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“From the Cracks in the Sidewalks of N.Y.C.”: The Embodied Production of Urban Decline, Survival, and Renewal in ’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 ’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 ’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 and President Carter through the , residents’ movements along the - border during the 1977 blackout, the “Son of Sam” ’s navigation of white ethnic outer-borough neighborhoods, and ’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

2. LOC

3. NY Mag New York Magazine

2. NYP

3. NYPL

viii Chapter 1: Introduction

“To assert in the 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 boarded a cream-colored limousine outside the building in 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 , “walked through two blocks of rubble that looked like the result of wartime bombing,” and became instantly known for “all in American cities that is unwanted and misunderstood.”3 That spring,

“compulsive walker” , 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 , “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 , “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, , 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 -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,” , 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 . 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. According to Jonathan Soffer’s Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City (New York: Press, 2010), 5, the sources of these deficits included “political patronage, cuts in federal funding, increases in health, welfare and pension spending, deindustrialization, and the credit crunch of the early 1970s and 1980s.” According to many scholars, the roots of crisis could also be found in the 1969-1970 national recession. 11 The short-term debt figure is cited in the Municipal Assistance Corporation’s (MAC) City of New York Annual Report 1977, found in the Edward N. Costikyan Papers, Columbia University (Box 40/Koch Miscellaneous Folder). Ed Costikyan was the former Manhattan Democratic Leader and head of the Charter Revision Commission, and served as a chairperson on Koch’s campaign staff. Goodwin’s New York Comes Back, 20, notes that total debts were over twenty billion and that the budget deficit was one billion. 12 Roger Dunstan for the California Research Bureau, “Overview of New York City’s Fiscal Crisis,” CRB Note 3, no.1 (California State Library, March 1, 1995). 13 New York State Governor constructed two agencies to handle the crisis; the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC) was tasked with refinancing the city’s bonds, and the Emergency Finance Control Board (EFCB) was granted complete control over the collection and disbursal of city funds. 14 See Time Magazine’s series “Cities: How New York City Lurched to the Brink,” June 16, 1975, for a thorough indictment of the City’s municipal generosity. For a journalistic examination of RAND’s studies and the resultant shifts in the City’s approach to firefighting, see Joe Flood’s The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City- and Determined the Future of Cities (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010), and ecologist Deborah and epidemiologist Roderick Wallace’s A Plague on Both Your Houses: How New York Was Burned Down and Public Health Crumbled (New York: Verso, 1998).

3 But, as this dissertation argues, these acts of taking to the streets also produced ideas about what this crisis meant. I argue that the city’s fiscal crisis was not only an economic crisis, but was also an embodied and spatial one; residents and public officials actively defined and negotiated the crisis’ meanings through their practices, and representations of these practices, within particular kinds of spaces. Specifically, I argue that discourses 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 altered the ways in which New Yorkers thought about and moved through particular spaces and resulted in concrete changes to these spaces.

This dissertation combines performance studies and cultural geography optics to question how ideas about spaces are produced, maintained, and negotiated through practice. Through this questioning, I probe how certain spatial ideas gain the cultural power to become accepted as “commonsense.” To do so, I examine city dwellers’ spatial practices and their perceptions of these practices through visual culture, verbal and written discourse, and the built environment. I pay particular attention to their feelings about these practices and the places in which they unfold. This study of what I call

“affective spatial habitus” explores how practice, discourse, and emotion allow ideas about urban places to become intelligible during a particular historical moment. During the crisis, New York’s affective spatial habitus defined the meanings of decline, survival, and renewal, and mapped where they could occur.

4 This dissertation also analyzes the critical role of public space, and the streets in particular, in producing crisis meanings, and considers how both official and unofficial practices within these public spaces constructed ideas about what it meant for New York to decline or survive. I also examine how the Ed Koch mayoral administration mobilized and complicated these practices to ultimately forge a renewal narrative about the city’s recovery.15 During the crisis, city dwellers struggled to make sense of and produce meanings about the streets as simultaneous sites of fear, violence, anger, creative possibility, and joyous self-expression. These public spaces became sites of reactionary insurgence, normative power maintenance, and grey spaces in which this binary was broken down. New Yorkers asserted particular blocks as microcosms of the city’s woes or resilience, and argued that the practices within these blocks produced these microcosmic emotional narratives about the city’s fate.16

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 and to New York City in particular. Scholars have argued that although New York’s economic despair was not singular among rust belt cities it nonetheless became the primary visual and narrative lens through which the

15 Ed Koch was elected in November of 1977, took office in January of 1978, and ended his tenure in December of 1989. 16 On the cover of his famous account of the crisis, The Streets Were Paved with Gold (New York: , 1975), journalist Ken Auletta sited the “tragedy” of the crisis within the streets. New Yorkers’ preoccupation with the streetscape was reflected in the Times’ daily “building boxes,” also known as the “ruins section,” which detailed buildings destroyed by ; this column became “killing boxes” during the 1980s, which provided daily statistics: as noted in Marshall Berman and Brian Berger, eds., New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). See also Jim McLaughlin’s “New York State of Crime” essay in the same volume where he describes how New Yorkers experienced crime in quotidian ways, and Marshall Berman’s essay in John Alan Farmer, ed., Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Remembered since the 1960s (New York: The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1999).

5 country viewed its urban transformations. They have also asserted that the city served as a forerunner of governmental policy across the nation. During the crisis era, New York shifted from a social welfare model of governance to a privatized “dual city” of extreme economic inequity, from a manufacturing economy to a “symbolic” economy fueled by tourism, and the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) industries, from modernist

“top-down” planning practices to localist community development, and from tolerant pluralism to “single-issue politics.”17 These transformations not only occurred within the context of larger national shifts, but also served as models for urban development and governance across the country.

I speak specifically to scholars who have characterized New York’s crisis as one of representation, during which the unprecedented amount of national and local media attention that New York received enabled narratives about the city’s meanings to emerge.

While the singularity of New York’s financial circumstances was debatable, 18 the city was nevertheless unique in public perception. The crisis’ import transcended economics as images of burning buildings, violent crime, and civil disorder were nationally and locally televised. New York quickly became “a national symbol of what [was] wrong with urban America.”19 This scholarship argues that representations and perceptions directly affected how officials governed and residents experienced the city during the crisis. Yet while these scholars have acknowledged that the era marked a turning point in

17 Soffer comments on the transition to “single-issue politics” in Koch. 18 A 1976 New York Affairs article concluded that Philadelphia, Richmond and were all worse off than New York: Richard Nathan, “Is There a National Urban Crisis?” New York Affairs 3, no.4 (Summer/Fall): 9-17: NYPL Milstein Division. 19 Severo, “Bronx a Symbol.” Although this phrase refers to the distressed South Bronx, as revealed through the media’s portrayal of President Carter’s visit to the borough, nationally broadcast images of this area soon came to stand in for the entire city in the popular consciousness. See Chapter 1 for a fuller discussion of this process.

6 how certain kinds of urban spaces were being represented to the public and inhabited on the ground, they position these spaces as backdrops for negotiating the crisis rather than dynamic sites through which its meanings were actively produced. Building and expanding upon their work, this dissertation considers the role of embodied practice in the production of these spatial meanings, and examines how spatial practice became a critical piece of crisis-era perceptions. In doing so, I uncover how the era’s transformations were also articulated and negotiated through specific spaces and everyday acts.

Methodology

In order to explore the role of practice within the crisis’ spatial history, this dissertation utilizes a distinctive methodology that draws from historical archival research, ethnography, cultural geography, and performance studies. Following the work of performance studies practitioner Shannon Jackson and historian James Goodman, I employ a methodological approach to the archive that can be termed ethno-historical, and which seeks to reassert the critical role of practice in the production of history.20 In

Goodman’s examination of the city’s 1977 blackout, it becomes strikingly evident that any scholarship that attempts to make sense of the fiscal-crisis era must probe the

20 Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (Ann Arbor: The University of Press, 2000); James Goodman, Blackout (New York: North Point Press, 2003). Through a similar blend of oral history and attention to everyday practice in the archives, George Chauncey is able to unveil an alternative set of tactical maneuvers that are accessible to gay men in quotidian urban spaces during the early twentieth- century in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890- 1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994). Both Goodman and Chauncey’s approaches follow the turn in urban history toward an anthropological approach that emphasizes the “discourse of the street.” See Timothy Gilfoyle’s “White Cities, Linguistic Turns and Disneylands: The New Paradigms of Urban History,” Reviews in American History 26 (1998): 175-204.

7 epiphenomenal quality of decline narratives by teasing out quotidian activities from archival materials.21 This close attention to practice will allow me to consider the non- verbal and non-written ways in which knowledge is produced and transmitted.22 Ways of moving are ways of thinking, asserts anthropologist Deirdre Sklar; our actions in the world both interpret and argue about the world.23 Jackson concludes that we must consider embodied practices as part of a broader signifying system of discourse that is not purely written.24 As Marvin Carlson explains, a performance studies paradigm is particularly well suited to approaching the question of how “human patterns of activity

[are] reinforced or changed within a culture” because it is concerned with “doings and redoings;” repeated practices both build up evidence of certain ideas within the body and within space, and are vulnerable to transformation precisely because no practice can be faithfully repeated. 25

21 This imperative to complicate monolithic decline narratives is also evidenced by both Steven Gregory’s Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton, NJ: Press, 1998) and Jonathan Rieder’s Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Press, 1985), which achieve somewhat similar results through the use of sociological ethnography, although their focus is on the production of site-specific visions of community within particular neighborhoods. Gregory emphasizes the “everyday dimensions of urban life” in order to understand the relationship between community formation and larger structures of economic and political power, and Rieder remains dedicated to the distinctiveness of residents’ experiences through which a “geopolitics of local community” is forged (Gregory, 5, 14; Rieder, 233). Yet within the body of more recent scholarship, which does not have the advantages of Gregory and Rieder’s style of ethnographic inquiry, Goodman’s Blackout stands alone. 22 In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), performance studies scholar Diana Taylor argues that the “repertoire” of social practices must be considered on equal terms with the “archive” of supposedly enduring written historical materials; through repeated praxis, the body has the ability to produce, store, and circulate knowledge. 23 Deidre Sklar, Dancing with the Virgin: Body and Faith in the Fiesta of Tortugas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 24 Jackson, Lines, 22. 25 Marvin A. Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003), ix. See Richard Schechner’s idea of “restored behavior,” and Shannon Jackson’s articulation of “transformative repetition.” There is a larger debate within the field of performance studies as to

8 Employing a space production method that utilizes the work of Henri Lefebvre and Shannon Jackson, I argue that the history of spaces must also be understood as the history of the changing everyday practices that occurred within them. Lefebvre argues that social space is never a container or backdrop for cultural action, but is constantly brought into being through social practices that develop, maintain, legitimize, and disrupt its meanings.26 By extension, the history of spaces can never be seen in causal or teleological terms but rather must be understood through changes in modes of production that include economic systems, expressions of power, and particular performances. The idea that space is produced through the practices that unfold within it is well evidenced in the work of Jackson and geographers Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose. Gregson and

Rose assert that space functions dialectically; spaces are brought into being through practice and yet these spaces also can constrain and necessitate certain practices.27 Justin

Spinney, Tim Cresswell, and Iain Borden specifically examine the relationship between embodied movements and the production of spatial meanings. Borden utilizes Lefebvre’s

“rhythmanalysis” to argue that bodies “speak an engagement with the city” as they move through it, and examines the ways in which the city’s built textures and temporal rhythms affect this engagement.28 For Jackson, an attention to spatial practices is critical to both

whether the knowledge produced through practices either lingers or disappears. For scholars like Taylor, the power of performance is manifest through the residue it deposits within bodies and spaces; for Jackson and Peggy Phelen, this power lies in the ephemeral and evasive nature of performances. 26 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1974/2000). 27 Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose, “Taking Butler Elsewhere: Performativities, Spatialities and Subjectivities,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 (2000): 433-452. 28 Quote from Iain Borden, “Another Pavement, Another Beach: Skatebording and the Performative Critique of Architecture,” in Iain Borden, ed., The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 187; Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006); Justin Spinney,

9 our understanding of the history of particular spaces and to the actual process of archival analysis. Jackson underlines that while certain spatial memories gain legitimacy in particular moments, approaching the archive through a performance studies lens allows historians to attend to different spatial inhabitations than those that are currently privileged by written history.

By focusing partially on spatial practices as they manifest in public discourse, this project also concedes that spaces are produced through a variety of mediums, and that verbal and written discourse help define the contours of what cultural ideas can become intelligible within a particular historical moment. Because of the nature of my sources, which are predominately printed news media and municipal documents and, to a lesser extent, video footage and photographs, my analysis often centers on how New Yorkers were describing and perceiving embodied practices. There are moments, of course, when

I contend that bodies themselves pose arguments about space. Yet even in these moments of close reading New Yorkers’ corporeality, I concede that these readings are often mediated through written accounts of practice. Broadly defined, Gabriella Gahlia

Modan describes discourse as a “set of utterances that are part of a linguistic and social context.” Public discourse, Modan argues, is a “discourse that can reach an audience which is, in principal, open to anyone.”29 Johannes Fabian’s work on chronopolitics clearly evidences the material consequences of discursive choices in anthropological study itself, and this understanding is aptly applied to the ethnographic work of scholar

Dwight Conquergood, who argues that “discursive displacement” of city dwellers can be

“A Place of Sense: A Kinesthetic Ethnography of Cyclists on Mont Ventoux,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, no.5 (2006): 709-732. 29 Gabriella Gahlia Modan, Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 6. Modan borrows sociolinguist Deborah Schiffrin’s definition of discourse.

10 as powerful and real as physical displacement in his study of marginalized urban space.30

Moreover, the two processes are often mutually constitutive, and the ways in which spatial narratives are constructed and recounted often justifies municipal interventions in the built environment, sanctions specific behaviors within those spaces, and assists urbanites in making sense of and navigating the city.31 In her anthropological study of meaning making among Appalachians in West Virginia, anthropologist Katheleen

Stewart probes this relationship between spatial practice and discourse. Stewart examines how wandering through “chronotopes,” which she describes as landscapes of material and symbolic excess that are not privileged by the dominant historical narrative, can produce corporeal and geographic “retellings” of history.32 Likewise, Lefebvre’s

“representational spaces” are a complex mixture of symbolic and textual representations of space, and lived experiences. Jackson considers the limitations of reading spaces and spatial practices purely as texts. “The lived experience of space is not always an act of decoding,” she writes. “It is sometimes about motion, sensual reaction, physical obstacle, and embodied gesture, often elements whose meaning is not articulated in a verbal

30 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Dwight Conquergood, “Life in Big Red: Struggles and Accommodations in a Polyethnic Tenement,” in Structuring Diversity: Ethnographic Perspectives on the New Immigration, ed. Louise Lamphere (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 325-341. 31 Likewise, Modan contends that discursive struggles over the proper meanings of particular places result in the allocation of spatial resources and the legitimization of appropriate activities within these spaces. Robert Beauregard’s Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (New York: Routledge, 2003) also emphasizes that urbanites negotiate their understanding of the city through stories about space, and that urban decline discourse in the 20th century helped to obscure racial and social issues by transforming the story of cities into a teleological “life-cycle” model of rise and fall. See also Joe Austin’s discussion of framing stories in Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 32 Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

11 consciousness.”33 Ultimately, stories about space have consequences on the ground, and closer attention to how words are lived can illuminate both the ways in which the two realms interpenetrate one another, and the ways in which lived practices can sometimes exceed linguistic categorization.

By closely attending to practice, I do not intend to lose sight of the larger structural constraints that delimit cultural production. This balance between structure and agency is expressed in what Margaret Drewal calls the “temporal approach,” and through this approach she is able to both place bodies within a larger context of historical, political, and economic constraints while also arguing that these bodies are never docile and are always imbued with some room to maneuver and manipulate within existing structures.34 This balance between structure and agency is applied to geographic space through Loretta Lee’s “interactionist” approach, in which she argues that people do not

“act on one hand, and read meaning on the other,” but that both the symbolic and potentially hegemonic structure of architecture itself and the social practices contained within physical structures occur simultaneously to produce spatial meaning, and that it is unduly facile to think of practice as merely “resistant.”35

My focus on the production of spatial meanings probes how power operates spatially, and how certain geographic ideas become accepted as normative or

“commonsense.” The work of geographers Tim Cresswell and Rob Shields has focused on the intersections between ideology and place. Cresswell argues that “common sense”

33 Jackson, Lines, 25. 34 Margaret Drewal, Yoruba Ritual: Performance, Play, Agency (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994). 35 Loretta Lees, “Towards a Critical Geography of Architecture: The Case of an Ersatz Column,” Ecumene 8, no.1 (2001): 51-77. See also Borden’s The Unknown City, in which he advocates a new approach toward urban architecture that acknowledges the role of discourse and practice in producing meanings about architecture.

12 is a powerful tool that maps the limits of what is good, what exists and what is possible in the world, and that normative landscapes are constructed by attaching behavioral norms and ideological values to certain places.36 Both Shields and Cresswell emphasize that normative landscapes are continually defined, defended, and challenged through practice and discourse, and that place becomes a particularly potent force in the construction of normative ideologies because of its seeming “obviousness.” Because of space’s apparent

“objectiveness,” it becomes an ideal site for the naturalization of particular world views.

During the crisis, this naturalization process was well evidenced by then mayoral candidate Koch’s curious statement to Daily News reporter in 1977:

“ is not racial- it’s geographical,” Koch claimed.37 In Deutsche’s study of art in

New York’s public spaces in the post-crisis era, she examines how Koch’s anti-homeless policies relied upon this supposed obviousness as he “[proclaimed] the transparency” and

“objective” function of particular spaces. Similarly, in her ethnographic study of the

“politics of place” in a Washington, D.C. neighborhood, Modan utilizes Jane Hill’s concept of “moral geographies” to examine the ways in which values are attached to certain groups or individuals within particular spaces. Modan describes these moral geographies as “spatialized forms of social positioning.” “Creating a moral geography is all about showing that you fit in and how you fit in- that you are the landscape are well matched,” states Modan. Moreover, Modan argues that the social identities of groups are solidified through a set of practices that unfold within a place. 38 And as Robert

Beauregard and Lefebvre have emphasized, the act of pathologizing certain spaces has

36 Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 14. 37 Pete Hamill, “Bushwick and Bush League Solutions,” DN, October 24, 1977. 38 Modan, Turf Wars, 298, 90. She utilizes the term “community of practice,” which she adopts from anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wagner, 282.

13 served as an insidious mode of producing “commonsense” ideas. “Such formulations [of pathologizing space] serve to divert attention from the criticism of space and to replace critical analysis by schemata that are at once not very rational and very reactionary,” concludes Lefebvre.39 Susan Craddock has considered the spatial pathology of filth, and has emphasized that this pathology reproduces itself through symbols, discourse, and practices.40 The ideological value of geography also becomes particularly apparent in urban public spaces, where battles over the “right” to the physical city and its representations are often waged. In his analysis of social justice in public space, geographer Don Mitchell remarks that these rights to the city do not exist in the abstract, rather they have to be claimed and enacted spatially; the city’s public spaces must be

“taken” through repeated struggles in order to come into being.41

I argue that practice is particularly critical to the construction of these commonsense geographies, and that by examining lived practices and their representations we can begin to understand the more tacit ways in which normative ideas about spaces are produced. In his oft-cited concept of “habitus,” Pierre Bourdieu argues that the social order perpetuates itself by transforming what is actually acculturated into what seems to be obvious or natural through repeated bodily praxis. A practical belief is never just a state of mind, it is a state of body, and as practices continue, they reinforce commonsense meanings by appearing to be in harmony with these meanings. “Embodied

39 Lefebvre, Production, 99; Beauregard, Voices. 40 Susan Craddock, City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). See also Mary Douglas’ seminal text, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, Routledge, 1966), for an examination of the relationship between material disorder and moral disorder, as well as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Press, 1986). 41 Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: The Guilford Press, 2003).

14 history,” writes Bourdieu, is “internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history.”42 As part of this naturalization process, he argues that space functions as a tangible classifying system that reifies the common sense of the social order and structures the practices that perpetuate it. Space constrains practices and these practices in turn perpetuate existing power structures. In his investigation of the modern prison’s political technology of power over the body, Michel Foucault argues that an embodiment of ideology occurs by training the malleable body through habit, and that this embodied ideology is ultimately more insidious than violence.43 Somewhat conversely, Michel de

Certeau examines the resistant potential of everyday acts and argues that tactical everyday appropriations of urban space, such as walking through the city’s streets, can undermine efforts to totalize or rationalize understandings of the city’s meaning.44

Performance studies scholars complicate de Certeau’s concept of resistant practitioners by underlining that practices can be utilized by both the powerful and the weak. Indeed, one of the central questions engaged by the field is the potential of performances to both trouble and perpetuate normative structures. Jackson explains this concept of

“transformative repetition” by stating that while everyday performances are able to exist as forms of social legitimization and system reproduction precisely because they repeat multi-sensual behaviors within the body, they are also vulnerable to transformation precisely because of this temporality and materiality. In other words, repeated practices can legitimize certain ideas as commonsense because their repetition builds up evidence within the body and within space, but these repeated practices are also imbued with

42 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Palo Alton, CA: Press, 1990). 43 Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (New York: Vintage, 1975/1995). 44 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

15 newness because they will never be able to completely reproduce previous practices. For

Drewal, as a practice is enacted part of it is reproduced and a portion of it diverges from the original, which allows for “improvisational interventions” on the part of participants.

Within existing structures, techniques of the body can become resources for negotiation,

Drewal argues. Diana Taylor investigates the constraints and possibilities of transformative repetition through her notion of the “scenario.” The scenario, claims

Taylor, is a meaning-making paradigm composed of both social practices and verbal and written materials, which is so deeply internalized by a culture that no one remembers its precedence. Though it may advance itself as universal, a scenario has localized meaning and can change and adapt over time. According to Taylor, scenarios reveal that performance is an invocational rather than a duplicative act; scenarios make our already established assumptions about the world visible for a moment, while also altering future ideas.45 Similarly, Victor Turner’s “social dramas” are processes wherein we declare where societal power and meaning lie and how they are distributed. Thus, these dramas possess the potential to expose the underlying order of existing social structures and to generate potential alternatives.46 By studying the various decline, survival, and renewal scenarios that were invoked during New York’s crisis, I hope to better understand how normative ideas about space were constructed and mobilized in this historical moment.

I also extend the work of scholars on the role of emotions in the production of cultural and spatial ideas. My work advocates for a kind of “affective spatial habitus,” in

45 Taylor, Archive. Taylor connects the idea of the scenario to Derrida’s ghosting, wherein the specter of the scenario occludes the construction of its spectacle, which encompasses the ways in which a particular imaginary’s borders are policed politically and interpreted locally. 46 Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974).

16 which evidence about normative spatial meanings is rendered even more powerful through the attachment of emotions to lived spatial practices. This effort relies particularly upon the work of Deborah B. Gould, who argues that power operates through affect, as she explores the “emotional habitus” of how certain feelings become culturally possible and acceptable within an historical moment. “We feel that our feelings are our own and this is why it can become such a potent means of system reproduction,” maintains Gould. “It is the emotional charge attached to our practical sense that gives the latter such force.”47 Geographer Steve Pile argues that the sometimes hidden emotional connections to parts of the city, whether actualized or imagined, contribute directly to the production of space and can result in material changes to the city’s physical fabric through both policy shifts and changes in the way urbanites navigate these spaces. Pile pays particular attention to the emotions of desire and fear, and the latter is particularly resonant within the fiscal-crisis-era cityscape, in which many spaces were produced partially through discourses and practices inspired by fear.48

Literature Review

Alongside its contributions to the fields of performance studies and geography, this dissertation also draws from and contributes to a recently developing historical scholarship on politics, urban space, and embodied practice during the 1970s. In

47 Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT-UP’s Fight against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 34. Gould defines affect as the “nonconscious and unnamed, but nevertheless registered, experiences of bodily energy and intensity that arise in response to stimuli impinging on the body.” She defines emotion as the portion of affect that “gets actualized or concretized in the flow of living,” 19-20. 48 Steve Pile, Real Cities (London: Sage, 2005). The study of emotional geographies has emerged as a sub-discipline in the field of cultural geography. See, for example, Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi and Mick Smith’s 2005 edited volume, Emotional Geographies (London: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2005).

17 particular, my work seeks to demonstrate how the national and urban transformations of the 1970s were produced and negotiated through practices within urban space. As a result, my project builds upon and extends three major groups of historical scholarship.

Firstly, my project serves as a political history that contributes to studies of the nation’s rightward political shift and the ways in which this shift became spatialized. Secondly, the project is a work of urban history that offers an innovative analysis of American cities and New York City in particular. Thirdly, the dissertation contributes to an emerging scholarship on the body and corporeality in the 1970s.

This dissertation makes a distinctive contribution to a burgeoning scholarship on the political history of the 1970s. Sandwiched between scholarly considerations of 1960s idealistic activism and 1980s conservatism, the 1970s has long been regarded as a decade during which “nothing happened.”49 Yet a new generation of historians is now beginning to regard the 70s as a critical moment of “productive uncertainty” in the nation’s history.50 These historians now point to the era as a transformative moment during which the postwar consensus ruptured, the country shifted from a social welfare model of governance to a center-right political coalition that advocated self-sufficiency and market-driven solutions, and the personal and cultural intersected with the political as

“Americans began looking outside of explicitly political channels to achieve

49 See Peter N. Carroll’s appropriation of this term in his book, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). 50 Beth Bailey’s term from Bailey and David Farber’s edited volume America in the Seventies (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001), 257. See also Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the 60s and the Making of 80s America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

18 liberation.”51 Bruce Schulman identifies two strains of conservatism that arose during the era: the “New Right,” which was composed of predominately sunbelt protestants concerned with anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism, national defense, and religious morality, and the “Neoconservative” movement of mostly urban, educated Jews and Catholics who favored reducing big government and advocating for faith in the market. Many scholars have considered the ways in which the , and the perceived excesses of Lyndon Johnson’s social welfare programs led to conservative backlash among the white Americans who would become known as Nixon’s “Silent

Majority.”52 Dan Carter’s study of conservative political candidate George Wallace claims that his campaign “laid the foundation” for this backlash by “linking traditional conservatism” to “cultural beliefs,” which included “the sanctity of the traditional family, the centrality of overt religious beliefs, the importance of hard work and self restraint, and the celebration of the autonomy of the local community.”53 Thomas Sugrue identifies the roots of this backlash somewhat earlier in and postwar governmental efforts to privilege homeownership, which he claims produced a “rights based liberalism” among both blacks and whites that often pitted these rights against the

51 Schulman, Seventies, 257. See also Jenkins, Nightmares. Suleiman Osman’s The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: and the Search for Authenticity in Brownstone Brooklyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) seeks to complicate the story of postwar rupture by attending to the unlikely coalitions forged through the neighborhood movement in brownstone Brooklyn. Dan Berger’s edited volume, The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), also interrupts the seamless narrative about a center-right political shift. 52 Judith Stein complicates this social backlash narrative by instead focusing on how economic restructuring during what she calls the “age of inequality,” led to the rise of neoliberalism in Pivotal Decade: How the U.S. Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 53 Dan Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 12.

19 needs of the poor.54 Michael Flamm investigates how conservative backlash was articulated on a national stage through postwar political discourse that emphasized “law and order” rhetoric about personal and economic safety, the innate pathology of criminals, and the policing of civil disorder.55 Other scholars have contested that grassroots movements and shifting identity politics on the ground were just as vital as political rhetoric in shaping the backlash. Philip Jenkins describes the role of populist movements, and Ronald Formisano identifies the ways in which this “reactionary populism” actually fit into a longer tradition of grassroots insurgency that drew upon tactics developed during the Civil Rights and Antiwar movements.56 Matthew Frye

Jacobson notes that some of this backlash mobilized cultural nationalisms among white ethnic descendants of Ellis Island immigrants. Although this rhetoric was mobilized for both liberal and conservative purposes, Jacobson argues that ethnic revival movements often made use of a “bootstraps” narrative of hard work and rugged individualism that contrasted with ideas about the black and Latino underclass as shiftless welfare

54 Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 55 Michel Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Flamm cites Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign as the beginnings of this rhetoric. Jenkins’ Nightmares specifically examines post-1975 shifts in ideas about criminality. See also historian Dominic Sandbrook’s Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), and journalist Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Days of Paranoia (New York: BBS/Public Affairs, 2010) for studies of the era’s enraged and paranoid emotional climate. 56 Jenkins, Nightmares; Ronald Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

20 recipients.57 In her study of American nationalism, Natasha Zaretsky probes how ideas about the country’s decline were wedded to anxieties about family deterioration.58

Beyond my contributions to broader scholarship on 70s-era transformations, I directly engage and extend the still small but growing body of urban history scholarship that specifically attends to American cities during the decade. The immediate postwar period in America’s urban history has received ample academic attention. Scholars have examined the ways in which urban crisis during the 1950s and 60s altered the racial, economic, cultural, and political landscape of American cities, and have debated the legacy of government-supported and suburbanization. 59 Scholars have also attended to the ways in which the 70s-era rightward political shift was spatialized within the suburban landscape. Matthew Lassiter posits that the rightward political shifts of the 70s were more than merely a “southern strategy” of sunbelt politicians, but were

57 Mathew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Schulman’s Seventies also explores this ethnocentric “retribalization.” 58 Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 59 There is a rich literature on the post-World War II urban crisis and . Among the most notable texts are Sugrue’s Origins, Eric Avila’s Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), and Robert Self’s American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). A number of works attend to the rise of suburban America during the postwar period, and include the edited volume by Sugrue and Kevin Kruse entitled The New Suburban History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), which seeks to reevaluate the by utilizing a variety of methodological approaches. Arnold Hirsch examines urban renewal efforts and racial struggle on Chicago’s South Side in Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Christopher Klemek’s The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) considers American renewal efforts within an international context. Texts that specifically consider urban renewal in New York often focus on the projects of Robert Moses, and include Joel Schwartz’s The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals and the Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1993), and Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson’s edited book, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007), which was published in conjunction with the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibition of the same name.

21 influenced by specifically suburban, grassroots movements in which suburbanites opposed racial equality by mobilizing ideas about colorblind meritocracy, de facto segregation and free market forces; suburbanites repositioned their status not as whites but as workers, parents and taxpayers.60 During the postwar period, suburban growth and urban decline became locked in a kind of discursive dance.61 Andreas Killen argues that the rightward political shift was spatially produced through a devaluation of urban landscapes in favor of these sunbelt suburbs, which symbolically began with the 1973 demolition of the Pruitt Igoe housing complex in Chicago, news stories chronicling the

South Bronx’s destitution, and Nixon’s 1973 “I am not a crook” speech, which he gave from Anaheim’s Epcot Center.62 This spatial shift was certainly felt in New York during the crisis era. When the Presidential Commission for a National Agenda for the 1980s proposed governmental assistance to people migrating to the sunbelt in 1981, the City’s

Deputy Mayor critiqued this policy as “a death knell for Eastern cities.”63 In many ways, the scholarship has echoed this spatial shift away from cities, and the urban landscape of the 70s remains relatively understudied. “Most descriptions of

60 Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), examines the roots of this populist suburban strategy in 1960s Orange County, California. In his study of the changing racialization of white ethnic immigrants from 1890 to 1945, David Roediger posits that suburban homeownership functioned as a kind of spatial essentialism. He argues that the construction of the suburbs replaced the physicality of the racialized body with the physicality of space, and that the relationship between whiteness and homeownership was naturalized: Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 61 Beauregard’s Voices cites 1955 as the emergence of the term “urban crisis.” See also Avila’s White Flight for an examination of the dialectical relationship between urban and suburban areas in the postwar period. 62 Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006). 63 “The Future of the Northeast,” WPIX, January 9, 1981. Mayor Koch Papers, Municipal Archives (Departmental Correspondence/MN 41026/#916).

22 the 1970s cityscape,” writes urban historian Suleiman Osman, “read much like the conclusion of a coroner’s report.”64 Many of these considerations of the 70s cityscape have placed it within a broader history of the postwar period. These include Jon

Teaford’s surveys of postwar urban redevelopment, Jefferson Cowie and Joseph

Heathcott’s study of postwar deindustrialization in rust belt cities, and Beauregard’s examination of twentieth-century urban decline discourse, the latter of which will prove particularly critical to my project.65 Beauregard argues that the meaning of urban

“decline” has always been historically contingent, and that in the twentieth century there was a marked shift from the fundamentally optimistic prewar conceptualization of cities as critical to national life, into a pathological postwar discourse whereby cities became

“spatial fixes” for national economic, social and racial anxieties. According to

Beauregard, this pathological discourse reached its pinnacle during the 1970s, at which point American cities were largely considered “obsolete” in the public consciousness. I draw upon these scholarly understandings of the larger trajectory of urban history to shift attention toward specific comprehension of the 1970s urban landscape. Such a consideration will allow historians to bridge the gap between the enormous urban

64 Suleiman Osman, “The Decade of the Neighborhood,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, eds. Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 109. 65 John Teaford The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) and The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Beauregard, Voices.

23 upheavals of the immediate postwar period, and the changes produced by gentrification and surveillance in the 1980s “revanchist” city.66

By more closely considering urban history during the 70s, my study also contributes to studies of the white ethnic urban experience, and to the history of the white backlash and rise of “Reagan Democrats.” According to historian Edward Berkowitz, national economic strife during the era led to a situation where certain groups could “no longer avoid one another” geographically as they had done in more prosperous postwar times, and this became particularly evident through neighborhood tensions between working class and lower middle class whites, African Americans, and Latinos.67

Sociologist Jonathan Rieder maintains that these tensions exposed the chasm between the liberal elite, who were often suburbanites, and the whites who remained in cities and thus didn’t have the “luxury of theoretical distance” from which to assess the postwar geographic shifts.68 The 1971 Federal Government report on “The State of the Cities” defined white ethnics as the “20 million or more predominately Catholic working men and women with annual incomes of between 5,000 and 10,000 and with family roots in

Central, Southern, or Eastern Europe.” “If it is an objective fact that economically and politically and socially they are a good deal better off than blacks, it is surely a subjective fact that they feel no less aggrieved,” concluded the report. “From a row house in a working-class neighborhood in a central city in the Northeast or Midwest, the temptation

66 Revanchist city is a term employed by Neil Smith in his examinations of gentrification and the urban landscape during the 1980s: see The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996). 67 Edward D. Berkowitz, Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 177. 68 Rieder, Canarsie, 60.

24 to see the urban scene as a battlefield is great.”69 Some scholars have chosen to specifically examine the role of these urban white ethnic communities in the backlash, and have advocated for a more complex understanding of these communities’ reactions to racial transitions not as abstractly “racist” but as concretely situated responses to perceived spatial threats. Formisano discusses how the “vulnerability of place” fueled anti-busing protests in the 1960s and 70s in white ethnic Boston neighborhoods, and how much of this vulnerability could be attributed to distrust of planners and technocrats in the wake of urban renewal. Similarly, Sugrue describes the roots of this “politics of defensive localism” in the 1940s and 50s, and the ways in which white homeowners defined the boundaries of race by defining the boundaries of their neighborhoods in postwar Detroit.

Particularly critical to my work are the group of scholars who have analyzed white ethnics’ place-based vulnerability within New York’s outer borough neighborhoods. During the crisis era, many white ethnic residents within these neighborhoods felt increasingly marginalized as they bore the brunt of racial geographic shifts, the decrease in city services, and the municipal government’s accompanying renewal of the business districts of Midtown and .70 In a city that then

69 “State of the Cities”: Jack Bigel Archive on Municipal Finance and Leadership, Baruch College. 70While white backlash came to a head during the 1970s, it was also connected to a longer history of geographic marginalization in favor of the Manhattan elite. In John Alan Farmer’s Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Remembered since the 1960s (New York: The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1999), Deutsche mentions the longer tradition dating back to the 1940s of preserving Manhattan for the elite, as does Robert Fitch in The Assassination of New York (New York: Verso, 1993). For a broader history of the role of white ethnics in New York’s political landscape, see Joshua Zeitz’s White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Postwar Politics (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), which tracks this history from 1945-1970. Soffer notes that the white working class voters in New York were somewhat distinctive from other conservatives in their desire for increased city services rather than “small-government conservatism,” Koch, 243.

25 contained 1.2 million Jews, 1.5 million African Americans, and 1.7 million Italians, Jon

Mollenkopf has noted that “growing black and Latino populations spread[ing] outward from the collapsing ghettos in former white working class neighborhoods … [prompted] the remaining white ethnics to create defended enclaves on the city’s periphery.”71

Rieder and journalist Jim Sleeper have examined these defended enclaves ethnographically. Rieder probes “the geopolitics of local communities” as he studies the

Jews and Italians of Canarsie, Brooklyn, and investigates everyday racial negotiations within the neighborhood’s “micro-geographic” spaces.72 My analysis extends these studies by applying this ethnographic lens to archival material, and by looking at how residents in these neighborhoods used everyday practices to negotiate and produce the shifting meanings of these spaces. Scholars have also considered the distinctive ways in which the city’s mayors related to the outer borough white ethnic constituency during the postwar period. Following Robert Wagner’s courtship of working and middle class white ethnics, Sam Roberts argues that became “the candidate of poor minority groups and well-to-do white liberals against the white middle-class Catholics and Jews living outside Manhattan.” Lindsay never won a plurality outside of Manhattan and

“cynics would even claim that he declared war on the other four boroughs … to placate

71 Jon H. Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells, eds., Dual City: Restructuring New York (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991), 8. Statistics come from 1977, cited in Jonathan Mahler, Ladies and Gentlemen, : 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City (New York: Picador, 2005), 103. According to the 1980 census, there were approximately 1.4 million Hispanics: City of New York, Community District Statistics: A Portrait of New York City from the 1980 Census (1980): City Hall Library. See also William Kornblum and James Beshers “White Ethnicity: Ecological Dimensions,” in Power, Culture and Place: Essays on New York City, ed. John Mollenkopf (New York: Russell Sage Foundation,1988), 201-222. Kornblum and Beshers explore the city’s outerborough periphery as an “ecological zone,” and examine the construction of place-based identity through acts of both “communal sharing” and sometimes violent defense. 72 Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990); Rieder, Canarsie, 233, 60.

26 his own constituents,” Roberts explains.73 Ed Koch’s relationship to outer borough white ethnics was considerably more complex. Jonathan Soffer reveals that during his 1977 bid for mayor the historically liberal Koch, who hailed from Manhattan’s , realized that he would have to court a new voting public of middle-class white ethnics.

This shift in political and spatial priorities was further influenced by the loyalties of his chief opponent, then Secretary of State , who possessed a “core constituency of outer borough Italians, who loved his ethnicity more than his politics and perceived him as an anti-Manhattan candidate.”74 According to Mollenkopf, once in office, Koch aimed to “divide and conquer the ethnic geopolitical checkerboard” by mobilizing white ethnic fears, appealing to minority groups’ middle class aspirations, and supporting a pro-growth coalition of business elites while balancing this through a return of public services and expansion of community organizations’ role in government.75

Through my attention to how everyday practices in white ethnic neighborhoods both produced and responded to the city’s larger political, economic, and social landscape, my work creates a critical link between these ethnographic accounts and broader political histories.

73 Sam Roberts and the Museum of the City of New York, eds., America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 109, 230. In Koch, Soffer connects this shift in feelings among outerborough white ethnics to the 1972 Lindsay proposal to place low-income scatter-site housing in the predominately middle-class Jewish enclave of Forest Hills. He notes that this was a turning point for Koch, who supported the residents in their fight against its construction. See also Vincent Cannato’s examination of Lindsay’s relationship with white ethnics, which he argues came to a head in his 1969 reelection campaign: The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Cannato also analyzes the scatter-site proposals in Forest Hills and Corona, Queens. And for broader evidence of growing white ethnic disillusionment under the Lindsay administration, see Pete Hamill’s April 14, 1969, New York Magazine article, “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class.” 74 Soffer, Koch, 127. 75 John Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York City Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

27 By attending to these place-based negotiations within the city’s outer borough neighborhoods, my efforts will critically contribute to the rich, although small, body of work on New York City during the 1970s.76 The majority of current academic works on the city during the era have focused on political history, and have analyzed the various causes of the city’s apparent economic and social collapse. These studies have alternately attributed New York’s decline to nationwide structural and social changes such as deindustrialization and suburban exodus, particular political figures, federal neglect, the city’s generous social welfare programs and, conversely, its predilection with corporate welfare and dedication of funds toward image policing. 77 These scholars have

76 The most comprehensive treatments of New York’s fiscal-crisis era have been undertaken by journalists, such as Mahler and Flood. There has also been a surge of fictionalized and pop cultural treatments of the time period that include Eric Bogosian’s Perforated Heart (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (New York: Random House, 2009) and the VH1 documentary, NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell, directed by Henry Corra (VH1 Rock Docs, 2007). 77 Some scholars have attributed New York’s downfall to nationwide structural and social changes such as deindustrialization and suburban exodus; George Lankevitch’s American Metropolis: A (New York: Press, 1998), and Fred Siegal’s The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities (New York: The Free Press, 1997), consider the role of political figures; Soffer advocates for the primacy of the Federal Government’s neglect, especially with regard to healthcare costs; Jonathan Freeman’s Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: The New Press, 2000) cites the City’s infatuation with municipal generosity and social welfare; in America’s Mayor, Sam Roberts notes that just prior to the crash, Lindsay’s spending had not been that different than the rest of the country’s with the exception of higher education and hospital costs, though he was not in a position to impose austerity measures because of his investment in anti-poverty programs; Fitch’s Assassination, Flood’s Fires, Miriam Greenberg’s Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World (New York: Routledge, 2008), Max Page’s The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), and Alex Vitale’s City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2008), consider the role of corporate welfare and image politics, and the City’s overzealous renewal of the financial sector through a global cities strategy at the expense of this civic liberalism. For further analysis of the global cities strategy, see also Fitch’s Assassination, which details the post-industrial planning shift away from manufacturing and toward commercial office space that he argues was masterminded by the FIRE sectors and solidified through municipal zoning measures. Vitale’s City of Disorder and Mollenkopf’s Phoenix further emphasize that these interests were able to gain power precisely because of the fact that MAC and the EFCB were largely comprised of business leaders. Flood’s Fires and the Wallaces’ Plague examine

28 argued for the crisis era as a critical turning point in both the city and the nation’s history.

“A post-1975 New York … was deeply involved in defining and establishing the postindustrial era of U.S. economic history in a number of ways,” concludes film scholar

Stanely Corkin. “[New York] was the proving ground for the broader transitions that took place in U.S. economics and politics during the Reagan administration.”78

This project will also build upon the handful of significant political histories of the Lindsay and Koch mayoral administrations. Vincent Cannato argues that during the

Lindsay administration, the “dual crises of the city and liberalism had become inextricably intertwined.” “Not only could Lindsay not stem the tide of that had begun in the 1950s,” writes Cannato, “he added to the feeling that New York City was both unlivable and ungovernable. The failure to deal adequately with the confusion and tumult of the era weakened liberalism’s legitimacy.”79 In probing this crisis’ legacy both inside and outside the city, Mollenkopf and Soffer have specifically assessed the mayoral administration of Ed Koch, who served the city during the postindustrial years of

1977-1989. Soffer argues that Koch’s “democratic form of neoliberalism” helped the city tack between its long-standing tradition of liberalism, “which used state power to mitigate economic inequality,” and “the new laissez-faire order” and corporate economy.80 Yet, as Soffer notes, Koch’s democratic form of neoliberalism also engendered considerable social, economic, spatial, and racial inequities. 81

how these FIRE interests, and technocratic city planning more broadly, manifest through the City’s response to fires during the crisis. 78 Stanely Corkin, Starring New York: Filming the Grime and Glamour of the Long 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 191, 123. 79 Cannato, Ungovernable, xiv. 80 Mollenkopf, Phoenix; Soffer, Koch, 7. 81 Soffer terms these inequities “the austerity paradox,” in which “Koch’s greatest successes- carrying out austerity, restoring the city’s credit, and building a political coalition behind that

29 I extend and complicate these political and economic histories of the crisis by directly engaging the vital body of scholarship that considers the crisis as one of representation, during which the meanings of the city were fiercely debated. 82 Journalist

Joe Flood argues that during the crisis, the “power of the story itself” transcended political and economic problems, and that this “crisis narrative” had such purchase precisely because of the changing national narrative about cities. “It wasn’t just that New

York was changing,” writes Flood. “The lens through which America viewed it was changing as well.”83 On a national level, Beauregard argues that the city’s financial crisis allowed the country to shift its discourse from racial tensions to economic questions. In

Austin’s examination of the city’s response to graffiti culture, he terms these public narratives “framing stories,” which he argues were built upon a dialectical construction of urban space that alternately marked the city as the “New Rome” and the “Rotten Apple.”

According to Austin, these constructions helped residents and government officials alike to render the city knowable, and thus controllable, in its entirety. Greenberg cites 1977 as the critical transformative year in which the “Rotten Apple” narrative entered into widespread circulation. She argues that in the absence of its ability to control the policy- paradoxically contributed to the homelessness, crime, and infrastructure breakdowns that tarnished his last term,” Koch, 5. 82 The public production and mediation of decline images are the central foci of both Greenberg and Austin’s works, and their analyses of the City’s publicity campaigns and anti-graffiti tactics, respectively, underscore the era as one in which various public narratives competed for primacy. Page analyzes cinematic representations of the city’s decline and probes some of the ways in which these images affected residents’ perception of their home. Evelyn Gonzalez’s The Bronx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), Jill Jonnes’ South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City (New York: Press, 1986/2002), and Rieder’s Canarsie utilize ethnographic inquiry to probe some of the ways in which residents actually experienced and interpreted these public narratives about their neighborhoods. 83 Flood, Fires, 48-50. See also Deutche’s discussion of fiscal-crisis ideology in Evictions, 86-87. Flood maintains, and Roberts agrees, that the 1965 Herald Tribune series entitled the “New York City in Crisis” was critical to the formation of this narrative. See also Berman and Berger’s New York Calling, which sets out to understand the transition in this public narrative from the widespread antipathy toward the city in the 70s to the widespread love of the post-9/11 era.

30 “material space” of the city, the municipal government instead chose to focus on controlling its “media space.” For Greenberg, the fiscal crisis marked a critical moment during which the municipal government began to favor a “symbolic” economy that utilized image production as a means to attract capital, chiefly through tourism and real estate speculation. This symbolic economy sold an image of New York to local and national audiences while obscuring underlying economic and social problems and thereby distracting the public from the administration’s radical shift in priorities toward neoliberal economic development. Yet Greenberg also emphasizes that this media space offered opportunities for oppositional “counterbranding” tactics by offering any New

Yorker the power to grab the headlines, and she also probes the counter-hegemonic possibility of these stories about chaotic decline, which were sometimes able to challenge the municipal government’s attempts to assert an orderly city image.84

Works that examine the role of the media in both shaping and responding to the crisis climate vitally contribute to my analysis. Roberts describes John Lindsay’s time in office as the first “public relations mayorship” and discusses how the Lindsay administration was the first to directly encourage local film production. Accordingly, some scholars have attended to cinematic representations of the city during the crisis era.

In the most exhaustive survey of the crisis era in particular, Corkin argues that between

1969 and 1981, New York entered into a distinctive cinematic phase during which its

84 While some scholars agree that the roots of this symbolic turn can be found in the late 1960s and early 70s under the Lindsay administration, for Greenberg the symbolic economy was directly born out of the fiscal crisis itself and the government’s perceived need to contain the images of destruction and disorder that accompanied media coverage. Greenberg claims that media coverage of the infamous “,” with its “burning, bullet pierced and rotten apple,” provided municipal government with a clear occasion to address the structural issues behind this rottenness, but that elected officials instead chose to dedicate their resources to “media space” rather than material space, Branding, 191, 192.

31 films articulated and produced understandings about the city’s changing urban spaces.

Ironically, Corkin notes, Lindsay “abetted the production of so many powerful narratives that portrayed his city as dirty, dangerous, and morally suspect.”85 Max Page contends that cinematic destructions of the city functioned as a means through which viewers were able to “make [their] world more comprehensible than it [had] become,” and that this was particularly true during the fiscal crisis. Similar to Beauregard’s contention that decline discourse served as a spatial “fix” for larger cultural anxieties, Page argues that images of destruction acted as a cinematic fix for national anxiety over social and economic changes by focusing the camera on certain anarchic behaviors and demographic groups as the perpetrators of urban decline.86 The 1977 mayoral run-off between candidates

Cuomo and Koch was termed the first media campaign, during which the two candidates spent an enormous amount of money on advertising, and Soffer notes that once in office,

Koch appeared on television “more than any public official except the president.”87

News media plays a particularly prominent role in both the existing scholarship and my dissertation. During the crisis, the news media was credited with actually

“revealing” certain areas of the city to formally uninitiated New Yorkers, and with spurring direct action by the municipal government. 88 For example, Teaford’s analysis

85 Corkin, Starring New York, 7, 6. Larger changes in film production created the conditions for this explosion of New York-based cinema. These changes included the dissolution of the Hays Code in Hollywood, which led to greater freedom in subject matter and the relative autonomy of the director, and changing production techniques that made equipment lighter and more mobile, which thus offered “a far more fluid vision of space.” 86 Page, City’s End, 9, 146-147, 154. 87 Soffer, Koch, 2. See Mahler’s analysis of the role of political consultant in both the Koch and Lindsay campaigns, Bronx is Burning, 164-166. 88 Both Jonnes and Goodman assert that the blackout marked a turning point in the city’s internal understanding of disorder by “revealing” formerly invisible neighborhoods to New York residents outside of these spaces, and that this sudden brand of “stardom” obscured the longer history of ongoing desperation experienced in these neighborhoods: see in particular Jonnes, South Bronx Rising, 309, and Goodman, Blackout, 69, and 85. See also Mahler’s account of the

32 emphasizes that while New York’s economic struggles were similar to those of other urban areas, the city “grab[bed] headlines” because its areas of despair, like the South

Bronx, were simply “better publicized.”89 The role of local newspapers reasserted their omnipresence in New Yorkers’ lives during the crisis, and this was especially true for the

New York Post and New York Daily News. Australian media mogul purchased the Post in 1976 and transformed it into a highly consumed tabloid that warred with the News for devotees. Although Mayor Beame, along with many journalists, was highly critical of Murdoch’s sensationalistic coverage, the paper nonetheless became one of New Yorkers’ primary sources for interpreting the crisis. While readership of these two dailies did drop slightly starting in 1975, by 1977 readers still totaled around 2 million for the Daily News and half a million for the Post in a city of around 8 million people.90 And as Soffer notes, readership statistics in New York are often skewed because of the particular nature of consuming news media in the city’s public spaces.

“New Yorkers read their papers in public,” writes Soffer. “On the subways, park benches, in New York’s newly emerging sidewalk cafés, even in the transparent steel-net trash bins that grace New York’s sidewalks, [Rupurt] Murdoch’s Post invaded people’s imaginations … [Murdoch] used [The Post] to reshape New York’s public space and

blackout’s media revelation, Bronx is Burning, 217-218. Coverage by the Daily News’ Martin Gottlieb of fires on Pine Street in Brooklyn and orchestration of the “living room debate” at the Casuso’s home were examples of media coverage resulting in direct action by the City administration. See Chapter 3 for a full discussion of the living room debate. See also Bobby Wagner’s quote in Mahler on how the Charlotte Street project in the South Bronx was a direct result of the “power of television on how decisions get made,” Bronx is Burning, 117. 89 Teaford, Rough Road, 206, 227. 90 Statistics taking from Ayers Dictionary: Library of Congress. Following Murdoch’s 1976 purchase of the paper, the Post’s readership began to grow in 1978.

33 political discourse.”91 “In his hamfisted, irresponsible way, Murdoch deserved a little credit for reminding New Yorkers that reading the newspaper, like living in the city, was an emotional issue,” remarks Mahler.92 During the summer of 1977, the Daily News’

Jimmy Breslin became “the most famous newspaper since Walter Winchell,” as he began receiving letters from serial killer David Berkowitz. New York magazine, founded in 1968, “came of age in the infamous era of white flight and urban blight” and also became a chief chronicler of the city’s crisis.93 New York’s crisis-era media climate was also connected to broader national transformations. According to Berkowitz, many politicians used the media to foster a climate of openness in the wake of Watergate.

Killen argues that the radical kind of individualism that emerged in the 70s also entailed acting this individualism out “on a public stage,” and was abetted by broadcast news innovations that included the introduction of videotape and direct satellite.94

By examining these crisis-era streetscapes, I extend the scholarship that considers how the crisis’ meanings were negotiated within the city’s public spaces, and broader analyses of the role of street spaces within twentieth-century urban history.95 At the time of the crisis, New York contained approximately 6,000 miles of streets, and scholar Joe

Austin remarks that the urban crisis was “frequently assessed by observing the city from

91 Soffer, Koch, 131. Mahler also notes that historically, the Post had been the paper of the city’s blue-collar Jews while the News’ readership was predominately blue-collar Catholic. Both, however, joined to endorse Koch in the 1977 mayoral election while the Voice endorsed and the Times, Mario Cuomo. 92 Mahler, Bronx is Burning, 269. 93 Mahler makes this claim about Breslin in the photo spread starting on 180; Mahler, Bronx is Burning, 72. The alternative weekly, , was also started during the postwar period in 1955. 94 Killen, Nervous Breakdown, 9. 95 Journalists and scholars have also often cited the particular intensity and complexity of New York’s street life. For example, in On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in (New York: Random House, 2006), Marshall Berman claims that this uniqueness has meant that all of the city’s conflicts and strong emotions have always played out in the streets.

34 the streets and [that] it was in the street that the crisis was most commonly located in representation.” 96 Alex Vitale notes that the streets represented a particularly troubling spatiality for municipal government because of their sheer magnitude and ultimately uncontainable nature.97 Likewise, Miriam Greenberg discusses the troubling, counter- hegemonic potential of “grimy” close-ups of the city’s streets during the crisis in contrast to the sanitized, panoptic perspective projected from the “Windows on the World” restaurant housed in the newly constructed World Trade Center.98 The street has often been a critical spatial lens through which scholars have interpreted changing ideas about cities. Peter Hall argues that the entire history of is largely a reaction to the “chaos” of the industrialized city’s streets.99 Eric Avila, Chad Heap, and Kathy Peiss all discuss the unexpected corporeal engagements that unfolded within turn-of-the- century “heterosocial” public and semi-public spaces of streetcars, nightclubs, amusement parks, and the streets themselves, which often challenged ethnic, racial, and gender divisions.100 Sugrue investigates postwar discourses about a “shiftless” “street corner society” of predominately black men who lingered on corners and at day labor sites.101 During the 1960s, some city dwellers critiqued the technocratic efforts of planners and government officials to map the streets through urban renewal efforts, many

96 Street mileage taken from a letter from Beame to the Sanitation Department, January 17, 1977: Mayor Beame Papers, Municipal Archives (MN61004, #685); Austin, Taking the Train, 36. 97 Vitale, City of Disorder. 98 Greenberg, Branding, 170. See also Mahler, Bronx is Burning, 15. 99 Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (New York: Blackwell, 1988). 100 Avila, White Flight; Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). For further investigations of comingling in the 19th century city, see Stallybrass and White’s Politics and Poetics. 101 Sugrue, Origins. The term “street corner society” comes from William Foote Whyte’s 1943 investigation of a lower class Italian neighborhood in Boston: Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943).

35 of which originated in the 1920s. These urbanites advanced the streets as communal and creative havens, which was an approach that engendered both liberal and conservative strains, and was exemplified in Jane Jacob’s description of the “street ballet” in The

Death and Life of Great American Cities.102 The works in Nicholas Fyfe’s edited volume, Images of the Street, seek to transcend a binaried analysis of urban history from either a panoptic or street-level perspective, and call for a more complicated understanding of streetspaces as “specific, local landscapes [that] manifest broader social and cultural processes.” In particular, I draw from David Crouch’s exploration of the street as an “everyday site of geographical knowledge,” and his consideration of “how people make sense of their lives by way of the street.”103

My emphasis on practices within these streets contributes to the small but critical group of scholars who have advocated for the primacy of the body and of quotidian practice during the 1970s. “The body was what the decade was about, beginning with where a body was” argues scholar Laura Jacobs as she writes about dance during New

York’s crisis.104 “The growth of interest in dance,” explained the Times in 1978, “reflects in turn the preeminence of things physical in our 70’s culture: the attention paid to every aspect of the body from health to sex.105 Historians of the 70s have also noted the importance of the quotidian scale to the decade; Killen, for example, argues that the era

102 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). See also Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (New York: Knopf, 1970), for a less utopian account of the potentials of “frictional” encounters in public spaces. 103 Nicholas Fyfe, ed., Images of the Street: Planning, Identity, and Control in Public Space (New York: Routledge, 1998), 1, 7. David Crouch, “The Street and the Making of Popular Geographical Knowledge,” in Images of the Street, 160-175. 104 Laura Jacobs, “Dancing the Body Electric,” City Journal 21, no. 1 (Winter 2011). 105 Hugh Fordin and Robin Chase, “Hollywood Puts On Its Dancing Shoes Again,” NYT, January 25, 1978.

36 was marked by a “revolution of everyday life” in which “spaces of uncertainty, experimentation and play [were] opened up by the crisis of established institutions.”106

Yet examinations of the body’s primacy during the decade have chiefly focused on the embodiment of sexual and racial identity through studies of disco culture, gay liberation, and the industry, and have not yet explored how more quotidian practices produced meanings about urban space.107 Moreover, my dissertation complements the small but significant body of scholarship on counter-hegemonic practices during the crisis, which includes analyses of hip-hop, disco dancing, graffiti, alternative art practices, and sexual counter-inhabitations of public spaces.108 I seek instead to

106 Killen, Nervous Breakdown, 4. 107 Many scholars have investigated disco’s roots as a gay and African American cultural product, and have examined the intersections between disco culture and the construction of gender, racial, and sexual identities. See Peter Braunstein, “Adults Only: The Construction of an Erotic City in New York during the 1970s,” in America in the Seventies, eds. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 129-156; Iain Chambers, Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture (Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1985); Carol Cooper, “Disco Knights: Hidden Heroes of the New York Dance Music Underground,” Social Text 45 (1995): 159-165; Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010); Gillian Frank; Kai Fikentscher, ‘You Better Work!”: Underground Dance Music in New York City (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan Press, 2000); Sherrie A. Inness, Disco Divas: Women and Popular Culture in the 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2003); Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day: The History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Robert McRuer, “Gay Gatherings: Reimagining the Counterculture,” in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, eds. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 215-240 ; Schulman’s The Seventies; and Peter Shapiro, Turn the Beat Around (New York: Faber & Faber, Inc., 2005). For a fuller discussion of this body of literature, see Chapter 4’s analysis of Travolta’s strut in Saturday Night Fever. There is also significant work on pornography and the sexual space of Times Square, which includes Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999), Kat Long’s The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City (Brooklyn: Ig Publishing, 2009), Lynn Sagalyn’s Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), and Braunstein’s “Erotic City,” the latter of which discusses both the expansion of New York’s “erotic city” during the crisis era and the relationship of this eroticism to disco culture. 108 Works that relate hip-hop to the urban landscape of 70s New York include a mixture of scholarly and journalistic efforts. See Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip- Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005); Murray Foreman, The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,

37 understand how New Yorkers actively produced the hegemonic crisis narrative, and how both official and unofficial practices in the streets became part of a normative narrative about what constituted decline, survival, and renewal.

Periodization

Because this project is chiefly concerned with the production of crisis meanings, it will emphasize certain events that unfolded in 1977, and will examine the roots and residue of these events in the years just preceding and following them. Taylor terms this approach the “episodic modality,” in which we seek to transcend history as a linear trajectory and instead explore how the effects of events radiate outward in a kind of historical constellation.109 While New York entered into crisis in 1974 and officially declared financial insolvency in 1975, many scholars have argued that the crisis’ emotional and cultural effects were not necessarily bounded by financial or political

2002); Raquel Rivera, New York Ricans from the Hip-Hop Zone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), as well as the films Wild Style, directed by Charlie Ahearn (1983; Wild Style), and From Mambo to Hip-Hop: A South Bronx Tale, directed by Henry Chalfant (2006; City Lore). For evidence of residential counter-practices in the South Bronx, see Jonnes’ South Bronx Rising, Gonzalez’s The Bronx, Lisa Kahane’s Do Not Give Way to Evil: Photos of the South Bronx, 1979-1987 (Brooklyn: Powerhouse Books, 2008), and Mel Rosenthal’s photographs in In the South Bronx of America (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2000). For work on alternative art practices and graffiti, see John Alan Farmer’s catalogue of the Bronx Museum of Arts Urban Mythologies exhibition, Austin’s Taking the Train, the documentary Style Wars, directed by Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver (1984; Public Art Films, 2004), DVD, and Marvin Taylor, Lynn Gumpert, Bernard Gendron, and Rosalee Goldberg’s The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). See also Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp, eds., Mixed Use Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices 1970s to the Present (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010); Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, Subway Art (New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1984); Will Hermes’ Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011); Allan Tannenbaum. New York in the 70s (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2009); and William Upski Wimsatt, Bomb the Suburbs (New York: Soft Skull Press, Inc., 1994/2002). 109 Taylor, Archive, 276.

38 markers, and have identified 1977 in particular as the city’s publicly perceived nadir. 110

Concomitantly, Jenkins cites 1977 as the nation’s death of liberalism, and argues that the cumulative events of this year pushed the country rightward. Mollenkopf terms 1977 the beginning of New York’s “post industrial revolution,” during which the city was

“transformed from a relatively well-off, blue collar city into an economically divided, multiracial, white color city” or “dual city,” and veered away from urban liberalism and minority empowerment, and toward conservative governance backed by the FIRE industries.111 And although the City had begun to regain economic independence by early 1978, this recovery was not necessarily accompanied by a change in public perception, and was arguably confined to a narrow geographic and socioeconomic cross- section.112 Scholars’ broader periodization of the 1970s has ranged from 1968 until 1986.

While Schulman dates the decade from the 1968 election of and the extreme rightward political rhetoric of presidential candidate George Wallace, most

110 See Greenberg’s Branding New York in particular. Numerous journalistic and pop-culture treatments of the era also identify 1977 as both the most culturally vibrant and most frightening year in the city’s history: see Mahler’s Bronx is Burning, and VH1’s NY77. 111 Mollenkopf and Castells, Dual City, 8. See also, Mollenkopf, Phoenix. 112 By 1977-78, the City had no short-term debt and in 1979 it was able to partially reenter the market and sell some short-term bonds. 1981 marked the first year that the City ran a balanced budget based on generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and by 1985, New York no longer needed MAC’s assistance. Yet these markers of recovery obscured ongoing economic and social divides. See Mollenkopf, Dual City, 8, for critiques of Manhattan-centric revival and the emergence of “new forms of inequality” amidst the “rapid economic growth” of the post 1977 period. Berman and Berger’s New York Calling notes that after a steady decline beginning in 1975, the city’s murder rate began to escalate in 1979, which was ironically the beginning of the Koch “renaissance.” The Citizens Budget Commission’s 1980 report on the crisis argued for the “need to redefine the term ‘fiscal crisis’” as a “service crisis,” and contended that in many ways the City was in a much more precarious place in 1980 than the initial threat of bankruptcy posed in 1975: Citizens Budget Commission, “New York City’s Fiscal Crisis: A Redefinition” (November 1980): Bigel Archive (Shelf 7/Periodical Box). Soffer echoes this critique of the service crisis, and notes that despite a balanced budget for FY 1981, the city’s finances “remained insufficiently stable to guarantee a solid basis of services,” Koch, 235.

39 scholars cite the , national economic downturn and oil crisis of 1973-

74 as the era’s start.113

Chapter Outline

To illustrate the idea that decline, survival, and renewal were produced through spatial practices in the city’s streets, I concentrate on a handful of performance sites rather than focusing on a single case study in a particular neighborhood. While some of the more iconic performances I choose may seem familiar, my goal is to critically reread these acts to evidence the connections between practice, space production, and crisis discourse. I argue that street practices located within the “outer boroughs” of Brooklyn,

Queens, and the Bronx became focal points for the debate over the crisis’ meanings, and my case studies emphasize these areas accordingly. 114 Whether it was by constructing a destitute moonscape in the predominately black and Hispanic Charlotte Street in the

South Bronx, disorderly material and corporeal excess along Bushwick’s Broadway, or stable white ethnic bulwarks against despair in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge and Queens’

Ridgewood, New Yorkers assessed and produced the meanings of decline and survival within neighborhoods experiencing various degrees of postwar social and economic transitions. In addition to their criticality to the city’s overall fate, these borough neighborhoods were also sometimes positioned as “authentic” expressions of New York’s urbanness. “In their five days of walking, my students learned that there was little to be

113 Killen’s Nervous Breakdown examines 1973 as the critical year, Jenkins’ Nightmares ends in 1986, and Berkowitz’s Something Happened in 1981. Carter’s examination of George Wallace cites Barry Goldwater’s presidential loss in 1964 as a turning point, which marked the failure of the twenty-year long conservative effort to push back the New Deal coalition. 114 New York City is comprised of five boroughs, each of which forms a separate county: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, , and Queens. The “outer boroughs” or “the boroughs” refers to those boroughs outside of Manhattan.

40 afraid of in the other [outer borough] New York,” wrote Michael Crosby for

Neighborhood in 1979. “If you want to understand New York, go to the other New York

… the taste for life [here] is the taste for the small, the known, the various- for life on the human scale.”115 Similarly, for journalist Ken Auletta, the boroughs were where the

“real” New York was located and he felt that one of the greatest tragedies of the crisis was the rise of Manhattan at the expense of the boroughs. “There are poor people, middle-income people, whites, blacks, Hispanics, trying to salvage their communities, leading quiet noble, unpublicized lives,” he concluded about these areas.116

Chapter 1 investigates how President Carter’s journey through the South Bronx both responded to and produced discourses about urban decline, and helped construct the real and imagined landscape of the South Bronx itself. While it was intended as a populist street-level engagement with urban America, I advance that Carter’s walk also problematically constructed the South Bronx as a barren land of stagnant bodies that was ripe for intervention and development. Through the President’s footsteps, he mapped the borders of decline, and determined which areas of the borough and the city could be visible and salvageable. I also advance that while it was constructed to appear spontaneous and to reveal a formally “unseen” landscape to the public, Carter’s tour actually relied upon an intricate network of preexisting understandings about political walking, and the South Bronx’s relationship to decline in order to craft its logic. In turn, his visit affected government policy, cultural production, and public perception.

Chapter 2 considers how the perambulations of serial killer David Berkowitz through the streets of white ethnic neighborhoods in the boroughs mapped the geography

115 Michael Crosby, “The Other New York,” Neighborhood: The Journal for City Preservation, volume 1, 4 (June 1979): Avery Architectural Library, Columbia University. 116 Auletta, Streets, xv.

41 of crime and urban decline. I argue that Berkowitz’s crimes disturbed New Yorkers not only because of their violence, but also because of the killer’s intimate knowledge of and mobility within urban space, and because of the locations of the crimes. I contend that residents, news media, and public officials geographically removed his crimes from the white ethnic neighborhoods in which they occurred and repositioned them according to an affective spatial habitus that located crime within “declining” black and Latino neighborhoods.

Chapter 3 examines how representations of blackout looters’ and white ethnic residents’ practices in the neighborhoods of Bushwick and Ridgewood actively constructed the border between the neighborhoods and, by extension, the boundary between urban decline and survival. In the wake of the blackout, I argue that city officials, news media, and local residents produced and policed this geographical boundary by representing looters’ practices as placeless, chaotic, and excessively mobile, and by contrasting these representations with the domestic “place-making” practices of the neighborhood’s remaining white ethnics and their compatriots across the border in

Ridgewood. I advance that representations of Ridgewoodites’ domestic practices sought to extend the private space of white ethnic home interiors into the neighborhood’s streets, and produced what I term “living room blocks.”

Chapter 4 explores the production of what I refer to as “survival space” within

Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood. To do so, I consider the representational space produced through John Travolta’s strut in the opening of Saturday Night Fever, the lived space constructed through resident’s practices on the ground, and the intersections between the two. I maintain that Travolta’s act of taking to the streets was a complicated

42 mixture of celebratory self-assertion and exclusionary turf seizure that both informed and was informed by spatial practices that unfolded within Bay Ridge’s actual streets, where residents engaged in industrious attempts to fill gaps in declining municipal services, and expressed their fears about encroaching urban decline.

Chapter 5 analyzes how Mayor Koch produced a post-crisis renewal narrative by engaging in and promoting certain kinds of spatial practices in the city’s streets. To construct this narrative, I argue that Koch responded to the articulations of decline and survival produced through Carter and Travolta’s walks, and through the everyday practices of Ridgewoodites and Bay Ridgeites. Through walking tours of Bay Ridge and

Ridgewood, and through the construction of the suburbanized Charlotte Gardens housing complex in the South Bronx, Koch reinterpreted these original spatial practices to forge a narrative about the city’s psychological recovery. And by encouraging workers to travel to work on foot during the 1980 transit strike, I assert that Koch ultimately shifted the crisis’ spatial lens from decline and survival practices in the boroughs to a seamlessly renewed Manhattan.

The dissertation ends with a coda that begins to assess the present-day legacy of the crisis era, and argues that New Yorkers continue to define belonging and meaning through practices within their city’s streets.

43 Chapter 2: “An Unscheduled Visit to the Slums”: President Carter’s Walk Down the South Bronx’s Charlotte Street and the Reproduction of Urban Decline

On October 5, 1977, at 8:54 am, Mayor Beame, President Jimmy Carter, and the

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Patty Harris, entered a cream-colored limousine outside the United Nations building on Manhattan’s East Side. The limo followed Drive across the Willis Avenue Bridge and up the Grand Concourse to Tremont Avenue in the Crotona Park East neighborhood of the area that had come to be known as the “South Bronx.”1 Over the next hour and a half Carter left the car twice, and these two stops were “designed to show him one of the few hopeful projects and the much more common hopeless areas of the Bronx.”2 At 9:14 am, the President exited at

Washington Avenue and 168th street where he visited a homesteading effort and “shook hands with passerby and chatted with storeowners” for eleven minutes.3 “We’re proud of what you’re doing,” the President told Ramon Rueda, executive director of the People’s

Development Corporation, which was responsible for the renovation of the six-story tenement at 1186 Washington Avenue. He then re-boarded the limousine and arrived at

Boston Road and Charlotte Street six minutes later, where he spent a total of nine minutes surveying a section of the block “on which all buildings on both sides had been demolished and the bricks had been bulldozed into heaps that in some places were eight feet high.”4 “Gazing at the burning buildings, gaping windows and rubble,” Carter immediately directed Harris to “get a map of the whole area and show what can be done

1 The neighborhood where Charlotte Street is located is alternatively referred to as “Crotona Park East” and “Crotona South.” Crotona South also encompasses 1186 Washington Avenue. 2 Lee Dembart, “Carter Takes ‘Sobering’ Trip to South Bronx,” NYT, October 6, 1977. 3 James Duddy and Harry Stathos, “‘Finest’ Shaped Up Fast: 20-minute Notice on Trip,” DN, October 6, 1977. 4 Dembart, “Sobering Trip.”

44 … see what can be salvaged and what can’t be salvaged.5 Before returning to Manhattan, the President concluded his visit with a driving survey that led him down 163rd Street and onto Southern Boulevard. “The President’s 20-car motorcade swept by rotting and burnt- out tenements in litter-strewn streets, frequently by junkies and alcoholics,” after which he “passed slowly down Fox Street … one of the most ravaged streets in the South

Bronx.”6 As he passed by, residents shouted, “Give us money!” and “We want jobs!”

This journey of less than two hours, and Carter’s walk down Charlotte Street in particular, was a public revelation of despair: “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 known for “all in American cities that is unwanted and misunderstood.”7

In a dissertation that demonstrates how different street practices produced crisis meanings, no single act of taking to the streets was more influential in constructing ideas about urban decline than Carter’s 1977 journey through the South Bronx. This chapter argues that Carter’s walk was more than a tour through rubble-strewn blocks. Instead, his journey was a carefully choreographed performance that not only responded to and produced discourses about urban decline, but also helped produce the real and imagined landscape of the South Bronx itself. While Carter’s choice to walk the streets was intended to bolster his populist persona within urban America, his tour also mapped the

South Bronx as a desperate landscape awaiting governmental intervention. As he walked, the President’s footsteps determined which portions of the neighborhood could

5 Dembart, “Sobering Trip”; Beth Fallon, “Tours Area in Surprise,” DN, October 6, 1977. 6 Patrick Sullivan and John Mullane, “Doubts Remain in Bronx,” NYP, October 5, 1977; Duddy and Stathos, “Finest Shaped Up Fast.” 7 Dembart, “Sobering Trip”; Richard Severo, “Bronx a Symbol of America’s Woes” NYT, October 6, 1977.

45 and could not be salvaged, rendered other areas of the borough and the city cartographically invisible, and emphasized stark contrasts between his own mobility and the apparent immobility of the South Bronx residents he encountered. And although it was constructed to appear spontaneous and to reveal a formally “unseen” landscape to the public, Carter’s tour relied upon an intricate network of preexisting understandings about political walks through urban areas, minority and impoverished neighborhoods, the South

Bronx, and Charlotte Street. In turn, his visit affected governmental policy, popular culture, and public perception, and these responses both reinforced and reinterpreted the ideas produced through the President’s original walk.

The idea that the “South Bronx” emerged as both a lived and imagined space during the 1970s is not a new one. Many scholars have critically examined how the area developed into a site of both symbolic and material urban despair during the decade.

