Ruins and Reforms: New York Yesterday and Today
Berman, Marshall
We beg delinquents for our life. Behind each bush, perhaps, a knife; each landscaped crag, each flowering shrub, hides a policeman with his club. —Robert Lowell, "Central Park" . . . the block...
...But we ourselves, New York's intellectuals, have to take a major share of responsibility for what New Yorkers know and when they know it...
...It is not the job of private developers to set limits...
...Daniel Bell complains that the city lacks a procedure, or even a vocabulary, for assessing public priorities...
...In 1958 the U.S...
...an overview of the city's political economy by Daniel Bell...
...they're the author's responsibility...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...we had to learn to negotiate streets full of people shrieking in rage and despair at the top of their voices, and often directing their shrieks at us...
...the trained incapacity to see the city as a human environment, or as anything more than a machine for generating money...
...Nothing in our collective civic consciousness prepared us for this sudden vulnerability...
...The bad news is that one of those few is our mayor...
...In one sense, nothing could be more obvious...
...It would be a sign of our oftenremarked provinciality for New Yorkers to think that it has fallen on us alone...
...Now we should not forget that, since the early 1960s, the sky has been falling all over America...
...it is their job to make money...
...Mary Perot Nichols sees the success of municipal reform movements as shallow and transient, and portrays a political machine increasingly adept at coopting its enemies...
...This wouldn't have been so bad if it had enabled Americans to confront the rapidly rising tide of violence throughout American society...
...The experience of looking back to New York in the summer of 1961 is a little like Philip Larkin's poem about pictures of England in August 1914...
...The Sunbelt became skillful at transforming its economic power into political power...
...In deepest night, Neither could see the other but sensed where he stood...
...A multibillion dollar, cost-plus, militarized economy virtually guaranteed spectacular profits to investors in the West and South...
...an exposé of Robert Moses's politico-bureaucratic empire by Fred Cook...
...De Kooning's cover expresses—we might even say, it helps to invent—the spirit of the 1960s...
...they are happy to identify themselves as New Yorkers, rather than trying to sound like universal beings...
...And yet, rereading our Summer 1961 issue, we can't help but notice the great gulf in experience and sensibility between those days and our own...
...But New Yorkers were willing to pay for them, in part because they appreciated the benefits they brought, in part because these services 424 • DISSENT LOOKING AT OUR CITY were a source of civic pride...
...Yet it might have made some difference—even now it still could make a difference—if we were blessed with political leaders honest enough to explain to the people the shape and weight of the forces we are up against...
...nothing prepared us for the burning down and virtual destruction of many of these neighborhoods, the flames shooting up around us night after night, the metamorphosis of teeming streets and overflowing buildings—sometimes the streets and buildings we'd grown up in—into deserts of burnt-out hulks and vast emptiness...
...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...To help things happen, we need to examine some of these old wounds once again...
...Ironically, these are precisely the qualities that have also made New York such a thrilling and beloved place...
...New York's intellectuals haven't done much lately to live up to this legacy...
...PAUL GOLDBERGER New York Times, May 31, 1987 shows how city and state governments pour lavish subsidies into culture as a luxury industry and imperial spectacle (in the 1960s it was Lincoln Center), even as Nat Hentoff and Mary Otis show how the jazz musicians and theater groups that are New York's real culture heroes face endless harassment from landlords, government bureaucracies, the mob, and the police...
...As the book plunges toward its end, the two men stalk each other with lethal weapons through the building's ruins...
...Each man is imaginative and talented, but profoundly blocked and unable to work through what he is trying to say...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...It features a memoir by Irving Howe, "New York in the Thirties...
...Edward Chase paints a picture of neighborhoods increasingly segregated by class and race, and the city as a whole polarized increasingly between rich and poor...
...Why did everything in the city seem to be collapsing at once...
...If we look hard at New York's civic culture as it is today, the view is bleak...
...It is the function of the city to represent the public interest and forge into the building process the values that matter, which often means drawing the line...
...All our people's energy and beauty can be instantly seen, heard, felt in the street...
...After all these years, aren't we sick of it...
...Dorothy Day distinguishes between stable poverty in which "the poor have some hope," and destitution, "habitation of the ill, the lonely and the hopeless ones" who "suffer the torments of hell...
...instead, they asserted the intellectual power to penetrate into that world's remotest corners and to grasp it as a whole...
...One of the crucial historical forces working against New York—and, indeed, against all industrial cities more than a generation old—is the vastly accelerated mobility of capital, propelled by breakthroughs in information technology...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...Still, they have held up over the long haul, and most New Yorkers use them every day...
