South Street: Photos by Barbara Mensch

1979, an artist/photographer walks into a bar at the fish market at 4am, and a big man walks up to her, with an icy stare, and says “get the fuck out.” The neighborhood was the Fulton fish market area, a men-only zone, and hostile. She did gain the trust of some locals, but others remained suspicious. After looking at the author’s photos, and reading her account of the area, I can see why.

    Barbara Mensch was one of three kinds of people who you’d see in the vicinity of South Street and the Fulton fish market. You had the Wall Street financiers, then the artists in the lofts, and finally the men who worked on the docks. For over 100 years the area was a seaport, and even after the seaports moved to New Jersey and Philadelphia, the fish market stayed. Towering glass office buildings hovered over the rotting piers, where men in bloody overalls loaded fish for the wholesalers. The industry was controlled by the mob, and the workers, on top of their backbreaking night shift work, had to deal with mob shakedowns. The place was dirty, smelly, and rough.

    Mensch has some photos that she (discreetly) took of the bar’s daytime customers, against the advice of the barkeep and some jewelry-wearing guys. In the grainy photos, a salty-looking old white man in a sailor’s peaked cap sits with two scrawny leather-clad black women, most likely prostitutes. According to her, the guy was English, possibly came as a sailor on one of the boats that used to dock here, and stayed on, living in an apartment in one of the filthy tenements of the area. I might add that South Street area was not a tourist attraction in the late 1970’s, but a filthy, rat-infested, dangerous place. It’s mentioned in the French Connection, where in the early 60’s you could find nasty dive bars on Pike Slip.

    The photos aren’t exceptional, they’re mostly the same pictures of rough, dirty white guys, few blacks worked on the docks. Unlike most photos that can’t give you much other than the image, Mensch’s photos give you a five-senses feel, so much that you can almost smell the fish! You also get a sense of how cold the men ached from the cold, and in the summer they must have been assaulted by the smell. Mensch writes that the dock workers weren’t happy about having to answer to the mob (on top of all their other problems), but at the same time they didn’t like government interference. They had a “where were you all those years” kind of attitude, and viewed the authorities as strangers who’d never been there for them. Almost all of the workers were Irish or Italian, and some of them lived on the Lower East Side, which at the time was also a hellhole.

    The place had its own laws, everything was based on trust (not as violent as you’d think) and the rules were simple; if you screwed up you never worked their again. It was a great place for ex-cons and illegal aliens, lots of Englishmen who came here as sailors. However, right after these photos were taken, the fish market was reduced. Thanks to the increase of high-priced real estate in the area, and the fact that the seaport was becoming a tourist spot, the city stepped in and regulated everything. Trucks had to be out of there by 10am so as not to bother the suit-wearing Wall Street guys. There’s a funny photo of a guy in an expensive suit and carrying a briefcase, walking briskly past guys in overalls unloading crates, and he looks like the sort of Italian American who in another decade would’ve worked at the docks. Another shows high-heeled yuppie chicks strutting past the men with crates. Good thing they didn’t need to use the bathrooms, because the walls were covered in nudie pics.

    There are other books about old New York, and I’ll name a few; The City That Became Safe, City of Disorder, Selling the Lower East Side. These books are scholarly, but they lack what this book has, and that is the primary source. Mensch not only includes photos, but also her words. She writes a firsthand account of her experience there, from someone who watched it all unfold up close

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan

    Lynne Sagalyn begins her story of the battle over the World Trade Center site with the battle of Mayor Guiliani versus American Express. The nation’s most respected credit card, also a mainstay of downtown Manhattan, was asking for a little too much; a huge NYPD security detail in exchange for staying. Rudy, in typical Rudy style, said no, and said it loudly. He wouldn’t give what he called “private contracts” that would tie the hands of the NYPD. Say what you like about him as the meanest mayor, but he was no bagman for the 1%. The problem was that even without the WTC tragedy, downtown Manhattan was already losing business.

   In the 1960’s, when the Chase Manhattan Plaza was going up, firms were moving from the Wall Street area to midtown. The Twin Towers would have more office space than the city could possibly need, and in the decades afterward, half the complex was empty. It was built on the site of Radio Row, where the electronics repair shops were located, and few in the area were happy about losing their stores. Sagalyn’s book portrays the World Trade Center as something built for show, rather than for offices.

