The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  In the immediate postwar period Wagner quickly climbed the political ladder—again with Tammany backing. He served successively as city tax commissioner, commissioner of housing and buildings, chairman of the city planning commission, and president of the borough of Manhattan. He rarely stayed in one office long enough to get the feel of it because Tammany kept grooming him for bigger things.

  After O’Dwyer resigned in 1950, his duties as mayor were taken over by Vincent R. Impellitteri, president of the city council. Then, in a special election, Sicilian-born Impellitteri was elected mayor to fill out the last three years of O’Dwyer’s second term. In the regular election of 1953, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., was elected the 102d mayor of New York City and soon dropped the “Jr.” from his name.

  Mayor Wagner stood 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighed between 150 and 155 pounds, depending, in part, on whether he could resist eating corn on the cob, which he relished. He had black hair, brown eyes, a splayed nose, and turtle-tight lips and looked nervous and harried most of the time. One reporter said he had the air of “an unloved Airedale.” The colorblind mayor let his wife choose his ties and paid scant attention to clothing, except for shoes; he enjoyed wearing loafers with tassels. He had a good memory for names and faces, kept the common touch despite his Ivy League background, and was so ready to listen to people seeking his attention that he was almost always late for appointments. A patient man, he never yelled and seldom swore, although his ears reddened when he became angry. He worked hard at his job and during emergencies would go without sleep for more than a day. Adept at reading speeches, he tended to ramble during television interviews.

  Because of Wagner’s colorless public image, his consummate skill as a politician sometimes was forgotten. One of his political foes said, “Wagner just doesn’t have anything—except the votes on election day.” In 1953 he was reelected mayor with the support of two of the five Democratic county organizations in the city. He kept Tammany hacks out of top policy-making jobs but let political considerations influence lesser appointments. Tammany leaders, who wanted patronage up and down the line, turned on Wagner in the 1957 primary, but he won the Democratic nomination against the opposition of all five Democratic county organizations and went on to win the election itself.

  His first two administrations were stained by a series of scandals, whose existence Wagner was slow to acknowledge, but none of the mud splashed high enough to splatter him. He matured on the job, his performance as mayor improving with each successive term. He established the office of city administrator, strengthened the city planning commission, emphasized education and overhauled the board of education, increased the size of the police force, improved the lot of city employees, served as prime mover in rezoning the city, played a major role in the creation of the City University, and was patient and generally effective in mediating some major labor disputes.

  Wagner also helped put through a new city charter granting him more power than any other mayor in the city’s history, but he did not choose to become a dictator. A politician to his fingertips, he lacked the instinct to close these fingers over the jugular vein of an enemy. He seemed hesitant to tangle with Robert Moses, who was known for his superlative mind and imperious ways. Wagner was intelligent, but not brilliant. There were times when the mayor also seemed to quail before blustering Michael J. Quill, who headed the subway workers union and occasionally threatened to halt all trains unless his demands were met.

  Wagner was good at formulating plans and programs but often failed to implement them. Sometimes he vacillated when firmness was needed. He always rememberd his father’s advice: “When in doubt—don’t.” On the other hand, he ignored LaGuardia’s warning that it is impossible to be both a good fellow and a good mayor. He tarried over hard decisions and muddled his way through several crises. Wagner once said defensively:

  You have to rule by compromise in this city or you will have constant fighting and get nothing done. I know there are some people who don’t think I’m forceful enough. What they don’t realize is that you just don’t pick up the ball and run with it. You have to look where you’re going first. Everything isn’t black and white. You have to sit back, consider all sides, and think about it for a while. Some people like the dramatic. I’m just not built that way. I’ve been around long enough to know that the dramatic doesn’t really work.

  This last remark is not necessarily true. LaGuardia was both dramatic and effective. But each mayor has his own approach to a position considered the most difficult in the nation except for the Presidency itself.

