The Routes Not Taken Page 21
Mayor La Guardia opposed the bill, feeling it shifted funding responsibility to the City Council and Bronx borough president.11 Lehman vetoed it, saying, “It is unwise to have government create a public benefit corporation with the color of governmental authority and sanction for the purpose of acquiring and operating a private railroad through several communities which has since been forced to discontinue its services.”12
Figure 8-1. The Bronx Home News ran this 1938 photograph of preliminary engineering work on Burke Avenue on March 19, 1946.
Williamson wrote to Lehman in July:
The closing of the railroad December 31, 1937, has caused serious inconvenience to those who founded their homes and established their businesses along its line. If its operation be not renewed, that inconvenience will result in actual reduction in value of the real estate in the zone of the service of the road. Such value falls not alone on the owner of an affected plot, serious though that be; as loss of taxable valuation, it spreads across each of the tax districts involved and so lays a charge across an entire community.… I respectfully suggest to you appoint a committee from all of these municipalities suffering from the discontinuance of the railroad.13
Lehman agreed: “I see no objection … to the appointment by me of an unofficial committee, provided that the Mayors or governing bodies of the municipalities desire it. As you point out, the committee would understand that no funds [were] available for their work from the state, from the county of Westchester or from the city of New York.”14
Moses criticized the Committee in a letter to Garvin:
With the assistance of various City and State executives with whom I have been working on such matters, I offered a reasonable solution of the problem. This was opposed by various people including some cheap political fellows in Westchester and smart aleck lawyers who told the former commuters on this road that they had some magic way of reviving it. The Commission appointed by the Governor on the nomination of various municipalities, was the most ridiculous I have seen in a long time.…
… So far as I am concerned, and speaking for the competent and intelligent engineers of the City and State who worked on this plan, I am getting sick of being the voice crying in the wilderness. I see no other future for your right of way excepting as a toll truck highway.15
Moses had stronger words in a letter to George Mand:
The fact of the matter is that they do not know what they are talking about, and there is no talent on the Regional Plan at the moment worth listening to or bothering about.
If they had any really first-rate men these men would have been absorbed into our big public construction program long ago, and would be earning a living instead of sitting up in an ivory tower drawing pretty pictures and telling busy officials how to do their work.16
Herman W. Johnston wrote to La Guardia for the Allied Civic Associations:
As the representative of the taxpayers along the route of the Westchester and Boston in the Northeast Bronx, the Allied Civic Associations of Old Eastchester protest and stand ready to fight the adoption of any such plan that Commissioner Moses proposes to convert the right-of-way into a toll truck highway.
… The right-of-way of the Westchester and Boston is a natural rapid transit route and its 25 years’ use has developed the northeast Bronx to an extent that obligates the City of New York to furnish transportation to its citizens. The City now has the opportunity to preserve this route for future transit use that will save millions of dollars in a few years.17
Moses learned that Lehman asked La Guardia for nominees, and so contacted the mayor on July 22. He suggested that La Guardia nominate him and other highway advocates (including Delaney, “because he can explain the uselessness of this road for rapid transit purposes”):18 “Obviously, recent attempts of Westchester politicians led by Senator Williamson and others to rehabilitate the old railroad and make the New York–New Haven people and the Receivers think they can still get a lot of money for their broken down road. It is quite obvious that Governor Lehman is simply playing politics with this issue and joining Williamson.… This railroad will never run again and it is simply spoofing the old commuters to tell them that it will.”19 Lehman appointed Moses and City Planning Commissioner Rexford Guy Tugwell; Albert Ritchie, a New Rochelle lawyer, was elected chairman. Herman W. Johnston and George Mand were also appointed. They toured the W&B right-of-way in December to have Moses’s plan explained to them.20
Figure 8-2. William E. Schramek and Pliny W. Williamson. (Yonkers Herald Statesman)
Preliminary work on Burke Avenue continued, but Manhattan Borough President Stanley M. Isaacs proposed its removal at the Board of Estimate:
I am moving for the elimination of this item because I think it is unnecessary. I think it is unsound policy on the part of the City to extend subways to the outlying regions and thus to drain populations from the center of the city—or in this case from the South Bronx.
