“From the Cracks in the Sidewalks of NYC”: The

“From the Cracks in the Sidewalks of N.Y.C.”: The Embodied Production of Urban Decline, Survival, and Renewal in New York’s Fiscal-Crisis-Era Streets, 1977-1983 by Elizabeth Healy Matassa B.A. in Italian and French Studies, May 2003, University of Delaware M.A. in Geography, May 2006, Louisiana State University A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 31, 2014 Dissertation directed by Suleiman Osman Associate Professor of American Studies The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of the George Washington University certifies that Elizabeth Healy Matassa has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of August 21, 2013. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. “From the Cracks in the Sidewalks of N.Y.C.”: The Embodied Production of Decline, Survival, and Renewal in New York’s Fiscal-Crisis-Era Streets, 1977-1983 Elizabeth Healy Matassa Dissertation Research Committee: Suleiman Osman, Associate Professor of American Studies, Dissertation Director Elaine Peña, Associate Professor of American Studies, Committee Member Elizabeth Chacko, Associate Professor of Geography and International Affairs, Committee Member ii ©Copyright 2013 by Elizabeth Healy Matassa All rights reserved iii Dedication The author wishes to dedicate this dissertation to the five boroughs. From Woodlawn to the Rockaways: this one’s for you. iv Abstract of Dissertation “From the Cracks in the Sidewalks of N.Y.C.”: The Embodied Production of Urban Decline, Survival, and Renewal in New York’s Fiscal-Crisis-Era Streets, 1977-1983 This dissertation argues that New York City’s 1970s fiscal crisis was not only an economic crisis, but was also a spatial and embodied one. During the crisis era, the news media, residents, and public officials fought to define who could inhabit certain types of spaces and what kinds of practices were permissible within them. Specifically, I argue that ideas about urban decline, survival, and renewal during the crisis era were produced through acts of walking, strutting, roaming, running, and cleaning in the city’s streets. Moreover, these acts not only produced crisis discourse but also helped produce the lived and perceived landscapes in which they occurred; street practices and their representations altered the ways in which New Yorkers thought about and inhabited these spaces, and resulted in concrete changes to the built environment. I consider the iconic walks of John Travolta in the opening of Saturday Night Fever and President Carter through the South Bronx, residents’ movements along the Brooklyn-Queens border during the 1977 blackout, the “Son of Sam” serial killer’s navigation of white ethnic outer-borough neighborhoods, and Mayor Ed Koch’s promotion of walking during the 1980 transit strike. This dissertation combines performance studies and cultural geography optics to question how ideas about space are produced, maintained, and negotiated through practice, discourse, and emotion. By valuing New Yorkers’ inhabitations of the streets, my study uncovers the more tacit ways in which ideas about space are produced and probes how certain among these ideas gain the power to become v accepted as “commonsense.” This project contributes to a newly emerging body of scholarship that examines the political and cultural shifts during the 1970s, and the relationship of these transformations to the nation’s urban areas. By examining spatial practices during this pivotal moment in both the city and the country’s history, I consider how these political and cultural shifts were also grounded in particular places and everyday acts. vi Table of Contents Dedication iv Abstract of Dissertation v List of Symbols viii Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2 44 Chapter 3 92 Chapter 4 144 Chapter 5 236 Chapter 6 274 Coda 327 Selected Bibliography 339 vii List of Symbols 1. DN New York Daily News 2. LOC Library of Congress 3. NY Mag New York Magazine 2. NYP New York Post 3. NYPL New York Public Library viii Chapter 1: Introduction “To assert in the language of common sense that an urban space refers unequivocally to intrinsic uses is to claim that the city itself speaks. For the notion that the city speaks for itself conceals the identity of those who speak through the city”- Rosalind Deutsche1 “Well you can tell by the way I use my walk/I’m a woman’s man, no time to talk”- The Bee-Gees2 In October of 1977, President Jimmy Carter boarded a cream-colored limousine outside the United Nations building in Manhattan and traveled to the Crotona Park East section of New York City’s South Bronx. Though he made only two brief stops in the borough, as the President walked down Charlotte Street in what was one of the most distressed neighborhoods in the city, his footsteps mapped the geography of urban decline. “Mr. Carter,” wrote the New York Times, “walked through two blocks of rubble that looked like the result of wartime bombing,” and the Bronx became instantly known for “all in American cities that is unwanted and misunderstood.”3 That spring, “compulsive walker” David Berkowitz, known as the “Son of Sam” serial killer, greeted the Daily News’ readership “from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C” as he traveled unfettered through the streets of working-class white ethnic neighborhoods in search of victims. 