Credit where it's due
November 1998
There is no doubt about it.
Mayor Rudolph W. Guiliani has done more to change the image of
The Big Apple than anyone before him, and, although I write from
what is now home on an island off Georgia's coast, I'm just back
from a visit to New York City and remembering.
When
I was three, I viewed the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade from
my father's shoulders.
At
four, it was from the roof of his car. At 15, I was a short-skirted
cheerleader in saddle shoes marching behind the high school band,
laughing, waving and shivering in the cold sunshine.
This
year I was in New York watching the crowds and spectacle from
a fifth-floor hotel window overlooking the end of it all. The
balloons flew high in front of Macy's but I saw them close to
the ground on a side street near Madison Square Garden.
At
five o'clock that morning, drum beats woke me and just like Ma
in her kerchief and I in my cap, I flew to the window and saw
an amazing sight. Two streets north on Seventh Avenue, there was
a full dressed marching band, 100 in all if I can trust 10 rows
across by 10 rows or so behind that, marching down the avenue
in step to the da-dum-dum-dum of the big bass drum.
Why,
I wondered. It was 5:00 a.m. They were going away from the route,
it was pouring rain and their shiny blue satin jackets were reflecting
the drops in the light of the street lamps.
They
disappeared from sight and sound behind Madison Square Garden.
I
satisfied my curiosity by surmising they were being filmed for
local television, or wherever in the country local was to them,
away from the clamor of the crowds during the actual parade.
Perhaps
it was practice time and the Garden was available only then. Perhaps
it was for a television interview. Perhaps, perhaps. No matter
what you see in the city that's open all night, you shrug and
say, "Only in New York."
In
1984, my daughter and I made her first visit to my birthplace
and stomping grounds until I married and raised a family ... making
her stomping grounds cornfields in Indiana, farmlands in Ohio
and, finally, steelmills in Pittsburgh.
I'll
admit, I had regrets those years when the children weren't getting
to know New York but they would argue that point. They had four
Superbowl wins in almost as few years and they lived in the city
Rand McNally named the City of the Year. "There's no place 'up'
from Pittsburgh, Mom," they still say.
Our
visit that week in the '80s did nothing to change Wendy's mind.
We flew into Newark Airport and took a bus to the Port Authority
on Eighth Avenue where the walls were held up, it seemed, by rows
of homeless, hopeless, helpless drunks who used to confine their
dereliction to the Bowery. The police seemed to do nothing more
than gently move them along with a tap of the nightstick and a
murmured "Move along." The lost ones shuffled away to hold up
the walls on the other side of the terminal.
Of
course, I was embarrassed. I was never offended by such sights
but I was seeing it all through another's eyes. I dragged her
so fast across town to the civilized avenues east of Eighth Avenue,
she felt like Dorothy in Oz. Things really moved fast.
It
was bad, then. The street cleaners tried but six feet beyond curbside
the street was perpetually littered with trash, blowing around
as honking, weaving cabs burned rubber to roar past the busses,
themselves belching black exhaust and bellowing from broken mufflers.
The
drunks stumbled out of bars and onto the streets; one, a twenty-year-old
in denim pants and jacket holding a 40-oz. bottle of Schafer's
beer, bulled off a stoop and into us to bum a quarter. My instinct
was to push him back but like most people in that era, the fear
of a drug-crazed maniac kept me in line. I'm sure he'd learned
how to cross the line, going further and further from his side
to ours.
From
the shrugs that said, "Well, that's New York" came pledges never
to go there again.
Conventions
didn't visit because security was a major concern. Central Park
became a haven to wilding gangs and enemy headquarters during
the War on Drugs. The buyers and sellers and overdosed users encamped
there and no one dared enter their territory.
Enter
Rudy.
After
generations of staring helplessly at the hordes of humanity converging
on the city each day, blaming everyone in general and no one in
particular, looking at the filth beyond the office doors and fancy
shop windows and saying, "There's nothing you can do," in walks
Rudolph Guiliani. From what I saw last week, it doesn't appear
as if he did anything more than grab a broom.
As
I looked up Seventh Avenue toward the dawn marchers, I didn't
see one discarded cup or matchbook, gum wrappers or flying newspaper.
The streets were clean, store windows washed before dawn. Taxicabs
that used to be fender-dented eyesores now gleam from being scrubbed
at the garage. The parks, safe and secure, are playgrounds.
People
are busy; and if pride is something you can see, I saw it. Doors
are held, a "pardon me" and "excuse me" accompany every brush
or jostle on the sidewalk. It was so crowded that I know I passed
all eight million people there and just one drunk. The Devil's
workshop continues to operate two avenues west of the newly-wholesome
Times Square, but you go there only if you're looking for problems.
Why
did it take so long? Maybe New York needed a Mayor who lived there
all his life and got tired of hearing the putdowns. Perhaps his
immigrant grandmother used to say in her native Italian, "scopa
nueva, scopa bene" -- a new broom sweeps clean.
When I walked the city miles this visit, I was so proud to be
a born-and-bred New Yorker. Yet I could take no pride in the exciting
renewal. To my chagrin, during my generation there we tossed up
our hands and shrugged our shoulders. That's hardly the best way
to hold a broom.
Thanks,
Rudy.
The
following email was received from Mayor Giuliani in response to
the above artice:
Date: Wed, 3 Feb 99 13:29:17 EST
From: MAILSRV@nycdoitt.ci.nyc.ny.us
To: INFINITY@DARIENTEL.NET
Subject: Published after T'giving visit to NYC
Dear Ms. Daley:
Thank you for your recent E-mail. I appreciate your sending me
a copy of your article "Credit Where It's Due". Your reflections
on New York City were very gratifying. I am pleased to know that
over your years of visiting New York City you have noticed many
of the positive effects my administration's programs are having
on our great City. Thank you again for sharing your article with
me and I hope that you have many more opportunities to visit.
Thank you for using NYC Link.
Sincerely,
Rudolph W. Giuliani
Mayor
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