Ladies and Gentlemen, THE BRONX IS BURNING

1977, BASEBALL, POLITICS, AND THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF A CITY

By JONATHAN MAHLER

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

Copyright © 2005 Jonathan Mahler
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-374-17528-4

Chapter One

ON the evening of July 3, 1976, some fifty thousand New Yorkers sat on blankets in Central Park's Sheep Meadow eating picnic dinners, drinking wine, waving red, white, and blue sparklers, and listening to Leonard Bernstein conduct the New York Philharmonic in a surging birthday concert for the United States of America.

The next day, a Sunday, dawned bright and brisk. Millions of people set out early to secure spots along the waterfront, crowding onto the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn or staking out space on the West Side Highway, the pockmarked stretch of crumbling concrete and rusting steel that had been closed to traffic for two years now, ever since an elevated portion of the road had collapsed under the weight of a city dump truck loaded with asphalt. The water was scarcely less congested. Thousands of boats jockeyed for space in the New York Harbor, from yawls to sloops to runabouts. It was a forest of masts and sails, "an unbroken bridge of small craft that reached from the shores of Brooklyn to the coast of New Jersey," as the lead story in Monday's New York Times described it. Some boats dipped in and out of view in the chop; others circled idly, their sails bent against the breeze, waiting for the parade to begin.

It began promptly at 11 a.m., when the three-masted Coast Guard bark slipped under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Fireboats sprayed plumes of red, white, and blue water. Cannons boomed. One by one, an armada of tall ships chugged north against the Hudson's current and a downstream wind: the Danmark (Denmark), the Gorch Fock (West Germany), the Nippon Maru (Japan), the Dar Pomorza (Poland), and on and on.

New York's five-foot two-inch Democratic mayor, Abraham Beame, watched the whole spectacle through his Coke-bottle-thick horn-rimmed glasses from the ninety-foot-high flight deck of the host ship, the gargantuan aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. By his side was none other than President Gerald Ford, who had only days earlier reversed his position and conceded to loan New York City five hundred million dollars-enough, for the moment anyway, to stave off bankruptcy. When the show was over, Beame, who was wearing a light blue seersucker suit and USS Forrestal cap, boarded a Circle Line craft that had been hired out to ferry dignitaries to the nearby shore. The boat strayed into the wrong channel and was seized by the Coast Guard. Beame laughed off his rotten luck, as did his wife, Mary. "If they put him in the brig," she joked, "it'll be the first vacation he's had since running for mayor!"

Darkness ushered in the biggest fireworks display in the city's history, thirty minutes of thudding guns and streaking rockets fired from Liberty Island, Ellis Island, Governors Island, and three separate barges. The splashes of color against the night sky were visible for fifteen miles around. Transistor radios were tuned to local stations, which played snippets of great American addresses, from Lincoln at Gettysburg to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. After the last chrysanthemum exploded into thousands of beads of light, the crowd turned toward the Statue of Liberty and sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" as a helicopter towing a huge flag made up of thousands of red, white, and blue lightbulbs floated overhead.

Nobody wanted the party to end. Fortunately, there was another one just around the corner, the thirty-seventh Democratic National Convention. The last two-Chicago '68 and Miami '72-had been notoriously rancorous, but this one was guaranteed to be a love fest. The party's presidential candidate, the genteel Jimmy Carter, had already been anointed, and the city was primping for its close-up. Special repair crews were sent out to patch potholes in midtown, the Transit Authority changed its cleaning schedule to ensure that key stations would be freshly scrubbed for the delegates, and more than a thousand extra patrolmen and close to one hundred extra sanitation men were assigned to special convention duty. With the help of a hastily enacted antiloitering law, the police even managed to round up most of the prostitutes in the vicinity of Madison Square Garden. New York's holding cells were overflowing, but its streets were more or less hooker-free. A red, white, and blue crown glowed atop the Empire State Building.

Come opening night, July 12, the Garden was stuffed to capacity. Beame, who had been the first big-city mayor to throw his support behind the ex-governor of Georgia, welcomed the throngs to "Noo Yawk" in his Lower East Side monotone and then proceeded to hammer the administration of his erstwhile shipmate. "It has been Noo Yawk's misfortune, and the misfortune of this entire nation, that the very men who should have been healing and uniting this land have chosen instead to divide it!" the Mighty Mite thundered.

