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

by Jonathan Mahler

  Reggie had a simple response to this sort of talk: “Play out your option or shut the hell up.” The way he saw it, he had taken a considerable risk by not signing a contract with Baltimore the year before. He could have gotten injured or simply folded under the pressure. Reggie had a point. Still, it’s hard to imagine a situation that required more diplomacy, which did not come easily to him. Instead, Reggie talked incessantly about his various endorsement deals and made sure to rearrange his thick rolls of hundred-dollar bills in plain view of his teammates.

  One afternoon Reggie asked a writer what his new teammates were saying about him. The writer told him that Sparky Lyle, the team’s closer, had said it was nothing personal, but that the Yankees already had plenty of left-handed power. (They already had a pair of right fielders too: Lou Piniella and Oscar Gamble.) Lyle later acknowledged that it was something personal: “After George signed him [Reggie], when he told the papers, ‘I didn’t come to New York to be a star. I brought my star with me,’ right then I knew. I said to myself, ‘This guy is going to be trouble.’”

  For Reggie, though, the biggest problem wasn’t what the guys were saying; it was what they weren’t saying. He felt excluded from nearly all the locker room needling, a rite of passage in the culture of the clubhouse. When he was razzed, it didn’t feel good-natured. One afternoon in early March, Piniella asked him how he was doing.

  “How you doin’, Hoss?” Reggie answered.

  “I’m not the horse, Reg,” Piniella replied. “You’re the horse. I’m just the cart”

  With Munson, things were more complicated. The Yankee captain wanted badly to put the self-aggrandizing superstar in his place, but he also felt an obligation not to alienate him. So he veered between trying to establish a working relationship with Reggie and doing everything he could to maximize the newcomer’s discomfort. Munson never gave the writers anything they could use-“What are you asking me for?” was his favorite response—but if you hung around the ballpark long enough, you were bound to overhear something revealing.

  One afternoon Reggie was taking some extra batting practice. First baseman Chris Chambliss and Thurman Munson, the only guys left on the field save for a rookie pitcher, settled in behind the cage to watch. Reggie fouled off the first couple of pitches. Chambliss looked at Munson and cracked, “Show time!” Reggie took a few more cuts and finally connected, but the ball fell a few feet short of the fence. “Some show,” scoffed Munson. “Real power!”

  At least no one could question Reggie’s work ethic. He got to the ballpark early and stayed late, running wind sprints across the outfield and pounding out sit-ups on the floor of the training room. At the end of the day he’d open the cuff of his jacket and let the river of sweat pour out. Then he’d peel off, and wring dry, each one of his T-shirts.

  What they could question was whether he was worth all the fuss. “He’s an average player, not even a real good player,” said Jim Palmer, a former teammate with the Orioles. Bitter about his own contract woes, Palmer was being excessively ungenerous, but Reggie’s credentials were hardly beyond reproach. He was bringing a lifetime batting average of .258 to New York and had never hit .300, not even in the minors. In five of his nine seasons in the big leagues, he had either tied or led the league in errors by an outfielder. The only record Reggie was on pace to break was the major-league strikeout record: His 1,237 put him well ahead of the reigning champ, Mickey Mantle, at the same point in his career. And the book on how to pitch to Reggie was as straightforward as they came: Stay up and in, so he can’t unfold those powerful arms. .

  “I give Reggie Jackson all the credit in the world for one thing—he talked that man [George Steinbrenner] out of $3 million,” Dock Ellis told a reporter for Ebony. “He’s an average ballplayer who has a lot of power. But more than that, he’s a helluva salesman and he sold himself. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Reggie conned ’em—it was one of the biggest cons in baseball—and I admire him for it.”

  Or was it Steinbrenner who had conned Reggie? The Daily News’s Dick Young speculated that the Yankees’ owner had paid off kids and cabdrivers to yell out to Reggie when he first brought him to New York for lunch at ‘21.’

