One Lodge, Six Charters / City Lodge No. 408 / William J. Gottlieb
He ran a small taxicab business, sat in the East of City Lodge No. 408, and led the Automobile Club of New York as its membership grew from 33,000 to nearly 400,000. For a quarter-century, William J. Gottlieb argued that motorists deserved a stronger voice in how their roads were financed and governed.
November 8, 2026 · By Brete Murphy
A Master at the Hotel Astor
In May 1936 the brethren of City Lodge No. 408 filled a room at the Hotel Astor to honor Jacob C. Klinck, newly elevated Grand Master of Masons in New York. About 150 members and guests came.
Presiding over a lodge then eighty years old was its Worshipful Master, William J. Gottlieb, who rose to call the guest of honor “a man who has worked with us and is one of us.”
He meant it as praise for Klinck, but it would have done as his own creed.
By day Gottlieb was the executive vice president of the Automobile Club of New York. Within two years he would be its president, and for the next quarter-century a persistent national voice for the ordinary person behind the wheel.
The Electrician and the Car of a Thousand Speeds
Gottlieb was a native New Yorker, born around 1897, just as the automobile was turning from rich man’s toy into city nuisance.
He served in the Navy during the First World War as an electrician, and that training brought him to cars by an odd side door. An uncle owned an Owen Magnetic, a luxury car sold as “The Car of a Thousand Speeds.” Its gasoline engine drove a generator rather than transmitting power to the wheels through a conventional mechanical drivetrain. Enrico Caruso owned one.
The uncle could not master it. His nephew understood the controller principle from his Navy days, so he trained a chauffeur to handle it instead.
The experience pushed him into the taxicab trade. He started with six cabs and learned a hard lesson about absentee ownership: drivers abandoned the cars and walked off with the receipts.
He was down to three when, in 1925, he joined the Automobile Club of New York as a paid member of its Membership Committee. The club then had fewer than 2,000 members.
By 1926 he was running its new Westchester Division from an office on South Broadway in Yonkers, where he had lived for years. His later campaigns would make him a familiar—and controversial—figure in the county.
Committee Rooms and a Militant Platform
The 1930s turned the young membership man into a legislative strategist.
He chaired a statewide auto club conference in 1930, and by 1935 he sat on the executive, legislative, insurance and bylaws committees of the New York State Automobile Association. That body called for an end to ticket-fixing, license revocation for drunk drivers and safety lessons in the schools.
In June 1936, a month after the Klinck dinner, Gottlieb laid out what the Brooklyn Times Union called a militant platform.
He could already claim a win: the club’s pressure had helped kill one cent of the state’s emergency gasoline tax, a reduction he credited with saving motorists $16 million a year. He wanted the other cent gone, a flat registration fee of no more than $3 a car, and an end to the diversion of motor taxes into the general budget.
His loyalties were plain, sometimes uncomfortably so.
That July he wired Police Commissioner Lewis J. Valentine to back a crackdown on jaywalkers, arguing that “the human machine is capable of stopping and starting with greater facility and certainty than an automobile.”
It was an argument made from the motorist’s side of the windshield: pedestrians, rather than drivers alone, should bear responsibility for keeping traffic moving safely.
The Toll Booth Wars
In January 1938 the board elected Gottlieb president, succeeding J. Mack Young. He already sat on the board of the American Automobile Association and led the state association’s fight against motor tax diversion.
At his re-election in July 1939 he reported that the Legislature had diverted $72 million in motor revenue. Both parties, he charged, had made “a political football of the car owner,” and he urged the state’s two million auto owners to vote as a bloc.
That same summer brought the fight that made his name in the suburbs.
Connecticut began collecting tolls on the Merritt Parkway on June 21, 1939, largely to pay for extending the road toward Hartford. Westchester answered with a toll on the Hutchinson River Parkway, authorized on August 7 and collected from August 21.
Gottlieb threatened suit and mocked the county for punishing New York drivers to spite Connecticut:
“A better example of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face cannot be found.”
The successful court challenge was brought by the State of New York, not by Gottlieb or the AAA.
In People v. County of Westchester, decided in November 1939, the Appellate Division held that the county lacked authority to impose the toll. The Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in March 1940.
The decisions supported the legal position Gottlieb had advocated, but they were rulings on the county’s statutory powers—not a general prohibition against toll roads.
Westchester’s editors were livid. White Plains’ Reporter Dispatch sneered that Gottlieb seemed “the ideal type of person to step out of an empty taxicab,” a jab at his old trade.
Years later the Port Chester Daily Item blamed his opposition for delaying tolls two years and costing the county nearly $3 million. Those were the newspaper’s claims, not independently established measures of his influence.
