AS A YOUNG MAN, I PLAYED PRO BASEBALL...
AND AS A NEW YORKER, I came to the city too late to see the heros of my youth. I missed Roy Campanella coming to the plate, a bat in his hand with men on base. I never saw Jack Roosevelt Robinson rounding third, heading for home. I never set eyes on Willie Mays going after a fly ball out in center field. To this day, I wonder what it must have been like to have been in the company of roaring human beings, glad people in a glad place in a glad time. Nobody can ever tell me that such moments were trivial.
Some may have seemed trivial to a few, but not to me. There remain a few New Yorkers who still tell tales of reading W.C Heinz in the Sun, or Red Smith and Jimmy Breslin in the Herald Tribune, or Dan Parker in the Daily Mirror; or Frank Graham in the Journal-American; who once ate the ice-cream cone called a Mello Roll, or candies called Houtons, Kits, Sky Bars, or B-B Bats; or once played stickball, held a spaldeen in their hand on a Saturday morning in a street empty of cars and full of hours. They knew what game Was being played at the Polo Grounds. They went to the El Morocco and the Copa, the Latin Quarter and Chateau Madrid, with the gangsters at the rear tables, all wearing pinkie rings, and the Wall Street big shots down front, and the tall women in feathers and frills on stage, with the highest cheekbones and creamiest skin in the universe.
As a former New Yorker, I ache for certain times and places and people. The gifts of New York are endless. Where else can you find so many free schools and libraries, those places where you could invent your own life? They were free because the children the poor Irish and the poor Jews never forgot when all such doors were closed. The poor of New York made the rich better. They voted for politicians who, in spite of their own weaknesses, made the city more prosperous, more just. The politicians were too often corrupt, but in the end the poor got water, the poor got hospitals, the poor got sanitation, the poor got schools and libraries. The poor of the nineteenth century physically built the city of New York. They dug subways and laid tracks. They paved the streets and erected the bridges and the skyscrapers. There was a sense among those working people, almost from the beginning, that you could do all right in New York if you followed the rules. The rules were simple. Work. Put food on the table. Always pay your debts Make sure that the old and the weak are never in danger or in need. For a long time, these were the rules all over the city.
The deepest trouble to the city came in the 1960s, when some of these rules were disregarded, and the glitter of the city slowly began to dim and then to fall into a sustained version of purgatory. If we had died in 1990, we'd have ended our days in a city plagued by drugs, guns, and despair. Somehow our luck held. The city gathered its will and energy and rose again, its people playing by the old rules. And every day we saw its thrilling results, sometimes in subtle changes. I once saw shopping-bag ladies, their rusting supermarket carts lumpy with debris wrapped in plastic bags. They slept in doorways, they babbled on corners, they multiplied and were everywhere, and then, abruptly, they were gone; as were the streetwalkers by the meat market below Fourteenth street, who had offered themselves for a price to cruising suburbanites, who were now free of smack and pimps and disease. The reason was simple. These people were abandoned and weak and forlorn, and the city of New York came to their rescue.
That openness is essential to any city.
But as we inch into the year of 2014, I'm not sure where it went.
Over the years, we have become somewhat dangerous when it comes to the care of others, a country that is now brash and vulgar and selfish. We are divided by political hustlers who tell us who is to blame for our problems. The poor are to blame. Women are the real problem. They all want too much. Thus, the wealthy have become bloated beyond their wildest dreams and the poor are now moneyless and no longer can afford food on the table. We have slowly evolved into a country of hate and discrimination. The problem is not our fault, it's theirs. And what we have lost along the way is the honor of working for all, of being just and fair to each man and woman and child. We have returned to the habit of complaint and blame instead of creating enduring solutions for each and every one of us.
If it turns out that the past truly was the end of The Good Old Days, that would be a disgrace for all of us!
Some may have seemed trivial to a few, but not to me. There remain a few New Yorkers who still tell tales of reading W.C Heinz in the Sun, or Red Smith and Jimmy Breslin in the Herald Tribune, or Dan Parker in the Daily Mirror; or Frank Graham in the Journal-American; who once ate the ice-cream cone called a Mello Roll, or candies called Houtons, Kits, Sky Bars, or B-B Bats; or once played stickball, held a spaldeen in their hand on a Saturday morning in a street empty of cars and full of hours. They knew what game Was being played at the Polo Grounds. They went to the El Morocco and the Copa, the Latin Quarter and Chateau Madrid, with the gangsters at the rear tables, all wearing pinkie rings, and the Wall Street big shots down front, and the tall women in feathers and frills on stage, with the highest cheekbones and creamiest skin in the universe.
As a former New Yorker, I ache for certain times and places and people. The gifts of New York are endless. Where else can you find so many free schools and libraries, those places where you could invent your own life? They were free because the children the poor Irish and the poor Jews never forgot when all such doors were closed. The poor of New York made the rich better. They voted for politicians who, in spite of their own weaknesses, made the city more prosperous, more just. The politicians were too often corrupt, but in the end the poor got water, the poor got hospitals, the poor got sanitation, the poor got schools and libraries. The poor of the nineteenth century physically built the city of New York. They dug subways and laid tracks. They paved the streets and erected the bridges and the skyscrapers. There was a sense among those working people, almost from the beginning, that you could do all right in New York if you followed the rules. The rules were simple. Work. Put food on the table. Always pay your debts Make sure that the old and the weak are never in danger or in need. For a long time, these were the rules all over the city.
The deepest trouble to the city came in the 1960s, when some of these rules were disregarded, and the glitter of the city slowly began to dim and then to fall into a sustained version of purgatory. If we had died in 1990, we'd have ended our days in a city plagued by drugs, guns, and despair. Somehow our luck held. The city gathered its will and energy and rose again, its people playing by the old rules. And every day we saw its thrilling results, sometimes in subtle changes. I once saw shopping-bag ladies, their rusting supermarket carts lumpy with debris wrapped in plastic bags. They slept in doorways, they babbled on corners, they multiplied and were everywhere, and then, abruptly, they were gone; as were the streetwalkers by the meat market below Fourteenth street, who had offered themselves for a price to cruising suburbanites, who were now free of smack and pimps and disease. The reason was simple. These people were abandoned and weak and forlorn, and the city of New York came to their rescue.
That openness is essential to any city.
But as we inch into the year of 2014, I'm not sure where it went.
Over the years, we have become somewhat dangerous when it comes to the care of others, a country that is now brash and vulgar and selfish. We are divided by political hustlers who tell us who is to blame for our problems. The poor are to blame. Women are the real problem. They all want too much. Thus, the wealthy have become bloated beyond their wildest dreams and the poor are now moneyless and no longer can afford food on the table. We have slowly evolved into a country of hate and discrimination. The problem is not our fault, it's theirs. And what we have lost along the way is the honor of working for all, of being just and fair to each man and woman and child. We have returned to the habit of complaint and blame instead of creating enduring solutions for each and every one of us.
If it turns out that the past truly was the end of The Good Old Days, that would be a disgrace for all of us!
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