From Tri-lnsula to Alcatraz?

"When disunion has become a fixed and certain fact," wrote New York City's Democratic Mayor Fernando Wood to the city common council 18 days after South Carolina seceded from the Union in December 1860, "why may not New York disrupt the bands which bind her to a venal and corrupt master--to a people and a party that have plundered her revenues, attempted to ruin her commerce?"

Wood proposed that New York City

1) walk out of the Union along with "our aggrieved brethren of the Slave States"; 2) abstain from joining any trouble-starred Southern Confederacy; and 3) declare itself a "free city," to be named Tri-lnsula for its islands of Manhattan, Staten and Long. The common council was all for it. But when South Carolina rebels fired on Fort Sumter, secession became a fighting word in the North, and nothing more was heard of Tri-lnsula.

One day last week the New York city council, in a crackpot mood, voted 23-1 to appoint a committee to study secession once again, this time not from the grand old Union but from New York State. Reason: Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the Republican-run state legislature were, in the words of Brooklyn Democrat Joseph T. Sharkey, "robbing us." The point: New York City contributes roughly 50% of the state budget, gets back only 38% of state expenditures on services. But one lone Republican, standing against a house divided, threw in an argument that stung the most ardent secessionists. Said Stanley M. Isaacs, onetime Theodore Roosevelt Bull Mooser, the only councilman to vote no to secession: "Remember that more than one-half of the prisoners in state institutions come from New York City . . . What would you do with all the criminals you now farm out to institutions upstate? Would you turn Staten Island into Alcatraz?"

There was no answer and there needed be none. The city council, in silly season, had its headlines. And it was more fun than dealing with New York City's more mundane problems, from raising revenue (for a $2 billion budget) to doing something about its raddled, potholed street paving.

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