Can't Stop Won't Stop (3 page)

It began with a master plan designed in 1929 by the New York Regional Plan Association. The business interests behind the master plan wanted to transform Manhattan into a center of wealth, connected directly to the suburbs through an encircling network of highways carved through the heart of neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. Buoyed by a post–World War II surge of government investment, Moses rose to unparalleled power. He saw his immortality fixed in the roads; they were monuments to a brutal kind of efficiency. The Cross-Bronx Expressway would allow people to traverse the Bronx from the suburbs of New Jersey through upper Manhattan to the suburbs of Queens in fifteen minutes.

In engineering terms, it was the most difficult road ever built. Caro wrote, “The path of the great road lay across 113 streets, avenues, and boulevards; sewers and water and utility mains numbering in the hundreds; one subway and three railroads; five elevated rapid transit lines, and seven other expressways or parkways, some of which were being built by Moses simultaneously.”
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More important, 60,000 Bronx residents were caught in the crosshairs of the Expressway. Moses would bulldoze right over them. “There are more people in the way—that's all”, he would say, as if lives were just another mathematical problem to be solved. “There's very little real hardship in the thing.”

In Manhattan's ghettos, using “urban renewal” rights of clearance to condemn entire neighborhoods, he scared off thriving businesses and uprooted poor African-American, Puerto Rican, and Jewish families. Many had no choice but to come to the places like east Brooklyn and the South Bronx, where public housing was booming but jobs had already fled. Moses's point, one of his associates said, was that “if you cannot do something that is really substantial, it is not worth doing.”
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In his grand ambitions, high modernism met maximum density. Vast housing complexes were designed on the idyllic-sounding “tower-in-a-park” model, a concept that had been advanced by the modernist architect Le Corbusier as part of his vision of a “Radiant City.” Bronx River Houses and Millbrook Houses opened with 1,200 units each, Bronxdale Houses with over 1,500 units and Patterson Houses with over 1,700 units.

To Moses, the “tower-in-a-park” model was a blackboard equation that neatly solved thorny problems—open space in the urban grid, housing for the displaced poor—with a tidy cost-efficiency. It also happened to support the goals of “slum clearance,” business redevelopment, and the decimation of the tenants' union movement.
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So in the New York area's construction explosion of the 1950s and ‘60s, middle-class whites got sprawling, prefab, white picket-fence, whites-only Levittown suburbs, while working-class strugglers and strivers got nine or more monotonous slabs of housing rising out of isolating, desolate, soon-to-be crime-ridden “parks.”

By the end of the decade, half of the whites were gone from the South Bronx. They moved north to the wide-open spaces of Westchester County or the northeastern reaches of Bronx County. They followed Moses's Cross-Bronx and Bruckner Expressways to the promise of ownership in one of the 15,000 new apartments in Moses's Co-op City. They moved out to the cookie-cutter suburbs that sprouted along the highways in New Jersey and Queens and Long Island. Traversing the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Marshall Berman would write, “We fight back the tears and step on the gas.”
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White élite retrenchment found a violent counterpart in the browning streets. When African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latino families moved into formerly Jewish, Irish, and Italian neighborhoods, white youth gangs preyed on the new arrivals in schoolyard beatdowns and running street battles.
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The Black and brown youths formed gangs, first in self-defense, then sometimes for power, sometimes for kicks.

Political organizations like the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords competed with these neighborhood gangs for the hearts and minds of those youths for a time, but they soon invited constant, sometimes fatal pressure from the authorities. The optimism of the civil rights movement and the conviction of the Black and Brown Power movements gave way to a defocused rage and a long
exhaustion. Militants turned their guns on themselves. Curtis Mayfield, who had once sung “Keep on Pushing” for Martin Luther King Jr. and other freedom marchers, now warned of the “Pusherman.” Heroin dealers, junky thieves and contract arsonists filled the streets like vultures. One Bronx cop waxed philosophical: “We are creating here what the Romans created in Rome.”
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One official told author Jill Jonnes, “The idea always was to bypass Manhattan with the ugliness as much as possible. You had public housing and highways in the South Bronx, and then, on top of both of those, which were destabilizing enough, you added a deliberate program of slum clearance to displace the worst. You were then at the point that it all started to go downhill.”
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Here was the new math: the South Bronx had lost 600,000 manufacturing jobs; 40 percent of the sector disappeared. By the mid-seventies, average per capita income dropped to $2,430, just half of the New York City average and 40 percent of the nationwide average. The official youth unemployment rate hit 60 percent. Youth advocates said that in some neighborhoods the true number was closer to 80 percent.
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If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work.

When the sound of automobiles replaced the sound of jackhammers on the length of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the fuel was in place for the Bronx to burn.

Apartment buildings passed into the hands of slumlords, who soon figured out that they could make more money by refusing to provide heat and water to the tenants, withholding property taxes from the city, and finally destroying the buildings for insurance money. As one fireman described the cycle: “It starts with fires in the vacant apartments. Before you know it, it's the whole wing in the building.”

The downward spiral created its own economy. Slumlords hired rent-a-thugs to burn the buildings down for as little as fifty dollars a job, collecting up to $150,000 on insurance policies.
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Insurance companies profited from the arrangement by selling more policies. Even on vacant buildings, fire paid. Groups of organized thieves, some of them strung out on heroin, plundered the burned buildings for valuable copper pipes, fixtures, and hardware.

