The Battle for Gotham (16 page)

When I was writing the story about Flatbush Town Hall and the trilogy of history of the former village of Flatbush, I discovered a wonderful gem. In the courtyard of Erasmus High School, a Gothic confection typical of many of the city’s public schools, is a little-known historic treasure—the 1786 Erasmus Hall Academy, a wooden schoolhouse built as a private academy for the Dutch church that remains, one of the oldest in the country. It’s in the courtyard, yet no mention or use of it made its way into the curriculum of the high school surrounding it.

New York City schools, like most public school systems around the country, have been remiss in giving students reason to appreciate their own neighborhoods, especially their historic fabric. Is it any wonder these kids grow up with the idea that upward mobility means moving out to a suburban tract house? Only a new appreciation of where they now live can change that and, in turn, advance the stability of their neighborhoods.

To my mind, then, if use of the Tweed Courthouse by the Board of Education does that for the current generation of public school students, it will be a worthwhile achievement. If they can see the value in something old, they may not be deceived into equating new with better. Equally important is the assurance of the intrinsic and
lasting
value of this stately edifice. The Board of Education will probably not be located there forever, but the building at least exists to accept an unpredicted future use.

The days where buildings like this one could be considered deserving of the garbage dump are over—at least in New York. Many American cities lag far behind New York in this evaluation, even though in New York vulnerable buildings still don’t get landmarked if a well-connected real estate owner wants an area of the city redeveloped.

The fundamental dilemma of the Landmarks Preservation Commission is the conflict between preservation and new development in a city where real estate ownership trumps all else in access to power and influence. How well preservation has prevailed over the years from administration to administration often depends on which prominent owner is involved. But when a site does get put on the commission calendar to be considered for designation and when owners seek permission to alter a landmark, the public hearing process is quite admirable. The public is not just heard. People who testify are really listened to by the commissioners. The measure of the commission is not just what gets designated a landmark or a landmark district. The key is what the commission avoids doing.

Opponents continue to argue that preservation is about freezing the city—
embalming
is the favorite word—about stopping change or stopping progress. Facts to the contrary make no difference in the public debate. Notable new buildings exist in many historic districts. An endless array of additions to historic buildings exist all over the city. The historic preservation movement rescued cities from the bulldozer of urban renewal and cataclysmic change, thereby rescuing urbanism itself. Preservationists first fought to preserve not only buildings but the urban fabric itself, all those elements now extolled by mainstream planners and urban designers—importance of density, real mixed-use and mixed-income neighborhoods, walkable streets and community gathering spaces. Through preservation, everything is connected.

For the most part, preservationists are too defensive. Once and for all, the time is now to acknowledge that preservation is about city building in the most expansive way, about enhancing the new by preserving and adaptively reusing the old, about moving forward and looking back at the same time. Preservation is about building anew on assets that exist, about Urban Husbandry at its best.

3

GREENWICH VILLAGE

Jacobs, Moses, and Me

The Village is amorphous; I can shape it into any place. . . . Everything in the Village . . . seems haphazard, accidental. When we first moved there, the old-timers told us the Village had Changed. The Village does not change, not really. The Village—the real Village, the one bounded by Fifth Avenue on the east and the Hudson River on the west—remains an accident.

MARY CANTWELL,
“Manhattan When I Was Young”

I
was a four-year reporter in 1969—almost a “veteran”—when I was one of nine
Post
staffers sent to the neighborhoods of their youth to write a series of articles meant to dramatize the changes wrought by time. Anthony Mancini went to the Northeast Bronx, Judith Michaelson to Flatbush, Timothy Lee to Park Slope, Jerry Tallmer to Park Avenue, Lee Dembart to Jackson Heights, John Mullane to Kingsbridge, Carl J. Pelleck to the Lower East Side, Arthur Greenspan to the Grand Concourse, and I to Greenwich Village.

For the most part, except for Park Avenue, the neighborhoods retained their working-class character. The Northeast Bronx, the Grand Concourse, and Kingsbridge, along with Jackson Heights (“the poor man’s Forest Hills”), were already on the upward-mobility route. The Northeast Bronx had not lost its rural feel, although the not-so-distant Co-op City, then in construction, was looming large. Park Avenue had already been transformed into mostly cooperative apartment houses with only twenty rental buildings left. And the Grand Concourse had not yet lost its “insular, isolated existence” primarily for Jews.

In every neighborhood, however, were signs of “city services getting bad, buildings getting shabby . . . and a tension that wasn’t there before,” as one wrote. The city had not hit the downward spiral that marked the 1970s, but its slow beginning was evident. Every neighborhood, it seemed, was in flux. Dramatic, if slow or subtle, shifts were unfolding, not the normal change of a healthy city. Moses’s massive urban renewal and highway building projects were increasingly causing disruptions that rippled throughout the city and were a primary cause of out-migration.

Too many chroniclers of the exodus from urban America are either unaware, choose to ignore, or downplay the enormous destabilization caused by the massive clearance projects that wiped out whole residential and industrial districts that would today be gentrified hot spots of renewing districts. Few acknowledge the significant impact of the push-pull effect. The riots of the mid-1960s accelerated that migration to the expanding suburbs. And the decade of the 1970s brought us to the brink of the deep abysmal fiscal crisis that marked so much of that decade.

