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

by Jonathan Mahler

  In the sixties and early seventies, Young became the patron saint to a generation of whippersnappers, the so-called Chipmunks, a new breed of sportswriter who wrote with attitude and favored a look known as the Full Cleveland—mint green or baby blue polyester pants, a wide snow white belt, and flowered shirts with oversize collars that broke like tidal waves.

  But as the seventies progressed, Young grew increasingly cynical. The proliferation of night games, of militant black athletes, of ballplayers who listened to loud music in the clubhouse, rankled him. His city was changing too. Young’s New York was a place where men still wore suits and fedoras to ball games. He seemed to recoil from the modern spasms of the city. When the freshly renovated Yankee Stadium reopened for business in 1976, Young urged his Spanish-speaking readers to leave their cans of spray paint at home. He was the press box equivalent of a neoconservative. He still had his admirers—“Surrounded by left-leaning New York anti-establishment types, he has the courage to tell the truth,” one of them wrote to the Sporting News in the summer of ’77—yet Dick Young was no longer the voice of the New York sports fan but rather that of the city’s blue-collar fury. The joke among his fellow newspapermen went that after reading Young’s copy, you needed a handkerchief to wipe the spit off your face.

  Young’s problem with Tom Seaver—“Tom Terrific,” or in Young’s mock baby talk, “Tom Tewwific”—was that he had the gall to complain about his $225,000-a-year contract. And so the scribe hammered away at the ace. Seaver, Young wrote, was typical of the “selfish modern-day ballplayer”; he had “an extreme maturity deficiency”; he was “destructive to club morale,” a “pouting, griping, clubhouse lawyer poisoning the team.” Then came the knockout punch. On June 15, 1977, Young implied that Seaver’s wife, Nancy, was jealous of Nolan Ryan’s wife because Ryan was outearning Seaver. Moments after hearing the offending line from Young’s column, Seaver demanded a trade. The following afternoon he was cleaning out his locker at Shea.

  It was the Post’s Maury Allen who first reported on Young’s role in the Seaver trade in a June 16 piece headlined DICK YOUNG DROVE SEAVER OUT OF TOWN. Allen was known for his ability to tap out a story in the time it took most of his colleagues to change their typewriter ribbons, but this had not been an easy one for him to write. Growing up in 1950s Brooklyn, Allen had idolized Young. In recent years, though, he’d watched his boyhood hero turn bitter, angry. “He expected things to be the way they were in the forties and fifties,” Allen says. “But they weren’t. The world was different.”

  17.

  41st and 40th St. along 8th Avenue across from the Port of Authority is one of the wildest areas spread over from the Times Square district. Big stereo and material shops plus overnight fruit stands have sprung up years ago to remain part of the color among dusty grease smeared windows of shadowy lampless bars where all of the characters from out in the ocean strut in to mix with delivery boys and pimps, prostitutes and the rest and small con guys who lean against the neon fuzz of jukeboxes illuminated faces like 30’s deco tobacco cards and weary workers who push hunks of stale roll thru greasy puddles of stew meat.

  DAVID WOJNAROWICZ’S UNPUBLISHED JOURNALS, AUGUST 12, 1977

  A 1977 New York City Planning Commission report counted no fewer than 245 pornographic institutions in the city. In 1965 there had been 9.

  As early as 1975 Mayor Beame, who was old enough to remember when the marquees along West Forty-second Street billed George M. Cohan’s latest musical rather than “live nude girls,” had been vowing to “reverse the blight in this vital center of our city.” But between the loopholes in city and state laws, the dwindling number of city policemen and prosecutors, and the need to avoid violating the civil liberties of his citizens, it had not been easy.

  Ramping up to his reelection drive at the start of ’77, Mayor Beame launched a fresh attack on smut peddlers, a citywide zoning plan that would ban “physical culture establishments” (bureaucratese for massage parlors, itself a euphemism for what were, in effect, brothels) and eliminate all other pornographic businesses in or near residential areas. But the proposal quickly became the victim of squabbling among the borough presidents, and by early spring it had been indefinitely shelved. Now the sex industry wasn’t just thriving, it was spreading east to the area around Grand Central Station.

