The Battle for Gotham (10 page)

Beyond the memorable headlines were the endless psychic wounds underscoring the city’s sinking state. In 1972,
The Tonight Show
abandoned Broadway for Burbank, California, as if leaving a sinking ship. The city became a favorite target of late-night talk-show jokes. Mayor John V. Lindsay appeared on the Dick Cavett panel show and in defense of New York said, “It isn’t true that people get mugged all the time in Central Park.” Replied Cavett: “No. They just get murdered.”

That same year revealed an even deeper wound when Mayor Lindsay tried to build needed public housing in the middle-class neighborhood of Forest Hills in the borough of Queens. “Scatter-site” projects—smaller increments of public housing inserted in middle-class communities—were offered as a socially progressive alternative to the postwar urban renewal format of high-rise ghettoes that evolved into new slums. The conflict sparked a virulent debate about race, class, and the post-civil rights era goal of integration. The large-scale project challenged the commitment of the heavily liberal and predominantly Jewish Forest Hills community. Representing the resistant community was a little-known Queens lawyer, Mario Cuomo.
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Cuomo helped fashion a compromise that downsized the proposed public housing apartment buildings to half the planned size. Celebrated
New York Daily News
columnist Jimmy Breslin turned the spotlight on Cuomo’s defense of the average middle class and catapulted him into the political spotlight. Cuomo had successfully represented another fighting Queens neighborhood in 1966. At that time, the city was condemning sixty-six private homes in Corona to build a school. Cuomo challenged the city’s plan to take the properties by eminent domain, a right formally expanded by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 to allow taking property from one private owner to give to another private owner without the conventional public purpose.

Two years after the Forest Hills project, in 1974, a portion of the West Side Highway collapsed, putting the deteriorated state of the city’s infrastructure in the spotlight. Cutbacks in maintenance dated back to the heyday of big new projects and highway building when maintenance and rehabilitation neither scored political points nor provided enviable photo opportunities. A hugely expanded proposed replacement, Westway, became the lightning rod for the debate over the ongoing reshaping of the national landscape for the automobile. Opponents forced recognition of the importance of reinvesting in public transit after years of frenzied highway building at transit’s expense. The battle marked the decade. The defeat in the mid-1980s marked a turning point in the regeneration of the city. (See chapter 9.)

In 1976 Mayor Lindsay promised the South Bronx a rejuvenated neighborhood when he committed $25 million to renovate Yankee Stadium—“the centerpiece of another New York City neighborhood renaissance,” a city hall announcement boasted. When it was finished in 1977, the cost had escalated to $120 million, but not a penny of the promised $2 million had been spent improving the surrounding neighborhood. One can be sure that with the completion of the new Yankee Stadium, the city and ball club will take full credit for the regeneration of the surrounding neighborhood that occurred long before the stadium’s current re-creation. Maybe the public will eventually forget the important local parks taken from the community, the expanded traffic-generating publicly paid-for parking garage given to the Yankees, and the millions in public subsidies for the stadium. Maybe the community will eventually accept the new park on top of a parking garage counted as a partial replacement and a scattering of replacement parks that will take years to deliver.

While the city invested in the stadium in 1976, the South Bronx was losing five thousand housing units yearly in rows of private houses, apartment buildings, and small businesses. Nothing comparable was invested in the renovation of potentially viable but partially abandoned neighborhoods. Arson for profit was the property owner’s way out of neighborhoods the city had glaringly given up on. The city cut back on fire services, closing firehouses in the most vulnerable of neighborhoods, as if to say “Let it burn.” Community groups, not government, took the initiative to enduringly rebuild Bronx neighborhoods block by block while official city priorities were elsewhere.

