“Yeah, the takeaway is we have to find a way to stabilize them here in the community and make them part of it.”
Ah yes, stabilize housing—that phrase was familiar to me, like concerns about vagrants and seediness and orderliness. Stability is one of the things that, in the minds of those within the Nation, define it, compared to the transience of the Colony. I’m sure the mayor really was concerned with making sure his constituents had a stake in the city and felt part of it for the long term. But the subtext was present, too: that it was the denizens of the Colony who were causing problems, and things would be fine if Ferguson could get rid of this disorderly class of squatters who had infiltrated their town.
In the Bronx of my youth, the specter of danger, disorder, and seediness manifested physically in abandoned and burned-out buildings. I found the mayor’s statement about stability slightly amusing because Canfield Apartments—a small cluster of tidy low-rise buildings featuring a communal yard and balconies on a tree-lined block—would have seemed thoroughly suburban even in Morris Park, and much more so in the South Bronx districts of Morrisania or Hunts Point.
Popular representations of the Bronx during the 1980s portrayed it as a literal war zone: rubble, decay, destruction, and abandonment. The footage of Ronald Reagan visiting the South Bronx on a hot summer day in 1980 looks like a head of state’s visit to a hostile country overseas. Black and brown bodies surround his white staff and detail, and in the background looms the uncanny landscape of an urban neighborhood so bereft of buildings you can see the actual horizon in the shot.
In a hilarious attempt to slap a Band-Aid on urban blight, the administration of Mayor Ed Koch covered the windows of dozens of city-owned abandoned buildings with full-length decals of venetian blinds or a shade partially drawn over a colorful flower box, as if to say Look someone lives here and cares for this window! This is not an abandoned building in a crushingly destitute warren of the Colony left to rot by the powers that be!
Of course, no one apparently could be troubled to vary the window decals much. (Let’s not get too crazy with our Potemkin makeover of one of the poorest places in the city.) Driving through the Bronx in the 1990s, you would look up to see rows of identical window box decals staring down from an obviously abandoned building. I remember having childlike daydreams about who put them there, and what it would be like to have the job of window-stickerer, spending one’s working hours in spooky, empty structures. The cumulative effect was precisely the opposite of its intent; the orderly rows of identical sunny stickers affixed to the hollow skeleton of a building that once housed urban life looked chilling and dystopian.
The intended audience for these stickers, of course, wasn’t the residents of the Bronx. They were mostly applied in city-owned abandoned buildings that faced major thoroughfares like the Cross Bronx Expressway, which thousands of non-Bronx residents passed during their daily commute. Residents of the borough were largely unenthused. One resident told a New York Times reporter “They should fix up the buildings, and have people living here, not decals.”
“Somebody doesn’t care,” said another, “or they’d be making homes for people rather than making missiles and giving us decals.” All the while, Mayor Koch defended the much-mocked stickers. “In a neighborhood, as in life, a clean bandage is much, much better than a raw or festering wound.”
“Festering wounds” were everywhere to be found in the city at that point. New York was an empire in disrepair. It was unruly. Above all else, from the street crime to the graffiti to the boom boxes, it was disorderly. The city was in physical decline. The subways were covered with graffiti, streets were strewn with trash, and across all five boroughs one could see thousands and thousands of broken windows.
BROKEN WINDOWS: A SIMPLE, casual fact of urban blight. These two words would become one of the most powerful phrases in the history of American criminology.
Given the folklore around “broken windows” as the silver bullet that once and for all slayed the urban crime monster, it’s a trip to go back and actually read the article that started it all. Published in 1982 in the Atlantic, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety” opens with a gloss of a report from the Police Foundation in Washington on the results of a New Jersey state experiment in which officers were pushed out of their cars onto foot patrols.
The controlled experiment did not produce a reduction in the actual crime rate, and yet according to the authors, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, “residents of the foot patrolled neighborhoods seemed to feel more secure than persons in other areas, tended to believe that crime had been reduced, and seemed to take fewer steps to protect themselves from crime (staying at home with the doors locked, for example).”