Abstract
After the 2016 presidential election, while urbanites across the United States sat in stunned and confused silence at the results, pundits began suggesting that American cities would be the crucibles of progressive activism and reform in the Trump era. In the past year, these predictions have rung true as mayors, city councils, and constituents in large and small cities throughout the United States have demonstrated, picketed, sued, and spoken out against federal policies. They have challenged immigration crackdowns, police brutality, the curtailing of efforts to combat climate change, and rolling back of criminal justice reforms. As they have in earlier eras, American urbanites are taking to the streets, putting cities at the vanguard of a new era of social and political activism.
New York City, with its self-proclaimed Progressive mayor, is an obvious site for such activism. The nation’s most polyglot city and reticent hometown to the leader of Trumpism, New York is a logical capital of progressive urban politics. New York City also has a significant history of progressive activism, from labor activism of the mid-nineteenth century to progressive reforms of the early twentieth century and, more recently, the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Despite this history of activism, the decades since the 1960s are generally not viewed as peak reform years for New York. During this period, New York City experienced a fiscal crisis, teetering on bankruptcy. The response to this economic calamity was the rise of neoliberal politics and policies, where private institutions assumed many functions previously reserved to the municipal government, including social outreach. Protests against these policies continued, of course, but the voices of reformers have generally been drowned out by those of the establishment. The three books under review examine this often-overlooked era of grassroots community activism. They show the strategies that New Yorkers used to stabilize their neighborhoods, attend to social problems, and address national politics, at a time when urban communities like theirs experienced rapid demographic, economic, and social changes.
No One Helped, Crossing Broadway, and Bronx Faces and Voices are essentially community studies of often-overlooked areas of the city—the outer boroughs of Queens and the Bronx and Manhattan above 125th Street. They ask crucial questions about how communities organize to address and solve neighborhood problems and challenges in the midst of disruptions in the larger city. Although these three books are quite different, they also share similar themes in looking at postwar New York at the neighborhood level. Community is a central theme of all three books—community formation as well as the tension between community apathy and community action in shaping both daily life and the image of the city in what many consider its nadir.
In No One Helped, Marcia Gallo revisits the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese, who was attacked and killed outside of her Kew Gardens apartment building in March of 1964. Genovese’s murder was long cast in the media and popular culture as a symbol of New Yorkers’ indifference amid the city’s plunge toward crime in the postwar period. Gallo challenges this “myth of urban apathy,” showing how it was constructed through media representations in the weeks and years after Genovese’s death. Notably, Gallo recenters the event on the victim and perpetrator of the crime. Most other accounts have focused on Genovese’s neighbors, presenting them as villains who ignored the young woman’s cries for help while she was raped and murdered on her own doorstep.
No One Helped is wide-ranging—not a biography of Kitty Genovese or a narrative analysis of her rape and murder. Rather, Gallo uses the Genovese crime as a lens for understanding a host of events in post-1960 New York City from the development of Queens in general and Kew Gardens in particular, to the rise of investigative journalism and the evolution of the New York Times as the national paper of record, to gay life in New York City in the mid-twentieth century of which Genovese and her partner Mary Ann Zielonko were a part, to growing racial tensions in New York City and the fight for civil rights in the urban north in the 1960s. Gallo also considers the development of block associations and vigilante groups such as the Guardian Angels in the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of social psychology and the role of the Genovese crime in developing new theories of urban community.
Gallo offers a three-dimensional examination of Kitty Genovese and the context in which she lived, examining Genovese as a working woman in 1960s New York City, a lesbian, and committed urbanite at a time when many of her contemporaries were abandoning the city for the suburbs. New York City is the second part of the book’s subtitle and Gallo also examines the city both as actor in and backdrop to the Genovese crime, real and imagined.
