Seth Barron - The Last Days of New York: a reporters true tale

The

Last Days of

New York

The

Last Days of

New York

a reporters true tale

SETH BARRON

Humanix Books

THE LAST DAYS OF NEW YORK

Copyright 2021 by Seth Barron

All rights reserved.

Humanix Books, P.O. Box 20989, West Palm Beach, FL 33416, USA

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any other information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

Humanix Books is a division of Humanix Publishing, LLC. Its trademark, consisting of the word Humanix is registered in the Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

ISBN: 978-1-63006-187-6 (Hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-63006-188-3 (E-book)

Printed in the United States of America

10987654321

To the memory of my mother,

and to my father

Contents

Foreword

I T MAY SOMETIMES SEEM that cities, like civilizations, are always on the brink of collapse, threatened by unmanageable complexity, internal strife, and serial misgovernance. Lewis Mumford, in The Culture of Cities (1938), foresaw imminent urban disintegration and chaos, an outlook best captured by one of his chapters titled, A Brief Outline of Hell. Roughly 20 years later, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs warned against the strangling effects of the urban planning that was then so fashionable and doing so much harm to small-scale neighborhood life. Only four years ago, Richard Florida, normally a civic booster of Babbitt-like enthusiasm, prophesied doom in The New Urban Crisis.

Little wonder, then, that episodes of civic renaissance and vitality are so striking: those fortunate times when things go right. Seth Barrons The Last Days of New Yorka propulsive chronicle of failed policy and bad leadershipshows that things did once go right in New York City, and not so long ago. Under Rudolph Giuliani in the 1990s and Michael Bloomberg in the three mayoral terms that followed, the city found its way again after the dangerous decline of the 1970s and 1980s.

This feat was accomplished by reducing crime, restoring public order, reconquering public spaces, and reanimating neighborhoods. Barron demonstrates just how easily such gains can be lost. He focuses in particular on the unwinding of the quality-of-life policing that made New York newly livable in the late 1990s and early 2000s, luring investors to a city that had faced bankruptcy within living memory. But behind that unwinding were leaders whose rhetoric was poisonous and whose decisions were destructive.

Here pride of place goes to Bill de Blasio, a man whose mayoralty (thankfully now in its last year) is at the center of Barrons narrative. De Blasios eagerness to appease public-sector unions, support radical protesters, recite woke cliches (not least the ones decrying racism), squander vast sums of money on feckless programs, and, most of all, soften or eliminate police procedures essential to fighting crimeall come under Barrons closely detailed scrutiny. And the city itself? More and more, Barron suggests, it is a place of squalor and disorder, with the homeless parked seemingly everywhere and violence on the rise. After decades of declining crime, he writes,... New York was, seemingly overnight, scary again. Meanwhile, the citys businesses, already under pressure from high taxes and the mayors progressive reforms (paid sick leave, a higher minimum wage), face endless ordeal and possible extinctiona condition that the recent pandemic has only intensified.

What is to be done? Barron, to his credit, offers no soaring visions of a future city that, with just the right mix of policies, will takes its place with Athens and Rome in the annals of municipal glory. But he cant help feeling that New York can do betterindeed, that it has done better and has ruinously lost its way. He describes a recent encounter he himself had with a seriously disturbed man in Washington Square Parka man (it turned out) with a long criminal history who was, at the time, wielding a crossbow and a machete menacingly. The police did come and arrest him, but he was released on his own recognizance right away.

Such incidents, all too familiar to New Yorkers these days, may not amount to anarchy, a word that Mayor de Blasio vehemently rejects when it is used to describe his city. But, Barron adds, it isnt the New York City that Bill de Blasio inherited, either.

Heather Mac Donald

Introduction:
Folly and Collapse

N EW YORK CITY WAS reeling in the summer of 2020. Riots had broken out after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May. Violent mobs targeted police officers, and more than 450 cops were injured by anarchists and Black Lives Matter protestors. Hundreds of New York Police Department (NYPD) vehicles were torched, and there were multiple attempts to firebomb occupied police cars. Hundreds of stores were looted of millions of dollars of goods. Unpermitted marches blocking traffic went on almost continuously.

In late June, hundreds of anti-police demonstrators occupied City Hall Park, between City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge, and pledged not to leave until the city defunded the NYPD in the forthcoming budget. The protestors indicated clearly that they wanted the existing police force disbanded and replaced by community-based conflict-resolution workers. Following passage of the budget, which shifted $1 billion in funding from the NYPD and cut recruitment, the occupiers refused to leave. Their camp turned the plaza next to City Hall into a shantytown, with violence, rampant harassment of local residents, and defacement of public and private property.

The month of July saw a shocking rise in violent crime across New York City. The number of shootings, compared with the same period the previous year, increased by 177 percent; the number of murders rose by 59 percent. Burglary, grand larceny, and auto theft were also up significantly. Neighborhoods around the city experienced a spike in street harassment and random assaults; thieves brazenly walked around luxury stores and walked out with whatever they wanted. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of residents were moving out or making plans to, thousands of businesses were closing their doors permanently, and the city was facing a $10 billion budget hole as tax revenue dried up.

In response to this unfolding inexorable disaster, Mayor Bill de Blasio made a bold move. On the morning of July 9, the mayor, joined by his wife, Al Sharpton, and a few dozen supporters, painted Black Lives Matter in giant letters on Fifth Avenue, in front of Trump Tower and television cameras. This is such an important moment for our city, announced de Blasio. This is something we need to do for New York City, here and all over. The mayor exulted, We are liberating Fifth Avenue! We are uplifting Fifth Avenue! Plans were set to paint similar street murals in every borough to celebrate the lost history that black people built Fifth Avenue, built New York City, built America. They gave people the right to have... luxury.

Later that same day, after helping paint the letter L, de Blasio went on CNN to discuss with Wolf Blitzer the cancellation of all public events for the foreseeable future, because of the pandemic.

So, no, we dont need big events any time soon. Weve had a lot of success making New York City healthier. Weve got to really stick to that plan... like street fairs. It means, you know, big outdoor concerts, and it means things like parades, you know, things that here in this city can mean not just thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. Its just not time for that now.