ANARCHIC APPLE
Amity Shlaes on the
poverty, chaos and resilience of New York
New York BACK in 1987 a friend of mine married one of New York's hotter young real estate developers. The groom and his business partner were two jolly fellows who had made plans and leveraged millions to rebuild some of a neighbourhood east of Greenwich Village called Tompkins Square and lots of Harlem. For good measure — let's not forget the market for summer homes! — the groom had also bought the wiggly strip of suburban Dutch- ess County, two counties up from Manhat- tan. The bride wore a train so long we maids of honour had trouble controlling it. She was afraid of flying, but rose to the occasion and, after taking her vows, brave- ly stepped from the grass into the honey- moon helicopter that whisked them away.
Three years later, my friend is divorced. Homeless rioters are keeping the noise level up at Tompkins Square, where the ex-groom now mopes in the ex-couple's ex-love nest. The fellow has so little cash he has to keep his creditors — mainly Polish construction workers — at bay by signing promissory notes against the Dutchess County property. As for his partner, the man no longer has an office, though he does occasionally ring up the divorcee from a pay-phone to flirt.
New York isn't doing well these days. The market may have convinced itself that it recovered from the 1987 stock crash, but the city has not. New York has stopped growing. It is getting more dangerous. I now have one-and-a-half times as good a chance of being forced to surrender my wallet when I descend into the subway on Eighth Street as I did when I first started taking the train to work in 1980. There's a word middle-class people repeat to each other to describe their fears about the city, and the word is anarchy. One man who giggled it to me is one of the 35,000 people unemployed after the stock crash. In the early 1980s, he was a stock market analyst. In the mid-1980s, he moved into mergers and acquisitions. Now he sits at home in a two-bedroom flat he can't afford, with nothing better to do than play with his Quotron, bet on the Preakness, and micro- wave the baby's bottle.
Among the poor, the anarchy fear shows up in talk of conspiracy. Take a cab ride and if the driver is Haitian he will tell you about the Aids conspiracy: the US State Department planted the Aids virus in Port-au-Prince because it wanted to deci- mate Afro-Americans. The Korean con- spiracy is also a favourite. The reason greenhorn Koreans own grocery stores (pay $3.75 for a pound of salad, get a Diet Coke for free) all over New York while black descendants of slaves who came here 200 years ago own nothing, is that Koreans are all funded by a secret fund from Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Or, by the Mafia. Or, by anyone who is out to get blacks.
Among more monied folk, the anarchy fear finds a more concrete expression: property. Five years ago, ten years ago, people here bought apartments — in New York, as in London, that was the thing people did. Now those same people want out of Manhattan. They want to move to Scarsdale and have lawnmowers like their parents. They want to move to Chappa- qua, a town with a neat little literary tradition and a public library where there is absolutely no chance of a smelly, homeless guy sitting down next to them. But the market is soft. Estate agents don't return calls from sellers. For buyers, they spend many minutes on hold. The New York Times recently produced a subway adver- tisement for its property listings section that described the New York fantasy, the successful sale. It read: 'Four strangers are now living in my home.' On one train, under the ad, an anarchy type wrote his comment: 'Kill them.'
Anarchy, of course, has a cheerful side. You can still like New York — the way you can still like the Third World. New York has coffee shops that stay open until 2 a.m, it has syncopated music on the street, it has street vendors. Outside our apartment, a man sells friendly little giraffes carved in wood for the equivalent of £2. Getting cash in New York used to be a lonely, self- centred process that involved gaining ac- cess to a bank's cash-machine vestibule by feeding a coded card into a slot beside the building entrance. Now New Yorkers re- trieving their money usually enjoy com- pany. Homeless people sneak into the cash centres, and, like crazed butlers, greet customers with a smile and an open hand at the door.
The man who is supposed to fix all this, New York's new mayor, is a mustachioed black man named David Dinkins. When Dinkins sallies into boardrooms to present his budget, he inspires some hope — he talks in tones so soft of New York's racial problems, of helping 'people of colour', that it's easy to forget they're swinging baseball bats on the streets. Dinkins is not a buffoon like the late Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, or a junkie like Marion Barry, the mayor of the nation's capital. But the budget he pulls from a shiny, fat folder has only one answer to the city's manifold problems: more taxes. New York is already the most heavily taxed state in the Union. In his new budget, the mayor is unloading odious little items like a tariff on drycleaning — get the yuppies where it hurts! — onto a city whose tax base is already in pain. Dinkins also shares some of the anarchy paranoia. He's no taxi driver, but he does voice a modified version of the conspiracy . theory. He wonders aloud where the Ko- rean grocers do get their capital — 'Can it be manna from heaven?'
New Yorkers are hardy people, in a way the Americans most fit to tolerate — and enjoy — their anarchy. They say New York has always had a cyclical economy. They point to the fact that New York has already survived a downturn. Back in the early 1970s it took some first-class thinkers from some first-class investment houses to keep the city out of bankruptcy. And people here have energy — they jump right over those homeless.
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