The Broken Apple

...Such a coalition would respond to civility as the central theme of his campaign...

...Conservative party candidate for governor of New York State...

...Don't you see why you are doing so much more poorly than you should be...

...Andrew Haskell Green and Frederick Law Olmsted, operating with a large measure of independence from ordinary municipal rules and regulations, produced Central Park...

...The Brooklyn Bridge was built by a private syndicate clever enough to entrust it to John Roebling and his son...

...He paid for his projects not with local tax revenues, but with grants from Washington and the proceeds of bond issues that the state legislature allowed him to sell in the name of semiautonomous authorities...

...With such an alignment behind him, London might force Governor Cuomo to acknowledge embarrassing skeletons in the closet of the state "family" he idealizes...

...there is residual faith in the magic of private enterprise...

...With this volume, London stakes his claim to being a triple-threat adult as well: Dean of New York University's Gallatin Division, a busy island of cultural conservatism at the edge of Washington Square Park...

...The city provided municipal loans to finance its first subway, but August Belmont organized the company that built it...

...The achievements of the Robert Moses era in highway construction, hydroelectric power, park development, and bridge-building were not in any organizational sense achievements of municipal government...

...London knows that his chances of filling a vacancy in Albany's Executive Mansion are no better than those of a newcomer from Omaha finding a rent-controlled apartment on Central Park West...

...Whether describing the sad state of the city's pavements, the unpardonable neglect of such essential facilities as the Williamsburg Bridge, the deplorable condition of the public schools, the loss of control in the parks, the ransacking of the treasury to pay for sculptural atrocities in public spaces, London falls just short of exasperation...

...Yet it coexists with an emotional state that surrounds and tends to smother it...

...Too jaded to believe that religious institutions can influence moral behavior, the best citizens call on government to help evade the consequences of promiscuity by distributing free condoms, encourage clean living by offering addicts new hypodermic syringes, and open a new era in human sexuality by instructing teen-age scholars in the moral neutrality of sexual "preference...

...Yet he believes his campaign will force Governor Cuomo and Republican aspirant Pierre Rinfret to discuss the future of New York State government, instead of describing its citizens as one happy family (Cuomo) or explaining discrepancies between one's campaign biography and other bits of recorded history (Rinfret...

...This record has little effect on city dwellers, whose energies have curdled into resistance to any physical change, loss of belief in the possibility of progress, and a willingness to turn over anysocial problem, however complex, subtle, and long-lived, to government...

...Through the London newsletters selected for reprint in this volume runs a constant theme—that New York City's center isn't holding...

...The "average" people to whom London refers repeatedly have not managed to find elected representatives who reflect their own sense of the chaos that must overtake a city that disdains the bourgeois values...

...The skyscraper, New York's architectural logo, is almost always the product of individual risk-taking and private energy...

...If London can collect the money, he could put together a ticket that would appeal to New York's "average" people...

...Moses used his energy, dedication, homicidal tongue, and freedom from second thoughts to amass personal power that could be found on no government chart of organization...

...While I thought twenty years ago that "average" people would fight to retain control of a city in which they could comfortably live, "average" people have in large part given up and moved out...

...London's essays express wonder at the tremendous gap between the achievements of individual New Yorkers and the gross failure of their government to manage any of the activities the citizenry entrusts to it...

...pen because of private enterprise...

...and author of this collection of newsletters, which have been sowing badly needed common sense among New Yorkers since 1985...

...Time and again, London touches on the disorder that comes from a tolerant affinity between the urban elites—the highly sophisticated professionals, the peace-seeking rich, the devotees who find art more real than life itself, the guilt-ridden products of contemporary higher education—and the new boozing, drugging lumpen proletariat throwing traditional mores to the wind, celebrating the hustle, and stamping on traditional values...

...They include an increasingly bewildered black middle class, new immigrants from Asia, and what's left of the city's traditional working ethnics...

...Even if they did not move beyond the city's political boundaries, they moved to outskirts that resemble suburbs more than the political construct that bears the name "New York City...

...London has an answer, expressed succinctly in a sentence or two: "Government is not going to change this city—if New York improves, it will hapRoger Starr is the author of The Rise and Fall of New York City (Basic Books...

...They were called "semi" autonomous only because the buyers knew that in the event of a default the state would be forced to make good on them or find itself excluded from future credit...

...he seems to be asking...

...24.95 Roger Starr H erbert London played basketball on the only Jamaica (Queens) High School team ever to make it to the final round of the Public School Athletic League Tournament in Madison Square Garden...

...Whether he is discussing graffiti, the homeless, or the replacement of traditional measures of accomplishment with ethnic quotas, London is seeking to appeal to the "average" people, abandoned by the top social strata and assaulted from the bottom...

...The author is probably right...

...New Yorkers have a childish crush on government, remarkable given that few of the city's major achievements can be ascribed to the ability of the city or state governments to carry out the missions assigned to them...

...It may surprise producers and soap-opera writers, but the spirit of free enterprise is alive and well and residing in the breasts of average people...

...46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990...

...Civil disorder, loss of pride, sacrifice of sound energy policy to pick up Long Island votes, fiscal chicanery that will inevitably end in destruction of the state's creditworthiness—these are the issues London raises in The Broken Apple...