  As the spring wore on, the pressure continued to bake the slugger’s neck. It wasn’t just Reggie, it was what he represented. This was the first year of free agency, the demon that owners and commissioners had been beating back since the creation of the game. Now that it was here, the alarm bells were clanging. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn was warning that free agency would drive some teams into bankruptcy and might even force the American League to fold. Baseball’s nostalgists bemoaned the end of the hometown hero (“Who’s on first? No, really, who’s on first?”), fretted that the new salary scale would increase the distance between fans and players, and complained that free agency was turning athletes into entertainers. Baseball, a game of order, had been thrown into chaos. Even the seemingly timeless “Casey at the Bat” needed to be updated. In Russell Baker’s retelling, Casey deliberately whiffs in order to avoid hitting the ball into the parking lot, where his Maserati is parked.

  Doubts were working inside Reggie. Late in the spring he abandoned his plan to wear No. 42, Jackie Robinson’s digits, opting for . 44 instead. The expectations for the game’s highest-paid, highest-profile free agent were high enough without inviting comparisons to a man who had hit over .300 while carrying his entire race on his shoulders. To add to the pressure, Reggie’s agent, Matt Merola, who soon changed the last four digits of his phone number to 4444 in honor of his most lucrative client, was pitching candy companies on a Reggie Jackson candy bar.

  By the end of spring Reggie didn’t sound much like the man who had, only one month earlier, joked about being too big for his breeches. A new tone had crept into his interviews, not exactly humility, but a sense that no matter what he did it wouldn’t be enough. “If I lead the league in homers and runs batted in and win the M.V.P. award and we win the World Series, they’ll say, ‘He should have done that. Look what they’re paying him,’” Reggie told Murray Chass, the beat man for The New York Times. “If I don’t do it, if I come short of it, if we don’t win, it will be my fault. ‘Steinbrenner fouled up, Jackson’s no good, he hurt the club, he created dissension.’”

  For the first time in his career Reggie was talking about the color of his skin. Asked one day about claiming his place in the storied tradition of the New York Yankees, Reggie pointed out that the old Bronx Bombers were all white and that their front office was racist and bigoted. “They didn’t want no black superstars,” Reggie snapped, deliberately letting his usually proper grammar lapse for effect. He was hedging his bets: If he didn’t become a hero, at least he could be a martyr. “I don’t know if I’m going to fit in here, man,” he told Newsday’s Steve Jacobson out on a Fort Lauderdale fishing pier near the end of spring, indulging his taste for melodrama. “I’m a loner.”

  By the time the Yankees broke camp, Reggie was coming to resemble, or perhaps fashioning himself after, the solitary hero of his favorite book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the gull that yearned to soar like an eagle. (A dreamy poster for the book had hung over his bed in Oakland.) If Jonathan had managed to transcend his scornful flock, all those petty birds that felt threatened by his ambition, why couldn’t he?

  11.

  AMBITION was about the only thing that Edward Irving Koch, the latest entrant into New York’s 1977 mayoral race, had going for him.

  Tall and exceptionally unathletic-looking with wide hips and narrow shoulders that looked even slimmer beneath the unflattering cut of his three-button Brooks Brothers suits, the fifty-three-year-old Ed Koch’s wavy brown hair had been reduced long ago to a narrow band of graying fuzz that wrapped around the side of his head. His face was expressive, almost elfin, and he often wore the teasing look of an uncle who was about to pull a penny from behind your ear. The writer and critic Michael Harrington described it as the look of a “diffident, somewhat loveable schlemiel.” Onl
y 6 percent of the city had any idea who Ed Koch was.

  The Daily News tucked the news of his mayoral candidacy into the end of a story on an unrelated subject. The Times deemed the March 4 announcement, in which Koch declared himself ready to captain the city “through its darkest hour,” worthy of a separate article but noted in the second paragraph that his first challenge would be to “scotch skepticism over the seriousness of his candidacy.” The Village Voice pegged him as “an early dropout,” which would be right in line with his last effort, when he’d bailed out of the 1973 mayoral race after seven weeks. For the moment Koch’s main competition was the incumbent, Abe Beame, and the borough president of Manhattan, Percy Sutton, but more candidates, including the well-known Bella Abzug, were expected to follow. His own campaign manager, David Garth, put his odds of winning at one in twenty.

