2. The Anti-Utopian

ROBERT MOSES

I am more and more doubtful of definitive biographies, of the conscientious, scholarly winnowing of unrelated bits of grain from vast quantities of chaff; of the lurid, imaginative historical novels revealing intimate details of daily lives and thoughts of departed great men; the caricatures of kings, statesmen, poets, actors and artists, full of “atmosphere,” fiction and subtle distortion; the candid photograph; the distorted etching.

Robert Moses, A Tribute to Governor Smith

One week before Rochdale Village opened, Robert Moses published a long article about the new cooperative in the Long Island Press, the daily newspaper for southeastern Queens.1 Moses was proud of what he had wrought on the grounds of the former Jamaica Racetrack, and as usual, he was not one to hide his light under a bushel. Moses’s role in the creation of Rochdale can hardly be overestimated. If Kazan provided the blueprint and the cooperative vision, Moses did almost everything else. Without Moses’s flexing of his political muscle, his complete mastery of the bureaucratic arts, and his unflagging enthusiasm for the project, which kept the idea moving forward when most (including Kazan) had their doubts, Rochdale Village never would have been built. Abraham Kazan, never one to share credit easily, said as much—“Rochdale Village owes its existence to Robert Moses”—and all the extant evidence corroborates Kazan’s contention.2

If Kazan has been largely overlooked—and he is surely one of the most neglected creators of twentieth-century New York City—Robert Moses is, if anything, too well known, regularly credited with a greater influence than he actually possessed. But this overestimation is pardonable. By 1963, Robert Moses, at the age of seventy-five, had been in the public eye for half a century, first as an energetic reformer in the Bureau of Municipal Research, then as a young Turk on the staff of Governor Alfred E. Smith. He developed the New York State park system and then played a similar role for New York City’s parks. He headed the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA) and dominated public and government sponsored housing construction in postwar New York City. He built power plants along the Niagara Frontier beaches on the southern shore of Long Island, and parks and parkways many places in between. He was a wearer of many hats, legendary for both the power he had accrued over the decades and the bitter controversies that invariably swirled around his exercise of it.

By December 1963, Moses was very much a lion in winter, and Rochdale Village was perhaps a penultimate, if not quite a last hurrah. Shortly after the deal to build Rochdale Village was announced in January 1960, Moses began to lose his political influence over city housing, and in the spring of that year he left his positions as city construction coordinator and chairman of the Slum Clearance Committee, and was gently kicked upstairs to chair the preparations for the 1964–1965 World’s Fair. He would remain head of the TBTA until 1967, but in 1964 Nelson Rockefeller relieved him of his chairmanship of the New York State Parks Commission, a position he had occupied for forty years.

Moses’s article on Rochdale is very laudatory, in his best panegyrist mode, praising Kazan, the United Housing Foundation, its union sponsors, and the state agencies that facilitated its construction. For all that, the real subject of the article is less Rochdale Village than Moses himself and his vision of the city, and this vision is surprisingly gloomy. He describes himself as isolated and beleaguered, caught in the crossfire of opposing camps, a lonely teller of truths to power, a voice crying in the wilderness. “Housing for the masses in a city like New York, if we seek the plain unvarnished truth without equivocation,” he writes, “requires almost an inhuman detachment and perspective, indifference to immediate political consequences, and a thirst for martyrdom beyond most of those who influence public opinion.”

If there is a healthy amount of self-pity in this description, it honestly reflects the way he thought about himself and his work. He was a powerful man, to be sure, and he thought that the proper exercise of power was crucial for the future of New York City. At the end of 1963, as Moses looked at the future of urban development, he saw confusion. “New York has no one firm philosophy, speaks with a divided voice, and lacks leadership.” After his departure as city construction coordinator, there was no single voice of authority, just a cacophonous din. “If the whim, caprice, and ambition of every last objector and scribbler is to prevail, where will you find the men of purpose, skill and courage to take the lead?”

