4. From Horses to Housing

Two public events are taking place in Jamaica: one is in connection with a great housing development and the other is where the State is getting its first ante from gambling. This is progress and that is regression. We are giving something to the people and they are taking away something the people cannot afford to lose.

Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in 1940, on the occasion of laying the cornerstone for South Jamaica Houses, speaking of Jamaica Racetrack.

Horses raced at Jamaica Racetrack for fifty-six years, from 1903 to 1959. The track’s primary creator, Timothy “Big Tim” Sullivan, was one of the most powerful and colorful of the leaders of Tammany Hall of his era, one of a long line of Tammany sachems who would also dabble in equine entrepreneurship. Jamaica would remain firmly in the ambit of Tammany throughout its existence. (Generally, if you didn’t like Tammany politics, you didn’t much like horse racing, and for progressives like La Guardia a hatred of both was a natural parlay.)1

The Jamaica track never had an impressive physical plant or enjoyed much respect among the touts. Common nicknames included “Foot Sore Downs,” and “the Meat Grinder.”2 The New York Times sports columnist Arthur Daley complained in 1953 that the track “has less comfort than a Bronx Express at rush hour.”3 When it closed there was none of the elaborate gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that, two years before, had accompanied the decision of the Dodgers and Giants to decamp for California. With two other nearby Thoroughbred tracks, Aqueduct and Belmont Park, the regulars perhaps permitted themselves a brief effusion of regret, shrugged their shoulders, and then moved on to other places to lose their money.4 The same demolition crew that had been pelted with rocks at Ebbets Field was able to work at Jamaica unmolested.5

Figure 5. Shoppers in the Rochdale Consumers Cooperative Supermarket, ca. 1964, probably in the temporary supermarket set up in the former grandstand of the Jamaica Racetrack. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University.

And yet, there was nothing second-rate about Jamaica Racetrack. In the early 1950s, with almost two million customers a year, the Jamaica Racetrack was the most popular sports venue in New York City, with a higher paid attendance than any of the city’s three baseball teams.6 Led by Man o’ War (who had two of his twenty victories at Jamaica) all the greatest names of the time in racing, human and animal, appeared on its oval. The Wood Memorial (named after a former owner of the track) was the most important race for three-year-olds in the New York metropolitan area after the Belmont Stakes. (It is now run at Aqueduct.)

When the track opened, in 1903, its setting was rustic and bucolic, described in the opening day program as “near enough to the sea to get the salt breeze on the warmest days, nestled though it is in the heart of a bit of beautiful rolling, fertile country.”7 The ambience would soon change, and there would be no more talk of wafted breezes. The area was developed and urbanized, and tracts of modest private homes would soon proliferate in the area. The track was on the fuzzy boundary between South Jamaica and Springfield (or, as it would become known by the 1950s, with a new suburbanized name, Springfield Gardens).8 By 1943, a study showed that “development has taken place in every area adjacent to the large Jamaica Racetrack, including an area near Merrick Boulevard (just to the west of the track), which has become ‘a better class Negro community’ of private homes.” Within a decade, the area around the racetrack would be predominantly black, and this would cement its location within the expanding community of South Jamaica.9

Racetracks do not, as a rule, make great neighbors. They attract a raffish crowd of carousers and heavy traffic on race days, while otherwise standing empty and inert, as was the case with the Jamaica track more than three hundred days a year. And as Jamaica found itself increasingly surrounded by private homes in the 1930s and 1940s, it was not merely La Guardia progressives but also real estate developers who suggested that the site was being underutilized. As early as the late 1920s there were suggestions that Jamaica might be replaced by a track elsewhere on Long Island, and that the city and state would earn more in taxes if Jamaica Racetrack were torn down and the site developed for residential use.10 In 1941 a real estate developer complained that the Jamaica track depressed the real estate value of a thousand acres of surrounding real estate by at least 10 percent, and had all the real estate utility of a cemetery. He estimated that 850 private homes could be constructed on the site and that the city would reap a sixfold increase in tax revenues.11

But the war postponed any talk of closing the track. And in the immediate postwar period there was a great surge of interest in horse racing that confirmed its position as the most popular spectator sport in the United States. In 1952, more than 45 million people went to racetracks in the United States, compared with 14.6 million attending major league baseball games.12 But the new popularity of horse racing placed New York track owners in a quandary. To keep pace with new suburban tracks, the city’s aging and dowdy courses required sprucing up; at the same time, the increased popularity of racing led city and state officials to demand a larger percentage of the take.13 One possible solution, given that Jamaica, Aqueduct, and Belmont were within ten miles of each other on the southern rim of Long Island, was to sell one of them in order to raise funds to refurbish the other two.

