Understanding Mario Cuomo and the ‘Forest Hills Compromise’
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Mario Cuomo rose to prominence through his work mediating housing issues in Corona and later Forest Hills. Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel/Wikimedia Commons
By Prameet Kumar
Queens-born Mario Cuomo, the 52nd governor of New York State, never thought he would run for public office. “I was perfectly content with a professional career that had brought me satisfaction as a lawyer and an adjunct professor of law at St. John’s,” he wrote. But once Cuomo got involved in a local housing dispute in Corona, Queens, 50 years ago, he “emerged as the Great Compromiser, the Henry Clay of Queens,” and his career took a turn.
Some 69 homes were slated to be razed in the Italian-American neighborhood of Corona before Cuomo negotiated a deal with Mayor John Lindsay’s deputy Richard Aurelio to save almost all of the homes. Even Aurelio was impressed with the lawyer sitting across the negotiating table from him.
“I was intrigued — not only by Cuomo’s creativity but also by how he articulated his case with heartfelt feelings for the powerless,” Aurelio wrote decades later. “At several contentious meetings in the Corona community and within city agencies, Cuomo masterfully rebutted each one with clarity and patience, and with sustained pressure and persuasion from City Hall, all parties finally came around.”
The Corona compromise showed New Yorkers early glimpses into elements of Cuomo’s personal ethos, conciliatory style, and political shrewdness. It also put him in direct opposition to the dominant city planning spirit of the time — a top-down approach with Manhattan at the top and the other boroughs at the bottom, exemplified by the autocratic public official Robert Moses. Cuomo was instead a believer in democracy and the people, particularly the people of Queens.
“Corona was the end of the Robert Moses era of government,” Cuomo said years later. “From that point forward, a new sensitivity developed in government, a new sensitivity that said, ‘Look, this can’t be done from Manhattan when you’re dealing in Queens. You have to be more careful; you have to give the people a fuller opportunity to participate.’”
In a 1977 mayoral debate, Cuomo described his foray into politics as a neighborhood advocate “by beating Robert Moses and John Lindsay and a whole series of establishments on behalf of neighborhood groups.”
The Corona compromise also thrust Cuomo further into the public eye. Although Cuomo may have been in opposition to Lindsay’s administration in Corona, he was on Lindsay and Aurelio’s shortlist of mediators for another housing dispute, this time for a scattered-site housing project proposed for Forest Hills, for which Cuomo would gain nationwide fame.
Scattered-Site Housing in Forest Hills
Scattered-site housing was a public housing concept that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century to direct low-income housing away from concentrations in a single neighborhood to be distributed, or “scattered,” throughout a city.
“Providing low-income assisted housing in areas away from economically depressed, minority-concentrated, inner-city neighborhoods has been a central concern of housing specialists, planners, civil rights activists, and other advocates for the inadequately sheltered for the past four decades,” a contemporary report prepared for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development stated.
In 1965, HUD mandated that a portion of federal housing grants, which New York City was eager to take advantage of, be used for scattered-site housing.
Former Bronx Borough President Herman Badillo said that in 1968, he and the borough presidents of Brooklyn and Queens had agreed to build scattered-site housing in their boroughs. “I got my housing approved, but I spread it into different areas,” Badillo said at the time. “I put in some housing in the Italian community of Throgs Neck. And I put in some housing in the Irish community, Bailey Avenue. And I put in some housing in the Jewish community, around Pelham Parkway.”
The mistake that the Queens Borough President made, according to Badillo, was that “they put it all in one place”— Forest Hills. Though there were many advisors to Lindsay who cautioned him against concentrating the scattered-site housing into just one neighborhood, Lindsay nevertheless pressed on.
“We went into scattered-site housing, which every political adviser to John Lindsay thought he was wrong about,” said Sid Davidoff, one of Lindsay’s top aides, at the time. “It may be a good concept on paper to go into a middle-class Jewish community like Forest Hills with this kind of housing, but it was going to be a devastation politically.
“He didn’t care. He was willing to take political turmoil,” Davidoff added. “He felt it was the right thing to do from a public-policy point of view.”
The turmoil began right from the start, and it had its roots in racial conflict. The area of Forest Hills in which this low-income housing was slated to be built — 108th Street and 62nd Drive — was a predominantly middle-class white and Jewish neighborhood. Most of the people who would move into the new housing would be Black and Latino. As Badillo explained then, with “this one large housing project in the heart of the Jewish community … once again, you have the Jewish community pitted against the Black and Puerto Rican communities.”
New York City’s Board of Estimate, a now defunct governmental body that was then in charge of land use decisions, approved a plan to build 840 units of low-income housing across three 24-story buildings in Forest Hills.