This body of work has offered thorough historical analyses of the area’s structural conditions, and of the varied political, artistic and community-based interventions into this heavily mythologized landscape. Many of these works, which include texts by Jill

Jonnes, Evelyn Gonzalez, Roberta Gratz, and Alexander Von Hoffman have traced a linear history of the area from its rise as an “American Dream” incubator for Ellis-Island- era immigrants to its “fall” in the postwar period, and back to its subsequent “rise” after the fiscal-crisis through the combined efforts of government, community organizations, and corporate-sponsored philanthropic non-profits such as the Local Initiatives Support

Corporation (LISC) and the Enterprise Foundation.8 Von Hoffman and Gratz, in

8 Jill Jonnes, South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986/2002); Evelyn Gonzalez, The Bronx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Roberta Gratz, The Living City (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989); Alexander Von Hoffman, House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of

46 particular, emphasize these renewal narratives, and probe the efforts of these groups to affect a “block by block” style of revitalization. Jonnes, Von Hoffman, Jonathan Soffer, and Lizabeth Cohen have specifically considered the Charlotte Street renewal efforts that followed Carter’s infamous visit.9 In their broader studies of the City’s Fire Department, journalist Joe Flood, and ecologist Deborah and epidemiologist Rodrick Wallace examine the municipal government’s complicity in the area’s destruction by fire.10 Scholarly works on Carter have focused on the President’s image as a political outsider, his foreign policy and human rights initiatives, and the ways in which he fit into the shifting conservative landscape of the 1970s. Carter’s former executive director of the Urban and

Regional Policy Group, Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich, provides the only comprehensive study of the president’s urban policy initiatives.11

America’s Urban Neighborhoods (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also Jack Kugelmass’ The Miracle of Intervale Avenue: The Story of Jewish Congregation in the South Bronx (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), which ethnographically examines one synagogue’s adaptations to the area’s postwar changes. 9 Jonathan Soffer, Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); information from Lizabeth Cohen’s forthcoming book is cited in “Research Brief: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Save America’s Cities,” The Real Estate Academic Initiative, Harvard University (March 2010), accessed July 22, 2013, http://www.reai.harvard.edu/sites/reai.harvard.edu/files/REAI_- _Cohen%20_researchbrief%20copy.pdf. See Chapter 5 for more on Koch’s housing policy and the Charlotte Street renewal efforts. 10 Joe Flood, The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City- and Determined the Future of Cities (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010); Deborah and Rodrick Wallace, A Plague on Your Houses: How New York Was Burned Down and Public Health Crumbled (New York: Verso, 1998). See also John Finucane’s fictionalized account of a South Bronx in When the Bronx Burned (New York: IUniverse, Inc., 2007). 11 Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich, Consensus and Compromise: Creating the First National Urban Policy Under President Carter (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006). See Betty Glad’s An Outsider in the White House: Jimmy Carter, his Advisors, and the Making of American Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009) and Mary E. Stuckey’s Jimmy Carter, Human Rights and the National Agenda (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University, 2008), for examinations of the president’s human rights and foreign policy initiatives; Frye Gaillard’s Prophet from the Plains: Jimmy Carter and his Legacy (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007) and J. Brooks Flippen’s Jimmy Carter, the Politics of Family, and the Rise

47 Other scholars have focused on what they have often characterized as “resistant” efforts to complicate the South Bronx’s despair narrative, which they argue have been chiefly promulgated by artists and musicians. These resistance studies include works that chronicle the relationship between hip-hop and the South Bronx landscape by Murray

Foreman, Henry Chalfont, Tricia Rose, and Jeff Chang, and studies of artistic production, which include Joe Austin’s examination of graffiti and the Bronx Museum of Art’s 1999 exhibition Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960s. The Bronx

Museum exhibition most explicitly engages the question of the South Bronx as a culturally constructed space, and the exhibition’s aim was to facilitate dialogue between artwork and images of the area in mass media. The South Bronx “has been widely contested in the discourse arena,” concede the curators, and these contestations “have all contributed to the way in which it has been constructed in the public imagination.”12

Yet while many scholars have focused on resistance and response to decline discourses about the South Bronx, few have probed how these ideas about the area’s despair were actively constructed. For example, while the Bronx Museum exhibition thoroughly complicates dominant discourse, in which “the neighborhoods … are of the Religious Right (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011) consider the President’s relationship to spirituality and conservatism. 12 John Alan Farmer, ed., Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Remembered Since the 1960s (New York: The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1999), 10. Murray Foreman, The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002); From Mambo to Hip-Hop: A South Bronx Tale, directed by Henry Chalfont (2006; New York: City Lore); Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994); Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005); Joe Austin, Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Additionally, Raquel Rivera’s New York Ricans from the Hip- Hop Zone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), examines the role of the Puerto Rican community in the birth of hip-hop. See also Mel Rosenthal’s photographs of the South Bronx’s destruction by fire from 1975-1983 in the 2001 collection In the South Bronx of America (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2000), and Lisa Kahane’s Do Not Give Way to Evil: Photos of the South Bronx, 1979-1987 (Brooklyn: Powerhouse Books, 2008).

48 homogenized into a continuous rubble-strewn urban landscape which synecdochically stands in for the entire Bronx,” it does little to probe how this dominant narrative was constructed and maintained.13 My chapter attempts to fill this gap by drawing from performance studies to examine how the President’s tour of the South Bronx contributed to and shaped this narrative. “When is an urban condition labeled decay?” questions

Rosalyn Deutsche’s essay for the exhibition’s catalogue.14 This chapter responds to this question by examining how this label of “decay” was produced through President

Carter’s performative act of walking. In order to better understand how the President responded to and produced ideas about American cities, my efforts ground Carter’s urban initiatives and political attitudes in a specific act of bodily engagement within the particular landscape of the South Bronx. Doing so can help scholars to understand how power can operate tacitly through the body, and how people in positions of power sometimes use practice to produce dominant narratives about urban space.

Carter did not simply produce the South Bronx ex nihilo. By the time of his walk in 1977, the “South Bronx” had already emerged not just as a symbol of urban decline in the borough, but also as a metonym for urban “ghettoes” in New York City and in the nation as a whole.15 The economic and social transformations that had begun to unfold across the nation following World War II, which included deindustrialization and suburbanization and their resultant racial and spatial shifts, had a profound effect on

American cities and the public’s perception of them as epicenters of crime, blight,

13 Farmer, Urban Mythologies, 10. 14 Rosalyn Deutsche, “The Threshold of Democracy,” in Urban Mythologies, 94. 15 For an analysis that considers how a particular urban neighborhood can become a metonym, see Josh Sides, “Straight into Compton: American Dreams, Urban Nightmares, and the Metamorphosis of a Black ,” American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (September 2004): 583-605.

49 material and sexual filth, and an intractable “culture” of poverty.16 Following the race riots of the late 1960s, the Federal Government and the American public’s fear of and hostility toward urban areas increased noticeably, and this national antipathy became hyper-focused on New York.17 “Goddamn New York … Jews and Catholics and blacks and Puerto Ricans,” President Nixon caustically remarked in 1972. “There is a law of the jungle where some things don’t survive … Maybe New York shouldn’t survive. Maybe it should go through a cycle of destruction.”18 As the City entered into fiscal crisis in early 1975, this antipathy increased. In many ways, narratives about the city’s crisis fit into the national “crisis of confidence,” a term which was famously utilized during

Carter’s July 15th, 1979, televised speech in which he argued that the country’s economic crisis was also one of moral and spiritual calamity.19 In 1978, the Times had connected this national climate of psychological crisis to the desperation of the South Bronx.

According to the paper, its recent series of stories about the area had reminded readers of the “social pathology underlying America’s gleaming progress,” and the fact that the

16 The “culture of poverty” thesis originated in anthropologist Oscar Lewis’ 1966 work La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family In The Culture Of Poverty—San Juan And New York (New York: Random House, 1966). The search to explain urban social problems had earlier, prewar roots. In particular, see the Chicago School, and founders Robert Park and Ernest Burgess’ 1925 publication The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925/1984), in which they argued that the spatial organization of cities could explain social problems. 17 Some scholars and journalists mark the Herald Tribune’s 1965 series, “New York City in Crisis,” as the beginning of this rhetoric: see Sam Roberts’ America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) and Flood’s Fires. The previous year, Richard Whalen also published “A City Destroying Itself: An Angry View of New York,” Fortune 70, no. 3 (September 1964): 114-123. 18 Cited in Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post- Sixties America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 207. 19 For a scholarly investigation of the provenance and impact of this speech see Kevin Mattson’s“What the Heck are You Up To, Mr. President?”: Jimmy Carter, America’s ‘Malaise,’ and the Speech that Should Have Changed The Country (New York: Bloomsburg, 2009).

50 country was in need of “healing from psychic wounds,” and a “renewal of confidence in its institutions.”20

The ‘South Bronx’ through which the President traveled was a 20 square mile,

600,000-person area south of Fordham Road and west of the Bronx River. “Not until the late 1960s,” claimed a 1979 Bronx Museum of the Arts exhibition entitled

Devastation/Resurrection, “did the term begin to be used in the context of fires, destruction and rubble, to become an aura which now engulfs old neighborhood boundaries.” The term’s symbolic resonance both produced and evaded physical boundaries. Some residents were not even sure what the term meant. When asked by

Curator Robert Jensen what the “South Bronx” applied to, resident Katherine Peele responded: “I imagine it means it’s an area where there’s a lot of deterioration, minorities.” “You don’t think it applies to a specific geographical area?” questioned

Jensen. “No, I don’t,” responded Peele. 21

The area’s economic devastation was not simply symbolic; it was most certainly real. By 1977, 34% of the area’s population lived below the poverty line, the per capita income was only 40% of the national average, and the unemployment rate was the city’s highest.22 The borough, and the South Bronx in particular, had also experienced severe population decline and destruction of its building stock. From 1970 to 1977, the South

20 “A Time to Begin,” NYT, January 1, 1978. 21 The Bronx Museum of Arts, Devastation/Resurrection: The South Bronx, curated by Robert Jensen, November 9 to January 13, 1980, 13, 65: NYPL Milstein Division. See also the Bronx County Historical Society’s 1979 publication “The Story of the South Bronx” by Lloyd Ultan, which explains the origin of the term in the postwar period. “By 1960,” writes Ultan, “the South Bronx was beginning to show the origins of all the troubles that was to make it a national image of the urban ills of the late 20th century.” 22 The City of New York, Abe Beame, Summary: The South Bronx, A Plan for Revitalization (December 1977): NYPL General Research Division.

51 Bronx’s population decreased by 14% and in 1977, the area contained 3,000 vacant lots.23

Between 1970 and 1975, the South Bronx lost 43,000 apartments, which represented 16% of its housing stock.24 In the two years leading up to the President’s visit, 7,000 fires had burned.25

Much of the devastation in the South Bronx was a product of deliberate public policy. To avoid the City’s bankruptcy and the anticipated threats to both the state and national economies, both levels of government intervened in the fiscal crisis. Given the anti-urban climate of the Nixon and Ford presidential administrations, federal aid was initially slow to materialize but in November of 1975, the government agreed to provide

$2.3 billion in short-term loans provided a strict set of conditions was met.26 The State, which was granted control over city funds, froze wages, laid off many public employees, implemented tuition charges at the city’s formally free public universities, and increased subway fares.27 The police and fire Departments were reduced by approximately 20%, sanitation by nearly 30%, and the correction, education, and healthcare departments all

23 The City of New York, Summary: The South Bronx. 24 Ken Auletta, The Streets Were Paved with Gold (New York: Random House, 1975), 9. 25 The City of New York, Summary: The South Bronx. 26 One of the initial federal fears was that a bailout would set a precedent for other municipal governments. The eventual decision to bail out New York was partially the result of national fears that the city’s crisis would produce a domino effect: see Time magazine’s “How to Save New York,” October 20, 1975. One of the conditions specified by the Federal Government was that the City would need to balance its budget by 1978 and regain access to the credit markets that same year. This didn’t happen until 1981. In Koch, Soffer argues that anti-urban federal administrations were a critical precipitating factor in the City’s economic downfall, specifically in the healthcare arena. According to Soffer, 116, mayors Lindsay and Beame responded to federal policies by putting recurring expense items, which were usually paid for with tax revenues, into the capital budget, which was financed by debts. 27 According to Soffer, 61,000 jobs were eliminate from between 1975 and 1977, and Koch placed a hiring freeze on all city departments except police, fire, corrections, sanitation and education between 1978 and 1982. John Mollenkopf reports that jobs overall fell 16% from 1969 to 1976, in New York Comes Back: The Mayoralty of Edward I. Koch, ed. Michael Goodwin and the Museum of the City of New York (New York: PowerHouse Books, 2005).

52 faced cuts between 10 and 20%.28 In this desperate economic climate, the City’s

Housing and Development Administration head Roger Starr suggested a kind of

Darwinian urbanism entitled “planned shrinkage,” which argued that “declining” neighborhoods should be entirely cut off from city services and left to die in order to direct funds toward “healthier” neighborhoods. Although Starr’s policy was not enacted in name, a kind of defacto planned shrinkage often characterized the City’s approach to the crisis.29 This defacto shrinkage was starkly evident in the South Bronx.

The “South Bronx,” however, was not just a class construct. It was also a racial construct that reinforced the city’s segregation and magnified anxieties about non-white urban spaces. Various explanations for the area’s situation were debated, and these included governmental abandonment, landlord greed, unemployment, resident-induced

28 Mayor Beame Papers, Municipal Archives (Departmental Correspondence/1974-77 Sanitation/MN61004/Box 10/Folder 295-298/#660). These cuts were even more disturbing to some New Yorkers because of their seemingly arbitrary nature. In 1975, a report on Human Services indicated that “in City agencies, no standardized uniform criteria were used in making budget cuts. There is not now, nor has there ever been a competent evaluation apparatus in City government:” Trends and Forecasts: A Quarterly Report on Human Services in New York City, fourth quarter 1975: Beame Papers (Taskforce on New York City Crisis Files/Deputy Mayor John Zuccotti Subject Files, 1975-77/Box 10/Folder 174/#17579). 29 Starr’s proposal was in partial response to the RAND institute’s study that revealed the relationship between the removal of city services and population decline. See Auletta, “An Agenda to Save Our City: 44 Proposals That Could Help Turn This Town Around,” NY Mag, March 22, 1976, 39. This concept was also articulated by Senator as “benign neglect:” see “ ‘Benign Neglect’ on Race is Proposed by Moynihan,” NYT, March 1 1970. For a critique of the City’s approach to spatial triage, see “Why Should the New Mayor Make Decentralization a Priority?” Letter from Marcy Boyle to Max Lehman: Edward N. Costikyan Papers, Columbia University (Box 1B). Miriam Greenberg comments that this proposal was both an economic and a visual strategy that was intended to provide a more orderly picture of the city for television cameras and newspaper reports: Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World (New York: Routledge, 2008), 141. She also notes that although the plan was never implemented by name, public and private disinvestment in these neighborhoods resulted in “defacto” shrinkage. This defacto shrinkage was particularly apparent in the provision of fire department services, which resulted in an enormous loss of building stock in many neighborhoods that Starr had identified as unproductive.

53 arson, and fear itself.30 But chief among the reasons given by municipal officials and the news media was the shifting racial and social landscape of the postwar period. From

1960 to 1975, the racial composition of the Bronx changed dramatically: the black and

Puerto Rican population rose from 24 to 54%, while the white population declined from

76 to 44%.31 “With these social changes came the rapid acceleration of deterioration in high-density areas,” concluded the City’s May 1977 “Housing Strategy” for the borough.

“Present trends for the southern part of the borough are forbidding, with fires, abandonment and demolition having taken their toll.”32 Yet in 1980, the Koch administration admitted that official neglect was also a critical factor; the South Bronx was the “only large ghetto area of New York City without a publicly supported, multi- purpose, community-oriented planning and development agency.”33

Media narratives about the South Bronx contributed to the construction of an affective spatial habitus in which fear, despair, and rage were endemic. Perhaps the most detailed media treatment of the South Bronx prior to the President’s visit was a 1973 New

York Times series. These stories were serialized in a manner similar to the 1977 Daily

News’ examination of Bushwick entitled “Our Dying Neighborhoods,” and this serialized approach implied that the treatment of the South Bronx would be thorough and that its story had a fundamentally dramatic quality. “Fear is the overriding emotion in a landscape of despair,” remarked reporter Martin Tolchin in the opening story, entitled

30 The Bronx Museum of Arts, Devastation/Resurrection, 13. 31 The City of New York, Department of City Planning and Office of the Bronx Borough President, Mayor Beame, A Bronx Housing Strategy (May 1977): Neighborhood Preservation Center. 32 The City of New York, Bronx Housing Strategy. 33 South Bronx Development Organization (SBDO), South Bronx Revitalization Program and Development Guide Plans: Areas of Strength, Areas of Opportunity (December 1980), 13: Avery Architectural Library, Columbia University.

54 “The South Bronx: A Jungle Stalked by Fear, Seized by Rage.” “The whole atmosphere is geared to crushing a person’s spirit, and most people don’t have the kind of strength to resist,” echoed director of the Bronx “Model Cities” program Victor Marrero.34 “Rage,” wrote Tolchin, “is a condition of life in the South Bronx. It permeates the rubble-strewn streets and the unheated tenements … the rage erupts frequently in acts of spontaneous, seemingly mindless violence and in wanton vandalism that has demolished buildings and marred others with graffiti.”35 Rage was both a natural outgrowth of the “rubble-strewn streets” and an active producer of these streets. The media also recounted wild-west style accounts of the area’s “Fort Apache” precinct, and depicted a landscape seething with both criminals and vermin; in 1976, the Sunday News chronicled the 17-block South

Bronx domain of a new species of “super rat” and warned that the rat’s radius was “likely to quickly spread.”36

Media accounts suggested that this desperate landscape both threatened the rest of the city, and was geographically and temporally detached from it. “This social cancer is spreading,” argued one editorial response to the Times series. “Unless checked, it can destroy not just the rest of the Bronx but the city itself … the South Bronx is the

American urban problem in microcosm.”37 Yet the series also emphasized that “even for a native New Yorker, the voyage across the Willis Avenue Bridge is a journey to a foreign country.” Indeed, the area was even advanced as “worse” than a foreign country.

Local Congressman reported that “as bad as the conditions were in

34 Martin Tolchin, “South Bronx: A Jungle Stalked by Fear, Seized by Rage,” NYT, January 15, 1973. 35 Tolchin, “Rage Permeates All Areas of Life in the South Bronx,” January 17, 1973. 36 Tom Walker, “Siege of Fort Apache,” NY Mag, February 23, 1976, 45; Edward Zuckerman, “The War Against Super Rat,” NY Sunday News, May 2, 1976. 37 Editorial, “Urban Cancer,” NYT, January 18, 1973.

55 Puerto Rico in the late nineteen-thirties … conditions in the South Bronx today are infinitely worse.”38 In 1969, Richard Severo’s four-part series on the city’s narcotics problem in the Times stated that “repeated visits to Hunts Point [in the South Bronx] uncover so much that is not supposed to be in America in 1969 that the visitor wonders if he has suddenly entered a time machine and been transported back to frontier days. In basic ways, portions of Hunts Point … have ceased to be a part of New York City.” This chronopolitical commentary removed the South Bronx both from the city itself and from participation in the present-day.39

In 1975, news stories about the area’s fires became ubiquitous and in the spring just prior to the President’s visit, CBS launched a documentary narrated by Bill Moyers entitled “The Fire Next Door,” which chronicled the more than 30,000 buildings that had burned in the borough over the past 10 years. The Moyers report advanced the fight against arson as a moral imperative: “it’s a test of whether democratic capitalism will be made to work for the poorest among us- that- and the knowledge that, unless we do act, the fires will no longer stop next door.” Moyers underlined that the Bronx residents

“want order, safety, and some degree of autonomy, just like everyone else,” while also evidencing the singularity of the area’s scorched-earth tragedy and the threat this posed not just to adjacent neighborhoods, but to democracy itself.40

This affective spatial habitus emphasized that any signs of hope were incongruous given the area’s endemic desperation. Entitled “Ghetto Landscape: On Gutted Kelly

Street, Vandalism and Arson Aren’t Anything New,” a Wall Street Journal story that ran

38 Tolchin, “Stalked by Fear.” 39 Richard Severo, “Hunts Point: Ruled by Addicts,” NYT, September 24, 1969. See the introduction for Johannes Fabian’s articulation of chronopolitics. 40 CBS, The Fire Next Door, narrated by Bill Moyers (March 22, 1977): Transcript at the Bronx County Historical Society.

56 in the summer just preceding Carter’s visit claimed that “one of the most incongruous sights this summer in the South Bronx is small crews of green-uniformed laborers day after day meticulously sweeping piles of rubbish along the ruined streets.”41 A 1976 New

York Times story about the “overshadowed race” of middle-class residents in the northern

Bronx reported that those blacks and Hispanics who moved in were “trying desperately to maintain middle-class values and to prevent the spread of the pockets of violence and ugliness.”42 Although some Bronxites might attempt to stave off the markers of decline, these narratives asserted that vandalism, arson, and filth were both spatially endemic and temporally interminable. “Has anyone seen the [South] Bronx lately?” quipped New York

Magazine the following year. “Where half of the borough’s 1.5 million residents are trying to survive what has become New York’s number one disaster area.”43

Beginning with the area’s 1967 designation as part of the federal “Model Cities” program, a number of municipally-produced narratives about the South Bronx’s despair had also circulated.44 In 1969, the City Planning Department’s “Master Plan” for the five boroughs commented that the South Bronx streets “vibrat[ed] to violence and fear.”45 In

1974, at the behest of a local community group, 200 city officials, real estate investors, bankers and reporters toured the South Bronx by bus yet failed to fully grasp the area’s problems.46 And just prior to Carter’s walk, the City’s May 1977 “Bronx Housing

41 Janice Simpson and Derek Reveron, “Ghetto Landscape: On Gutted Kelly Street, Vandalism and Arson Aren’t Anything New,” Wall Street Journal, July 20, 1977. 42 Murray Schumach, “About New York: That Overshadowed Race in the North Bronx,” NYT, September 11, 1976. 43 Samuel Kaplan, “The Bronx ,” NY Mag, December 14, 1970. 44 This 1967 “revelation” is discussed in Eulalio Rodriguez, “Portrait of a Blighted Area: The Bronx,” The Sunday News, September 26, 1971. 45 Quoted in Samuel Kaplan, “The Bronx Arrangement,” 10. 46 Von Hoffman notes that although Genevieve Brooks, the head of the newly formed Mid-Bronx Desperadoes, attempted to expose the visitors to the gravity of the neighborhoods’ problems

57 Strategy” described it as a “borough of striking contrasts. Neighborhood conditions range from the dilapidated tenements of the South Bronx to the small one-family homes of City Island to the spacious wooded estates along the banks of the Hudson River in

Riverdale. Vacant, garbage strewn lots are located not far from some of the City’s largest and most beautiful open spaces.”47

As my analysis throughout the rest of the chapter will evidence, the President’s trip often relied upon and responded to these already-established ideas about the South

Bronx landscape. Similar to these stories, Carter’s walk argued that the South Bronx both posed a threat of contagion that needed to be contained, and would forever remain an otherworldly land that did not participate in “progress.” Additionally, in an echo of the Moyers report, Carter exposed the area as both a national bellwether and a moral imperative. And while the President’s walk did not position the South Bronx in contrast to middle-class areas of the borough, his surprised recognition of homesteaders on

Washington Avenue exposed their efforts as anomalous rather than normative.

Yet Carter’s walk was not simply a response to these previous discourses. The

President’s journey was also a carefully choreographed political performance with its own intended message and audience. Carter’s steps were planned as a form of political expression through movement that both cited and complicated previous urban political walks. By taking to the streets, the President hoped to present himself as a populist, to bolster his commitment to urban areas, and to critique technocratic urban planning. In the wake of the two previous presidential administrations’ dishonesty regarding Vietnam and Watergate, Carter’s walk was part of his efforts to restore the public’s faith in through charts and graphs, they were most concerned with learning about Herman Badillo’s bid for mayor, Block by Block, 23. 47 The City of New York, Bronx Housing Strategy, 6.

58 government by adopting “everyman” tactics, and utilizing the media to foster a climate of openness about the political process.48 Following his swearing-in on January 20, 1977, he became the first president to eschew the limousine and instead travel on foot from the

Capitol to the White House, and in 1979 he paid surprise visits to the homes of ordinary

Americans to get their take on particular issues. Prior to his time in office, Carter had also spent part of the 1960s perambulating through blighted neighborhoods as a door-to- door born again Christian. Although time would reveal that Carter’s populist image as a hardworking, ethical, peaceful and simple man was largely genuine, during his presidential campaign the press and the public became obsessed by the story of the peanut farmer from rural Georgia who had catapulted to the presidency from relative obscurity.49 “Despite scholarly predictions that their nation is on the decline, the people of the U.S. still believe in themselves. And they want to believe that the man from

Plains, Georgia, is one of them,” remarked James Neyland in 1977’s Carter Family

Scrapbook.50 “The drama of a decaying New York neighborhood drew [Carter] away from the drama of international peacemaking,” commented ABC regarding Carter’s visit to the South Bronx, which emphasized the highly performative quality of his journey and its symbolic political import.51

Carter had also sought to distinguish himself from his predecessors by evidencing his superior commitment to urban areas, and to New York City specifically. “There will

48 For examinations of Carter’s everyman status, see Bruce Schulman’s The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001) and Edward Berkowitz’s Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 49 PBS, American Experience: Jimmy Carter (2002). 50 James Neyland, The Carter Family Scrapbook: An Intimate Close-Up of America’s First Family (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1977). 51 Nightly News, ABC, October 5, 1977: The Vanderbilt Television News Archive Collection, LOC.

59 never be a newspaper headline, however, in any community as long as I am President telling it to ‘drop dead,’ advanced Carter in May of 1976 at a speech given at Gracie

Mansion. This speech referenced President Ford’s infamous refusal to offer the city a financial bailout as it faced crisis in 1975. “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” read the front page of the Daily News on October 30, 1975, following Ford’s refusal. “We may not always agree on the definition of a problem or the best solution for it, but there will never be any doubt among the citizens of New York that I am anxious to help them in remaining the greatest city in the world,” concluded the then presidential candidate.52 Carter positioned his journey through the South Bronx as an act of spatial atonement for past governmental sins. By calling the trip “sobering” and commenting that it “had an impact on me and my own conscience,” the President stressed that his journey was not just spatial but also psychological. 53 Moreover, he emphasized that this trip had forced him to grapple with his guilty conscience about the nation’s urban problems. In this way, Carter’s walk partially reinterpreted the area’s existing affective spatial habitus of fear and rage to produce a more docile landscape, which was ripe for governmental intervention. While news stories of the President’s visit did chronicle South Bronxites shouting for jobs as the motorcade passed, these shouts were apparently cheerful and the Daily News reported that the motorcade kept its “windows open while amazed passerby slapped each other’s hands gleefully and waved.”54 Washington Avenue resident Claude Riley addressed the

52 “Statement by Former Governor Jimmy Carter at Gracie Mansion,” May 26, 1976: Jack Bigel Archive on Municipal Finance and Leadership, Baruch College (NYC Fiscal Crisis/News Releases Concerning Beame/Shelf 8 Binder). 53 Bruce Drake, “Carter Puts Tight Focus on South Bronx,” DN, October 14, 1977. See also the City’s December 1977 plan and Dembart’s “Sobering Trip” for connections between Carter’s visit and morality. These narratives also fit into the broader portrait of Carter as a spiritually and religiously committed president. 54 Fallon, “Tours Area in Surprise.”

60 President colloquially: “Hi Jimmy,” he said. “Glad to see you in the Bronx, checking out conditions.”55 Carter shook hands with “stunned but delighted black and Puerto Rican residents” as he walked toward 167th street.56

Carter’s decision to walk was also an expression of a new post-60s consciousness in urban planning that valorized the neighborhood scale, public participation, and experiential knowledge.57 “Only if you can see and smell and hear will you be able to have a genuine idea of the magnitude of the problem,” suggested Borough President

Robert Abrams when he invited the President to the South Bronx in 1976.58 The idea that the South Bronx’s struggles could only be understood through experiential knowledge, and through walking in particular, was echoed a year later in a City Planning

Commission press release that cited various statistics charting the neighborhood’s despair, but which maintained that “in a very real sense, though, these figures do not fully convey the impact of what has happened to much of this area … To walk around parts of the South Bronx, especially around Charlotte Street, is to see a dramatic example of the government’s failures to cope with urban problems.”59

Carter’s walk also cited and responded to the tradition of political walking tours in impoverished minority neighborhoods during the postwar urban crisis. “The South

Bronx has become the great urban landmark of the 1970s,” remarked Owen Moritz of the

Daily News. “Jimmy Carter goes there as the Pope went to thirteen years ago:

55 Judith Michaelson and Joy Cook, “Carter Tours Bronx Ruin and Vows Aid,” NYP, October 5, 1977. 56 Fallon, “Tours Area in Surprise.” 57 See Chapters 3 and 5 for a broader discussion of community-based urban planning, and the government’s commitment to such efforts. 58 Dembart, “City Reminds Carter There Is a Plan for the South Bronx,” NYT, October 7, 1977. 59 NYC Planning Commission, Press Release, October 16, 1978: Ken Auletta Papers, NYPL (Writings/Koch Profile/Research Files: South Bronx/Box 19/Folder 2). Note that this press release follows the Commission’s initial approval of Koch’s Charlotte Street Housing Plan.

61 because it’s there, because it’s the worst expression of us and if it can be saved, so can the rest of society.”60 Vernon Jordan referred to the President’s visit as a form of “slum tourism,” and thus linked Carter’s walk to a much longer history of class and race divisions in the industrialized city.61 Interestingly, while Carter’s walk was partially intended to critique the anti-urban policies of the Nixon and Ford administrations, it actually cited Nixon’s 1969 walk up Washington, D.C.’s Seventh Street following the

M.L.K. riots in order to do so. “There could be no more searing symbol of governmental inability to act than those rubble-strewn lots and desolate, decaying buildings, once a vital part of a community’s life and now left to rot,” remarked Nixon in 1969, and

Carter’s statements about the South Bronx were eerily similar. Just following Carter’s visit, the Times emphasized the ways in which the trip echoed Nixon’s stroll in order to question its efficacy.62

The most famous postwar political walk through an impoverished New York neighborhood was arguably Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s 1966 stroll through the

Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, which eventually led to the creation of the country’s first community development organization. In some ways, Kennedy’s walk was quite distinctive from Carter’s. The Senator “toured dilapidated Bedford-Stuyvesant buildings … and found himself the focus of wrathful comments by leaders of the heavily

Negro section of Brooklyn,” reported the Times.63 Kennedy “sat impassively during what were virtually harangues” by local residents, and a small child even slammed a door in his face. This frictional landscape was quite different from the depictions of gleeful and

60 Owen Moritz, “Can the South Bronx be Saved?,” DN, October 16, 1977. 61 Auletta, “South Bronx: Do Schemes Match Our Dreams,” DN, February 5, 1978. 62 Roger Wilkins, “After Carter’s South-Bronx Visit, His Urban Aid Effort is Being Watched,” NYT, October 13, 1977. 63 Ralph Blumenthal, “Brooklyn Negroes Harass Kennedy,” NYT, February 5, 1966.

62 passive South Bronxites. When he wasn’t walking through areas empty of human life,

Carter appeared to be in control of the interactions he had with residents. His look was mostly one of grave concern rather than fear, and he even laughed convivially with residents at the Washington Avenue stop.64 Moreover, Bed-Stuy had been chosen because it wasn’t as far “gone” as other areas of the city, and contained a significant proportion of homeowners. Yet RFK’s visit also mobilized a number of ideas that were echoed through Carter’s walk; media accounts emphasized Bed-Stuy’s startling contrasts and advocated for self-help practices among residents.65 The neighborhood’s “ever expanding borders” also threatened to spill over into adjacent areas of the city.66

At the municipal level, the most notable postwar perambulations were certainly those of Mayor John Lindsay, who took to the streets during the racial conflagrations of the 1960s. As the mayor who “used more shoe leather” than even Fiorello LaGuardia,

Lindsay’s walks primarily unfolded within impoverished black neighborhoods “where many New Yorkers have never been and fear to tread.”67 Through these walks, the

Mayor attempted to mollify white city dwellers’ anxieties about street uprisings by exposing the penetrability of these spaces. Yet his walks also continued to demarcate these neighborhoods’ apartness from the rest of the city by underlining that he “dared” to walk here alone. His movements displayed an optimism and taken for granted sense of expertise; Lindsay’s aides were often distraught as he would suddenly disappear during

64 Footage of Carter laughing was broadcast on NBC’s Nightly News on October 5, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection. 65 Joseph Fried, “Bedford-Stuyvesant has Bright Side, Too,” NYT, , 1969; William Borders, “Mrs. Kennedy Tours ‘Superblocks’ Renovated in Bedford-Stuyvesant,” NYT, September 31, 1969. 66 From Edward R. Schmitt, President of the Other America: Robert Kennedy and the Politics of Poverty (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). 67 “Walks on the Wild Side,” NYT, August 10, 1967.

63 tours to explore on his own without protection, and in the wake of RFK’s assassination, he initially strongly resisted additional security.68 And although the communities through which he passed were often skeptical about the benefit of Lindsay’s visits, newspaper reports depicted an emboldened mayor who was able to pacify “hostile” blocks and to transform them into comfortable home spaces.69 He became famous for stating that he felt “a lot safer on the streets of Harlem than [he did] at City Hall,” and that the people in

“ghetto communities” offered him special protection.70 In July of 1966, Lindsay

“pacified a volatile crowd of 1000 Negro and Puerto Rican demonstrators in Brooklyn … by walking unescorted through their midst.” “The mayor’s black sedan drew up at the rear of the noisy crowd and the mayor got out and walked into the throng. There was a moment of startled silence. Then the chants of anger turned to cheers as a half-dozen burly Negro youths lifted the mayor to their shoulders and carried him through the crowd,” reported the Times.71 While Lindsay’s self-assured footfall sought to make the city’s streets “safe” for certain kinds of New Yorkers, Carter’s expert footsteps were heavy with sadness and disbelief as he revealed not a comfortable home space but a distant wasteland which nonetheless remained ripe for transformation.72

As part of this tradition of populist walkers, Carter aimed for his visit to appear to authentically “reveal” the South Bronx to the public for the first time.73 His visit was

68 Richard Reeves, “Security Tighter on Mayor’s Tours,” NYT, June 26, 1968. 69 Murray Schumach, “Lindsay Walk in Brooklyn Stirs Pros and Cons,” NYT, August 19, 1968. 70 Reeves, “Security Tighter.” 71 Douglas Robinson, “Mayor Walks Alone into Angry Crowd and Draws Cheers,” NYT, July 20, 1966. 72 See also Joe Flood’s and Sam Roberts’ discussions of Lindsay as a walking mayor. 73 Scholars have commented on this revelation although none have probed how it was actually produced. See in particular Jonnes and Von Hoffman. “In seven days during early October 1977, the South Bronx became the most notorious inner-city neighborhood in the ,” writes Von Hoffman. “It had fallen into the abyss long before and languished- except for occasional

64 meticulously planned, yet kept secret to ensure its seeming spontaneity; Mayor Beame was only informed of the tour at the last minute and not even the district’s Congressman was invited to join him.74 According to the Carter administration, plans were kept quiet to avoid excessive attention from reporters, and to grant the President access to the area with a “minimum of disruption.”75 CBS referred to the trip as an “unscheduled visit to the slums.”76 “No one could recall,” reported the Times, “when Mr. Carter, or any other

President had visited an area like the South Bronx- a point that was underscored by the reaction of people all along the route.”77 While Charlotte Street had supposedly “ceased to exist, except as a place on a Bronx” map, Carter’s visit “revealed” a particular history of the block’s construction and maintenance by hard-working white ethnics. The

President stopped to survey the damage at “almost the precise spot” where the “grandest apartment on the street” had been, which was inhabited by “doctors, lawyers and nurses- the professionals.” Italian immigrants who worked as “skilled masons” had constructed the no-longer-extant buildings.78 Interestingly, prior to the President’s visit, there had been only one mention of Charlotte Street in the Times; “Sure we would like to dramatize the abandonment,” said an aide to Bronx Borough President Abrams in 1970, “but we can’t get newsmen to come up to blocks like Charlotte Street.” This comment laid the groundwork for Carter’s revelation of the street’s despair.79

hell-on-earth exposes- in disreputable semi-obscurity,” Block by Block, 20. “Overnight, the SB had been vaulted to stardom as the worst place in America, maybe the whole western world,” echoes Jonnes, South Bronx Rising, 317. 74 Nightly News, NBC, November 29, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection. 75 Edward Walsh, “Carter, Ending Visit, Sees Decaying South Bronx,” Washington Post, October 5, 1977. 76 Nightly News, CBS, October 5, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection. 77 Dembart, “Sobering Trip.” 78 Fred Ferretti, “After 70 years, South Bronx Street is at a Dead End,” NYT, October 21, 1977. 79 Kaplan, “Bronx Arrangement.”

65 While the walk’s intended message was one of spontaneity and on-the-ground engagement with local residents, the walk was in fact highly choreographed and carefully planned in advance. Firstly, Carter’s choice of Charlotte Street was made only after much deliberation, and advance consideration of the street’s destruction as a potent symbol of decline. The result was a tour of a block that was more aberrant than representative of the South Bronx’s struggles. Community District 3, which included

Charlotte Street, was beset by the most extreme abandonment in the South Bronx. The district lost two-thirds of its population between 1970 and 1980.80 Of the remaining residents, over half were black, 38% Puerto Rican, and 9% white.81 In Charlotte’s

Street’s Crotona South neighborhood in particular, the poverty rate reached nearly half the population by 1980.82 Three-fifths of the land lay vacant, most of which was city- owned.83 And Charlotte Street was by far the emptiest area in the neighborhood; the three block stretch between Crotona Park East and Jennings Street contained only one small group of multi-family apartments, and this was not technically located on Charlotte

Street but at 1500 Boston Road around from the spot where Carter journeyed.84 As the City-run South Bronx Development Organization (SBDO) later made clear, the street was in many ways an aberration: “despite the widespread

80 Eric Marcus, “High-Rise, No-Rise: Families strive to turn an American nightmare into the American dream,” Metropolis (April 1985): Bronx County Historical Society. The SBDO’s 1980 report counters that there was a one-third population loss between 1970 and 1977, from 151,000 to 100,000: SBDO, Areas of Strength, 67. 81 City of New York, Department of City Planning, Fact Book: Community Portfolio: Information for Community Districts: The Bronx (November 1977): Avery, and City Hall Library. 82 Von Hoffman, Block by Block. 83 SBDO, Areas of Strength. Von Hoffman provides specifics statistics for housing units in Crotona Park East: housing units drop by more than half between 1970 and 1980, and the percentage vacant reaches 20% in 1980, up from 4% in 1970. 84 See “Tenants Cling to Last Building on Block,” NYT, October 21, 1977.

66 misconception that large areas of the South Bronx are entirely empty, it is rare to find a single block which is totally vacant and City owned.”85

The President’s eventual decision to visit Charlotte Street followed a number of unanswered invitations to the South Bronx. Bronx Borough President Abrams had reportedly invited Carter in 1976; following the publication of its “Bronx Housing

Strategy” the City had invited the President in June; and in July he was again invited by

U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. At this time, Deputy Press Secretary Rex

Granum said that the President “had no plans to make such a visit anytime soon.”86 The

President was strongly critiqued for his apparent refusal to engage with urban problems.87

In May of 1977, U.S. Senator George McGovern’s limo “took a wrong turn” and ended up in the South Bronx, and his voyage proved to be a platform for indicting Carter’s urban ineffectuality; “I saw the same dilapidation there today as I saw six years ago,” he concluded.88 Alongside these specific invitations to the South Bronx, news media and public officials also commented on the President’s failure to engage with other impoverished areas of the city. That July, Carter had also been invited to tour looted blackout neighborhoods, the South Bronx among them, and National Urban League director Vernon Jackson had harshly criticized Carter’s inability to make this trip.89 Just

85 SBDO, Crotona South: Final Planning Report and First Year Action Program (May 1981): Papers of Jill Jonnes, . 86 Dembart, “City Reminds Carter There is a Plan”; Frank Jackman, “Pat Offers Tour to Carter, DN, July 27, 1977. 87 There were many critiques of Carter’s urban policy record, which reflected his often ambiguous position between the 1960s great society model of urban social welfare and the financial realities of the 1970s. See for example, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak’s “Carter to City: ‘Heal Thyself,” NY Mag, March 14, 1977, for a discussion of Carter’s hands-off approach toward New York. 88 Richard Gooding, “Wrong Turn Gives McGovern a Look at the South Bronx,” NYP, May 20, 1977. 89 Dembart, “Sobering Trip.” See also Jonathan Mahler’s discussion of Carter’s refusal to grant the city national disaster status during the blackout and his failure to visit affected neighborhoods:

67 days prior to Carter’s walk down Charlotte Street, Jimmy Breslin quipped that when the

President arrived on his scheduled October visit to the city, he would most likely “appear at the United Nations and then sit in a hotel suite,” and would pay no heed to the New

York of “the South Bronx, Bushwick and Central Harlem.”90 The Daily News had also mapped an itinerary for Carter through the city’s imperiled neighborhoods, which would not be limited to the destitute South Bronx, but would also include Bushwick. The News underlined that this stop in Bushwick would give the President a fuller picture of despair’s continuum by showing Carter a neighborhood with a few remaining middle- class families who were struggling to survive.91

In the wake of all of these unanswered invitations, and an urban policy of “studied indifference,”92 the President’s visit to the South Bronx was partially seen as a remedy for these oversights; if Carter had seen a small portion of the South Bronx, he had supposedly seen it all. Mayoral candidate Mario Cuomo’s “disturbing” tour of Harlem’s streets a few weeks after the President’s trip emphasized this idea that the South Bronx could serve as a metonym. “President Carter went through the South Bronx but he didn’t come here,” one Harlem resident remarked angrily. Yet the story asserted that Carter probably didn’t have to visit Harlem because the streetscape was nearly identical: “the small van moved slowly along St. Nicholas Avenue … passing dozens of men and women congregated in small groups on the sidewalk. Some of them were drinking wine

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City (New York: Picador, 2005), 225-226. James Goodman also mentions Carter’s failures during the blackout: Blackout (New York: North Point Press, 2003), 177. 90 Jimmy Breslin, “How to Make Carter a One-Term President,” DN, October 2, 1977. 91 See Mahler, Bronx is Burning, 322. 92 Quote from Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 225.

68 or beer, others were smoking and glancing anxiously up the block.”93 This description was almost interchangeable with the news stories that depicted the South Bronx’s aimless landscape of residents lingering on street corners. A few days after the trip, Borough

President Abrams underlined the arbitrary nature of the President’s geographic decision and its very real policy implications: “If President Carter’s chauffeur had taken a right turn instead of a left turn, we’d have all the money going to Bushwick now,” he concluded.94

Carter and his advisors chose Charlotte Street precisely because it reproduced preexisting understandings about what the South Bronx looked like and its relationship to urban decline. While Carter and the media often described a visit to a strikingly alien urban landscape, this visit was also advanced as “a typical example of urban decay that has become a familiar scene in the South Bronx.”95 “HUD officials had planned a possible trip for Carter to hard hit neighborhoods in Brooklyn. But the White House settled on the South Bronx because it is widely regarded as the nation’s foremost symbol of urban decay,” reported the Daily News.96 Moreover, photographs of the visit underlined the “familiarity” of the scene by reproducing the framing of previous news media depictions.97 “President Carter’s visit to the South Bronx … confirmed what all

93 Steven Marcus, “Cuomo Takes a Disturbing Harlem Tour,” NYP, October 21, 1977. 94 Anna Quindlin, “The Politics of Charlotte Street,” NYT Magazine, October 7, 1979, quoted in Jonnes, South Bronx Rising, 325. 95Nightly News, ABC, October 13, 1977. 96 Bruce Davidson, “Carter Bids HUD Chief Look at a City Plan to Save South Bronx,” DN, October 10, 1977. 97 For example, note the remarkable similarity between an image of Carter’s visit in the Daily News’ October 6, 1977, edition and a previous image of the neighborhood printed on April 27, 1977.

69 those close to the problem had seen and said before,” concluded the City in its December

1977 revitalization plan just following the visit.98

In addition to these pre-established understandings about the South Bronx and about the relationship between walking and urban decline, Carter was also explicitly prepared for what he would see through specific briefings prior to that morning’s visit.

Although Auletta claimed that “nothing had prepared the man from Plains for what he would encounter” on his mission, in fact, everything had prepared him for exactly what he would see and how he was supposed to see it.99 Federal officials conceptualized the trip as an “initiation into the enormously difficult and complex world of urban blight,”100 and Harris’ elaborate briefings to Carter, which were informed by her prior visits to the area, dictated to the President exactly what would be evident along the South Bronx blocks. “What is seen in the South Bronx,” Harris wrote to Carter on October 1st, “is the end product of a process of decline and decay which is taking place in many older

American cities. The area is unique only in that it is at the final stage of the process.” By declaring the area already nearly dead, Harris created a set of visual expectations and laid the groundwork for the only potential performance the President could affect: that of emergency surgeon or, potentially, coroner. She also introduced Carter to a network of vague assertions about the area’s despair without providing statistics to support these: along Boston Road and Charlotte Street, argued Harris, “there is more crime and more police than in any other district.” Moreover, she provided a concrete set of visual expectations for what Carter could see by stating that “in every direction the view is of

98 City of New York, “Summary: The South Bronx.” 99 Auletta, “Do Schemes Match our Dreams.” 100 Wilkins, “After Carter’s South-Bronx Visit.”

70 abandoned and burned-out apartments and the area is completely dilapidated.”101 By revealing what was visible “in every direction,” she occluded any possibility of seeing things differently. The two stops had been chosen by Harris based on her previous surveys of the area and she informed Carter prior to the visit that the first stop was

“active with area residents at this time of morning [that the president] may wish to stop and talk with,” and that the second stop at Charlotte Street included “an elevated area

[that] provides an excellent view of the decay in the neighborhood.”102 Carter had also been prepared earlier that summer following the blackout. The Federal Insurance

Administration communicated to Carter after its tour of looted areas in the Bronx, and painted a very clear picture of destruction for the President. “The devastation that I observed … brought to mind Berlin or London after the bombings during the war,” wrote

Robert Hunter. “Blocks and blocks of shattered buildings stood as silent witnesses to years of neglect and the charred ruins resulting from fires reflected the frustration and anger of the residents. The businessmen indicated that without adequate housing, the area would die if, in fact, it was not already dead.”103

One of the most notable ways in which Carter was prepared to view the landscape was through a volume of photographs entitled “How the Other Half Still Lives,” which was arranged for him by Bob Adelman of the Phelps Stokes Fund anti-poverty foundation and mailed to the President by the foundation’s president, Franklin H.

Williams on June 9th. Williams claimed that “these pictures of the South Bronx and other slum areas speak for themselves,” and this statement underlined the supposedly

101 Letter from Patty Harris to President Carter, October 1, 1977: Patricia Harris Collection, LOC (Box 138/Folder: South Bronx, October 77 #1). 102 Letter from Patty Harris to President Carter, October 1, 1977. 103 Federal Insurance Administration to President Carter, Summer 1977: Harris Collection (Box 108/Folder: New York General 1977).

71 “obvious” quality of the images that were, in effect, already spoken for by a long lineage of slum images that extended back to Jacob Riis’ study from which the volume adopted its name. “The lights and the shadows and the rubble, the play of brick against broken glass, the icicles hanging from the doorposts- cave-like stalactites inside a family’s apartment. And the emptiness. But it is the people who live there- who still live there- who stand out: the boys leaping over a graveyard of discarded lumber, the little girls having tea in the ruins of a demolished building,” wrote Williams. One of the images viewed by the President depicted a landscape of abandonment and emptiness amidst which some life remained against all odds, seen in the form of a stray dog and a resigned elderly woman staring out from a window. “The photographs will, we hope, convince you of the tremendous value of a personal visit to (these) areas,” continued

Williams’ appeal to the President. “No single gesture on your part could do more for the spirit and hopes of our ghetto citizens than a sidewalk tour of their neighborhoods.” The letter suggested that the quotidian act of walking would permit the President to both authentically access the lives of suffering residents from a populist perspective, and to discover small shreds of hope from a privileged position. It also tied the fate of the South

Bronx to the rest of the city: “The South Bronx is not an island,” stated Williams. “Its future is linked with the fate of the city.”104 Carter responded to this contention as he simultaneously positioned the South Bronx as a metonym and laboratory for all urban problems.

Notwithstanding the walk’s populist intentions, the temporal aspect of the

President’s movements allowed him to experience the South Bronx from a privileged

104 Cited in Judith Michaelson, “This Is How the Other Half Still Lives,” NYP, October 11, 1977. Full Text in Shelby Moorman Howatt and Bob Adelman, “How the Other Half Still Lives,” Society 44, no. 1 (November 1978): 75-78: Kingsborough Community College.

72 position. Despite all of its advance preparation, the trip was exceedingly brief. He spent barely twenty minutes on the ground, the bulk of his journey was conducted from a limousine accompanied by motorcycles and helicopters containing a “small army” of cops, and many Bronx residents did not get a chance to witness his passing.105 Newspaper accounts established a clear distinction between the stagnant neighborhood through which he passed and the President’s particular brand of unfettered mobility. On October

5th, the Post reported that the president’s “motorcade, accompanied by twenty police cars with sirens wailing, drove past entire neighborhoods in charred ruins and groups of young men standing on street corners drinking beer.” These “early morning clusters of street people” included “startled winos [waving] their bagged bottles happily and black youths

… calling, ‘give me a job Jimmy.’”106 And, of course, the President was able to escape quickly following his visit, which stood in stark contrast to the residents who were left behind. Such descriptions positioned these “street” people as indigenous outgrowths of the naturally occurring built environment, where clusters of early morning drunkards were as much a part of the landscape as buildings in ruins. These residents’ seemingly stagnant bodies fit into a long-established urban trope about “street corner” societies. 107

Yet Carter’s journey also responded more immediately to the excessive mobility of that summer’s blackout looters in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, who were described by reporters, government officials, and residents as swarms and plagues of hyper-mobile wild animals. Poor, minority bodies in both of these spaces were depicted as existing

105 Duddy and Stathos, “Finest Shaped Up Fast.” 106 Nightly News, CBS, October 5, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection, LOC; Fallon, “Tours Area in Surprise.” 107 Refer to the introduction for a discussion of the “street corner society” trope and how it functions as a moral geography by linking lingering bodies in urban public spaces to poverty and crime.

73 outside of normative mobility, and were portrayed as either excessively stagnant or excessively itinerant.108

The President’s production of South Bronx space was not just affected temporally and kinetically; he also constructed ideas about the area by adopting a particular visual perspective. “No advance notice of the excursion was given because ‘we wanted the president more to see than be seen,’” asserted Press Secretary Jody Powell in the October

5th issue of the Washington Star.109 Although they inhabited the same streets that Carter walked, the residents apparently existed “to be seen” rather than to see. “The South

Bronx has been looked at and clucked at for a long time. It’s the wrong kind of tourist attraction. [Carter’s] seen us. Now let us see,” countered the Bronx Press Review. Yet the story also argued that seeing the devastation firsthand was critical to potential efforts to save the area: “now that they’ve seen the place first hand, it won’t be so easy for them to forget,” the report argued. 110 This visually privileged position was also evident in the federal administration’s treatment of the area as a distinctly visual symbol. Following the tour, Harris commented that it would take approximately five years to “get rid of the evidence of blight.111 Apparently, HUD was just as concerned with ridding the area of the visual “evidence of blight” as it was with probing this blight’s underlying causes.

This visual production of space was reinforced during HUD’s follow-up visit to the area.

Following Carter’s walk, HUD coordinator of Federal Services William White stated in an October 28th memo to Harris that it was necessary that “all those who had not seen the

108 See my examination of blackout bodies in Chapter 3. 109 Vernon Guidry Jr., “Carter Tours Slum in South Bronx,” Washington Star, October 5, 1977. 110 “Presidential Visit,” Bronx Press Review, October 13, 1977: Bronx Historical Society. 111 Michaelson and Cook, “Carter Tours Bronx Ruins.”

74 Bronx [to] see the Bronx.”112 The act of seeing without being seen was also reinforced by White’s assertion that although he was planning a formal visit for October 18th, he

“intend[ed] to slip into the Bronx prior to going up with Jack Watson [who] is fully aware of the sensitivity of the assignment and … our to keep a very low profile.”113

By positioning himself as a clandestine secret agent, White reinforced the understanding that government officials could decide what to see, how to see it, and how to avoid being seen. This was evident in White’s follow up memos to Harris after his October 14th return to Charlotte Street, where he stated that he “saw more of the area than the president” and looked for “healthy tissue,” which again placed him in a position of medical expertise through ground-level engagement with the sick “patient.”114

According to the Post, the official follow-up trip that took place after Watson secretly

“slipped” into the area, “was a fact-finding and get-acquainted trip” that was described as a “working tour,” and this contention presumed both a kind of up-close spatial intimacy gleaned by walking the streets and a panoptic technocratic detachment that allowed officials to assess and define just what was unfolding in the streets. Compared to the barely twenty minutes that Carter spent on the ground, this trip was three hours long and was followed by a two-and-a-half hour meeting with Beame at Gracie Mansion.115

Carter’s public revelation of their home space provoked a range of reactions by residents. For some residents, Carter’s “discovery” of their activities had the potential for positive change. Ramon Rueda remarked that “we’ve been doing this for the last two

112 Memo from William White to Patty Harris, October 28, 1977: Harris Collection (Box 138/Folder South Bronx October 1977 #1). 113 Memo from William White to Patty Harris, October 11, 1977: Harris Collection (Box 138/Folder South Bronx October 1977 #1). 114 Memos from William White to Patty Harris, October 20, 1977 and October 14, 1977: Harris Collection (Box 138/Folder South Bronx October 1977 #1). 115 Mike Rosenbaum, “Four Carter Aides Tour South Bronx,” NYP, October 18, 1977.

75 years and now we’ve been discovered.” Carter’s attention could undoubtedly help the group gain broader visibility and governmental commitment. But this “discovery” discourse also implied that Carter was an explorer in a strange land, and that his decision to publicly fix his gaze on Rueda’s project was necessary for it to be seen at all. For other residents, especially those not implicated in rehab projects, skepticism about this singular revelation ran high. “Just coming up here and looking around don’t mean anything, unless he’s going to do something about it,” noted Henry Brown, a manager of a Washington Avenue gas station.116 “So he was here,” remarked a mother on Fox Street.

“He comes once in a blue moon. I get up in the morning and live here every day.”117

And because of the fairly secretive nature of his trip, many residents did not have the chance to see the President pass through their streets. In this sense, the neighborhood’s

“revelation” relied heavily upon Carter’s ability to orchestrate the exact terms of what could be seen.

Reporters and city officials critiqued the President for using the area as a metonym in part because they thought of the South Bronx as an outlier in comparison with other areas that were experiencing decline. “Because the South Bronx is seen as an

‘outrage’ the focus is here instead of on more viable neighborhoods,” Auletta reported.118

Following Carter’s walk, the Times’ Roger Wilkins commented that choosing the South

Bronx as the site of his walk was a dangerous exercise in symbolism because “to take the moonscape of the South Bronx as a metaphor for the nation’s urban needs is to inflate an already horrendous problem to a scale that would defy even the most ambitious political

116 Peter McLaughlin and Robert Carroll, “A New Kids Strolls Tough Turf,” DN, October 6, 1977. 117 Breslin, “Carter Has Little Impact on One Mean Street,” DN, October 6, 1977. 118 Auletta, Streets, 261.

76 imagination.” City Planning Commission chairman Robert Wagner also critiqued the

President’s geographic choice, and suggested that Carter should have chosen a more

“marginal” neighborhood like Bushwick rather than one that was utterly unsalvageable.

Auletta attacked the actual symbolic import of the President’s embodied act of taking to the streets: “Jimmy Carter may concoct urban policy while standing on street corners- but that’s no reason to follow him into a dark alley” he wrote in 1978.119

While some criticized the president for choosing a street that was an outlier, others felt that the President’s visit ignored areas that were equally if not more desperate.

Just following his visit, Assemblymember Jose Serrano displayed outrage at the fact that he and other local elected officials were not invited on the tour. “We could have pointed out some things that no one else in the inspection party could have,” he griped, and concluded that he was “going to invite Carter to the South Bronx for a real tour of the devastation.120 “There are other Charlotte Streets in the South Bronx,” echoed Auletta.121

The concrete implications of the President’s geographic selection were immediately apparent on nearby Fox Street. In the wake of Carter’s walk, Charlotte Street became the site of a major government-sponsored renewal project while Fox Street was left to languish in obscurity. As Breslin reported for the Daily News the day following Carter’s visit:

“Jimmy Carter did not make a stop on Fox Street. Two motorcycles swung onto the block first, then came a car filled with agents, then two more motorcycles, a car, another car, more motorcycles, more cars, sirens crying, red lights blinking- you’ve done something wrong, you’ve done something wrong- and now a brown limousine with flags on the front fenders and Carter in the back seat, looking out

119 All cited in Auletta, “Do Schemes Match Our Dreams.” 120 “Not Everyone Cheered over President’s Visit,” Bronx Press Review, October 13, 1977; “Visit Scored,” NYP, October 7, 1977. 121 Auletta, Streets, 9.

77 the windows and, you hoped seeing something. The motorcade rolled along the stone desert. Then it turned the corner and was gone.”122

While Carter’s brief shop on Charlotte Street had spurred immediate plans to survey and renew the street, along Fox Street one could only hope that Carter “saw something” as he flew by at lightning speed.

Fox Street had already been established as a symbol of decline, and Carter’s neglect of the street on his tour further produced this idea. In 1969, after garnering funds through the Model Cities program, the City had constructed housing along Fox Street that was later destroyed by arson. In 1973, the Times reported that the project stood “as a disfigured symbol of the difficulties of social engineering.”123 By sounding sirens and flashing lights, Carter’s motorcade linked the South Bronx to medical distress and criminal activity. The President’s rapid passage had a profound effect on residents; as sirens passed through the aural space of Fox Street that day, some residents assumed the noises indicated a “big police raid.” Although Fox Street was largely left in the dark as

Carter swiftly passed through it, his tour had still shed enough light on the street to implicate it in the image politics of the South Bronx. After Carter’s visit, a building on the street was demolished because, according to Breslin, “somebody in municipal government decided that it would be rather poor taste for the building to collapse and perhaps crush a child or two so soon after the President’s visit.”124

Despite these critiques, Carter’s walk became a powerful form of spatial production. Firstly, while the walk attempted to utilize the South Bronx as a metonym for all declining neighborhoods, it also paradoxically mapped the Bronx as a land that

122 Breslin, “Carter Has Little Impact.” 123 Tolchin, “Future Looks Bleak for the South Bronx,” NYT, January 18, 1973. 124 Breslin, “Series in the Bronx, But There’s No Joy in Fox Street,” DN, October 11, 1977.

78 existed apart from the rest of the city, the country, and even the planet.125 Media representations of the tour emphasized its geographic specifics, but often mapped the journey as a confined route extricated from the rest of the borough and the city.126

Following the walk, the Times commented that “over the years, parts of the Bronx have appeared to cease being a part of the city” and Carter’s walk itself remapped this distance.127 If the South Bronx had been “part of the city,” Carter’s performance would have been entirely unnecessary because its streets would not have been special enough to warrant this voyage into outer space, as Auletta referred to it the following February in the Daily News. “Last October,” wrote Auletta, “James Early Carter decided to visit another planet … so he stepped aboard his Air Force One capsule and was deposited in

New York. From there he journeyed to his final destination, the South Bronx. Stunned, and ever mindful of the cameras, Carter decided to leave his flag on this strange land.”128

The shots produced from his visit were largely bereft of people, and crafted an almost pastoral image of the urban crisis; Carter and his team appeared to be explorers in a land that was ripe for colonization.129 “Nothing prepares the eye or ear … for the first sight of the ‘nothing’ that is Charlotte Street,” emphasized Auletta.130 The trip also produced ideas about this foreign land’s relationship to linear progress. Officials may have been comfortable identifying exactly what the area contained in the present-day and how to interpret this seemingly obvious “evidence,” but they also positioned its decline as somehow inexplicable and ahistorical. “The forces which have brought the South Bronx

125 Severo, “Bronx a Symbol.” 126 See in particular the map of the President’s tour route in Dembart’s “Sobering Trip.” 127 Severo, “Bronx a Symbol.” 128 Auletta, “Do Schemes Match Our Dreams.” 129 For example, see the image of the President and his assistants striding through the rubble in Dembart’s “Sobering Trip.” 130 Auletta, Streets, 9.

79 to its present circumstances are extremely complex; we understand some of them and don’t even recognize others,” stated Jack Watson and Bruce Kirschenbaum in their status report for the President.131 By relegating some of decline’s supposed causes to the realm of the unthinkable, government officials positioned the area as aberrant and somehow removed from the network of governmental choices that had been brought to bear on it.

Similar to Severo’s 1969 Times story, news media and government officials’ descriptions of the area as a moonscape and a World War II battleground emphasized that the South

Bronx was not only distanced from the rest of the city and country, but was not even able to participate in the present day.

Carter’s mapping of the South Bronx as a faraway land was partially a response to the area’s contagious threat, which had been established through earlier stories, and continued to resonate in the context of the President’s walk. In her letter to Carter days prior to his trip, Harris commented that the area represented “the final stage of a process seen in cities throughout the country” and maintained that if the South Bronx crumbled,

“the city [would] not survive.”132 This sense of the South Bronx as contagion was also articulated in municipal rhetoric. On October 6th, just following Carter’s visit, Cuomo addressed a liberal party dinner and argued that the South Bronx’s decline “is spreading so inexorably and extensively as to threaten much of the city.”133 And in a policy paper produced later, he went on to describe the ways in which the South Bronx directly threatened not only the city itself but the nation as a whole. “New York City is only the

131 Jack Watson and Bruce Kirschenbaum to President Carter, “Status Report,” November 20, 1977: Harris Collection (Box 138/Folder 2/Nov-Dec 77). 132 Letter from Patty Harris to President Carter, October 1, 1977: Harris Collection (Box 138/Folder: South Bronx, October 77 #1). 133 Mario Cuomo, “Statement Delivered at Liberal Party Dinner on Thursday, October 6, 1977”: Auletta Papers (Cuomo Profile: Cuomo on 1977, Box 6/Folder 8/Item 10).

80 leading edge of urban decay in the nation,” argued Cuomo. “We are a test case for about

160 million Americans dwelling in urban concentrations.”134 In response to this threatening contagion, HUD positioned the South Bronx as a potential government laboratory for urban change. In the November following Carter’s visit, the agency reported that “the urban neighborhood, especially the low and moderate income neighborhood, provides the appropriate geographic, political and psychological setting for urban revitalization.135 And in Governor Carey’s follow-up meeting with Carter, he declared that “the South Bronx effort would be a pilot project for neighborhood salvation that would be ‘replicated in other parts of the city and other parts of the country.’”136 The

City immediately went to work devising a renewal plan for the area and Mayor Koch’s eventual Charlotte Street project would prove to be the ultimate form of symbolic containment as it advanced a small cluster of single-family houses as the answer to the entire area’s problems.137

As Carter’s choice of route rendered portions of the Bronx and the city outside public visibility, his actual footsteps “mapped” a new affective spatial habitus in which pieces of land could and could not be salvaged. At the Charlotte Street stop, “Carter stood amid rubble of what once had been tenements and ordered Mrs. Harris to ‘get a map of the whole area and show me what should be done.’” “The study should show,” claimed Carter, what “ought to be salvaged and what ought to be torn down.” Harris was told to immediately prepare a plan to “reconstruct, block by block, the depressed area.”138

134 Cuomo, “Statement Delivered at Liberal Party Dinner.” 135 HUD, “Urban Policy Discussion Draft,” November 1977: Harris Collection (Box 34). 136 Fallon, “Tours Area in Surprise.” 137 See Chapter 5. 138 Michaelson and Cook, “Carter Tours Bronx Ruins.”

81 If Washington Avenue was the “hopeful stop” and Charlotte Street the “hopeless one,” 139

Carter was an emotional expert who was able to define the geography of hope itself. As he walked, the President decided which areas were hopeful enough to necessitate saving, and which were hopeless. The President “found bright spots” as he traveled by foot but also admitted that “some of it [couldn’t] be salvaged.”140 His footsteps imbued him with the authority to literally decide which portions of space could and could not continue to exist. And although the community’s involvement was subsequently discussed at various stages of federal and municipal planning, Carter’s initial sentiments were clear as he directed Harris to work with City and State agencies to “begin reclaiming the area.”141

The South Bronx had supposedly been “lost” to some unnamed force and his walk signaled the beginnings of spatial reclamation by the government experts who were the streets’ “rightful” owners. Along Washington Avenue, where residents were already engaged in homesteading efforts, Carter’s response positioned these efforts as aberrant acts of hope, and utilized them to bolster his self-help agenda for urban communities.

“What a surprise!,” Carter told Ramon Reuda. “I’m proud of what you are doing … we hope a lot of people will see what you are doing and will want to do the same thing.”142

“Carter Will Help Us Help Ourselves,” read an October 16th Daily News heading and in

November, a status report prepared for the president by Watson and Kirschenbaum stated that “word is beginning to get out that we are most interested in helping those that help themselves.”143

139 Dembart, “Sobering Trip.” 140 Nightly News, CBS, October 5, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection, LOC. 141 Fallon, “Tours Area in Surprise.” 142 Michaelson and Cook, “Carter Tours Bronx Ruins.” 143 Bruce Drake, “Carter Will Help Us Help Ourselves,” DN, October 16, 1977; Watson and Kirschenbaum to Carter, “Status Report.” Carter’s walk certainly responded to ideas about

82 Carter’s footsteps also produced visions of future spaces; as he walked, the

President imagined recreational areas in place of what he perceived to be empty or underutilized land. As Carter passed from the homesteading that he found so

“encouraging” along Washington Avenue and onto the Charlotte Street landscape, which was “not so encouraging,” he began “envisioning playgrounds.” Blocks that were

“beyond rehabilitation” could become “recreational institutions,” concluded the

President.144 “The particular conditions existing in the South Bronx, where areas of previous high density have been abandoned leaving vast open spaces dotted by deteriorated and burned out building shells,” wrote HUD’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Housing Marilyn Melkonian, “appear to lend themselves to clearance and use as open green space.” The correspondence went on to state that the Boston Road-Charlotte Street area could provide 90 acres of green space, and that it was imperative to bring federal parkland to people who could not afford automobiles.145 Critiques of the President’s visions for park space emphasized that the area’s problems could not be solved through mere beautification. HUD coordinator of federal services William White, along with the

City, felt that housing would prove far more useful. Congressional Representative

Herman Badillo also strongly critiqued the President’s approach to underutilized land. “I community-driven neighborhood renewal, which were circulating in the post-war period (see Chapters 3 and 5). But Carter further grounded these ideas by claiming that it was specifically residents’ bodies that would transform the urban decline narrative. For or an examination of community planning under Carter, refer to the Federal Neighborhood Self-Help Act of 1978, under which groups already engaged in “self help revitalization activities,” a term that was never clearly defined, would be eligible for federal grants and assistance: Harris Collection (Box 33/Folder: Urban and Regional Policy Group- Neighborhood Initiatives). 144Nightly News, ABC, October 5, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection, LOC; Michaelson and Cook, “Carter Tours Bronx Ruins.” Note that this was part of a longer lineage of governmental taming, instructing, and containing of the urban poor through recreation. For an excellent example of this practice in New York City, see Robert Moses’ expansion of the parks system under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. 145 Marilyn Melkonian, Office of Housing Secretarial Correspondence, October 1977: Harris Collection (Box 138/Folder: South Bronx #1).

83 don’t know how committed the President is to this when he stands in the epicenter of urban blight in America and says we need recreation, we need trees,” argued Badillo.

“We need new housing, economic development and more rehabilitation. We don’t need more plans. We have the models in the South Bronx right now.” 146 These critiques also sometimes problematically recapitulated commonsense assumptions that the area was too dangerous to support such spaces. “What good does it do to build a beautiful new park if you need a machine gun to walk through it?” questioned Mayor Koch’s coordinator

Lloyd Kaplan the following February.147

While Carter’s walk responded to previous narratives and produced new discourses about urban decline, it in turn affected subsequent interpretations of the area.

These cultural and political responses to the South Bronx landscape both echoed and transformed the original performance’s effects. One week after the President’s walk, the other most significant public “revelation” of the South Bronx’s despair occurred. On

October 12th, just before the start of Game Two of the at Yankee

Stadium in the South Bronx, a fire broke out at an abandoned elementary school nearby.

As ABC began its broadcast, a helicopter camera caught the fire on film and broadcast it to millions of viewers. “There it is ladies and gentlemen,” remarked announcer Howard

Cosell, “the Bronx is burning.” “What’s wrong with these people?” continued Cosell.

“Don’t these people have any self respect?”148 Cosell’s assertion that the Bronx was burning drew from a 1974 Times editorial and BBC documentary of the same name, but his commentary and its accompanying footage also relied upon Carter’s walk in order to become legible to viewers. Carter’s footsteps had already given viewers evidence of

146 Wilkins, “After Carter’s South-Bronx Visit.” 147 Auletta, “Do Schemes Match Our Dreams.” 148 Marshall Berman, “Views from the Burning Bridge,” in Urban Mythologies, 72.

84 what existed on the ground, and viewers were now prepared to interpret an aerial shot, and to accept Cosell’s use of one burning building as a metonym for the entire borough.

Following these two “public” revelations, the South Bronx began to be utilized as a cinematic backdrop to showcase urban despair. The opening scene of 1979’s The

Warriors, which was based on Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel of the same name, reveals a symposium of citywide “armies of the night,” who gather “27 miles behind enemy lines” in the Bronx to discuss joining forces and “taking” New York borough by borough.

Their potential unity quickly dissolves as the leader who brought the symposium together is murdered, and ’s “Warriors” are framed for his death. The film depicts the Bronx as the spatial incubator for the violence that ensues as the Warriors fight their way back to Coney. Although the film offers a highly-stylized, supposedly futuristic portrait of the city, it nonetheless capitalizes on understandings about the crisis- era streets as sites of fear, violence, and emptiness. That same year, The Wanderers rather nostalgically evoked the 1950s and 1960s as it chronicled an Italian-American

North Bronx gang’s attempts to negotiate a changing racial landscape. 1981’s Fort

Apache, The Bronx, revealed NYPD officer Paul ’s travails as he futilely attempted to restore order to the South Bronx’s notorious 41st precinct. In 1982 and

1983, science-fiction action films 1990: The Bronx Warriors, and its sequel Escape from the Bronx: Bronx Warriors 2, positioned the borough as an anarchic wasteland overrun by , which had been “officially” declared a “no-man’s land.” The most immediate cinematic residue of Carter’s walk manifested in the fall of 1979, when Wolfen, a horror film that chronicled “mythical carnivorous creatures that inhabit a former urban center,” began shooting on Charlotte Street. “A major construction effort of the kind Charlotte

85 Street has been unable to obtain in real life is proceeding, in the unreal world of the movies,” reported the Times as Wolfen began filming. Portions of Charlotte Street were fenced off and rubble was actually shipped in to enhance the setting’s destitute effect.

The paper noted that it was somewhat paradoxical that this premiere site of decline was actually functioning as part of the City’s plan for economic rejuvenation as the film brought money into the municipal coffers.149

Corrective cultural re-imaginings of the area also responded to the walk, the most notable of which was the Bronx Museum of Art’s 1980 exhibition entitled

Devastation/Resurrection. Curator Robert Jensen, who had grown up in the Bronx only to return and find that “in my short absence someone or something had ravaged all of the things which had helped to shape me as a human being,” utilized the exhibition to move beyond commonsense causes for the area’s deterioration and to “bridge the gap” between symbols and reality. The exhibition also examined residents’ reactions to the aftermath of Carter’s walk. “Now, two years after the visit, many South Bronx residents are cynical,” wrote Jensen. “They believe they have been used as a backdrop for a stage production: politicians fly in with cameras rolling, walk through some rubble making promises they know it will be impossible to keep, and fly away home. Others see it differently. The President did come to the South Bronx, and that visit was useful. If it

149 “Bronx Gets ‘Charlotte Street Project’- A Movie Set,” NYT, November 3, 1979. The Warriors, directed by Walter Hill (1979; Paramont Pictures, 2005), DVD; The Wanderers, directed by Philip Kaufman (1979; Orion Pictures Corporation); Fort Apache, The Bronx, directed by Daniel Petrie (1981; Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation); 1990: The Bronx Warriors, directed by Enzo G. Castellari (1982; Commodore Films, 2006), DVD; Escape from the Bronx: Bronx Warriors 2, directed by Enzo G. Castellari (1982; New Line Cinema); Wolfen, directed by Michael Wadleigh (1981; Orion Pictures Corporation).

86 did not result in new funding programs, it did enlarge the perspective of some residents and enhance the South Bronx’s conception of its power.”150

The visit to Charlotte Street spurred various forms of “slum tourism,” which reinforced and extended the “South Bronx” space that Carter’s walk produced. The existence of these touristic expeditions suggested that the area was an aberrant land apart, a metonym for all “slums,” and a barren land that awaited intervention. ’s urban planning department led tours of Charlotte Street every other Saturday for eight dollars to real-estate speculators, urban planners, people touring their own pasts, and those who simply viewed the area as a “perverse” attraction.151 Bronx District Attorney

Mario Merola commented that visiting judges demanded to see Charlotte Street rather than Radio City or the . “Unfortunately the people in the area cannot make any money on the sale of souvenirs,” remarked the Times sardonically. “Sightseers are too scared to leave the bus.”152 The Uptown Express even critiqued the notion of slum tourism in its highly satirical “SoBroland” proposal. The “all-new Disneyland in the old South Bronx” would include such activities as getting chased by a youth gang and helping firemen. “Yes there’s something for everyone in the Magic Slum,” the story quipped. “Look for the Red Line going through your neighborhood in the near future.”153

In August of 1980, the Times offered visitors to the democratic convention an “insider’s guide” to the “real” New York, and suggested a visit to 177th Street and the Grand

Concourse to “see the new Charlotte Street before the next president does.” “It may not be long before a president stands on the Grand Concourse, looks into cameras, and

150 Bronx Museum of the Arts, Devastation/Resurrection. 151Jonathan Mandell, “Sunday ,” Sunday News Magazine, July 18, 1982. 152 Ira Rosen, “The Glory that was Charlotte Street,” NYT, October 7, 1979. 153 “SoBroland,” Uptown Express, 1978: Bronx Historical Society.

87 echoes the pledge to draw the line on urban decay. But you have a chance to visit there before the crowds hear about it- before nothing can be done about it. Before it looks like

Charlotte Street,” the guide cynically concluded.154

The President’s footsteps resonated even further through political visits to

Charlotte Street. In 1980, presidential hopefuls Senator Edward Kennedy and Ronald

Reagan both attempted to re-perform his walk. While Carter’s journey had produced a

Charlotte Street that was ripe for transformation through government intervention, these later walks revealed a dead-end landscape of broken promises and hostile residents. “His shoes got muddied and his coat got soaked but that didn’t stop Senator Edward Kennedy from riding around a rainswept, bombed-out block in Charlotte Street in the South Bronx yesterday,” reported the Daily News in March. “He stood on the spot where President

Carter held out glittering promises of new housing, jobs and economic development for the area.”155 Reagan’s visit in August, which occurred a few days prior to the Democratic

National Convention, was met with boos and jeers “as he stood in a glass and trash filled lot across the street and denounced Carter’s 1977 pledge, made in the same spot.” His swift departure reproduced ideas about residents’ hopeless stagnancy. “Reflecting on the visit, Reagan said, ‘There we were driving away and you think of them back there in all that ugliness, and they have no place to go. They have no jobs, not going to school, and all that’s left for them is to sit there and look at what we just saw.”156 In response to that summer’s convention, Bronx community groups joined with activists from across the nation to stage a “counter-convention” along Charlotte Street. Comprised of around 500

154 Jamie Malanowski and Mary McCartney, “An Insider’s Guide to New York City,” NYT, August 11, 1980. 155 Marcia Kramer, “Kennedy Builds on South Bronx,” DN, March 23, 1980. 156 , “Reagan Gets Bronx Jeers,” Today, August 6, 1980.

88 members, the activists engaged in workshops, discussed demands, and even erected a small “tent city” of wooden buildings along blocks that had been renamed Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues. One of these buildings was named “The White House of

Charlotte Street,” and was located at the corner of Boston Post Road and Charlotte Street, where both Reagan and Carter had stood. The “white house” was “intended to symbolize that the community could begin to do in a matter of days what the Carter administration had yet to do for the South Bronx.”157

Yet the overwhelming narrative that was produced through these political walks was one of relatively unchanged despair. “Today the South Bronx remains basically what it was a year ago,” wrote the Post in October of 1980. “Its streets littered with debris; its stores shuttered. Decades of abandonment, vandalism, arson and the flight of the middle class have not been turned around [since] the Presidential visit.”158 That fall, the Daily News suggested that Carter’s walk actually produced more abandonment.