In the article on Rochdale he provided a long defense of his policy of tenant relocation to build middle-income housing. While this was a subject of doubtful relevance to Rochdale, since only horses and not people had to be moved to build it, there was no subject Moses was more sensitive about than tenant relocations, and he needed little in the way of prompting to offer his defense. In Moses’s opinion the complaints were grossly exaggerated—“Let us have less unproven charges of sadistic tenant removal and less twaddle about ‘bulldozing’ the common man”—but his broader argument was the need for a suitably cosmopolitan outlook and the recognition that personal inconvenience needed to be balanced against a utilitarian calculus—petty problems versus the best outcome for the greatest number. Tenant relocations needed to be handled with “sympathy and understanding,” but no one was entitled to “block progress because he is inconvenienced or misled. His personal wishes must yield to a common good.”

The common good, Moses felt, was realized in places like Rochdale. It was an example of what can happen when the government and the private sector engage in enlightened collaboration, creating something on an enormous scale, for the benefit of average New Yorkers, something to give his critics pause. Rochdale, Moses proclaimed, “is the most significant multi-family cooperative going on in the city at this time—measured by location, size, rent, low coverage, amenities, accessibility, and widespread neighborhood transformation.” It will benefit both residents, “self-respecting people” who need “only a little help to be on their own,” and the surrounding community in the form of new schools, shopping, and recreational facilities.

But the elegiac tone of Moses’s article on Rochdale Village conveys a sense that unless things in the city underwent a radical change, Rochdale Village represented the end of his particular vision of the city. Things had gone in the wrong direction since his exit, he concluded. Slum clearance was increasingly discredited, and the ideas of Jane Jacobs, not mentioned by name though included in the epithet “avant-garde housers,” were a gathering specter, turning many against his views of redevelopment. Big superblock projects like Rochdale were increasingly seen as passé. There was a growing sense that New York City was too big, its problems grown too enormous to be managed by any one person or any specific direction. Confidence in the city’s future was now crowded out by a fashionable sense of worried unease. Moses would have none of this. Bigger problems just called for even bigger leaders, and he diagnosed the city’s ills in one of his classic Menckenian philippics:

We shift from one extreme to another. First it is fearless surgical slum clearance, cutting out the malignancy; then it is rehabilitation and repair stimulated by nostalgia; then the modern Savanarolas come marching in, denouncing our urban civilization as essentially wasteful and wicked; and finally the sad sacks, proclaiming the city hopeless, and advocating dispersing the population to perfectly planned suburbia and exurbia, or yielding spinelessly to philosophical despair. In such an atmosphere complete frankness is rare, unpopular, and even dangerous—and yet only absolute honesty and candor will save the day.

But what made Rochdale Village so special to Moses—though he seems to have been reluctant to say it here in so many words—was that Rochdale was an answer to the many critics who charged him with being indifferent to civil rights and minority aspirations. The article did contain one of Moses’s coded references to his doubts about civil rights legislation—“economic and social objectives no doubt ultimately valid and undeniable but hardly immediately obtainable,” but Rochdale for Moses represented civil rights in practice, and not as abstract and unrealizable theory—thousands of white families voluntarily moving to a black neighborhood, and helping to anchor and improve the surrounding community. It was for this reason that Moses ranked Rochdale Village as one of his greatest achievements, a view he would continue to hold in the years to come. Moses concluded the article by linking Rochdale with two of his most famous projects, Jones Beach and Lincoln Center, and promised bus trips to all three places from the 1964 World’s Fair, so that the fairgoers would see in Rochdale “the essence of the spirit of cooperation, the spirit that can alone unite all peoples and in the very long run produce peace.” In many ways Moses saw Rochdale Village as a culmination of his life’s work.3

The relationship between Moses and Kazan is a largely untold story. For reasons that are not entirely clear, you will not learn anything about it in Robert Caro’s monumental, magisterial, indispensable, though in many places aggressively negative and one-sided biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, which has cast a giant shadow on all subsequent discussions of Moses. And Kazan’s absence is all the more striking because, as the historian Joel Schwartz has noted, Kazan was probably Moses’s favorite postwar developer.4 Neither Abraham Kazan, nor the UHF, nor Rochdale Village make an appearance on any of the 1,250 pages of The Power Broker.

