“But what about underreacting?” asked angry store owners who couldn’t understand why the police hadn’t been more aggressive. Commissioner Codd had left himself wide open to these attacks when he said on TV a couple of days after the blackout that “sufficient force,” even “deadly force,” would have been used if the rioters had tried to move beyond the confines of the ghettos. Conservatives quickly rallied to the cause. An editorial in the Post blasted what it called Commissioner Codd’s “absurd order to go slowly … as the mobs ran wild.” In the News, syndicated columnist Patrick Buchanan nostalgically recalled the far less measured response to the 1863 rioting, which had also erupted on July 13, by Irish immigrants who were protesting the Civil War draft. “With a clear conscience,” Buchanan wrote, “President Lincoln dispatched the Army of the Potomac, which in turn dispatched a number of the rioters.”
The commissioner of corrections, Benjamin Malcolm, had spent the night of the blackout visiting prisons, first Rikers, where eight inmates had escaped through a hole in the wall at the onset of the power outage, and then the Bronx House of Detention, where a riot had broken out. Prisoners were setting fire to their mattresses, breaking furniture, and clogging toilets to cause flooding. They had hurled a steel bed frame through a window and were lowering a string of knotted blankets down to the street when order was finally restored.
For Malcolm, a veteran of the prison riots of the sixties and the first black to hold his position, the biggest challenge was still ahead: what to do with all the arrested looters. Virtually every cell in the city’s seventy-three precincts was full to overcrowding, as were the prisons. “City buses filled with black men in chains,” wrote Timothy Crouse in The Village Voice, “were roaming from jail to jail looking for empty cells.”
With nowhere else to house prisoners, paddy wagons and squad cars had started delivering them to criminal court buildings a couple of hours before dawn. Officers signed in the accused by flashlight and went about packing them into detention pens meant to hold prisoners for an hour or two before their arraignments.
Morning broke, and police wagons continued rolling up and unloading more prisoners. Before long, at 100 Centre Street, Manhattan’s House of Detention, they were being stuffed into the windowless basement, where a gasoline-generated spotlight had made the already uncomfortably hot room unbearably so. Soon it too was full. Malcolm had no choice but to petition a judge to reopen the Tombs, a prison that had been ordered closed in 1974 for its inhumane conditions.
As the day wore on, the bottleneck continued to build. Arraignments were stalled by missing paperwork and missing officers, many of whom were still out in the streets making arrests, instead of hanging around the courthouse waiting for their cases to be called. Both evidence and witnesses able to make identifications from the dark, chaotic night were in short supply. So were the rap sheets and fingerprint records necessary for judges to set bail, as the power outage had knocked out communications with the central computer in Albany, where everything was stored.
As of 3 p.m. on July 14, the Bronx had worked through two cases, two more than Brooklyn could claim. At 4:30, the courts closed down on account of darkness. The office of the Manhattan DA had prepared 250 felony complaints over the course of the day, but without lights the judges couldn’t read them. “The city was not ready,” was the self-evident conclusion offered several months later by the state committee charged with assessing New York’s “emergency preparedness.”
Before long civil rights groups had been alerted to the squalid conditions in the overcrowded court detention pens. There was no bedding to cover the steel benches, a shortage of bathrooms, and no medical attention for the scores of drug addicts in withdrawal and accused looters sporting nightstick abrasions and lacerations from broken glass. Thirty-six men were in a holding pen twenty feet long and nine feet deep in downtown Manhattan. The president of the Corrections Officers Benevolent Association warned that if something wasn’t done soon, “our prisons will explode and lives will be lost.”
