A first-person account, in the form of a childhood memory of liberal social policy gone disastrously awry, may illustrate a meaningless microcosm of bygone New York City politics, or a contemporary, still valid, criticism of progressive thinking, ideals and governance.
In many ways lived experiences shape our politics as individuals, as much as, or maybe more than, textbook ideas and the ephemeral news we assimilate. In either case, family, community life and our developmental environment indisputably influences a person’s view of the world, despite efforts to bombard us with ideological indoctrination.
In the 1960’s and early 70s, Bronx, New York, specifically 30 West 190th Street, was my childhood home. There is nothing nostalgic for me about that time and place. No idyllic memories. No Spielberg or Scorsese cinematic recreation could imbue those days, in that place, with a pleasing, sentimental aura, while maintaining historical verisimilitude.
I would never romanticize the monotonous roar of the Jerome Avenue elevated trains, under which I walked alone to grade school. My solitary traipses with a heavy book bag customary for my grade school cohort. In those years, to my perception, during daylight hours, the Bronx streets seemed safe from harassment or crime, even for children.
Though largely unaccosted and unescorted, we were at a young age acutely alert to those physical threats that lurked in alleys and shadows. The asphalt, brick, and concrete milieu gave us all, boys and girls, a rough-edged toughness, a streetwise cynicism endemic to New York City schoolchildren of every generation. It is the kind of adaptive temperament needed to survive in New York City regardless of race, religion and ethnicity.
The public grade school I attended was PS 33, a short five-block walk from our apartment. That ancient school, now gone, was a converted Spanish American war hospital, at least that was the folklore surrounding the structure. My walk to and from elementary school, in the 1960s and early 70s, was typically uneventful. The greatest physical risk was the four-way traffic crossing the busy intersections under the elevated trains.
Several stretches of blocks, on the fringe of this neighborhood, were tree lined with ornate private homes. But the proximate area to our apartment was densely compacted with six story residential buildings; build before, during and immediately after the great depression. Some of these banal buildings were, in an architectural effort to differentiate, embellished with Art Deco flourishes. During their pre-World War Two openings the buildings considered luxurious.
By the 1970s, however, these Bronx structures were in rapid physical decline, with largely absent landlords, many living in Florida, and the nearby private homeowners were selling quickly or dying off in place.
The racial and ethnic demographic of the neighborhood, sandwiched between Fordham Road and Kingsbridge Avenue, encompassed the world, but Irish, Jewish, Puerto Rican and African-Americans were predominant, though each congregated into respective tribal sections, as occurs so often in the City.
In 1971, the film French Connection was playing in theaters. The New York Times review at the time labeled the film a “hellishly precise vision of the disintegration of modern urban life.” The film captured the gritty landscape of New York City, with a population visibly worn down by economic adversity and the cold, grey stress of daily metropolitan life, infused with evident and inexorable decay. Only the Park avenue elite seemed immune, and of course, contemptuous of the downtrodden masses in the outer boroughs, The Mayor at the time was the liberal, patrician uber-WASP John Lindsay.
That same year, while Gene Hackman was racing on screen to nab a European villain peddling heroin, my Bronxneighborhood was on the cusp of change. For one day, that year, a particularly expansive private house, at the intersection of 190th and Davidson Avenue, suddenly had a huge plate affixed to its front entrance proclaiming “Medical Center.”
A Medical center seemed, ostensibly, like a progressively good thing — convenient health care across the street not a distance away at the hospital. The Medical center was across from a church. My father had cancer and I thought, naively, that having such a facility close by might benefit our family.
Within a few weeks of opening the doors of this medical center, disheveled, ragged teenagers and listless young people, of all races, were sleeping in the streets all around this struggling community. Their sidewalk slumber was not normal. My walk to school now entailed stepping over numerous supine bodies not dead, but seemingly not conscious.
Glass vials and needles now littered the surrounding streets. Occasionally, one could also find in the streets strange quarter-size cellophane wrappers stamped “Blue Magic.” As a child in sixth grade, I thought these were treats from the corner candy stores.
The “Medical Center” was in reality a methadone clinic, a politically convenient euphuism to belie an alienating social service intention. Naive liberal dogma and malicious administrative arrogance can brew a toxic alchemy. The ruling powers, the zoning commission and the Mayor’s office, deemed this particular high-density, working-class neighborhood could best be served by a drug treatment facility.
That summer personal belongings began to disappear from apartments throughout the neighborhood. These mysterious thefts occurred behind locked apartment doors, secured by a fearful population with sometimes up to three or four deadbolts. Radios, televisions, cash, inherited jewelry all just disappeared from families that had very few possessions to their name; families like mine that barely clung to the first rung of the socioeconomic ladder above poverty.
In the warm months, rusted fire escape scaffolds, which girded every apartment building, were availed by drug addicts to use as a burglars’ point of entry. Access to these points of criminal entry came not from the streets, which would have been obvious, but from the apartment roofs where locks had been smashed. Steel bars needed to be drilled, welded or otherwise secured across every apartment window. The largely law-abiding community had become domiciled prisoners, with views behind bars.
