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

by Jonathan Mahler

  The Eight-Three’s reputation was well established within the department. When the precinct’s commanding officer first addressed his men a couple of years earlier, he had told them that his superiors described the precinct as a cross between a foreign legion outpost and a leper colony.

  Rookies were taught a few important lessons when they reported for duty at the Eight-Three. Don’t walk too close to the buildings (someone might drop a brick on you). Don’t let neighborhood kids wear your hat (lice). Always check the earpiece on call boxes before using it (dog shit).

  30.

  UNLIKE Sekzer, Officer Robert Locklear was already on duty when the lights went out. He remembers people hanging out on Broadway, Bushwick’s main strip, playing cards, drinking beer, trying vainly to catch a flutter of breeze. Now and then a train would rumble across the elevated tracks overhead, momentarily drowning out the sounds of salsa and disco emanating from the boom boxes below. Locklear, one of a small group of minority cops in the Eight-Three, and his partner had collared a murder suspect earlier in the evening—they found the guy frying chicken with his door open at the top of a tenement stairwell, in plain view of the dead body at the foot of the stairs—and were hoping the rest of the shift would be relatively quiet.

  Locklear can’t remember what he heard first, the sound of shattering glass or the store alarms. But he’ll never forget what he saw when he looked down the block moments later: mobs of people materializing in the darkness. A local woman called the Police Department in a panic: “They’re coming across Broadway like a herd of buffalo.”

  Cops gathering at the Eight-Three station house found it dark; the batteries were missing from the emergency floodlights that were supposed to kick in the moment power went out. “Hats, bats, and jeans”—riot helmets, billy clubs, and dungarees—were the norm. Officers were assigned to “combat cars” of four men, using every marked and unmarked vehicle at the precinct’s disposal. They were ghetto cops. No one had to tell them to expect the worst. “This wasn’t Park Avenue,” Sekzer says. “This was the jungle. You could bet your ass there was going to be gunfire tonight.”

  Still, nothing could have prepared them for what greeted them on Broadway. Thousands of people were already out on the street; thousands more were pouring in from every direction. “If they had turned on the lights,” one cop remembers, “it would have looked like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.”

  According to one police report, the looting had started at 9:40 p.m., only minutes after the onset of darkness. Marauding bands were sawing open padlocks. They were taking crowbars to steel shutters, prying them open like tennis-ball-can tops or simply jimmying them up with hydraulic jacks and then wedging garbage cans underneath to keep them open. They were pulling up onto sidewalks in tow trucks, slipping the big iron hooks under storefront gates, and ripping them clean off. They were punching through plate glass windows to grab the clothed mannequins inside, first with bare hands, later with towels wrapped around their fists. Four men wrenched a parking meter out of the ground and used it to batter open the door of a jewelry store. They filled cars, vans, trucks, and U-Hauls or simply carried their loot, be it sofas, television sets, or refrigerators, on their backs or in their arms. In the darkness, it was especially hard to miss the white washing machines bumping along Broadway, propelled by pairs of legs poking out underneath.

  The most expensive shops were hit first: jewelry, electronics, and furniture stores. A teenager attached a chain to the bumper of a stolen truck and tore off the gates of a luxury item shop called Time Credit. He pitched a garbage pail through the window and filled the truck with TVs, air conditioners, and a rack of watches. After helping a fellow looter load a couch onto the roof of his station wagon, the teenager sped off. “At the onset of the blackout, the widely dispersed activities of those involved in criminality made it virtually impossible to prevent individual acts of vandalism and looting,” William Bracey, the commanding officer for North Brooklyn, later reported.

  The elevated tracks that ran above Broadway obscured the light of the slivered moon. In the darkness the cops started wading into the thick knots of people and making arrests. “You just grabbed ’em,” says Locklear, who was patrolling the neighborhood in a battered gypsy cab. “There were plenty of them to grab on to.”