A fireman said, “Every fire in a vacant building had to be arson. No one lives there, and yet when we pull up, the fire's out thirty windows.” He continued, “People move out. The landlord starts to cut back on his maintenance. When he stops making the profit, more and more apartments become vacant . . . and, before you know it, you have a block with no one living there.”
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Journalists Joe Conason and Jack Newfield investigated arson patterns in New York City for two-and-a-half years and found that insurance agents made commissions based on the number and dollar amount of policies they sold. “There is simply no incentive for banks, insurance companies, or anyone else with money to invest in building or rebuilding dwellings at reasonable rents,” they wrote. “In housing, the final stage of capitalism is arson.”
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But some argued that the South Bronx presented indisputable proof that poor Blacks and Latinos were not interested in improving their lives. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York's Democratic senator, was heard to say, “People in the South Bronx don't want housing or they wouldn't burn it down.”
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In 1970, he had written an influential memo to President Richard Nixon, citing Rand Corporation data on fires in the South Bronx and bemoaning the rise of radicals like the Black Panthers. “The time may have come,” he famously wrote, “when the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect.' ”

Moynihan would later complain that he was misunderstood, that the memo should never have been leaked to the press, that he never meant to suggest services should be withdrawn from Black communities. But whatever his intention, President Nixon had pencilled “I agree!” on the memo and forwarded it to his Cabinet.
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When it became public, “benign neglect” became a rallying cry to justify reductions in social services to the inner cities, further fuel for the backlash against racial justice and social equality.

When “benign neglect” was inflated into pseudo-science, the results were literally explosive. Armed with unsound data and models from the Rand Corporation, city politicians applied a mathematics of destruction to justify the
removal
of no less than seven fire companies from the Bronx after 1968.
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During the mid-1970s budget crisis, thousands more firefighters and fire marshals were laid off. As the ecologists Deborah and Rodrick Wallace would put it, the result was a “contagion” of fires.

Less than a decade later, the South Bronx had lost 43,000 housing units, the
equivalent of four square blocks a week. Thousands of vacant lots and abandoned buildings littered the borough. Between 1973 and 1977, 30,000 fires were set in the South Bronx alone. In 1975, on one long hot day in June, forty fires were set in a three-hour period. These were not the fires of purifying rage that had ignited Watts or a half dozen other cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. These were the fires of abandonment.

Not just another summer. The bottom point of the loop between the Malcolm X's assassination and Public Enemy's call to arms. The year of the snake. A time of intrigue and uprisings, coups and riots.

After dark on July 13, as if an invisible hand was snuffing them, the streetlights blew out. The city had plunged into a blackout. Looters took to the streets in the ghettos of Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, Harlem and the Bronx. At Ace Pontiac on Jerome Avenue, fifty brand new cars were driven out of showroom. On the Grand Concourse, shopkeepers armed themselves with guns and rifles, but for the next thirty-six hours most would be helpless against the rushing tide of retribution and redistribution.

“That particular night, one thing I noticed,” a resident would later say, “they were not hurting each other. They weren't fighting with each other. They weren't killing each other.”
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“It was an opportunity for us to rid our community of all the people who were exploiting us,” graffiti writer James TOP told historian Ivor Miller. “The things that were done that day and a half were telling the government that you have a real problem with the people in the inner cities.”
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A thousand fires were set. Prisoners at the Bronx House of Detention blazed up three dormitories. Hundreds of stores were cleaned out.

Smoke and glass, police and thieves even got into sitcom character George Jefferson's clothes, perplexing the laugh track. In the made-for-TV version of the blackout, George left his Upper East Side deluxe apartment in the sky to protect his uninsured dry cleaning business in the South Bronx, the one where he had begun his road to the riches. “I ain't gon' clean it up,” he vowed. “I'm gon' close it up.” There, he confronted looters until he was mistaken for one and nearly arrested by Black cops. In the end, a Bronx resident convinced George to keep his
Black business open. It was the kind of tale of reversal that the hip-hop generation would grow up to love: what moves on up must be brought right back down, 360 degrees.

Under Mayor Abraham Beame, mighty New York City was heading toward massive financial ruin. In mourning the city's fallen glory, columnists had prattled on about the broken subway system and the prostitution in Times Square. But these were mere totems next to the magnificent destruction of the South Bronx. In the words of one Dr. Wise, a neighborhood clinic director, the South Bronx was nothing less than “a Necropolis—a city of death.”
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For his CBS report
The Fire Next Door,
reporter Bill Moyers led his crew across the East River to follow a Bronx fire company. They plunged into scenes of chaos: burning apartment buildings emptying families into the night streets; anxious firemen cutting away a roof to save an occupied building; neighborhood kids—many of them laughing, happy to be on television, no longer invisible—gathering on a rooftop to help firemen aim a hose at the threatening flames of the building next door.

Moyers also returned to capture the grim aftermath: an elderly Mrs. Sullivan waiting for a moving truck that would never come, her few remaining belongings ransacked by youths as she stood on the stoop being interviewed by Moyers; a young Black mother in a Panther-styled leather jacket and bright orange headwrap describing life with her two children in a burned building, her cold room's only decoration a magic-markered list of the Five Percenters' Supreme Mathematics written on the blank white wall (“7: God; 8: Build or Destroy; 9: Born; 0: Cipher”).

“Somehow our failures at home paralyze our will and we don't approach a disaster like the death of the Bronx with the same urgency and commitment we carry to problems abroad,” Moyers concluded as he stepped out of a building scorched black against brown brick, blue sky visible through the topmost windows. The shot pulled back to reveal a block of 100-foot ghost-shell structures casting long afternoon shadows against each other on the desolate street.

“So the Vice President travels to Europe and Japan, the Secretary of State to the Middle East and Russia, the UN ambassador to Africa,” Moyers solemnly intoned. “No one of comparable stature comes here.”
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Then, a week before Catfish Hunter's first pitch in the World Series, President
Carter emerged from a state motorcade at Charlotte Street in the heart of the South Bronx—three helicopters overhead, a passel of Secret Service agents at his side—to gaze silently upon four square blocks of dead city.