Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  LEONARD KOPPETT: By the middle of the 1960s, the nightlife scene was unraveling because the people who were part of that scene, for the most part, were no longer living in the city. You came out of the theater at 10:45, got in your car and drove home to the suburbs, or you competed against hundreds of people for a taxi. Also ticket prices were so much higher, and you had a television set at home. The nightlife on the streets began to dry up.

  HOWARD KISSEL: My first year at Women’s Wear Daily, I used to get something called the Theater Information Bulletin, which listed what was in the Broadway theaters and what would be opening. There were not more than a dozen shows. Most of the theaters were dark. Around that time, the curtain hour was moved to 7:30 because they were afraid people wouldn’t want to stay in the city too late.

  But then, in 1974, ’75, things started to change. Maybe what prompted the turnaround was that the season before, Pippin had been a big hit, probably the first in a long time. Once you have a big hit, people with money are willing to put money in. Also they were bringing over a lot of things from England. That season began with the revival of Gypsy with Angela Lansbury, then you got Equus with a young Anthony Hopkins, a wonderful version of Sherlock Holmes with John Wood, Diana Rigg in Pygmalion, Rex Harrison in Pirandello. And at the end of the season you had A Chorus Line, which had opened downtown at the Public Theater in the spring of ’75 and on Broadway that fall. It exploded; it primed the pump. And for the next few seasons, it was like everything opened up again.

  It’s interesting that A Chorus Line opened around the time when the city was on the verge of bankruptcy. At a certain point, the West Side Highway collapsed, and there was this feeling that things were falling apart around us.

  But what happened was that people who normally eyed one another with extreme hostility or distrust had no choice but to talk to one another. The city had all these public schools they could no longer keep going, so they started leasing them for peanuts to artists. There was a turning around of public spaces becoming used in a creative way.

  In 1976, the tall ships of Op Sail coming up the harbor against the backdrop of lower Manhattan provided the first romantic image in maybe twenty years. By then it was a new skyline because you had the Twin Towers and all the glass boxes—I liked the older skyline of towers better—but nevertheless, juxtaposed with the tall ships, it was a very beautiful image. That was when people began to perceive New York differently.

  Part Three

  10

  Politics as Usual

  THEODORE KHEEL: After the war, I was hired as an advisor to Mayor William O’Dwyer. My job was to settle labor disputes, of which there were many. As wages had been restricted during the war, there was a mad rush on the part of unions to get wage increases. O’Dwyer liked the idea of participating in labor settlements. I remember calling him at four o’clock one morning saying, “General [he’d been a general in the Army], we’re pretty close to a settlement.”

  He said, “Hold it. I’ll be right down.” And he came down to participate.

  One of the big disputes was with the Transport Workers Union (TWU), which had lost membership after the war because it wasn’t doing much for its members. Mike Quill, its fiery president, took a bold gamble and threatened the first citywide transit strike. His principal issue was exclusive recognition.

  O’Dwyer called everybody to city hall. He appointed David Sarnoff, the head of RCA, as mediator. I became part of a four-member board that was to make recommendations.

  We met in the Central Park South apartment of Samuel Rosenman. It was the summertime so we sat on the patio of his apartment and agreed on the general principles we would recommend. Arthur Meyer, who was chairman of the New York State Board of Mediation and chairman of our group, was to write it.

  Arthur had never been to college, but he fancied himself a Shakespearean authority, and he loved to use three- and four-syllable words. He wrote a report and read it to us. We sat there. It was simply awful, not from a substance but from a style point of view. Finally, Anna Rosenberg said, “Arthur, that is the greatest report I have ever heard. There’s only one thing wrong with it. Nobody will understand what you said.”

  Arthur took umbrage at that. “Well, you write it!” he said, and left.

  I said, “We have the speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt here. Why don’t we ask him to rewrite it?”

  Sam said he would if I assisted him. So we sat down and went over the report.