    In most of the book, the problem seems to be finance. Port Authority ended up with most of the cost, but how could a tiny police agency be expected to handle a construction project, let alone the management? There would be the cost of clearing the site, the design, and the construction, which would take years and millions of dollars. Then there were the politicians in Albany, most of whom didn’t trust Larry Siverstein, and weren’t convinced that Port Authority could steward the project.

    With regard to Mayor Rudy, he wasn’t in charge when the WTC went up. He didn’t have to deal with the massive crisis that the city was going through, and his problem was crime, not finance. In this book, the WTC is seen as a financial issue that either a disaster that crippled the city or an experimental medicine to cure the disease. Rudy, unlike earlier mayors, wasn’t swayed by huge business. He wasn’t going to give Amex a free security detail, any more than he would build the Yankees a new stadium. But his predecessors didn’t have a choice.

   Sagalyn doesn’t give a positive look on the World Trade Center. It was clearly a megaproject in an era when the city was bankrupt, and it was not a time to be borrowing money. Ironically, the architect who designed the place was the same guy that designed Pruitt-Igoe, another megaproject that never paid off. Maybe that shows us something about the effect of megaprojects on a city? You also have to wonder if the city would’ve been better off without the WTC. There was already a surplus of office space, so nobody needed those huge buildings. As for “revitalization,” there were other areas, like the South Street Seaport, that were ripe for improvement.

    Looking back on the WTC, I’m reminded of something Donald Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal. Back in the 1980’s, when he turned the Commodore Hotel into the New York Hyatt, he had to go through acres of red tape to get it started. The New York Central Railroad, which owned the hotel, owed millions in taxes, and the city, famously bankrupt, needed the tax money. But it wasn’t like Mayor Kotch jumped at the opportunity to pay off the debts and revamp the area; on the contrary the Mayor waffled on it. The same thing happened when he tried (and eventually begged) to fix the Wollman skating rink in Central Park. It was probably easier to get the permits to build the World Trade Center than it was to get a permit to fix that skating rink.

    Sometimes I wonder if it’s easier in this city to do a megaproject than it is to do a small one.

Hello New York by Julia Rothman

Julia Rothman is a wonderful and entertaining graphic storyteller. She starts out with an ode to her hometown of City Island and proceeds to the icons of the five boroughs of New York City. In the Grand Central Library, a librarian recounts a bartender who would go through the rare books, looking for antique cocktail recipes. He wanted to bring back 1920’s drinks, perhaps to recreate something from the F. Scott Fitzgerald era.

   Rothman uses illustrations to describe the buildings, and uses words to tell us about the characters in them. She draws the Puck Building, Grand Central Station, the 23^rd Street public baths, and the Spa Castle in Queens. We get the Astor Place Cube (gone and deeply missed), Union Square South, which she describes as the “most unloved” (I agree, I hated the installation since it opened in 2000) and many others. Thankfully, she goes through a lot of overlooked sites, like the Cloisters, the Transit Museum, and the Museum of the Moving Image. Staten Island, not a tourist hub, gets included too, thanks to the tattoo museum, a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and the tugboat graveyard.

    My favorite part is where she draws the different kinds of apartments-the studio, the railroad, the two-bedrooms-along with the rats, bedbugs, and roaches. However, I think these parts should be extended, maybe they could be an article in the Sunday Times? The apartments could even be a children’s book, or if she has enough drawings, a coffee table book? It would be a great NYC souvenir. 

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe

 Professor Stiglitz writes what we all know now, that the Euro was flawed from the first day. His claim is that the single currency was designed to prevent inflation, but not to promote growth. He also portrays the Euro as being blind to economic diversity; the economies of France, Ireland, Italy, Germany and Greece are far different. They all have different  economies, and their taxation policies are all different from each other. But the big question is, why was the crisis not foreseen?

    Way back in 2005, a Greek-American colleague lamented the days when she could visit Greece. Thanks to Greece going on the Euro, the costs had all gone up. Couple that with a weak dollar, and US currency wouldn’t get you anywhere in Greece anymore. If US tourists were staying away, and money sent home by Greeks living abroad wasn’t worth as much, then Greece would’ve lost its revenue. What use was the Euro now?

    Stiglitz’ research has found some things with regard to the Euro that I find a little disturbing. Greece was forced to change its food quality laws with regard to milk so that Dutch milk could be sold in Greece and compete with the local. It didn’t lower the price of milk, because the Dutch wanted top dollar. What it did was force out the Greek dairymen, because it couldn’t be called “local” anymore. In Greece, only local was called “fresh,” but the new rules said that Dutch milk had to be allowed that label, even if it wasn’t fresh at all. Lowering the price of Greek milk wasn’t feasible. The Dutch got the benefits, and the Greeks got the bills.

