The Battle for Gotham

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by Roberta Brandes Gratz


  That City Room would seem prehistoric today. An assorted collection of wood and metal desks held mechanical typewriters in a sunken center section. Paper and carbons were scattered everywhere. Cigarette butts littered the floor. Paper coffee cups with Greek symbols sat around for days. Wrappings from drinking straws hung from the ceiling, blown there by impish and bored copyboys. One end of the wrapping was torn off and the other end dipped into the jelly of the donuts. Blowing through the straw would propel the paper to the ceiling, and the jelly would make it stick. The sports department was in one corner, and the fashion and food section took up a smaller space in another corner. The chatter of the Teletype machine of the AP and UPI wire services never ceased.

  New York had seven daily newspapers (the Herald Tribune, World Telegram and Sun, Daily Mirror, and Journal American no longer exist) when I started at the lowest rung of the City Room ladder, the promised first step to being a reporter, which, it turned out, didn’t always happen. Because of a seven-month strike that affected all the city papers, copy boys resigned in droves, leaving precious job openings when the strike ended. I grabbed one. At a salary of $52 a week, I needed my parents’ assurance of supplemental support since my monthly rent was $154.

  A New York newspaper job fresh out of college with no out-of-town newspaper experience, the prescribed route for landing on a New York paper! Leaving New York again for me was out of the question. It was either get a New York newspaper job or pursue another field. So even the offer of a lowly copy boy position was a coup. This was the city of my birth from which I had been taken unhappily, but I couldn’t wait to return. I was back soaking up the excitement of the city and determined never to leave again.

  DIVERSITY IN THE CITY ROOM

  While my New York City youth was totally Manhattan-centric, my new colleagues at the Post came from all over the city and beyond. The City Room overflowed with talent. Pete Hamill. Ted Posten. Oliver Pilat. Gene Grove. Helen Dudar. Fern Marja Eckman. Bill Haddad. Barbara Yuncker. Norman Poirier. Judy Michaelson. Ed Kosner. Don Forst. Nora Ephron. Stan Opotowsky. Just watching them churn out great stories and well-turned phrases was the best possible journalism school.

  Jimmy Wechsler was the editorial-page editor. He had been the executive editor, famous for standing up to J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy and for breaking the story of the scandal that led candidate Richard Nixon to deliver the tearful Checkers speech on television. Paul Sann was now the skillful executive editor. With his cowboy-booted feet up on the desk and his antique two-part candlestick phone, Sann seemed like the editor after whom Walter Burns of The Front Page was fashioned. The Post City Room looked like the stage set out of The Front Page era. In fact, for a revival of the play, the star, Bert Convey, came to observe and get a “feel” for his role.

  The Post occupied the first few floors of an early-twentieth-century office building in Lower Manhattan, 75 West Street, only a few blocks south of what would become the World Trade Center. This 1920s building was converted to an upscale condominium in 2003. That district was then a bustling collection of electronics stores with a thriving wholesale produce market just to its north. I watched all that disappear under the bulldozers of so-called progress defined by the extraordinary excavation that made way for the Twin Towers. That excavated dirt became the landfill on which Battery Park City was created, directly across the West Side Highway.

  The Hudson River and expanding landfill were the view from our office window until, in 1969, the Post moved to the other side of Lower Manhattan, at 210 South Street (former home of the Journal American), between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and just north of the Fulton Fish Market. There, we watched the South Street Seaport Museum and mall fill up the restored historic buildings. Some of the fishmongers stayed in the Fulton Fish Market despite the city’s efforts to relocate them up to the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx, but the great fish restaurants—Sweets, Sloppy Louie’s—disappeared. By 2004, the fishmongers too had left for either the Bronx or out of town. With their move from the Fulton Market, more of the smaller fish businesses closed, and big ones have gotten bigger.

  THE LUCKY BREAK

  Within my first year, I moved up from copy boy to editorial assistant, a move hardly worthy of the word up. I answered phones and wrote plot lines for TV listings in the feature department, but all around me was the buzz of the real news business and I soaked it up.

  In August 1963 I traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend the March on Washington. It was one of the most memorable events of my life. Editorial-page editor James Wechsler, who, like many people, didn’t anticipate the significance of the event, asked me many questions about it when I returned. He regretted not going and said, “This is something you will be happy to tell your grandchildren about.” He was correct.

  Months later, the hot topic in the City Room was all the political jockeying unfolding before the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. I was dying to go. But the New York Post management was notoriously tightfisted. The editors were happy to have me work at the convention as editorial assistant if I took vacation time to go, paid my own way to get to Atlantic City, and covered my own expenses. Once there, I was paid my normal salary. Of course, it was worth it. Mostly I ran errands, but it took me to the convention floor among the delegates.

  The convention was an emotional one, less than a year after Kennedy’s assassination. I watched from the press box as Robert Kennedy addressed the cheering crowd and received a twenty-minute standing ovation before he said his first word. Tears welled in his eyes.