I believe the transportation question could be better handled by a proper system of bus line feeders to our main subways, with interchangeable feeders. By going in for the construction of unnecessary feeders, the City merely increases the deficit for subway building. One of the reasons advanced in favor of this situation is the fact that the Hillside development is built there. It could be served by buses.21
Lyons protested; Isaacs’s resolution failed. Deputy Mayor Henry Curran voted for La Guardia, and Comptroller Joseph McGoldrick supported Lyons; City Council President A. Newbold Morris supported Isaacs.
Figure 8-3. City Council President A. Newbold Morris in 1940. (Long Island Star Journal)
The W&B’s infrastructure was disappearing. After a hurricane devastated New York and New England on September 21, New Haven Railroad crews removed rails, ties, and ballast from the W&B’s New Rochelle–Port Chester branch to repair their lines. Ritchie protested, but he couldn’t stop this from happening.
The City Planning Commission deleted all but $185,000 ($2.95 million in 2011 dollars, according to MeasuringWorth.com) of Burke Avenue’s funding from the 1939 capital budget in November, while funding another Moses project, the Circumferential Parkway, connecting Brooklyn and Queens (an unwieldy name later changed to the Belt Parkway). Outraged, Lyons blamed Council President A. Newbold Morris: “[The funding cut] will deprive the North Bronx of transit facilities.… It is another of Newbold Morris’ brainstorms based on a lack of information and knowledge of the situation.… It was used simply as a method to reduce the budget to provide for a circumferential parkway in Brooklyn.”22
Johnston, speaking for Allied Civic Associations, protested:
When [Burke Avenue] reached the stage where we were assured that the contracts were to be let before the first of the year, along came a persuasive Commissioner of Parks with a scheme to “doll up” Brooklyn with a circumferential parkway and a complacent Board of Estimate very graciously handed over to him the money that had been set aside in this year’s capital outlay budget.… Our organization is determined to fix the responsibility for this treatment at City Hall. The Northeast Bronx is not just another community waiting for [a] rapid transit facility.
It has within a year lost a first class railway service, the New York, Westchester and Boston Railroad, upon whose service the entire community was built up. To a large area affected by the closing of the W&B the promise of speedy construction of the Burke Avenue subway was the only factor to counteract the depressed values in the properties when the railroad abandoned its tracks.23
The Allied Civic Associations met on November 15 at Evander Childs High School. They advertised the meeting with a leaflet with the headline “STOLEN. Your help is needed in restoring the Burke Ave. SUBWAY to the Capital Outlay Budget.”24
“The Board of Estimate cannot find $5,000,000 [$65.3 million in 2011 dollars] to cover necessary expenditures for the next year for [the] Burke Avenue subway, yet it did find nearly 30 millions for a parkway [$1.03 billion in 2011 dollars], which will never benefit the thousands
of residents of the Northeast Bronx who must have transit facilities,” Herman W. Johnston wrote to the Northeast Bronx civic groups. “Much as these North Bronx people appreciate Commissioner Moses’ efforts to build parks and highways, they realize that work on them must be deferred until certain necessary transit facilities are provided for the Northeast Bronx.”25
Approximately nine hundred people attended. Lyons, Mand, Loewenthal, and Council Member James A. Deering encouraged them to attend the Board of Estimate hearing the next day; many went.
With Morris chairing, Lyons made a motion to restore funding. “My motion is not for approval of [the $5 million]—it merely states that it is the sense of this board that the Burke Avenue extension be restored to the budget. By adopting my motion, you will let these people know that you are in favor of it,” Lyons said.26 Morris said the Board of Estimate couldn’t vote on an individual item.
