Not that crime was anything new to New York City, home of Five Points, a notorious downtown slum that allegedly had the highest murder rate in the world in the nineteenth century. In fact, famous frontier outlaw William H. Bonney, better known throughout the Wild West and in dime novels as Billy the Kid, was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1859. He even got started by committing his first homicide here. Murder Incorporated was the name the press gave to the hit men who operated as the enforcement arm of the Mafia in the 1930s and ’40s, though I’m guessing that despite the professional-sounding name, they weren’t listed in the phone book and didn’t file tax returns.
As it happens, homicide statistics date all the way back to the week Henry Hudson and his crew dropped anchor in the lower bay of what would become New York Harbor in September 1609. The exploring party’s initial contact with the Delaware Indians, who had welcomed Giovanni da Verrazzano eighty-five years earlier, was described as being very friendly. However, four days later, when a small crew returned from exploring the Upper Bay and the Narrows by boat, they were attacked by Delaware braves in a pair of canoes. Two sailors were wounded and one was killed by an arrow through the throat.
What people were experiencing in the 1970s and ’80s was a rise in crime from previous decades, especially street violence. New York’s murder rate had quadrupled between 1960 and 1975. This was largely the result of a bad economy, the departure of manufacturing jobs, an
increased drug trade, and a surge in the homeless population. Of all the heroin addicts in the country it was estimated that more than half were in New York. Meantime, this was no longer the great port city it had been from inception right up through the 1950s, when competing modes of transportation and union troubles caused a sharp decline in shipping.
Not one but two New York baseball teams, the Dodgers and the Giants, bolted for sunny California. Professionals fled to the suburbs, thereby eroding the tax base even further, and it was a downward spiral from there. Those who stayed behind double- and triple-locked their doors while adding steel bars to the windows (even though you couldn’t see the people or possessions inside as most windows were covered in grime from factory smoke and car exhaust). Truck drivers refused to make deliveries in certain neighborhoods without police escorts. School kids gave the rats that inhabited their classrooms names. The mighty Hudson River, where my father used to go swimming, had become a toxic dump for industrial contaminants.
So you didn’t make eye contact when out on the street, tried not to be alone anywhere, and always kept handy a $20 bill known as “mugger money.” You never wanted to make a thief angry by only having a couple of bucks, because if he was in need of a quick fix, being broke was a good way to get killed. Also, if your mugger money was in a purse or wallet then you could put the rest of your cash in a shoe or secret pocket. I knew men who carried decoy wallets in their back pockets filled with expired store coupons and a sarcastic note declaring the felon had been fooled. If people were ever beginning to act a little crazy around you, it could never hurt to start acting crazy yourself and try to out-crazy them with babbling and twitching, the way Paul Newman disarmed his knife-wielding attacker in Fort Apache the Bronx. People with visible tattoos were to be avoided as they were either badass ex-marines, gang members, or former felons, not benign students and makers of artisanal okra.
The homegrown Guardian Angels set up shop in 1979 to protect people from violence and crime. These unarmed volunteers in conspicuous red jackets and red berets made citizen’s arrests while patrolling
the streets and subways. At first the local government rejected the self-appointed superheroes, but then quickly realized it needed all the help it could get.
Defense tactics aside, one still felt sorry for street people and addicts because most were clearly in need of medical attention. But left to their own devices, many had developed a threatening aura, probably in large part by trying to keep from becoming victims themselves. However, my question was this: Why do so many seem to hear voices that tell them to disrupt events or commit violent acts? Where were the voices telling people to work in the community garden, assist the elderly, and return any overdue library books?
Before cell phones, it was easier to identify who was disturbed because they’d be talking to themselves, usually engaged in a heated stream-of-craziness argument. (One could well ask: If you’re going to have an imaginary friend, why not choose someone you get along with?) Anyway, since the advent of hands-free phones, everyone now walks around seemingly talking to themselves, looking agitated and insane.
Springtime in New York in the 1980s didn’t just mean getting mugged under blossoming cherry trees, it also meant the appearance of “trash twisters” on windy days, a result of all the stray plastic bags that had thawed out, and “floaters” in the East River – those who’d run afoul of gangsters and been sent to “swim with the fishes” but had lost their cement overshoes. Of course, bodies also turned up in car trunks and storage lockers in the bad old days. As everyone knows from watching Goodfellas, it can be damn hard to get rid of a body around here. Speaking more poetically, Spring has sprung, the grass has riz, I wonder where the bodies is?
New Yorkers became accustomed to a certain amount of crime in the ’80s. After all, it’s never been lost on us that we have a great deal in common with convicts. New Yorkers eat on the run, wear layers of clothing, can always use a dependable wheelman, and don’t make unnecessary polite conversation. Plus there’s no shortage of bravery among a people who hop into cars with complete strangers and eat food from pushcarts on the street. There’s a reason frankfurters are called “dirty water dogs,” or “haggis” if you’re Scottish. Then again, New
Yorkers don’t have much sympathy for prisoners living in 10 x 20 foot cells with annoying roommates and/or neighbors, compliments of the government, when they’re paying $2,200 per month plus utilities for the exact same accommodations.
