New York city Archives - Page 3 of 3

The Kitty Genovese narrative largely debunked

Read the New Yorker article about the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder, and you will recognize that the New York Times story of the time had done a grand disservice to our views of the cities, especially NYC.

If you were old enough – and I was – the name of Kitty Genovese was a name you knew. Not just that she was a murder victim in Queens, NYC, stabbed to death on March 13, 1964, “one of six hundred and thirty-six murders in New York City that year,” but that the apparent indifference to her plight by over three dozen “witnesses” spoke volumes about the apathetic nature of a segment of American life:

…the gist of the [New York Times] piece lent itself perfectly to Sunday sermons about a malaise encompassing all of us. It was a way of processing anxieties about the anonymity of urban life, about the breakdown of the restrictive but reassuring social conventions of the fifties, and, less directly, about racial unrest, the Kennedy assassination, and even the Holocaust, which was only beginning to be widely discussed, and which seemed to represent on a grand scale the phenomenon that one expert on the Genovese case calls Bad Samaritanism.

Except that the narrative was largely untrue. Not that her murder was not horrific, but read the New Yorker article, and you will recognize that the story had done a grand disservice to our views of the cities, especially The City.

The Kitty Genovese narrative – I was 11 at the time – terrified me. It fit into a narrative of black people, and their white supporters – disappearing in the South and ended up dead. But that was far away, down “there”. This story, not just the murder but the indifference, 180 miles from my home at the time, made my world just a bit of a scarier place.

I remember that after the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, one pundit noted that one would not expect that sort of thing in “the heartland” – my, I HATE that word – though you would EXPECT that sort of thing in NYC, and he used the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as an example. The people in what the NY/LA folks sometimes call “flyover country” are supposed to be immune to that sort of thing, because, it seems, they care more about each other. The one oddly beneficial thing about 9/11 was that, for a time, EVERYONE was a New Yorker, and that kind of divisive thinking went away, if only for a while.

My ambivance about Ed Koch

Ed Koch also didn’t endear himself to upstate voters when he ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of New York State in 1982, again against Mario Cuomo.

Edward I. Koch died recently. He was the brash, outspoken mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989. You should watch this interview conducted in 2007, where he “reflected on his life and political career, and talked of how he would like to be remembered.” I would agree that he brought some fiscal stability to a city on the brink of bankruptcy, “turning a $1 billion budget deficit into a $500 million surplus in five years. He restored the city’s credit, doubled the annual budget to $26 billion and oversaw $19 billion in capital improvements.”

The year 1977 was tough for both NYCNY and me. The city had a blackout that led to widespread looting. A guy dubbed Son of Sam was going around shooting people. I had graduated from college the year before and was underemployed in my college town in the autumn of 1976. In desperation, I lived with my parents in Charlotte, NC for the first four months of 1977; not my favorite place at the time. Then, after a brief trip to Binghamton, NY, I ended up living in the apartment of my sister and her husband at the time. Much of the time, they were in Boston, though they were present some of the time, and he and I did not get along that well.

I had a 30 hour per week telephone job from 6 pm until midnight. I spent most of my time hanging out in Greenwich Village with a co-worker named Michael, who pursued an ill-fated romance with a young woman. I’ve long since lost track of him, but have remained friends with the woman to this day.

So I wasn’t all that engaged with the politics that was going on. It seemed that there were a half dozen folks running for mayor. Ed Koch had been a reform-minded member of Congress, but his pro-death penalty position troubled me greatly. I ended up rooting for Mario Cuomo, who was the state’s Secretary of State.

Despite living there, I was totally unaware of signs that were apparently all over the city saying “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo.” Mario Cuomo has continually denied being behind these signs, and though Cuomo and Koch appeared together from time to time subsequently, Koch never forgave either Mario, or his son Andrew, the current New York State governor. (I tend to believe Mario, but wouldn’t be surprised if Andrew were involved; he was a very nasty guy.)

He also didn’t endear himself to upstate voters when he ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of New York State in 1982, again against Mario Cuomo. Koch described his run as hubris. He was hurt by an interview with Playboy magazine, where he was insulting to upstaters, describing rural life as “a joke,” for instance.