Lyons wouldn’t accept this: “We are here demanding from the Board that you will again take this matter up and put it back in the budget. Every other borough has benefited, but here are thousands crying for transportation. The Westchester and Boston Railroad has been abandoned, leaving them without means of travel and they are pleading for consideration and hoping you will return this item to the budget so that construction may be started.”27
Brooklyn Borough President Raymond V. Ingersoll noted that Burke Avenue was only deferred. “We had that $5,000,000 in the 1937 budget and in the 1938 budget, and now it is in the distant future, although Brooklyn has about $20,000,000 for subways for 1939,” Lyons responded.
“At various public meetings the Borough President of the Bronx has been reported as saying that the President of the City Council moved to strike out that $5,000,000,” Morris said. “That is a direct misstatement and also a violation of one of the first principles of orderly procedure of this board. What transpires in executive session is supposed to be confidential. That is supposed to be a violation of what I consider ethics. However, I don’t hold the Borough President of the Bronx to the same rules of conduct as I do the other members of the Board.”28
Members of the audience hissed. Morris continued: “We were discussing the circumferential highway and I asked Mr. Lyons to telephone the Board of Transportation to see if $5,000,000 could be cut out of subway construction funds. He did so, and there was no suggestion that any specific item be eliminated.”29
“We expected that $5,000,000 would be eliminated from the general transportation program, but it came to us in a different form,” Morris went on to say. “We never contemplated this. All boroughs should have the same treatment. I consider that it would be unfair not to do it that way.”30 He characterized Lyons’s accusation as “very unfair,”31 and called him a “pie-eyed piper of Hamelin.”32
“The statements I made were based on facts and I don’t withdraw one iota of them,” Lyons responded. “You withdrew $3,000,000 for the new Appellate Division courthouse and you withdrew $5,000,000 for the Bronx Extension and then you told me to telephone John H. Delaney and he said he would prefer to take it out of the lump allocation. I then returned and asked you to rescind the action that had been taken.”33 He made a motion to restore Burke Avenue’s funding but was ruled out of order.34
Deputy Mayor Curran said money was in the budget for Burke Avenue: “The Planning Commission has put up $185,000 for the next year. The balance $10,000,000 is listed under Table 1 as expenditures after 1939, as I read it.… If the Burke Avenue line were to be abandoned, it would be silly to put in even one penny. The City Planning Commission has put in the amounts possible to spend next year.”35 “The people of the Bronx do not want $185,000 in the budget this year,” Lyons protested. “They want a subway. That’s not progress.”36
Other projects took priority—constructing a new Queens Borough Hall, erecting a hangar for La Guardia Airport, purchasing the Elks Building in Downtown Brooklyn for use by the Board of Education, and planning the Circumferential Parkway. “Homes that cost $10,000 are worth only $2,000 now because it is impossible to travel since suspension of the Westchester, Boston railroad service. The city will lose much more. We have expected this subway for 20 years and we should have it before someone else is given a fancy highway around Brooklyn,” said Lillian Britton of the Burke Avenue–Eastchester Road Association.37
Ingersoll defended the Circumferential Parkway by pointing out that the Bronx received $12 million in state funding for parkways. The Bronx residents chanted, “We don’t want parkways! Give us a subway!”38 “There are no transit facilities in the Northeast Bronx. This subway is an investment,” said the Board of Trade’s Thomas V. Tozzi. “It will be comparable to what happened on the Concourse. Help these people.”39
Before his election to the Board of Aldermen,40 Charles E. Keegan was Mayor McKee’s press secretary as well as vice president and general manager of Hillside Houses. Joseph E. Kinsley was a World War I veteran and Fordham graduate who was elected to the State Assembly when he was twenty-five years old in 1923, and the Board of Aldermen in 1929. They became the Council’s most tenacious advocates for Northeast Bronx subway service.
Keegan and Kinsley, along with their Bronx colleagues, Salvatore Ninfo, James A. Deering, and Michael J. Quill (also Transport Workers Union chairman), brought the fight to the Council. Keegan and Ninfo filed legislation on November 22 restoring the Concourse line extension to the capital budget.
