The Streets Were Paved with Gold (3 page)

I also learned—and this is the third caution—that I should not attempt to present an agenda of “solutions.” Like most journalists, my business is stating problems, not solving them. Besides, in the process of delineating a problem one sees that the solution is often self-evident. It takes little imagination to proclaim that the antidote to weak leaders is strong leaders. Clearly, it costs too much to do business in New York, and if the city hopes to compete, it will have to somehow reduce taxes and energy costs. A local economic development agenda, including Washington and Albany’s role, is a subject I grappled with once in
New York
(“An Agenda to Save Our City: 44 Proposals That Could Turn This Town Around,” March 1976). Radical reform of the manner in which the city delivers services, including management, civil service and collective bargaining reforms, I tried to address in
The New Yorker
(“More for Less,” August 1977). In truth, while preparing this book I originally intended to include a solutions chapter. I came to fear, however, that it would be misleading. After talking to and reading “the experts,” I discovered none had a magic potion, a still-secret plan to restore New York. Increasingly, I became convinced that the sum of the “solutions” would not equal the sum of the problems.

Perhaps Lewis Mumford captured the ambivalence I feel about New York when he said, “I am an optimist about possibilities and a pessimist about probabilities.” I am too angry to be cynical, yet too skeptical to be evangelical. So I’ve just tried to tell the truth as I see it about a very big story.

P
RINCE
P
ROSPERO
was an indefatigable, some might say an impervious man. The plague of the “Red Death” had entered the homes of half his minions, causing rapid bleeding and sudden death. But Prince Prospero remained undaunted. As told by Edgar Allan Poe in
The Masque of the Red Death
, the Prince blithely summoned a thousand of his heartiest knights and dames and retreated to a magnificent castle, where they would defy the contagion.

A lofty wall stood between them and the populace, its gates made of iron and, as an extra precaution, sealed with sturdy bolts. There was no need to step outside the palace:

Gaiety prevailed. For six months, they partied and danced to the music of a full orchestra, waltzed freely through the seven brightly colored chambers, paused to listen to the chimes from the giant ebony clock, ignored the bright sun which was tamed by thick, beautiful stained-glass Gothic windows. Prince Prospero was content. Yet he wished to do something new, something different, something
special. At last he seized on the idea of a masquerade ball. On the appointed evening:

The music ceased when the giant clock struck midnight, the waltzers froze, all dutifully waiting for the twelve chimes to ring. Suddenly, there was a stranger among them:

The courtiers were confused, torn between rage and horror. Not Prince Prospero, he was simply enraged. “Who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery?” he commanded, ordering the intruder to be seized and hanged. Still awed, no one moved; all watching as the stranger turned and stalked from the blue to the purple chamber, to the green, the orange, the white, finally halting in the violet chamber. Meekly, the courtiers followed, cringing along the walls, before making a hesitant motion to arrest the intruder. Prince Prospero did not hesitate. Dagger in hand, he bolted through the six chambers, and as he was about to plunge the knife into his victim, the intruder turned. A loud shriek reverberated through the chambers as Prince Prospero fell dead.

Timid no more, the revellers lurched to seize the tall, motionless figure, gasping “in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.”

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life and the ebony clock went out with that
of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

A “
MULTITUDE OF DREAMS
” was loose on New Year’s Eve in Manhattan as 1977 drew to a close. Selected guests were invited to pay $300 per couple to attend a masquerade ball at Régine’s, the very chic, very
in
Park Avenue discotheque. From behind a peephole, cold eyes screened the guests before the door opened to a room of varnished lights and mirrored ceilings. On regular nights, the menu advertised two scrambled eggs with caviar: “Les Deux Oeufs Poule au Caviar” ($19), “Caviar d’Iran” ($60). A bottle of Chivas Regal could be purchased for $90; a bottle of Coca-Cola, for $6. The disco, owner Régine Zylberberg once told writer Julie Baumgold, “has a whole psychology. You must make people into actors and exhibitionists.… People with no names come to see people with names. People with names come to see others they know.”