Tolls eventually returned to the Hutchinson River Parkway and remained until October 31, 1994. The Merritt’s lasted until June 27, 1988. Gottlieb lived to see neither go.
Gasoline, Coupons and “Big Shots”
World War II turned the motorist into a rationed citizen.
The Office of Price Administration banned pleasure driving in the East in January 1943, eased the ban in March, and brought it back in May. Gottlieb had already warned drivers to economize or face Sunday station closings.
When Washington ruled that summer that A-coupon gas could fund only certain vacation trips, he called the rule a gift to “big shots” that cheated war workers who could not take two weeks off.
“Give everybody an even break,” he urged.
On July 29 he predicted the ban would end within two weeks, citing an “unquestionable authority,” and promised that the A-coupon motorist would be freed from “the odious surveillance of OPA inspection.”
He was early. The ban came off in the Northeast on September 1, 1943.
Two weeks after his prediction he wrote to War Mobilization Director James F. Byrnes, accusing Midwestern oil companies of holding back gasoline from the East and charging that Harold Ickes had surrendered his authority to the oil industry.
A Mansion on East Seventy-Eighth Street
Peace brought a flood of drivers, and the club grew with them.
It bought the McKim, Mead & White mansion built for Philip A. Rollins at 28 East 78th Street, and Governor Thomas E. Dewey cut the ribbon on October 31, 1946.
Dewey said most New York roads had been built for “the model T Ford era.” Gottlieb’s numbers made the point: 41,300 members in October 1945, 92,500 a year later.
The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” paid a visit in April 1948 and found a thickset man with bushy eyebrows and a swirly red-and-blue tie.
The club had 145,000 members, 252 employees, a staircase designed by Gutzon Borglum and a library of 990 maps. A fifteen-telephone breakdown desk in the basement took 1,200 calls on an ordinary day and up to 4,000 in a storm.
The club posted bail for members arrested on motor-law charges, up to $5,000. In the December 1947 blizzard, its tow trucks carried pregnant women to hospitals.
Only members, Gottlieb added.
He was now a figure in Washington, too. On October 31, 1947, he was among the AAA delegates President Truman received at the White House with the Inter-American Federation of Automobile Clubs.
A few days later he told the AAA’s annual meeting that New York was “a traffic jungle,” with the nation’s worst parking problem and the least done about it.
Time reported that he jokingly proposed closing every bridge and tunnel into Manhattan and declaring a state of siege.
In 1948 he aimed at “the drones of Manhattan” at City Hall:
“If words were bricks, there would have been enough garages built in the last two years to house every car from the Bronx to Queens.”
The Arithmetic of the Toll Road
Gottlieb’s central argument was about money.
In 1952 he challenged the Port Authority’s commuter arrangements with a precise figure: 71.79 percent of passenger cars, he said, still paid the full 50-cent toll.
The city’s new auto use tax, $5 a year on a light car, became another target. The Daily News later credited him with persuading the city to drop it in 1957.
The Thruway era sharpened everything. The state created the Thruway Authority in 1950 to build the road with toll revenue bonds, and the first tolled section opened on June 24, 1954.
Months later a staff report for a state commission proposed new tolls on free parkways, including the Northern State and the Taconic, so they would not compete with toll roads.
Gottlieb called it an invitation to “ruthless exploitation” of the motorist.
Toll financing, he argued, cost twice as much as building with motor taxes, because interest on Thruway bonds would roughly equal the cost of the road. That was his financing argument, not a universal accounting rule for road construction.
He predicted a “day of reckoning” and a revival of shunpiking, the old farmers’ trick of driving around the tollgate.
Sentinels of Safety
For all the combat, Gottlieb’s proudest boast was gentle.
Asked in 1952 to name the AAA’s greatest achievement in fifty years, he chose the School Safety Patrol, then more than 400,000 children strong, each “a sentinel of safety” at the curb.
His club ran an annual “School’s Open” campaign. In September 1952 he handed Mayor Vincent Impellitteri the first of 10,731 placards bound for city lampposts.
He pushed his club toward fairness off the road as well.
In December 1955 the members voted to ask the national AAA to withhold its seal of approval from hotels, motels and restaurants that turned away Jews and other minorities. Gottlieb promised a committee of members to put the resolution into effect.
The Man Who Never Got a Ticket
The private man surfaces in the society columns.
A 1953 Miami Herald profile dubbed him “Mr. Triple A of Fort Lauderdale.” He chaired the AAA’s National Touring Board and was a trustee of its safety foundation.
He and his wife, Mildred, kept two yachts, the Velaim IV and Velaim V, at their Rio Vista home and summered in Great Neck. Their son, Bill Jr., was at the University of Miami, and their daughter, Phyllis Ann, was at Pinecrest.
