Downtown: My Manhattan

by Pete Hamill

  At the same time, a new cast was appearing in Times Square, made up of inspired citizens, real estate people, members of foundations, hardworking bureaucrats, drafters of zoning laws, and architects. Most were not well-known to the public but were encouraged by the politicians in their primary goal: to save Times Square, starting with Forty-second Street. Their efforts over two decades began to work, with increasing New York-style velocity. They thought the area could be saved without being bricked up or converted into a faceless new version of Rockefeller Center. They insisted that the loose, populist character of Times Square could actually survive progress.

  At first, the changes were small, incremental. The Port Authority Bus Terminal was expanded and then cleaned up by its own police officers, who forced the regiments of vagrants off the premises. Special plainclothes cops watched for runaways, saving them from the predators, gently persuading them to go home. Times Square was becoming the visual symbol of changes that were taking place across the entire city.

  In his last year, Mayor David Dinkins added five thousand new police officers to the force. His successor, Rudolph Giuliani, and his police commissioner, William Bratton, showed how to use them. They employed computers in a system called COMSTAT and insisted on accountability from their commanders. That tale has been well told in a thousand newspaper and magazine articles, and though Giuliani gave himself a variety of unnecessary problems through his brusque personal style, the new system began to work. Crime rates plunged.

  Giuliani had some good luck too. Wall Street and the NASDAQ began to boom, making money available for projects that were impossible during the austere times. The crack fad slowly ended, as ghetto kids backed away from the drug. They had seen what it did to their older brothers and sisters and their parents. Within the poorer communities, many people started calling for a renewed sense of personal responsibility, most clearly voiced at the Million Man March in Washington in October 1995. Speaker after speaker said that black men must take care of their children and guide them to a fully human future, and when the march was over and everybody went home on the buses and trains and in crowded automobiles, that process, steady and slow, actually began to take place. Meanwhile, national welfare reform was enforced locally, and the welfare rolls would fall during Giuliani’s term by more than a half million. At the same time, the largest immigration wave in a century was under way, with more than a million people from China, the Dominican Republic, Russia, Korea, and Mexico arriving in the city, bringing a new version of the work ethic in their baggage. The traditional New York alloy was being revived.

  Then strange things began to happen, most obviously on the Deuce. The grind houses slowly closed, one or two at a time. The welfare hotels closed too, along with the porno shops. The crowds of young hard guys began to thin. The Disney people announced grand plans for the decayed old New Amsterdam Theater, built in 1903, once the home of the Ziegfeld Follies. They began to restore it in 1994 with money from the city (and did the work with extraordinary care). The Disney name attracted other investors. Soon, the newspapers were running many stories of things to come. On another level, change could be witnessed in glimpses. For the first time in many years, I saw women in the subways carrying Macy’s bags. Others even risked what they had not risked for two decades: a subway nap.

  One summer night in Giuliani’s second year, I walked to a building on Twenty-second Street and Broadway where my wife had a small office. We were going to dinner together, and I told her I’d wait for her downstairs, outside the building. The front garden was surrounded by a low polished brick wall. I sat on the wall and watched people go by the way I had when I was a young man on the stoop on East Ninth Street. A white-haired man and his heavyset wife passed, murmuring intimately in the warm downtown air. The restaurant across the street had four small sidewalk tables, lit by hurricane lamps, each chair full. A young woman ran past me and leaped for her young man and they hugged each other. Three young black men ambled by in the other direction, dressed in the summer version of the gang-banger uniform. They were talking about the following month, when they would enter the City University. A man in his sixties came out and sat ten feet away on the brick wall beside a garden light, nodded at me, and began to read a newspaper. A Latino man passed with a transistor radio in his hand. He was tuned to the Mets game. And I thought: It’s over.

  Then my wife came out of the building and I hugged her in that little piece of my city and hers, and all she wanted to know was why I had tears in my eyes.

