There are 8,000,000 Stories in the Naked City and this is the Last One

How a Gang of Bankers and Muggers Decided to Pull the Plug on New York City

A tradition, long current among Indian tribes, told of a remote period when a calm translucid lake surrounded the fair island of Manahata. Gold and silver fishes abounded in the lake; fruit and flowers were inexhaustible upon the land; and above all brooded the spirit of the sovereign god, Manitto! But suddenly an irruption of the great river laid waste the peaceful spot; the roadway opened to the sea, and amid the rush and roar of tidal waters the protecting god took flight.

--Julia M. Colton, Annals of Old Manhattan, 1609-1664

I am speaking to you from the Sun Fun Hut at the resort/residential complex of Palmas del Mar, a genuine imitation Mediterranean village on the south-east coast of Puerto Rico. The trade winds are riffling balmily through the palms, I am on my third piña colada with double Ron del Barrilito, canned dual pianos are plinking Cuando Calienta el Sol (Aqui en la Playa) and right now you are asking yourself, (A) Sun Fun Hut? and (B) If this is an article about the death of New York City, (continued on page 158)8,000,000 Stories(continued from page 142) how come the author is addressing me from the shore of a tropical isle?

The answer to A is, if not, may my suntan fade in a day. The answer to B is that Frank Sinatra has a gag in his patter that goes, "New York--you know, the capital of Puerto Rico." Like all current New York yoks, this contains a virulent germ of truth--and it's not just that there are more Ricans in the city than there are in San Juan.

That's why I'm in Palmas del Mar, the retarded brain child of Charles Fraser, who built Sea Pines Plantation in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Fraser's concept is to take remote, naturally endowed, underpriced parcels of land, build toy cities on them, flog the apartments to executives and professionals who want to get away from cities overrun by them and defray the owners' costs by managing the rental of the units to vacationing families. Palmas was to be Fraser's Big Pineapple, 8000 condominiums over a ten-year period on 2800 acres with six miles of beach. The money came from the Chase Manhattan Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), a dodge that allows New York's second biggest bank to gamble in highly speculative projects far from Flatbush without kibitzing from banking authorities. Needless to say, the Chase has no ten-year plan for turning Manhattan into an island paradise. The New York banks' long-range strategy has been to let the city deteriorate while investing heavily in instant residential complexes where the white-flight set can escape the deterioration. Here's the scenario by which New York acts out its death wish, Puerto Rican division:

First Spain is forced to hand over Puerto Rico to end the Spanish-American War, a land grab cooked up by the New York press as a circulation promotion.

Then the New York Democratic machine creates a vote-buying scheme cleverly disguised as a welfare system that suckers Puerto Rico's underclass into moving en masse to the city, thereby destroying the island's basic industry, agriculture.

New York doesn't exactly lift its lamp beside the golden door for the Puerto Ricans, preferring to pay the price in burglary losses, tough schools and stitching up head wounds in 79-year-old ladies.

Then the banks refuse to lend to people who want to build housing in New York because it's a high-risk area--i.e., too many P.R.s.

But the Chase has to do something with its depositors' money, so it lends it to a guy who wants to build 8000 sun fun huts in Puerto Rico for New Yorkers who want to get away from Puerto Ricans. He starts to build on a sugar plantation he is able to pick up cheap because all the potential cane cutters are on welfare in New York.

As any moron could have told David Rockefeller, people who dislike Puerto Ricans are not about to plunk down $105,000 for a two-bedroom hideaway in Puerto Rico. So Palmas bombs and its $70,000,000 loan from Chase's REIT goes sour. The same thing happens to so many loans in the banks' portfolios that there's talk of REIT bankruptcies--even of sending David on a long vacation.

So the banks find themselves cash short and have to cut back sharply on new loans. If they trimmed their loans to business, there would be yelps of "credit crunch" and calls for a Congressional investigation that would reveal that they were milking the cities to buy into the condominium crapshoot. Instead, they suddenly discover that the city of New York's budget isn't balanced, which is like suddenly discovering that Yasir Arafat isn't a member of B'nai B'rith. Go to Palmas del Mar, have three piña coladas with double Ron del Barrilito and you, too, will see that the so-called New York fiscal crisis is actually a media mask for the capital crisis in the city's--i.e., the nation's--banking system.

