New York, New York, It's a ...
By Roger Rosenblatt
Four years ago, 20,000 whooping Democrats blew into New York City, chomped its pizza, downed its booze and donned their funny hats. They were confident. They sensed a win. Their host, on the other hand, was all smiles, but shaky. It had no confidence and sensed collapse. Oh, the city scrubbed its face, all right; got out the good china, the usual. But New York was broke, after all. Bonds were finally due. Corporations headed for the hills. When the Democrats showed up in 1976, New York was like a Marx Brothers hotel with Margaret Dumont in the lobby--all love and terror and accommodation.
Goodbye to all that, at least for the moment. For the moment New York may still be going broke, but nobody is saying so above a whisper, and the desperate, adamant I LOVE NEW YORK of three years back sounds suddenly sincere, almost giddy. In the four years since the Democrats sighed amen to Jimmy Carter, New York has reduced its debt (considerably), improved its cultural life (remarkably), raised its housing costs (out-of-sightedly), increased its industry (selectively), supported a new mayor (mostly), cleaned up after itself (doggedly) and become a happier place to live (generally). There are naysayers (naturally) and data to justify their attitude. But most New Yorkers agree that the place is fit as a fiddle again, and only a few believe that the fiddle is Nero's.
What has happened to cause the illusory miracle is that the city has played to its strength, with all the usual rewards and penalties of such a strategy. New York's strength is Manhattan. Manhattan is beautiful and rich and piled high with roof gardens that give shade to some very rich and beautiful people. The cost of rental apartments in Manhattan, if one can be found, has risen preposterously since 1975, which means in short that a two-bedroom pad for $1,500 a month is a steal. Or would you rather buy? The number of cooperative apartments resold in 1976 was 1,026, at an average price of $11,380 per room. In 1979 the number of resales was down to 845, and the average price per room up to $34,481. Only the arrogance of realtors has risen proportionately. Co-op prices at a million or two are neither rare nor shocking.
Naturally, the consequence of such prices is that people are clawing their way into every inch of Manhattan space available. After a long quiescence, builders are now providing more space all the time, both office and living. In the East Side area between 50th and 94th streets--the heart of the matter, if the Big Apple were an artichoke--at least eight new co-ops or condominiums are currently in some stage of completion, all high-rising and luxurious, of course, and all smack in the center of things, which accounts for their appeal. At the proposed 44-story Museum Tower, for example, condominium owners will be able to descend from a $250,000 one-bedroom home to an extension of the Museum of Modern Art within the same building. In the 62-story Trump Tower (named for Builder Donald, not the bridge maneuver) one apartment is planned that will cost $11 million. The applicants so far do not include any New Yorkers.
Why people would pay such prices to live on an island without good fishing is a source of befuddlement to country boys, but is laughably reasonable to the simplest New Yorker. He wants to eat well; French, Chinese, Greek, Italian, Indian, you-name-it. He wants to ogle masterpieces. He wants concerts and ballet and opera and people, millions of them, all dressed to the nines, hopeful, busy, important, on the ladder, on the make; luxury high-risers every one. And of course he wants to buy, to shop, to feel the peculiar exhilaration of coughing up $350 for a belt at Hermes, or better still, now that Gucci's Galleria is finally open, to rise in the glass elevator available only by key to that portion of the store where $500,000 gems may be contemplated near a mural by Roy Lichtenstein. If not Gucci, then "Cartier; if not that, then some other: all spilled out along Fifth Avenue like Jay Gatsby's shirts.
On Broadway the lights have rarely looked brighter, especially compared with 1976, when perhaps two or three plays justified lines around the blocks and theater critics were bewailing American dependence on British muses. In 1980 the list of Broadway successes includes Evita, Children of a Lesser God, Talley's Folly, Sugar Babies and Barnum. A theater district that can successfully revive Peter Pan and West Side Story simultaneously can't be all bad. Since 1976 there has been a 51% increase in theater attendance in New York, and a 137% increase in ticket sales. Broadway orchestra seats can go for $30 apiece, and are filled not only by natives but also by tourists, 17.5 million of them last year alone, who are also filling the expensive hotels. In 1976 the occupancy rate for New York hostelries was 72.2%; in 1979, 82%. Five Manhattan hotels offering 5,200 rooms are either about to open or have just done so.