  My big editorial break came on the last day of the convention. All staff reporters were off on assignments. I was alone in our makeshift office with managing editor Stan Opotowsky. A press release came in announcing that President Lyndon B. Johnson would celebrate his birthday on the boardwalk with a big cake. Stan sent me up to take notes. The cake was in the shape of the United States. Johnson took his first slice out of the state of Texas. A more obvious story lead could not be handed to the most inexperienced reporter. I came back and instead of typing notes, as Stan had asked, wrote the story, starting with LBJ taking the first slice out of Texas. Stan was caught by surprise, edited the story, and sent it in immediately. It made the front page—no byline—under a photo of Johnson slicing the cake. The word spread around the City Room that it was my story, and many of the reporters cheered. They were now my friends and rooting for me.

  Soon after the Atlantic City convention in August 1964, a Young Democrats event was scheduled to take place at Gracie Mansion, the official residence of New York mayors. LBJ was now the presidential nominee, and much was being made in the news about Texas barbecue replacing the elegant French food served in the Kennedy White House. Walter Jet-ton was Texas’s most famous barbecue chef, and he was coming to New York. I was still only an editorial assistant at the Post, but I offered Dan Wolf the story for the Village Voice. He said yes.

  The story depicted Lynda Bird Johnson’s New York political debut at this young citizens’ event at Gracie Mansion, hosted by Robert Wagner Jr., son of the mayor. The Texas-style barbecue and Texas-sized portions of food marked the abrupt transition experienced by these young sophisticates, many of whom had first been politically energized by the youthful “vigah” and style of the Kennedys, not to mention the dominance of French food and understated elegance.

  I don’t know if that story in the Voice advanced my standing with the Post editors, but two months later, I started my three-month “tryout” as a reporter. On my first day, Judy Michaelson, a veteran reporter, advised me, “Take your first assignment, run right out of the office as if you know exactly what you are doing, and then call me from the nearest phone booth.” As it turned out, I didn’t need to. I was sent to cover a press conference held by proabortion advocate Bill Baird calling for legalization. Only a year or two earlier, I had had an abortion, forced to go to the infamous Women’s Hospital in Puerto Rico rather than succumb to the illegal, unsafe backroom procedure
available in the United States. I knew more than any reporter—even a new one—needed to know about the subject.

  A few years later, abortion would become one of the issues on which I focused as a reporter. I covered efforts to change the law, wrote a six-part series on the issue, and then wrote the cover story for Ms. when the Roe v. Wade decision was handed down from the U.S. Supreme Court in January 1973. That was the height of the women’s movement, and I was as much a part of it as my professional restrictions permitted. When editors allowed me, I wrote stories related to women’s issues, not something many editors allowed at other newspapers.

  Rape was another topic that I covered in depth in the early 1970s before the laws applying to it were liberalized. There was little talked about and less written about a subject fraught with myth and pain. Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, published in 1975, changed all that and catapulted the issue into the nation’s consciousness. But when I was writing this series a few years earlier, corroboration requirements were so onerous, a “woman’s word” so suspect, juries so doubtful, and policemen and district attorneys so unsympathetic that most women didn’t even report the crime, and if they did very rarely achieved justice. I wrote a six-part series on rape in 1972, spotlighting the inequity of the law. What I learned over the months of research and interviews for that series angered me greatly. Attitudes ranged from “women should relax and enjoy it” to “they ask for it.” Blaming the victim was common. My slowly emerging feminism ratcheted up to full speed.

  PROMOTED TO REPORTER

  In January 1965 I was promoted to full “general assignment” reporter, byline and all, loving the daily routine of being sent all over the city on whatever news story was unfolding. Murders, press conferences, “daily close-ups” (features on personalities in the news—authors, bank presidents, actors, philanthropists, and so on), and everyday mundane assignments consumed most of my time. But the full luxury of picking issues to write about came after several years of being a reporter.

  The ’60s art scene, very much a new “scene”—auctions, museum openings, artist personalities—was another reporting focus. Art auctions were now making big news on a regular basis. I had grown up in a household where art was a daily interest. The Whitney Museum, the quintessential institution of the Village and then still on Eighth Street, was a favorite place for my mother, my sister, and me to visit. The Whitney moved uptown in 1954. Young, not yet well-known artists were my parents’ friends, including Mark Rothko and his wife, Mel, who lived in our apartment house, and Milton Avery, whose daughter, March, was my sister’s classmate and friend. My mother sold art by her friends, then still unknown, to her decorating clients.

  And then, in May 1965, I married Donald Gratz, a metal manufacturer peripherally in the art and architecture business. Architecture was a new world for me, and I learned from him. My interest in art and architecture expanded, and I applied it to the reporting assignments I requested.

  At the same time, I reported on housing, urban renewal, and community battles for survival, on small successes and large failures, on historic preservation and neighborhood revitalization. I saw government policies repeat the mistakes of the past because vested interests, misguided analyses, and wrongheaded plans stood in the way of appropriate urban change. And I saw neighborhoods rebuild themselves despite government-created impediments. What I learned about the dynamic of cities I learned first in the neighborhoods of New York and from the people who fought to save and renew their turf. Residents and business owners in any place, the essential users, instinctively know what is needed and not needed to keep their community healthy or to make it better.

