On the one hand this illustrates how a familiar urban principle, that of patronage (the more garbage there is to be collected, the more garbage collectors can be employed), can be reduced, in the bureaucratic wilderness that is any third-world city, to voodoo; on the other it reflects this particular city’s underlying criminal ethic, its acceptance of graft and grift as the bedrock of every transaction. “Garbage costs are outrageous,” an executive of Supermarkets General, which owns Pathmark, recently told City Limits about why the chains preferred to locate in the suburbs. “Every time you need to hire a contractor, it’s a problem.” The problem, however, is one from which not only the contractor but everyone with whom the contractor does business — a chain of direct or indirect patronage extending deep into the fabric of the city — stands to derive one or another benefit, which was one reason the death of a young middle-class white woman in the East 68th Street apartment of the assistant commissioner in charge of boiler and elevator inspections flickered so feebly on the local attention span.
It was only within the transforming narrative of “contrasts” that both the essential criminality of the city and its related absence of civility could become points of pride, evidence of “energy”: if you could make it here you could make it anywhere, hello sucker, get smart. Those who did not get the deal, who bought retail, who did not know what it took to get their electrical work signed off, were dismissed as provincials, bridge-and-tunnels, out-of-towners who did not have what it took not to get taken. “Every tourist’s nightmare became a reality for a Maryland couple over the weekend when the husband was beaten and robbed on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower,” began a story in the New York Post during the summer of 1990. “Where do you think we’re from, Iowa?” the prosecutor who took Robert Chambers’s statement said on videotape by way of indicating that he doubted Chambers’s version of Jennifer Levin’s death. “They go after poor people like you from out of town, they prey on the tourists,” a clerk explained in the West 46th Street computer store where my husband and I had taken refuge to escape three muggers. My husband said that we lived in New York. “That’s why they didn’t get you,” the clerk said, effortlessly incorporating this change in the data. “That’s how you could move fast.”
The narrative comforts us, in other words, with the assurance that the world is knowable, even flat, and New York its center, its motor, its dangerous but vital “energy.” “Family in Fatal Mugging Loved New York” was the Times headline on a story following the September 1990 murder, in the Seventh Avenue IND station, of a twenty-two-year-old tourist from Utah. The young man, his parents, his brother, and his sister-in-law had attended the U.S. Open and were reportedly on their way to dinner at a Moroccan restaurant downtown. “New York, to them, was the greatest place in the world,” a family friend from Utah was quoted as having said. Since the narrative requires that the rest of the country provide a dramatic contrast to New York, the family’s hometown in Utah was characterized by the Times as a place where “life revolves around the orderly rhythms of Brigham Young University” and “there is only about one murder a year.” The town was in fact Provo, where Gary Gilmore shot the hotel manager, both in life and in The Executioner’s Song. “She loved New York, she just loved it,” a friend of the assaulted jogger told the Times after the attack. “I think she liked the fast pace, the competitiveness.”
New York, the Times concluded, “invigorated” the jogger, “matched her energy level.” At a time when the city lay virtually inert, when forty thousand jobs had been wiped out in the financial markets and former traders were selling shirts at Bergdorf Goodman for Men, when the rate of mortgage delinquencies had doubled, when fifty or sixty million square feet of office space remained unrented (sixty million square feet of unrented office space is the equivalent of fifteen darkened World Trade Towers) and even prime commercial blocks on Madison Avenue in the Seventies were boarded up, empty; at a time when the money had dropped out of all the markets and the Europeans who had lent the city their élan and their capital during the eighties had moved on, vanished to more cheerful venues, this notion of the city’s “energy” was sedative, as was the commandeering of “crime” as the city’s central problem.
3
The extent to which the October 1987 crash of the New York financial markets damaged the illusions of infinite recovery and growth on which the city had operated during the 1980s had been at first hard to apprehend. “Ours is a time of New York ascendant,” the New York City Commission of the Year 2000, created during the mayoralty of Edward Koch to reflect the best thinking of the city’s various business and institutional establishments, had declared in its 1987 report. “The city’s economy is stronger than it has been in decades, and is driven both by its own resilience and by the national economy; New York is more than ever the international capital of finance, and the gateway to the American economy.”
And then, its citizens had come gradually to understand, it was not. This perception that something was “wrong” in New York had been insidious, a slow-onset illness at first noticeable only in periods of temporary remission. Losses that might have seemed someone else’s problem (or even comeuppance) as the markets were in their initial 1987 free-fall, and that might have seemed more remote still as the markets regained the appearance of strength, had come imperceptibly but inexorably to alter the tone of daily life. By April of 1990, people who lived in and around New York were expressing, in interviews with the Times, considerable anguish and fear that they did so: “I feel very resentful that I’ve lost a lot of flexibility in my life,” one said. “I often wonder, Am I crazy for coming here?’” “People feel a sense of impending doom about what may happen to them,” a clinical psychologist said. People were “frustrated,” “feeling absolutely desolate,” “trapped,” “angry,” “terrified,” and “on the verge of panic.”
It was a panic that seemed in many ways specific to New York, and inexplicable outside it. Even later, when the troubles of New York had become a common theme, Americans from less depressed venues had difficulty comprehending the nature of those troubles, and tended to attribute them, as New Yorkers themselves had come to do, to “crime.” “Escape From New York” was the headline on the front page of the New York Post on September 10, 1990. “Rampaging Crime Wave Has 59 % of Residents Terrified. Most Would Get Out of the City, Says Time/CNN Poll.” This poll appeared in the edition of Time dated September 17, 1990, which carried the cover legend “The Rotting of the Big Apple.” “Reason: a surge of drugs and violent crime that government officials seem utterly unable to combat,” the story inside explained. Columnists referred, locally, to “this sewer of a city.” The Times ran a plaintive piece about the snatch of Elizabeth Rohatyn’s Hermès handbag outside Arcadia, a restaurant on East 62nd Street that had for a while seemed the very heart of the New York everyone now missed, the New York where getting and spending could take place without undue reference to having and not having, the duty-free New York; that this had occurred to the wife of Felix Rohatyn, who was widely perceived to have saved the city from its fiscal crisis in the midseventies, seemed to many a clarion irony.