Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City

by Jonathan Mahler

  Garth was crushed—he’d tried to persuade Cuomo to enter the race himself before signing up with Koch—but he knew it wouldn’t be right to switch horses now.

  Not that Cuomo needed him. In 1977 New York, a city known for its electoral tribalism, had 1.2 million Jews, 1.5 million blacks, and 1.7 million Italians. And Cuomo had much more than a last name ending in a vowel to recommend him to voters.

  The working-class Daily News had been the first to canonize Saint Mario, urging him to run a day after publishing a full-page editorial urging Beame not to. “[Cuomo has] high intelligence, a hard, realistic view of what needs to be done to save New York, a reputation for almost zealous candor, and a capacity to inspire,” the News wrote in early April. The Village Voice followed ten days later with a profile titled “Cuomo Rising.” It began: “Will New York’s great smart hope run for mayor?” New York was experiencing a phenomenon that soon became familiar to all America: The longer Cuomo debated moving onto center stage, the larger his shadow loomed.

  At the age of forty-four, Mario Cuomo embodied the contradictions that explain his diversity of support. He was a hard-knuckled ethnic tough who quoted Augustine and worked beneath a large portrait of Saint Thomas More. He was an outsider—he’d attended St. John’s University and, after being rejected by a dozen Manhattan law firms, had set up his law practice across the river on Court Street in Brooklyn—whose many friends on the inside included the editorial director of Random House, Jason Epstein. He was emotional and expressive, but introspective too, a practicing Catholic with a chronic existential twitch, a gifted athlete—before a career-ending injury, Cuomo had been a promising prospect in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization—who read voraciously and wrote daily in his diary. He was a committed liberal, but a realist too, a family man with five children and an intuitive grasp of the state of mind of New York’s outer boroughs, the world from which he’d sprung.

  Cuomo’s father, Andrea, an Italian immigrant, started his life as an American digging ditches and cleaning sewers in New Jersey. When he’d saved up enough money, he opened a small grocery store in South Jamaica, Queens, and with the help of his two sons, he managed to keep it open twenty-four hours a day. Andrea led by example. His callused hands and undying devotion to his family, who lived above the store, spoke louder than any homespun homilies could. Theirs was a polyglot neighborhood dotted with first-generation immigrants. On the Cuomos’ block alone, there were Italians, Irish, Czechs, Greeks, and Jews. An altar boy at his family’s Catholic church and a shabbos goy at the synagogue around the corner, Cuomo was steeped in ethnic diversity from an early age.

  The New Yorkers who knew Mario Cuomo—and in May 1977 it remained a relatively small group—knew him best from his involvement in the 1972 flap over a public housing project in Forest Hills. But before Forest Hills there was Corona, a community of Southern Italians tucked away in an untraveled corner of Queens, a quiet village of wood-frame and shingle houses whose residents toiled away at blue-collar jobs during the week and lounged around the neighborhood on weekends. This, at least, was the picture of tranquillity that prevailed until 1966, when word spread through the community that the high school going up in nearby Lefrak City was going to force the condemnation of sixty-nine houses in Corona. The residents hastily mobilized and hired a thirty-three-year-old lawyer, Mario Cuomo, to help them take on City Hall.

  Four years and dozens of briefs later, the bulldozers were moving closer to Corona. Cuomo had exhausted his legal options with no visible progress. The whole business might have passed unnoticed into history—another community plowed under by City Hall, another idealistic young lawyer disillusioned along the way—had not a stocky, rumpled caricature of a newspaperman named Jimmy Breslin tumbled into the picture. One Sunday night in November 1970 a friend of Breslin’s persuaded the writer to come along with him to a Corona homeowners’ meeting at the headquarters of the local volunteer ambulance corps. The room was jammed; Breslin was impressed. He asked his friend whom they had representing them. “Just a little local lawyer,” his friend answered.

  As the friend continued talking, Breslin’s attention drifted elsewhere, toward a tall, handsome man with dark hair and strong shoulders who had risen to address the group. He was holding the audience rapt as he eloquently reviewed the history of the conflict. After the meeting Breslin took this man, Mario Cuomo, out for a cup of coffee.