He painted Florida seascapes and mounted the king mackerel he caught offshore.
The Herald also reported that in all his years with the AAA he had never been given a traffic ticket.
The Last Mile
William J. Gottlieb died at New York Hospital on December 7, 1963, after several days’ illness. The Daily News and Associated Press accounts gave his age as 66.
The Associated Press called him a recognized national spokesman for the motoring public. During his presidency the club had grown from 33,000 members to more than 398,000, among the largest in the AAA.
An obituary credited him with ideas adopted by traffic engineers, including the one-way thoroughfare. A Memphis paper ran the news under the heading “Masonic Death Notice.”
His public career left a record of arguments over who should pay for roads, what motorists were owed for their taxes, and how much a city should accommodate the automobile.
Gottlieb’s answer consistently began with the driver. Motorists paid the taxes and tolls, he argued, and public authorities owed them an accounting.
The record does not establish that his Masonic work produced his transportation policies. It does establish that, in the same year he helped articulate the platform that would define his public career, he was serving as Master of City Lodge No. 408.
At the Hotel Astor in 1936, he praised a Grand Master as a man who had worked with the brethren and remained one of them. For the rest of his career, he sought to speak in much the same way for the members of his automobile club: as their advocate, their organizer and their persistent voice in the room.
Endnotes and Sources
Lodge Records and Masonic Notices
“Masons Honor J. C. Klinck as ‘Master of Humanism,’” Times Union (Brooklyn), May 19, 1936, p. 9. Identifies Gottlieb as Master of City Lodge No. 408.
“Masonic Death Notice: William J. Gottlieb,” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis), December 9, 1963, p. 32.
“Ex-Judge Dittenhoefer Honored,” The New York Times, March 28, 1912, p. 20. Gives the lodge’s organization year as 1856.
Newspapers and Magazines: Early Career and the Toll Dispute
“New York Automobile Club Has Established Branch in Yonkers,” Yonkers Statesman, April 1, 1926, p. 1.
“Donahue, Mangan to Speak,” Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester), December 25, 1930, p. 23.
“New Officers Elected by Automobile Club,” Buffalo Courier Express, December 20, 1935, p. 18; “Stevenson Elected Auto Club President,” Buffalo News, December 20, 1935, p. 42.
“J. M. Young Again Heads Auto Club,” Times Union (Brooklyn), June 28, 1936, p. 16.
“Back Police Drive on Jay Walkers,” Times Union (Brooklyn), July 12, 1936, p. 22.
“W. J. Gottlieb Head of N.Y. Auto Club,” Brooklyn Eagle, January 23, 1938, p. 46.
“Auto Club Head Urges Fight to Block Diversion of Vehicle Tax,” Daily News (New York), July 2, 1939.
“AAA Threatens Suit on Tolls,” Reporter Dispatch (White Plains), August 5, 1939, p. 1; “Misrepresentation,” editorial, August 8, 1939, p. 10.
Newspapers and Magazines: Wartime and Postwar Advocacy
“Plan Wartime Road Control in N.Y. State,” Daily News, July 24, 1941; “Warns Motorists on Gas Economy,” undated Daily News clipping.
“Drivers Wail in Vain to Get Vacation Gas,” Daily News, July 8, 1943; “Pleasure Trip on More A Gas Due in 2 Weeks,” July 30, 1943; “Gottlieb Asks Byrnes to End ‘Muddle in Gas,’” August 13, 1943, p. 54.
“Confusing the Toll Issue,” editorial, The Standard-Star (New Rochelle), March 18, 1947, p. 4.
Bert Pierce, “New York Called a Traffic Jungle,” The New York Times, November 5, 1947.
“Manners & Morals: The Last Traffic Jam,” Time, December 15, 1947.
“The Talk of the Town,” Automobile Club of New York profile, The New Yorker, April 10, 1948.
“Traffic Headache Still With Us,” editorial, Daily News, August 11, 1948; “Mr. Gottlieb’s Dilemma,” editorial, The Daily Item (Port Chester), August 24, 1948, p. 8.
“William J. Gottlieb,” Daytona Beach News-Journal, April 22, 1949, p. 2; “Gottlieb Honored,” Fort Lauderdale News, December 28, 1949, p. 18.
Jimmy Jemail, “Ask Anybody!,” Daily News, April 27, 1952; “Auto Club Asks Authority Once Again: Cut Tolls,” August 1952; “School’s Open” photograph and caption, September 5, 1952.
Joyce Gardner, “Executive of AAA Moors His 2 Yachts at Rio Vista Home,” Miami Herald, January 18, 1953, p. 9.