...In The Tenants, as in all his best fiction, Malamud was a master of imprisonment...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...Anti-Semitic ape...
...And when it did happen, instead of learning to scrutinize their own towns more closely, they attacked New York even more violently, as if we had afflicted all America with its spreading blight...
...Those writers were often bitter or sad, but not traumatized or shocked...
...Civic culture was born, in ancient Athens and Jerusalem, when intellectuals took their stand in public spaces, and took it on themselves to act as the consciousness and conscience of their cities...
...in the end, however, they lose themselves in the sure joys of martyrdom, even at the price of self-destruction, rather than staying alive and running the risks of solidarity...
...Much of this issue of Dissent examines Edward Koch's policies and strategies: the spectacular giveaways to real estate developers...
...But that also means that all our strains and tensions are instantly visible, audible, palpable—and, moreover, because the streets are our lifeline, there is nowhere we can go to get away from it all...
...The shock was greatest, probably, for the more than half a million New Yorkers who, between 1968 and 1980, saw their own homes and neighborhoods—large parts of Brownsville, East New York, BedfordStuyvesant, the Lower East Side, Harlem, a dozen neighborhoods in the Bronx—go up in flames...
...an eminently sensible "Utopian proposal" by Percival and Paul Goodman to ban private cars from Manhattan...
...Our whole public sector, which was supposed to form a structure of solid walls binding New Yorkers together into a community, seemed to be crashing down on our heads...
...There was nowhere you could get away from it...
...A random walk in the street or ride on the train can give us a remarkably full view of the richness, diversity, and color of New York life...
...Koch could never have done so much for New York's plutocrats without his demagogic flair for dividing and demoralizing its people...
...We've stayed indoors, upstairs, while more and more of our city has been sold and bulldozed out from under us...
...understanding pain can help us work our way toward a stronger civic identity...
...The city is no longer our protector, but a full-fledged participant in the orgy of Manhattan real-estate development...
...People who have been chronically victimized often glory in their wounds and fear a future without them...
...It would be silly to restrict the scope of this novel's meaning to Jews and blacks, or for that matter to New York...
...Those of us who lived through the 1960s and 1970s in New York often felt like soldiers in that Great War: under fire for years, assaulted from more directions than we could keep track of, pinned down in positions 422 • DISSENT LOOKING AT OM CITY from which we couldn't seem to move...
...Robert Lowell, "Central Park" . . . the block is burning down on one side of the street, and the kids are trying to build something on the other...
...Percival Goodman Koch 8 the Developers Once, there was a time when the city of New York saw its responsibility for physical planning as a simple mandate: to limit growth...
...Anybody who lived in a housing project, took the subway to work, sent a child to public school, tried to use a city hospital or summon the police for help, came face to face with institutions that were, or seemed to be, on the point of breakdown...
...above it, boldest of all, like a billboard flashing in Times Square, DISSENT...
...And that is just what the city has chosen not to do...
...Here he captured the tragic pathos of Jews and blacks clinging to our crumbling city when so many others had given up on it...
...THE EDITORS 428 • DISSENT...
...Still, if we want to think about the costs of isolation, New York's Jews and blacks in the past fifteen or twenty years are not a bad place to start...
...In 1961, however, that first generation made what we might call a great leap inward, and produced a splendid issue on New York...
...If we expose some of our inner wounds to the air, we can not only discover their sources, but see how widely they are shared...
...the city lurches between sophisticated nihilism and crude erupFALL • 1987 • 427 LOOKING AT OM CITY Lions of tribal fear and rage...
...But the symbolism took on an insidiously twisted form: poverty, racism, easy access to drugs and guns, desperate rage exploding into mayhem, were considered uniquely our problems...
...Below the exploding chaos, "New York, N.Y...
...but the trouble they feared was entropy, not catastrophe...
...Harlem, My Harlem," Claude Brown's first published piece...
...out-of-towners seeing our town come apart concluded complacently that it could never happen to theirs...
...Even as New York's street life has intensified our collective troubles, the city's preeminence as a world communications center has blown them up into something mythical...
...This is the sad truth—that the municipal government, which at its best should be a moral force for good development, has shown so little interest in anything except accommodation...
...In 1984 I coined a word for this dreadful process: URBICIDE, the murder of a city...
...We were used to shabby, impoverished, neglected neighborhoods all around the town— some of us worked in them, others drove through on the way out of town...
...we would only learn when the knock or call came from the police...
