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

by Jonathan Mahler

  Reminders of the city’s decline were already everywhere. In 1972 the Tonight Show had moved from midtown Manhattan to Burbank, California. To a generation that had grown up watching Jack Paar and Johnny Carson interview Broadway actors, cabaret singers, and jazz and rock stars—live from the show’s studio at Rockefeller Center—this was the cultural equivalent of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ moving to Los Angeles, the surest sign yet that America’s cultural axis was tilting. Carson, who had engineered the move himself, never looked back. New York’s travails soon became a running joke in his nightly monologues, which were now, in a symbolic triumph of Hollywood over Broadway, taped. Central Park was Johnny’s favorite punch line (“Some Martians landed in Central Park today … and were mugged”).

  As for Beame, the time for tiptoeing was over. He gave thirty-eight thousand city workers, including librarians, garbage collectors, firemen, and cops, the ax. In anticipation of the layoffs, the police union had already distributed WELCOME TO FEAR CITY brochures at Kennedy Airport, Grand Central Station, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which came complete with a “survival guide” advising arriving tourists not to leave their hotels after dark or to ride the subways at any hour. On the July 1975 morning when five thousand cops were furloughed, hundreds of them amassed in front of City Hall, waving empty holsters and signs that read: BEAME IS A DESERTER. A RAT. HE LEFT THE CITY DEFENSELESS. From there they marched over to the Brooklyn Bridge, where they blocked rush-hour traffic with Police Department barricades. Once the flow of cars had been halted, they deflated tires and hurled obscenities and beer bottles at uniformed ex-colleagues who tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade them to clear the roadway.

  Fear City also became Stink City when ten thousand sanitation workers walked off the job to protest the layoffs. The piles rose quickly, and ripe refuse was soon oozing from burst garbage bags and overstuffed trash cans, making it difficult for pedestrians to negotiate many of the city’s sidewalks. Within a matter of days some fifty-eight thousand tons of uncollected garbage were roasting in New York’s summer sun. Sanitation workers ensured that private collectors wouldn’t be able to provide relief from the unremitting stench by sealing off the various dumps in the city’s outlying areas.

  Twenty-six of New York’s 360 firehouses were shuttered, prompting waves of firemen to complain of minor injuries and request sick leave. Communities around the city staged angry protests. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, a poor neighborhood fighting a losing battle against arsonists, residents blockaded an engine company slated for closure and held hostage the fourteen firemen inside. An assistant Fire Department commissioner was dispatched to negotiate their release, and the residents took him hostage as well.

  Library branches and public hospitals were closed and the subway fare jumped from thirty-five to fifty cents. More devastating still, at least symbolically, Mayor Beame ended 129 years of free tuition at New York’s public colleges, including his alma mater, City College, the fabled gateway to middle-class life. That it was Abe Beame, and not his silver-spooned predecessor, John Lindsay, who presided over the dismantling of this great experiment in social democracy amounted to a bitter irony. He was, after all, one of its proudest products. Beame’s parents had fled czarist oppression in Warsaw at the turn of the century for a cold-water flat on the densely populated Lower East Side. His father, a paper cutter and hot-blooded Socialist, toted his young son along to drink in the fevered calls for social justice in drafty high school auditoriums and dingy meeting rooms.

  His father’s ideological ardor never rubbed off on Beame, but his work ethic did. Beame’s first job, in grade school, entailed walking through the tenements before dawn, knocking on doors to wake people who couldn’t afford alarm clocks. When he was old enough, Beame joined his father at the stationery factory after school and on Saturdays. Free time was scarce, but on Sunday afternoons he occasionally splashed around the public swimming pool in the old Madison Square Garden on Twenty-third Street. His nickname was Spunky.

  A degree in accounting from City College safely in hand, Beame got married, moved to Brooklyn, and started logging time at the local Democratic club in Crown Heights. What he lacked in personal magnetism, he more than made up for with tirelessness and fidelity to the Democratic Party. Beame was a veritable vote-gathering machine, the political equivalent of salesman of the month election in and election out. And so he gradually worked his way up, from doorbell ringer to club captain to party leader.

