New York: Two Tales of a City
Grant, James
James Grant New York: Two Tales of a City • • NEW YORK—What was Owen J. Quinn, an unemployed construction worker, trying to tell us when he parachuted 1,950 feet from the top of the World Trade...
...bankers refused to lend the city more money...
...New York politicians, the evidence suggested, were incompetent, profligate, and crooked...
...City debt was up from $1 billion in 1921 to $2.2 billion in 1932...
...In one instance, authorities had covered up a gambling-related murder on the premises of a Democratic political club...
...Drastic reform...
...The assessed valuation of city real estate miraculously rose from $13 billion in 1926 to $19.6 billion in 1932 (it stands at $39.7 billion today), an increase, some charged, contrived by the Mayor to support a bigger base of debt...
...There had been bribery of the zoning board and of the vice squad...
...It is sometimes asserted in uninformed quarters that the present financial condition of the City of New York is due to the general business depression," Seabury wrote...
...merely to service the debt—i.e., to repay principal and interest —will cost some $1.8 billion this fiscal year...
...There is the instructive case of James J. McCormick, Democratic district leader of the 22nd Assembly District in Manhattan and Deputy City Clerk in charge of marriage licenses...
...The proportion of local government employment to population, reports the Conference Board, is the highest in the nation...
...Yesterday and today are much alike...
...That the city long has lived beyond its means...
...Do you pretend to any knowledge of the city's finances...
...The details of the fall are hypnotizing...
...Big Mac"), told city councilmen the other day...
...It is a tale known, at least in its headlines, to everyone...
...Municipal disaster, in the thirties, was a forthright business...
...Overall indebtedness exceeds $13 billion...
...he didn't, as a rule, invoke the Declaration of Independence when confronted with the evidence...
...Yet, as with Quinn, we want to know more...
...scandal and malfeasance presided at City Hall...
...To be married at City Hall, the Seabury Committee concluded (it did so without the willing testimony of McCormick), one had to be serious enough to pay twice...
...Sinking funds—reserves set aside to repurchase long-term bonds—were raided to buy short-term IOUs...
...City spending, in the past decade, has soared from $4.5 billion to over $12 billion annually...
...As Quinn was led away by police, examined by psychiatrists, booked on charges of criminal trespass, reckless endangerment, and disorderly conduct, he was heard to remark (and we paraphrase): I did it for the poor...
...that, despite billions of dollars in loans, it may yet succumb—all this is commonplace...
...Certainly," he could lave written, "it is not because of mere accident that in a city of tenants, rents should be set by law below market rates...
...This is not the fact...
...The towering buildings, reckless leaps, questions of sanity, protestations (from the Mayor and City Council) that we did it for the poor...
...Cunningham replied, with a forthrightness now rare, "No...
...To Frank A. Cunningham, for nine years the chairman of the Finance Committee of the Board of Aldermen, Seabury put this question: "Now let us be frank...
...Mayor James "Gentleman Jimmy" Walker, Seabury charged, had personally pocketed $1 million in tributes from city contractors...
...must come and must come at once...
...Elsewhere meant the Walker administration, which had fallen back on ancient shortcuts...
...of the City of New York have made and are making for a grave extravagance and wastefulness in nowiseconnected with the existing economic emergency...
...1n the past decade, New York's short-term borrowing has risen by more than 700 percent...
...I think it's going to be very tough for you gentlemen to cope with the stringencies that are going to be required without the aid of the state and federal governments," Felix G. Rohatyn, chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corp...
...that for eight months it teetered on the brink of bankruptcy awaiting state and federal aid...
...If Judge Seabury (a stern descendant of the nation's first Episcopal bishop) were at work today, he might ignore corruption for the greener turf of rent control...
...Political favoritism governed the distribution of unemployment benefits, bus franchises, and shipping licenses...
...How like Quinn is the City of New York...
...If a Tammany regular stole, he lied...
...So spoke New York Governor and President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt on December 9, 1932...
...Quite apart from corruption, it seemed to Seabury, city government was running out of control...
...Tammany Hall, aid though it did in the Panic of 1837, the Blizzard of '88, and the Winter of '93, never dreamed of the uses to which compassion might be turned...
...Between 1922 and 1932, the budget had risen from $354.7 million to $676.4 million, or 91 percent, while population had grown by just 23 percent, from 5.6 million to 6.9 million...
...Accused of this and more, Farley declared under oath, according to the Committee report, "thathe had, during the period when he was business agent for a union, accumulated more than $100,000 in cash, which he kept in a tin box—`a wonderful box,' as he described it—and it was from these monies that he, from time to time, made deposits which appeared in his bank account...
...Certainly it is not because of their special aptitude for their positions or mere accident," wrote Judge Samuel Seabury, appointed in 1931 to investigate conditions in New York City, "that practically every Democratic district leader in the City is ensconced in a key office of the City, many of them with nothing to do and a host of supernumeraries to help them do it...
...Defects in the government...
...city pension funds saw similar service...
...As a matter of fact, the question of New York's survival was raised under strikingly similar circumstances just 44 years ago...
...Employment and population both have fallen—the city has lost 500,000 jobs in the past seven years—and, despite a vacancy rate of just 2.8 percent, roughly 30,000 apartments are abandoned each year, the bitter fruit of rent control...
...The talk in New York concerns survival...
...New Yorkers look to government not for Christmas turkey but for low rents and free college tuition...
...Mismanagement twice took New York into the teeth of default...
...the trouble lies elsewhere...
...James Grant New York: Two Tales of a City • • NEW YORK—What was Owen J. Quinn, an unemployed construction worker, trying to tell us when he parachuted 1,950 feet from the top of the World Trade Center last summer...
...Only the nature of patronage has changed...
...McCormick earned ten thousand dollars or so annually on the job, yet deposited some $384,788 in his bank account between 1925 and 1931...
...The ranks of city employees had soared 91 percent, from 38,872 to 74,220 souls...
...Then, as now, the end of government is power...
...yearly carrying charges exceeded $200 million...
...Seabury's committee listened in disbelief as witnesses described dealings between politicians and gamblers—indeed, as its report was to charge, "not merely gamblers but murderers, gunmen and highway robbers...
...Social legislation, in large part, has replaced the larceny and paternalism of clubhouse days...
...He could turn with equal profit to municipal unions, free tuition and open enrollments at the City University, a sprawling and under-utilized municipal hospital system, and the entire gamut of poverty programs...
...Then there was the case of Thomas M. Farley, Democratic leader of the 14th Assembly District, whose clubhouse, the Thomas M. Farley Association, sheltered 'Billy Warren's Club," one of the city's most notorious gambling houses...
...Indebtedness then had risen dramatically...
...It bore this inscription, from Matthew 19:26: "...With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible...
...It was a brief reprieve...
...A year later, New York The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 9...
...In December 1931, only the passage of a state law permitting the sale of new city securities averted embarrassment...
...Do you...
...that its tax base is eroding...
...There comes a point at which the viability of the city comes into question...
...Approximately $200,000 found its way into Farley's bank account between 1925 and 1930, although his reported annual income was about $8,000...
...The football jersey he wore provides a clue...
Vol. 9 • May 1976 • No. 8
