"No One Helped": Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy by Marcia M. Gallo (review)

The recent fifty-year anniversary of the murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City on 13 March 1964 was accompanied by a new round of popular and academic articles, books, and a documentary film, The Witness, focused on her brother's quest to understand her death. Marcia Gallo's "No One Helped" is a distinctive contribution to this body of work. Her study has three main aspects, highlighted in its subtitle: Kitty Genovese herself and why and how her life story disappeared into a story of her death; New York City in the early 1960s, with its cultural and political specificities, on the edge of the profound social shifts identified with the decade; and "the myth of urban apathy" that was spun from the story told of her death in that city. At the core of Gallo's book is the extraordinary resonance and persistence of that story. That the story of Genovese's death is a story is key. Gallo explains the ways in which the powerfully established narrative differs from what happened that night, as well as how it was established, principally by Abe Rosenthal, then the newly appointed city editor at the New York Times.

Genovese was not an ideal victim. She was a young white Italian-American woman, but, though briefly married, she was living with a female lover just a couple of doors down from where she died. She supported herself by managing a working-class bar, and she had just driven herself home alone at 3:00 a.m. Her murderer, Winston Moseley, was likewise not an ideal killer. As an African American male, he embodied the cliché of urban threat, but he was light-skinned, twice married, a father, and gainfully employed. He ultimately confessed to two other murders, other attacks on women, and burglaries in the preceding weeks, but little attention was called to these crimes because it would have raised questions about the police's failure to apprehend him.

In an essay for the Times and a short book (Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case), journalist Abe Rosenthal focused neither on Genovese nor on her murderer, ignoring both Moseley's prior victims and the actions of the police. Instead, Rosenthal's guilty parties in this story were a hypothetical set of thirty-eight of Genovese's neighbors in Kew Gardens, Queens, all of whom, indifferent, witnessed her murder and failed to intervene. Gallo explores details ignored in this story: the tendency of observers to interpret an altercation between a man and a woman on the street as a private affair; the person who interrupted the first attack by calling out; the others who claimed they did call the police; and the fact that it was common practice for police precincts to ignore calls from private citizens, especially about altercations between men and women. Only one person, not thirty-eight people, could have seen the second, fatal attack, which took place in the vestibule of a small apartment building. A friend ran to comfort Genovese as she lay dying and while they waited for an ambulance.

Gallo then focuses on the source of the received version of events, Abe Rosenthal, and on the gap between the vision of urban life he expounded and the actual life of New York City and the nation at that moment. Rosenthal diagnosed a sickness—an urban apathy. His story drew on a familiar trope of the threat of atomized urban life that had flourished since the dramatic expansion of cities in the mid-nineteenth century. At the same time, Gallo argues, the story Rosenthal produced was enmeshed in postwar anxiety about all of the citizens who failed to intervene on behalf of their neighbors in Nazi Germany. There was a rising tide of social engagement in New York City at this moment, Gallo explains. Bayard...