  The city had lifted its licensing requirements for massage parlors in the late sixties, and they’d been proliferating ever since, often stepping in to fill the void left by midtown businesses that were either closing or leaving New York. By 1977 there were at least ninety-three of them in and around Times Square, Manhattan’s biggest erogenous zone, a neighborhood studded with nude fortune-tellers, stores selling dirty books, twenty-five-cent peep shows, pornographic movie theaters, topless bars, topless-and-bottomless bars, and prostitutes (the antiloitering law that had been enacted for the Democratic Convention in ’76 had long since been struck down).

  In 1977, Times Square saw the opening of Show World, its biggest sex institution yet. Situated on the corner of Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, the heart of Times Square, Show World was a twenty-two-thousand-square-foot multistory sex arcade complete with video booths, live sex acts, and private rooms where naked women sat behind thin sheets of Plexiglas. Most sex emporiums were dark, mysterious. Show World, which announced its presence with a blinking neon sign, was bright, garish. Some four thousand people passed through its doors each day.

  After his antipornography zoning plan had been tabled, Mayor Beame decided to try a more confrontational approach. During his antiracketeering crusade in 1934, Mayor La Guardia had taken to the streets to personally smash illegal slot machines. On an afternoon in late March, Mayor Beame led a pack of cops and newsmen on a series of pornography raids beginning with Jax 3-Ring Circus, a strip club on Fifty-third Street east of Lexington Avenue.

  It did not go well. The modest mayor waited outside, while the policemen and reporters marched inside to find three nude women gyrating under spotlights. Moments later he stood blushing under the marquee amid the jostle of news photographers, half-clothed dancers, and fleeing patrons. Beame and one of his aides taped a “peremptory vacate order” sign on the club’s window, and the thumping music and nude dancing promptly ceased. Within a few hours, however, a judge for the State Supreme Court ordered the Jax reopened.

  And so New York’s sex industry continued to boom. In the fall, a potbellied ex-McDonald’s manager–cum–orgy entrepreneur named Larry Levenson opened Plato’s Retreat in the basement of the old Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side. The Bronx-born Levenson, who was himself divorced, had been initiated into the world of swinging singles about a year earlier by a woman he’d picked up at a cocktail lounge in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. From there it was a short trip to hosting private orgies; then, at the suggestion of a potential investor, a business opportunity in the form of New York’s first nightclub with a mattress area.

  For a place that celebrated sexual freedom, Plato’s had a lot of rules. A man couldn’t enter without a female date—the cover charge was twenty-five dollars per couple, plus an extra five dollars for a temporary membership—and a lifeguard supervised the orgies from a chair overlooking the mattress area. Drugs were not permitted, though Plato’s gift shop sold small felt pouches that were suspiciously well suited for concealing Quaaludes. If you were wearing a towel around your waist, you were dressed modestly. Maximum occupancy was six hundred, and there was almost always a line of people waiting to get in. What was most remarkable about the crowd at Plato’s was how unremarkable it was. “Those of us who used to take comfort in the belief that sexual excesses were historically the vices of the bored and jaded upper classes must now acknowledge that a sizeable portion of the middle classes are now indulging quite openly,” wrote The Washington Post’s Judy Bachrach in an article about the club in early 1978.

  In fact, New York’s middle class was absorbing its appreciation for sexual excess not from Park Avenue but from the West Village.
Sandwiched between the arrival of AIDS on New York’s shores during the 1976 bicentennial celebrations and the first reported cases of the virus in 1978, 1977 was the last great year of unprotected, nonreproductive sex in the city.

  By the summer of ’77 the surge of political energy unleashed by the 1969 Stonewall riots had more or less run its course. For every gay New Yorker marching for equal rights, umpteen more were finding their way into gay bars, bathhouses, and discotheques, not to mention the city’s most famous gay cruising zone, the abandoned West Side piers. The sixties were over. As Arthur Bell, New York’s first openly gay columnist, put it in The Village Voice in early 1977, “The movement made it possible to ‘be gay,’” while the emerging gay sex scene “made it possible to be gay with impunity, to drop your inhibitions along with your pants.”