In a way the most significant boom has been that of the movie industry, which until recently was stone cold in New York. In April of this year ten feature films were being started or completed in the city that moviemakers fled for California long ago. Now their return means dollars, of course, but it also suggests what New Yorkers have been feeling for a while now: the city has regained its romance. The romance is not soft, but it never was. In movies about itself New York always played the antagonist, an now it has simply updated the role, pitting Kramer vs. Kramer and all that jazz Woody Allen's Manhattan, which seemed so nostalgic at first glance, was in fact prophetic. Given a chance, most hard-boiled New Yorkers will plunge to weeping at any shot of the skyline at dusk or of a horse and buggy at dusk, or best of all, of themselves at dusk, hand in hand.
O Luciano. O Reh-gie. These days New York's romance with itself takes simple forms. A Reggie Jackson home run seems an act of pure chauvinism. Thousands of people stretch out on blankets in Central Park to hear Luciano Pavarotti sing only to them. Pavarotti is the second most beloved Italian singer in town. The first may be heard on record seemingly everywhere, belting out New York, New York. O Frankie.
There is, of course, another tune to New York. It is played on a cornet isolated from one of the George Gershwin songs in Manhattan and then carried above 96th Street and out to pockets of The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, where, alone, it sounds less like a horn than a siren. The city's slums have also changed dramatically in the past four years, but not for the better. "Look at this," says Mrs. Wilma Burroughs, who lives in the area of now infamous Charlotte Street in the South Bronx. "It's bee four years. Four years of promises. Four years of nothing. I've got three children You think this is any place to bring them up? We're trapped up here. The businessmen and the politicians are always putting up new buildings downtown and talking about how good things in New York are getting. They haven't been up here. It's as if those people at city hall are afraid they'll fall off the edge of the world if they come up above 110th."
In fact, a great many politicians, including Ronald Reagan, are traveling up to Charlotte Street these days, claiming that Jimmy Carter reneged on his vow in 1977 to rebuild the South Bronx. None of the new visitors to the area need fear what the President might have feared three years ago--that a building would fall on his head--because almost all the buildings have fallen in the interim, and are now nicely disguised as two lawns of gray-yellow dust on either side of Charlotte Street. The dust is thicker than the ash from Mount St. Helens. It fills the air. It smells of nothing organic but manure, yet even that smell is not precise; it is tinged with an odor at once dead and sweet. Only fragments in the rubble-wire nettings, a square of bathroom tile --suggest that life ever existed in that place. Beyond the dust lawns, sudden green weeds have begun a crazy garden, as if the wilderness had decided to reclaim the neighborhood.
What buildings do remain stand agape and hollow. There is no broken glass in the windows, because there is no glass in the windows at all. The garbage in the doorways is not a pile but a growth. On a street north of Charlotte a green Chevy lies on its back like a cleaned fish. Such things are seen not only in the South Bronx but also in Harlem and the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, formerly a Jewish ghetto, now black. These areas too are worse off than they were four years ago. From a tenement roof in Long Island City, stately Sutton Place is in plain view across the East River. On the wall of a burned-out building in Harlem one sign of commerce remains: ADVERTISE IN THIS SPACE.
Of course there are slums and there are slums, as Spiro Agnew did not know. Every impoverished area of New York is a few notches better off than Charlotte Street, but that fact gives no consolation to those who live in sagging wooden tenements or in squat red apartment houses with laundry strung like paper necklaces from window to window. In the summers what passes for life in these areas moves out to the fire escapes or up to the roofs among the antenna forests, or out to the doorways where teen-agers and their elders mill, hang out and wait. They have not the Jordache look. A good pickup game is as exciting as an N.B.A. playoff in these places. Otherwise there are few signs of vitality. Street lamps arch like deacons over the relentless streets. Open hydrants shoot water at passing cars the way fire boats sprayed the tall ships in the Bicentennial festival of 1976.