  Chapter Eleven

  Envoi

  THE CLICHÉ IS true. Nothing lasts forever. As noted, there is almost nothing physical left of the Dutch town. Not much has survived from 117 years of the British colony except the language and the names of places and the paths of certain streets. And yet the Dutch and the British would recognize the place, as would the Knickerbockers, who were descended from their inevitable merger. It might take a few astonished weeks as they adjusted to the height of buildings and the advances of technology. But those original Dutchmen, and the English who accepted and then refined their hardheaded wisdom, would recognize the enduring presence of certain templates. The original settlers knew that the only way human beings could live together here was by practicing tolerance. Sometimes it was a reluctant tolerance. Sometimes it was tolerance combined with the wink and shrug of hypocrisy. But in the end, it was a tolerance that insisted on one fundamental truth: There are people here who are not like us, and we must accept them in order to live.

  Those original New Yorkers must have known, too, that a living city is made through a process of retreat and advance, decay and revival, corruption and reform. That was one of the lessons of European history, going all the way back to the Greeks and Romans. The details have always differed, but similar cycles, no matter what the details, have been part of the history of New York. As I write, we are living in a wonderful period in the city’s life, in spite of, and possibly because of, the worst calamity in our long history. One result of that cyclical history, of course, is that the city and its people are full of contradictions. We moan about the decay of Times Square and Forty-second Street, and then when they are brought back to life, too many of us bemoan something called “Disneyfication.” We pretend to be tough and can weep at the news of a child killed in an accident. We sometimes have a rude way with strangers but go out of our way to help those strangers find their way. We like to brag that we are generous people, but we vigorously protest any new tax that might help the weak. No surprise: Eventually, begrudgingly, we pay, which is why New York is the most heavily taxed city in the United States. This is the city, after all, that made Walt Whitman celebrate each noisy, crowded day, and sing his chants democratic. But it is also the city from which Whitman fled, to live the last eighteen years of his life in New Jersey. In his poetry, Whitman made a virtue of his contradictions. In our lives, so do many of us. New Yorkers often bitch and moan about the impossibility of a decent life in such a place. Some even leave. Almost all of them return. I like to believe that they can’t live without contradiction.

  Like so many New Yorkers, I’ve tried to live the time of my life as fully as possible. But there has simply never been enough time to know all that I wanted to know. One example in my Manhattan is Harlem. I’m a resident of Downtown, and Harlem, in its way, defined Uptown, but I still felt possessive about it, although I knew it only in glimpses. When I was young, I would go there to listen to musicians, sitting some evenings in Small’s Paradise on 135th Street and Seventh Avenue or in the boisterous rows of the Apollo Theater. In the summer of my return from the navy, I saw Duke Ellington standing with a friend outside Frank’s Restaurant. He was the only true American aristocrat I’ve ever seen, but I was still too timid to say hello and give him my gratitude.

  In the fall of 1960, I was sent by the city desk to the Hotel Theresa on 125th Street to cover the action that was swirling around the presence of Fidel Castro. He had come to New York for a meeting of the United Nations Gener
al Assembly, checked in with his people at a hotel in Murray Hill, hated it, and left for Harlem. There he would hold separate meetings with Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union and Egypt’s president Nasser. But affairs of state were only part of the story. Outside the Theresa, crowds gathered for a glimpse of young Castro. Some of them cheered his arrivals and departures. But there were anti-Castro Cuban exiles on the street too, and some black Americans who agreed with their congressman Adam Clayton Powell that Castro was simply using Harlem as a stage set for his own purposes.

  Among the anti-Castro Cubans was a man who was an eerie double for Fidel. He was tall, had the Fidel-style beard, wore the horn-rimmed glasses that Fidel then favored, held a huge (unlit) cigar, and was dressed in fatigues. The photographers loved him, and a UPI cameraman named Andy Lopez, who had covered Fidel’s triumph in Cuba, was among them. Somehow, in spite of security, the photographers rented a room on a middle floor of the Theresa. They gave it to Fidel’s double. Then, as Fidel groupies appeared among the crowds in front of the Theresa, the photographers whispered to them about the chance to meet their hero in private. Up they would go. To this day there must be women who are certain they once slept with the bold hero of the Sierra Maestra, when he and they were young.