“Three long years after President Carter visited Charlotte Street … hardly anybody goes there … there aren’t even any people left to listen to the promises of the politicians … at mid-afternoon on Election Day, the only person to be seen in the drizzly gloom of

Charlotte Street was a derelict in ragged clothing. No Kids, no cars, no nothing.”159

Eventually, officials began to eschew these decline walks down Charlotte Street. “No more Charlotte Streets,” stated resident Robert Garcia in 1981 as HUD chief Samuel

Pierce toured the South Bronx in April alongside forty community leaders. “We’re sick

157 Sheila Rule, “Counter-convention Opens amid South Bronx Ruins,” NYT, August 9, 1980. See also “Bronx Activists Will Press Goals with a Coalition: ‘Human Needs’ Stressed,” NYT, August 4, 1980. 158 Carter B. Horsley, Untitled, NYP, October 4, 1980. 159 Owen Moritz, “View from Charlotte Street, Three Years Later,” DN, October 5, 1980; Albert Davila and Bob Herbert, “Charlotte Street Feels the Empty Promises,” DN, November 9, 1980.

89 and tired of the Carters and the Reagans looking at the negative side of the South Bronx.

We showed him the positive sides, places where he can make a difference.”160 Yet these revisionist trips continued to emphasize the area as one of startling contrasts, within which only two narratives were possible.

But perhaps the most important way in which Carter’s walk produced South

Bronx space was far more concrete. Carter’s footsteps not only defined how the South

Bronx was imagined, but they also sparked municipal calls for redevelopment. This frenzied government attempt to correct Carter’s revelation of decline eventually resulted in a new housing project that radically reimagined Charlotte Street. As I will explore in

Chapter 5, it was precisely this binaried understanding of South Bronx space that Mayor

Ed Koch relied upon to produce his vision of renewal along Charlotte Street.

On his journey to the South Bronx, President Carter attempted to utilize the act of walking as a populist commitment to urban America that envisioned the city from the ground-up. Yet through his footsteps, Jimmy Carter mapped the counters of decline, and reproduced commonsense understandings about what this decline entailed. His walk revealed the South Bronx, and Charlotte Street, as a metonym for all impoverished urban areas, and constructed a landscape that was both a barren laboratory and a desperate warzone peopled by stagnant residents awaiting governmental intervention. While his walk intended to appear as a spontaneous revelation of a formerly unseen landscape, the journey only selectively revealed certain areas that were deemed salvageable and relied heavily upon preexisting understandings about the area’s meanings. Through established narratives about the South Bronx’s destruction, a lexicon of governmental walks through the postwar landscape, and elaborate preparations for his actual visit, the President’s walk

160 John Cirri, “HUD Chief’s Tour is Snub to Charlotte,” DN, April 14, 1981.

90 invoked a well-established urban decline scenario to craft its logic. In turn, his visit produced cultural and political effects that both escaped from and recapitulated the knowledge produced by his walk. Finally, Carter’s revelation of despair laid the groundwork for its hopeful spatial counterpart, and would facilitate the Koch administration’s production of a renewed Charlotte Street.

91 Chapter 3: “An Unlikely Setting for a Violent Crime”: Serial Killer David Berkowitz’s Geographical Mobility and the Commonsense Mapping of Street Crime

Between July 29, 1976, and July 31, 1977, the man known as the “Son of Sam” serial killer struck eight times across the boroughs of Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, killing six people and wounding seven others.1 On August 10, 1977, following the largest manhunt in the city’s history, twenty-four-year- old Jewish postal worker and former auxiliary police officer David Berkowitz was finally apprehended outside of his apartment just north of the Bronx in the city of Yonkers and arrested for the .

New Yorkers’ fears about the crimes often focused on Sam’s choice of victims, who were predominately young couples parked in lover’s lanes. Yet descriptions of their terror also emphasized a predilection with Berkowitz’s intimate knowledge of the city’s geography and his ability to move through the streets undetected. Because of this geographical knowledge, the Times reported that in July of 1977 detectives were pursuing theories as to whether the killer might be a , a laid-off policeman, or even a “compulsive

1 Sam’s eight strikes were as follows: On July 29, 1976, Donna Lauria and Jody Valenti were shot while parked in front of Lauria’s house in Westchester Heights in the Bronx. Lauria was killed and Valenti was wounded; On October 23, 1976, Carl Denaro and his girlfriend Rosemary Keenan were shot in a parked car in Flushing, Queens. Denaro survived a shot to the head. It was believed that he had been mistaken for a woman because of his shoulder-length hair; On November 27, 1976, Joanne Lomino and Donna DiMasi were shot on Lomino’s porch in Bellerose, Queens. Lomino was paralyzed and DiMasi was wounded; On January 30, 1977, Christine Freund was shot and killed while sitting in a parked car with boyfriend John Diel in Forest Hills, Queens; On March 8, 1977, Virginia Voskerichian was shot and killed while walking home in Forest Hills; On April 17, 1977, Valentina Suriani and boyfriend Alexander Esau were shot and killed while parking in the Bronx’s Baychester neighborhood; On June 26, 1977, Judy Placido and boyfriend Salvatore Lupo were both shot while parking in Bayside, Queens. Both survived; and on July 31, 1977, Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante were both shot while parking in Brooklyn’s Bath Beach. Moskowitz was killed and Violante was partially blinded. The “Son of Sam” nickname was adopted based on a letter the killer had left to NYPD Captain Joseph Borrelli at the scene of his April 17, 1977, attack, in which he referred to himself as the “son” of a patriarchal figure named Sam. He later revealed that Sam referred to his neighbor, who relayed messages through his dog that told Berkowitz to kill: See Robert D. McFadden, “‘Sam’ Suspect, Heavily Guarded, Arraigned and Held for Testing,” NYT, August 12, 1977.

92 walker who roams the city night and day.”2 “[The suspect] knows the whole city,” remarked Jimmy Breslin and in their novelized account of the crimes. “He loves to walk. He walks constantly. Through the streets … He walks everywhere. He says he knows every street in the city. In fact, it’s his walking [that] made us suspicious.”3 New Yorkers were further troubled by the specific locations of his crimes, which were situated in the working and middle-class white ethnic neighborhoods of

Westchester Heights and Baychester in the Bronx, Flushing, Bellerose, Forest Hills, and

Bayside in Queens, and the Bath Beach section of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. He “can strike at will, whenever and wherever he wants, and for no particular reason,” lamented

Chief of Detectives John Keenan. “He’s holding all the cards.”4 Following his second attack, which occurred in Flushing, Queens, one detective told the Press that

“this is not something that usually occurs out here [in this neighborhood]. It may never happen again.”5 But “as months passed and the toll of victims mounted, fear spread through the city’s normally quiet neighborhoods, and even into the suburbs.”6

While the first chapter considered how the footsteps of a powerful political figure constructed the landscape of urban decline, in this case study I turn to a more unexpected source of spatial production: the wanderings of a serial killer. I build upon my previous

2 Howard Blum, “Who Is Really Behind That .44?: Police Pursuing Many Theories,” NYT, August 3, 1977. It was eventually revealed that Berkowitz had worked as both an auxiliary policeman and firemen, and as a taxi driver. 3 Jimmy Breslin and Dick Schaap, .44 (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 209. Though this was a work of fiction, much of it stayed quite true to actual events, and some passages were directly culled from news reports and quotations from the police officers involved. In the book’s introduction, Schaap and Breslin maintained that although the piece was novelistic, “the terror was real.” 4 Robert Daley, “Search for ‘Sam’: Why It Took So Long,” NY Mag, August 22, 1977. 5 Quoted in Jonathan Mahler, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City (New York: Picador, 2005), 246. 6 McFadden, “Heavily Guarded.”

93 examination of urban decline to now consider how this decline’s spatial production mobilized ideas about street crime, and how these ideas were constructed and experienced in the city’s white ethnic neighborhoods. This chapter examines how

Berkowitz’s movements, and New Yorkers’ responses to them, produced ideas about the geography of crime and urban decline. Berkowitz’s crimes disturbed New Yorkers not only because of their violence, but also because of the killer’s keen sense of the city’s spatial layout and mobility within its streets. Moreover, by unfolding in white ethnic neighborhoods that were often positioned as stalwart survivors during the crisis, Sam’s attacks challenged the commonsense geography that located crime within “declining” black and Latino neighborhoods. By penetrating areas of the city that were seldom connected to violence, Sam breached these commonsense spatial boundaries and forced frightened New Yorkers to grapple with the ways in which they mapped crime and urban decline. In some ways, New Yorkers advanced that Berkowitz’s crimes were distinctive from those in black and Latino neighborhoods because of his intellect, individuality, and superior geographical knowledge. While blackout looters, for example, were portrayed as senseless animals who destroyed their own neighborhood spaces,7 reports emphasized that Sam was a kind of cartographic expert with the ability to travel freely throughout the city by car and on foot. Yet the killings also exposed distinctions between public spaces in white ethnic and black neighborhoods, and reinforced some of the class-driven spatial divides between Manhattan and working-class areas of the boroughs. Ultimately, however, residents, news media, and government officials geographically removed his

7 Many New Yorkers employed animalistic metaphors and terminology to describe the blackout looters, and the news media both fueled and responded to this language. See for example Robert Lipsyte, “The Strange Logic of Looting,” NYP, July 15, 1977. For a full discussion, refer to my analysis in Chapter 3.

94 crimes from the white ethnic neighborhoods in which they occurred, and instead connected them to ideas about decline that were associated with minority and racially transitioning spaces.

Examining perceptions about David Berkowitz contributes to the literature on shifting national understandings of crime and criminality in the 1970s by probing how these transformations were also produced within urban space, and in particular, within white ethnic neighborhoods. “By any measurement, crime has become an ominous national problem,” reported Time magazine in 1975. The article noted a “growing consensus” among conservatives and liberals in their attitudes toward imprisonment, increased rates of anonymous killings and victimless crimes, the new pathology of criminals, and the vigilante responses taken by many Americans to protect themselves.

The piece provided sociological evidence that heterogeneity and ethnic pluralism, alongside the country’s rapid economic development and tradition of freedom, had fueled the wave. Changing morals were deemed the “ultimate problem.” According to the report, “old values and restraints [had] been battered by recent upheavals,” which led to

“widespread ethical torpor.”8

Scholars have linked these changing national understandings of crime to the broader rightward political shift during the decade, and have specifically connected

Berkowitz’s crimes to a range of 70s-era social and cultural transformations. Philip

Jenkins analyzes transformations in crime rhetoric within the context of this rightward shift, which he argues was a grassroots populist transformation. “At home and abroad, the post-1975 public was less willing to see social dangers in terms of historical forces, instead preferring a strict moralistic division: problems were a matter of evil, not

8 “The Nation: The Crime Wave,” Time, June 30, 1975.

95 dysfunction,” Jenkins argues. Moreover, according to Jenkins, the transformation was not in the scale of the [era’s] violence but in the “lethal seriousness with which [crime] was now seen.” Jenkins considers how urban America fit into this shift, and briefly chronicles this transformation in New York City from the 1964 death of Kitty Genovese, a much publicized killing in Kew Gardens, Queens, in which a number of New Yorkers supposedly ignored Genovese’s pleas for help, to the 1978 Willie Bosket case, when young Bosket killed three people in conjunction with attempted . Jenkins contends that Genovese’s death revealed an apathetic urban society who killed her by not responding to her pleas, while the Bosket murders evidenced a public who pathologized

Willie as an innate “monster” for his killings. He also notes that a growing obsession with serial killers, Berkowitz among them, was particular to the era. “Violent crime is attributed to a handful of evil individuals, and understanding this menace is less difficult than comprehending the diverse social factors that drive the faceless robbers, rapists, and murderers of real life,” Jenkins writes. Although he does not directly probe the relationship between urban space and Berkowitz’s crimes, Jenkins does mention that

Sam’s letters “linked random violence to social dysfunction and urban decay.”9

Anthropologist Elliot Leyton contextualizes Berkowitz’s crimes within what he identities as a rise in serial killings that began in the late 60s, which he attributes to male frustration at decreased social and economic mobility.10 Jane Caputi examines the murders’ implications for understandings of gender and sexuality, and places them within the

9 Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 11, 143, 148, 145. 10 Elliot Leyton, Compulsive Killers: The Story of Modern Multiple Murder (New York: New York University Press, 1986).

96 broader history of sex crimes.11 This chapter extends and complicates these studies of how the murders fit into the broader national consciousness by spatializing Sam’s crimes within New York’s fiscal-crisis era white ethnic neighborhoods. This spatialization will allow me to consider the ways in which these crimes produced site-specific understandings about the city’s changing topography.

My scholarship also draws from and contributes to the small but critically important body of work that has placed Berkowitz’s crimes within the specific context of

New York’s crisis. Miriam Greenberg, Peter Braunstein, and Jonathan Mahler all touch on the crimes as part of their investigations of the crisis era.12 Greenberg positions the crimes within the summer of 1977, and emphasizes that this summer was an ideological turning point in the city’s history. According to Greenberg, the media circulation of that summer’s events produced a “counter-hegemonic” force that exposed the city’s underlying disorder, and offered a missed opportunity for city officials to change their course and begin to grapple with actual issues rather than continuing to police images and perceptions. Braunstein examines the relationship between the crimes and the era’s sexual permissiveness, which was spatialized in the city’s public and semi-private spaces.

Braunstein argues that Sam “consistently targeted the public sexual overflow” by attacking young lovers.13 In his journalistic account of the summer of 1977, Mahler examines the news media’s obsessive coverage of the killings. “The frenzied coverage fanned the growing sense of fear; the growing sense of fear fanned the frenzied

11 Jane Caputi, The Age of Sex Crime (Bowing Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987). 12 Miriam Greenberg, Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World (New York: Routledge, 2008); Peter Braunstein, “Adults Only: The Construction of an Erotic City in New York during the 1970s,” in America in the Seventies, eds. Beth Baily and David Farber (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2004); Mahler, Bronx Is Burning. 13 Peter Braunstein, “Adults Only,” 150.

97 coverage,” comments Mahler.14 Mahler also begins to probe the ways in which Sam’s crimes mapped fear onto the city. “The .44 caliber killer hysteria had altered New

Yorkers’ relationship to their city. The vague sense of unease that washed over city dwellers whenever they found themselves walking along a quiet avenue late at night had been transformed into a real sense of fear … this had the peculiar effect of rendering the vast, violent city into a small town,” he writes.15 I seek to build upon this scholarship by more deeply probing how this fear was mapped, and how the crimes produced particular understandings about the city’s fiscal-crisis era geography. By arguing that the attacks ultimately reinforced hegemonic ideas about where violence and decline were located, I partially challenge Greenberg’s reading of the murders’ “counterhegemonic” force. My analysis also supports and extends the broader scholarship on the cultural geography of crime and fear by examining how Sam’s crimes and New Yorkers’ reactions to these crimes both affected the ways in which New Yorkers navigated urban space, and produced new understandings about these spaces.16

By considering local responses to Berkowitz’s crimes, my efforts also intervene in the scholarship on law and order in New York’s public spaces. Scholars have argued that

14 Mahler, The Bronx Is Burning, 253. The News’ accounts of Sam’s apprehension sold 2.5 million copies, which was 600,000 more than usual, and the public’s insatiable appetite for the story caused journalists from the Post, News, Washington Post and Time magazine to break into Berkowitz’s apartment following his capture: Mahler, 266. Harsh critiques were leveled at the News and the Post, and even suggested that media coverage had encouraged the killings to continue: Mahler, 267. New York Magazine’s year-end issue from 1977 reprinted a series of comic strips that parodied this relationship between the News’ coverage and the actual crimes. 15 Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 257. 16 See for example, Geographer Rachel H. Pain’s examination of the social geography of women’s fear: “Social Geographies of Women’s Fear of Crime,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 22, no. 2 (1997): 231-244. See also Richard Yarwood and Graham Gardner’s study of the intersections between crime fears and fear of cultural threats in the countryside: “Fear of Crime, Cultural Threat and the Countryside,” Area 32, no. 4 (Dec 2000): 403-411.

98 following the Beame administration, the policing of the city’s streets and other public spaces underwent a fundamental transformation. This evolution in policing tactics both informed and was informed by the larger national economic context. “As wealth in the

U.S. became more and more unevenly distributed, the need for harsh policing took on a certain attraction,” argues Stanley Corkin. “Thus, in New York, the liberalism of the

Lindsay era soon gave way to the repressiveness and rhetorical excesses of the Koch regime and the more material repression of the Giuliani administration.”17 The 1982

“Broken Windows” policy paper, written by Harvard researchers James Q. Wilson and

George L. Kelling, heavily influenced these changing police practices. This manifesto emphasized that small-scale disorder was a precursor to larger crimes.18 Ironically, as

Jonathan Soffer notes, the evidence of decay that the broken windows policies sought to combat was a result of what he calls Koch’s “pothole paradox.” As Koch adopted fiscal austerity to save the city from economic disaster, residents experienced the crisis through a public service breakdown and deterioration of the city’s material conditions. As a result, Koch’s implementation of disorder controls were often “stop-gap” measures

“before it became possible to raise capital funds to pay for real improvements.”19 Alex

Vitale echoes that although disorder was most definitely a culturally constructed idea that the municipal government seized upon during the crisis, New Yorkers’ nonetheless expressed their anxieties about the changing city through attention to these material signs.

17 Stanley Corkin, Starring New York: Filming the Grime and Glamour of the Long 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 123. See also Themis Chronopoulus’ Spatial Regulation in New York City: From Urban Renewal to Zero Tolerance (New York: Routledge, 2011). To understand the broader relationship between neoliberal ideology and urban space, see Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore’s edited volume Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003). 18 James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, “Broken Windows,” Atlantic Monthly (March 1982). 19 Jonathan Soffer, Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 3, 327.

99 Vitale maintains that while people experienced crime most often through the news and

“informal communication networks,” what they did experience on a daily basis was the

“growth of disorder” through dirt, vandalism, and graffiti.20 Nonetheless, Soffer argues that the Koch administration “created a new spatial order for New York City in the 1980s by promoting gentrification and privatizing public space,” and “[voicing] the frustration of many middle-class New Yorkers at [the] public smells and spectacles” of the homeless population.21 Vitale and Rosalyn Deutsche examine changing and often highly exclusionary conceptions of “quality of life” rhetoric and majoritarian views of the

“public” within New York’s “new spatial order” of the 1980s and 90s.22 The “quality of life” paradigm, argues Vitale, “[reoriented] the efforts of city government away from directly improving the lives of the disenfranchised and toward restoring order in the city’s public spaces.”23 This “new spatial order” came into fullest flower during the

Giuliani administration, with its “zero tolerance” policies that sought to remove the homeless, prostitutes and even squeegee men from the city’s public spaces.24 My chapter probes the transitional moment just before the birth of this new spatial order by analyzing

20 Alex Vitale, City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2008). 21 Soffer, Koch, 255, 284. 22 Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996). 23 Vitale, City of Disorder, 1. Vitale also tracks the shifting uses of this phrase from the more optimistic and therapeutic social programs for the disadvantaged under Lindsay, through its crisis-era incarnation as a coded way to talk about racially and socially transitioning spaces. 24 Giuliani was certainly not alone in adopting this approach and municipal administrations across the country began implementing aggressive aesthetic policing tactics. Nor was he solely responsible for the shift. As Vitale explains, the roots of this style of policing can be found in the Dinkins’ administration and were also a response to community pressures. Sadly, the effects were most brutally felt by the homeless, who were increasingly punished for their “disorderly” presence in public space. For a discussion of the homeless and the construction of the public sphere during this time see Don Mitchell’s The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: The Guilford Press, 2003). Shifts in the surveillance of public space beginning in the 1990s are also more broadly discussed in Mike Davis’ City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990).

100 how New Yorkers’ fears about Sam’s crimes both shaped and were shaped by the spaces in which they unfolded. New Yorkers’ feelings about the attacks are critical to understanding crime discourse’s evolution during a historical moment when the symbolic and the actual state of the city and its street spaces converged; during the crisis, stories and perceptions about crime became as important to New Yorkers’ navigation of their city as direct experiences with this violence. Moreover, while many of the existing studies about shifts in policing have focused on predominately black and Latino lower income neighborhoods, I argue that the middle-class white ethnic neighborhoods where

Sam’s murders unfolded were also vital to this transformation.

Given the seemingly endless stream of horrors reported in the news media during the late 1970s, and especially during 1977, the ability of Sam’s crimes to capture the public’s imagination was singular. “In an age where random murder is an everyday occurrence, where the police blotter daily moans a litany of violence, it is almost phenomenal how the .44-caliber killer has seized the public imagination and fears,” reported the Times.25 “No story in recent years has touched a deeper nerve among New

Yorkers,” concluded the News in its introduction to their August 7th special pullout section that chronicled Jimmy Breslin’s coverage of the killings. “Not in record of memory have the people of New York dwelled on a crime as they have on this set of murders,” Breslin stated in the special. “There is in the mind of New York this week a row of headstones covered with fog and somewhere, just beyond where eye or light can reach, is a man crouched with a gun.”26 Sam’s crimes appeared to unite the city’s residents through their collective fears and anxieties. As the search for Sam escalated in

25 Richard F. Shepard, “About New York: A .44-Caliber Cloud of Fear,” NYT, August 4, 1977. 26 Jimmy Breslin, “Breslin’s File on the .44-Caliber Killer,” DN, August 7, 1977.

101 August of 1977, ABC news reported that the hunt had “the entire city angry [and] worried.”27 Moreover, the attacks seemed to tap into some fundamentally troubled condition that plagued the city’s psyche. “You have forced yourself up out of the dark corners of this city’s imagination, and now people the dreams of thousands,” wrote journalist Pete Hamill as he appealed to Sam in the Post. “You have appointed yourself the dark avenger of New York, coming out of the night as judge, and executioner.”28

The psychological effects of the crimes were particularly evident among the city’s young women. With the majority of the attacks directed at women or parked couples along lover’s lanes, the spree became “a staple of conversation particularly among women,

[even] in neighborhoods far from the crime.”29 Chief of Detectives John Keenan even remarked upon the case’s uniqueness: “it’s certainly [the case] that’s received the most notoriety … and in terms of emotional involvement on the part of policeman as well as the people it is the most unusual case I’ve ever been associated with,” he told popular morning talk show host Stanley Siegel.30 Law officials’ “emotional involvement” in the case was apparent as they described the high stakes of Sam’s capture, and dedicated an unprecedented amount of both paid and unpaid labor to the manhunt. Sam’s crimes even captured ample international attention.31 After his apprehension there was also an immediate commercialization of the spree, and New Yorkers and tourists purchased Sam

27 Nightly News, ABC, August 2, 1977: Vanderbilt Television News Archive Collection, LOC. 28 Pete Hamill, “Dear Sam: Let Us Tame That Monster in You,” NYP, July 1, 1977. 29 Shepard, “Cloud of Fear.” Five out of six people killed by Sam were women, and five out of the eight strikes were directed at couples. 30 The Stanley Siegel Show: The Capture of David ‘Son of Sam’ Berkowitz, WABC-TV, August 12, 1977: The Paley Center for Media. 31 Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 265.

102 memorabilia that included magazines and newspapers, tee shirts, books and tapes.32

Fierce debates broke out over the media’s role in producing and responding to this psychological climate.33

While these fears about Sam’s crimes did possess a remarkable power, they also became comprehensible within a broader fiscal-crisis era climate that emphasized violent and fearful emotions. Accounts of the crisis often employed morbid language that chronicled the city’s “death” or “murder.” “Is it murder or suicide?” questioned Ken

Auletta for the Daily News in 1978. “What I think doesn’t square with what I feel.” 34

New York magazine’s 1977 year end issue examined the “three kinds of arson [that] plague the city: arson for profit, arson as protest, and arson as sheer hatred.”35 For municipal workers, service cuts represented not simply a tightening budget, but the

32 ABC reported on this commercialization. On August 15th, they revealed that Berkowitz’s attorney had apparently immediately begun selling recordings of the killer. And on the 25th, they chronicled the growing trend of “instant” tragedy mementos and mentioned that “Son of Sam” and “.44 Caliber Killer” had already been reserved for film titles: Vanderbilt Collection. 33 CBS aired a half-hour special entitled Media and the Son of Sam, in which journalist David Marash mediated a conversation between the Village Voice’s Alexander Cockburn, the News’ Breslin and the Post’s Steve Dunleavy, as well as another conversation among television reporters. Dunleavy had been accused of going to “inexcusable lengths” to get Sam stories, which included dressing as a grief counselor in order to get inside information from the Moskowitz family, and Breslin’s reprinting of Sam’s personal letter to him and coverage of the anniversary of Lauria’s death were bitterly critiqued. Charles Borgen of Channel 2 News was attacked for reenacting Sam’s firing stance. On the program, Carl Tucker of the Saturday Review questioned whether reporters were “inciting or adding to the flames, which made New York and New Yorkers a very panicky place,” and a representative from the ACLU even accused the press of “suspending all critical judgment” by “crawling into bed” with the police. Breslin and ABC’s Geraldo Rivera, in particular, defended their journalistic integrity and insisted that they had been merely doing their jobs and responding to the public’s interest in the crimes: CBS program housed at The Paley Center. In his interviews with forensic psychologist David Abrahamsen, Berkowitz even indicated his own involvement in the media frenzy and mentioned, for example, that he didn’t know he had successfully killed Lauria until he “read the Post the following afternoon”: from Abrahamsen’s Confessions of Son of Sam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 94: NYPL. Shepard’s “Cloud of Fear,” also details some New Yorkers’ complaints about the tremendous amounts of publicity afforded to the crimes, and the ways in which this affected public perception. 34 Ken Auletta, “Is it Murder or Suicide?” DN, January 15, 1978; Auletta, The Streets Were Paved with Gold (New York: Random House, 1975). 35 Dennish Smith, “The War on Fire,” NY Mag, December 26, 1977.

103 potential collapse of civil society. “There will be 12,395,104 garbage cans in the streets,” decried President of the Uniformed Sanitation Men’s Association, John DeLury. “How many women are going to be raped?” questioned Douglas Weaving, the vice president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.36 In the wake of proposed layoffs in 1975, the

Uniformed Association and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association produced a pamphlet for distribution to visitors entitled “Welcome to Fear City: A

Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York.” The pamphlet’s cover sported a menacing image of the grim reaper and argued that if personnel were cut from a city already facing rising crime rates, visitors would have to fend for their lives on the streets.37

Berkowitz’s crimes merely “heightened the perceptions of a people already disposed to expect the worst,” concluded the Times.38 For New Yorkers inclined to expect the worst, it seemed that they had received many confirmations during the crisis- era and, in particular, during the summer of 1977. “During the past few weeks, New

Yorkers have been subjected to a series of criminal outrages unmatched in recent memory,” remarked Mayor Beame in a press release on August 4th. “A night of looting, another fatal attack by the .44 caliber killer, a rash of arson, a day of bombs and bomb threats- all sudden, vicious acts against which there can be no instant defense.”39

“Millions of people [were] caught in another blackout even though the lights [were] on

36 “CITIES: How New York City Lurched to the Brink,” Time, June 16, 1975. 37 Uniformed Firefighters Association and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, “Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York,” 1975: Jack Bigel Archive on Municipal Finance and Leadership, Baruch College. 38 Shepard, “Cloud of Fear.” 39 City of New York, Beame Press Releases, August 4, 1977: City Hall Library. Following Sam’s final murder, the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN detonated bombs in two office buildings.

104 again,” reported the News.40 Fear and outrage were the two emotions most frequently invoked by news media, officials and residents during the crisis era, and as thousands of people contacted the police department in the wake of the killings, ABC news emphasized that these residents were primarily “motivated by outrage and fear.”41

Narratives about the crisis often emphasized irrational fear of and indirect victimization by crime, and Sam’s attacks reinforced and produced these concepts.

Although most New Yorkers experienced crime indirectly through stories, these narratives nonetheless generated very real fears among city dwellers that altered the ways in which they inhabited urban space. “In a city where crisis has become commonplace and violence is woven into every aspect of daily life, the threat of sudden violence still remains the ultimate nightmare,” concluded Kitty Hanson’s 1977 series on crime for the

Daily News.42 In her column for the News entitled “I see you, Son of Sam- everywhere,”

Constance Rosenblum wrote that many New Yorkers shared her intense anxiety about the crimes despite having “no rational cause to be fearful” seeing as they lived far from the neighborhoods where the crimes occurred. “Even if he won’t come to actually kill us, he’ll at least dog our footsteps,” continued Rosenblum. “A King Kong of the subconscious has leaped off a tower and descended upon the city.” Dr. Martin Symonds, psychiatrist and director of the Karen Horney Clinic, was interviewed for the piece and concluded that “for every person who’s mugged, there are ten minds that get mugged.

Fear is contagious … It can capture the imagination of an entire city … People living in

New York suffer chronic fear anyway. Something like this can be the straw that breaks

40 Michael O’Neill, “The Son of Sam: His Darkness and Our Darkness,” DN, August 3, 1977. 41 Nightly News, ABC, July 7, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection. 42 Kitty Hanson “What Happens to Most Victims is a Crime,” DN, October 3, 1977.

105 the camel’s back.”43 “In addition to those he killed and wounded, the people of New

York were also the victims with Berkowitz the victimizer,” remarked forensic psychologist David Abrahmsen.44 The fall following Sam’s arrest, a series of articles in the Post and News chronicled the plight of crime victims in the city. Hanson’s reportage for the News argued that “every 24 hours in New York City, some 330 citizens are robbed, raped, assaulted or murdered … but the number of victims will be many times higher. Because one act of criminal violence reaches far beyond the immediate family to scar entire families, relatives, even friends … by the end of 1977 an estimated 500,000

New Yorkers will have become victims of violence.”45 These victims, however, were not uniformly passive and both the Berkowitz murders and a range of other street crimes began to provoke victims’ vigilante responses. That fall, a woman attacked in the wealthy neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights fought back by shoving her ice cream cone in one girl’s face and biting another’s finger. “We are getting sick and tired of people saying New Yorkers are cowards,” argued one of the people who had come to her aid. “I think a lot of people- including myself- wanted to see the girls roughed up and they

43 Constance Rosenblum, “I See You, Son of Sam- Everywhere,” DN, July 3, 1977. 44 Abrahamsen, Confessions. 45 Hanson, “What Happens.” When considering crime statistics during the crisis, it is important to keep in mind that the City’s crime data was extremely unreliable at this time. As Soffer notes in Koch, due to problems funding data collection and a lack of overall strategy, crime statistics during the crisis were often an unclear measure of actual conditions on the ground. And as the purpose of my investigation is to consider how ideas about space are formed, I am just as interested in considering the ways in which crime perception concretely shaped how New Yorkers inhabited the city, regardless of actual crime rates. For example, although 1977 marked the city’s perceptual nadir, and by 1979 it had begun its “recovery,” crime rates did not necessarily reflect these changes in perception: the city’s murder rate began to rise after 1964, ironically declined in 1977 and 1978, and then began to rise again in 1979. In the early 80s, it again began to decline, until the period from 1986-1990, when it peaked again, contemporaneous with the crack epidemic: murder rate taken from Marshall Berman and Brian Berger, eds., New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg (London: Reaktion Books, 2007).

106 would have been if the cops hadn’t shown up so quickly.”46 In 1979, the Koch administration responded to this climate of fear by forming a new “victims’ services” agency.47 “The fact is that anyone can be the victim of a crime,” stated a draft of the agency’s informational brochure.48 Yet despite Koch’s attempts to respond to this emotional landscape, stories about crime continued to directly affect how New Yorkers felt about their city. “New Yorkers just don’t feel safe anymore,” stated constituent

Dolores Costa of Brooklyn to Mayor Koch in 1980. “Everyday we hear of people getting mugged, pushed to the ground, hurt.”49

During the crisis, New Yorkers often cited these fears and anxieties within the city’s streets and public spaces. And while many New Yorkers continued to move through the city’s public spaces despite this fearscape,50 the power of these stories

46 Patrick W. Sullivan, “Mug Victim Thanks Her Rescuers,” NYP, October 28, 1977. 47 Though as Soffer notes, despite Koch’s best intentions, as crime rose, forces dwindled because of extreme financial constraints. The number of officers dropped from 31,000 just before the 1975 crisis to less than 22,000 by 1981. “Crime went down and (mostly) up largely independent of anything the mayor did or said, which was frustrating and difficult to accept,” writes Soffer, Koch, 330. The City’s response to crime also emphasized the criticality of walking the streets. In April of 1978, the Koch administration reintroduced the police department’s “neighborhood stabilization units,” which were designed as part of the “park, walk and talk” concept under former Police Commissioner Robert McGuire. These street tactics emphasized foot patrols as the most effective means of crime prevention. 48 Chief of Staff Diane Coffey to Press Secretary Maureen Connelly, Draft of Brochure, September 12, 1979: Mayor Koch Papers, Municipal Archives (MN41020/#1072). Note that this brochure estimated that in 1978 almost 600,000 New Yorkers were victims of crimes, and that another 600,000 had probably failed to contact authorities. 49 Letter from Dolores Costa of 211 31st Street in Brooklyn to Ed Koch, October 17, 1980, Koch Papers (MN41050 Box 116/Folder 6/#1675). 50 “Despite the fact that ‘crime in the streets in New York’ seems to be about the favorite gag of every television comedian,” reported the 1977-1978 Frommer’s Guide to New York, “we honestly feel that the subject has been grossly exaggerated”: Faye Hammel, Arthur Frommer’s Guide to New York (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979): NYPL General Research Division. Proof of the streets’ safety, claimed the guide, could be found in the free movement of everyone who lived and worked in New York. Artists, musicians and lovers also developed new kinds of inhabitations that capitalized on the streets’ relative emptiness. For a primary study of sexual inhabitations, see Edward William Delph’s sociological study The Silent Community: Public Homosexual Encounters (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1978): NYPL General Research Division. See also Mahler’s account of public sexual culture, Bronx Is Burning, 124-129, and

107 profoundly affected how residents navigated the streets. “In a growing number of city neighborhoods, people no longer sit on stoops, no longer venture out at night,” remarked

Auletta in his account of the crisis. “Eyes are fixed on television sets and bolted doors.

Neighborhoods exist in name only.”51 This fear of crime was often experienced through micro-geographic changes in the streetscape and residents’ negotiation of these details.

“The way that crime affects the individual in a city like New York- if you are not being actively victimized- is in the small details of your life that change,” Jim McLaughlin writes in his recollections of the era. “People start putting ‘no radio’ signs on their car windows.”52

Much of this public rhetoric focused on the forfeit of the streets by law-abiding

New Yorkers. At the start of the crisis era, Mayor Beame inaugurated the City’s “Walk

N’ Talk Street Program,” which was aimed at “encouraging neighborhood residents to use their streets in the evening hours, thus promoting safety and a sense of community” along neighborhood blocks throughout the five boroughs. Yet this campaign subtly advanced ideas about what kinds of street activities would most appropriately support a sense of “community.”53 As the crisis became official news in 1975, Mark Stuart of the

Times advanced his “candy-store theory of the decline of New York,” and commented that after the lights of these stores disappeared, “fewer people came out at night … as honest people sealed themselves in, the skulkers became bolder, crept out more brazenly.”54 “What is of major concern to our citizens,” reported a conference on the

artistic inhabitations, 166-172. For more on artistic counter-inhabitations of public space, see my literature review in the introduction. 51 Auletta, Streets, 11. 52 Jim McLaughlin, “New York State of Crime,” in New York Calling, 198. 53 Statement Year End Report 1974, Mayor Beame Papers, Municipal Archives. 54 Mark Stuart, “The Candy-Store Theory of the Decline of New York,” NYT, July 13, 1975.

108 “Decline of New York in the 1970s” held at SUNY Binghamton in 1982, “is the fear of using public facilities like parks and even the streets. Since this fear affects all aspects of living in New York City and affects virtually everyone, it should be a central issue for any organization concerned with the quality of life.”55 This new climate of street fear even affected such seemingly fundamental New York street institutions as stickball and handball: “The games are still the same, only the streets are changing,” commented

Rachel Gallagher in her 1976 book Games in the Street. “They are overridden with drugs, crime, pollution, and the constant tearing down and putting up of taller and taller buildings … there are fewer and fewer places to play.”56

Sam’s killings escalated this climate of fear in the city’s public and semi-public spaces. As the hunt for the killer continued during the summer of 1977, the Times remarked that “it takes no very deep probing to pry expressions of fear and pessimism from New Yorkers. Even a haphazard meeting of the eyes on the street is avoided lest some latent hostility should explode.”57 And interestingly, fear about the crimes came to a head during the summer, when the city’s public spaces were most heavily utilized, despite persistent crisis-era anxieties. “It was not until summer, when the cityfolk gather as a Greek chorus in the market places, that the fear gripped all,” reported the Times following Sam’s capture.58 Additionally, through official policing of the semi-public lover’s lane spaces where Sam often struck, and through unofficial curfews and rules set

55 “The Decline of New York in the 1970s: A Demographic, Economic and Fiscal Analysis: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the State University of New York at Binghamton,” May 1977: Bigel Archive (Shelf 7/Periodical Box). 56 Rachel Gallagher, Games in the Street, (New York: Four Winds Press, 1976): NYPL General Research Division. 57 Shepard, “Cloud of Fear,” NYT, August 4, 1977. 58 Shephard, “About New York: A Summer of Doldrums Plus,” NYT, August 13, 1977.

109 by young New Yorkers’ parents, Sam’s crimes directly altered the ways in which urbanites navigated and inhabited their city.

Discourse about Sam’s crimes also fit into a particular conversation about street crime within the city’s white ethnic outer borough neighborhoods. 59 And while this discourse often reflected very real fears, it also shaped a narrative about by whom the streets had been lost and to whom they rightfully belonged. 60 The relationship between white ethnic outer borough residents and their neighborhood streets was a major focal point of both Mario Cuomo’s mayoral campaign and the struggles along the Ridgewood-

Bushwick border, both of which occurred during 1977’s “summer of sam.”61 Although

Cuomo’s rhetoric did not directly speak to the crimes, his ideas about neighborhood street spaces, criminality, and belonging were direct responses to his white ethnic constituent base, many of whom inhabited the same neighborhoods in which Sam struck. An Italian-

American from Jamaica, Queens, Cuomo was “as angry as you are about what’s happened to our city,” and advocated for “every old woman who lives behind triple- locked doors, waiting for day to return, afraid to venture onto the night streets or once

59 As outlined in the introduction, the emotional climate within these neighborhoods’ streets was often a complex mixture of anger at their perceived neglect by the City, fear about encroaching decline, and self-directed survivalist practices in the face of this anger and fear. For a fuller discussion of self-directed survival practices in particular, see Chapters 3 and 4. See also Chapter 5’s consideration of the ways in which Mayor Koch built upon practices in white ethnic borough neighborhoods to forge his renewal narrative. 60 See, for example, Selwyn Raab’s April 10, 1977, Times article entitled “Sharp Rise Reported for Serious Crimes in All Five Boroughs,” which remarks on the strong increase in felonies in middle-class borough neighborhoods during 1976. The article notes, however, that these strong increases do little to level the playing field between these neighborhoods and the crime-ridden areas of Harlem, the South Bronx, and Central Brooklyn. See also my earlier discussion of crime statistics during the crisis. 61 Interestingly, in July of 1977 the cops followed a call by a man claiming to be the killer to an apartment n Ridgewood. Cited in Howard Blum, “Ringing Doorbells Day and Night in Ceaseless Hunt Of ‘Son of Sam,’” NYT, July 14, 1977.

110 look up at the night sky.”62 Through an aggressive platform targeted at mobilizing New

Yorkers to recapture the streets that “naturally” belonged to them from a seemingly faceless threat, Cuomo argued that “every citizen of the City of New York has the right to walk every one of its streets.”63 Yet this seemingly universal rights campaign often spoke specifically to the offspring of Ellis Island-era immigrants, to whom Cuomo referred as “the children of giants,” and he wedded his rights rhetoric to a homescape of white ethnic neighborhoods “where the immigrant dream is still at work, in hundreds of stores and restaurants and homes,” and “where people put down their roots and kept their families together.”64 A critical part of Cuomo’s identity was linked to his own inhabitation of a “transitioning” neighborhood street, and through this inhabitation he appealed specifically to New Yorkers who felt imperiled by the racial and economic changes in their neighborhoods. In a Daily News series dedicated to exploring the mayoral candidates’ home territories, Cuomo’s neighborhood was headlined as “less and less cozy” due to encroaching decline.65 As the mayoral race progressed, New York magazine echoed this predilection with Cuomo’s transitioning block as reporters Richard

Gambino and Michael Novak described driving “down a badly pockmarked street” to

62 Mario Cuomo, “Declaration of Purpose,” May 10, 1977: Ken Auletta Papers, NYPL (Box 6/Folder 7/Item 10: Writings, Cuomo Profile, Cuomo on 1977). 63 Cuomo, “Declaration of Purpose.” 64 Cuomo, “Declaration of Purpose”; Cuomo, Campaign Brochure: “On Thursday September 8, Put Your Anger to Work,” 1977: Bigel Archive (Shelf 8/Elections Binder). In his critiques of Cuomo’s campaign, Ed Koch seized on Cuomo’s “vague generalities” and claimed that Mario didn’t really know the issues but instead capitalized on “this immigrant feeling” to garner votes (Campaign Video, Channel 2 News, June 5, 1977: Ed Koch Collection, LaGuardia College #08.002 V15). Diane Coffey, Koch’s head of public relations, echoed this comment in 1992 when she explained that Cuomo’s campaign was “flag waving and very patriotic … I don’t want to hear descriptions of your parents and the grocery store and values … how are you going to close the budget gap?” (Diane M. Coffey, Interviewed by Sharon Zane, March 25, April 16, July 13 1992: Edward I. Koch Administration Oral History Project, Columbia University). Yet nearly 19% of voters during the democratic primary, and 41% during the general election, were content to consume Cuomo’s grocery store tales of immigrant life. 65 Beth Fallon, “Cuomo’s Neighborhood Is Less and Less Cozy,” DN, July 28, 1977.

111 reach Cuomo’s home.66 Similarly, discourse about the Son of Sam crimes focused on

Berkowitz’s own inhabitation of a racially transitioning neighborhood, and contrasted threatening spaces of black and Latino decline with the supposedly healthy white ethnic neighborhood streets in which the crimes unfolded.

Reporter Jimmy Breslin, who became the most famous journalistic voice during the murders, played a more direct role in producing understandings about the crimes’ geographic relationship to white ethnic neighborhoods. In August of 1975, Breslin described the changing landscape of these neighborhoods through his description of a bar in the white ethnic Queens enclave of Richmond Hill. This beloved spot, where he had first met his wife, had recently curtailed its evening hours and now operated the door by a buzzer in order to only admit familiar patrons. “If a bar in Queens discourages strangers,” questioned Breslin, “then how are strangers to meet in the night, to discover each other? I know not. I do know that in the neighborhoods of the City of New York we have forfeited the nights. Nothing moves, nobody meets. A city gasps for life while a

German shepherd growls behind double-locked doors.”67 Stories about the journalist himself positioned Breslin as a natural outgrowth of the geographic spaces that he inhabited. “Jimmy Breslin is as much of a part of New York as the , or , or the village, or the boroughs,” wrote Michael O’Neill in a 1984 compilation

66 Richard Gambino and Michael Novak, “Campaign Diary: Is Saint Mario the Ethnic Savior?” NY Mag, September 5, 1977. Cuomo’s intimate knowledge of transitional neighborhood spaces was also evidenced through the results of the September 10th primary, during which he won the majority of votes in the neighborhoods of Ridgewood and Bushwick, the two most highly publicized “transitional” neighborhoods in the city: “Results of the Primary Election,” NYT, September 10, 1977. After becoming Lieutenant Governor, Cuomo continued to advocate for these kinds of spaces as he sought federal assistance for a equity assurance program that would support middle-class neighborhoods that were threatened by “ethnic change, racial change, social change, or physical change”: Queens Ledger, January 10, 1980. 67 Breslin, “A City Gasps for Life,” Boston Globe, August 22, 1975: Bigel Archive (Shelf 7/Periodical Box).

112 of Breslin’s work. “And New York is part of him, too, pounded deep into the marrow of his bones by a thousand and one encounters with daily life. The rhythms of the great city pulse in his Irish blood, its variegated moods are his moods, its often ugly sights and raucous sounds the stimulus for his reportorial eye.” Through the practices of “daily life,” Breslin’s white ethnic corpus had rhythmically fused with the city’s built environment and ideological spirit. From the first column Breslin produced for the News in November of 1976, which chronicled a street killing, Breslin was intimately associated with the boroughs, white ethnicity, and rough-hewn street smarts.68 Breslin functioned as a spatial insider within the city’s white ethnic neighborhoods and was thus able to report on the crimes from a privileged position; Berkowitz even sent him a personal letter, which he reprinted in the pages of the News.69 According to CBS, Breslin was Sam’s

“conduit” and his “conscience.”70 “No writer has been closer to [the Son of Sam] story than … columnist Jimmy Breslin,” argued the News.”71 The crimes’ other insider was

Deputy Inspector Timothy Dowd, who served as head of the police department’s special

“Son of Sam” “Operation Omega” taskforce. Dowd was described as being both a shrewdly bookish problem solver, and a down-to-earth white ethnic who had been born in

Kerry, Ireland, and was schooled in the tough Irish neighborhood of South Boston.72

68 Breslin, The World According to Breslin, annotated by Michael O’Neill and William Brink (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984), 1. 69 Although the New Yorker indicted Breslin for printing the letter, he had actually responded to Deputy Inspector Dowd’s request that he do so in the hopes that it would lead to communication with the killer: According to Breslin. Breslin also responded to these critiques on CBS’ Media and Son of Sam program, and indicated that he felt absolutely no responsibility for fueling the hysteria or precipitating the Moskowitz murder by reprinting the letter. 70 Media and Son of Sam. 71 Breslin, “Breslin’s File.” 72 Francis X. Clines, “About New York: ‘Nothing to Do But Catch This Person,’” NYT, April 21, 1977.

113 In their accounts of the crimes, New Yorkers’ granted special attention to the attacks’ geography, and this spatial obsession was not merely motivated by the manhunt’s necessities. The obsession was also produced by intense anxieties about both the elusive omnipotence of street violence during the fiscal crisis era, and about Sam’s ability to penetrate white ethnic neighborhoods where this violence supposedly did not occur. Whereas accounts of violence in the city’s lower income black and Latino neighborhoods often referenced a vague and ever expanding construction of areas such as the “South Bronx” or “Bushwick,”73 nearly every article published on Sam’s killings included either a map of locations or a list of addresses at which he had struck.74 New

York Magazine’s year-end issue in 1977 even included a snapshot of each attack’s location.75 Following the attack on Judy Placido and Sal Lupo in Bayside, Queens, the site of the shooting quickly became a place of pilgrimage, and one neighborhood resident commented that “this place is becoming a national monument” as the “whole world” seemed to be driving by the corner of Northern Boulevard and 211th Street.76 Reports also evidenced a predilection with Berkowitz’s own geography, and detailed his various moves between homes in the Bronx, New Rochelle and Yonkers.77 One of the most frightening aspects of the crimes for Queens resident Michelle Markowitz was that

73 See Chapters 1 and 3. 74 For example, on June 27th, just following the attack in Bayside on Placido and Lupo, ABC’s nightly news program showed a map of Sam’s killings, which it spatially contained by referring to them as a “corridor” through Brooklyn and Queens. 75 “The Year of the Apple,” NY Mag, December 26, 1977. The Post also ran a story that detailed the street where Donna Lauria lived on July 29th, 1977. 76 “Where ‘Son of Sam’ Struck, Young Women Walk in Fear,” NYT, June 30, 1977 77 According to Abrahmsen’s account, Berkowitz grew up at 1105 Stratford Avenue in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx, moved to the borough’s Co-op City in 1970, to Barnes Avenue in January of 1975, to New Rochelle in February of 1976, and to Yonkers three months later.

114 “nobody knew where [Sam] lived.”78 In an attempt to comprehend the killer’s elusive cartography, the force obsessively plotted his movements. Inspector Dowd, who ran his taskforce, out of the 109th precinct in Flushing, Queens, functioned as “a general cloistered in his war room as his troops deploy for battle … [and he] plotted the movements of his units on a large map.” “Police believe the killer chooses the location for the crime, rather than a specific victim,” concluded the Inspector.79 This was later confirmed by Berkowitz himself upon his capture, when he revealed to officers that he was not motivated by victims with a particular physical appearance but had instead sought out particular areas of the city; he had intended to strike next in the Bronx and

“was going to look in Riverdale” upon his arrest.80 “I had no plans for attack, so to speak,” Berkowitz confessed to Dr. David Abrahamsen, a forensic psychologist who had worked on the case and later published a book about the crimes in collaboration with

Berkowitz. “However, I did have a general idea of where I would be going in search of victims. So, I familiarized myself with the streets … I managed to learn all the streets by repeated trips into the area.”81 Upon seizure in Yonkers, detectives found “folders containing maps and information about , Long Island, Westchester and the five boroughs of the city,” amidst the piles of soiled clothing and empty liquor bottles inside Berkowitz’s apartment.82

78 Eye on People Against the Law: Son of Sam, CBS, November 14, 1997. 79 Michael Hechtman and Richard Gooding, “Witnesses Saw .44 Killer’s Face,” NYP, June 27, 1977. This point is also made by Schaap and Breslin on page 75. See also Molly Ivins, “ a Man Called ‘Son of Sam,’ the .44-Caliber Killer,” NYT, May 21, 1977, which describes the walls of the 109th precinct as “covered with maps showing the times, dates and places of the shootings.” 80 McFadden, “Heavily Guarded.” 81 Abrahamsen, Confessions. 82 Thomas Collins, “Glimpse of a Grime (sic) Loner in Apt. 7-E,” DN, August 11, 1977.

115 As the killings continued, New Yorkers feared that Sam’s movements would continue to expand their geographic radius. This discourse revealed that the crimes had deeply unsettled New Yorkers’ expectations about where violence could or should occur.

“While the shootings all have taken place in the city,” reported the Post just days before

Sam’s first Brooklyn murder, “police sources say the show of strength planned by city police over the next few days may force the killer to the suburbs.”83 Twenty- four-year- old Sean Gallagher commented that even in Peoria, Illinois, where he had been the month before, people were scared that someone would copycat the killings.84 Following his last attack, Sam was sought “even beyond NYC’s borders,” and upon his capture, sources revealed that he was planning a mass murder in a Long Island discotheque.85 This commentary implied that if the city’s white ethnic neighborhoods were no longer safe, then violence’s next frontier could even extend to the sheltered bastions of the suburbs and the American heartland. Throughout the course of the murders, New Yorkers had attempted to divine patterns in the crimes, which focused on Sam’s apparent predilection for dark-haired Catholic women in the Bronx and Queens. The killer’s last murder, which occurred in the Bath Beach section of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, terrified New

Yorkers not only because of its violence, but also because it challenged these cultural and geographic expectations. “With one terrible strike,” wrote Breslin and Schaap, “the killer had cut across so many mythical boundaries: a different borough, a different hair color, even a different religion. Jews, Catholics, Protestants all sharing the same fear, white

83 “Son of Sam Attack in Suburbs Feared,” NYP, July 28, 1977. 84 David C. Berliner, “Disco: With ‘Son of Sam’ Still at Large, Fear is a Strong Element of New York’s Singles Scene,” , August 6, 1977. 85 Nightly News, ABC, August 4, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection; Nightly News, CBS, August 11, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection. Robert Hanely’s “Apprehension Over ‘Son of Sam’ Is Leaving Lovers Lanes Vacant,” NYT, August 11, 1977, also details fears in Northern New Jersey and police response in these communities.

116 killing white, it was a switch.”86 Mark Rubin, a neighbor of Stacy Moskowitz who had been killed in the attack, remarked that “it’s like he’s saying he can strike anywhere … there’s no way of really protecting yourself.”87 “This murder [Moskowitz] is no more tragic than any of the others, but it makes a kind of statement … it is frightening because it shows he’s in control. He went to Brooklyn, killed a blonde girl. He can go to Nassau, anywhere,” commented a young man in a Bayside barbershop.88 “Brooklyn used to be safe before this attack,” echoed Sean Cestaro, the manager of Elephas disco, which had been the site of another Berkowitz attack earlier that summer. “Now there’s no more sanctuary.”89 This lack of geographic containment incited similar fears among the PD, and Dowd remarked that “we now have an entire city to protect. Sam is now telling us he will strike anywhere.”90 “How do you seek a killer whose impulse sprawls anonymously over two counties?” questioned the Times.91

In addition to their preoccupation with the killings’ geography, New Yorkers became deeply concerned about Sam’s intimate neighborhood knowledge and his mobility through these neighborhoods on foot. Drawing upon Sam’s admission in one of his letters that he was “a spirit roaming the night,” detectives speculated that one of the most likely identities for the killer was that of a “compulsive walker.” Walking itself was

“a common manifestation of severe psychosis” and the police were “actively investigating a man who walked from Forest Hills to New Jersey in an afternoon” as a

86 Breslin and Schaap, .44, 291. 87 Eric Pace, “Cry for Help Wakes Up a Brooklyn Neighborhood,” NYT, August 1, 1977. 88 Shepard, “Cloud of Fear.” 89 Berliner, “Disco.” 90 Howard Blum, “For the Police, the Latest Attack Enlarges Already-Large Haystack,” NYT, August 1, 1977 91 Clines, “Nothing to Do.”

117 potential perpetrator.92 “What if the guy walks? People are so frightened that a nigger will mug them that only somebody out doing something wrong walks the streets late at night,” mused Schaap and Breslin’s fictionalized deputy inspector Dom Carillo as he tried to understand how the killer covered so much ground.93 According to Schaap and

Breslin’s account, walking the streets also afforded Sam a kind of practice-based knowledge of the city’s inhabitants: “He had been learning the streets of Queens and the streets of the Bronx, and he had been learning the people, too, the habits of the young and the old,” they wrote.94 Dr. Abrahamsen emphasized that Berkowitz planned the crimes through the acts of “walking,” “prowling,” and “stalking.” According to Berkowitz, as told to Abrahamsen, he sometimes walked the streets for several hours before alighting on a victim.95 Even after Berkowitz’s apprehension, it became evident that he had altered the ways in which New Yorkers thought about the pedestrian landscape. Just following his capture, the Times concluded that “there are more people about, and later at night.

This, logic dictates, is better than fewer people… Yet so many passersby are shuffling … that you may find something sinister in this un-New Yorkish pace, particularly when the pedestrian is a loner.”96 The article indicated that while the reinhabitation of the city’s public spaces should have logically helped stave off New Yorkers’ fears, Sam’s crimes had transformed the ways in which city dwellers interpreted certain kinds of walking. In the October following his imprisonment, Berkowitz was described as “on the move”

92 Howard Blum, “Who is Really Behind that .44? Police Pursuing Many Theories,” NYT, August 3, 1977. 93 Breslin and Schaap, .44, 115. 94 Breslin and Schaap, .44, 15. 95 Abrahamsen, Confessions. 96 Shepard, “Summer of Doldrums.”

118 while “pacing his cell banging his fists against the walls.”97 “Despite his overweight and the prison guards who always accompanied him wherever he went, it was surprising how quickly he could move to and from his cell to my office when the passage was clear,” concluded Abrahamsen.98

The Police Department responded to Sam’s compulsive walking by taking to the streets themselves in an effort to contain the killer’s seemingly uncontainable movements. Following the death of Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau in Baychester,

“the Police Headquarters followed the killer’s lead and decided to treat the Bronx and

Queens as a common hunting ground.”99 The search for Sam became the largest manhunt in the city’s history, and approximately 225 cops, 75 detectives and at least 250 volunteer cops were assigned to the task. The effort cost the City approximately $10,000 per day.100 Multiple newspaper reports detailed the department’s quotidian strategy of

“ringing doorbells” in their hunt to find the killer and underlined that they would keep

“knocking on doors” until they located him. In Breslin’s May 15th update on the crimes,

97 Steve Dunleavy, “Sam Wants Out- I Must Hunt,” NYP, October 10, 1977. 98 Abrahamsen, Confessions. 99 Clines, “Nothing to Do.” 100 Cost cited in Tom Mathews, “Hunting the ‘Son of Sam,’” Newsweek, July 11, 1977; volunteer figure cited in John McQuiston, “250 Policemen Volunteer to Hunt In Spare Time for ‘Son of Sam,’” NYT, August 4, 1977; cop and detective figures cited by Deputy Inspector Dowd on The Stanley Siegel Show, and in Abrahamsen’s Confessions of Son of Sam. Mahler counts 50 detectives, 20 on standby, 100 uniformed and undercover officers and 700 cops who volunteered for off-hours duty. These volunteers initially worked against the City’s wishes; the administration did not want anyone working for free until the rehiring of officers due to crisis layoffs. After the final Moskowitz murder, Mayor Beame rehired over 100 laid off cops and doubled the number of officers on the Omega taskforce. On PBS’ special MacNeil/Lehrer Report on the case, Lieutenant John Power indicated that it was one of the only cases in years where volunteers worked (aired July 29,1977: The Paley Center). Mahler also notes that many of the cops who joined Operation Omega were in their early 40s, lived in the outer boroughs, and had teenage daughters, Bronx is Burning, 250-255. See also Howard Blum’s “Police to Restrict Parking By Couples,” NYT, August 6, 1977, which remarks on Beame’s rehiring of 136 laid-off officers, and also cites 300 detectives working on the case following the Moskowitz murder. McFadden’s “Heavily Guarded,” cites up to 300 full time detectives and “hundreds more working on their own time to track down leads, no matter how seemingly frivolous.”

119 entitled “Fear in Queens,” he detailed one detective who sought to understand the killings through walking. “I always start at the start,” the detective told Breslin. “Go to the scene and start walkin’ from there.”101 The PD consistently emphasized these acts of taking to the streets, and argued that their battle had to be fought on the ground. “We’re sending all these men out to comb the city, daring Sam to strike,” claimed one Queens detective.102 The streets also became a particularly masculine proving ground for the department, and the City actually positioned a number of policewomen in parked cars outside bars and in the hopes that they would lure the killer.103 Law enforcement’s commitment to pounding the pavement even got a nod from Sam himself. In one of his letters to the precinct, he declared that “upon my capture I promise to buy all the guys working on the case [who walk the streets at night] a new pair of shoes if I can get up the money.”104 “The detectives whose shoes he would buy walk the streets at night,” remarked Breslin.105 The department also limited the movements of suspects through the streets and “anyone walking the streets who fits the description [of the killer] … [was] stopped and questioned.”106

The killer’s movements were even more disturbing to New Yorkers because they capitalized on the anonymity afforded by urban living itself, and accounts stressed his ability to be physically absorbed into the city’s built environment and its populous

101Breslin, “Breslin’s File.” 102 Howard Blum, “Police Mobilize, but July 29 Comes and Goes with No Sign of .44 Killer,” NYT, July 31, 1977. 103 Blum, “Police Mobilize.” Mahler notes that some male officers were also sent out wearing wigs, and that male officers would sometimes pretend to embrace in cars to bait Sam, Bronx is Burning, 250. 104 Michael Hechtman and Richard Gooding, “Witnesses Saw .44 Killer’s Face,” NYP, June 27, 1977 105 Breslin, “Breslin’s File.” 106 Blum, “Ringing Doorbells.”

120 crowds. “He probably stays to himself so much that nobody in a city of more than 7 million knows him,” claimed the News’ special report. “He could come out of a room in a

YMCA or from a rooming house in a transient neighborhood.”107 “He is lonely, he has no friends. I see him in some cheap furnished room,” remarked psychologist Harvey

Schlossberg to the Times.108 These descriptions of Sam conjured New Yorkers’ fears about the city’s ability to breed isolation and loneliness, and to also afford the killer the necessary transience to carry out his acts undetected. “He just kind of melts right into the city scene,” concluded Inspector Dowd.109 “By day … Son of Sam seems to blend easily into the crowded life of the city,” echoed Newsweek.110 Yet the spatial anonymity promised by the urban environment also had the power to potentially challenge Sam, who might eventually be overwhelmed by the city’s sheer size. “Dissolve back into the city so once again you may become a small entity,” begged Audrey W. in her letter to the

News.111 “You are faced now with the implacable logic of sheer numbers,” wrote Pete

Hamill for the Post. “There will always be more people than you can kill.”112

In response to this discourse about Berkowitz’s relationship to an anonymous, multitudinous city, New Yorkers constructed an urban landscape where Sam could be lurking anywhere and could be encountered through everyday spatial practices.

Residents anticipated encountering Sam during the most quotidian of urban acts, which included riding public transportation and walking through crowded streets. “I see him everywhere,” wrote Constance Rosenblum in the News. “Jostling me in the crowded

107 Breslin, “Breslin’s File.” 108 Molly Ivins, “Police Trying to Out-Psych the .44 Killer,” NYT, April 26, 1977. 109 Mathews, “Hunting.” 110 Mathews, “Hunting.” 111 “Haunted By Fear: Brooklyn,” DN, July 14, 1977. 112 Hamill, “Dear Sam.”

121 street. Peering out from the shadowy booth where I buy my subway token. Delivering my groceries.”113 Law officials both reinforced and responded to the idea that residents were most vulnerable to attack during these daily spatial practices. The director of the

PD’s psychological services department reported to the Times that Sam would make contact with his victims days in advance by “bumping” into them on the street and asking them for a match.114 “Son of Sam rides with cabbies” emphasized a Daily News report, which encouraged cab drivers to be constantly vigilant about even the most innocuous encounter, and gave them composite sketches of the killer in order to do so.115 The sinister portent of everyday acts was even emphasized through his capture, when the

“totally mundane everyday ordinary act” of receiving a parking ticket helped lead to the seizure of “an utterly obscure postal worker” in Yonkers.116 “Unable to find a parking spot for his Ford Galaxie on the night he killed Stacey Moskowitz, he had parked several blocks away, too close to a fire hydrant,” reported New York Magazine. “The catch- modern training and space age gadgetry to the contrary- was routine.”117 Cecilia Davis, the Bath Beach resident who’s observation about the parking ticket led to Sam’s eventual capture, had been engaged in the quotidian act of “walking her dog [when she] became frightened and ran home]” after seeing Berkowitz.118

Sam’s geographic omnipresence caused many residents to suspect their fellow

New Yorkers of the killings and to change their daily practices accordingly. “I walk down the streets suspecting my fellow neighbors,” wrote New Yorker Audrey W. in a

113 Rosenblum, “I See You.” 114 Ivins, “Out-Psych.” 115 “Son of Sam Rides with Cabbies,” DN, August 8, 1977. 116 “Capture Report,” CBS, August 11, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection; “The Year of the Apple.” See also McFadden’s “Heavily Guarded.” 117 Robert Daley, “The Search for ‘Sam’: Why It Took So Long,” NY Mag, August 22, 1977. 118 McFadden, “Heavily Guarded.”

122 letter to the editor of the Daily News. “There can be no stranger who is innocent ... Son of Sam, are you sitting next to me on the subway? Are you in the same bar with me pretending to enjoy yourself?”119 “An entire city full of people” was potentially suspect argued John Jay psychologist Dr. Charles Bahn on PBS’ MacNeil/Lehrer Report.120

Even the PD stressed Sam’s quotidian omnipresence. “Somebody has to live next door to the killer,” remarked Police Commissioner Michael Codd.121 Deputy Inspector Dowd requested the help of private home residents and rooming house operators in the hunt and asked them to look out “for the smell of gun cleaning fluid.”122 “For this type of man to exist he has to live someplace,” Dowd told reporter Robert MacNeil on the PBS special that detailed the crimes. “Somebody had to know who he is … [he is] a loner type of person who lives in a room or an attic or a basement or the back of someplace. If they paid close attention they would spot [him] for us,” Dowd concluded.123 Dowd’s conscription asked New Yorkers to alter their relationship to the spatial practices that took place within their homes, and evidenced that the killer had penetrated the city’s personal, domestic spaces. As New Yorkers began to see Sam lurking everywhere, their fear compelled a number of residents to actually turn in friends, neighbors, and even ex- boyfriends as the killer.124 Operation Omega fielded 1,000 tips per day and the public

119 “Haunted by Fear: Brooklyn,” DN, July 14, 1977. 120 MacNeil/Lehrer Report. 121 Andy Logan Papers, NYPL (Box 10/ “Around City Hall” research notes). 122 Steve Dunleavy, “Son of Sam Could be Sniffed Out, Police Say,” NYP, July 11, 1977. 123 MacNeil/Lehrer Report. 124 See McQuiston’s, “250 Policemen Volunteer.” See also Breslin, “Breslin’s File.” Joe Nicholson’s “The Hunt for ‘Son of Sam’ is Labor of Pure Drudgery” for the Post on June 29th, 1977, reported that many women who had been “jilted” by ex-lovers reported them as potential suspects.

123 called in the names of 7,000 suspects, at least 3,000 of whom the PD investigated.125

Occasionally, false accusations resulted in violence. In early August, just following the

Moskowitz murder, “swarms of angry people rushed out of [a] bar and from nearby buildings shouting for vengeance against a man they had taken for Sam.”126

Sam’s crimes were not only disturbing because of his intimate knowledge of the city’s geography and ability to move freely within it, but they were also deeply troubling to many New Yorkers because of their location within white ethnic neighborhoods’ public and semi-public spaces. As many residents in these neighborhoods retreated from what they perceived to be dangerous streets for the interior of their homes during the crisis, they left the public spaces through which Sam prowled virtually empty. Berkowitz himself even commented on this emptiness when he struck for the first time: “cautiously,

I was watching for movement from other people in the street. However, there was none,” he recounted to Dr. Abrahamsen.127 As the crimes further reinforced the idea that public spaces were highly risky, city officials further perpetuated their emptiness by placing restrictions on where young lovers could park. On August 6, 1977, Mayor Beame ordered the PD to remove all cars from “isolated areas” as a “logical way to reduce the opportunity for a crime to be committed or for a victim to be involved in a crime.128

These geographical constrictions were difficult for young white ethnics, who relied upon the semi-public spaces of cars for sexual freedom. “These kids live with their parents,” commented one New Yorker to the Daily News’ Beth Fallon. “A car is the only place

125 Mahler, Bronx is Burning, 253; Daley, “The Search for Sam.” 3,000 figure cited in McFadden, “Heavily Guarded.” 126 Thomas Rafferty, “.44 Rumor Stirs Anger,” DN, August 4, 1977. 127 Abrahamsen, Confessions, 94. 128 Blum, “Restrict Parking.” See also Michael Oreskes and Robert Lane, “Lovers Abandon Wooing Grounds,” DN, August 7, 1977.

124 they can be alone. But they’re scared now.”129 Alongside the City’s official sanctioning against public space inhabitations, parents also urged children to retreat back into the family home instead of risking a night out. “Stay in [your girlfriend’s] house,” one

Brooklyn father told his son. “Or stay in ours, for God’s sake. Be safe.” One young woman in Kew Gardens even gave a Son of Sam party for her friends where they spent the night together to avoid having to enter the streets.130 These geographical constrictions were difficult for young women. The Times reported that in Forest Hills, Maria Smith

“never used to be afraid to walk the streets … of her neighborhood. Now she says she’s afraid to sit in her own backyard.”131 Following the attack on Judy Placido, Laura

Borger, a 19-year-old secretary complained that “my father refuses to let me go out …

Tony (her steady boyfriend) makes me lie down in the car when we’re driving.”132

Women also actively sought to alter their gendered appearance as they moved through the streets, and there was an overwhelming demand for blonde hair bleach and wigs citywide.133 In Queens, “private security guards cruise the streets along with regular patrol cars, and women suddenly are wearing their hair up or in curlers,” reported

Newsweek.134

As the media, city officials and family members warned young New Yorkers to stay inside, some young people refused to be confined to the private realm. This refusal was particularly evident within the city’s disco clubs. While Sam’s relationship to disco

129 Beth Fallon, “Sam Alters Youths’ Life Style to Death Style,” DN, August 2, 1977. 130 Fallon, “Sam Alters.” 131 “Young Forest Hills Women Find Fear of Killer Affecting Them,” NYT, August 3, 1977. 132 Berliner, “Disco.” See also Peter Keepnews and Joe Nicholson, “‘Son of Sam’ Puts a Damper on Dates,” NYP, June 28, 1977. 133 For example, see “Young Women Walk in Fear,” for accounts of women changing their hairstyles. 134 Mathews, “Hunting.” See also The MacNeil/Lehrer Report for interviews with frightened groups of young women.

125 culture was tenuous and he later confirmed that he had never actively searched for victims inside the clubs despite the two strikes that occurred after couples had gone dancing, the news media reinforced the relationship between the two. It was also within discos that many young New Yorkers sought to challenge and escape from the spatial restrictions imposed by his crimes.135 “Although a minority of the attacks have occurred following visits to discos, it is there that singles gather on hot summer nights for music, drink, dance and most of all, companionship,” reported the Washington Post following the Moskowitz murder.136 Despite warnings by family and friends, Judy Placido and

Stacy Moskowitz had both journeyed out to the clubs prior to their shootings, and this choice revealed more than the ordinary rebelliousness of youth; it emphasized the vitality and importance of public and semi-public spaces to these young New Yorkers’ lives.

Even in the immediate wake of Placido’s shooting, young women continued to flock to

Elephas disco. “I’m supposed to be at a friend’s house,” stated one female patron, “not out where that ‘crazy’ might get me. If my mother knew I was here, she’d kill me.”137

The continued patronage of disco clubs, albeit in smaller numbers, contradicted assumptions that the murders were “killing” the disco business entirely, or that “fear [was

135 Although only two of the strikes unequivocally involved couples who had just been to a discotheque, both the media and residents in the affected neighborhoods dwelled on the potential for disco-goers to become victims of the crimes. There are some conflicting reports as to whether Lauria and Valenti had just returned from a discotheque or the movies prior to the first attack. The first solid connection between disco clubs and the murders was established during the Placido and Lupo attack in Bayside, Queens. Placido and Lupo had been dancing at the Elephas discotheque just prior to the strike. See for example, Maurice Carroll, “An Unlikely Setting for a Violent Crime,” NYT, June 27, 1977. McFadden’s “Heavily Guarded,” mentions that after his capture, Berkowitz commented to officers that he “had not looked for victims inside discotheques.” In Social Dancing in America: Lindy Hop to Hip-Hop, 1901-2000 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), Ralph Giordano argues that the media was responsible for establishing a pattern in the ultimately patternless crimes by suggesting that disco-goers were prime targets. 136 Berliner, “Disco.” 137 Berliner, “Disco.”

126 shrinking] the disco crowds,” as one New York Post headline claimed.138 Indeed, even this article conceded that while patrons may have shifted away from clubs in Queens following the Placido attack, young people’s desire for disco often trumped their fear of the killer. On the anniversary of Berkowitz’s first killing, “refugees from Queens” showed up at Jasmines discotheque in Bay Ridge and though patrons nervously talked about the killer as they waited to enter, they were still committed to going out to dance.

A few days later, Moskowitz and Violante were among these patrons. Following

Berkowitz’s capture, stories focused on the joyous return of young women to the clubs.

“When they heard the news at Elephas discotheque, just after midnight yesterday, the young girls reached for the ribbons in their hair and let it tumble down, free. The accused was in custody and the young were ready to dance again,” reported Beth Fallon for the

News.139 Moreover, as the crimes unfolded, women’s willingness to enter the city’s public spaces could be seen as partially complicating the crisis-era geography of fear within white ethnic neighborhoods. The female victims who were not parked in cars with boyfriends were either “walking alone,” or otherwise unaccompanied by men.140

Ultimately, however, discourse about the crimes rearticulated gendered spatial norms by suggesting that women who were promiscuous or willing to venture out into the night unaccompanied by men would risk murder.

As Sam targeted couples in white ethnic borough neighborhoods, discourse about the crimes also reinforced some of the actual and imagined class-driven spatial divides between elitist parts of Manhattan and the working class areas of the outer boroughs.

This divide was made especially apparent in Manhattan’s disco clubs, where owners

138 Deborah Orin, “Fear Shrinks the Disco Crowds,” NYP, August 1, 1977. 139 Beth Fallon, “Let Their Hair Down and Dance,” DN, August 12, 1977. 140 Nightly News, ABC, July 7, 1977.

127 invoked the crimes through their restrictive admissions policies, which often excluded dancers from the boroughs. After Berkowitz’s capture, disco writer Albert Goldman noted that “the tribe [at Studio 54] celebrated the vanquishment of its most implacable enemy- one of those bridge and tunnel people that would never have been allowed through the door.”141 The club’s owner, Steve Rubell, had coined the term “bridge and tunnelers,” and his derisive nickname was mobilized both to distance Studio 54’s disco culture from the murders perpetrated in the boroughs, and to authorize the space where violent acts could and could not happen.142 Not only were bridge and tunnelers not welcomed into Rubell’s private sanctuary, but their inability to gain entry into private sexual spaces also relegated them to the dangerous streets where the murders took place.

In Studio 54, and other elite Manhattan clubs, sexual acts frequently took place in backrooms, bathrooms, and basements. But for the young couples in the boroughs, almost all of whom had been “parking” before their deaths, these sexual acts were forced to occur in the semi-public space of the car, both because they were not condoned within the clubs and because many working-class youths lived with their families. Mahler notes that the crimes transformed the vast city into “two small towns: the boroughs, where the killer represented a true source of terror, and Manhattan, where he was already becoming a symbol of kitsch, as evidenced by the Son of Sam T-shirts- emblazoned with the police sketch and the words Son of Sam: Get Him Before He Gets You- now being sold on midtown street corners.” Following the harsh critiques of the Post and News’ coverage of the crimes by the New Yorker, Breslin fought back by indicting the publication’s

141 Albert Goldman, Disco (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1978), 20. 142 Ironically, Steve Rubell hailed from Canarsie, a white ethnic neighborhood in the far reaches of Brooklyn. Prior to his ownership of 54, he had run a club called the “Enchanted Garden,” which was located on the grounds of a former golf course in the semi-suburban neighborhood of Douglaston, Queens.

128 Manhattan-centric elitism. “In the world of the New Yorker writer,” argued Breslin, “one sits in the Algonquin lobby and sips daiquiris.”143

Sam’s crimes also highlighted the lived and perceived distinctions between public spaces in white ethnic and black neighborhoods. While blackout narratives had underlined the frightening potential of excessively crowded public spaces in black and

Hispanic neighborhoods, Sam’s attacks within empty white ethnic streets were sometimes actually contrasted with the safety afforded by crowds in these minority neighborhoods. 144 “These murders never could happen in a black neighborhood. Too many people out on the streets. Everybody would see who did it,” remarked a detective who had “spent his life in slum precincts,” to Breslin as they toured the 109th precinct where “there was not a person in sight.” “Man we after is only workin’ white neighborhoods,” the detective continued. “Nobody comes out at night and he can prowl around and catch him a stray girl and do what he has to do. Look at these people around here,” he stated as the pair passed by a “row of attached houses.” “It was 11 p.m. and the only sign that there were people inside were windows filled with the pale blue light of television.” The detective’s solution was to encourage white ethnic residents to actively inhabit their streets:

“You put a lot of kids on the streets here makin’ some noise, and these here people call up and complain. They got any sense, they pay kids to hang out on the sidewalks all night. Hang out and bang garbage cans around. No killer goin’ walk around if you got people out on the streets. We got a Jack the Ripper case and everybody thinks they’re better off hidin’ inside the house… Black people the

143 Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 268. While reports at the time used the crimes partially to distinguish between white ethnic borough neighborhoods and elitist Manhattan, the 1997 CBS Eye on People Against the Law: Son of Sam program instead describes the discos as “curtains” between the South Bronx and middle class areas. 144 See Chapter 3 for a full discussion of blackout narratives.