  Often the looter would drop the merchandise and run the moment he saw a cop approaching. The cop would give chase. If he managed to catch up with the looter, he’d tackle him, handcuff him, and go back to pick up the evidence, provided it was still there. Now he had to get his prisoner and the stolen property back to the station house. Short on cars and long on perps, he found it necessary to improvise. “I saw cars pull up at the station house,” remembers one Bushwick cop on duty that night. “They’d pull four prisoners out of the back, open up the trunk, and pull two or three more out of there.”

  Robert Curvin and Bruce Porter, coauthors of Blackout Looting!, a study sponsored by the Ford Foundation in the wake of the blackout, divided the looters into three categories: the professional criminals, who were the first to start pillaging; the “alienated adolescents” who soon joined in; and the poor and not so poor, who either got caught up in the excitement or were motivated by “abject greed.” Curvin and Porter interviewed one looter, a twenty-one-year-old man who lived with his mother and siblings in Brooklyn, who described the blackout as a gift from above. “It was like the man upstairs said I’m gonna put out the lights for twenty-four hours and you all go off, you know, and get everything you can … I was out there ’cause I’m a poor person and, like, you know, lock a hungry dog up with some food, you know he gonna eat it.”

  For the cops, there was no time for paperwork. All the stolen merchandise was piled up in the property room in the back of the station house. Polaroids were snapped of the cop with his perp. Time and place of arrest were scribbled on the backs. The prisoner was stuffed into a holding cell, and the arresting officer headed back out into the mayhem. Ordinarily prisoners were taken to downtown Brooklyn for processing, but the message had come down that all suspects were to be detained in the precincts in which they were arrested in order to conserve manpower on the streets and relieve pressure at central booking.

  As the night wore on, some merchants started turning up to protect their property, but because most of them didn’t live in the neighborhood any longer, everything was already gone by the time they got to their stores. Raphael Aboud, the owner of a shoe store on

  Broadway, arrived at his shop while it was being looted and was attacked. He ran to a nearby subway station, where he hid in the bathroom. Three cops eventually found him there and brought him back to the station.

  At one point Sekzer and his partners followed a group of looters into a furniture store. It was pitch-black inside. The cops walked through with their flashlights but saw no one. There was a staircase in the back. Walking down into the basement, Sekzer heard voices. A lot of voices. There were at least thirty people down there. “We’re all thinking the same thing,” Sekzer recalls. “I’m not shooting anybody over this. If they come running at us to try and get out, then take care, send me a postcard.”

  The officers told the offending mob they were under arrest. Now the question was how to get them back to the station house. Sekzer and another cop went upstairs to commandeer a city bus. They managed to flag one down. The bus stopped, the door opened, and a police captain leaned out. “What the fuck is your problem?” he asked. The bus was filled with a detail of cops on their way to Brooklyn’s central command for reassignment for the night. Unable to find a vehicle large enough to transport the mob of looters, Sekzer went back to the furniture store to confer with his partners. They decided to let the women and children go and call for squad cars to come pick up the men.

  Bullets, as well as bricks and bottles, were raining down from rooftops. Meanwhile, WINS was reporting that there was “a party atmosphere” in New York. “These must be happy bullets,” Kevin Cox, another cop in the Eight-Three, cracked t
o his partners. Many officers were using their guns repeatedly, usually with the intention of clearing hostile crowds and scaring off snipers. Some cops recall Emergency Services vans combing the streets, tossing out extra boxes of ammunition to officers in need. One cop says he and his partner shot on the order of 130 rounds. Another remembers talking to a shaken transit cop who had defended a token booth at an elevated subway stop by running back and forth between the two entrances, firing his pistol to keep the looters at bay.

  At a little after midnight word spread that John and Al’s, a sporting goods store on Broadway that sold firearms, was under siege. Just about every officer in Bushwick headed straight for it. They showed up in time to arrest seventeen looters, but dozens of guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition were already gone. At least some of the baseball bats had been left behind. One cop grabbed a Louisville Slugger to replace his nightstick, which he had already broken on a looter. The cops secured the location and turned it over to one of the store’s owners, who stood guard the rest of the night with a high-caliber rifle.