  Wagner was sensitive to the Puerto Rican immigration. In 1955 the New York City commission on intergroup relations (C.O.I.R.) was established. Dr. Alfred J. Marrow, who served awhile as the chairman of C.O.I.R., wrote that its creation “marked the most comprehensive attempt yet made at achieving the goal of positive intergroup relations through healthy democratic participation via the avenues of education, law and social therapy.” In 1957 Wagner appointed a Puerto Rican to the post of city magistrate. The next year New York City passed the first law in the nation banning discrimination in private housing because of color or creed.

  By 1964 Puerto Rico’s standard of living had improved so much that migration into New York had ceased to be a problem. In fact, reverse migration set in—that is, more Puerto Ricans returned to their island than entered New York. Nevertheless, this city was left with more than 700,000 Puerto Ricans, and Spanish became the city’s second language.

  The so-called Puerto Rican problem coincided with the Negro revolution. After the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1954 that racial segregation in public schools violated the Constitution, American Negroes launched the most massive effort in their long history to win full civil rights. At first the struggle was waged mainly in the South. White New Yorkers, sitting before television sets, winced at the sight of Southern police breaking up Negro demonstrations with dogs, fire hoses, and electric cattle prods. Although New York was not a paradise for minority groups, it was far ahead of other American cities in the number and scope of its laws protecting the rights of all citizens. As the Negro revolution gained impetus, New York itself became a trouble spot.

  Hundreds of civil rights demonstrations erupted here in 1963, with more pickets on the march than ever before in the city’s annals. Defying the platitude that “you can’t fight City Hall,” thousands now tried to do so. Negro leaders protested what they called the undercurrent of racism here and elsewhere in the North. Negroes and Puerto Ricans complained that they were not given a fair share of jobs in the construction industry. By marching, picketing, parading, carrying placards, shouting slogans, singing, lying down in front of trucks, and signing petitions, demonstrators tried to halt $2,500,000,000 in state and city construction projects until more jobs went to Negroes and Puerto Ricans.

  A liberal like his father, Mayor Wagner said, “Dissent and protest have always held a cherished, if controversial, place in American government and life. . . . Protest marchers and picketing demonstrations have been employed by many groups in support of many different objectives. . . . The country owes much to those who focused our attention on the pressing need.” Despite the mayor’s liberalism, civil rights pickets staged sit-ins outside his City Hall office. Wagner put up with them for forty-four days; but then his patience wore thin, and he ordered them ousted. Three policemen were hurt in the melee that followed. Negroes complained time and again of police brutality and demanded that a board of civilians review charges filed against cops.

  Generations of Negro and white pupils had sat in classrooms together in New York City, which had legally ended school segregation in 1900. Now some militant Negroes demanded total and instant integration. But to achieve absolute racial balance in classrooms seemed an impossibility. In predominandy Negro neighborhoods there naturally were more Negro than white pupils in local classrooms. Some Negroes insisted that children be sent by bus to distant schools to achieve a more even distribution of the races. Many white
mothers objected for a variety of reasons, including the greater danger of traffic accidents during longer bus rides. The board of education tried to satisfy Negroes and whites alike but succeeded only in further antagonizing both.

  Communication seemed to break down between all dissenting groups and the city administration. Teachers were assaulted in schools, policemen were attacked on the streets, the crime rate rose, violence increased in subways, business and industry reassessed their employment policies, rookie cops were trained to be patient and impartial, and by August, 1963, civil rights demonstrations were costing the city $15,000 a day in overtime pay to policemen. Negro and Puerto Rican mothers demanded that something be done to kill the rats biting their children. Negro tenants launched a rent strike against their slumlords, who did little, if anything, to keep apartment buildings in good condition. Honorable landlords lamented that although they spent thousands of dollars to improve their property, hooligans quickly broke windows and defaced walls.

