The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [87]
Carter’s impulsiveness was again matched by the city’s. As has been proven time and again, city officials will do anything for a federal buck, even if they believe it makes no sense. Take, for instance, the proposed $1.1 billion Westway project, which would replace the dilapidated West Side Highway along Manhattan’s waterfront with a modern highway and park land. In his campaign for mayor, Koch called the scheme “a disaster” and vowed, “It will never be built.” Yet, six months after he was inaugurated, Koch failed to alter Governor Carey’s support for the project and agreed to support the “disaster” rather than risk losing federal dollars. His Parks Commissioner, Gordon Davis, supported a $750,000 federal grant to build a new park and ball field in Brooklyn’s Canarsie section—until the local planning board said it didn’t need a new park and ball field. What they really needed, they said, was $250,000 to maintain the two parks and ball fields they already had. Commissioner Davis tried vainly to convince them they were “sacrificing” a federal gift. But the local board knew a “disaster” when they saw one coming.
Which, I fear, cannot be said for the city’s South Bronx plan. Privately, many city officials think the plan will fail.
“Why did you have to tell a reporter you wouldn’t have picked the South Bronx for a federal experiment?” Deputy Mayor Basil Patterson is said to have scolded Planning Chairman Wagner at a Koch cabinet meeting.
“Do you disagree?” Wagner asked. “No,” said Patterson. “But did you have to say it?”
Parts of the city’s plan “are a joke,” groused a city official. “What good does it do to build a beautiful new park when you need a machine gun to walk through it?” says Denis Alee, then the First Deputy Administrator of the Economic Development Agency. He was referring to the deeper economic and social problems of places like the South Bronx which are blithely ignored by new parks or buildings. A danger in rebuilding the South Bronx is that the same underclass will burn it down again.
We can’t deal with this problem until we talk about it. One of the few local politicians who does talk is Herman Badillo, born in Puerto Rico and once a representative of the South Bronx in the Congress. Today, Badillo is a deputy mayor of New York, and one of his responsibilities is coordinating the South Bronx plan. He speaks of youth gang members and the hard-core unemployed “who have no superego,” no sense of right or wrong. New business tax incentives, new housing, new parks—as called for in the federal/city South Bronx plan—don’t address this problem. Nor, necessarily, do conventional counseling techniques, more schools, more hope, more concern. It’s a tough problem they don’t have in Plains, Georgia, and we fear talking about in New York.
Unfortunately, Badillo’s concern does not seem to loom large in the South Bronx plan he shaped. Badillo prefers talking, quite impressively, about the consequences of continuing to neglect places like the South Bronx. “Planned shrinkage,” or “encouraging abandonment,” as he also calls it, “is a good theory for making New York a poor city. If we don’t build in places like the Bronx, the poor will move to middle-class areas and the middle class will leave. Soon there will be nothing but the South Bronx.… Parts of New York still look like they’ve been in a war. They represent indifference. We can’t allow them to stand.” The South Bronx is not a total wasteland. There are 750,000 real people living there, hundreds of community organizations—dedicated citizens struggling to salvage their neighborhood and lives.
But saying why something must be done is not the same as saying how it will be done. Sadly, resources are limited. There is no way to achieve a balanced