If, as was generally assumed, Belmont, the most prestigious of the three, remained open, the choice came down to Jamaica or Aqueduct. Although Jamaica had the highest annual attendance, it had a number of comparative disadvantages: no direct subway connection (only the LIRR); and because it was hedged in with private houses on all sides, it had less room for needed expansion. Furthermore, the density of the surrounding urban settlement made Jamaica’s underlying land more valuable than that of the two other tracks. There was the additional factor that Jamaica Racetrack was located in an African American neighborhood, and though it is plausible that that fact figured in the decision to shut it down, I have no evidence to support that idea, despite an extensive search. In any event, even without a racial dimension, the logic for selling Jamaica rather than Aqueduct was compelling. In September 1954, the Jockey Club, the organization that supervised Thoroughbred racing in New York State, announced a plan to sell Jamaica Racetrack, improve Belmont, and transform Aqueduct into a “dream track.”14 Although Jamaica had its defenders, some of whom argued that selling “the best earner and the most popular track,” was not the way to proceed, Jamaica seemed to be the odd track out.15

But the sale of Jamaica for housing was contingent on a number of related factors. The ownership of the state’s four Thoroughbred tracks (Saratoga in addition to the Long Island tracks), each owned by a separate, closely held private corporation, had to be consolidated into a new not-for profit corporation formed to govern racing in the state. This was done in 1955, with the creation of the Greater New York Association—it would be given a more descriptive name, the New York Racing Association (NYRA), in 1958—despite the worries of some that the consolidation was an example of creeping socialism that would stifle innovation in the racing industry.16 In 1955 the new association acquired the outstanding stock of Jamaica Racetrack for about $10.2 million.17 Expansion of Aqueduct required the participation and agreement of the Port Authority of New York, which owned the land adjacent to the track at Idlewild Airport that Aqueduct needed for expansion, and this took several years of negotiation. Probably most importantly, the right buyer at the right price had to be found for Jamaica. All this ensured, despite the announcement to sell the track in September 1954, that there would be several more years of racing at Jamaica.

One person who was, not surprisingly, very interested in the talk of the possible sale of Jamaica Racetrack was Robert Moses. Although he was city construction coordinator, his ability to determine the use of the site was not ensured. Ultimately it was the elected officials who made up the Board of Estimate (the mayor, comptroller, president of the City Council, and the five borough presidents) who would make the final decision on land use. Moses could make a proposal to the Board of Estimate, find backers and developers, and arrange financing, but others could (and did) as well.

In July 1955, when the reorganization of the state’s racetracks had been approved, Moses wrote Mayor Wagner: “Will you please let me know if you wish us to pursue the plan to have the city purchase the Jamaica Track?”18 Plans to convert the racetrack to housing had been on Moses’s drawing board for some time. But two years later, after Moses had done much to move the project along, the final deal was still very far from being consummated. He wrote one of his aides, asking “What can we do to get a hold on Jamaica track before other interests go after it?”19 As in many of his deals, including the planning for Rochdale, Moses was more the middle man than the power broker, trying to simultaneously balance several competing groups of public officials with contending private parties.20

Before what would become Rochdale emerged as Moses’s favored plan for the site, he considered several other options. According to Abraham Kazan, Moses’s first idea for the site was for low-income housing.21 If this is true, there is little trace of it in the record, and there are reasons for doubting Moses ever pursued such a plan for very long. For one thing, if the entire Jamaica site had been used for low income housing it would have been by far the largest project in the NYCHA, and as we have seen in the last chapter, by 1955 local community groups were vociferously protesting far smaller low-income NYCHA projects in the area, not wanting this unique area of black middle-class housing to be overwhelmed by large low-income housing developments. Nevertheless, in Moses’s earliest extant thoughts he did suggest that a component of Jamaica be reserved for low-income housing. He wrote to Wagner in 1955 that he was thinking of using the site “for public, middle income and higher rental housing with appropriate incidental improvements.”22 Although he repeated this idea several times in the summer of 1955, it went nowhere.23 In early 1956 he was toying with the possibility of building prefabricated concrete houses. This development would have been, in Moses’s words, “middle-income stuff” with the houses selling for about $8,000, comparable to the price of a new house in Levittown and other suburban developments. This too went nowhere.24

In the summer of 1955, when Walter O’Malley first announced publicly that, if the Brooklyn Dodgers didn’t get the deal he wanted in Downtown Brooklyn, he would consider moving the club to Los Angeles, there was a brief flurry of interest in a new stadium at Jamaica. Moses wrote to John Flynn, the publisher of the Daily News, in August 1955 that while “the Long Island Rail Road Terminal [at Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues in Downtown Brooklyn] is a dead issue with the Dodgers in it,” there might “be a new Long Island, as distinguished from a Brooklyn field in Queens at the Jamaica Track combined with housing and other improvements in one very fine imaginative plan.” Several days later he wrote much the same to John Cashmore, borough president of Brooklyn.25 The idea died a quick death, as did Moses’s other (and also eminently reasonable) suggestion that the Dodgers consider relocating to Flushing Meadows Park in Queens.