Though the friendship between Kazan and Moses was fruitful for both parties, it was in many ways a curious tie. Throughout his career Moses had little use for the labor movement or social democracy (to say nothing of anarchism), and even vigorous liberals would often cause a serious furrowing of his brow and a spraying of choice adjectives in their direction. But in the article on Rochdale Village he dutifully praises the Rochdale Equitable Pioneer Society and their little store on Toad Lane, and the traditions of British communalism that gave rise to it. Letting his rhetoric arch skyward, Moses said of the UHF that it was “lifting up the tabernacle of cooperation in our fiercely competitive American wilderness.” If Moses was laying it on a bit thick, there’s little doubt that the underlying admiration for the cooperative movement in general and Kazan in particular was sincere, praising the latter as “tough-minded,” a “doer,” at once an “incurable optimist” and “successful realist.” Whatever Moses’s true feelings about the cooperative movement, and it is clear, even in this article, that he viewed the broader cooperative vision of a nonprofit world as hopelessly naïve, he appreciated the way it animated its adherents, and the results it produced. In 1956, at the groundbreaking ceremony for the UHF Title I Seward Park cooperative, he said, “These cooperatives are tops in my book. They are built cheaply and well by devoted, I might say almost fanatical, idealists, not for profit but for substantial, reliable people who have a real stake in the City.”5

At the same time, there’s no disguising that in many ways the partnership of Abraham Kazan and Robert Moses was a partnership of opposites. As was sometimes remarked at the time, the two men were an odd couple. There’s no evidence that they were particularly close personally. Moses, who affected an informality and easy equality with the highest and the mightiest—Mayor Wagner was “Bob,” Governor Rockefeller was “Nelson”—used “Mr. Kazan” as his preferred salutation, and Kazan in turn opted for the formal “Commissioner Moses” in his letters. The two men didn’t travel in the same social circles. Kazan was a short man with a heavy Yiddish accent, with no formal education to speak of. Moses was a man of great physical presence, erudite and well-spoken, educated at the greatest universities on two continents. Kazan was a Russian Jew whose entire career was spent within the ambit of the Jewish left. Moses was a person of German Jewish background who kept his distance from all Jewish associations and affiliations and had spent his lifetime hobnobbing with the rich and powerful.

Robert Moses was born in New Haven in 1888, grew up in New York City in a wealthy family, and attended Yale and Oxford before receiving his doctorate from Columbia. Before his dissertation was published in 1914 he had already embarked on his career as a progressive reformer in New York City. He would eventually become a leading associate of Al Smith, and worked closely with him during his four terms as governor between 1918 and 1928. He admired Smith for his combination of political smarts and reformer’s ambition, and Smith’s success would in many ways be a model for his own career. But while Smith’s public persona was that of genial, effective, and affable persuader and builder of coalitions, Moses soon developed a reputation as tough and demanding, with a difficult personality, the sort of person you didn’t want to challenge, and definitely did not want to cross. In 1924 Moses became chairman of the New York State Parks Commission. He would later work closely with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who appointed him to a number of important offices, starting with New York City Parks commissioner in 1934, and a variety of mayors and governors through John Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller.6

Moses began his career as a progressive cleanser of the Augean stables of Tammany and patronage politics, and while he never lost his distaste for venal backroom negotiations, in time he would direct his greatest animus against the liberal and reform-minded gnats he tried to swat away from so many of his plans and deals. For Moses, the main problem with reformers was that they were untethered critics with no allegiance or roots in a political faction; they were both powerless (and therefore did not need to be placated) and unconstrained by practical responsibilities (and therefore generally incapable of making wise decisions). In a speech in 1960 about his distinctive brand of conservatism, Moses spoke of how he accomplished things by respecting existing sources of power:7

The conservative, no matter where he started, gets around in time to recognizing political leaders as a necessary liaison between the voters and the candidates for elective office. The leaders analyze better than the pollsters. They interpret. They reconcile differences which might flare up into feuds. Many, if not all of them, want the best government consistent with their running it. The conservative understands their motives and trusts them a lot further than he does the self-righteous and sour reformers. The conservative is in a sense a reformed reformer.