FROM BAD TO WORSE

The deep decay of our cities poisoned the decade. Across America, conditions varied only in degree, not in kind. Every social ill imaginable was blamed on the urban condition. None of the big-project bromides meant to rejuvenate cities were working anywhere. St. Louis had demolished its economic heart on the waterfront to build the Saarinen Arch in the 1950s and kept losing economic strength and population. Chicago had erased the dense neighborhoods of the South Side for the parade of dysfunctional public housing high-rises now being torn down and replaced, but that city’s decline continued. Pittsburgh had wiped out the vibrant black community of the Hill District made famous by August Wilson to build an arena and arts center (not built), and left vast unused land empty around it for decades. Los Angeles had wiped out its authentically urban downtown when it leveled Bunker Hill. An interstate highway had wiped out Miami’s vibrant and historic black community of Overton. Buffalo had wiped out at least half of its downtown to build a highway and then watched the unused cleared land lie fallow as the rest of the city continued to fall apart. Boston had cleared its bustling West End. By the 1970s, urban challenges had gotten worse. All the big visions had mushroomed. All the big visions had made things worse.

The lost neighborhoods had mixtures of working poor, industry, small manufacturers, and strong social networks and institutions that bolstered the difficult lives of their residents. The social upheaval caused by these physical changes was catastrophic. Baltimore, Portland, Seattle, Miami, Indianapolis, you name it, urban renewal or highways demolished large swaths of the urban fabric in almost every city, weakening almost beyond repair the remaining urban threads. Few cities stood firm against the bulldozer like Savannah, which, as one native recalled, “resisted urban renewal as a communist plot.” All of the bulldozed neighborhoods, of course, were either predominantly low-income African American and Hispanic or a mix of residents, small businesses, and industries, or both.

Decades of postwar federal investments in highways and suburban developments coupled with decades of financial institutions’ abandonment of urban dwellers and their properties had done the trick. The suburban ideal reached its height, the urban alternative its depth. Throughout the 1970s, the bleak condition of urban America was on the front pages of newspapers across the country.

These were turbulent times, to be sure. New York City was at the point of collapse. Over the space of a decade, the city went from bad to worse. Strikes by sanitation and subway workers occurred and even briefly by police and doctors in city hospitals. The blackout of 1965 had brought out the best in everyone. People came through it with grace and dignity. We patted ourselves on the back with the slogan, “When the going gets rough, New Yorkers get going.” Everyone was ineffably polite. The riots of the 1960s, both in New York and in other cities, had focused mostly on black rage, racial injustice, and the until then out-of-sight, out-of-mind dire conditions in urban ghettoes. But by the blackout of 1977, looting marked the day, taking the city to the brink of disaster. More than two thousand stores were burned in twenty-four hours. Areas of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Harlem, and the Lower East Side, after years of tumultuous physical and social reengineering, seemed to implode. It was as if the rug had been pulled out from under the city. City planners predicted the population would drop precipitously from just under eight million to five.
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The limits—and question of usefulness—to the projections of planners and urban economists come into focus every few years. As
New York Times
columnist Joyce Purnick pointed out in a December 31, 2006, article, “New York, Where the Dreamers Are Asleep,” “The city’s population has had a way of taking on a life of its own. Zoning consultants in the 1960s advised city officials that New York’s population would grow to 8.5 million in 1975—it may well have if not for the fiscal crisis that was at its worst in 1975. Instead, the numbers dropped so sharply—to 7.2 million in 1980 from 8 million in 1970—that some social scientists advocated ‘planned shrinkage’ in city services.” Purnick also noted that by 1990 the city’s population was up to 7.6 million, “an increase that was also unanticipated.” With that growth came the need for some schools to build annexes in prefabricated trailers to handle the equally unanticipated increase in students. Families with children living in the city—what a concept! How things had changed.

Jim Dwyer reflected in a July 14, 2007,
New York Times
column, “Only the deranged or visionary could have imagined on that summer night in 1977 that New York in 2007 would be fat, happy and standing-room only; perched here in 2007, many would find it hard to believe that 2,000 stores were burned or looted inside of 24 hours.”