O’Malley blamed Moses for the failure of a Downtown Brooklyn deal, and though many historians have sided with O’Malley on this, accusing Moses of driving the Dodgers from Brooklyn is unjust. Title I acquisition of the land desired by O’Malley would have been exorbitantly expensive for the city, and Moses was genuinely concerned that it was inappropriate to use Title I money solely to benefit a private for-profit concern that would create no new housing.26 Moses complained in another letter to Flynn in August 1955 that the Dodgers owner was issuing a “Macedonian Cry.”27 (Acts 16:9, for those rusty in their New Testament exegesis: “And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing beseeching him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’”) Although Moses thought the location of a new stadium near the Nassau County line might be attractive for suburban fans, O’Malley apparently had little interest, and given the racial composition of South Jamaica, he probably would rather have moved the Dodgers to Macedonia. Perhaps what is most interesting about the episode is that it shows Moses’s great enthusiasm for the potential of the Jamaica site.

By 1956 Moses thought the best plan for Jamaica would be middle-income cooperative housing. The reason for his dropping the mixed-use plans are unclear, but there is little reason to doubt Abraham Kazan’s words that “by the time the Jamaica racetrack was made available Moses had learned that cooperative organizations were the most reliable and dependable [developers] to work with.”28 On October 4, 1956, Moses spoke at a meeting of the UHF, where he outlined his plans for a cooperative development at Jamaica. He proposed a $52 million cooperative ($34 million less than it eventually cost) with 4,600 apartments, with about a quarter of the 170 acre site devoted to schools, parks, and playgrounds. Kazan was interested from the outset in what would have been, by far, the largest cooperative project he ever tackled.29

But neither Kazan nor Moses were in a position to implement their plans for the Jamaica site without a lot of assistance, most specifically from the racetrack’s new owners, the Greater New York Association and its successor, the NYRA. Almost immediately after the Jockey Club announced the plan to sell Jamaica in late 1954, its new owners, the Greater New York Association, started to have seller’s remorse, and started to consider taking the track off the market because of Jamaica’s profitability and perceived difficulties in the expansion of Aqueduct. In April 1956, the Times ran an article under the headline “Role for Jamaica in Racing Hinted.”30

Moses’s speech to the UHF in October 1956 on the use of Jamaica for cooperative housing was perhaps an effort to nudge its owners towards selling. If so, the gambit failed. By the next February, he was writing to Mayor Wagner’s aides, asking him to write to Governor Harriman to see if he could pull the necessary strings to satisfy the Greater New York Association. “Either all the talk about large scale middle income housing (at Jamaica) means something or it doesn’t. This must be put on our program or stricken off it.”31 The next month Moses was encouraging Kazan to contact Harriman directly, bearing the same message.32 All in all, as the Times put it in October 1957, Moses was “Annoyed by a ‘Slow’ Track.”33

Nonetheless, negotiations continued, and Moses wrote one of his lieutenants in February 1958 that the chief lawyer of the Greater New York Association “says there will no trouble in agreeing on the price for the Jamaica track.”34 In April he conveyed to the organization an offer of $25,000 per acre, which would have come to about $4,250,000.35 This was dismissed as inadequate. In their 1957–58 Annual Report, the NYRA coyly refused to restate their intentions to sell the racetrack—“only time can determine the future of Jamaica”—and committed the association to keeping it open for at least several additional years, with a final determination to be made only after the renovations on the other tracks were completed.36

Moses, as only he could do, hit the ceiling. He wrote to the NYRA’s lawyer that “in the course of fairly long public employment and service, I do not recall anything quite like this runaround.” He wanted straight answers from the NYRA on the future of Jamaica; he reminded their lawyer that the NYRA now had a quasi-public function, and he threatened to take up with the governor their blocking of “ahousing matter of very large public importance on which we have been working with the big unions and the financial interests.” Moses, as he often did when he was giving someone an epistolary dressing down, made sure that all the relevant people knew about his anger, and sent copies to Governor Harriman, State Attorney General Jacob Javits, and State Comptroller Arthur Levitt. Negotiations with the NYRA continued.37

Moses continued to push hard for the Jamaica project. Sometimes he bared his teeth, as in a November 1958 letter to the NYRA’s chief lawyer in which he wrote, “you are a man of action and in your more serious moments have a sense of the difference between time and eternity. Incidentally, I don’t like to be kidded by my friends.”38 And sometimes he worked behind the scenes to smooth out difficulties, as when he persuaded the Port Authority to lease to the NYRA four hundred acres near Aqueduct to be used for stables.39

The Jamaica project would mark a decisive break in the Moses-Kazan collaborations in two significant ways. First, unlike their other joint ventures since the creation of the UHF, they would not develop the cooperative through Title I, but through a state program, the Limited Profit Housing Companies Act of 1955, commonly known as the Mitchell-Lama law after its two sponsors, Republican State Senator MacNeil Mitchell and Democratic Assemblyman Alfred Lama, which provided extensive tax abatements and subsidies of up to 40 percent to developers of middle-income housing who agreed to limit themselves to profits of no more than 6 percent.