129 only ones who know what to do about crime. The more people outside the house, the less can happen to you.”145

In this landscape of emptiness, Sam’s walking became particularly suspicious and he preyed upon the few places left where young people would gather. “All of [the killer’s] nights were about to become an empty street with patches of deep indigo and silent houses and, somewhere, a block away, two blocks away, the sidewalk bathed in rose from the neon sign of a discotheque or a bar where young people like to go,” wrote

Breslin and Schaap.146” The murders may even have helped some New Yorkers of color to move through public spaces with greater ease. “For the first time in the lives of some

[black New Yorkers], they were above suspicion. They had, in the context of this terrible fear that swept through the city, turned white,” quipped Breslin and Schaap.147 Breslin later recalled that the situation that arose because of the crimes “was unique because when people saw a black or two blacks walking down a tree-shaded street at night they were relieved, because it was the white guy you were looking for that was the danger. It was the first time blacks were welcomed on the street in my time.”148 While this may have been an exaggeration, Sam’s crimes did cause New Yorkers to refocus some of their fear of street crimes on white male figures in the public realm. “For a too-short time

[during the crimes], remarked Screw Magazine columnist Rocco Bonelli, “the white and the poor, the white and the unemployed, the white and the functional illiterates, the white and the junkies, the white and the gentiles, were one.”149

145 Breslin, “Breslin’s File.” This passage is also reproduced nearly word for word in Schaap and Breslin’s novel on page 162. 146 Breslin and Schaap, .44, 75-76. 147 Breslin and Schaap, .44, 244. 148 Eye On People Against the Law. 149Rocco Bonelli, “Elect Son of Sam Mayor: A Modest Proposal,” Screw Magazine, September 1977.

130 Yet despite their locations, I maintain that discourse about the attacks ultimately reinforced the idea that crime and decline were exogenous to these white ethnic spaces and indigenous to minority neighborhoods. Broadly, the public’s obsessive interest in the case, and the response of the police department, revealed a highly racialized response to crime. “How many times have there been lunatics loose in the black community and they’ve killed just as Berkowitz did, six and seven, and we took no note of it at all,” commented Breslin on the CBS “Son of Sam” special. “In neighborhoods where the poor people live this was comical,” he argued.150 Sam’s elusiveness also underlined an uneven response by the police department toward different criminals that reinforced ideas about endemic criminality in black neighborhoods. “How come they don’t catch him?” asked a teenager shooting baskets at a court in Harlem during the summer of 1977. “They catch niggers robbin’ some McDonald’s, takin’ off purses. They can do that. They can’t catch a dude out shootin’ and killin’ people? Nigger robbed a store here, they’d have him in

Riker’s Island (prison) in a week.”151 But according to the News, Sam was “not the ordinary homicidal person we grow so quickly in the slums. The .44 killer is one of those special, twisted people who have been with us through the ages.”152

Another way in which Sam’s crimes were set apart from the supposedly primeval group acts unfolding in black and Latino neighborhoods, was through descriptions of the killer’s individualism. While the media’s coverage of the blackout had emphasized masses of disorderly bodies, and Carter’s visit to the South Bronx had underlined a street corner society’s aimless languor, stories about the .44 caliber killer stressed his

150 Media and Son of Sam. 151 Jimmy Breslin, “Harlem Kids Shoot Baskets in Summer of .44 Killer,” NYP, June 30, 1977. 152 Breslin, “Breslin’s File.”

131 distinctive personality, intellect, and orderly and calculated movements.153 In contrast to the chaotic blackout bodies that were described in local news media as herds of beasts and swarms of locusts, Sam was a savvy, untraceable “needle in a haystack.”154 News stories often speculated about the specifics of Sam’s character, education, and even his astrological profile.155 An August 3rd Daily News story probed the mysteries of Sam’s

DNA and questioned if it was possible “that a single amino acid [could hold] a city in fear.”156 “Whoever he is, he is probably the only killer I’ve ever heard of who understands the use of a semicolon,” argued Breslin.157 “Few people anywhere can write with this flow,” he remarked about the killer’s infamous letter.158 Inspector Dowd “has spent a good deal of time thinking about what kind of human being Son of Sam is,” remarked the Times.159 “We are dealing with a cool, shrewd, calculating customer who knows what he is doing,” the Inspector concluded.160 Reporters and city officials imagined that Sam was most likely a retired professional of some kind whose “expertise” with a weapon suggested “a former military man, a rogue cop or a sky marshal.”161 “The fact that he always kept at least one bullet in reserve indicates tremendous discipline, as does his ability to elude police traps,” remarked Matt Bonora, a former member of the

Nassau County Police Department who shared his expertise with the Times. “The .44-

153 While Abrahamsen’s Confessions of Son of Sam maintained that Berkowitz had been depicted as a “mindless beast,” the vast majority of reports investigated the killer’s identity, tastes, and life history. 154 Blum, “Already-Large Haystack.” 155 Ivins, “Stalking a Man,” also chronicles the ESP methods employed by the PD to track Sam. An article in the August 5, 1977 Daily News questioned whether his crimes had a “biorhythm,” and another article on the 4th speculated that “among the more accepted theories- or hunches- is the belief that the killer has deep roots in rock and disco music.” 156 Michael O’Neill, “The Son of Sam: His Darkness and Our Darkness,” DN, August 3, 1977. 157 Breslin, “Breslin’s File.” 158 Breslin, “Breslin’s File.” 159 Ivins, “Stalking a Man.” 160 Mathews, “Hunting.” 161 Mathews, “Hunting.”

132 caliber killer, in fact,” continued the Times, “reminds [Bonora] of George McKie of

Inwood, a former Golden Gloves boxer with an I.Q. of 163 who read hundreds of books on murder.”162 A savvy criminal demanded an equally educated police force. Newsweek emphasized that Inspector Dowd, a “37-year veteran” of the NYPD, was “no spit-on-the- squad-room-floor cop. He studied Latin and English in college … holds a master’s degree from the Baruch School of Business and earns $40,000 a year. And he never watches ‘Kojack.’”163 “Tracking down a major killer is more like a chess game than the car chases, stakeouts and shootouts that characterize so many TV police series,” reported the Times.164 These descriptions stood in stark contrast to accounts of cops during the blackout, which emphasized their hopelessness and helplessness as they ran police cars onto sidewalks and grabbed aimlessly at the criminalized hordes.165

Reports on Sam’s crimes also emphasized the incongruity between violence and the idyllic, quasi-suburban landscapes of family cohesion, neighborliness, and cleanliness in which they occurred. Following the June 1977 attack on Judy Placido and Sal Lupo, the Times printed a story entitled “An Unlikely Setting for a Violent Crime,” which implicitly asked New Yorkers to consider where the “likely” settings for violent crimes might be located. The article stressed that this unlikely setting in Bayside, Queens was distinctive not only for its whiteness but also for its suburbanness. It was a

“neighborhood of neat one-family homes,” and the victims were attacked “under a large oak tree and beside a white picket fence.”166 Although the discotheque which Placido

162 Lawrence Van Gelder, “The Corrupt Are Still His Target,” NYT, July 17, 1977. 163 Mathews, “Hunting.” 164 Ivins, “Stalking a Man.” 165 See Chapter 3. 166 Carroll, “Unlikely Setting”; Emanuel Perlmutter, “‘.44-Caliber Killer’ Wounds Two in Car Parked on Queens Street,” NYT, June 27, 1977.

133 and Lupo had visited just before the attack had once been the site of disorderly crowds, an “older and more affluent” clientele had frequented it at the time of the crime.167

Breslin and Schlaap reinforced the suburbanness of Queens in their fictionalized account:

“[Riding the subway out to Union Turnpike] transports you from a forest of on Manhattan’s East side to a part of Queens where the hoods resemble an Ohio town.”168

Reports on Moskowitz’s death suggested that the neighborhood from which she originated was nearly as shocking as the crime itself. Her home in Gravesend, Brooklyn, was described as a “middle-class … largely Jewish neighborhood of tree-lined streets and neat lawns [where] the sense of community is strong.”169 The Moskowitz family home’s

“trim façade” was tucked into the “quiet, tree-shaded reaches of south west Brooklyn” where “neighborliness soon gave way to pangs of fear and horror.”170 Even the location of the murder was described as positively pastoral. “A vine-covered chain-link fence separated the parked couple from a view of Gravesend Bay and… Ten minutes before the shootings, Mr. Violante and Miss Moskowitz got out and took a stroll under the full moon on a footpath and an esplanade overlooking the water. [They returned] just before the marauder walked out of the woods,” reported the Times.171 In Forest Hills “blood- soaked pine bushes” marked the suburbanized location where Virginia Voskerichian was gunned down, and Donna DiMasi and Joanne Lomino were shot “standing on the tiny cement porch of Joanne’s home in Floral Park, Queens.”172

167 Carroll, “Unlikely Setting.” 168 Breslin and Schaap, .44, 105. 169 Cass Vanzi, Thomas Raftery and Robert Carroll, “I Knew He’d Come Here: Brooklynite,” DN, August 1, 1977. 170 Erik Pace, “Cry For Help Wakes Up a Brooklyn Neighborhood,” NYT, August 1, 1977. 171 Robert McFadden, “.44 Killer Wounds 12th and 13th Victims,” NYT, August 1, 1977. 172 Mathews, “Hunting.”

134 Stories about the crimes also emphasized that before their deaths, the victims had actively engaged in hard-working, hetero-normative spatial practices within their neighborhoods. Descriptions of these practices furthered the idea that these neighborhoods were “unlikely” settings for violent crime. Christine Freund, who was shot while parking with “steady boyfriend” John Diel, who “was to become her fiancé two weeks later on Valentine’s Day,” had spent a night out in Forest Hills watching

“” and eating at a wine bar, and the two were planning to head to a Masonic dance.

The News emphasized Stacy Moskowitz’s self-sufficient acts of mobility as they printed her father’s account of his daughter’s trip to Mexico “on her own money.”173 Moskowitz, who was “meticulous” about her appearance, “always greeted [neighbors] when she walked by on her way to or from work and … frequently stopped to kiss the parents of her best friends.”174 These accounts also underlined the kinds of interconnected neighborhood practices that unfolded in the wake of the attacks. At the spot where

Suriani and Esau were murdered in Baychester,“the women in the Bronx [walked] out in the morning with pails of water to scrub the blood.”175 Neighbors also quickly rallied to care for Moskowitz and Violante; “a 32-year old Brooklyn housewife … gently slipped towels under [Violante’s] body” and “another neighbor comforted [Moskowitz].” “The people of the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn were quick to rush out of their homes yesterday morning and give help,” the Times concluded.176 The immigrant roots and the professional aspirations of many of the victims were also stressed. Virginia

173 Breslin, “Breslin’s File.” 174 Mary Breasted, “Latest Victims Met Only About a Week Ago,” NYT, August 1, 1977. 175 Breslin, “Breslin’s File.” 176 Pace, “Cry for Help.”

135 Voskerichian, who showed a “particular facility for Russian literature,”177 had been born in Bulgaria and was “the daughter of an Armenian watchmaker,” and Freund was born in

Austria before moving to Ridgewood with her family.178 In contrast to these individualistic portraits of Sam’s hard-working victims, the news media’s coverage of murder victims in black and Latino neighborhoods was not nearly as favorable. In

August of 1977, the Times reported on a Police Department study of homicides in 1976, which revealed that murder victims were nearly 80% black and Latino. The report stressed that half of victims had prior arrest records, and almost half had traces of alcohol or narcotics in their blood. A map showing the density of homicides by precinct evidenced the highest concentrations in the black and Latino ghettos of Harlem, the South

Bronx, the Lower East Side, and Central Brooklyn.179

Furthermore, media and city officials did little to probe the potential reasons behind Sam’s choice of white ethnic victims. “All of the victims happened to be

Catholics and most were Italian-American. But so are the neighborhoods where Son of

Sam did his hunting,” contended Dowd prior to the Moskowitz murder.180 This statement asserted that the identity of the victims as white ethnics was of little consequence.

Instead, Dowd declared that the obviousness of the spaces in which the crimes occurred was Sam’s primary motivation in choosing victims, even as these spaces were portrayed as “unlikely” settings for violent crime. 181 And despite the fact that Sam was a Jewish man who attacked other white ethnic victims, the CBS report on his capture emphasized

177 Breslin, “Breslin’s File.” 178 Robert D. McFadden, “Profiles of Psychopath’s Victims,” NYT, June 28, 1977. 179 Leonard Buder, “Half of 1976 Murder Victims Had Police Records,” NYT, August 28, 1977. 180 Mathews, “Hunting.” 181 See also McFadden’s “Profiles of Psychopath’s Victims,” which stressed that all of the victims had brown hair but did not mention that they were all white.

136 that his final attack occurred in a “neighborhood where he seemed out of place.”182 Any possible relationship between Sam’s ethnicity and his choice of victims was seemingly secondary to his chosen neighborhoods’ aberrant geography.

As the violence of Sam’s crimes was positioned as spatially aberrant to the white ethnic neighborhoods in which they unfolded, they were instead interpreted as part of a larger citywide narrative about the threat of urban decline. This threat had principally become associated with black and Latino neighborhoods, and Sam’s crimes were ultimately repositioned within these spaces. Berkowitz’s crimes were placed at the center of an increasingly frenetic public narrative about the death of the city that provoked the

Times to question whether “New York City [is] a failed ultra-urban experiment in which people eventually crack, social order eventually collapses, and reason ultimately yields to despair.”183 Religious philosopher described Sam’s “country” in the

Daily News as “the new process among us that can end so suddenly in gutted shops, gutted lives, broken glass, broken neighborhoods.”184 Does the Berkowitz case trigger others in the community who are like guns waiting to fire,” questioned morning show host Stanley Siegel.185 In 1997, CBS’s documentary about the crimes would even make the claim that the crimes actually increased white flight as they “drove untold New

Yorkers into the suburbs.”186

In accounts of the crimes, vigilante reactions to Sam’s attacks were mobilized as evidence of both the collapse of urban order, and white ethnic residents’ self-directed initiatives in the face of encroaching decline. As the hunt for Sam escalated, “a vigilante

182 Nightly News, CBS, August 11, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection. 183 “The Added Danger of a Savage Week,” NYT, August 5, 1977 184 “Satan Among Men,” DN, August 9, 1977. 185 The Stanley Siegel Show. 186 Eye on the People Against the Law.

137 spirit stalks the streets [and] decent citizens speak in a savage voice,” wrote the Times.

The danger implicit in the “street chorus” of New Yorkers crying for vengeance was that

“[Sam and the FALN bombers’] barbarism will provoke ours, that their contempt for the social order will be mirrored in ours,” the piece concluded.187 As Sam entered a

Brooklyn courthouse following his capture, throngs of New Yorkers chanted “Kill! Kill!” as he entered.188 “Some of them brandished baseball bats. Others wielded ax handles.

One swung a rope tied into a hangman’s knot,” reported the News.189 Fearing an attack on the suspect, the PD took extra precautions as they escorted him.190 The Stanley Siegel

Show’s special report described the “sense of pandemonium” that characterized the capture, and compared it to the public’s reaction to the 1963 capture of Lee Harvey

Oswald.191 In the News’ “Voice of the People” section, one young woman with brown hair maliciously threatened that “my dad has a .357 Magnum, and I hope the Son of Sam runs into him some day. I’m thirsty, too, Son of Sam, for your head!”192 “You know what I’d do with him?” questioned a candy store manager on King’s Highway in

Brooklyn following the Moskowitz murder. “I’d cut both his legs off and say to the police, ‘When you give me the reward, I’ll bring the rest of the body.’”193 Yet these extremely violent reactions were also sometimes officially sanctioned. After the

Moskowitz murder, Mayor Beame claimed that he was “damned angry” and reversed his

187 “The Added Danger.” 188 McFadden, “Heavily Guarded.” 189 Michael Daly, “Runnin’ Scared,” DN, August 22, 1977. 190 Nightly News, CBS, August 11, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection. 191 The Stanley Siegel Show. 192 “Voice of the People,” DN, August 7, 1977. 193 Mary Breasted, “In Brooklyn, Neighbors Talk of Vengeance,” NYT, August 2, 1977.

138 long-held opposition to the death penalty.194 In the face of the crimes, residents of white ethnic borough neighborhoods also engaged in a variety of self-policing efforts.

Following the attack on Placido and Lupo in Queens, neighborhood patrols quickly formed.195 And for many Brooklynites, the Stacy Moskowitz murder was a call to arms.

One young man told reporters that “he’ll [Sam] make a mistake. Brooklyn was a mistake.

They’ll get him.” 196 “On the streets [of Southern Brooklyn], the talk among Bob

Violante’s friends is of vengeance,” reported Geraldo Rivera for ABC news on August

1st.197 “The heavily Italian neighborhood [of Bensonhurst] was more angered than frightened by the shootings, since it prides itself on being safe,” reported the News. “We have our own system of justice,” said one young male resident. “If it were up to us he never would have gotten out of here.”198 Despite his shared identity as a white ethnic, these descriptions of vigilantism stressed the outsider nature of Sam’s crimes, and emphasized that these self-directed residents were ready and willing to face the threat of decay by taking matters into their own hands.

Fears about the crimes’ relationship to the city’s overall decay were exacerbated by Sam’s seemingly personal relationship to decline. This intimate relationship was made publicly apparent in his infamous June 5th, 1977, letter to Breslin, when Sam greeted the reporter and the newspaper’s readership from the “gutters,” “the sewers” and

194 Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 255. On CBS’ Media and Son of Sam special, the Voice’s Alexander Cockburn argued that the tabloids coverage of the crimes resulted in then mayoral candidate Koch’s capital punishment advocacy. 195 Nightly News, CBS, July 26, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection. 196 Fred Ferretti, “Details of Her Death Fill the Day for Family of the Latest Victim,” NYT, August 3, 1977. See also Breasted, “In Brooklyn.” 197 Nightly News, ABC, August 1, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection. 198 Vanzi, Raftery and Carroll, “I Knew He’d Come Here.”

139 “the cracks in the sidewalk” of N.Y.C.199 With its haunting rhythm and vivid language detailing the refuse of the city, Sam’s letter reveled in the city’s landscape of fetid filth.

“Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C.,” intoned Berkowtiz, “which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood. Hello from the sewers of N.Y.C. which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks. Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C. and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed on the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks.” Interestingly, the letter connected Sam to a then instantly recognizable cultural figure of decline who had first graced city screens in February of 1976, just six months before Sam’s first attack.

“Thank god for the rain,” Travis Bickle states in Taxi Driver’s opening scene. “Which has helped wash the garbage and trash off the sidewalks … All the animals come out a night: whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal.

Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Although in some ways, Bickle’s vigilantism was connected more to New Yorkers’ responses to Sam’s crimes, and by the film’s end he is hailed as a hero, Bickle and Berkowitz had a number of things in common. Just as many New Yorkers speculated that Sam’s crimes critiqued public sexual acts, Bickle begins his violent spree as a partial reaction against the excesses of street crime and prostitution; and both men were isolated loners who had served in the military, worked as cab drivers, and possessed an above average knowledge of the city’s cartography.

Reports also linked Sam’s crimes to the conditions that supposedly signaled decay, which included racial transitioning, filth, blackout looting, and arson. Upon

Berkowitz’s capture, stories about the sordid interior of his apartment and its location in a

199 Jimmy Breslin, “Breslin to .44 Killer: Give Up Now!” DN, June 5, 1977.

140 racially transitioning neighborhood underlined the relationship between the killer, and aesthetic and social decline. “He is a white man who lived in an apartment building where eight out of ten residents are black or Hispanic,” reported the News. This racial landscape became clear through NBC’s report on Sam’s capture during which they interviewed all black tenants in his building. 200 The News’ story described this

“neighborhood in transition” as a “heavily industrial section of Yonkers,” where stores located on the main commercial strip of Ashburton Avenue, which were owned mostly by Jews and Italians, had been heavily looted during the blackout. This connection to blackout looting, which had been starkly positioned in the media as a spatial behavior endemic to black and Hispanic ghettoes, called into question the racial status of Sam’s neighborhood and by extension, the racial status of his actual crimes. The description of

Berkowitz’s apartment further emphasized this landscape of decline: “his apartment, a one-room unit with a dinette, has an orange shag rug and is sparsely furnished. Cops described it as filthy. Neighbors indicated the curtains to the windows at Berkowitz’s apartment were always closed” the report concluded.201 “Staring from street corners, from the doorways of boarded-up shops, and from windows of old frame houses is the query to Yonkers’ future: the faces of the black unemployed,” wrote Breslin and Schaap of Berkowitz’s neighborhood.202 Breslin and Schaap’s novel also connected the victims of Sam’s crimes to racial transitioning. Sal Bonventre, one victim’s father, had fled

Bushwick for the northern Bronx “where he now felt comfort, where he heard familiar shouts in the streets, where he could raise his child without worrying about them all the

200 Nightly News, August 11, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection. 201 Collins, “Glimpse of a Grime.” 202 Breslin and Schapp, .44, 14.

141 time.”203 Following his receipt of Berkowitz’s infamous letter, Breslin commented on the killer’s “timeless” criminal derangement while also suggesting that the “answer” to the crimes could somehow be related to the historically specific conditions unfurling in the

South Bronx: “Somewhere out there was the answer to nine shootings … The .44 killings are of the type that have been with man all through the ages. There is no way to prevent a man’s becoming deranged. But on top of this, we allow other conditions to exist that could be eliminated and are not, and which give us even more killing and violence. The South Bronx is a cocked gun.”204 A year following his capture, Berkowitz was connected to one of the most powerful markers of declining neighborhoods as he confessed to setting 2,000 fires across the city. These fires included both the Italian-

American southern Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bensonhurst and Dyker Heights, as well as the arson-plagued Bronx.205 Through these connections to looting, arson, and infamously declining neighborhoods, Sam’s crimes were further distanced from the white ethnic neighborhoods in which they unfolded and were instead positioned as the result of urban decline’s racialized spatial consequences.

This chapter has probed the ways in which David Berkowitz’s violent kinetics, and New Yorkers’ responses to them, produced ideas about the geography of crime and urban decline. For New Yorkers, one of the most frightening aspects of the killer was his thorough knowledge of the city’s topography and ability to move freely through it.

Alongside this fear of Berkowitz’s movements, city dwellers became deeply disturbed by

203 Breslin and Schaap, .44, 8. 204 Jimmy Breslin, “Son of Sam and Offspring Can Drive a Man to Drink,” DN, June 7, 1977. 205 “Sam Says He Sets Fires in Bensonhurst, Dyker Heights,” Home Reporter and Sunset News, May 12, 1978. Dr. Abrahamsen’s book states that Berkowitz claimed to have set 1,411 fires in 1974, 1975, and 1977. According to Abrahamsen, it was highly unlikely that he had actually been responsible for all of these acts.

142 the location of his crimes within white ethnic neighborhoods, and these locations were particularly shocking because anxiety about violence was largely focused on black and

Latino bodies in the city’s “declining” ghettos. As Sam’s attacks challenged New

Yorkers’ assumptions about the geography of crime, they exposed the distinctive uses of public space within white ethnic neighborhoods, and the divides between these uses and those occurring within black and Latino areas, and the spaces of Manhattan’s elite.

However, Sam’s crimes were also positioned as spatially exogenous to the neighborhoods in which they unfolded, and were aligned instead with ideas about urban decline within black and Latino neighborhoods. Thus, the crimes ultimately reinforced commonsense ideas about where decline and violence were “supposed to” occur.

143 Chapter 4: “Where the Housewives Even Wash Down Their Stoops”: Domesticating the Spaces between Decline and Survival along the Ridgewood-Bushwick Border

At 8:37pm on July 13, 1977, lightening struck the Buchanan South substation along the Hudson River and a “combination of natural phenomena, improperly operating protective devices, inadequate presentation of data to the system dispatcher, and communication difficulties” led to a “total collapse” of the electrical system.1 At

9:36pm, New York City’s five boroughs and portions of Westchester County were plunged into darkness, and full power would not be restored for twenty-five hours.2

Some danced, some cooked meat on the verge of spoilage, and over 3,000 predominantly black and Hispanic young men were arrested on charges that ranged from disorderly conduct to grand larceny, but which were generally described using the term “looting.”3

To local and national newspaper readers, New York was represented as a disaster zone

“ravaged by marauders,” and the estimated damage was believed to have exceeded “that of any man-made destruction of recent history.”4 A majority of the destruction that

1 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Impact Assessment of the 1977 Blackout (Palo Alto: Systems Control Inc., July 1978). 2 Unlike the blackouts of 1965 and 2003, the 1977 outage was localized to the New York City metropolitan area. 3 There were 836 arrested in Manhattan, 961 in the Bronx, 1088 in Brooklyn, 191 in Queens, and 100 in Staten Island. Sixty-five percent of arrestees were black, 30% Hispanic, and 4% white: from the New York City Criminal Justice Agency (NYCJA), A Demographic Profile of Defendants Arrested in the New York City Black-out: A Preliminary Report Prepared by the New York City Criminal Justice Agency for the New York City Deputy Mayor for Criminal Justice (August 1977): John Jay College. Staten Island statistic taken from The Andy Logan Papers, NYPL (Box 52/Folder 8). This arrest rate could be compared to the regular citywide average of 600 for a 24-hour period: from the DOE’s Impact Assessment. More than half the defendants were between the ages of 16 and 25, and only 6.7% were women: from The Ford Foundation, Blackout Looting!, by Robert Curvin and Bruce Porter (New York: Gardner Press, 1979). The Ford Foundation’s study was notable in that it was the only inquiry into the potential causes of looting: as cited in James Goodman, Blackout (New York: North Point Press, 2003), 218. 4 Jared Kopel and Marsha Kranes, “The Pillage: A Huge Tab,” NYP, July 15, 1977. Estimated damages totaled around $350 million according to the DOE’s Impact Assessment. According to Curvin and Porter’s Blackout Looting! there was $135-150 million in theft and property damage,

144 resulted in the arrests had taken place in Harlem, the South Bronx, Jamaica in Queens, and the Central Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bushwick and East New York. News media, residents and city officials were chiefly concerned with the looters’ movements, which were most often described as primordial, chaotic, and endemic to the neighborhoods in which they unfolded. “Only a fuse or two stands between the Big Apple and the Jungle

Habitat,” wrote New York Post reporter Robert Lipsyte, and this “jungle habitat” was composed of animals who only appeared under cover of the night; even the “darkness had a feral texture to it.”5 By far, Bushwick suffered the most extensive damage.6 Along the border between the neighborhood and the adjacent, predominately white ethnic working- class area of Ridgewood, these movements were perceived as particularly threatening.

As Ridgewood sought to distinguish itself from its “declining” neighbor, news reports

City damages of between $12 and 15 million, and a total in the hundreds of millions that included sales losses and a lost day of work. The City Planning Commission counted 1,616 looted stores, and attributed 80% of the $155 million in damages to businesses to the looting and arson of small merchants. It is also notable that the blackout marked the only episode of civil disorder in New York City in which all five boroughs participated, and that the City’s appeal for federal disaster relief was denied because the blackout was not considered a “natural” disaster. Eventually, the Federal Government offered an $11.3 million aid package, but according to some government officials, including then mayoral candidate Koch, this amount would only dent the total damages: cited in Goodman, Blackout, 161. Koch was also the strongest critique of Mayor Beame’s failure to call in the National Guard. 5 Robert Lipsyte, “The Strange Logic of Looting,” NYP, July 15, 1977; Francis X. Clines, “About New York: Down These ,” NYT, July 15, 1977. Both the actual climate of fear during the blackout, and the media-driven narrative had an enormous impact on the public consciousness. The DOE’s report called the blackout a “drama” that was also “viewed as a morality play in other localities.” 911 calls totaled over 70,000 while normal statistics for a 24- hour period totaled only 18,500. 6 The City’s 1979 study of Broadway draws this conclusion: City of New York, Broadway Brooklyn: A Commercial Redevelopment Strategy (1979): City Hall Library. This conclusion is also supported by statistics in the City, State and federal blackout reports. Jonathan Mahler notes that 134 stores were looted and 45 were burned, and that all told, “more than thirty blocks of Broadway, a distance of a mile and a half, were devastated overnight,” Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City (New York: Picador, 2005), 205. The neighborhood’s 83rd precinct held 133 people accused of looting, Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 214. Goodman notes that a year following the blackout, nine out of ten looted businesses on Broadway, Bushwick’s major commercial artery, remained closed, Blackout, 21.

145 described an array of frightened residents on both sides of the border who felt deeply threatened by the masses of people who seized the city streets. “They’re coming across

Bushwick Avenue like buffalo,” stated one petrified woman in a phone call to the 81st precinct in Brooklyn.7 “It is a shame when innocent people can’t even come out of the house, a crime what is happening to this city,” remarked local butcher John McFadden.8

During the fall following the blackout, mayoral candidates Mario Cuomo, Ed

Koch, , and Roy Goodman met in the Casuso family’s living room at 168

Harman Street in Bushwick to discuss the neighborhood’s future. Local media had already become enamored of the fourth-generation Italian-American family who staunchly refused to leave their home in the face of Bushwick’s destruction. As the candidates convened in the living room, every major paper covered the action. Accounts stressed the Casuso’s commitment to maintaining their home amidst increasing crisis, and related this commitment to the family’s ethnicity and morality. Furthermore, the candidates’ choice to enter the home emphasized that a white ethnic family’s cohesion within private domestic space was critical to the larger political debate about the city’s survival. Photographs depicted the candidates and the Casusos conversing while lounging on a comfortable couch dressed with a “colorful, fall floral-patterned slipcover

[that Kathleen Casuso] had made especially for the occasion.” “As the candidates talked,

Kathleen’s granddaughter, Barbara, two months old, could be heard crying occasionally in the front bedroom … [and] the sun poured through the orange drapes.”9 This intimate living room space was starkly contrasted with the politicians’ “walk around the half-

7 Richard Boeth, “The Plunderers,” Newsweek, July 25, 1977. 8 Richard Severo, “Two Blackouts and a World of Difference,” NYT, July 16, 1977. 9 George James, “Hopefuls in Harman Street Living Room,” DN, October 24, 1977.

146 destroyed block, their shoes crunching on the broken glass.”10 A decade later, the News reminisced that the “extraordinary” living room meeting had “forced [the candidates’] to see and hear first-hand what had become of a once-proud community of Italian and

German-Americans.”11 Across the border in Ridgewood, other white ethnic residents engaged in similar, albeit less “extraordinary,” domestic practices in order to combat decay and mark the border between the two neighborhoods. “The solution for deterioration,” reported the Ridgewood Times that December, “lies in the hands and hearts of those ordinary people who have helped maintain the character of Ridgewood.”12

Ridgewood was depicted as a “small American town” not only because of the presence of three generations of inhabitants, but also due to its neighborhood stores “with a rich ethnic flavor,” and the fact that “brass door knobs are polished and sidewalks and gutters are swept.”13 In the words of John Dereszewski, then district manager of Bushwick’s community board, Ridgewoodites’ practices were acts of “benevolent self-interest” in the face of Bushwick’s perceived destruction.14

This chapter argues that in the wake of the blackout, city officials, news media, and local residents used representations of spatial practices in Ridgewood and Bushwick to distinguish between urban decline and survival. These New Yorkers produced the spatial and ideological boundary between the two neighborhoods by representing looters’ practices as placeless, chaotic, and excessively mobile. In contrast, they emphasized the rooted, orderly, place-making techniques undertaken by the neighborhood’s remaining

10 Beth Fallon, “The Candidates Debate in Bushwick,” NYP, October 24, 1977. 11 Paul La Rosa, “Bushwick: Reviving,” DN, July 12, 1987. 12 Carl Clemens, James Kelly and Maureen Walthers, “The Agony of Bushwick: Part 7,” Ridgewood Times, December 1, 1977. 13Alan Metrick, “Ridgewood Mourns Its Loss- and Worries,” New York Tribune, April 19, 1977. 14 In discussion with the author, June 27, 2011.

147 white ethnics and their compatriots across the border in Ridgewood. Although this binary between itinerant black bodies and intransigent white bodies often did not reflect life on the ground, I argue that New Yorkers constructed this binary precisely to police the ideological and physical spaces between urban decline and survival. In distinguishing between these spatial practices, New Yorkers produced a Bushwick landscape that was predominately characterized by abstract, nomadic spaces of decline, and a Ridgewood dotted with homey, immutable places of survival. I argue that Ridgewoodites’ practices, and the rhetoric about these practices, sought to extend the private space of their white ethnic homes into the neighborhood’s streets. Ridgewoodites used these practices to position themselves as defenders not only of their salubrious blocks, but also of an ethnic construction of place that the news media and City officials deemed pivotal to New

York’s ability to survive the crisis. This extension of private spaces into public space resulted in what I term “living room blocks.”

This chapter contributes to the literature on the cultural construction of urban spatial and racial boundaries. Although he dedicates only a small section of his work on postwar Detroit to the “cultural geography of the borderlands,” Thomas Sugrue’s analysis of boundary negotiations between white ethnic homeowners and African Americans argues that white homeowners engaged in acts of “neighborhood self determination” that encoded possession and difference in urban space. Thus, contends Sugrue, these homeowners invented communities of race that they defined spatially. According to

Sugrue, these borderland negotiations were particularly fraught in urban spaces; while suburbia’s boundaries were firmly established and government protected, urbanites had

148 to defend “invisible,” fragile borders with their actual bodies.15 I extend Sugrue’s claim and apply the lens of performance studies to more deeply consider the ways in which embodied practices actively produced spatial divisions in the postwar city. While the formal institutional practices that constructed postwar urban neighborhood boundaries have been well-established, my project argues that alongside these institutional boundary markers, residents themselves constructed and policed borders through less formalized practices such as cleaning stoops and shopping for food.16 These less formalized practices affected official understandings of and responses to these areas. Moreover, both official and less formalized practices often worked together to produce an affective spatial habitus along the border.

There is also a rich literature on border spaces and post-colonial identities, which can inform this more localized study. Seminal texts such as Homi Bhabha’s The

Location of Culture and James Clifford’s Routes have challenged the assumptions that culture is homogenous, historically continuous, or geographically fixed, and have considered the relationship between trans-border identities and national identification.17

15 Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 229-253. 16 Many scholars have attended to the ways in which the FHA loan scandals and redlining practices shaped urban neighborhood boundaries. See, for example, Sugrue’s Origins; Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Kevin Fox Gotham, Race, Real Estate and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2000 (Albany, NY: State University of , 2002); Thomas Hanchett, Sorting Out the New South City: Race, Class and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate and the Exploitation of Black America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009); and Craig Steven Wilder, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 17 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

149 Following this call to understand the effects of shifting borders and geographical mobility on cultural identity, scholars have begun to critically assess postmodern celebrations of hybridity in border spaces. For example, Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg’s edited volume, Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies of Identity, argues that borderlands are not merely joyful spaces of creolization; they are minefields that involve constant cultural clashes. 18 Borders both “bleed” and “contain,” echoes Dwight Conquergood.19

My efforts also deepen studies of how New Yorkers utilized and conceptualized the neighborhood scale by probing the intersection between residents’ on-the-ground experiences, and the city’s broader political and economic landscapes. Although New

York, along with most urban areas, has been composed of a patchwork of socially and economically distinct neighborhood units since industrialization, scholars have advanced that during the fiscal crisis these neighborhoods became highly contested terrains over which residents, government officials, and the news media battled to define both the

“decline” and “renewal” of their city.20 “The unseen truth,” remarks Jill Jonnes, “was that the great changes- political, social and economic- that had convulsed New York City in the twenty years since World War II had finally seeped all the way down to the basic unit of city life, the neighborhood and the block.”21 Jon Teaford notes that while the

1997). See also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 18 Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, eds., Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). See also Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands-La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987). 19 Dwight Conquergood, “Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics,” Communication Monographs 59 (1991): 179-94. 20 Sam Roberts remarks that the city contained approximately 450 neighborhoods during the Lindsay administration, America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 21 Jill Jonnes, South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986/2002), 200. The Council on the Environment’s “New York’s City Streets” guide in 1973 notes that although block associations had been around in

150 neighborhood scale had long been central to the city’s identity, during the 1970s faith in the neighborhood’s ability to survive became critical to the overall discourse of renewal.22 Scholars have argued that this return to a neighborhood scale was both coincident with , during which government officials utilized the rhetoric of community revival to abdicate public responsibility, and evidence of residents’ growing disillusionment with previous planning practices. 23 Hillary Ballon explores the roots of this 1970s localist vision under Mayor Lindsay, who sought to open the political process to multiple voices through decentralization measures. According to

Ballon, 1966 marked the end of the automobile’s domination in planning, and Lindsay’s efforts ranged from cycling advocacy to the creation of “little city halls,” located in storefronts across the boroughs, which would become the precursors to the community board system.24 Suleiman Osman argues that the localist vision advanced through grassroots neighborhood movements in brownstone Brooklyn helped lead to the collapse of the “new deal liberal planning regime” and the shift to municipally endorsed “mini planning” during the 1970s, and, somewhat unexpectedly, to the “flowering of the 1980s corporate landscape” as brownstone neighborhoods became sites of real estate some form for as long as the city had existed, “in their present form” they “really grew up post World War II.” At the time of the guide’s publication, the council estimated between 6,000 and 8,000 in the city (guide housed at the Neighborhood Preservation Center). 22 John Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 23 See Jonnes; Teaford; Evelyn Gonzalez, The Bronx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Wendell Pritchett, “Brownsville, Brooklyn (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002); Howard Connolly, A Ghetto Grows in Brooklyn (New York: New York University Press, 1977); Suleiman Osman, “The Decade of the Neighborhood,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, eds. Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 107-127; and Alexander Von Hoffman, House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America’s Urban Neighborhoods (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). These scholars all investigate the participation of neighborhood residents in federal and municipal renewal projects and reveal the varied degrees of success and failure implicit in this “laboratory” style of revitalization. 24 Hilary Ballon, “The Physical City,” in America’s Mayor, 134-147.

151 speculation.25 Deborah and Rodrick Wallace, and Joe Flood probe how the neighborhood scale sometimes produced frighteningly inequitable municipal policies, as they examine how the City disinvested in poor neighborhoods’ fire protection.26 Some scholars have also noted that renewal efforts and decline experiences in New York’s neighborhoods were inextricably bound to ideas about the cultural geography of home, and have considered residents’ various methods of emotional place-making to evidence the micro- geographic ways in which class and race were negotiated during this era.27 For example,

Jim Sleeper reveals that during the fiscal crisis and its aftermath, the process of “grieving for a lost home” both united residents and led to severe political and social divides.28 My efforts build upon these explorations of emotional place-making by arguing that local practices affected and were affected by the city’s broader crisis-era changes. The story of

Ridgewood and Bushwick was projected citywide, and became a spatial lens through which New Yorkers debated race, ethnicity, class, and urban change. Residents’ practices and the rhetoric that surrounded them were critical conduits through which the

25 Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 272. Osman maintains that the Lindsay administration advanced a kind of “local modernism” that partially embraced the neighborhood movement, and that Koch was a somewhat conservative articulator of this localism. Also see Joe Flood’s The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City- and Determined the Future of Cities (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010) for an examination of the tensions between local knowledge and centralized planning during the crisis. 26 Deborah and Rodrick Wallace, A Plague on Your Houses: How New York Was Burned Down and Public Health Crumbled (New York: Verso, 1998); Flood, The Fires. 27 These emotional geographies are most explicitly treated through the lens of white ethnic places that were perceived as “lost” through racial transition, and are most commonly associated with nostalgia for either previous incarnations of enclaves in which residents remained, or in defensive peripheral neighborhoods to which they have relocated. For sociological studies, see Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); and Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990). See also Jonnes’ discussion of nostalgic Bronx topographies in South Bronx Rising. 28 Sleeper, Closest, 121-122.

152 terms of this debate were produced and mediated. And as I will explore in Chapter 5,

Mayor Koch soon harnessed Ridgewoodites’ “do-it-yourself” style of neighborhood revitalization in his efforts to construct a renewal narrative that relied on the self-directed labor of the city’s residents.

Specifically, my consideration of crisis-era Ridgewood and Bushwick engages works that offer critical readings of neighborhood spaces as cultural constructions, and that challenge concepts of “good” and “bad” neighborhoods. Among the scholars who analyze particular neighborhoods’ experiences of crisis, Osman and Steven Gregory are notable for their problematization of this binary. Through his analysis of the LeFrak City housing projects in Corona, Queens, Gregory reworks the teleological narrative of neighborhood decline and revival, and is able to complicate understandings of community survival by underlining how Lefrak residents reworked existing neighborhood geographies and asserted the viability of these spaces even in their fiscal- crisis era condition.29 Osman’s study of the neighborhood investigates the creation of this particular spatial idea through do-it-yourself brownstone rehabilitation. Utilizing this scholarship as a point of departure, my study analyzes how New Yorkers actively produced a spatial binary in “good” Ridgewood and “bad” Bushwick by emphasizing particular practices. Examining representations of spatial practices on both sides of the border will allow scholars to understand how decline and survival were co-constitutive concepts that were continually negotiated through residents’ bodies, and discourse about these bodies.

29 Steven Gregory, Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

153 This effort will also specifically contribute to the small but vital literature on the neighborhoods of Ridgewood and Bushwick, which has thus far focused on Bushwick’s blackout status as a poster child of despair. James Goodman’s complex, poetic analysis of the evening’s events deftly challenges the linear decline and renewal narrative of the fiscal-crisis era by complicating generalizations about blackout behavior and its meanings.30 Jonathan Mahler offers a journalistic angle, situates the events within the infamous “summer of ’77,” and considers the media’s role in crafting the blackout narrative.31 And Nicole P. Marwell provides a contemporary ethnographic study of community-based organizations in the neighborhood.32 While scholars have identified the blackout as a critical moment in the negotiation of the crisis’ meanings, the spatial practices that actively produced the blackout narrative have not yet been considered.

This chapter will help extend the work of these studies by considering how this dominant narrative of declining Bushwick was tacitly produced through residents’ and officials’ practices on both sides of the border. Moreover, there is currently no scholarship on

Ridgewoodites’ responses to this narrative, and my work extends studies of the crisis-era white ethnic experience by uncovering some of the everyday ways in which residents negotiated neighborhood change.33 Both Sleeper and Jonathan Rieder’s studies offer compelling considerations of outer borough neighborhoods experiencing racial and economic changes during the 70s and 80s, and their analyses seek to probe the “integrity

30 Goodman, Blackout. 31 Mahler, Bronx Is Burning. 32 Nicole P. Marwell, Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 33 See my introduction for a full literature review on white ethnics during the 1970s.

154 of everyday experience.”34 Both of these studies were conducted within the years during which these transitions unfolded, and I thus hope to complexify these efforts with a historically nuanced analysis. Furthermore, I extend these studies by arguing that embodied practices were critical to the production of white ethnic identities and the neighborhood spaces in which they were forged, and that these practices produced broader understandings about the city’s crisis.

Attending to the cultural construction of these neighborhood borders also contributes to scholarship on the role of embodied practice in the construction of spatial ideas. By exploring how residents’ practices built up “evidence” about what these spaces meant, this study seeks to uncover the more tacit ways in which dominant ideas about urban space take root, and the ways in which these spatio-cultural distinctions are maintained. Central to this analysis is geographer Sophie Watson’s assertion that in order to be upheld, symbolic spatial boundaries necessitate the repetition of performative acts.35

Elaine Peña examines the performative construction of national space along the U.S.-

Mexico border, and in her study of spatial pathology and public health in San Francisco,

Susan Craddock argues that porous boundaries between spaces are shored up through everyday acts.36 This temporal production of space was a critical aspect of blackout discourse. On the one hand, discourse emphasized looters’ extraordinarily destructive acts as aberrations that momentarily descended upon neighborhoods. On the other hand,

34 Sleeper, Closest, 142; Rieder, Canarsie. See also Ronald Formisano’s consideration of defended neighborhoods and the “vulnerability of place” in 60s and 70s era white ethnic Boston neighborhoods: Boston Against Busing: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 35 Sophie Watson, City Publics: The (Dis)enchantments of Urban Encounters (New York: Routledge, 2006). 36 Elaine Peña, “Depoliticizing Border Space,” e-misférica 3.2 (November 2006); Susan Craddock, City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

155 representations of looters’ practices argued that these extraordinary acts were spatially endemic to looted areas and thus, quite ordinary or expected. And while many residents in looted neighborhoods continued to engage in quotidian acts such as cleaning house and cooking food, these stories were seldom recounted. The blackout itself was positioned as a kind of media “revelation,” which suddenly made Bushwick’s ongoing and inevitable forces of destruction visible. Stories about the neighborhood prior to the blackout described buildings that were ripe for burning and a creeping contagion of decline that would certainly seep across the borderline. As the blackout commenced, reports suggested that it did not take long before violence erupted, and the time of night itself was also positioned as a particular menace. Representations of looting also underlined these acts’ sustained nature, and positioned them as a constant future threat that could recommence any time the lights went out again. On the other side of the border,

Ridgewoodites’ practices were described as individual acts of domestic dedication that occurred on an everyday basis, but which also had a longer temporal lineage. The rehabilitation of buildings and cleaning of stoops necessitated daily maintenance. Yet stories about these practices also wedded them to a heritage of past practices undertaken by Ridgewoodites’ European ancestors. This interplay between temporality and ethnicity was also well-evidenced during the living room debate, which was both an

“extraordinary” one time meeting, and was also connected to the Casuso’s inherently quotidian use of their living space, their ongoing refusal to leave the neighborhood, and a longer history of Italian tenancy in Bushwick.

According to geographer David Sibley, consciousness of geographic boundaries is often heightened during times of extreme cultural anxiety, and reaches its greatest

156 expression along boundaries that appear to be threatened.37 The crisis era was just such a moment, during which residents acted to shore up the boundary between what constituted decline and what counted as survival, and to place themselves on the right side of this boundary. Gabriella Gahlia Modan emphasizes that moral geographies function through specific “spatio-discursive practices,” which operate by conflating a certain group with a spatialized activity, thereby centralizing the speaker and peripheralizing the other.

Certain people are positioned as “fitting in” to a place, while others are positioned as “out of place.”38 Geographer Rob Shields considers the implications of these geographic margins and centers, and maintains that the process of spatially expressing conceptual divisions results in a kind of spatial essentialism, which is particularly powerful because it provides seemingly tangible physical evidence of these divisions.39 In the context of the blackout, public discourse about residents’ practices produced moral geographic divisions. According to these representations, Bushwick and Ridgewood’s white ethnics naturally “fit” well with their economically and aesthetically stable landscape. By contrast, this discourse emphasized both the aberrant spatiality of Bushwick’s black and

Latino bodies during the blackout who were “out of place” in the streets, and argued that these bodies naturally “fit” within such a destructive landscape. Ultimately, both looters’ practices and those undertaken by white ethnics on both sides of the border were positioned as natural outgrowths of their practitioners’ bodies, and naturally resultant of

37 David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (New York: Routledge, 1995). 38 Gabriella Gahlia Modan, Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007). This articulation of moral geographies also recalls Tim Cresswell’s In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 39 Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1991). See my introduction for a fuller discussion of normative or “commonsense” geographies.

157 the urban landscapes that surrounded them. Yet while white ethnics were represented as productively indigenous stewards of healthy homescapes, black and Latino bodies were constructed as destructively transient interlopers who had precipitated their neighborhood’s decline.

This study also engages cultural geography’s distinctions between the concepts of place and space.40 Specifically, through my consideration of blackout looters’ hyper- mobility alongside white ethnic residents’ domestic practices, I conjure what geographer

Tim Cresswell terms “sedentarist” and “nomadic” metaphysics. Sedentarist metaphysics involve the territorialization of identities in place, and what Cresswell critiques as humanist geography’s “warm coziness” of home, while nomadic metaphysics encompasses both travel as a postmodern means to question identity and cultural fixity, and the dangerous figure of the homeless itinerant.41 Practices along the Ridgewood-

Bushwick border activated these tropes, as looters’ movements became part of an official narrative about transience, decline, and spatial destruction, and the sedentarism of

Ridgewoodites produced ideas about the relationship between spatial commitment, urban survival, and domesticity.

40 For the foundations of this conversation, see geographer Yi Fu Tuan’s 1977 Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). Tuan defines space as chiefly a visually experienced sense of movement, and argues that space is a pause in this movement where a geographic locus becomes an intimate center of value; as human experiences accumulate over time, places become saturated with significance. In Edward Relph’s 1976 Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976), he seeks to define the critical features of “places” in order to preserve them. The 2011 edition of Key Thinkers on Space and Place, eds., Phil Hubbard and Rob Kitchen (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), 499, defines “sense of place” as “a central concept in humanistic geography, intended to describe the particular ways in which human beings invest their surroundings with meaning.” 41 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006)

158 Negotiations over the Ridgewood-Bushwick border became intelligible within broader crisis-era discussions about the fate of the city’s neighborhoods. Residents, officials, and the news media often assessed the city’s fate from the vantage point of particular neighborhood blocks, and asserted that this scale was critical to the construction of the crisis’ meanings. In the Winter 1976 issue of the New York Afffairs journal, scholar H.V. Savitch argued that the economic and political crisis was inextricably linked to a crisis of community and intense “concern over the last decade for the fate of the neighborhood.”42 Following the blackout, this scholarly assertion was echoed in the Daily News’ five-part series on burning Bushwick. In the series, reporters revealed the central question they claimed was “troubling” all New Yorkers: “Do our neighborhoods have to die?” The series asserted that in a time of great social and economic flux, the city’s neighborhoods offered something “solid and durable to cling to.” 43

In the wake of municipal neglect during the crisis, residents engaged in a variety of self-directed practices to make their neighborhood streets more livable. In 1973, the

Council on the Environment of New York City produced a “Guide to Making Your Block

More Lively and More Livable” that sought to complicate the narrative that “the city is under attack” by excavating the streets “where the hopes and potential for social interaction are buried.” The guide provided detailed questionnaires for “taking the pulse of your block” that included where to stand and how to survey existing conditions.

“When people take paint brushes, hammers, brooms and buckets in hand to improve their

42 H.V. Savitch, “New York’s Crises and the Politics of Charter Revision,” New York Affairs 3/2 1976, 68-79: NYPL Milstein Division. 43 Martin Gottlieb, Arthur Browne, John Hamill and George James, “Our Dying Neighborhoods: Part 1,” DN, August 1977.

159 neighborhood they do more than clean and decorate their surroundings; they revitalize their own lives, individually and together,” the guide argued.44 In 1977, the Citizens

Committee, a non-profit that was formed in direct response to the fiscal crisis, produced the “New York Self Help Handbook.” The manual asserted the critically of quotidian acts to the city’s survival, and included over 100 pages of step-by-step instructions for everything from organizing sweeping efforts to implementing health care programs and block patrols.45 The June 1979 issue of Neighborhood, a journal published by the New

York Urban Coalition founded in 1967, ran a comic strip entitled “Neighborhoodman,” which starred a black man who was transformed into a superhero inside a grimy pool hall and went on to save his neighborhood from an expressway.46 On both sides of the

Ridgewood-Bushwick border, residents engaged in these types of self-directed practices in the face of municipal neglect. Yet public discourse highlighted those practices that were undertaken by white ethnics, and especially those that occurred within Ridgewood.

As early as the 1960s, the news media emphasized quotidian distinctions between the two sides of the Brooklyn-Queens border. At this moment, the areas closest to this border were often described as either “Ridgewood Brooklyn” or “Ridgewood Queens” as distinguished from the neighborhood of Bushwick proper, which was located further south from this border. But as Bushwick’s destruction escalated throughout the 70s, and especially following the blackout, these borderland areas were increasingly distinguished

44 Mary Grozier and Richard Roberts for the Council on the Environment of New York City, New York’s City Streets: A Guide to Making Your Block More Lively and More Livable, 1973: Neighborhood Preservation Center. 45 Karin Carlson for the Citizens Committee for New York City Inc., New York Self Help Handbook: A Step by Step Guide to Neighborhood Improvement Projects, 1977: Neighborhood Preservation Center. 46 The New York Urban Coalition. Neighborhood: The Journal for City Preservation, volume 1, 4 (June 1979): Avery Architectural Library, Columbia University.

160 by their proper neighborhood names of Ridgewood or Bushwick depending on their location on either side of the county line. In 1969, the U.S. News and World Report described this border as self-evident, and asserted that the divide became obvious by examining everyday practices. “Drive down the street dividing white Ridgewood from black and you see an unusually sharp confrontation,” the story argued. “On one side, sidewalks and yards almost spotless; on the other side, debris and dilapidated houses.”47

Although a 1971 Times article argued that the “differences between the two boroughs

[were] not very apparent to the roving eye,” the piece did note differences in housing and car insurance costs, and educational standards, emphasized the Brooklyn side’s industrial landscape, and cited a local service station owner’s observation that the precinct on the

Queens side of the border was “quiet,” while the Brooklyn precinct was “heated” and

“popping all night.”48 Ridgewood resident and community activist Paul Kernzer recalls that you could “feel the difference” and could measure this distinction through

“cleanliness.” “You could tell the difference between the two sides of the block by the way it was kept in terms of the front doors, the brick work, the garbage, the receptacle storage,” remembers Kerzner. “All those physical attributes were maintained judiciously on our side, but they were let go on the other side.” In his recollections of serving as the district manager of Bushwick’s community board, John Dereszewski emphasizes that because the line between the two neighborhoods was not a “natural boundary” that could be marked by water or other topographical features, as was the case in other parts of the

47 U.S. News and World Report, November 24, 1969. 48 McCandlish Philips, “Brooklyn on this Side, Queens on that and an Urban Microcosm inbetween,” NYT, February 14, 1971.

161 city, residents had to bolster it through both symbolic and physical acts. “You can’t draw a line and say you can’t go beyond that,” remarks Dereszewski.49

During the postwar period, the two neighborhoods became increasingly demographically and economically distinctive. The 1970 census reported that the

Community District that encompassed Ridgewood was 98.86% white and that 30.85% of residents had foreign born parents, and the 1980 census showed little change.50 By the time of the 1980 census, 24% of Ridgewood residents were of Italian origin, 15%

German, and 7% Irish.51 In 1985, the Koch administration described the area as “middle- income, working-class people. Ethnically, the long-time residents are of German, Italian,

Irish and Polish descent.”52 Predominately white ethnic Ridgewood contrasted with the racially transitioning neighborhood of Bushwick, which was 38% white, 30% black and

27% Hispanic in 1970.53 These statistics were already a marked change from 1950, at which point the neighborhood was 100% white and home to Brooklyn’s second largest

Italian-American population.54 During the late 50s and early 60s, “[Bushwick] featured an endless string of feasts for patron saints, complete with oompah bands and barefooted old women fighting through the crowds to pin a dollar bill to the statue of the Virgin

49 Kerzner, in discussion with the author, July 2011; Dereszewski, in discussion with the author, June 27, 2011. Kerzner also comments that “Ridgewood Queens” was no stranger to changes in its cultural topography. Following WWI, anti-German sentiment causes many of the streets names to change. For example, Hamburg Avenue became Wilson Avenue. 50 City of New York, Department of City Planning, Fact Book: Queens and Brooklyn (1977): City Hall Library. 51 City of New York, Department of City Planning, Community District Statistics: A Portrait of New York City from the 1980 Census: City Hall Library. 52 1985, Mayor Koch Papers, Municipal Archives (MN41041/Box 98/Folder 13). 53 City of New York, Bushwick Action Plan and Bushwick II Urban Renewal Plan (January 20, 1978): Koch Papers (MN41077/#808). 54 Ken Auletta, The Streets Were Paved with Gold (New York: Random House, 1975), 19. 100% figure comes from the U.S. Census as cited on the Brooklyn Historical Society’s “Up From Flames,” May 23-August 26, 2007, under “The Path to Ruin: Demographic Changes,” by John Dereszewski, http://www.upfromflames.brooklynhistory.org (accessed September 2012). The site chronicles the BHS’s exhibit by the same name.

162 Mary being paraded through the noisy streets,” remarks Mahler.55 This Italian community would change considerably in the coming years as new black and Latino residents entered the neighborhood. 56 Dereszewski notes that while many of these black and Latino Bushwickites were poorer than previous residents, a good number of them were working class and some were homeowners. However, in the face of a number of factors that included FHA scandals, redlining practices, and a declining industrial base, it became difficult for these homeowners to maintain their properties.57 Alongside these working class residents, an influx of mostly Latino, public assistance dependent residents also arrived.58 As a result of a complex confluence of factors that included the building stock’s structural elements, public and private disinvestment, building abandonment due to the FHA mortgage scandals, and vandalism, Bushwick was also subjected to extensive fires beginning in the late 60s.59 Starting in 1969, one out of eight buildings in the neighborhood was damaged or destroyed by fire each year.60 Although this destruction was not publicly revealed until 1977, the earlier “tipping point” occurred in 1972, when

55 Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 207. 56 Dereszewski comments on the movement of Italian residents: “In 1970, a substantial Italian community still resided in the northern portion of Bushwick, specifically in the area north of Knickerbocker and Myrtle Avenues. But this population had significantly declined during the previous decade and the remaining members were poised to join the exodus. While this community had basically considered itself to be part of Ridgewood, the replacement of the Italian with Hispanic residents would, in time, essentially move the de facto Bushwick –Ridgewood border to that of the Brooklyn – Queens boundary line”: “Up From Flames,” under “Resources: Bushwick Notes From the 70s to Today.” 57 “Up From Flames,” under “Resources: Bushwick Notes from the 70s to Today.” Goodman also describes this working black and Latino contingent, Blackout, 81. 58 Mahler notes that the neighborhood’s “first wave of welfare recipients” were displaced tenants from neighboring East New York and Brownsville, Bronx Is Burning, 208. He also remarks that urban renewal plans for Bushwick in the 60s spurred white exodus. Dereszewski notes that these tenants primarily occupied housing stock of inferior quality within the “central core” of the neighborhood: “Up From Flames,” under “Resources: Bushwick Notes from the 70s to Today.” 59 See also Flood, and the Wallaces’ works on the RAND studies and the City’s disinvestment in fire protection within the neighborhoods that needed it most. 60 Goodman, Blackout, 122.

163 the neighborhood exceeded 6,000 fires annually.61 By 1980 the neighborhood had lost a third of its population.62 Of the remaining residents, 56% of Bushwick residents were now Latino, 26% black and 15% white.63

As Bushwick underwent demographic and economic transformations in the postwar period, Ridgewood residents perceived their neighborhood’s border as increasingly porous, and acted to shore up this boundary through quotidian practices.

Kerzner cites 1965 as the “beginning of crime or the perception of crime,” when his parents declared that “we’re gonna have to lock our front doors.” “It’s a small point,” recollects Kerzner, “yet I remember it because that was a defining moment. That time of innocence came to an abrupt end. We were starting to batten down the hatches.”

According to Kerzner, this “battening down of the hatches” was echoed along the neighborhood’s major commercial artery, Myrtle Avenue, when businesses started to roll down their gates at night in the early 70s. After WWII, echoes Dereszewski, “the consciousness” of the two neighborhoods changed.64 By late 1974, Ridgewood’s fears about decline seeping into their streets from adjacent Bushwick were chronicled in the

Daily News, and then Queens District Attorney Geraldine Ferraro connected this potential spread to ideas about white ethnic pride. “Bushwick’s creeping cancer of property deterioration and abandonment could cross the Queens line into Ridgewood because of rising home fuel costs,” Ferraro warned. She argued that “residents of the predominately

Italian and German neighborhood have a great deal of ethnic pride that would prevent

61 See Curvin and Porter’s Blackout Looting! Mahler also notes that the figure was the “unofficial benchmark of a severe social crisis,” Bronx Is Burning, 209. 62 Brooklyn Historical Society, “Up From Flames,” under “The Path to Ruin: The Fire War,” by Adam Schwartz (accessed September 2012). 63 Tony Sanchez, The Bushwick Neighborhood Profile (Brooklyn in Touch Info Center, Inc., January 1988): Avery. 64 In discussion with the author, June and July, 2011.

164 them from seeking such governmental aid as food stamps to supplement budgets depleted by home heating costs.”65 The following year, the blight of Bushwick was “slowly creeping into Queens,” according to Congressman Walter Ward. “The City must do something to revitalize the area before it is too late,” he concluded.66 These seepage fears also fit into broader ideas about the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, the latter of which contained a much higher percentage of white residents overall. In the introduction to Mario Cuomo’s 1974 Forest Hills Diary, which recounts his role as a mediator in the struggle to site in the predominately white, middle-class Queens neighborhood, Jimmy Breslin remarked that residents viewed the project as a “threat,” which signified that the Bronx and Brooklyn were “moving” to Queens.67 In the spring just prior to the blackout, the murder of a white Ridgewood youth in Queens by a

Hispanic boy from across the county line revealed the potential consequences of racially marked neighborhood boundaries. The New York Tribune noted that the attack occurred as a result of the “growing number of Hispanics from near the Brooklyn border,” and the

Times stressed the distinctions between the Queens and Brooklyn sections of Ridgewood, and the increased intermingling of the two as the result of school bussing.68 Two local students commented that the violence had occurred because “the Puerto Ricans won’t stay in their neighborhoods … we gotta protect what’s ours.”69 By the following

65 “Fears Blight in Bushwick May Spread to Ridgewood,” DN, October 8, 1974. 66 Tom Turner, “Ridgewood: Where People Settle for Life,” Long Island Press, October 8, 1975. 67 Mario Cuomo, Forest Hills Diary: The Crisis of Low-Income Housing (New York: Random House, 1974), vi. 68 Metrick, “Ridgewood Mourns Its Loss; Laurie Johnston, “Killing of Queens Youth Spotlights the Problems of the Two Ridgewoods,” NYT, March 31, 1977. 69 Metrick, “Ridgewood Mourns Its Loss.”

165 summer, Koch had identified Ridgewood and Bushwick as two of the city’s top racial

“trouble spots” and had appointed a group to grapple with these tensions.70

Yet it was 1977’s blackout that marked the watershed in the border’s public demarcation; media coverage of the destruction transformed Bushwick into an official tragedy and the area, along with its Ridgewood neighbor, was positioned by news media, residents, and city officials as critical to the city’s fate. When it was not focused on looters’ destructive practices, blackout discourse constructed Bushwick as a threatening wasteland characterized by its very absence of living practices. The News argued that the neighborhood was the “fire-ravaged battleground on which may be decided our very survival as a city,”71 “Bushwick’s experience can be replicated in any neighborhood in

New York City, or it can be a lesson for those communities threatened by a similar cataclysm,” echoed the Ridgewood Times.72 “Riding around the wasteland which was once the thriving community of Bushwick is painful,” wrote the Ridgewood Times in the wake of the blackout. “It is nothing short of shocking when one views the devastation of burned out buildings which stand silently as a grim reminder that this can happen in any neighborhood if not checked at its beginnings.”73 According to NBC’s “Nightly News” broadcast on July 15th, “whole blocks [of looted neighborhoods had been] wiped out,” and these kinds of reports emphasized landscapes both devoid of any ongoing life, and foreclosed to the possibility of future lived practices.74 The struggles that affected

Bushwick were certainly real. By 1979, it was ranked fourth of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, and was listed as one of the top eight neighborhoods for population

70 “Koch Appoints a Group to Ease City’s Tensions,” NYT, July 27, 1978. 71 Gottlieb, Browne, Hamill and James, “Dying: Part 1.” 72 Clemens, Kelly, and Walthers, “Agony: Part 7.” 73 “A Ray of Hope,” Ridgewood Times, August 11, 1977. 74 “Nightly News,” NBC, July 15, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection, LOC.

166 decline citywide, with a 32.5% loss of residents from 1970 to 1980.75 An average of eighty fires per month burned through Bushwick during the year of the blackout, and by the year’s end the area contained 1,000 abandoned buildings, 500 vacant lots, and 850 unsafe structures.76 Six thousand structural fires occurred between 1970 and 1975, and the rate of destruction escalated from 1976 to July of 1979, during which another 3,000 fires occurred.77 “The eye confirms the idea that these figures do not lie,” claimed a New

York Magazine report on the neighborhood’s arson epidemic. “A tour of some blocks in

Bushwick is a sickening, depressing experience. Viewed from the air, the desperate stretch perpendicular to Green Avenue might look like the spine of some huge dead fish.”78 Broadway, Bushwick’s main thoroughfare, was the most negatively impacted commercial street in the city during the blackout, and over 120 stores were damaged.79

While the neighborhood had long struggled to fight poverty, arson, and abandonment, representations of blackout Bushwick made its plight publicly visible.

This revelation produced ideas about the meanings and geography of urban decline.

“Until the blackout,” wrote Martin Gottlieb, one of the Daily News reporters most responsible for chronicling the neighborhood’s plight, “Bushwick was one of the least known neighborhoods in the city.” “These catastrophic events (the blackout and the July

18th “all hands fire” in a knitting factory, which destroyed 23 buildings and caused 65

75 Sanchez, Neighborhood Profile. Mahler remarks that by 1977, almost 40% of its residents received public assistance and 80% were unemployed. Bushwick’s infant mortality rate was the highest in the city, Bronx Is Burning, 213. 76 City of New York, Broadway, Brooklyn; Clemens, Kelly, and Walthers, “Agony: Part 3,” Ridgewood Times, November 3, 1977. Around half of these fires were deemed suspicious according to Supervising Fire Marshal John Regan of Battalion 28 in Bushwick (Thomas Plate, “The Blaze in Bushwick: Will the Burning Every Stop,” NY Mag, July 18, 1977). Goodman provides a higher figure of 75% as arson-related, Blackout, 123. 77 City of New York, Broadway, Brooklyn. 78 Plate, “Blaze in Bushwick.” 79 City of New York, Broadway, Brooklyn.

167 families to lose their homes),” echoes Dereszewski, “changed public perception … and literally placed Bushwick on the map.”80 One confused local radio station announcer summed up this revelation: “Bushwick?” he asked, after a local fireman had called the station to report the disturbances. “Where’s that?”81 In the eyes of the City administration, much of this “revelation” could be credited to the news media’s coverage.82 Kerzner comments that at this moment, “perception drove the reality” because “you didn’t have the instantaneous communication like we have today. And so your news came primarily through the newspapers and secondarily … the evening news on the major networks. The news reporting was straight. It wasn’t sensational. But there was a constant drumbeat, particularly after the riots of ‘67 … there was a sense that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better.”83

Two particularly rich examples of the way in which Bushwick was produced by the media were the emotionally-charged newspaper series entitled “The Agony of

Bushwick” and “Our Dying Neighborhoods,” which ran in the Ridgewood Times and the

Daily News respectively.84 Although these series performed critical work by calling

80 Brooklyn Historical Society, “Up From Flames: Mapping Bushwick’s Recovery,” under “Home” and “Resources: Bushwick Notes from the 70s to Today,” (accessed July 2011). See also Sam Roberts, “Blackout Starts Bushwick’s Rise from the Ashes: It Exposed the Area as a Symbol of Official Failure and Urban Blight,” NYT, July 9, 1987. 81 Quoted in Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 200. 82 Mahler remarks that for the Beame administration, the Post’s coverage was as disastrous as the looting itself, and notes that the paper’s blackout special exceeded usual daily sales by 75,000, Bronx Is Burning, 237-239. Goodman comments on the war for blackout headlines that was waged between the Post and the Daily News, Blackout, 33. Mahler also examines televised coverage of the blackout and contends that “watching the endless loop of destruction proved uniquely unsettling, not so much because of the ruination itself, devastating though it was, as because of what it seemed to suggest, or reveal, about the city,” 218. And while televised broadcast were critical to the post-blackout consciousness, during the electrical outage residents relied on radio broadcasts that included those produced by WNEW, WABC, WCBS and WINS: See Goodman, 33. 83 In discussion with the author, July 2011. 84 The Ridgewood Times’ series won an award from the Public Relations Society of America.

168 attention to the struggles of neighborhood residents and by revealing some of the causes behind the area’s destruction, they also helped produce a narrative about the geographic and discursive space between decline and survival, which suggested that decline and survival were somehow indigenous to particular spaces, and were self-evidently visible by walking the streets. “What happened to Bushwick?” asked the Ridgewood Times.

“Walk along Central Avenue and you can see, smell and feel what has happened … the abomination of desolation: the ‘what’ happened in Bushwick is palpable; the ‘how’ and

‘why’ it happened more difficult to fathom.”85 The series suggested that decline could not be understood through statistical study but instead had to be accessed by moving through the neighborhood’s streets. “Fires are not prevented by Master Plans or by scholarly treatises,” argued the series, and the neighborhood’s unemployment was supposedly “obvious” just by looking.86 While the series did attempt to probe some of the causes behind the neighborhood’s destruction, which included “human greed and official mismanagement,” it also produced a narrative of inevitable decline that was precipitated by the community’s “civic suicide” in the mid 1950s as welfare tenants without “roots in the community” arrived.87 “The patient is beyond recovery,” the series concluded. Although the destruction “has not happened overnight … nothing has slowed the pace of Bushwick’s cremation.”88 The Daily News series echoed this sense of inevitability, and argued that the neighborhood was consistently poised for destruction.

“In Bushwick, and many other depressed sections of the city, the torch doesn’t need much incentive,” stated the News’ August 4th edition. “There’s a whole aspect of arson

85 Clemens, Kelly, and Walthers, “Agony: Part 1,” Ridgewood Times, October 20, 1977. 86 Clemens, Kelly, and Walthers, “Agony: Part 5,” Ridgewood Times, November 17, 1977. 87 Clemens, Kelly, and Walthers, “Agony: Part 2,” Ridgewood Times, October 27, 1977. 88 Clemens, Kelly, and Walthers, “Agony: Part 4,” Ridgewood Times, November 10, 1977.

169 that has to do with the readiness of our decaying buildings,” stated arson expert Paul

DeCicco.89

The City responded to this media exposure, and the Koch administration’s concern for Bushwick following the blackout became fundamental to its construction of a citywide renewal narrative.90 This commitment was particularly symbolically potent given the City’s previous neglect of the area. Up until Koch’s 1978 commitment to the

Action Plan, one of the most unique features of Bushwick’s decline was that it had occurred without any major governmental intervention.91 The neighborhood was left out of the 1966 Central Brooklyn Model Cities program due to outdated demographic information.92 In the City’s 1969 Master Plan, the Lindsay administration concluded that

“Bushwick urgently needs almost every type of community facility” and that although

89 Alton Slagle, “Our Dying Neighborhoods: How to Save Your Home,” DN, August 4, 1977. 90 In 1986, Elizabeth Blaney, who served as the City’s assistant director of the Community Assistance Unit, commented on the relationship between blackout exposure and the Koch administration’s actions: “The Bushwick community was the focus of national attention as the result of the destruction caused by the 1977 blackout. Because of that event, coupled with the devastation of previous years, in 1978 [Koch] established the Bushwick Taskforce”: Koch Papers (MN41041/Box99/Folder1). “After reading the articles in the Daily News, I realized how many people were suffering out there in Bushwick,” Koch stated in a 2007 interview: Brooklyn Historical Society, “Up From Flames: Mapping Bushwick’s Recovery,” under “Turnaround: Media and City Attention,” (accessed September 2012). Koch’s Deputy Mayor Nathan Leventhal also later recalled the ways in which the City responded to media reports. After a devastating fire destroyed Pine Street in nearby East New York, the City immediately intervened. Leventhal commented that this intervention had much to do with the Daily News’ advocacy, and compared it to the News’ role in Bushwick. “When the press adopts something, you almost have to respond,” Leventhal concluded: Leventhal’s interview with Sharon Zane, August 12, August 19, September 29, October 16, November 24, 1992: Edward I. Koch Administration Oral History Project, Columbia University. Note also that the Beame administration had begun to attend to fire prevention in Bushwick through the creation of a mobile force of fire marshals called the “Redcaps”: Brooklyn Historical Society, “Up From Flames: Mapping Bushwick’s Recovery,” under “Turnaround: Winning the ‘Fire War,’” by Adam Schwartz, (accessed September 2012). 91 Dereszewski notes that the Action Plan was developed under the Beame administration as a collaborative effort between Bushwick’s Community Board 4 and the City’s office of Housing Preservation and Development, but that Koch’s commitment to and extension of the plan were critical: “Up From Flames,” under “Resources: Bushwick Notes from the 70s to Today,” (accessed September 2012). 92 Clemens, Kelly, and Walthers, “Agony: Part 4.”

170 “relatively little has been done because its problems were overshadowed by the enormous problems of neighboring slums … assistance must be provided quickly.”93 Yet assistance was not provided. In 1972, the Federal Government halted a plan for low income housing in accordance with the National Environmental Protection Act’s claims that constructing residences beneath the elevated train line was “too noisy.”94 The area was designated a Neighborhood Preservation Area by the City in 1973 only to fall prey to neglect in the wake of a federal housing moratorium and the city’s fiscal crisis.95 In conjunction with the City’s revamped 1978 Bushwick Action Plan, Deputy Mayor Nat

Leventhal evidenced the symbolic value of this municipal commitment by commenting to

Koch that “I think we have a reasonable chance of turning around the relatively negative stories which appeared on Bushwick” during the blackout.96 In 1979, Koch reaffirmed his commitment to the area after criticism that his administration was solely concerned with the fate of wealthy midtown Manhattan. The criticality of everyday practice was again highlighted by this trip, which took the form of a walking tour. Similar to the candidates’ 1977 circumnavigation of the Casuso’s block, Mayor Koch “walked on streets where glass crunched underfoot.” This visit reemphasized the placelessness and destitution of Bushwick’s streets and, curiously, tied Koch’s journey to President Carter’s contemporaneous travels through the U.S. in anticipation of his reelection campaign.

93 Gottlieb, Browne, Hamill, and James, “Dying: Part 1.” 94 Gottlieb, Browne, Hamill, and James, “Dying: Part 3: The Bulldozing of Bushwick,” DN, August 3, 1977. 95 However Dereszeski does note that the opening of the Neighborhood Preservation Office did “strengthen the community’s ability to impact future development:” “Up From Flames,” under “Resources: Bushwick Notes from the 70s to Today,” (accessed September 2012). 96July 14, 1978, Koch Papers (MN41077/#1095). Dereszewski describes the implementation of the Action Plan on “Up From Flames,” under “Turnaround: Beginning to Rebuild,” (accessed September 2012). The Action Plan eventually led to the City’s Bushwick II Urban Renewal Plan in 1979.

171 “Koch shook hands with bemused passers-by who complained about a lack of jobs and housing and stopped at stores that have stood on Broadway for decades,” the article recounted. According to Koch, his visit was “better than going down the Mississippi

[like President Carter].” The latter comment both positioned Bushwick as a fundamentally American landscape, and conjured visions of poverty and racial division.97

Following the blackout and its media coverage, Ridgewoodites’ defensive construction of the border escalated and preserving this border was viewed as increasingly critical to both the neighborhood and the borough’s survival. Kerzner remembers that the Daily News series “crystallized things for [Ridgewoodites]. … It scared people in a way so that if there was white flight … if there were people who were going to move, this cemented it.”98 On the night of the blackout, ten squad cars assembled along the border between the two neighborhoods, and policed this border by

“pushing into Bushwick along the county line with their lights shining.”99 “Half a dozen teenage Italians, armed with baseball bats and iron pipes, helped merchants guard a five- block section of Myrtle Avenue,” reported Time magazine.100 Mahler notes that while

Bushwick’s station house was in chaos, “when cops needed a breather, they’d drive a few blocks toward the Queens border, which was eerily quiet.”101 In 1977, the “perceptible

97 “Koch Tours Areas Looted in 1977,” NYT, August 21, 1979. 98 In discussion with the author, July 2011. The News’ role in crafting the Bushwick narrative was singular, and their story was a complicated blend of high drama and much needed exposure. In 2007, Martin Gottlieb remembered that the series “caught a moment in the city. On this one block, in this one neighborhood, you had a microcosm of the challenges facing our city:” Brooklyn Historical Society, “Up From Flames: Mapping Bushwick’s Recovery,” under “Turnaround: Media and City Attention,” (accessed June 2011). 99 Paul Kerzner, in discussion with the author, July 2011. 100 From Time’s July 25, 1977 report, quoted in The Federal Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (DCPA), “The Lightless Night of Looting”: Lessons from the 1977 New York City Blackout, by John Hollister Stein (October 1978), 52: John Jay College. 101 Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 202.