  Across the years, I came to know Harlem in other ways. I visited such places as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on 125th Street, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and the Frederick Douglass Center, where young writers held workshops. I saw Malcolm X make a speech to a crowd of almost two thousand people, his language vivid, his volcanic anger simmering beneath almost every word. Alas, I covered too many murders that didn’t get into the newspaper, because they took place at the wrong addresses. I covered a few fires, and one riot that did not approach in horror the eruptions in Watts, Detroit, and Newark. I listened to black nationalists on street corners and got accustomed to being called a “blue-eyed devil.” I sat and talked to the families of black American soldiers who had gone off to Vietnam and came back in body bags, forever young.

  Many Harlemites were welcoming to me, speaking about the things they feared. They were the same things all New Yorkers feared: drugs, guns, the feral young. They were often angry with the police, for what they did (with clubs or guns) or what they didn’t do (cracking down on drug dealers). Like all New Yorkers, the Harlemites often contradicted themselves. But I admired their intelligence, their courage, and their clear-eyed skepticism. Yes, there was still too much injustice if you were a person of color. But they were New Yorkers. The skepticism seldom collapsed into empty cynicism. They believed that life in Harlem would get better because life in New York would get better. “This is my town, man,” one Harlemite said to me during some of the worst of the crackhead years. “I ain’t going anywhere. We gonna beat these bastards.”

  By the time of Giuliani, the change was already under way. Many blacks were annoyed with Giuliani, and a few infuriated, but he and his police commissioners were saving black lives. Black-on-black crime declined, and most violent crime in New York had been committed, sadly, by blacks against blacks. More and more young African Americans were graduating from college and, unlike the educated generation immediately before them, they were staying put in New York. In Harlem, they began reclaiming many of the broken-down brownstones, returning them to life. Other New Yorkers noticed. For the first time in eighty years, whites were competing with blacks for the same Harlem houses, and certain blocks were being integrated. Some unreconstructed sixties-era black nationalists objected to the arrival of the whites, but their rhetoric sounded racist or anachronistic or both. In the years of the boom, most Harlemites were too busy working to join any campaign against the gradual change. Many African Americans had died over the years in the name of integration. How could it now be resisted?

  Around the same time that Disney and others were transforming Forty-second Street, similar changes were under way on 125th Street. The former basketball star Magic Johnson opened a thirteen-screen multiplex for first-run movies. Video stores opened, and record stores, and a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream place, along with clothing stores and restaurants. Yes, this was about being middle class, but Harlemites had little sympathy for the romance of poverty. They knew too well what it was. For Harlem near the end of the twentieth century, as for so many other parts of New York, the plague years seemed to have ended.

  But I never got to know Harlem the way I know other parts of the island’s geography. Again, the main reason was simple: I never paid rent there. I came as a visitor and then went home to some other place. I’ve read the histories* of Harlem and the many fine novels, but they don’t create the knowledge that comes from being part of the dailiness of a place. You have to live in a place to absorb its truest rhythms, to read its whispered scripts, and to know the names of dozens of people and not a mere three or four. I’ve known Harlem the way I know, say, Paris, or even the Upper East Side. The surface is there for me, and the spirit of the place. But now there isn’t enough time left in my life for me to find that other, deeper Harlem. On some nights, in the loft I share with my wife downtown, I apologize to myself.

  As a New Yorker, I ache for certain places and times and people. But the recurrence of that ache is obvious proof that they were alive and so was I. They existed in the world, and I was there to see them. I’m among the most fortunate of men. Much of my life was spent in a ringside seat at the spectacle of history. But being a newspaperman wasn’t the only factor in my education. I saw my city exuberant with life after 1945 and was a boy in a place where everything seemed possible and where I was never alone. I was part of this larger thing too, this city, this living alloy that was Irish and Jewish and Italian and African, this New York.

