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

by Jonathan Mahler

  A total of 473 stores in the Bronx were damaged; 961 looters were arrested. Virtually every Bronx precinct was forced to house prisoners in clerical offices and sitting rooms. Some dumped their excess at Rikers Island until it too was overcrowded. And still the looting continued.

  It was worse yet in Brooklyn. On a five-block stretch of Crown Heights, seventy-five stores, including twenty shops owned by local Caribbean craftsmen, were hit. Sunset Park, Williamsburg, Brownsville, Flatbush Avenue—the list of ransacked areas goes on. More than seven hundred Brooklyn stores were plundered; 1,088 people were arrested.

  Still, the character of the chaos in Bushwick was unique. “The crowds on Broadway in Bushwick seemed to possess a special kind of hysteria as the evening wore on,” concluded Curvin and Porter. “This spirit appeared to lead them as much toward destruction and burning as toward looting.”

  It was a spirit born of the poverty and desperation of ghetto life. Yet what was so remarkable about Bushwick was that it had been a sturdy middle-class enclave just a decade earlier. The speed of its decline was dizzying. In ten years’ time, a community whose roots in New York went back three hundred years had been virtually destroyed by greed, indifference, and good intentions. Worst of all, perhaps, few had even noticed. The South Bronx, Harlem, Brownsville—these were New York’s ghettos, the symbols of a city in distress.

  “Bushwick?” asked a puzzled reporter for New York’s twenty-four-hour news station, WINS, when a local fireman called in during the blackout to fill the station in on what was happening there. “Where’s that?”

  33.

  IN Bushwick the arrests peaked at about 1:30 a.m. By then there were two shifts’ worth of cops—4 p.m. to midnight and midnight to 8 a.m.—out on the streets. The Eight-Three’s holding cells, which were designed to accommodate one prisoner, had upwards of ten in each. When they couldn’t squeeze in another body, cops handcuffed prisoners to radiators, to benches, to tables, to one another. (One popular method entailed cuffing five of them in a line, then cuffing the last guy to the first guy’s ankles.) The rest were stuffed into a small courtyard behind the station house.

  The property room was overflowing with merchandise. “P. C. Richard’s was empty compared to that room,” remembers one officer. “Sears, Roebuck? Forget about it.” When the room was full, goods were redirected to a designated area outside the station where an officer stood guard.

  By 2 a.m. the dispatcher was reporting only 10-30s and 10-13s—robberies in progress and officers needing assistance. Several cops remember being instructed to stop arresting looters. Even though they weren’t hanging around to process their collars, the arrests were taking them off the streets for too long. Besides, the station house was running out of room for prisoners.

  Instead, cops cracked their shins or gave them “turbans,” copspeak for a bloody head wrapped in a towel or bandage. “You just wanted to stop the riot, so you beat up the looters with ax handles and nightsticks,” recalls Robert Knightly, a bearded, mild-mannered veteran of the Eight-Three who is now a defense attorney for Legal Aid. “You beat ’em up and left them in the street. You catch them looting, you just smacked them down and left them.”

  Knightly chased one looter who was carrying a love seat. He caught up to the perp and knocked him down. The looter popped right up, as if attached to a spring. “I’m not like these people. I’ve got a job,” he barked. “Oh, yeah?” Knightly answered. “Is today your day off?”

  The station house was in chaos. When cops needed a breather, they’d drive a few blocks toward the Queens border, which was eerily quiet.

  Several officers recollect being told to remove their shields and nameplates. The shields gave the looters a target to shoot at in the darkness. As for the nameplates, “They wanted this thing over as quickly as possible, and they didn’t want anyone worrying about being identified,” says one cop. The officer who had taken the Louisville Slugger broke it on a looter and yanked a metal riser out of the stairwell of an abandoned building to use as his new nightstick. It got him through the remainder of the night.

