The Streets Were Paved with Gold (2 page)

Sure, there were racial and ethnic tensions in Coney Island: a black might get his ankles bent if he strayed into Braggo’s coffee shop on Mermaid Avenue and West 15th Street, where some pretty tough Italians hung out; a passing Jew might be called a “fairy.” But even those who did not want to be were exposed to others in a way that could not help but educate them. Out of this exposure there slowly grew greater tolerance. First for ethnic and racial minorities. Then for ideas, different life styles, for people who in other places might have been branded as “queers.” I shall always be grateful to Oswego State Teachers College, it being the only university generous enough to ignore an unpromising high school record for the sake of my then-promising fastball. But one cannot forget the 1963 civil rights protest march into downtown Oswego, when the local
Palladium Times
actually wrote that we were “a bunch of communists”; or Syracuse University, where I completed graduate studies, when the chancellor whacked a peaceful Vietnam war protester with his cane, only to be cheered, not jeered, by student and community leaders. In small towns, protesters were Enemies of the People. They threatened the existing order of things. By
comparison, New York had no clearly defined existing order of things to threaten. Strangers, change, growth, waves of migration in and out, rigorous competition—all were normal here.

Yet New York is changing. As kids, we equated New York City with Manhattan. The signs along Shore Parkway in Brooklyn or Grand Central Parkway in Queens pointed to Manhattan yet read,
TO NEW YORK CITY
, as if the four other boroughs weren’t part of the city. Sometimes, on weekends, we would take the BMT to “the City” for a day or night out to see the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, to catch a movie six months before it came to our neighborhood theater, to watch the Knicks play basketball on a portable court in the Armory. If I was paying, dinner would be at the Automat—45¢ for a delicious chopped sirloin, 5¢ extra for mashed potatoes. If my parents were paying, we went to the House of Chan, which offered chow mein that wasn’t smothered in onions, unlike Taeng Fong’s on Bay Parkway. We had annual feasts at our local Lady of Solace church, which was nothing like the Casbah that was Greenwich Village. All of Manhattan seemed to be a feast. Aside from a handful of rich Protestants who we knew lived in Fifth and Park Avenue penthouses, we never assumed people actually lived in Manhattan from the Battery to 96th Street. We didn’t think of it as a place with neighborhoods, kids playing stickball or johnny-on-the-pony, knuckles, kick-the-can, ring-a-leaveo; we never imagined there were pool halls or luncheonettes where other kids hung out. What did we know? We were tourists.

As we grew older, many of us gravitated to suburban homes or to apartments in Manhattan. As Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens stopped growing, as people and jobs fled the outer boroughs, as blight spread there, it came more and more to be true that Manhattan was
the
city. Those living in Manhattan or outside the other four boroughs came to view the other boroughs as we once viewed Manhattan—it was assumed there were no neighborhoods, no stickball, no culture out there. Staten Island was not only close to New Jersey, but its one- and two-family homes made it look the same. Queens was a poor suburb of neighboring Nassau County. The Bronx was no longer renowned for its Grand Concourse boulevard or vast zoo and Botanical Gardens, but for the cancer sweeping north. Brooklyn seemed to die about the same time the Dodgers left. The Hamptons replaced Coney Island as a weekend retreat.

Of course, neither tourist vision represents reality. Manhattan always had street life and neighborhoods, just as the other four boroughs do today. Walk under the El in Corona, Queens, and you’ll see a procession of ma-and-pa stores, most owned by Haitians and Dominicans and other immigrants, many of whom probably entered this country illegally. They found that the American Dream still works. Bedford-Stuyvesant is
not just abandoned housing or youth gangs. It also contains some of the finest row houses in New York, and one of the most spirited organizations—the Bedford-Stuyvesant Redevelopment Corporation—struggling to transform a neighborhood. Brooklyn is not just the fires of Bushwick, the abandonment of Brownsville; it is also the brownstone revival of Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, the pluck and determination of Northside residents to save their firehouse, the Russian Jews who now find refuge in Brighton Beach, the tree-lined streets of Bay Ridge, the bucolic pleasure of standing in Prospect Park, in the middle of a city, and seeing no tall buildings, nothing but grass and trees and lakes. Little Italy is alive and well in the Belmont section of the Bronx; Irish-Americans compete in old-country sports over in Gaelic Park in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx; the affluent still consider themselves lucky to land a vacant estate overlooking the Hudson in Riverdale, a stone’s throw from the South Bronx. Even Coney Island, which Pat and Nettie Auletta still call home, has not surrendered. There are people there, as in the South Bronx, who we will one day read about and admire. There are poor people, middle-income people, whites, blacks, Hispanics, trying to salvage their communities, leading quiet, noble, unpublicized lives.

