The Streets Were Paved with Gold (4 page)

Frank Rivera’s home is East Harlem. In nearby Central Harlem, once known as the black capital of America, 24 percent of the residents were on welfare in 1977; 75 percent of the children were born to mothers without husbands. The infant mortality rate, 42.8 for each 1,000 births, is more than twice the citywide average. Each year, 3,000 apartments fall to arson, abandonment, decay.

North of the Harlem River, in the Bronx, a butcher sweeps the sidewalk in front of his store on the Boston Post Road. I ask him directions to Charlotte Street. “That’s easy,” he says. “You can’t miss it. You just drive until you see nothing. Then you know
you’re there.” In much of Manhattan, it’s hard to find a vacant apartment. In the South Bronx, it’s sometimes hard to find a building. More than 2,000 square blocks are devastated. Fifty-one apartment buildings, housing 3,000 people, once stood on Charlotte Street and its adjoining blocks—just seven miles from Régine’s. Today, only nine remain standing, eight of them sealed shut by brick or ruined by fire. Amid the hills of rubble and discarded garbage, 100 people still reside at 1500 Boston Post Road and Wilkins Avenue. Their rents range from $140 to $160 a month for the 39 one- or two-bedroom apartments.

Once, not long ago, this neighborhood was different. There were tennis courts; the local synagogue sported Moorish columns; people darted in and out of Solly Sherman’s vegetable and deli market. There was a Rumanian restaurant where a meal of chopped calves’ liver, kosher broiled steak, white radishes, pickles and free seltzer came to $1.35. Today, there are no tennis courts, and the synagogue, its columns painted gray, houses the Tremont Crotona Day Care Center. Solly Sherman’s and the Rumanian restaurant are gone, destroyed years ago by fire.

There are other Charlotte Streets in the South Bronx. Between 1970 and 1975, the South Bronx lost 16 percent of its housing, or 43,000 apartments, and over the last twelve years 80,000 apartments have been abandoned. Forty percent of all its manufacturing jobs have disappeared. Each day, there are ten fires. Each week, an estimated four blocks succumb to physical decay. The per capita income is 40 percent of the national average; one of three residents is on welfare; only one of four students entering an academic high school actually graduates; the area has lost 10,000 jobs in the last four years.

According to the City Department of Health, the two health districts on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, between Park and Fifth avenues, contain 2,063 doctors. In two comparable South Bronx health districts, Tremont and Morrisania, there are no doctors.

Nothing prepares the eye or ear for such statistics, for the first sight of the “nothing” that is Charlotte Street, for the youth gangs who use moving police vans for target practice. And only a military war prepares the mind for the massive evacuation from the area. Were the Bronx a city, its population of 1.5 million would make it the nation’s fifth largest. Yet in fifteen years half its white residents
—mostly middle-income taxpayers—have fled, with the contagion spreading even to the once-glorious Grand Concourse that marches north through the borough.

Brooklyn would qualify as the fourth largest city. Six miles south of Régine’s, not far from the water separating the borough from Manhattan, one enters Bushwick. The name derives from the Dutch word
Boswijk
, meaning “town of woods.” In the 1800’s, Bushwick was primarily an agricultural community. As late as the 1930’s, its then-famed Claridge Hotel advertised a “country-like setting”; guests could walk to the Bushwick Theatre, which rivaled the Palace for vaudeville. Immigrants from Northern Europe, and later from Italy, settled here; by 1950, neat one- and two-family wooden houses with small gardens were home for Brooklyn’s second largest Italo-American community. In 1960, 77 percent of the residents were white working-class.

Today, 75 percent of Bushwick’s residents are black or Hispanic, and nearly half the population is on welfare. The Claridge Hotel is gone, as is the Bushwick Theatre. The South Bronx used to rank number one in fires. No more. Bushwick now claims that distinction because it still has buildings to burn; it averages 6,000 fires a year. In the arson and looting following New York’s blackout in the summer of 1977, ninety-two stores on Broadway and Bushwick avenues were razed. The owners of sixty-six of them did not plan to reopen.