Station Square in Forest Hills. Photo by NewYork718/Wikimedia Commons
Journalist Murray Kempton wrote that “the Forest Hills project was conceived in haste and approved with an almost contrived failure to consult with the community. By the time the neighborhood recognized that the city was serious, all public hearings were over; those opposed had all but exhausted their legal remedies and were left with no recourse except agitation.”
It was this community agitation that led Lindsay to appoint Cuomo as mediator for Forest Hills in 1972.
Aurelio was immediately impressed with Cuomo’s grasp of the situation. “Cuomo was amazingly well informed on the issues and sufficiently interested to stay on the phone with me, asking wide-ranging questions, raising tangential issues, discussing the personalities of the opposing factions’ leaders, speculating on how they would receive him and repeatedly asking for assurance that he would be an independent agent,” Aurelio wrote. “Within days, Cuomo was in command.”
Racial Hostility in Forest Hills
Racial conflict was not new to Forest Hills.
The neighborhood is best known for the section called Forest Hills Gardens, the planned community built by architects Grosvenor Atterbury and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. in the early 20t Century, inspired by Britain’s garden cities, and home of the West Side Tennis Club and U.S. Open Tennis Championships.
A resident of Forest Hills in the 1930s wrote in the New York Times in 1995 of “the stately greenery of Forest Hills Gardens, which maintained an isolation reinforced by restrictive covenants that permitted occupancy only by white Christians, a fact not lost on us, a Jewish family.”
A couple of weeks later, the president of the Forest Hills Gardens Taxpayers Association wrote a letter to the editor that said though “Forest Hills Gardens does have restrictive covenants concerning architecture and zoning … nowhere in the covenants is there any reference to who could or could not purchase a home.” But for all purposes, Forest Hills Gardens was a de facto white Protestant community.
In 1959, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Black American Ralph Bunche and his son were denied membership to the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills Gardens because the club still barred Black and Jewish people. The club president “was quoted by Dr. Bunche as saying that the club was a private one, the same as a person’s home, where ‘you can invite whom you want to.’”
The longtime TimesLedger columnist Kenneth Kowald wrote in 2015 that the Bunche incident “is something to remember about Mario Cuomo and his efforts to make the promise of democracy live up to its hoped-for reputation.”
This racist environment was only a decade removed from the one in which Cuomo was operating. The site of the proposed low-income housing in Forest Hills was just a mile and a half from the West Side Tennis Club. Not bound by any restrictive covenants there, it was the site of a large middle-class Jewish community, but it still did not welcome the low-income black people that the scattered-site housing would bring.
The protest over the housing project took on an intense, sometimes violent, form.
Andrew Cuomo, Mario’s son and current governor of New York, experienced his first protesters when the Jewish residents of Forest Hills rallied outside his family home in opposition to the low-income housing.
“Outside the huge bay window, three dozen protesters, men and women, were marching in front of our house in Queens, holding up signs demanding, ‘Don’t ruin our neighborhood!’ and ‘No project – no way!’ Andrew Cuomo wrote in his autobiography. “[City planners] believed that the predominantly middle-class, Democratic, Jewish neighbors would embrace a project designed to lift up the poor. They assumed that since most of the residents were renters, they wouldn’t complain that public housing would lower property values. They assumed wrong. The people of Forest Hills didn’t want a housing project.”
Protesters threw rocks at the construction site and smashed the windows of the construction trailers. They gave Lindsay the name “Adolf” in chants. They protested at a dinner in Corona that both Lindsay and Cuomo attended, at which Cuomo was slapped across the face, and police had to be called to the scene. When Lindsay ran for president in 1972, protesters followed him on the campaign trail.
“Forest Hills followed us through the whole second term with Lindsay, even when we went to Florida in 1972 campaigning for the presidential nomination,” Davidoff said. “They would hand out the flier about how Lindsay wanted to destroy neighborhoods by putting people in there that didn’t belong. Handed it out to these old people in Florida.”
For Black New Yorkers, these protests were yet another sign that they were unwelcome in many parts of the city.
“By 1971, the year Mayor John Lindsay appointed Cuomo to investigate and propose a solution to the Forest Hills crisis, it was apparent that the backlash against the black civil rights movement was hardly a southern phenomenon,” Saladin Ambar wrote in his biography of Cuomo. “Whites in New York City, the great ‘melting pot’ that exemplified so much of the mosaic that Mario Cuomo would later speak of so often, was now encountering its own form of racial conflagration around the issue of housing.”
The New York Amsterdam News, one of the oldest black newspapers in the country, put what it considered to be the message coming from white outer-borough neighborhoods a headline: “The Queens Theme: ‘N------ Get Out!’”
