One New York Life

We got our lease renewal form from our management company last week. The verdict: my rent is being “bumped up” to $2950/month. When we moved to that apartment two years ago, our 650 square feet of prime label-whoring was $2150.

Welcome to Manhattan… please bend over.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve watched the rent and apartment prices in our neighborhood soar. It isn’t really surprising; our neck of Manhattan is a planned neighborhood, full of doorman buildings and penthouses with prime location near the major subway lines. It’s quiet: no bars or restaurants open after 11pm. No clubs with drunken fools staggering home to scar precious little kids… and full of people who make way more money than me raising kids. Kids in your neighborhood in Manhattan is a pretty good sign you’re around people with lots more disposable income than you have. When we moved in, there was still a little touch of the 9/11 douchechills because of it’s proximity to the World Trade Hole. The rents were down and the rental-agent fees were non-existent. As we’ve watched 600 square foot apartments start to sell for $600k-$700k, the writing has pretty much been on the wall for eight months. I’m sure the management company was patiently waiting to soak us for the two-year lease that’s kept them honest.

So, with a little bit of sadness, we enter back into the awful world of hunting for an apartment in New York City. Of course, even though we know we’re moving it’s next to impossible to find a November availability apartment in September. We’ll really have to wait until early October before we’ll be able to find November availability. No pressure of course.

Let the Craig’s List mining begin.

Or, its full name: Ladies And Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City by Jonathan Mahler.

Believe it or not, the ESPN series wasn’t exactly the reason I found this book. I was talking about the series to a co-worker who mentioned that he had read the book. I don’t usually do non-fiction but I knew that the book hit up a few historic events in New York’s history that I was kind of interested in; the Blackout and the Son of Sam Killer… all of this behind the backdrop of baseball. Of course, the baseball it dealt with was Satan’s team. In fact, the only cameo the Mets made in the book was the Tom Seaver trade…….. because the Mets’ have a history of being run brilliantly.

Anyway, there are six central storylines:

1) The Death of the Neighborhoods: New York City in the 1970s and 1980s wasn’t quite as glitzy as it is today. In fact, before the ghettos and public housing started to take over various neighborhoods, most of the outer boroughs were middle-class suburbs for the dudes who worked on the docks, railroads, and other standard middle class jobs. Think of your city, then think of the random suburbs around it, then attach a subway. This was Brooklyn and Queens. The early neighborhoods out in Brooklyn were enclaves of immigrants who all clustered in one part of the city. There are remnants of these even now… Carroll Gardens and Howard Beach are heavily Italian, Woodlawn in the Bronx is heavily Irish, the shell of Little Italy remains in Manhattan… but a lot of them were broken up in the sixties and seventies. New York City, in an effort to break-up the “ghettos” that had formed in Harlem, decided to relocate the people living in them. The plan of awesomeness was to build public housing in the neighborhoods… dropping 10-20 floored apartment buildings of subsidized housing in the middle of a neighborhood full of Italian or Irish folks.

It went about as well as you would expect.

People started leaving the neighborhoods. Some by their own accord and some fueled by real estate brokers convincing them to “sell now before the property values go down.” As the people left, the neighborhood crashed. Instead of breaking up the ghettos, they’d managed to create them all over the city. While the poor folks had a place to live, that no one really cared to go to, they still were the same uneducated poor folks they were in Harlem. Now they were just in Bushwick instead. There was civil unrest… most of which came to a head during

2) The Blackout of 1977: The city, in the midst of a financial crisis brought on by gross overspending, the middle class exodus from the neighborhoods, and banks refusing to back the city’s bonds, had the lights go out at 9:30pm on 7/13/77. It did not take long for the “civil unrest” turn to looting. So sayeth Wiki: Looting and vandalism were widespread, hitting thirty-one neighborhoods, including every poor neighborhood in the city. Among the hardest hit were Crown Heights where seventy-five stores on a five-block stretch were looted, and Bushwick where arson was rampant with some 25 fires still burning the next morning. At one point two blocks of Broadway, which separates Bushwick from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, were on fire. Thirty-five blocks of Broadway were destroyed: 134 stores looted, 45 of them set ablaze.

3) The Democratic Mayoral Primary: You know how when two really great teams meet in the AFC Championship game and two totally mediocre teams meet in the NFC Championship game writers tend to call the AFC Championship game the “actual Super Bowl”? Well, up until Giuliani’s victory that was pretty much the Democratic Primary in New York City. This primary actually featured an incumbent loss… such was the level of hell that was New York City in the 1970s.

4) The Media: This was the part I cared about the least. It was mostly about how the New York Media machine had grown over the years. How the Post and Daily News came about and the eventual purchase of the Post by Rupert Murdoch. I didn’t really care much about this because I hate the New York media and wish it would go away.

5) The Son of Sam: The serial killer from Yonkers who walked around Queens and Brooklyn and randomly shot people.

6) The 1977 Yankees: The part of this book mostly dramatized in the ESPN series. Mahler goes in to a lot of detail about how Martin came to be the Yankee’s manager and the level of nonsense that Steinbrenner put his manager and team through even in those days. Much like how Billy Beane managed Art Howe in Moneyball, this was how Steinbrenner tried to manage Billy Martin, going so far as to tell Martin where to put people in the line-up and otherwise. Martin, however, was not hired with the understanding that the front office would be running the team and fought back.

Then, in comes the marquee free agent. Reggie Jackson, then the highest payed baseball player in the league, was put on to Martin’s staff and they did not get along, coming to a head when Billy pulled Reggie in the middle of an inning for a defensive replacement for not running down a ball. This nearly led to a fight in the dugout on national television. However, all of the drama was for naught as the Yankees slapped around the Dodgers in yet another World Series and kicked them back out of the city.

Los Angeles Dodgers… more the Bronx’s Bitch than even the Red Sox. At the very least, the Red Sox have never gotten beaten so bad for so long that they had to leave town. The Yankees beat two baseball teams out of town then, they came back for more in the 70s, and got smacked around and kicked out again.

Unless New York City history is your thing, there’s not much of interest in your book. However, the politics that turned one of the largest bastions of immigrations and jobs into the disgusting, bankrupt, ghetto in the 70s and 80s is interesting. Much of these same policies can be seen in California right now. New York, for the most part, has moved past a lot of these policies… because the 80s taught them they couldn’t afford it. While I did find some of the history of the political process interesting, I felt like the history of the newspaper media was a waste of time. I don’t care about Rupert Murdoch and I hardly care about reporters in any sense (as I find the New York Media and, really, the media in general to be parasites who revel in creating fear and reporting on celebrity buzz… but that’s a column for another day). I certainly don’t care about how certain papers grew at the expense of other papers.

Outside of the media theme, though, the other storylines were interesting… but probably only for a New Yorker. Unless you really liked the series, or politics, this book probably isn’t going to be for you.