ELAINE MARKSON: I probably voted for Norman Mailer, I’m ashamed to say. He represented something very different. He was an intellectual; we thought he was going to do something for the city.
JIMMY BRESLIN: The trouble was the blind ignorance of the people around us. Norman and I thought we could learn something in the campaign that we could use in writing. But political stories are so hard to sustain because the election is over and everybody forgets about it the next morning.
HERMAN BADILLO: Mailer and Jimmy just wanted to have a good time. Mailer admitted it was a question of whether to run for mayor or write a book about the astronauts. It was all a joke. But it was a really serious thing, and I’ve never forgiven Mailer for that.
The next time around, in 1973, the state legislature—where I did not have the power—decided that they would have a runoff for the Democratic primary for mayor because they were worried I would come out first. This time the race was among Biaggi, Blumenthal, Beame and Badillo; the runoff was between Abe Beame and Herman Badillo.
During the campaign, a friend called me. “What are you doing in the Jewish community?”
“I’m just campaigning.”
“No, no,” he said. “There are flatbed trucks with Puerto Ricans and blacks going through the Jewish communities after ten o’clock at night, hanging on bongo drums, shouting, ‘Vote for Badillo so we can take over City Hall,’ and distributing leaflets saying Badillo is endorsed by the Black Panthers and the Young Lords.”
Jack Neufield called these the Stanleymobiles. Stanley Steingut was the county leader in Brooklyn. He had paid blacks and Puerto Ricans to go on these flatbed trucks through Jewish neighborhoods.
Abe Beame got elected because he was the city comptroller and supposedly understood money. But he died on that because once he got elected, the fiscal crisis came about. Beame was blamed for it, and properly so, because he knew what was going on. That cost him his legacy; he will be remembered as the mayor who presided over the city’s fiscal crisis.
One of the things I had pointed out during the campaign was that normal day-to-day expenses were coming out of the capital budget. For years, the city had spent more for day-to-day and year-to-year expenses than it collected in taxes, and that money was put into the capital budget. You can do that for a limited amount of time. Sooner or later, it catches up.
Because taxes don’t come necessarily on schedule, the city borrows every day in advance of getting money from taxes. It borrows short-term for day-to-day expenses and long-term for the capital budget. Beame thought he would be able to talk the investment bankers into continuing to lend money to the city. But it had gotten to the point where there were billions of dollars in the capital budget. The financial markets came to the conclusion the city could not manage its budget. So they stopped the credit. The government couldn’t meet its day-to-day expenses, and it came to a halt.
This problem was going on during Wagner’s and Lindsay’s terms, but they were able to get away with it. It was precipitated by the movement of the middle class out of the city after the Second World War.
THEODORE KHEEL: Back in 1945, New York City was largely white. The Highway Trust Fund, which opened up the highways from the central city to the suburbs, had a tremendous influence because the whites moved to the suburbs while the blacks and Hispanics came into the city. The city’s problems were exacerbated because the minorities could not pay the taxes necessary to support the city’s services.
JIMMY BRESLIN: They came into New York, these sad-faced women with their arms lagging from carrying babies. They arrived from Shreveport, Louisiana; Valdosta, Georgia; the Tidewater area of Virginia; North Carolina—driven off the cotton fields of the South by the invention of machinery that did the work of ninety field hands. They came to New York because of the hope that there would be more decent treatment here than any other place in the world. At the same time, there was a huge pouring in of people from Puerto Rico on flights into Idlewild Airport, which became Kennedy later on. They called them the flights of the chicken. These people would get out on a cold, windy night at the airport by Jamaica Bay, wearing summer dresses and short-sleeved shirts.
Everything stopped as large amounts of money were put into social services. A lot of people moved out—they didn’t want their kids going to school with blacks and Puerto Rican kids. Financial stress and social problems resulted. Although the city of New York was hurt, it is something for which it shall forever be proud. We tried to feed too many people, to meet too many tremendous needs.
HERMAN BADILLO: One of the arguments I was making during the campaign is that we have to recognize the changing composition of the city, not just in terms of ethnic composition but in terms of poverty and class. Nobody wanted to face up to the fact that New York had become two cities.
When the city couldn’t borrow money, it turned to the federal government to provide short-term assistance.
JOHN CAMPI: On October 30, 1975, the Daily News headline was “Ford to New York: Drop Dead.” It was a classic, and from what Ford said later on, it lost the election for him.
CAROLE RIFKIND: I do believe that headline galvanized people to feel proud about New York. The resilience, the ability of New Yorkers, of the city itself, to triumph over adversity was something many people on many levels felt.
HERMAN BADILLO: I was a congressman at that time, and I remember the struggle to get President Ford and Congress to support us. My colleagues in Washington didn’t like New York. To them, it was a city of minorities: Irish, Italian, Jewish, black, or Puerto Rican, not really part of America.
Fortunately Governor Hugh Carey came up with the idea of the Financial Control Board to guarantee that the state would oversee the operations of the city and make sure that it would have a truly balanced budget. He had been a congressman and had some credibility in Washington. On that basis, New York got federal aid.
