PRESS: The Big apple

...We have heard plenty about Beame and Carey and Elish and Simon, and we are going to hear a lot more when next year's mayoral race gets underway, but when are we going to hear about the money...

...All the newspapers After she has read the newspapers she tells us what' was in the newspapers...

...The Times hires pollsters to find out what New Hampshire housewives think of detente...

...For the rest, things seem pretty much the same...

...New York is filled with writers and editors who love the city, and care about its people, but they are treating the budget crisis as if it were quantum mechanics, too hard and complex for their simple little heads to get straight...

...or thirteen?-running for the Democratic presidential nomination...

...The aspect of New York's fiscal crisis which demands attention is what the money was spent on, and whether or not it was wasted...

...The rest of the city's troubles have been neglected...

...New York is like the Voice where the city is concerned, only more so...

...Parts of Queens must be as remote as Siberia by now...

...Perhaps...

...why don't they hire the Rand Corporation to find out where the city's money is going...

...If the deficit is not removed the city eventually will default, very likely pulling the state down with it...

...The budget cuts are plain arithmetic, not Boolean algebra...

...But I suspect that the hacks, the layabouts and the paperpushers are getting along fine, while the city is gradually dying, like a plant starved of sunlight...

...The only aspects of New York's fiscal crisis which have been thoroughly explored in print so far are the precise way the city ran up its debts in the first place, and the reasons the bankers finally said no...

...But it is senseless to shy away from such questions because we don't know where they are going to come out, at the cost of surrendering all decisions on who gets what to the EFCB...

...What does she want...

...The city deserves but is not getting a serious public discussion of its decline...

...The occasional story appears about the progress of financial malnutrition in this or that city agency, but there has been no major, sustained attempt to analyze the greatest economic and governmental crisis in the city's history...

...In the last month or two the Times has published a brilliant series on medical malpractice and incompetence, a solid series on the growth of the Sunbelt, and a worthy but interminable series on the (then) eleven candidates;-or was it twelve...

...There seems to be a Voice policy of one city story a week and some of them have been first-rate-Deborah Davis on the Sanitation Department (February 2), Henry Stern on free tuition at CUNY (January 12), Jack Newfield on the 25 worst political hacks on the city payroll and Phil Tracy on Victor Gotbaum (both December 8...

...I suspect not...

...The fault is more properly that of their editors, whose minds have been on other things...

...The trouble with this is that most of what public, figures really do is done in private...

...Questions of a similar sort ought to be raised and answered about other expensive city programs...

...It's a question of temperament, and the Voice-New York temperament is lively and personal, rather than general and . . . alas .. . dull...

...We all know the city is "in trouble," and we all know the city is going to have to "tighten its belt" and "bite the bullet," but knowing that is knowing too little...

...No, no, no, and no...

...The new journalism-not the Tom Wolfe sort, but the Voice-New York sort-has only three Ws: Who is doing What to Whom...

...THOMAS POWERSight...

...The only other magazine which might be expected to take a serious, sustained interest in the city is The New Yorker (yes, The New Yorker) and in fact it has published at least a dozen "Around City Hall" columns by Andy Logan during the last year...

...She might have investigated things, like a reporter, rather than listed them, like an archivist, but she has chosen instead to stick to the record...

...There is a schedule taped to the front door but it's as con* fusing as an airline timetable and I can never remember from one day to the next if it's closed on Wednesday or Thursday, and open till nine on Monday or Friday...

...Logan does is to read the newspapers...

...Why can't The New Yorker devote as much space and meticulous attention to New York as it does to the survival of the bark canoe...

...what will they be like after the city cuts another $800 million from its budget over the next three years...

...I don't know what they do, and I don't know anyone who does know...

...The heart of the problem is this: the city's $1 billion deficit ($200 million down, $800 yet to go) must be reduced to zero by 1978...

...It's interesting, and sometimes it's to the point, but mostly it neglects the details for the melodrama...

...Contrary to the hopes of those who consider the repudiation of debts a form of instant socialism, a city-state default will have very unpleasant, not to say catastrophic effects...

