The 20th Century wrought epic changes in city life. Two world wars helped transform culture. Cities teemed with people from all strata of society. The article vignettes scenes from a New York City neighborhood and discusses the impact social legisl by Daniel Bonner
(libertarian)
Monday, September 26, 2011
Street Scenes March 26, 2011
A national magazine recently lamented in an editorial that people stay indoors these days, leaving city streets to wayfarers, troublemakers and traffic. The hopeful editors pointed to a group of neighbors who reported on suspicious doings of certain residents living nearby. Police rounded up some people and charged them with terrorist activities. The editorial suggests America needs more of this keen, cooperative observation. Still, such behavior would seem to leave city streets fairly ill-populated. It's common for women and men to leave home for work early and return late; kids, out of school, zoom into their rooms -- adult-free -- to explore the latest techno-gadgetry or land sakes knows what all else. Organized sports preoccupy the athletes amongst them. When non-jock youngsters congregate, they visit homes. For the diligent, school work gets done a bit more easily; for others, texting, You Tubing, and MTV – to name just a few diversions – beat out-of-doors play. Now and then, all the same, one will see skate boarders zipping by, defying gravity as they spin.
In the old days, for decades before World War II, and for about 15 or so years after, South Bronx streets teemed, especially in summer. Many people, mostly men back from work, sat at windows keeping an eye on the buzz below. Often a fellow would saunter by, pail in hand, heading for the corner tavern. On the trip back, kids gaped as suds flew from the pail. Urchins would courteously halt a game of “off the stoop,” to let an adult pass by. Some could expertly bounce a Spalding (pronounced spaldeen) a hollow, red-rubber ball off the edge of the stoop sending it arcing across the street, over parked cars, and onto Oak Terrace, a flight of stone stairs. Under kids' rules, this feat was called a home run.
Girls ran potsy games, and they could hold their own in stickball games. Double-dutch jump rope took skill on both ends: ropes danced in cross-weaving parabolas; limber jumpers leapt seemingly by magic through the maze. One pack of kids got the idea to put on a block Olympics. All games were okay. The best of them was the foot race down Crimmins Avenue up to Cypress Avenue, and back down 141st Street. Around the block they came, once, twice, three times. The winner's name passed into the sands of time.
The Police Athletic League came by in summer to help direct games and close off the street from traffic. PAL summer-help gave chits to the eager kids, and this, with a quarter would furnish a seat to a Yankees game. This was the DiMaggio, Rizzuto, Berra era, and Bronx kids, most of them, gloried in their team's winning ways.
Gradually, over several years, much of the street hubbub and clamor slowed, then stopped. More and more, almost overnight, families in the neighborhood got savings together to buy a new-fangled television set. That went for people of modest means, as for the middle class and the well off. Across the country an epochal transformation had begun. True, radio had captured the imaginations of children for generations. And homework was delayed to give scholars a chance to listen to the Green Hornet, the Lone Ranger or (as Gene Shepherd delighted in telling), Little Orphan Annie. Now Uncle Uncle Miltie would vie with Archbishop Sheen.
Parents felt a magnetic incentive to stay indoors. Whereas stuffy summer nights kept them outside on the stoop or on the fire escape until late, TV drew them in. For them that had them, the neighborly front porch became a curio. A sharp observer of the American scene, Jane Jacobs, didn't like the change. Just from the newly hazardous way the neighborhood looked, fewer kids around, less pedestrian traffic, a certain rootlessness, Jacobs tabulated her reflections and came up with a 1960's best seller, The Life and Death of Great American Cities.
She noted that despite appearances, old housing stock made living possible in otherwise hardscrabble places. Socially adept urban engineers thought that big sections of Harlem, the Lower East Side, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the South Bronx were eyesores and needed to be cleared: the term was slum clearance. After that, the 1960's wrought Model Cities and urban renewal, both part of massive schemes to put a damper on the political solidarity of ethnics.
Ever since New York City filled up with poor folks and immigrants from four corners of the globe, squalor jostled with plenty. Around the end of the 1800's, Jacob Riis, a prominent social worker with a camera caught truly terrible scenes of misery that led to outcries against a society perceived to be guilty of unpardonable neglect. Settlement Houses sprang up to help alleviate e lot of the down-trodden.
Some of the roots of the situation cropped up owing to Lincoln's policy during the Civil War. Irishmen, enticed by Union agents with sign-up cash, agreed to fight against the Confederacy. Their advent meant that they would occupy the lowest rung on society's ladder. A Thomas Nast cartoon depicted a simian-looking Irishman descending a tree. It follows that mass immigration would furnish great success and untold misery. Withal, despite the desperation of millions, the United States offered marvelous opportunities for millions. The experience of many Jews, for example, demonstrates that culture, intelligence, and hard work repay the rigors of hardscrabble struggle.
With the advent of the New Deal, housing proposals proffered a new way of life for the urban poor. But despite slick architectural elevations and general upper-crust gladness something very wrong happened. Whole neighborhoods were bulldozered. Thus, alongside immense high-rise projects – guarantors of anomie, existing old neighborhoods had to endure separation from old friends, and the scientific results of treating people as problems. Top Society's success was success whether the poor, targets of its ministrations, felt the same way or not.
America's cities hobbled into the 1960's, its denizens having watched and participated in a numbing hell in World War II. A “Police Action” in Korea. On the heels of the Korean Cease Fire (still in effect) France was wrapping up its disastrous effort to stop Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. The Angel of Dien Bien Phu was to be long remembered for her healing valor, but France's failure was to gestate for seven years into war policy in the Pentagon. The decision to teach the Reds a thing or two would much later turn into a national humiliation. Whereupon The 'Sixties turned upside down.
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