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

by Jonathan Mahler

  By then St. Martin’s mother, Irma, had packed up his seven siblings and moved out to Long Island. Carl wanted to stay behind in Bushwick. The family’s three-story frame house on Greene Avenue would have fetched next to nothing if they’d tried to sell it, so he broke it up into rental apartments, keeping one on the third floor for himself. Eventually he learned to stop looking up from his medical school textbooks when he heard the scream of a fire engine.

  Local firemen spray-painted signs on abandoned buildings. A single diagonal line meant that a building was structurally unsound, that firemen should enter only if absolutely necessary. Two intersecting diagonal lines, an X, meant a building wasn’t safe: Do not enter, period. They were like tombstones for the doomed residents of a town confronting a deadly epidemic.

  The fires were set by landlords who were tired of trying to evict delinquent tenants. They were set by vandals who intended to return for the plumbing systems, which were easier to extract and sell once the firemen had knocked down the walls. They were set by idle kids who wandered the streets aimlessly after school.

  Sometimes ignition was preceded by the ritual removal of property, meaning that the fire had been started by a family that knew that Social Services was obligated to provide new housing and moving expenses to victims of disastrous combustion. Only a gasoline-soaked mattress would be left inside. “We’d go to a fire and the furniture would be out on the street and the building would be burning,” recalls Santo Puglisi, a driver for Bushwick’s Engine Company 271. (One Bushwick family was eventually accused of setting thirteen fires over the course of eight years, and bilking the city of more than forty thousand dollars in the process.)

  When Puglisi first came to Bushwick in 1967, it was considered a soft assignment. His company’s meals, eaten up on the third floor, were only rarely interrupted. When his company did respond to an alarm, they left the firehouse doors open. In 1976, Ladder 124, the “truckies” with whom Puglisi worked most closely, finished first out of 136 on the city’s chart of most runs. Ladder 112, Bushwick’s other ladder company, was second. Between 1975 and September 1977, there were four thousand fires in Bushwick. Tired of sliding down three flights’ worth of fire pole mid-meal, Engine Company 271’s firemen ponied up the cash to relocate the kitchen to the first floor. They also always locked the doors to the station house on their way out.

  Local firemen tried to keep a sense of humor, jokingly referring to gasoline cans as Bushwick overnight bags. But mostly they found their work relentlessly depressing. Endangering their lives to save the neighborhood’s aging housing stock came to seem like an increasingly senseless calculus; Bushwick was beyond redemption. They treated most blazes like garbage fires, the goal being containment.

  It was a goal that was nearly impossible to achieve. Most of Bushwick’s buildings had been built for German immigrants before 1910. More than half of them were made of wood and designed with air shafts over their stairwells. They burned like furnaces. Because they were usually connected via common cocklofts, the attic space between the roof and the ceiling, fires virtually leaped from house to house. The only way to stop one from advancing next door was to poke holes in the ceiling and try to draw the flames upward. There were two methods of accomplishing this, and both were perilous. Firemen could climb up the stairs through the smoke and heat and poke the holes from the inside or hover precariously on a ladder outside—right in the line of fire the instant the flames started licking toward the sky.

  The dying neighborhood had a haunting beauty. “You’d be out fighting a fire until dawn,” Puglisi recalls, “and riding back to the firehouse, you’d notice that there were fewer and fewer buildings. Then you’d start noticing the churches. Bushwick had a lot of churches. And the houses weren’t blocking the view anymore.”

  Lisa Casuso, the fourth generation of Casusos in Bushwick, remembers sitting on the stoop of her family’s house on Harman Street in the early seventies. With each passing year, the sound of the fire engines grew louder, the smell of smoke more pungent. The fires were getting closer. Once the engines came within a block or so of the Casusos’ home, her parents started hosing down their small backyard to fend off the encroaching flames. Before long the fires hit Harman Street. By then most of the three-story frame houses had been abandoned. Unable to sell, their owners had simply packed up and left. When the Casusos’ next-door neighbors did just that, her father took to the porch of the unoccupied house every evening to ward off potential arsonists. He sat in a folding beach chair, a shotgun in his lap.