THE STATE OF THE NEIGHBORHOODS

A few themes run through most of the reporters’ recollections. As a group, these observations reflect New York as it entered the 1970s. Many older people were still “in the neighborhood,” having been in the same residences for decades. People didn’t seem to move often. Many of their kids had left, although Jackson Heights, according to Dembart, was still considered by many “the first push to the ‘suburbs’” from the Bronx and Brooklyn. Every neighborhood was experiencing a changing ethnic makeup, often making longtime residents nervous. Some noted that each group “stayed to themselves” and didn’t “bother with one another.” Others were quick to blame creeping downward trends on “them.” The “them” varied from neighborhood to neighborhood. Often, the new arrivals were the displaced of the latest “clearance” project elsewhere in the city. Many of those interviewed said the problems were being caused by their own kids, not as well behaved as they used to be.

The ethnic mix of each of these neighborhoods was still predominantly Irish, Italian, and Jewish, in differing proportions. Puerto Ricans, South Americans, Asians, and blacks were adding to the mix in different areas, but the minority numbers were still marginal in contrast to today. On Park Avenue, middle-class West Siders, mostly Jews, were moving over. In the Slope, Timothy Lee reported, “the new people” were the “transplanted Manhattanites who have bought a few score of the attractive brick and brownstone houses over the past 10 years.” This was the only mention in any of the stories of the beginning of the great transformative trend that would bring middle-class residents back to so many historic neighborhoods in New York and across the country. Sometimes called “the Brownstone Movement,” “the Back-to-the-City Movement,” or just “urban pioneers,” this early trickle of new, mostly young city investors was the vanguard of what is today one of the clearly recognized trends of urban regeneration. And like most movements of positive change, this one started slowly at a small scale at the grassroots level and was totally unrecognized or underestimated by the Experts.

Gangs had been a factor in almost everyone’s childhood, but as Timothy Lee noted about the “predominantly Irish and Italian working class” Park Slope, “For years their sons fought each other in gangs, sometimes to the death. They fought because one gang, the Tigers, was Irish, and the other, the Garfield-South Brooklyn Boys, was Italian. They stopped when pistols became more readily available during the Korean War and the fun was suddenly gone out of the fighting.”

Now, though, each neighborhood was experiencing new kinds of trouble—vandalism and crime—which the city would see dramatically increase during the 1970s. In Flatbush, Judith Michaelson observed, the street conflicts had been between “the apartment-house kids and the private-house kids.” Carl Pelleck remembered “hanging out with gangs cause it was the thing to do.” What I thought I remember as gang fights in Greenwich Village were, according to author Victor Navasky, a classmate of my sister, “culture conflicts between the Italians of the South Village and the private school kids. Fights broke out during school soccer games and sometimes they’d steal our soccer ball. When they taunted us after school, fist fights occasionally broke out.” What I witnessed in Washington Square Park was never worse than rough bullying and weapons never more dangerous than sticks. The degree of minimum violence and fear didn’t compare to the 1970s.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF CRIME

In all of the neighborhoods, crime had been petty, but by the dawn of the 1970s, in many areas, things were getting rough. The rise in drug abuse was a common complaint, first experienced, Tim Lee noted, during the Korean War. At first, many of the drugged kids were the children of heavy-drinking parents, he added, but, increasingly, new groups were bringing drugs into several of the neighborhoods.

Almost everyone’s neighborhood had a busy retail shopping street. John Mullane said of West 231st Street in Kingsbridge: “It was impossible to go more than five steps without meeting another acquaintance.” For Kingsbridge, 231st Street was still its “Times Square,” and even the RKO Marble Hill was still operating. This onetime common community experience, where the faces of shopkeepers were familiar and cops still walked the beat and were on a first-name basis with kids, seemed to be diminishing everywhere.

Streets had been playgrounds for many of us. “Stickball was the big game,” Carl Pelleck noted about the Lower East Side. “You asked a driver to please not park on the base, to drive to the other end of the block to keep the field clear. Most complied.” And in Kingsbridge, John Mullane noted, “the curb was reserved exclusively for bouncing pink Spaldeens off it.” No more. Stickball and curb ball were now clearly a thing of the past. Complaints now were of too many cars, either double-parked on the street or racing through the community “like the Indianapolis Speed-way,” as one Bronx resident complained to Anthony Mancini.

On the Grand Concourse, Arthur Greenspan found, displeasure was expressed about what traffic engineers had done to the residents’ beloved boulevard. “They’ve widened the street, ripped out half the trees, built dividing traffic islands of green concrete instead of grass, built yellow-pavement entrances and exits—all the better to use the Concourse to flee elsewhere,” Greenspan wrote.

Only one return visitor, Jerry Tallmer, found his neighborhood quite improved: Park Avenue and Eighty-second Street, “the only homogeneous area in the city, with no weak spots, 86th St. down to 60th, between Fifth and Lexington . . . with the swinging scene” concentrated on First, Second, and Third Avenues. And only one returnee, Carl Pelleck, found his neighborhood, the Lower East Side, filled with dramatic poverty, “filth, high crime and total change” . . . but “never considered a fashionable place to live” in the first place.

The following is what I found when I went back to the Village.

“The Old Neighborhood: Greenwich Village”

Post Daily Magazine,
December 26, 1969

My apartment house is long gone, replaced by a grotesque monument otherwise known as the NYU Library. Washington Square Park is in a state of bulldozed shambles, a renovation promising some grand, improved design of the park that none of us thought needed improvement. Nathan’s is coming to 8th St., Blimpie’s is already on the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker, and Rienzi’s—the once famed coffee house—is now a boutique.