There are millions of New Yorkers who live like that. There are millions, more who live somewhat better, but hardly well, who are not to be officially classified as poor, but whose lives limp on a few miles, and spiritual lightyears, away from the perpetual midtown Easter Parade. Donald Petty, 48, of Astoria, Queens, is trying to bring up four kids in a small row house. "I hear a lot of talk about how great New York's doing, about all the new money coming into the city," he says. "I don't see any of it out here. I've been complaining about my street for five years. If you try to drive more than ten miles an hour, you'll leave your whole front end in a hole."
A tale of two cities, then: the best of times and the worst. Says Arthur Taylor, former president of CBS and now head of a business organization called the New York Partnership: "What we have in the city right now is an island on which enormous wealth is being created, surrounded by a sea of economic deprivation." What New York has, in short, is a problem. The problem was not created in the past four years, but it has been made more apparent than ever within that time by the fact that on the whole, the city is up. On the whole. Yet there is also the fact that 16% of New Yorkers live below the poverty line. To put no fine point on it all, the question that haunts New York is: Can the city survive in the long run only by killing off its poor?
The man who must deal with that question, along with all the other questions that feed into it, is Edward Irving Koch, 55, mayor since 1978 and, as Sydney Greenstreet said of Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, a real character. If New York is a taxi, Ed Koch is its driver--quick-tempered, belligerent, opinionated, chatty, protective, frank and possibly nuts. He usually speeds, and sometimes he drives on the sidewalk. His enemies are "crackpots." To everyone within earshot he asks, "How'm I doing?" Two out of three of those surveyed have answered: good.
Whether or not they are right will be more fairly judged in a year or so, perhaps after Koch balances the city budget, as he has loudly and frequently promised. At present he is little more than halfway through his term. While there is no question that he is the most colorful mayor the city has seen since Fiorello La Guardia (1934-45), the hard issues he faces will not be resolved by style:
1) MONEY. Koch might have balanced the budget even earlier than promised had New York not been hit by a public transportation strike last spring. The wage settlements that ended that strike and averted another by city workers in June gave the unions raises averaging 17% over the next two years. That, in turn, put the city's $13.58 billion budget back into the familiar red. Earlier this year Koch told Congress that he anticipated no more than 4% in wage hikes for each of the next two years. Now, he expects a $265 million deficit for this year--$135 million of which is due directly to the wage settlements with the unions--and a deficit that could hit $1.2 billion in 1982.
Koch and Governor Hugh Carey have differed on how to reduce the deficit, Koch originally taking the position that only a general tax raise could do the trick, Carey believing that high taxes would drive business from the city again. In the past few weeks Koch appears to have come around to Carey's view. Naturally, both leaders would prefer to rely on the Federal Government for help, but until that traditional cornucopia spills open, an increase in property taxes, which would not bring in enough, is about the only course of action available. Still, Koch has just about managed to eliminate the city's once gargantuan short-term debt of $4.5 billion. As Felix Rohatyn, chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corporation and the city's chief financier, told TIME'S Frederick Ungeheuer: "The city is clearly stronger than it was five years ago. But it will take at least two consecutive years of balanced budgets without gimmicks before it can get back into the long-term market again."
2) WELFARE. In 1977 there were 962,000 people on welfare in New York. As of April 1980 the welfare list was down to 867,173. That drop is due in part to the general decline in the city's population (now estimated at 7.1 million, compared with 7.9 million in 1970) but is due more to tighter eligibility rules and to the rooting out of welfare cheats and frauds. At present the city pays about $1.2 billion out of its own tax revenues for aid to dependent children, or exactly the amount projected as the city deficit in 1982. Nearly everyone in the know, from Koch to former Mayor (and now senatorial candidate) John Lindsay, agrees that the solution is for the Federal Government to pick up New York's welfare burden. To date, only the Federal Government has not agreed.