  Beame’s climb through the civil service ranks was equally slow and steady. In 1946 he was named assistant budget director of New York City. Six years later he was duly promoted to budget director. (His salary practically doubled—to $17,500.) He put in fifteen years of service in the budget office, accumulating a thousand days of unused vacation along the way. In 1961 Beame was elected comptroller. This appeared to be the end of his ascent. He was plenty smart, but he was no leader.

  A failed campaign for the mayoralty in 1965 confirmed this impression. The Democratic candidate in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, Beame ought to have been the odds-on favorite. There were even some early attempts to turn his physical stature into an advantage by reminding New Yorkers that the city’s greatest mayor ever, Fiorello La Guardia, was exactly the same height. La Guardia had been known as the Little Flower; several of Beame’s allies started referring to him as the Little Giant. The nickname didn’t stick. He was just Abe Beame the bookkeeper. His flat campaign speeches, often delivered from atop an attaché case so that he could see over the lectern, accelerated his undoing. His overbred opponents—the tall, blond, and eloquent Upper East Side Yalies John Lindsay and William F. Buckley, Jr.—did verbal pirouettes around the pride of City College’s accounting department.

  After being drubbed by Lindsay, Beame skulked out of politics. In a betrayal of his roots that would surely have broken his late father’s heart, he became an investment banker. “I was probably earning twice as much money doing one-tenth the amount of work, and I had very nice, lavish offices and whatnot,” he reflected later. But private sector life wasn’t for him, so in 1969 Beame ran again for comptroller and won. Four years later, at the age of sixty-seven, he took another shot at the mayoralty.

  Things were different now. He was the same Abe Beame; it was the city itself that had changed. New York was waking up from eight years of John Lindsay with a hangover. Like most benders, this one had started with unselfconscious giddiness and infinite expectations for the night ahead, and had ended with lipstick smudged, rouge faded, and a cold, hard look in the mirror.

  In the beginning the question wasn’t so much did Lindsay deserve to be mayor of New York as did New York deserve to have him. The hope was that he’d restore civility to New York on his way to the White House. The reality proved otherwise. His tenure started inauspiciously and got worse. Hours after Lindsay’s inauguration the city’s thirty-five thousand transit workers went out on strike and didn’t return for twelve days. (“Mayor Lindsay eliminated subway crime on his first day in office,” joked Sammy Davis, Jr.) Two years later Lindsay’s experiment with community control in a predominantly black school district in East Brooklyn yielded an angry dispute between local parents and New York’s predominantly Jewish teachers’ union. A series of teachers’ strikes followed, closing almost all the city’s schools for the better part of two months. When the dust finally cleared, the historic alliance between the city’s blacks and Jews had been shattered.

  Yet for a while anyway, New York clung fast to the image of its strapping mayor, tie loosened, suit jacket slung casually over his shoulder. In this time of racial turmoil, Lindsay had kept his city riot-free, bravely taking to the streets of Harlem the night of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder to soothe an angry, distraught community. Campaigning for reelection in the summer of 1969, the unflappable Lindsay admitted that he’d made some mistakes, and like that year’s Miracle Mets—who invited him into their champagne-soaked locker room parties—he marched on to improbable victory.

 
By the early 1970s, though, New York had a bellyful of disillusionment. Lindsay’s attempts to reestablish confidence between the police and the people backfired when his idea for a civilian review board to consider police brutality claims was shouted down by the Daily News as “the property of … cop-haters.” His antipoverty programs became bastions of corruption and created warring fiefdoms within the city’s ghettos. And nothing divided New York as bitterly as Lindsay’s grand plan to build several low-income housing towers in the middle-class neighborhood of Forest Hills, Queens.