  The Corona story was a natural for Breslin, who, as his editor Michael O’Neill once put it, believed that politicians needed to be beaten every morning in order to keep them attentive to the will of the people. Here was a working-class community—on Breslin’s home turf of South Queens no less—getting bullied by some swinging elbows in starched shirts. It was a tragedy with a little flicker of hope that was almost extinguished, but only almost, which is just how Breslin liked his tragedies. Best of all, the Corona story had its own unlikely hero—“talent willing to be tortured,” as Breslin wrote of Cuomo.

  With Breslin’s help, the so-called Corona Fighting 69 became a cause célèbre. Newspapers as far-flung as the Los Angeles Times editorialized in their defense. Thanks to a Breslin-brokered meeting at City Hall, Mayor Lindsay took note. Before long he had agreed to Cuomo’s compromise solution. Lindsay liked what he saw in Cuomo, and a few years later he enlisted the young lawyer to help him put out the fire raging over the city’s plan to build a low-income housing project in the middle-class neighborhood of Forest Hills, Queens.

  The plan had grown out of a 1965 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development mandate requiring that cities use a large portion of their federal grants to build low-income housing in stable neighborhoods. At the time so-called scatter-site housing sounded like a fine idea to most white middle-class New Yorkers. They shared the dream of racial and economic integration, and they were ready, in principle anyway, to do their part to stop the spiral of poverty by opening their neighborhoods to poor families. Forest Hills, a community of predominantly liberal Jewish apartment dwellers, many of whom had firsthand experience with discrimination, seemed as good a place as any to give it a try.

  But much had changed by the time Lindsay recruited Cuomo in 1972. For starters, the specifics of the plan had been unveiled. It called for the construction of three twenty-four-story towers, not exactly the modest, well-distributed buildings that the term scatter-site suggests. This wasn’t breaking up the ghettos; it was consolidating and relocating them. What’s more, as the bright idealism of the sixties gave way to the grim realism of the seventies, the concept of scatter-site housing had gone out of fashion, both in New York, where politicians were now touting “ghetto rehabilitation,” and in Washington, where President Nixon was offering cash subsidies for the poor to pay for apartments wherever they could find them.

  Having failed to consult with the people of Forest Hills before presenting the project as a fait accompli, Mayor Lindsay was taking most of the heat for it. Local protesters were picketing daily, waving placards that read: ADOLF LINDSAY—THE MIDDLE-CLASS WILL BURY YOU; SAVE FOREST HILLS, SAVE MIDDLE-CLASS AMERICA; and LIBERALISM IS A GOOD IDEA UNTIL IT HITS YOU WHERE YOU LIVE. Led by the demagogic Jerry Birbach, the heavyset president of the Forest Hills Residents Association, demonstrators threw rocks and flaming torches through the windows of construction trailers. (Birbach threatened to lie down in front of the bulldozers if the project went ahead, an idea that his opponents quite liked.) Forest Hills was no longer about one project and one neighborhood. It was, in the words of journalist Walter Goodman, “a monument to many of our urban aches and pains … commemorating the ideals and the limitations of those who are trying to manage this poor city and the dangerously conflicting needs and emotions of those who are trying to live in it.”

  Cuomo spent several months at the center of the storm, often with his friend Breslin, a resident of Forest Hills, absorbing the arguments of both sides before presenting a compromise solution that called for the buildings to be halved to twelve stories. Birbach dubbed the new plan �
��totally unacceptable.” His principal opponent, the Housing Authority’s Simeon Golar, denounced it as “outrageous. ” Cuomo, it appeared, had done something right.