Two thousand elite guests received scroll invitations to attend an unusual New Year’s party at Studio 54, the even more
in
disco on the West Side of Manhattan. “Nothing new has been done on New Year’s Eve for a long time,” explained thirty-three-year-old co-owner Steve Rubell, “and we thought this year was the year to do it.” Starting at 3
A.M.
, and for only $40 per person, Grace Jones would be performing—
The Grace Jones
, who had driven motorcycles onstage, danced half naked in gay discos, her head shaved into a fuzzy cap, her pretty face masked with green and red paint. People were just
dying
to know what she would do next. “I know what I’m doing,” Grace said, “and I know there is money to be made at what I am doing.”

The plague spreading throughout the rest of New York City remains largely invisible to those sealed off in the castle of mid-Manhattan. All “the appliances of pleasure” are here. Walk along Fifth Avenue, one of the most heavily trafficked pedestrian streets in the world. Window-shop at Gubelin of Switzerland, where a gold Patek Philippe watch retails for $4,900 and gold cuff links for $660; at Godiva’s, where a box of Belgian chocolates goes for $35; at Gucci’s, with their modest $315 calf billfolds trimmed with 18-karat gold. Stroll past the Olympic Towers’ $750,000 cooperative apartments.

One avenue east, on Madison, a rash of new boutiques are opening, many at rents of $50 per square foot. Complice sells special
jeans for $65; Ungaro’s, silk blouses for $250; Pumpkins and Monkeys, a child’s dress for $235. The waitresses in Confetti wear Bill Blass vests.

Manhattan is thriving. Six of the nation’s largest banks, employing 120,000 people, are headquartered here, as are nine of the ten biggest ad agencies, all but two of the Big Eight accounting firms, 42 of the 50 leading investment banking establishments, 90 of the Fortune 500 companies, one-third of the nation’s 48 largest law firms. According to the real-estate brokers Cross & Brown, Manhattan’s real-estate market in 1977 was the highest it had been in five years; nearly 3 million square feet of vacant office space was rented in one year, and prices of $25 per square foot were common. The first new office tower in five years is planned at 487 Park, an avenue that is already a crowded steel-and-glass warehouse for the nation’s foremost corporations. Four new office towers will rise on Madison Avenue between 50th and 57th streets. The Chrysler Building is being refurbished, as are other once-abandoned relics. The one-square-block $147 million Citicorp Center was christened in the fall of 1977; rising 59 stories between East 53rd and 54th streets, and stretching from Third Avenue to Lexington, the complex is bursting with ten restaurants and assorted shops, including one that sells imported bonbons.

Housing is also at a premium. In 1977, Manhattan real-estate values soared 30 percent. According to
W
, a publication devoured by people who frequent Régine’s, the monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Paris is $729; in London, $720; in Zurich, $500. In chic areas of Manhattan, the same apartment rents for $1,170. The co-op market is at its zenith. On Park Avenue north of Régine’s, where white-gloved doormen patrol under shaded canopies, limousines stand at attention and nannies push baby strollers across a wide boulevard lush with tulips and begonias, the average three-bedroom apartment sells for $200,000. Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, tried—and failed—to purchase an eighteen-room apartment at 640 Park for $600,000, with yearly maintenance charges of $25,000.

Manhattan’s real-estate boom is matched by its tourism, now New York’s second leading industry. More visitors (16.5 million) and conventions (834) were drawn to the city in 1976 than at any time since the 1964–65 World’s Fair. They came to spend $1.5 billion and buy 10 million tickets to Broadway’s 36 theaters and 500 sister theaters off Broadway, to visit the 400 art galleries, 90 night
clubs, 50 institutions for the performing arts, 28,000 restaurants, 30 department stores and 61 museums. Most of these attractions are in Manhattan, where the 100,000 first-class tourist hotel rooms are located. To cope with this surge of tourists, new hotels are in the works. Harry Helmsley plans a fifty-seven-story, 600-room luxury palace—to be called the Palace—on Madison Avenue and is considering another on East 42nd Street. William Zeckendorf, Jr., recently redecorated the Delmonico and McAlpin hotels. The old Commodore Hotel is scheduling a comeback as a Hyatt Hotel, and the New York Hilton is contemplating the addition of 1,200 rooms. Manhattan restauranteurs, whose volume in 1977 was one-third greater than it was in 1976 (a very good year), worry not about customers but about President Carter’s proposal to eliminate tax deductions for the “two-martini lunch.”