  How full of marvels was the world! One of the marvels is that I got to see Roy Campanella coming to the plate, a bat in hand and men on base. I saw Jack Roosevelt Robinson rounding third, heading for home. I saw Willie Mays. And I saw them in the company of thousands of roaring human beings, glad people in a glad place in a glad time, all of them members of my tribe, the New York tribe. Nobody can ever tell me that such moments were trivial, mere examples of mindless entertainment and diversion, part of the bread and circuses devised by those who rule us. Such moments were possible only among people who ruled themselves.

  And what gifts were granted to us in our rude democracy. Some were indeed trivial, although made more important by loss. There are New Yorkers in their thirties who never once read W. C. Heinz in the Sun, or Red Smith and Jimmy Breslin in the Herald-Tribune, or Dan Parker in the Daily Mirror, or Frank Graham in the Journal-American. They never ate the ice-cream cone called a Mello Roll either, or candies called Houtons, Kits, Sky Bars, or B-B Bats. They never played stickball. They never held a spaldeen in their hand on a Saturday morning in a street empty of cars and full of hours. They don’t know what game was played in the Polo Grounds. They never saw El Morocco or the Copa, the Latin Quarter or the Chateau Madrid, with the gangsters at the rear tables, all wearing pinkie rings, and the Wall Street big shots down front, and the tall women in feathers and frills on stage, with the highest cheekbones and creamiest skin in the universe. They never saw the Palladium.

  The young still have their cherished moments too, of course, glamorous nights and stars they will remember when they are old. But I don’t make much of an effort to understand Britney Spears. Forgive me, but I saw Billie Holiday. Up on the stage at Carnegie Hall one final time in the 1950s, her voice a ruin, singing those songs written by Jews and Irishmen and transformed by Lady Day into autobiography. Her autobiography, and mine too. I listened to her records for hours on end, and the blues entered me to stay for life, that music of the midnight city that we shared. She was at once one of the gifts my city gave me and part of my tribe.

  The gifts were endless. Where else could you find so many free schools and libraries, those places where you could invent your own life? They were free because the children of the poor Irish and the poor Jews never forgot the time w
hen all such doors were closed. The poor of New York made the rich better. They voted for politicians who, in spite of their own weaknesses, made the city stronger, more prosperous, more just. The politicians were too often corrupt, but in the end the poor got water, the poor got hospitals, the poor got sanitation, the poor got schools and libraries. The poor of the nineteenth century physically built the city in which all of us now live. They dug the subways and laid the tracks. They paved the streets and erected the bridges and the skyscrapers. Too many of them died while doing those jobs. That’s why so many of them had a certain amount of contempt for those whose antics filled too many inches in the newspapers. After all, poor silly Mrs. Astor, with all her fancy dress balls, had never put one brick upon another. When she died, nothing was left behind except her name and the story of her many follies.

  There was a sense among those working people, almost from the beginning, that you would do all right in New York if only you followed the rules. Where I came from, the rules were relatively simple. Work. Put food on the table. Always pay your debts. Never cross a picket line. Don’t look for trouble, because in New York you can always find it. But don’t back off either. Make certain that the old and the weak are never in danger. Vote the straight ticket.

  For a long time, these were the rules all over the city. We got into our deepest trouble in the 1960s, when some of these rules were discarded. I’m part of the New York generation that saw the city glitter and then slowly begin to dim and then to fall into a sustained version of purgatory. If we had died in 1990, we’d have ended our days in a city plagued by drugs, guns, and despair. Somehow our luck held. We have lived long enough to see the city gather its will and energy and rise again, its people playing by the old rules. And every day, we see the thrilling results, sometimes in subtle changes. In my time in New York, I saw shopping-bag ladies arrive, their rusting supermarket carts lumpy with debris wrapped in plastic bags. They slept in doorways, they babbled on corners, they multiplied and were everywhere, and then, abruptly, they were gone. The reason was simple: Those women were weak and abandoned and forlorn, and members of the New York tribe came to their rescue.