Letter From New York

IN THE FIRST few weeks after I moved back to New York City this summer, Mayor Ed Koch announced crack-downs on sidewalk vendors, panhandlers, street entrepreneurs who wash your car windows while you’re waiting for the light to change, and carriage drivers who don’t clean up the manure their horses leave in the street. I was impressed that the Mayor had apparently managed to solve the problems of poverty, homelessness, inade-quate schools, street crime, and municipal corruption while I was away. Then I took a closer look around.

New York has always been a city where you had to ignore a lot of what was going on around you in order to stay sane. But these days it’s getting harder to do, at least if you take the subways to work, as millions of New Yorkers must each day. Now, the New York subways — with their incompre-hensible alphabet route maps, the deafening grind of metal against metal, the sardine-can ambience of trains at rush hour, the menacing, cavernous subterranean passage-ways — have never been the most pleasant form of urban transportation.

But now the subways are filled with destitute homeless people. This city has always had terrible pockets of poverty, but they were — at least to people who didn’t live in them — something you drove by on the way to Connecticut. For a white middle-class New Yorker poverty was seen through a car window —it was a view of abandoned tenements in Harlem or the South Bronx. A few years ago the Mayor came up with a plan to conceal even that, ordering the Buildings Department to paste large decals over the shattered and boarded-up windows, so we could see instead a Potemkin village of lace curtains, plants, and the occasional dozing house cat.

Decals notwithstanding, these days it is nearly impossible to avoid running into some of those who fell through the mythical safety net of the “Reagan recovery” or were trampled over in the city’s craven conces-sions to rapacious developers. Cup-rattling beggars patrol the trains. Warm in the winter and —amazingly, thanks to some actual progress in renovating the rolling car stock — cool in the summer, the subway cars provide hundreds of homeless people with a place to sleep each night.

Entering the subway lately, you are likely to encounter enterprising young criminals who jam the token slots (which gives them control of the entry turnstiles) and take your tokens as they pass you through. Offensive as this practice is — and it costs the system thousands of dollars in revenue each day — it may be an improvement over the previous trend in subway crime, token-sucking. (Yes, right out of the slot and into their mouths.)

Hard times have produced all kinds of entrepreneurs. After some initial resistance by the Transit Authority, there are now musicians performing on nearly every platform in the subway system — everything from a cappella singers to players of steel drums. This can provide an occasional uplifting moment in the periods of waiting that characterize subway travel. But then there will be a string quartet competing with a jazz combo on the opposite platform and the roar of the train into the station is actually a welcome relief.

NOT ALL the new entrepreneurs are below ground, of course. Near the stairs at the Times Square subway station one day recently, was a man trying in vain to lift up a large board that served as a bridge over a tremendous puddle caused by heavy rains. The man was furious because he had placed the board there so he could stand in front of it like a troll and collect contributions from grateful New Yorkers, who instead, in another great New York tradition, pushed him out of the way. Then there are the container collectors. A few years back, the state legislature passed a law, designed as an environmental protection measure, mandating a five-cent deposit and return on bottles and cans. In the Dickensian New York City of 1988, this has turned into an income transfer program. Now street people sift through every garbage can in the city and major supermarkets look like welfare offices, with long lines of poor people waiting to redeem their bottles for cash. A recent column in New York Newsday suggested, only half in jest, that the city’s environmental and poverty problems could be further addressed by extending the bounty concept to newspapers and animal wastes.

Any visitor here during the last several years knows that the increase in poverty and homelessness exists simultaneously with, and in sharp contrast to, a sustained expansion of the luxury sector. There seems to be no shortage of investment bankers, commodities traders, and corporate lawyers who can afford a $3,000 rental or a $500,000 co-op; those whose tastes run to fresh verdicchio, squid-ink fettucini, and sun-dried tomatoes can indulge themselves in the hundreds of new restaurants and food shops scattered from one end of Manhattan to the other.

This is an impressionistic portrait, to be sure, but cold statistics tell the same story. A priest friend told me that 65 percent of the funerals in his Black parish in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn are for addicts dead from AIDS. A recent report from the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies shows that 40 percent of all homeless families entering the city’s shelter system include pregnant women or new-borns and that one in three of the city’s children live 75 percent below the poverty line.

Meanwhile the Mayor crusades against the panhandlers and street entrepreneurs who symbolize the underside of the city’s much-touted economic recovery, makes regular pronouncements on foreign policy matters from Israel to Ireland, touts a dress code and the Pledge of Allegiance as reforms for a school system where the majority of Black and Hispanic students drop out before graduation, and campaigns for amending the due process guarantees of the U.S. Constitution to advance the “war on drugs.- All the while he governs a city that spends not a single municipal dollar on drug rehabilitation — where pregnant women addicts who want to kick their habits must take their places on a waiting list for the few federal- and state-funded slots available.

It’s often said that people get the leaders they deserve, but New Yorkers deserve better than this. Will they get it? With the national election out of the way, the city is now beginning to focus on next year’s mayoral race, where Ed Koch is determined to win an unprecedented fourth term. There is a long line of potential challengers, and a stack of polls testifying to the Mayor’s vulnerability. But no one counts out this expert practitioner of the politics of distrac-tion and division.