For those fleeing the real or imagined plague abroad, the island of Manhattan is the new Mecca. In 1964, the United States was home for only 11 foreign banks. By July 1977, Manhattan alone had 128 foreign branches, with assets of $44 billion. Thirty-two of these had opened in the last year. Today, almost 70 percent of the total U.S. assets of all foreign banks are sequestered in Manhattan branches. Seventy-eight countries maintain consulates in Manhattan, more than in Washington. There are 131 international law firms and 543 restaurants offering foreign specialties. The twin 110-story towers of the World Trade Center, in lower Manhattan, house 120 foreign companies representing 60 nations. One-third of the new 1977 leases acquired by Rudin Management Corporation, one of Manhattan’s premier landlords, were signed by overseas firms. During the first two years of the city’s fiscal crisis, 1975–77, foreign companies leased 466,000 square feet of new office space.

An infectious spirit permeates mid-Manhattan. Broadway stars from
Annie, A Chorus Line, The Wiz, The King and I
and
Dracula
volunteer their time to belt out a joyously brilliant “I love New York” television commercial. Sylvester Stallone, Frank Sinatra, Faye Dunaway, Diana Ross and other big names are again making movies here. It seems like everyone, including me, is a Liz Smith addict, reading her New York
Daily News
column to learn if Woody still wears baggy pants, if Halston still adores Liz, Bianca and Liza, if Warren and Diane are nibbling on each other’s ears at Elaine’s. As I write, Central Park is closed on weekends, a victory over the automobile for the strollers and joggers. Monet is featured at the Metropolitan Museum; Calder and Matisse, at the Guggenheim;
Saul Steinberg, at the Whitney; eighteenth-century Nigerian wood carvings, at the Museum of Natural History just blocks from my home. The Beethoven Society is at Hunter College; Baryshnikov, at the Metropolitan Opera House; film retrospectives, at the Regency; jazz at Hopper’s and Jimmy Ryan’s. Just about every newspaper and magazine in the world can be found on 42nd Street, as can just about every species of human. Even if you revel in none of these glories, New York can never be boring. It is the eighth wonder of the world. After you’ve seen the Pyramids, that’s it for Egypt. In Manhattan, there’s a pyramid on nearly every block.

Occasionally, Manhattan residents or visitors will confront intruders from another world—the world of Eighth Avenue, with its panhandlers, pimps and prostitutes; a stray youth gang snatching purses and gaining attention, as happened in the summer of 1977, by beating up two
New York Times
editors. Most people who run New York, or write about it, live in Manhattan or its suburbs. Without walls or iron gates, they have reason to feel as secure and sealed off as Prince Prospero.

But this Manhattan offers a distorted view of New York City. Outside, a plague spreads, ravaging much of the rest of the city. Two miles from Régine’s, where Park Avenue plunges thirty feet, grim railroad tracks suddenly surface to slice the avenue in half. The panorama of glistening office towers, penthouses and tulips gives way to tenements and abandoned, rubble-strewn lots. This is the world of Frank Rivera. Rivera rarely gets to visit south of 96th Street, except to work as a peddler on the sidewalk across from the Plaza Hotel. Fifty-seven blocks away from where he works, Rivera lives in a five-room walk-up at 1646 Park Avenue. The rent is $70 a month. The plaster is peeling. Rats abound. The wail of the subway is the music he has lived with, here, for the last twenty years.