The Mitchell-Lama law emerged out of the perception of a crisis in middle-income housing in postwar New York City, a sense that the almost exponential growth of suburbs was robbing the city of jobs, culture, and vitality, and that the city needed new ways to compete against the availability of attractive and affordable private homes over the city line. The New York Times ran a series of articles in 1952 about what one letter writer called New York City’s “vanishing middle class.” The paper warned that without a middle-income housing program, “New York will become an urban core inhabited mainly by those wealthy enough to afford luxury apartments or poor enough to remain in slums or qualify for public housing.”40 This concern became a major issue in the 1953 mayoral campaign, as one of the main planks in the victorious Robert F. Wagner’s platform, and was echoed by Averill Harriman the following year in his successful run for governor.41 Moses supported the Mitchell-Lama law, and by one account, even stole the credit for the initial idea. He too agreed, as he stated in a 1956 speech, that unless a city had a large middle class to separate “the crust which represents the poor and the icing that represents the rich” the extreme contrasts of poverty and wealth would make democratic life in cities impossible.42

But if there was broad (though by no means universal) support for the Mitchell-Lama law and its goal of expanding middle-income housing, as a New York Times reporter wrote Moses in 1958, “nearly everyone has a different definition of ‘middle income.’”43 Harriman’s commissioner of housing, writing in the same year, acknowledged that “middle income housing is a loosely used term with an infinite number of definitions and an equal variety of interpretations.”44 The rough tripartite division of housing into low, middle, and upper income was characterized as much by function as by price. In general, new low-income housing was built and controlled directly by the state or the city, generally controlled by the New York City Housing Authority, with per-room rents under $20. Upper income was privately owned housing, charging what the market would bear, with the lower limit at $35 or $40 per room. Middle-income housing was a term of art, which generally meant privately built, government aided, and offered at below market rates, as at Rochdale.

Figure 6. The creators of Rochdale Village gather at the groundbreaking for Co-op City in May 1966, from left, with juvenile groundbreakers: UHF executive vice president Harold Ostroff, Robert Moses, UHF lawyer Robert Szold, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and UHF president Jacob Potofsky, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, retired UHF president Abraham Kazan, and Bronx borough president Herman Badillo. Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Records, Kheel Center, Cornell University. Photograph by Sam Reiss.

The UHF generally shunned the label “middle income” for its cooperatives, preferring to describe themselves as builders of “low and moderate cost” housing or the makers of “houses within the financial means of working people.”45 The average carrying charges at Rochdale was $21 per room—as low as $16 per room, or as high as $22.46 Middle-income housing in the early 1960s was generally defined as falling between $20 and $30 per room, but could rise to almost $40 per room.47 Rochdale Village was on the low end of the range of middle-income housing, overlapping with the more expensive housing of the “lower income” variety.

This was Moses’s view as well: middle-income housing was subsidized private housing in the range of $20–$30 per room, the lower in the range the better.48 In 1958 he stated that “by combining partial tax exemption and liberal mortgage financing, the present normal rental of $38 to $40 per room can be brought down to $25 a room. And non-profit cooperatives could reduce these rates further to $20 to $22 a room.”49 In his 1956 speech on Jamaica Moses proposed that, if proper financing was found, the apartments could be made available at a rent or carrying charge of $21–22 per room per month. When Rochdale opened in 1963, Moses proved a good prophet.50

But determining the rental price of a middle-income cooperative was as much a matter of politics as economics, and this was one reason middle-income housing was so difficult to define. There were always those who felt that it was unfair to build new middle-income housing, since many people of comparable income were getting by without any governmental largess. As one irate homeowner wrote Governor Rockefeller in early 1959, “What is ‘middle income’ housing anyway? If it’s up to $6,500 a year, there are plenty of families in this bracket that own one family homes. The more middle income projects are set up, the more these same home owners will have to shell out in taxes.”51 On the other hand, as a 1958 report by the State Division of Housing claimed, there was a “housing void” for families with annual incomes between $5,000 to $7,000, who “cannot afford purchase or rental housing on the open market; yet are not eligible for public housing because their income is slightly higher than the maximum permitted.” As a result, the report concluded, “many of these families dwell in slums or crowd into accommodations inadequate for the conduct of decent family life.”52