  Off-duty cops were slowly rolling in. Some, like Sekzer, just assumed they’d be needed. Others were responding to Police Commissioner Michael Codd’s call-up order on the radio. Those without riot helmets were given air-raid helmets, teamed up, and sent out in the streets. The Eighty-first Precinct, which was just over on the other side of Broadway in Bedford-Stuyvesant and shared a radio frequency with the Eight-Three, had most of its men out on Broadway as well. For some reason, though, the Eight-Three received no backup from any of the city’s quieter precincts.

  31.

  MAYOR Beame had just started in on a campaign reelection speech to a standing room only crowd of five hundred at the Traditional Synagogue in Co-op City when the lights went out. After he continued on in the darkness for a couple of minutes, promising to do something about the putrid smell wafting over from the Pelham Bay landfill and to close all the porn shops in the area, his aides ushered him out.

  The mayor climbed into his Chrysler and was spirited down to Gracie Mansion, where a candlelight strategy session was already in progress. After taking an aide’s advice to lose the tie and roll up his sleeves—“it makes you look like a tireless worker”—Beame proceeded to a darkened City Hall. He invited a handful of newspapermen to lean over his shoulder and listen in as he grilled Con Ed’s chairman, Charles Luce, who assured him that the city’s power would be back soon.

  Several hours later a bleary-eyed Beame officially declared war on the utility. Standing on a table outside the police commissioner’s office, where he and his staff had relocated to take advantage of the emergency generators, he accused Con Ed of “gross negligence—at the very least.” (Luce knew a scapegoat when he saw one, quipping, “If we didn’t have a Con Ed, we’d have to invent one.”)

  Beame did not follow his predecessor Mayor Lindsay’s lead and take to the riot-torn streets himself. Such a tour, he explained to reporters, might just be a “stimulant” to more violence. Instead, he and his entourage visited the Upper East Side, where they stopped in on an empty fire station. Everyone was up in Harlem fighting the arson fires that had begun erupting shortly after the looting began. When he returned to police headquarters at a little after 5 a.m., Beame held another press conference in which he called on religious leaders to get into patrol cars and calm their communities. One of those who did, a priest in the Bronx, had his altar stolen while he was gone.

  Some twenty-five hundred cops had been on the beat when darkness fell. Within minutes Police Commissioner Codd had ordered all officers to report for duty immediately, only instead of insisting that everyone try to find a way to get to his command, Codd told them to report to the nearest precincts.

  This proved to be an enormous mistake. Ever since the 1962 repeal of the Lyons Law, which had required all cops to live in the city, police officers had been moving to the suburbs in droves. Most of those who continued to reside in the city lived in Queens or on Staten Island, so in the early hours of the blackout, there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of idle cops hanging around quiet precincts. Many were eventually reassigned to neighborhoods in need, but when they arrived in civilian clothes, without flashlights, helmets, or nightsticks, they were as good as useless. One South Brooklyn commander was thrilled to see a load of Staten Island cops pull up at his station house and disappointed when they stepped off the bus looking like what he described as “a tennis team.”

  Some cops simply ignored, or rather pretended not to have heard, Codd’s call-up order. Morale in the department had been on the skids ever since the ’75 layoffs. Mayor Beame’s recent threats to put one cop in each patrol car in half the city’s precincts as a further cost-cutting measure hadn’t helped matters any. It perhaps explains why, as the looting peaked between midnight and 4 a.m., some ten thousand cops, 40 percent of the force who were neither on vacation nor on sick leave, had yet to check in.

  32.