The Legal Aid Society urged the courts to grant the accused parole until their arrest records were located. When that failed, they drafted a statement calling attention to the “abhorrent conditions” in the cellblocks. The suspected looters, the statement went on, were victims of “extreme misery caused by extraordinary unemployment … and massive cutbacks in services.” Hundreds of protesters marched in front of Con Ed’s headquarters on Irving Place, waving placards that read, JAIL LUCE NOT THE LOOTERS and PUT CON EDISON UNDER MARTIAL LAW, NOT THE POOR AND HUNGRY. A new crisis was emerging. “On Wednesday night professional burglars and amateur scavengers disgraced us,” wrote Murray Kempton, “and since then we have disgraced ourselves with our treatment of those arrested for looting.”
Over the weekend, Corrections Commissioner Malcolm and a few of his fellow officials toured Brooklyn’s criminal court building, which had been forced to house 510 detainees, roughly five times its capacity. Two dozen men had been packed into an eight-by-twelve cell for several days. The temperature outside was inching its way toward 100 degrees; the temperature inside was easily 120. There were puddles of urine and vomit on the floor. One of Malcolm’s colleagues compared the pens with the galley of a slave ship. Malcolm, who had seen some grim prison conditions in his day, called these “the worst I’ve ever seen” and promptly barred the press from entering.
On Monday morning a suspected looter was found dead in a basement cell. That afternoon the temperature in the city hit a hundred for the first time in more than ten years. Con Ed appealed to New Yorkers to use electricity sparingly. (100 DEGREES AND THREAT OF A BROWNOUT, blared the front page of the Post.)
The next day the mercury touched 102, making it New York’s hottest July 19 on record. It was the seventh straight day of the heat wave, with no end in sight. Thousands of gallons of water gushed out of hydrants across the five boroughs, triggering a citywide water alert. Beame announced that anyone caught watering his lawn or washing his car would be subject to a fine. On Thursday, the twenty-first, the ninth day of the heat wave, the temperature hit 104, making it the second-hottest day in the city’s 108-year weather history.
By now, at least, the city’s twenty facsimile machines and four computer printers were again spitting out fingerprints and arrest records from Albany. Emergency arraignment courts worked around the clock, dismissing cases, remanding suspects to prison, or setting bail. Most judges heeded Mayor Beame’s call to prosecute looters to the fullest extent of the law, meting out stiff bails and refusing to pleabargain with anyone whose record showed prior felony arrests. “Because this happened during an emergency,” one Brooklyn judge told Newsweek, “it was more than just burglary.”
All 3,776 prisoners had finally been arraigned. But the reckoning with the damage, both physical and psychic, had only just begun.
38.
IN 1969, Norman Mailer, who was pursuing a lark candidacy for the New York City mayoralty at the time, wrote an essay for The New York Times Magazine headlined CAN NEW YORK SURVIVE? In July 1977, the question no longer sounded rhetorical.
A few days after the blackout, Union Carbide, the manufacturer of Eveready batteries, took out a full-page ad in the Daily News headlined IT WASN’T A TOTAL POWER FAILURE. The ad pointed out that flashlights had helped lead people safely down dark stairwells and that portable radios had provided vital information to guide citizens through the crisis. “Whatever else may have happened Wednesday night, we can never forget that tens of thousands of New Yorkers rose to the occasion,” it continued. “Eveready is proud of whatever part our products may have played in this service. We’re even prouder of the New Yorkers who used them to help others.”
What the ad failed to mention was that Union Carbide was in the process of moving its corporate headquarters out of New York City—not, as a company spokesman later pointed out, merely because of the crime and high cost of living but because of its “changing ethnic mix, which makes some people uncomfortable, and the graffiti
on the subways, the dirt on the streets, and a lot of other things.”
Between 1973 and 1976 the city had lost 340,000 jobs. How many more were sure to follow now? An executive recruiter from Chicago told a reporter that he had been handling an alarming number of resumes from people who were willing to go any place but New York, and that was before the blackout.