It was the fires that finally got to Rose and Jesse Napoli. For forty-five years, Jesse’s father, Silvestro, owned their six-family house at 152 Harman Street. Before that, his aunt had owned the eighty-year-old building. Then, on September 22, 1977, an arsonist torched the abandoned building two doors away, igniting the adjoining houses and their own top floor. Across the street, six buildings were already burned; behind them, an entire block. In just three months, Harman Street lost fifty families to safer neighborhoods. And on a sunny October day, Harman Street lost the Napolis.

It used to be that Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville neighborhoods, alone, looked like sets for a World War II movie. But the plague has spread to Bushwick, as it is spreading to the neighboring community of Williamsburg. In the same month the Napolis departed, the Love Brothers, a not-so-loving youth gang, were terrorizing the 100 tenants of a six-story building on South Fourth Street. They smashed windows, stole furniture and
tore out fixtures, peddling stoves for $35, steam radiators for $3. Their reign of terror lasted a week, at the end of which the building was vacant. The youth gangs—some employed by landlords seeking to collect insurance, some just out for kicks—no longer alarm police and are often ignored or overlooked; they have become a normal part of urban life.

South of Williamsburg, on the southern tip of Brooklyn, is Coney Island, where my parents still live. Once the amusement capital of the United States, featuring white sandy beaches, Steeplechase, Luna Park, Ravenhall and Feltman’s amusement areas, the 5¢ Nathan’s hot dog and a million tourists on hot summer weekends, Coney Island is the next Bushwick. Many of the wooden one- and two-family homes have been ravaged by fire; empty lots abound; youth gangs freely roam the streets, some openly flaunting shotguns. Luna Park burned down, and Feltman’s and Steeplechase are gone. A concrete parking lot blankets much of Ravenhall. Most stores along Mermaid Avenue, once the main shopping thoroughfare, are now burned out or abandoned. Nathan’s sells fewer hot dogs, and those they do sell cost 75¢. The parachute jump, which can be seen from Manhattan’s Empire State Building, has been closed for eight years and is scheduled to be torn down and sold as scrap. At one time, it dominated the skyline; today hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of public housing projects crowd the sky.

The changes in Harlem, the South Bronx, Bushwick, Williamsburg and Coney Island are mirrored in declining neighborhoods throughout the city—East New York, Borough Park, South Jamaica, Long Island City, Corona, Greenpoint, Fort Green, Washington Heights, Crown Heights. Of the city’s 340 health districts, almost one-half have less than one physician for every 1,000 residents—one-third the national average and in stark contrast to the average of 42 per 1,000 residents on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. A “successful city neighborhood,” Jane Jacobs wrote in
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
, requires “eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street.” Neighborly eyes ensured safety, a feeling of security, of community. In growing numbers of city neighborhoods, people no longer sit on stoops, no longer venture out at night. Eyes are fixed on television sets and bolted doors. Neighborhoods exist in name only.

Like Prince Prospero’s minions, New York has been bleeding—jobs and people. Since 1969, 11 percent of its jobs—more than
600,000—have disappeared. Since 1947, the city has lost one-half its 1 million manufacturing jobs. Since 1952, it has lost 80 percent of its 50,000 longshoreman jobs. Of 161 job categories policed by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, 147 registered a loss of jobs between 1969 and 1976. Had the city’s economy expanded at the same rate as the nation’s between 1965 and 1974, a study by Alan Campbell and Roy Bahl of Syracuse University concluded, it would have gained 25 percent, or 1.03 million jobs.

Since World War II, New York, like many older cities, has been transformed. Almost 2 million middle-income residents have moved out, and almost 2 million mostly poor residents have moved in. The city’s tax base has shrunk as its need for services has expanded. In 1960, 78 percent of the city was white; by 1975, 62 percent. And these figures do not include illegal aliens, variously estimated from 500,000 to 1.5 million people. Noting that 60 percent of the city’s population under fourteen is black or Hispanic, Bernard Gifford of the Russell Sage Foundation wrote, “It seems likely that the 1980 census will reveal a non-white majority in New York City.”

There would be little concern if the melting pot were melting. It is not. Once, New York served as an incubator, nursing the poor and hoisting them into the middle class. But that was when New York was growing, when there were jobs. By the early 1970’s, almost 30 percent of the city’s population was receiving some form of public assistance. Between 1970 and 1974, former Mayor Abe Beame reported, the income of New York City blacks declined by 3.7 percent.