  Time and again, Lindsay’s noble attempts to empower the underclass served only to alienate the working class. The city’s population was diminishing; its welfare rolls were growing. Crime had risen faster in New York in the 1960s than in any decade since the thirties, and the growth had continued through the early seventies. Subway cars and stations were bruised with graffiti, a cry of anguish from the ghetto to some, a sign the city was spiraling out of control to others. A new consensus emerged: The mayor wasn’t a man of the people after all. Clark Whelton, writing in The Village Voice, put it best: “John Lindsay is a creature of air … He could walk on air. The people he tried to lead couldn’t.” By the end of his second term Lindsay had become, in the words of one especially memorable magazine headline, AN EXILE IN HIS OWN CITY.

  Thus did Beame’s moment arrive. There was no seductive rhetoric, no risk of dashed expectations. He was New York’s rebound lover. What’s more, he was a bookkeeper, and New York’s books were in desperate need of attention. Reluctant to cut services during this time of social upheaval, Mayor Lindsay had gotten into the habit of borrowing. “He knows the buck,” Beame’s campaign posters confidently, if blandly, asserted.

  He had a funny way of showing it. Less than halfway through Beame’s term, the city was careering toward bankruptcy. In the end it was Governor Hugh Carey and a coterie of financiers who managed to rescue New York. In the summer of ’75, Carey created the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC) to oversee the city’s finances and put Felix Rohatyn, the head of the investment firm Lazard Frères, in charge. Rohatyn rolled the city’s debt into new bonds and with the help of the rest of MAC’s principals—businessmen, brokers, and bankers all—brought them to market. It was, or so it seemed at the time, the final indignity for the municipal bookkeeper from the Lower East Side; benched, as a high-gloss team of Park Avenue suits bailed out the city to which he had humbly devoted his life.

  3.

  HOW far away those dark days seemed in July ’76, as Beame sat in the Rainbow Room with a large party of Democratic well-wishers, the bright lights of the city shimmering in every window, a few hours after that final chorus of “We Shall Overcome.” He couldn’t help showing off the personal letter he’d received from Jimmy Carter, who promised the city complete support from the White House.

  New York had been though hell, but in the summer of ’76 there was reason for hope. It was a feeling more than anything, palpable, if not quantifiable, that the embattled city was on the edge of a new day. America’s hostility toward New York had only reawakened the city’s pride, and the bicentennial celebrations had confirmed its preeminence. Washington was the nation’s capital, Philadelphia the birthplace of its independence, but when it came time to commemorate the country’s 200th birthday, no one even gave it a second thought: New York would be the center of the action.

  Los Angeles could have The Tonight Show; New York now had Saturday Night, a subversive ninety-minute sketch comedy show that had debuted less than a year before and was already capturing more than twenty-two million viewers a week. The counterculture was starting to migrate from San Francisco to New York, a trend evidenced by Rolling Stone’s plan to relocate from Haight-Ashbury to midtown Manhattan in the summer of ’77. And just as America’s bicentennial celebrations had awakened a nation’s interest in its history, so one of the surprise best sellers of 1976, Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers, had rekindled nostalgia for a critical chapter of that narrative, the immigrant experience on New York’s Lower East Side.

  Bold new restaurants were opening, including the extravagantly refurbished Tavern on the Green. The food was forgettable—“Took home a doggie bag,” wrote one critic. “The dog refused it.”—but the vote of confidence in the future of Central Park wasn’t. (Take that, Johnny!) The new Tavern was the brainchild of a man-child, the 264-pound Warner LeRoy, who had grown up in Hollywood on the back lots of Warner Brothers, which his maternal grandfather had founded. (One of LeRoy’s earliest childhood memories was of skipping along the yellow brick road; after the filming had been completed, he got to keep Toto as a pet.) When the time came, though, LeRoy declined to take over the family business, and moved to New York instead. He had his own passion for entertaining and transporting that needed cultivating.