In an editorial about Forest Hills, the newspaper wrote, “There is no reason to seek a compromise with those who fear that white, middle-class residents of Forest Hills will leave with an influx of minority or poor residents. The housing needs of minority communities are much too critical to pander to the prejudices of such persons. Mayor Lindsay … should stand fast on the Forest Hills Project. Mediator Cuomo should report to both sides that the Black community will tolerate no compromise.”
Cuomo later said to the Times on a separate racial issue that “‘there is no single solution’ to racial conflicts but pointed out that government structure in the city did not provide for any institutional method of mediating racial clashes.”
Conflict and Compromise
Though there were some local leaders within the Jewish community who supported the housing project (Forest Hills’ state senator Emanuel Gold said, “My ancestors did not break loose from the ghettos of Europe … to have me lead the charge here in New York City to keep others in ghettos”), many others attempted to give non-racial excuses for their opposition.
“We are not racist bigots, they insisted,” sociologist Richard Sennett wrote of the residents’ concerns. “Slum families have a high incidence of crime; we are afraid for our own children; physically our neighborhood will be destroyed.”
What also bothered these residents was the city’s total lack of acknowledgment of their concerns during the public process.
“The city hearings were farces,” Sennett wrote. “In one, for example, a board member who was absent sent a subordinate to cast his vote and read a statement summarizing his ‘reactions’ to the issues the community had raised … For the people of Forest Hills, recognition by the city that they had legitimate objections was especially important.”
Indeed, Cuomo found that even Black families in the Queens neighborhood of Hollis would not have wanted a scattered-site housing project in their neighborhood. “They unhesitatingly said that they would not want the project in their neighborhood,” Cuomo wrote. “They feel that many of the whites who oppose it in Forest Hills are bigots, but then in an interesting contradiction they themselves admit that they would oppose it in their own neighborhoods.”
In a thesis on the Forest Hills scattered-site housing controversy, Andrea Gill wrote that “although Forest Hills residents’ fear of poor African Americans certainly informed their opposition to the project, their protests were also directed against a style of government that had shaped New York City politics since the New Deal. In demanding community control and portraying themselves as the victims of totalitarian city planning, Forest Hills residents voiced their objections to the lack of accountability on the part of public authorities whose power allowed them to impose redevelopment schemes on an often unwilling citizenry.”
Still, the protestors betrayed their racial animus at times, such as when one of their leaders Jerry Birbach “announced that unless the project was changed to meet his demands, Birbach would sell his own house to a black man, and then organize a massive emigration of the whites, ‘tearing down in his wake the whole community’.”
While these protestors sought to halt construction on the housing project, others proposed various compromises to appease them, including setting aside a percentage of the units for veterans. (“It might help security at the site,” Cuomo once mused. “Some people are worried about safety. I think veterans might provide that.”)
Another plan by Simeon Golar, chairman of the New York City Housing Authority and a strong supporter of public housing, called for one of the buildings in the housing project to be converted into a Mitchell-Lama project to provide housing for middle-income families instead of low-income.
Ultimately, Cuomo went with something much simpler; he simply cut the size of the project in half. Instead of three 24-story buildings totaling 840 units, he proposed three 12-story buildings totaling 432 units. Newsday called it a “Solomon-like solution.”
Cuomo, knowing that the compromise would upset all parties involved, ended his report by repeating a 1775 quote from Irish philosopher Edmund Burke: “All government — indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act — is founded on compromise.”
Golar called the compromise “immediately absurd,” and Birbach called it “totally unacceptable.”
In a New York Times letter to the editor, National Urban League Executive Director Vernon Jordan wrote, “The compromise plan in the Forest Hills housing controversy represents a failure of leadership and a failure of reasoning. The mediator, Mario Cuomo, reasoned that the community opposed the project because it fears crime and vandalism. What kind of leadership is it that gives in to irrationality like that?” He ended his letter with the resounding words: “Lost in the charade over Forest Hills is the basic question: Where do poor people who need decent housing go?”
Still, Cuomo’s compromise found support in some circles, including from U.S. Rep. and future New York City Mayor Ed Koch, who called it “a reasonable solution which deserves the support of reasonable men,” and the Anti-Defamation League, whose chairman said it contained “welcome recommendations which constitute a constructive attempt to respond to the needs and concerns of the community.”
Eventually, Lindsay also backed the compromise, but he did so with hesitation. “I come to this decision reluctantly, but with a view that the extreme polarization caused by this project overrides the merits of the original design of the project,” he said. (The news was major enough to be featured on page one above the fold on that day’s edition of The New York Times.)