The city was saved but it had to pay a heavy price. We had to fire tens of thousands of city employees and increase the subway fare. City services declined greatly. But the most tragic result of the crisis was the end of free tuition at the City University. Members of Congress hated the idea that the City University was the only free university in the nation. So they insisted that one of the requirements for providing federal aid would be that we impose tuition. It was a blow directed against the poor. Five generations of New Yorkers had moved from poverty into the middle class through the City University. People like me and Abe Beame would not have been able to make it if not for the fact that we could go to a college that was free.
After graduating from City College, I went on to Brooklyn Law School, and then started a law practice. The judges found out I spoke Spanish, and they began assigning me to criminal cases, where I discovered a lot of young people were being unjustly held because they were poor and didn’t have a lawyer. There was no legal aid in those days and hardly any lawyers who spoke Spanish. Finally I decided that I couldn’t continue working on a case-by-case basis. I wanted to get involved with the problems in a larger forum. That was how I got into politics.
In 1962, I took over as housing commissioner as a result of the replacement of Robert Moses. He was capable but authoritarian. I opposed him on the Lower Manhattan Expressway. It was very close; he almost won. But Moses’s day was over by that time.
I did not want to repeat the mistakes of the huge public housing projects like those in East Harlem. Say you’re a Puerto Rican kid born on 112th and Madison. Wherever you go, you see a low-rent housing project. You grow up thinking the city is made up of nothing but blacks and Hispanics, and that all blacks and Hispanics are poor. Since it’s low-rent housing, by definition anybody who works his way up has to move out, and new low-income people move in. And all the symbols of authority, the people who run the society, are white.
CAROLE RIFKIND: Previously, public-housing design was limited to the plain redbrick boxes, which are going to be recognized as better than we thought they were because they are nicely proportio
ned and simple. Unfortunately architects had to work within miserable limits, like urban renewal requirements stipulating no doors on the closets. But the architects did what they could, and the housing was built fairly well, with good ventilation. At first they were four stories, then six stories. But they grew with elevator technology up to twenty stories, and that’s when you started to get a lot of social pathology.
ALVIN REED: At first, we in Harlem thought the projects were a blessing from heaven. My mother used to pray every night that it happen to us. When you are coming from rat-infested apartments, straight walk-through railroad flats where to get to the kitchen you got to walk through two bedrooms, the projects seem wonderful. They were just being built; they were brand-new, clean, modern.
By the time my mother finally did get into the projects, she was in her late sixties, and they had turned bad. “Ma, you don’t want to move in there,” we told her. But she still had that thing about getting into the projects.
LACONIA SMEDLEY: You had the city as the bad landlord. They started off okay. They screened people. Then they let anyone in.
ALVIN REED: It got to where everybody who was in there was on some kind of assistance, and if you had a job, they’d charge you so much more rent, and you were living next to people who were hardly paying anything.
LACONIA SMEDLEY: And there were those who were doing drugs, staying home all day, having babies, getting more welfare money, having more babies, and not supervising the children.
HERMAN BADILLO: Between 1962 and 1965, I worked out a huge percentage of the urban renewal projects, including the West Side Urban Renewal Area, which involved a twenty-block neighborhood from 87th to 97th Streets and from Central Park West to Amsterdam Avenue. The original plan called for only four hundred units of low-rent housing, but when I and Judge Milton Mollen, coordinator of housing and development, got involved, we felt the number of low-income units should be raised to twenty-five hundred.
What we did, for the first time in history, was put low-income people in middle-income housing. Instead of having a building with one hundred percent middle-income people, we made it eighty percent middle-income and twenty percent low-income people. A new concept—eighty–twenty—was born.
Central Park West was perfect so we left it alone. But Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues were slums, and so were the brownstones between 87th and 97th Streets. We tore down the slum housing on Columbus and Amsterdam and scattered vest-pocket public housing throughout the area. Because the low-rent apartments were scattered in the buildings, nobody could tell who was who. At the same time, we rehabilitated the brownstones on the side streets and basically made them luxury housing. By doing that, we stabilized the neighborhood south of 87th Street and effectively saved the entire West Side.
CAROLE RIFKIND: What we don’t talk about because of its absence is what was torn down for urban renewal. Lincoln Center is a period piece, and I’ve learned to respect period pieces. But to build it, they moved thousands of poor people out of that area, and when you uproot people, you create social problems. While people lived in their neighborhood, they had continuity; they lived with generations. If a kid misbehaved, the grandmother saw what he was doing. Once people were moved away from their connections, of course they acted out. And it was on such a massive scale.
Lincoln Towers was outrageous because they tore down poor people’s houses and put in housing for upper-middle-class people. Some people said it was not urban renewal but Negro removal or Hispanic removal.