Amid his accomplishments, and they were many, it was thought by many that he was lousy on race relations with blacks, and extremely slow in responding to the HIV/AIDS crisis.

After his time as mayor, he worked as a partner in a law firm, did radio commentary, wrote newspaper columns, and even movie reviews. talk-show guest. his support of the war in Iraq peeved me, especially since he had opposed the Vietnam war as a Congressman. More recently, he tried, unsuccessfully, to get nonpartisan reapportionment done, which I support.

The writer Pete Hamill said in 2005 that he was “some mad combination of a Lindy’s waiter, Coney Island barker, Catskills comedian, irritated school principal and eccentric uncle.” This was meant as a compliment, and it’s pretty accurate. The praise he received was no doubt warranted, but somehow, I was not his biggest fan.
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Artists Against Fracking is a video postcard from Yoko Ono to Andrew Cuomo

From the 1977 Sacred Songs album, NYCNY by Daryl Hall, which rather sounds like NYC, NY of 1977

Q is for Queens

The Queens Library has the highest circulation of any public library system in the U.S.

Queens is one of the five boroughs of New York City. The boroughs are coterminous with the five counties that comprise the city, out of 62 counties statewide: Manhattan (New York County), Brooklyn (Kings County), Staten Island (Richmond County); Bronx and Queens have the same county and borough names.

Queens is physically the largest of the NYC boroughs, at 109.7 square miles (284.12 square kilometers or 70,190.2 acres), and with 2.3 million people, the second-most populous, after Brooklyn; this is more people than any other whole US city, save for Los Angeles and Chicago. NYC has established 59 community districts in 1975, based on the historic development of communities, 14 of which are in Queens.

Queens has a rich history as one of the 12 original counties of New York State. You can read about that here. Just as interesting, though, is the fact that Queens is considered one of the most ethnically diverse counties in the United States. Here are just the ancestry groups with an estimated 25,000 or more, according to the 2009 American Community Survey 1-year estimates: Asian Indian 137,696; Chinese 190,183; Colombian 83,433; Ecuadorian 107,931; German 48,042; Greek 50,949; Guyanese 53,012; Haitian 44,226; Irish 82,543; Italian 153,704; Jamaican 50,828; Korean 59,690; Mexican 83,185; Polish 54,974; Puerto Rican 123,219; Russian 39,798; Salvadoran 26,571; plus a lot of less numerous groups as well.

I have some personal links with Queens. My mother’s uncle Ernest died of cancer in 1954, and then six months later, Aunt Charlotte and her four kids moved from small-town Binghamton (NY) to New York City, into a house in Queens. As Charlotte’s daughter Fran noted in a 2005 interview, her mother thought that with her “kids coming from a town where there were big back yards and big houses — and when we would get too noisy she would just put us in the back yard to run around — that we would be too much to move into an apartment…. So we moved into St. Albans, a three-bedroom house.” My family would visit that house several times a year when I was growing up; it seemed enormous but was probably dwarfed by the current McMansions.

Then in 1965, my family went to the World’s Fair in Flushing. Oddly, my most vivid memory was standing in line FOREVER to get to have something called Belgian waffles. With strawberries! And whipped cream!

My sister and her then-husband moved to an apartment in Jackson Heights c. 1976, and my eldest niece Rebecca was born there in October 1978; I first saw her within a month of her birth, and then several times subsequently, including on her first and second birthdays.

I even lived in that apartment in the summer of 1977; my sister was going back and forth between NYC and Boston. I won $48 in a radio contest, and I took my sister to see a New York Mets baseball game; they, too, are the pride of Queens. The Mets played at Shea Stadium, which was built in time for the 1964 season – and 55,000 Beatles fans were there in 1965. In the early 1970s, my father and I caught a New York Jets-Houston Oilers football game at Shea. The stadium was razed in 2008, replaced by Citi Field in 2009. There’s a documentary about the stadium, Last Play at Shea; the trailer is HERE.

Since I’m a librarian, I should note that the Queens Library is “an independent, not-for-profit corporation and is not affiliated with any other library… With a record 23 million items in circulation for FY 2009, the Library has the highest circulation of any public library system in the U.S. and one of the highest circulations in the world.”

ABC Wednesday – Round 7