The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [136]
There blossomed a multiplicity of organizations dedicated to a specific goal, a specific group, a specific neighborhood. Democratic reform clubs sprang up throughout the city, weakening the ability of the dominant Democratic party to discipline disparate voices. City Hall’s power to command was weakened by mushrooming state and federal aid—up from 21 percent of the city’s budget in 1961 to 42 percent in 1977, with the federal share jumping from 4.5 to 20.3 percent. Public authorities—the Port Authority, Triboro Bridge and Tunnel Authority, Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Independent Board of Education, and Health and Hospitals Corporation—assumed functions formerly controlled by City Hall. Municipal unions became partners in the city’s governance. Mayors were left with less control of their budgets and more demands for a piece of it. More poor people required more services. Black power demands were followed by community and then ethnic group demands from poor Hispanics, Jews, and Italo-Americans. There surfaced community action centers, police precinct councils, neighborhood health centers, ethnic and racial groups, community planning boards, community task forces, social clubs, block associations.
While these separate voices grew, simultaneously the family, the church, the party, the government were losing their venerated status. The oversized city became a vast sea of hostile elements. The cop on the beat was now often a stranger, no longer living in the neighborhood. The white teacher and the black or Hispanic child couldn’t communicate. High-rises plowed through once-stable neighborhoods. Residents in the four boroughs felt Manhattan was favored by City Hall. Blacks shrieked racism; Jews, anti-Semitism. Ugly racial differences replaced milder class conflicts. Parents admonished their kids not to go out at night, not to talk to strangers.
The city atomized, and became more depersonalized. The large supermarket replaced the corner grocer and butcher. Government competed with the family as provider. But it wasn’t as if you could talk to the government. No more the party leader with the welcoming turkey or bag of coal for the new family on the block. There were too many officials, too many districts, too many names to remember. Government was a big, impersonal bureaucracy. Lots of forms and surly clerks. Strangers. It wasn’t as if government’s money was your money. You got what you could. That’s what everybody was doing. Weren’t those people on welfare doing it? Those rich people in rent-controlled housing? Those landlords with the special tax breaks? Those municipal workers and Mitchell-Lama residents and political big shots?
Size contributed to remoteness, as did television. Television brought the world into our living rooms, made the foreign familiar. Too familiar. Television was the impersonal city of the air. It helped desensitize us. Murder means less after you’ve watched a President’s head get blown off. Vietnam became a nightly war movie. Bull Connors’ vicious dogs snapping at civil rights workers were followed by regular clubbings, hosings, church bombings, shotgun murders. After a while, Vietnam and civil rights became a bore. Like last year’s I Love Lucy show. Television was supposed to entertain. It allowed people who already feared unsafe streets to retreat to their living rooms. They did not to have to go out and meet people. They no longer sat on stoops and, in effect, policed the streets.
Television also changed politics. It permitted candidates and elected officials to speak directly to the