For Moses, determining the proper rental rates for middle-income cooperatives involved finding a golden mean; too low and it would seem like too much of a giveaway to middle-income families, too high and private developers would complain about the government treading on their toes. Moses was careful not to bundle together too many tax breaks in a single project. For this reason, he had refused to combine Mitchell-Lama tax breaks with Title I funding.53 He warned his friends in the cooperative movement in 1958 that they “must be careful to recognize the limits of city aid. It is theoretically possible to reduce rentals still further by more and more tax exemption.” However, this could not be done, because it would “cause widespread opposition from those who pay in full to projects.”54 And when in 1958 a UHF official proposed an expanded tax abatement that would bring down the per room carrying charges at Jamaica to $17 per room, Moses would have nothing to do with it, complaining that the proposal’s “tax reduction figures are completely unrealistic” and would especially make a bad impression on “the public, especially the surrounding population in Queens.”55

And the Jamaica project would have many critics. Longtime housing gadfly Vito Battista in 1960 railed against “discriminatory practices bankrupting small property owners and taxpayers,” among which he singled out the Jamaica project as a “big pie” for favored “land barons,” who reaped the rewards while “forcing other taxpayers to foot the tax bill.”56 A more powerful critic was Queens borough president James J. Crisona, who wrote Moses in March 1958 of the difficulties he had encountered in reducing “the resistance of the home owners to this project because of the tax exemption feature.”57 Moses played one side off against the other to reach the compromise he had wanted all along, of about $21 per room carrying charges.

But although middle-income housing could be financed either through Title I or Mitchell-Lama, by 1959 Moses was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the Title I process as a whole, and especially the attenuated waits for approvals. In 1959 he complained to J. Anthony Panuch, a special adviser to Mayor Wagner on housing issues, about the “tremendous red tape and delay” in approvals and that the regional office of the Housing and Home Finance Agency had “gone to great lengths to delay and interfere with projects, bypass the official committee and stimulate, encourage, and confirm irresponsible press stories and ‘disclosures’ especially those involving Title I.”58

Kazan similarly felt that Title I led to piecemeal urban renewal at best. Compared with Kazan’s model, in which 20,000 units of new cooperative housing would be built annually, Title I kept new housing down to a trickle. Rather than transforming the city’s housing problem, Title I ensured that the best efforts of housing reformers would be a frustrating game of catch-up. “From experience we find that it takes three years before a Title I job is approved and another two years to build it. The increasing shortage of housing during this five-year period more than offsets the number of units that are built.”59 For both men the Mitchell-Lama route, which by 1958, its third year of operation, had twenty-five housing projects either planned or under construction, was the obvious alternative.60 And by the end of 1959 Moses would write that the “Jamaica Track project under the Construction Coordinator and with state aid and no federal participation is the most important development by far in pointing the way, establishing a future, workable, large scale middle income cooperative program.”61

The Jamaica project marked another, and even more significant, break with previous Moses-Kazan collaborations. Since only horses needed to be relocated, and involved a single property owner, it did not require the use of eminent domain, the most controversial aspect of Title I funding, which permitted municipalities to acquire parcels of urban land and present them at reduced rates to developers. One of the reasons he regularly in the late 1950s called Jamaica his favorite ongoing project, Moses said gleefully on more than one occasion, was there were “no people to move.” As early as his letter to Wagner in 1955 about the racetrack he emphasized that the site would be “vacant.”62 In one of his final efforts to close the deal, a frantic telegram to Governor Nelson Rockefeller in January 1960, Moses stressed that the project “does not involve moving people.”63

Tenant relocations had become an increasing problem for Moses. Of all of Moses’s main policy initiatives, those that involved relocating people were by far the most controversial, and by the late 1950s, as the size and ambition of his projects grew, so did the clamor of criticism against Moses’s relocation plans. In 1959 he wrote to Anthony Panuch that a “major difficulty is increasing trouble where relocation from presently built-up areas is concerned. No reliable official support. This promotes irresponsible press criticism and attacks by self-serving civic and tenant organizations…. The minute opposition of any kind develops, the local officials concerned fall apart, lose their nerve and interest.”64 Abraham Kazan remembered, “the difficulties he [Moses] had encountered in clearing the Lincoln Center site were still fresh in his mind when he learned that the Jamaica racetrack was going to be given up.”65