  Negro leaders indignandy denied a newspaper report that teen-age Harlem gangs were being trained in karate and judo for the purpose of killing any stray white person found there. Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, publicly lashed out at “teen-age Negro hoodlums” whose violence, he said, “was undercutting and wrecking gains made by hundreds of Negro and white youngsters.”

  New Yorkers lived in a climate of fear. All the white middle-class residents of an apartment building at 226 East Third Street moved out because of Puerto Rican threats against the landlord. The fear of violence in a forty-block area of Manhattan’s upper West Side caused many residents to “seal themselves in at night,” according to the Fund for the Republic. In fact, one man characterized this part of Manhattan as a combat zone. Quasi-vigilante groups were formed here and there in the city to help make streets and homes safer.

  Some citizens called for decentralization of city government, a development that worried Mayor Wagner. He protested that many community groups “want to assume the functions of the government themselves.” Then he asked rhetorically, “Who shall decide whether the viewpoint of the neighborhood or the viewpoint of the central government of the city shall prevail? If it is morally right for the local view to prevail in one case, on what basis shall it be denied in another?”

  Civil rights agitators schemed to attract worldwide attention to their various causes by inciting trouble at the opening of the new World’s Fair here in the city. After a secret meeting in a Harlem tenement some of these leaders issued a statement denouncing “discrimination practiced by the power structure of the city.” Other civil rights spokesmen threatened to stall cars and thus snarl traffic on highways leading to the exposition ground in Flushing Meadow. They announced that they would use nonviolent combat teams to halt railroad traffic to the site. The mayor denounced these tactics and ordered a heavy concentration of policemen to take up positions in and around the fair.

  When the exposition opened on the rainy morning of April 22, 1964, it was only about 85 percent complete, 15 pavilions and 3 amusement area shows still being unfinished. Despite public apprehension, the threatened auto stall-in failed. Traffic was slowed up briefly, but motorists found it easy that first day to get to the fair by private car. However, subway trains were delayed by activists, who jerked emergency cords, held train doors open, and sat down on the platforms at subway stations. This led to scuffling between police and demonstrators, with some heads being cracked.

  The worst disorders took place at the fair itself. Led by officials of the Congress of Racial Equality, hundreds of chanting and shouting men and women staged lie-in and sit-in demonstrations at exhibits and pavilions. Cries of “Freedom now!” and “Jim Crow must go!” drowned out Mayor Wagner’s opening remarks and served as a harsh counterpoint to the main speech by the heavily guarded President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson. Before the day ended, 10 persons were injured and 109 were arrested. The demonstrators did succeed in attracting attention—unfavorable attention.

  Despite a few other incidents in the days and weeks that followed, the fair settled down and attracted visitors from all over the world. The most popular exhibit, which drew 29,000,000 sight-seers through its doors, was the General Motors Pavilion with its slanting canopy 110 feet high. Taking a “ride into the future,” guests sat down in plastic contour chairs equipped with speakers that provided an explanation of everything to be seen. The seats moved along a track that dipped and climbed through the two floors of the exhibit hall. Visitors, from the comfort of these chairs in motion, looked at sets depicting a trip to the moon and life under the ice, under the water, in a jungle, and in a desert.

  The 1964-65 New York World’s Fair was the first billion-dollar exposition in history. Its theme was man’s achievements in an expanding universe, and its purpose was to promote peace through understanding. However, a variety of controversies, besides the civil rights demonstrations, brought the fair bad publicity, and total attendance was only 51,000,000 instead of the 70,000,000 that had been predicted. Investors lost money.

  The morning of July 16, 1964, a group of Negro boys were lounging on East Seventy-sixth Street in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. An apartment house superintendent, who was watering his flowers, turned his hose on them—either accidentally or intentionally. They attacked him. Their leader, fifteen-year-old James Powell, went after the man with a knife, according to the police. The boy’s friends later said that he didn’t even own a knife. In any event, the ruckus attracted Thomas Gilligan, an off-duty police lieutenant. The police report said that Gilligan ordered the lad to drop the knife, fired a warning shot when he refused to obey, was slashed by Powell, then fired twice more, and killed the youngster.