  Sam told me that in 1936, when Roosevelt was running for reelection and was scheduled to speak in Pittsburgh, he remembered he had given a speech there in 1932 in which he promised to balance the budget. “Sam,” the president said, “write me a speech that explains what happened.” A couple of days later, the president asked, “Sam, have you figured out what to say about that speech in Pittsburgh?”

  Sam said, “Yes, Mr. President. Deny you made it.”

  But we didn’t deny the report Sam and I wrote. It made the TWU, as the largest of the transit workers’ unions, the first among equals and set a pattern so that the others could not get more. It left open the question of strikes by municipal employees, but it led to the organization of many other municipal employees, like the teachers and sanitation workers.

  I became assistant director and then director of the Division of Labor Relations. The transit workers were demanding a wage increase, but the money wasn’t there. The fare was still the same five cents it had been when the first subway was built in 1904. Politically, the five-cent fare was sacrosanct. The Executive Committee of the TWU, which was left-wing, voted to maintain the five-cent fare because it would help the American Labor Party candidate get elected mayor. At that point, Quill, who maintained the five-cent fare had to be increased, denounced the Communist Party. I called O’Dwyer, who was visiting his brother in California. “General, Mike Quill came out in favor of a fare increase.”

  And O’Dwyer said, “I’m coming right home.”

  At a meeting in the mayor’s office, O’Dwyer said to Mike Quill, “How much of a wage increase do you need to beat the Commies?” He knew Quill was going to have a fight with them in his union.

  Quill said, “Twenty-four cents an hour.”

  O’Dwyer said, Will that beat the Commies?”

  Quill said, “That will do it.”

  “Anything else?”

  “The check-off [the deduction of union dues].”

  “You got it.”

  The American Communist Party had been a power, but now it began to unfold.

  The fare on the buses was raised a penny. Later, the fare on the buses and subways went to ten cents, then fifteen cents, then twenty cents, and on up to $1.50.

  O’Dwyer was terrific when it came to handling these labor disputes. I’d brief him for maybe five minutes about what the union wanted and so forth, and he’d call in the press and speak for twenty minutes with complete knowledge of all the subtleties. However, he became bored with the job of mayor, and after he was reelected in 1949, he resigned and became ambassador to Mexico.

  In New York State, the gubernatorial election is one year after the mayoral election. But since O’Dwyer was retiring, there would be a second mayoral election. And then something interesting happened that hasn’t happened again in New York. All four candidates for mayor were Italian.

  The political practice was to have the position of the mayor, the comptroller, and the president of the city council filled by one person from the Bronx, one from Manhattan, and one from Brooklyn. One had to be Irish, one Jewish, and one Italian. Back in 1945, the party bosses selected O’Dwyer, an Irishman from Brooklyn, for mayor; a Jewish man from Manhattan for president of the city council; and an Italian man from the Bronx for comptroller. Then O’Dwyer announced he would not run with the other handpicked nominees of the bosses. So the party selected a Jewish man named Larry Joseph from the Bronx to run for comptroller. They still needed an Italian candidate from Manhattan for president of the city council.

  The word
went out. It was like the song from the show Fiorello—“What about so and so? / He’s dead / What about so and so? / He’s in jail.”

  They got out The Green Book, which lists every department and officer who works for the City and State of New York, and they went through it until finally they came to the name Vincent Impellitteri.

  “Who’s that?”

  “A clerk to a Supreme Court justice.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “Manhattan.”

  “Impellitteri—must be Italian.”

  And they grabbed him.

  Impellitteri was a perfectly pleasant person, as mediocre as anybody in The Green Book. He ran with O’Dwyer in 1945 and got elected.

  When O’Dwyer resigns, Impellitteri becomes mayor. Now there’s a new mayoral election. Carmine De Sapio, the head of Tammany Hall, picks Ferdinand Pecora, an Italian and a justice of the state supreme court, to run for mayor. Impellitteri says as a loyal Democrat, he would step aside for any nominee of the party—except another Italian. If it’s an Italian, he says, it has to be him.