  This new defiance was reflected in gay fashion too. Femme chic had given way to macho chic. Platform shoes, tight-fitting Lurex, and European couture were out; bomber jackets, lumberjack shirts, and work boots were in. “It is getting exceedingly difficult to tell a homosexual from a longshoreman,” reported Christopher Street, a short-lived gay literary magazine, in late 1976.

  Clandestine gay bathhouses had been part of the city’s shadow landscape for decades. (A 1933 tabloid reported on the phenomenon beneath a headline that blared, PASHY STEAM ROOMS PANDER TO PANSIES.) Police raids were common, particularly in the McCarthy-fueled late fifties and early sixties. But ever since Stonewall, New York’s gay bathhouses had been coming out of their collective closet. The 1977 gay guides listed them all over the city: the Upper East Side, Harlem, Wall Street.

  Gay bars were also multiplying; a growing number of them—the Anvil, the Mineshaft, the Stud, the Toilet—had dark rooms in the back for fornication. For several years, these so-called backrooms had been operating out of public view, but in early 1977 Arthur Bell introduced them to straight New York in a graphic dispatch from this seedy subterranean world, describing the “dimly lit or pitch-black chambers where whips crack and urine and Schlitz are often served in the same container … TV dinners for young men in a hurry.”

  Not everyone in the gay community approved, either of Bell’s decision to go public with the backrooms or of the culture of the backrooms themselves. “Do you want to be forced back into the closet by a society which is growing sick of the revolting image of homosexuals which is being forced down its throats by those who are willing to sell us down the river in the media?” Michael Giammetta, publisher of Michael’s Thing, a weekly magazine covering New York’s gay culture and social scene, asked in late March. A few weeks later a sympathetic reader wrote in to the magazine to echo its concerns and bemoan the fact that the backrooms had eliminated all conversational foreplay: “the lack of verbal communication leaves one as lonely as before.”

  The new permissiveness of the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS era produced a peculiar nostalgia for the more illicit sex of a disappearing era. When a new bathhouse called the Broadway Arms opened in the summer of 1977, it featured “the latest in backroom concepts,” the IRTearoom. Modeled after the bathrooms on subway platforms, formerly favorite gay trysting spots, the IRTearoom boasted stalls lined with tiles coated with graffiti and urine stains. The screeching sound of subway cars was piped into the room to enhance verisimilitude. Another savvy bathhouse owner outfitted his establishment with an eighteen-wheeler to simulate the once-popular pastime of sneaking into the trucks parked in front of the meatpacking district’s commercial warehouses for furtive late-night sex.

  During the summer months much of the anonymous sexual activity in New York’s gay community took place outside, and no place was more popular for al fresco sex than the Lower West Side’s derelict, semienclosed piers. New York’s gay waterfront had a long history, one dating back to at least the 1930s, when queer locals trolled for transient seamen in boardinghouses and saloons near the Hudson River. The city’s shipping trade eventually dried up, but a gay subculture clung stubbornly to the piers.

  By 1977 the stretch of piers from Christopher to Fourteenth Street—“the Casbah,” as gay guidebooks had labeled them—thronged with gay life. They were a hot spot for nude sunbathers; a campground for a racially diverse group of gay teens who had either run away from home or been kicked out of the house; and, most famously, a bustling gay cruising spot. Many things contributed to the piers’ erotic appeal: the slapping of the Hudson; the smell of commingling sweat and brine; the sense of discovery that accompanied exploring an abandoned site; the sense of danger that accompanied having sex on aging wood planks over a polluted river.

  This “moist and rotting nighttown,” in the evocative words of the Voice’s Richard Goldstein, was a proud product of municipal neglect. The insolvent city had written off its waterfront. Even in decay, New York continued to bloom, if in ways unforeseen.

  18.

  The thing I like best about Bella is that she puts on fresh makeup and tries to have her hair done before a demonstration.

  A NEIGHBOR OF BELLA ABZUG’S, QUOTED BY VOGUE MAGAZINE

  THEowner of the empty Buick showroom on Fifty-fifth Street and Broadway that served as the headquarters for the Abzug mayoral campaign didn’t want his new tenant hanging posters in the windows, so her staff painted B-E-L-L-A in huge orange letters on the plate glass instead. Part of the showroom was given over to the Bella Boutique, where a big-breasted woman in a tight T-shirt and sailor’s cap sold Bella knickknacks, including a button of Gracie Mansion with an outsize hat hanging off the side. There was a gay porn theater with a twenty-four-hour pickup scene across the street. Some mornings Jackie Mason, who lived in the neighborhood, would stop by and volunteer: “What can I do for Bella?”

