You're probably talking about Robert Moses? Park commissioner, city planner, huge asshole. There's a huge book called The Power Broker that's a fascinating history of him and the city.
It also mentions a part where one of his lead engineers came to him and was like "if we build it like this, it'll cost basically the same and if we want to put train tracks in the future it will be easy. If we build it your way , it'll be impossible to put a train here without a ton of expensive work".
Moses went the anti-train way on purpose.