City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, 3-volume box set

6 Amid Decline and Revival

151 With the eyes of millions of viewers coast-to-coast on the screen watching the second game of the World Series, commentator Howard Cosell looked beyond the diamond to the view outside Yankee Stadium: “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced in his acerbic fashion, “The Bronx is burning!” A controversial Jewish sports commentator who saw himself as a transcendent social critic, Cosell prided himself on telling it “like it is.” So although he misidentified the source of the conflagration—he said it was an apartment building , but it was an abandoned school—Cosell, with a mien of extreme gravitas, pointed out to the nation that his native city was ablaze, a blighted, steeply declining metropolis under siege. Cosell did not pause to note the symbolism of the action on the field. The October 11, 1977, game pitted the Los Angeles Dodgers—that once-adored neighborhood-hugging franchise that had, in 1958, abandoned Brooklyn and contributed to a decline in the borough’s self-esteem—against the Yankees, long emblematic of the city’s power and dominance but presently rife with internal strife and controversy. For Abraham D. Beame, the city’s first Jewish mayor, New York City needed such negative publicity like a hole in the head. But Cosell’s pronouncement etched itself into national consciousness. Everyone now saw New York as a city of broken promises.1 Cosell’s stinging jab came just a few days after President Jimmy Carter had made a surprise visit to the South Bronx. Newspapers and television reported that “he viewed some of the country’s worst urban blight.” Carter delivered a powerful media blow to the city Beame led. Arriving by way of the southernmost part of the Grand Concourse, described as “a decaying remnant of C H A P T E R 6 Amid Decline and Revival 152 ■ j e w s i n g o t h a m a once fashionable boulevard,” he walked on Charlotte Street, near Crotona Park, “through two blocks of rubble that looked like the result of wartime bombing.” Less than two years earlier, a Daily News headline screamed, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” While President Gerald Ford took offense at this tabloid ’s characterization of his response to New York’s appeal to the federal government to “underwrite the city’s debts” to prevent municipal bankruptcy, Ford asserted strongly that the “people in New York have been the victims of mismanagement.”2 Beyond the injurious rhetoric lay unavoidable realities that a confluence of social, economic, and political crises had brought the city to the brink. Unlike earlier periods in New York history, in this century seemingly there was no escape. When Beame took office in January 1974, the explosive, explicit racial name-calling of the late 1960s had abated, but underlying tensions from longexisting problems of urban decline persisted. The compromising controller had won election after outlasting Herman Badillo, the first Latino to run for mayor, in a Democratic primary runoff and then defeated Republican John Marchi and Conservative Mario Biaggi in the general election.3 Under Beame’s watch, the “lag” ended on many interconnected fronts “between the time when destructive forces” began to work and “the time when the effects” became visible. The metropolis’s years as a light manufacturing center ended. Jews for generations found work and prospered in the city’s industries, but neither their children nor new immigrants managed to compete against cheap, nonunionized labor and tax incentives in Sunbelt states. New York’s garment trades, printing industries, and food processing migrated south, the first stop before leaving the country. Located near superhighways, these businesses had plenty of room to expand operations, and goods could be easily transported to, rather than from, old large-city markets. As the city’s revenue base declined due to out-migration of businesses, short-sighted increases in municipal corporate taxes on the firms that remained and the always annoying permit and inspections fees further exasperated manufacturers.4 A significant worldwide recession began in 1973, exacerbating matters. Many major commercial banks, concerned with their own liquidity, demanded that the municipality pay back loans that they had for years encouraged New York to assume. These lending institutions also pushed strongly for greater government responsibility, calling for diminutions in city services, Amid Decline and Revival ■ 153 freezes and reductions in city jobs, and the rolling back of longstanding municipal labor benefits. Attempting to respond, the...