by Chris Hayes
Of course, the phenomenon of urban illicitness is by no means limited to New York. Parts of every major city in America had the same problems, from Boston to San Francisco to Washington, D.C., where drug deals happened in Lafayette Park just across from the North Lawn of the White House. In these venues, the political problems that seediness caused and the policy solutions it demanded had nothing to do with the actual people and populations who were causing it: people in need of clothing, housing, drug treatment, and mental health services. They themselves were the problem, and the solution was to do something with them rather than do anything for them.
Even to this day, the discussion around homelessness in major cities, New York included, focuses primarily on the problem of nonhomeless people seeing too many homeless people, not on the problem of too many people lacking homes. This was a core problem of seediness for New York’s powers that be: who wanted to open a business with riffraff squatting outside, scaring customers at all hours of the day and night?
More than anything, seediness imposed a kind of mental tax on certain strata of the middle to upper classes, the mostly white city dwellers and commuters who found the ambient unruliness stressful. The sense of menace and chaos that hung about made residents and tourists alike uncomfortable.
The somewhat infamous “squeegee men” epitomized that unease, which I remember feeling myself when my family would drive around Manhattan to visit my mom’s sisters. At a red light, a squeegee man (almost always black) would approach the car and begin washing the windshield with a squeegee. When he’d finished, you’d give him some change or a buck or two.
Something about the exchange was slightly intimidating. He didn’t ask you if you wanted your window cleaned; he just started doing it, with the expectation that once he was finished, you the driver would compensate him for his labor. And this forced the driver to make a decision: either he would hold fast to his initial desire not to pay for a pointless window cleaning, and perhaps face the wrath of the man who’d just done it, or he would allow himself to be manipulated into paying the man for a service he’d never wanted and never requested.
I’ll stress again that this phenomenon was quite distinct from the massive spike in crime. These interactions might’ve been unpleasant and uncomfortable and maybe, under the strictest reading of New York statutes, illegal, but they were in no way violent. They were an incursion. They were the city reaching into your car and forcing you to reckon with it.
Urban seediness was the opposite of suburban tranquility. In fact, the suburbs were where you fled to escape seediness, to protect your children from it. The suburbs were clean, and the city was dirty. The suburbs enjoyed empty streets, while city streets hosted vagabonds and drug addicts. More than anything else, the suburbs were orderly—with houses, lawns, people, and cars all in their place. The city was disorderly, a tangle of people and noise and unclear rules.
Seediness in this specific urban context wasn’t reducible solely to race—the gutter punks hanging out in seedy Tompkins Square Park or loitering on St. Marks Place in the Village were mostly white—but it was inextricably connected to it. During much of the twentieth century, the great migration of black people out of the South had made America’s cities, from New York to Chicago to Detroit to L.A., places of concentrated blackness. And even as the de jure segregation in the Jim Crow South was being slowly dismantled, the long-standing de facto segregation of housing and schooling in the North intensified. Federal policy facilitated both the construction of the “ghetto,” large areas of black residents and disinvestment, and white flight to the suburbs, abetted by subsidized mortgages and racially discriminatory lending guidelines.
By the mid-1960s, cities outside the Deep South had become front lines of American racial struggle. Watts erupted in flames, and Martin Luther King, Jr., marched through Chicago, greeted by white people shouting “Niggers go home!” and chucking bottles. He encountered such venom, he said that white people in Chicago could teach white people in Mississippi “how to hate.”
AT THE MICRO LEVEL, the Nation’s anxiety over racial equality and coexistence manifested as concerns about “the neighborhood,” as in “there it goes.” In the years when black people were moving into neighborhoods in, say, the formerly white ethnic enclaves of the Bronx, crime was also going up. These events were unrelated, but they were easily and at times eagerly conflated by white residents, politicians, and predatory realtors. A semantic shift occurred. Now one could talk about race without ever mentioning the word black. The legendary Republican political operative Lee Atwater once described the way this worked at the national level.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
In the context of urban politics, it worked somewhat differently. The key sites of battle weren’t tax cuts and budgets. Instead, residents and politicians could speak of property values or crime, and then even further removed, they could say the concern was litter or graffiti or abandoned buildings. They weren’t lying: they were, at some level, actually concerned with the creeping seediness of the city. But American racial history—the nation’s most enduring and violently loaded conflict—lurked even in the municipal disputes of my youth, as the virus of racism infected neighborhood politics and bloomed in tabloid headlines.