Ten days after the lights went out, stolen property recovered in raids or returned by citizens was still arriving at the property clerk’s storehouse in Queens at the rate of five truckloads a day. The estimates from the blackout—the damage, the stolen merchandise, the lost business, the spoiled perishables—fluctuated daily, spiking as high as $1 billion before settling at $150 million. (A year later a definitive congressional study put the losses at a little more than twice that.) The debate was academic. Whatever the final sum, it was one that the barely solvent city would not be able to manage. Any hopes that Con Ed might feel obligated to help out were quickly dashed when Luce kicked the blame upstairs, calling the cause of the blackout “an act of God.”
It seemed safe to assume that many of the looted stores would never reopen. Most of them were in dangerous neighborhoods where insurance was either unavailable or prohibitively expensive. A number of those that were insured had civil disobedience clauses in their policies, which precluded claims for losses incurred during riots. Moreover, most of the looted merchants had moved out of the neighborhoods years earlier and had no real stake in their survival. Given what they had just lived through, there wasn’t much reason to believe that they’d be interested in rebuilding their businesses there.
The rest of the country was hardly sympathetic. In the late sixties the rioting in Detroit and Newark had served to draw attention to the plight of America’s ghettos. The 1977 blackout looting in New York only seemed to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions about the city. To go with the fictional portrayals of the dangerous, dystopian metropolis in recent movies such as Taxi Driver, there was now documentary footage.
The Washington Post set the tone, calling the looting “an indictment of the state of the city, its government, and its people.” A spokesman for Miami’s Chamber of Commerce pointed out that America had expected the worst, and New York had not let it down. Even Christianity Today weighed in, suggesting that God had sent his judgment on a city that had turned away from him. “The lack of electricity lit up the reality of people’s minds and hearts,” the magazine wrote. “That’s what people are like when separated from light and the light.” Writing in The New Yorker, Andy Logan summed up the popular sentiment thus: “Instead of comfort, what New York received in the first days after the disaster was often the punitive judgment that it had just got what it deserved, considering the kind of place it was.”
President Carter also rebuffed New York, denying the city’s request to be declared a major disaster area, a designation that would have given it access to badly needed federal funds. Since his election Carter had come to the aid of no fewer than fourteen regions, including some shrimping towns off the coast of his beloved Georgia that had endured a cold winter. But the blackout, the president insisted, was not a natural disaster and thus didn’t qualify for the Federal Disaster Relief Program. The man who had vowed never to tell New York to drop dead was doing just that.
It wasn’t the first time either. As a candidate Carter had criticized President Ford for having “no urban policy.” To date, Carter’s own urban policy had been one of studied indifference. Most noteworthy had been his failure to make good on, or even acknowledge, his campaign pledge to assume the city’s welfare costs, which were currently exceeding its education budget. (Even Mayor Beame had written off the president. “Jimmy Carter still loves me,” the mayor joked at the annual follies put on by the City Hall press corps. “The last time I met with him, he told me he had a whole list of items to help the city. But he left the list in his other sweater.”)
Surely, in the wake of the blackout a presidential visit to one of New York City’s devastated slums was in order. After all, during his presidential campaign, Carter had worked New York’s black churches until his hymn-humming throat was sore. “We do not anticipate there being such a trip,” responded the president’s deputy press secretary at a late July White House press briefing. (First Brother Billy, meanwhile, was making plans to come to ‘21’ to do a TV spot for Peanut Lolita, a new liqueur made from peanuts.)
Not even a pointed attack from Vernon Jordan, the executive director of the National Urban League, could stir Carter to action. “The sad fact,” Jordan told some seven thousand league members at a conference on July 24, “is that the Administration is not living up to the first commandment of politics: Help those who help you.” Instead of redoubling his efforts to help the urban needy, Carter summoned Jordan to the Oval Office to dress him down, assuring him that he had a “genuine interest in poor people … and that statements that argue to the contrary are damaging to the hopes and aspirations of those poor people.”
