Of course, the phenomenon of urban illicitness is by no means limited to New York. Parts of every major city in America had the same problems, from Boston to San Francisco to Washington, D.C., where drug deals happened in Lafayette Park just across from the North Lawn of the White House. In these venues, the political problems that seediness caused and the policy solutions it demanded had nothing to do with the actual people and populations who were causing it: people in need of clothing, housing, drug treatment, and mental health services. They themselves were the problem, and the solution was to do something with them rather than do anything for them.
Even to this day, the discussion around homelessness in major cities, New York included, focuses primarily on the problem of nonhomeless people seeing too many homeless people, not on the problem of too many people lacking homes. This was a core problem of seediness for New York’s powers that be: who wanted to open a business with riffraff squatting outside, scaring customers at all hours of the day and night?
More than anything, seediness imposed a kind of mental tax on certain strata of the middle to upper classes, the mostly white city dwellers and commuters who found the ambient unruliness stressful. The sense of menace and chaos that hung about made residents and tourists alike uncomfortable.
The somewhat infamous “squeegee men” epitomized that unease, which I remember feeling myself when my family would drive around Manhattan to visit my mom’s sisters. At a red light, a squeegee man (almost always black) would approach the car and begin washing the windshield with a squeegee. When he’d finished, you’d give him some change or a buck or two.
Something about the exchange was slightly intimidating. He didn’t ask you if you wanted your window cleaned; he just started doing it, with the expectation that once he was finished, you the driver would compensate him for his labor. And this forced the driver to make a decision: either he would hold fast to his initial desire not to pay for a pointless window cleaning, and perhaps face the wrath of the man who’d just done it, or he would allow himself to be manipulated into paying the man for a service he’d never wanted and never requested.
I’ll stress again that this phenomenon was quite distinct from the massive spike in crime. These interactions might’ve been unpleasant and uncomfortable and maybe, under the strictest reading of New York statutes, illegal, but they were in no way violent. They were an incursion. They were the city reaching into your car and forcing you to reckon with it.
Urban seediness was the opposite of suburban tranquility. In fact, the suburbs were where you fled to escape seediness, to protect your children from it. The suburbs were clean, and the city was dirty. The suburbs enjoyed empty streets, while city streets hosted vagabonds and drug addicts. More than anything else, the suburbs were orderly—with houses, lawns, people, and cars all in their place. The city was disorderly, a tangle of people and noise and unclear rules.
Seediness in this specific urban context wasn’t reducible solely to race—the gutter punks hanging out in seedy Tompkins Square Park or loitering on St. Marks Place in the Village were mostly white—but it was inextricably connected to it. During much of the twentieth century, the great migration of black people out of the South had made America’s cities, from New York to Chicago to Detroit to L.A., places of concentrated blackness. And even as the de jure segregation in the Jim Crow South was being slowly dismantled, the long-standing de facto segregation of housing and schooling in the North intensified. Federal policy facilitated both the construction of the “ghetto,” large areas of black residents and disinvestment, and white flight to the suburbs, abetted by subsidized mortgages and racially discriminatory lending guidelines.
By the mid-1960s, cities outside the Deep South had become front lines of American racial struggle. Watts erupted in flames, and Martin Luther King, Jr., marched through Chicago, greeted by white people shouting “Niggers go home!” and chucking bottles. He encountered such venom, he said that white people in Chicago could teach white people in Mississippi “how to hate.”
AT THE MICRO LEVEL, the Nation’s anxiety over racial equality and coexistence manifested as concerns about “the neighborhood,” as in “there it goes.” In the years when black people were moving into neighborhoods in, say, the formerly white ethnic enclaves of the Bronx, crime was also going up. These events were unrelated, but they were easily and at times eagerly conflated by white residents, politicians, and predatory realtors. A semantic shift occurred. Now one could talk about race without ever mentioning the word black. The legendary Republican political operative Lee Atwater once described the way this worked at the national level.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.