3) RACE. "I been trying to get a job for two years," says Danny, a tall young black in Bedford-Stuyvesant. "Nothin'. My father, he tried for two years and then split. We haven't seen him for a year. So how do I live? I hustle... deal some dope, do a little stealing ... maybe even try to knock over a white newspaper reporter if I thought he had anything worth takin'. That's how a lot of us live out here."
That's how a lot of young blacks live everywhere in the country these days; the New York situation is merely terrible, not unusually terrible. A recent report of the National Urban League, The State of Black America 1980, shows that while many blacks have moved up the proverbial money ladder in the past few years, many more have fallen off. In New York the estimated level of unemployment among young blacks and Hispanics is set at anywhere from 38.7% to 80%. No one believes they know the true figure, perhaps because to deal dope and run numbers may be considered forms of employment. Blacks and Hispanics in New York are as desperate as ever, and without an effective leader.
As an article of political faith, Koch is frequently regarded by blacks as a racist, mainly because he has cut back on services to try to balance the budget, and the poor always feel those reductions most acutely. Koch's proposed closings of Sydenham Hospital in Harlem and of three other large city hospitals that principally serve the poor have the residents of those areas dismayed and furious at the mayor's apparent unconcern for their needs. What rankles blacks and Hispanics particularly is Koch's manner, which has none of Lindsay's shallow gregariousness, but no gentleness in it either. As yet Koch has not learned that the last thing hopeless people have need of is a realist.
4) EDUCATION. Among Koch's other cutbacks are the schools. Since 1976 about 70 have been eliminated, and with them approximately 1,000 teaching jobs (not including special education teachers), 700 assistant principals and 400 guidance counselors. Extracurricular activities have nearly been cut out entirely. Still, Deputy Chancellor Richard Halverson sees a new stability in the school system. A memo prepared by Halverson's staff notes that in the period from 1976 to 1980 both reading and math scores have improved, if minimally, in certain grades. What is missing, thanks to the staff reductions, are many of the elements of school life that make it enjoyable and attractive. To complete the picture: also missing are 130 handguns and 277 knives confiscated from pupils in 1980, three times the size of the arsenal seized in 1976.
5) CRIME. In 1977 there were 1,557 homicides committed in New York. In 1979 there were 1,752. Local statisticians may boast that New York ranks a poor 13th nationally as a city of crime, but that is small consolation to the woman who can no longer wear jewelry on her neck for fear that some quick-handed thug will yank it away. One morning in Central Park, a woman on horseback was jumped by a man from a tree. Subways are no longer for sleeping. One of the spring 1980 fashions in city crime has been to shove robbery victims before oncoming trains. The trains themselves look like murderers; like rattlers, tattooed from head to tail with graffiti. Yet New Yorkers have to ride them.
Doors on some trains do not open, owing to a policy of "deferred maintenance," meaning no maintenance. Among New York wits there is a continuous competition to find the precisely right metaphor for the feeling of riding in the company of one's fellow citizens at rush hour on a summer day. "We could fix up the trains and the tracks," explains Richard Ravitch, head of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. "We could clean up the subways, buy new air-conditioned cars. We could get a lot more transit patrolmen down into the subways and cut crime. We could do all those things and make the M.T.A. the most efficient public transportation system in the country. All it would take is money."
Square one.
Naturally, the mayor has lots of things to say about the city's problems--all of them said at tenor pitch in a New York-Newark nasal that at odd times seems to swoop into Texas. Koch, who has the Big Bird look, is at his best in a fracas, but he is also a thoughtful politician who appreciates the dignity of his office. He is in his job to stay, he feels; for two more terms, he hopes. On the evening of Aug. 3, before making an address to the annual convention of the National Urban League, he sat on the porch of Gracie Mansion, his official residence, sipping wine, sweating up a storm and discussing his domain. "I think we're doing all right," he said, as if supplying the desired answer to his own trademark question. "New York has come a long way since 1976. We've got an up-to-date accounting system. We've got a fully balanced budget a year ahead of time. We've still got problems, of course. But I think we can deal with them."
