Giuliani’s Legacy: Lower Crime, Higher Rents, Dancing Ban
By Steven Wishnia
"NO DANCING," reads the
sign behind the bar. It’s not some kitschy 19th-century relic. It’s the law
in New York City, as revived by our just-departed mayor, Rudy Giuliani.
Specifically, it’s a Prohibition-era
cabaret law that bans dancing in bars without a license for it. By the ‘60s,
it was only used against gay bars, and that era ended after the June 27, 1969
raid on the Stonewall Inn. But Giuliani--lionized as the mayor who "saved" New
York--resurrected it. In the summer of 1998, 70 cops invaded an East Village
rock club to shut down a Saturday night dance party. Neighborhood bars have
been fined $1,500 because people were dancing to the jukebox.
So some of us who actually
live here have a bit of a problem with Giuliani’s canonization since September
11. All he did was act like a compassionate human being for a few weeks--granted,
quite a feat for a man who announced his plans for divorce on TV before he told
his wife--and people were calling him a hero.
"Racist" and "fascist" are
not too strong words to describe him. Giuliani refused to meet with black or
Latino elected officials--not the borough presidents of the Bronx or Manhattan,
not leading members of the City Council--until after the 41-shot police killing
of Amadou Diallo in 1999.
The dancing ban was just
one of his petty-fascist initiatives. A 1995 law makes it a misdemeanor for
20 or more people to be in a park without a permit--so far, it’s only been used
against witches, rappers, and Lower East Side squatters. Police often almost
outnumber protesters at demonstrations. When black supremacist Khalid Muhammad
held a march in Harlem in 1998, Giuliani cut off subway service to the neighborhood.
Still, the city’s establishment
hailed him as the savior who tamed the "ungovernable" city, and Giuliani drew
around 70% of the white vote in all three of his mayoral races. The biggest
reason is that crime was dropped dramatically during his term. How much credit
he deserves for that is debatable. The crime decrease is a national trend, and
probably more due to the lower unemployment of the ‘90s, the decline in the
crack trade, and simple police tactics like using computers to chart high-crime
blocks, rather than to Giuliani’s much-vaunted "quality of life" initiatives.
But what those tactics--attacks on marijuana-smoking, the homeless, squeegee
men, etc.--did accomplish was to ease white people’s perceptions of crime. Some
of Giuliani’s most ardent defenders are the kind of white people who take cabs
everywhere because they’re scared to ride the subway.
Meanwhile, black New Yorkers
supported Giuliani about as much as Jews supported Pat Buchanan. The map of
mayoral voting patterns almost perfectly matches the city’s racial map. Giuliani
got over 80% of the vote in hardcore white areas like Bensonhurst in Brooklyn
and Glendale in Queens, less than 15% in most black districts, and generally
around one-third in Latino neighborhoods. (Despite the hype about nonwhite voters
deserting Democrat Mark Green to elect Mike Bloomberg, this pattern largely
held last November.)
White Giuliani supporters
were perfectly content to accept a little police brutality as long as crime
was down. He was easily re-elected less than three months after the much-publicized
sexual assault and torture of Abner Louima. That support cracked slightly after
the Diallo killing, and significantly after Patrick Dorismond was shot by another
cop in March 2000 and Giuliani released the victim’s sealed juvenile record.
By then, even white New
Yorkers seemed weary of Giuliani’s bullyhood. He proclaimed himself the patron
of "civility," but couldn’t disagree with someone without denouncing them as
"jerky" or "intellectually dishonest." In late 1999, he made it illegal for
homeless people to sleep on the streets, and moved to put their children into
foster care. "If Giuliani had been mayor of Bethlehem," the Rev. Al Sharpton
thundered at a Union Square rally that December, "they would have put the baby
Jesus into foster care."
But like most bullies, he
didn’t stand up to those bigger than he. He slung insults at the city’s public
schools, but at one point actually asked the state for less school aid. When
the Republicans in state government blocked renewal of the state’s rent-control
laws in 1997, threatening millions of city residents with eviction, Giuliani
tiptoed into Albany late on a Friday afternoon to whisper that he supported
rent regulations.
Given his record on housing
issues--he packed the city Rent Guidelines Board with anti-rent-control ideologues,
and took millions in campaign money from landlords--repeal probably would have
suited him fine. But especially in an election year, supporting it would have
been political suicide. He endorsed the eventual compromise, which basically
gutted controls on vacant apartments, and settled for using the rent board as
a rubber stamp to impose the biggest increases possible without causing him
political damage.
The result: The city’s housing
crisis, brewing ever since the greed-is-good speculation of the Reagan economy
followed the massive building abandonment of the ‘70s, is now boiling. In the
last four years it’s become next to impossible to find an apartment for less
than $1,000 a month, outside a few neighborhoods.
Giuliani leaves a city that
is safer from street crime, but blander and more ruthless. Muggings are down,
but the music scene that once bred bebop, rap and the Ramones is deader than
it’s been in decades. Core Manhattan has become a yuppie playland of $14 blue
martinis, while in the rest of the city office cleaners and deli clerks live
three to a room, and once-middle-class jobs like teaching and firefighting don’t
pay enough to cover a two-bedroom apartment.
|