Before the opening of that drug treatment center, there were crimes, but a surge of theft, vagrancy and violence quickly followed the opening of its doors. The neighborhood rapidly skidded into a lawless, inhospitable, threatening environment. The correlation was clear and traumatic.
The responsible civic response was to avail the political process to close down the New York City sponsored drug treatment center. I recalled petitions circulating, so many petitions, and meetings with politicians. There were street demonstrations and organized marches with placards and posters, handmade. This was democracy in action; a childhood civics’ lesson.
Constituent appeals were even made to the ultra liberal Congressman Jonathan Bingham, all to no avail. Apparently, the governing establishment deemed the greater societal good served by the methadone drug treatment center.
Given the center’s proximity to a church, across the street, and to schools, blocks away, it seemed like a gross zoning error. Nevertheless, the “Medical Center” remained open and its clientele of young, itinerant drug addicts grew. So-called “white flight” from the community hastened. There were reports of young girls being raped on roofs.
Then, when the sky was dark, and the “Medical Center” locked and empty, the community festively gathered around it, while yellow and crimson flames shot upward into the night sky and engulfed it. Almost a half century later, I can still vividly recall the distinct odor from that blaze and its eerie, floating crystalline embers, drifting over the ebullient crowd. The incinerated methadone wafted over the community with a memorable, acrid, almost nauseating sweetness, enough to preserve the scent in my mind.
It was like a communal campfire. The community was united. Fire personnel on the scene, of mostly Irish lineage, with a full complement of hook and ladder fire equipment diligently ensured that the inferno did not encroach any other building. Their hoses, however, never smothered the source of the blaze. Their professional refrain from dousing the fire was so obvious, intentional and seemingly unprofessional that I remember questioning why the firefighters were not putting the fire out.
By daylight, all that was left was dirt and ash, with nothing standing but inchoate piles of brick. A rubbish monument to ill-conceived social policy, engineered by those thinking they were doing societal good, while refusing to self-correct when presented with obvious deleterious effects upon a fragile population. While the neighborhood celebrated that night, it never recovered from the social upheaval caused by drug addicts that flooded the neighborhood.
New York City personal history as contemporary political metaphor can be a dubious proposition. But, perhaps this history can be viewed today as relevant and that fire metaphorical, if extrapolated to our current politics. For the smug conceit and paternalistic arrogance of liberalism remains even today a source of antipathy and strident political polarization. When ideological administrators, whose ardent embrace of social justice ideals, falsely believe they are beyond moral or ethical reproach, the end result can be perverse, harming the very people they purport to nurture and protect, while, by virtue of wealth and social status, remaining immunized from adverse, unintended consequences.
Across the street from that Bronx corner ash heap, some four decades later, in that second-floor hallway of my former residence, Bimal Chanda, 59, was beaten to death with a metal object in a brutal mugging for fifteen dollars. He had been planning a move out of the building, fearing for the safety of his wife and daughter. Reportedly, he had left the apartment at 9:00 AM on a Saturday morning to get packing tape for the move. I believe Mr. Chandra was attacked outside what had been, decades earlier, our family’s apartment front door.
Maybe the two events, a ruthless murder and the reckless placement of the drug treatment center, are unrelated, or maybe they are in an indecipherable, transcendent way connected in the existential intersection of the millions of lives that reside, pass through, or perish in New York City.
Living far from the City now, in recent years, I would use the internet to look at that corner where the converted private home turned drug treatment clinic once stood. I am probably one of the few who remembers the capacious private residence that had been there and the ignominious history of that corner.
Following the fire, for decades thereafter, it remained a vacant, trash-strewn lot. In retrospect, the nighttime conflagration of that drug center was in all likelihood premeditated and intentional. It was an audacious, lawless action of last resort, with risks entailed, but seemingly necessary. to protect the community and correct an egregious governmental error. It may have been an act of rebellion by the working class of my childhood neighborhood, a poor and seemingly powerless constituency that despite living in a democracy was largely ignored while the quality of their lives degraded.
I do not know when, but I checked recently, and it appears that the vacant site is now an iron gated community garden. Finally, half a century later, an effort to rebuild, with the rudiments of carefully nurtured plantings. If only Bimal Chanda had lived to see it, a tiny parcel of uninhabited utopia, fertilely spouting up next door, protected and secured by a perimeter fence, with the New York City Park Department’s logo emblazoned on a plaque, labeled “New Beginnings.”
Barry R. Ziman is the author of the award-winning novel: “Girls, Crimes, and the Ruling Body” (Archway Publishing, 2021). His novel won both the American Fiction Award (Political Thriller) and the Pencraft Award for Literary Excellence (Fiction-Mystery). In 2021, his short fiction “Will-O-the-Wisp” was a runner-up finalist for the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story literary award. His other short fiction “Flash Bang” appeared in the 1922 Review and creative non-fiction “Capturing Mengele” in The Bookends Review, and was published in the 2023 TulipTree Anthology “Stories that Need To Be Told.”