The Haunted House

Peter Elkind’s book Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer is a better and more serious book than it seems at first glance. It includes some of the seamy details of Spitzer’s secret life as Client No. 9 of Emperors Club VIP, but not as many as I expected. (It is apparently true that Spitzer once hired three different “escorts” in a single day. It is apparently not true that he kept his calf-length black socks on.)

The book does include a lot about Spitzer’s stellar career as attorney general, his temperamental lack of affinity for the job of governor, and the details of why New York State’s government is even more expensive, gridlocked, and maddening than most. One illustration of that comes in Elkind’s description of the capitol building in Albany, a stone pile I’ve seen many times but was never curious enough to go inside. Now I want to.

The capitol building of New York is the perfect monument to democracy in the Empire State: it was finished scandalously late, ran massively over budget, and is the product of unholy compromise.

A five-story jumble of turrets and towers, the capitol was built on a hill overlooking downtown Albany and the Hudson River, on a site covered with quicksand. It is both grand and grandiose. Construction began in 1867; it took thirty-two years to complete. The original architect was fired eight years in, with just two stories finished, after scandalous cost overruns had exhausted a $4 million budget, prompting a string of investigations and editorial outrage. The new architects didn’t like the Italian Renaissance design, so they built the remaining three stories in Romanesque style instead. Everything about the capitol is massive. It occupies five and a half acres; its granite walls are five feet thick. The vaulted sandstone ceiling in the assembly chamber was the widest ever constructed—until it started collapsing and had to be scrapped. When finally completed in 1899, at a price of $25 million, it was the most expensive government structure ever built—twice the cost of the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

The building’s interior is dark and Gothic, filled with long corridors, arched windows, marble columns, tall unmarked doors, even a secret entrance to the governor’s office. It is dominated by three huge, ornate stairways that seem to rise endlessly skyward in unknowable directions, like something out of an Escher lithograph. The most remarkable, known as the “Million Dollar Staircase,” contains 444 steps and took fourteen years to build. It is adorned with scores of faces painstakingly carved in place out of stone. Most are famous: Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant, Walt Whitman. But the five hundred carvers also memorialized wives and children, animals and random citizens. Some of the images—a cherub and a tiny devil’s head—are tucked in nooks and crannies, visible only with a flashlight. To new arrivals, like Spitzer’s staff, the building seemed unknowable and vaguely mysterious, filled with secrets. Rich Baum, Spitzer’s top deputy, came to call it “the Haunted House.”

Wrestling with Moses

Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City by Anthony Flint is a short, readable book about the collision of two philosophies of urban development and two people who embodied those philosophies.

In a career of more than thirty years as the “master builder” of New York City (and many parts of New York State), Robert Moses exemplified top-down big-picture planning. By the time he opened the Henry Hudson Bridge in 1936, notes Flint, “Moses was already the nation’s most prolific builder of public works.” Meanwhile, “the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Whitestone, Throgs Neck, and Verrazano-Narrows bridges, Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium, and the United Nations were still to come.”

Jane Jacobs, on the other hand, was a journalist from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who had settled in the West Village and come to appreciate the vitality of dense, organic urban neighborhoods with short blocks and a mix of old and new buildings and residential and commercial space.

Jacobs was not the first person to win a victory against Robert Moses—Flint mentions the battle over a grove of trees in Central Park that Robert Caro considers the turning point in Moses’ fortunes (the trees were cut down, but Moses’ reputation was seriously damaged)—but she was a key figure in the successful fight to stop Greenwich Village from being bulldozed as a slum, and to prevent the Lower Manhattan Expressway from driving across the island by way of Broome Street, displacing thousands of people and businesses, and demolishing many of the historic cast-iron buildings that are a distinctive feature of what is now SoHo.

Robert Moses was such an outsized character that even a 1200-page biography was not enough to cover all the important events of his life. Amazingly, as Flint notes in his epilogue, Jane Jacobs is not even mentioned in The Power Broker.

Though there was an entire chapter on Jacobs in the original manuscript, it had to be cut, along with others on the New York Port Authority and the City Planning Commission and detail on the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers, because the doorstop-size book had grown too large by hundreds of pages.

Having recently read The Power Broker, I appreciated the additional light that Wrestling with Moses sheds on the story. For those who have not yet read Caro’s biography, or Jane Jacobs’ influential The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Wrestling with Moses is a good place to start.

The Power Broker

After more than a thousand pages, I am nearing the end of The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro, a book I have been meaning to read for more than 30 years.

