Senator of Design
From Pennsylvania Avenue to Penn Station, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has
championed great American architecture. He leaves Capitol Hill with a legacy
and a question: Will anything get built without him?
By Benjamin Forgey
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It is late in the afternoon of a busy legislative day in the United
States Senate. The bitterly divisive issue of trade relations with
China is on the floor, and, as is often the case, New York senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan has been in the middle of the action. He
favors opening our relations with the People's Republic, and when
I arrive for an interview at his cozy hideaway office inside the
Capitol building, he seems predisposed to continue speaking about
the issue--almost as if he were still on the Senate floor and I had
a vote to cast on the opposing side.
The subject
of our meeting is Moynihan's involvement with federal architecture.
Or--let me put
 this
as precisely as I can--his extraordinary, resourceful, and exceedingly
effective long-term advocacy of excellence in government architecture,
landscape architecture, urban design, infrastructure, and planning.
In nearly four decades in Washington, Moynihan, now 73, has instituted
guidelines for federal architecture; spearheaded the rebuilding
of Pennsylvania Avenue, including the Federal Triangle; pushed the
new Penn Station project relentlessly forward; and secured funding
and built coalitions for numerous preservation projects. Peg Breen,
president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, one of the legions
of design-related agencies that have enjoyed Moynihan's tireless
support, says she has been closing all her recent letters to the
senator with the plaintive query, "What are we going to do without
you?" That question occurred to a lot of architects, preservationists,
city planners, and longtime observers of federal design and planning
policies two years ago when Moynihan suddenly announced his intention
to retire from the Senate this month, after 24 years.
But for the
moment Moynihan's mental adrenaline is still pumping from the China
confrontation on the Senate floor. Sitting cross-legged in a traditional
wing chair in a book-filled
room that could be a scholar's home library, the
Senate's acknowledged intellectual embarks on a looping journey
through recent Asian history. You can be certain it is going to
end up on point, and it does: if the United States fails to take
this action, "it would be as fateful a decision as we have made
in the postwar period." But it is the stops along this conversational
way that are truly arresting, including a hilariously pointed description
of Tiananmen Square: "two enormous flagpoles and two vast portraits
of two hirsute nineteenth-century Germans--Mr. Marx and Mr. Engels--with
young people running around to the dot-com shops."
During this
informed, entertaining disquisition, I think again about the rarity
among politicians of Moynihan's passion for architecture, and how
seamlessly he fits it into a political life overflowing with weightier
responsibilities. The secret is that, to Moynihan, aside from the
 gravest
matters of war, peace, and social stability, other issues simply
are not more important than the building and rebuilding of our cities.
In his office, this has been a daily fact of life. Architect Alexandros
Washburn recalls being "pretty far down the totem pole" in 1994
when he joined Moynihan's busy, 50-person Senate staff. But Moynihan
always made time for architecture and urbanism. Once he summoned
a pair of veteran senior aides to his office and, pointing to Washburn,
commanded, "You two will help this man get Penn Station built, whatever
it takes!" (Washburn was later sent to New York to become the first
president of the Pennsylvania Station Redevelopment Corporation.)
To Moynihan,
getting things built (and built well) is all part of the job and
the responsible exercise of power in a democratic society. He often
quotes Thomas Jefferson's
dictum that "design activity and political thought
are indivisible." As if on cue, he offers this quotation as a response
when I ask him to explain how and why architecture has played so
prominent a role in his political career. Then, with a professorial
gesture--chin up and drawn in, eyeglasses tilting forward on cheeks
that can still be called cherubic--he launches into another of his
favorite related topics: the history of Washington, D.C., in particular
Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant's ambitious city plan, which famously
built symbols of the democratic experiment into the layout of the
streets and major buildings. "The idea of Washington," Moynihan
points out, "was an architectural idea, a design idea."