In my small suburb outside Buffalo, people would leave their cars running with the keys in the ignition while they popped into stores, church, or a friend’s house. Once you’d started a rusted-out beater, which is what most of us had amidst the double whammy of bad weather and a bad economy, it was wise not to take chances, especially in wintertime. Folks would start the car in the morning an hour before work and leave it running in the driveway or on the street while they showered and ate breakfast. Not only was this not an option in 1970s and ’80s New York City, but drivers there didn’t stop at red lights in many neighborhoods for fear the car would be stolen with them inside it.
The decades-long crime spree featured homemade cardboard signs in windshields declaring no radio in car and everything already stolen. Dr. William Portnoy’s sign should’ve said headhunters only. Portnoy’s complaint was that six human heads intended for medical research were stolen from his trunk and then discarded in a gutter after the thief realized there was no secondary market for his plunder.
The main question of 1980s New York: Which was worse, the robberies or the subsequent car alarms that kept an entire city awake as they shrieked the nights away? Racket rage led to alarms being deactivated with bats and guns, which just resulted in more crime. While tourists went around whistling their favorite Broadway show tune, New Yorkers were left humming their favorite car alarm. A mechanically minded friend of mine installed a car alarm that sounded like gunshots. That always got a quick response from the police.
Central Park was overrun by rats, pushers, hustlers, junkies, stabbers, swindlers, thugs, and muggers. Or, as my mother the psychiatric nurse would say, “Persons engaged in a wide spectrum of antisocial behaviors.” As for the monuments, benches, bridges, pathways, and railings, they suffered from corrosion, graffiti, vandalism, and neglect. The tunnels served as crime scenes, vagabond living quarters, and public lavatories. The park’s lights were burned out and the fixtures smashed,
while the “playgrounds” consisted of brown patchy grass littered with discarded hypodermic needles and brok
en glass. “Grown men come in the park and don’t leave alive,” was how one of the robbers summed it up in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York – a children’s movie.
Meantime, Tompkins Square Park in the East Village was operating as a full-blown Hooverville, complete with shanties and trash-can fires that served as a homeless encampment but also a gathering place for drug dealers, skinheads, and other disaffected youth whose main occupation was drinking to excess, playing loud music, and lighting firecrackers. This odd mix of patrons coexisted respectfully until 1988 when resident noise complaints brought about a curfew, which led to riots between police and pretty much everyone else.
In the late 1980s came the harshest blow of all – our sandboxes were taken away. Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern declared that having sandboxes in parks and playgrounds required a higher level of social responsibility than some of our citizens possessed. Ouch.
Times Square had likewise hit on hard times. In addition to several legitimate Broadway theaters, freewheeling 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues was the main drag for dealers, drifters, grifters, users, boozers, hucksters, suckers, strippers, derelicts, doomsayers, fast talkers, cardsharps, cops, pimps, peep shows, seedy bars, clip joints, grindhouses, porn shops, and fleabag hotels, and not coincidentally the block with the highest crime rate in the city. Legions of gum-cracking prostitutes plied the neighborhood in sequined halter tops, hot pants, stiletto-heeled slides, and patchwork rabbit fur jackets.
Two hundred police officers were assigned to the few blocks that made up Times Square, yet they didn’t make a dent in the crime rate. An area that in the 1920s had been synonymous with wealth and entertainment; home to upscale hotels, trendy restaurants, and elegant theaters; and iconified as “The Center of the Universe” and “The Crossroads of the World,” was now known as “The Cesspool of the World.” And “Swing Street,” which is what they called West 52nd between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in the 1930s and ’40s because of the jazz
clubs featuring the era’s greatest performers, was now nicknamed “Sleazy-Second Street.”
Times Square was also the street scam capital of America. Hustlers have been running three-card monte games in New York since at least the 1870s. More than a century later they were still going strong. In this particular scam, a cardboard box or plastic crate is turned upright, three cards are shown and then shuffled, and then a rube is supposed to bet on the location of one card. (“Watch the red, and around and around it goes, find the red and your money grows, find the black and you don’t get nothing back.”) If there aren’t any suckers the shill bets and wins. If a victim is about to take the bait, the shill urges him on. The house rarely loses, because the dealer is extremely skilled. Most of these swindlers had become proficient in the first place by practicing for hours every day in prison. Resident Times Square raconteur Damon Runyon had warned the wide-eyed visitor to New York City: “One of these days in your travels a guy is going to come up to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken and this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. But son, do not bet this man, for as sure as you stand there, you are going to wind up with an earful of cider.”
Not as debauched but just as dodgy were Astor Place, gateway to the burned-out crack-infested East Village, and the Bowery (better known as Skid Row), which were home to seven-day-a-week unlicensed and unrestrained riffraff flea markets. Winos and vagrants would rummage through trash for castoffs such as a torn men’s flannel shirt, stained sundress, single earring, battered toaster, chipped mug, or old magazine, and set these items out on the pavement for sale. Green-minded citizens should be proud to know that recycling has always existed in Manhattan at some level, going all the way back to the droves of swine that lived off garbage flung into the streets and would eventually become Christmas hams.