  So Pecora runs as a Democrat, and Impellitteri runs as an Independent. Edward Corsi is the Republican candidate, and the American Labor Party picks Vito Marcantonio as their nominee. There are four Italians running for mayor. They make wild charges against each other—Pecora is the candidate of the mobster Frank Costello; Impellitteri is dominated by Three-Finger Brown. But Impellitteri runs his whole campaign against the bosses, and he wins.

  Impellitteri served out his term until 1953. Then Bob Wagner ran and won. Impellitteri was not prepared to he mayor, but Wagner was. He came from a family that knew New York government. Wagner was a very nice man but a genius at postponing decisions. What Wagner liked best was not making decisions. Jim McFadden was the acting commissioner of a division related to labor matters, and a man Wagner didn’t like at all. Wagner was reluctant to fire McFadden since he had the support of organized labor, but he would not appoint him as full-time commissioner either. The situation reminded me of the song from Guys and Dolls about “the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York”—McFadden was the oldest established permanent floating commissioner in New York. He never got appointed.

  In 1965, Wagner was succeeded by John Lindsay, who got elected because he was very attractive, spoke well, and had the support of the New York Times. But he did not have any understanding of the problem of labor-management relations. The first challenge he faced was the Transit Workers’ strike. It started the first day of his administration—January 1, 1966—lasted eleven days, and shut the subways down.

  The Transit Workers—the exclusive union for the subway workers and several of the bus lines by this time—was pushing for a cents-across-the-board increase. You would get twenty cents whether you’re an electrician or a sweeper. In 1965, the sweeper was getting $2.56 an hour; the motorman was getting $3.46 an hour. If each got a twenty-cent raise, the absolute differential of ninety cents was maintained, but the relative differential, or percentage, was changed.

  Mayor Robert Wagner (left) and Robert Moses (right) tour a housing project in 1956. New York City Housing Commissioner Moses was described as “capable but authoritarian.”

  The sweepers were increasingly blacks; the motormen were whites. There was an uprising of the whites, and Mike Quill realized he had to do something more for the whites than for the blacks because of the relative differential. Quill wanted to meet with Lindsay (he called him “Lindsley”) but Lindsay—who was very partial to problems of minorities—was told by the New York Times not to make any deals with Quill.

  All three commissioners of the Transit Authority and Quill were Irish. Quill said to the chairman, Joseph O’Grady, “Joe, I have an idea [he pronounced “idea” like “idée”]. Why don’t I strike on Saturday morning, January first, and we’ll settle this by midnight on Sunday.”

  Joe said, “Mike, if you do that, I’m going to get an injunction and put everybody in jail except you.”

  Quill said, “Joe, we’ve been friends for all these years. If anybody goes to jail, I have to go to jail.”

  Mayor John V. Lindsay in 1966. He got elected “because he was very attractive, spoke well, and had the support of the New York Times.”

  Quill struck on Saturday morning, expecting to make a settlement by Sunday night. Joe got an injunction; he had to enforce the law, which prohibited the public employees from striking and imposed penalties on striking workers. Quill was put in jail. He had a heart attack and was rushed to Bellevue.

  The strike was on, and it was devastating. The secretary of labor came to town, and the three mediators—of which I was one—were called to city hall. Deputy Mayor Bob Price said to me, “I’d like to talk to you privately.”

  We went down into the basement of the mayor’s office. “We can do you a lot of good,” he said. “This strike is killing us. Would you go to Bellevue and find out how much Quill will settle for?”

  I said, “Bob, there’s nothing you can do for me. I want this strike settled as much as you do. But I’m the wrong person to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Quill’s not going to negotiate with me. I’ll tell you who should go.”

  “Who?”

  “You. You can make a deal.”

  Price went to Bellevue and asked Quill what he’d settle for. Quill put up four fingers. Four bucks, a fifty-four-cent raise on the $3.46 motormen’s hourly rate, or fifteen percent. That became the settlement. The fifteen-percent increase gave more on the motormen’s $3.46 than on the sweepers’ $2.56, so that stretched out the differential.