On the subject of hospital closings, specifically that of Metropolitan Hospital in Spanish Harlem, he insisted that no one would receive worse or less health care as a result of the shutdown, because "a better hospital" will be put up in place of the old. On unemployment, he spoke of the necessity of creating the right climate for jobs, but added that "New York cannot become the employer of last resort. That's a federal responsibility." On housing costs, he acknowledged the madness in Manhattan, but recommended the boroughs.
A practical man himself, Koch can understand intellectually how some others might forgo practicality. But the mayor cannot see why either he or the city should be blamed for the consequences.
In many ways his problem with race relations is his most exasperating, because, as an oldtime liberal, he feels that his reputation is largely undeserved. For one thing, he has appointed a much higher percentage of blacks to city jobs than any of his three predecessors. For another, there is his handling of a summer job program that got him into trouble with several black groups when he first became mayor. After studying the program, which gave local black leaders the right to hand out a certain number of jobs each, he found that only 76% of those who got the jobs were nonwhite. Koch put an end to the patronage system and set up a computer. The first summer the new system was in operation, 120,000 young people signed up for 60,000 jobs. Of those who got them, 92% were nonwhites. He made a similar improvement in a college program, removing the privilege of selecting participants from the Urban League. The city is now sending 5,000 kids to college instead of 2,000, says Koch, who adds: "You can only get these things done if you're willing to stand up and take all the crap that comes' from rocking someone's boat."
There are some things that Koch will not take. At a public gathering a few months ago, a young physician from California, outraged over the threatened closing of Sydenham Hospital, leaped at Koch and smashed an egg in his face. Koch, who brawls with his eyebrows, did not take the incident philosophically. "I took the bastard to court," he beamed. "And he's going to do some time in jail. That's what he deserves. I won't take that from anybody."
Koch may feel that he does not get enough credit for his good works, but he gets an awful lot of credit by the standards of New York City mayors. Most New Yorkers, prominent and not, are high on Koch, some fairly intoxicated. That is especially true of the middle class, which almost never has a champion, yet clearly has one in the mayor. Koch is even liked in Washington. Senator William Proxmire, chairman of the Banking Committee, who sees a golden fleece in Koch's idea of relying on the Federal Government for the city's economic salvation, nevertheless much admires the mayor's joie de vivre. Almost everyone concedes that for a mad mix of vices and virtues, the mayor and his city are a perfect match.
As for New York's own joie de vivre, is genuine, if precarious. Mike O'Neill, editor of the New York Daily News and an astute observer of the city, exclaims that "it's amazing how the mood of the city has become enthusiastic, optimistic, especially in the cultural, business and economic areas, where everyone seems ebullient about what a great town this is." Foreign money has enriched the city one obvious way. But plenty of foreigners who are nonmillionaires--Cubans, Haitians, Grenadans, Dominicans--have enriched it another, the old way, adding their ore to the melting pot, which still exists.
They come to New York for the jobs they may not get, for the homes they may not find, for the peace of mind or self-esteem or safety that may never be theirs. Yet they come for the same stubborn reason that everyone has always had in coming to New York: to find civilization, in spite of its discontents. The Democrats will be doing somewhat the same thing this week, although their convention is small potatoes compared with New York's. New York's convention has been going on for 327 years.
But can the great, gaping divisions also go on forever? Given the choice be tween Fifth Avenue and Charlotte Street, only a madman would pick the South Bronx. But if the eventual choice comes down to having a city like Oz surrounded by polar wastes, or a little less Oz and a little less waste, will New Yorkers preserve their city? New York has come a long way in the past four years, in two opposite directions .
Reported by Peter Stoler/New York
With reporting by Peter Stoler
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