Worried about losing their apartments and joining the city`s huge population of homeless vagabonds, the poor are also forced to observe continually, often in their own neighborhoods, the other side of Manhattan life–the affluent young professionals in their expensive clothes throwing away $70 on dinner for two at the most modest corner restaurants; the boutiques and hair salons and gourmet food shops, where the prices rival the snobbery. The young among the borough`s have-nots, nearly all of them black or Hispanic, naturally develop a strong resentment in the face of this ostentation. The envy is sometimes expressed through insults shouted at any prosperous-looking white person who happens to be walking by. Other times, it is expressed through violence.
Just as naturally, the victims of these assaults, be they verbal or physical, also react negatively. The result, over time, has been an evolving polarization that has shattered whatever image this city once had as a bastion of enlightened progressivism. The Upper West Side, where not so long ago Bella Abzug reigned supreme, has become a center of racial tension and mutual suspicion. ”It`s sickening. Every time I go to a party, I hear more racist jokes,” says one white woman in her 40s who has lived in the community since her student days at Columbia University. ”The attitudes are frightening. It`s especially frightening to me to see how my own attitudes have changed.”
This mounting racial division finally exploded onto the front page with one terrible yet hardly surprising act of violence three days before last Christmas. At age 37, there was nothing extraordinary about Bernhard Goetz. Like most other white Manhattanites, he had become moderately successful, running a one-man electronics business out of his studio apartment on West 14th Street. He was active in a number of community organizations and was well liked by his neighbors.
But Goetz was a tormented man, tormented by the drug dealers who operated unchallenged outside his building, tormented by a fear that stemmed from having been the victim of a mugging four years earlier that had left him with the recurring pain of torn cartilage in his chest.
On the afternoon of Dec. 22, aboard an IRT subway car headed north from the World Trade Center, something snapped inside Bernhard Goetz. There are conflicting versions of what happened in that car. The unenviable task of judging what is the truth is left to the jury in Goetz`s upcoming trial on charges of attempted murder. What is not in dispute is the fact that Goetz, who was armed with a chrome-plated, .38 caliber revolver loaded with dum-dum bullets and concealed in a quick-draw holster, suddenly opened fire on four black youths from the Bronx, at least one of whom had approached him asking for $5.
During the months after the shootings, Goetz has consistently maintained that he acted in justifiable self-defense, that he could tell by the ”body language” of the young men that they were armed and that they were planning to harm him. The victims, all but one of whom has recovered from the gunshots, have insisted that they were engaged in nothing more than innocent panhandling.
Virtually every New Yorker soon learned additional facts of the case
–that all four young men had been carrying sharpened screwdrivers at the time, that all four have criminal records, including convictions for such offenses as larceny, receipt of stolen goods and breaking and entering. One of the youths, 19-year-old Darrel Cabey, currently faces a charge that he robbed three men with a shotgun last October.
The circumstances of the subway incident itself may not be as significant as the public reaction to it. Fueled by circus like media coverage, the Goetz case has further inflamed emotions and hardened attitudes in a city where the fuse was already short. A survey by The New York Times a month after the shootings revealed that 52 percent of all New Yorkers supported Goetz`s conduct, while only 28 percent were critical. (The rest had no opinion.) The news in late January that a grand jury had refused to indict Goetz for anything except minor firearms violations was celebrated with an impromptu street party outside the gunman`s apartment building, one passing cabdriver jumping out of his taxi for a brazen victory dance. The announcement two months later that a second grand jury had reversed the first panel`s decision and indicted Goetz for attempted murder was received with quiet resentment in many circles.
A surprising number of blacks have been supportive of Goetz, or at least not critical of him. The Times poll found that Goetz was backed by 56 percent of all whites surveyed and 45 percent of the blacks. But many other blacks have professed alarm, viewing the hysteria and the criminal justice system`s initial leniency as signals of an open season on any young black male who might seem menacing to a passing white person.
The highly charged atmosphere has hardly been calmed by the actions of Mayor Edward Koch, a conservative Democrat whose base of support lies in the Jewish and Italian neighborhoods of the outer boroughs. Facing re-election this year after a humiliating defeat in a race for governor in 1982, Koch assembled reporters less than a half hour after the announcement of the first grand jury`s gentle wrist-slapping. Calling the decision ”Solomonic,” the mayor said he was ”pleased that the grand jury found he (Goetz) did not go past the right of self-defense.” (The reversal by the second grand jury brought a terse ”no comment” from the normally loquacious Koch.)
The mayor`s intemperate comment on the Goetz case is not the first time he has sought to appeal to his white constituency by resorting to rhetoric that many blacks perceive to be racist. Naturally combative in style, Koch heatedly denies that his has been a divisive influence on the city. Rather, he argues, he is helping to insure the future of New York by speaking out on behalf of those middle-class ethnics whom the city must retain if it is to survive.
It is one of the many ironies of contemporary New York that the same Ed Koch who now makes this argument was, 10 years ago, a left-wing congressman who was regarded as a champion of minorities.
”Sure, Koch has changed,” acknowledges one local politician who admires the mayor. ”We`ve all changed. The city has changed. This has always been a tough town. But it`s getting tougher.”
In fairness, any litany of New York`s problems should be followed by a peering into the future for signs of hope, for signs that processes are at work that eventually will make the city livable, or at least tolerable.
Slowly, rent control is evaporating by attrition, so that by the turn of the century there should be some semblance of supply-and-demand economics in the Manhattan housing market. Whether that semblance translates into affordability is an open question.
Gov. Mario Cuomo has proposed a slight reduction in the state income tax, which would suggest to the burdened middle class that things at least are not getting any worse. But a tax cut also would deny to the city badly needed funds for rehabilitating the subways, improving the schools and, in general, keeping things from completely falling apart.
Nor can Washington be counted on to help. If London or Paris or Rome were in half as bad a shape as New York, the national government would certainly have intervened. But in the United States, under our federal system, federal bailouts are never easy. They are especially not easy when the recipient of the largesse is New York, a city that most Americans at once admire and resent, envy and despise.
