Themes

Raw Notes

• 1907 - 1 million jews in NYC
• 1915 - 1.5 million jews in NYC
• Jews were coming into NYC at 90K / year
• Moses’ mother’s family was part of Jewish elite that had immigrated from Germany in 1870s/80s
• She was very anti-religious, didn’t even want them to be circumsized and also sent her kids to Ethical Culture. Bob Moses wasn’t circumsized or Bar Mitzvahed
• Early 1900s was when govt municipal agencies started actually using budgets. Started uncovering a lot of corruption.
• Remember Al Smith - really interesting character who became governor of NY 1919-1920 and also 1923-1928
• Al Smith was born in an impoverished neighborhood of Irish immigrants right under the Brooklyn Bridge on the LES. His father died when he was 13, leaving his family penniless and his mother providing for them. But by 16 she couldn’t anymore and he had to provide for his family. He was known to be jovial and could get along with anyone, and was extremely boisterous and a talented actor. He also had a quick wit and could command the attention of a room. He started taking jobs in the Tammany sphere of influence and eventually rose to be a prominent figure and became a member of the NY Assembly in 1904. He hated reading and the bills that came across his desk were always extremely opaque and difficult to decipher for anyone, let alone someone who had dropped out of schooling before high school. He stuck with it and became incredibly literate in the law and city government and ultimately became a major force in his party. When elected governor, he was the first Tammany man to do it. He was a real representative of the people in that he actually had experienced what so many of the poor immigrants, especially Irish catholics, had experienced in NYC.
• Robert Moses was Chief of Staff to Belle Moskowitz, who was basically Al Smith’s most trusted political advisor. Moses was Republican and Smith was a loyal Tammany man, but Moskowitz and Smith wanted social reforms and felt Moses understood government well. Moses wrote a seminal work compelling reorganizing city government - consolidating the different departments and giving the governor more authority and power. He also wanted a rigorous merit system and he wanted to thin out much of the government. Tammany didn’t really like this tho because many of the unecessary jobs Moses wanted to cut were ones Tammany supplied. His reforms failed, largely because Smith wasn’t reelected, but when Smith won back the governorship, Moses became one of his inner circle, and soon had power to reform the municipal government in the way that he thought made sense.
• Moses was fairly elitist even though he wanted to devote his life to making city government more efficient as a service to the broader society and people. He was probably the most educated person on civic reform and government organization in the city, considering his study at Yale, Oxford, and University of Berlin.
• Belle Moskowitz is an amazing woman worth learning more about. She was a small Jewish woman, who through advising Al Smith became arguably the most powerful woman in politics. She was a master politician and deft fixer / influencer. She had an incredible ability to get people to do what she wanted, especially the press with regard to Smith.
• The 1920s is really the birth of the concept of leisure in the country. In the early industrial revolution, standard working conditions were 70-80 hours a week. Reforms reduced this over time, introduced half holidays, then full holidays on Saturdays and the birth of the work weekend started. People started spending their time looking for places to take their kids to have picnics and enjoy time together in nature, rather than only being able to go to beer halls along the Bowery. This meant the explosion of people searching for public spaces to enjoy their time off. However, that space was shrinking in the 1920s, and much of Long Island was either held by the robber barons of the early Industrial Age, or were segregated by often racist fishing communities that had lived out on Long Island for decades and weren’t really connected to city life. Suffolk county was dominated by the KKK in the 1920s, and they persecuted not just blacks but also Jews and Catholics
• 1920 Brooklyn and Queens had 2 million people, more than all but 8 states in the US
• It was really hard for the there to be any state parks created in Long Island because the island was owned by all the robber barons of the era, the allegiances of which were all in the state legislature
• Fire Island is actually a distortion of the word “Five,” since it used to be a collection of 5 separate islands separated by inlets that have now dissapeared
• Bronx River Parkway was first highway in the country to eliminate traffic lights, which they did by eliminate intersecting traffic by moving all the cross roads above the highway. Newspapers predicted it would be the most beautiful road in America. Moses read this and believed his ideas that would eventually become the Southern State Parkway in Long Island could be more beautiful
• In 1922, there wasn’t a single state park in NY east of the Hudson River. West of the Hudson, there were 20, mainly around old mansions from the revolutionary war battlefields that were purchased by private philanthropists
• Moses report outlining proposals for the State Parks of NY was seminal and of a very different philosophy from the time. It was large in that it required $15M in bond issuances, but also believed that there should be a state park system (not just different parks as separate entities), and that the state should be divided into 11 regions, each governing over it’s own park authority. It was also unique in that before that point, parks were merely looked at as areas to breathe for city dwellers, for them to meditate and view nature. Moses believed it should be used for that AND the active leisure activities that had become so popular in the US over the last few decades - baseball parks, tennis courts, etc. He believed the land should be manicured for leisurely use.