In other words, the reason for New York's current fiscal mess isn't that the city's finances have recently been mismanaged. The city's finances have always been mismanaged. The reason the poo-poo hit the propeller is that the banks would rather piss their--i.e., our--money away on pie-in-the-sky middle-of-nowhere neo-pseudo-para-cities than bail out the actual city.

Now, all cities are always falling apart. The trick is to build them up faster than they're crumbling. Years ago, the banks decided to quietly stop building New York's housing stock and pacified the city fathers by giving them an unlimited line of revolving credit, to be "invested" in municipal services that would somewhat compensate New Yorkers for the dilapidation of the city's physical plant. Now this line has been choked off. A deputation from Wall Street has assumed control of the city's finances and is cutting services--police, fire, garbage, hospitals, education--in an attempt to balance the books. No way: The reduction of services will drive more of the middle class from the city, further erode the tax base, further decrease revenues and force the city deeper into bankruptcy.

For a decade, New York has been comatose, its vital processes hopelessly impaired, hooked up to the fiscal equivalent of a positive pressure respirator: capable of delaying death indefinitely but not of restoring life. Now the plug has been pulled. The Democratic nominees for the Presidency could have a head start at rescuing New York. Unlike their Republican opponents, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale are two of the 71 North American members of the Trilateral Commission, whose recommendations precipitated the city's crisis (more on that later). Still, I could throw around all the journalistic shoulds and musts I wanted, but the brutal, mortal fact of the matter is that New York City isn't going to be saved, not by the Federal Government or by Jimmy Carter or by the Tooth Fairy. New York is farblundget. New York is over and out. New York is up shit's creek without its water wings.

•

You dwell (said he) in the City of Destruction . . .. --John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress

In the Sixties, liberals wanted to save the world. Now they'll settle for the five boroughs of New York. Articles about saving the city have become a major category of journalism. All of them share one fallacy: They assume that New York can be saved.

When I began this piece, I wanted to save New York, too. After all, I'm a product of New York. I look like New York. I think like New York. I talk like New York. I grew up there. I went to college there. I fell in love there. My son was born there. My grandparents are buried there. When I was a kid, I loved New York. I don't mean I liked it a lot--I mean I wanted to fuck it in its dark, throbbing places.

I still love New York. To prove it to you--I don't live there. I met a Spaniard the other day at a charming little inn called Hacienda Gripiñas high in the mountains of Puerto Rico. I asked him how things were in Spain now. "Oh," he said, "I do not live there. I live in London. No one who truly loves Spain could bear to live there." I love New York so much that the only time I go there is to have my teeth checked. I've got a celebrity dentist from Hong Kong who's the only one in the world who charges enough for me to trust to put his hand in my mouth. But I wanted to save the city so much that even though my teeth felt great, I checked into a suite in an East Side hotel and began making forays in search of The Answer.

I went to the South Bronx with the director of the mayor's arson task force and saw square miles of the city reduced to rubble by arsonists hired by racketeers who buy buildings and torch them for the insurance. I saw that there was only one guy trying to rebuild anything there and he had to surround his buildings with a ten-foot-high chain link fence topped with concertina wire and close off the streets around them with gates manned by street gangs armed with (continued on page 195)8,000,000 Stories(continued from page 158) baseball bats. The cops call the area Fort Apache. Not only is help not on the way with bugles but they just laid off a third of the cavalry.

I went to the Criminal Courts Building and saw robbers arriving for court dates in the khaki jump suits they wear when they pistol-whip 70-year-old liquor-store owners with heart conditions. They leave the guy fibrillating, peel off the jump suits and laugh when the cop car drives by looking for two men in khaki coveralls. They carry their legal papers around in red rope folders and refer to the judges knowingly by their last names.