...This was dreadful, not just for the immediate suffering it caused (which was plenty), but for the revelation that, after all the expense and care we had lavished on our public services, we were as endangered and helpless as if we had spent the last twenty years asleep...
...They talk of James Joyce and Bessie Smith, share space, smoke dope, feel like brothers, help each other survive...
...Editors' note: With this issue, the masthead changes to a low-rise model.] Examined at closer range, this mostly but not wholly Jewish masthead— "Howe, Walzer, Geltman, Phillips, Carpenter, Plastrik, Avishai, . . . Schapiro, Sexton, Steinberg, Steinfels, Wrong" —evokes the rows of doorbells on the thresholds of the Bronx and Brooklyn apartment houses where many of us grew up, or in the lobbies of the more formidable piles of the Upper West Side where many of us live now...
...Indeed, the strong vertical form of our masthead resembles nothing so much as a New York apartment house...
...In the late 1960s, New York came to symbolize "urban violence...
...only in life the landlord is not Malamud's kindly old Levenspiel, an outsider like his tenants, but Donald Trump, who treats all New Yorkers as so much slag, to be discarded fast when we get in the way of his gold mines...
...But our city life was shattering and exploding in so many ways, that all New Yorkers were burned by the heat...
...Robert Moses's Cross-Bronx Expressway, which displaced about 50,000 people, made the Bronx seductively easy to get out of, and increasingly difficult to stay in...
...Navy relocated the Brooklyn Navy Yard to the Gulf Coast, taking with it not only thousands of jobs but a whole complex of satellite industries that supported thousands more...
...Nevertheless, there are certain features of New York that have made these general troubles particularly traumatic...
...Why, in a city full of smart people who love the city, haven't we moved beyond the urbanism of the summer of 1961...
...the triumphal march of the city's rejuvenated political machines, whose movers and members have made the 1980s one long carnival of white-collar crime...
...They constitute public space of a breadth and intensity probably unsurpassed in the world, and not even dreamt of in the rest of the U.S.A...
...We assumed that although we as individuals were bound to die, our city would live forever...
...We need first to mourn, then to reform: to go through our grief together, and then to move beyond the work of mourning, to create a framework that can bring our city's future development under its citizens' control...
...Each heard himself scarcely breathing...
...So many ordinary, decent people like ourselves, who had worked all their lives to stay clean, suddenly found themselves entangled—as victims, witnesses, or survivors—in ferocious crimes...
...the federal budget was focused more and more on guns, and the social expenditures which, starting in the Great Society years, had helped so many poor people and their neighborhoods survive, were slashed...
...Another severe blow to New Yorkers came from a direction where we had felt most secure: our city's public sector...
...We all learned (often without noticing that we were learning) to be very alert in public places, to respond to subliminal signs...
...It was, and still is, a desperate predicament...
...He has written about New York City politics for Dissent since 1980...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc...
...Yet our defense systems, adept in protecting us against strangers, might totally fail to alert us to what our loved ones were doing just behind the door...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...Federal Housing Administration lending policies, which effectively blacklisted cities (and all locations with large minority populations), created similar incentives for families to relocate...
...Hustlers and haters fight for hegemony...
...Our own media mythicized us into America's Other, which could be blamed for everything that the country didn't want to see in itself...
...So how come we're still waiting for a preface to a new social contract...
...In scrutinizing New York, we are buzzing our own bells to get us to come out in the open...
...Facts become symbols instantly—often long before they are understood...
...They saw New York deteriorating in all sorts of ways...
...One irony of our history is that this coincided precisely with a human wave of mass migration, in which millions of poor and uneducated blacks and Hispanics came to northern cities in search of industrial jobs that were going the other way...
...the attacks on the poor, depriving them of industrial work, low-income housing, public hospitals...
...It was only in the late 1970s, after our fiscal crisis, that we developed a comprehensive analysis that did justice to the longterm complexity of our troubles, and brought to light the deep structural forces at their root...
...This openness is one of the things that makes New York so endlessly exciting...
...Banks Welcome Aboard Two new members have been added to our editorial board BRIAN MORTON edits Dissent's "In the Magazines" section...
...second, because they provided formidable social support for people in need and generated a sense of civic solidarity...
...Most of Dissent's editors have spent most of their lives in or near this city...
...Our founders, growing up in immigrant families and neighborhoods, and coming of age in the various radical movements of the 1930s, prided themselves on taking the whole world as their province...
...First of all, there is our city's intense and vibrant street life...
