The Most Overrated Book of the Year
Frum, David
David Frum THE MOST OVERRATED BOOK OF THE YEAR Bronx cheers to conservatives who've been heaping praise on Jim Sleeper's socialistic The Closest of Strangers grr he cause of bad writing," 1 H. L...
...Rising property values closed the tenement in 1981...
...The answer, as anybody who lives in Brooklyn knows, is crime: her neighborhood was one of the very few areas in central Brooklyn where an old woman can walk around the block with some feeling of safety...
...All this by the age of 16...
...Every New York borough except Staten Island is home to fewer people today than it was in 1960...
...As usual, Mencken was not being entirely fair...
...Sleeper appears to understand this danger, and has an idea of how to avert it...
...Bruno's old house are huge, depopulated stretches of ground...
...He re-emerges, sentences later, blowing water out his nose, looking ridiculous...
...Fifty years ago, New York's leading businesses were light manufacturing, shipbuilding and ship repair, entertainment, loading and unloading boats, and railroading...
...But a more intimate yet often invisible cause of neighborhood churning is a real-estate industry that is to New York City what big oil has been to Houston, a remarkable agglomeration of bankers, investors, developers, builders, owners, managers, and brokers who speculate frenetically on the sites of the great enterprises and headquarters and on the neighborhoods where their owners, managers, workers, clients, and customers might live...
...Although visitors who spend their time touring the city's posh neighborhoods might find this hard to believe, New York is not a very crowded place...
...Capitalism killed Mrs...
...To the north, south, and west of Mrs...
...New York must have more of everything that hasbrought it to its present trouble—more rent control, more "social investment," more interference with business, more public housing, more taxes, more federal aid, more welfare, more of everything that has so miserably failed over the past thirty years...
...But why couldn't Mrs...
...they are "withdraw[ing] at least provisionally into communal and personal inner journeys in order to reclaim themselves and redefine their terms of entry" Churchgoing blacks who build their own houses are not merely decent citizens...
...That's poor Jim Sleeper's problem...
...They are responding, in turn, to ever-changing configurations of capital, technology, and culture—of the non-spatial networks I've mentioned...
...But Sleeper replies, "Perhaps the 'enemy's' lair really lay closer to home, in the hardheaded calculation of slum real-tors and developers, calculations that could be upset only by galloping socialism or a full-employment economy...
...You get the idea...
...But I fear that the conservative critics of Sleeper's book are miscalculating its likely effect—an effect that it is now more likely to have because of their too-hasty applause...
...Some entity other than the privateeconomy must step forward and pump money into the city to employ its people in ways that do not wreck New York's neighborhoods as they exist precisely now, in late winter 1991...
...Sleeper admits only to hoping to slow it down...
...He was too fearful...
...Today they are finance, advertising, publishing, entertainment, and design...
...If this unceasing motion is to stop—if new yuppie migrants are to cease displacing old Italian migrants—so too must the commercial and industrialchange that causes it...
...For many people, writing is as treacherous as mounting an inflatable pool toy: just as they get one leg wrapped around the thing, it shoots out from underneath them...
...Still, he and his supporters stand vigilant to prevent its return...
...I remember once reading about the daughter of a rich New Yorker of the early nineteenth century...
...Most obvious is the city's ever-changing demography, people of wildly divergent lineage pouring in and out, seeking opportunity and freedom...
...At the same time, Pulitzer Prizewinner J. Anthony Lukas, than whom nobody is more Politically Correct, received the book with wary applause in the New York Times Book Review...
...The solution, Sleeper believes, is to control that arrogant "sluicing" in the interests of neighborhood preservation...
...Therefore, middle-class New Yorkers of all colors must struggle together against the real threats to the city—uncontrolled corporate investment and disinvestment, real estate speculation, and insufficient federal funds...
...Office development choked the midtown streets with traffic...
...Then a renovator bought Anna's building and told her she'd have to move...
...About the form that the solution should take, Sleeper is characteristically murky: he has nothing more specific to say than that there ought to be "some way for cities to influence or make claims upon new configurations of technology, investment, employment, consumption, demographics...
...Anna had to move to Florida to live with her daughter...
...Sleeper's conservative readers seem to have decided that an attack on black radicalism by a member of the Newsday editorial board who once wrote for the Village Voice and Dissent is such a stupendous event that it deserves all the encouragement it can get, even if the attack is scalped from twenty-year-old issues of the Public Interest...
...they are, "though sometimes brusque and formulaic," "dialectical in a way ideologues with all the answers never can be...
...That victory did little good, though, for "what [the tenement] hadn't managed to do, the yuppies were accomplishing": Anna Bruno had raised her kids in a rented apartment on the block and would look out at the world from a pillow propped on the sill of her ground-floor window, cursing the Puerto Rican kids on their go-carts...
...Its dustjacket carries a glowing blurb from neoconservative writer Diane Ravitch...
...New industries need new kinds of buildings, and attract new kinds of workers who need new kinds of homes...
...But however finely one were to calibrate it, a slowdown would at the very least kill the "full employment economy" that is the only alternative that Sleeper offers us to slums or "galloping socialism...
...Bruno...
...Capitalism tosses old ladies out of their homes...
...Scott McConnell, an editorialist for the New York Post, commended the book in Commentary...
...Sleeper quotes New York's onetime pub14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 lic housing chief, Roger Starr, as worrying in 1959 about the city's "enemy"—its "internal forces of self-destruction...
...What most fundamentally threatens the stability of New York's neighborhoods, Sleeper believes, is not crime, disorder, and taxes, but gentrification...
...David Frum is an assistant features editor at the Wall Street Journal...
