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By Root 660 0

had been foredoomed. Richie Basciano did not aspire to be alternative anything; neither, for that matter, did Times Square. And this particular rear entry to Times Square, here on Eighth Avenue, was not about making weird stuff broadly acceptable; it was about making dirty stuff broadly acceptable. Aaron Beall had been a false start; Marc Barbanell was the right man to negotiate the treacherous passage to respectability— from Show World to Le Club. Someday, many years from now, with the old Times Square only a picturesque memory, Richie Basciano’s grandchildren might come to think of him just as Aaron did: as the Florenz Ziegfeld of Eighth Avenue. And who, after all, remembered Ziegfeld’s invisible fish?

15.

DEFINING DEVIANCY UP

IN SEPTEMBER 1993, Rudy Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor then taking his second run at the mayoralty of New York, gave a speech in which he said that residents of the city had come to feel consumed by “a sense of dread”—about the ubiquity of the homeless and the mentally ill, about garbage-strewn streets, about crime both petty and grave. And he vowed to act in the face of these numberless incivilities. He would, he promised, not only crack down on serious crime but imprison panhandlers and “squeegee operators” who try to extort or intimidate passersby into giving them money. David Dinkins, the incumbent mayor, snorted that “killers and rapists are a city’s real public enemies—not squeegee pests and homeless mothers.” (Giuliani had not proposed incarcerating homeless mothers.) Elite opinion took Dinkins’s side, but ordinary New Yorkers—middle-class whites, of course, but many minority voters as well—plainly warmed to Giuliani’s message. The challenger narrowly won the election, and then was reelected in a landslide four years later.

Giuliani was speaking out of intense personal conviction, but he was also drawing on a growing body of opinion about the consequences of urban disorder. A few months earlier, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a U.S. senator from New York and a distinguished social theorist, had said that a city in the throes of social disintegration had accepted a defeatist strategy of “defining deviancy down.” Moynihan described a place in which the forces of social control seemed to have surrendered to the forces of disorder. Giuliani cited this resonant expression in his speech, and mentioned instances of it that few could deny. He also drew on the “broken windows” theory, advanced by the criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, who had argued that “serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked. The unchecked pan-handler is, in effect, the first broken window.” Giuliani vowed to reverse the process by arresting the window breakers.

As mayor, he did just that. Crime had begun to drop after Dinkins obtained the funds to increase the police force to unprecedented levels. But under Giuliani and his first police commissioner, William Bratton, it dropped much further, to levels not seen in thirty to forty years. What was more, Giuliani found ways of characterizing infuriating forms of disorderly behavior, such as soaping up the windshield of helpless motorists, as criminal behavior, and he enforced laws against low-level crimes that had previously been ignored, like public drinking. He moved decisively against pornography. And in those parts of the city where offensive behavior and “quality-of-life” incidents were as pervasive a problem as serious crime—in places like Times Square—the new policy produced immediate effects.

Gretchen Dykstra, executive director of the Times Square BID, says that the BID had tried and failed to wipe out the three-card monte games that flourished all over the area, blocking the sidewalks and preying on tourists unwise enough to trust their luck. But Chief Bratton ordered police officers to arrest violators, and by 1996, the scam had virtually disappeared from the streets. Police officers had almost stopped making arrests for street-level drug sales after a series of corruption scandals; Giuliani and Bratton