That night Rolling Stone magazine threw a big bash for Carter's campaign staff at Automation House on the Upper East Side. A month earlier the magazine had splashed Hunter S. Thompson's maniacal twenty-five-thousand-word profile of Carter-JIMMY CARTER AND THE GREAT LEAP OF FAITH-on its cover, thus sewing up the youth vote for the Democratic candidate. (Thompson insisted that the article wasn't an endorsement, but you would have to have been high to read it as anything less.) Pious Christian that he was, Carter may not have been rock 'n' roll ready-in a few years' time, a disillusioned Hunter would be comparing him to a high school civics teacher-but he'd do in a pinch. At least his campaign team, which included the likes of Jody Powell, Hamilton Jordan, and Pat Caddell, passed for young and hip, especially for a magazine that was aspiring to get out of head shops and onto newsstands.

The party was the hottest ticket in town, a strictly A-list affair-the drugs were to be contained to the bathrooms and closets-to which only an elite five hundred had been invited. Thousands more, including dozens of congressmen, turned up. The party started at 11 p.m. By midnight the doors had been barred, and taxis and limousines were still disgorging hundreds more. Lauren Bacall, Senator Gary Hart, Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, Warren Beatty, Carl Bernstein, Nora Ephron, Ben Bradlee, and Katharine Graham all were stuck outside, vainly brandishing their invitations. The scene inside was a little more subdued, as the Establishment (Walter Cronkite) mingled seamlessly with the anti-Establishment (John Belushi). At 3 a.m. the landlord of Automation House, the labor lawyer Ted Kheel, asked the magazine's thirty-one-year-old founding father, Jann Wenner, for a couple thousand dollars to keep the party going. Wenner shouted at Kheel for a few minutes before writing another check, and the booze continued to flow into Monday morning.

It was a bleary crew at the Garden that night, when the Democratic Party adopted a platform that promised, among other things, a "massive effort" to help New York. Twenty-four hours later Jimmy Carter was nominated. As the convention drew to a close, delegates, well-wishers, surely even some reporters sang along to "We Shall Overcome."

ABE Beame might have been forgiven for imagining that those words were meant for him. The past few years had been abysmal, both for the city and, by extension, for its hapless mayor. The clinical term for it, fiscal crisis, didn't approach the raw reality. Spiritual crisis was more like it.

The worst part was that Beame had seen it coming. As the comptroller to his predecessor, John Lindsay-the equivalent of being lookout on the Titanic, as the columnist Jack Newfield once quipped-Beame knew just how precarious things were. On the damp, blustery day when he was sworn into office at the beginning of 1974, he'd grumbled about a newspaper editorial praising Lindsay for leaving the city in good fiscal health. "The man left us with a budget deficit of $1.5 billion," snorted Beame, slapping the paper with the back of his hand for effect as he foreshadowed his headache-filled future. In case he needed another reminder, President Nixon, who would soon know from greasy poles himself, summoned Beame to the Oval Office to tell him he was at the top of one. "And believe me," said an unsympathetic Nixon, "New York is a greasy pole."

Sure enough, New York's 104th mayor hadn't been in office one year when, in the fall of '74, he was forced to put a freeze on all municipal hiring. New York's lenders weren't satisfied. A few months later the mayor sacked New York City employees for the first time since the Great Depression. Now the municipal unions were steamed. Beame quickly caved and rehired some of the laid-off workers. By February '75, Beame was supposed to have gotten rid of twelve thousand of the city's three hundred thousand employees. A New York Times investigation revealed that only seventeen hundred were gone; the rest had merely been shifted to other budget lines. In April '75, Standard and Poors suspended its rating of the city's securities. New York was not considered a safe investment. The city was no longer able to sell bonds, its main source of capital. The iceberg had hit, and Gotham was taking on water.

Down in Washington, hat in hand, Beame received an unsolicited lecture from Treasury Secretary William Simon on the perils of New York's civic liberalism: the generous municipal salaries and pensions; the subsidized public transportation; the rent-controlled apartments; the free higher education. President Ford's equally unsympathetic response was summed up most memorably by the 144-point Daily News headline, FORD TO CELT: DROP DEAD. (Rejected drafts included FORD REFUSES AID TO CITY and FORD SAYS NO TO CITY AID.)

