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| Re: Brooklyn Dodgers (on topic) (467409) | |||
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Re: Brooklyn Dodgers (on topic) |
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Posted by Michael549 on Sat Jul 28 02:42:03 2007, in response to Re: Brooklyn Dodgers (on topic), posted by GP38/R42 Chris on Fri Jul 27 23:11:02 2007. The Power Broker, Robert Caro, pg 492-3-4But Moses simply shouted the reformers down. He replied - in replies that received better newspaper "play" than the statements he was replying to - that he was giving the slums parks - great parks. What, he demanded, was the great recreational complex he was building on Randall's Island? The great recreational complex he was building at Riverside Park? They were "easily accessible" to Harlem. As for small parks within the slums themselves, his "experience," he said, had taught him that they were just "too expensive" to be considered. Three acres, he said, was the smallest area that could be "controlled and managed" as a park. And since three acres is 130,680 square feet and land bearing profitable slum tenements was going in the 1930's for about $30 per square foot and a single park would thus cost the city about $4,000,000 for land acquisition costs alone, and since as many as 2,500 people might he displaced by the razing of the tenements involved and would have to be relocated, this was an unanswerable argument - if you accepted it. Many reformers - far more than had ever disagreed with Moses before - did not accept it. A park did not have to be three acres to help a slum, they said. It could be the smallest crevice in the grim wall of tenements; even a space the size of a single 100 foot by 20 foot building lot - or smaller - could if planted with grass and a few trees or if equipped with a few benches mean so much to the people of the block on which it was located. Something does not have to be big to brighten something that is drab, to bring pride to a place without any pride. Because they have nothing else to do, the people of the slums spend a lot of time looking out their windows; if there was a small park, even a tiny park, in the neighborhood, there would be a pleasant little scene to look at, something affirmative; even if there was no grass in the park there could be a few benches - and all at the once the neighborhood would have a better place to rest than the fenders of parked cars; a vest pocket park could be an elegant little plaza, but it could also be just a place for a kid to play or the elderly to relax - or for a pregnant mother to sit down for a minute on a walk home from the grocery store that suddenly seemed longer than it ever had before. The reformers, experts in parks, knew there were good small parks in other cities; they knew that Moses' argument was wrong. Furthermore, these reformers said, Randall's Island and Riverside Park were not "easily accessible" to the slums. The Triborough Bridge would make the island accessible by car, but the people of the slums didn't have cars. There would, by Moses' edict, be no bus service to the island; the only way to get there would be to walk - from the nearest point in Harlem or the South Bronx a good three-quarters of a mile. And that was from the nearest point of the slums, the edge of the river. From most of the slums, you would have to walk much further; from the center of Harlem, then 145th Street, say, more than two miles. Riverside Park along the Hudson River was a hike up a long, achingly steep hill from the nearest point in Harlem. People didn't want to hike long distances to parks; they wanted recreational facilities close at hand, so that every trip to sit under a tree or shoot some baskets didn't have to be an expedition. The people of the slums wouldn't use those parks, they said. Morningside, St. Nicholas, and Colonial Parks, the three parks which formed the western border of Harlem, were fine, they said, but there was no park between them and the East River. In the entire three square miles of Harlem, an area which contained 300,000 people, there wasn't a single patch of green. But while newspapers printed the reformers' resolutions, they did not support them editorially. And the reform front on the issue was not solid. The prestigious Park Association of New York City was dominated by elderly park fighters clung to the old view of parks; its insistence that Central Park be kept for passive contemplation was the proof of the way it really felt. And while its president, Mrs. Sultzberger, was more liberal on the point than many of her colleagues, Mrs. Sultzberger was not criticizing Robert Moses. And Moses was not listening to criticism, anyway. When an alderman from Harlem wrote to Moses appealing for more playgrounds, Moses replied that he was, of course, "in entire sympathy with what you have in mind" but that "the sites you suggest are too expensive. We shall provide one playground in Harlem...." When the alderman ventured to write him again on the subject, Moses declined to continue the correspondence. |
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