  More plans to replenish Bushwick’s dwindling housing stock were hatched and aborted. A scandal in the city’s Municipal Loan Program derailed a scheme to rehabilitate and fireproof close to one hundred deteriorating dwellings. Real estate agents called the remaining white homeowners to induce further panic selling. Speculators snapped up the houses on the cheap and stuffed them full of families on public assistance, exploiting their welfare subsidies to drive up rents for working people. Local banks stopped granting mortgages and home improvement loans in the area, calling it “too susceptible to heavy damage due to vandalism” and thus too risky for “prudent lending.”

  The Federal Housing Administration stepped in to help; the government would guarantee the loans. But what should have been a boon turned into a boondoggle when corrupt FHA credit inspectors conspired with sleazy real estate operators. The scam worked like this: Speculator buys a house for a pittance, then triples, even quadruples the price. Speculator pays off FHA credit inspector to approve a naïve prospective buyer. Buyer becomes owner. Buyer defaults on his loan. The FHA pays off the balance of the mortgage and then boards up the property. Speculator and FHA credit inspect tor move on to the next property.

  As houses fell, crime rose. Both the numbers of robberies and the incidents of grand larceny doubled in the early seventies. In such an environment, any buffer from the violence was welcome. St. Martin’s block was protected somewhat by the Spanish church on the corner. The drug dealers who hung out in front of the church didn’t want any other criminals drawing attention to their activities.

  A deacon was mugged at knifepoint in front of St. Barbara’s. Attendance at Sunday mass dropped by more than half. Human excrement was found in a confessional. Wrought iron gates went up around the church, symbolically sealing it off from the community that it had once nurtured. The growing sense of spiritual desolation was mirrored by a physical one: The big beautiful church squatted among streets leveled by wrecking balls and arson. Now truly nothing was detracting from St. Barbara’s grandeur. The effect was hardly elevating.

  The church closed its parochial school in 1972. Between ‘73 and ’77, the neighborhood’s welfare population rose by more than eighteen thousand. By ’77 some 40 percent of its residents were on public assistance; 80 percent were unemployed. Half of Bushwick’s families were living on less than four thousand dollars a year. Bushwick High School, which had been designed for two thousand students, was supporting three thousand, roughly four hundred of whom dropped out every year. The neighborhood’s infant mortality rate was the highest in New York City.

  As Jim Sleeper wrote in The Closest of Strangers, his trenchant 1990 book about liberalism and race in New York, “By the mid-1970s, Bushwick was … a prison of traumatized welfare recipients reeling in rage and despair.” In the darkness of July 13, 1977, that rage and despair found an outlet.

  36.

  IN the days after the blackout a damp, acrid smell permeated Bushwick. Fire-damaged buildings sloughed off large chunks of debris. Broken pipes burped brown water onto sidewalks. In the litter-strewn streets, people filled shopping carts with abandoned packages of meat.

  Like the rest of the station houses in Brooklyn, the Eight-Three was told to hang on to its 133 accused looters for a couple of days, until central booking was ready for them. For Sekzer it was just as well. It was going to take him days to complete the paperwork for the 32 men he’d collared. Most of the precinct’s prisoners had been wedged into
an open courtyard between the cells and the property room. Several cops threw McDonald’s hamburgers down to them from the detective squad on the second floor. At least one officer urinated on them.

  During a few successive roll calls, sergeants asked if anyone had used his gun that night. No one wanted to deal with the paperwork that accompanied every shot fired, not to mention the elaborate examinations and reenactments mandated by the Weapons Discharge Review Board. (The department’s policy on firing weapons into the air was nearly as strict as that on firing at someone.) In his report to the NYPD’s chief of operations, the captain of the Eight-Three, John Menken, stated: “The Officers were subjected to provocations of bottle and other missile throwing, and the stress of attempting to contain the unrestrained lawlessness; however, no firearms were discharged.”