...Meanwhile, the federal highway system, probably the biggest public works project in history, was creating massive incentives for businesses and industries to leave city locations...
...The élan of that public comes through in the issue's cover, a brilliant expressionist montage by Elaine de Kooning, deploying torn newspaper headlines ("Larger Capacity...
...Then we might at least begin to develop a new civic consciousness, appropriate to an age of deindustrialization and dematerialized capital...
...The Jew, Lesser, can hardly bear to go out...
...Grace Paley, "Somewhere Else" There are all sorts of ironies in a Dissent issue devoted to New York City...
...they couldn't imagine that their homes, or their streets, or their city, could have meaning for anybody but themselves...
...New York's public services included enormous housing and hospital complexes, the most generous welfare allowances in the country, and a city university that not only dwarfed all existing state systems (except perhaps California's) but was free...
...In life as in art, the landlord steps over the bodies...
...we weren't prepared to see them face to face, flooding our own streets and doorways and subway stations, and sleeping out in the cold and rain because they had no place to go...
...I think that New York intellectuals are stuck because the inner wounds we suffered through the 1960s and 1970s, when we saw our city shake and break, still have not healed...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...The first wave broke over the cities of the Northeast...
...In 1971, at one of New York's darkest moments, Bernard Malamud published a brilliant parable, The Tenants, that came close to the heart of our darkness...
...He has written one novel, which was rejected by every publisher in the U.S., and is at work on another...
...At the end, Levenspiel, the old landlord, finds the bodies, and cries and cries for rachmones, mercy for us all...
...These were years when violence, and violent death, became everyday facts of city life...
...Norman Mailer, living life on the edge with a Brooklyn gang...
...the casual brutality that has come to permeate our public life, as in the recent wave of mass arrests to drive homeless people out of the railway terminals that the city's own development policies have driven them into...
...If New Yorkers can come to feel how much we all have lost, it can help us work together fast before we lose it all...
...It was implicitly understood that the private sector, acting on its own, had little incentive to preserve these things, and that it was the responsibility of the city to do so instead...
...followed by redlining (i.e., refusing mortgage or construction loans in) large areas of the city...
...Then we will be able to let go of our pain, and to build over the ruins a city we can share...
...For years nobody seemed to FALL • 1987 • 425 LOOKING AT 00B CITY have a clue...
...The demonization of New York reached orgiastic heights in the mid-1970s, during our fiscal crisis, when many politicians and media pundits spoke as if social peace would return to all America if only New York could somehow be wiped off the map...
...But there's no reason for our paralysis to be terminal...
...The number of homicides in New York, which had remained remarkably constant at around 300 per year since 1930 (when reliable statistics begin), quintupled in the course of the 1960s...
...Sometimes victims turn into vicious chauvinists who try to monopolize suffering, and erupt with rage at anybody who might hope to heal or even to share their pain...
...By the end of the 1960s, however, all the city's public services found themselves overwhelmed by floods of people who were in far more trouble than the city's resources could even begin to cope with...
...They are briefly aware of each other's anguish, and alive to the possibility of empathy and mutual aid...
...All these converging forces put us—along with dozens of other cities—up against the wall...
...This mobility, which no government in the world has as yet figured out how to regulate, is fast bringing about the deindustrialization of America...
...If they don't know that the city is controlled by a development machine that is eating up their neighborhoods, their livelihoods and their culture, and if they don't know that they have the power to fight the machine and change the city's course, then we haven't been doing our job...
...But, somehow, that whole did not include themselves, or the world they came from and moved in...
...What makes Dissent's first New York issue so special is the passion that drives it, and the willingness of the writers to affirm the ties that bind them to a particular place...
...They saw themselves as part of a large, growing, increasingly self-confident reforming public, a public that cared passionately about the city and had the energy to make real changes, if it could just understand what was going on...
...They saw quite early that they would never storm the Winter Palaces of the world...
...They showed amazing aptitude for seeing the big picture, and yet failed to put themselves and their own history into the picture...
...The upkeep of these services helped to make New York the most highly taxed city in the U.S.A...
...We still have plenty of brains and energy, and we still love New York...
...Their metal glinted in hidden light...
...The frequency of assault, robbery and rape, and of drug-related death seems to have increased even more...
...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...
...They seem to understand instinctively how the personal is political...
...In important structural ways, then, New York hasn't changed much in the last quarter century...
...A former speechwriter for City Council President Carol Bellamy and teacher in New York University's Metropolitan Studies Program, he is at work on a book about New York...
...That Summer 1961 issue of Dissent is still exciting a quarter century later...