Few politicians
have enjoyed the kind of intimate, meaningful relationship with
the nation's capital that Moynihan has earned in nearly four decades
of activity here. He has taken
the trouble to study its history, absorb its symbolism,
work ceaselessly to improve its physical appearance--and live right
in its symbolic heart. When he wakes in the morning Moynihan can
step out on the balcony of his Pennsylvania Avenue apartment and
see the sun rise behind the monumental dome of the Capitol. On mild
evenings he and Elizabeth--his wife, campaign manager, and fellow
architectural advocate--can gather there with friends to watch the
sun disappear behind the trees on the White House lawn. Turning
their attention to the urban scene directly below, they can watch
the day wind down on busy Market Square with its navy memorial--a
statue of the "Lone Sailor" standing in a paved projection map of
the world.
Like the view
from the balcony, Moynihan's career in Washington has embraced the
legislative and executive ends of "America's Main Street," as well
as its bureaucratic middle (in the form of the impressive cluster
of classical revival buildings known as the Federal Triangle).
As a young, high-ranking assistant to Labor Secretary
Arthur Goldberg during the Kennedy administration, Moynihan gained
a lifelong appreciation of the uses and limits of the federal bureaucracy.
As a top domestic policy aide to President Richard Nixon--perhaps
the most surprising aspect of Democrat Moynihan's multifaceted life
work--he saw politics and policy close up from the White House point
of view. And as a flamboyant senator from a major state for nearly
a quarter century, he has been a legislative, not to mention oratorical,
force to reckon with on Capitol Hill.
Most telling
is Moynihan's justifiable pride in the fact that he had a hand in
getting built much of what you can see from his balcony--and even
the balcony itself. The plaza, the memorial, and Market Square,
the mixed-use building that he and Liz live in--stores and restaurants
at the bottom, offices in the colonnaded middle, and residences
on top--are all fruits of Moynihan's long labors on behalf of Pennsylvania
Avenue. That work has been, he says, "the joy of it all," and he
has been there for the beginning, middle, and end of the story.
These days Moynihan tends to recount his history with the avenue
in a sort of cheerfully amazed shorthand that is altogether appropriate
to the tale itself.
Legend has
it that it was President John F. Kennedy who, during his triumphant
inaugural parade, took note of Pennsylvania Avenue's decaying north
side and decided then and
there to do something about it. In reality it was
Goldberg who did the noticing, as Moynihan recalls in shorthand
style: "There was that '61 cabinet meeting on foreign affairs, and
then the next most important issue of government comes up--which
was of course office space. Then we set up the committee with the
wonderful name Ad Hoc Committee on Federal Office Space."
Moynihan wrote
the committee report, following through on his boss's initiative,
a feat that did nothing less than turn what ought to have been a
drudge of a document into a proposal for the rebirth of Pennsylvania
Avenue--a spectacular turnabout of bureaucratic norms. When Goldberg
was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in fall 1962, the duty of
overseeing this daring initiative fell to Moynihan--and, as it happened,
he became responsible for stoking the coals for the idea in the
Johnson administration after Kennedy's assassination. (In this Moynihan
had the significant help, he never fails to point out, of Jacqueline
Kennedy.)
President Kennedy
had appointed Nathaniel Owings, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM),
then
 the
most redoubtable architecture firm in the United States, to head
an unofficial council to plan the avenue's future. Moynihan and
Owings became friends and would walk the avenue together, never
tiring of its history and potential. "We would sit on those nice
strong benches alongside the National Archives Building," Moynihan
remembers, "and look up at the Old Patent Office and see Rome or
Italian hill towns." Those benches were right across the avenue
from the current site of Moynihan's mixed-use building, with its
Navy band concerts, restaurants, theaters, and galleries. "Nat envisioned
what is now Market Square: people would have frolics," Moynihan
says. "Well, they have frolics!"
