Big Apple of discord - failure of enlightened reform to solve New York City's social problems - Rebuilding America: A Citizens' Guide

National Review, May 28, 1990 by Richard Brookhiser

GRAND Central Terminal, at the navel of midtown Manhattan, is a pompous building, in the literal sense of the word-grandiose, majestic, full of pomp. What else could you call a structure that presents to the tourist or commuter, as the first thing he sees above the main entrance, a fifty-foot-tall sculpture of Roman deities: Mercury, Hercules, and Minerva-"a monument to the glory of commerce," in the words of Whitney Warren, the architect, "supported by moral and mental energy"?

The second thing the tourist or commuter sees, once he is inside, is bums.

The bums-also known, in polite (and politically charged) discourse, as the homeless"-for years made the waiting-room benches their special encampment. It was impossible for ticket-holders who did not want to fraternize with them to wait there. MetroNorth, the commuter railroad that manages the terminal, waged a war of nerves on the homeless throughout the Eighties: removing benches and lockers, forbidding shaving in the men's rooms, closing the doors at 1:30 A.M. But the homeless had allies. Every night, a feeding van from the Coalition for the Homeless would pull up to the terminal to distribute sandwiches, milk, and fruit. City buses would pull up too, to take anyone who wanted to go to a city-run shelter, but as these were thought by the homeless (correctly) to be focal points of drug use and crime, there were few takers, and the shelter buses no longer stop there. There is a fair amount of talk about homelessness in New York City, though less as New Yorkers have become inured to it. There isn't much debate over it, since almost everyone chews and rechews the same supposed causes-the de-institutionalizing of mental patients, or "Reagan cuts" in government spending. But one cause that is rarely mentioned is inescapably obvious to anyone who takes the subway to the Bronx Zoo. When the trains come out of their tunnels in the South Bronx, and make the rest of the trip north on elevated tracks, anyone can see that New York City has a shortage of homes. Vast tracts of the South Bronx look like an artillery range or a combat zone. Entire blocks are flat as Arabia Deserta. Here and there stand single trees, or an incongruous slab of a row house. Many of the buildings that still stand have tinned or cinder-blocked windows, like blind eyes. Between 1972 and 1982, three hundred thousand apartments -nearly 2 per cent of the housing stock-were abandoned.

THESE ARE the neighborhoods one doesn't visit because there is no neighborhood there. Other neighborhoods are avoided because one would be killed. (In 1951, there were 244 murders, 904 rapes, and 7,004 robberies in New York City; in 1986, when the population had declined from 8.5 to 7.3 million, the figures were 1,896, 3,912, and 86,578.) The great inflammatory agent of crime in New York has been the drug trade. Addicts rob and steal to support their habits; drug sellers kill each other and policemen in pursuit of market share, and occasionally passersby as well. (Gang slang for those who accidentally stop bullets meant for someone else is "mushrooms.") The crack crime wave touches other parts of town, too. Alexander's department stores lost $18 million to shoplifters during the year ending August 1989, despite spending $6 million on security. "Crack has caused an increase in employee theft," the vice president of security told the local weekly 7 Days. "Some of the addicts can function enough to work here.

Then they form conspiratorial rings with addicted employees of other stores." Shakespeare & Co., a prestige bookstore on the Upper West Side, loses 10 per cent of its inventory to thievery. Shoplifters have actually been caught with lists of best-selling titles that they intended to steal.

WHENEVER the present is grim, men place their hopes in education. But not too many New Yorkers place their hopes there. The New York City school system is notoriously heavy on administrators and light on achievement; 5,200 people work at the school system's central office at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn. (The city's parochial-school system, with one-quarter the number of pupils, makes do with 24 employees at its headquarters.) Joseph A. Fernandez, the new Schools Chancellor, has won a reputation for Gorbachev-like political finesse in dealing with this mess. His achievement? To get the Council of Supervisors and Administrators (the principals' union) to cede him the power to shift incompetent principals. Not to fire them, simply to move them to other schools. Since 1974, New York City principals had had "lifetime tenure to a building," a privilege they won from Governor Hugh Carey in return for political support.

Mr. Fernandez is not the only man to achieve iconic status for doing the obvious. Frank Mickens, principal of Boys and Girls High School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, recently announced that students could not come to class with gold caps on their teeth. These are not dental work but jewelry, often emblazoned with the wearer's initials, costing $40 to $100. "You can't go to Wall Street with gold teeth," Mickens told an auditorium-ful of freshmen. You can be a drug dealer, you can be a prostitute, you can be a pimp. I'm not playing," the principal added, when his remarks were greeted by what the New York Times characterized as "loud cries of derision." Mickens's sensible decree was deemed newsworthy by all the papers.