  I covered the fight to build low-income housing in middle-income neighborhoods and wrote with colleagues Anthony Mancini and Pamela Howard a six-part series, “The Great Apartment House Crisis.” I worked on another six-part series, this one about the newly opened Co-op City and its impact on the South Bronx, especially the Grand Concourse from which many of the residents had moved. I was stunned to observe such massive relocation out of one neighborhood into another. Later, I investigated shady landlords and cheating nursing home operators, covered hot zoning battles and ongoing urban renewal clearance projects, and investigated Forty-second Street property owners purposely renting to illicit uses to make a case for city condemnation and payout for their properties.

  THE APPEAL OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION

  Historic preservation grabbed me most of all, probably because so much of the city was threatened by demolition and I was so impressed by the local people I met in the neighborhoods fighting to save their communities and the things that made them special. Sometimes the battle was to save a building, other times to get a traffic light in front of a school or to prevent a rezoning that would permit an out-of-scale new project to intrude on a neighborhood.

  Most of these grassroots warriors did not know the difference between architects H. H. Richardson and Philip Johnson, but they knew what the local church, school, library, or firehouse meant as an anchor to their neighborhood. They saw the row houses and modest apartment houses dating from the lost eras of quality and care being replaced by dreary, barrackslike structures or excessive scale, projects that undermined the fragile economic and social ecosystem on which any community rests. They knew what inappropriate new development could do. Planners, city officials, academics, and other experts either dismissed or ignored the common wisdom. Worse, many of them didn’t even know how to hear it.

  At the same time, some grassroots community rebuilding efforts were mobilizing to reclaim solid but abandoned buildings, trying to create affordable housing for people being displaced by demolition-style rebuilding all over the city. These efforts grew into the significant community-based redevelopment efforts that laid the groundwork for the renewed city, an observable truth ignored or minimized by most contemporary histories of the city. The Cooper Square Committee on the Lower East Side. The People’s Firehouse. UHAB (Urban Homesteading Assistance Board) on the Upper West Side. The People’s Development Corporation and Banana Kelly in the South Bronx. Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration in Brooklyn.

  These groups didn’t oppose development; there was no development to oppose. They created community-based housing organizations and renovated eighty thousand units, setting the stage for the private investment that followed. Collectively, they pushed for changes in the insurance laws that did more to discourage landlord-sponsored arson than any public policies. They developed new ways to finance the rehabilitation of housing, pushed for tenant protection, devised preservation strategies, and developed new and renovated units all over the city that helped stem the tide of abandonment and pave the way for new investment. Over the years, they advanced more redevelopment than for-profit developers did. “More importantly,” notes Ron Shiffman, former director of the Pratt Center for Community Development and longtime adviser to many community efforts around the city, “they have enabled many places to retain their genetic footprint, the form that gave the distinctiveness and unique character to that particular community. They helped spawn the environmental justice and industrial retention movements. And they spurred greater attention to sustainable planning practices and green building approachers.”

  I watched these citizen-based efforts rebuild a city in ways officials despaired to understand. To this day, too many “experts” and public leaders fail to recognize the continued validity of this process, in New York City or elsewhere. These citizens all resisted official plans reflecting how experts said things should work and how people should live but not reflecting how people actually lived or that added to the vibrancy of urban life. These citizen groups were planning from the bottom up, and step by small step they were slowly adding up to big change. I was fascinated by these groups, and I learned from them. I didn’t appreciate then that I was witnessing the precursors of the regeneration of the larger city.

  The only way to understand any city or any part of it is to walk the streets, talk to people who live and w
ork in the neighborhoods, look at what works or doesn’t work, and ask why, how, who. Direct observation, not theory. Instinct over expertise. That is the journalist’s habit or should be. It was not the habit of many professionals who claim to know best the interests of the city.

  THE 1960S

  In many ways, the city in the 1960s and 1970s seemed no different from the New York of my childhood. But in so many ways it was different. The World Trade Center and Battery Park City were not yet built. Lincoln Center was in construction. The Metropolitan Opera and the McKim, Mead, and White Pennsylvania Station still stood. The New York City Landmarks Law—one of the earliest in the country—did not exist. New York Magazine was yet to be born, first as a supplement to the Herald Tribune. Passenger liners graced West Side piers. The Twentieth Century Limited still went from Grand Central to Chicago. Yankee Stadium had not been renovated the first time, and Shea Stadium was in construction.

  Suburban malls had not yet made an impact. All the department stores were in their rightful places along Fifth Avenue—Bonwit-Teller, Bergdorf-Goodman, Saks, Lord & Taylor, Best & Co. Fifth Avenue was “the Avenue,” and Thirty-fourth Street was still the preeminent “pedestrian” shopping street. B. Altman’s was at the Fifth Avenue end of Thirty-fourth, Macy’s and Gimbels at the Sixth Avenue end. Ohrbach’s was in between, along with dozens of small shops, both chains and locals. Soon, malls would vacuum the heart out of many American Main Streets. But while malls killed much of downtown America, they only partially injured New York City. The density of this city guaranteed a less dramatic impact than the shell shocks that crippled so many other cities.

 

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