The “Harlem section”

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

The areas of the maps on which the dots were sprinkled most thinly of all corresponded to those areas of the city inhabited by its 400,000 Negroes.

Robert Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City during the 1930’s. He built one playground in Harlem.

Robert Moses built seventeen playgrounds as part of the West Side Improvement. He built one playground in the Harlem section of the Improvement. He built five football fields as part of the Improvement. He built one in the Harlem section. He built eighteen horseshoe courts, twenty-two tennis courts, half a mile of roller-skating paths and a mile of bicycle paths in the rest of the Improvement. He did not build a single horseshoe or tennis court or a foot of roller-skating or bicycle path in the Harlem portion.

When the Improvement first opened, in fact, there was not a single recreational facility of any type in the entire “Harlem section” — not so much as a stanchion with a basketball hoop attached.

Robert Moses had always displayed a genius for adorning his creations with little details that made them tie in with their setting, that made the people who used them feel at home in them. There was a little detail on the playhouse-comfort station in the Harlem section of Riverside Park that is found nowhere else in the park. The wrought-iron trellises of the park’s other playhouses and comfort stations are decorated with designs like curling waves. The wrought-iron trellises of the Harlem playhouse-comfort station are decorated with monkeys.

There are other matters: Moses’s varied efforts to prevent Black people (and carless New Yorkers generally) from availing themselves of Jones Beach; his use of water temperature in city pools to enforce de facto segregation (he believed that Black people did not like cold water). In 2014, Robert Caro wrote that Robert Moses’s racism was “unashamed, unapologetic.” The Power Broker makes that clear. (Spoiler alert: that article gives away the story behind the final sentence of The Power Broker.)

The monkeys were removed in 2023.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io)