  One cop remembers a looter running around beneath a building like an outfielder trying to get under a fly ball. “We were saying ‘No, no way he’s going to do this.’” He did. A love seat came crashing down on top of him from a couple of floors up. The looters were attacking one another too. According to one police report, a man was loading a van with stolen merchandise at Gates and Broadway. He offered an onlooker a hundred dollars to help. The onlooker declined. But as soon as the van was full, the onlooker stabbed the driver, took the keys to the van, and drove off.

  Officer Frank Cammarata remembers chasing a looter up to the roof of a six-story furniture store with a few other officers. One thing led to another, and the looter went over the edge. A tree broke his fall. He looked up from the pavement, gave the officers the finger, and hobbled away.

  By 3 a.m. the only hospital in the neighborhood, Wyckoff Heights, was a madhouse. A police administrator was stationed at the registrar’s desk, filling out police reports while the registrar did intakes. So many people had cut themselves on broken glass that the hospital was running out of suture material. When officers came by to drop off the injured or simply to wash up and rest for a few minutes, nurses gave them packets of suture threads to keep in their pockets in case they needed them later.

  Carl St. Martin, a medical student who lived on Bushwick’s Greene Avenue, was helping stitch people up. A trim but muscular young man who wore a pooka shell necklace, a thin beard, and a full but tame Afro, St. Martin was home studying for his medical boards when the lights went out. Like Sekzer, he thought it was a fuse. “Then I heard noises in the street, people yelling. Within a matter of minutes people were going up to Bushwick Avenue to get stuff,” he says. “The next thing I knew people were walking down my block with TVs on their backs. I remember one man carrying a sofa all by himself.”

  He also noticed that a lot of people were cut up from the glass. So he decided to walk up to Wyckoff Heights, where the overwhelmed emergency room was happy to put him to work. He sewed people up until close to dawn.

  34.

  WHEN the pricier shops and shoe stores had been cleaned out, the looters moved on to the supermarkets and bodegas. Even a taxidermy store on Broadway was hit, leaving a trail of eyeballs in the street.

  After five hours there was little left to steal, but the worst was not over. Orange flames pierced the darkness; Bushwick was burning. Some of the looters, caught up in the insanity of the night, driven by the desire to destroy their neighborhood, or maybe just bored, were torching stores.

  At one point two solid blocks of Broadway were ablaze. As fire trucks sped along the avenue, looters pelted them from the el tracks with rocks, bottles, bags of Goya beans. Cops tried to disperse the crowds at the various fire sites and protect the firemen so they could do their job. After the firemen abandoned one truck to seek cover from the objects raining down on them, a few cops climbed aboard and turned the water cannon on the crowd. The force of the stream sent looters skipping as far as half a block. Later the cops tried clearing the street by fastening a metal chain between two patrol cars and driving down either side of Broadway.

  As dawn approached, exhaustion, as well as a growing sense of futility, had set in. A group of cops looked on as all the vehicles in a used-car lot were torched. The ad hoc bazaars had already begun: A $500 color TV set was going for $135, Pro-Keds basketball shoes for $5 a pair, a $200 Peugeot ten-speed for $40.

  The sun finally rose, revealing endless piles of broken glass. Disembodied mannequin parts littered the streets like battlefield debris. Locklear sat on a curb in a daze, as streams of blackened water pooled up in front of him and a police helicopter buzzed overhead. Not only had the crowds on Broadway not diminished, they were larger than ever. “Ain’t you guys have wives or girlfriends at home?” he asked a group of men busy picking through the litter. “Ain’t you tired of being out here?”

  With virtuall
y no stores left to loot, the Eighty-first Precinct redirected all its men to the fire scenes to prevent people from harassing the firemen. “This tactic was successful,” the commanding officer of the precinct reported, “but it was costly in that it tied up manpower and resulted in numerous injuries to police officers which were caused by thrown missiles.”

  In all, more than thirty blocks of Broadway, a distance of a mile and a half, were devastated overnight. One hundred and thirty-four stores were cleaned out; forty-five of them had been burned as well. “I remember a merchant on Broadway whose place was looted all to shit,” says the Eight-Three’s Knightly. “He was standing there, wondering why the police didn’t stop them. I didn’t have an answer. I guess because there weren’t enough of us to go around.”