    My problem is the conclusion to his book. His plan for the Eurozone works, but it seems to advocate for a central European bank and regulation system. I don’t see this as being much different from what started the crisis in the first place, seeing as the Euro was governing the whole of Europe, with no regard to each nation’s credit. If Europe has a central currency system, will each nation have to prove itself in order to get loans? What about Greece’ existing debts? Will the German voters agree?

    I think of the Euro in terms of an IPO; you don’t let a company go public unless you know what it has to sell, otherwise you’ll end up with another Facebook or Martha Stewart on your hands. Both of these corporations owned nothing, they were just services, and that’s why the stock price plunged. So why would Europe want a single currency if the Greeks couldn’t be trusted to pay their taxes? I guess it was Greece that turned out the be the biggest problem in the Euro.

    The US once had a similar problem to the Eurozone. Congress wanted the Federal government to assume all remaining debts from the Revolution, and the south refused because they’d already paid off their debts. The solution; in exchange for the south agreeing to nationalizing the debt, the nation’s capital would be in the south. Alexander Hamilton had to “throw them a bone,” because no country wants to assume debt.

   Not that the south got much of a bargain either. Washington DC was built on a swamp!

   

Writing On the Wall by Kareem Abdul Jabbar

America’s iconic athlete-turned-actor-turned-writer (and not a bad one at that) says that his older relatives had a bleak view of voting. They called it “selecting the lesser of two evils” and sometimes I’m inclined to agree. When you can’t stand either candidate, you end up voting for any con man, huckster, poverty pimp, or generally corrupt, power hungry jerk. I agree with the author, because the Republicans have a rich clown with a campaign that rivals Britain’s Monster Raving Loonies (look them up if you don’t know.) As for the Democrats, their prime candidate is a power-hungry carpetbagger. Both have big stupid egos and limited accomplishment.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar observes how the conservatives want the small town ideal to come back, but it can never happen. He quotes Bob Dylan’s song The Times They Are A-Changing, with the words “better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone,” because it happened 50 years ago and it’s happening now. The Republicans want back the old Mayberry stereotype, but it’s unrealistic. I’ve seen firsthand how many of these quaint small towns are now infested with drugs, ruined by teenage pregnancies and prescription pill addiction, and families have broken up.

Ironically, Jabbar spends much of his first chapter, called The Broom of the Nation, trying to get everyone’s head out of the clouds and wake them up from the Mayberry dream. I say it’s ironic, because Ron Howard, who played little Opie Cunningham, grew up to direct anti-establishment films. As for Andy Griffith, he played a nasty, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, womanizing drifter turned media star in A Face In the Crowd. He sings “I’ll be a free man in the morning” while in the drunk tank at the jail, and sings it again when he hears that the TV sponsor is mad at him. I guess you’re only truly free if you’re homeless.

I disagree, however, with his claims that white people are using Obama to say “I’m not racist.” True, however, is that a lot of whites, both conservative and liberal, think that Obama’s lack of take-charge attitude has created an excuse for black criminals. Never mind Collin Flaherty or Thomas Sowell, I’m talking about the average white worker that nobody knows about. People who have no power (except for the ballot box) are more than happy to have a president who takes command, but as with any business, an executive who can’t manage brings no hope and no change.

Jabbar says he still gets called a nigger, but would it make him happier if someone said “you wrote a book, I didn’t know you were educated?” Then he says that blacks who get to “climb the mountain” are mostly in entertainment and sports, but then he ignores blacks in law, science, and the military. I can guarantee, there are black men and women in astronomy, biology, engineering, and forensic science. There are black physicians in the USA, but they don’t get as much attention as womanizing athletes or rappers with tattooed faces. Maybe the real problem is the schools, putting the ball before the book, giving the athletes all the attention while the scholar gets ignored (or worse, bullied)?

Next comes a complaint about the Confederate flag. I agree with Jabbar, it doesn’t belong outside the state capitol building, but do you really have to remove it from everything else? Is it fair to deny white southerners their heritage? Does Jabbar believe that the average Confederate fighter, a 17 year old backwoodsman, could’ve owned slaves? He compares having a statue of a slave owning southerner or Confederate General to having a “Hitler Hall” on campus, and that’s an unfair analogy. You can’t expect a nation to whitewash and rewrite history just because your ancestors were effected differently. Sorry Kareem, life is unfair. Keep in mind, when the Civil War ended, the whites were poor as well.

