The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [5]
Some of the material in this book—some pages here, a paragraph or sentence there—is borrowed from earlier work. Chapter 2 expands on a New York magazine cover story I wrote in October 1975 (“Who’s to Blame for the Fix We’re In”). Chapter 3 uses several pages from a December 1975 New York cover story (“Should These People Go to Jail?”). Chapter 5 relies on an August 1977 piece in The New Yorker (“More for Less”). With the exception of stray paragraphs borrowed from my work in the Village Voice (1975–76), the Sunday New York Times, an essay in The New York Review of Books or weekly columns in the New York Daily News (1977–78), roughly 85 or 90 percent of this book is new. In another sense, it is all new. Forced to wrestle with an entire book, to step back and read and think more deeply, I made connections I had not before made. I could not, in one sentence, tell Stanley Siegel what this book is about.
I also learned—and this is the third caution—that I should not attempt to present an agenda of “solutions.” Like most journalists, my business is stating problems, not solving them. Besides, in the process of delineating a problem one sees that the solution is often self-evident. It takes little imagination to proclaim that the antidote to weak leaders is strong leaders. Clearly, it costs too much to do business in New York, and if the city hopes to compete, it will have to somehow reduce taxes and energy costs. A local economic development agenda, including Washington and Albany’s role, is a subject I grappled with once in New York (“An Agenda to Save Our City: 44 Proposals That Could Turn This Town Around,” March 1976). Radical reform of the manner in which the city delivers services, including management, civil service and collective bargaining reforms, I tried to address in The New Yorker (“More for Less,” August 1977). In truth, while preparing this book I originally intended to include a solutions chapter. I came to fear, however, that it would be misleading. After talking to and reading “the experts,” I discovered none had a magic potion, a still-secret plan to restore New York. Increasingly, I became convinced that the sum of the “solutions” would not equal the sum of the problems.
Perhaps Lewis Mumford captured the ambivalence I feel about New York when he said, “I am an optimist about possibilities and a pessimist about probabilities.” I am too angry to be cynical, yet too skeptical to be evangelical. So I’ve just tried to tell the truth as I see it about a very big story.
Chapter One
The Rotting Apple
PRINCE PROSPERO was an indefatigable, some might say an impervious man. The plague of the “Red Death” had entered the homes of half his minions, causing rapid bleeding and sudden death. But Prince Prospero remained undaunted. As told by Edgar Allan Poe in The Masque of the Red Death, the Prince blithely summoned a thousand of his heartiest knights and dames and retreated to a magnificent castle, where they would defy the contagion.
A lofty wall stood between them and the populace, its gates made of iron and, as an extra precaution, sealed with sturdy bolts. There was no need to step outside the palace:
it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”
Gaiety prevailed. For six months, they partied and danced to the music of a full orchestra, waltzed freely through the seven brightly colored chambers, paused to listen to the chimes from the giant ebony clock, ignored the bright sun which was tamed by thick, beautiful stained-glass Gothic windows. Prince Prospero was