Of course, a lot of the time racial conflict wasn’t subtext. In 1986 four black men walked into the white Queens neighborhood of Howard Beach after their car broke down. They were chased and beaten by a white mob. As twenty-three-year-old Michael Griffith, one of the four, attempted to evade the mob, he was struck by a car and died. Just three years later four black teenagers went to the white ethnic Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst to inquire about a used Pontiac for sale. They were met by a mob of white men wielding baseball bats, and one, a man named Joseph Fama, was carrying a gun. The mob beat the young black men, and then Fama fired two shots into the chest of sixteen-year-old Yusef Hawkins, killing him.
The mob had apparently been lying in wait for another group of black and Latino men who they believed were coming to the neighborhood. It was a lynching, plain and simple, more than six decades after the Dyer anti-lynching bill was introduced (and never passed), and over two hundred miles north of the Mason-Dixon line.
This level of virulent white racism wasn’t limited to a few isolated neighborhoods—it could be found throughout the city. In fact, I spent much of my childhood in one of those places. The Italian American neighborhood Morris Park in the Bronx, where I went to elementary school, featured delicious pizza, single-family homes, and tidy yards with fig trees wrapped in blankets and trash bags to keep them warm in the winter. It was also, in the mid-1980s, the kind of place where certain adults would drop the word nigger causally.
Not by accident, one of the chief architects of Nixon’s highly effective racialized Southern Strategy, which led white southerners away from the Democratic Party and into the arms of Nixon, Reagan, and the Republicans, was the definitively nonsouthern Kevin Phillips, a white Bronx native of the Parkchester neighborhood, adjacent to Morris Park. His first political job was staffing a Republican congressman from the Bronx who ran the borough’s Republican party and represented Morris Park among other ethnic enclaves.
In 1970 Phillips was contemptuous of attempts by liberal Republicans to persuade black voters to join the party, telling a Times reporter:
From now on the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 per cent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that . . . but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit
the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.
This wasn’t a Mississippian but a New Yorker talking about the benefits of backlash politics and the advantages of bringing “negrophobes” into the Republican Party. As the Times profile noted, Phillips
had grown up in the Bronx. His observations of life in this polyglot borough had convinced him that all the talk about melting pot America was buncombe. Most voters, he had found, still voted on the basis of ethnic or cultural enmities that could be graphed, predicted and exploited.
The kind of raw and bitter New York racial battles that formed Phillips’s worldview, and that swirled everywhere around me in the city of my youth, now largely take place through the lens of gentrification, an inversion of the old “there goes the neighborhood” politics of white flight.
But today in inner-ring suburbs around the country, worry that the neighborhood is going to seed is a constant preoccupation. In many metropolitan regions, urban real estate price spikes have pushed the poor out into the periphery. Areas that were once squarely in the Nation now see the Colony flooding over the border. In these places, the freighted municipal battles of the Bronx of my youth are reinscribing themselves. North Charleston, South Carolina, a once-white suburb, is now majority black—and a black man fleeing a traffic stop was shot in the back by a white police officer. Ferguson, Missouri—like many parts of the Bronx—went from majority white to majority black in a relatively short period of time. “A lot of people have left here,” Ferguson’s white mayor, James Knowles, told me. By which he meant, I think, A lot of white people have left here. He continued, “There is also a lot of people that have stayed here and enjoyed that diversity.”
After a few days of talking to Ferguson residents, I recognized a familiar dynamic: the cheek-by-jowl racial politics of a large metropolis was now churning through a town of 20,000 residents. As in New York in the 1980s, Ferguson’s racial composition had changed, but its governing class hadn’t kept up. Ferguson’s white residents spoke a lot about the parts of the town that were unruly, unkempt—seedy—notably the Section 8 rental apartments on Canfield Drive where Mike Brown was shot and killed, a one-block stretch of the Colony.
“You know, Canfield Apartments [are] one of the things we have struggled with for the past few years,” the mayor told me. “There is a lot of subsidized housing over there, a lot of people do not stay very long. A lot of people they come and go.” Disorderly, in other words.
I asked him what he thought was the big takeaway from the death of Michael Brown and the protests for racial justice that had brought hundreds of reporters from around the world to his city.
The mayor didn’t hesitate: “We have to find a way to stabilize housing. There is, all across north St. Louis County, a problem with housing where people only live for a few years. They switch school districts, you know, every year. They move houses every year, every six months. They never really set down roots. We have to find a way to do that.”
I was a bit incredulous: “So you think that is sort of the—that is your takeaway from this?
“Yeah, the takeaway is we have to find a way to stabilize them here in the community and make them part of it.”
Ah yes, stabilize housing—that phrase was familiar to me, like concerns about vagrants and seediness and orderliness. Stability is one of the things that, in the minds of those within the Nation, define it, compared to the transience of the Colony. I’m sure the mayor really was concerned with making sure his constituents had a stake in the city and felt part of it for the long term. But the subtext was present, too: that it was the denizens of the Colony who were causing problems, and things would be fine if Ferguson could get rid of this disorderly class of squatters who had infiltrated their town.