New York reacted to all this with predictable indignation, the rest of the country with just as predictable glee. The syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak understated the matter considerably when they wrote, "Americans do not much like, admire, respect, trust, or believe in New York." In political cartoons across the nation, New York became a sinking ship, a zoo where the apes were employed as zookeepers, a naughty puppy being swatted by a rolled-up newspaper, a stage littered with overturned props.

Reminders of the city's decline were already everywhere. In 1972 the Tonight Show had moved from midtown Manhattan to Burbank, California. To a generation that had grown up watching Jack Paar and Johnny Carson interview Broadway actors, cabaret singers, and jazz and rock stars-live from the show's studio at Rockefeller Center-this was the cultural equivalent of the Brooklyn Dodgers' moving to Los Angeles, the surest sign yet that America's cultural axis was tilting. Carson, who had engineered the move himself, never looked back. New York's travails soon became a running joke in his nightly monologues, which were now, in a symbolic triumph of Hollywood over Broadway, taped. Central Park was Johnny's favorite punch line ("Some Martians landed in Central Park today ... and were mugged").

As for Beame, the time for tiptoeing was over. He gave thirty-eight thousand city workers, including librarians, garbage collectors, firemen, and cops, the ax. In anticipation of the layoffs, the police union had already distributed WELCOME TO FEAR CITY brochures at Kennedy Airport, Grand Central Station, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which came complete with a "survival guide" advising arriving tourists not to leave their hotels after dark or to ride the subways at any hour. On the July 1975 morning when five thousand cops were furloughed, hundreds of them amassed in front of City Hall, waving empty holsters and signs that read: BEAME IS A DESERTER. A RAT HE LEFT THE CITY DEFENSELESS. From there they marched over to the Brooklyn Bridge, where they blocked rush-hour traffic with Police Department barricades. Once the flow of cars had been halted, they deflated tires and hurled obscenities and beer bottles at uniformed ex-colleagues who tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade them to clear the roadway.

Fear City also became Stink City when ten thousand sanitation workers walked off the job to protest the layoffs. The piles rose quickly, and ripe refuse was soon oozing from burst garbage bags and overstuffed trash cans, making it difficult for pedestrians to negotiate many of the city's sidewalks. Within a matter of days some fifty-eight thousand tons of uncollected garbage were roasting in New York's summer sun. Sanitation workers ensured that private collectors wouldn't be able to provide relief from the unremitting stench by sealing off the various dumps in the city's outlying areas.

Twenty-six of New York's 360 firehouses were shuttered, prompting waves of firemen to complain of minor injuries and request sick leave. Communities around the city staged angry protests. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, a poor neighborhood fighting a losing battle against arsonists, residents blockaded an engine company slated for closure and held hostage the fourteen firemen inside. An assistant Fire Department commissioner was dispatched to negotiate their release, and the residents took him hostage as well.

Library branches and public hospitals were closed and the subway fare jumped from thirty-five to fifty cents. More devastating still, at least symbolically, Mayor Beame ended 129 years of free tuition at New York's public colleges, including his alma mater, City College, the fabled gateway to middle-class life. That it was Abe Beame, and not his silver-spooned predecessor, John Lindsay, who presided over the dismantling of this great experiment in social democracy amounted to a bitter irony. He was, after all, one of its proudest products. Beame's parents had fled czarist oppression in Warsaw at the turn of the century for a cold-water flat on the densely populated Lower East Side. His father, a paper cutter and hot-blooded Socialist, toted his young son along to drink in the fevered calls for social justice in drafty high school auditoriums and dingy meeting rooms.

His father's ideological ardor never rubbed off on Beame, but his work ethic did. Beame's first job, in grade school, entailed walking through the tenements before dawn, knocking on doors to wake people who couldn't afford alarm clocks. When he was old enough, Beame joined his father at the stationery factory after school and on Saturdays. Free time was scarce, but on Sunday afternoons he occasionally splashed around the public swimming pool in the old Madison Square Garden on Twenty-third Street. His nickname was Spunky.

A degree in accounting from City College safely in hand, Beame got married, moved to Brooklyn, and started logging time at the local Democratic club in Crown Heights.

Continues...

Excerpted from Ladies and Gentlemen, THE BRONX IS BURNING by JONATHAN MAHLER Copyright © 2005 by Jonathan Mahler. Excerpted by permission.
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