Kazan also was happy to have a project without tenant relocations. Relocations had been required in all of Kazan’s Lower East Side cooperatives. In alliance with Moses, the UHF became one of the most prominent beneficiaries of Moses’s aggressive use of Title I. But by the late 1950s Kazan’s cooperatives were becoming increasingly controversial for this very reason. The expansion of the Seward Park cooperative was blocked in the late 1950s, largely because of community opposition to demolitions.66 The massive cooperative planned south of Pennsylvania Station—itself soon to become New York City’s most famous martyr to the wrecking ball—spawned community protests over the demolition of a fifteen-block area, opposition that was eventually overcome through compromise.67 And in 1959–60, in the Cooper Square area of what was beginning to be called the East Village, community protests derailed another planned UHF cooperative, the Robert Owen Houses. When the plans for the Robert Owen Houses fell through, the UHF encouraged the several hundred people who had already applied for apartments to apply for a place in Rochdale Village.68

The interest of Moses and Kazan in projects without tenant removals went beyond worries about political fallout. It was obviously less expensive to build without needing to pay for tenant relocations, and permitted faster demolition and construction, which also provided a financial savings. Beyond the lack of tenants, both Kazan and Moses were excited by the size of the Jamaica lot, 170 acres of undivided space. As Moses mused in 1957, the site “would be on a big-enough scale so that we could do a bang-up planning and building job there.”69 In 1958 he encouraged labor unions to “tackle a giant cooperative project at the Jamaica track where at least 20,000 people of moderate means might live in comfort on one hundred and seventy acres of presently vacant land, in the very center of the City, under as nearly ideal conditions as we can muster in this vale of tears.”70

But as 1959 began, the deal was far from sealed. In April 1959 Moses proposed to Kazan to purchase the racetrack for $6 million, as part of an $82.5 million project of which the state would contribute $19 million.71 As this indicates, Moses still assumed that the UHF would be able to pick up the lion’s share of the project’s costs. But the UHF, backed by a consortium of labor unions, had no funds of its own. Each cooperative venture had its own separate syndicate of backers, usually a combination of labor union pension funds and savings banks. The ILGWU had been particularly active, and was the major union sponsor for two cooperative projects, the East River Houses—sometimes known as the ILGWU Houses—and Penn South. Local financial institutions such as the Bowery Savings Bank were also major backers. But neither unions nor banks were particularly interested in investing in developing Jamaica Racetrack. As Kazan said in his oral history, “The UHF finances were not in good shape. Moses assumed the UHF was rolling in dough. I didn’t dare tell him the true facts.”72 The ILGWU, having invested in two UHF cooperatives, was reluctant to tie up more of its money in a project its president, David Dubinsky, considered more risky and far more expensive than any previous UHF cooperative.73

No one else wanted to back the UHF’s plans for Jamaica, either. Moses tried to get Chase Manhattan Bank to loan some money for the project. The chairman of the bank, John J. McCloy, whose imperiousness was at least equal to that of Moses—a man who as assistant secretary of war during World War II had been a chief implementer of the Japanese internment policy on the West Coast—no doubt looked at the controversies surrounding Moses’s tenant relocations as strictly penny-ante. He turned down Moses and the UHF cold. McCloy told Kazan that you are “dreaming” if he thought the bank would go along with Moses’s proposal.74 Proposals to get the Equitable Life Assurance Company, Ford Foundation, or New York Life on board went nowhere.75 Moses would take a second bite of the apple with Chase Manhattan, trying to interest the somewhat more pliant vice-chairman, David Rockefeller, in the Jamaica cooperative, but this too failed to materialize. Moses was still at square one.76

Moses was, as we have seen, certainly not above threatening his allies. He wrote an aide in April 1959 that he wanted “a definite answer from Mr. Kazan and Harry Van Arsdale [the powerful president of the New York Central Labor Council, and one of the most important backers of the UHF] as to whether or not their groups will sponsor the Jamaica Track project…. Let’s say if he’s not interested we are going to approach others immediately.”77 But this was an idle threat. Kazan was of course deeply committed to the project, and no one but Kazan could have provided cooperative housing at the size and scale needed and at the price Moses desired—about $21–$22 per room—as efficiently as the UHF. But both sides continued to press their own interests.

Moses, in the midst of the Jamaica negotiations, provoked a temporary rupture between himself and Kazan when, in 1958, he accepted Fred (father of Donald) Trump’s bid for the land in Brooklyn Kazan had coveted for a large cooperative project.78 (Trump was offering more than Kazan, and for his own political reasons and for placating potential critics, Moses wanted to see some of the for-profit developers get a cut of the middle-income development pie as well.) When Kazan sulked over what he considered Moses’s betrayal in the deal with Trump, and made noises about his lessened interest in Jamaica, Moses tried to coax him back into negotiations, and eventually backtracked from his decision to give the entire plot to Trump; he worked out a compromise, eventually adopted, in which the UHF and Trump would share the land, and the two developers would build, respectively, Amalgamated Warbasse Houses and Trump City.79

