Op-Ed at 40: New York

We are in a fiscal mess. The effects were not merely regional but nationwide. We induced cheap labor to come here to glut a full-up market. We created a huge relief program, only part of which should on any reasonable theory fall on New York. We have had little sympathy and aid from Washington.

Locally, we refused to be honest about threatening clouds. We pretended not to see them. Where were the statesmen, bankers, industrial leaders, philosophers, pundits and the news media and advertisers? It is late for wailing, amateur pontificating, the confessional, mea culpa, financial miracles and promises henceforth to be good.

Mine is a youngish, slightly tatty ’hood: video clerks, personal trainers, life coaches, voice-over actors and lots of chain-smoking older women with small dogs.

The night of the blackout it proved a fine place to be.

Out in front of some of the funkier apartment buildings the tenants sat on the sidewalk powwow-style. In the small rowdy pubs, bartenders worked with flashlights clenched between their teeth, tilting their chins to spotlight new customers as they pulled beers and passed out cups of ice for the sake of ice.

Despite the booming business the bars themselves were fairly empty: most of the patrons took to the sidewalks with their drinks, as if there were a special dispensation for mobile cocktails during a blackout.

It was loud out there, but happy loud, no worse than a bombed episode of “Friends.” In fact, there was only one incident that had any kind of edge to it.

The Lower East Side as we know it, and as our parents and grandparents knew it, may disappear. There is a war being fought there, a territorial war. On one side are hard-working, law-abiding people. On the other are the invaders who use the streets and abandoned buildings to carry on an open market in drugs.

Recently, the police began arresting and prosecuting street-level sellers, hawkers and managers on federal drug charges. If those who are arrested are punished with sentences that frighten those who might be contemplating such crimes, we can reduce drug traffic.

Already, however, some in the federal “elite” are complaining that these cases are not important enough for the federal courts. For too long, too many in

Any kid who grew up in the city before the arrival of McDonald’s and the “big box” stores selling books, beds and bath towels can tell you how strange a first trip to a shopping mall was. For us, shopping was synonymous with striding through the city. One day we could cruise a Fifth Avenue department store, just like Lauren Bacall in a career-gal movie, and later spend hours in an Eighth Street bookshop, displaying a genuine interest in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg.

In the city our shopping opportunities had history. We

By now, the Howard Beach story is well known: three black men walking in a white neighborhood were set upon by a gang of white teenagers. Shouting racial epithets, the gang chased and assaulted the black men, one of whom was killed when he ran onto a highway. The assaults appear to have been provoked only by the fact that the men were black.

In the aftermath of the incident, we must restate certain truths about the evil of racism, the need for racial tolerance and the importance of the fight against discrimination. But we will not advance racial understanding unless we also attempt to come to grips with the fear of crime in general and white fear of black crime in particular.

New York is a city of neighborhoods, and I consider myself extremely fortunate in the one where I have lived for the past 20 years. (To me, it will always be the “the Lower East Side,” never “the East Village.”)

Whoever invented the myth that America is a melting pot? It is nothing of the kind and, as a lover of diversity, I say, “Thank God.” The Poles, the Ukrainians, the Italians, the Jews, the Puerto Ricans who are my neighbors may not be the same as they would be in another country, but they keep their own characteristics. Mine is a neighborhood of

On quitting New York City in 1957 where I had been living under the name Jean Stafford, I asked Consolidated Edison to send my final bill. Instead of a bill, I received a check for six cents, which represented, I supposed, what was left of my deposit. I kept it, partly as a curio, partly in the hope that in a wee way I could bollix up the company books, and partly because I thought it might come in handy some day. Eleven years later, thanks to my mean-spirited foresight, I was able to use it as a tactical diversion in a battle I fought with and won from Con Ed.

In the spring of 1968, having spent a miserable 10 months in a stygian sublet in the East 80s, calling myself Mrs. A. J. Liebling, I once again asked to settle my account with the Diggers Who Must. When the bill came, I read it in artificial light and I took it outdoors and read it in the sun; I read it with and without a magnifying glass; each time I saw the same incontrovertible figures.

Over a period of 27 days I had, according to the computers, used up $6.32 worth of electricity and $409.28 of cooking gas, but, because I had a credit of $8.03 from the month before, the total came only to $407.57 instead of $415. 60.

I had the bill and the old check for six cents Xeroxed and then I sat down to write a 17-page letter. I began:

“The originals of these unusual documents are at the frame shop. They will hang, well lit by LILCO, in some conspicuous part of my house in Suffolk County