4 In July, a power outage left the city in darkness and led to widespread looting in the streets of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, the most severe of which was located in 1 Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 52. 2 The Bee Gees, “Stayin’ Alive,” Saturday Night Fever, RSO, 1977. 3 Lee Dembart, “Carter Takes ‘Sobering’ Trip to South Bronx,” NYT, October 6, 1977; Richard Severo, “Bronx Symbol of Woes,” NYT, October 6, 1977. 4 Jimmy Breslin, “Breslin to .44 Killer: Give Up Now!” DN, June 5, 1977. The term “white ethnic” has been defined in a number of ways. In the broadest sense, it refers to non-Protestant Americans with roots in Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe. The term often has working class connotations, and is connected to landscapes in the Rust Belt and northeastern U.S. In the context of New York City, Jews, Italians, and the Irish are often cited as the three major white ethnic groups. For more information, see my discussion of existing scholarship on the white ethnic urban experience in the literature review. 1 Central Brooklyn’s Bushwick. “They’re coming across Bushwick Avenue like buffalo,” stated one petrified woman in a phone call to the 81st precinct in Brooklyn.5 In the wake of the blackout, mayoral candidates primed for that fall’s election circumnavigated a “half-destroyed block [in Bushwick], their shoes crunching on the broken glass” to reach the living room of the Casuso family, where they saw “first-hand what had become of a once-proud community of Italian and German-Americans.” 6 Across the Bushwick border, in the predominately white ethnic enclave of Ridgewood, resident Mathias Kump, attempted to “chase decay from [his] doorstep” by “sweep[ing] his stoop and sidewalk ‘everyday, sometimes twice.’”7 And in December, John Travolta’s disco-dancing character Tony Manero claimed the pavement as his own as he swaggered down Bensonhurst, Brooklyn’s 86th Street in the opening of Saturday Night Fever. “The street’s all his, past doubt. And more, if he wants,” wrote Time magazine following the film’s release. “Travolta fills up all that space and pushes at the boundaries.”8 These practices were produced by a city in economic and, some believed, social crisis. During the 1970s, New York teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, lost nearly one million inhabitants, and suffered severe cuts in municipal services.9 In November of 1973, the nation entered into a recession that was characterized by a combination of inflation and high unemployment, termed “stagflation,” and which was partially spurred 5 Richard Boeth, “The Plunderers,” Newsweek, July 25, 1977, 23. 6 Beth Fallon, “The Candidates Debate in Bushwick,” NYP, October 24, 1977; Paul La Rosa, “Bushwick: Reviving,” DN, July 12, 1987. 7 Peter Freiberg, “Ridgewood Tries to Chase Decay from its Doorstep,” NYP, March 13, 1977. 8 “High Steppin’ to Stardom: John Travolta Owns the Street, and His Fever Seems Contagious,” Time, April 3, 1978, 82. 9 This marked the first major population decline in the city’s history. The white population in particular decreased by one-fourth according to John Mollenkopf cited in Michael Goodwin, ed., New York Comes Back: The Mayoralty of Edward I. Koch (New York: PowerHouse Books, 2005). 2 by rising oil prices and increased spending on the Vietnam War. As New York continued its longtime practice of financing deficits with expensive short-term borrowing, and shifting ongoing expenses into a capital budget financed by debt, the system collapsed.10 In April of 1975, the city was shut out of credit markets and its short-term debt reached a staggering 6 billion dollars that was scheduled to come due within the next year.11 “The nation’s largest city had literally run out of money and could not pay for normal operating expenses,” remarks scholar Roger Dunstan.12 The State took control of the city’s finances.13 Officials, residents, and journalists fiercely debated the causes of the fiscal crisis, which ranged from a critique of the City’s supposedly overzealous social welfare policies to backlash against its increased support of corporate welfare at the expense of these social initiatives.14 10 The City had begun running deficits during the mayoralty of Robert Wagner, who served from 1961-65.

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