windel's says Moses told him confidentially that while heating plants at the other swimming pools kept the water at a comfortable seventy degrees, at the Thomas Jefferson Pool, the water was left unheated, so that its temperature, while not cold enough to bother white swimmers, would deter any "colored" people who happened to enter it once from returning. [The rest of the page describes how Negro and Puerto Rican residents would travel the distance to the Colonial Park Pool, rather than to use the Thomas Jefferson Park Pool, even if it were closer.] |
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