172 boundary,” which Ridgewood residents termed the “Siegfried Line,” was located at

Wycoff Avenue.102 “At that moment [1977],” remembers Kerzner, “we saw that

Bushwick was so far gone, so rotted, that there was nothing worth saving and so we just brought down the iron curtain. We brought our own iron curtain down. We were very clear … you came up from Brooklyn driving up on the side streets and you knew when you crossed the county line.”103

This defensive boundary was articulated through discussions about a wide-array of perceived threats that ranged from arson to rodents. The areas east of Bushwick “are in the direct path of the tidal wave of apathy and exploitation. … If Ridgewood falls, it will precipitate a domino effect which will spread to Glendale, Maspeth and Middle

Village,” the Ridgewood Times argued in December of 1977.104 “Are the flames of

Bushwick licking at the heels of Ridgewood?” the paper asked the following year.

“Ridgewood borders Bushwick, and the Brooklyn-Queens County Line is not covered with asbestos.105 In 1979, New York’s arson problems fueled a congressional hearing that included expert testimony from the Ridgewood Times’ Maureen Walthers and Carl

Clemens. In his testimony, Clemens referred to the “seeds of destruction” that could

“move like a plague” across the border if unchecked, and likened the congressional efforts against arson to a previous bill designed to combat medical cancers.106 Kerzner

102 Gottlieb, Browne, Hamill, and James, “In the Ashes, There is Hope,” DN, August 5, 1977. The Siegfried Line refers to a German built defensive line of tanks during WWII. 103 In discussion with the author, July 2011. 104 Clemens, Kelly, and Walthers, “Agony: Part 7.” 105 Clemens, Kelly, and Walthers, “Will the Mistakes of Bushwick Be Corrected or Repeated,” Ridgewood Times, July 27, 1978. 106 Subcommittee on the Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government Appropriations, Arson Problems in New York City, 96th Cong., 1st sess., 1979, 67044, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/67044NCJRS.pdf (accessed September 2012).

173 remarks that “there was a sense by the late 70s by some people that we were vital. And if we fell, that the rest of Queens was going to.”107 In January of 1978, the threat took the form of hundreds of cat-sized rats who openly disregarded the Brooklyn-Queens border and fled Bushwick for the “greener pastures” of Ridgewood.108 Soloman Peeples, the

Deputy Director of the City’s Bureau for Pest Control, summarized the sentiments of

Ridgewood residents by stating that “people are up in arms over there [Ridgewood] and you can’t blame them because rats mean filth and Ridgewood is not that way.”109

Presumably, the rats had traveled from Bushwick because the devastation of the neighborhood’s building stock and resources had left them with little place to hide and nothing to eat. Although Ridgewood residents advocated to have the area marked as a target for rat control, which was a “dubious distinction … generally reserved for such impoverished areas as Harlem, Bushwick and the South Bronx,” by 1978 the rat problem was still tied up in bureaucracy; the State Health Department could not provide the neighborhood with funds because they were not as economically deprived as their

Bushwick neighbor.110 Ridgewoodites balked as “the radius of the rats’ forays [began] widening … spreading to nearby factories and into a vacant lot at the corner of Flushing and Onderdonk Avenues,” only two blocks from the border. As the border’s porosity was exposed, residents retreated into their homes. Resident John Illardi of 166

Onderdonk Avenue commented that he was “afraid to let my three boys go out of the

Walthers referred to Bushwick as a “microcosm of the nation,” and detailed the “racial and social fears” that she believed discouraged homeownership and led eventually to arson. 107 In discussion with the author, July 2011. 108 Editorial, “You Dirty Rat …” Ridgewood Times, January 5, 1977. 109 Murray Weiss, “Rats are Invading Ridgewood,” DN, December 29, 1977. 110 Weiss, “Rats Invading.” In July 1979, the neighborhood finally got their rodent control office, which was the first of its kind in Queens (as reported in the Ridgewood Times on July 12, 1979).

174 house. We become like prisoners here once it gets dark.”111 This flouting of neighborhood borders by oversized vermin was not simply a question of cleanliness or scarcity of food. Rather, the rodents’ mobility became a powerful conduit through which the borderland between the two neighborhoods was produced. A letter to the editor of the

Ridgewood Times sardonically solidified this metaphoric connection by attributing the infestation to the rats’ “dissatisfaction with the living conditions in Bushwick.” The letter cynically declared that the rats had “constitutional rights,” and that they probably felt that they were a “neglected minority whose needs have been ignored for too long.”112

The language of imminent threat remained consistent into the early 1980s. For resident Florence Braunt in 1981, “it was always easy to tell where Brooklyn ended and

Queens began,” and arson blurred and destabilized the border that residents had come to perceive as self-evident. One local fire marshal concluded that “it’s almost like watching a cancer grow … the threat to Ridgewood is very real.”113 Ridgewood’s past ability to stave off arson was partially attributed to the neighborhood’s “second-generation

European immigrants, many employed in blue-collar jobs.” 114 While Ridgewood residents were described as “fighting back,” these linkages between demographic neighborhood composition and acts of arson rendered it unclear whether the target of their battles was fire or its presumed perpetrators.

Ridgewoodites’ fears about the spread of this blight fit into a larger narrative about the relationship between Bushwick and other areas of the city that were thought to be in decline. Before it became the poster child of threatening decay in 1977, reports

111 Randall Sullivan, “Rats Will Be History on Onderdonk,” DN, January 17, 1979. 112 Letters to the Editor, Ridgewood Times, January 1, 1978. 113 Michael Arena, “Anti-Arson Unit Is Taking Aim at Ridgewood,” , August 2, 1981. 114 Arena, “Anti-Arson.”

175 argued that Bushwick could catch the plague from neighboring Bedford-Stuyvesant.

“Fear has been expressed that Bushwick will gradually become a cousin community to

Bedford-Stuyvesant and that muggings, gang marauding, drinking and drug addiction- and finally race riots- will become a characteristic,” wrote the Tribune in January of 1966.115 “It used to be that Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant and

Brownsville neighborhoods, alone, looked like sets for a World War II movie,” wrote journalist Ken Auletta in his famous account of the crisis. “But the plague has spread to

Bushwick, as it is spreading to the neighboring community of Williamsburg.” The plague could even avoid geographic contiguousness entirely, and Auletta argued that

Coney Island, all the way at the southern tip of the borough, was the “next Bushwick.”116

Bushwick was compared to the South Bronx in a way that both suggested that the neighborhood was not as far “gone,” and also argued that declining areas were interchangeable and indistinguishable. As fires escalated in the neighborhood, reports underlined that Bushwick had “caught” this particular form of plague from the South

Bronx: “The outbreak of arsonous fires that devastated large areas of the Bronx has leapfrogged to Brooklyn, threatening the borough with a fast-spreading virus that demoralizes residents and destroys neighborhoods,” reported the News. “The South

Bronx is just about burned out,” reported Chief Edwin Jennings. “It seems now that

Brooklyn is the target for burning.”117 “[Bushwick’s] problems are not unique,” wrote

Martin Gottlieb. “Like the South Bronx, blocks of Brownsville, Harlem and the lower

East Side, it is a shell of shattered dreams- the rotted body of a neighborhood consumed

115 Francis Sugrue, “Bushwick: A Changing Community,” NY Herald Tribune, January 9, 1966. 116 Auletta, Streets, 10-11. 117 Vincent Lee and Robert Carroll, “Fire Peril Spreads to Brooklyn,” DN, May 22, 1977.

176 by the cancer of urban decay that is even now creeping into other sections of the city.”118

In a conversation with President Carter, then mayoral candidate Ed Koch “described

Brooklyn’s Bushwick and East New York, and the South Bronx as a ‘devil’s cauldron’ whose destructive brew is steadily spilling over into surrounding neighborhoods.”119 Yet a later Daily News report emphasized that whereas the South Bronx was “a national symbol … beyond salvation … Bushwick residents insist that their neighborhood can still be saved.”120 In 1978, the neighborhood still appeared to teeter on the brink of South

Bronx status as the Times called Bushwick “a South Bronx in the making.”121 In 1980, a

Housing Authority spokesperson invoked Carter’s walk as a spatial ultimatum by arguing that “[Bushwick] is not going to be another Charlotte Street.”122

This idea of decline’s contagion was mobilized on the night of the blackout, and reports positioned Bushwick as the epicenter of a quickly spreading plague throughout the city’s ghettos.123 “No poor area in any of the five boroughs was left untouched,” concluded community organizer Robert Curvin and journalist Bruce Porter in their 1979

Ford Foundation commissioned study. “At least thirty-one separate neighborhoods experienced considerable destruction or stealing.”124 “In the grimy streets of black

Brooklyn … the ravaged South Bronx and the twin ghettos of Harlem and Latino East

Harlem … the terror … spread from slum to slum,” argued Newsweek menacingly.125

118 Gottlieb, Browne, Hamill, and James, “Dying: Part 1.” 119 Sam Roberts, “They Came to Brooklyn, Even Unto Bushwick,” DN, October 24, 1977. 120 Roberts, “They Came to Brooklyn.” 121 “Ground Broken for Housing,” NYT, December 28, 1978. 122 July 28, 1980, DN. 123 While the citations included in this analysis of looting come from a range of impoverished neighborhoods, Bushwick was widely agreed upon as the figurehead for the destruction, and official studies of its destruction concluded that it was the most extensively devastated. 124 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting! 125 Peter Goldman, “Heart of Darkness,” Newsweek, July 25, 1977, 19.

177 The “terror” to which the article referred was the threateningly itinerant bodies of looters and other residents who took to the streets during the blackout. According to official reports, the spread of this terror was presaged by the wildfire spread of poverty itself.

“Of all the things revealed by the blackout looting, nothing was so surprising as what it said about the travel of poverty in the city since the last U.S. census,” concluded the Ford

Foundation’s initial report on the looting. “The proliferation of poor people throughout

New York City in the last five to seven years has proceeded with such wind-like speed that the concept of a “ghetto”- wherein the poor are contained by geographic boundaries- may indeed be obsolete. Leaving aside those middle and upper-middle class bastions where money and racial feelings create an insurmountable barrier to minority groups, the poor, it seems, now live virtually everywhere.” 126 “It would be easier to say where they are not, rather than where they are,” remarked Curvin and Porter’s final report. “We have been lectured by many writers who say that the poor will always be with us. What the looting suggests is that the poor are now neighbors to most of us.”127 The City’s

Criminal Justice Agency (CJA) report emphasized that defendants’ geographic origins were sprawling and interconnected, and that these origins were natural areas of crime.128

“We have many areas characterized by low income and high crime rates, where local tensions exist even when the lights are on,” remarked first deputy mayor Donald

Kummerfeld in his testimony during the Joint State Legislative Committee’s hearing on

126The Ford Foundation, A Report on the Blackout Looting in New York City, July 13, 1977, by Robert Curvin and Bruce Porter (1978), 5: John Jay College. This is the 1978 precursor to Curvin and Porter’s 1979 publication. 127 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, 113. 128 NYCJA, The 1977 New York City Blackout: A Summary of Criminal Justice Findings (May 1979), 32, 40: John Jay College. The CJA was a private non-profit, which was funded by the City and the Federal Government through the Mayor’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council. The report noted that the areas of residence for blackout defendants were largely the same as those of a comparison group composed of previous property crime offenders.

178 the blackout.129 While the Federal Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (DCPA) described the events as a “seemingly-spontaneous uprising by a sizable portion of one city’s social underclass,” the report concluded that “regrettably, there is reason to believe that recurrent blackouts can be expected, and, more important, that there are circumstances other than blackouts which might precipitate major ghetto disorders.”130

According to Channel 11 News, the darkness simply “magnified the normal character of

New Yorkers,” and thus behavior in looted areas was concluded to be endemic and natural.131 While officials and news media often used this relationship between crime rates and looted areas to argue that violent behavior was endemic in these neighborhoods, local residents experienced this relationship quite differently. “It gets dark here every night. Every night stores get broke into, every night people get mugged, every night you scared on the street. But nobody pays no attention until a blackout comes,” stated a 14- year old looter in Harlem.132

These anxieties about looting and poverty’s geographically contagious potential were connected to New Yorkers’ obsession over black and Latino bodies’ overcrowding in the streets during the blackout. According to some accounts, the most notable difference between the blackout of 1965 and that of 1977 were the sheer numbers of people who took to the streets. In 1965, “people in poor neighborhoods were not out in the streets in great numbers,” noted Curvin and Porter.133 “Few enjoy revival of

‘blackouts of 1965’” claimed a Daily News headline, and the distinctions were mainly

129 City of New York, Koch Press Releases, July 19, 1977: City Hall Library. Note that Kummerfeld does not specify what these crimes rates are or what types of crimes they encompass. 130 DCPA, Lightless Night, 15. 131 “Blackout News Show,” Action News, Channel 11, July 14, 1977: The Paley Center for Media. 132 “Night of Terror,” Time, July 25, 1977 133 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, xiv.

179 evidenced through street behavior. This time around, the story argued, “the sultry streets were black and menacing. Headlights gave glimpses of groups of loiterers who could be a threat.134 The atmosphere was supposedly so distinctive that Mayor Beame did not follow in Lindsay’s footsteps to “take to the riot-torn streets himself” because he feared that “such a tour … might just be a ‘stimulant’ to more violence.”135 “Because of the blackness, even a rough estimate of how many people were on any one street is only guesswork, but witness after witness said the numbers were truly awesome,” stated

Curvin and Porter. “On Utica Avenue in Crown Heights, the police estimated that

‘thousands’ were crammed in a narrow street five blocks long. The people were impenetrable. Squad cars made no attempt to get through. The looters carried on with complete freedom. Trying to characterize the conduct and make-up of those crowds is a futile project, for they varied with each block and changed as the evening wore on.”136 A

Puerto Rican storeowner in the South Bronx reported that “the crowd extended from one side of the Concourse to the other, across six lanes and two dividers. Another Concourse merchant said again and again that ‘you cannot comprehend how many people were out there … everyone was out there.”137 And nowhere was this overcrowding more frightening than along Bushwick’s Broadway where “the crowds seemed to possess a special kind of hysteria as the evening wore on [and] this spirit appeared to lead them as much toward destruction and burning as toward looting.”138 “If they had turned on the lights [in Bushwick],” one cop remembered, “it would have looked like the Macy’s

134 Anthony Burton, “Few Enjoy Revival,” DN, July 15, 1977. The ’65 blackout took place on a cool afternoon in November, and many shopkeepers were open for business and stayed on to protect their stores. 135 Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 196. 136 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, 41. 137 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, 143-144. 138 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, cited in Mahler, 200.

180 Thanksgiving Day Parade.”139 During Mayor Beame’s tours through looted neighborhoods in the days following the blackout, he was “mobbed” by questioning residents.140 Moreover, the Mayor’s consistent calls for New Yorkers to stay home during the blackout implied a priori that whether or not they were engaged in acts of looting, the crowds of residents in looted neighborhoods had entered the streets against the City’s wishes.141

This predilection with crowded masses of disorderly bodies belied the reality that the majority of people, both in poor neighborhoods and in the city at large, were not involved in looting activities.142 In a press release following the restoration of power,

Mayor Beame advanced the paradox of a criminal minority who nonetheless appeared to physically take over the streets in a “reign of terror.” “In the face of sacrifices made by the overwhelming majority of the people of this City and the heroism and cooperation shown by so many thousands of New Yorkers,” stated the Mayor, “the crimes of a small segment of our people who were looters and arsonists constitute a much more grievous assault against our society.”143 “As in other neighborhoods,” concluded Curvin and

Porter, despite their earlier depictions of teeming bodies, “the streets in Bedford-

Stuyvesant may have seemed alive with people, but only a small fraction of the community’s population was involved in either the looting or the watching. In the residential blocks between Fulton Street and Myrtle Avenue, people reacted to the blackout as they did anywhere else in the city: after their initial nervousness vanished,

139 Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 191. 140 Nightly News, CBS, July 15, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection. 141 “We Won’t Have Any This Summer,” WNBC-AM, July 14, 1977: Paley Center. 142 In Blackout, Goodman considers the idea that the majority of New Yorkers were not engaged in looting during the 1977 blackout as a way to complicate the “tale of two cities” narrative of “good” New York during the 1965 and 2003 blackouts, and the “evil” 1977 blackout. 143 City of New York, Beame Press Releases, July 16, 1977: City Hall Library.

181 they sat on the stoops, drank beer and generally enjoyed the strange experience.”144 Yet reporter Andy Logan maintained that “the explanation that only small areas of the city

[experienced looting] only emphasized the degree to which the blacks and Puerto Ricans were separate from the mainstream of city life.”145

News media and city officials emphasized that residents in looted neighborhoods lacked stable geographical roots.146 In Bushwick, this discourse drew distinctions between this current black and Latino overcrowding, and the neighborhood’s older white ethnic populations. “From the west, thousands pour out of a 630-acre slum called

Bushwick,” wrote Denis Hamil and Michael Daly for the Village Voice. “Today, there are no Dutch, Germans, Irish, Poles or Italians. Today there are 225,000 blacks and

Puerto Ricans living in 42,000 dwelling units.”147 According to representations of

Bushwick following the blackout, not only was the neighborhood plagued by masses of bodies, it was also peopled by excessively transient residents. “Bushwick is a place where people sleep with their clothes on and their bags packed,” concluded the News’

“Our Dying Neighborhoods” series.148 “For many of these people, the apartments are only a wayside station- there’s no sense of belonging for them,” argued local real estate executive Michael Lewin. In addition to these temporary residents, Lewin went on to describe groups of people “loitering” on corners who were clearly “not from the

144 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, 158-159. 145 Logan Papers (Blackout 1977/Box 52/Folder 8). 146 The notion that the poor, and especially poor African Americans, are excessively transient is part of an older trope in American urban history. 147 Denis Hamill and Michael Daly, “Here Comes the Neighborhood,” Village Voice, July 25, 1977. 148 Gottlieb, Browne, Hamill, and James, “Dying: Part 1.”

182 neighborhood.”149 Frank Mason, a resident of the adjacent neighborhood of Brownsville, distinguished between his generation of hardworking black New Yorkers who moved from Harlem into Central Brooklyn, and the new, exogenous waves of black and Latino residents. “This is a whole different element,” Mason concluded. “They’re not native

New Yorkers.”150 Curvin and Porter suggested that looters’ physical mobility was also connected to shifty ideological values. “Members of the lower class maintain a belief in the same values as everyone else,” they concluded. “[However] the possibility that those who hold these values could shift to an entirely different system of behavior, does not lie far beneath the surface.”151 According to blackout discourse, not only were looters geographically unstable, but they also annihilated their own homes. On national television, Geraldo Rivera gravely described “average citizens turning on their own neighborhoods and consuming them.”152 This sense of placelessness would ultimately serve as a foil to the representations of white ethnics’ place-bound commitments to their neighborhood’s built environment.

Looters were chastised for a “brazenness” that was connected not only to their seeming willingness to steal freely, but also to the boldness with which they entered the streets.153 Channel 11’s Action News special on the blackout remarked that looters were so bold that they “walked leisurely home with their loot, seeming not to care whether they were filmed.”154 Looters’ threatening boldness was also connected to their far-flung geographic radii and seemingly random spatial choices. “Roving bands,” of “teenagers

149 Pranay Gupte, “Bushwick Block Seeking Light After Enduring Blackout,” NYT, August 12, 1977. 150 Francis X. Clines, “About New York: Down These Mean Streets,” NYT, July 15, 1977. 151 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, 18. 152 “Blackout Special,” ABC, July 14, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection. 153 Severo, “Two Blackouts.” 154 “Blackout News Show,” Action News, Channel 11, July 14, 1977: Paley Center.

183 and adults surged along the street striking sporadically at stores,” echoed the Times.155

Among residents now frightened to enter the street, these acts of brazenness raised questions about belonging in the public realm. “Garbage cans burned on every corner, and in their flickering glow you could see the faces of the young men who would soon own the night,” wrote Pete Hamill for the News.156 “It was a lot different from 10 years ago,” stated Harlem resident Daisy Voight. “Last time people were helpful. This time people are … running for buses or bars. Everybody’s afraid to go out.”157 According to

Bushwick tenant Robert E. Lee, the blackout merely exacerbated the existing climate of fear in the neighborhood’s streets: “It’s become so bad that we can’t even go to the movies at night and come home safely,” he concluded.158 However, this geography of brazenness and resultant fear to enter the streets was not uniformly distributed. In Rego

Park, a middle class, predominately white area of Queens located far from the looted areas, the Post reported that “for the first time in Greg Hlinka’s memory, people in his neighborhood were not afraid to go out at night.” “There are so many people in the street, nobody’s getting mugged,” concluded Hlinka.159

The Ford Foundation reported that these street seizures might actually exacerbate postwar urban demographic shifts by driving white bodies out of the streets and further precipitating decline. “It was suspected that the widespread looting would further frighten more stable, middle-class residents of the city, not in neighborhoods where

155 Selwyn Raab, “Ravage Continues Far Into Day; Gunfire and Bottles Beset Police,” NYT, July 15, 1977; Judith Cummings, “Store-Pillaging Unchecked in Two Brooklyn Sections,” NYT, July 15, 1977. ABC’s “Nightly News” on July 14th also refers to looters as “roving gangs,” and Time’s “Night of Terror,” calls them “roving bands.” 156 Pete Hamill, “Black Night of Our Soul,” DN, July 15, 1977. 157 Lawrence Van Gelder, “State Troopers Sent Into City as Crime Rises,” NYT, July 14, 1977. 158 Pranay Gupte, “Bushwick Block.” 159 Michael Hechtman, “Fear Was Gone in Queens,” NYP, July 15, 1977.

184 looting occurred, but in adjacent areas where people were on-the-fence as to whether to stay or remain in the city,” stated the report.160 The City confirmed these speculations; according to the Chair of the City Planning Commission, Victor Marrero, “the City has invested a great deal of time and money in efforts to stabilize such neighborhoods and much of it may be lost.”161 This threat was seemingly imminent on the Upper West Side.

“The looting on the Upper West Side of Manhattan was perhaps the most surprising, especially to those New Yorkers who have always found- and still do find- such pleasure in the hip, earthy, intellectual and relaxed ambiance of the neighborhood,” remarked

Curvin and Porter. “It never appeared that the habitués of Columbia University, Lincoln

Center and the smart shops and restaurants in between had lost control of the neighborhood’s style and behavior. Unlike Harlem, where whites have not moved freely since the mid-1960s, most of Broadway, Amsterdam and Columbus Avenue belong to everyone.”162

These debates about the blackout’s role in the production of social and economic decline were also conjured in stories that focused on aggrieved shopkeepers. Although looters’ attacked businesses in a seemingly racially indiscriminate fashion, “white merchants were overwhelmingly their victims,” observed Curvin and Porter.163 Many of these merchants had fled the neighborhoods in which they now continued to maintain shops. Curvin and Porter’s 1979 report noted that the blackout’s worst effects unfurled in

“transitional neighborhoods … where merchants’ resolve to stay in the inner city was

160 Curvin and Porter, Report on the Blackout Looting, 6. 161 Curvin and Porter, Report on the Blackout Looting, 6. 162 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, 114. 163 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, xiv.

185 shaky even before the lights went out.”164 The Post also speculated about the potentially devastating acceleration of commercial flight from looted neighborhoods. “People don’t realize that this is the finish of this area,” the owner of a camera shop on Brooklyn’s

Flatbush Avenue told the paper.165” “It’ll be a after this,” echoed another shopkeeper in Williamsburg. “No one’s going to invest in this neighborhood.”166

Accounts of business owners’ despair and concomitant commercial flight were also intermingled with tales of their industrious rebuilding practices. On Bushwick’s

Broadway, “the sound of hammering had replaced the wail of police sirens at Mr.

Rosenblum’s [sporting goods] store.”167

Questions about whether looters belonged in the streets engendered bitterly divided debates about whether acts of looting and arson could be legitimately constructed as forms of public protest against desperate social and economic strife, and these debates further produced ideas about Bushwick residents’ nihilistic placelessness.168 While comparisons were frequently drawn to the 1964 and 1968 race riots, mainstream media discourse distinguished the blackout from the riots due to looters’ apparent lack of racial targeting. Newsweek reported that blackout destruction was “apparently not the product of the sort of blind rage against whitey’s Establishment that had fueled the racial riots of

164 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, 59. 165 Peter Freiberg and Robert Garrett, “Also Looted: Their Future,” NYP, July 15, 1977. 166 “Nightly News,” CBS, July 15, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection. 167 David F. White, “A Glimpse of Bushwick’s Broadway After the Looting,” NYT, July 16, 1977. 168 Goodman comments on these bitter divisions and notes that “bitterly divided” did not mean “equally divided”: a Times poll found that 60% of readers believed people looted because “they are the kind … who always steal if they think they can get away with it,” and rejected explanations that included heat, frustration, poverty, and unemployment, Blackout, 219-220.

186 the late ‘60s.”169 “Because it emphasized personal gain rather than politics, the looting struck many people as ideologically empty—a temporary escape from poverty rather than a lashing out at perceived oppression,” stated the Ford Foundation’s report. “Those who maintained that the looter, like the rioter, might be ‘saying’ something, argued one writer, failed to see the difference ‘between a hoodlum and a dissident.’”170 Debates over the politicized nature of looters’ actions provoked particularly visceral responses among the aggrieved middle class. “It’s the middle class which should have been looting,” stated

Bronx resident John D. Jackson in the News’ “Voice of the People” blackout special.

“We don’t get food stamps, rent subsidies, welfare payments, not to mention the magnificent programs to cure urban woes made possible by the high taxes we pay.”171

Media depictions of the looters’ seizure of the public realm often painted them as fragmented, disorganized, and cartoonishly nightmarish. ABC’s blackout special called the night’s activities “an orgy of revenge and lawlessness and columnist Tom Wicker remarked that “many of the looters appear to have been little more than children.”172 In another report, even the race riots were referred to as “outbreaks,” which implied that they were unpremeditated types of illnesses. 173 In Bushwick, one account of pre-looting activities conjured the street-corner society trope of listless, aimless bodies: “There were groups standing on the corners [during the blackout], mumbling and talking to themselves. They were trying to get up the energy to do something,” commented a

169 Boeth, “Plunderers,” 23. New York’s African-American publication, The Amsterdam News, also notably condemned the looters’ actions and members of the black community’s excuses for these actions as “suicidal”: Goodman, Blackout, 186. 170 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, 9. See also Mahler’s discussion of what he terms “blackout backlash,” Bronx Is Burning, 229. 171 “Voice of the People,” DN, July 21, 1977. 172 Tom Wicker, “A Prophecy Fulfilled,” NYT, July 17, 1977. 173 Cummings, “Store-Pillaging Unchecked.”

187 coordinator for Bushwick Youth Services Audrey Emmonds.174 Yet while the looting may not have been directed toward certain proprietors, this kind of discourse did little to probe the often harsh realities of life in these neighborhoods.175 While some had undoubtedly entered the streets that night without a codified political agenda, their desire to obtain the products of capitalism was inherently politicized and some looters saw their behavior within this context.176 One enraged looter remarked that she was “getting back

… for all the time we’ve been oppressed.”177 As he grilled a steak in an alley the morning after the blackout, a Bushwick resident remarked that “the new sign is the fist with a towel wrapped around it … that’s the power salute. This time it was flashlights, not guns. All power to the looters.”178

While in the eyes of many New Yorkers, people did not belong in the streets of looted neighborhoods and failed to utilize these streets as conduits for political expression, outside of the looted areas descriptions of blackout behavior focused on individualized, irreverent, and playful acts, and painted the evening’s events as a celebratory and carnivalesque suspension of ordinary rules. For some, when the clocks stopped, everyday urbanness seemed to grind to a halt and “the dominant impulse outside

174 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, 4. 175 This same critique was directed toward African American and Latino rioters following the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992. Again, the accusation that rioters were not politically motivated due to lack of white racial targeting ignored the limits of their inter- neighborhood mobility, and the larger structural causes of their rage. 176 See Herbert G. Gutman, “As for the ’02 Kosher-Food Rioters,” NYT, July 21, 1977. See also Goodman, Blackout, 119-121 where he recounts a News article about a Bushwick storeowner who describes looting as an inevitable outgrowth of “window shopping” everyday in the city and being unable to afford more than the “bare necessities.” 177 “Blackout Special,” ABC, July 14, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection. This was a recurring element of looting discourse, and many news reports emphasized looters’ angry desire to strike back and take what was rightfully theirs from a system that had too long denied them. 178 From Daly and Hamill’s Here Comes the Neighborhood, quoted in Goodman, Blackout, 78.

188 the stricken ghettos was to laugh in the face of the dark.”179 While some intended to

“plunder and to pillage,” others “took to the streets for the fun of it.”180 For Times

Square revelers, “the broken glass and shouts of rage in Brooklyn and the South Bronx could have been a thousand miles away … because the nightlife was getting along just fine in the dark.”181 In the West Village, “the fire hydrant … erupts like a geyser.

Clothes and inhibitions are shed. Middle-aged men, kids, street gays, women with shopping carts, and even shirtless reporters revert to childhood. For some, it’s Brooklyn,

1950, when summer meant sitting all night on the stoop … Ed Koch comes by … shakes hands with his wet constituents and smiles his best blackout smile.”182 “Several stretches of on the Upper East Side might have been mistaken for the streets in Paris, were it not for the angled cars, headlights on, that made it possible for diners to identify what they were eating,” argued Mahler.183 What were mapped as destructive, chaotic, and contagious events within the ghettos, were merely amusing within other spatial contexts. In a midtown hotel, the act of setting a fire took on an air of luxurious liminality as a former ambassador and his wife “twisted a piece of Kleenex, took a bottle of cognac from their luggage, soaked the Kleenex in the cognac, put the whole thing on a plate and set it on fire.” “‘It cost us half a bottle of cognac,’ said Mrs. Aynor philosophically.”184 The Washington Post presented a wealthy woman stealing groceries in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood not as a threatening criminal but as a silly

179 Goldman, “Heart of Darkness,” 22. 180 “Special Blackout Report,” ABC, July 14, 1977: Vanderbilt Collection. 181 , “A Walk on the Wild Side,” Newsweek, July 25, 1977, 31. 182 Hamill and Daly, “Here Comes the Neighborhood.” 183 Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 197. 184 Enid Nemy, “For Some, a Day to Make Light of the Dark,” NYT, July 15, 1977.

189 spectacle, who stuffed the products into a Louis Vuitton handbag.185 Similarly, whereas claims to the street by ghetto residents were seen as threatening, in wealthier areas of the city block parties served as spontaneous celebrations of the night, and this temporary suspension of norms allowed some New Yorkers to enter a fantastic world of nighttime reverie.186 “Everyone’s living out his fantasies” stated Mary Harrison, a woman who had emerged from a subway that was trapped near Midtown Manhattan and had begun to direct traffic.187 The night allowed normally demure people to engage in illicit activities.

A young woman who had traveled to the city from Connecticut “[was] delivered into a cauldron of nightlife (Times Square) that might have scared her even with the lights on,” yet she entered this world with a mix of trepidation and excitement. “I can hardly tell the difference between truth and reality,” stated another happy reveler. 188 In the West

Village, a gay orgy broke out in the street.189 While crowded streets represented menace in the ghettos, “the Times Square subway concourse was crowded with people waiting for news and snacking on donuts and fried chicken from subway stands.”190 Attempts to restore order focused on stories that revealed examples of good citizenry and unity. “One truth is undeniable: New Yorkers know how to cope when trouble strikes their city,” commented one article. In contrast to those who stormed the streets in looted neighborhoods, in Grand Central Station stranded New Yorkers “were somber and bored

185 See Goodman, Blackout, 47. 186 “Night of Terror,” 22. 187 “Tales They Tell: A Walk on the Light Side,” NYP July 15, 1977. 188 Axthelm, “Wild Side,” 31. 189 Goodman, Blackout, 40. 190 Ralph Blumenthal, “No Panic Reported in Subways Among Trapped Passengers,” NYT, July 14, 1977. See also New York Magazine’s August 1, 1977, issue, which claims that “many New Yorkers were at their best” during the blackout, chronicles silly and irreverent stories, and praises blackout “heroes.”

190 and tired and hot, but they sat there and waited.”191 ABC’s July 14th special program on the blackout emphasized that “peaceful people tried to retain a tenuous routine,” as they focused the camera on a man sweeping a sidewalk.192

Not only were looters’ bodies positioned as excessively mobile, but news reports and government documents also emphasized that these itinerant bodies spawned a chaotic and contagious series of events during which lawlessness begat lawlessness. “Forty-one minutes after the blackout began, police officers broadcast over their radio a report of gun shots and looting at West 103rd and Broadway,” stated the DCPA’s report on the events.

“Not very long thereafter, municipal officials realized that thousands of New Yorkers were taking to the city streets to break open and pillage neighborhood stores. The criminality appeared to be spontaneously erupting across much of the city, in thirty-one neighborhoods by later count, virtually all of them enclaves of poor blacks and

Hispanics.”193 “In a rapid sequence of events, many social restraints disappeared,” echoed the CJA’s final report. “The 3000 arrests represented only a fraction of the total number of people involved in looting. After the event, both observers and participants reported that participation in the looting was often encouraged by the relative lack of fear of arrest and by the feelings of peer approval.”194 Even ordinary residents who would not otherwise be engaged in lawless behavior were apparently provoked by the masses.

Curvin and Porter asserted a staged theory of looting, which tracked the increasingly frenzied street behavior in targeted neighborhoods through three phases. The final stage,

191 Deirdre Carmody, “Some Led Others by Flashlight, Some Knocked on Doors to Help,” NYT, July 14, 1977. 192 “Blackout Special Program,” ABC, July 14, 1977: Paley Center. 193 DCPA, Lightless Night, 15. The Federal DCPA offered assistance to the City during the blackout, and investigated how well the City responded to the evening’s events. 194 NYCJA, Summary of Criminal Justice Findings.

191 during which usually law-abiding residents joined seasoned criminals and delinquents, was marked by “hysteria … due partly to the large numbers of people in the streets. The force loose in the street [drew in] the better off, employed, neighborhood resident who seemed to be motivated by abject greed. … From the fairly methodical opening of stores in the beginning, to the pitch of frenzy in Stage III, more and more people poured into the streets, and the police began to chase them up and down.”195 According to Channel 11, in central Brooklyn this chaos challenged the ability of reporters to piece a proper story together; “getting information from the area has been difficult to say the least,” reported the station’s blackout special.196

Depictions of the police force emphasized their struggle to maintain a sense of order on the ground in the face of overwhelming chaos.197 One policeman in the 81st precinct, just on the other side of Broadway in Bed-Stuy, reported that “[the looters] could have taken the precinct if they wanted it.”198 “You just grabbed ‘em,” remarked

Officer Robert Locklear in Bushwick. “There were plenty of them to grab on to.”199 In

Bushwick’s community of around 90,000 residents, only fourteen officers were on duty.200 Roles were reversed and the usual symbols of order carried no weight. “The

195 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, 7, 41. 196 “Blackout News Show,” Action News, Channel 11, July 14, 1977: Paley Center. 197“It was the largest mass arrest in the city’s history, yet it had barely dented the momentum of the looting,” remarks Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 219. 198 Boeth, “Plunderers,” 25. 199 Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 192. Mahler also notes that Bushwick’s 83rd precinct was both racially and structurally incongruous with its surroundings. While the precinct was predominantly white, the neighborhood was almost entirely black and Hispanic. And the structure itself was a large Victorian home that “looked almost like a medieval castle in miniature,” 188. He also stresses that while the neighborhood had the highest crime rate of any central Brooklyn precinct in the year preceding the blackout, there was only an average of thirty- four officers on duty at any one time, 189. 200 Goodman, Blackout, 51.

192 blue uniform didn’t mean a thing,” stated one officer in Harlem. 201 Media accounts of the blackout depicted an all-out attack on the city’s already taxed police force. Although no police officers were killed, newspapers repeatedly described cops as under attack by

“sniper fire” and “rock and bottle throwers.”202 Newsweek’s blackout special reported that “even en masse, the city’s 25,000 man force could not hope to contain an all-out insurrection.”203 In East New York, cop cars were forced to resort to running potential criminals off the sidewalks in patrol cars because of the huge disparity between numbers of disorderly residents out in the streets and the numbers of available officers.204 “In the beginning we attempted to chase people with cars” stated Chief Bracey of the Brooklyn

North area, which contained Bushwick. “But seeing this, they became like flies in a kitchen; you hit over here, and they move there … we never got to the point where we could have a strategy … sometimes the looters were so thick that the police couldn’t even chase them.”205 Channel 11 reported that looters would “scatter” in all directions as officers arrived and images from the broadcast revealed frenzied crowds dispersing and small children cheering as officers plunged into the fray.206 A report from Bronx commanding officer Raymond McDermott to the PD’s Chief of Operations described the psychological effects of such extreme disorder on officers, and contrasted this wildness with the Department’s measured response: “Initially, as in all disorders, the trauma of

201 Selwyn Raab, “Ravage Continues Far Into Day; Gunfire and Bottles Beset Police,” NYT, July 15, 1977. 202 Raab, “Ravage Continues.” 422 cops were injured according to a July 21st memo from the Police Department’s Chief of Field Services to the Chief of Operations entitled “City Wide Compilations of Critique Submitted by Area Commands re: Power Failure and Related Incidents:” Louis Anemone Papers, John Jay College. The DOE’s Impact Assessment cites 436 injured. 203 Boeth, “Plunderers,” 24. 204 DCPA, Lightless Night. 205 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, 63 206 “Blackout News Show,” Action News, Channel 11, July 14, 1977: Paley Center.

193 seeing people, most considered law abiding, looting, wild in appearance, stealing objects, sometimes of no use, can be overwhelming to a police officer not experienced in said disorders. It argues well for the Police Department’s future, when after seeing this and being more or less ‘pushed to the brink’ in feeling frustrated, our personnel could gather

‘their forces’ and be that flexible, rebound with herculean efforts ‘blunt’ the impact of the rioters and with proper aggressiveness, effect [sic] many arrests and bring back order to the affected area, in such a time period.”207 The range of crimes for which defendants were arrested also underlined this preoccupation with disorderly movement in public spaces. Charges against defendants included jostling, disorderly conduct, riot, criminal mischief, and trespassing.208 These charges emphasized that residents’ excessive and disorderly corporeal movements in looted neighborhoods would be severely punished; looters were arrested because their bodies challenged the boundaries of both property and propriety.

In contrast to the chaotic bodies in the streets, many accounts of police response emphasized their corporeal restraint.209 Even though the DCPA admitted that the blackout was in many ways “not comparable” to the riots, “1977 brought out a police response of quite different quality. … The average officer … evidenced a kind of patient fortitude, of internalized discipline, which was sometimes lacking in the ranks a decade before.”210 Yet the number of arrests that took place during the blackout was eight times

207 New York City Police Department, “City Wide Compilations.” 208 NYCJA, Summary of Criminal Justice Findings. 209 Yet Curvin and Porter’s 1979 report explains that while police officers evidenced extreme bodily restraint during the riots, they actually participated more actively with their bodies during the looting, and thus risked more physical harm. 210 DCPA, Lightless Night of Looting, 15. Reasons given for this apparent discipline included a more stringent firearms control law, the seniority of officers on duty, and the efforts of the City toward “reducing racial antipathies” among the force.

194 that of the 1960s race riots.211 William Reed remarked in the News that the praise of police restraint was an outgrowth of the geography of looting: “when looters and arsonists, tired of pillaging their own mean streets, invade these elite neighborhoods, then you will see a prompt and immediate end to stories praising police restraint.”212 These contrasts between chaotic blackout bodies and the officers who attempted to restore order also often obscured the geographic chaos that enveloped the Police Department that night. Many police officers were exhausted by budget cuts, and many more were unwilling to enter the city’s poorest neighborhoods.213 Furthermore, there was a marked disparity between the “high crime” precincts where the majority of destruction occurred, and the “staging precincts” to which the majority of officers reported that evening.214

The City had directed officers to report to the precincts closest to their homes, and with a majority of cops living in Queens, Long Island, Staten Island, and north of the Bronx, the result was an overwhelming amount of police support where it was arguably least needed.215

Descriptions of the legal and criminal justice system’s responses also focused on teeming, uncontainable bodies. Prisoners were held in “sweltering temporary ‘pens’” and

211 “Night of Terror,” 18, 21. The State’s report also detailed the harsher treatment of detainees during the blackout: The New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services Report to the Select Committee on Criminal Justice Emergency Preparedness: Defendants Arrested as a Result of the New York City Blackout, July 13 and 14 1977, by Cynthia C. Wainwright and Christine McKay (September 8, 1977): John Jay College. 212 William Reed, “The Best and the Worst of the Apple,” DN, July 22, 1977. 213 Twelve-hundred auxiliary cops were utilized, according to an August 8th letter of support from acting police commissioner James Taylor to the DCPA’s director Bardyl R. Tirana: Anemone Papers. The DOE’s Impact Assessment states that out of 24,960 total officers, 18,858 were considered available and 17,411 reported for duty, 81. See also Goodman, Blackout, 60-61. 214 These terms are utilized in the DCPA’s Lightless Night. 215 Police reports from the Anemone Papers state that officers both recognized and strongly critiqued this policy.

195 the arrests “swamped the city’s justice system.”216 “The Tombs,” a prison closed three years prior to the blackout for its “inhuman conditions” was reopened for the occasion due to the City’s inability to contain the thousands that had been arrested, and photographs of jail cells depicted huge piles of debris, which burned mattresses and other waste that had been left by prisoners.217 Columnist Tom Wicker commented that “legal order all but vanished in some sections of the city in the hours following the blackout.218

Police “dumped” their charges at the station house and “dove” back into the “sea” of looters with no time to complete paperwork, commented Channel 11.219 Following the restoration of power, accounts focused on both the impossibility of statistically quantifying the damages, and on the frantic search for ways to bring statistical order to the chaos. There was “no way to calculate” the damages, and the blackout would “bury the city further in debt” and also “bury it in paperwork.”220 Yet “at the end, there was a pile of grubby statistics as high as the rubble in the streets.”221 Even the hope for quantifiable data became tainted by the teeming multitudes that poured through the ghettos’ streets. Although these narratives also attempted to recount a story about a municipal government that was unable to handle the massive influx of prisoners, the stories linked this inability to the ooze of disorderly bodies that challenged the very limits of this system. These stories also emphasized the distinction between the named , politicians, judges, and police officers who were able to speak on behalf of

216 Joseph B. Treaster, “Blackout Arrests Swamp City’s Criminal-Justice System,” NYT, July 15, 1977. 217 Jane Perlez and Andy Soltis, “Looters Fill the Jails,” NYP, July 15, 1977. 218 Perlez and Soltis, “Looters Fill.” 219 “Blackout News Show,” Action News, Channel 11, July 14, 1977: Paley Center. 220 Kopel and Kranes, “Pillage.” 221 Boeth, “Plunderers,” 23.

196 prisoners, and the faceless masses who poured from the streets into the houses of detention to be “manacled together.”222

In response to the seemingly uncontainable mobility of looters’ bodies, and its potential to “spread” across the city, media narratives utilized an elaborate and racially charged lexicon of metaphors about barbarism and sickness. This language attempted to construct an obvious and naturalized relationship between looters’ practices and the spaces in which they originated in order to discursively force residents’ bodies to “stay put.” Blackout looters’ “disorderly” mass movements through the streets were described as violently primitive kinetics that threatened to turn urban civilization back into primordial chaos. Looters “swooped in like vultures” and declared “open season on New

York,” and whether they were positioned as nature’s scavengers or partially humanized through hunting metaphors, these city dwellers were consistently described as primitive perpetrators of terror.223 “Looters scattered, roachlike,” “teen-aged boys swagger[ed] like toreadors,” and later metamorphosed into the “the running of the bulls.”224 “I found it hard to believe,” remarked Captain Driscoll of the 81st precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

“[Looters along Bushwick’s Broadway] were like bluefish in a feeding frenzy. … The strongest feeling I had was one of disbelief. I’ve seen looting before, but this was total devastation. Smashing, burning … as if they’d gone crazy. … Indeed, all the goods pouring out of the stores and the people racing madly through the streets seemed to foment emotional outbursts that frightened even the looters themselves, who saw the situation getting out of control.”225 One New York Times column defended these

222 Treaster, “Blackout Arrest.” 223 “Night of Terror,” 17; Boeth, “Plunderers,” 26. 224 Clines, “Down These Mean Streets.” 225 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, 41.

197 animalistic metaphors and claimed that they were not racially motivated, but rather were reflective of the obvious inhumanity of the acts’ destructiveness: “In a non-racial sense they were right [to utilize animalistic terminology]. Inhumanly, the looters attacked with no guilt to their actions.”226 Through the removal of looters’ humanity, the ghettos were depicted as jungle spaces that operated outside of the urban order, thus justifying little assistance from municipal authorities. At times, even the looters appropriated this animalistic language, and described themselves as relentless scavengers that “want[ed] to go in like rats so that tomorrow they [other residents wouldn’t] be able to go to the stores-

[because] there [wouldn’t] be any.”227 This rhetoric of inevitable self-destruction both obscured the conditions that caused the looting, and reified barbaric spaces that exceeded the confines of civil order. “The animal metaphor … separates the behavior of the discontented poor from the conditions that shape their discontent,” critiqued Professor

Herbert Gutman for the Times. Gutman’s contention was soon met with a flurry of enraged critiques.228

According to many accounts, looters and looted areas were infected with a self- destructive illness. In “the scabrous ghettos,” which were infected with an “invisible cancer,” “cars were “disemboweled for parts.”229 Likewise, a candy-store owner “saw his store disemboweled onto the Brownsville sidewalk” while steel gates that protected other stores were “yank[ed] out like baby teeth.”230 The urban landscape itself had become a sick body, and the actual bodies contained within it were “struck” by a “fever.”

At times, this sick body was also infected with illicit sexual desire. The night was

226 , “Christmas in July,” NYT, July 18, 1977. 227 Boeth, “Plunderers,” 26. 228 Gutman, “Kosher-Food Rioters.” 229 “Night of Terror”; Severo, “Two Blackouts” NYT, July 16, 1977; Boeth, “Plunderers.” 230 Clines, “Down These Mean Streets.”

198 described as “an orgy of looting” that included “lithe, dark young bodies darting past, laden with booty.” Even a story of youths ripping the clothes off mannequins in a window display was distinctly reminiscent of an act of sexual violence. “Youths stripped clothing from window mannequins, broke their limbs and scattered them on the floor,” stated the report. 231 And looting itself had the potential to actually invade the body of the perpetrator: “There is something about the virus of looting that causes a person’s body to hunch and the eyes to become furtive,” remarked Breslin for the News.232

Officers described Bushwick’s 83rd Precinct as a “cross between a foreign legion outpost and a leper colony.”233

Accounts also depicted these dangerously mobile bodies at the margins of productive labor, described streets that were filled with excessive material waste, and asserted that this idleness and excessive materiality were indigenous to these neighborhoods. In looted areas, metaphors of excess, rot, and ooze were utilized to both indicate that these areas had “obviously” ceased to function within the urban order and that this waste was endemic to these spaces. Many news reports commented on the unexpected and potent stenches that emerged in looted neighborhoods, which signified the complete breakdown of the urban order. One correspondent in the South Bronx noted that the “stench [in the streets] was overpowering,” and in Bushwick, “the smell of burned timbers” assaulted reporters.234 Moreover, the panic engendered by blackout activities was described using olfactory terminology and waste metaphors: “I hope they will explain the stench of terror that hung over Times Square as the scum of the city

231 “Night of Terror”; “A Blind Night: Let a Nation Heed the ‘Animals,’” NYT, July 17, 1977; “Night of Terror.” 232 Jimmy Breslin, “Black Deeds Done in the Heart of Darkness,” DN, July 15, 1977. 233 Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 190. 234 “Night of Terror”; White, “Glimpse of Bushwick’s Broadway.”

199 surged along and lined Eighth Avenue,” wrote New York Post reporter Robert

Lipsyte.235 Other striking examples of material excess were found in the descriptions of rotten food and trash in looted areas. After “touring the ravaged south Bronx,” a Time magazine correspondent described “burned-out delivery trucks spilling their seats onto the pavement.” This uncontainable material excess reached its height in a Fedco supermarket where “several inches of mashed produce, packages of squashed hamburger, rivers of melted ice cream and broken bottles covered the floors.”236 Similarly, residents in Bushwick “wandered ankle deep through litter.”237 “At times,” reported Pete Hamill for the News, “it was if some multiheaded beast was devouring everything in its path, and would be sated only after eating enough plastic and metal.”238 This geography of excessive waste was not only emphasized in newspaper accounts, but also in mayoral press releases; a July 19th release remarked that 500 tons of refuse had been collected from looted areas.239 The ooze of wasteful and rotten garbage in these disordered spaces stood in stark contrast to reports of a tony West Village restaurant where health inspectors arrived to “taste the fresh fruit and portions of a prepared shish kebab … [and to examine] by touch and smell the melons, cherry pies and breaded shrimp in the restaurant’s refrigerator.”240 Although it is certainly not surprising that fancy shish kebabs and breaded shrimp were found in this gourmet restaurant, the description of contained and healthful foods was explicitly positioned against the rottenness of trash in

235 Lipsyte, “Strange Logic.” 236 “Night of Terror.” 237 Richard Gooding, “The Great Blackout: Looters’ Haul in the Million$,” NYP, July 15, 1977. 238 Hamill, “Black Night.” 239 City of New York, Testimony of First Deputy Mayor Donald Kummerfeld before the Joint Legislative Committee Hearing on the Consolidated Edison Blackout, Beame Press Releases, July 19, 1977: City Hall Library. 240 Patricia L. Raymer, “In Wake of Blackout, Agents Find Little Spoiled Food in Markets,” NYT, July 16, 1977.

200 looted areas. While spoiled food was certainly matter “out of place” in the rest of the city, it was seemingly indigenous to the “rotten” neighborhoods pillaged during the blackout.241 Though the New York Times report concluded that virtually no spoiled food had been found by City Health Inspectors, they had presumably not traveled to places like the Fedco supermarket in the Bronx. While some Manhattanites were busy “looking out for cream-filled items that looked limp or had ‘lost their steam,’” the widespread destruction of poorer neighborhoods had resulted in the absence of basic food items.242

“I’m trying to find bread … I can’t find none,” one woman remarked.243

Although residents of looted neighborhoods may not have been able to “find bread” after the night’s destruction had left virtually all stores closed, it was exactly the divide between “necessity” and “luxury” stolen items that came under fire in the media.

Descriptions of the stolen products emphasized that the excessiveness of these items was evidence of residents’ inability to engage in healthy place-making practices. While

Curvin and Porter’s study maintained that more than a third of total looted stores sold clothing or food, critics argued over the images of people stealing liquor, jewelry, washing machines, and furniture.244 As columnist William Safire wrote: “they took toasters, not bread; liquor, not milk.”245 “What was a lark for midtown revelers, sheer

241 Tim Edensor refers to sensually disordered elements of the landscape, particularly those that are experiencing some sort of decay, as “hidden excesses of the urban order.” These hidden excesses, much like Mary Douglas’ description of dirt, are representative of matter out of place and are antithetical to the creation of a strict aesthetic urban order. At the same time, Edensor argues that these bits of matter have the potential to craft new meanings for urban space. See Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, Materiality (New York: Berg, 2005); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). 242 Raymer, “Little Spoiled Food.” 243 “Night of Terror.” 244 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting! Curvin and Porter’s study utilizes Department of City Planning Data to support this contention. 245 Safire, “Christmas.”

201 terror for those trapped on trains, and inconvenience in the very least for the vast majority, was a spree for some others. A shopping spree,” concluded the Daily News.246

Descriptions of this spree emphasized objects that were spilling from stores, shattering on streets, and mixing with looters’ blood as they sifted through broken glass to recover them. At Kiddie Bargain Town in Brownsville, Brooklyn, “looters wadded themselves in, slashing their own vanguard, and popped back out with a ludicrous inventory of baby carriages and strollers and infant paraphernalia.”247 This description revealed that even items that could be construed as necessities in another geographical context, such as baby products, became “ludicrous” in looted neighborhoods. Representations of these objects obscured residents’ potential necessity for them by emphasizing their extraordinary power to destroy the city: “The looters during the recent blackout didn’t just steal some furniture or television sets. They mutilated their communities and assaulted our city,” concluded Mayor Beame.248 This hyperbolically tragic narrative of extraordinary practices once again obscured any semblance of daily place-making practices in looted neighborhoods while also emphasizing that extraordinary destruction was a normal occurrence within these areas. Ironically, the supposed extraordinariness of these acts and objects in some cases actually allowed residents to come closer to “ordinary” life in non-looted neighborhoods. Debates over the nature of the products stolen obscured the relationship of most American consumers to the market at the end of the 1970s.

Although one might not be able to “survive” on a washing machine, it was a symbol of success, efficiency, and the relatively good consumer life that many Americans were living at this time, in spite of the fiscal crisis. According to the Ford Foundation’s report,

246 “The Lights Go Back On,” DN, July 15, 1977. 247 Clines, “Down These Mean Streets.” 248 City of New York, Beame Press Releases, August 4, 1977: City Hall Library.

202 blackout looting was provoked by “a spiritual kind of hunger, deeply felt by the citizens of the ghetto because they simply lack the goods, the material things, and the power to consume them that is so thoroughly emphasized by the media in our society. To have those things is the way to participate in the American way of life.”249 “We’re going to take what we want- and what we want is what we need,” summed up one young black child in Harlem.250

Debates over the luxurious material excess of stolen goods were also connected to arguments about arrestees’ relationship to the mainstream labor force. These arguments further underlined looters’ itinerant position within their neighborhood spaces.

Approximately 40% of blackout defendants were unemployed and although this represented a slightly lower unemployment rate than the general arrest population, it was still an overwhelmingly large number compared to citywide employment statistics.251 In many cases, looters engaged in their own forms of outlaw capitalism and became micro- entrepreneurs within their neighborhoods’ public spaces. “Jewelry, liquor and appliance stores were knocked over immediately- their goods sometimes resold in an ad hoc bazaar on the nearest corner,” and “one group of young entrepreneurs set up shop in a previously

249 Curvin and Porter, Report on the Blackout Looting, 240-241. 250 Goldman, “Heart of Darkness.” 251 NYCJA, A Demographic Profile of Defendants. The CJA’s final report, Summary of Criminal Justice Findings, emphasized that defendants had slightly higher numbers of dependents. In the reports following the blackout, there were debates about depicting the defendants as “better” than the general arrest population in order to endear them to judges. Yet ironically, these depictions sometimes led the public to interpret their behavior as not desperate enough to be justifiable. There was also significant debate over the employment statistics. Note, for example, that the Ford Foundation’s 1978 report estimated between 65-83% unemployment; the CJA countered that the Foundation’s sample size was too small. Goodman also notes that the low welfare rate for arrestees corresponded to the fact that many were young single men, and that employment stats were necessarily compromised because many defendants knew they would have a better chance of being released on bail if they said they were employed, Blackout, 195- 196.

203 abandoned store on 120th Street and openly hawked their goods to all comers.”252

Following the blackout, Curvin and Porter described the general climate of joblessness in the looted areas: “thousands of black and Puerto Rican teenagers … jammed manpower centers to apply for work in the blackout clean-up that paid only 2.35 an hour for no more than 25 hours of work a week.”253

When not depicted as oozing streetscapes that teemed with material waste and excessively mobile bodies, descriptions of looted areas emphasized a climate of extreme absence and desolation similar to Carter’s Charlotte Street. Blackout landscapes were positioned as distant battlegrounds, which widened the discursive gap between marginalized portions of the city and its center, and allowed reporters to function as types of foreign correspondents that recounted strange tales from “the scorched and scattered remains of the city’s blackout battle zones.”254 The chaos in the streets was alternately described using accounts of the Holocaust and the Vietnam War. “I went through

Auschwitz and Buchenwald- the only difference is that there they wore boots and here they wore sneakers,” commented Emil Bernath, a furniture-store owner on the Upper

West Side.255 Depictions of warlike chaos also refocused attention on corporeal disorder. One resident noted that the “the mannequins [stripped] remind me of the dead people I saw in Nam without legs and arms” and in other areas of the city, “mannequins were sprawled like bodies of war victims in the street and piles of glistening glass.”256

Yet despite the intense violence of this battleground language, there were surprisingly

252 Goldman, “Heart of Darkness.” 253 Curvin and Porter, A Report on the Blackout Looting, 239. Goodman notes that 1500 people in Brooklyn reported to manpower centers in hopes of obtaining one of these jobs, Blackout, 191. 254 Kopel and Kranes, “Pillage.” 255 Deirdre Carmody, “Ravaged Slums Facing a Future of Uncertainty,” NYT, July 16, 1977. 256 “Night of Terror”; White, “Glimpse of Bushwick’s Broadway.”

204 few casualties during the night of the blackout.257 And as Mahler notes, this vacancy created a “perverse situation”: because “high-density areas were the first priority … the depleted slums were among the last to get their power back.”258

In the aftermath of the night’s destruction, representations of hyper-mobile blackout bodies were often contrasted with the intransigence of the bodies that now lingered in the streets without apparent aim. In Bushwick, “groups of Puerto Ricans sit around card tables on milk boxes and play dominoes,” reported the Village Voice. “Salsa blares from a new tape deck. The stores along Broadway are either shuttered or gutted.

There is already graffiti on some of the plywood covering broken windows. In yellow spray paint, someone has written: Detroit.” The listlessness of groups of Puerto Ricans

“sitting around,” the rapid materialization of graffiti, and the suggested relationship between the neighborhood and Detroit, another powerful symbol of post-industrial despair, produced a landscape inevitability given over to aesthetic decline and aimless languor. In contrast, a similar scene in Manhattan’s West Village was described as a

“party atmosphere.” “Thousands of people are still in the streets,” wrote the Voice.

“Music blares from new tape decks and transistor radios. Batteries are going for two dollars apiece. One man dances a soft shoe with a mannequin.”259 In the wake of the blackout, Bushwick’s streets were depicted as alternately desolate and menaced by lingering bodies. “Overhead the elevated subway line closes out the sun, giving an added sense of desolation to the street,” wrote Curvin and Porter. “Hollowed-out storefronts stand bleakly along rubbish-strewn sidewalks, their iron gates wrenched apart as if by a

257Time’s “Night of Terror” reported that three people died in fires, and one man was shot attempted to break into a Brooklyn drugstore. Mayor Beame’s July 19th press release reported two deaths. The DOE’s Impact Assessment tallied 204 civilians injured. 258 Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 217. 259 Daly and Hamill, “Here Comes the Neighborhood.”

205 giant hand. Here and there an elderly person sits on a kitchen chair staring into the street; children play in the debris; and unemployed men tinker over the engine of a rusted-out car.”260 “Most hours of the day and night, young men and women loiter on Gates

Avenue, sprawl on the stoops, drink liquor, harass passers-by and hassle them for money” reported the Times.261 The South Bronx landscape was peopled with similarly shiftless bodies. “Walking these streets [the South Bronx] in a cold November drizzle, we saw dozens of young men gathering in hallways or converging at street corners,” remarked

Curvin and Porter. This landscape of empty aimlessness contrasted with that recent July, when “the people who live in these buildings poured out into the Concourse in waves.262

And in a bitterly ironic twist, the aftermath of the blackout signaled municipal attention to the long-neglected practice of street cleaning. “This is the first time street sweepers have been seen on Broadway in three or four years,” concluded men’s store owner

Maurice Phillips.263

Representations of blackout looting positioned Bushwick’s streets as non-places that were inhabited by excessively mobile bodies who could not properly care for their neighborhood. Residents, city officials, and the news media defined urban decline as a natural outgrowth of the chaotic, untraceable, and potentially contagious movements of

Bushwick’s black and Latino bodies. Blackout discourse positioned these practices as both extraordinary in their destructiveness, and indigenous to Bushwick, and this paradox obscured ongoing quotidian acts of survival in the neighborhood. By contrast, the news media, residents, and city officials argued that the domestic practices of white ethnics in

260 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, 26. 261 Gupte, “Bushwick Block.” 262 Curvin and Porter, Blackout Looting!, 143-144. 263 White, “Glimpse of Bushwick’s Broadway.”

206 Bushwick, and across the border in Ridgewood, were dedicated place-making acts undertaken by residents who were fiercely committed to “staying put” in the face of this encroaching decline. Through acts that included everything from the washing of stoops to the baking of strudel, white ethnic residents often valiantly attempted to preserve their neighborhood in the face of Bushwick’s very real physical destruction. But these residents, along with city officials, and the news media, also utilized rhetoric about these practices to produce evidence of white ethnics’ “natural” relationship to a stable built environment. Residents’ domestic practices connected the private space of their homes to the public space of the street, and the resultant “living room blocks” were deemed critical to both the neighborhood and the city’s survival. Ultimately, these practices were utilized to map and police the geographical and rhetorical boundary between decline and survival.

In the fall immediately following the blackout, media representations shifted from the excessively itinerant blackout bodies who wandered Bushwick’s alternately menacing and vacant street spaces to the stalwart survival of the neighborhood’s Italian-American

Casuso family within their own living room. Sponsored by the Daily News, the meeting was intended to be a debate between the four mayoral candidates about the neighborhood and, by extension, the city’s future. 264 Among the group assembled in the living room to question the candidates were a handful of neighbors who had also been chronicled in the

“Our Dying Neighborhoods” series. These neighbors included Kathleen Fisher, “mother

264 The meeting was specifically organized by the paper’s editor, Sam Roberts. Koch’s Chief of Staff Diane Coffey commented on both the News’ sponsorship of the debate, and the way that Koch would later use the paper in unusual ways to keep commissioners “on their toes.” A few months after his election, she noted that Mrs. Casuso phoned the office about a water main break, which Koch immediately reported to the News: Diane M. Coffey, interview with Sharon Zane, March 25, April 16, July 13, 1992: Koch Oral History Project.

207 of six” and president of the Harman Street block association, Willie Ortiz, “father of two,” and Carl St. Martin, a medical student who “decided to stick it out” after his

Trinidadian mother relocated to Long Island. Other guests included chairperson of the local community board Chineda Carter and Eliot Yablon, the director of the City’s

Bushwick Office of Neighborhood Preservation, which was assembling a $50 million plan for the demolition, rehabilitation and construction of housing units in conjunction with the City Planning Commission.265 The room’s walls were “lined with a hand drawn map charting the block-by-block firestorm, and with photos of the Casusos’ oldest children who [had] already left the neighborhood in which they were born and bred.”266

Alongside the photos of “Mr. Casuso hunting … girls in wedding dresses and boys in soldier’s uniforms,” were “antlers … [and a] picture of a country stream, orange with autumn.”267 This intermixing of personal memorabilia with handmade planning charts suggested that the neighborhood’s survival would be composed of equal parts homegrown initiative and technocratic sagesse, and that there was a clear connection between domestic space and the fate of the streets beyond the home.268 The candidates visit served as a vital form of experiential learning whereby “even one personal appearance is enough to strike the senses so severely that only a candidate of no conscience could ever forget the systematic destruction of a community that the mayor

[Beame] never even stopped to see.”269 As the candidates prepared to depart, Kathleen

265 James, “Hopefuls.” 266 Sam Roberts, “They Came to Brooklyn, Even Unto Bushwick,” DN, October 24, 1977. 267 Pete Hamill, “Bushwick and Bush League Solutions,” DN, October 24, 1977. 268 See also Maurice Carroll, “Blighted Neighborhood’s Residents are Moderators in Mayoral Debate,” NYT, October 24, 1977. 269 Roberts, “They Came to Brooklyn.”

208 Fisher commented that “there haven’t been this many cars on this street in years … it’s usually empty.”270

Prior to the meeting, the paper had established the Casusos’ critical relationship to neighborhood change through a number of stories. The Casusos were introduced in the

“Our Dying Neighborhoods” series and the opening story argued that “nowhere was

Bushwick’s deterioration more evident than in the network of places and lives that touched the Casuso family.” The story chronicled friends who had encountered violence and departed the neighborhood, a church struggling to survive, and a deteriorating shopping street. This present landscape was contrasted with the family’s memories of christening their daughter Kathleen in 1967: “Afterward, 25 people walked three blocks to the Casuso household for the christening celebration … In a quiet way on an ordinary block of three-story frame houses this was an exhilarating day, one that spoke of the rewards of living in a neighborhood of hard-working people in a city alive with such neighborhoods. There would not be another day like it for the Casuso family,” the News claimed.271 Amidst the destruction of the neighborhood’s streets, the hopefulness, abundance, and commitment inspired by the Casusos’ private domestic spaces were underlined. The News reported that after workdays, father Octavio “usually relaxes … in the modest backyard of his three-story house. … He snoozes surrounded by his tomato plants and peppers and the comforting hubbub created by his youngest children … [he] enjoys the warmth of the sun on his upturned face- a weary mix of toughness and kindness- and is filled with a sense of well-being.”272 The spaces that surrounded the

270 Hamill, “Bush League Solutions.” 271 Gottlieb, Browne, Hamill, and James, “Dying: Part 1.” 272 Gottlieb, Browne, Hamill, and James, “Dying: Part 4: Bushwick’s Trial by Fire,” DN, August 4, 1977.

209 house offered the family a unique perspective from which to witness and become knowledgeable about decline’s causes. “Mrs. Casuso has lived in her own home on

Harmon Street, near Central Avenue, for almost 10 years,” reported the Ridgewood

Times. “She knows what caused her block and the blocks and the blocks around it to decay. She saw the decline daily, when she hung out her clothes and when she stood on the front stoop; so did her neighbors.”273

The Casuso story became part of a broader narrative that emphasized the relationship between ’ spatial commitment to Bushwick, and the area’s ability to survive. “Bushwick entered the decade of the 1950s as a pleasant predominately Italian community [where Italian Socities] provided a stabilizing influence in the predominately Italian northern section,” reported the Ridgewood Times.274 Two types of potential mobility threatened this survival: white ethnic residents’ exodus from the neighborhood, and the influx of supposedly transient black and Latino newcomers who lacked the spatial dedication of their Italian predecessors. “Despite the influx of new Italian immigrants after 1965, and the fact that these clubs still remain based in

Bushwick, the overall decline of Bushwick was not slowed … [because of the] white middle-class exodus … [which has eroded] the basic foundation of the neighborhood,” the Ridgewood Times went on to claim. According to the paper, this flight was compounded by the influx of the “welfare population,” who were “without roots in the neighborhood.”275 The Casusos’ dedicated spatial immobility was an answer to both the mass exodus of their fellow white ethnics, and the rootlessness of the “welfare population.” The living room debate was announced in an October 12th report that

273 Editorial, “The Answer They Didn’t Give,” Ridgewood Times, October 27, 1977. 274 Clemens, Kelly, and Walthers, “Agony: Part 2.” 275 Clemens, Kelly, and Walthers, “Agony: Part 2.”

210 contrasted this stalwart resistance with the fifty families who had departed Harman Street for “safer neighborhoods” over the course of just three months.276 Yet the stories that recounted these residents’ departures also revealed the spatial commitments shared by both the Casusos’ and their fellow white ethnics. These tragic tales of exodus emphasized the emotional arduousness of these families’ departures, and placed them in an indigenously intimate relationships with the spaces that they inhabited. “After living more than 70 years in the same house in Bushwick [on Harman Street],” the Napoli family “tore up its roots [in October], and another city neighborhood died a little more,” reported the News. By the end of the year a neighboring Italo-American family, the

LaMarcas, had followed suit. The News chronicled the love letter Jo LaMarca and her family had written to their Bushwick home, and this letter further reinforced the seamlessness between these families’ identities and their built environment. “We will never forget you, dear house,” wrote Jo. “We didn’t abandon you or leave you to the vultures who were waiting to strip you of all your dignity.” The LaMarcas moved only eleven blocks away to Stockholm Street, where the Napolis had also relocated, “but it is not in Bushwick,” remarked the News. “It is across the Queens border in Ridgewood, a world away. Sometimes, when he looks out his window Tony LaMarca feels disoriented for a moment to discover that he is not looking at Harman Street. Each day, he drives back and sits in his car studying the old, wood frame house, thinking that if it hadn’t been for the fire, he would still live there.”277 In the wake of these departures, the Casusos

276 Auletta, Streets, 10. 277 Gottlieb, Browne, Hamill, and James, “A Glimmer of Hope in Bushwick: ‘We Will Never Forget You, Dear House,’” DN, December 28, 1977.

211 wondered how long they could last and Octavio commented that he could no longer sleep at night for fear of his building’s destruction.278

Yet the Casusos remained in their home, and news stories depicted the family as a consistently imperiled, lone survivor amidst a sea of ongoing destruction that had been gravely exacerbated by the blackout. In the two square blocks that surrounded their home, only twenty-one out of fifty-nine buildings were still occupied, and within four days of the debate, “three fires- including one fatal one- burst out within a block” of their house.279 As patriarch Octavio relaxed in his bountiful backyard, decay threatened the peaceful semi-private space he had constructed: “The scene is idyllic until you look beyond the greenery,” argued the News. “Looming above his backyard is a ghostly row of charred paneless windows- the backs of burned out houses along a deathly one-block stretch of Green Avenue.”280 Yet amidst this rapidly encroaching despair, representations of the Casusos’ practices emphasized their continued immobility, and inherent toughness.

Following the departure of their next-door neighbors, patriarch Octavio “took to the porch of the unoccupied house every evening to ward off potential arsonists. He sat in a folding beach chair, a shotgun in his lap.”281 Octavio was a fierce “professional wrestler turned mover” and mother Kathleen refused to succumb to street terror.282 “Until [the day of the visit], there may not have been anything more unusual about Kathleen Casuso than the fact that she rides the M train home at midnight from her job as a proof clerk in a

278 James and Gottlieb, “Family with Roots Flees Hell of Burning Bushwick,” DN, October 12, 1977. 279 Gottlieb, Browne, Hamill. and James, “Glimmer of Hope.” 280 Gottlieb, Browne, Hamill, and James, “Dying: Part 4: Bushwick’s Trial by Fire,” DN, August 4, 1977. 281 Mahler, Bronx Is Burning, 212. 282 Gottlieb, Browne, Hamill, and James, “Glimmer of Hope.”

212 bank and is unafraid,” reported George James for the News.283 Stories about this emboldened spatial resistance related the Casusos’ practices to the broader struggles of middle class families throughout the city. The Christmas following the debate, Martin

Gottlieb wrote that the Casusos’ “determination to stay in Bushwick has become symbolic of the desire of hard-pressed and middle-class families throughout New York to stick it out in the midst of adversity.”284 The Casusos also became part of a narrative about struggling white ethnic families who remained in declining neighborhoods partially as a result of economic circumstances. At the debate, Mario Cuomo worried about “the people who are stuck and can’t get out.”285

Although reporter Pete Hamill had speculated about Koch’s belief that “nothing that would happen in that room would really change the election,” the Koch administration, the news media, and the Federal Government, subsequently argued that the living room meeting produced tangible changes to the neighborhood and was vital to understanding the city’s fate.286 Some changes were immediately experienced at the street level; “Already there were results,” reported the News. “On Saturday, the few families left on Harman Street were startled by the sight of a City Sanitation Department

Mechanical Sweeper dispatched on the eve of yesterday’s unprecedented political and press pilgrimage to a non-disaster in a dying neighborhood.”287 By December of that

283 James, “Hopefuls.” 284 Martin Gottlieb, “Hope for the Neighborhoods,” DN, December 24, 1978. 285 Fallon, “Candidates Debate.” As an Italian American living in the racially transitioning neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens, Cuomo had a particularly personal stake in the fate of Bushwick and Ridgewood’s white ethnics. See Chapter 2’s discussion on Cuomo’s campaign rhetoric. 286 Hamill, “Bush League Solutions.” 287 Roberts, “They Came to Brooklyn.”

213 year, one resident commented that “you can sense [the turnaround] on the streets.”288

Again, the Casusos’ domestic practices were related to this burgeoning renewal, and as

Christmas approached, “in accordance with an old German traditions that Mrs. Casuso’s family has carried out for nearly 100 years in Bushwick, they will climb on chairs, take a piece of herring in one hand, and a penny in the other and jump off at the stroke of midnight.”289 Interestingly, this domestic holiday tradition was not only connected to the

“glimmer of hope” in the neighborhood streets, but it also linked the Casusos as Italian

Americans to Ridgewood’s significant German population.

Both the living room visit and a later tour by the Federal Government were positioned as critical tools through which to understand decline even as they actively produced their own understandings about what constituted decline. “Just as President

Carter’s Bronx visit opened his eyes to the enormity of big-city blight,” wrote the News, the candidates visited Bushwick “to see firsthand the racking, flesh and blood torments that make up the vaguely named ‘urban problem.’”290 Although it had been planned before the debate, U.S. Commerce Secretary Juanita Kreps toured Bushwick the next day and awarded a $5 million federal grant, to be administered through the State Urban

Development Corporation, for the transformation of Old Brewery Square in Bushwick-

Williamsburg into a commercial and industrial park.291 “It’s almost impossible to realize that it is as bad as it is until you see it,” she remarked on her “sobering experience” that

288 Gottlieb, Browne, Hamill, and James, “Glimmer of Hope in Bushwick,” DN, December 28, 1977. 289 Gottlieb, Browne, Hamill, and James, “A Glimmer of Hope in Bushwick,” DN, December 24, 1977. 290 “Bushwick Agony,” DN, October 25, 1977. 291 Clemens, Kelly, and Walthers, “Agony: Part 2.”

214 day. “Devastation is the right word.”292 This revelation of despair conjured both Carter’s

“sobering” trip to the South Bronx and the mayoral candidates grim walk around the

Casusos’ block. Following Ed Koch’s election as mayor, the Casusos’ home was tied to the “home” of municipal government. In January of 1978, Koch invited the family to

Gracie Mansion on the premise that “they took me into their home, so I invited them to mine.”293 He later remarked that “social values” cannot come from government but must be produced by the family, church, and smaller community groups and referenced the

Casusos’ living room among these morally critical spaces.294 By the end of Koch’s tenure in the late 80s, the Mayor credited the living room meeting with the groundbreaking of a housing project in the area.295

As the Casuso narrative argued that the interior of a white ethnic family home was critical to the survival of the surrounding neighborhood’s streets, stories about

Ridgewood similarly connected residents’ ethnic heritages to the neighborhood’s ability to withstand this crisis. While this narrative escalated following the blackout, its roots were established during the late 60s, when shifting conditions in Bushwick provoked tangible fear among Ridgewoodites. On the Queens side of the line in 1969, the U.S.