Although the theme of community activism is not the sole thesis of No One Helped, a central focus of the book is the increased emphasis on activism in New York City in the 1960s at the very moment when the myth of urban apathy was being promulgated. Gallo’s challenge to the myth of urban apathy is thus worth considering in the company of other studies of community activism in the postwar period. As Gallo points out in her introduction, “The media promoted an epidemic of indifference at the precise moment when millions of Americans were organizing for social change” (p. xiv). Far from apathetic, many New Yorkers were involved in community activism, forming neighborhood watches, tenants’ councils and block associations, marching and organizing for civil rights both within and outside of New York City, and agitating for an end to police brutality, especially against African Americans. In the decades following Genovese’s death, activists continued to coalesce around her story, including women’s rights activists who began to more publicly tackle the crime of sexual assault. Gallo also contextualizes AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) activism within the larger move toward public demands for government action in the face of a national health crisis.
Gallo’s approach to this increased activism is nuanced, evincing a recognition both of progressive activism in favor of a broadening of civil rights as well as conservative activism such as the white neighborhood watch groups that were focused on policing neighborhood borders and excluding minorities from moving to or even visiting the neighborhood. Likewise, Gallo sees the vigilantism of the 1970s and 1980s, exemplified by organizations like the Guardian Angels, and individuals like Bernhard Goetz who, in 1984, took the law in his own hands and shot four teenagers whom he alleged were trying to mug him on the subway, as examples of increased community involvement in the face of rising urban crime.
Linked to the theme of activism is the theme of community. Gallo points out that the idea of Genovese’s neighbors as heartless and apathetic was grossly exaggerated (as has been subsequently revealed in court cases, media coverage, and a notable latter-day correction in the New York Times, the originator of the myth). In fact, the reaction to Genovese’s murder among Kew Gardeners was to organize to prevent another such occurrence by forming civic associations aimed at community-building and self-policing.
In sum, No One Helped expands our understanding not only of the Kitty Genovese murder but also of the workings of community and activism in New York City in the postwar period. These workings were not unabashedly positive, as Gallo shows. Establishing community could signal the enactment of boundaries, which embraced some individuals and shut out others. Gallo also makes an important contribution in revisioning the death of Kitty Genovese, in seeing Genovese less as “the chalk outline left on the sidewalk in a crime scene after a body has been removed” (p. 35), than a living, breathing New Yorker whose life reflected on some of the many developments the city was experiencing during her brief residency.
In Crossing Broadway, Robert Snyder focuses on similar themes to Gallo but through a different lens—the devolution and resurgence of the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights. Snyder was born in the neighborhood in 1955 and remembers it fondly from visits as a teenager (his family moved to the suburbs when he was a baby). But in the 1980s, he recalls, the Heights became a symbol—in politics and media—for crime and drugs. “From afar, I asked myself: How did a good neighborhood get so bad?” Snyder explains. “And how had fear of crime come to dominate politics, journalism, and everyday life in New York City?” (p. 2). In his book—part family history, part neighborhood study—Snyder answers these questions and examines the neighborhood’s “comeback,” through the lens of community activism, beginning in the late 1990s. The book traces Washington Heights’ history from its original settlement to today, including demographic changes in the neighborhood over the course of the twentieth century, rising crime in the 1970s and the crack years of the 1980s, and the neighborhood’s recent stabilization and resurgence.
Snyder extends Gallo’s example of community engagement and activism into the 1980s and beyond, the period when Washington Heights residents’ efforts to “unslum” their neighborhood, in the parlance of Jane Jacobs, bore fruit. The density of the neighborhood, Snyder argues, encouraged “collective efficacy” (a theory of the city developed by sociologist Robert J. Sampson) wherein neighbors—yet strangers—looked out for one another in ways formal and informal. These strategies included calling the police to report a crime but also attending public meetings and engaging in civic activism that sought municipal-, state-, and federal-level solutions to neighborhood problems. In much the same way that Gallo argues against the dissolution of community model that was posited to explain the murder of Kitty Genovese, Snyder looks at the complexity of community as both a force for cohesion and conflict.