When it came to New York anyway, the problem for Carter wasn’t so much the black poor as it was the white middle class, one Italian middle-class enclave in particular: Howard Beach, Queens, an otherwise tranquil bayfront community that had managed to plunge the American president into an international crisis within months of his inauguration. At issue was a 1,350-mile-an-hour plane called the Concorde, whose manufacturers, Britain and France, wanted very much to land it at John F. Kennedy Airport, which happened to abut Howard Beach. It was bad enough, the people of Howard Beach complained, that they had to endure the constant roar of ordinary airplanes skimming their rooftops, but to add to the mix the boom of a supersonic jet breaking the sound barrier—and one that hadn’t even been built in this country!—was too much to ask.
The angry protests against what one local politician called “the Edsel of the aircraft industry” paid off. The Port Authority of New York, which had jurisdiction over JFK, banned the jet indefinitely. The French, who considered a berth at the airport critical to the plane’s commercial success and thus to the economic viability of the French town where it was being assembled, didn’t take the news well. “The airport is on the sea, and the sea is crowded by fishes, not by people,” sputtered a disbelieving President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
The president defended the Concorde—CARTER TO QUEENS: DROP DEAF, the headlines might have read—and tried to explain to his respective foreign leaders that the decision was out of his hands. To no avail. France threatened to sabotage future projects with the United States, and warned that it might well withdraw from NATO because of this “’Oward Beach.”
And President Carter offered a beleaguered, postblackout New York a paltry $11.3 million in grants and loans—“a sop … a cover-up for federal inaction,” harrumphed Bronx congressman and long shot mayoral candidate Herman Badillo.
39.
BACK up off the canvas, if still a little woozy, in the weeks after the blackout New York found itself groping to understand the nature of the beating it had just endured.
The last citywide blackout in 1965, when crime had actually dipped, offered an obvious, and not exactly reassuring, basis for comparison. “In ghastly contrast to 1965, when a spirit of unity and common sacrifice brightened every section in the darkened city,” the New York Post editorialized on July 16, “New York was transformed into a series of seething battlegrounds.”
There were important distinctions between the two blackouts. In ‘65, the lights blinked off at five-thirty on a seasonably cool November afternoon, meaning that people hadn’t been out in the streets escaping their steamy tenements as they were in the sultry darkness of July 13. What’s more, most store owners hadn’t yet shuttered for the night, so many simply decided to stay put and protect their property for the duration of the blackout. But the circumstantial details went only so far. The rampage that followed hard on the heels of the onset of darkness in ’77 could not be reasoned away by the temperature and the time of day.
How to explain it then?
Two possibilities quickly emerged. Either the looters were heirs to the urban rioters of the sixties, members of what one columnist termed “the most significant class uprising in this decade,” or they were hoodlums.
That the darkness had illuminated the state of New York’s ghettos, where black and Hispanic teenage unemployment was hovering at 70 and 80 percent respectively, was irrefutable. The argument soon followed that the looting was, at bottom, an indictment of the city’s financial fumblings, which had left too many people without jobs or safety nets to break their fall.
Campaigning in the days after the blackout for City Council, Ruth Messinger, a Bella Abzug acolyte, hammered the point: “It is indefensible that the fiscal crisis has been worked out on the backs of people … Unemployment breeds hunger, resentment, and hopelessness. Low wages, heavy inflation, and loss of services convince people that government is not meeting their basic needs. Our society has been stretched too thin. It took the blackout to expose this to full and public painful view.”
President Carter himself, while not actually setting foot in New York, echoed the theme in an Oval Office interview with the National Black Radio Network, calling the looting a reminder that “deteriorating urban areas have been neglected too long.”
Writing on the op-ed page of the Times, Herbert Gutman, a professor of history at CUNY, went even further, linking the blackout pillaging to the 1902 rioting by Lower East Side Jewish housewives protesting the artificially inflated prices of kosher meat. A flood of angry letters poured in, opposing both Gutman’s piece and a pair of Times editorials. “These people,” concluded one of the editorials, “are victims of economic and social forces that they sense but do not understand … they are locked in a once-promising city, watching jobs and opportunity evaporate across the suburban horizon.”
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City Page 24