  The few New Yorkers who did know Ed Koch in the spring of 1977 thought of him as a lumpy liberal from Greenwich Village. A middle child, he’d been born in the Bronx, though his parents, Jewish immigrants from Poland, had started their New York journey in a scabby, peeling tenement on the crowded Lower East Side. Koch’s mother, Joyce, worked in a garment factory and spent nearly all her paltry earnings on a tutor who taught her to read and write English. His father, Louis, signed on with a furrier and eventually became a partner in the business.

  Safely on the road to middle-class, the Kochs abandoned the bustling ghetto for the relative tranquillity of a six-story apartment house on East 173rd Street in the Crotona Park section of the Bronx. A new elevated subway stop had just arrived in the neighborhood, and with it came thousands of immigrants, a modest new bourgeoisie in search of roomier apartments and a little open air.

  When the Depression hit, most Crotona Park residents managed to stay put until the storm had passed. Louis was not so lucky. His fur business went bankrupt, and he was forced to move his wife and children back to a slum, this time in a dingy corner of Newark, New Jersey, where the Kochs shared a two-bedroom apartment with Louis’s brother-in-law, his wife, and their two kids. Louis worked for tips at the hatcheck concession in a local dance and catering hall. (The hall’s manager pocketed the twenty-five-cent fee per hat and coat.) At age twelve, Koch joined his father at the catering hall every evening at eight and often stayed until midnight. “Don’t forget the hatcheck boys,” they’d remind anyone who tried to escape without leaving behind a little loose change. Soon Koch was logging afternoons at the deli counter at a local supermarket as well.

  Eventually the family socked away enough money to move into their own walk-up in Newark, and in 1941, the year Ed Koch graduated from high school, they relocated to a house on Brooklyn’s Ocean Parkway, the wide, tree-lined boulevard that stretches from Prospect Park to the boardwalk of Coney Island. Koch had just finished his second year at City College when his draft notice arrived, and he was shipped off to Europe, where he became a specialist in denazification, the Allies’ campaign to purge Western Europe of Nazis.

  Sergeant Koch returned from the war in 1946, a heady time for middle-class New York. Mayor La Guardia’s handiwork was everywhere: prepaid health insurance for all New York residents; twenty-two municipal hospitals; subsidized housing cooperatives; a five-cent subway ride that zigged and zagged across four boroughs. La Guardia spoke endlessly about beautifying New York, about finding new ways to lift the spirit of its citizens. His successor, William O’Dwyer, picked up right where La Guardia left off. On the heels of his election in 1945, O’Dwyer put Robert Moses in charge of a sweeping program of postwar public works construction. Moses went to work drawing up plans for a new East River waterfront that would stretch all the way from City Hall to midtown, a new Metropolitan Opera House, a new Carnegie Hall, a new Madison Square Garden, and towering new apartment buildings everywhere.

  New York’s neighborhoods were still largely divided along ethnic lines, but the rise of the working class—out of the 3.3 million people employed in New York City in 1946, upward of 2.6 million were blue-collar—had produced a sense of common struggle that often transcended these boundaries. Something else was happening too. A new generation was coming of age. It consisted of people like Koch, children of immigrants who had passed through Ellis Island earlier in the century. Their parents had clung fast to the comfortable shores of their ethnic ghettos. By contrast, Koch and his peers were eager to swim out into bigger waters. Yet at the same time, their humble beginnings fostered in them a passionate commitment to the underclass.

  Like so many idealists of his generation, Ed Koch came under the spell of politics in 1952, when Adlai Stevenson made his first unsuccessful bid for the presidency. As a twenty-eight-year-old volunteer in the campaign, Koch armed himself with a small American flag and a soapbox and went from one Manhattan street corner to the next, railing against Dwight Eisenhower and his evil running mate, Richard Nixon.

  Koch lived with his parents on Ocean Parkway while attending an accelerated program at New York University Law School, in the heart of Greenwich Village. He fell in love with the neighborhood: the brick town houses; the twisting tree-lined avenues; the cafés; the cheap Italian restaurants; the bustling street life; the small-town political ferment. Brooklyn was too provincial for a young man who’d been bitten by the political bug, and he was tired of his mother’s nagging him to get married. Koch rented a small apartment on Bedford Street, which he shared with a roommate. Not long after, Koch found his way into the loft on Sheridan Square that served as the headquarters for the Village Independent Democrats. Formerly a support group for Adlai Stevenson, who’d run a second unsuccessful presidential campaign in ’56, the VID had by now refashioned itself into a “reform club,” an alternative to the machine-controlled organizations that had ruled Democratic politics in the city since the days of Tammany Hall. Koch was soon elected its president.