More untrue claims follow. Jabbar says that Blacks are suffering more than white from foreclosure, and I promise you I can find whole towns of white people losing their homes. Then he cries “we’re the majority victims” in turns of lead paint poisoning and prisons. Well let’s see, were there any black families living in Love Canal or Times Beach? How many black people have their water polluted thanks to mountaintop removal? As for the prisons, the victims of the “kids for cash” scandal were mostly white, and in states with few black residents, the jails are full of white kids, with the same family problems-alcohol, drugs, welfare, child abuse, sexual abuse-that occur in black families. Read the recent book Hillbilly Elegy (or The Glass Castle, or All Souls, or Townie and see what I mean.)

As for the media, why doesn’t Jabbar rave and rant at the sitcoms that make black people look stupid? Did he protest to get Good Times off the air? That program had a stupid, unmasculine, unemployed, 20-something black character who shucked & jived, wore a chicken hat, and pushed the stereotype of the black American as a lazy, stupid, ragdoll of a man. Didn’t John Amos say that he quit the show because of the shucking & jiving, and that the producers used it to avoid having to write dialogue?

Jabbar admits that athletes like Lance Armstrong (cheater), Mike Tyson (rapist), Ray Rice (wife beater), and Aaron Hernandez (murderer) are bad role models. Here we are on the argument that school sports have lost their way, veering from its health and civics purpose to being a ticket out of poverty, eventually becoming a ticket TO poverty. He also discusses how nobody loses an academic scholarship because of an injury, but a dislocated knee or torn ACL will cost you an athletic scholarship. But the problem is that for as long as colleges give athletic scholarships, poor kids will put the ball before the book. As for Jabbar, I wonder how he (back when his name was Lew Alcindor) got into Power Memorial High School and UCLA? He couldn’t have paid full tuition, and he wasn’t an academic genius. I doubt that a college scout came to his school looking for black kids who were talented scientists. Without athletic scholarships, he’d have gone nowhere. White America didn’t love him for his mind.

If Kareem Abdul Jabbar thinks that white guys like me are going to feel guilty for what a few whites said and/or did, he is mistaken. I’ll never feel guilty, because I’m too busy with something called SURVIVAL. For me it’s all about paying the bills, making sure I have food to eat, and paying my taxes. Come to think of it, the fact that I pay my taxes absolves me from having to feel guilty for anything. My taxes are paying for government charity that feeds both black and white people.

White Rage by Dr. Carol Anderson

    Dr. Anderson wants to rant about how white people are all getting over-defensive towards black American improvement. She thinks that white Americans are all retreating behind high walls in order to protect their turf, so they can be sure to leave nothing for the blacks. First she blames white Republicans for Obama’s bad rap, citing Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina and his “you lie” outburst. Then comes House Speaker Boehner and his deliberate slighting of the president. Given, both these guys were wrong. For Wilson, he’s well-educated enough to know better, so he can’t claim stupidity, and as an officer in the National Guard he should be setting an example. As for Boehner, he was wrong to schedule a foreign head of state to speak to Congress without telling the White House.  Dr. Anderson is right; the Republicans went out of their way to publicly slight the president. The question is how did it start and why?

    D.L. Hughley, in his book I Want You to Shut the F-ck Up interprets Boehner’s actions as “telling that black man he’d better learn his place.” Obviously, the House Speaker and the rest of the conservatives hardly gave Obama a chance, no doubt about that. My question is why Obama didn’t prepare for it? He could have met with all these guys before the election and said “gentlemen, let’s face it, I’m going to win, so now you need to let me know what you’re going to need, we’ll all have to get along.” Reagan and Tip O’Neil, opposites politically, got along well, same thing with Clinton and Gingrich. So why has the US Congress become polarized? Do both sides lack restraint? Does Obama think he has to be enemies with the Republicans?

    Take as an example the Facebook threats that Obama received (though I’m not sure how much time the President spends on Facebook, so I don’t know if he saw it) and which Facebook took down. Obama could’ve laughed it off or ignored it. I can imagine him saying “in high school you’re just unpopular, but in the Presidency they override your vetoes.” He could’ve been the “Teflon” president, with no criticism sticking, but he ended up criticized for everything. Maybe he overextended himself?

