That Homey Touch

The New York Times has always been more of a national than a metropolitan newspaper; even its local coverage leans heavily on city politics and gives short shrift to human-interest stories. Last year, in an attempt to remedy the situation, Metropolitan Editor Arthur Gelb assigned Staff Reporter Joseph Lelyveld to spend a year covering the New York school system from the back row of a fourth-grade class at Harlem's P.S. 198.

Buoyed by favorable reader response, Gelb has now commissioned a staffer to devote full time to a single city block in Manhattan. The man is John Corry, a veteran journalist and author (The Manchester Affair), who had just returned to the Times after three years of writing for Harper's.

Tenuous Alliance. For his project, Corry zeroed in on 85th Street between Central Park and Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side, largely because of its diversity. A kind of Manhattan in microcosm, the block includes among its 1,500 black, white and Puerto Rican residents a number of welfare families, a man who owns his own ad agency, some composers, some middle-class types, and a few hookers and junkies. Corry rented an apartment on the street, then set out to find "The Real City" from the stoops and sidewalks.

What he found was a relatively close-knit community, a "good block" with "good buildings" housing "good people." Yet the homiest of the five articles to run so far--long treatises on the comity of the postman and the everyday frustrations of shopping--fail to dispel the notion that New York neighborliness is little more than a tenuous alliance. In fact, Corry's best piece so far lists the precautions taken by residents of the "good block" to keep from being robbed, raped, beaten or killed: "George Bassat keeps a club next to his front door. Mr. Brouwer no longer sits on his stoop, because he's afraid of being mugged."

Corry's city-block series has been well received, and he hopes to see it run for a year, with future pieces concentrating on individuals. Meanwhile, Corry is contemplating articles on two of the most pressing issues facing the residents of West 85th Street and every other New Yorker for that matter: double-parked cars and uncurbed dogs.

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