Lindsay also included a warning that he would not “reduce the number of low‐income units in the project below 432 considering the desperate need for new housing of this kind in our city.” (Birbach quickly derided Lindsay as “totally unresponsive, pompous and arrogant.”)
Legacy as Launching Pad
As the compromise took hold, Cuomo published a diary he had kept during his months of mediation – the insightful Forest Hills Diary. (If you’ve read the diary, “then you know more about me than I do,” Cuomo quipped).
Journalist Jimmy Breslin wrote the foreword for the book, and Sennett wrote an afterword. A 1974 review in the New York Review said, “Breslin has the journalist’s bent for tragedies with vaguely hopeful endings; he sees Cuomo, not unpersuasively, as that solitary just man whose ‘lonely, excruciating work’ might redeem the city. Sennett draws rather less hope from Cuomo’s experience; he sees it as “a glimpse into what happens when the political machinery in a city ceases to work.”
Cuomo’s work on Forest Hills developed his public persona as a master mediator and political pragmatist. In his biography, Ambar wrote that Forest Hills “demonstrated his early penchant to observe progressive principles while acknowledging the more conservative voices within the liberal Democratic coalition.
Similarly, the New York Review wrote, “Cuomo is liberal, patient, and appreciative of the weight of each side’s argument; he has in other words all the virtues a mediator requires.” His reputation had been cemented, and the diary he published helped in doing so. “The publication of Cuomo’s diary suggests something most curious in a politician: an insistence on showing his private face in public places, a need to reflect on how the self appears to the ideal of the self, an appreciation of the value of having someone to confess to.”
With this public persona crafted by Forest Hills, Cuomo was now in a perfect position to launch the political career he had once had no intention of launching. In 1974, he ran for Lieutenant Governor of New York, lost, and was subsequently appointed Secretary of State.
According to Cuomo, one of the main reasons that he lost the race for Lieutenant Governor was because liberal New Yorkers believed that he had conceded too much in Forest Hills.
“I went on from Forest Hills to a race for lieutenant governor, in which the New York Post, then the liberal newspaper, would not interview me, in which the Liberal Party, led by Alex Rose, would not interview me, in which the Democratic National Committee that loved the mayor gave me zero votes, not one vote at the convention,” Cuomo said. “So the liberals killed me in 1974 … They called me a ‘Queens conservative.’”
In 1977, Cuomo ran for mayor of New York City against Koch, a race in which the legacy of the Forest Hills compromise still haunted Cuomo. Although Cuomo hailed from Queens and Koch from Manhattan, Koch was trouncing Cuomo in the neighborhood of Forest Hills. The manager of Koch’s television campaign even considered running an anti-Cuomo commercial that said, “The people who know him best voted against him 2 to 1.”
Cuomo would go on to lose the race to Koch. But the Forest Hills compromise was eventually considered successful enough that even Koch wanted to lay claim to it. “Many of my opponents today date from the fact that I said that I was opposed to the three 24-story buildings to be built in Forest Hills because I thought it would be destroying a middle-class community,” Koch said. “I said that it should be scaled down … I remember Mario Cuomo came to interview me, and his ultimate proposal is the one that I had advocated first, publicly.”
Years later, it was the legacy of Forest Hills and Cuomo’s success as a mediator of that compromise that laid the groundwork for his path to Governor of New York.
“Forest Hills brought Cuomo national recognition and made him a rising personality in New York politics,” Aurelio wrote. “His patient attention to detail, the clarity he brought to complex issues, his ability to calm community tensions, and his devotion to the disadvantaged and the powerless, were all qualities that would go on to captivate New York voters in the 1982 governor’s race. The rest, as they say, is history.”
The Aftermath of Forest Hills
Just a few years after the Forest Hills compromise, public opinion that had once been staunchly against the project came to embrace it.
Part of the shift came from the conversion of the project into a publicly owned cooperative, the first of its kind in the country — championed by Queens Borough President Donald Manes. As a result, former detractors turned into supporters.
“I picketed the site regularly,” said Joseph Walderman, who went from demonstrating against the project to sitting on its board of directors. “I don't deny it. But we've come to a happy conclusion here. A very happy conclusion.”
But, as a result of the compromise, just one-seventh of the Forest Hills cooperative’s residents were Black 16 years after its opening.
Cuomo knew his work was unfinished.
“My compromise has been adopted,” he wrote in 1972 at the end of his Forest Hills Diary. “Will this provide the community with another occasion for resentment, anger, trouble?” And with some foresight, he wondered, “I’m afraid the questions will always be there. There will be congratulations, probably a lot of them, but the wondering will still be there.”
Prameet Kumar is vice chair of Land Use for Queens Community Board 6 and president of the Queens Central Democratic Club.