    After listing all the things that she thinks whites have done to sabotage the president, she cites Lawrence Otis Graham’s son’s experience as an example of pervasive racism. The boy attended a New England boarding school, and a carload of local whites called him a nigger, which according to her means America is racist. I say Dr. Anderson needs to give us a break; everywhere in the USA, the locals, or “townies” if you prefer, don’t like the students. Remember Wes Moore’s book, where he attends Valley Forge Military Academy, and the local whites are nasty? I promise you that no matter what your color, the locals do not like the rich kids who attend the boarding schools. Unfortunately, Dr. Anderson doesn’t care about the white students at Yale, Temple, University of Chicago, or Pratt, who get shot by local black criminals.

    If Dr. Anderson wants to do something about racism, why not complain about all the corrupt black politicians who can always count on the black vote? Why not discuss the nepotism in the construction industry, and how it keeps black men (and women) out? Or that question I’m always asked by black kids; why white parents talk to their kids and give them time-outs, while black parents belt their kids’ butts?

    Dr. Anderson obviously thinks it’s all one great big conspiracy by white people to ruin black America. Well guess what Dr. Anderson, you’re right. It’s all a big conspiracy to ruin you. White politicians are having secret meetings right now to discuss how they’re going to steal your money, ruin your career, throw you in jail to silence you, and force you to watch ice hockey. Maybe they’ll even try to ban the NBA and force black people to watch NASCAR. 

In Defense of Housing by David Madden and Peter Marcuse

    Housing has gone from a place where people live, to a commodity traded by absentee investors, often with the collusion of local governments. Even without reading this book I can understand the point of the authors, because I’ve seen firsthand how a house can change owner four times in a month. One of their arguments in the book is that the local councilmen or aldermen can be enticed into joining the scheme, sometimes using public money. In a cash-strapped state, the governor can throw eminent domain at a homeowner, and force the demolition of beautiful old houses, replacing them with a pharmaceuticals factory. The owner gets a payout, no matter how much money they get, it can never account for the fact that she’s lived there for 30 years. As for whatever the developer intends to build on the site, it may never get built, leaving behind an empty lot.

    Another argument of the authors Madden and Marcuse is that the government’s regulation and backing of mortgages may be part of the problem. Bank racism and redlining have persisted for years, even after civil rights legislation, even in federally-guaranteed loans. They pushed Chicago’s black residents further and further south, kept them from getting loans to fix the houses in their neighborhoods, and left perfectly good houses to rot for lack of repair funds. The result was Chicago’s violent, decrepit, drug-infested housing projects.

    In the chapter Oppression and Liberation in Housing the authors show us how urban renewal can be used to control the populace. They start with Baron Haussman, who rebuilt Paris by tearing down whole blocks and replaced narrow, medieval streets with boulevards, plazas, and stricter building codes. They also show how, after years of rebellions, the government wanted the streets to be designed so they couldn’t be barricaded. However, I don’t see this as a bad thing, because the anti-barricading plan also made it easier for firefighters to get close to the building.  As for urban renewal elsewhere, like New York City, it can keep business in the community. Lincoln Center is one example; it was built on the site of a crumbling neighborhood, full of buildings that were emptying rapidly. The project came just in time, replacing a fire-trap neighborhood with a useful, attractive concert venue. If the city had waited ten years, the financial crisis would’ve prevented it from being built.

    One of my problems with this book is that gerrymandering, redlining, and blockbusting are discussed in vague terms or are left out. This is a major problem in housing, because a massive housing project, like the Robert Taylor houses in Chicago, can jam the votes of the poor into one district. It was a problem not only in Chicago but also in Northern Ireland, South Boston, Paris, and Israel. The authors don’t give much attention to success stories, like the Mitchell-Lama program in New York City, or homesteading.

    The origin of the housing projects may have been to provide good housing and prevent crime, but it had adverse effects. It kept Catholic in Belfast from having any voting power, kept Chicago’s black population out of the way, and kept low-class Irish in the lousy parts of Boston. Today it keeps Africans in Paris’ least desired areas, keeps Ethiopian and Yemeni Israelis in out-of-the-way places, and things in Chicago haven’t changed.

    Perhaps it had a lot to do with the Fabian Society’s idea of housing? It’s possible that the wealthy elite, no matter how liberal they were, didn’t want the poor to enter their territory? Conservative elements desired the same thing, but didn’t want the serving classes to live so far away that they couldn’t get to work. Building contractors could smell opportunity; they’d build the projects with the cheapest materials they could, and turn huge profits. Politicians on both sides saw the chance to create jobs and get in good graces with construction unions. They all patted each other on the back, and the projects were born.

    They would soon fall apart, and the governments that built them had no interest in maintaining them.