City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [104]
I’d lived through both of the blackouts in New York. The first one, in 1965, went more or less peacefully by since it happened when it was getting cold, but the second one occurred on July 13 and 14, 1977, and led to two days of rioting and looting. Some 1,616 stores were looted, and at certain points the looters were looting the other looters. Altogether 3,776 people were arrested—the largest mass arrest in the city’s history—and 1,037 fires were reported.
New York was a mess by the late 1970s. The city had lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. It was from time to time incapable of paying teachers their salaries. Graffiti covered every square inch of the interiors of subway cars, which were awash with garbage. Passengers were subjected to the intolerably loud music coming out of boom boxes. Crime had risen faster in the sixties (and was continuing to rise in the seventies) than in any other American city since the 1930s. In 1975 Mayor Beame had furloughed thousands of city workers, including cops and garbagemen. When Beame asked President Ford for federal assistance to meet the payroll, Ford told New York to drop dead. New York had been called Fun City. Now it had become Fear City and Stink City. Garbage left on the streets would go weeks without being collected.
I remember I had a boyfriend at the time, Ken, who sold sappy greeting cards and was a determined masochist. He was from Kentucky and talked all the time—in such an irritating, constant motormouth way that it was easy to whip his butt from time to time out of sheer frustration. We were sitting in his apartment—him talking, me smoldering with boredom—when the 1977 blackout started. He thought it was a lark, a sort of “trend,” and he was always alert to trends. He lived in the Village on West Fourth Street around the corner from Pizzeria Uno, where within an hour or two the hundreds of frozen pizzas were quickly thawing and were being handed out to passersby completely free. Ken grabbed several and “we had a ball,” as he put it. “This is fabulous,” he said. He wanted me to get “into” it more, but there was a limit as to how much cheery excitement a sadist could exhibit to his slave. I was self-conscious about my role because it wasn’t my usual one. We sat on his fire escape. The earlier blackout had been reassuring because it had shown how good-natured and ultimately how disciplined New Yorkers were. The new blackout showed how racially divided we were, how much anger seethed just below the surface, how rapacious and every-man-for-himself we’d all become.
In 1978 I moved back downtown. Keith McDermott was living mostly on the West Coast, my nephew had decided to return to the Midwest and was enrolled in the University of Chicago—and I found the West Side depressing. I had a part-time beau, Norm Rathweg, who found me a studio apartment in the Colonnades on Lafayette Street, a series of scruffy Greek Revival buildings from the 1830s—the most elegant address of the period, filled with Astors, but by the late 1970s in a picturesque state of decay worthy of the French Quarter of New Orleans. My big studio apartment had twenty-foot ceilings, parquet floors, a small white-marble fireplace, and tall windows outfitted with wood shutters that folded back into the deep window frames. My windows looked down on a garden restaurant, and in the evening in summertime I could hear the friendly murmur of voices and the rattle of silverware on dishes. In the winter I usually had a fire on the grate, or a hibachi on which I grilled swordfish or lamb for guests. Norm put in