News and World Report suggested that Ridgewoodites were part of a larger national narrative about white ethnic morality and geographical insularity. “No Americans wear the badge of respectability more proudly than the 40 million of ‘ethnic’ background,” commented the report. “And none are more resistant to intrusion.”296 Three years earlier,

292 Browne and Gottlieb, “Mrs. Kreps Views Blighted Brooklyn, Awards a 5M Grant,” DN, October 25, 1977. 293 Hamill and Gottlieb, “In Year After Blackout, A Street Dies in Brooklyn,” DN, July 13, 1978. 294 Paul La Rosa, “Bushwick: Reviving,” DN, July 12, 1987. 295 Susan Heller Anderson and David W. Dunlap, “New York Day by Day,” NYT, July 13, 1985. 296 U.S. News and World Report, November 24, 1969.

215 the local argued that “Ridgewood remains essentially the same

German-American and Middle European community it has been for 60 years” and that although population shifts were occurring to the south and west of the neighborhood, these stalwart ethnic groups remained largely unaffected.297 By 1977, the Post emphasized that although the German population had declined, and Italians and Austrian

Gottscheers had increased, the neighborhood still boosted the city’s largest German

American population.298 The Ridgewood Times suggested that Bushwick would benefit by adopting this type of ethnic insularity in order to survive the aftermath of 1977’s destruction. “The struggle for decency, stability, and normalcy in Bushwick is an unrewarding and seemingly endless task,” argued the Ridgewood Times. “Neighborhoods cannot survive without this sense of particularity and identity. Some might call this

“community,” others “ethnicity.” Call it what you want, but the identification of oneself in space, time and history is the antidote to alienation and rootlessness … Bushwick needs a little parochialism.”299 And despite the serious changes that affected its

Bushwick neighbor, in 1986 the Daily News argued that “more than any other neighborhood in Queens, Ridgewood has remained both the same visually and in spirit for nearly a century. Because so many first-generations settle here, it is an area that still believes in the American dream. There is a strong work ethic.” According to the article, one of the area’s most appealing aspects was its “homey character.”300

297 Gene Gleason, “Ridgewood Straddling Two Boroughs Has Strong Sense of Identity,” NY Herald Tribune, March 13, 1966, Sunday edition. 298 Peter Freiburg, “Ridgewood Tries to Chase Decay from its Doorstep,” NYP, March 14, 1977. In my discussion with John Dereszewski, he describes the transition from German to Italian inhabitants as a continuation of the “same community.” 299 Clemens, Kelly, and Walthers, “Agony: Part 5.” 300 “Ridgewood,” DN Magazine, November 9, 1986.

216 This connection between supposedly immutable ethnic history and neighborhood survival was further bolstered by news reports that suggested an indigenous relationship between white ethnics and the neighborhood’s physical streetscapes. On March 14,

1977, the New York Post revealed “a typical Ridgewood street scene” of children playing.

Reporter Peter Freiberg maintained that what was geographically “typical” about the street included both ethnic and moral characteristics: “With residents and others familiar with Ridgewood, the same words usually crop-up: Loyalty. Affection. Ethnic. Close- knit. Clean. Safe. Hard-working people. A good neighborhood.”301 By connecting ethnic and moral traits to a clean and safe built environment, and by evidencing this connection through a photograph of a supposedly “typical” scene, the article naturalized the relationship between ethnicity, morality, and a particular kind of streetscape.

Moreover, public officials declared that this particular kind of ethnic streetscape was part of a network of similar spaces across the boroughs that were deemed critical to the city’s survival. “It’s one of your typical New York ethnic neighborhoods,” commented the director of the City Planning Department’s Queens office. “If it begins to fall apart … that would be a very serious cancer for all of Queens.”302 And even if the physical streetscape was destroyed, the spirit of particular ethnic blocks was deemed so strong that it could even be transported far from its original geographic location. While Bushwick’s

Greene Avenue was declared “dead” in a 1978 report, it “[rose] from the ashes of memory … 45 miles and a lifetime away” in Huntington, Long Island at a neighborhood reunion of Italian former residents.303 And in 1980, a small sliver of Hart Street between

301 Peter Freiburg, “Ridgewood Tries to Chase Decay from Its Doorstep, NYP, March 14, 1977. 302 Freiberg, “Chase Decay,” NYP, March 14, 1977. 303 Stewart Ain and George James, “Brooklyn Street’s Reborn During a ‘Picnic of Love,’” DN, 1978. The News’ “Dying: Part 2,” on August 2, 1977, also referred to Greene Street as a “model

217 St. Nicholas and Cypress Avenues, which was located a block from the border and had supposedly remained a “bastion” of the old Italian neighborhood, was named a “model block” by the City. This model block status conflated ethnicity, values, and the built environment.304

In contrast to representations of looters’ transient, seemingly placeless practices, reports from Ridgewood emphasized residents’ variety of place-making practices.

Similar to the Casuso meeting, representations of these practices attempted to connect interior, domestic spaces to the neighborhood’s streets, and advanced this connection’s criticality to the area’s survival. The first way in which residents produced these “living room” blocks was by cleaning the areas immediately adjacent to their homes.305 In

March of 1977, the Post reported that that Ridgewood was trying to “chase decay from its doorstep,” and Mathias Kump, a resident of Gottscheer origin, was canonized as one of the battle’s most valuable soldiers who “sweeps his stoop and sidewalk ‘everyday, sometimes twice,’” in Kump’s words.306 The ability to control blight at the micro-scale of the stoop was echoed in a 1978 Daily News report on the rat infestation, which assumed that the creatures could not possibly belong in “a spotless neighborhood where the housewives even wash down their stoops.”307 Kerzner underlines the importance of the stoop as a semi-private space that reflected the neighborhood’s changes: “[change]

block.” “For some reason everything else was burning down around it and the block seemed so good. Now the cancers in there,” commented Fireman Barey Feeney. 304 Garry Pierre-Pierre, “New Wave of Immigrants Changes a Once-Italian Bastion,” NYT, September 18, 1994. 305 News media and governmental accounts emphasized these white ethnic practices on both sides of the border but because Ridgewood was primarily composed of white ethnic residents and was threatened with imminent decline rather than already ongoing destruction, many more stories about these domestic practices emerged. 306 Freiberg, “Chase Decay.” 307 Editorial, “It’s Ironic,” DN, January 4, 1978.

218 started to come in the late 60s … plants on people’s stoops being stolen or broken. You couldn’t put out holiday decorations as easily for fear of either being destroyed maliciously or stolen.”308

Not only were stoops critical bellwethers of a changing urban landscape and staging grounds for the daily battle against encroaching decline, but they were also related to the neighborhood’s historical constancy and its ethnic traditions. In an article on intra-city ethnic touring, New York Magazine commented that “we don’t want to belabor any compulsive hausfrau stereotypes, but the fact remains that Ridgewood is squeaky clean. You could eat off the stoops of the three-story turn-of-the-century row houses of peach and apricot brick that are characteristic of most of the neighborhood.”309

Although the article attempted to eschew stereotypes, by invoking the “compulsive hausfrau,” it tacitly linked a mythical German housewife’s body to the “squeaky clean stoops.” The stability and continuity that was produced through cleaning stoops and shared building lobbies comforted a former resident who returned to the neighborhood in

1980. “I was sure that after 50 years Seneca and the surrounding neighborhood would be victims of neglect and decay. But I was wrong: the old box-like building was just as I had remembered it- clear, well cared for, dignified. The handrails on the iron banisters gleamed with fresh varnish. The tile floor was spotless and the metal fire doors at each apartment looked newly painted.” The report contextualized these everyday cleaning practices within a larger narrative of Ridgewood’s economic survival, which was explicitly tied to area’s “steady influx of blue collar workers from Europe,” who had

308 In discussion with the author, July 2011. 309 Peter Freiberg and Lindsay Van Gelder, “Touring Europe Right in Town,” NY Mag, June 29, 1981.

219 helped stave off “urban deterioration.”310 And when stories about stoop-cleaning practices conceded how these practices did change somewhat over time, these representations stressed residents’ consistent investment in cleanliness. In 1983, when a large section of the neighborhood garnered Historic District status on the National

Register, cleanliness practices were linked to the area’s historical import and architectural value. Although “stoop-scrubbing is not as prevalent as it once was, ‘there is still a lot of sweeping,’ and neatness is much valued,” remarked the Greater Ridgewood Restoration

Corporation’s historical expert Donald Presa when the neighborhood was awarded this status.311

Residents extended these cleaning practices beyond the stoop and into the neighborhood’s streets as a way of policing the border. “Not dumbing down was very important. If you’re going to move into Ridgewood, there are certain standards. If people want to have that standard [the other standard], they already have it. It’s called

Bushwick,” Kerzner comments about his recollections of board meetings in the late

1970s.312 Ridgewood’s cleanliness served as a distinguishing factor for building inspectors in 1977, when chief inspector Marvin Perlmutter stated that “to our surprise,

Ridgewood was pretty clean, very clean in relation to the abandoned building situation in other parts of the borough.”313 Ridgewood’s distinctive cleanliness was perpetually imperiled by Bushwick’s unsanitary appearance and in 1978, the Daily News insidiously linked demographic transitions to a dirtier streetscape.314 In 1984, the Community Board

310 Jack Goulding, “Going Home: Growing up in Ridgewood,” Ridgewood Times, April 10, 1980. 311 Ruth Marks Stout, “Ridgewood Still as Sturdy as a Brick,” Ridgewood Times, 1983. 312 In discussion with the author, July 2011. 313Jerry Schmetterer, “Abandoned Buildings Found No Menace to Bustling Ridgewood,” DN, October 5, 1977. 314 Thomas Pugh, “Ridgewood Residents Irked by Sanitation Service,” DN, November 14, 1978.

220 that encompassed Ridgewood developed a “rotten apple” award for the worst sanitation violators. The award’s text declared that the board “has been consistently in the forefront of diligent sanitation code enforcement … in order to maintain our communities’ traditional high standards of cleanliness.”315 In its housing development program for

Bushwick, which began in the aftermath of the blackout and was completed in 1986 with a total of over 900 rehabilitated and newly constructed units, the Koch administration suggested that Bushwick could become part of the renewal narrative through everyday cleaning practices that were linked to broader homeownership ideals.316 At the final phase’s dedication ceremony on Linden Street, “Koch handed bread, salt, brooms and fruit baskets” to some of the new tenants. “The brooms, Housing Authority spokesman

Val Coleman told the crowd, were for ‘a clean sweep.’” Brooklyn Borough President

Howard Golden declared that ‘the days of arson’ were over and that city officials “had come back to Bushwick to bless it anew in its opening days of wine and roses.”317

Residents also constructed living room blocks through practices aimed at rehabilitating and maintaining the neighborhood’s building stock. While these efforts certainly helped the area’s physical streetscapes to survive, these acts also reinforced the idea that Ridgewoodites were intimately connected to the neighborhood’s bricks and mortar; through these practices and the discourse that surrounded them, the built environment became an anthropomorphized extension of its inhabitants’ bodies.

315 City of New York, A Guide to Community Board Participation in Planning the Delivery of Sanitation Enforcement Services (May 1984): City Hall Library. The neighborhood was also given a “self-help” award for cleaning practices by The Citizens Committee for New York City in 1979: Cited in Karin Carlson’s New York Self Help Handbook: A Step by Step Guide to Neighborhood Improvement Projects (New York: Citizens Committee for NYC, Inc., 1977): Neighborhood Preservation Center. 316 For a fuller discussion of the ways in which Koch linked everyday practice to homeownership, see Chapter 5. 317 Caryn Eve Wiener, “A Street Grows Strong in Bushwick,” Newsday, October 24, 1986.

221 Homeownership was a critical piece of this intimate relationship, through which residents produced distinctions between the Queens and Brooklyn sides of the border. In 1980, the

Ridgewood Restoration Corporation encouraged people to own their apartments to ensure the neighborhood’s renaissance. The Corporation’s executive director commented that

“greater Ridgewood ends at Wycoff Avenue, with an unseen wall dividing Queens from

Brooklyn” and that on the Ridgewood side of this unseen wall, “you can see how well- kept [homeowners’] homes are, their windows are shiny clean, their streets swept.”318

The commonsense geography of homeownership obscured the barriers that may have prevented Bushwick residents from following suit. As reported in the 1980 census, only

15.2% of Bushwick’s community district housing units were owner-occupied, compared to 42.4% in Ridgewood’s community district. Of these 25,383 Ridgewood units, 24,991 of these were occupied by white homeowners.319 As Ridgewoodites began to rehabilitate

“Matthew flats” along Palmetto Street in 1978, the Daily News described the buildings as

“sturdy, brick, six family houses built before WWI,” thus emphasizing the relationship between these physical structures’ endurance and their history of inhabitation by early immigrant families. Kerzner, who played an integral role in the efforts, commented to the News that “it’s a sound community. Many people are the third generation of their families to live there. Improvement is just as contagious as deterioration.”320

Assemblymember Rosemary Gunning put her body on the line in 1980 when she spent the night “impulsively and protectively, in an empty building on Palmetto Street,” as part of the Ridgewood Restoration Corporation’s rehabilitation efforts. “‘I don’t know what I

318 William Neugebauer, “Live-In Apartment Owning Urged,” DN, July 20, 1980. 319 City of New York, Community District Statistics. 320 William Butler, “Ridgewood Puts Faith in Old Flats,” DN, April 2, 1978. “Matthew flats” are two-toned brick apartment buildings that are most commonly found in Ridgewood.

222 would have done if the junkies broke in,’ said the woman, gray-haired, pink-faced, smiling like an elf,” the Times reported.321 This story suggested that even a sweet, elderly woman could summon her corporeal resilience in order to protect the neighborhood’s physical structures.

Alongside these do-it-yourself rehabilitation efforts, historic preservation tactics further naturalized the connections between residents’ bodies, the physical streetscape, and the neighborhood’s overall ability to survive. In 1983, the National Register of

Historic Places recognized 3,000 of Ridgewood’s buildings, and the neighborhood replaced Greenwich Village as the nation’s largest historic district.322 As discussions began about the potential of this designation in 1982, the Brownstoner drew a strong connection between the historical building stock and the values of Ridgewood residents;

Polly Campbell reported that “like a small town in the middle of the big city, Ridgewood is a quiet, middle-class neighborhood that has in abundance the qualities that make New

York’s neighborhoods its finest assets- long-time residents with a sense of community, a strong architectural and social identity, and lovely turn-of-the-century homes.” The article emphasized the area’s “German flavor” and made the observation that the homes

“[had] hardly changed appearance” since the turn of the century.323 The quality of the building stock in Ridgewood was not evidence of municipal service provision or economic status, but instead became a naturalized characteristic of the German people.

Once the historic status was achieved, the neighborhood was touted as “a monument to

321 Francis X. Clines, “About Politics: Facing Reality in the Land of Promise,” NYT, March 24, 1980. Interestingly, the article drew a comparison between the broken political promises on Charlotte Street, and the more “hopeful” neighborhood of Ridgewood where Gunning’s work “seems longer lasting.” 322 Bernard Rabin, “Ridgewood Makes its Land Mark,” DN, December 1, 1983. 323 Polly Campell, “Like a Small Town in the Middle of the Big City,” The Brownstoner 13, no. 1 (Jan-Feb 1982).

223 the hard-working middle class, the bricks and mortar of America.”324 Not only was the neighborhood a monument to a class-based work ethic, but its ethnic inhabitants were also as “natural” to the space as the buildings themselves. In a report on the designation, the New York Times remarked that “extended families like the Coppingers, the Tantillos and others, belong to this working-class neighborhood as much as the turn-of-the-century brick rows houses that line its narrow streets.”325 These corporealized buildings also stored ethnic flavors within them. Although the Ridgewood Times commented that the neighborhood’s demographics were shifting, “the European flavor that [historic expert

Donald Presa] speaks of when he refers to the architecture is strictly strudel and sauerkraut.”326

These preservation practices not only naturalized the relationship between residents and the built environment, but they also mapped the border between

Ridgewood’s survival and Bushwick’s decline. By 1985, the ways in which Ridgewood had utilized preservation to draw distinctions between decline and survival were codified into a strategy. “Pride and optimism are growing in the community, for historic designation has placed this quiet, tree-lined community on the map,” commented Kerzner in 1985. And the News argued that “the threatened spread of deterioration from adjoining

Bushwick has been halted in the last year” because of the designation. 327 As the neighborhood celebrated “Preservation Week,” the Ridgewood Times reported that

“declining neighborhoods use preservation as a tool to revitalize while stable neighborhoods, like Ridgewood, use preservation to maintain their integrity and to retain

324 Stout, “Sturdy as a Brick.” 325 Sara Rimer, “Ridgewood Gains Recognition and Quiche May Join the Strudel,” NYT, December 26, 1983. 326 Stout, “Sturdy as a Brick.” 327 Bernard Rabin, “Ridgewood’s Historic Status Excludes Blight,” DN, January 1, 1985.

224 their identity.”328 Kerzner remembers the 1983 designation as a critical moment when the neighborhood transformed from a “rough diamond” to a “diamond in the rough,” and that it gave residents a sense of “buoyancy” and feeling of success that continues through the present-day.329

The ways in which discussions of building preservation sometimes obscured racial and class inequities became startlingly evident in the 1983 Wyckoff Heights neighborhood designation, when a portion of Brooklyn that had formally been known as either Ridgewood or Bushwick was officially renamed by the City Council. While

Bushwick Councilmember Alex Olmedo had initially indicted the renaming as “a ‘racist’ maneuver designed to separate the predominantly white Wyckoff area from Bushwick, which is largely Black and Puerto Rican,” he finally concluded that the “move was designed to foster community pride.” “We still have our respect for Bushwick and

Ridgewood, but New York City is made up of neighborhoods and we wanted our own,” claimed president of the Wyckoff Heights Neighborhood Association Margaret

328 “Ridgewood Celebrates ‘Preservation Week,’” Ridgewood Times, May 5, 1985. 329 In discussion with the author, July 2011. The preservation of the “Onderdonk House” by the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society was also particularly important in demarcating the space between decline and survival, seeing as the building was located on the “official” dividing line between the two neighborhoods. The Society’s proposal for support of the House explained that “the restoration of the Onderdonk House … is symbolic of the fierce commitment of greater Ridgewood to reclaim its heritage. It is also symbolic of an effort to stabilize the Flushing Avenue area of the Brooklyn-Queens border historically noted as the ‘disputed territory.’ Revitalization of this area is critical to the stability of the neighborhoods in view of the rapid decay experienced recently in Bushwick … Bushwick has become synonymous with fire and the looting and violence after the New York City blackout is an agonizing nightmare. Yet the immediate section of Northern Bushwick, adjacent to the Onderdonk House, is still viable.” The letter also reemphasized the connection between the historicity of the building and the neighborhood’s ethnic population and explained that “the composition of the present population of approximately 165,000 persons is also basically unchanged:” Shirley Margolin, Executive Director of the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society, “Greater Ridgewood Community Proposal for Support of the Onderdonk House” (1979): Onderdonk House.

225 Wenzel.330 “Almost an historic oasis, Wyckoff Heights is hardly exempt from the city’s rise in , building vandalism, car thievery and street muggings. The civic group’s goal is to have the area secede from the arson-plagued part of Bushwick that surrounds it on two sides. The community also is trying to develop an identity separate from Ridgewood, Queens, which sometimes shares the same name but never the political power or police protection,” concluded the News.331

In addition to these cleaning, rehabilitation, and preservation practices, the living room block was further produced through consumption along Bushwick and

Ridgewood’s major commercial arteries. These practices and their representations suggested that white ethnic cuisine was “native” to the neighborhoods’ spaces, and that gastronomical abundance naturally emanated from the streets. In 1978, the City recognized that along Knickerbocker Avenue, which was located near the border between

Ridgewood and Bushwick, “many stores retain their Italian identity.”332 Later that year, the administration “rushed to the rescue” of a collapsing building along this same avenue, which was deemed “Bushwick’s busiest and most viable shopping street.” While they had left countless other buildings to burn, the administration argued that “in this case the essential vitality of Knickerbocker Avenue was at stake.” “Housing officials understood that the loss of a building … was more dangerous than bracing it. Such a cut would open one of Bushwick’s healthiest neighborhoods to the diseases of urban blight and decay.

The officials who fought for the building were fighting for the whole street,” concluded

330 Queens Ledger, February 17, 1983. 331 Dinah Price, “Section of Ridgewood Seeks a Name,” DN, November 22, 1981, Sunday edition. 332 Koch Papers (MN41077/#808).

226 the Williamsburg News.333 In 1981, a Knickerbocker revitalization project sponsored by the City and local merchants evoked an “Old World” atmosphere, and building contractor

John Mione remarked that the street had become “a Sicilian village.” “It is that continuity with the past that people there want to preserve and now improve,” the Daily

News concluded. Along the avenue this continuity was directly attributed to white ethnic bakeries and butcher shops, and merchants dedicated themselves to “prevent[ing] another

Bushwick or South Bronx.” Alongside an image of the project director lording over a scale model of rehabilitated stores, the article included photographs of a local baker, cheese seller, and sausage maker. The inclusion of these images suggested that hanging sausages and preparing fresh bread for the oven was as critical to the area’s survival as the official efforts of city planners. In a photograph of baker Mario Zinerco, the caption included Zinerco’s remark that “this neighborhood is where I have my friends and paisanos.”334

Ridgewood’s ethnic culinary abundance became attractive to Manhattanites in the early 80s as part of a growing intra-city tourism movement. Interestingly, this intra-city tourism became part of Koch’s increasingly Manhattan-centric narrative of renewal, and was primarily targeted at Manhattan’s cultural elite who were interested in traveling to the “outer” boroughs in search of “authentic” white ethnic cuisine. A 1981 New York

Magazine article encouraged city dwellers to take advantage of the ability to “tour

Europe right in town,” and declared that “while the tourists from Munich and Milan zip off to Chinatown and Harlem … we cross the water to Brooklyn and Queens and the

333Nedda Albray, “Bushwick Building Saved by City,” Williamsburg News: Koch Papers (MN41077). 334 Albert Davila, “Knickerbocker Ave.’s Dream,” DN, January 25, 1981, Sunday Brooklyn edition.

227 ethnic communities whose forebears come here from Greece, Italy, Norway, Denmark,

Sweden, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Poland and Ireland.”335 Although “probably fewer than half [Ridgewood’s] residents today are German-born or of German-descent,” the neighborhood still maintained a “Germanic flavor” where residents could “get a taste of the Old World.” The Post had remarked on this connection between ethnic identity, commercial arteries and consumption in 1977 when it maintained that although the

German population was on the decline in Ridgewood, “the German influence can be seen on Myrtle Avenue and other commercial streets … [where a diner] even boasts ‘we serve sauerbraten every day.”336

In 1979 and 1980, the City advanced two commercial revitalization plans for thoroughfares on either side of the border, and these projects further codified the border between Ridgewood’s domesticated, healthy “places,” and post-blackout Bushwick’s barren, scorched “spaces.” In Ridgewood, the City’s interest in Myrtle Avenue was informed by local revitalization efforts along that strip, and the project utilized both public and private funds.337 The Myrtle Avenue Local Development Corporation (LDC) opened its offices in August 1979, and worked in conjunction with the City’s Office of

Economic Development to utilize both federal and municipal grant monies.338 LDC president Herman Hochberg stressed that these efforts were critical to the survival of adjacent Queens’ neighborhoods and, by extension, to the city as a whole. “If there is no

Ridgewood,” stated Hochberg, “there is no Glendale, no Maspeth, no Middle Village, no

335 Van Gelder and Freiberg, “Touring Europe.” 336 Freiberg, “Chase Decay.” 337 Kerzner remarks that all of the efforts along Myrtle Avenue at this time were a combination of the City and residents, and also that residents were quite aggressive in getting the City to respond to their needs. 338 “Myrtle Avenue Contract Under Prep,” Glendale Register, August 30, 1979. See also “Grant Aids Revitalization Projects on Avenue,” Ridgewood Times, December 20, 1979.

228 Queens, no City of New York!” According to Hochberg, Bushwick’s deterioration imminently threatened the avenue’s survival, and became visible through shifts in commercial retail. Hochberg told the Ridgewood Times that “the deterioration that began in Bushwick has been spreading slowly across the Queens line into Ridgewood over the past decade. … Our better-quality stores have moved to suburban malls on the perimeter of the city and we have seen more and more vacancies.” For the LDC, the solution apparently lay in suburbanizing the street. “For more than half a century, Myrtle Avenue was a downtown shopping center for people all over south and western Queens. … We want it to become that again by bringing some of the amenities of suburban malls such as trees and benches and better lighting to an 11-block stretch between Wyckoff Avenue on the Brooklyn line and Fresh Pond Road on the Glendale border,” concluded Hochberg.339

Although Myrtle Avenue cut through both neighborhoods, the City’s 1980 plan included only the Ridgewood side of the border.

The City’s Myrtle Avenue plan emphasized the connections between

Ridgewood’s stability and vitality, and the laudable practices of its ethnic residents. “The continued vitality during the past fifty years of Myrtle Avenue’s commercial development, as it runs through Ridgewood, has reflected the area’s health: its exceptionally stable population- predominately blue collar workers, with many senior citizens, its strong economic base and its ethnic variety,” wrote the Planning

Commission. “The residential areas abutting the avenue still retain an old world charm, with the cleanliness, quiet and self-containment of a small town.” The plan suggested

339 “Grant Aids Revitalization Projects on Avenue.” The LDC came out of a Community Board subcommittee formed in 1977 to stave off Bushwick blight. The Myrtle Avenue Business Improvement District (BID) was established in July 1989, which was managed by the LDC. According to Kerzner, it was one of the first BIDs of its kind.

229 that this charm and vitality were the result of an immutable work ethnic and a commitment to homeownership. “Today, the population of Ridgewood is still composed of citizens working earnestly to better their lives,” wrote the Commission. According to the document, the neighborhood’s “extremely stable” population was composed of a particularly high percentage of homeowners as compared to the rest of the city.

According to the City’s study, the avenue was imminently threatened by “urban decline,” which it described as both aesthetic blight and the perception of visual blight on the part of residents. “The signs of recent urban decline are increasingly apparent on Myrtle

Avenue,” argued the City. “The visual blight of deteriorating buildings and offensive signs and billboards, economic decline in many shop vacancies, and lower quality merchandise, and environmental deterioration accompanied by traffic congestion and lack of pedestrian conveniences.” In accordance with the fiscal-crisis era predilection for policing aesthetics, the City indicated that one of the central goals of its efforts was to

“reverse the perception held by market area residents of deterioration, especially in the western end of the study area, and to upgrade the image of Myrtle Avenue.”340

While the Koch administration had begun to recognize and support

Ridgewoodites’ efforts at preservation and rehabilitation, their approach to streetscape beautification across the border in Bushwick positioned these efforts as an uphill battle within a battered wasteland. In January of 1978, two areas of private homes and apartments “in the heart of two of the city’s most rundown, arson-battered neighborhoods

[Bushwick and the South Bronx]” were being considered for landmark status at the city level. “Pinpointed by commission staffers as striking examples of survival in a climate of decay,” the Bushwick section encompassed a 7.5 block stretch between Greene Avenue

340 “Council Okays Wyckoff Designation,” Queens Ledger, February 17, 1983.

230 and Madison Street that included turn-of-the century beer baron mansions and millwork manufacturers.”341 While portions of the South Bronx eventually did get designated,

Bushwick did not achieve this status. Instead, the City suggested preservation in the form of building decals. Commissioner of the City’s Department of Housing Preservation and

Development Anthony Gliedman wrote to Koch in March of 1981 and announced that

“our new decorative sealing program has started and I am hopeful that Bushwick groups will take advantage of this.”342 Many residents in the decaled areas were skeptical. In section of the South Bronx where Carter had walked, residents sardonically suggested that the City might expand its program to include “Mercedes Benz decals to strap to their sides, and decals of strip sirloins for them to eat.”343 In response to harsh critiques, Koch fiercely defended the aesthetic, pragmatic, and emotional value of the program.344

The healthy small town pastoral of Ridgewood’s Myrtle Avenue stood in stark contrast to the City’s description of Broadway for its 1979 revitalization plan. The plan’s cover depicted a barren, ominous street under the elevated tracks, and this wasteland image conjured the specter of the excessive, disorderly blackout bodies who had

341 Gottlieb, “Bushwick, South Bronx Areas May Be Landmarks,” DN, January 16, 1978. 342 Letter from Anthony Gliedman to Ed Koch re Bushwick Taskforce Report,” March 1981: Koch Papers (MN41022/#2099). 343 William E. Geist, “Residents Give a Bronx Cheer to Decal Plan,” NYT, November 12, 1983. 344 See for example, the Mayor’s statement in the Koch Papers (MN41041, Box 98/Folder 9): “When you go into an area- whether it’s in the Bronx and you’re on the Cross Bronx or any other area—when you see these gutted buildings it destroys a community or, if someone is driving across the highway, particularly if they’re looking for a place to locate, the neighborhood is not going to have that kind of appeal if they see the abandoned building. We’re able to take a block or a series of buildings and make the people in that area feel better about the community because they don’t see an eyesore and, yet, we’re not going to demolish it because this year, next year, five years from now, the building is in cold storage and we will repair it … To be knocked for doing that can take the heart out of you,” Koch concluded. The Koch administration’s use of Operation Sealer was not merely an elaborate smoke and mirrors strategy to abandon poor neighborhoods. Some of the impulse behind it was borne directly out of the crisis’ shrinking resources, and was often intended as a stop-gap measure until funds for rehabilitation could be secured. The City allocated $122,000 for the program.

231 annihilated their neighborhood. In contradistinction to the industrious, laboring abundance of bodies along Myrtle Avenue who “attempted to reverse the decline” along the border, the City argued that Broadway had actually been destroyed by its own residents. The plan suggested that the street was a geographic reservoir of rage, and that the blackout had occurred as the result of “deep-rooted, long-festering social problems which were unleashed at the nearest available target- the local shopping street.”345 While

Myrtle’s ethnically infused commercial offerings represented the last traces of healthy abundance that could save the neighborhood, Broadway’s destruction during the blackout

“diminished the available goods and services below the level necessary to serve even the diminished needs of a declining neighborhood.” Furthermore, Bushwick’s despair outpaced the ability of any one plan to truly affect change. “The Broadway corridor has many programs,” wrote the City. “No one program can revitalize the streets.”346 The study implied that the area’s decay was somehow inevitable by suggesting that it defied economic explanation, which was the usual indicator in a street’s decline.

In January of 1980, the border between decline and survival was officially redrawn, and “the residents of Glendale and Ridgewood [became] Queens residents, finally, in the eyes of the Postal Service.” After a long battle spearheaded by

Representative Geraldine Ferraro, the first zip code change in the city’s history was finalized, and 38,000 homes and businesses in Ridgewood and Glendale switched from

Brooklyn zip code 11227 to Queens zip code 11385. The change followed the border between the two counties. Deresweski recalls that Ferraro “created” the postal code issue, and made it an “us versus them” battle but that she had also responded to the will

345 City of New York, Broadway, Brooklyn, 59. 346 City of New York, Broadway, Brooklyn, 11.

232 of the people. The switch had been “overwhelmingly approved by area residents last

May” with over 70% of voters in favor, reported the Glendale Register.347 “For a long time, residents were treated somewhat like step-children [by] being thrown into a postal code in the adjoining borough,” commented Ferraro at the January 13th ceremony. The zipcode change resulted in a “swelling” of “pride of community,” and was explicitly related to the “four generations” of German immigrants that “settled in and never left.” 348

Residents desired the switch for both “practical” purposes and psychological concerns about decline’s meanings. These concerns included the idea that “Glendale and

Ridgewood [were] physically part of Queens County,” worries about the potentially inflated car insurance rates and redlining mortgage practices, “and what some felt was a connection with a borough that was not as highly regarded as the one in which the communities were actually located.”349 Although the Glendale Register questioned the claims that the old code actually resulted in inflated insurance costs, the news media and residents rallied behind “a more important psychological resonance” that was tied to images of neighboring blight.350 “[The Zipcode] was the last part of the umbilical cord that was holding us together,” remembers Kerzner. “There was a great sense of relief psychologically to Queens that we had no nexus to Brooklyn.”351 One resident commented on both the apparently inflated car insurance rates she endured because of her block’s attribution to Brooklyn, and the cultural significance of her geographic positioning when she phoned her agent in New Jersey to remind him that “we’re really in

347 Frank Sammarino, “Effects of the Zip Code Change: We’re in Queens Now,” Glendale Register, January 10, 1980. 348 “Ridgewood & Glendale Get New Zip Code,” Leader Observer, January 17, 1980; Tony Schwartz, “2 Areas of Queens Cut ZIP Tie to Brooklyn,” NYT, September 15, 1979. 349 Sammarino, “Effects of the Zip Code Change.” 350 Tony Schwartz, “2 Areas of Queens Cut ZIP Tie to Brooklyn,” NYT, September 15, 1979. 351 In discussion with the author, July 2011.

233 Queens.” “He always laughs and says, ‘Yeah. I know you’d never live in Brooklyn.

You’d need a tank,’” she stated. 352

This re-designation process officially solidified the border as an obvious and natural spatial division, and this division was again bolstered through Ridgewoodites’ domestic practices. Ferraro remarked that “making the switch will involve considerable community effort,” thus stressing residents’ labor in facilitating this border shift.353

Reports that accompanied the designation commented on residents’ industrious practices on the Ridgewood side of the border. A New York Times article that chronicled the switch noted that along Myrtle Avenue, “an older woman [was] hard at work in front of her immaculately maintained six-family home. Hose and hard brush in hand, she was scrubbing away at the brick walls.” Only two blocks away, there was a palpable change;

“Buildings were burned out and stores were boarded up under the elevated tracks that mark the border of Brooklyn.”354 Interestingly, this remapping of the border often necessitated domestic practices that linked public and private space; each time

Ridgewoodites collected the mail outside their homes, and brought packages to and from their local post office and back into their home spaces, they further solidified the borderline between decline and survival, which had now received an official designation.

This chapter has argued that during the crisis, the definitions of decline and survival were co-constitutive, and that the distinctions between these two concepts were actively produced and policed through representations of spatial practices on both sides of the Ridgewood-Bushwick border. In the wake of the blackout’s revelation of an

352 Schwartz, “Cut ZIP Tie.” 353 “Set Date for Zip Code Change,” Ridgewood Times, June 28, 1979. 354 Schwartz, “Cut ZIP Tie.”

234 imperiled Bushwick, residents, city officials, and the news media argued that the hyper- mobile excess of looters’ bodies and the spaces they inhabited were responsible for the neighborhood’s decline. Looters’ movements were positioned as brazen seizures of public spaces that did not belong to them, as potentially dangerous and contagious acts, as nihilistic practices of placelessness through which residents destroyed their own neighborhood, and as somehow indigenous to this landscape of destruction. In contrast to these hyper-mobile, placeless bodies of decline, representations of white ethnics in

Bushwick and Ridgewood emphasized their quotidian place-making practices of “staying put,” and argued that these practices were critical to the neighborhood and the city’s survival. Through these practices, and the discourse that surrounded them, residents, the news media, and public officials, linked the private domestic space of white ethnic homes to public street space. These “living room blocks” naturalized connections between ethical values, residents’ ethnic bodies, and the built environment. The distinctions between decline and survival were further solidified through official efforts to map

Ridgewood’s spaces, which included historic preservation designations, commercial revitalization projects and, eventually, the first postal code change in the city’s history.

235 Chapter 5: “You Can Tell by the Way I Use My Walk”: Strutting to Survive in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn

The pavement is filthy, the grinding metal from the elevated B train is deafening, and the neon logo that flashes “Saturday Night Fever” is crooked. Yet through his cocksure strut, his full body viewed from the ground up, Tony Manero claims 86th Street as his own. In December of 1977, John Travolta’s disco-dancing character swaggered through the predominately Italian-American, middle-class neighborhood of Bay Ridge,

Brooklyn to the Bee Gee’s infectious beats.1 Both the film, and the New York Magazine article on which it was based, conjured the specter of crisis-era urban decline through aesthetic markers, racialized turf battles, working class malaise, and gender conflict. In the face of these threats, Tony’s self-assured footsteps in his opening strut evidence that

“staying alive” in Bay Ridge necessitated a both intimate and exclusionary claim to his neighborhood’s streets. At Bay Ridge’s bicentennial celebration two years earlier, residents had openly critiqued the City administration’s apparent inability to stave off threats of decline. “Let it be known that Bay Ridge stands ready to fight the decay that is threatening the city. … Bay Ridge is taking the reins into its own hands,” remarked community organizer Al Nahas as he described residents’ dedication to domestic practices that included baking cakes, vacuuming streets, and donating meat.2

This chapter continues my examination of the ways in which both representational and lived practices produced crisis-era space. My analysis of Manero’s

1 Although Travolta’s initial walk technically takes place in the southern Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst, the majority of the film is set in nearby Bay Ridge and is most commonly associated with the latter neighborhood. Both neighborhoods were predominately Italian American. Most news articles about the film described the opening strut as taking place in Bay Ridge. See “High Steppin’ to Stardom: John Travolta Owns the Street, and His Fever Seems Contagious,” Time 111, no.14 (April 3, 1978): 82. 2 “76 Self-Sufficiency is the Spirit in Bay Ridge,” Sunday News, October 5, 1975.

236 strut shifts the focus to a cinematic practice that was intended to be purely representational, yet which affected and was affected by lived practices in Bay Ridge.

Specifically, the chapter considers the crisis-era production of what I call “survival space” in Bay Ridge’s streets. Alongside dominant crisis-era ideas about decline, stories about resilience in the face of decay constructed another kind of affective spatial habitus.

As I began to explore in the previous chapter on Ridgewoodites’ domestic practices and will continue to build upon here, the ways in which residents, media, and government officials naturalized the relationship between ethically valuable emotions of determination and toughness, self-directed practices, white ethnic residents, and

“healthy” neighborhood streets produced this affective spatial habitus. To examine this survival space’s production in Bay Ridge, I analyze the representational space produced through the film, the lived space produced through residents’ practices in the actual neighborhood, and the ways in which the two intersected, informed, and complicated one another. Tony’s strut joyfully argued for the continued vitality of Bay Ridge’s streets, and also seized these streets to the exclusion of the film’s women, homosexuals, Latinos, and African Americans. Alongside the representational spaces constructed through

Saturday Night Fever, Bay Ridge residents also produced ideas about survival through spatial practices that were borne of equal parts disillusionment with the City administration, fear of encroaching decline, and creative ingenuity. These representational and lived landscapes interpenetrated one another. The film relied upon understandings about survival and decline that were produced through residents’ practices, and the spatial ideas produced through the film affected the ways in which Bay

Ridge residents thought about and navigated their neighborhood.

237 Spatializing the film in its Bay Ridge context offers an innovative perspective both for scholarship on Saturday Night Fever and cinema in the 1970s, as well as for historical and sociological works on Bay Ridge and white ethnic neighborhoods during the fiscal crisis. While the majority of writing on Saturday Night Fever has focused on the film’s identity politics and has been largely aspatial, my analysis spatializes Fever and argues that Tony’s strut actively relied upon and produced ideas about the tumultuous crisis-era landscape of white ethnic Bay Ridge. Additionally, there has been no scholarly treatment of Bay Ridge during the crisis to date. By probing the production of space in Bay Ridge, I aim to advance understandings about the place of white ethnic neighborhoods within crisis-era discourse, and to better understand how this discourse relied upon ideas about both representational and lived spaces.3 Both of these interventions will be discussed in more detail below.

Saturday Night Fever tells the story of Tony Manero, a teenager from Bay Ridge who works daily in a local hardware store and lives for the nights when he can take to the floor at the 2001 Odyssey dance club. On the club’s luminescent rainbow floor, the self- directed sexuality of Tony’s moves captivates men and women alike. Outside the club, he is idolized by his small group of male friends with whom he runs the streets. He lives with his parents, sister, and grandmother, and his rather stereotypical Italian-American home life is both claustrophobic and loving. In the club, Tony meets Stephanie, who is also a Bay Ridge resident and dancing queen, but is employed as a secretary in

Manhattan and attempts to convince Tony of the neighborhood’s provincialism.

3 See my introduction for a full discussion and literature review of white ethnic borough neighborhoods during the crisis. See also Chapter 3 for a discussion of the value of studying everyday practices within these neighborhoods.

238 Stephanie’s apparent cosmopolitanism both threatens and disgusts Tony, and his attempted courtship of her challenges many of his long-cherished ideas about heteronormative relationships. As Tony and Stephanie prepare for the upcoming dance contest held at the Odyssey, the lives of his friends are challenged by the neighborhood’s social and geographical changes. Gus is attacked by a group of Puerto Ricans and the friends organize a revenge posse that turns fiercely violent; Bobby C. struggles with his girlfriend’s pregnancy and the religious morality of abortion; and Tony’s brother Frank

Jr. relinquishes the priesthood and returns home to the horror of the Manero family. The film builds toward the night of the dance contest and a battered Tony, fresh from the gang fight, arrives at the club and manages to pull off a majestic, sensuous performance with

Stephanie, set to the strains of The Bee-Gee’s “How Deep is Your Love.” But it is clear that the couple is no match for the other two top competitors, one of whom is a black duo, the other Puerto Rican. When the prize is given to Tony and Stephanie, the fraudulent insularity of his Italian neighborhood finally becomes clear to him. Tony rejects the trophy, begins a fight with Stephanie that ends in attempted , and the momentum of his realization crescendos toward Bobby C.’s suicide off the Verrazano Bridge. Tony then boards the subway alone and travels to Stephanie’s apartment in Manhattan to make amends and plan his future away from Bay Ridge.

Fever’s narrative was widely distributed as the film quickly attained blockbuster status, and was communally consumed among theatergoers during the last moments before the VCR’s takeover of the movie watching experience.4 Despite its modest scale

4 See Edward Berkowitz’s Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). In Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979 (Berkeley: University of California Press,

239 and budget, the film grossed over 100 million dollars in the United States, and 300 million worldwide, which made it one of the top earning films of all time. “Unless you’ve been on an oil rig off the coast of Alaska, you know that ‘Saturday Night Fever’ is the movie of the moment and John Travolta is its star,” wrote gossip columnist shortly after its release.5 After its first theatre run with an R rating, a PG version of the film was produced to cater to the industry’s fastest growing market: young men between the ages of twelve and twenty-four, and this market avidly consumed both the film and the fashions of its central character.6 Fever’s success was complimented by the soundtrack, which sold thirty million copies worldwide and remained the highest selling album of all time until it was replaced by ’s Thriller in 1983. This success transcended musical genres, and the album topped both the pop and R&B charts.7

Many viewers consumed the film as a sort of rock concert and returned to the theatre multiple times to enjoy the music and dance numbers.8 “Stayin’ Alive,” which accompanied Tony’s opening strut, occupied the number one position on the billboard charts for four weeks and eventually went platinum.9 Fever was also an important part of the City’s burgeoning symbolic economy, much of which was centered on the film

2002), David Cook maintains that by 1979, the VCR had one million owners and by 1981, this had increased to three million. 5 Liz Smith, “Gossip Column,” DN, December 19, 1977. 6 See Cook, Lost Illusions, for an explanation of the growth in film consumption among young men. For information on Travolta mimicry, see Angela Taylor, “Around the City, They’re Brushing up on the Travolta Look,” NYT, April 29, 1978. 7 Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010). 8 Cook, Lost Illusions. See also Norma McLain Stoop, “John Travolta: Staying Alive,” Dance Magazine (August 1983) for a discussion of SNF as a “dance” film. 9 “High Steppin’ To Stardom,” 82.

240 industry. In 1977, forty-two films were produced in the city, which represented 280 weeks of shooting, and charted a 50% increase over the previous year.10

Although the disco culture of which the film is a product has sometimes been marginalized, scholars have begun to reevaluate its historical relevance.11 There is a growing literature on disco’s identity politics, and its relationship to broader 70s-era transformations. Many of these scholars have considered how disco functioned as a potential source of empowerment for historically marginalized groups. Bruce Schulman argues that the disputes around cultural nationalism and integration during the 1970s were also fought on the dancefloor; Schulman maintains that disco challenged both whites who considered it too gay and too black, and cultural nationalist movements led by blacks and Latinos, who considered it assimilationist. Robert McRuer discusses how dancers used disco to remake the self in a communal setting that challenged American individualism, and Peter Shapiro argues for the dancefloor’s potential as a unifying, democratic space. Carol Cooper considers the heterogeneity of the disco audience as well as the geographical divisions between these dancers, and Sherrie Inness probes the integral role of women in the culture’s construction. Ethnomusicologist Kai Fikentscher places disco within a longer lineage of African-American expressive culture and gay culture, and examines the intersections between these two lineages. These scholars have also considered the evolution of disco from its gay and black roots to its eventual mainstreaming. Peter Braunstein, analyzes the “heterosexualization” of disco culture in

10 City of New York, Mayor Koch Press Releases, August 16, 1978: City Hall Library. See also my introductory discussion about the expansion of filming under Lindsay, scholarly investigations of the 70s as a singular moment in New York’s film history, and in particular Miriam Greenberg’s discussion of the City’s symbolic economy in Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World (New York: Routledge, 2008). 11 The film was also recently placed on the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry.

241 70s New York, while Alison Echols’ Hot Stuff complicates the dualism between disco’s transgressive beginnings and ultimate commercialization. Gillian Frank and Tim

Lawrence consider disco backlash at the end of the 70s, and argue that this backlash was linked to broader white working-class, hetero-masculine anxieties.12

While SNF has sometimes been regarded as the height of this assimilationist sentiment, the film’s portrayal of disco culture among white ethnics in Bay Ridge is far from utopian, and different ethnic and racial groups face off rather than mix happily on the dancefloor. 13 According to Lawrence, the film is a “sober condemnation of the lifestyle that it supposedly celebrates.”14 While “disco is often criticized for being either apolitical or politically regressive,” echoes Echols, “the film is gritty and surprisingly bleak as it chronicles the prejudices, anxieties, and all-around unsettledness of those

12 Peter Braunstein, “Adults Only: The Construction of an Erotic City in New York during the 1970s,” in America in the Seventies, eds. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 129-156; Carol Cooper, “Disco Knights: Hidden Heroes of the New York Dance Music Underground,” Social Text 45 (1995): 159-165; Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010); Kai Fikentscher, ‘You Better Work!”: Underground Dance Music in New York City (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan Press, 2000); Gillian Frank’s “Discophobia: Antigay Prejudice and the 1979 Backlash Against Disco,” The Journal of the History of Sexuality 16, no. 2 (2007): 276-306; Sherrie A. Inness, Disco Divas: Women and Popular Culture in the 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2003); Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day: The History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Robert McRuer, “Gay Gatherings: Reimagining the Counterculture,” in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, eds. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 215-240 ; Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001); Peter Shapiro, Turn the Beat Around (New York: Faber & Faber, Inc., 2005). Lawrence also charts the evolution of disco culture from the “reclusive” paradigm of underground dance spaces to the “exclusive” paradigm of high-profile clubs like Studio 54. 13 In “Adults Only,” Braunstein argues that disco’s mainstreaming actually predated SNF and attributes this mainstreaming instead to the Brady Bunch episode that aired on November 26, 1976. In Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound (New York: Routledge, 1999), Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson argue that while the dancefloor was a neutral space in Manhattan, Brooklyn clubs were highly concerned with territoriality. 14 Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 305.

242 times.”15 In many ways, Fever’s enormous commercial success and merchandising of its soundtrack place it within the “blockbuster” era of film making that began in 1975 with

Jaws and is most recognizably signified by 1977’s Star Wars.16 But despite this mainstream success, the film’s actual content occupies a more complex place in cinematic history by channeling much of the anti-authoritarian energy and decline aesthetics of the previous New Hollywood era.17 Film scholar Thomas Elsaesser comments on the “unglamorous everydayness” of these films’ geographic landscapes, and the “crisis of masculinity,” which afflicted their “unmotivated heroes.”18 Despite

Manero’s captivating moves on 2001 Odssey’s dancefloor, it was precisely the

“unglamorous everydayness” of the Bay Ridge neighborhood that lent his character an air of what viewers perceived as “authenticity.”

Of the relatively few scholars who have treated Fever specifically, most have attended to the film’s identity politics, and have argued over the extent to which the film critiqued the normative racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual landscape.19 Echols contends

15 Echols, Hot Stuff, 194. 16 Though it is interesting to note that even Jaws comments on urban decline: the film’s protagonist is a retired NYPD officer who flees the city. 17 “New Hollywood” refers to the era that followed the collapse of the old studios due to anti-trust laws. As the stringent Hays Code for films dissolved, filmmakers became freer to craft more challenging narratives. In The New Hollywood: From Bonnie & Clyde to Star Wars (London: Wallflower, 2005), Peter Kramer distinguishes between two phases of this New Hollywood era, and places the start of the second in 1977. 18 In The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U.P., 2004), 282, Thomas Elsaesser cites the peak of this period as the years between MLK’s murder and Nixon’s resignation. He also mentions tension in these films between the “realness” of their geographical locations and these locations’ symbolic import. 19 Shapiro comments on the radical significance of SNF through Manero’s realization of Bay Ridge racism. See also Frank; Chris Jordan, “Gender and Class Mobility in Saturday Night Fever and Flashdance,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 24, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 116-122; John Cooke, “Patterns of Shamanic Ritual in Popular Film,” Literature/Film Quarterly 12, no. 1 (January 1984): 50-57; Joseph Kupfer, “Stayin’ Alive: Moral Growth and Personal Narrative in Saturday Night Fever,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 38, vo.4 (2007):170-178; Kelly

243 that the film “reveals the city’s postindustrial turn, shifting sexual landscape, and upended gender and race rules.” In particular, she maintains that Fever sought to

“expand, not constrict, the parameters of masculinity,” and cites Travolta’s opening strut as part of this challenge through its pleasurable focus on material consumption. 20

Moreover, Tony’s implicitly subversive gender performance, much of which stems from disco dancing’s queer roots, produces a narrative arc that is surprisingly non-normative.

In the end, albeit after attempting to sexually assault Stephanie, Tony eschews the hyper- masculinity of his chauvinistic Bay Ridge compatriots and flees to Manhattan; he accepts the help of Stephanie, not as a romantic partner, but as a friend who has entered into the island’s white-collar service economy that has left Tony and the film’s male characters behind; and his ultimate rejection of the club’s refusal to grant the Puerto Rican couple their rightfully earned contest prize is explicitly anti-racist, argues Echols. Shapiro also argues for the radical significance of Fever as Tony rejects his neighborhood’s racism.

While these scholars have thoroughly treated issues of race, gender and sexuality, they tend to overlook how these ideas were explicitly connected to the city’s transforming urban landscape and, specifically, to the predominately Italian-American neighborhood of Bay Ridge. With the exception of Echols, who does mention some of the ways in which the Bay Ridge landscape was utilized by the film’s production team, scholars do little to examine SNF’s relationship to the changes that the city and the

Ritter, “Spectacle at the Disco: Boogie Nights, Soundtrack and the New American Musical,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 28, vo.2 (Winter 2001): 166-175; Jeff Yanc, “‘More Than a Woman’: Music, Masculinity and Male Spectacle in Saturday Night Fever,” Velvet Light Trap: A Critical Journal of Film and Television 38 (Fall 1996): 39-50; Greg Keeler, “Saturday Night Fever: Crossing the Verrazano Bridge,” Journal of Popular Film & Television 7, no. 2 (1979): 158-167; K. Bradford, “Grease Cowboy Feather; or, the Making of Johnny T.,” Journal of Homosexuality 43, no. 3-4 (2002): 15-30; M. Heyer-Caput, “Italian-American Urban Hyphens in Saturday Night Fever,” Italian Americana 29, no.1 (2011): 34-39. 20 Echols, Hot Stuff, 185.

244 neighborhood were experiencing. Berkowitz treats Fever as a “cultural mirror” that

“contains nice glimpses of a declining neighborhood on the fringes of the urban action.”

“The people in the neighborhood lead out-dated lives,” he writes, “eating chop suey in

Chinese restaurants and wearing clothes that the audience recognizes as cheap and loud.”21 Lawrence comments that SNF’s consumption was largely “decontextualized and dehistoricized,” and Schulman argues that the film’s narrative about urban decline was largely forgotten, and that the lingering images of SNF are instead the “ridiculous” suits and dance numbers. 22 Yet while filmgoers were most concerned with the film’s dance numbers, they nonetheless consumed a narrative about the changing city that was at turns both pleasurable and deeply troubling, and which was often produced tacitly through

Tony’s body. In considering the non-normative strains of the film, Echols poses an important question about the mainstreaming of disco culture in its aftermath: “What happened?” she asks. “How did its critique of racism and sexism, and its subtle queering of Tony’s Bay Ridge world, come to be so forgotten?”23 The same question might be asked about the divided urban landscape that the film depicts.

The few scholars who have considered the film’s relationship to the urban landscape have argued that Saturday Night Fever was part of the City’s Manhattan- centric image revisal campaign, and have distinguished it from the previous era of gritty decline cinema that emphasized New York’s decaying infrastructure and supposed social disorder.24 My analysis complicates this contention by arguing that the film instead articulates a more complex negotiation of decline, survival, and renewal, and that these

21 Berkowitz, Something Happened, 193. 22 Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 307. 23 Echols, Hot Stuff, 194. 24 See Berkowitz’s commentary on SNF’s ultimate Manhattan-centrism, and Cook’s argument that the film related to the “upbeat” national mood fostered by Carter, Something Happened, 215.

245 ideas are actively produced through embodied spatial practice. Stanley Corkin argues that the period of New York based cinema that dated from 1969 to 1981 oriented viewers to the city’s position in the new global order by commenting on and producing changing spatial orientations. According to Corkin, SNF fits within a final phase of this process of reorientation and builds upon previous decline films, “which devised strategies of commerce and safety for the gentrifying city.” In these later “lifestyle” films of entertainment and personal relationships, of which he claims Fever is a part, a

“connection [is established] between distinct regions of the city and the relative status of the individual,” and Manhattan becomes the city’s “aspirational core.”25 Echols begins to complicate this analysis by noting that, ultimately, SNF “doesn’t idealize Manhattan as the promised land. Tony sees through Stephanie’s bullshit- her disparagement of her roots, scrapping of her accent, and romanticizing of all things ‘refined.’”26 My chapter extends this claim, and I argue that while Fever reasserts Manhattan through Tony’s eventual exodus from Brooklyn, this reassertion is fraught. Tony’s future is unclear, the

Bay Ridge that he leaves behind has not been made “safe,” and the film’s closing scene retains none of the celebratory glory of his opening street strut and dancefloor antics.

Something has been lost in this transition across the bridge.27 Additionally, I contend that the turf battles between Italian Americans and Latinos, which take up a significant part of

25 Stanley Corkin, Starring New York: Filming the Grime and Glamour of the Long 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 162-163. 26 Echols, Hot Stuff, 190. 27 “Curiously for a movie marketed as a celebration of disco, SNF suggests that getting ahead (as opposed to ‘stayin’ alive’) requires abandoning disco,” notes Echols, Hot Stuff, 182. The film also mobilizes a number of the ideas that Corkin outlines in previous sections on decline films, which challenge its place among so-called “revival” cinema. These ideas include the interconnectedness and insularity of the ethnic neighborhood, the vigilante seizure of the city’s streets, and even some of the “visual strategies of ghettoization” that Corkin connects to depictions of Harlem in blaxploitation films, Starring New York, 101.

246 the film’s narrative, relate to media scholar Max Page’s assessment of popular culture depictions of New York’s decline. “In ways not portrayed with such directness since the racial ‘invasion’ stories of the early twentieth century,” writes Page, “popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s linked New York’s imagined destruction with the growing concentration of minorities in the impoverished city.”28

The film produces survivalist space that is both celebratory and exclusionary, and which ultimately distances Bay Ridge from the “declining” areas of Brooklyn that threaten it. Through his opening strut, Tony “survives” by first establishing his physical intimacy with the street’s built environment. The title sequence begins with the distant hush of traffic and train noise, and a shot of the city from above. But the camera soon forfeits this panoptic urban gaze as it tracks along the course of the Verrazano Bridge before diving into the streets below. The soft rush of traffic is traded for the deafening rattle of the elevated train accompanied by the opening beats of “Stayin’ Alive,” and the camera immediately pans to Tony’s dapper feet as he holds his shoe up against a similar model in a store window, his paint can swinging to the beat. The camera then focuses on his confident, directed steps against the pavement, which mark time with both the disco sounds and the train’s clatter. His feet, the disco beat, and the city’s cacophony are deeply interconnected and synonymous with a way of knowing urban space at the ground level. This intimate territorial knowledge is present throughout the film, and not a scene passes in which Tony’s feet are not shown. “You can tell by the way I use my walk,” claim the Bee Gees as Tony struts, and Tony “uses” his walk to become an indigenous piece of the cityscape; his feet are connected to the concrete, his strut is bound to both the

28 Max Page, The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 146-147.

247 beat and the clatter of the train, and as his face is revealed, his gaze upon the street is one of tender and easeful boldness. Tony’s body is primarily revealed through shots that solely exhibit his steady steps against the street, display his full body quite literally from the pavement up as if the streets themselves are witnessing his passage, or depict Tony as a glowing individual amidst a sea of other self-directed pedestrians. “He walks down the street so fine, strikes so easy, steps so smart, struts high and light. He could just step off the concrete and fly,” commented Time magazine in an advertisement for their special

Fever issue.29 A slight smile appears on his lips and the street’s fellow residents and wares appear ripe for the taking; he approaches several luscious women, smiles at other passerby and stops off to make a few purchases. “The street’s all his, past doubt. And more, if he wants. Travolta fills up all that space and pushes at the boundaries,” concluded Time.30 Through his body and his gaze, Tony claims the space completely.

These easeful and authoritative claims to space occur frequently throughout the film: most notably on the dance floor, along the Verrazano bridge, and in Tony’s final subway ride to Manhattan.

Though its role in the film’s narrative structure is to evidence Tony’s disillusionment with the constrictions of Bay Ridge life, his final ride to Manhattan also reveals that survival is possible because of his intimate mobility within the city’s built environment. While Schulman argues that this scene is further evidence of the film’s urban destitution narrative, I maintain that it also reveals a sensuous claim to the urban public realm that parallels the knowledge produced through Tony’s opening strut.

Following the revelation that the disco competition was rigged to ensure that non-Italians

29 Taken from the March 28, 1978, advertisement for the Time issue in the NYT. See also the article proper: “High Steppin’ to Stardom.” 30 “High Steppin’ to Stardom.”

248 could not place first, the scene depicts a bruised and battered Tony riding the graffiti- soaked RR train alone from Bay Ridge into Manhattan, sporting a tarnished white leisure suit. Both his body and the physical space of the train rely on commonsense citations of urban decline: the station is filled with litter, the train is doused in graffiti. Nevertheless,

Tony’s body looks distinctively at home in this underground space. He lounges on the seat like a living room sofa, smokes a cigarette, and runs his hands down the support beams on the platform with a kind of blind knowledge that can only be born from intimacy. As the soft, romance of “How Deep is Your Love” accompanies his passage,

Tony even shuts his eyes in innocent vulnerability as the train journeys onward. His willingness to be vulnerable within this space complicates the consistently threatening narrative of subway travel that was advanced by the news media and other New York films.31 He is also able to use this spatial intimacy as a proprietary form of knowledge, which is underlined when Stephanie and Tony sit beneath the Verrazano Bridge near the end of the film and Tony explains a litany of facts about the bridge’s construction, length, composition, and function. “I know everything about that bridge,” he claims. “I come down here a lot. I get ideas.”

Yet Tony’s intimate claims to the neighborhood’s public spaces are not merely celebratory acts of survival, but are also gendered and racialized seizures of neighborhood turf. As the rest of the film evidences, his individualistic and sexually aggressive claim to 86th Street must be waged at the expense of those who aren’t supposed to lay claim to the neighborhood’s streets: women, Latinos and African

Americans. As Tony grins and struts to the infectious beat, he is passed by a stream of

31 For films that depict fear in the subway system see, for example, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, directed by Joseph Sargent (1974; Palomar Pictures, 2000), DVD, and The Warriors, directed by Walter Hill (1979; Paramont Pictures, 2005), DVD

249 curvaceous Italian and Latina women all shot from behind, and this choice of camera angle stands in stark contrast to ground-level shots of Tony that reveal the space between his self-assured legs. Although this aesthetic abundance is partially proof of a fertile urban streetscape, it also foreshadows the violently exclusionary hetero-masculinity of the film’s Bay Ridge culture, in which Tony’s friends eventually gang rape his first dance partner Annette, divide the world of women into “nice girls” and “cunts,” and harass

“fags” in public parks. The importance of walking the streets is evidenced when Tony’s friend Gus is attacked by a pair of Puerto Rican men when “all he was doin’ was walkin’ along the street carryin’ his groceries.” Tony’s friends stress that it is only after “they threw his fucking groceries into the street” that Gus responds with racialized rage: “so he sort of says under his breath, greaseballs, spic dicks and they laid into him.” Tony and his friends’ attempt to reclaim their roles as the streets’ rightful proprietors when they attack the Puerto Rican “Barracuda” gang “Italian style.” Nik Cohn’s New York

Magazine story paints an even grimmer portrait of racialized spatial divisions. “There was no overlapping. Italians were Italian. Latins were greaseballs, Jews were different, and blacks were born to lose,” writes Cohn. “But they never touched. If one member erred, ventured beyond his own allotted territory, he was beaten up. That was the law.

There was no alternative.”32 In the film, the Barracuda gang’s dirty, grafittied garage hideout is reminiscent of Cohn’s descriptions, and is located in a liminal industrial zone that is largely depopulated. Tony and his friends’ attack on the gang is vividly spatial in nature; they quite literally drive their car through the front of the garage to destroy this geographical marker of decline. However, they soon discover that this attack has been

32 Nik Cohn, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” New York, June 7, 1976, 34.

250 completely ineffectual when Gus admits that it probably wasn’t even the Barracudas who were responsible. Instead, the moments where Tony actually has a chance to effectively lay claim to his neighborhood turf are through his opening strut and on the dancefloor.

Tony’s proprietary turf seizure is also a response to the constrictions of white ethnic working class masculinity. “Every inch of Travolta’s body is saying, ‘What am I, a Prince of the Earth, doing here, trapped in this lousy life” writes Vivian Gornick in her analysis of the ways in which Travolta uses his body to challenge the limitations of his working class neighborhood.33 The construction of Tony’s working-class ethnic identity was a chief preoccupation of screenwriter Norman Wexler, who had grown up in a neighborhood similar to Bay Ridge in Detroit, and was “fascinated” by “ethnic, working- class America.”34 The film’s original director, John Avildson, had conceived of the film as a kind of dancing Rocky.35 Kitty Hanson’s disco guidebook remarked that Tony “has become this generation’s Everyman … the most famous working man since ‘Marty.”36

The film’s sequel, Staying Alive, continues to probe white ethnic working class struggle.37 “We start off at birth basically as underdogs,” director Sylvester Stallone commented about the film. “Every day is a constant struggle. There’s always some force, some deity, some political movement, something that always seems to be one step

33 Vivian Gornick, “Hers,” NYT, March 30, 1978. 34 Echols, Hot Stuff, 166. It is also interesting to note that Norman Wexler wrote 1973’s Serpico, a film about police corruption starring Tony Manero’s Italo-American idol, Al Pacino. 35 Janet Maslin, “Screen: Avildsen’s Slow Dancing,” NYT, November 8, 1978. According to Echols’ account, Avildsen left the film because of disputes with Travolta about Tony’s character, which Avildsen wanted him to soften, Hot Stuff, 167. 36 Kitty Hanson, Disco Fever (New York: New American Library, 1978), 165. Disco guides were a genre that emerged in the late 1970s as the culture mainstreamed. The guides detailed popular clubs, dance moves, styles of dress and makeup, and even included sections about health and fitness. 37 Staying Alive, directed by Sylvester Stallone (1983; , 2007), DVD.

251 ahead of us. I think that’s what I most identify with.”38 “I’ve been kicked around since I was born … I’m going nowhere, somebody help me,” the Bee Gees trill in the film’s opening scene. While Tony and his friends may be able to occasionally channel their malaise through their sexual domination of women, Tony’s footsteps also respond to broader feelings of working class inefficacy that confront the film’s older white ethnic men. Tony’s boss at the paint store tells him “you can’t fuck the future. It fucks you” while Tony attempts to defy this adage through dance when he claims that “tonight’s the future” as he heads to the club to reclaim his selfhood through kinesis. Similarly, his father is depicted as an aimless and enraged figure who collects unemployment, never praises Tony for his endeavors, and directs his anger toward Tony’s mother, who has started “hitting and talking back and talking about getting a job.” Again, Tony responds to this rage through his corporeal preparations for the dancefloor; he argues with his father not to “hit his hair” after he’s spent such a long time on it, and asserts that the only two times that he’s ever been told he was good were on the dancefloor and through his raise at the paint store, and certainly never by his father. Tony responds to the older generation’s feelings of aimlessness through the embodied practice of disco-dancing and this practice is directly connected to his opening strut, where Tony uses the street as an extension of both the dancefloor through his rhythmic timing complete with backing beats, and a response to the ennui of working class labor as his paint can swings by his side in time to his footsteps.

The physicality of Travolta’s performance also produced and responded to cultural narratives about hard-working white ethnics during the 1970s. During the white ethnic revival of the 1970s, both conservative and liberal discourse sometimes

38 McLain Stoop, “Staying Alive,” 76.

252 distinguished between the supposedly hard-working, disciplined Ellis-Island-era immigrants and the newer, shiftless black and Latino immigrants of the postwar era. 39

Travolta’s performance tapped into this narrative by connecting to a longer lineage of

Italian-American urban figures in American cinema.40 The Times placed Travolta within this emergent pantheon of 1970s Italo-American characters, and argued that this Italian street hero could be understood in contradistinction from black urban cinematic figures.

According to the article, the viewing public forgave the white ethnic figure’s violence as long as it was spatially containable. “We’ll forgive and forget the cruelty … as long as it’s kept within the neighborhood,” argued reporter John Mariani. “While blacks and

Hispanics still seem to threaten the American psyche (how transitory was the eminence of such black films as “Shaft” and “Sounder”), the Italian-American onscreen appears hardworking, stalwart, and lovable, like John Wayne with garlic breath.”41 Fever furthered this narrative about industrious Italian Americans through stories about the arduous physical labor involved in Travolta’s performance. “Was it magic? Was it a

39 For a full discussion of the bootstraps’ narrative, see Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), which I mention in the introduction. See also Chapter 2’s discussion of Mario Cuomo’s 1977 mayoral campaign, which mobilized this discourse about hardworking white ethnics in the boroughs. 40 On January 13, 1978, the Times ran a CBS film advertisement, which commented that “seeing [Travolta] is like seeing Brando … or Stallone for the first time.” The film provides evidence of Tony’s place as part of this lineage; his bedroom walls are adorned with both a Rocky poster and a picture of Al Pacino’s Serpico and on the dancefloor, after kissing him, a female admirer screams “I just kissed Al Pacino” as she swoons. Echols also explores the queer implications of Tony’s Al Pacino idolization. 41 John Mariani, “Hollywood’s Favorite Ethnic Group,” NYT, June 4, 1978. It is interesting to consider the ways in which Travolta’s strut cites and complicates Shaft’s opening scene. While the film also forgoes the panoptic viewpoint to descend into the streets and Shaft uses his body to navigate these streets with a kind of intimate prowess, his walk is darting and tense and at one point he nearly gets run over by a car. Unlike Travolta, who grins with joy as he walks his walk, the only pleasure the tight-lipped Shaft derives from movement is tacit: the pursuit of justice and the sexual bounty that is only implied by the theme song. While Shaft does stop off to talk with the news seller in the opening scene, the streets are largely places of dangerous negotiation, anonymity, and potential criminality.

253 whim of the gods?” questioned Time in regards to Travolta’s remarkable performance.

“Not at all … [it was] a relentless sense of discipline and purpose.”42 Travolta spent more than 300 hours rehearsing for his role.43 According to biographer Craig

Schumacher, he “threw himself into a rigorous training schedule that had him up exercising at 5 every morning. After that came three hours of dance lessons. At night … he went from dance floor to dance floor looking for anything that would make Tony

Manero a more believable character.”44 In addition to daily dance lessons, Travolta ran two miles a day and trained with the same boxer who prepped Stallone for Rocky.45 Boys across the city also reproduced the labor implicit in Travolta’s performance as they sought to emulate his look. “Looking like Mr. Travolta is as desirable as dancing like him,” reported Angela Taylor, “[and] both take a lot of practice … mirrors have gone back up on high-school locker doors and there’s often a dryer and as many as five brushes on the shelf.”46 Travolta, a “real old-fashioned gentleman,” according to pop biographer Suzanne Munshower, had to put considerable effort toward losing weight and

“learning to smoke,” the latter of which was particularly difficult because, as he explained, “I haven’t any vices at all.”47

In order to evidence Tony’s corporeal struggles to stay alive amidst decay, the film utilizes some of the aesthetic and geographical markers of urban decline. Yet ultimately, the film underlines the distance between Bay Ridge’s streets and this decline.

42 Advertisement for Time, NYT, March 28, 1978. 43 Judson Klinger, “TV’s Teen Idol Comes Down with Adult Movie ‘Fever,’” NYT, December 11, 1977. 44 Craig Schumacher, Rock N’ Pop Stars: John Travolta (Mankato, MN: Creative Education, 1979), 30. 45 Rex Reed, “The Male Animal: Yet Off-Screen, John Travolta is Really Mr. Nice,” DN, December 16, 1977. 46 Taylor, “Travolta Look.” 47 Suzanne Munshower, John Travolta (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1976/1978), 65.

254 Cohn’s story portrays the neighborhood as “a dead land” composed of “only railroads and junkyards, abandoned car seats … a wasteland.” In the story, Vincent lives “with the remnants of his family” in a three room apartment “high up in a block of buildings like a barracks.” His “windows [look] out on nothing but walls” and the walls produce the stench of “the corpse of some decaying animal buried deep [within].” In the story, Bay

Ridge is affiliated with the “Bronx-Brooklyn-Queens monstrous urban limbo, filled with everyone who is no one.” 48 Fever’s opening scene partially challenges Cohn’s decline pastoral by presenting a joyous synchronous street ballet that is crowded with swiftly striding residents. While Stephanie disparages Bay Ridge in comparison with the cultural refinement of Manhattan, Tony counters that “[the neighborhood] ain’t the worst part of

Brooklyn. It ain’t like a hellhole.” After that summer’s nearly pornographic publicity surrounding Bushwick’s blackout looting, it would have been clear to the viewing public to which Brooklyn “hellhole” Tony referred. Furthermore, Bushwick was consistently linked to the “moldering neighborhoods” of Carter’s South Bronx walk, which were

“ruled by hopelessness and dominated by drug addicts.”49 For both viewers without any knowledge of New York and for residents, Carter’s walk, Travolta’s strut, and the looters’ roaming were three of the most famous city images exported through the media that year, and these various neighborhoods could automatically be placed in a hierarchy of geographic commonsense, with Tony’s Bay Ridge as the safest of the three spaces.

Even the “Son of Sam” crimes, which had unfolded in neighborhoods demographically and economically similar to Bay Ridge, had been distanced from these spaces and repositioned as indigenous to the city’s black and Latino ghettos.

48 Cohn, “Tribal Rites,” 34, 32, 31. 49 Richard Severo, “Bronx a Symbol of America’s Woes” NYT, October 6, 1977.

255 Through Tony’s opening strut, 86th Street manifests in stark contrast to the streets of Bushwick and the South Bronx. This contrast becomes evident through the scene’s abundant material goods and inhabitation by healthy mobile bodies that travel assertively toward their destinations. Tony’s opening strut reveals a network of interconnected neighborhood residents who are part of a complex and industrious “Jane Jacobsian” dance that quite literally helps the city to “stay alive.” As Tony stops off at the pizza shop and tailors, his connections to this network become apparent. The pizza seller greets him warmly, and although the tailor tells Tony “don’t trust me” when he offers a down payment on the shirt, the comment is a tongue-in-cheek ode to brash city ways rather than a menacing reference to New York’s crime-ridden streets. And although his job soon reveals itself to be less than fulfilling, the first glimpse of Tony that viewers are offered is that of his foot beside the paint can. Tony is employed and by extension, able to purchase his shiny shoes and take them for a bold spin out in the streets to which his footsteps lay claim.

Tony’s home block also produces this industrious sense of survival, and is not located on the periphery of the adjacent Latino neighborhood of Sunset Park, as indicated by Cohn’s story, but is instead firmly entrenched on Bay Ridge’s 79th Street. His block is consistently shown in the sunlight, and as Tony first walks home after the opening scene, it becomes a miniaturized 86th Street; even the children are all engaged in a carefully orchestrated game of baseball and they all call out to him as he passes. The built environment is clearly urban, as evidenced by the close proximity of its residences and the number of bowfront townhouses characteristic of the boroughs, but it is also infused with a slight suburban sensibility that is underscored by the Manero’s detached, single-

256 family home. The Manero’s block is able to combine the urban street ballet’s joyous interconnectedness with a moral geography of hard work and homeownership.

The film’s complicated production of survival space was also echoed within the actual neighborhood of Bay Ridge. Through their spatial practices within the streets, Bay

Ridge residents’ constructed an imagined and lived white-ethnic landscape in which an industrious sense of survival drew on both creative ingenuity and vigilante protest.

According to the 1970 census, the neighborhood’s nearly 130,000 residents were over

98% white and this figure dropped only to 95% by 1980. Of the white population, nearly

30% were of Italian ancestry, with about half as many Irish, and a significant population of Greeks.50 Both residents and media accounts actively contributed to the idea that Bay

Ridge was a distinctly white ethnic space. In 1976, the Times described Bay Ridge as

“one of the few republican strongholds in the city,” and “also one of the last middle-class, almost completely white areas in Brooklyn.” “Bay Ridge residents are resolutely middle class,” continued the article as it posited a relationship between Bay Ridgeites’ class status and certain kinds of ethical values and practices. “They respect family, education, and property. They believe in hard work, cleanliness, and they are committed to their church and their compatriots.”51

In the context of the city’s crisis, these overwhelmingly politically conservative residents engaged in a variety of self-directed acts that often critiqued municipal government. Nowhere was this more evident than in the neighborhood’s bicentennial celebrations in 1975. Al Nahas, the head of the 3rd Avenue Merchants association,

50 City of New York, Department of City Planning, Fact Book: Community Portfolio: Information for Community Districts: Brooklyn (November 1977): City Hall Library; City of New York, Community District Statistics: A Portrait of NYC from the 1980 Census (1980): City Hall Library. 51 Marcia Chambers, “Greeks in Bay Ridge,” NYT, October 8, 1976.

257 described the preparatory practices for this celebration as challenges to decay and self- sufficient acts of independence that invoked colonial era battles against the British. “Let it be known that Bay Ridge stands ready to fight the decay that is threatening the city,”

Nahas stated. “Bay Ridge is taking the reins into its own hands,” he continued. “We’re picking up our garbage ourselves. We are getting back into self-sufficiency … it’s just like the old days … the colonists decided they’d had enough of old King George … we’re going to be picking up the slack in services created by the city’s financial condition.”52 A similar mixture of self-directed action and vigilante critique of the City marked Bay

Ridge Community Council (BRCC) president Robert Hedlund’s remarks in 1977. “The city must realize it has very few tax basis areas left. Bay Ridge is a large one. I don’t want to imply that we must have greater services in Bay Ridge but they must respect the true feelings of the residents of Bay Ridge, who can be vocal when crossed,” concluded

Hedlund. 53 Hedlund’s invocation of a constituency who were quick to anger when

“crossed” recalls Tony’s proprietary claims to space, and his friends’ fights for retribution in the film’s turf battles.

