The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [13]
Not only are buildings being abandoned, but New York’s aging infrastructure is crumbling. The City Planning Commission issued an eighty-nine-page report in early 1978 warning that “renewing the city’s capital stock is second in priority only to resolving the fiscal crisis.” Alarmed, they found that many of the city’s 51 bridges “face collapse,” as did some of its 6,000 miles of sewers, 80 sewage pumping stations, 6,200 miles of paved streets, 6,700 subway cars, 4,550 buses 1,695 sanitation trucks, 32 million feet of water tunnel trunk, 20,000 trunk valves, 25,000 acres of parkland. Because of the fiscal crisis, the city could not borrow sufficient funds to finance its capital budget. Even if the federal government were to approve long-term loans to the city, the report noted, Mayor Beame’s four-year fiscal plan did not provide adequate funds for capital improvements. Ominously, it concluded, “Yet the city’s infrastructure—worth billions and billions of dollars—is an irreplaceable and essential asset. It is the platform on which the economy rests, the basis of all amenities, and the anchor for neighborhoods. Were it to break down, many thriving activities associated with New York City would come to a halt.”
Which represents a true picture of New York: booming Manhattan or Charlotte Street? Those neighborhoods coming alive or those that are dying? The burst of tourism or burgeoning abandonment? Is New York’s economic decline a snapshot, taken at one point in time and subject to reversal, or a continually moving picture? Like the proverbial glass of water which is either half full or half empty, the answer depends on feelings as well as facts. One can choose to emphasize the rise of Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens or the fall of Coney Island; one can point to the fact that New York has three times as many Fortune 500 companies as its nearest competitor or that its total has fallen from 140 to 90.
No one is immune to subjective judgments, not even Herb Bienstock. The regional head of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics makes his home in Bayside, Queens, and his living collecting, compiling and interpreting facts. The city has been his home for fifty-odd years, and not even the grim numbers spewing from his computers can blight the beauty he sees in New York. Several years ago, I visited the Bureau’s Times Square office to meet with Bienstock and three of his economists. We reviewed the city’s depressing facts—the lost jobs, shrinking population, rising taxes and living costs, racial polarization, abandoned housing. After two hours, the three economists and I felt almost suicidal.
Not Herb Bienstock. Slowly, he lifted himself from a deep chair and wandered over to the wide windows overlooking Times Square. Thirty-four stories below stretched a panorama of empty office buildings, abandoned hotels, porn theaters and massage parlors. “Do you really feel New York is deteriorating?” he asked of no one in particular. “It looks pretty good to me.”
Today, New York City is looking “pretty good” to a growing number of urban economists and civic boosters. “I’m definitely optimistic about this city’s long-term economic recovery,” Bienstock told me in early 1978. “The reason I’m optimistic about the mid- and late eighties is that the disasters that have visited us are turning around almost on their own. In the eighties, a lot of politicians are going to be taking credit for improved employment opportunities that