...Where politics is played as a brokerage game, all groups defend private interests" against social needs...
...By and by, however, accumulated pain, rage, and despair poison the friendship...
...Jim SLEEPER is a writer, teacher, and consultant on urban affairs...
...The worst part is the dearth of alternatives...
...There was nothing in that first Dissent—or in any other American source—to warn us...
...Knowledge is power...
...They attack each other, and as they lie dying— this is the book's last line— "Each, thought the writer, feels the anguish of the other...
...Our nineteenth-century street system, built for pedestrians to walk around in, and our early-twentieth-century mass transit system, built to move streets full of people en bloc, have been overtaxed and undermaintained for a long time now...
...The poet's refrain: "Never such innocence again...
...One of the most striking things about our FALL • 1987 • 421 LOOKING AT OUR CITY first New York issue is how much of its political analysis still rings true today...
...But all the tensions that have been seething throughout American society—tensions between races, classes, sexes, generations— have boiled over instantly on the sidewalks of New York...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...We were used to photographic images of ragged, distressed people down on the Bowery or uptown in Harlem...
...He has been remarkably adept at polarizing blacks and Jews, exploiting their pain and vulnerability, opening and deepening their inner wounds, nourishing their resentments and dreams of revenge, entrenching them in the death frieze of The Tenants, ensuring that they will not learn to unite...
...Then, too, we could take a first step toward a new social contract, in which New Yorkers could share in both the sacrifices that are necessary and the benefits that are still possible...
...It proclaims that we can let all the city's eruptive forces live and thrive...
...q To Our Contributors: A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your ms—the mails aren't always reliable...
...Like citizens of so many cities through the ages, we discovered, to our shock, the precariousness of urban life...
...The idea was not to restrict it unreasonably, or to meddle excessively with the forces of capitalism, but to guarantee that those qualities of urban living that are of public benefit, such as light, air, sunshine and a sense of comfortable scale, did not disappear...
...The dominant modes of civic consciousness today help to keep New Yorkers unconscious of the gigantic development deals that will blow them all away tomorrow...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...We were used to walking through streets full of quiet desperation...
...it has fluctuated between 1,500 and 1,800 per year ever since...
...Daniel Friedenberg begins his "Real Estate Confidential" with the assertion that "The most stunning fact about New York is the realty boom," and concludes, "As long as the laws deliberately subsidize the rich and rapacious, a frenzy of building and speculation will be a permanent aspect of American life...
...Tigers," "Man," "Murderers," "Rage," and other familiars of daily life), shredded Christmas wrappings, and fragments of industrial debris, leaping off the page in bold black and white and fuchsia and purple...
...Now, as a matter of fact, very few New Yorkers have turned themselves into brutal chauvinists, monopolizers of suffering, empty of empathy or rachmones—that's the good news...
...a portrait of contrasting modes of urban poverty by Dorothy Day...
...I've argued that this long absence springs not from ignorance or indifference, but from impacted pain and grief...
...No dot matrix submissions, please...
...Malamud's protagonists are a Jewish writer and a black writer, the 426 • DISSENT LOOKING AT OUR CITY sole inhabitants of a collapsing East Side tenement that the landlord is trying to tear down...
...There was probably nothing New York could have done to avert the crash of 1975, because it depended so heavily on decisions made at a national and international level by elites utterly indifferent to the fate of the city...
...It may sound obvious, but it hasn't come easy...
...the long-term transformation of New York into a place where capital from anywhere in the world is instantly at home, while everybody without capital is increasingly out of place...
...At such times, our FALL • 1987 • 423 LOOKING AT OUR CITY wonderfully open city has felt like a great, festering open wound...
...We have come a long way since then...
...First, because they contained world-renowned people and institutions...
...and twenty other pieces, almost every one of which still stands up today...
...Things that happen in New York are beamed instantly all over America, indeed, the world, thanks to all the mass media that are located here...
...Meanwhile, the American economy as a whole was becoming increasingly militarized, further inflating the power of the Sunbelt...
...At first, they are delighted to meet...
...Each comes to believe that it is the other's very existence that blocks him...
...the rescue of the city from the clutches of a hostile federal government, by selling it (or giving it away) to rapacious real estate empires that will tear down anything or throw up anything, if it pays...
...The generosity of spirit, the reforming vision and energy of the 1960s seem to be gone with the wind...
...Bloodsuckin Jew niggerhater...
...No doubt Mayor Koch and his henchmen, and the media that adored him uncritically until last year, deserve plenty of blame for this...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