I went to the N.Y.C. Correctional Institution for Men on Riker's Island and watched a battalion of the recidivists who make it unwise to step into a city street without a third-degree black belt in Praying Mantis Kung Fu being lock-stepped to a cafeteria with piped-in Barry White. I sat down and listened to a 28-year-old Viet vet with a sweet smile and a gentle voice and scars in the crooks of his elbows who was in for a "bullet," one year for burglary, but who basically mugged people with a straight razor in the city's most expensive neighborhood, the East 60s just off Central Park, to which he commuted every day from Queens. He told me apologetically that he had mugged perhaps 1000 people and that in good weeks he had netted $3000 to $5000.

I sat down with Ralph Salerno, the former head of the city police Rackets Bureau, author of The Crime Confederation, the top expert in the country on organized crime, who told me that the city could simultaneously bring the heroin traffickers to their knees and balance the budget by legalizing the numbers, the slum lottery. He explained that the heroin traffic was financed by the "float" from numbers bets and could be shut off overnight. But New York's legislators were in the pockets of the numbers men, who were always good for a campaign contribution, so that in all the casting about for ways to "save New York," legalizing the numbers hadn't even been mentioned.

I sat across from Sterling Johnson, Jr., the city's Special Narcotics Prosecutor, as he kept one eye on the closed-circuit TV on which he would get a preview of the hit men coming to kill him if the contract on his life happened to be consummated while we were chatting. He told me that the city's Narcotics Squad had been cut from 600 to 450 and that because of seniority, the 175 who walked were the undercover men who actually made the buys, so that the number of collars had dropped by two thirds. He told me that cops are discouraged from working on Sundays, so that's when all the deals go down. He told me that the Turks were about to start manufacturing heroin themselves, thereby eliminating the need for a new French Connection, and that in the face of the coming deluge of heroin, his budget had been cut in half. As I got up to leave, one of Johnson's lawyers came in and asked him when he could count on getting his first pay check, because he had been working there six months and still hadn't been paid.

I'll spare you the account of my meeting with the city's comptroller. You can have a rain check on my encounter with the president of New York University. Instead, I'll tell you about my tête-à-tête with a man about town who has a hole for a face and who carries a scythe.

One evening, while I was at my hotel recuperating from a series of sensory insults otherwise known as a day in New York, everything I had seen and heard in the past several days resolved itself into a death's-head. What New York was going through wasn't just a fiscal crisis of the city's government--it was a concatenation of crises in every area of the city's life. I realized that not one of the situations I had encountered stood the remotest chance of being turned around. And I had barely scratched the surface.

The words of Jack Dempsey when they asked him what he had to say after his rent was jacked up so high that he had to close his restaurant, where passers-by used to crowd around the window to watch the champ eat and it was as if you could file into the tomb in Red Square and see Lenin behind the glass putting away a Spanish omelet, echoed in my mind, louder and louder: This is the end of Broadway . . . of Broadway . . . of Broadway . . ..

I sought an audience with Lewis Mumford, universally acknowledged as the greatest urban scholar, a man who long ago withdrew from the metropolitan myth to reside in a hamlet in Upstate New York. Were the situations I had encountered terminal processes? Did New York still have hope of recovery and escape? Or should I try to get her to tell me where she put the key to the safe-deposit box?

"The patient has a terminal disease," Dr. Mumford told me. "It is too late to operate. We can give drugs to ease the pain, but there is no possibility of a cure. Get a copy of my book The Culture of Cities and read the chapter on Rome. . .."

Mumford's prognosis was so unremittingly bleak that I decided it was necessary to go above his head and approach the world's most authoritative expert on urban affairs: the New York City cabby. Here is what John Mitchell, hack number 152555, who drives out of the Dover Garage on Hudson Street, told me:

"It's a comforting myth to suppose that the city's financial base is being eroded by the interaction of increasing expenditure on welfare, municipal payrolls and the like, with shrinking revenue as taxable corporations and their employees leave the city. These phenomena are certainly real, but they are symptoms of the city's malaise, not its cause.