  On October 26, 1972, the Cuomo plan went before New York City’s Board of Estimate. A standing room-only crowd filled the board’s white-walled chamber. On the right side of the center aisle were the Forest Hills residents and their supporters, easily identified by their “No Project—No Way!” pins and black armbands. On the other side were the mostly black defenders of the original project. The hearings opened with a moment of silence for Jackie Robinson, who had died of a heart attack two days earlier. The next twelve hours featured nothing approximating silence. The chaos inside was exacerbated by the chaos outside. Some three hundred tow truck operators, protesting the city’s low towing fees, had ringed City Hall with their trucks, blocking traffic and leaning on their horns for the better part of three hours. Inside, a succession of speakers made their pleas to the board. Years of acrimony were compressed into one long, ugly day. “If you let these criminals into our fine middle-class community, our future blood is on your hands,” warned one woman from Forest Hills. If the project isn’t built in its original conception, answered a woman from the other side of the aisle, “you’ll see blood in the streets. We’ll all die together, and we’ll take many of you with us.” Mayor Lindsay was conspicuously absent, but his stand-in, the president of the City Council, called for extra policemen.

  The sun set, and the raucous hearing finally drew to a close. The Board of Estimate overwhelmingly approved the compromise. Mario Cuomo had faced down some of the worst impulses of his city with humanism. He had recognized the misguided absolutism of the liberals who considered his compromise plan a betrayal, but he had never wavered in his commitment to the principle of integration obscured by their zealotry. At the same time, he’d refused to treat the Forest Hills homeowners like bigots, appealing to their sense of decency in his efforts to persuade them to change their attitude toward the project.

  Eight years of the Manhattan-centric Lindsay had left the outer boroughs hungry for a candidate of their own, someone who under, stood life in the neighborhoods. In the wake of the Forest Hills compromise, Breslin and a few of Cuomo’s other boosters urged him to run for mayor in 1973.

  Cuomo agreed to test the waters with a series of breakfasts and speeches. By then he could see that New York’s spiral of poverty was coarsening the spirit of his home borough, but he didn’t intend to let that stand in the way of his liberal ideals. It would just require a little finesse. “You’ve got all these blacks and Puerto Ricans down in South Jamaica, where I was born and raised,” Cuomo said in an address to a political club in Queens. “You think they’re all bad because they’re the ones coming up here, mugging and raping you and breaking into your houses. And you’re saying, ‘We don’t want them in our neighborhoods. We don’t want them anywhere near us.’ … Well, the net result of that attitude is their poverty will get worse and they’ll produce more muggers and rapists … The liberals come and tell you it’s our moral obligation to help those people because we oppressed them—the blacks, anyway—for 400 years. That’s what John Lindsay told you, right? However, here in Queens, how can I tell my father that? … He never punished a black, or hurt a black, or enslaved a black … Here’s what you have to say to my father: Whether you love them or not, whether you have an obligation to them or not, is between you and God … But unless you do something about where they are now, how they live now, they will continue to come into your neighborhoods and mug and rape … You have to find ways to break up segregated neighborhoods. And most of all, you have to find ways to get them jobs. Real jobs.”

  In the end Cuomo decided not to run for mayor in ’73. He made his first bid for elective office a year later, losing the Democratic nomination for the lowly job of lieutenant governor. It was a humiliating defeat for a man with so much political promise. Fortunately, the new governor, Hugh Carey, recognized that promise and asked Cuomo to be his secretary of state. Over the next few years, Cuomo mediated a rent strike at the huge Bronx housing cooperative known as Co-op City, investigated a scandal in state nursing homes, and played referee in a land dispute between New York State and the Mohawk Indians. In early 1977 Carey came to Cuomo with a new task: running for mayor. After a few months of hemming and hawing, Cuomo reluctantly agreed. “The governor had given me the opportunity to come into public service,” he says. “I felt I owed him something.”

  Cuomo launched his mayoral drive on May 10 in his newly opened campaign headquarters in the working-class, immigrant-rich neighborhood of Rego Park, Queens. His wife, his children, his parents, his in-laws, and some twenty other relatives filled the rows of folding chairs to the left of the podium as he spoke: “The record of the administration is on the faces of all those among us who have lost their sense of hope—of every old woman who lives behind triple-locked doors, waiting for day to return, afraid to venture onto the night streets or once look up at the night sky.”

  In a poll of registered Democrats conducted a few days later, he was running a close third behind Beame and Abzug.

  14.