Moses tried to assuage Kazan’s hurt feelings, and reminded him of his broader ambitions: “Let me add that I am more than ever convinced that the Jamaica Track project, properly carried through, because of its size, conspicuous location, freedom from tenant removal, and from Washington red tape, etc., will pave the way for the big state aided middle income cooperative program we all want.”80 At the same time, when Kazan balked at the $6.5 million land acquisition costs, Moses told him that there was no other way forward, and tried to get him to go along with a promise and a veiled threat. “It will be very easy to wreck this plan, and if it goes down, your larger program which might be advanced if we have the example of Jamaica Race Track will go down with it.”81

There was another problem with the Jamaica project that could be discussed only in whispers—Jamaica Racetrack was in South Jamaica, and there were many who saw the building of a huge middle-income cooperative in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood as a profoundly risky venture, one that would not attract whites, and one that, because it was more expensive than low-income housing, would be out the range of many black families as well. As Kazan related in his oral history: “The property was located in South Jamaica, a section of the borough populated with colored people. To induce white people to move into a predominantly colored area was a difficult task to accomplish. This was the primary reason why Harry Van Arsdale, member of the board of the UHF, was very cool, or at least not enthusiastic about the project.”82 Other labor leaders who usually backed the UHF also worried that whites would be afraid to move to South Jamaica and blacks would be reluctant to move into a massive cooperative in sufficient numbers.83 Kazan felt the only way the cooperative had any chance of success and of not becoming, in his words, “a white elephant,” was to keep prices as low as possible, and to achieve this, the interest rates on the funds lent to the UHF had to be shaved to the absolute minimum.84

Whether Kazan would have walked if favorable terms were not arranged is not clear—it seems unlikely—but in the end the deal was at least as important to Moses as it was to Kazan. He would not let it fail. Perhaps external events made him even more determined, more committed to closing a deal that he knew would win plaudits. The summer of 1959 was perhaps the most difficult period in his public career. A series of exposés, especially at the troubled Manhattantown project, created a cloud of scandal that even Moses’s usually effective publicity machine was unable to blow away, and the critical voices went beyond the usual voices in the city’s liberal press, like the New York Post and the Nation, and breached the pages of the usually supportive (some would say sycophantic) New York Times.85 Moses was undeterred, and when pressed that summer he continued to emphasize his unfinished work, with the Jamaica project often given pride of place.86

The final day of racing at Jamaica was August 2, and on August 20, the Board of Estimate tentatively approved the Jamaica deal. Nonetheless, the last months of finalizing a project are invariably the most hectic and pressured, and the effort to close the deal on Jamaica proved no exception. Moses still needed a way to fund it. The road to funding went through Albany, and Moses proceeded to pay court to Governor Rockefeller. Rockefeller was sympathetic to the cause, though he and his staff required some prodding. Rockefeller had never met Kazan before, and Moses thought that a meeting would improve the chances of the deal, writing Rockefeller on September 17, 1959, that Kazan and his allies “know their stuff and they won’t waste your time.”87

James Gaynor, Rockfeller’s commissioner of housing, tried to block the deal by urging the governor not to meet with Kazan, arguing the tax breaks were too extensive; Gaynor feared a face-to-face meeting at which the eager-to-please Rockefeller might give away the store, making concessions he was not authorized to offer.88 Moses managed to get past this roadblock, arguing that Kazan was the only person who could bring off this cooperative development, that Kazan would walk if the per-room average cost was greater than $21, and that all the planned tax breaks were necessary for the deal’s completion.89

The meeting was arranged: just Kazan, the president of the Amalgamated Bank, Rockefeller, and a secretary. Kazan initially was worried. “I wasn’t convinced about anything when I went into the room. The difficulties that we generally had in negotiating for mortgage money were caused by the fact that cooperators were not very popular with bankers and other people not thoroughly acquainted with the idea of cooperation…. Nelson Rockefeller didn’t have any experience with cooperatives himself.” Kazan told the governor that he “needed someone to really roll up their sleeves and go to work in order to get the project built.” He got the answer he wanted (and perhaps the answer that some of Rockefeller’s associates feared). “The governor announced that not only would he be willing to roll up his sleeves but to take off his shirt and go to work and see that the job was done…. The meeting was informal, with a very friendly approach to the matter…. He was really interested in doing something for the project. He was very, very easy to talk to. No high-hattedness about him.”90

Of the $86 million it cost to build Rochdale, all the money provided by outside sources came from various state agencies. Moses thereafter arranged, as he invariably did with his projects, the necessary real estate tax exemptions with the city comptroller.91 Without the collaboration of the two most powerful men in New York State, Robert Moses and Nelson Rockefeller, Rochdale Village never would have been built.92