Indeed, Snyder devotes significant space to exploring moments of cooperation and moments of conflict as Heights residents formed communities that were at times inclusive and at other times exclusive. A diverse neighborhood, Washington Heights was a collection of strictly delineated sub-enclaves—African Americans in the southern part, Jews west of Broadway, Irish east of Broadway in the years preceding and immediately following World War II. Heights residents clustered in these “urban villages,” which contained such mitigating institutions as clubs, houses of worship, local newspapers, restaurants, and mutual aid associations. At the same time, these enclaves served as bases for turf battles in the neighborhood throughout the twentieth century. Like Gallo, Snyder takes a broad view of activism, seeing it as both progressive and regressive.
Washington Heights turf battles include an unsuccessful attempt in the early twentieth century to exclude Jews from Hudson View Gardens, a neighborhood coop building; the murder of fifteen-year old Michael Farmer, a boy of Irish descent from the Northern Heights, and the trial of seven of his accused assailants, Latino and African American teens from the Southern part of the neighborhood; school integration battles in the 1960s and 1970s; and efforts in subsequent decades to stem the decline of the neighborhood that was occurring in the South Bronx directly to the east.
In the late twentieth century, Washington Heights developed into Quisqueya Heights, the center of Dominican life in New York City. Older, European American residents feared the decline of their neighborhood in the mode of the South Bronx. Concerns about blight were valid in the postwar period but they were also tinged with racist undertones. Furthermore, the same municipal policies that encouraged blight discouraged social services for racial minorities from which earlier generations of immigrants to New York had benefited. Anti-Dominican sentiment, Snyder points out, was exacerbated by the transnational quality of Dominican American life, which was less evident for the early-twentieth-century immigrants who settled in the neighborhood and remained during the postwar period. Snyder also shows how the enclave, supportive of its members in many cases, had negative effects. For example, in the 1980s, the youth culture and economy of the neighborhood became dominated by the crack trade and many parents looked on helplessly as their children became ensnared. The same social centers that served as the foundation of community life for earlier generations of Washington Heights residents—public parks, Highbridge Pool—now became home turf for gangs and drug dealers.
Like Gallo, Snyder presents several forms of community activism of the 1970s and 1980s, including electoral politics, grassroots organizing and coalition building such as the Washington Heights-Inwood Coalition, a Jewish–Catholic effort to address local problems such as rehabilitating parks, encouraging better policing, and improving local schools. These coalitions and organizations managed to stem the decline of Washington Heights, Snyder argues, by finally transgressing the insular local enclaves and finding common cause in neighborhood revitalization and social services across ethnic boundaries. For example, the Washington Heights-Inwood Coalition was dominated by older Washington Heights residents through their religious institutions but made efforts to reach out to the growing Dominican population through tenant organizing and conflict mediation.
Meanwhile as they came to dominate the neighborhood, Dominicans formed organizations such as Alianza Dominicana, which offered social services to the community and, eventually more politically oriented associations such as the Asociacion Comunal de Dominicanos Progresisstas (ACDP), which fought successfully to establish a Dominican toehold in New York City politics in the 1980s, rooted in Washington Heights. Community activism came to bear during the crack epidemic as well. Snyder discusses antidrug marches in 1986 and the early 1990s, building- and block-level anticrime organizations and larger groups such as Riverside Neighborhood Security Association and Mothers against Violence, which created a watch in Highbridge Park both to provide outreach to drug addicts and to work with local law enforcement to take the playground back for kids.
Snyder implicitly agrees with Gallo’s rejection of urban apathy, pointing out the ways that Washington Heights’ residents claimed their “right to the city” by demanding good schools, safe streets, and municipal services. In so doing, they paved the way for their neighborhood’s resurgence in the 1990s and beyond. Ironically, they also contributed unwittingly to gentrification, a process which now threatens to unsettle the very communities that helped to rehabilitate the Heights.