  Not that Bella herself was ever there. The only candidate without a day job, she was out crisscrossing the boroughs, a bullhorn affixed to her mouth, one of her big hats flapping on top of her head. Abzug’s day started early, even if that meant powdering her nose in the back of her campaign car, a yellow Chevrolet Impala convertible. She was a full-contact campaigner, a polka-dotted beach ball bouncing from one outstretched hand to the next. “How arya? I’m Bella Abzug. I think I’m gonna be your next mayor. So let’s get to know each other,” she’d say. “Give ’em hell, Bella,” or, “You’ve got my vote,” they’d say back. “Bella was always fabulous on the streets,” recalls her press secretary, Harold Holzer, who had first met Abzug while covering her 1970 congressional race for a small Manhattan weekly.

  Abzug even looked different when she was campaigning. Her scowl turned into a smile; her round face grew soft and pink. “Campaigning does the same thing for her that pregnancy does for some women,” Jack Newfield once observed. When Abzug and her aides returned to their Fifty-fifth Street offices, usually after midnight, they’d head around the corner to the Stage Deli. The candidate would have the corned beef on rye, even though she was, notionally, on a strict sixteen-hundred-calorie-a-day diet designed personally by her friend Shirley MacLaine. (US magazine was already planning a feature on Abzug’s weight loss regimen.) Back home after 1 a.m., she might call an old friend or two from the movement. When they complained about her waking up their kids, Abzug would assume an indignant tone: “What? Aren’t you a liberated woman?”

  Abzug’s radical, protofeminist past was never far behind her. She was born Bella Savitzky in 1920, the year women got the vote, and grew up in a South Bronx railroad flat. She struck her first blow for feminism at age thirteen, when her father died and she flouted the rules of her family’s Orthodox synagogue by reciting the Kaddish—the Jewish prayer of mourning reserved for sons, not daughters—before school every morning. She had learned to stump by weaving in and out of crowded subway cars as a teenager, raising money for the creation of a Jewish state. “I shook my can for the JNF [Jewish National Fund],” she would later say.

  The Depression stirred left-wing passions in Abzug’s South Bronx neighborhood, an enclave of first-generation immigrant idealists, many of whom had already lived through the depths of privat
ion in the Jewish ghettos of Europe. By the time she was elected president of the student council at Hunter College in 1942, the New York Post was already referring to her as a “known campus pink.” Before entering politics, she worked as an attorney, defending alleged Communists—McCarthy called her one of the most subversive lawyers in the country—and a thirty-six-year-old black man who had been convicted of raping a white woman in Laurel, Mississippi, on whose behalf Abzug appeared in court eight months pregnant.

  Abzug became an early champion of gay rights during her 1970 congressional race, after her campaign manager, Doug Ireland, encouraged her to stump in the Continental Baths, the bathhouse/ cabaret/disco in the basement of the old Ansonia Hotel. Abzug headed gamely up to the baths with no idea what she was in for and promptly called Ireland from a pay phone, screaming: “What the hell have you gotten me into? There are hundreds of guys up here wearing nothing but towels held together by Bella buttons!” Ireland talked her down, and Abzug addressed the half-naked crowd in a navy blue dress with white polka dots and a Calamity Jane hat. “I’m sorry that I’m not quite dressed for the occasion,” she began. She was a huge hit.

  In June 1977, after the citizens of Dade County, Florida, had voted overwhelmingly to repeal a local law banning discrimination based on sexual preference, New York’s gay community sought solace from Abzug. The referendum was the work of Anita Bryant and her grassroots group Save Our Children. Campaigning on its behalf, the beauty pageant queen–cum–homophobic ideologue had worn her familiar winning smile, only now, instead of extolling the virtues of Florida orange juice, she inveighed against the “human garbage” who practiced “a lifestyle that is an abomination against the laws of God and man.”