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By Root 1022 0

of Bay Ridge, the bucolic pleasure of standing in Prospect Park, in the middle of a city, and seeing no tall buildings, nothing but grass and trees and lakes. Little Italy is alive and well in the Belmont section of the Bronx; Irish-Americans compete in old-country sports over in Gaelic Park in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx; the affluent still consider themselves lucky to land a vacant estate overlooking the Hudson in Riverdale, a stone’s throw from the South Bronx. Even Coney Island, which Pat and Nettie Auletta still call home, has not surrendered. There are people there, as in the South Bronx, who we will one day read about and admire. There are poor people, middle-income people, whites, blacks, Hispanics, trying to salvage their communities, leading quiet, noble, unpublicized lives.

For them, as for me and my family, Brooklyn is like a small town in a big city. I remember how we shared the same stoops, the same food and Coke bottles, how we asked permission to spend the night at a neighbor’s house. If I didn’t hear my mother, a friend would run over and tell me that she had her head out the window and yelling, “Kenny, supper is ready.” I think about that a lot now, living as I do in a twenty-story mausoleum on Manhattan’s Central Park West. It’s pretty, but there are no stoops and, maybe, I know the names of five neighbors.

Sadly, the hub if not the heart of New York has become Manhattan. The boroughs are no longer as unique as they once were. Other cities—like Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island—enjoy diverse cultures, neighborhoods, working class and poor living side by side, brownstone revivals, Horatio Alger success stories. Increasingly, what is unique about New York is associated with Manhattan. Only Manhattan is gaining jobs. Only Manhattan is the center of commerce, communications, ideas. Only Manhattan is what tourists usually think of when they think of New York. Only Manhattan is what E. B. White thought of when he penned his famous essay “Here Is New York.” These are some of the reasons I find myself depressed about the city I live in and love. Blight and decay have not suspended their onslaught. The “renaissance of New York” which Mayor Koch ludicrously talks about—“I feel it as I walk around,” he told me—is confined to a relatively few blocks in mid-Manhattan. If you share such cheer, this may be an uncomfortable book. Perhaps my pessimism is excessive. I understand that a great city lives on hope, as well as facts. Our leaders, unlike our journalists, cannot just shout, “Fire! Fire!” Perhaps the isolation of writing a book, of laboring through lifeless data and budgets, of staring at a typewriter, of challenging conventional wisdom, induces undue hostility on the part of the writer. Perhaps I am reading the evidence too literally—a few years ago, no study or trend line predicted today’s resurgence of Manhattan real-estate values.

Beware, dear reader, the writer’s biases. In addition to an underlying pessimism, I plead guilty to believing:

The most dangerous people in New York are not the Cassandras but the Candides. To solve problems you have to know you have them. That means facing the truth.

No one devil theory can explain what has happened to New York. Neither John Lindsay nor Abe Beame, alone, brought us to our collective knees. Nor, by themselves, did the banks, the federal government or historical inevitability.

Local decisions, made by New Yorkers, are more to blame for the city’s crisis than most of us like to admit.

Individuals should be held responsible for their acts.

If there are solutions, they will have to emanate primarily from within New York.

Several other disclosures are called for. In writing this book I confronted an intellectual conundrum. Briefly, I oppose bankruptcy. Yet to avoid it, I recognize, requires steps which may be counterproductive and even wrong. Financial institutions need make loans which a prudent investor probably would not make, risking a violation of their fiduciary responsibility. The state of New York need divert funds from desirable tax