  Being black-owned offered stores no protection. One black proprietor, a pharmacist on Broadway, had managed to fend off looters without the help of the police. After staying all night with a loaded gun, he finally left his drugstore the next day to go get something to eat. When he returned a half hour later nearly everything was gone. Only after he squeezed off a couple of warning shots did the looters disperse. J. Walters, a local barber, had just rented out space for a new supermarket on Broadway. “I was almost ready to open,” he says. Overnight he lost forty thousand dollars’ worth of uninsured meat-slicing equipment. The supermarket never opened.

  More than twenty fires were still burning along Broadway come Thursday morning, ten hours after the blackout had begun. The stifling heat was made more oppressive by the blanket of black smoke that hung heavy over the neighborhood.

  After catching a ride home from the hospital, St. Martin went out to pick up his shirts at the dry cleaner. The store had been burned to the ground.

  “Seeing the destruction,” says Thomas Creegan, a redheaded veteran of the Eight-Three, “what was most upsetting was that you worked in this precinct. You worked with these people, you had taken care of them, and yet here they were, burning their own stores down. Where are you going to go come Friday? Where’s that nice old lady in the tenement going to get her food?”

  35.

  In some ways, New York affects me like Venice. It’s in danger of dying, so there’s something tender about it.

  PAUL MAZURSKY, FILM DIRECTOR

  BROADWAY separates Bushwick from Bedford-Stuyvesant, which was once a middle-class enclave too, a neighborhood of stickball, brownstones, and postwar optimism. As the fifties wore on, though, more and more of Bed-Stuy’s working-class white families migrated to the suburbs. Lured by the promise of jobs at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, black families moved in to fill the void.

  The jobs soon disappeared, and the steady white migration became a mass exodus. Still more poor black families, Harlem residents displaced by ambitious but ill-fated urban renewal projects, moved in. Still more white families moved out, often at the prodding of real estate agents who warned them to sell now because the neighborhood was turning.

  Their prophecy became self-fulfilling: In 1965 the Department of Housing and Urban Development called Bed-Stuy “the heart of the largest ghetto in America.” Federal antipoverty programs lined the pockets of local power brokers charged with administering them, rather than provide desperately needed first aid to a wounded neighborhood.

  It was a familiar fate for much of Brooklyn in the late 1950s and early 1960s, yet it was a fate that Bushwick managed to postpone. Most of the neighborhood’s housing stock, yellow-brick or three-story wood-frame row houses, was solid, if not fancy, and between its eleven breweries—longtime locals remember the pervasive aroma of yeast and hops—its knitting mills, and various other light manufacturing plants, Bushwick was less dependent on the dying navy yard for jobs than much of the borough. The beer barons who once lived in the mansions set back from the elms along Bushwick Avenue were long gone, but they had been replaced by doctors and lawyers.

  The Italians were Bushwick’s primary ethnic group, but there was still a smattering of Germans, as well as small pockets of blacks and Puerto Ricans. As an ethnic group, Italians tend to stick around neighborhoods longer than others, and Bushwick’s six Catholic churches, and the culture that flourished around them well into the sixties, helped deepen their roots. The neighborhood featured an endless string of feasts for patron saints, complete with oompah bands and barefooted old women fighting through the crowds to pin a dollar bill to the statue of the Virgin Mary being paraded through the noisy streets.

  Bushwick’s best-known church was St. Barbara’s, where Christmas Eve masses were so jammed you couldn’t enter without a ticket. Modeled after St. Peter’s Basilica, albeit with some Gothic touches, this hulking church cut an imposing figure among the neighborhood’s modest row houses; its architects had wanted nothing to detract from its grandeur. Ornate moldings adorned the cream-colored façade. Inside, pastel murals covered arched ceilings beneath a two-tiered dome. On Sunday mornings the owner of the funeral parlor across the street left his doors unlocked to provide an extra bathroom for the fifteen hundred churchgoers. After mass, the crowd migrated to LaRosa’s Bakery for hot bread. The congregation was overwhelmingly white, but not entirely so. St. Martin had been an altar boy at the church and a student at St. Barbara’s parochial school. The school charged families tuition only for the first child, giving Catholic parents one fewer disincentive to reproduce and one more reason to stay put in Bushwick.

