The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [10]
It was the fires that finally got to Rose and Jesse Napoli. For forty-five years, Jesse’s father, Silvestro, owned their six-family house at 152 Harman Street. Before that, his aunt had owned the eighty-year-old building. Then, on September 22, 1977, an arsonist torched the abandoned building two doors away, igniting the adjoining houses and their own top floor. Across the street, six buildings were already burned; behind them, an entire block. In just three months, Harman Street lost fifty families to safer neighborhoods. And on a sunny October day, Harman Street lost the Napolis.
It used to be that Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville neighborhoods, alone, looked like sets for a World War II movie. But the plague has spread to Bushwick, as it is spreading to the neighboring community of Williamsburg. In the same month the Napolis departed, the Love Brothers, a not-so-loving youth gang, were terrorizing the 100 tenants of a six-story building on South Fourth Street. They smashed windows, stole furniture and tore out fixtures, peddling stoves for $35, steam radiators for $3. Their reign of terror lasted a week, at the end of which the building was vacant. The youth gangs—some employed by landlords seeking to collect insurance, some just out for kicks—no longer alarm police and are often ignored or overlooked; they have become a normal part of urban life.
South of Williamsburg, on the southern tip of Brooklyn, is Coney Island, where my parents still live. Once the amusement capital of the United States, featuring white sandy beaches, Steeplechase, Luna Park, Ravenhall and Feltman’s amusement areas, the 5¢ Nathan’s hot dog and a million tourists on hot summer weekends, Coney Island is the next Bushwick. Many of the wooden one- and two-family homes have been ravaged by fire; empty lots abound; youth gangs freely roam the streets, some openly flaunting shotguns. Luna Park burned down, and Feltman’s and Steeplechase are gone. A concrete parking lot blankets much of Ravenhall. Most stores along Mermaid Avenue, once the main shopping thoroughfare, are now burned out or abandoned. Nathan’s sells fewer hot dogs, and those they do sell cost 75¢. The parachute jump, which can be seen from Manhattan’s Empire State Building, has been closed for eight years and is scheduled to be torn down and sold as scrap. At one time, it dominated the skyline; today hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of public housing projects crowd the sky.
The changes in Harlem, the South Bronx, Bushwick, Williamsburg and Coney Island are mirrored in declining neighborhoods throughout the city—East New York, Borough Park, South Jamaica, Long Island City, Corona, Greenpoint, Fort Green, Washington Heights, Crown Heights. Of the city’s 340 health districts, almost one-half have less than one physician for every 1,000 residents—one-third the national average and in stark contrast to the average of 42 per 1,000 residents on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. A “successful city neighborhood,” Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, requires “eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street.” Neighborly eyes ensured safety, a feeling of security, of community. In growing numbers of city neighborhoods, people no longer sit on stoops, no longer venture out at night. Eyes are fixed on television sets and bolted doors. Neighborhoods exist in name only.
Like Prince Prospero’s minions, New York has been bleeding—jobs and people. Since 1969, 11 percent of its jobs—more than 600,000—have disappeared. Since 1947, the city has lost one-half its 1 million manufacturing jobs. Since 1952, it has lost 80 percent of its 50,000 longshoreman jobs. Of 161 job categories policed by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, 147 registered a loss of jobs between 1969 and 1976. Had the city’s economy expanded at the same rate as the nation’s between 1965 and 1974, a study by Alan Campbell and Roy Bahl of Syracuse University concluded, it would have gained 25 percent, or 1.03 million