Robert Moses speaks at the New York Zoological Society Annual Meeting
At the 1957 annual meeting of the New York Zoological Society at the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria, Robert Moses, Commissioner of Parks, speaks in support of plans to build a new aquarium at Coney Island.
President Fairfield Osborn introduces Robert Moses and makes a few remarks about the popularity of the New York Aquarium at Battery Park. Calling it one of the four main wonders of the city, he states that since taking over operation of the aquarium in 1910 "83 million people in 30 years have come to see it by direct count --and you don't have to go to the IBM, that's about two and half million people a year." Moses is described as a companion, an ally, sharing their dream for a new institution that will once again be a wonder of New York City and maybe the world.
Moses begins by ribbing the board of trustees as an elitist club, comparing him and Mayor Robert Wagner to a "proverbial old girl in the black bombazine with ten shares of stock attending the annual meeting of General Motors." Moses reiterates Osborn's sentiment of a "pleasant and productive" partnership between the city and the New York Zoological Society, "we like what you are doing." He urges them to worry more about the lions licking their chops in the Bronx Zoo rather than those in Borough Hall.
He anticipates opening in spring and predicts success for the first stage of the aquarium at Coney Island. From the folding of the Brooklyn Eagle Newspaper and the impending move of the Dodgers to Los Angeles, "Brooklyn will again have something on which to lavish it's affection, loyalty, and pride. Stage one of the aquarium construction will give our good-natured crowds a taste of what is to come, and as they gnash their knishes and gnaw their corn on the cob, they will raise a great Macedonian cry for stage two and stage three, and you won't be able to build fast enough to satisfy them."
"One thing, however, we can agree on, that if once more, the long night descends upon the earth, setting us back thousands of years, when the luckiest reincarnationist will inhabit a pterodactyl immune to radioactive fallout, the most priceless evidence of the heroic ascent from clod to man, the hardest to duplicate and replace, will be those which are now exhibited in our great museums here in New York."
Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection
WNYC archives id: 150425
Municipal archives id: LT6812