  There followed a taxpayers’ lawsuit that led to a court order canceling the increases and imposing fines on the striking workers. Quill died of his heart attack, and his successor appealed to Harry Van Arsdale, the head of New York City’s Central Labor Council, who turned to Governor Nelson Rockefeller for assistance. The governor got a law passed repealing penalty provisions of the antistrike law as it pertained to the transit workers and named a committee to write a new law regarding public-sector employment relations.

  As I was a mediator in the transit strike, Lindsay and I started out disliking each other. But ultimately I came to like him. He was intelligent and able, but he was put into a position for which he was not fully prepared.

  JIMMY BRESLIN: Lindsay was the best mayor we had on the topic of race. There were riots all over the country and none here because people trusted him.

  HERMAN BADILLO: Mayor Lindsay was so terrified of riots that he allowed the City University to be destroyed in 1969 after a group of black and Latino students at City College demanded the admissions standards be changed so that there would be the same percentage of black and Latino students at CUNY as there were in the high schools. I was the only public official to come out against open admissions because I knew the value of the City University diploma would be destroyed if the colleges no longer had standards.

  When I was a student at City College, we had a traditional curriculum and very tough courses. The students were the best in the city, the elite. When a professor would start to ask a question, twenty hands would go up: “We know the question, we know the answer.”

  KEN LIBO: I was swept in by open admissions in the early seventies; I rode the crest, becoming an assistant professor at City College. With few exceptions, the old guard could not adjust to having had Jonas Salk as a student in the 1930s and now having generally ill-prepared blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, Koreans. But I adored those kids.

  HERMAN BADILLO: The change to open admissions came about during the time I was running for mayor. I was borough president of the Bronx then and had gotten a lot of good press. It looked very good for me. But there was the possibility that Mayor Wagner, who was then ambassador to Spain, might decide to run for mayor for a fourth term. I found that possibility strange because he had chosen not to run against Lindsay in 1965.

  I met with Wagner and told him the Reform convention of the Democratic Party had vote
d to support me if I pledged to stay on as candidate, even if he were to announce his candidacy six weeks from now. “Tell me if you want to run for mayor, and I will be glad to support you,” I said to him.

  Wagner said, “I understand what you’re talking about. I will not run.” I got the Reform endorsement, and six weeks later Wagner announced his candidacy. That was the first disaster.

  The second was Norman Mailer. He had become close to Jose Torres, the light heavyweight champion of the world, who was a good friend of mine. Jose arranged a fund-raiser for me at Norman’s Brooklyn Heights home. All of the intellectuals, Jack Neufield, Jimmy Breslin, and other such people who were writing for the New York press were there. I spoke and answered questions, and everybody was very impressed.

  A week later Norman asked me to meet him for lunch at the Algonquin. “You know, you were very good,” he said, “but I’m thinking I want to run for mayor myself. I talked to Jimmy Breslin and he agreed to run with me for city council president.”

  JIMMY BRESLIN: One night, Jack Neufield suggested Norman and I should run, and we called the Associated Press and said we’re running. When I woke up in the morning, it was on the wire—too late.

  HERMAN BADILLO: Mailer and Breslin went around drunk through the whole campaign talking about the fifty-first state. At one point Mailer was asked, “Assuming by some miracle you get to be elected, what are you going to do? You know nothing about running the city of New York.”

  He said, “That’s okay I’ll appoint Badillo deputy mayor. He knows what to do.” Even with Wagner in the race, I only lost by about thirty-nine thousand votes. But Mailer carried the Village and the West Side, getting around forty-three thousand votes that would otherwise have come to me. Because the liberal vote was split between Mailer and me, the most right-wing candidate, Mario Procaccino, won the Democratic primary. At that point, we in the black and Puerto Rican community decided to support Lindsay.