  IF Sports Illustrated was the Time magazine of the sports world, Sport was its Esquire, a slick monthly filled with well-marinated profiles and straight-to-the-wall photographs—dispatches from the American dreamland. When it first sprang to life in 1949, a smiling Joe DiMaggio and son Joe, Jr., on its cover, Sport was in the business of making heroes. By 1977 the magazine was more concerned with satisfying the public’s increasing appetite for personality. That was why Dick Schaap, Sport’s editor in chief, had sent Robert Ward down to Florida in March to profile the newest member of the Yankees. It was a perfect match of author and subject. Ward was a surging, scenic writer who went on to make a small fortune writing for the television shows Miami Vice and NYPD Blue.

  Reggie initially refused to cooperate with Ward, claiming he’d been burned by Sport before (“They wrote a piece that said I caused trouble on the team, that I have a huge ego”). Ward started on the piece anyway, hanging around the clubhouse, watching Reggie as he moved through camp, asking his various teammates to comment on their new right fielder. After a few days of this, Reggie agreed to a drink, as long as Ward agreed to tell him what the guys were saying about him.

  They met at a bar called the Banana Boat. Reggie showed up in a windbreaker, which he promptly ditched, revealing a blue T-shirt on which the word SUPERSTAR! was spelled out in silver letters across the chest. It was from the TV show that he hosted, but the implication was clear.

  Ward began by telling Reggie that some of his teammates had expressed reservations about him. “You see,” Reggie said as they started in on their first round, “I’ve got problems the other guys don’t have. I’ve got this big image that comes before me, and I’ve got to adjust to it … Also, I used to just be known as a black athlete; now I’m respected as a tremendous intellect.”

  They were just getting going when the old Yankees’ Rat Pack-Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, and Billy Martin—settled down at a backgammon table at the other end of the bar. Reggie told the cocktail waitress, who was decked out in a green Tinker Bell costume, to send over some drinks on him. She returned with a message: “Whitey Ford appreciates your offer, but says he’d rather have your Superstar T-shirt.” Ward glanced over and noticed Mantle and Martin cracking up; they had obviously put Ford up to this bit of hazing. Reggie stripped off his T-shirt and delivered it to Ford, who in exchange gave Jackson his sweater, a pink cashmere V-neck that must have been three sizes too small for the slugger’s thick torso.

  The encounter, coupled with Ward’s report on Reggie’s unpopularity among his new teammates, tripped something inside Reggie. In a sense, it was Martin who was the odd man out. Mantle and Ford were “living legends”; Reggie’s legend was still in the making but well on its way. Of the four, only Martin would be condemned to a lifetime of faint praise adjectives like “scrappy,” “feisty,” and “hardworking. �
� That was not how it felt to Reggie. He knew that he would never enjoy the kind of camaraderie with his teammates that Martin, Mantle, and Ford shared. Players were more transient in the nascent era of free agency, but more than that, Reggie was too self-centered to command much in the way of personal loyalty from anyone.

  Back at the bar, Reggie stirred around the fruit in his piña colada and delivered himself of an unforgettable soliloquy. “You know, this team … it all flows from me,” he told Ward. “I’m the straw that stirs the drink. It all comes back to me. Maybe I should say me and Munson … but really he doesn’t enter into it … I’ve overheard him talking about me … I’ll hear him telling some other writer that he wants it to be known that he’s the captain of the team … And when anybody knocks me, he’ll laugh real loud so I can hear it … I’m a leader, and I can’t lie down … but ‘leader’ isn’t the right word … it’s a matter of PRESENCE … Let me put it this way: No team I am on will ever be humiliated the way the Yankees were by the Reds in the World Series! That’s why Munson can’t intimidate me. Nobody can … There is nobody who can put meat in the seats the way I can. That’s just the way it is … Munson thinks he can be the straw that stirs the drink, but he can only stir it bad … Just wait until I get hot and hit a few out, and the reporters start coming around and I have New York eating out of the palm of my hand … he won’t be able to stand it.”

  All the essential Reggie Jackson contradictions were here: the swaggering free spirit versus the self-conscious brooder; the supremely sure exterior versus the vulnerable interior; the desire to feel loved versus an unconscious need to feel alone, embattled, by way of motivating himself.