  The downtown crowd had its place, One Fifth, so named for its Fifth Avenue address, a former NYU dormitory at the corner of Eighth Street. Its proprietor, George Schwartz, had opened the place in January ‘76, envisioning it as New York’s La Coupole. In a sense, it was. “It started with fashion people and a woman named Larissa who made furs for rock stars,” Schwartz recalls. “Suddenly all hell broke loose, and we were the ‘in’ place.” Nineteen-seventies New York was not 1930s Paris, but the restaurant’s decor—cruise ship art deco—provided a whimsical diversion from the dirty, deserted streets outside. Schwartz had picked up all the furnishings a few years earlier, when a 1930s Cunard liner washed up in the New York Harbor with a broken engine. Rather than foot the bill to have it repaired, the ship’s owner auctioned off its contents. Schwartz bought the lights, chairs, port windows, and German brass sconces that had filled its first-class smoking room and reassembled them in his new restaurant. The wait staff was gay and gorgeous; the maître d’ wore tails, a lorgnette, and heavily gooped slicked-back hair. The food was continental American. No one knew who the chef was; no one cared who the chef was.

  Still farther downtown, on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, the two inarticulate towers that had received such scathing notices two years earlier, was Windows on the World. New York magazine’s food critic, Gael Greene, couldn’t resist the symbolism when the restaurant opened for business in the spring of 1976. “Suddenly I knew, absolutely knew—New York would survive,” she wrote. “If money and power and ego could create this extraordinary pleasure … this instant landmark … money and power and ego could rescue this city from the ashes.”

  The next president was going to help too. When Carter launched his general election campaign in September, the city’s subway cars and buses were festooned with posters of his smiling Southern mug and his solemn vow, “I GUARANTEE THAT IF I GO TO THE WHITE HOUSE, I’LL NEVER TELL THE PEOPLE OF THE GREATEST CITY ON EARTH TO DROP DEAD.” On his final swing through the Northeast two months later, Carter showed up at a rally in the garment center with Beame by his side. Clasping the mayor’s hand, Carter proclaimed, “Together, we can do anything.” Two days before the election Beame summoned seventy New York City Democratic district leaders to Gracie Mansion and told them to make sure that everyone who was ambulatory got to the voting booths: New York could put its faith in J. C.

  And so it did.

  Without the impressive turnout in the city, Carter would not have won New York State, and without the state’s forty-one electoral votes, Carter would not have won the election. The president-elect wasted no time inviting Governor Carey, Felix Rohatyn, and Mayor Beame to his plantation on a little island off the Georgia coast to express his gratitude.

  As for Beame, the pained expression that he’d worn for the better part of the last two years was finally giving way to something approaching a smile. “I think we’ve turned the corner and seen the light at the end of tunnel,” the Mighty Mite told reporters in the fall of 1976. By now the city had an election of its own approaching, the ’77 mayoral election. Beame sent the word around City Hall that, expectations to the contrary, he’d be running again after all.

  4.


  THE Martin meltdown began with the usual epithet-laced rantings in the early innings of the fourth and final game of the 1976 World Series on October 21 and ended with a dramatic detonation in the top half of the ninth, when the Yankees’ forty-eight-year-old manager picked up a foul ball and hurled it in the direction of home plate umpire Bill Deegan.

  A predictable chain of events ensued. After being ejected from the game, which was virtually unheard of in the World Series, Billy Martin stormed out of the dugout and let loose a ferocious tantrum. Neck veins bulging, jaw clenched, he was eventually coaxed off the field. Passing back through the dugout before disappearing from public view, he delivered a swift kick to the bat rack. Martin’s anger soon turned to shame—not at his behavior but at being swept by the Cincinnati Reds. He retreated into the trainer’s room, which was off limits to the press corps, to sob inconsolably.

  Over the course of the series he’d used every excuse, from the chilly temperatures of the night games (so scheduled to keep the TV advertisers happy) to the plastic grass of Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium, an affront to his old-fashioned sensibilities. Now, curled up on the floor beneath the cold metal training tables, Martin was left alone with his crushing sense of disappointment—that is, until his boss, George Steinbrenner, barged in to berate Martin for embarrassing him.

  Martin eventually emerged, bleary and broken, clutching a cup of scotch. A reporter asked, unnecessarily, if he’d been crying. “Yes. I’m not ashamed of it,” Martin answered. “I’m an emotional guy … It hurts my pride, my ego, I guess, to lose like this.” It hardly needed to be said. Alfred Manuel “Billy” Martin’s desperate desire to win, to avoid losing, was already legendary.