Like many nations in Europe, New York has developed a permanent underclass, a group of people not easily reachable even if there were adequate jobs and counseling and broad social services. It is, said Senator Ted Kennedy in 1978, “the great unmentioned problem of America today.” Michael Harrington wrote eloquently of this new group in his 1962 book,
The Other America
: “If a group has internal vitality, a will—if it has aspiration—it may live in dilapidated housing, it may eat an inadequate diet, and it may suffer poverty, but it is not impoverished. So it was in those ethnic slums of the immigrants that played such a dramatic role in the unfolding of the American dream. The people found themselves in slums, but they were not slum dwellers.”

Thirty percent of all New York births in 1976, according to a research study by Nicholas Kisburg of Teamsters Joint Council 16,
were illegitimate. That same year, according to the City Health Department, more than 50 percent of all black and 45 percent of all Hispanic births were illegitimate, and in some neighborhoods the figure was higher. In the last ten years, the number of false-alarm fires has zoomed from 37,414 to 249,041. We have a growing number of people, says Deputy Mayor Herman Badillo, “who have no superego, no sense of right or wrong.” That is the affliction of seventeen-year-old Francisco Mendez, a Bronx teenager accused of twenty-five counts of murder for setting fire to a Bronx social club, killing twenty-five and injuring twenty-four. When the foreman of the jury announced the verdict in State Supreme Court on February 10, 1978, Mendez smiled, turned to face the spectators, and shrugged.

Confirming the 1968 warning of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, New York continued to move toward two separate societies—one black, one white. It was not just the rich or some Catholics who sent their kids to private schools. By 1977, only 29 percent of the city’s white population attended public schools, and three-quarters went to schools that were at least 50 percent white. According to a Board of Education brief, “The rapidly changing demographics of the city have virtually eradicated the chances for meaningful integration in the Bronx, Manhattan and even Brooklyn.” By 1987, says Dr. Richard Vigilante, Director of the Board’s Office of Educational Statistics, the white enrollment in all five boroughs will be 14 percent.

There was considerable controversy in 1976 when Housing Administrator Roger Starr proposed a city policy of “planned shrinkage”—reducing services to blighted neighborhoods and encouraging a smaller city population. Instead, New York continues to follow a policy of non-planned shrinkage. Between 1970 and 1975, the city’s population shrank by 491,000—one of every 16 residents left. What troubles people like Sam Ehrenhalt, Deputy Regional Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is that those who left were mostly middle-income taxpayers, including many blacks and Hispanics. People moving up the economic ladder are moving out. New York is shrinking, but it’s losing the wrong people. There are too many poor people, which means extra services, and too few middle-income taxpayers to pay for them. The city and its ghettos are not perceived as the land of opportunity. A poll conducted in late 1976 for Democratic mayoral candidate Percy Sutton buttresses this gloomy prognosis: 51 percent of black
Democrats who planned to vote in the primary said they’re thinking of moving from the city.

The city’s fiscal crisis is a result of this dwindling economic base. Mayor Beame tried to hide it, but the city’s deficit—like the Red Death—kept spreading. The Mayor’s final budget, offered in the spring of 1977, projected a gap of $86 million for fiscal 1978, not counting over $700 million of expenses still financed by the capital budget. Running for reelection, Beame strove to paint the best face on things, claiming that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.” Running to get away from political responsibility for the city, the state Emergency Financial Control Board, which since 1975 has been empowered to oversee city finances, claimed that the budget was “technically balanced.” Soon after Beame lost the September 1977 primary, the same city officials who tiptoed behind his $86 million claim suddenly discovered that the gap had widened to $468 million. Beame corrected them, giving the new figure of $249 million. In January, the new Koch administration presented to Washington a four-year financial plan that pegged the city’s true gap at $1.022 billion, not counting the cost of new labor contracts.

While Beame was painting a rosy picture, the city’s official prospectus to potential investors was gloomy. The May 20, 1977, 141-page “Official Statement” received little notice but is worth quoting. By June 1976, it reported, the city’s debt totaled an average of $1,476 for each of the city’s 7.5 million residents, a sum approached by no other city in the country and representing an increase of 25 percent in one year. And this total $12.6 billion debt did not include the $8.5 billion “unfunded accrued liability” it said was owed future city pensioners. The report also showed that the value of city real estate had declined and that debt as a percentage of the total value of taxable property reached 28.6 percent—up 45 percent in one year.