What did it mean for Moses to be a “reformed reformer”? It meant he could speak the language of reform, and advocate needed social change, but at the same time decry what he called the “fallacy of expertizing,” and the tendency to academize and overintellectualize the problems of governing.8 Reformers wanted to trespass on his turf, and they wanted to be taken seriously as political players without having done the work to establish a political base. In 1943, in a typical blast against urban planning, with people like Lewis Mumford in mind, he excoriated a catalogue aria of “long-haired critics, fanatics, and demagogues, perfectionists and day-dreamers” and “ivory-tower philosophers with their abracadabra about urbanism.” Reformers who remained wedded to their a priori dreams were in for rude awakenings. Moses thought that political leaders needed to plan wisely, but he was adamantly opposed to “planning” as an abstract academic pursuit. “I devoutly hope,” said Moses in the late 1930s, without much prescience, “that no university will start a school for planning.”9

Indeed, when it came to criticizing the artificialities of urban planners, Moses had more than a little in common with his best-known detractor, the architectural critic and activist Jane Jacobs. Neither had any use for Lewis Mumford, or for architects like Le Corbusier (whom Moses met during the planning of the United Nations complex), and whom Moses dismissed as a foolish, abstract daydreamer, whose drawing-board fantasies of the city of the future were fundamentally pernicious.10 Speaking in 1959 he criticized planned cities of the future, all those “New Delhis, Canberras, and Brasílias” which might “have all of the neatness, logic, and harmony of an oriental silk rug,” but what city dweller would trade the complexity of urban life for life upon a pretty pattern? Moses went on to quote a letter of Henry James to the effect that “cities are living organisms that grow from within and by experience and piece by piece; they are not bought all hanging together, in any inspired studio anywhere whatsoever.”11

There were few things Moses enjoyed more than crumbling ivory towers and dream palaces. Moses was that rarity of his time, an intellectual in politics. Did anyone with a PhD, save Woodrow Wilson, amass more political power than Moses in America in the first half of the twentieth century? But Moses was rarer still, an intellectual in politics who hated other intellectuals in politics. He wrote no systematic treatises, founded no school of urban theory, taught no students, and never had any real protégés or disciples. Nonetheless, he was a compulsive writer of self-justifications, with a philosophical chip on his shoulder, and he directed most of his anger at other intellectuals, whom he tried to convince that they didn’t know how the world worked, or how to run it. Robert Moses was at his core an anti-utopian, even a proselytizing anti-utopian, whose goal was to get others to accept the world as it is. But for a complex series of reasons, in Abraham Kazan, Moses found a utopian he could do business with.

Abraham Kazan and Robert Moses first met shortly after the end of World War II, over the planned expansion of Kazan’s second cooperative, the Amalgamated Dwellings. The Amalgamated Dwellings were a direct result of the praise heaped on his first cooperative, the Amalgamated Houses in the Bronx, which was described by Governor Al Smith in his 1929 autobiography as “a group of multiple dwellings…modern in every respect.” (It was also the first housing project built under the 1926 Limited Dividend Housing Companies Law, which Smith took great pains to push through a somewhat recalcitrant legislature.)12 Other housing reformers in and out of government, including Smith’s successor Franklin Roosevelt, pressed Kazan and the Amalgamated to build a cooperative on the Lower East Side that would more directly involve urban redevelopment; that is, the removal of slum tenements and the erection of replacement housing. In 1931 the 226 unit Amalgamated Dwellings opened on Grand Street, in a striking Art Deco design that drew on Austrian and Soviet designs for workers’ housing, and received the financial support of and the financial backing of the lieutenant governor (and future governor and senator) Herbert Lehman and the wealthy real estate investor Aaron Rabinowitz, and it became the Lower East Side’s first privately financed slum clearance project.13

