Just Kids From the Bronx (23 page)

—BG
183, MEMBER OF
T
ATS
C
RU

What also amazed me about the Bronx River was that it was crystal clear.… So beautiful. It was like a secret I had discovered. The whole experience there was like opening presents when you’re not sure what the present will be, whether it’s going to be something you really want or nothing. Seeing and finding these giant turtles in the river is a present I’ll never forget.

—E
RIK
Z
EIDLER

SAM GOODMAN

Urban planner

(1952– )

When I was in fourth grade my mother said to me, “Dad wants to meet you for dinner. Do you know how to count and do you know how to read?” And I looked at her. “Of course I know how to count. Of course I know how to read.” She said, “You’re going to take the D train to Forty-Second Street. You’re going to be in the last car and when the door opens your dad will be waiting for you.” I was in fourth grade—nine years old. I went on the subway by myself and I bought the subway token and I learned how to ride the subway to Manhattan. By the time I was a teenager I knew every subway line and I could get anywhere. My parents were never reluctant to teach us how to make the city our home and they had the brains to show us how. Consequently, I’ve always felt at ease in our urban environment. It was, and still is, my home.

In the early sixties, as part of what was seen as the need to integrate grade schools in New York City, a pairing plan was established whereby underutilized elementary schools could be matched up with overpopulated elementary schools in other parts of the city. Buses would transport the students from one to the other. P.S. 70, which was my school, in the West Bronx was paired with an elementary school in the East Bronx and we all knew that the East Bronx had bad neighborhoods.

There were many senior citizens where I lived, and because of that we had relatively big schools with empty seats. The poorer neighborhoods, with primarily people of color, were overloaded with kids. There were these meetings where they were trying to figure out how to achieve this balance of integration without busing the kids out of their neighborhoods. It’s important to remember that no one wanted the busing plan. The schools in the East Bronx wound up being as opposed to it as the schools in the West Bronx. So, ultimately, that whole thing didn’t happen. I was in grade school at that time, and I remember that there were demonstrations with these loud angry people marching and screaming. The neighborhoods were changing and it was one more signal that it was time to move. Whenever people had the means, there was every incentive on every level, from the school system to the police department to the elected officials. They were all saying to people who lived in our neighborhood at the time, “Move. It’s not going to get any better. Just move.”

There was also a dramatic jump in crime in the sixties. People were being mugged, and I would hear stories. There was a little luncheonette that we went to in our neighborhood. We’d hear an older person talking about being pushed down a flight of stairs, about being held up in an elevator. There were robberies and windows broken and old people screaming to scare off strangers in the buildings. There was an article that came out in the
New York Times
, July 21, 1966, about how the Grand Concourse was going to change for the worse. My mother thought that Robert Kennedy’s model cities program could offer the necessary guidance for places like ours, of mixed race, to become a national model. My parents took that article, with me in tow, to meet our congressman, James Scheuer. He told my mom, “Mrs. Goodman, if I were you, I would move. In twenty years we’re going to bulldoze that whole place down.” He further said that the City of New York could no longer afford to keep up the level of municipal services needed, and that a good option would be to move to Co-op City. That just smacked us right across our faces. That was in July, and in October we moved up to Connecticut.

The idea that my neighborhood, the Grand Concourse, could change from what it was in the twenties to—forty or fifty years later—become a slum was something inconceivable to me. I got angry about it. It prompted me to write a newspaper that I would distribute to the community called
Community Times
. “All the news that fits, we print.” That was the slogan. I would type up interviews that I had with officials. I, a thirteen-year-old kid, would write a letter to some city official inviting them to our apartment for a community meeting. Then I’d write about the meeting and hand it out to everybody in the neighborhood. The captain of the Forty-Fifth Precinct or maybe it was the Forty-Sixth up there, came to one of the meetings, with his gold badge and all that, and told everybody how they could no longer rely on the police for their safety. Can you imagine a policeman telling people that the police department could no longer guarantee their safety? And he passed out a piece of paper that was basically a set of behaviors that everyone needed to adopt in order to protect themselves from being the victim of crime.

I was fifteen when we moved to Connecticut. I had watched this Bronx community that I knew—with both relatives of mine and friends of mine living there—I watched that community slowly fade away. When we moved I decided I wanted to be someone who would make the Bronx better rather than worse. At that time, I read a lot of news articles about the Bronx, and the articles were all negative. I would stuff them under my bed. I had hundreds of articles stuffed under my bed in my Connecticut bedroom. My parents actually encouraged all of this because they recognized that perhaps I would get involved in government in one way or another. People who still lived in the neighborhood called me “the kid congressman.” Whenever I had a chance to write an essay about something I would write it about that community.