After making some progress in the late summer and fall of 1959, negotiations with the state agencies stalled over the interest rates and the conditions of the loans, leading to a possibly Moses-inspired editorial in the New York Times on December 4, 1959, “Great Housing Opportunity,” urging Rockefeller to act with dispatch.93 The NYRA, now paying mortgage and upkeep on a property that they had no intention of using again for racing, was placing increasing pressure on Moses, informing him that alternative suitors for the Jamaica site were available and willing to pay more than the UHF.94 Moses tried to placate the NYRA, at once begging for more time and threatening them. And he continued to work on Kazan, telegraphing him that he needed to get his act together. In Kazan’s words, “In the meantime Moses was just as fearful as I was that the racetrack would be sold to someone else. On December 31 he sent me a long telegram insisting that I get my hard headed labor officials to realize that the racetrack people will dispose of the property and will not wait for us if we were going to dilly dally much longer.”95

Moses kept bombarding Rockefeller and the relevant members of the state government with the message that hesitation could result in failure.96 As an anonymous state official scribbled on a memo: “Moses keeps hollering that we will lose the opportunity unless we have immediate action.”97 More snags led the NYRA to tell Moses that “one problem after another, sponsorship, financing, tax exemption, et cetera, has appeared to delay the transfer of the property” and that as a result the NYRA would offer the racetrack for private sale.98 This led to another flurry of desperate telegrams from Moses to Rockefeller and Wagner. After laying out the problems and his suggested solutions Moses concluded with a reminder to the governor that “this is the largest and most significant middle income cooperative housing project in the country.”99 The $86 million deal was announced on February 16, 1960. The State Department of Housing was to provide $19 million from a housing bond issue tied to Mitchell-Lama projects. The State Teachers Retirement System and the State Employees Retirement System, neither of which had lent money for housing before, would each provide mortgage loans of $28.5 million.100 (The UHF would provide $10 million, to be raised from down payments by Rochdale residents.)

Even after the financing was announced in Albany there was one final hurdle to clear, and a final chance for the deal to fall through. Before the deal could be approved by the Board of Estimate, another real estate developer, John J. Reynolds, came forward, maintaining he had been frozen out of negotiations, and claiming he could provide the city with more money for their trouble than the UHF. (He probably was the “other bidder” the NYRA made reference to in their correspondence with Moses in late 1959.)101

Reynolds was a prominent real estate developer, a longtime adviser to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese and a close associate of Joseph Kennedy in many deals.102 Reynolds argued before the Board of Estimate that he could develop the racetrack without any tax abatements. “This is practically a giveaway,” said Reynolds. “Every real estate man in the city should be down here today objecting to this transaction.” Kazan claimed that Reynolds made “a vicious attack on me personally” before the Board of Estimate.103 The Municipal Court justice Jenkin R. Hockert, who represented the Central Queens Allied Civic Council and the North Shore Council, spoke before the Board of Estimate, decrying those who were thinking of moving to Rochdale as shirkers and societal parasites. “I, for one, would be ashamed to live in a half-tax cooperative knowing that although I was financially capable I was not carrying my full responsibility.”104 There was, perhaps, an undercurrent of anti-Semitism in some of these attacks; apartment-dwelling Jews reap the benefits of Mitchell-Lama tax abatements while hardworking gentile homeowners do not. In any event, the efforts of Reynolds and those who supported him did not work. Mayor Wagner was not impressed, especially when Reynolds mentioned that apartments in his development would rent for an average of $38 a month. That, said Wagner, didn’t sound like middle-income housing to him.105

On April 28, the Board of Estimate approved Rochdale Village 20–2, with James J. Lyons, the Bronx borough president, casting the only dissenting votes. (Borough presidents had two votes on the Board of Estimate.)106 This was one of Moses’s last major deals. Only the week before, his Slum Clearance Committee was replaced by the Housing and Redevelopment Board, and the powers he had long exercised over the city housing policy were waning. In all the complex negotiations over Rochdale in Albany, he was an outside exhorter, with no real power in the governor’s councils, and he was reduced to hectoring from the sidelines. Moses had written to Rockefeller in the fall of 1959, “I had the devil’s own time persuading the labor leaders to agree to sponsor this project.”107 Moses was being too modest. He had a difficult time with almost everyone involved in the development of Jamaica Racetrack, from labor leaders, to bankers, to government officials. It would have been very easy for the plans for a huge integrated middle-income housing cooperative in South Jamaica to fall apart because of its inherent difficulties and challenges; the need to balance tax breaks against political realities, the need to find funding for a project that most intelligent observers deemed risky and speculative, and the need to control the racial fears that threatened to derail it. If many share in the credit for the creation of Rochdale, its prime mover, its only begetter, its power broker, was Robert Moses. The existence of Rochdale Village is a tribute to his powers of persuasion and his dogged persistence.