...W. Robertson in Fortune for last August, "Going Broke the New York Way...

...What I want is that some publication should make a sustained effort to find out what has gone wrong in New York City...

...I suspect that the exodus of citizens and business is speeding up while the city is being allowed to run down...

...he is going to balance the budget by reducing the city agencies across the board...

...She makes all those governmental comings and goings sound silly and futile, and of course sometimes they are silly and futile...

...The city university, for example, has increased its budget since 1950 from $27.7 million to more than $600 million...

...They care what is happening, and are willing to listen to the details, but the press is treating them a bit like children, slow to take notice and quick to get bored...

...Open admissions and free tuition provide benefits where they are needed the most, and yet the city is getting ready to penalize the poor and the disad-vantaged for the benefit of...

...In the last it is only the title, and not the article, which blames it all on Rockefeller...

...I suspect that things are eroding quickly, just out of sight...

...If they made a speech, or a remark in passing to a reporter, or cut the ribbon at a building site, or issued a denial of this or that charge, or shook hands outside a Congressional committee room, or quoted Thomas Paine in a speech, it is all there...

...and M. J. Rossant in the Harper's for January, "How Rockefeller Destroyed New York...

...But to make the same point in the same way, column after column, year after year, is to decline from the sardonic to the smug...

...Yes, yes, yes, and yes...

...Like so much in The New Yorker, the purpose pi "Around City Hall" must remain a mystery...

...Even after 25,000 employee cuts there are stffl 270,000 or 280,000 people working for the city...

...It wants everybody to have a marvelous time, but it won't stick to the point...

...No one has been taking the matter seriously, or at least not in the public prints...

...The budget is not published in Greek...

...It relates in detail (and, it must be admitted, in wry, sometimes arch, but always precision-tooled prose) what public figures have been doing in public...

...I suspect that I must sound a bit of a nut on this subject, perhaps even as passionately vague as the woman who prompted Freud to cry out, "Woman...

...The reason I only suspect these things without actually knowing one way or the other is that the press has made no coherent effort to tell me...

...THOMAS POWERSS...

...It is not only the local papers which have neglected this matter of what we need, and what we don't, but the magazines as well...

...Maybe she has, but that isn't the way her column reads...

...New Yorkers would read a serious and systematic attempt to explain where their money went in the past, and where it ought to go in the future...

...I share New York's conviction that New York is the world's best place to live-where every day is a sweet discovery--but I wish the magazine would pay stricter attention to the mechanics of the city, since it is, after all, breaking down...

...The dislocation has been so slight, in fact, that one wonders what all the hoorah was about in the first place...

...By this I mean that some city services are going to be cut 100 per cent...

...Logan has ever printed a quote or a fact which had not previously appeared in the newspapers...

...The reason I want to know is that I suspect the EFCB, left to itself, will make its decisions politically, just as the city always has,-and thus end by cutting truly vital services in order to protect police wash-up time, the 4 o'clock summer quitting hour, and retirement on half-pay after 20 years for bus dispatchers...

...These fall into a strange New Yorker genre, like Richard Rovere's "Letter from Washington" and Elizabeth Drew's "Washington Journal" during the Watergate hoorah...

...Logan might have used her monthly three or four thousand words to find out what was behind Mayor Beame's trip to Washington, or Governor Carey's State of the State message...

...Perhaps a few layabouts have been dropped from the city payroll, as well, a few political hacks sent out to earn an honest living, a few tons of pointless paperwork lifted from the daily load...

...Ten per cent less pencils, ten per cent less prison guards, whatever it takes...

...See especially, Steve Weisman in the New York Times Magazine of last August 17, "How New York Became a Fiscal Junkie...

...CUNY, after all, is one of the genuine benefits the city offers its middle-class residents...

...I don't know who...

...Of course LaGuardia once read the funny papers over the radio, but that was because the funny papers were otherwise unobtainable...