In the Bronx of my youth, the specter of danger, disorder, and seediness manifested physically in abandoned and burned-out buildings. I found the mayor’s statement about stability slightly amusing because Canfield Apartments—a small cluster of tidy low-rise buildings featuring a communal yard and balconies on a tree-lined block—would have seemed thoroughly suburban even in Morris Park, and much more so in the South Bronx districts of Morrisania or Hunts Point.
Popular representations of the Bronx during the 1980s portrayed it as a literal war zone: rubble, decay, destruction, and abandonment. The footage of Ronald Reagan visiting the South Bronx on a hot summer day in 1980 looks like a head of state’s visit to a hostile country overseas. Black and brown bodies surround his white staff and detail, and in the background looms the uncanny landscape of an urban neighborhood so bereft of buildings you can see the actual horizon in the shot.
In a hilarious attempt to slap a Band-Aid on urban blight, the administration of Mayor Ed Koch covered the windows of dozens of city-owned abandoned buildings with full-length decals of venetian blinds or a shade partially drawn over a colorful flower box, as if to say Look someone lives here and cares for this window! This is not an abandoned building in a crushingly destitute warren of the Colony left to rot by the powers that be!
Of course, no one apparently could be troubled to vary the window decals much. (Let’s not get too crazy with our Potemkin makeover of one of the poorest places in the city.) Driving through the Bronx in the 1990s, you would look up to see rows of identical window box decals staring down from an obviously abandoned building. I remember having childlike daydreams about who put them there, and what it would be like to have the job of window-stickerer, spending one’s working hours in spooky, empty structures. The cumulative effect was precisely the opposite of its intent; the orderly rows of identical sunny stickers affixed to the hollow skeleton of a building that once housed urban life looked chilling and dystopian.
The intended audience for these stickers, of course, wasn’t the residents of the Bronx. They were mostly applied in city-owned abandoned buildings that faced major thoroughfares like the Cross Bronx Expressway, which thousands of non-Bronx residents passed during their daily commute. Residents of the borough were largely unenthused. One resident told a New York Times reporter “They should fix up the buildings, and have people living here, not decals.”
“Somebody doesn’t care,” said another, “or they’d be making homes for people rather than making missiles and giving us decals.” All the while, Mayor Koch defended the much-mocked stickers. “In a neighborhood, as in life, a clean bandage is much, much better than a raw or festering wound.”
“Festering wounds” were everywhere to be found in the city at that point. New York was an empire in disrepair. It was unruly. Above all else, from the street crime to the graffiti to the boom boxes, it was disorderly. The city was in physical decline. The subways were covered with graffiti, streets were strewn with trash, and across all five boroughs one could see thousands and thousands of broken windows.
BROKEN WINDOWS: A SIMPLE, casual fact of urban blight. These two words would become one of the most powerful phrases in the history of American criminology.
Given the folklore around “broken windows” as the silver bullet that once and for all slayed the urban crime monster, it’s a trip to go back and actually read the article that started it all. Published in 1982 in the Atlantic, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety” opens with a gloss of a report from the Police Foundation in Washington on the results of a New Jersey state experiment in which officers were pushed out of their cars onto foot patrols.
The controlled experiment did not produce a reduction in the actual crime rate, and yet according to the authors, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, “residents of the foot patrolled neighborhoods seemed to feel more secure than persons in other areas, tended to believe that crime had been reduced, and seemed to take fewer steps to protect themselves from crime (staying at home with the doors locked, for example).”
Though the theory would later be simplified to suggest that one could reduce crime by stamping out disorder—drunkenness, public urination, sidewalk gambling—the authors were actually makin
g a far more modest claim. They were interested in psychology. Police, they argued, could be used to make people feel safer even if they weren’t actually improving overall safety:
Many citizens, of course, are primarily frightened by crime, especially crime involving a sudden, violent attack by a stranger. This risk is very real, in Newark as in many large cities. But we tend to overlook another source of fear—the fear of being bothered by disorderly people. Not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed. What foot-patrol officers did was to elevate, to the extent they could, the level of public order in these neighborhoods. Though the neighborhoods were predominantly black and the foot patrolmen were mostly white, this “order-maintenance” function of the police was performed to the general satisfaction of both parties.
Kelling and Wilson were explicitly offering a police strategy designed to produce a collective psychological effect, one intended to satiate the neuroses of anxious urban dwellers who worried that the neighborhood was going downhill, and to stem the contagion that came with that unraveling. “A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change,” they observed, “in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle.”