Small Models For a Towering Builder

Midtown Manhattan lay in a jumble of six pieces in the back office space at the Queens Museum of Art. As though in a remake of “King Kong,” a museum conservator, Joseph Chiarello, towered over the Empire State Building, reaching down amid a swath of Lilliputian structures. He was hovering over a miniature version of the Mid-Manhattan Expressway, an ambitious proposal that would have split Gotham at 30th Street, had Robert Moses gotten his way in the 1960s.This scale model with Matchboxsize poplar buildings was recently salvaged from an enclosed vaulted storage space under the Triborough Bridge on Randall’s Island. It will be on public view for the first time along with other models as part of a threepart exhibition, the most comprehensive ever, about Moses and New York City — “Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Road to Recreation,” opening January 28 at the Queens Museum of Art, “Robert Moses and the Modern City: Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution,” opening January 30 at the Wallach Gallery of Columbia University, and “Robert Moses and the Modern City: Remaking the Metropolis,” opening February 1 at the Museum of the City of New York. A related book, “Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York,” co-edited by the curator of the three-part exhibition, Hilary Ballon, and Kenneth T. Jackson, will be published simultaneously by W.W. Norton.What better way to look at “Big Bob the Builder,” as the New York Daily News once called Moses, than by getting one’s hands around his gargantuan projects? The small-scale structures are helpful in understanding this larger-thanlife figure who changed the face of the city. “They give you a glimpse of Moses’s-eye-view of the city,” said the chief curator at MCNY, Sarah Henry. “He thought of the city in a sense from above.” Ms. Ballon said they revealed Moses’s commitment to audacious engineering.The archivist for Metropolitan Transportation Authority Bridges and Tunnels, Laura Rosen, and Ms. Ballon went to examine a few of the models three years ago in a cold, damp storage lair, where they had lain on tables under plastic for three decades.Except for the model of the proposed 1939 Brooklyn Battery Bridge, the facsimiles in the exhibition had once been in the model room in the Authority’s administration building on Randall’s Island. Ms. Rosen said they were not on public display, though anyone who came to the building could see them. Sometime in the 1970s the model room was turned into offices, and some models were placed in the storage space adjacent to the building under the Triborough Bridge. This show will be the first time these models have been on display since the model room was closed. (The Brooklyn Battery Bridge model was shown at the Queens Museum when it was restored in 1990.)Two people can carry most of the miniature models, some of whose pieces are connected by metal hinges. Moses used the models to sell businessmen, politicians, and other decision makers on his bold ideas. A Brooklyn Eagle photo in 1939 shows the Brooklyn Battery Bridge model at a meeting at the Majestic Theater in Brooklyn to promote the project.At times, Moses could make the building process look all too easy. The model of Moses’s proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, which was to connect the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges to the Holland Tunnel and West Side Highway, has a portion with Lucite handles whereby one can simply lift a neighborhood out and replace it with part of the expressway. Ms. Ballon doubted that inserting the expressway in the city could be done in such a simple, benign manner without spillover effects to neighborhoods. It certainly was not the way the preservationist Jane Jacobs saw things, Ms. Henry said.The Mid-Manhattan Expressway would have carved a corridor along 30th street, an area chosen to avoid Grand Central Terminal, Penn Station, and Herald Square. This proposed elevated six-lane highway, Moses boasted, would solve “the worst problem of traffic strangulation in history.” As explained in the book accompanying the exhibit, groups like the fur industry, Murray Hill Home Owners Association, and Midtown Realty Owners Association vigorously opposed it.Moses’s Brooklyn-Battery Bridge would have demolished Castle Clinton in Battery Park. The proposed Long Island Sound Crossing provoked the town of Rye to commence a lawsuit and Oyster Bay to donate 3,100 acres in the path of the bridge as a wildlife refuge to the federal government. Most famously, Jacobs helped halt a highway from running through Washington Square Park, an idea Lewis Mumford likened to “civic vandalism.”The models on display represent Moses’s unbuilt dreams, showing in sharp relief battles he lost. But the unbowed builder picked himself up and began new projects. “He was good at moving on,” said Ms. Ballon, whose students at Columbia will be giving gallery talks on Moses. “The viewer will be stunned once again by the scale on which Moses thought.”The models of the Mid-Manhattan Expressway and the Long Island Sound Crossing were made by a company called Lester Associates. The Queens Museum exhibition on Moses will coincide with the reopening of the most famous model made by Lester Associates, the huge sprawling panorama of New York that spans 9,355 square feet, making it the largest architectural scale model in the world. Consisting of 890,000 buildings, the panorama took a couple hundred people three years to build by hand. (As though in a Saul Steinberg cartoon, Nassau County and New Jersey are painted in black with no buildings.)Preparing the Moses models for the show, Mr. Chiarello has been a one-man clean-up crew, taking a vacuum cleaner to the models, while using an air-spray can on delicate areas. He removed accumulated dust around Bayville and clamped down on the Long Island Sound Crossing bridge with a few wooden clasps. It seems shrinkage had created some stress causing it to buckle slightly. He was applying plastic glue to prevent it from popping its head up like a sea serpent. He cleaned other areas of the model with a solution that emulsifies dirt, soot, and grease.Mr. Chiarello used a syringe to apply glue in hard-to-get places under the bridge. His tiny tool kit also includes a brass file and a small knife. Like a character out of “Gulliver’s Travels,” he held a small wooden church in his hands, pondering where it belongs. He will attempt to match the stain on the bottom of it to the pattern of discoloration or loss on the surface of the model.On the Mid-Manhattan Expressway model, Mr. Chiarello dusted with a paper towel rather than cloth so that if an edge caught on a building, it wouldn’t harm the model. He also scrubbed where water damage had caused acidic stains.Jars of raw umber and yellow ochre lay nearby. He selected gray #5 to paint the tops of buildings, using brushstrokes influenced by his mother, who painted scenes from her native Sicilian town of Castrofilippo in Sicily. He was delighted to see on the Mid-Manhattan Expressway model the very church where his mother and father, who was a tailor, were married in the early 1920s. Mayor Jimmy Walker married them in a separate civil ceremony, he noted.For swaths of green grass and parkland, Mr. Chiarello poured out “blended turf” bought at a hobby store in Nassau County. The material is actually dried sawdust shaken as though from an oregano container.The Mid-Manhattan Expressway model will be a centerpiece at the MCNY exhibition, with ramps that people can walk up, in order to see from overhead. “This will help visitors get a sense of the overall Moses projects, not just the scene we all see from the street,” said the vice president for communications for the Museum of the City of New York, Barbara Livenstein.The models have tremendous fascination all by themselves, said Ms. Henry. “These have the added level of an unrealized vision.”The executive director of the Queens Museum of Art, Tom Finkelpearl, said he gets a chill looking at the other Lester Associates model, of the Long Island Sound Crossing. Multicolored thumbtacks – red, orange, brown, yellow – mark where highways would have run through neighborhoods. “I think the particularly bad ideas didn’t get built,” he said. Yet with a grin, he mused that his trips from the Queens Museum to Midtown Manhattan meetings would have been shortened by Moses’s projects.

Small Models For a Towering Builder

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