...PRESS THE BIG APPLE New York's fiscal crisis is roughly a year old now, but its effects on West 10th Street, where I live, are visible in only two ways: the garbage trucks make three pickups a week, instead of six, and the Jefferson Market branch of the public library, at the corner of 10th and Sixth Avenue, is closed whenever I want to use it...

...You may well wonder why she does this...

...The street sweeper still comes around three or four times a week, Con Edison has not cut off power to the sodium arc street lamps, the potholes are no worse (if not better), the fire trucks clang by just as often, and when I walk the dog in the morning I pass the same two cops, drinking coffee in their car parked in front of the Church of the Ascension on Fifth Avenue...

...In the meantime the hard decisions are being made elsewhere, out of sight...

...The list of neglected questions could be extended indefinitely...

...Ask yourself: is Richard Reeves ever going to tell you anything about the SALT talks...

...The deliberations of the EFCB are not conducted in Latin...

...If that strikes you as an exaggeration, read Jason Epstein's excellent description of the city's troubles in the February 19 issue Of The New York Review of Books...

...Algerian natural gas...

...Dear God, what does she want...

...The most important are the Village Voice and New York, step-siblings which have begun to look and especially to sound like each other...

...41 at 11th and Sixth is still open, of course, and so far as I know none of the kids has been run over crossing the street even though the school crossing guards were all fired...

...Is he going to say anything about Nixon's trip to China, Kissinger's resignation, Reagan's hollow promises, Ford's hollow performance...

...thesis to find out if Ms...

...I suspect that it is fear of just such conclusions which gives so much writing about New York a tone of nervous ill-temper...

...Terry Sanford and Lloyd Bentsen are already gone, but I know more about them than I do about city services in Queens, or the workings of the Emergency Financial Control Board, or the ballooning maintenance costs of the subway system, or the city university...

...It would be the work of tea years and a Ph.D...

...Too many of the Voice stories, however, suffer from brevity (often a page or less, with a lot of the page given to photographs and big headlines), and from a narrow focus on personalities...

...That is, excited and rich and vaguely, well . . . concerned...

...Mayor Beame says not to worry...

...Why doesn't the Voice have as many city specialists as it does movie reviewers...

...The question, of course, is whether I can see what is actually happening from my front door...

...The Voice has done a better job of covering the city's troubles than New York, which is perhaps natural since it is, after all, a weekly newspaper printed on newsprint and therefore properly concerned with news...

...When I guess, I always seem to guess wrong...

...After all, most of her New York readers read the newspapers all by themselves, and her out-of-town readers probably do not care what was in the New York papers...

...tariffs...

...What I would like to know is which ones are really useless, and which vital...

...Some of them may be awkward or painful...

...What, exactly, did New York get for its $6 billion in accumulated short-term debt...

...Its 280,000 students are almost certainly going to be asked to pay tuition, but perhaps it would be better to junk all the courses on transcendental meditation, house officials in less palatial quarters, cut back marginal programs, reduce paperwork, fire some faculty and staff, and let students go to school for free...

...Most New York journalists, and journals, would not like to conclude that rent control ought to go, that perhaps a union or two ought to be busted (before the city is busted), that maybe the city ought not to solicit the poor with welfare, while driving away business with taxes...

...What Ms...

...the IMF...

...The old journalism, you will remember, was based on the five Ws-who, what, when, where and why...

...It'll tell you where to buy potted plants or brass beds, and what it costs to play tennis on Saturday morning, and how tall Robert Redford is, or isn't, and what the Paleys would like to do to Truman Capote, after what Truman Capote did to the Paleys, all of which is interesting, after its fashion, but none of which helps New York readers to understand what the EFCB is up to, and why...

...Ken Auletta published a fine piece on the "The 20 Critical Decisions that Broke New York City" (October 27) but most of New York's New York coverage has been in the three Ws category...

...I am not faulting the reporters who have been covering the stories of the day, tike Steve Weis-man of the Times (recently transferred to Albany, like the city government itself, when you come to think of it...

...In fact it is far more likely the EFCB will make its cuts selectively...

...that is precisely my point...

...From what I can see, personally, the city's budget cutbacks have not made much difference...