As chance would
have it, Moynihan's involvement with the avenue lasted longer than
Owings's, or anyone else's for that matter. During the Nixon administration
he was instrumental in the creation of the Pennsylvania Avenue Development
Corporation, the powerful
 government
agency that eventually would oversee the actual construction--much
of it financed by private enterprise--of a revised, and much improved,
version of the Kennedy-era plan. (Owings's original had foreseen
the destruction of virtually every historic building along the avenue's
north side--something Moynihan says he did not like but did not object
to at the time.) "I was too young to realize that you really had
to have a man on the inside of the White House to get things done,"
SOM's David Childs recalls of the Republican interlude. "Pat taught
us all that lesson. With his love for the project, he was able to
follow it up every day." It almost doesn't need pointing out that,
during his Senate years, scarcely a month went by when Moynihan
was not engaged in some productive way or another with the rebuilding
of the avenue.
Moynihan acquired
his love of architecture as a young man--more or less by osmosis,
he believes. He mentions his youth in Manhattan, hurrying through
a list of buildings
 that
he passed by or through on a daily basis--the Chrysler,
the McGraw-Hill, Penn Station. But he stresses London, where he
studied at the London School of Economics for three years on a Fulbright
grant and the GI Bill. "What do you do when you are a young person
in Europe?" he asks, with a reflective smile. "You go around and
look at buildings." Historian Godfrey Hodgson, author of the recent
Moynihan biography The Gentleman from New York, writes that the
London years, though not a time of altogether serious academic pursuit,
were crucial for "exploring and meeting new ideas, new ways of doing
things, and new friends." Among the more specific acquisitions,
Hodgson notes, was "a lifelong interest in architecture."
Longtime Moynihan
watcher Robert Peck, commissioner of the Public Buildings Service
of the General Services Administration (and another former Moynihan
aide), has a different take. "He was a city guy, looking around
at how the streets work and how the buildings work," he says of
Moynihan's hardscrabble New York adolescence. "He wove this into
his concern about a multicultural society. Where is it that everybody
gets together? Where do the Irish, the Jews, the Puerto Ricans mix?
In New York it's the parks, the hotel lobbies, the Grand Centrals,
the Penn Stations."
The two views
are complementary: one concerns individual structures--architecture
with a
 capital
A--and the other reflects how buildings can come together to make
a civic whole. Moynihan is consistently attentive to both points
of view, often simultaneously. His authorship, during the Kennedy
years, of "Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture" is a prime
exhibit. There was no public demand for such principles; there was
not even a presidential request. Moynihan simply thought that if
you were going to propose rebuilding an avenue--or a nation--having
a set of guiding principles would be a good idea. So he wrote them
down and attached them to the Ad Hoc Committee on Federal Office
Space report.
The principles
were short and to the point. There should be no official architectural
style. Rather federal buildings should reflect "the finest contemporary
American architectural thought." Choosing a site should be the first
step of the design process. The buildings
should be architecturally distinguished and reflect
the "dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American National
Government." Presto--there was a policy, something all advocates
of distinguished government design could call upon in times of need.
And they do: it is not by accident that federal architecture has
improved at an accelerating curve in the last two decades. As Peck
states flatly, "He [Moynihan] has single-handedly disinterred public
architecture from a public policy grave and restored it to the political
agenda." This is no small matter--the federal government is far and
away the nation's largest single landlord, builder, and consumer
of design services.
Moynihan's
involvement with architecture and urban affairs has been exceptionally
varied,
and everyone has a different explanation for his
ability to rack up accomplishments in this arena. Some say Moynihan's
success relies on his ability to ally strong vision with sheer perseverance.
"It just strikes me that a lot of people in government get worn
down and tell you why you can't do something," says the New York
Landmarks Conservancy's Breen. "But Moynihan thinks big, figures
out how to do it, and has the stamina to carry it through all kinds
of layers of bureaucracy."
Others think
innovation is Moynihan's strong suit. Susan Henshaw Jones, director
of the National Building Museum, in Washington (another more-or-less
Moynihan project), is awed by the tale of the Federal Archives Building
in Greenwich Village. Moynihan managed to get this building, which
was declared federal surplus property in 1976, converted into an
apartment house whose rents now feed the nation's largest loan fund
for preservation. "There are so many things that he did quietly,"
Jones says, "and this one really helped revitalize communities all
over New York."