"Cities are living creatures, as all cultural organisms are, and subject to the imperative that when environmental conditions change, one must adapt or die.

"New York is primarily a seaport. This was the raison d'être of its establishment in 1625 and the base on which the rest of its history is built. New York is secondarily a business, communications, industrial and cultural center.

"Seaports are no longer as essential as they once were; aircraft carry freight just as effectively as ships and are more efficient in that they can unload right at the destination of the cargoes. Hence, a particular location with all the paraphernalia for the unloading and rerouting of freight is an obsoletism.

"Similarly, the business and industrial aspects of the city are totally dominated by communications. It is now possible to sell a customer in Seattle a product in inventory in Dallas, record the transaction in Salt Lake City and exchange the funds in a Boston bank simultaneously, by machine. Business and industry not only no longer need to be centralized but are, in fact, hampered by centralization.

"The conclusion to draw is not that some person or cabal of interests is destroying the city. The city is dying because it is no longer necessary to the social organism."

At that point, something inside me snapped. Every New Yorker's nervous system is the city in microcosm. The ego is midtown Manhattan. The superego is Wall Street. The id is Times Square. The subconscious is the network of passages beneath the streets where the utilities run and, it is said, alligators flushed down toilets as babies grow to maturity and lie in wait for employees of the Department of Water, Gas and Electricity. As the city goes haywire, the municipal workers in the little city inside each New Yorker begin to be laid off. Mine retaliated with a general strike.

Suddenly, I found myself in the most luxurious penthouse apartment in New York. It is now the lair of an individual known as Jive, the King of the Muggers. Jive is as black as the darkness behind your eyes immediately after one of his legion of 16-year-old button men saps you from behind with a stretch sock full of bird shot. He has redone the general's apartment in crimson shag and smoke mirror with black patent vinyl couches, track lighting and a disco-grade sound system that plays Gamble and Huff 24 hours a day.

The King of the Muggers rises at sundown and sets at dawn, and in the meantime keeps in radio contact with his supervisory force, sips malt liquor and gets sucked off by a skinny white female with a henna friz who never says anything. The reason she never says anything is that one night it occurred to Jive that he had never liked the feel of her teeth on his John Thomas, so he took off his sunglasses and bashed her pumpkin seeds down her throat and told her to say thank you, which she did drooling bloody goo, because the young lady knows better than to trifle with the 21-year-old potentate of street terror in the wealthiest neighborhood in the world.

"I got my guys out in radio-equipped player cars dealing stuff to all the werewolves on the swank East Side," Jive says. "They want to work the park streets, that OK with Jive, long as they buy from Jive's guys. If they say, 'Hey, I thank you, brother, but I already loaded,' they get to see how good they walk with one kneecap. Striking fear into the heart of the multitude is a delicate affair--you don't want all kind of trash out there shuckin' on their own. To create anarchy, you need organization. If you really want to save New York, get city hall to legalize street crime and run it for profit. All the muggers be in desk jobs in six weeks. By the way, you know anybody want to buy a snuff film of Staten Island?"

I asked Jive if he didn't think that his activities might betray a certain lack of civic pride.

"Listen, Playboy, what I'm doin' ain't nothin'. There's a war on against New York in which my Continental kids is just sharpshooters picking off stragglers. The assassinations of the Sixties was all directed against New York. John F. Kennedy was a New York personality, all that stylin' and profilin' about Massachusetts notwithstanding. Yeah, Joe Kennedy come from Boston. So what? I from Tougaloo, Mississippi. Joe moved his family to Bronxville in 1926 and the heavy part of his business and political career was conducted out of New York. The family office is in the city to this day. J.F.K.'s financial backing came from the city. His political rabbi was Charley Buckley, the Bronx Democratic boss. His policies were pure New York liberal eyewash. While he was President, he spent a great big hunk of his time running the country out of his apartment in the Carlyle Hotel. The Carlyle was his San Clemente, only he made sure with his 'news management' that he didn't have to read about no Manhattan White House. And before Gentleman Johnny got iced, look at all the New York City Presidential contenders and winners, from Teddy Roosevelt to Al Smith to F.D.R. (really a New York figure who hid behind a Hyde Park image) to Thomas E. Dewey. Since 1963, nobody from New York has even been nominated.