There were two phases of urban renewal: the Eisenhower-influenced years of the fifties and into the early sixties, and the Kennedy-influenced years starting in 1963, when there was massive federal assistance that had not been available before. High and good design was part of the mission of the second phase of urban renewal—a reflection of the influence of Jackie Kennedy, the association with culture, the spirit of innovation and rebelliousness that the sixties brought with it. There was a new energy of planning in the city when Lindsay, who loved high-design architecture, formed something called the Urban Design Group. Later New York State formed the Urban Development Corporation, and those two entities crisscrossed.
THEODORE LIEBMAN: Public housing in New York City is a miracle. All over the United States, it is looked down upon and criticized. Not in New York. Maybe that’s because we accept the fact that not only do we live among poor people and rich people, but we need people of every level to make the city work.
Right after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the New York State Legislature, under very direct pressure from Governor Nelson Rockefeller, passed the Urban Development Act of 1968, which created the New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC). As a result, over the next five years, more than thirty thousand housing units and several new towns were created throughout New York State. The UDC worked with every kind of program and made use of the rather vigorous federal programs of that time to get a mix of income in publicly assisted housing. Its president and CEO was Edward J. Logue, whose previous great achievement had been the building of the new Boston.
UDC was clearly the only public agency within the nation that was focusing not only on building numbers of units but in making them good architecture. I had worked for Ed in Boston, and so when in 1970 he asked me to become chief architect at UDC, I was eager to accept.
I admired Bill Chafee, the first chief architect at UDC, who had directed the program during its first two years. But the focus was on high-rise housing, while I was leaning toward low-rise housing solutions to problems of family housing. My instincts told me children were not suited to the elevator as their means of going out to play, nor was it good for parents to supervise their children from windows on the 19th floor.
I said I would accept the job if I could have the opportunity to see what public housing was like in Europe, where I knew there were better examples of low-rise buildings. And so for nearly a year, my wife and I and our very young children lived in eighty housing projects, in thirty-six different cities, in ten different countries.
People returned from the war and what did they build? The most modern thing: the tower in the park. At the same time, there was an intense need for housing coupled with improved technology that allowed you to build higher, and elevators that allowed you to go higher. But what I discovered, especially in England and Scandinavia, was the beginning of a social reaction to the policies of high-rise housing. And I came back with the idea that we develop a low-rise prototype for New York City blocks with the same or more density than high-rise housing. Ed Logue permitted this to happen.
At UDC, we were looking at some neighborhoods where four- or six-story buildings had been destroyed over the years. The choice was either to consolidate and replace with high-rise towers, or to create blocks identical to the ones that had existed. Our goal was to rebuild full neighborhoods and demonstrate that this type of housing fostered a greater sense of community and provided a more livable environment. We were able to build low-income housing of small units with twice the density of a tower. The spaces between buildings were smaller, but well defined, heavily used, and comfortable. We had seen too many examples of large undefined space that people were afraid to use. This was my focus for over five years at UDC.
CAROLE RIFKIND: If there is anything that represents the whole vision of that time, it is the development of Roosevelt Island. It had a lot of the idealism of the late sixties.
THEODORE LIEBMAN: When Ed Logue undertook developing Welfare Island, which became Roosevelt Island, even the economists at UDC were telling him: If you’re going to build five thousand mixed-income units, start with the upper-middle and middle, and little by little add some low income. He refused a hundred percent. He insisted it be fifty-fifty. His dream was to demonstrate in a place where everybody could see it that all incomes could live together immediately.
Welfare Island was 147 acres in the East River across from the Upper East Side, a place of hospitals, ruins of an asylum, some outbuildings, and not one
unit of housing. Many of the chronically ill patients I met when I first went there were in wheelchairs; they had not been off the island for years.
Ed envisioned turning this place into a car-free community for thousands of New Yorkers. “There should be a school system that’s the best in the city so people should want to come here,” Ed Logue said. “The poor kids and middle-income kids all going to school together in their youngest grades will learn to live together.”
He brought many innovations to Roosevelt Island, like a Scandinavian vacuum system where garbage dropped in a chute was eventually processed at one end of the island, a thousand-car garage and free electric minibuses. The subway that was supposed to come in 1976 did not come until 1986, so as a way to bridge the gap, he bridged the East River with the tram—a gondola-type aerial cable car. We had two slogans: “Only four minutes to the island from Manhattan by tram” and “Four minutes by air to Bloomingdale’s.”
We challenged architects to think about a way to build housing that would work for everyone in a very dense situation where you could not have only low-rise housing. Philip Johnson did the master plan. The architects for the low- and middle-income aspects were Jose Luis Sert, who was dean of Harvard at the time, and Johansen and Bhavnani, who did upper-income housing as well.
UDC was the most powerful housing agency in the state, but it was run like a private company, with an enormous number of very bright lawyers and development-oriented kinds of people—young people who went on to become successful leaders in their fields. It brought a lot of minority architects to prominence. It created an awful lot of mixed-income housing. And Ed Logue was its guiding light.
It came to an end because federal aid was stopped on January 5, 1973, when President Nixon put a freeze on funds for public housing. We knew about this several weeks before and worked day and night to get projects in the pipeline funded.
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