Model of Urban Blight
SHAPIRO, HARVEY D.
Model of Urban Blight No Cause for Indictment: An Autopsy of Newark By Ron Porambo Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 398 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Harvey D. Shapiro Staff member, Governor's Select...
...But Porambo is not really an ideologue, either...
...Porambo's bits of good writing come in those kinds of bursts, but they are enveloped in a pastiche of non sequiturs and literary abominations...
...The book includes numerous "where are they now" vignettes, the most interesting being on John Smith, the taxi driver whose arrest one evening in 1967 gathered the crowd that erupted into four days of rioting...
...Its unemployment rate is double the national average...
...He is most comfortable simply portraying such people as Anthony Imperiale, the white militant city councilman who was elected to the New Jersey Legislature this fall, and his chief adversary, Imamu Baraka, better known as LeRoi Jones...
...Reviewed by Harvey D. Shapiro Staff member, Governor's Select Commission on Civil Disorders, Newark, New Jersey Newark has the highest percentage of substandard housing, crime, venereal disease, and infant and maternal mortality of any major American city...
...Yet even if the remaining venality were to disappear, Newark would still be a crumbling, dying city...
...its 1967 riots, which left 23 people dead and $15 million in property damage...
...Perhaps his days as a newspaper columnist explain the book's lack of focus, for columnists, like quarter horses and sprinters, must be short-hitters...
...His "autopsy" begins with the death of 17-year-old Walter Mathis, shot in the back by an off-duty patrolman on Christmas Eve, 1965, then moves through the period of civil disorders, and winds up with the acrimonious teachers' strike that confronted the city's first black mayor last year...
...There was a flurry of concern for the city after the 1967 disorders...
...It's too bad Porambo couldn't form these snippets into a panoramic view or assessment of Newark, but several of the individual scenes are fascinating and frequently moving...
...and its previous mayor, who was found guilty in July 1970 of 63 counts of extortion and one of conspiracy...
...Though blacks and white liberals fought to win the mayoralty for Kenneth Gibson, that election may very soon be understood not as a victory for black power, but as the symbolic moment when the white middle class gave up on Newark and left it to the blacks...
...Porambo also talks to the survivors of the 22 homicide victims in the riots, as well as some of those who were injured in it...
...Like Pete Hamill, the old Jimmy Breslin and the rest of the tough-minded, hard-boiled, proletarian wing of the new journalism, Porambo uses strong words to conceal a sentimental view of little men caught up in large events...
...And while many highly suspicious deaths occurred during the riots, Porambo fails to present the sort of closely reasoned, carefully documented analysis of the police department's role in these deaths that is needed to be persuasive...
...To those who do not live there, Newark brings to mind three things?its airport, which really serves New York...
...The corruption is seemingly more an effect than a cause of the city's travail...
...by now that has faded and the city's urban coalition is on the verge of collapse for lack of funds...
...Model of Urban Blight No Cause for Indictment: An Autopsy of Newark By Ron Porambo Holt, Rinehart & Winston...
...Porambo recounts numerous allegations of police corruption and reconstructs the killings of 30 blacks, blaming the police for these deaths and scorning the grand juries' judgment that there was "no cause for indictment...
...Each evening the white middle class departs for the suburbs, leaving the city's 420,000 inhabitants, 65 per cent of whom are black, shut inside their homes, afraid to go out????indeed, lacking anything to go out for...
...When Porambo can gather his thoughts, he provides a grim picture of the decadence represented by Newark...
...four years ago the Governor's Select Commission on Civil Disorders pointed to the "pervasive air of corruption" in Newark and reported a widespread feeling that "everything was for sale" at city hall...
...Often he merely offers a flatout assertion: Malcolm X was shot down "with the full knowledge, if not the financial support, of the Federal government...
...his evidence of official culpability is mostly second hand and unconvincing...
...Indeed, if everything has changed in Newark since the riots and the election of a black mayor, a ride down Springfield Avenue, the boarded-up main street of the black ghetto, suggests that for the people nothing is really different...
...They come out of the starting block fast, spewing adjectives in all directions, hit full steam in a few paragraphs, and then come to a screeching halt at 600-800 words...
...Oh, Joey, yeah, I remember him" is the way one segment begins...
...The author's charges of corruption are not new...
...In this somewhat peculiar book, Ron Porambo, a 33-year-old former Golden Gloves champion and New Jersey newspaper columnist, sketches some of the people and events central to Newark's decline...
...The riots and the commission report led to the eventual removal of Mayor Hugh Addonizio and some of the more visible corruption...
Vol. 55 • January 1972 • No. 2