  William Bracey, the commanding officer for North Brooklyn, came through the Eight-Three to offer his commendation for a job well done, and without firing a single shot. “Where the fuck were you, Hawaii?” Sekzer chuckled to himself. In his own “unusual occurrence” report to the department, Bracey wrote: “[P]olice personnel performed in a most exemplary fashion and there were no instances when firearms were utilized.”

  On Saturday, July 16, Bushwick’s Signorelli family hosted a big barbecue to use up all the meat that had defrosted when the power was out. Like the Casusos, Charlie and Vickie Signorelli had refused to leave the neighborhood, where they had met and fallen in love after World War II. At the barbecue, one family member started talking about how “the animals” had destroyed Bushwick. The Signorellis’ son Gasper, a senior at City College at the time, shouted him down. “I defended the looters in my liberal reflexive way,” he says, “but part of me was angry because I knew he was right. You couldn’t defend stealing sneakers just because you can.”

  On Sunday, July 17, four days after the looting had started, two teenagers and a twelve-year-old set fire to an abandoned knitting factory. A few years earlier the Fire Department had urged the city to demolish the five-story building, which had already been the site of two three-alarm fires. Instead, it was slated to be converted into a low-income apartment complex. The fiscal crisis arrived before renovation could begin, and the building was now a popular hangout for local junkies.

  The fire started at 1:40 p.m. in the basement, as temperatures outside climbed toward a hundred degrees, and spread with startling speed. Before long it had progressed from a three-alarm fire to a fullborough alarm fire, the equivalent of ten alarms. Flames were jumping across the street. A fire truck’s windshield melted. Brick façades tumbled, and wooden houses collapsed, burying cars underneath them. More than fifty-five fire companies, including thirteen from Manhattan, were summoned to help, as were the cops on duty at the Eight-Three. All of the neighborhood’s fire hydrants had already been opened by neighborhood kids looking for some relief from the unrelenting heat, drastically reducing the water pressure for the firemen.

  Officer Cox of the Eight-Three and his partner were among the cops told to drive down the center of the street looking for survivors. Through their windshield, they could see the flames above their heads. When they emerged, having found no one, the paint on their car had blistered.

  Firemen managed to get the blaze under control in about three hours, but by then it had destroyed twenty-four buildings in a four-block area, including a Methodist church. It was the city’s biggest fire since 1963—“another sad day for Brooklyn,” according to Borough President Howard Golden. As night fell, the Salvation Army was serving coffee to cops, the Red Cross was trying to find temporary housing for the two hundred newly homeless, and scavengers were picking through the rubble left behind.

  It was an ignominious introduction, but New York had finally met Bushwick. In the weeks after the blackout a parade of columnists paid their respects to the battered neighborhood. “It is here, in the dirt and the smells and the heat,” wrote Jimmy Breslin, “that New York must struggle to keep a crucial part of its city from falling apart.” Martin Gottlieb and a team of Daily News reporters produced a heart-wrenching series on Bushwick’s ills. In one of the articles, St. Martin told Gottlieb that he planned to stay put there and even open a medical clinic “to serve the people who now struggle to survive in the shell of a neighborhood.” (St. Martin soon moved out, hours after being attacked by one of his tenants. When he returned to pick up his mail a month later, all the aluminum siding had been ripped off the house and his neighbors had run extension cords into his basement to use his power.)

  For the Eight-Three, the bad summer got worse. In late August one of precinct’s most beloved cops, a black officer named Joseph Taylor, Jr., the father of a three-year-old daughter, was killed in the line of duty. Taylor, who was thirty-four, and his partner, a laid-off cop who’d just been rehired, had been instructed to respond to an anonymous 911 call. Several men who’d just robbed a local McDonald’s were on the third floor of a house on Linden Street, a relatively safe block. The officers checked upstairs and found no one there, so they descended to the first floor, to the apartment at the end of the narrow hallway. The officers knocked. They could hear people inside, but no one answered. They knocked again. Eventually someone inside cracked open the door, peeked out, and then quickly slammed it shut. Taylor’s partner started trying to kick the door in. Taylor realized that if the people inside were armed, his partner would be leaving himself wide open and quickly pushed him away. As he was doing so, one of the people inside threw the door open, stuck the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun against Taylor’s chest, and fired.