  Negro leaders flared in rage, demanding to know why an experienced police officer had to shoot a boy much smaller than himself. The next day 200 Negro boys and girls staged an orderly 4-hour demonstration in Yorkville to protest the shooting, and in separate incidents 2 white men were attacked by roving bands of Negro youths. The people of Harlem seethed in fury.

  Harlem was ripe for an explosion. It was nearly 3 times more crowded than the rest of the city. Within its 3½ square miles lived more than 232,000 persons, of whom 94 percent were Negroes. Half of Harlem’s buildings were officially classed as “deteriorating” or “dilapidated.” Harlem’s landlords got $50 to $74 a month for 1-room flats that rented for only $30 to $49 in white slums. Infant mortality was nearly twice that in the rest of New York.

  Every fourth Negro man was without work. Nearly one-fourth of Harlem’s people were on welfare. Their families having been torn apart by white slave traders in the past, Negroes lacked a tradition of family stability. Only half of Harlem’s children lived with both parents. Negro boys lagged behind in their studies, and more than half who entered high school quit before graduating. Harlem’s juvenile delinquency rate was almost 2½ times as great as in the rest of the city. Narcotics were used at a rate 8 times that prevailing elsewhere in New York. Harlem’s murder rate was 600 percent higher than the city’s. A Harlem woman declared, “This is the jungle—the very heart of it.” James Baldwin, the brilliant Negro writer, said, “The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.”

  Harlem erupted on Saturday, July 18, 1964. It was a hot and humid night. Workers for the Congress of Racial Equality set up a blue kitchen chair and a small American flag at 125th Street and 7th Avenue, which was the Times Square of Harlem. One speaker after another climbed onto the chair to shrill angrily about the killing of James Powell. More and more Negro spectators crowded closer to hear: “James Powell was shot because he was black. . . . It is time to let the Man know that if he does something to us, we are going to do something back. . . .”

  A minister exhorted everyone to march to the 123d Street Police Station, a couple of blocks away, to demand that Police Lieutenant Gilligan be arrested for murder. The people moved off in the direction of the
precinct house, picking up reinforcements and swelling from a crowd into a roiling mob. “Killer cops!” screamed the Negroes. “Murderers!” Policemen tried to seal off approaches to the station, but the enraged multitude bulled past the barricades and clashed with the cops.

  Hoodlums, skulking across the roofs of tenements, threw bricks and bottles and garbage-can covers onto the streets below. Homemade Molotov cocktail bombs hit the pavement and burst into flames five feet high. Screaming thousands thrashed back and forth in the heart of Harlem, fighting policemen, assaulting white people, menacing reporters, and smashing windows. Helmeted policemen clubbed them. The mob refused an order to break up and go home. Now police officers gave the order to fire over their heads. Cops also squeezed off warning shots above the roof-scampering hooligans. It was a full-scale riot, in which the police never lost control of the streets. Gunfire hiccuped throughout the rest of this sad and sour night, but reason did not return with the dawn.

  Between July 18 and July 23 violence rocked both Harlem and the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. One person was killed, and 140 persons were seriously injured. A total of 520 persons were arrested. Perhaps no more than 1 percent of the city’s Negro population was direcdy involved in the riots.

  President Johnson ordered 200 F.B.I. agents to investigate, declaring, “American citizens have a right to protection of life and limb—whether driving along a highway in Georgia, a road in Mississippi, or a street in New York City.” Mayor Wagner was in Europe at the time, and Paul R. Screvane, president of the city council, was serving as acting mayor. Screvane said that the disorders were incited partly by “fringe groups including the Communist party.” Two months later, however, the F.B.I. reported that there was “no systematic planning or organization” behind these riots in New York and eight other Northern cities.