  Greenwich Village in the late fifties was a neighborhood in transition. It was still predominantly Italian, but progressive young professionals were discovering its charms, as were beatniks. Few of these corduroyed bohemians lived in the Village—the nearby Lower East Side offered tenement apartments at lower rents—but they gathered there nonetheless, often at coffeehouses like the Figaro, named after the Italian barbershop whose former quarters it inhabited. Streams of people poured into the neighborhood each day, including more and more blacks (so-called A-trainers) from Harlem. They came to hear poetry, to listen to folk and jazz music, to browse the local bookstores, or simply to walk around and absorb the scene. Not since Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Roaring Twenties had the neighborhood’s narrow streets swarmed like this. Much of the activity took place along MacDougal Street, which also happened to be studded with tenements densely populated with Italian-Americans, longtime Villagers who didn’t like being kept up all night by the nonstop partying beneath their windows.

  Tensions inevitably arose. Neighborhood thugs vandalized coffeehouses and extorted protection money from their owners, particularly those who catered to racially mixed crowds. Local cops shook down the same establishments for such minor infractions as not having enough soap in their bathrooms. When a legal loophole was discovered—most of these coffeehouses were offering entertainment without the requisite $150 cabaret license—the local Democratic boss moved to have them shut down. Washington Square Park too became embroiled in the battle over the character of the neighborhood. Older Villagers wanted it to remain a sanctuary; the new colonizers thought it should be a cultural center as well, with art shows, chamber music, folksingers, and guitarists.

  In the “town-gown” struggle between the neighborhood’s working-class Italian-Americans and its college-educated liberals, Koch naturally sided with the liberals. He formed the Right to Sing Committee to counter the campaign to eject the folksingers from Washington Square Park and drafted a change to the cabaret license law. When Koch ran in a local assembly race in 1962, he dubbed his platform “SAD” after its three linchpin issues: sodomy, abortion, and divorce. (He was for making gay sex and abortion legal
and for rewriting the state law that considered adultery the only viable grounds for divorce.)

  Despite an endorsement from Eleanor Roosevelt, Koch got his clock cleaned, but the following year he ran for district leader against the neighborhood’s longtime Democratic power broker, the man known as the Bishop, Carmine De Sapio. A decade earlier it would have been the equivalent of taking on a Kennedy in Boston. By now, though, bossism was taking a beating in New York. The name De Sapio smacked of the smoke-filled rooms of Tammany, of the sometimes corrupt, always patronage-hungry old-time Democrats. Even De Sapio couldn’t ignore the winds of political change: He traded in his trademark sinister dark sunglasses for a more subtly shaded pair, acknowledging that his old ones were “no asset for a political leader.”

  By now Koch had been hanging around the Village long enough to have some influential friends of his own, most notably Dan Wolf, part owner and editor in chief of The Village Voice. Wolf swung his feisty paper behind Koch, covering every twist and turn of his campaign, while missing no opportunity to attack De Sapio and his history of influence peddling. As the campaign wound down, it looked as if it could go either way. The night of the election reports swept into Koch’s headquarters on West Fourth Street that turnout in the predominantly Italian South Village had been strong and that a good many voters had entered the polls chanting “five, seven, nine,” the numbers of De Sapio and the slate of candidates from his club, Tamawa. Koch also knew that Labor Day had just passed, and some fifteen hundred VID members were not yet back from their summer homes in the Hamptons and on Fire Island. De Sapio had the lead with one district left to report, Stewart House, an apartment complex on East Tenth Street that was massive enough to constitute its own election district. Koch figured he was finished; one of De Sapio’s running mates lived in the building. He was preparing to concede when the Stewart House returns were announced: Koch 165, De Sapio 77. Koch had won the election by 41 votes.