  But change was coming to Bushwick too. Father Peter Mahoney, the monsignor at one of the neighborhood’s Catholic churches, recalls returning from a three-month leave in the early sixties to discover that a hundred families had left his parish. Nearly all of them lived on the same block.

  In 1965, Bushwick was denied Model City status. Unlike the slums on its southern and western borders, it was judged too white and too well off to qualify for federal antipoverty funds. The trouble was that the government had relied on six-year-old census figures. New immigrants, mostly Puerto Ricans, were already changing the ethnic and financial makeup of the neighborhood.

  Bushwick soon received its first wave of welfare recipients, courtesy of East New York and Brownsville, where several twenty-block tracts were cleared for low-income housing projects. The displaced people were to be temporarily relocated to Bushwick. The new housing was never built.

  The bulldozers rolled into Bushwick next. The city was going to replace the two-family houses and small businesses on two square blocks across the way from St. Barbara’s with four fourteen-story housing projects, an elementary school, a community center, and a park. Neighborhood activists tried to fight the plan—“It wasn’t urban renewal; it was urban removal,” recalls Father James Kelly, one of those activists—but they were no match for the zealous idealists who dominated urban planning in the sixties. Many of the new occupants would be poor blacks and Hispanics. Local real estate operators pounced, calling homeowners to stoke their racial fears and stuffing their mailboxes with flyers warning them to sell before it was too late. Many were gone before the wrecking balls were set in motion.

  The buildings were demolished, but weeds were soon growing in the rubble-strewn lot. Stray dogs, junkies, and winos moved in beneath a sign that read, URBAN RENEWAL ZONE. The twenty-three-million-dollar plan had been shelved, leaving a yawning hole in the heart of Bushwick.

  Some of Bushwick’s working class pulled up stakes, in most cases pushing east into Long Island. Others dug in their heels. On the night of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in April 1968, St. Martin’s father and many of his family’s neighbors—black and white alike—took to their rooftops with shotguns, ready to shoot any rioters who came near their homes. Several tense weeks followed. A number of Italian-owned neighborhood stores were vandalized, and Father Kelly spent hours in the Italian social clubs along Knickerbocker Avenue, trying to dissuade their members from retaliating. Gates started appearing on the windows of the stores on Broadway.

  More simmering racial tensions bubbled over when local Puerto Ricans who had once steered clear of Bush
wick’s Italian enclave began frequenting a park where elderly Italian men gathered to play bocce. Fights became commonplace. One Italian man was stabbed in the heart with a switchblade and died.

  Bushwick was bleeding. The Catholic Church undertook a study of its operations there to determine how to deal with the sudden and dramatic changes to the neighborhood. Buried in Mayor Lindsay’s 1969 master plan for the city was this bracing cri: “Bushwick urgently needs almost every type of community facility and service—vest-pocket housing, schools, health services, parks, supervised recreation activities, language classes, low-interest loans to encourage improvement of private property, social services for every age group, cultural activities, libraries, more job opportunities, and training programs and improved sanitation and police protection … Bushwick’s decline began almost overnight. And relatively little has been done because its problems were overshadowed by the enormous problems of neighboring slums.”

  Even those all too aware of Bushwick’s woes couldn’t have predicted what was coming next. When a house near St. Martin’s burned down in 1969, neighbors expressed their condolences to the owner. Nobody thought arson. “We felt sorry for him,” says St. Martin. “Insurance or no insurance, you didn’t burn your own house down and put other people at risk. It was unthinkable. It just didn’t happen.”

  It did, and it would, again and again. In 1972, Bushwick’s two ladder companies, 124 and 112, went on more then six thousand runs, the unofficial benchmark of a severe social crisis. One block of Greene Avenue, a short walk from St. Martin’s, lost one house in ‘73, thirteen in ’74, nine in ’75, and forty-one in ’76. Eventually the entire block was burned down.