For them, as for me and my family, Brooklyn is like a small town in a big city. I remember how we shared the same stoops, the same food and Coke bottles, how we asked permission to spend the night at a neighbor’s house. If I didn’t hear my mother, a friend would run over and tell me that she had her head out the window and yelling, “Kenny, supper is ready.” I think about that a lot now, living as I do in a twenty-story mausoleum on Manhattan’s Central Park West. It’s pretty, but there are no stoops and, maybe, I know the names of five neighbors.

Sadly, the hub if not the heart of New York has become Manhattan. The boroughs are no longer as unique as they once were. Other cities—like Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island—enjoy diverse cultures, neighborhoods, working class and poor living side by side, brownstone revivals, Horatio Alger success stories. Increasingly, what is unique about New York is associated with Manhattan. Only Manhattan is gaining jobs. Only Manhattan is the center of commerce, communications, ideas. Only Manhattan is what tourists usually think of when they think of New York. Only Manhattan is what E. B. White thought of when he penned his famous essay “Here Is New York.” These are some of the reasons I find myself depressed about the city I live in and love. Blight and decay have not suspended their onslaught. The “renaissance of New York” which Mayor Koch ludicrously talks about—“I feel it as I walk around,” he told me—is confined to a relatively few blocks in mid-Manhattan. If you share such cheer, this may be an uncomfortable book. Perhaps my pessimism is excessive.
I understand that a great city lives on hope, as well as facts. Our leaders, unlike our journalists, cannot just shout, “Fire! Fire!” Perhaps the isolation of writing a book, of laboring through lifeless data and budgets, of staring at a typewriter, of challenging conventional wisdom, induces undue hostility on the part of the writer. Perhaps I am reading the evidence too literally—a few years ago, no study or trend line predicted today’s resurgence of Manhattan real-estate values.

Beware, dear reader, the writer’s biases. In addition to an underlying pessimism, I plead guilty to believing:

Several other disclosures are called for. In writing this book I confronted an intellectual conundrum. Briefly, I oppose bankruptcy. Yet to avoid it, I recognize, requires steps which may be counterproductive and even wrong. Financial institutions need make loans which a prudent investor probably would not make, risking a violation of their fiduciary responsibility. The state of New York need divert funds from desirable tax cuts to even more essential increases in state aid. And the federal government, which has to curb its deficit and say no to special pleaders, somehow has to say yes to New York City’s pleas. Inconsistent? Yes. But better, in my judgment, to be inconsistent than to allow America’s premier city to go bust.

Some of the material in this book—some pages here, a paragraph or sentence there—is borrowed from earlier work.
Chapter 2
expands on a
New York
magazine cover story I wrote in October 1975 (“Who’s to Blame for the Fix We’re In”).
Chapter 3
uses several pages from a December 1975
New York
cover story (“Should These People Go to Jail?”).
Chapter 5
relies on an August 1977 piece in
The New Yorker
(“More for Less”). With the exception of stray paragraphs borrowed from my work in the
Village Voice
(1975–76), the Sunday
New York
Times
, an essay in
The New York Review of Books
or weekly columns in the New York
Daily News
(1977–78), roughly 85 or 90 percent of this book is new. In another sense, it is all new. Forced to wrestle with an entire book, to step back and read and think more deeply, I made connections I had not before made. I could not, in one sentence, tell Stanley Siegel what this book is about.