Kazan, however, had his doubts about this project from the beginning, and wrote that various difficulties including the lack of understanding of the cooperative idea on the part of the residents created “obstacles almost too difficult to cope with.” One of the problems with the Amalagamated Dwellings was, to Kazan’s mind, that it was undersized, too small at a little more than two hundred families to develop its own internal culture. Kazan had long subscribed to the contagion theory of housing, that cooperatives had to be separate from the baneful influence of the slums; he worried that the Amalgamated Dwellings, a relatively small development covering one city block, was being “engulfed by the surrounding slum buildings,” and decided he wanted to build an adjacent cooperative.14

Kazan had felt this way since almost the opening of the Amalgamated Dwellings but was in no position to do anything about it until 1945. During the Depression Kazan could do little but try to stay solvent, and the war years precluded any expansion. But with the end of the war, Kazan was ready to remedy the situation on the Lower East Side, and in early 1945 he presented a plan for a massive expansion of the Amalgamated Dwellings, sixteen city blocks surrounding the Amalgamated, with the removal of more than sixty tenements to the City Planning Commission, one of whose members was Robert Moses.15

In 1945 Robert Moses was a relatively recent arrival on the housing scene in New York City; it was not until 1938, when La Guardia named him to a committee to advise him on slum clearance and housing that he added New York City housing planning to his portfolio. In 1942 he was named to the City Planning Commission, and had a major role in the passage that year of the Redevelopment Companies Law (a state act), which made it easier for the city to condemn land and sell it to a private investor. (It was a precursor of sorts to Title I of the National Housing Act of 1949.) In 1946 he was named city construction coordinator, and in 1948 chairman of the Committee on Slum Clearance, two positions which enabled him to dominate city housing policy until 1960.

In 1942, under the aegis of the Redevelopment Companies Law, Moses was the prime mover in his first large-scale middle-income housing project, Stuyvesant Town, which as we have seen, he compared to Rochdale Village in 1963. Stuyvesant Town was always controversial, both because of the large-scale tenant removals involved, the question of the replacement of lower-income with middle-income housing, and most notoriously, the insistence of Metropolitan Life (Stuyvesant Town’s developer) that all African Americans be excluded. For Moses the battle over Stuyvesant Town was perhaps his primal urban struggle, the battle of sensible priorities for building middle-income housing arrayed against a host of enemies, which he would return to again and again in his career. Still, Stuyvesant Town was a model to him of what urban redevelopment could accomplish. He proclaimed its triumph in the article on Rochdale Village. “We moved over 11,000 people from the rat-infested old law tenements of the middle East Side, roosting in buildings covering eighty to ninety percent of the ground, to make way for Stuyvesant Town with 27,500 middle income people in high, attractive buildings set in gardens and covering only twenty-five percent of the land.”16

But for various reasons, Metropolitan Life built no more Stuyvesant Towns, and Moses by the late 1940s was looking for new developers to partner with. The initial encounter between Kazan and Moses was not auspicious. After Kazan in 1945 presented his plan for a huge development on the Lower East Side, the City Planning Commission gave it to Moses for review. In May of 1945 Moses nixed the project. He claimed it was a project done primarily to “provide substantial income for its promoters,” who were not a “recognized, responsible financial group.” Instead it was a “mere scheme proposed by lawyers and architects.”17

Like many of those on the receiving end of one of Moses’s mighty epistolary blasts, Kazan was at first stunned into a shell-shocked silence, and did little for several weeks. He then summoned his courage and requested a meeting with Moses. To his surprise, Kazan found Moses friendly. Moses had in the interim made inquiries, and found that Kazan was respected as honest and trustworthy, and that his two cooperatives were well run, and rather than blocking the proposal, Moses suggested scaling it back to four blocks, clearing sixty-five tenements, and insisted on adding a four-story parking garage. This complex opened in 1950 as the Hillman Houses, 807 units in three twelve-story buildings. With their height and location on large superblocks, and their design by Herman Jessor (the architect of every major UHF cooperative, including Rochdale), they pointed the way to future Kazan and Moses collaborations.18