The subjects of Bronx Faces and Voices also engaged in various forms of activism to improve their neighborhood. But Bronx Faces is a different kind of book from Crossing Broadway and No One Helped. This collection of sixteen interviews of Bronx residents and activists serves primarily as a primary-source collection. The interviews, which were compiled in the 1980s and just finally published in book form, are organized into five sections: The First Wave, Community Organizers, The Stabilizers, Movers and Shakers, and The Politicians. They focus on the experience of living and organizing in the Bronx, particularly in the period of the borough’s greatest challenges, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Photographs by Georgeen Comerford from the early 1980s complement the interviews, presenting scenes and faces from the Bronx (though not in most cases portraits of the interviewees).
Put together, the interviews in Bronx Faces and Voices tell the story of the Bronx that is narrated in other studies of the borough such as Evelyn Gonzalez’s The Bronx, Jill Jonnes’s South Bronx Rising, and Lloyd Ultan’s The Northern Borough. They trace the borough’s history from a symbol of upward mobility on the tenement trail for early twentieth-century European immigrants and their children, to the center of New York’s Puerto Rican and Latino population and culture in the mid-twentieth century. Chronologically they cover the period when “the Bronx was up,” in the early twentieth century to its decline (particularly the South Bronx) in the postwar period and its lowest point in the 1970s when the cycle of abandonment was worst and arson the only business in the area. Hill’s interviews, like Snyder and Gallo’s studies, highlight more than perhaps any other theme the role of Bronx activists in securing the borough to enable its eventual rehabilitation when city and federal policies as well as the economy became more favorable toward urban revitalization.
A number of the interviewees recall major transitions in Bronx history, including the demographic shift in the borough from a primarily European to a predominantly black and Latino population in the 1960s, and the postwar population decrease and attendant challenges including housing abandonment, arson, and rising crime and mortality rates. Hill’s subjects banded together to address these challenges, forming such organizations as tenants’ associations to stabilize declining buildings (and in some cases purchase and rehabilitate them). hospital advocacy groups, youth outreach organizations, and cultural institutions. They spearheaded such initiatives as Mike Nunez’s Bronx Venture, which sponsored industry in the borough in the 1970s; and Irma Fleck’s Bronx Frontier, which fostered community gardens on the burned-out lots of the South Bronx. Some of the interviewees were involved in a number of different programs and organizations. Ray Velez, for example, spearheaded antipoverty programs as well as housing initiatives, antidrug programs, and voter registration drives from his umbrella organization, the Hunts Point Multi-Service Center.
The authors of Bronx Voices take a very light editorial hand, letting the interviews essentially speak for themselves with almost no editorial context provided (except brief introductions and coeditor Janet Munch’s identifications of key sites and individuals). As such, Bronx Voices provides a primary-source counterpart to No One Helped and Crossing Broadway, covering many of the same topics with a less analytical, more direct perspective.
As noted, there is some considerable overlap between the three books, down to the subjects under study. Activist Ellen Lurie, who fought for school integration, makes an appearance in both Crossing Broadway and No One Helped as does the Queens-based Parents and Taxpayers organization (PAT), which formed to oppose the “pairing plans” (pairing schools with black and white majorities to achieve integration) floated by the New York City Board of Education in 1963. Also in both books we see the way that school desegregation battles in 1960s New York City highlighted the more conservative side of 1960s activism as white parents fought to keep African American and Latino students out of their neighborhood schools, policing the boundaries of the neighborhood became the goal of community activists over the goal of upholding the promise of a polyglot city.
And, again, the theme of community activism and engagement—of the insistence of urban residents to assert their own right to the city—is at the heart of all three of these books. Taken together, No One Helped, Crossing Broadway, and Bronx Faces and Voices offer a three-dimensional perspective on the grassroots efforts to create and maintain community during a period in New York City’s history that is often presented as one of helplessness in the face of rising crime and declining city services. These stories are important, given how crucial local activists’ efforts were at shoring up city neighborhoods—including some of the most downtrodden—to put them in a position to stabilize once the city’s economic fortunes improved in the 1980s. As twenty-first cities resume their position as centers of activism and grassroots organizing, these past examples point the way toward future urban activism and toward the improvement of social conditions—even in the face of federal resistance—city- and nation-wide.