SMALL STEPS, BIG CHANGE

As despairing as the 1970s were, symbolic events helped boost the city’s fragile ego. For example, in 1976, to honor the Bicentennial, the Tall Ships from around the world sailed into New York Harbor on a glorious summer weekend, reminding New Yorkers and the world of the treasure that is the city. The event, along with the decadelong debate over Westway, reminded the city that it had turned its back on the untapped resource of 572 miles of waterfront.

New York Magazine
celebrated New York’s celebrities throughout the 1970s and coincidentally celebrated the city itself. Aspiring cities across the country spawned similar city-focused publications, fueling the aspirations of the urban boosters.

Exuberant nightlife flourished, personified in John Travolta’s performance in
Saturday Night Fever
. Studio 54, the headline-grabbing discotheque, opened in 1977, demonstrating to the world that New York life could be hard, but entertainment and nightlife still thrived. The Bronx, too, was giving birth to a unique music scene, hip-hop, born in the unglamorous first-floor community room in “an otherwise unremarkable high-rise just north of the Cross Bronx and hard along the Major Deegan,” wrote David Gonzalez in the
New York Times
. There, in 1973, Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, spun together the tunes that spilled out onto nearby streets and parks, eventually spreading worldwide.
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In 1978, in the gritty, crime-ridden meatpacking district on the Lower West Side, a Frenchman, Florent Morellet, opened a diner and French-bistro hybrid where longshoreman ate at Formica countertops next to a rising number of well-heeled customers, raising the neighborhood’s profile that today is the epitome of chic. The classic diner structure was a centerpiece of this once vibrant food-focused district of low-rise buildings with projecting canopies and cobblestone streets. By 2008, Florent had had enough and closed the restaurant. By then, the Gansevoort Historic District was one of the city’s most upscale.

New York had become the center of the international art world in the 1960s but came into full bloom in the 1970s. With the defeat of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, SoHo blossomed into both an arts district and an exemplary reborn industrial neighborhood. SoHo helped change the way the country viewed cities.
New York Magazine
declared SoHo “the most exciting place to live in the city.” Loft living became the new chic. Other cities followed suit. Urban resilience was the wave of the future.

SoHo grabbed the headlines, but the real early stirrings of rebirth were totally citizen generated in neighborhoods out of the mainstream consciousness. The Back-to-the-City and Brownstone Movements began slowly in the 1960s all over New York City and in cities across the country. The increasing urban appeal gained strength in the 1970s. Historic architecture, great financial values, and urban lifestyles were the draw. Young middle-class families—called “urban pioneers”—began repopulating run-down neighborhoods around the country. It seems incomprehensible today to think that Georgetown in D.C., the Vieux Carre and Garden Districts in New Orleans, the Victorian Districts in San Francisco and Savannah, Back Bay in Boston, Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, and so many other now chic neighborhoods were once deteriorated slums.

And in the either abandoned or half-empty neighborhoods that most pioneers overlooked, new immigrants found shelter and opened new businesses. By the late 1970s, seventy-five thousand immigrants a year were coming to New York, twice the number of New Yorkers leaving for the suburbs. Immigration laws were loosened in 1965, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that one could observe the full flowering of these changes.

The enormous positive impact of the new waves of immigrants took a long time for experts to acknowledge. To this day it is a rare expert who acknowledges the long-standing and full positive impact because with that acknowledgment should come recognition of the organic nature of what has occurred, in that it was not developer or government driven.

Early in 2009 during the debate over the size and nature of the congressional stimulus package, Thomas L. Friedman wrote a column, “The Open-Door Bailout,” advocating a nonprotectionist bent to the legislation. He pointed out how critical to our past and recent national history have been the waves of immigrants. In the recent context, he cited a study showing that more than half of Silicon Valley start-ups of the last decade were founded by immigrants. Another study showed that increases in patent applications parallel increases in H1-B visas. Friedman quoted the somewhat tongue-in-cheek stimulus advice from Shekhar Gupta, editor of the
Indian Express
newspaper, “All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans. We will buy up all the sub-prime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate—no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”
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In effect, that is what happened in New York in the 1970s and ’80s with the great immigrant influx.