But it was Title I of the 1949 National Housing Act that brought the friendship of Kazan and Moses to fruition. Title I permitted the federal government to reimburse municipalities for two-thirds of land acquisition and condemnation costs for urban sites. It was intended to encourage the rebuilding of tenement areas in large contiguous plots primarily by private developers (either for profit or nonprofit) as a means of stabilizing and improving urban areas. Title I projects, as envisioned by the Act and by Moses, were intended to be a mix of housing and building types, including the expansion of institutions of higher learning (NYU and LIU), market-rate housing, and subsidized middle-income housing. Low-income housing was generally not included in Title I projects. Moses’s opposition to centralized planning did not mean, of course, that he didn’t plan his urban renewal projects carefully, and he recognized in his building plans the need for a mixture of income levels. He often rebuilt slum areas with a mixture of public housing and middle-income Title I projects, enabling him to house in the former some of those displaced by the latter. Moses developed seventeen Title I projects between 1949 and 1960; eight of those were limited-equity middle-income cooperatives.19

One of the areas that Moses was interested in developing most extensively was Corlears Hook, on the Lower East Side, and the site of the Amalgamated Dwellings and the Hillman Houses. Moses in 1944 already saw the area with new public housing as “part of the East Side reclamation. Not a pipe dream, but a reality.”20 He wished to add middle-income housing into the mix. Shortly after the passage of the 1949 Act, Moses approached Jacob Potofsky, Hillman’s successor at the Amalgamated, and Kazan about sponsoring new housing on the Lower East Side.21

Moses’s interest in cooperative housing helped Kazan decide to form his own organization, one that would be connected to but separate from the Amalgamated and other unions.22 Labor would provide political and economic support, and Kazan would provide the direction and the vision for the cooperative housing movement. Kazan had long chafed under the need to play second fiddle to unions and union leaders, who often wanted the building of housing cooperatives to take a backseat to a broader union agenda. He felt that when cooperatives became too closely identified with any outside institution, even their sponsoring institutions, they lost their independence. Kazan adamantly opposed any reservation of apartments in his cooperatives for union members, even for those unions who had financially contributed to the cooperative, and felt that the cooperatives were serving a broader and more universal social need than merely servicing the union movement. All working families, whether union members or not, would benefit from cooperatives. A permanent organization enabled Kazan to move on more easily to new projects, once a cooperative became fully self-governing, to help popularize the cooperative idea, and provide an umbrella organization for all housing cooperatives. The United Housing Foundation was formed in 1951.23

Some would argue that with organizations like the UHF, the union movement in postwar New York City lost its way, concentrating on building ancillary institutions rather than developing the core strength of its unions, and that in the end the extensive social democratic superstructure of the city availed them but little when, in the mid-1970s, it all came crashing down at once. The urban planner Hilary Botein has shrewdly argued that once the UHF was fashioned, Kazan was able to view the labor movement “from a benignly opportunistic perspective.”24 From the other side, Moses twitted the transformation of union officials into housing developers. “There is really nothing,” he said in 1962, “quite like the conservatism of a labor leader turned capitalist.” Both positions have their merit, but Kazan would have argued that the creation of affordable housing for as many working families as possible was hardly at odds with the original goal of the labor movement, and it is difficult not to agree with Joshua Freeman that union involvement in cooperative housing was “one of the greatest and least-known achievements of working-class New York.”25

The UHF, throughout its history, was actually only the visible part of a more complex arrangement. The year before its founding, Kazan organized the Community Services and Management Corporation, later Community Services Inc. (CSI), to be the general contractor for the cooperatives he developed. Community Services would hire and supervise subcontractors and would receive a 1 percent developer’s fee on completion of each project. This money was advanced to the UHF, which would be the public face of Kazan’s operation. The UHF would provide publicity for its projects, obtain the needed political support, work with the unions (nineteen in all) that were members of the UHF, and who would often provide funding for the projects.26 Kazan was the president of CSI from the beginning, but he was content until 1957 to let others serve as president of the UHF.27

