Eat the City(21)

FOR decades, as the national economy boomed, Harlem foundered. The neighborhood became known less for its jazz clubs and home cooking than for its vacant lots. These started multiplying in the 1950s, as abandoned buildings were demolished. Empty lots became dumping grounds, and neighbors would “air-mail” their garbage down from upper-floor apartments. Some people began cleaning up the lots and transforming them into gardens, but the scale was small and the efforts spotty.

Things changed when riots erupted in Harlem in 1964 after a white cop killed a black fifteen-year-old boy. Suddenly government viewed poor neighborhoods and their vacant lots as breeding grounds for discontent. A few weeks after his inauguration, Mayor John Lindsay and his wife, Mary, shoveled refuse out of a Bronx lot he had designated as a “vest-pocket park,” or minipark. Soon, the people of Harlem adapted his idea to clean up lots to grow vegetables, and civic groups presented a course called Rubble to Roses, with tips on urban agriculture. “I hope,” a Harlem resident wrote to the Amsterdam News, “that this sense of not owning anything of our own here in the city might be overcome in the actual getting together and digging.”

Because if one thing was becoming plentiful, it was land. In the past, prissiness had ruled the city’s open spaces like a bulwark against chaos. Men were not allowed to take their shirts off in parks; children were upbraided for playing on the grass—it would “bruise”—and community groups that dared to plant flowers on city properties watched maintenance workers uproot them. All that was changing. The overbuilding that had created Harlem was rolling back. Housing was coming down, at first building by building—a fire here, a demolition there. Soon, there was open space everywhere. On Willie’s block in 1969, there had been a liquor store and a car shop and a drugstore, along with a row of narrow-windowed, small-roomed nineteenth-century brick tenement buildings packed with Willie’s customers. Over the next decade, while he busied himself in the garden, something astonishing happened. The whole row of tenements came down, one by one, until on the south side of the street not a single building was left on the entire block.

It turns out that neglect starts fires. Where a landlord failed to fix the boiler, or pay the gas bill, or repair the electricity, a space heater or a jerry-rigged outlet or a pot of bathwater warming on a failing gas stove could lead to a conflagration. “Milkers” would buy a building for cheap only to cut maintenance and even heat and hot water to maximize rental profits. They might hire a professional “finisher” to come in with wrenches and screwdrivers to strip whatever copper wiring and brass and lead pipes could be sold. They might even hire someone to torch the place, for insurance money. The fire department no longer had the manpower to inspect buildings and enforce codes, and its hydrants and trucks often broke down. In poor, packed neighborhoods, firehouses closed, and, predictably, fires spread. People will tell you about going up to their rooftops in the 1970s to see two or three fires burning at once. They would avoid making evening phone calls because of the screaming sirens at that time of day. They would smell the burning every time they went outside. They would watch their neighborhoods literally turn to ash. Harlem, the Lower East Side, the South Bronx, Central Brooklyn, Williamsburg, Bushwick, Washington Heights, Brownsville, East New York—they all burned. FDNY veterans still call the 1970s “The War Years.”

It wasn’t just fire. From 1970 to 1980, the city’s economic output fell by 20 percent; average income dropped by 35 percent; and a million jobs were lost. Heroin flooded the streets, muggings, burglaries, and armed robbery spiked, and the murder rate almost quadrupled. In a few years in the 1970s, central Harlem lost almost a third of its total population, and other neighborhoods across the city emptied too. “Something happened,” one elderly man told the Times in 1975, as he sat on the Coney Island boardwalk near a stretch of vacant lots, staring at the sea. “Everything is changed now.”

The housing commissioner, Roger Starr, thought the city was just renewing itself. “Planned shrinkage” was his proposal to encourage hundreds of thousands of poor people to move away so their land could be renovated. “Stretches of empty blocks may then be knocked down, services can be stopped, subway stations closed, and the land left to lie fallow until a change in economic and demographic assumptions makes the land useful once again,” Starr wrote in an article in the New York Times Magazine. His controversial proposal cost him his job, but people continued to debate to what extent the city’s ongoing shrinkage of services was in fact part of a deliberate plan.

Beginning in 1974, budgets were stripped bare as the city teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. In some neighborhoods, the Sanitation Department stopped picking up curbside garbage—never mind cleaning the multiplying charred vacant lots that were becoming a symbol of urban failure. The Parks Department held off on fixing benches, painting pools, and installing new seats on swings, and there was talk of jettisoning parks that could not be maintained—not of making vacant lots into parkland. People in poor neighborhoods began to think the City was intentionally targeting them for service cuts as the closing of police and fire stations only assisted the frenzy of arson and accident that produced more vacant lots. In 1975, with the city more than $12 billion in debt, President Gerald Ford refused to help with a federal bailout. “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” the Daily News headlined.

Meanwhile, city lots filled with detritus. A building would burn down or be wrecked, and its remains would not be removed. Bricks and beams and mortar would crumple and crumble, disintegrating into litter, attracting more of the same. Businesses quit paying licensed carters to haul their refuse to the costly city dump. Whole neighborhoods became dumping grounds. Cars, fridges, stoves, sofas, tires. Red bags of medical waste, Glad bags of office papers. Even Sanitation Department trucks were found dumping in city-owned lots. Dumping begat litter. Box springs and pop cans, a single roller skate, butane lighters and hamburger boxes, Polaroids and Budweiser bottles, syringes, chicken bones, baby clothes. Vacant lots became an ashy catalog of all the city didn’t want, including the lots themselves.