Of course, the
 senator
also has a keen ability to pluck targets of opportunity. In 1977,
for example, almost on a dare from an incredulous mayor of Buffalo,
Moynihan stated that he would find federal funds to save Louis Sullivan's
masterful skyscraper there, the Guaranty (now Prudential) Building.
After having done so, he moved his small upstate office into the
restored masterpiece.
Perhaps a mastery
of details is Moynihan's greatest strength. Richard Eaton, a federal
judge and onetime administrative assistant to the senator, tells
how Moynihan saved the elaborate stained-glass windows of Frank
Lloyd Wright's Darwin Martin House, convincing Christie's auction
house to sell them not at auction but rather to a conservation group
that planned to reinstall them in the original building.
Then there's
his holistic approach. Consider the Old Post Office Building in
Washington, long thought to be an 1890s eyesore marring the classical
rectitude of the 1920s-30s
Federal Triangle. Moynihan helped save it with
a law that allowed the general public to patronize private stores
and restaurants in its cavernous interior. Characteristically, he
wrote the law so that it would encourage other federal buildings
to follow this example. Only a few did, alas, but one of them was
huge, centrally placed, and more or less under Moynihan's direct
control: the immense Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade
Center, which opened in 1998 to complete the Federal Triangle half
a century after construction had stopped.
Finally, the
real key to Moynihan's successes may be his eye for major public
architecture. Witness the plan for a new Penn Station in the renovated
Farley Post Office (across the street from the site of the demolished
original, in which Moynihan used to shine shoes for nickels and
dimes). The latter is just the kind of project Moynihan
loves--big, unquestionably significant, daring,
incredibly complex, and almost impossible. When it's done, says
Childs of SOM, the project's chief architect, it ought to be renamed
Moynihan Station. "He is the guiding light and the soul of it,"
Childs says. For all of his time and visibility in the Senate, some
critics claim Moynihan lacks an overriding legislative achievement.
There is no "Moynihan bill" to remember him by, in the words of
writer Irving Kristol. But this is wrong. A rival to Moynihan's
long-term interest in architecture is his commitment to the national
infrastructure. His fingerprints are all over the most far-reaching
pieces of infrastructure legislation to emerge from Congress in
the last half century--the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency
Act of 1991, and its successor, the Transportation Equity Act for
the 21st Century (Ice Tea and Tea 21, for short). By encouraging
states and communities to begin planning sensibly for their long-term
transportation
needs--especially mass transit--the laws are beginning
at last to cut away the highway lobby's 40-year hold on national
and local transportation policy. They represent significant positive
changes in both theory and practice, and though they are not known
as Moynihan bills, that is what they are. In infrastructure, his
sensible, comprehensive approach has spawned imi-tators. There is
even talk of a "Water Ice Tea"--a law to bring the same sort of reasonability
to the issue of shepherding the nation's water resources as the
Tea laws brought to transportation.
To replace Moynihan
you'd need a lot more than one person. "I'm concerned, as he walks
away, that there just isn't anybody who combines his bundle of qualities,"
says Oregon Democratic congressman Earl Blumenauer. Washburn agrees.
"We are going to come in for a very, very rude surprise when something
comes up that requires knowledge and passion about architecture
on the federal level--and there is no Moynihan there," he predicts.
The Moynihan "bundle" is improbable and irreplaceable, and his departure
leaves an enormous void not just for Washington and New York but
also the nation.
Which is all
the more reason, once again, to celebrate the view from the balcony.
Moynihan
has set a fine example, and we can learn from it.
He has tirelessly advocated the cause of architectural excellence,
and always in the cause of larger purposes--the communication of
public meaning, the building of better cities. Four decades ago
the well placed young bureaucrat wrote presciently, in that committee
report, that the decay of Pennsylvania Avenue was in fact an opportunity.
The great boulevard should become "lively, friendly, and inviting,
as well as dignified and impressive." Thanks in large measure to
Moynihan's foresight and persistence, the nation's rebuilt Main
Street has come awfully close to meeting those ideals. Others must
now pick up where he left off and apply this man-date to similar
"opportunities" in the capital city and beyond. |
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