Every time a new cooperative was started, a new corporation would be founded— such as Rochdale Village Inc., organized in 1960. These individual cooperative corporations would own the land on which the cooperative was to be built, hire CSI as the general contractor, and manage the cooperative in its opening years until the cooperators could take direct control of the board of directors of the corporation. (In Rochdale, this would not happen until 1969, some five years after all the residents had moved in.) Kazan would borrow a page from Moses and endeavor to wear as many hats as possible—for each of the cooperatives, Kazan would simultaneously be the president of the cooperative corporation, president of CSI, and a board member (and later president) of the UHF. These interlocking corporations ensured that Kazan would dominate every aspect of the construction and management of the early phase of his cooperatives.28

The partnership between Moses and Kazan endured to the end of their careers, in projects of increasingly gargantuan size, something that no doubt pleased both men. With Moses, Kazan and the UHF sponsored three Title I projects in Manhattan: the East River Houses at Corlears Hook, completed in 1956, with four buildings and 1,672 apartments; the Seward Park Houses (1961), also on the Lower East Side, with four buildings and 1,728 apartments; and Penn Station South (1962), in the Midtown area, with ten buildings on twenty acres and 2,820 apartments. Thereafter Moses and Kazan largely left Manhattan and concentrated on building large cooperatives in the outer boroughs on vacant land that therefore did not fall under Title I, and were developed through the state Mitchell-Lama middle-income housing program. Rochdale, at 5,860 apartments, was nearly twice as large as any previous UHF cooperative. The other UHF Mitchell-Lama cooperatives were the Amalgamated Warbasse Houses (1965) in Brooklyn, with five buildings and 2,585 units, and Co-op City in the Bronx. In 1968 the first of 15,383 families moved into this massive development. With its thirty-five highrises and 246 town houses it was almost as large as all previous UHF cooperatives combined.29 It would prove to be the last cooperative built by the UHF, and just about the last project, of any sort, with Moses’s imprimatur.

Despite various bumps and strains, the alliance between Moses and the UHF was an enduring one. From Moses’s perspective, his alliance with Kazan was based on shared views of urban redevelopment. They agreed on the diagnosis—slums and tenements were physical and moral eyesores, at the root of almost all urban problems—and they agreed on the solution—substandard tenements need to be pulled out by their roots and replaced by new affordable workers’ housing, new housing that was antithetical in design and function to the old tenement. There were practical reasons as well, of course. Working with Kazan afforded a connection to the treasuries and pension funds of major trade unions, and he found in Kazan one who fit all his adjectives of approbation, someone who had “survived discouragements which would have floored a weaker man.” And the fact that Kazan ran a nonprofit organization, and could build housing for less than his for-profit competitors, was just an added feature in his favor.30

The admiration of Moses and Kazan was mutual. Although it was undoubtedly useful to have Moses’s power on his side, Kazan had worked closely with very powerful men before, such as Sidney Hillman, often with very frustrating results.31 Kazan didn’t admire Moses for his power—at best one respects, not admires, those who wield power for its own sake—but he admired Moses, according to Harold Ostroff, because he was trustworthy, and he would fight for his friends. “If you got Moses to be on your side, you knew that you didn’t need anything more than a handshake to know that Moses would be with you through thick and thin.”32 The relation between Moses and Kazan was not particularly close, but was rather a working friendship, each man with his own sphere of interests and influences. For Moses, writing in 1956, Kazan was the “working genius” of cooperative housing in New York City, who had created “a record of over a quarter of a century of steady, genuine undeniable progress,” the living refutation of “the bright, eager critics of our slum clearance” who “build nothing” and live on “mud-throwing and false, garbled statistics” who believe that the city should “fix up the slums with rubber bands and scotch tape.”33 What some would say of Moses, Moses said of Kazan. “Look about you in this City,” he said in 1962, echoing the famous epigraph about Sir Christopher Wren, and “see his monuments.”34