There were a lot of things happening in the 1960s. The living wage jobs for low-skill people were dwindling, because so many people were coming here looking for those jobs. The ability of a man with very little education, like my father’s father had in his day, to earn a living wage was quickly vanishing. At that same time, there was this dramatic rise of primarily people of color from the South, who were coming here to escape what we know today was a hard situation down in the Jim Crow South. And the fact is these people came here hoping to achieve what they knew could be found here—only to be disappointed when it wasn’t really there. To make up for that disparity, the city helped out with welfare assistance. Here’s the weird thing about welfare assistance. You couldn’t be married and qualify for welfare because the assumption was that, as a couple, one person could always find a job. You couldn’t work and collect welfare at the same time. You also got a benefit if you had children, so the City of New York was discouraging people from getting married, encouraging them to have children without getting married, and making it very difficult for a person to earn a living if they in fact required welfare help. At the same time, if you were on welfare, where you lived was entirely up to the City of New York. My parents had a domestic who helped take care of our apartment but certain days the woman couldn’t come because a social worker was coming to meet with her at her own place and she had better be there, because if she wasn’t, and if they found out she was working, that would be the end of her welfare. This whole system was not designed to help people to come together, but rather to exacerbate a racial prejudice and economic stress, which is a foundation for conflict.

If young people, in particular, don’t sense that they are welcome, or don’t sense any opportunity, sometimes just out of desperation a person would do something that they would rather not do. And once it becomes socially acceptable for people to be that way, for whatever reason, the reluctance on the part of a kid to harm a senior citizen walking down the street is no longer an issue for that kid. My grandfather, on my mom’s side, stayed in the Bronx well into the 1980s and ultimately didn’t ever go out. He used to pay someone to do his shopping for him because he was afraid to go into the street. It irritated me because I knew that what was happening was not accidental. The officials chose to make decisions that they recognized were not necessarily in the best interest of their constituency. They hid these problems rather than addressed them. An elected official would not likely address a long-term problem because by the time that problem might be resolved the official would no longer be in office. So sometimes people in government would push the can down the road, because they knew they couldn’t solve the problem quickly or easily. There was also rent control in effect in most of the apartment buildings in the Bronx. If you were on welfare, in some cases you weren’t paying the full rent, or in other cases the welfare system offset the rent costs. Most of the people who were living in the buildings moved in when the buildings were first constructed, so these original rents were ridiculously low. My grandfather was paying a hundred fifty-three dollars a month for a seven-room apartment. From the 1940s to the 1960s the city was showing all these danger signs and no one addressed them until the 1970s, when the city went belly-up financially. At that point the whole house of cards came crashing down.

My grandfather on my mother’s side, Abraham Mayer, always said that it wasn’t how much you owned, but how much you could share. He used to say, “A rich man is not rich if he doesn’t know how to use his money to help someone else.” He would talk about the Depression and how he would buy dinners for people because he had the money and he knew someone else didn’t. One of the most devastating aspects of the Bronx turning from a prosperous community to a poor community was that although our community, which was mostly Jewish, although it was of one color, one race, one ethnicity, and one religion, it wasn’t homogeneous on income levels. There were different income levels within the community. I can remember people coming to my grandfather’s apartment and they would go into a bedroom and after they would come out and leave my grandfather would say to me, “That man lost his job. You never want to work for someone else. You always want to work for yourself. I was able to help him because I work for myself.” The point is that when the city started manipulating the way people lived in this community, it put everyone poor in one place. Well, if everyone in the building is just as poor as everyone else, where’s the help going to come from? And when you create an entire community of people who are desperately poor, who don’t want to be where they are, what is the inevitable outcome of that kind of lifestyle? If not one of violence, it’s certainly one of resentment. I know people who worked in this office [office of the borough president] who would say, “I need to rent a post office box somewhere else, because if I give my real address as the Bronx, who would want to hire me?” So they would rent a P.O. box at Grand Central Station so they wouldn’t have a Bronx address. This is what we’d done.

My father was trying to inspire me to be a lawyer and, in retrospect, I regret that I didn’t follow his advice because he had a very successful law practice. During the summers, when I was a high school and college student, he would take me to work with him in order to expose me to his profession. And the more I was exposed to what he did, the more intimidated I got. I can remember one meeting with a client where my father was instructing this client as to how to answer the questions that the other side might pose. I was just bowled over, especially since I was a kid. I saw it as a chess game. And the whole point was that this was an adversarial thing where you have two sides trying to demonstrate opposite sides of an argument. This was my first case of law through my father’s eyes and it turned me off. It scared me. This is not me. I’ll never succeed in this. As a consequence, I followed a different career path.

When I finished college I started looking for that career. I had a BA in political science from Kenyon College, which in New York City meant I knew how to think. I didn’t know how to make myself or someone else any money. I wound up driving a school bus in Westport because I couldn’t find a job. This was in 1975 and things weren’t so good, economically, so I decided to get myself a master’s degree. If you majored in journalism as an undergrad, you could become a news reporter. If you majored in accounting, you could become an accountant. I was a political science major. What does that mean? What I understood was how government worked and how it didn’t work, because of what I learned from watching and living in the Bronx. So I got my master’s in urban management.

Things are different now. I moved back to the Bronx. I purchased the apartment across the street from where I work at the courthouse. The apartment is number 800 Grand Concourse. The reason I chose that building was because I remembered the building as a kid. To this day, it’s a very well maintained Bronx apartment house, and believe it or not it was affordable. It’s taken all these years practically until now for people to start to see the Bronx as a place to go to rather than a place to escape from. That’s because it’s affordable, it’s a super location, and there’s been a dramatic drop in crime and a diminishing fear of neighbors that appear to be different than oneself. I’m glad to say that things are looking up. The Bronx is New York’s borough of opportunity.