  THE looting was by no means citywide. In some of the tonier areas of Manhattan, restaurants moved tables outside to escape the heat. Several stretches of First Avenue on the Upper East Side might have been mistaken for streets in Paris, were it not for the angled cars, headlights on, that made it possible for diners to identify what they were eating. At the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway, the cast of Beatlemania picked up their acoustic instruments and led the audience in a sing-along of Beatles’ tunes. At the Metropolitan Opera, where the Canadian Ballet was performing, the orchestra’s harpist did an impromptu solo of “Dancing in the Dark.” Eight cast members of the nude revue Oh! Calcutta! were caught in the altogether. Unable to find their way backstage in the dark, they borrowed shirts and jackets from the audience. On Weehawken Street in the West Village, a gay orgy broke out. (“The small one block was a beehive of mad insane activity,” one participant recalled in the magazine Michael’s Thing a few weeks later. “Nudity was the rule; many guys were pushed against cars and performed upon with the full consent of everyone there.”)

  But not a single poor neighborhood escaped damage. In most cases the destruction outlasted the darkness, continuing well into the following afternoon. To this day the blackout looting of 1977 remains the only civil disturbance in the history of New York City to encompass all five boroughs simultaneously.

  The authors of Blackout Looting!, the Ford Foundation study, counted no fewer than thirty-one neighborhoods that suffered considerable damage or theft. In white, working-class Queens and Staten Island, the damage was far less severe—mostly broken windows and missing display cases—but by no means insignificant.

  In Manhattan’s Alphabet City, residents started congregating almost immediately after the lights went out. “Subsequently,” wrote the commanding officer for the local precinct, “these groups became unruly and began to smash and destroy windows and interiors of various commercial premises; looting of these premises began to occur.” Patrolling officers were forced to evacuate the streets temporarily when looters started hurling objects at them from tenement rooftops. The looting continued along Avenues A, B, and C, from Houston up to Tenth Street, until ten the following morning.

  More than a hundred blocks uptown, in East Harlem, outnumbered police initially tried to chase looters off and secure stores along Third Avenue. They soon realized that the looters were simply retreating to side streets and lying in wait until the officers were drawn to other locations. With the help of a busload of fifty-five cops who arrived from Queens at around 3:30 a.m., local officers began mobile sweeps, trapping looters by entering both sides of streets at once.

  Over in West Harlem, Joyaria Ortega, a jewelry store on 144th Street, was one of dozens of shops cleaned out along Broadway. The owner’s brother had arrived with his shotgun as soon as he could, but it was already too late. People were now picking through the heaps of glass shards, hoping something had been left behind. One cop, John Ryan, remembers finding a couple of the store’s safes smashed open and emptied of their contents. Ryan made fifteen arrests that nig
ht, packing every one of his collars into the same ten by thirteen cell in the Thirtieth Precinct.

  The pillaging reached all the way down into the Upper West Side. Between 96th and 110th streets along Broadway, store after store was damaged. Capri, a furniture store at 92nd and Amsterdam, lost everything, forty thousand dollars’ worth of dressers, bedroom sets, mirrors, and sofas. “The size of the store didn’t matter; who owned it didn’t matter,” the Westsider newspaper reported. “All that mattered was that they were there.” Even the Twentieth Precinct, which ran from 59th to 86th Street, reported looting at thirteen stores and vandalism at several more. Between 63rd and 110th streets on the Upper West Side, sixty-one stores were hit. The emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital, adjacent to Columbia University, treated eighty people between midnight and 8 a.m., more than four times the usual number. Nearly all of them had suffered lacerations during looting or had been injured fighting with fellow looters over the spoils.

  The Bronx was hit even harder than Manhattan. By 11 p.m., the showroom windows of a Pontiac dealership on Jerome Avenue had been smashed, and fifty of the fifty-five new cars parked inside driven off into the black night. Fifty-eight stores were looted along one stretch of East Tremont Avenue. “At the time of the blackout there were 38 officers on patrol,” wrote the commanding officer of one Bronx precinct in his report to the NYPD. “Ten times that number would have been necessary to cope with the spontaneous incidents of looting, fires and attacks on police officers.” The officers who were trying to cope with the bedlam were instructed to avoid using their sirens and turret lights, “so that a ‘carnival’ atmosphere is not spread.”