As it happened, Mafia-run neighborhoods with their Madonnas on the front lawns were the only places where children could safely play outside and old people could shuffle down the streets without getting robbed. As I mentioned before, there weren’t any random muggings or stabbings where I lived on Carmine Street in the Italian section
of Greenwich Village; I suspect the butcher shops kept ready-to-serve horse heads frozen in the back. Likewise, Little Italy in Manhattan, Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, Arthur Avenue and Morris Park in the Bronx, and much of Staten Island, in addition to having the best fireworks displays, were considered safe for pedestrians at all hours of the day and night, so long as you weren’t the target of an arranged hit or the wrong ethnicity.
Chapter 9
The Turnaround
The FBI tips hotline rarely gets calls from concerned New Yorkers. For one thing, your average resident is more worried about death by bike messenger than a terrorist attack. Second, the directive to report unusual sights and behavior can’t exactly be applied here. Between the steaming manholes, performance artists, everyday street drama, naked cowboys, brown-robed Franciscan Friars wearing bright orange Crocs instead of sandals, and people dressed in everything from superhero to cartoon character to chicken costumes, one wouldn’t know how to begin to define unusual. All of Greenwich Village, Times Square, and the Lower East Side might have to be cordoned off with police tape.
Nobody thought it particularly odd that a 1972 Brooklyn bank heist was embarked upon so that one of the robbers could pay for his male lover’s sexual reassignment surgery. The bank job was botched and the robber ended up doing jail time, but he was paid for the rights to his story and 1 percent of the resulting film’s net profits, which were used to finance the sexual reassignment surgery so that Ernest could become Elizabeth. The movie, Dog Day Afternoon, went on to win an Academy Award for the best original screenplay.
In the meantime, Homeland Security has declared that people who are sweating profusely and not making eye contact are probably terrorists. That’s every single New Yorker taking the subway on a sweltering August day.
Strange things are always happening in New York. Poets wander the streets selling verse-on-demand, while people covered in boa constrictors or live parrots offer themselves up for photographs. The fact that there are 8 million people in the city means that when someone says there’s a one-in-a-million chance of something happening, it will happen eight times a day in New York. Likewise, it’s pretty bad to be called the town drunk in a place with 8 million people. Still, you can be assured that if you visit a place like Denmark, which has 5.6 million people in the entire country, someone will ask if you know so-and-so from New York. I’d find this silly except that when people ask if I know so-and-so from Buffalo, a city of 260,000 people, I almost always do.
Violent crime in New York City finally began to drop in the early 1990s. “Dart Man” seems to have signaled the end of our headline-grabbing maniac-on-the-loose phase. This particular attacker was shooting darts into the posteriors of women on the street during the summer of 1990, claiming more than fifty victims. People feared his projectiles were laced with poison or the AIDS virus. Since Dart Man’s targets tended to be wearing business suits, women around the city immediately ditched their skirts in favor of shorts, leggings, and capri pants. A thirty-three-year-old Bronx resident named Jerome Wright was apprehended by police and identified by three of the woman. Wright was granted bail at $1,000 and the charges were reduced to misdemeanors. That must have taught him a lesson he’ll never forget.
Today’s scams are rather mild in comparison to the days of darts and manslaughter. People stop you on the street with a long story about how they need money for a train ticket to Westchester, Ronkonkoma, or Plainfield – basically the urban version of begging for gas money. Then you get a few daredevil cyclists who wait for people to enter a bike lane, purposely crash into them, scream how they could’ve been killed by such stupidity, and proceed to extort money. A similar (but less dangerous) ploy involves finding a deli container with some half-chewed leftovers and a price of abou
t $9.95 on it, collide with a pedestrian staring down at her phone, show her the price of your “food,” and extract reimbursement.
Oddly, kidnapping for ransom never took off in New York the way it has in Mexico, Haiti, and the Middle East. Living in such cramped quarters results in a certain amount of bedroom envy that might weigh heavily against a payout. Or maybe it’s just too hard to grab someone off the E train and drag him through the turnstile, up two flights of stairs, and into a waiting car that gets stuck in gridlock. Most witnesses would probably just assume it to be some sort of performance art.
The decline in crime has been variously attributed to a larger police force, changes in law enforcement tactics, the end of the crack epidemic, using computerized statistics to map crime, applying the “broken windows” theory (addressing vandalism and fare-beating before it snowballs), the legalization of abortion (controversial), and the decline in lead poisoning among children. The widespread use of electronic payments has also played a role in putting muggers and pickpockets out of business.
A large number of public and private initiatives have helped get people off the streets and into shelters, apartments, and treatment programs over the last three decades. Still, the problem of homelessness is far from resolved, and despite a reduction in the number of visible street dwellers, advocacy groups say there are more people in city-run shelters today than thirty years ago. As the system stands now, it’s more rewarding to build high-end apartment buildings that attract a wealthy clientele than to put up affordable or subsidized housing. Meantime, charities and religious organizations feed thousands of people, including children, every day.
Life in New York Page 7
