Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City

by Jonathan Mahler

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  PART TWO

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

  40.

  PART THREE

  41.

  42.

  43.

  44.

  45.

  46.

  47.

  48.

  49.

  50.

  51.

  52.

  53.

  54.

  55.

  56.

  57.

  58.

  59.

  60.

  61.

  62.

  63.

  64.

  65.

  66.

  67.

  Praise for Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning

  About the Author

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Copyright Page

  TO MY PARENTS

  PROLOGUE

  I grew up hearing stories about the New York of my father’s childhood, the New York of the 1940s and 1950s. The working-class Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx that was thick with semidetached houses; the broom handles swiped from his mother’s closet, the pink spaldeens sailing over manhole covers: That was my mythology.

  The images were especially resonant because we lived so far away from this world, in Palm Springs, California, where the streets are named after Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra and the landscape alternates between spiky desert shrubs and golf courses. Those supernaturally green fairways, kept lush by constantly whirring sprinklers, were my reality; the bustling streets of New York were my dreamworld.

  The California Angels played their spring training games in a small ballpark just a short bike ride from our house. We would get season tickets every March and dutifully cheer on the home team, which was owned by one of the community’s many aging celebrities, Gene Autry. But I never cared much for the Angels. I knew that baseball loyalty was generational, not geographic. You don’t choose your team; you inherit it. So I became a Yankees’ fan from afar, methodically monitoring their daily performances through The Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, and our West Coast edition of The New York Times.

  In the summer of 1977 we visited the city. I was only eight, but it didn’t take long to figure out that this wasn’t the place I had imagined. Whenever we climbed into a taxi, my parents promptly rolled up the windows and locked the doors. When I drifted toward a group of men dealing three-card monte, my mother quickly yanked me away.

  The highlight of our stay was a Yankees’ game. We took the No. 4 train north from Eighty-sixth Street on a sticky July afternoon. My father, a starched white button-down shirt tucked stiffly into his high-waisted chinos, kept a firm grip on my arm as I tried to decipher the swirls of graffiti that covered our car. The train rumbled into one station after another. At each stop a dozen more people in Yankees caps and T-shirts pushed their way aboard. Finally, I saw the glimmer of natural light that meant we had crossed into the Bronx. The train climbed out of the tunnel, and there was Yankee Stadium. I recognized only one feature from the gauzy photographs in my Yankees books: the ring of white wooden trim running over the bleachers like a picket fence. It was the last vestige from the Yankee Stadium of old, an anachronistic detail on top of this concrete fortress. The ballpark was surrounded not by the cheerful brownstones and flower boxes that I had imagined but by grim tenements with screenless windows thrown wide open in the heavy summer air.

  The team inside the ballpark also bore little resemblance to the neatly pressed, fair-haired Yankees of my father’s generation—“heroes who summed up the ideals of manhood, courage and the excellence of an entire generation,” as one of the bent-up paperbacks on my bookshelf described them. The Yankees of the fifties won with ease and grace. They scored eight runs in the first inning … and then slowly pulled away. The 1977 Yankees were racially and ethnically mixed. They were life-size, loutish. On the field they did everything the hard way, with the maximum of stress and strain on their fans. Off the field, they bickered, backstabbed, and demanded to be traded.

  When I first embarked on this book four years ago, my intention was to write about the ’77 Yankees against the backdrop of New York during this infamous era of urban blight. As the months passed, though, the city slowly advanced into the foreground, and the two stories became one.

  I might have anticipated this. I moved to New York after graduating from college in 1990, and while it was obviously a much cleaner, safer city than it had been in the late seventies, I nevertheless felt nostalgic for the New York that I had caught only in fleeting childhood glimpses, a New York that still felt wild, unsettled. And so, as my research progressed, I sought out people who had once roamed this urban frontier: disco devotees who frequented underground dance clubs; cops who patrolled the streets during this period of soaring crime; firemen who fought the epidemic of arson that swept through the city’s ghettos; gays who cruised the abandoned West Side piers; artists and musicians who homesteaded in cheap, dingy lofts in the postindustrial wasteland of SoHo.

  On September 11, 2001, I happened to be researching the orgy of looting and arson that had accompanied the twenty-five-hour citywide power failure in July 1977. There are, of course, obvious differences between a localized blackout and a terrorist attack that killed thousands. Still, both were extraordinarily trying moments for the city, and I couldn’t help pondering how different New York felt in their respective wakes. In the aftermath of 9/11, there was a sense that our tallest towers had been felled but that our foundation was more secure than ever. We were able to identify (if not locate) our enemy, and the rest of the country, not to mention most of the free world, was on our side. During the days and weeks that followed the blackout, New York had felt shaken to its core, and America had been anything but sympathetic.

  At the same time, though, as it sank to a new low in the summer of 1977, the city was also revealing its endless capacity for regeneration. I gradually came to regard ’77 as a transformative moment for the city, a time of decay but of rehabilitation as well. New York was straddling eras. You could see it everywhere: in the mayoral race, which featured a hotheaded radical (Bella Abzug), an aging creature of the city’s smoke-filled political clubhouses (Abe Beame), and a pair of unknowns who went on to play starring roles in the modern history of New York (Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo). You could see it in Rupert Murdoch’s reinvention of the New York Post, formerly a dutiful liberal daily, as a celebrity-obsessed, right-wing scandal sheet and in the battle to stop the spread of porn shops and prostitutes across midtown.

  You could see it in the Yankees too. The team’s two biggest person
alities, Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin, were locked in a perpetual state of warfare, and it was hard not to see race, class, and the tug-of-war between past and future at the root of their dispute. Reggie Jackson was New York’s first black superstar. He was also a perfect foil for the scrappy, forever embattled Martin, the hero of New York’s fed-up working class and a powerful reminder of the team’s—and the city’s—less complicated past, the yellowing image of what New York had been and the still blurry image of what it was becoming.

  This book is the story of that change.

  PART ONE

  1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  2.

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

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

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

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

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