“Auto Group Blasts Plea for New Tolls,” Daily News, January 5, 1955; Sydney Mirkin, “Toll Tale of the Turnpikes,” May 10, 1955.
“City Uses Sugar to Sweeten Rocky on Offtrack Betting,” Daily News, 1959.
Obituaries and Succession
Daily News, December 8, 1963, p. 566.
Associated Press obituary, The Record (Hackensack), December 9, 1963, p. 37; Buffalo News, December 9, 1963, p. 7.
“Automobile Club Fills Its Vacant Presidency,” The New York Times, December 13, 1963.
Court Records
People v. County of Westchester, 257 A.D. 769, 15 N.Y.S.2d 365, New York Appellate Division, November 6, 1939. Holds that Westchester lacked authority to impose the challenged Hutchinson River Parkway toll.
People v. County of Westchester, 282 N.Y. 224, 26 N.E.2d 27, New York Court of Appeals, March 5, 1940. Affirms the judgment.
Papiernick v. City of New York, 202 Misc. 717, New York Supreme Court, 1952. Concerns the city’s auto use tax.
Government and Archival Records
Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Daily Appointments of Harry S. Truman, October 31, 1947. Transcript supplied with the research materials.
U.S. Bureau of Mines, Minerals Yearbook 1943. Rationing chronology, including pleasure-driving restrictions.
New York State Thruway Authority, “History of the NYS Thruway.”
Additional Published Sources
“A.A.A. to Be Asked to Withdraw Approval from Hotels Practicing Bias,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 22, 1955.
“The Philip A. Rollins Mansion, No. 28 East 78th Street,” Daytonian in Manhattan, March 3, 2016.
“A History of Tolls on the Hutchinson River Parkway and Their Impact on Pelham,” Historic Pelham, May 2016.
“Merritt Parkway: Tolls Added in 1939, Removed in 1988,” Kurumi.com Connecticut Roads.
“Owen Magnetic,” Wikipedia. Background on the automobile’s electric transmission.
“100 Years of the AAA School Safety Patrol Program,” AAA Northeast Magazine; “AAA School Safety Patrol,” The Auto Club Group.
A Note on the Sources
Gottlieb’s service as Master of City Lodge No. 408 is documented for 1936. His initiation, passing and raising dates, the full span of his service as Master, and any Grand Lodge honors have not been established by the sources assembled here.
The descriptions “native New Yorker” and age 66 at death support an approximate birth year of 1897, not a confirmed birth date or borough. The Memphis death notice gives his age as 62, in conflict with the Daily News and Associated Press accounts. This article follows the latter reports.
The club’s membership figures describe different stages of Gottlieb’s career. It had fewer than 2,000 members when he joined its paid Membership Committee in 1925. The figure of 33,000 refers to the beginning of his presidency in 1938.
The AAA threatened litigation over the Westchester tolls, but the reported case was brought by the State of New York. Gottlieb’s public campaign and the State’s successful legal challenge should not be treated as the same action.
The 1939 court record establishes that Westchester authorized the challenged toll on August 7 and began collecting it on August 21. Later accounts discuss subsequent toll arrangements and proposals. They should not be read as describing one uninterrupted legal and operating history.
The claim that Gottlieb delayed tolls for two years and cost Westchester nearly $3 million comes from a critical newspaper editorial. It is presented as that publication’s assessment, not as a verified calculation.
Gottlieb’s July 1943 prediction that the pleasure-driving ban would end within two weeks proved premature. The federal chronology places its removal in the Northeast on September 1, 1943.
The claim that Gottlieb helped secure the repeal of the city’s auto use tax in 1957 rests on the Daily News obituary and has not been independently corroborated here.
The description of the Owen Magnetic is intentionally general. Its electric transmission differed from a conventional mechanical drivetrain; it should not be confused with a modern battery-electric car.
The relationship between Gottlieb’s Masonic service and his public advocacy is interpretive. The sources establish both activities but do not prove that his lodge work caused his transportation policies.
Direct links are supplied for the identified court opinions. Other sources retain their bibliographic citations rather than links to unverified archive pages.
Continue the Story
Place City Lodge in the Larger Lineage
Explore One Lodge, Six Charters
Follow the lodge histories that became part of Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586.
Another Lodge in a Changing City
Read the history of Island City Lodge No. 586
Explore a neighboring Masonic tradition rooted in Long Island City’s commercial and civic life.
Read the Toll Decisions
The Appellate Division’s 1939 decision
The Court of Appeals’ 1940 decision
Read the rulings behind one of the most contentious road-financing disputes of Gottlieb’s early presidency.