Residents also performed this critique of municipal government through spatial practices in the neighborhood’s streets. The most overt of these spatialized critiques occurred in 1978 after residents of 61st Street suffered three weeks without trash collection following a winter snowstorm.54 In late February, the street’s inhabitants responded by staging a “staggering trash-in,” which the Daily News called “the most

52 “76 Self-Sufficiency.” 53 Ronelda Roberts, “Bob Hedlund: Looking Back (and Ahead at 26),” Brooklyn Spectator, 1977. 54 It is interesting to note that this protest occurred on the border between Bay Ridge and the adjacent neighborhood of Sunset Park, which was often positioned as a declining neighborhood that threatened Bay Ridge’s stability. However, during the crisis, news reports were careful to distinguish between these two neighborhoods and chronicles of the trash protest consistently referred to it as unfolding in “Bay Ridge.”

258 graphic protest so far this season against the Sanitation Department.”55 Tom McDonald, a local firefighter with Ladder Company 109, stated that the protest came out of the

“treatment of neighborhood residents like ‘second class citizens.’” “If necessary,” he concluded, “we will picket City Hall or load the garbage on to Manhattan bound subway trains.”56 “Of course, throwing trash in the street wasn’t right,” remarked resident

Jeannette Swannick, “but it worked, didn’t it? … I don’t think they’ll forget about us anymore.”57

In addition to these more overtly critical practices, stories about Bay Ridge’s residents asserted that their industrious spatial practices produced a uniquely stable domestic landscape that was worth defending. According to the Sunday News, the bicentennial celebration, which took place along between 67th and 81st streets, was a “united effort” that mobilized residents’ bodies in a variety of ways:

“Florists have donated flowers. Butchers have given meats. Housewives have baked cakes. Artists have made posters. High school students have painted fire hydrants red, white and blue. People have been vacuuming the streets.”58 This landscape of industrious, intertwined practices echoed Tony’s opening street ballet. Nahas’ rhetoric may have strongly critiqued the City’s abdication of responsibility for the neighborhood, yet the acts in which residents engaged ultimately produced a clean, patriotic, and hetero- normative streetscape. The following December, the Daily News connected residents’ dedication to erecting a Christmas display to the city’s overall ability to survive. “Good will exists in Bay Ridge,” reported the News. “For more than two months, several

55 Steward Ain and Richard Edmonds, “Angry Folks Raise Stink on Rue de Garbage,” DN, February 27, 1978. 56 Susi Powell, “Residents Strew Garbage on 61st Street,” Brooklyn Spectator. 57 Lindsay Miller, “Brooklyn Trash Quick Relief,” NYP, February 27, 1978. 58 “76 Self-Sufficiency.”

259 residents worked to erect a life-sized Christmas display … and in seven years, no one has damaged the display, a good omen in these times.59 Similar to the stories about

Travolta’s hard-working performance, stories about the neighborhood often emphasized the labor involved in these practices. “Such dedication to the neighborhood takes many forms,” reported E.J. Dionne for the Times in 1977, “but usually it boils down to work.

To walk down any of Bay Ridge’s tree-lined streets on a Saturday afternoon is to watch industry and its fruits.” The Times portrait stressed that residents’ care for and commitment to their homes was a critical aspect of this moral geography. “[Bay Ridge] is an area where many New Yorkers, in the words of one of them, fulfilled their dream of

‘getting a little house with a little yard,’” the article concluded. According to resident

Maria Casolaro, the community functioned because of geographic proximity, where “we have families here whose mothers live on one side of the street and their daughters live on the other side.”60 The neighborhood was apparently so emblematic of a certain brand of house pride, that in 1976 the Times annual “101 things to love about NYC” story granted the 96th spot to “American flags on Bay Ridge houses.”61 These stories often suggested that residents’ ethnicities were naturally connected to this hardworking landscape. “The clean streets, the neatly painted human-scale three- and four-story apartments, the small shops, seem more like Europe or a pleasant Middle Western

59 Joan Shepard, “Christmas Spirit Prevails in Bay Ridge,” DN, December 22, 1976. 60 E.J. Dionne Jr., “Bay Ridge-Area Voters Find an Embarrassment of Riches: Republican Enclave Split by Ethnicity and Religion Over the November 8 Election,” NYT, October 29, 1977. 61 “101 Things to Love About New York City,” NYT, June 13, 1976. Bay Ridge was the only specific neighborhood named on this list. Interestingly, despite this obsession with Bay Ridge homes and the concept of property ownership and its virtues, the rate of ownership in the neighborhood was around 29% in 1980, which was only slightly higher than the New York City average, and significantly less than Ridgewood’s 42.4%: from The City of New York’s Community District Statistics.

260 community rather than the busy city that is New York,” reported the Times in 1975.62

Akin to Tony’s home block, such descriptions of the neighborhood emphasized that its survival depended upon its “human-scale,” village-like atmosphere, and quasi-suburban

“community” values.

As Fever also evidences, these self-directed acts were often responses to residents’ fears about encroaching decline, and these fears were often spatialized within the neighborhood’s streets. In the neighborhood, these fears were often tied to the belief that the City was offering crime protection to poor areas at the expense of Bay Ridge. In the spring before the film’s release, Bay Ridgeites railed against inadequate police protection on their streets, which they believed were being underserved because the City perceived the area to be “stable.”63 “Fear, rather than racism, is the dominant emotion,” remarked the Times as it probed Bay Ridge’s political climate during the mayoral election that same fall. “Fear of crime, fear of decay and above all, fear of losing something valuable.”64 While the Bay Ridge precinct’s crime statistics only ranked 46th out of 73 in 1977, “the department does not rank precincts for their obsession with crime,” commented the Sunday News. “If it did Bay Ridge would probably be near the top.”65 In the neighborhood, perceptions and reality both had power to produce space, and stories about crime and residents’ emotional reactions to the crisis directly informed

62 George Vecsey, “Bay Ridge Has Long Been a ‘New’ Norway to Many Immigrants,” NYT, July 7, 1975. 63 John Hamill, “Residents Fight Decline in Bay Ridge,” DN, April 27, 1977. 64 Dionne Jr., “Embarrassment of Riches.” 65 Jerry Adler, “What a Place It Is!” Sunday News Magazine, December 17, 1978; Jerome Hoffman’s The Bay Ridge Chronicles (Brooklyn: The Bay Ridge Bicentennial Committee of Planning Board 10, 1976) notes that the neighborhood is 57th in homicides, 65th in robberies, and 55th in burglaries out of 71 precincts. Yet it is also important to underline that although Bay Ridge was not one of the highest crime neighborhoods relative to other areas of the city, it did in fact experience a sharp rise in crime during 1976: see Selwyn Raab’s April 10, 1977, Times article entitled “Sharp Rise Reported for Serious Crimes in All Five Boroughs.”

261 the ways in which they understood and inhabited the streets. That fall, Representative

Leo Zeferetti echoed this sentiment: “Criminal statistics should not be the sole priority for assigning police protection,” he insisted.”66 And while the film did not overtly critique the City’s lack of police presence, Fever depicts a vigilante landscape curiously devoid of law officers, in which Tony and his friends are left to take matters into their own hands. Like the film and the article’s depictions of aesthetic and social decay in the public realm, Bay Ridge residents often accessed ideas about decline through perceived changes in the neighborhood’s streets. “A lot of small things like dirt along and a house that needs a coat of paint are things that discourage the long-term residents,” remarked Mrs. Lepore, a member of the 77th Street Block Association.67

Walking was a particularly critical type of practice through which residents debated and contested the real and imagined threats of urban decline. The ability, and lack thereof, to safely move through the streets both evidenced residents’ strong feelings about the City’s neglect and distinguished the neighborhood from other, apparently more dangerous topographies throughout the city. “This is one of the few neighborhoods in

Brooklyn where you can walk around with a modicum of safety,” remarked conservative party district leader Carmine Guadagnino in the fall of 1977.68 On October 27, 1977, residents banded together for an anti-crime forum in conjunction with the 68th precinct, and large groups marched to the town hall locations. “This will be our way of showing the next mayor that the only way our members dare venture out at night is in large groups,” commented President of the Bay Ridge Association of Senior Citizens, Bill

66 Jack Leahy, “Cops Promise Action on Bay Ridge ‘Jungles,” DN, September 28, 1977. 67 Hamill, “Residents Fight Decline.” 68 Dionne Jr., “Embarrassment of Riches.”

262 Graves.69 This narrative of fear was later interspersed with stories that chronicled Bay

Ridge’s immutability as a bastion of safety in a sea of despair. In 1981, New York

Magazine rated it among the safest neighborhoods in the city, and remarked that

“Brooklyn has undergone wrenching changes over the past 25 years, but the shifting racial and social tides seem to have barely ruffled the quiet streets of Bay Ridge.”70 “For most residents,” commented the Times the following year, “crime is something that comes from elsewhere, which explains their determination to keep their neighborhood as it is.”71

Residents’ fears about encroaching decline were most often spatialized by contrasting Bay Ridge with the adjacent neighborhood of Sunset Park. 72 By the time of the film’s debut, local news stories were discussing the “growing blight” in Sunset

Park.73 In early 1978, multiple block-watcher programs were established in conjunction with the fire department in order to “[prevent] arsonists from turning their communities into blocks of burned-out buildings as in Bushwick.”74 A few months later, $40,000 in state funds was requested by local Senator Conklin “to stem the tide of deterioration in

Sunset Park and surrounding neighborhoods” that directly threatened Bay Ridge.75 The threat of decline was often explicitly racialized and problematically attributed to the

69 Bay Ridge Community Council (BRCC), “Bay Ridge Forum Town Hall-Anti Crime Day October 1977,” BRCC Notes: Brooklyn Community Board 10. 70 Randy Young, “The City’s Safest Neighborhoods,” NY Mag, October 19, 1981. 71 Lawrence Josephs, “If You’re Thinking of Living in Bay Ridge,” NYT, August 15, 1982. 72 In “Sunset Park Seeks Another Chance,” NYT, December 26, 1976, reporter Janice Maruca notes that the emergence of Sunset Park as a distinctive neighborhood occurred in 1966 when the area sought to qualify for federal poverty funds, and needed to distinguish itself from the more solidly middle class Bay Ridge of which it had formally been part. 73 Owen Fitzgerald, “Warns Sunset’s Blight May Pull Down Bay Ridge,” DN, 1976-77?; Editorial, “A Growing Blight,” Home Reporter & Sunset News, March 25, 1977. 74 Stewart Ain, “Act to Douse Arson in Bay Ridge, Sunset Park,” DN, January 20, 1978 75 Sara Otey, “Seek State to Fix Vacant Buildings,” Home Reporter & Sunset News, March 3, 1978; “Murphy Urges Carey Aid of Sunset Park Area,” Brooklyn Spectator, April 12, 1978.

263 neighborhood’s influx of Latino newcomers. As the Sunday News commented late in

1978, although Bay Ridge was staunchly white, “the Hispanics [of Sunset Park] make occasional appearances in its ‘Precinct Beat’ column, but they all seem to be wearing sneakers and their heights and weights are specified.”76 Both the film and Cohn’s story made use of the actual boundaries between Bay Ridge and Sunset Park. Cohn reports that Vincent lives on the 11th floor of a high-rise on Fourth Avenue and 66th street, which is located on the boundary between the two neighborhoods, and although Manero’s house in Fever is situated firmly within Bay Ridge proper, Latinos are the chief “threats” to his turf.

As the use of these actual neighborhood boundaries suggests, the line between the film’s production of “real” and “fantastical” urban space was considerably complex.

After publishing his 1976 chronicle of the emergent “suburban” (outer boroughs) disco scene, music journalist Cohn later admitted that the article was largely fictitious, and that its protagonist, Vincent, was a composite character produced from a few brief visits to

Bay Ridge. Self-admittedly, Cohn had always been in the business of “myth-making.”

“Not having been to a place never stopped me from describing it,” he once commented.77

Tony is “an imaginative representation of an imaginative representation,” concludes

Lawrence.78 Still, in spite of this doubly imaginative performance, the film was produced with “realness” in mind, and it generated ideas about urban space that were consumed by viewers and, in turn, affected how they interpreted these spaces. In his extensive studies of neighborhood residents, Travolta observed that “their whole way of dancing, moving, conversing, relating to their girls, was ritualistic. It had its set rules,” and he attempted to

76 Adler, “What a Place It Is!” 77 Nik Cohn, Ball the Wall: Nik Cohn in the Age of Rock (London: Pan Books Ltd., 1989), xvi. 78 Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 305.

264 mimic these rules in order to establish an authentic performance. 79 Dance scenes were filmed in the actual 2001 Odyssey club, which was one of Brooklyn’s most popular discotheques, and many club regulars were used as extras.80 “What really sets SNF apart, besides the dancing,” wrote Laurie Werner for the Daily News, “is its authenticity. The film was shot on location in and around the more depressed sections of Bay Ridge and that adds to the total effect: the viewer actually gets a sense of who the character is, and the limitations of his life.”81 And although the consumption of music and dance propelled the PG version’s production, Paramount chairman Barry Diller commented that

“it is not the same film because it doesn’t have the impact of that raw reality.”82

As the film sought to capitalize on Bay Ridge’s site-specific “authenticity,” it also mobilized broader urban tropes about gritty street life to gain a wider appeal. Both inside and outside the neighborhood, viewers’ interpretations of the film were conditioned by press materials and news reports, which often suggested that Tony’s relationship to the city’s streets was somehow “universally” identifiable. “When asked about the possible reactions of those viewers who are unfamiliar with the Brooklyn area,” wrote Times reporter Judson Klinger, Travolta stated that “I try to duplicate life as I see it and I tend to give a common reality with other people. The character strikes close to home.

[Watching him] I saw everything people deal with in real life. He’s universally identifiable.”83 Even Travolta himself was connected to this notion of “realness” and the film’s executive producer Kevin McCormick commented that he “emit[ed] reality,”

79 Tom Burke, “Struttin’ His Stuff,” , June 15, 1978. 80 Echols, Hot Stuff, 177. 81 Laurie Werner, “Hollywood Gets a New Idea … Disco Flicks,” DN, December 25, 1977. Interestingly, these “depressed sections” of Bay Ridge were classified by most residents as existing outside their neighborhood’s boundaries in adjacent Sunset Park. 82 Aljean Harmetz, “ ‘Fever’ Redone for PG Rating,” NYT, January 11, 1979. 83 Klinger, “TV’s Teen Idol.”

265 especially because he reminded McCormick of his brother who “was a street character, too.”84 Despite his own spatial origins in Englewood, New Jersey, Hanson’s guidebook describes John as “long ago [having] fled the gritty streets of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.”85

Advertisements for the film reinforced this abstracted universality by stating that the picture “touches something within everyone, everywhere. … Its hero comes from the streets. His dreams are everyone’s.”86 “He’s a street animal who has this generic sense of survival,” remarked Stallone about Travolta’s character in Staying Alive.87 “When

Travolta first appears in SNF,” remarked Time Magazine, “there’s an instant charge- a shock of recognition, of excitement, of acceptance.”88

While the film often attempted to portray life on the ground in Bay Ridge, it also produced tangible residue within the neighborhood. “There is little doubt,” reads Andy

Blackford’s disco guidebook, “that the cast and the film gained much from the reality of the locations.”89 The viewing public became fascinated with the “reality” of the film’s urban landscape, as evidenced by pilgrimages to Bay Ridge’s 2001 Odyssey club “just to dance on the same floor that lit up the sure hustling feel of John Travolta,” local tourism to experience the neighborhood’s street life, and reports about the real lives of the film’s local extras.90 In the wake of the film, the owner of 2001 told one reporter that Fever had

“increased his business 100%” and that tourism was so frenzied that patrons were

84 Janice Selinger, “Saturday Night Fever Goes Back Stage,” NYT, April 30, 1978. 85 Hanson, Disco Fever, 165. 86 Film advertisement, NYT, December 11, 1977. 87 McLain Stoop, “Staying Alive,” 77. 88 “High Steppin’ to Stardom.” 89 Andy Blackford, Disco Dancing Tonight: Clubs, Dances, Fashion, Music (London: Octopus Books, 1979), 58. 90 See Vita Miezitis’ discussion with Fever extras in the disco guide Night Dancin’ (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980) and Lawrence Van Gelder’s “Elocution Lessons in Brooklynese,” NYT, January 6, 1978.

266 stealing everything that “wasn’t nailed down” in order to garner souvenirs. “They’d rather come here now than they would go to Studio 54,” he remarked.91 In fact, Fever had supposedly infused the disco scene with new energy throughout the entire borough of

Brooklyn, remarked Hanson.92 Disco guidebook author Vita Miezitis commented that once the height of the fever subsided, the ambience in 2001 was “reminiscent of a gold rush town at the turn of the century once the gold ran out.”93 Alongside this disco- specific tourism, the film also helped spur a more generalized interest in Bay Ridge. In early 1978, the Times described how to spend a day exploring the neighborhood, which was specifically tailored toward inter-city tourism from Manhattan. Community leader

Al Nahas even related the success of the film to the revitalization of the neighborhood’s main commercial thoroughfare, Third Avenue, and stated that the street’s “boom began about the same time the film … brought notoriety to disco dancing.”94 As resident Rocco

Miele later recalled, the film encouraged “wild, late-night cruising [on 86th Street] … that plagued the neighborhood for more than a decade.”95 Reporter Carol Milano’s description of the actual 86th Street in 1979 evidences this interplay between the film and the neighborhood’s reality. “86th street stretches across Bensonhurst, in Saturday Night

Fever country … where the elevated “B” train [roars] above the blocks of small mom- and-pop stores,” writes Milano. “It’s a white working-class neighborhood; a glance down any side street reveals rows of one and two-family homes … the street is ethnically mixed with Kosher butchers next to pork stores … nearly every block has at least one

91 Jeannette E. Walls, “Friday Night in Disco Country,” The Phoenix, June 18, 1978. 92 Kitty Hanson, “A Disco Beat,” DN, May 4, 1979. 93 Miezitis, Night Dancin’, 136. 94 Ari Goldman, “Bay Ridge: Beyond Travolta,” NYT, February 17, 1978; Josephs, “Living in Bay Ridge.” 95 Sarah Kershaw, “A Major Guy, Gadfly Wise,” NYT, June 30, 1996.

267 Italian food store,” she concludes. 96 The landscape Milano describes conjures the industrious ballet of the film’s opening by referencing its aurality, ethnic mixture, working-class character, and mixture of small town suburban feel with big city conveniences. Yet Milano references the ways in which the film has produced a spatial imaginary that overlays the actual neighborhood topography; 86th Street is now part of

“Saturday Night Fever country.” Film shooting, which took place during the spring of

1977, also had a profound effect on the neighborhood. At the end of each day of filming in Six Brothers Hardware Store, where Manero works, “it became necessary to have

Travolta escorted out the back door … due to the unpredictable reaction of the boisterous crowd in front of the shop,” the Home Reporter commented. And while the filming did cause a considerable amount of disruption in local traffic patterns,” the story emphasized that it also “gave the neighborhood a certain amount of class and generated a great deal of enthusiasm among many of the spectators.”97

The film was avidly consumed in Bay Ridge. Opening night was accompanied by a party at 2001, which was open to the public and included free champagne, wine, dance lessons, and “other surprises.” Newspaper columnists and Paramount Pictures representatives were in attendance.98 Following its debut, SNF also sparked a number of dance contests throughout the neighborhood.99 Reporter Ari Goldman commented that during a screening at the neighborhood’s Loews Alpine Twin theatre “the audience applauds the Brooklyn Bridge, sneers at a sophisticated Manhattanite and cheers the very

96 Carol Milano, “86th Street/King’s Highway,” New Brooklyn 2, no.1 (summer 1979): 54 97 Marco Albergo, “Travolta’s in Town at Six Brothers Hardware,” Home Reporter & Sunset News, March 25, 1977. 98 “Whew! Saturday Night Fever,” Brooklyn Spectator, December 14, 1977. 99 See for example, “Far Out 2001 Odyssey Disco Holds Exciting Dance Contest,” Home Reporter & Sunset News, March 11, 1977.

268 streets outside as they appear on screen. Watching Saturday Night Fever in Bay Ridge is like watching “Oklahoma” in Tulsa.”100 In fact, parts of the film seemed so authentic to

Bay Ridgeites that some Odyssey regulars contended that despite Cohn’s fake story,

“there was a ‘real Tony Manero,’ a blond guy by the name of Eugene Robinson, who worked in a supermarket and was the club’s hotshot dancer.” Odyssey deejay Ralphie

Dee recalls Robinson arriving one day “with agents and lawyers” right after Fever’s release. Another club employee contended that Robinson even tried to sue Paramount

Pictures.101

Fever’s depictions of decline generated strong polemics in local papers. In

January of 1978, the Home Reporter published an editorial entitled “Saturday Night

Malady,” which argued that the film’s “unpleasant exaggerations” were done “in a manner that only suits the pocketbooks of the film makers.” The editorial argued against the insulting and inaccurate coverage of the neighborhood by Daily News film critic Rex

Reed, who had described Fever as “taking place ‘amidst pizza parlors, subways, White

Castle hamburgers, street litter and garbage of Bay Ridge.’” “We’re sure that’s precisely what Mr. Reed sees when he perhaps looks from the window of the Daily News building, light years away from a neighborhood where residents point with pride at the civic involvement and middle-class achievement that makes Bay Ridge one of the last remaining desirable residential areas in the city,” concluded the piece.102 “SNF’s representation of Bay Ridge as ‘a slum’ [indicates] the extent to which the ‘other’ New

York is misunderstood,” echoed Michael Crosby in his defense of the outer boroughs for

100 Goldman, “Beyond Travolta.” 101 Echols, Hot Stuff, 164. 102 “Saturday Night Malady,” Home Reporter and Sunset News, January 13, 1978; Rex Reed, “John, the Lovable Punk,” DN, December 21, 1977.

269 The Neighborhood Journal for City Preservation in 1979.103 A series of letters in response to the Home Reporter editorial revealed that a significant number of local residents actually testified to the film’s realism. “Speaking from a point of view of a

Bensonhurst teenager,” wrote young Dina Carnivelli, “I can vouch for most of the actions of the characters in the movie.”104 Julie, a 19-year old patron of 2001 from New Jersey, remained more skeptical about the relationship between Bay Ridgeites and the film: “The really sad thing is how these people loved the movie,” she commented. “They didn’t see beyond the music and the dancing. The movie was very critical of these people and their way of life, and the idiots don’t realize it.”105 The siting of disco clubs, and the noise pollution from Fever’s indelible symbol of urbanness, the elevated B train, also engendered fierce neighborhood debates.106

The film’s ending again evidences the complex intersection between lived and representational space in Bay Ridge, and within Mayor Koch’s increasingly Manhattan- centric New York. While the film makes no overt references to the City’s abandonment of Bay Ridge, Tony’s eventual exodus from the neighborhood partially reflects the Koch administration’s shift in spatial priorities, and evidences the neighborhood’s ultimately

103 Michael Crosby, “The Other New York,” The Neighborhood Journal for City Preservation 1, no.4 (june 1979): 58. 104 Letters to the Editor, Home Reporter & Sunset News, February 3, 1978. 105 Walls, “Friday Night.” 106 In 1980, the Daily News reported on a “disco dispute” between the neighborhoods of Gravesend and Bensonhurst. Bensonhurst’s community board district manager, Howard Feuer, argued that “this is a middle-class community and we fear the effects a disco would have on a residential area.” In early 1978 the “Big Screechers” community group, headed by Carmine Santa Maria, spoke for the “long-suffering citizens of Bensonhurst, bombarded overhead by their own version of the SST, known locally as the BMT B line.” “Ours is a middle-class community,” another resident told the Daily News. “Our residents are too civilized to engage in violent demonstrations or to build bonfires on railroad tracks … but the patience of Bensonhurst is running short” (Thomas Raffery, “Bensonhurst Din; Group Takes Aim at B Train,” DN, January 18, 1978). The “SST” battle to which the citation refers waged in the Italian-American enclave of Howard Beach, Queens, where residents fought against noise from the Concorde jet at nearby JFK airport.

270 unresolved conflict with neighborhood change. As Tony journeys across the bridge to plan a potential future in white-collar Manhattan, he grapples with both the divide between outer borough white ethnics and the “WASP” whiteness increasingly associated with Manhattan, and the racial divides within Bay Ridge. 107 In some ways, the film’s ending helped fuel the City’s image revival campaign by shifting attention from the supposedly rotten outer boroughs made famous through Carter’s walk, the Berkowitz murders, and blackout looting. Off the screen, this shift toward Manhattan-centric renewal was also evident in the way that Travolta marketed the film by actually strutting through Midtown’s streets. “The first thing I did when I got to New York to promote SNF was walk down Fifth Avenue,” he commented. “Every fifth person would recognize me and yell, ‘Hey, there’s John Travolta!’”108 Still, Tony’s “escape” from Bay Ridge is also an escape from the threats posed by racial transitioning; Tony may relinquish the trophy to the Puerto Rican couple at the film’s end, but he is also forfeiting his neighborhood to the inevitability of racial division rather than unification as he departs. His disavowal of

Bay Ridge and his trip to Manhattan at the close of the film contain none of the claim- staking glory of the opening scene and its dancefloor counterparts. It is on 86th Street and on the dance floor where viewers experience his body most vibrantly, and this is

107 In December of 1978, Elizabeth Stone reported for the Times that “It’s Still Hard to Grow Up Italian.” The article advanced a moral geography that connected Italians’ ethnic values to insular neighborhood spaces. Stone’s article argued that strong neighborhood ties, and an enduring wariness of outsiders were fundamentally Italian characteristics. Stone also remarked that many Italian Americans saw themselves as marginalized by the dominant “WASP” culture’s whiteness, and this feeling also manifests in the film as viewers see Tony struggle in his interactions with Stephanie and his subsequent realization that he lives a world apart from Manhattan’s white cultural elite. While Tony ultimately declares that “they’re [all] assholes” in his neighborhood and vows never to return, it is precisely Tony’s working class white ethnic “way of putting things together” that still attracts Stephanie to him, and causes her to chose him over her WASP-y Manhattanite cultural mentor. 108 Reed, “The Male Animal.”

271 underscored by the primacy of disco music in these scenes, which was the chief way in which viewers consumed the film. Tony’s journey to Manhattan is reluctant and subdued, and his future remains uncertain.

1983’s Staying Alive finds Tony living in a squalid SRO in Midtown Manhattan, where he hustles for auditions during the day and works as a waiter in a posh club by night. The film’s opening is as grim as Fever’s is lush: Tony struggles to keep up in a darkened audition room set to the aggressive strains of Frank Stallone singing “this is the end, you made your choice.” The street scene that follows could not be further from the

86th Street strut: Manero looks haplessly lost amidst the bleak, grey central business district landscape and there is only the monotonous sound of traffic to accompany his walk. As Tony gloomily buses tables at the club, a well-dressed woman condescendingly tells him she loves to “watch [him] walk.” The cut throat Broadway dance world that

Tony inhabits is bloodless. While in Fever’s Bay Ridge, he learned that “everybody’s gotta dump on somebody,” on the other side of the bridge he discovers that “everybody uses everybody” and that you have to “look out for number one.” Laura, the wealthy ice queen whom Tony unsuccessfully pursues, exemplifies this harsh land of emotionless upward mobility. “I used to be pretty incredible myself when I lived in Brooklyn,” he tells her. “What happened?” she asks. “I moved to Manhattan,” he responds with a half smile. Toward the end of the film, Tony again makes a journey but this time, it is the reverse of Fever’s subway ride. Forlorn and exhausted, Tony travels on foot across the

Brooklyn Bridge and back to Bay Ridge to make amends and rediscover his purpose.

After finally capturing the lead role in Broadway’s “Satan’s Alley,” which is billed as a

“journey through hell,” he finds redemption. But the film’s real redemption follows his

272 opening night performance, and finds Manero rediscovering his body by remapping

Manhattan through a Brooklyn lens. Tony’s final act is the same as SNF’s first one;

“You know what I wanna do?” he asks his girlfriend Jackie. “Strut,” he responds defiantly. Yet this strut is not borne from intimacy with the nighttime landscape of the

Theater District’s largely empty streets. Instead, Tony’s steps echo his old Bay Ridge shake, and Brooklyn is thus infused into the Manhattan streets.

Manero’s strut argues that fiscal-crisis era urban survival in the white ethnic enclave of Bay Ridge was a complicated mixture of celebratory self-assertion and exclusionary turf seizure. While Tony’s body evidences his intimate relationship to the built environment, this relationship is hard-won and his strut becomes a conduit through which Manero can lay claim to the pavements of his changing neighborhood. The ideas about survival that this walk produced both informed and were informed by spatial practices that unfolded within Bay Ridge’s actual streets, where residents engaged in industrious attempts to fill gaps in declining municipal services, and expressed their fears about encroaching urban decline and anger at municipal neglect. While in many ways, the film attempts to distance Bay Ridge from the notion of urban decline, its ending reveals that “stayin’ alive” in the city’s white ethnic borough neighborhoods during the crisis-era was an arduous endeavor, and that the tensions between survival and the threat of decline were far from resolved.

273 Chapter 6: “Marching Like Untrained Recruits”: Do-It-Yourself Street Practices, the 1980 Transit Strike, and the Embodied Production of Mayor Koch’s Renewal Narrative

During the spring following Saturday Night Fever’s debut, newly-inaugurated

Mayor Koch toured Bay Ridge’s streets in a rented bus crowded with community leaders and elected officials. “If we lost these people [the residents of Bay Ridge], this town

[would be] over,” the Mayor commented to his fellow riders.1 “Bay Ridge is my second home from now on,” he concluded.2 In 1979 and 1983, Koch took two similar walking tours of Ridgewood, and remarked that the area was “as busy as Bay Ridge” as he praised residents’ self-directed efforts to maintain their streets.3 His visits were markedly different from his 1978 trip to the streets of Bushwick, where the Mayor “stayed in his car for most of the tour up and down side streets … [and] took one fast, long-legged stride down Knickerbocker Avenue.”4 And in 1983, Koch directly responded to

Carter’s walking production of decline along Charlotte Street as he broke ground on

“Charlotte Gardens,” a project that sought to “transform the former symbol of American devastation into a pleasant community of homes surrounded by lawns and white picket fences.”5 Just before the April 1983 ribbon cutting ceremony the South Bronx

Development Organization (SBDO) invited Koch not to reproduce Carter’s walk down the street, but to instead spend the night in one of the homes. “We would like to extend

1 Dena Kleiman, “Bay Ridge Complains and Mayor Listens,” NYT, April 30, 1978. 2 Stefani C. O’Connor, “Koch Pledges City Aid Here,” Brooklyn Spectator, May 3, 1978. 3 Andrew Hampass, “Koch Strolls Down Myrtle Avenue,” runs in both the Queens Ledger and the Glendale Register, July 7, 1983. 4 Barbara Ross, “Koch Tours Bushwick- $43 M Help on the Way,” NYP, April 25, 1978. See also Koch’s 1979 walking tour through Bushwick, which he used to revise the image produced through his previous visits, and to reaffirm his commitment to poor, borough neighborhoods after criticism that his administration was solely focused on wealthy Manhattan: “Koch Tours Areas Looted in 1977,” NYT, August 21, 1979. 5 South Bronx Development Organization (SBDO) Newsletter, 1, no.8 (May-June 1983): Mayor Koch Papers, Municipal Archives (MN41122/#72).

274 the opportunity to you,” wrote SBDO director Ed Logue, “to return to your roots. … It might bring back some memories since we understand that you spent several years as a young boy at 1680 which is about two hundred yards up the street. … This would be the symbolic beginning of the end of the negative image of Charlotte Street.”6

This concluding chapter argues that Mayor Koch produced a post-crisis narrative about the city’s renewal by engaging in, promoting, and co-opting spatial practices discussed in this dissertation’s previous chapters. To construct this narrative, he responded to the articulations of decline and survival produced through Carter and

Travolta’s walks, and to the everyday practices of Ridgewoodites and Bay Ridgeites.

While Carter’s walk through the South Bronx had produced a desperate warzone, Koch’s wanderings through Bay Ridge and Ridgewood affirmed a particular brand of homegrown resilience that he deemed indigenous to these white ethnic spaces. In

Charlotte Gardens, Koch promoted a similar kind of spatial commitment forged through homeownership and everyday practices. However, both the structure of the project and reactions to it emphasized its juxtaposition with the surrounding neighborhoods, and thus continued to contribute to the area’s affective spatial habitus of decline. Finally, by encouraging workers to travel to work on foot during the 1980 transit strike, Koch shifted the crisis’ spatial lens from decline and survival practices in the boroughs to a seamlessly renewed Manhattan. As a flood of walking workers crossed the bridges into Manhattan,

Koch exalted their corporeal efforts as evidence of their dedication to a renewing city, and this exaltation obscured the city’s continued economic, social, and racial divides, many of which were most apparent in the boroughs.

6 Letter from Ed Logue to Koch regarding “an invitation to spend the night” in Charlotte Gardens, February 18, 1983: Koch Papers (MN41122/#55).

275 My efforts intervene in the scholarly conversation about how Mayor Koch’s complex mixture of liberalism and conservatism affected the city’s spatial landscape.

Much of this literature has been particularly attentive to Koch’s policing of public spaces, which has manifested through his attitudes toward the homeless and visible signs of

“disorder” within this public realm.7 I seek to extend and complicate this work by also considering Koch’s spatial politics within areas of the city that he deemed critical to New

York’s economic and psychological recovery, and by probing the ways in which the

Mayor actively produced his political ideas through embodied practices within these spaces. And while much of this literature has emphasized the latter portion of Mayor

Koch’s tenure, I instead examine the renewal narrative that emerged shortly after Koch took office in order to better understand how he facilitated the ideological shift out of the crisis. For my analysis of the Mayor’s involvement in the South Bronx, I rely in particular on the work of Jonathan Soffer, who provides a nuanced analysis of Koch’s housing strategy that helps contextualize the administration’s attitudes towards homeownership along Charlotte Street. He argues that Koch’s housing policy tacked between liberal and conservative approaches as it fused “grassroots housing activism” with the self-sufficiency and private funding of the neoliberal era.8 Historian Lizabeth

Cohen examines how urban planner and SBDO director Ed Logue fits into the postwar urban landscape, during which liberalism was forced to adapt many of its planning ideals.

7 See Stanley Corkin, Starring New York: Filming the Grime and Glamour of the Long 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Themis Chronopoulus, Spatial Regulation in New York City: From Urban Renewal to Zero Tolerance (New York: Routledge, 2011); Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996); and Alex Vitale, City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2008). See also Chapter 2’s discussion of law and order policing. 8 Jonathan Soffer, Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 295-296. Also see the introduction.

276 Cohen argues that Logue’s approach to Charlotte Street “reveals how liberal planners negotiated the conflicting demands of governmental responsibility, popular participation, and private investment in rebuilding major American cities” as urban areas shifted toward piecemeal approaches driven by community organizations and for-profit developers.9

My analysis extends these broader studies, and instead examines how these transformations in politicized planning ideas were produced through particular spatial practices along Charlotte Street.

Ed Koch established himself as a “walking” mayor by arranging an extensive series of neighborhood tours throughout the boroughs, which were organized through the

City’s Community Liaison Unit. During his first two years in office, he took twenty such walking tours, which were intended to “bring the mayor to areas of the City he might not have other occasions to visit.” Similar to both Carter’s visit to the South Bronx and

Lindsay’s ghetto tours, these were orchestrated to appear as spontaneous as possible, with neither press nor public officials informed, yet included elaborate agendas and instructions that specified every movement the Mayor would make in a particular neighborhood.10 Special attention was given to minority neighborhoods, which were classified as 50% or more black and/or Hispanic, and by September of 1984, Koch had traveled through 56 of these neighborhoods.11 These tours also sought to shift the emphasis away from the Mayor’s authority and onto the community as a coalition of self- help oriented experts: reports from the tours emphasized that local community groups

9 Information from Cohen’s forthcoming book is cited in “Research Brief: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Save America’s Cities,” The Real Estate Academic Initiative, Harvard University (March 2010). 10 See the Koch Papers, Municipal Archives (MN41042/Box 100/Folder 5). 11 Memo from Bruce Feld to Koch Re: Community Outreach, September 1984: Koch Papers (MN41041/Box 98/Folder 11).

277 served as the Mayor’s hosts and chose the route along with the CLU staff in an effort to show the Mayor both “the accomplishments as well as the problems in the community.”12

In addition to these more extensive walking tours, Koch also fulfilled a promise to visit nearly all fifty-nine community boards. “The next question, Koch indicated, may be ‘can

I (visit) each block?” remarked the Daily News in 1981.13 Ed Koch “knew the nitty gritty dynamics of the city in terms of the street realities,” claimed President of the Patrolmen’s

Benevolent Association Philip Caruso in his 1994 remembrances of the Mayor.14

Koch’s efforts were the culmination of a decade-long shift in postwar municipal policy that emphasized the neighborhood scale, and which capitalized on the do-it- yourself practices of neighborhood residents.15 In 1968, Lindsay began “Operation

Better Block” and that same year the community board system was formed. In 1971, he founded the first annual “Dress Up Your Neighborhood” awards for greening efforts across the city.16 In his bid for the mayoralty, author , whose running mate was none other than Jimmy Breslin, advocated a neighborhood platform: “power to the neighborhoods would mean that any neighborhood could constitute itself on any principle, whether spiritual, emotional, economic, ideological or idealistic,” wrote

Mailer.17 In his mayoral campaign, Mario Cuomo was avowedly as “angry as you are about the deterioration of our neighborhoods.” “If I stand for anything in politics,” he

12 Koch Papers (MN41042/Box 100/Folder 5). 13 Marva York, “Fight City for Bay Ridge Site,” DN, June 2, 1981. 14 Philip Caruso, as interviewed by John Metzger, August 16, 1994, #1/9. Edward I. Koch Administration Oral History Project, Columbia University. 15 See Chapter 3 for a full discussion of the neighborhood scale during the 1970s. 16 The Community Boards had their roots in Mayor Wagner’s 1951 Manhattan Community Planning Councils, which were then extended to the boroughs in 1963. For information on Lindsay’s “Dress Up” awards see Deirdre Carmody’s “Honors for Making the City Look Nicer,” NYT, December 18, 1975. 17 Norman Mailer, “Why Are We in New York?” NYT, May 18, 1969.

278 wrote in his statement of purpose, “it is that the neighborhoods may live.”18 His newly coined “Neighborhood Preservation Party” would occupy a separate space on the

November 8th ballot and the Preservation Party’s symbol, designed by Cuomo himself, was a well-tended brownstone building with a tree growing in the front yard. And much like the concept of the “model minority,” the City also officially declared certain streets

“model” blocks during the crisis-era.19

By Koch’s debut in office, the city contained several thousand block associations in addition to its extensive network of tenant associations. In Koch’s transitional materials, Maxwell Lehman of the Urban Academy urged Koch to “experiment with ways to give block associations a greater role in doing the things necessary to improve the quality of life on their blocks.”20 The need to develop service area boundaries that were coterminous with community board district lines became a chief effort of the Koch administration, and Koch also reformed Community Development Corporations

(CDCs).21 “A certain new self-reliance is in evidence among New Yorkers, who on their

18 Mario Cuomo, “Statement of Purpose”: Ken Auletta Papers, NYPL Special Collections (Writings: Cuomo Profile: Cuomo on 1977/BX6/F8/I10, Folder 2 of 2); “Cuomo Fleshes Out Second Ballot Line,” NYT, October 27, 1977. 19 The term model minority was coined in 1966 by sociologist William Petersen to describe Asian Americans’ supposed predisposition toward hard work and ethical achievements. For a scholarly examination of the term, see Nancy Abelman and John Lie’s Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). The origins of this “model blocks” program are unclear. It appears that during the crisis, the program involved certain neighborhood groups gathering private funds to renovate blocks, and that the Koch administration seized on these efforts to create designations of the same name. See Bruce Gold, “Merchants Organize, Model Block Project Set for Summer,” Brooklyn Tenant, June-July 1977; Rosemarie Rugani, “Model Blocks and Sidewalk Murals,” Brooklyn Tenant, August 1977; Garry Pierre-Pierre, “New Wave of Immigrants Changes a Once-Italian Bastion,” NYT, September 18, 1994. 20 Max Lehman and the Urban Academy, “The Koch Book 1977: Analysis of the problems faced by New York City government prepared for Ed Koch after his election as Mayor in 1977:” Edward N. Costikyan Papers, Columbia University (Transitional Materials, Box 1B). 21 CDCs are non-profit, community-based organizations that began in the 1960s to support local commercial and residential development efforts. Under the Koch administration, CDCs garnered

279 own are reclaiming parks, planting community gardens, developing day care activities” reported Time magazine in 1978.22 “I know that the people of New York have not forgotten how a city really works. They have not forgotten that it is we, the citizens, who form the city’s first line of defense. … Government cannot do what the people will not do,” Koch stated in his inaugural January 1978 speech.23 Koch often wedded this self- help spirit to the particular ability of his “urban pioneers” to engage in industrious practices in the city’s streets.24

While Koch often linked this do-it-yourself energy to a seemingly universal condition of the city’s residents, much of his administration’s self-help rhetoric emphasized the particular resilience of middle-class white ethnic neighborhoods during the crisis. The growing focus on these neighborhoods was partially a response to residents’ critiques. In April of 1978, Koch aides “said City Hall was being hit by complaints from middle-class neighborhoods protesting that too much attention was being paid to dying communities and too little to sections of the city where residents and community organizations are engaged in their own volunteer, self-help programs.”25 In

May 1979, the Mayor announced the formation of a special “taskforce on middle class neighborhoods.” “In the past, the city’s healthy neighborhoods have often been neglected,” Koch’s press release argued. “We hope to remedy that neglect, without penalizing the poverty neighborhoods. We intend to understand better than ever before

technical support from national, corporate sponsored non-profits like the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), which Koch hoped would help depoliticize the process. See Soffer’s discussion of CDCs on 297, and Alexander Von Hoffman, House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America’s Urban Neighborhoods (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 22 “Nation: New York Bounces Back,” Time, August 21, 1978. 23 Ed Koch, “Inaugural Speech,” January 2, 1978: City Hall Library. 24 The phrase “urban pioneers” is explicitly mentioned in Koch’s “Inaugural Speech.” 25 “Mayor: Middle Class Will Get More Help in Neighborhood Efforts,” DN, April 30, 1978.

280 what it is that makes a healthy neighborhood, and what is required to maintain such neighborhoods in stable condition,” concluded the release. The administration defined impoverished neighborhoods as those containing 15% or more residents receiving public assistance, and thus calculated that 4.8 million residents, or 63% of the city’s population, lived in middle class areas.26 Support for “stable” areas of the city was also evidenced through Koch’s unprecedented 1985 housing program, which emphasized low-density, subsidized private development. “The Koch housing program was primarily an economic development program, not a welfare program,” notes scholar Jonathan Soffer. “Koch’s emphasis on home-ownership and neighborhood stabilization eased fears that publicly- funded housing would bring crime.”27

Koch’s support for a particular brand of DIY neighborhood housing renewal fit into his larger efforts to produce rhetoric that facilitated New York’s “psychological recovery” from crisis.28 To produce this rhetoric, the Mayor capitalized on the perpetual extremism of crisis-era discourse. Crisis discourse often swung wildly between emotional poles, and juxtaposed angry and fearful narratives with stories of renewal and resilience. Sometimes, stories about this resilience were playfully cynical. In 1976, the

Times printed its “101 Things to Love about New York City” column, which included

“how everyone else hates New York,” “hating New York,” “people that haven’t left yet,” and “the rush of relief when you’re not mugged after you thought you would be.”29

“Those of us who care about New York City are faced every day with a problem of perception,” proclaimed City Council Speaker in 1979. “Are things

26 City of New York, Mayor Koch Press Releases, May 4, 1979: City Hall Library. 27 Soffer, Koch, 295-297. 28 Soffer, Koch, 11. 29 Glenn Collins, “101 Things to Love about New York City,” NYT, June 13, 1976;

281 getting better or worse? … Are we on recovery lane or still traveling down the road to ruin?”30 Time magazine cited a spirit of renewal in 1978 that dated to the 1976

Bicentennial celebration, at which point “the Anger Quotient” began to plummet.31

While in the wake of the blackout, only 6% of Americans thought New York was “a good place to live,” millions of New Yorkers went about their daily lives in a city which they nonetheless continued to inhabit and by early 1978, 85% of these residents wanted to remain in their neighborhoods and 50% were prepared to take positive action through participation in local government.32 “Curse it as Sodom or Gomorrah; call it a jungle; tell us it is inhabited by crazies and brutes. But in the end, the city remains,” concluded journalist Pete Hamill at the height of the image crisis in 1977.33 In his inaugural speech on January 2, 1978, the Mayor built upon this emotional landscape as he argued that the city’s crisis would ultimately be resolved through feeling. “I will talk about issues tomorrow,” stated Koch. “Today I want to tell you how I feel about the city … Without a question, this city has made mistakes. But our mistakes have been those of the heart.”34

In his “State of the City” address the following February, Koch detailed the “biblical” plagues that had befallen the city, yet maintained that “I have no doubt about the outcome. We will prevail. Renaissance involves both the psychological and the

30 Carol Bellamy, “The Status of the City,” WQXR radio, 1979, Carol Bellamy Papers, New York University (Press Release Series 1, Box1/Binder3 Jan-June 1979). 31 “Nation: New York Bounces Back.” 32 Susi Powell, “Abandoned Building Topic of Community Meeting at OLPH,” Brooklyn Spectator, March 1, 1978: Bay Ridge Community Council Records. Victor Marrero, Commissioner of the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) cites these statistics. These types of statistics were often debated; see Ken Auletta’s The Streets Were Paved with Gold (New York: Random House, 1975) for other polls evidencing New Yorkers disenchantment with life in the city. 33 Pete Hamill, “Despite the Crazies, Visions of a Big Shining Apple,” DN, July 6, 1977. See also the DN editorial series entitled “New York- A Love Story,” which debuted in September 1975. 34 “Text of Address Delivered by Koch at His Inauguration Speech as ,” NYT, January 2, 1978.

282 substantive. I think we’ve won the psychological battle already.”35 Looking back on

Koch’s tenure, Pete Hamill writes that the Mayor took “command of his unruly, depressed citizenry” by calling “on their collective toughness, the heritage of the

European immigrants and the descendants of slaves.”36

In some ways Koch waged this psychological, imagistic battle because, quite simply, the City was not in the financial position to make necessary material and infrastructure changes.37 In 1977, Professor of Public Systems Management at Columbia

E.S. Savas wrote to Koch’s advisor Ed Costikyan with “A Strategy for the New Mayor of

New York.” Savas cited that the key threats with which Koch would have to grapple included the perception that “quality of life … is low and declining compared to the suburbs, fear of crime, and lack of confidence in government.” He suggested not reducing crime or increasing quality of life, but changing the perceptions of these things.38 The politics of perception would prove critical to Koch’s mayoralty, during which he employed tactics that ranged from sealing abandoned buildings with trompe l’oeil window decals to a full-scale advertising campaign entitled “I Love New York.”39

“It is defensive municipal flag waving, the equivalent of the old LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT

35 Koch, “State of the City Address,” February 1979: Auletta Papers (Writings/Koch Profile/Research Files, Box 19/Folder 3). 36 Hamill, “Personality with a Point,” cited in Michael Goodwin, ed., New York Comes Back: The Mayoralty of Edward I. Koch (New York: PowerHouse Books, 2005), 40. 37 See in particular Soffer’s consideration of Koch’s anti-graffiti tactics. 38 “A Strategy for the New Mayor of New York,” November 9, 1977, letter from E.S. Savas to Ed Costikyan: Costikyan Papers (Koch Misc/Box 40). Savas was first deputy administrator under John Lindsay and subsequently, a professor of public-systems management at Columbia. 39 See Chapter 3 for a fuller discussion of “Operation Sealer” and, in particular, residents’ accounts of the efficacy of this program in the South Bronx in William E. Geist’s “Residents Give a Bronx Cheer to Decal Plan,” NYT, November 12, 1983. For a thorough analysis of the “I Love New York” campaign’s origins, see Miriam Greenberg, Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World (New York: Routledge, 2008).

283 sticker,” remarked Time magazine about the campaign, “but a change both real and psychological has occurred.”40

The relationship between the boroughs and Manhattan became a critical piece of

Koch’s renewal narrative. While Koch had spent his early life in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, his political career unfolded in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village where he started out as a staunchly liberal reformer. During the contentious 1977 mayoral election, the left-leaning Manhattanite garnered the support of outer borough white ethnics and adopted a more conservative “law and order” platform. Once in office,

Koch’s relationship to these outer borough residents became considerably complex as he tried to balance various interests amidst a renewal narrative that relied on a largely

Manhattan-centric lens.41 “Tourism and the theater are booming; Bushwick and the

South Bronx are burning,” remarked Auletta for the Daily News in 1978. “Mayor Koch

… suddenly discovered a city ‘renaissance’ the day he occupied City Hall. The upbeat view is common among Manhattan suburbanites who live or work in midtown and pass through the city’s four other boroughs like commuters on a speeding train.”42

“Everywhere we can see palpable signs of new life: new buildings under construction, office space in demands, shops and stores doing heavy business. Tourists are now flocking to New York in record numbers,” remarked Speaker Bellamy in 1978.43 A year later, Bellamy critiqued the Manhattan-centrism of this renewal: “I am still concerned because most of that construction takes place in Manhattan, rather than in the other four

40 “Nation: New York Bounces Back,” Time. 41 For more information about Koch’s relationship to the boroughs, see my introductory discussion and Soffer’s analysis. 42 Auletta, “Trying to Faith Heal the City,” DN, December 10, 1978. 43 Bellamy, “The Future of New York: Speech to the Community Church of New York,” April 23, 1978: Bellamy Papers (Bellamy Speeches Series 3, Box1/Folder 2).

284 boroughs, where most New Yorkers live and work.”44 “Must we all move to Manhattan to be saved,” questioned Councilmember Vincent Riccio in a letter to Koch and

Sanitation Commissioner Anthony Vaccarello after the blizzard of 1978 left the boroughs buried.45

While he shifted his spatial lens toward Manhattan, Koch also had to “solve” the problem of the boroughs in order to argue for the omnipresence of the city’s recovery from crisis. To do so, the Mayor attempted to harness white ethnic borough residents’

DIY survival practices. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Bay Ridge. While

Travolta’s strut and the everyday practices of Bay Ridgeites had evidenced the neighborhood’s complex survivalist practices in the face of municipal neglect and perceived decline threats, Koch’s visits to Bay Ridge transformed this complexity and reproduced the neighborhood as an stalwart icon that would renew the city. In February of 1978, the newly elected mayor visited Bay Ridge alongside Governor Carey and through this trip he sought to establish his credibility as an advocate for middle-class outer borough residents. “Despite the fact that Mayor Koch has always represented

Manhattan, a borough that he obviously knows and loves, he seems to be making a real effort to become acquainted with the special problems of the communities in the outer boroughs,” wrote the Home Reporter and Sunset News following the Carey-Koch visit.46

“You, the middle class, are the backbone of this city,” exalted Koch at the meeting’s cocktail hour. “You are entitled to competent government and I’m going to give you that

44 Bellamy, “Address to the New York Chapter General Association of Accountants,” March 20, 1979: Bellamy Papers (Bellamy Speech Series 3, Box 2/Folder 1). 45 Councilmember Riccio to Koch and Sanitation Commissioner Anthony Vaccarello, “Again the City Administration Has Proven to be Manhattan Oriented,” February 1978: Koch Papers (MN41012, #567). 46 Editorial, “The Mayor and the Neighborhoods,” Home Reporter & Sunset News, February 24, 1978.

285 government.”47 Although this rhetoric also fit into Koch’s broader narrative about the vitality of middle-class neighborhoods and their importance to the City’s survival, he would consistently single out Bay Ridge as particularly emblematic of the constructive, self-willed energies to maintain and improve their streets that he deemed so critical to

New York’s recovery.48 Bay Ridge was mentioned as a spatial counterpoint to the South

Bronx in his inaugural speech in January 1978 and again the following year, when

Koch’s planned town hall meeting in Harlem faced severe protest. “Doesn’t he want

Harlem to get the same service that Bay Ridge gets?” Koch questioned in response to the critiques launched by the Association of Black Social Workers’ chairman Cenie J.

Williams Jr.49

In April of 1978, Koch set out by bus on his first extensive tour of the neighborhood. “Mayor Koch,” reported the News just following the tour, “whose administration has been concentrating on devastated areas such as Bushwick and the

South Bronx, promised yesterday to help middle-class neighborhoods and said their survival is crucial in saving New York City.”50 Community advocates Ruth Berg, Sal

Milazzo, Al Nahas and Charles Otey organized the bus tour and their chief reasons for extending the invitation were twofold. The first reason was to show the mayor “the

47 Stefani C. O’Connor, “Carey, Koch Here: Vow Support of Bay Ridge,” Brooklyn Spectator, February 8, 1978. 48 The Mayor consistently praised Bay Ridge’s specialness. He referred to the area as his “second home,” and even expressed his desire to “clone” Bay Ridge in order to eradicate the city’s problems. See Randy Diamond, “Third Avenue is Now First-Rate,” DN, January 26, 1984. 49 “Koch’s Harlem Visit Facing a Protest,” NYT, February 22, 1979. Koch also mentioned Bay Ridge when he revealed his middle class homeowner platform to the Yale Political Union on February 16, 1977. “New York City cannot afford to lose the middle class homeowners from places like Bay Ridge and Riverdale and Staten Island and Laurelton,” stated Koch: from “A Zero Based Budget: A Prescription for Municipal Health”: Jack Bigel Archive on Municipal Finance and Leadership, Baruch College (NYC Mayoralty 1965; 1973 to 1985/News Clips, Speeches and News Releases/Shelf 8/1977 Primaries Binder). 50 “Mayor: Middle Class Will Get More Help in Neighborhood Efforts,” DN, April 30, 1978.

286 deteriorating urban conditions in sections of Sunset Park and what effect the encroaching blight would have on Bay Ridge.”51 The second, which was emphasized in a statement released at the tour’s start, was “to show City Hall what we are able to do and to prevail upon them to make available to us, in a direct and effective way, the offices of the Mayor and the services of the City.”52 “One of the themes of the tour was to demonstrate how the local citizenry has adopted a ‘do-it-ourselves’ approach to augmenting services which are in shortened supply these days,” remarked Otey.53 “We want to point out to the

Mayor that we in Bay Ridge are willing to do our share and we will not go the way of so many other communities,” echoed Nahas.54 The organizers emphasized that the tour would be distinctive from the usual “constituent hours” in which Koch participated throughout the city’s other neighborhoods. The tour offer had been extended to Koch from the community itself shortly after his November election rather than initiated by his administration. “This is an historical visit, a first tour of its kind,” remarked Otey. “It never could have been done under a prior administration.”55

The tour lasted approximately three hours and Koch was accompanied by fifty of the community’s leaders and legislators. The group began their journey at Joe Major’s restaurant at 69th Street and Fourth Avenue at 10 a.m. Following breakfast, “the mayor and community leaders crowded into a bus rented by the Third Avenue Merchants

Association, and festooned with banners announcing Koch’s visit. With a large red and

51 O’Connor, “Koch Pledges.” 52 Sara M. Otey, “Koch Says ‘Bay Ridge is 2nd Home’ After Tour,” Home Reporter & Sunset News, May 5, 1978. 53 Sara M. Otey, “Mayor Koch Finds Bay Ridge Not Hard to Take,” Home Reporter, May 5, 1978. 54 Stefani C. O’Connor, “Mayor Koch, Local Leaders to Survey Community Needs,” BK Spectator, April 26, 1978. 55 Otey, “Bay Ridge is 2nd Home.”

287 white button proclaiming ‘I love Bay Ridge’ pinned to his lapel,” Koch set off.56 “On board a bus full of leaders, who lectured him along the way, Koch saw the busy shopping areas, sidestreets of one and two-family homes and the perimeter area of Sunset Park’s burned-out and abandoned homes.”57 The Mayor was “stunned” by abandoned buildings near 58th Street and 4th Avenue, and declared “we must save Sunset Park in order to save

Bay Ridge.” Koch aligned himself with Bay Ridgeites as he stated that “our fate is tied up with Sunset Park.” “It is good that Bay Ridge residents appreciate this and want the area helped. This is the heart of the problem, we must work from strength,” the Mayor concluded.58 “The mayor’s personal viewing of the decay caused by abandonment should open the door at City Hall to leaders of this battle,” concluded reporter Frank

Griffin.59 From this site of abandonment, “the tour swung around and onto the broad, tree-lined streets of Bay Ridge where the bus swept by such sites as the 69th Street Pier, the palatial homes along Shore Road which the mayor ogled admiringly, the Shore Hill

Senior Citizens Center and Fontbonne Hall Academy which welcomed the mayor with a painted sign.”60 Following the tour, an editorial in the Home Reporter commented that

“what the Mayor viewed during his unprecedented tour here were neighborhoods both in transition and clinging to the tradition of middle class values that form the backbone of the city. We are sure that Mayor Koch could not help but be impressed with the quiet tranquility of broad tree-lined streets here dotted with well-kept homes, bustling commercial avenues, parks filled with youngsters playing ball, and old and new

56 O’Connor, “Koch Pledges.” 57 “Mayor: Middle Class Will Get More Help.” 58 Otey, “Bay Ridge is 2nd Home.” 59 Frank Griffin, “Mayor Found Bay Ridge ‘Sophisticated,’” Home Reporter, May 5, 1978. 60 O’Connor, “Koch Pledges.”

288 landmarks.”61 This description emphasized the connection between class status, values, and a particular kind of streetscape that was both “bustling” with urban commercial vitality, and filled with quiet quasi-suburban streets of well-tended homes.

By the tour’s end, a beaming Koch remarked that this was the “best organized trip

I’ve been on” and when asked if he would return, responded “of course … Bay Ridge is my second home.”62 Koch touted both the close-knit provincialism of the area, and its connection to the city’s sophistication. “Bay Ridge people are fantastic,” he continued.

“They live in the atmosphere of a small town and they are very sophisticated.”63 “I am very impressed,” Koch remarked over lunch at Griswold’s pub. “There’s such a sense of community here. Your concern for marginal areas says something about the type of community you are. You must build on your strengths; keep strong those areas that are strong and help others that are not. I’m not going to let you down. I’m not going to abandon you,” the Mayor assured residents.64 The tour’s other attendees responded genially to the Mayor’s visit. “After Saturday’s warm reception, Ed Koch certainly knows that he has many friends in Bay Ridge … while Ed Koch may have represented

Manhattan’s Silk Stocking district in Congress he and his close advisor, John LoCicero, cut their political teeth in Italian neighborhoods in lower Manhattan which are quite similar ideologically to much of Bay Ridge and the surrounding area,” remarked Otey for the Home Reporter.65

61 Editorial, “The Visiting Mayor,” Home Reporter, May 7, 1978. 62 Otey, “Bay Ridge is 2nd Home.” 63 Griffin, “Mayor Found Bay Ridge.” 64 O’Connor, “Koch Pledges.” 65 Charles Otey, “Mayor Koch Finds Bay Ridge Not Hard to Take,” Home Reporter, May 5, 1978.

289 The fall after his bus tour, Koch took to the neighborhood streets in the annual children’s “ragamuffin” Halloween parade, and the Amsterdam News referred to the mayor as the “pied piper” of Bay Ridge.66 “Happily handing out balloons and candy to delighted youngsters … Mayor Ed Koch declared that ‘I love Bay Ridge. All communities should be like this one. [If they were] we’d have a great city.”67 Koch continued to herald Bay Ridge’s do-it-yourself mentality and this mentality’s critical role in the renewal narrative in 1979, when he publicly praised residents and merchants along

Third Avenue for beginning a revitalization project almost entirely from private funds.

Koch had forewarned Bay Ridgeites that they were too stable to quality for public monies and stated, “you will basically have to do it yourself.”68 “That’s when Bay Ridgers rolled up their sleeves and started making things happen,” reported the Daily News. “We hope other neighborhoods around the borough and the city will take a careful look at the Third

Avenue experience and apply the lesson to their own streets. Maybe then there will be a lot more success stories in New York,” concluded the piece.69 In 1981, Koch congratulated Bay Ridge community groups for doing “what the City either can’t do for you or hasn’t done for you,” and in January of 1984, Koch returned to Bay Ridge to enjoy ethnic food and praise the neighborhood’s efforts.70 “I wish we could clone Bay

Ridge,” the Mayor asserted. “If there were hundreds of Bay Ridges in the city, we wouldn’t have any economic problems.”71

66 “Pied Piper,” Amsterdam News, September 23, 1978. 67 “Mayor Says He’s ‘Top Ragamuffin,’” Home Reporter, September 29, 1978. 68 Murray Weiss, “Koch Offers Kudos for Bay Ridge Self-Betterment,” DN, November 30, 1979. 69 “Bay Ridge Bootstraps,” DN, December 6, 1979. 70 York, “Fight City.” 71 Diamond, “Third Avenue.”

290 Mayor Koch’s two walking tours of Ridgewood further produced a renewal narrative that seized upon residents’ self-directed practices. 72 On August 22nd 1979,

Koch “made a largely unheralded” visit to the neighborhood and had the chance to view some of the residents’ renewal and restoration efforts. Through this walk, Koch made these efforts officially visible and sanctioned their criticality. “The tour included a visit to the Onderdonk House, a look at the restoration of 1714 Palmetto Street and the refurbishing of several fire-damaged houses, a walk along Myrtle Avenue and its revitalization program, and a discussion of the smoke detector and fire prevention programs being set up in [the] area,” reported the Ridgewood Times. Shirley Margolin, the executive director of the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society, remarked that “the

Mayor is extremely aware of the efforts of the community in the difficult task of restoring the Onderdonk House” and that he would commit to attending the annual Heritage-

Oktoberfest to raise money for its restoration. “I’m delighted to attend, and this year will be no exception,” Koch told Margolin. After the official stops, Koch proceeded to the subway station “where commuters … were greeted with the famous ‘How am I doing?’

They were delighted to find the Mayor in Ridgewood, and were quick to answer ‘pretty good.’” Koch “continued along Myrtle Avenue greeting passerby, signing autographs and answering questions to the enthusiastic crowd which followed.”73

72 Koch’s relationship to Ridgewood was somewhat particular. Both Maureen Walters and Carl Clemens, who published the Ridgewood Times, were longtime Koch supporters: see the Koch Papers (MN41041/ Box 98/Folder 13). In my conversation with Ridgewood resident and community activist Paul Kerzner in July 2011, he also commented that Koch had a specific relationship to the idea of neighborhoods, which placed him in a unique position to understand and support Ridgewood’s plight. According to Kerzner, he was the first elected official to understand the “dynamics of neighborhoods and that neighborhoods can be protected.” “Koch being somebody from a neighborhood, understood neighborhoods. He was the first cheerleader,” claimed Kerzner. 73 “Mayor Koch Pays Visit to Ridgewood Area,” Ridgewood Times, August 30, 1979.

291 Koch returned in July 1983, and his survey of the Myrtle Avenue Revitalization project established connections between street survival, ethnic consumption, and civic participation. “The affable Koch emerged from his limousine at Myrtle and Putnam, wearing shirt sleeves on a hot afternoon. He smiled, waved and greeted residents and merchants during the 45 minute visit.” Koch stopped into Rudy’s Pastry Shop on Seneca

Avenue to sample German sweets, offered some pastry to a child outside the store, and visited with merchants on Myrtle Avenue. Following his tour, Koch concluded that

Ridgewood was “a very thriving neighborhood,” and “as busy as Bay Ridge.” A photo that accompanied the Glendale Register’s cover story on the Mayor’s journey showed

Koch “[getting] ready to chow down at Rudy’s Pastry Shop.”74 After the walk concluded, Koch stated that he was “very impressed, as I am every time I come out here.

It was a wonderful walk. I’ve been here before and I’ll come back many times. I learned a lot.”75 By greeting passerby warmly, referencing previous visits, and even offering food to a small child, Koch established his spatial intimacy with the neighborhood. His comment that the area was “busy as Bay Ridge” positioned Ridgewood as part of a broader network of white ethnic survivors.

As Koch traveled comfortably through the homey landscapes of Bay Ridge and

Ridgewood and advanced residents’ preexisting survival practices in order to produce his renewal narrative, the Mayor’s efforts on Charlotte Street actually sought to build such a home-scape from the ground up. The Charlotte Gardens project was financed through a combination of city, state, federal, and private monies, and its primary source of private funding came from the Ford Foundation’s Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC),

74 Hampass, “Koch Strolls.” Soffer discusses Koch’s visits to gentrifying areas of the city and how they often included gastronomical sampling. 75 Hampass, “Koch Strolls.”

292 whose mission was to strengthen local community groups.76 Although Charlotte Gardens was completed in partnership with the stalwart local community group the Mid-Bronx

Desperadoes, the flavor of the project was quite distinctive from other municipal efforts to capitalize on the do-it-yourself revitalization of existing buildings that was often undertaken by local residents. While many homesteading efforts were underway in the

South Bronx, Koch alighted on Charlotte Street, where there was almost no existing building stock with which to work. The final project consisted of ninety single-family, suburban-style homes with backyards and picket fences, which had been trucked into the

South Bronx from their manufacturing site in Pennsylvania. Charlotte Gardens’ low- density, detached, prefabricated homes bore little resemblance to the surrounding cityscape. The housing development was intended to transform the “American nightmare” produced through Carter’s walk into Koch’s “American dream,”77 yet the project ultimately reproduced Carter’s landscape of decline by starkly exposing the disconnect between this domesticated landscape and the surrounding streets.

Koch’s construction of Charlotte Gardens was a direct response to Carter’s walk.

Early in 1978, Koch’s coordinator Lloyd Kaplan’s remarks made this connection clear:

“Tolstoy’s War and Peace is about events and what flows from them. Jimmy Carter came to Charlotte Street. What else flows from that? That’s what I’m going to live out,” stated Kaplan.78 Koch formed the SBDO in April 1979, tasked the organization with the oversight of renewal efforts, and emphasized that the organization’s formation was a direct result of Carter’s visit. “Following a visit and pledge by President Jimmy Carter in

76 Charlotte Gardens received 40% in federal funds (Winston Williams, “Rebuilding from the Grass Roots Up,” NYT, December 21, 1986). 77 Eric Marcus, “High-Rise, No Rise: Families Strive to Turn an American nightmare into the American Dream,” Metropolis (April 1985). 78 Auletta, “South Bronx: Do Schemes Match Our Dreams?” DN, February 5, 1978.

293 October 1977 to help the city deal with the problems portrayed by Charlotte Street,

Mayor Edward I. Koch created the SBDO to organize and implement a comprehensive approach to the problems of the South Bronx,” stated a December 1980 SBDO report.79

“This … is not a revitalization program for just another deteriorated area,” wrote the

SBDO in 1981. “It is a program for the best known symbol of devastation in the country.

… This is the area where President Carter stood and stated his concern, directly and eloquently. President Reagan … took the trouble to visit the exact same area and express his concerns.”80 This direct response to Carter’s walk was intended as a corrective reimagining from the outset. Led by LISC project director Anita Miller, the tour that marked the start of the project was taken by bus rather than on foot, and “the bus deliberately avoided the rubble-strewn Charlotte Street.” Instead, the group stopped for lunch amidst the “bustling stores and well-tended private homes” of predominately

Italian Belmont.81

The administration emphasized that the Charlotte Street project was equally concerned with transforming geographical perceptions as it was with changing life on the ground. “[The revitalization project] was designed to put a positive end to the Charlotte

Street Story,” that had begun with Carter’s walk, claimed Ed Logue, and thus perpetuated the entanglement of image and reality along the street.82 “These homes are a symbol to me and to the people of the South Bronx,” stated Koch. “They represent our

79 SBDO, South Bronx Revitalization Program and Development Guide Plans: Areas of Strength, Areas of Opportunity (December 1980): Avery Architectural Library, Columbia University. 80 SBDO, Crotona South: Final Planning Report and First Year Action Program (May 1981): Papers of Jill Jonnes, Lehman College. 81 Kathleen Teltsch, “Bus Tour Marks Start of Project in the South Bronx,” NYT, May 5, 1981. 82 Letter from Ed Logue to Koch regarding Crotona South, May 22, 1981: Koch Papers (MN41121/#2363).

294 determination to change the image, and the reality, of this wonderful community.”83 Not everyone was pleased by the direct connection between the symbolic import of Carter’s visit and the City’s priorities. Local community board district manager Dana Driskell argued that “the Charlotte Street area is not the planning board’s number one priority. It is not a reason to develop a housing plan just because the President strolled through the area.” “I think the City has overdramatized the need to have development at that location where he stood,” Driskell maintained.84 Even the City Planning Commission argued that

“this development has taken on a symbolic significance which has little to do with its size or its location.”85 “Like those houses that have achieved immortality because George

Washington slept there, Charlotte Street has become the touchstone of South Bronx redevelopment because Jimmy Carter stood there,” concluded the Times.86

However, there was a genuine feeling among the Koch administration that this symbolic act would have material consequences. Logue explained to the LA Times in

1981 that “if you change the attitude of the South Bronx people and they begin to think there is a reason for staying and a reason for improving, that makes the difference. There is a whole public perception of what the place is like, and there is a whole different reality.”87 In May of 1981, LISC echoed Logue’s assertion and stated in their South

Bronx program that neighborhood renewal provided “an opportunity to distinguish the

South Bronx as imagined from the South Bronx as reality.”88 Even some residents

83 SBDO Newsletter 1, no.8 (May-June 1983): Koch Papers (MN41122/#72). 84 “Charlotte Street Leads Bronx Plan,” City Limits Magazine (May 1978): Papers of Jill Jonnes (Box 5/Folder 1). 85 NYC Planning Commission Press Release, October 16, 1978: Auletta Papers (Writings: Koch Profile: Research Files: South Bronx/Box 19/Folder 2). 86 John Oakes, “The Charlotte Street Risk,” NYT, November 24, 1978. 87 John Goldman, “Bootstraps: South Bronx Strength from Unity,” LA Times, July 26, 1981. 88 LISC South Bronx Program, May 1981: Koch Papers (MN41121/#2306).

295 responded to this politics of perception as the plan eventually got underway. “Even if people can’t afford to buy them, they’ve given us new hope,” remarked former Charlotte

Street resident Dalia Conrad. “Just seeing these homes makes you think differently. I was standing here and a guy I didn’t even know drove up and started telling me how he could see himself putting in plants and working around the house with a hammer.

Everybody thinks they’ve got a chance now.”89 As these residents laid eyes on this new landscape, they constructed spatial imaginaries where they envisioned themselves engaging in daily practices of “working around the house.”

Moreover, Koch evidenced Charlotte Street’s critical role in his renewal narrative by pushing his plans forward despite strong objections.90 Following Koch’s initial proposals in the spring of 1978, a letter from White House aide Bruce Kirschenbaum to

South Bronx State Senator Israel Ruiz on December 5, 1978, implied that even the Carter administration was initially critical of the Mayor’s plans. Although the President’s office soon apologized for this “poor wording” and affirmed its commitment to the City’s efforts, the letter suggested a potential withdrawal of federal funds until the City could evidence “good, solid planning.” “The net result of the incident,” reported the Times,

“was a vivid illustration of how sensitive the huge South Bronx redevelopment program is, and how concerned the Koch administration is that it not be perceived as mishandling the program.” 91 In February of 1979, following an initial approval in November 1978, the Board of Estimate (BOE) defeated these initial plans for 732 units of low-rise cooperative housing on the Charlotte Street site. This defeat was propelled by board

89 Philip Sudo, “Again, Hope for Charlotte Street,” DN, March 20, 1983. 90 See especially Joseph Fried, “In Rebuilding the South Bronx, Politics Are Also a Priority,” NYT, December 24, 1978, for a good summary on doubts about project’s soundness. 91 Fried, “Carter Aide Apologizes for Letter Critical of South Bronx Planning Effort,” NYT, December 14, 1978.

296 members’ critique of the project as largely symbolic and their fear that dedicating large sums toward the South Bronx would neglect other areas of the city that were not as “far gone” as Charlotte Street. “Is this the best site or was it chosen because the president stood there,” asked City Council Speaker Carol Bellamy in the fall before the BOE’s decisive vote.92 “I’m afraid the Charlotte Street project may be- three years from now- our Vietnam,” stated one city planner.93 The initial plan would have been partially funded by HUD’s “Neighborhood Strategy Areas Program,” which was “primarily intended to benefit basically solid neighborhoods,” and the BOE members, as well as other members of the City administration, felt that these funds were not appropriate to the extreme desperation found in the South Bronx.94 “It is my view that at this stage of our planning for the South Bronx, we can more profitably place new housing units in the many marginal neighborhoods where vitality still exists but is threatened by increasing abandonment and vandalism,” wrote Bellamy in a March 1979 press release to her constituents.95 “[The project] is an illusion or a charade,” that leads the residents of the

South Bronx to believe “there is something where actually there is nothing,” echoed

Brooklyn Borough President Howard Golden bitterly after the vote.96 The plan’s initial failure provoked a range of highly emotional reactions among residents, and a group even decided to stage a mock funeral for the stalled project.97 Yet “nothing anybody can do

92 Fried, “A Glimmer of Hope in the South Bronx,” NYT, November 15, 1978. 93 Oakes, “Charlotte Street Risk.” 94 Memo from Ed Koch to Deputy Mayor Nathan Leventhal, June 9, 1978: Koch Papers (MN41077/#902). 95 Letter from Carol Bellamy to Constituents, March 1979: Bellamy Papers (Press Release Series 1/Box 1/Binder 3: Jan-June 1979). 96 Glenn Fowler, “South Bronx Plan Voted Down 7 to 4 by Estimate Board,” NYT, February 9, 1979. 97 Lee Dembart, “Koch, in a Reversal, Orders New Plan for South Bronx,” NYT, February 13, 1979.

297 [could] undo the fact that this is where Jimmy Carter stood [emphasis added],” stated

Logue in the vote’s wake.98 In response to the initial plan’s failure, Koch requested that the SBDO prepare a new, scaled- back plan in June of 1979.

The municipal government and news media emphasized that the Charlotte

Gardens project would allow homeowners to participate in a fundamentally American spatial ideal. “The wreaths are on , and from the street looking past the white picket fences, trees with colorful blinking lights can be seen inside the homes,” reported the Daily News the winter after the 1983 groundbreaking. “Christmas has come to

Charlotte Street [and] certainly the folks in Charlotte Gardens believe in Santa Claus.”99

The most startling symbol of this spatial ideal was the homes’ white picket fences. “I want white,” insisted Logue, when critics suggested that the fences would undoubtedly become a target for graffiti artists. “I’m not worried. What is the American dream? A home of your own with a white picket fence.”100 At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Koch remarked that “we are solving this problem [of the South Bronx] in a way which promotes stability and creates a family neighborhood which will survive and prosper. …

We have provided an opportunity for people who live here to share in the American dream and not leave their community.”101 This American homeownership narrative was further solidified through Koch’s personal connection to the neighborhood: as a young child, the Mayor had lived on 173rd street in Crotona Park and his immigrant Jewish family had utilized the neighborhood as a stepping stone toward upward mobility.102

98 Paul Goldberger, “For Urban Planners, a Case Study in Frustration,” NYT, February 11, 1979. 99 John Lewis, “At Last, Charlotte Street Has Merry Christmas,” DN, December 23, 1984. 100 Philip Shenon, “Taste of Suburbia Arrives in the South Bronx,” NYT, March 19, 1983. 101 SBDO, “An American Dream Comes to Charlotte Street,” SBDO Newsletter 1. 102 See Jonathan Mahler, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City (New York: Picador, 2005) 89.

