Traffic congestion has been driving New Yorkers crazy since forever. Like all the city’s biggest problems, it was quickly handed off to New York’s Finest. In the late 1800’s, well before the automobile, the enfabled Broadway Squad of police officers– six-footers chosen for their brawn and good looks, to appeal to the ladies — was deployed from Bowling Green to 59th Street to escort shoppers and other fearful pedestrians through the mayhem of horse-drawn trucks and carriages and their wild and profane drivers. A Brooklyn counterpart of “Giants” in blue soon followed.

By 1903, with the advent of the automobile, the city’s Board of Aldermen promulgated the first traffic regulations and mounted officers were assigned to patrol Fifth Avenue. By 1908 the police commissioner was empowered to control the flow of traffic throughout the newly amalgamated (1898) city. A police traffic school to train specially selected officers came next, and by 1914 the first consolidated accident reports (of which there were many, as we shall see) were being compiled and centrally assembled.

We know all this from a highly informative 1952 Traffic study issued by the Mayor’s Committee on Management Survey, the colossal municipal makeover that dragged the metropolis into the modern era.

The records of the MCOMS fill 23 boxes in the Luther Gulick Papers of the Baruch Archives’s IPA Collection, and a treasure trove they are.

Robert Moses, naturally, dissented. A fellow student of Gulick’s in the Training School for Public Service in the nineteen-teens, the irascible Moses had gone on to a legendary career as bridge and highway mastermind and Parks Commissioner, while also serving on the board of the MCOMS — but that didn’t keep him from publicly excoriating the reorganization effort in 1952.

He blistered the would be-reformers like Gulick as “white-collar sleuths armed with shiny badges, junior bloodhounds with big bowwow collars, petty expense-account auditors and meter readers…”

But the reorganization effort prevailed, thanks in part to exhaustive scholarship like the Traffic study.

The report was written by Bruce Smith, the Institute of Public Administration’s criminal justice authority and the nation’s foremost police expert. http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-police-race-freddie-gray-20150430-story.html

With the city’s streets more clogged than ever, it may be useful to look back on that survey and see what’s changed, and what hasn’t, over the 63 years.

The 1950 census rated New York, with a regional population of 13 million, the nation’s densest city, averaging 25,000 people per square mile. By the 2010 census, the metropolitan population had grown to nearly 19 million, with an average density of 31,254 people per square mile.

http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/reports/c2010sr-01.pdf

With the clearing out of overcrowded tenements, Manhattan’s density, though, dropped from 88,000 psm to about 67,000 now, although another spurt is being forecast.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/realestate/how-many-people-can-manhattan-hold.html

But in the same period, traffic grew exponentially. Smith’s report put the number of registered motor vehicles in the city in 1952 at 1.35 million. Last year, the number topped 2 million. And they all seem to be clogging the streets when you’re crawling crosstown to make a theater curtain or escape town on a summer Friday. (Of course, you’re part of the problem, too, but traffic is always the other guy.)

But for all the increased congestion, the streets have become safer. In 1929, traffic fatalities in the city hit a peak with 1,350 deaths. The toll began steadily falling until, Smith reported, by 1951 it was down to 559. So far this year, 197 people have been killed on the streets, including 109 pedestrians. Mayor Bill de Blasio, pushing his Vision Zero initiative, says his goal is to  eliminate traffic deaths altogether.

Maybe it’s time to bring back the giants of the Broadway Squad — not for their good looks but their authoritative presence at busy crosswalks. Who would dare to block the box?

John was a genuine municipal hero who was instrumental in saving New York City from bankruptcy in the 1970s. He graciously agreed to serve on the Baruch Archives’s advisory committee for a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to preserve and promulgate the IPA Collection and Luther Gulick Papers. Farewell, John — you served our fair city extraordinarily well!

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/nyregion/john-e-zuccotti-urbanist-and-financier-dies-at-78.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

The photos, of course, have been seared into history — Hitler’s henchmen in the dock at Nuremberg.

And Luther Gulick was there (although they misspelled his name).

Here, found in Gulick’s World War II files, is a seating chart of the trial.

For five days in July, 1946, Gulick sat in Courtroom 600 in the Palace of Justice — the only major building in the medieval Nazi showcase that had not been bombed into rubble — taking part in the International Military Tribunal that sought justice for Germany’s  numberless victims and innovated the prosecution of crimes against humanity.

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the court’s convening.

Nine days later, on Oct. 18, 1945, the Allies made the charges official, indicting 24 Nazi leaders.

The following month, with the number of major defendants now at 20, the trial opened.

Gulick had played a significant role in the Allied victory, serving on Roosevelt’s War Production Board and an alphabet soup of other defense and relief agencies.

Most important, perhaps, his work as a member of the Brownlow Committee in the 1930s had been instrumental in reorganizing the executive branch, creating the modern office of the Presidency that proved so vital in reversing the Great Depression and winning the war.

So it stands to reason Gulick would turn up in Nuremberg. But it was not his first trip to defeated Germany.

In July 1945, he traveled to Potsdam with President Truman and envoy Edwin Pauley to meet Stalin and Churchill to hammer out the details of German surrender and reparations.

Here he is with Pauley (center) and Gen. Mark Clark in Vienna. 

He preserved many mementos of his visit.

He had even taken a souvenir from Der Fuehrer’s office itself.

So what was Gulick doing in Nuremberg?

A grisly mission. Supreme Court Associate Justice and Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson had asked Gulick to examine and survey the more than 20,000 exhibits of evidence against Nazi leaders. His account sums up the horrors of the Holocaust.

He cited a report, evidently to Heinrich  Himmler on the “Elimination of the Jews from Warsaw” including daily “progress” reports of thousands of Jews “disposed of” — documented in some cases by photos of corpses.

He found medical studies of grotesque human experiments, and documents and photos  of a human “soap factory” with victims beheaded and scalped for their hair.

“Another exhibit is a lampshade of tatooed human skin.” And “a chemically shrunken head, mounted on a slab or mahogany” from the home of a concentration camp commandant.

Interviews with some of the defendants, Gulick concluded, found some “crafty and smart” but others “extremely stupid.”

Particularly shocking, he said, was “the casual callous every-day nature of the routine reports” documenting the atrocities “and the calm way all of the prisoners admit the facts and their own participation in the system but think they have no responsibility in the matter.”

The Judgment at Nuremberg on Oct. 1, 1946, acquitted three. Four got 10 to 20 years. Three got life. And 12 were sentenced to death. Goering killed himself with cyanide before he could be hanged. Martin Bormann, condemned in absentia, was never captured but remains later identified as his confirmed his death. The remaining 10 went to the gallows  on Oct. 16, 1946.

We’re on the boards!

Yes, highlights of the IPA Collection and Luther Gulick Papers now decorate a wall on the fifth floor of Baruch”s Newman Library at 151 East 25th St., (the same historic building, as we have written, that once housed Sam McClure’s irreverent upstart magazine and its staff of journalistic muckrakers back in the 1890s.) https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/?s=muckrakers

Here’s archivist Steven Calco putting the finishing touches on the display, which went up shortly after Baruch officially announced the opening of the collection to scholars. However, a major part of it is still undergoing digitization for eventual online access.

It’s been a long haul, to say the least, since August 2014 when the collection first arrived at the Baruch Archives in more than 700 boxes looking like this…

…and this…

Now it looks like this!

So we take particular pride in the new exhibit that just skims the surface of the vast collection that traces the origins of the good-government revolution in America and the man who has been called “the leading reformer of the 20th century” — Luther Halsey Gulick III.

It’s worth a picture!