  Sekzer, one of Taylor’s best friends, took his body to the morgue and asked to be left alone. He lifted up the sheet to say goodbye to his colleague. “I could have put my fist through the hole in his chest,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘At least he went quickly.’”

  37.

  NEW York’s long night of looting was followed by another hot day, with temperatures climbing into the high nineties. The power still wasn’t back. The streets were littered with debris, the skyscrapers empty, the subways hushed. Here and there a building burned for no apparent reason.

  Con Ed needed to disconnect the entire system so that all its component parts could be inspected for damage. Then, once everything was reconnected, the juice had to be restored slowly to avoid any surges that might cause another failure. High-density areas were the first priority, creating a perverse situation: The depleted slums were among the last to get their power back. Not until 10:39 Thursday night, July 14, twenty-five hours after New York was first unplugged, was the entire city back up and running. Only one fire was still burning out of control in Brooklyn.

  Many New Yorkers had followed the events of the night through the city’s two all-news radio stations, WINS and WCBS. Some woke up the following morning to learn that their city had been ransacked. The Times was already on press when the blackout hit, but the paper’s reporters and editors hastily cobbled together a new page one in their candlelit newsroom. POWER FAILURE BLACKS OUT NEW YORK; THOUSANDS TRAPPED IN THE SUBWAYS; LOOTERS AND VANDALS HIT SOME AREAS, read the six-column banner headline. The Daily News borrowed several generator-powered klieg lights from the crew of Superman, which was being filmed in the lobby of its building (the huge globe made it the picture-perfect newspaper lobby) and managed to publish a late edition. The wood, in tabspeak, was BLACKOUT!

  But it was the local news broadcasts that really brought the story home, the searing images of tenements in flames, of twisted metal and broken glass, of shirtless young men strutting brazenly down crowded streets, pushing shopping carts filled with TV sets, or balancing new couches on their backs like seesaws. This was urban decay on fast forward. Watching the endless loop of destruction proved uniquely unsettling, not so much because of the ruination itself, devastating though it was, as because of what it seemed to suggest, or reveal, about the city. The conservative social critic Midge Decter likened the sensation to “having been given a sudden glimpse into the foundations of one’s house an
d seen, with horror, that it was utterly infested and rotting away.” She then carried the metaphor to its logical, if alarmist, conclusion: “No one will be at ease in the edifice again for a long time, if ever.”

  The final tallies were plenty unnerving in their own right: 1,037 fires, 14 of them multiple alarmers; 1,616 damaged and/or looted stores; 3,776 people arrested. This last figure may well have been the most shocking. In 1964 an off-duty white cop had shot a black teenager, touching off several days of rioting in Harlem and Brooklyn; 373 arrests had been made. Four years later, in the disturbances that followed the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 465 people had been hauled in. Taken together, then, the arrests from the city’s two most recent disorders amounted to one-quarter of those arrested during the blackout of ’77.

  It was the largest mass arrest in the city’s history, yet it had barely dented the momentum of the looting. As one commanding officer in the South Bronx put it, “The restoration of power and the sunrise were the main elements in containing the emergency.” The Chief, the newspaper of the city’s municipal unions, was quick to blame this reality on the layoffs two years earlier, which had reduced the size of the police force by five thousand to twenty-five thousand. The paper warned, ominously, that unless these men were rehired right away, it was doubtful that the Police Department would be able to cope with another citywide power failure.

  The consensus quickly emerged that the cops had exercised commendable restraint. Department officials pointed proudly to their Firearms Discharge Review Board, which had been established several years earlier to discourage officers from firing too freely. “To put matters quite bluntly, we’re shooting less … and hitting more,” Deputy Police Commissioner Frank McLoughlin told New York magazine in an article headlined WHY THE COPS DIDN’T SHOOT. The NYPD reported that only two officers in the entire city had discharged their weapons the night of the blackout. According to the official record, in one case, a Staten Island cop’s gun had gone off accidentally; in the other, an officer in Queens shot a looter’s dog. Much had apparently been learned from the riots of the sixties, which had underscored the dangers of overreacting.