298 This spatial ideal was also an outgrowth of the “mayor’s preference for expanded homeownership in lower-income neighborhoods,” and was originally revealed to the public in the context of a citywide announcement that showcased similar efforts.103 “Too often in the past our urban aid programs have been too paternalistic,” remarked Logue.

“Homeownership is self-reliance, self-help. These successful families will be role models, civic activists and community leaders who will spur local government to improve the often inadequate public services in such communities.”104 “Once these homes are built, the place we used to know as the street of broken promises will be, once again, a place where South Bronx families can raise their children and live in peace, safety and dignity,” maintained Congressman . “What more could anybody want than a nice house in a quiet and attractive neighborhood?”105 Ferrer’s statement implied both that Charlotte Gardens was a universally desirable spatial ideal, and that it was an obvious answer to the current landscape of despair. If Carter’s walk had constructed Charlotte Street as a barren space through which to pass, the Koch administration attempted to reproduce it as a place to call home.

Yet the project’s emphasis on a seemingly universal homeownership ideal obscured the disconnect between those who were able to afford these new homes and the majority of local residents. As Koch spoke during the opening ceremony for the development, journalist and historian Jill Jonnes noticed “a big lanky kid hanging off a slide … yelling and heckling.” “What are you doing for the poor people? Stop lying,

103 Ed Logue, “Charlotte Gardens Briefing Sheet,” January 26, 1983: Koch Papers (MN41122/#169); Memo from City Planning Commissioner Robert Wagner to Koch regarding the Charlotte Street proposal, February 13, 1980: Koch Papers (MN41036/#1145). 104 Ed Logue for the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, “Charlotte Gardens: Is there a Future for Single Family-Homes in New York,” The Assessor 3, no. 1 (April 5, 1985). 105 Congressman Fernando Ferrer, “My Weekend at Charlotte Gardens,” SBDO Newsletter 1.

299 motherfuckers,” the kid shouted.106 “The most stable stratum in New York City’s housing stock is the low-rise, owner-occupied, one-to-four family house,” argued the

SBDO in its December 1980 report. “It survives in the South Bronx, even under the dreariest conditions.”107 While the 1980 citywide homeownership rate was 23%, the

Bronx topped off at only 3% by 1977.108 The project may have helped South Bronxites come closer to the American dream, but this was clearly an uphill battle. While priority was given to former residents of Charlotte Street and residents in the immediate area, the

City Planning Commission noted that “one of the most important factors in determining the marketability of the project is the number of potentially eligible families in proximity to Charlotte Street. However, very few families in the nearby area were in the eligible income range, making the market potential in the surrounding area limited.”109 Each home cost $49,000 and applicants needed average family incomes of greater than

$33,000. This middle-class vision “was seen as challenging the idea that it would be difficult to attract middle class homeowners to an area as devastated as Charlotte Street

… [and] helping dispel the notion that the South Bronx is populated only by the poor.”110

These new homeowners were positioned as pioneers in a hostile wilderness.111 To render it within the reach of the majority of people in Community District 3, Logue argued that a

“more drastic approach would be required” that would probably have resulted in trailer

106 Jill Jonnes, “Account of Charlotte Gardens Opening Ceremony,” April 17, 1983: Papers of Jill Jonnes. 107 SBDO, Areas of Strength. 108 City of New York, Community District Statistics: A Portrait of NYC from the 1980 Census; City of New York, Fact Book; Community Portfolio: An Information System for Community Districts (1977): Avery and City Hall Library. 109 Charlotte Street Area Project Fact Sheet: Papers of Jill Jonnes. 110 David Medina, “Line up to buy South Bronx Homes,” DN, May 23, 1983. 111 Philip Shenon, “ ‘Pioneer’ Settlers Bring Glow to South Bronx,” NYT, January 14, 1984.

300 housing.112 Logue’s comment emphasized that this kind of community was not indigenous to the South Bronx’s predominately poor, minority population but was rather a spatial aberration that had to be spectacularly inserted with governmental aid.

While the project was intended as part of Koch’s post-crisis renewal narrative, critiques of Charlotte Gardens emphasized its incongruity with its surroundings and thus reinforced Carter’s commonsense landscape of decline. Despite the dramatic barrenness of Charlotte Street, the low-density, quasi-suburban Charlotte Gardens plan was partially a reaction to the City’s perception that the South Bronx was actually overcrowded. “The

South Bronx has had perhaps the highest residential density in the United States,” concluded the Koch administration in 1980.113 After its construction, the Times mused that the “low-density” solution for the South Bronx was actually a form of planned shrinkage.114 Ironically, the low-density, suburbanness of Charlotte Gardens only directed further attention to the contrasting urban areas which surrounded it. By its completion, the plan had become “a suburban community in a concrete jungle.”115 “The scene isn’t exactly Levittown, and the problems that remain certainly are gigantic,” reported the LA Times. “But the symbol of suburban middle-class home ownership as a

112 Logue, “Charlotte Gardens: Is There a Future.” 113 SBDO, Areas of Strength. 114 Alan Oser, “A Struggle Over Sites in the South Bronx,” NYT, October 22, 1989. See also Fergus Bordewich’s “Clearance Stirs Objections,” NYT, February 10, 1980, for a discussion of community board claims that the City was enacting planned shrinkage through building demolition. 115 In the words of one resident, cited in Philip Sudo’s “Again, Hope for Charlotte Street,” DN, March 20, 1983. Von Hoffman comments that “Logue’s little project flew in the face of most people’s preconceptions of what New York City should look like. Urban planners who only a few years earlier had called for completely emptying the South Bronx now criticized the project for putting too few people on urban land. The population density of rubble-strewn lots was zero, but apparently that counted for little in the face of nostalgia for the Bronx’s old six-story flats,” Block by Block, 37.

301 means of anchoring slum neighborhoods is powerful and appealing to urban planners.”116

Unlike Levittown, there were no amenities surrounding the Charlotte Street project.117

Carol Bellamy summed up this spatial incongruity when she called the project “an island unto itself.”118 Years later, former Deputy Mayor Nathan Leventhal echoed this comment when he recalled that the project was “a bizarre thing to see … they were building single family homes … in the middle of a bombed out area.”119 Metropolis magazine suggested that this stark contrast was what actually afforded the project its symbolic power, and referred to Charlotte Gardens as a “startling” publicity stunt. “The presence of middle-class homes bought by middle-class families in the most infamous disaster area said something to the outside world,” commented the magazine. “The startling contrast of white picket fences and burned-out buildings guaranteed that message would be carried in newspapers and on the evening news all across the country.

And it was.”120 Critics of the project feared vandalism, and the homes themselves were constructed offsite in Pennsylvania because “the home builders were scared to death of the South Bronx, as they were and are of the other major New York ghettos.”121 Logue and Koch attempted to eschew these fears. “They don’t know what they’re talking about,” argued Koch. “Do you think people who will own these homes here, these three- bedroom homes, are going to allow people to come in and vandalize them? Never, never.

116 Goldman, “Bootstraps.” 117 Ellen Hopkins, “Six Rooms, Rubble View,” NY Mag, March 12, 1984. The SBDO’s 1981 Planning Report claims to respond to the critique about lack of amenities by providing transit improvements, an industrial park, and two new neighborhood shopping centers but these were not on the scale of Levittown according to Hopkins. 118 Bellamy, Letter to Constituents Regarding Charlotte Street. 119 Leventhal, interviewed by Sharon Zane, August-November 1992: Koch Oral History Project. 120 Marcus, “High-Rise, No Rise.” 121 Logue, “Charlotte Gardens: Is There a Future.”

302 They’ll stand here and protect them with their lives,” the Mayor stated emphatically.122

Design features included a minimum lot size of 6,000 square feet, side and backyard fences, deadbolt locks on doors, decorative security grilles on windows and pre-wired intrusion alarm systems.123 Even Logue’s own herculean efforts to construct the project emphasized the incongruity between Charlotte Gardens and its surrounding landscape. In

January of 1981, in preparation for the project, Logue explained to Koch that “the area is

[so] sufficiently blighted” that the City would have to physically remove much of the visual evidence of decline “in order that potential investors would have a clear perspective and indeed assurance that the worst of what was around them would be taken out.”124 Charlotte Gardens was “the most difficult project I ever undertook,” he commented in 1985.125

In the context of Koch’s renewal efforts, news stories emphasized the “hidden” potential of the neighborhood. These stories only further reinforced the spatial idea that renewal and resilience were unexpected, aberrant emotions in a predominately desperate landscape. “The South Bronx, 20 square miles of New York City widely believed to contain only rubble-strewn empty lots, hides surprising pockets of strength,” reported the

LA Times in 1981. “While blocks of Charlotte Street typify urban blight and are startling to tourists, the contrasts now appearing in the South Bronx are equally startling.”126 This narrative of spatially incongruous survivors was exemplified by the media’s predilection

122 Larry Sutton, “On the Street of Dreams: Suburbia Moves into South Bronx,” DN, April 18, 1983. 123 SBDO, “Fact Sheet”: Papers of Jill Jonnes (Grand Opening Celebration Folder). 124 Memo from Ed Logue to Koch re: Crotona South Area, January 16, 1981: Koch Papers (MN41121/#2146). 125 Logue, “Charlotte Gardens: Is There a Future. See also Alan S. Oser, “Lessons from One- Family Housing in the South Bronx,” NYT, April 21, 1985. 126 Goldman, “Bootstraps.”

303 with the last building standing in Carter’s stomping grounds, located at 1500 Boston

Road on the corner of Charlotte Street. After the landlord had abandoned it, a trio of older female tenants had begun a drive to purchase the building. One of them, Miss

Steiner, had suggested they name the building “Last Hope,” and this phrase was spray painted across the building during the 1980 Democratic National Convention.127 In

December of 1982, the tenants bought the building from the City, and in September of

1983, with help from the SBDO and the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes, “Last Hope” became the refurbished “New Hope Plaza.” The building’s survival was undoubtedly evidence of residents’ fortitude in the face of governmental neglect. “I’m like a tree planted by the water, and I shall not be moved,” stated Miss Steiner to Mayor Koch.128 Tenants’ efforts were also a proclamation of their geographical existence; “we’re still here,” declared a sign stretched across the building’s rooftop.129 Yet many of the news stories that praised this fortitude depicted a bizarrely incongruous island of survival floating in a commonsense sea of despair. “A single occupied building stands, mirage-like, atop a moonscape of rubble on the street where … Jimmy Carter visited the South Bronx.

Across the top of the six-story, sooty gray apartment house, tenants have painted ‘Last

Hope’ in big white letters,” stated the LA Times.130 These narratives also underlined the uniformity of the street’s current desperation by positioning the building as a symbol of a distant, more hopeful past. During the renewal ceremony, the New York Times remarked that the Plaza “was welcomed as another sign of revitalization in a once-proud

127 For Miss Steiner’s renaming story see Sara Rimer, “3 Women Who Led Rescue of Building in South Bronx See Hopes Fulfilled,” NYT, September 24, 1983. For a discussion of the spray painting see Sheila Rule, “Counter-Convention Opens Amidst South Bronx Ruins,” NYT, August 9, 1980. See Chapter 1 for a fuller discussion of this “counter-convention.” 128 Rimer, “3 Women.” 129 John Goldman, “‘Last Hope’ Aids South Bronx Revival,” LA Times, July 26, 1981. 130 Goldman, “‘Last Hope.”

304 neighborhood.” Such remarks suggested that residents’ present experience of their neighborhood was less than prideful. And the SBDO’s choice to invest in the site was further evidence of the Koch administration’s choice to direct their renewal funds toward the spatially symbolic Charlotte Street.

Although he didn’t accept the offer to spend the night in one of the homes, Koch did engage in a “ceremonial painting of the fence, Tom Sawyer-style” on the day of the ribbon cutting.131 Logue himself planned to live in one of the units and Congressman

Fernando Ferrer spent a weekend there with his family to “dramatize in a concrete way our commitment to seeing this homeownership opportunity, as well as our commitment to seeing Charlotte Street rebuilt.”132 By the summer of 1983, the City claimed that the turnaround was complete. “Today these streets are alive and well,” reported the SBDO.

“This is a remarkable story of neighborhood rebirth.”133 While Carter’s mobile body had produced understandings about decline along the street, Koch’s commitment to “staying put” emphasized the street’s critical role in the construction of a post-crisis renewal narrative, even as it ultimately reinforced the divide between the aberrant Charlotte Street and the landscape that surrounded it.

As Koch’s spatial practices attempted to reinterpret the embattled outer borough landscapes of decline and survival, in order to solidify his renewal narrative he also used embodied practice to shift the geographical focus toward the fast-growing economic hub of Manhattan. During the 1980 transit strike, Koch rallied Manhattan-bound commuters to take to the streets and walk what were in many cases extremely long distances between

131 SBDO, “An American Dream Comes to Charlotte Street,” SBDO Newsletter 1, no.8 (May- June 1983): Koch Papers (MN41122/#72). 132 Ferrer, “My Weekend.” 133 SBDO, Meanwhile in the South Bronx: A Report of the South Bronx Development Organization (Summer 1983): Brooklyn Collection, Pratt Institute.

305 their homes and their places of employment. Throughout the ten days of striking, Koch chose two bridges each day, one for the morning commute and one for the evening, and cheered on his militia of workers from these crossings and from the streets of

Manhattan’s business districts.134 These walkers’ journeys to work, and the rhetoric which surrounded these practices, argued that these movements were critical to the City’s ability to economically thrive. Yet by emphasizing the healthiness of certain kinds of laboring walkers in certain areas of Manhattan, this narrative obscured the economic, racial, and gendered fissures in this “revitalized” city. 135 As commuters took to the streets en masse, newspaper reports emphasized the physical labor of walking and its healthful effects. This rhetoric contributed to an affective spatial habitus that suggested that the city’s streets should be commuter pathways for optimistic, orderly, and healthy participants in a Manhattan-centric economy. These laboring participants shifted the spatial lens away from the disorderly bodies of decline in areas like the South Bronx and

Bushwick.

The circumstances of the strike dramatically affected the city’s transportation landscape, and resulted in an unprecedented number of pedestrian commuters. As the

Transport Workers Union’s (TWU) contract came up for renewal in early 1980, the

Union initially demanded a 30% wage increase to meet the rising cost of living. After the

MTA responded with a 3% wage increase, negotiations failed. In the early morning hours of April 1st, 34,000 workers walked out, and the city’s 1,800 miles of subway and bus lines ground to a halt, followed soon thereafter by the Long Island Rail Road and

134 Taken from Koch’s commentary on photo #374 of him crossing the on April 2, 1980: Koch Collection. 135 Auletta, “Transit Strike: The Dark at the End of the Tunnel,” DN, April 6, 1980, notes that the city is still “imperiled” by budget caps of 677 million for 1981 and 1.07 billion for 1982.

306 four private bus lines. Three million subway and bus riders, 180,000 Long Island

Railroad commuters, and 200,000 private bus passengers would have to find other ways to work that morning. 136 While the strike compelled New Yorkers to search out a variety of alternative transportation sources,137 it was the pedestrian plight that most compelled the media and municipal government’s imaginations. The number of pedestrian commuters increased from 3,000 before the strike to 65,000 by the strike’s end.138 On the first day of the strike, 30,000 of these pedestrians crossed the bridges into Manhattan, and images of this mass movement were printed in local papers.139 Koch championed these walkers as he made “an unscheduled stop at the foot of the [Brooklyn] bridge on the

Manhattan side to rally his troops in the war against acquiescence to transit workers’ demands.”140 “Don’t give them anything,” one pedestrian shouted at the mayor. ‘Give

‘em hell,’ chimed another. ‘We’re going to need your help,’ Koch told commuters. ‘If we work together we can reduce the pain.’”141 Soffer writes that Koch’s approach to the strike revealed his complex relationship to conservatism: while his “adversarial tone marked the end of an era of labor-management collaboration [he] never abandoned collective bargaining.” Nonetheless, Soffer maintains that Koch “correctly calculated that New Yorkers, like other Americans, had become more individualistic and were less

136 “The Strike at a Glance: Facts,” DN, April 2, 1980. 137 On the first day of the strike, the Post reported that “New Yorkers coped surprisingly well today. … They biked, hiked, jogged, skated, thumbed, cabbed and carpooled their way to work in the strangled city”: Rita Delfiner and Cy Egan, “The Transit Strike: The City Skates Through Day One,” NYP, April 1, 1980. 138 Bike riders jumped from 4,000 to 40,000: City of New York, Koch Press Releases, Mayor Koch and Transportation Commissioner Anthony Ameruso, “Analysis of Traffic Conditions,” May 4, 1980. 139 See for example, the April 2, 1980, cover of the Daily News. “The morning tide of incoming commuters surges across the Brooklyn bridge,” read the picture’s caption. 140 Don Gentile, “TWU Walked Out, So Folks Walk In,” DN, April 2, 1980; Carl Pelleck and Maralyn Matlick, “A Hero’s Welcome for Koch,” NYP, April 1, 1980. 141 Pelleck and Matlick, “Hero’s Welcome.”

307 likely to reflexively support the union. At the same time he believed that they could be convinced to act together as citizens for what he saw as the common good.”142

Koch touted that his approach to the strike was markedly different from that of his predecessor, John Lindsay, who had urged New Yorkers to “stay home” and to decide whether they were truly essential to the City’s workforce.143 Lindsay’s circumstances were somewhat distinctive considering that the TWU’s 1966 strike was the first of its kind in New York and that the actions eventually resulted in legislation known as the

“Taylor Law,” which was intended to regulate public sector bargaining. Yet Koch’s rhetoric during the strike was not only the result of historical hindsight’s advantages, and he consistently sought to reinforce his distinctively aggressive agenda by tying the practice of walking to the refusal to surrender to the demands of strikers; New York

Magazine noted that Koch “set new standards in improvisational locomotion” during the strike.144 This “improvisational locomotion” was composed of spontaneous, spirited theatrics that transformed Koch into a kind of mobile, municipal cheerleader. As he marched across Brooklyn Bridge on the seventh day, Koch clapped and cheered as he yelled for New Yorkers to “keep it up” and commented to reporters that “New Yorkers are walking to their jobs … fighting this battle so we don’t have to give in to intimidation. Mayor John Lindsay told the workers to stay home in 1966: he killed their ego … that was the dumbest thing ever.” And although public opinion throughout the strike proved to be divided over support of the strikers’ cause, Koch’s movements helped

142 Soffer, Koch, 208, 219, 213. 143 See “Strike Rules Set on Travel into City During Strike,” NYT, January 1, 1966. See also Former Press Secretary Evan Cornog’s interview with Roma Connable, June 26, 1992 for the Koch Oral History Project. 144 Steven Marcus, “Koch as Koch Can,” NY Mag, April 21, 1980.

308 to produce a seemingly united front against transit workers’ unreasonable demands.145

“Hi everybody. Am I right in standing firm?” Koch asked commuters as he strode across bridges and through crowded streets, to which most people answered a resounding

“Yes.”146 “Governor Carey, Mayor Koch and MTA chairman have all made absolutely clear that they will not allow the Taylor law to be tampered with,” wrote the Post. “Neither, the transit workers can be sure, will any New Yorker. It would be a poor reward for the spirit and endurance the citizenry has shown in getting to and from work. [State Legislators] will not lightly risk the people’s wrath at the coming election by nullifying both the law’s key provisions and the personal sacrifices of millions throughout this strike.”147 After the strike’s end on April 12th, Koch again stressed the relationship between New Yorkers’ willingness to walk and their unwillingness to give in to the unreasonable demands of public employees: “Don’t you understand that resiliency, that willingness to sacrifice and to bear the pain will be demonstrated again, as the result of the negotiations that took place when people walked to work, and in the event that we’re threatened in the municipal government … people know that they can walk again,” stated the Mayor.148

Koch and the news media argued that the ability of New Yorkers to take to the streets was part of their natural capacity to thrive amidst adversity, while also connecting this capacity to crisis-specific conditions. “New Yorkers are best in adversity,” quipped

Koch.149 “[They] can endure anything. We are building on a very special quality [during

145 Brian Kates, “Pay ‘Em Already! Is the View from the Bridge,” DN, April 3, 1980. 146 Marcus, “Koch Can.” 147 Editorial, “New York Under Siege: No Retreat on Amnesty,” NYP, April 8, 1980. 148 Milton Lewis, Bob Miller, and Peter Bannon for WABC’s Eye Witness News, April 12, 1980: Bigel Archive (Shelf 1/Box 7). 149 “Walking,” NYT, April 3, 1980.

309 the strike]. New Yorkers can take everything that comes along and do it on foot.”150 “In times of trouble, people seek their roots, and New York at root, downtown anyway, is legs in motion,” claimed the Times. Yet many reports also emphasized the relative desperation of these walking workers, and drew connections between the fiscal crisis itself and their ambulatory bodies. Following the strike, the Daily News assessed its

“psychic cost” and questioned whether “a picture of thousands of New Yorkers trooping across the Brooklyn Bridge during the transit strike [was] a symbol of strength and unity during a crisis … or merely a picture of thousands of New Yorkers trooping across the

Brooklyn Bridge because they had no other way to get to work.” Dr. Arthur Freeman, an former New Yorker who practiced psychology in Philadelphia, went on to comment that the strike was “just one more stressful situation” in a crisis climate during which “New

Yorkers are used to the fact that every time they pick up the newspaper, the government’s going bankrupt, water’s being shut off somewhere, the schools are going broke.”151

Professor Yakov Epstein, a Rutgers psychologist who specialized in the “subway psyche” commented that “the two things that bother straphangers most are being touched by strangers and the sense that they are not in control … people feel powerless … but with the strike, if they don’t have to go to work- and they can get there by walking … they’re suddenly in control, and it can be a good feeling.” Epstein went on to urge New

Yorkers to handle the strike “emotionally” by “congratulating” themselves on finding a way to work and treating the experience as an “adventure.”152 Just as New Yorkers had produced the crisis’ meanings through highly emotionalized spatial practices, stories

150 George Arzt and Leo Standora, “Wily Wives May Force New Car Curb,” NYP, April 2, 1980. 151 Carol Wallace, “The Psychic Cost of the Transit Strike: Do New Yorkers Really Have Nerves of Steel?” DN, April 15, 1980. 152 John McLaughlin, “Psychology of a Strike: Beating the System Can Be an Ego Trip: ‘Til it Rains,” DN, April 4, 1980.

310 about recovery from crisis necessitated a particular kind of affective bodily engagement.

However, this embodied transition from crisis to recovery was far from seamless, and in the wake of the strike, New Yorkers continued to experience signs of crisis through their spatial practices. “When New Yorkers re-entered their subways after 11 trying days, enthusiasm died quickly. The cars were still smeared with graffiti; no gnomes had repaired broken doors or lights,” reported the Times on April 16th.153

Descriptions of the walkers emphasized their optimistic participation in the city’s capitalist economy. In accounts of the strike, there was virtually no mention of the effects on the unemployed, people who needed to use transit for reasons other than work, or people who did not commute into Manhattan for work. Though the State eventually requested federal aid to assist over 500 companies, which estimated losses of at least $50 million, and overall losses were calculated at $100 million per day in wages and

$780,000 in taxpayer dollars to make up for the overtime worked by police and transit cops, reports in the early days of the strike stressed a “business as usual” model as committed laborers carried on with their work, even if it meant taking extraordinary measures.154 Wall Street brokers reported “no problems” and that business was

“functioning normally,” and Koch reported a job attendance rate of approximately

90%.155 The News “congratulated” commuters on a “herculean” feat: “mostly, we walked. We got up early … we started out, putting one foot in front of the other, and then we stepped out as bravely as we could under the circumstances, marching like untrained recruits, striding toward our offices, sometimes ten blocks away, sometimes ten

153 “Traffic Lessons of the Strike,” NYT, April 16, 1980. 154 City of New York, Koch Press Releases, April 10, 1980; “Strike at a Glance.” 155 John Toscano and Steve Lawrence, “Businesses Aren’t Jogged, They’re Limping Along,” DN, April 2, 1980; Amy Pagnozzi, “Quip-a-minute Koch Greets Crowd,” NYP, April 7, 1980.

311 miles.”156 And although Koch eventually began urging a four-day workweek to ease the effects of these daily commutes, this shortened week was predicated on a shift in labor from eight to ten hours per day. Many businesses made the adjustment.157 The labor of these bodies also necessitated a certain amount of risk and the physical toll on walkers became part of this embattled narrative, which depicted pedestrians as a kind of militia combating the unreasonable demands of strikers by continuing to participate in the city’s economy. Heart attacks reportedly rose 20% during the strike, car accidents also 20%, bike accidents went up 6%, and pedestrian injuries rose 4.5%.158 One man actually lost his life on the ten-mile trek from Mill Basin, Brooklyn, to the financial district.159 Lesser effects included injuries to New Yorkers’ feet; podiatrists reported an upswing in business and shoe stores sold out of pads and supports.160

Stories about elaborate bodily preparations for walking emphasized that workers’ economic labor was innately connected to their corporeal labor. The News’ Edward

Edelson reported on “survival hints” for pedestrians and bikers that included a ten to fifteen minute warm-up, and the Post offered hearty recipes to make before setting out on a long trek.161 These reports suggested that in order to walk to work, labor had to first begin at home through disciplined exercises and domestic culinary endeavors. These stories also argued that walking to work was a corporeally taxing endeavor for which participants had to prepare in order to “survive.” Elena Klensch posted a similar column in the Post entitled “These Feet Are Made for Walking,” which provided details on how

156 Donald Singleton, “Congrats, Everyone, On a Herculean Feet!” DN, April 2, 1980. 157 Murray Weiss, Robert Lane, and Hugh Bracken, “Koch Urges 4-day Week for Relief,” DN, April 4, 1980. 158 Cy Egan and Joe Nicholson, “New Yorkers Hurting as Injury Toll Soars,” NYP, April 7, 1980. 159 Egan, “10-mile Trek to Job Kills Man,” NYP, April 2, 1980. 160 Marcia Kramer, “Our Song: Toot, Too, Tootsies Don’t Cry,” DN, April 3, 1980. 161 Jane Ellis, “Eat Hearty Before Setting Out!” NYP, April 7, 1980.

312 exactly to walk and dress before setting out to stride. “Keep your head up, chest out and stomach in,” she wrote. “A GOOD [sic] walker moves with the toes pointing in the same direction as the body. Point your toes outward, and your arches, knees and hip joints suffer. Pigeon-toed walkers put a strain on ankles and knee joints. LEAN [sic] forward slightly when walking uphill, maintaining the rhythm and smoothness used when walking on the level. You might even consider investing in a back pack. It puts least strain on your body and keeps it balanced so you can walk faster and more steadily.” The column even included a skin care section, with instructions for a milk and fruit mask to combat the perilous effects of sun, wind and air pollution.162 These instructions focused on producing a discipline of walking that distinguished between “good” and “bad” walking; good walkers were mindful of their bodies in space, and the reward of this attention was that they would become even more productive participants in the labor force who would be able to travel to their jobs “faster and more steadily.” The “work” of commuting on foot was intimately tied to the labor of the workplace. “Ira Osder, a 38-year old computer expert from Baldwin, Long Island, arrived in Manhattan wearing a blue nylon jogging suite and said he’d run the thirty-three miles home from the garment center tonight. ‘I’m training for a marathon in May, anyway,” he said. ‘I have to get work anyway so I might as well run.’”163

According to transit strike discourse, walking not only necessitated physical training, but it also demanded proper comportment on the city’s streets. On day one of the strike, the Post “urge[d] all citizens to join in every endeavor to maintain order, self-

162 Elena Klensch, “These Feet Are Made For Walking,” NYP, April 8, 1980. 163 Delfiner and Egan, “City Skates.”

313 discipline and civility.”164 New Yorkers remarked on the courteous behavior of their fellow workers and assumed that there was a natural relationship between this courteousness and a dedication to employment. “Those that did make it into work were incredibly polite on the way” and “the sidewalks were crowded with groups of chatting, laughing people dressed in weekday working clothes, hurrying along purposefully.”165

The News even printed a primer of walking etiquette that discouraged walkers from

“dawdling” or “window shopping” and urged them to “take advantage of your walking time to soak up culture.”166 Proper comportment in the city streets would also be financially rewarded: just after the strike’s end, Koch announced a $20,000 grant to the

City from the Josephine Lawrence Hopkins Foundations “to reward individuals who demonstrated meritorious conduct during the strike.” Cash awards of between $250 and

$500 would be given to “deserving individuals” who were selected from “nominations made to the Mayor and the comptroller by City agencies.”167 This act further codified the relationship between well-behaved bodies in the streets and the monetary rewards of labor.

Aside from the potential financial rewards, strike narratives emphasized that the work of walking produced both physical and psychological benefits. Dr. Richard Stein commented to the News that “more than 300,000 pounds of flab [were] trimmed away because of strike-induced walking.” Stein emphasized that a faster walking pace resulted in more weight lost, and this equation implied that walkers who moved efficiently and

164 Editorial, DN, April 1, 1980. 165 Delfiner and Egan, “City Skates”; “Getting to Work: 1: It’s Great, If You Can Take the Pace,” DN, April 1, 1980. 166 Carol Wallace, “Strike Etiquette: Would Emily Post Have Stepped On Your Toes?” DN, April 9, 1980. 167 City of New York, Koch Press Releases, April 14, 1980.

314 quickly toward work without dawdling stood the best chance at toning their bodies.168

Following the strike, the City established a transportation policy taskforce that recommended the creation of an extensive network of bike lines citywide based on New

Yorkers’ practices. This policy recommendation further reinforced the relationship between the city’s streets and bodies engaged in particular kinds of healthful practices.169

The healthful effects of walking could also be felt through its cultural and emotional pleasures. Thomas Tomasulo of the News reported that by walking, “you have more time to observe things like architectural structures when you are striding through the city. … I never realized how much you miss by hopping the IRT Lexington Line to Worth Street-

Brooklyn Bridge.”170 This touring impulse was echoed by mayoral aide Elliot Winnick’s suggestion that New Yorkers “use the strike to let [themselves] see the town.”171 For the

Koch administration, the “town” meant Manhattan south of Central Park, where the

City’s tourist economy was centered. Love was even able to blossom as New Yorkers walked together towards Midtown Manhattan; “Gary Sampson and his girlfriend Barbara

Kalmaer … thought the pleasant spring weather was just perfect for strolling from Park

Slope in Brooklyn to Bloomingdale’s at , where Sampson works.”172

These healthy, orderly, industrious, and cultured walkers were often contrasted with the disorderly bodies who would not or could not participate in this embodied act of renewal. On the morning of April 4th, when a severe rainstorm refused to discourage commuters, Koch drew a divide between healthy and “sick” New Yorkers: “Where are

168 Edward Edelson, “Transit Strike’s Extracting Pounds of Flesh,” DN, April 11, 1980. 169 City of New York, Koch Press Releases, April 14 and April 30, 1980. 170 Thomas Tomasulo, “We Give a Gold Medal to the Pedal,” DN, April 2, 1980. 171 “Skate, Rattle, and Roll,” Village Voice, April 2, 1980. 172 Gentile, “TWU Walked Out.”

315 the whackos today?” he asked. “Only good New Yorkers are out on days like this.”173

Koch’s reference to “whackos” referred to an encounter with a man on a bicycle earlier that morning who had nearly “plowed his bike into the press corps that surrounded the mayor.” The man, a teamster named Rich Richardson, indicted Koch for his firm stance against the strikers. “You union-breaking bastard. Nobody believes your crap,”

Richardson shouted at Koch, to which the Mayor responded: “go ahead, strike me and

I’ll have you arrested. I don’t have to take this from whackos.” “With that the biker rode off and Koch continued on his walking tour,” reported the News.174 For the Mayor, the line between “whacko” strikers and the “good” New Yorkers who fulfilled their economic duties by walking to work was clear. The contrasts between orderly and disorderly bodies sometimes had a racialized component. The Voice commented on the racialized divide between productive and unproductive New Yorkers; white organizer

John Lawe was depicted as the “good guy” and the predominantly black and Hispanic transit workers were positioned as dissident and slothful.175 The specter of black and

Latino blackout looters was also invoked, as reports compared the walking workers to

New Yorkers during the 1965, rather than 1977, blackout. Dr. Melvin Stanger, a psychiatrist at NYU and Downstate Medical Center commented that even “problems in the 1977 blackout were caused by a very small part of the population, people who saw themselves as have-nots taking from the haves.”176 Not only was this statement a marked shift in opinion from the media’s lurid obsession with the widespread destruction during

173 Leslie Gevirtz and Rita Delfiner, “Drenched: But New Yorkers Refuse to Be Downhearted,” NYP, April 4, 1980. 174 Jerry Schmetterer, “Koch’s Bridge Party Crashed,” DN, April 5, 1980. 175 and Joe Conason, “Painting the Strikers Black,” Village Voice, April 14, 1980. 176 Pat Smith, “New Yorkers Would Do Very Well in a Nuclear Attack. If We Had Some Time to Prepare, We’d All Die with Grace and Class,” NYP, April 2, 1980.

316 the 1977 blackout, it also sought to further marginalize this population of excessive and disorderly bodies who were depicted as “have nots” rather than the unemployed poor, and did nothing to probe the causes of the division between the two economic groups. Such references subtly continued to assert the difference between bodies that behaved and those that exceeded the limits of order, and positioned these two types of practices as inevitable results of universal qualities of “goodness” and decency. The decent bodies who were now taking to the streets en masse were those who served the capitalist economy.

More subtle distinctions between orderly and disorderly bodies during the strike were drawn around street inhabitations involving amplified sound. As one Manhattanite wrote to the Post, “While walking in the Times Square area recently, I saw an inconsiderate noise-maker with a radio the size of a baby grand piano playing it so earsplitting loud that it could be heard for miles around. Then to my delight, I saw a policeman go up to him and say: You and your blasting noise box, get off my beat or I’ll run you in.’ And this guy ran like a rabbit.”177 The news media and municipal government had already established a clear relationship between boom boxes and declining areas of the city, and claims to the city’s streets, even sonorous ones, were quickly equated with violence. A Times article reported that when a box traveled down the street, “a scarf of torn and bloody sound leap[t] out and a listener almost duck[ed] reflexively,” and that the music infected the body of the unwilling listener and “[stuck] to the roof of your brain,” while listeners vainly attempted to “pry [the sound] loose by

177 Letters to the Editor, NYP, April 4, 1980.

317 [wriggling their] ears raw.”178 Abrasive amplified noise was linked to decaying and dangerous urban neighborhoods and box carriers earned the moniker “the Bronx box people,” which conjured images of an alien species poised to invade the streets. This portrayal of amplified sound as an assault on urban space was echoed in the municipal government’s legal response to street music; box decibels were regulated through the

Department of Environmental Protection’s noise code.179

Beyond these more subtle divides between different types of bodies, the City blatantly argued that laborious walkers could suppress disorderly bodies by lowering of crime rates. Police Commissioner Robert McGuire told the Post that “muggers appear to be frightened that strikebound New Yorkers will form posses and chase them … [and that] this dramatic shift in the balance of terror on city streets helps explain a big drop in crime during the transit strike. People normally tend to be anonymous, but this has broken down during the strike and that’s a healthy thing.”180 These commuters, who were finally able to move through the streets freely and productively, could be contrasted with the criminals who were “robbed” of their living during the strike by being quite literally robbed of their mobility and denied entry into Manhattan. “Little Arron the chain snatcher is stranded in Crown Heights, Gregory the purse snatcher is uptown.

Beebe the jostler is trapped out in Jamaica, Queens,” the News reported. Yet the threat of this populace would never be completely eradicated. “Even though the distance was great, in evaluating his plight, Beebe decided it may be worth his while to hoof it to

178 Francis X. Clines, “About New York: Music From the ‘Box’ is their Forte- or Triple Forte,” NYT, August 14, 1979 179 Following the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969 and the Noise Pollution and Abatement Act in 1972, municipalities began to instate local noise control acts. The types of sounds that were regulated, and the threshold decibel levels, varied from city to city. 180 Joe Nicholson, “Now It’s the Muggers Who Are Terrified,” NYP, April 9, 1980.

318 midtown. The sidewalks will be packed. And all plainclothes detectives will be in uniform directing traffic,” the report concluded.181

The City posited a direct statistical relationship between the strike and lowering crime rates; a 10% drop in crime was reported during the first week of the strike as compared with the previous week, and major crimes, including murder, rape, , assault, and bank robberies dropped a “dramatic” 16%, although the exact relationship between these major crimes and the strike was never actually specified.182 Supposedly, this drop in major crime was even possible in the sordid South Bronx, where a medical intern at Lincoln Hospital reported that “until the strike, all I get is knifings and gunshots

… now I look at feet all day.”183 The drop in crime was also attributed to the 10,000 cops on the streets during “daylight hours,” which was a 50% increase over usual foot patrols.

The media, however, failed to mention that this drop in crime was clearly centered on protecting workers within Manhattan during regular business hours.184 In the years following the strike, the Times reported on workers who continued to be inspired by the transit strike by taking to the streets as a means of commuting, and in their portrait of one particular worker, stressed that he had been held up “only once.”185

Ultimately, the work of walking commuters who streamed into Manhattan during the strike was critical to what was sometimes referred to as Koch’s “dual city” renewal narrative. This narrative subtly shifted the geographical lens away from the declining corners of the boroughs and toward Manhattan as the spatial center of tourism, real estate,

181 Michael Daly, “The Transit Strike is Robbing These Punks of a Living,” DN, April 7, 1980. 182 Nicholson, “Now It’s the Muggers.” 183 Michael Daly, “A Foot Soldier is a Casualty in the Transit War,” DN, April 4, 1980. 184 Editorial, “A Tribute to the Cops in Our Strike-Bound Town,” NYP, April 4, 1980. 185 Deirdre Carmody, “More and More Walkers Hit Strike: Many Like the Walk to Work,” NYT, April 29, 1982.

319 and business. As early as 1978, Ken Auletta commented on the relationship Koch drew between walking and Manhattan-centric renewal. “The renaissance of New York,’ which

Mayor Koch talks about- ‘I feel it as I walk around,’ he told me- is confined to a relatively few blocks in Mid-Manhattan. Because Fortress Manhattan is alive and well, it’s assumed that the rest of New York is, too.”186 While Mayor Lindsay had “equated his actions in the transit crisis as being synonymous with the needs of … ghetto dwellers” during the 1966 strike and made special visits to Bed-Stuy, Koch waited at the foot of the bridge’s Manhattan side to welcome working New Yorkers into the center of power.187 Through this shift in spatial practice, the respective mayors evidenced their commitment to different political, racial, and economic visions of the city. The

Manhattan-centric economic renewal narrative was produced actively through New

Yorkers’ industrious, directed walking and through strike discourse, which stressed this new cartography. The Daily News’ special pullout map, printed on April 2nd and repeated in subsequent issues, depicted “some prominent destinations” and the approximate walking time between them. Places listed included the Plaza Hotel, 59th Street Bridge,

Grand Central Station, Penn Station, the Brooklyn Bridge, Washington Square, Port

Authority Bus Terminal, the World Trade Center and . Not only was this vision Manhattan-centric, but it was also centered on a laboring section of the island that obscured its entire northern, and poorer, half.”188 The geographically inequitable effects of the strike further revealed Koch’s dual city. Soffer notes that garment workers were among those hardest hit, “perhaps because many of the poorest workers … who lived in

186 Auletta, Streets, 286-286, 197. 187 Michael Marmo, More Profile Than Courage: The New York City Transit Strike of 1966 (Albany, NY: SUNY Series in American Labor History, 1990), 196. 188 “Hoofing It? Here’s a Timetable,” DN, April 2, 1980.

320 faraway outer-borough neighborhoods, had the most trouble getting to work.” “For the wealthy the effects were less pronounced. The strike had no effect on floor activity on the stock exchange, the hotels were full, retail food sales were normal, and most Fortune

500 companies were open for business,” Soffer remarks.189 In questioning why the city had run relatively well despite the strike, the Times speculated that it might have been because “rush-hour riders in the 1980s include fewer hourly workers and more salaried employees with flexible schedules.”190 While the strike had revealed an economically and geographically divided city, the practices and representations of walking workers emphasized that these divides were necessary to the city’s continued renewal.

In the wake of the strike, Koch would continue to argue for the relationship between walking through the city’s streets and public spaces, and a Manhattan-centric vision of economic renewal. During his 1985 “State of the City” address, he stressed this relationship between walking and the growth of a Manhattan-centric economy, which he argued was as naturally indigenous to the City’s landscape as the “new growth” of trees in the springtime; “In the spring,” stated Koch, “you can walk through our parks and hear the rustle and snap of new growth. As you walk our streets today you can hear the rustle and snap of pile drivers, riveters and cranes. New office buildings are going up. NYC is growing. In 1985, all four seasons are spring,” the Mayor argued.191 That same spring,

Koch proclaimed that the weekend of April 12th was “New York Walkers Weekend,” when residents could “eat and sing their way through the city” on any number of guided

189 Soffer, Koch, 216. Soffer also notes Governor Carey’s critique that the strike was mostly borne by poor people of color. 190 “Traffic Lessons.” 191 Ed Koch, “State of the City Address,” 1985: Koch Papers (MN41122/#1099).

321 walking tours.192 This contention that public spaces were the domain of industrious, working New Yorkers took on a sinister note as Koch began his campaign to cleanse the city’s streets and parks of homeless bodies, an action which would inform the municipal government’s policies for decades to come.193 As Koch detailed his plan to combat homelessness in 1989, he stressed that although “no one should turn away from the plight of the homeless … neither should the homeless turn public streets, parks and buildings into de facto shelters. Public space is for all to use and none to abuse.”194

In 1989, just before his final bid for reelection, Koch’s Manhattan-centric renewal narrative was punctured by movements he could not control. On the evening of

Wednesday, August 23rd, at the intersection of 20th and Bay Ridge avenues, mere blocks from where Travolta staged his opening strut, sixteen-year old African American Yusef

Hawkins was fatally shot by a gang of white teenagers. Hawkins, along with three friends, had apparently come to Bensonhurst from predominately black East New York to look at a car and were surrounded by as many as thirty boys armed with baseball bats.

The murder appeared to be a case of mistaken identity, which was nonetheless racially motivated. Gina Feliciano, a young Italian-American woman who had broken the mores of her community by dating black and Latino men, had threatened to bring a gang of

African Americans into the neighborhood to challenge the Italian-American boys. The

Italian boys were staked out in front of her house when Hawkins and his friends arrived and because black men were so rarely seen in Bensonhurst, Hawkins’ attackers thought he and his friends were the gang. Hawkins’ death marked the third high-profile, racially-

192 Jennifer Dunning, “Where to Walk Now That Spring’s Afoot,” NYT, April 12, 1985. 193 See my introduction, and in particular Alex Vitale’s City of Disorder and Neil Smith’s The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996). 194 Paul LaRosa and Marcia Kramer, “He’d Send Homeless to Isles,” DN, January 26, 1989.

322 motivated murder in the city during the 1980s; the previous two had taken place in

Southern Brooklyn’s Gravesend and Queens’ Howard Beach, both of which were also predominately Italian-American neighborhoods.

The Times argued that the crime revealed the segregation in the city’s white ethnic working class neighborhoods, and the geographic and social distances between

African Americans and white ethnics, many of whom felt increasingly neglected by municipal government during the postwar period.195 The neighborhood’s “fierce vigilance over territory [that] has sometimes slipped into vigilantism” was partially attributed to the insularity of many residents’ southern Italian culture.196 Yet this territorial vigilance was also connected to an apparently stable home-scape of clean streets and community spirit. “Unlike in many other parts of New York City, little has changed in Bensonhurst in the last decade” continued the Times. “More than 60 percent of the people still live in the one- and two- family houses that line the tree-lined streets.

The gardens are usually brightened by pots of geraniums or petunias, often adorned by religious statues. In the evenings, families and neighbors set out lawn chairs on the sidewalks for leisurely end-of-the-day conversations.”197 Following the crime, “in what seemed a world away [from East New York], people [in Bensonhurst] tended neat lawns dotted with plastic pink flamingos and ceramic . Children zoomed over

195 Howard French, “Geographic and Social Isolation May Spur Acts of Random Violence, Experts Say,” NYT, September 4, 1989. 196 Celestine Bohlen, “In Bensonhurst, Grief Mixed with Shame and Blunt Bias,” NYT, August 28, 1989; John Kifner, “Bensonhurst: A Tough Code in Defense of a Closed World,” NYT, September 1, 1989. 197 Bohlen, “Grief Mixed with Shame.”

323 sidewalks on skateboards as parents went in and out of the small shops and bakeries along 20th avenue.”198

Interestingly, one reporter drew a connection between life on the ground and cinema but this time, rather than Saturday Night Fever, the film was ’s Do the

Right Thing, which had debuted that summer.199 Some felt that the film’s depiction of racial tensions would lead to riots, and while it did not lead to immediate violence, the film anticipated Hawkins’ death just two months later by chronicling racial tensions between Italian-American pizzeria owners and African-American residents in Brooklyn’s

Bed-Stuy neighborhood. As the film’s tensions escalate, the pizzeria owner’s son remarks that “we should stay in Bensonhurst and the niggers should stay in their neighborhood.”200 The film finally explodes into a violent riot during which African-

American residents furiously chant “Howard Beach!” in memory of the 1986 death of

Michael Griffith.201 As the pizza shop is destroyed in one of the final scenes, flames consume a photo of John Travolta, which is part of the restaurant’s Italo-American “wall of fame.” A photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. and . eventually takes its spot.

On August 27th, a group of around 70 protestors, which included clerics, marched through Bensonhurst to protest the killing, and were met with heckling and jeers. “Go home,” chanted some Bensonhurst residents. “We are home,” countered the protestors.

“No part of New York is exempt from us,” remarked Reverend Timothy Mitchell.

198 Don Terry, “On Slain Youth’s Block, Sorrow and Bitterness,” NYT, August 25, 1989. 199 , directed by Spike Lee (1989; 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 2009), DVD. 200 Sam Roberts, “Once Again Racism Proves to Be Fatal in New York City,” NYT, September 3, 1989. 201 Griffith was killed after his car broke down near Howard Beach. He and his friends walked to the neighborhood to seek help, and were confronted outside the New Park Pizzeria by a group of white men. In an attempt to run from the men, Griffith was eventually hit by a car

324 “We’re not going to let the racists tell us where we cannot go in this city.” “I’m not afraid of the streets of Bensonhurst,” echoed Reverend Herbert Daughtry. “I’m not afraid of streets anywhere. Nobody is going to turn us around.”202 A few days later,

“nightsticks flailed and bottles and bricks flew as the leading ranks of a predominately black crowd of 7,500 demonstrators breached the police lines in an attempt to cross the bridge and carry the protest into Manhattan.” “Whose streets? Our streets! What’s coming? War!” chanted protestors.203 Koch criticized the marches. “There is nothing wrong or illegal about a protest march,” remarked Koch. “The question is do you want to be helpful in reducing tensions, or do you want to escalate those tensions?” Reverand Al

Sharpton, who had led two of the four marches, was livid about Koch’s seeming abandonment of the Civil Rights Movement. For Sharpton, the ability to walk

Bensonhurst’s streets represented the ability to freely inhabit the city: “Even though you may be looking at it differently because you’re the mayor now, you are inadvertently saying you shouldn’t be in the neighborhood. You should be in any neighborhood. And you should be able to protest in any neighborhood where a crime has been committed,” the Reverent argued. Koch later referred to Hawkins’ murder as the “turning point of the campaign,” which led many New Yorkers to embrace ’ seemingly more straightforward confrontation of the city’s racial tensions.204

202 Nick Ravo, “250 Whites Jeer Marchers in Brooklyn Youth’s Death,” NYT, August 28, 1989. 203 Robert D. McFadden, “‘Day of Outrage’ March Ends in Violence,” NYT, September 1, 1989. 204 Quoted in Soffer, Koch, 385. See also Sam Roberts, “The Actions of 2 Candidates Speak of Strife,” NYT, August 31, 1989; and Celestine Bohlen, “Racial Link in Brooklyn Killings Divides the Mayoral Candidates,” NYT, August 29, 1989. See also Dennis Hevesi, “Protests Worth Risk, Supporters Say,” NYT, September 2, 1989, for Koch’s critique of the marches. Do the Right Thing also comments on Koch’s position; after the riot, a local radio deejay cynically announces that the City will investigate the disturbances and that the Mayor will pay a visit to the neighborhood.

325 This chapter has argued that Mayor Koch constructed a new affective spatial habitus for the post-crisis city. Koch produced this renewal space by co-opting the self- directed practices of neighborhood residents in Bay Ridge and Ridgewood, and by transforming and domesticating Carter’s desperate South Bronx landscape. And through his walking zealotry during the 1980 transit strike, Koch attempted to shift the city’s emotional landscape away from contentious crisis in the boroughs and toward a seamlessly renewed, economically fertile Manhattan. Yet Koch’s new city was haunted.

While Tony’s strut had revealed the complexities of kinetic survival during the crisis, and

Koch’s walking workers had attempted to obscure these contradictions, Hawkins’ murder and its aftermath brutally revealed the high stakes of taking to the streets in an economically reviving yet increasingly stratified city. The bodies of those who existed on the margins of Koch’s Manhattan-centric renewal could no longer be denied.

326 Coda: “Feel the City Breakin’ and Everybody Shakin’”1

“But we should be wary of the pundits’ tale of two cities- the sick city and the healthy city, the lean years and the fat years, the bad New Yorkers and the good. Or any other story that suggests that everything or everyone has changed, or remained the same.

New York was a dangerous place in 1977, and it was a safe place. It was a kind place and a cruel place. It was a thrilling place and a frightening place. It could be dark in broad daylight, and bright in the dark. Many people were miserable, and many people were having the time of their lives.

It is all that now. And perhaps what is most thrilling and most frightening is how, in a fraction of a second, for particular people in particular places at particular points in time, it can change from one to the other.” – James Goodman2

I will always remember the first time I saw Tony strut. As a strong-willed, physical, Sicilian-American kid growing up near Philadelphia, Tony’s footsteps seemed instantly recognizable to me. Before I could understand the film’s racial and gendered landscape, I knew instinctively that our bodies had the power to argue for a particular way of knowing the city. Seated on my living room couch, I knew the promise of that strut as well as I knew the desire to transform suburbia’s highway rush into the clatter of urban streets. Lying in bed each night, I would will those sounds to mutate and would will myself away, out onto the Rotten Apple’s raw, effervescent pavements. And as a young teenager, I took to whatever streets I could find. I practiced my own strut down the side of that suburban highway and along the Jersey shore’s boardwalks. Through my swagger, I searched for a way to claim those spaces, and my body, as my own. My preparations for these corporeal experiments were as elaborate as Tony’s. I stood before the mirror and painstakingly learned how to put my lipstick on straight, readying my

1 The Bee Gees, “Stayin’ Alive,” Saturday Night Fever, RSO, 1977. 2 James Goodman, Blackout (New York: North Point Press, 2003), 226-227.

327 body for its territorial explorations. In my teens and early twenties, I followed the beat of

Tony’s strut onto the dance floors of Philly’s gay clubs, and found solace in the kinesthetic legacies of disco’s utopian dream. During these years, Tony’s legacy also became more complicated for me. In my late teens, I encountered Spike Lee’s Do the

Right Thing for the first time and was struck by Rosie Perez’s bracing, rhythmic claim to the street space outside her stoop, and Radio Raheem’s aural appropriations of Bed-

Stuy’s scorching summertime blocks. In some ways, this was a different city. But it was a city in which the body’s primacy still reigned.

Eventually, I made it to the Rotten Apple. The first weekend after I moved to the city, I blindly boarded the train out to Coney Island. As I road solo, the elevated train coerced my body into its rhythm. Unconsciously, I passed over the Bensonhurst street once claimed by Manero. Following that first visit, I made the pilgrimage out to Coney countless times. I walked the boards, dove into the sea, roller skated inside the decaying

Child’s Restaurant building, and danced to the house and disco beats that poured from radios and speakers and even seemed to emanate straight out of the ocean water itself.

Sometimes, I would catch a glimpse of a small, unassuming Puerto Rican man on a bicycle. On good days, a massive boom box was strapped to his rack. 3 And on the best days, Stephanie Mills’ 1980 disco hit “I Never Knew Love Like This Before” came alive in the city’s salt air.

It was here in Coney Island that I started to divine both the echoes and the fissures that constitute the city’s history. I also began to discover the ways in which city dwellers

3 The City Department of Parks and Recreation imposes a ban against amplified sound on the beach and boardwalk. Likewise, the Department of Environmental Protection’s noise code is used to prosecute music above certain decibel levels in other areas of the city, and the transit department forbids the playing of radios on subway trains and buses. In spite of these censures, Coney Island pulsates with amplified sound.

328 are always already theorizing on the ground: as they hawked their wares from carts, paraded half naked down the boardwalk, and even danced in the wake of Giuliani’s draconian cabaret laws, these New Yorkers used their bodies to apprehend and argue about what Coney’s spaces meant, who they belonged to, and what kinds of practices were permissible within them.4 In the postwar period, Coney has evolved into a kind of municipal guilty conscience as successive administrations have continued to push what and whom they consider undesirable towards the water’s edge. In the post-fiscal-crisis era, the and mayoral administrations have responded to the neighborhood as a specter of inequity and a bastion of disorder, which has risen up against their seamlessly renewed city.5 While some aspects of their efforts have been dedicated to improving the area’s economy, providing jobs, and infilling vacant lots, the rhetoric of this “rebirth” raises questions of belonging. Coney has long been the summertime playground of less privileged New Yorkers. While the municipal government insists on elaborate plans for bringing people “back” to Coney, on any given summer day the beach and boardwalk are overwhelmed by bodies in motion.

As Goodman’s poetic summation reminds us, we should always be wary about urban stories of either/or, bad and good, decline and renewal. Behind these commonsense valuations of space lie site-specific, time-specific, cultural constructions about the way things are. These stories delimit the boundaries of what we consider possible within certain spaces, and they have tangible consequences on the ground; they change how we navigate space, and define who has the right to the city. In the post-crisis

4 During Rudy Giuliani’s reign as mayor from 1994-2001, he revived the City’s Age “cabaret laws,” which forbid three or more people from dancing together in a bar or club that lacks a license for such movement. Although the Bloomberg administration has expressed some desire to repeal the law, it remains on the books. 5 Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002.

329 city, a golden age narrative of decline and subsequent recovery remains seductive. Crime is supposedly down, boundless optimism is supposedly up, and that free-floating signifier, the “quality of life,” has supposedly improved. “Those of us who remember

[the summer of ‘77], know the end of the world has come and gone,” argues for the Daily News.6 Yet if we look closer, we start to see that things aren’t all one way or the other. New York Magazine’s review of a recent photography exhibition entitled

“NYC, c.1985,” playfully interrogates this fall and rise narrative. Although the photographs give viewers a window into a world when city dwellers had “the sense that

New York might- might- just recover,” according to the review, the “jury’s still out” on whether the city has indeed recovered during the so-called “new Gilded Age.”7 We now inhabit a New York that is increasingly economically and geographically stratified. In the wake of Giuliani’s out-of-sight, out-of-mind policies that sought to remove the disenfranchised and destitute from public view, and the more subtle elitism of

Bloomberg’s quality-of-life initiatives, many New Yorkers have increasingly accepted these divides as simply “the way things are.” Yet if we question these commonsense constructions of how the city is or should be, we could come closer to revealing the multitude of cities that might be.

Following Ed Koch’s death in February 2013, New Yorkers have begun to revisit the legacy of the crisis era as they imagine the kind of city they want to inhabit. “The diminished expectations we have for the public sector and the increasing difficulty of

6 Jim Dwyer, “A Frenzy in Dreadful Darkness,” DN, July 6, 1997. See also Sewell Chan, “The Night the Lights Went Out,” NYT, July 13, 2007. 7 “To Do,” NY Mag, June 17, 2013, 71. See also the magazine’s article “Next Stop: The Seventies?” in the June 15-22, 2009, issue, which was published in conjunction with the new film version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. “As the remake arrives this week, the [subway] cars are clean, the city is safer, and subway ridership is much higher. But dark clouds loom,” the piece concludes.

330 living a middle-class life in the city suggest the legacy of the fiscal crisis even now,” writes scholar Kim Phillips-Fein for The Nation.8 As this fall’s mayoral election that will end the Bloomberg era makes clear, the economic and social distance between the working and middle-class boroughs and wealthy Manhattan have only deepened.

Candidates face off on a variety of issues that include their respective commitments to working people in the boroughs, and to white ethnics specifically. Candidate Bill de

Blasio takes to the streets of Howard Beach to distinguish himself from , a “creature of Manhattan,” and Quinn counters accusations of her elitism with post- hurricane Sandy visits to white ethnic enclaves in Staten Island and the Rockaways, and discussions about “her family’s immigrant history.”9 “After 12 years of being ruled by the wealthiest person in the city, the candidates all seem to be banking on the populace wanting someone more like them to govern now,” reports Andy Humm for the Gotham

Gazette.10 For some New Yorkers, the real and imagined city of the 70s has become an object of gritty veneration in the face of an increasingly sanitized post-crisis regime.

“Looking around the city today, saturated with money and starkly divided by wealth, the very bleakness of the 70s seems a refuge, a time of possibility,” argues Phillips-Fein.

Following 9/11, the city also sometimes seems like a different place through which to move. Surveillance is commonplace, and the ability to linger in “public” space is often predicated on purchasing power. However, as I have explored in this dissertation, mobility through the crisis-era streets was also considerably complex and often exclusionary, and stories about this “time of possibility” can mask whose possibilities

8 Kim Phillips-Fein, “The Legacy of the 1970s Fiscal Crisis,” The Nation, May 6, 2013. 9 Chris Smith, “The City Politic: Outside In,” NY Mag, November 30, 2012, 26. 10 Andy Humm, “Lessons of 1977: Will Quinn Be the Next Ed Koch or Bella Abzug?” Gotham Gazette, June 3, 2013.

331 these were and are.

Across the city, the echoes of the 70s resound and are reinterpreted through spatial practices. Sometimes the residue of this era produces spatial ideas that are seemingly familiar, but this familiarity can obscure the specific conditions and actors that shape these stories about the way things are. In still-struggling Bushwick, the specter of the 70s now produces a landscape that appears ripe for real-estate speculation and artistic production. “You Can Do Anything in Bushwick,” claims an October 2010 New York

Magazine story that chronicles a local restaurant’s successful “DIY Empire.” Bushwick is produced as both an open canvas and chemistry set, where young, often white, neighborhood newcomers can build their own empires with cash and a dream.11 Against this backdrop of entrepreneurial imperialism, other elements of urban decline’s affective spatial habitus linger. The Gotham Gazette and the Huffington Post recently solicited photos and stories of “nasty neighborhood trash,” and found that many New Yorkers identified Bushwick and the Bronx as “centers of grit and grime.” As neighborhood newcomers sometimes rely upon “grit” to build an urban aesthetic, many more New

Yorkers live amidst increasingly inequitable conditions that are explained away through stories about a time when the city was supposedly much “worse.” Despite the uneven geographical distribution of waste, the Gazette and Post’s trash inventory concluded that

“New York has seen much worse,” and that the city is a “long way from the 80s.”12 The mayoral candidates once again mobilize the interior space of the home to evidence their commitment to a changing city. But this time, the five candidates meet in a Harlem housing project rather than in a white ethnic working-class living room for a “sleepover”

11 “You Can Do Anything in Bushwick,” NY Mag, October 4, 2010. 12 Courtney Gross, “Talking Trash,” Gotham Gazette, February 3, 2010.

332 that exposes the startling divides in the Bloombergian city.13 At Conduit Avenue and

Linden Boulevard, a new Brooklyn-Queens “frontier town” has flowered. A reputed land of outlaws, isolation, and potentially buried bodies, this new borderline is located near the edge of Howard Beach, where African-American Michael Griffith crossed over in 1985 and met his death for being “out of place” in the predominately Italian-American neighborhood.14 Yet in this new border town, one of residents’ chief fears is not violent crime or encroaching decline, but the fear that they will lose their homes in the city’s increasingly frenzied real estate market. And for a “new Bay Ridge,” there is a “new

Tony Manero.” In 2001, the Times revisited the “redemptive powers” of the dance floor as they followed thirty-six-year-old Latina Maritza Gonazalez’s nightly visits to Bay

Ridge’s “Club Rio.” While the piece suggested a racially changing Bay Ridge, it also stressed that the neighborhood remains “a community with its own ethos [which] still has an Irish and Italian core.”15 Stories about practices across the city are repeated, and they are also transformed.

The meanings of the Bloombergian city continue to be produced through spatial practices. Although the Bloomberg administration has in some ways appeared to be a temporary reprieve from Giuliani’s outwardly oppressive movement policies, the

Mayor’s “nanny state” politics, which have banned smoking in public parks and the

13 Javier C. Hernández, “For Five Mayoral Candidates, A Sleepover in City Housing,” NYT, July 21, 2013. 14 Janon Fisher, “Echoes of the Wild West Mark an Urban Frontier,” NYT, October 17, 2004. See Tim Cresswell’s In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) for an examination of the normative geographies produced through Griffith’s murder. See also my analysis in Chapter 5. 15 Peter Duffy, “For a New Bay Ridge, A New Tony Manero,” NYT, April 1, 2001. Note that 2001 Odyssey, where Tony danced, remained a club until 2005. Interestingly, it became a predominately gay club: see Alex Cerniglia, “No More for a Glittering Symbol of Disco,” NYT, February 20, 2005.

333 purchase of large sugary beverages, have targeted both public spaces, and the private, interior spaces of the body itself.16 Bloomberg’s police tactics, which allow officers to

“stop and frisk” anyone on the street under suspicion of a crime, produce ideas about who belongs in the streets by targeting mostly innocent black and Latino New Yorkers, and the neighborhoods where they live.17 Amidst these more repressive, authoritarian body policies, Bloomberg has also produced ideas about his “livable” city by advocating for particular kinds of mobility. The environmentally friendly mayor commutes daily to City

Hall on the subway, although not before completing a quarter of his journey in an S.U.V. in order to reach an express station.18 And Bloomberg’s support of cycling has become associated with his livable city’s white, wealthy face. Planning student Samuel Stein’s

2011 study explores how the Department of Transportation’s streetscape improvements and bicycle redesign plans have fit into the Mayor’s larger efforts to attract global capital, and how the siting strategies for these improvements often neglect poorer neighborhoods where they are needed most. Despite the widespread use of bicycles throughout the city’s poor and working class neighborhoods, “by focusing construction on the most intense flashpoints of gentrification, the bicycle network reflects and reproduces the city’s transportation injustices in terms of class, race and geographic isolation,” concludes

16 More recently, Bloomberg’s corporeal initiatives have focused on encouraging office workers to utilize stairs instead of elevators. 17 In their data collected from 2002 to 2012, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) reports that nearly 9 out of 10 people stopped were completely innocent: NYCLU, “Stop-and- Frisk Data,” http://www.nyclu.org/content/stop-and-frisk-data (accessed June 17, 2013). Both stop-and-frisk, and the soda ban, have ended up in court. The recently passed a series of police reforms aimed at overhauling stop-and-frisk, which the Mayor has vowed to veto. 18 Michael M. Grynbaum, “Mayor Takes the Subway- By Way of S.U.V.,” NYT, August 1, 2007.

334 Stein. 19 As part of Bloomberg’s efforts to produce these “livable” streetscapes, the corporate sponsored “Citi Bike,” bike-sharing program debuted this spring. Although the program has planned more potential stations, the initial map looks curiously like a diagram of the city’s inequity: stations crowd Manhattan south of Central Park, and the gentrifying neighborhoods of northwestern Brooklyn. In the post-Koch era, New York’s uneven geography has increasingly come to resemble that of a South American city, with a wealthy core surrounded by poor peripheries. “The biggest obstacle to cycling’s egalitarian aspirations” is “distance,” writes Henry Grabar for the Atlantic Cities.20

Debates over the City’s support for cycling have not just raised class issues, but have also become conduits through which New Yorkers have expressed disparate religious and cultural beliefs. In Brooklyn’s gentrifying Williamsburg, many Hasidic Jews have protested bike lanes by claiming that the lanes both present safety hazards, and result in inappropriately dressed women cycling through their religious community. New Yorkers continue to struggle over the city’s ideological and physical spaces by negotiating who should move through the streets and how they should move.

Our physical navigation of the city is always a complex negotiation of multiple layers of meaning. We wander through our present experience, our past experiences, and the collective past of the city both real and imagined. In the winter of 2011, I set out to how explore how city dwellers produce and access meaning through practice by asking

New Yorkers to take to Tony’s streets in response to his strut. Together, the participants and I gathered to watch Fever’s opening twice. The first time, we were seated on chairs.

19 Samuel Stein, “Bike Lanes and Gentrification: New York City’s Shades of Green,” Progressive Planning, no. 188 (Summer 2001): 34-37. 20 Henry Grabar, “The Biggest Obstacle to Cycling’s Egalitarian Aspirations? Distance,” The Atlantic Cities, June 5, 2013.

335 The second time, we got up to move. We closed our eyes and dropped down into the Bee

Gee’s rhythm, and strutted in place. Following this viewing, participants journeyed to

86th street and brought a memorial of some kind to leave along the street. By following in Manero’s footsteps, they both searched for residue of Tony’s passage, and deposited their own relics along the way. These objects, or absences, served as their responses to the scene. Among the collected relics were a bottle of hair gel, a bath sponge covered in hearts, a ball of trash, and an eye sketched onto tinfoil. The project was less about nostalgia or memory, than about what we can learn by coercing our bodies into re- performing past actions, and what we can uncover by walking the streets over and over again.

I tracked the fate of these objects over time and as they invariably disappeared, I replaced them each with a miniature, silver disco ball. My first official visit to the objects, less than two weeks after the initial walks, revealed that only three offerings had survived: the foil eye, the heart sponge, and the trash ball. Yet, as I proceeded toward a bench in the neighborhood’s Milestone Park to place the first disco ball, an alternate form of residue manifested; a delivery van, which was paused at a stop light at the corner of

18th Avenue and 82nd Street, pumped the clear, sweet strains of the Bee-Gee’s “More than a Woman” into the unseasonably warm, winter solstice air. As I placed the balls on street corners and benches, and chained them to lampposts, they attracted a fair amount of curious attention and a few pedestrians stopped to touch them. One had found that he simply could not leave a relic. In honor of his absent memorial, I boarded the elevated train that had accompanied Tony’s rhythmic strut thirty-four years prior, and placed the last disco ball on the plastic seat across from me. I waited patiently to witness

336 its fate. I didn’t have to wait very long. At the next stop, a man in his mid forties quickly seized it. His face instantly transformed from the grim, impassive wash of the city train rider into the magic openness of those same city dwellers, who are always looking for a sign. He immediately informed the person he was speaking to on the phone about his discovery, with a mixture of joy and incredulity. At the following stop, a friend of his boarded; “I just got on the train and look what I found!?” he declared giddily. “A disco ball!” The two proceeded to admire the ball, as the lucky finder held it up to the light and twirled it on its string all the way into Manhattan. I left them at Grand Street. Returning to 86th Street two days later, I discovered that all of the balls had disappeared, headed out for destinations unknown in a city that is sprawling, paradoxical, and continually brought into being by our mobile bodies. And the beat goes on.

337 Every house on the block would burn. It would be a slow, cruel burn as only this borough can promise. Women would file into the streets, tight skirts licking thighs, dripping with sweat, smelling like coconuts and cleaning fluid. Children would slam flat rubber balls against walls that would slowly dissolve, and the rubber would melt into asphalt and the children would cross the river and grow old. The women would reinvent their lives in another borough where the earth was fertile and the graves more plentiful. And in the end, there would only be the old men and the dogs. And whatever stories you could tell about the land, which in the end didn’t care, even if you told a lie.

There was a provision in the city’s building code that allowed for the reconstruction of an ancient structure that had been demolished by a natural disaster or a slip of the tongue, the drop of a match or even the mere lack of consideration for its particular past. And even if the current zoning wouldn’t allow for it, the provision clearly stated that the building could rise again, conjuring visions of marshlands and monstrous wooden ships and all the dreams the city dwellers would dream as they’d play their slow midnight slide reels of imaginary municipalities and real childhoods and unspeakable basements.

Albert Sanchez had applied for such a permit. And 3 years ago, he descended his basement stairs with a shovel, a book of matches, some cable cords, half a disco ball, and the better part of a baseball bat. And deep in the belly of a third floor walk-up in the neighborhood of Tremont, in the borough of the Bronx, he had achieved the unthinkable. It had been whispered by in the caverns of the city’s libraries by mustached history lovers, it had been hissed down back alleys through the teeth of mad packs of skinny boys with their lusty daydreams of glass and fire, it had been murmured by entangled lovers raw fucking in the walk-in meat freezers in the backrooms of Italian restaurants, just to escape the heat.

The people would talk and they would tell their stories. But Albert had done it right in his very own basement. Do-it-yourself history with a pair of pliers, set to the radio humming Stephanie Mills’ “Never Knew Love Like This Before.” Albert had hatched the specter of the blackout of 1977 by hacking through his floorboards into the boiler room below. He had given birth to 25 hours in a certain year, filled with sweat and the stretched skin of baseballs and political races and buildings that burned and burned. It was July 1977, underneath this street, Echo Place. And soon, they would come for him. They would come for it with their grasping hands and their heavy hearts. They would claw at the walls with their greedy fingernails and try to strip the wallpaper back to that moment, to make it theirs. To recover their old loves and bury their old guilt and have at their past, just this once.

But for now, it was quiet and Albert could touch the edges of his history softly, recognizing it like a tiny city from high up in a transatlantic airplane. And then … descending upon it slowly. Coming home again. It was July 1977 underneath his bedroom and Albert could finally sleep.

-Elizabeth Healy Matassa, 2013

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343 Edensor, Tim. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, Materiality. New York: Berg, 2005.

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Escape from the Bronx: Bronx Warriors 2. Directed by Enzo G. Castellari. 1983. New Line Cinema.

Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Farmer, John Alan, ed. Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Remembered since the 1960s. New York: The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1999.

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344 Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish. New York: Vintage, 1975/1995.

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347 Popular Film & Television 7, no. 2 (1979): 158-167.

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Lavie, Smadar and Ted Swedenburg, eds. Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies of Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

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348 1974/2000.

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Mollenkopf, John H. A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York City Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

349 ______, ed. Power, Culture, and Place: Essays on New York City. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988.

Mollenkopf, John H. and Manuel Castells, eds. Dual City: Restructuring New York. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991.

Munshower, Suzanne. John Travolta. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1976/1978.

Newfield, Jack and Wayne Barrett. City For Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

New York Magazine. “The Year of the Apple.” December 26, 1977

Neyland, James. The Carter Family Scrapbook: An Intimate Close-Up of America’s First Family. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1977.

1990: Bronx Warriors. Directed by Enzo G. Castellari. 1982. Commodore Films, 2006. DVD.

NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell. Directed by Henry Corra. 2007. VH1 Rock Docs.

Osman, Suleiman. “The Decade of the Neighborhood.” In Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, edited by Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, 106-127. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. ______The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Page, Max. The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

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Peña, Elaine. “Depoliticizing Border Space.” e-misférica 3, no. 2 (November 2006). ______Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Phelps-Stokes Fund. “This is How the Other Half Still Lives,” by Bob Adelman. Society 44, no. 1 (November 1978): 75-78.

350 Pile, Steve. Real Cities. London: Sage, 2005.

Price, Richard. Ladies’ Man. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1978.

Pritchett, Wendell. Brownsville, Brooklyn. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

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Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion, 1976.

Rieder, Jonathan. Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Ritter, Kelly. “Spectacle at the Disco: Boogie Nights, Soundtrack and the New American Musical.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 28, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 166- 175.

Rivera, Raquel Z. New York Ricans from the Hip-Hop Zone. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Roberts, Sam and the Museum of the City of New York, eds. America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Roediger, David. Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. New York: Basic Books, 2005.

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994.

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Sagalyn, Lynne B. Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.

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351 Satter, Beryl. Family Properties: Race, Real Estate and the Exploitation of Black America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009.

Saturday Night Fever. Directed by John Badham. 1977. Paramount Pictures, 2007. DVD.

Scandura, Jani. Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

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352

Siegal, Fred. The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities. New York: The Free Press, 1997.

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353 Tannenbaum, Allan. New York in the 70s. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2009.

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Teaford, Jon C. The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. ______The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

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354 Whalen, Richard. “A City Destroying Itself: An Angry View of New York.” Fortune, 1965.

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Yarwood, Richard and Graham Gardner. “Fear of Crime, Cultural Threat and the Countryside.” Area 32, no. 4 (Dec 2000): 403-411.

Yeadon, David. Nooks and Crannies: An Unusual Walking Tour Guide to New York City. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979.

Zaretsky, Natasha. No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Zeitz, Joshua. White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Postwar Politics. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Zukin, Sharon. The Culture of Cities. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995. ______Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

355 University Press, 1982. ______Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Selected Archives Consulted and Key Repositories

Baruch College

Jack Bigel Archive on Municipal Finance and Leadership

Bay Ridge Community Council

Bronx County Historical Society

Bronx Library Center

Brooklyn Community Board 10

Bay Ridge Community Council Records

Meeting Minutes

Brooklyn Community Board 11

Meeting Minutes

Brooklyn Historical Society

Brooklyn Public Library

Brooklyn Collection

City Hall Library

Mayor Beame Press Releases

Mayor Koch Press Releases

Columbia University

Avery Architectural Library

356 Edward N. Costikyan Papers

Edward I. Koch Administration Oral History Project

John Jay College

Lois Anemone Papers

LaGuardia College

Abraham D. Beame Collection

Edward I. Koch Collection

Lehman College

Papers of Jill Jonnes

Library of Congress

Patricia A. Harris Collection

Vanderbilt Television News Archive Collection

Municipal Archives

Mayor Beame Papers

Mayor Koch Papers

Neighborhood Preservation Center

New York Public Library

Andy Logan Papers

Art and Architecture Collection

General Research Division

Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy

Ken Auletta Papers

Library for the Performing Arts

357 Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division

Science, Industry and Business Library

New York University

Carol Bellamy Papers

Onderdonk House- Greater Ridgewood Historical Society

Ridgewood and Bushwick Subject Files

The Paley Center for Media

Pratt Institute

Brooklyn Collection

Queens Public Library

Long Island Research Division

University of Maryland

Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library

358 Periodicals and News Sources

ABC News, WABC News

The Assessor

Bronx Press Review

The Brooklyn Spectator

The Brooklyn Tenant

The Brownstoner

CBS News

Channel 2 News

City Limits Magazine

Glendale Register

Herald Tribune

Home Reporter and Sunset News

Long Island Press

Los Angeles Times

Metropolis

NBC News

The Neighborhood Journal for City Preservation

New Brooklyn

Newsday

Newsweek

New York Daily News

359 New York Tribune

New York Magazine

New York Post

New York Sunday News

New York Times

New York Tribune

PBS WNET

Queens Ledger

Ridgewood Times

Screw Magazine

Time Magazine

Today

Uptown Express

U.S. News and World Report

Village Voice

Wall Street Journal

Washington Post

Washington Star

360