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suggested Flushing Meadow could be developed—with some of the public funds that the Fair would be receiving—into a wonderful, elegant fairground. A lease was drawn up, and Moses, as City Parks Commissioner, became the Fair’s landlord. In return he requested a piece of the profits to design and sculpt Flushing Meadow Park as he wished.
    But it never happened. Although Moses was able to bury “the valley of ashes”—ingeniously using the miles of refuse as landfill for what would become the Van Wyck Expressway—the 1939–40 World’s Fair, the grandest and largest exposition of its time, was a financial disaster.When it was over, the Fair that had offered forty-six million visitors a glimpse of “the World of Tomorrow”—a world of futuristic wonders like television and skyscrapers—only paid investors thirty-three cents on the dollar.
    Thanks to Moses’ protean efforts, there was now a Flushing Meadow Park, meticulously landscaped with two man-made lakes, an elaborate new drainage system, a new art deco–style civic building (the former New York City Pavilion), and the wide asphalt roads and pathways that serviced park-goers. However, it wasn’t the grandiose public space he originally envisioned, which would have included everything from a boat basin, bike paths, and a nature preserve to both a Japanese garden and another modeled on the Garden of Versailles. His dream would have to wait.
    Although World War II slowed down the pace of his building, Moses continued to plan for the postwar surge he anticipated. In 1943 New York City initiated its own plans to stem the tide of citizens who had already begun to eschew cities for the suburbs. The catchphrase for this process would come to be known as “urban renewal,” the systematic clearance of decayed and blighted slum areas—“cancerous areas in the heart of the city,” according to Moses—that could be redeveloped and turned into affordable housing for middle-class families.
    By 1943 Moses, then the chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, had “induced” the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to build Stuyvesant Town, a series of large, concrete-slab apartment buildings that would stretch along Manhattan’s East Side from 14th Street to 20th Street between Avenue A and Avenue C. The complex would ultimately create nearly nine thousand affordable and comfortable apartments for twenty-five thousand people. Moses lauded Met Life’s chairman of the board, Frederick H. Ecker, praising his “farsightedness and courage” to get involved in public works. Not everyone agreed. The New Yorker ’s architecture critic, Lewis Mumford, wrote that the buildings looked like “the architecture of the Police State.”
    The project quickly caused a public outcry when it was revealed that Met Life had a whites-only policy. Ecker only added to the firestorm byblatantly revealing his segregationist views. “Negroes and whites don’t mix,” the Met Life chairman stated, and claimed that if Stuyvesant Town was integrated, it would be detrimental to the city because “it would depress all the surrounding property [values].” It didn’t help, in the eyes of many progressive citizens—including the NAACP—that, at Moses’ urging, Met Life was also creating a similar apartment complex uptown, the Riverton Houses, which had a blacks-only policy.
    Lawsuits were filed, including one by three African-American WWII veterans. Moses dismissed any and all complaints, in particular any objections to Met Life’s discriminatory policies, claiming that such lawsuits were the handiwork of citizens who were “obviously looking for a political issue and not for the results in the form of actual slum clearance.” In 1947 the New York State Supreme Court sided with Met Life; the insurance company, as the de facto landlord of the