“Thousands of residents in the northeast area of the Bronx are now being deprived of adequate transportation facilities,” said Ninfo. “There is no reason why people who bear their share of the burden of taxes and assessments equally with the other residents of the city, should not share equally in the benefits of suitable transportation.”41
The Bronx Council Members sought the resolution’s immediate adoption, which required their colleagues’ unanimous consent. Joseph Clark Baldwin of Manhattan objected, because Burke Avenue would serve the Hillside Houses. He opposed building tax-exempt housing at taxpayer expense, followed by subways serving them; instead, he wanted subways built in congested parts of the city.
The Bronx Council Members met with Baldwin, seeking his support. He wouldn’t budge. He understood the need for the line, but wanted more discussion,42 asking if Hillside would benefit from Burke Avenue’s opening. “Twenty years before Hillside Homes was ever thought of, the people up there asked for a subway and the BOT was even then in favor of it,” Keegan said.43
The City Council debated the resolution on November 29. Baldwin’s opposition continued:
Important principles are involved. We all realize the necessity for adequate transportation, but you can’t take these isolated spots and build subways to them. I know that this is a long-standing question, but you can’t spend $5 million now—you haven’t got it.
We have to study the placement of housing developments. To spend the money that has been put into Hillside Homes and then to have to build transportation to it is expensive. We know this $5,000,000 is not available, and to adopt this resolution is an empty gesture. I am not opposed to transportation for the Bronx at the proper time, but the time to take this up is when there is a general plan. Trying to force the hand of the Board of Estimate now is a mistake.44
Ninfo, Keegan, and Kinsley objected. “This matter has been up for twenty years. There are nearly 50,000 families in the Northeast Bronx and most of them live in small homes. This is not a question of Hillside Homes,” Ninfo stated.
“This subway extension is not just for Hillside Homes as Baldwin insists.… There are only 1,400 families there and as a former officer of that corporation I know the $5,000,000 was not thought of for that project,” said Keegan. “But there are 50,000 other families up there, as has been pointed out. They have paid their share for the transportation for other parts of the city. They were doing that twenty years before Hillside Homes were designed. This promised subway has been in the budget twice and was taken out as a convenience to the Mayor and to save embarrassment to the Mayor in hi
s plan for a pretty parkway in Brooklyn and Queens.”
“The only time you get to the Northeast Bronx is when you are on your way to the Yale Bowl to see the Yale and Harvard game,” Kinsley said. “It is all right to say that we haven’t got the money, but the Bronx has taken a kicking around not only on this but on other things, particularly by the City Planning Commission, even in such matters as the zoning at the old Protectory site [the location of the Parkchester development]. Why don’t you come down to the common people? If we don’t get this subway now, it will not be built for five years.”45
The bill was approved by a vote of twenty-one to three vote, but Burke Avenue was now included in a group of subway improvements. Lyons blamed it on La Guardia: “The people of the Bronx are getting the foot with a fine Italian hand on the Burke Avenue extension.”46
Lyons claimed that the Bronx was fooled into believing Burke Avenue had been funded, as there was no specific budget line, a decision made in a secret Board of Estimate session excluding him and Queens Borough President Harvey. La Guardia replied:
Hm! Well this is a most silly statement. There was no action taken by the Board of Estimate on Monday, because there was no meeting of the board. Naturally the Mayor has to confer with the Comptroller and the President of the Council about items in the budget, and any action that must be taken by the board.
As to the Bronx extension of the Independent Subway, there is only one man in the city responsible for its elimination and that is Mr. Lyons. He traded it in for the circumferential parkway in Brooklyn and Queens, and I can show you his vote on this.
There isn’t any Italian hand this time—it was instead sort of a dumb-skull.47
“The Mayor is more unfair than he usually is in saying that I traded the Burke Avenue extension for the circumferential highway,” Lyons retorted. “The action on this controversial project was determined at one of the private conferences of the Board of Estimate, and the Mayor was unable to hold these members who usually follow his bidding like Charley McCarthy against the persuasive Commissioner Moses.… I do not think that I am the only man interested in the Burke Avenue extension, as I know more than 50,000 families are clamoring for transportation up there.”48