I had thought that I would learn a lot about Robert Moses and the modern history of New York State and New York City, and I have. I also expected that the book would be a bit of a slog—and in that I was wrong. It is a mark of the energy of this book that I will be a little sorry to come to the end. In its clarity, its erudition, its character drawing, and its flashes of emotion, it reminds me of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.

The Power Broker would have been a great reading experience years ago, but now that I have spent more than a decade in New York City, it becomes much richer. I have been to Inwood Hill Park, and was startled to see that a highway built by Robert Moses cuts through what is still billed as the only unspoiled indigenous forest in Manhattan. I’ve spent time looking out from Battery Park, and shudder to think that Robert Moses nearly succeeded in demolishing historic Castle Clinton and covering the park with a highway overpass. I’ve been to the site of the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, one of Moses’ last great projects, and seen the Unisphere standing in the rather bleak surroundings of what was meant to be one of his greatest parks.

I knew that Robert Moses had reshaped Long Island and much of New York City for the benefit of drivers, so when I decided one day that I would like to walk across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, I was not too surprised to find that the bridge had been built by Moses without pedestrian access. But I didn’t know until reading this book that Moses himself never learned to drive.

Though Moses was unquestionably a ruthless, arrogant bastard, he Got Things Done, as Caro puts it. The Power Broker dramatically conveys the almost impossible technical challenges of, for instance, threading the Cross-Bronx Expressway through a densely populated borough and across or under existing highways, water mains, and railroad lines.

But, especially in the chapter “One Mile,” Caro underlines the human cost of his subject’s success. Time and again—as when he sacrificed the neighborhood of East Tremont rather than reroute the expressway by two blocks—Moses added to that cost through stubbornness and vindictiveness.

Asked why he demolished the valuable clubhouse of the Columbia yacht club after taking it over for the city, he replied, “Because they were rude to me.”

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

David Grann has a clean, solid prose style, much like his New Yorker colleague John McPhee. When he’s writing about hunting for giant squid, or about the system of water tunnels under New York City, you might almost think you were reading the man Paul Theroux called “Doc” in honor of his quiet expertise about everything.

But most of The Devil and Sherlock Holmes takes place in darker territory. It’s hard to imagine any book of McPhee’s that could be subtitled “Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession.” Grann writes about an amnesiac fireman who survived 9/11, the death by garroting of a Sherlock Holmes scholar, the mob-friendly city of Youngstown, Ohio, and how a Haitian death-squad boss became a real estate agent in Brooklyn. Balding, beefy, and unshaven in his author photo, Grann even looks like a tough guy.

Not surprisingly for a book that discusses a lot of bad behavior, the subject of the death penalty arises more than once. In “Trial by Fire,” Grann looks at the case of a Texas man who was sentenced to death for torching his house and killing his little girls, based on strong circumstantial evidence and what seemed like irrefutable testimony from arson experts. But by the end of the story you are convinced that what passes for expert testimony, at least on this subject, is a tissue of myths and mistaken assumptions. And you may well believe that the state of Texas executed an innocent man. (Not for the first time, I’m sure.)

Yet later in the book, in a chilling piece on the Aryan Brotherhood, Grann lays the basis for one of the stronger arguments I’ve heard for the death penalty. The Aryan Brotherhood is an extraordinarily violent gang with deep roots in the American prison system. Its leaders have proven capable not only of ordering murders from solitary cells in supermax prisons (using an ingenious code) but killing people inside the prisons. Many of the killers are already serving life sentences. How do you stop them? And how can you punish them more than they’re being punished already? Grann describes the thinking of Gregory Jessner, the mild-mannered but exceptionally brave prosecutor who set out to dismantle the Aryan Brotherhood.

In an audacious move, Jessner decided to pursue the death penalty for nearly all the gang’s top leaders. “It’s the only arrow left in our quiver,” he told me. “I think even a lot of people who are against the death penalty in general would recognize that in this particular instance, where people are committing murder repeatedly from behind bars, there is little other option.”

What does Grann himself think about the death penalty? He doesn’t say. Like McPhee, who for most of his career has let slip only occasional tidbits about himself (a bit more in The Crofter and the Laird and Silk Parachute), Grann keeps his focus on his subject. 

The Great Recession in pictures

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has produced a useful feature called The Legacy of the Great Recession, which presents some of the key features of the current situation in pictures. Above is a chart showing the estimated effect of the Recovery Act on employment.

It’s also worth contemplating an older article, from September 2009, entitled Top 1 Percent of Americans Reaped Two-Thirds of Income Gains in Last Economic Expansion.