...has won the praise of people whose tastes don't usually agree...
...As it happened, no action of Dinkins's was needed to stop the Koch real estate boom...
...But that's not Sleeper's answer...
...The new high-rises on the Upper East Side blocked the views of the residents of Park Avenue...
...Why couldn't she settle there...
...leeper is articulating a wish that is 1.3 about all the politics that New York's white left still has: the wish to turn New York into a brownstone Venice, where communities go on living where they always have, as they always have, protected from the chaotic impact of change...
...So does the present municipal administration...
...But "the neighborhood changed rapidly and most of our friends . . . the Grahams, Townsends, deForests, Berghs, Kips, Kerries, LeRoys, Wilmerdings, Whitneys, and others of the old New York families . . . moved away...
...Black nationalists are not separating themselves from the rest of America...
...And the city's new residents showed a dismaying lack of respect for its traditional customs: yuppies who rented 1,000-square-foot boxes in the sky for $2,400 a month found it hard to understand why prominent critics of the "Greed Decade" were able to live in five rent-controlled bedrooms overlooking Central Park for half that sum...
...A few forlorn letters from Florida=`There's nothing to do here...
...The Koch administration had many faults—very, very many—but it did at least understand that the business of American cities is business...
...NY, the Manhattan Institute's excellent new quarterly, has reprinted a chapter...
...they sluice the currents of neighborhood investment and disinvestment that are so swift and unsparing...
...But what isn't said enough is that the cause of bad thinking is stupidity...
...What seems to prevent Sleeper from expressing himself straightforwardly is his nervous suspicion that his ideas will sound commonplace unless decorated with big dollops of verbal goo...
...T he thesis that has so pleased both 1 right and left goes roughly as follows: White racism is not in fact entirely to blame for the poverty and degradation of black New York, and much of what gets condemned as white racism is in fact a normal reaction to behavior by underclass blacks that is intolerable by any standard...
...And, naturally, that entity is the federal government, which stupidly "doesn't know enough to lavish on New York's great heart a tenth of what the French spend on Paris or Italians on Rome...
...Wrapped around Ravitch's blurb are those of Shelby Steele, arch-liberal columnist Sydney Schanberg, and Randall Kennedy, the editor of the new black academic quarterly Reconstruction...
...In The Closest of Strangers, his much-praised book about New York's racial troubles, he can never quite make his words do what he wants them to.' Every time he seems at last about to get a grip on them, they capsize him...
...This, I'm sorry to report, is what passes for bold, innovative, and courageous thinking in what was once the intellectual capital of America...
...Brooklyn alone has lost 1.5 million residents over the past thirty years...
...capitalism . . . corrodes the fabric of community life...
...Four years later, the family moved to Fourth Street, near Washington Square, and soon afterward, to Greenwich Street in what's now called Tribeca...
...The Closest of Strangers 'The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York, by Jim Sleeper, W. W. Norton, $19.95...
...It's rather like the reaction of a Canadian friend of mine when told that a witticism attributed to a nineteenth-century politician in the Oxford Book of Canadian Political Anecdotes was, in fact, plagiarized from Charles James Fox: "Well, John A. MacDonald may not have beenthe first person to say it, but he was the first Canadian to say it...
...then the dam of her dignity burst, and she hobbled up and down the street, weeping on the necks of her friends...
...She was stoic about it until her last morning on the block, when the movers arrived...
...David Frum THE MOST OVERRATED BOOK OF THE YEAR Bronx cheers to conservatives who've been heaping praise on Jim Sleeper's socialistic The Closest of Strangers grr he cause of bad writing," 1 H. L Mencken once told a professor who'd been incautious enough to ask, "is, as often said, bad thinking...
...Not all the money is to come from Washington: some must come from New York's middle class, for, as Sleeper sternly warns, the pathologies of New York's poor do not excuse their "angry victims from supporting social investments in prenatal care, early education, and jobs...
...Here's a little glimpse of Sleeperism, in an anecdote he tells of an Italian neighborhood on Carroll Street, on the edge of Brooklyn's Park Slope Throughout the 1970s, the neighborhood had been threatened by criminals from a nearby slum tenement...
...We remained here until we were surrounded by immigrant boarding houses, and then went uptown to live...
...She had been born in 1837 in a house near Battery Park...
...Bruno have moved a couple of blocks away...
...As they try to profit from various communities' emergence, stabilization, upgrading or decline, they stamp the perceptions and preferences of New Yorkers, whose standing in the real-estate market is determined by income and tastes derivative of their relationships to the larger, nonspatial networks of the city...
...Sleeper's analysis won't do much good, and his recommendations—which the municipal authorities are more likely to heed—could cause much harm...
...Not everybody liked the change...
...New Yorkers, in Sleeperese, aren't cosmopolitan or tolerant...
...It is this determination—and not any tendency in the mayor toward bravery in the face of the Sharptons and Daughtrys and Maddoxes of New York—that Sleeper's book will reinforce, if it has any impact on New York politics at all...
...Quite the contrary . . . " Quite the contrary...
...I'm all alone”—and then, back in the old neighborhood for a visit at Christmas, she keeled over onto a friend's linoleum floor and died...
...These key players in the real-estate game have a culture and sub-cultures all their own...
...The Koch administration by and large permitted those new buildings and new homes to be built...
...they are "marked so indelibly by the vigors and ironies of this difficult passage that one can never be quite comfortable in one's old tribe or parochial faith...
...Because of capitalism, New York is in the grip of a ruthless real estate industry that unfeelingly shoves the old and infirm out of the way in order to make a buck: What causes all this churning, sometimes more brutal than benign...
Vol. 24 • March 1991 • No. 3