"Malcolm was the head of the New York spin-off of the Muslims--pow. Martin Luther Kingfish hung his hat in Atlanta but operated with 100 percent New York money--the New York liberals' designated black leader. When Bobby the K ran for Senator from New York, lot of people accused him of carpetbagging. His whole campaign was about how he was really a New York boy. All those murders added up to an Operation Phoenix against the most effective national proponents of New Yorkism--'cause that's what it was: an ism that had to be extirpated. You heard of homicide? Genocide? This a brand-new crime: urbanicide--blowing away a city. Goes right on through to the cancellation of Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell.

"This whining about how New York's a victim of Southern racism--you know, that black people was so poor and oppressed down South that they all moved to the city--that 100 percent pure lard. At the time of the Civil War, New York supported the South. In 1861, Mayor Fernando Wood proposed that New York City secede from the Union, become a 'free city' and sympathize with the Southern states. Motherfucker had Norman Mailer beat by 108 years. In 1863, the Democratic politicians convinced the Irish that the draft was taking too many potato eaters and that if slavery was abolished, all the free niggers would come up and there'd go the neighborhood. The Irish staged the biggest riot in American history--1200 killed, mostly black. Look on my wall--see that old print? That my favorite picture of the Draft Riots. Caption reads, 'Carrying Plunder from the Orphan Asylum.' Whenever I hear a Democratic pol runnin' his mouth about New York havin' to pick up the welfare tab for all the black refugees from Southern racism, I think of that caption. If New York had its way, we'd still be slaves. Our being here serve New York right.

"Everybody blames how disgusting this town is on the blacks and PRs. They think before the coloreds arrived it was some kind of golden age, with everybody sitting around Delmonico's, lookin' good in the gaslight. Well, let me tell you something, blood--this city was a shithole when it was white as underneath a Polack's bathing suit.

"Golden age my ebony ass! In 1857, one seventh of the city was on relief--exactly the same as now."

Jive sprang to his bookcase. "Central Park? Listen to Sir Lepel Griffin, a colonial administrator in India, visited the city in 1884: 'The Central Park, so called from being a magnificent expanse of wilderness in the center of nothing, is ill-kept, ragged and at night is unsafe for either sex.' If Johnny Carson had been around a hundred years ago, he'd have been telling Central Park gags then, too.

"Let's see, who have we here?. . . Ah, Rudyard Kipling, my man. New York's streets in 1892 are 'kin to the approaches of a Zulu kraal'--and we know what ole Rudyard thought about Zulu highway maintenance. 'Gullies, holes, ruts, cobblestones awry. . . building materials scattered half across the street. . . and lastly, a generous scatter of filth and more mixed stinks than the winter wind can carry away. . ..'

"Oh, here my main man, Matthew Hale Smith, 'The World-Renowned Correspondent of the Boston and New York Press,' Sunshine and Shadow in New York, 1879. Calls this little vignette of New York's golden age A Night on Murray Hill:

"I was detained somewhat late one night, and was invited by a friend to take a bed in his brown stone mansion near Fifth Avenue. Before going to bed, I was entertained with the probable program of the night. The entire row of houses opposite had been entered a night or two before and completely sacked. I was informed that the entrance to this house, if it were entered at all, would be by the lower door or through one of the windows of the room that I was to occupy. Should an entrance be made into my room, I was cautioned to lie perfectly still and to scarcely breathe, as that was the only chance of life. The burglars enter with a velvet tread, and they do not add murder to robbery if they can avoid it. . .. The preparation for the night was the letting loose of a huge bulldog, whose ferocity required him to be confined in the cellar during the daytime. Such is life in gay New York among the upper ten.

"So you see--the niggers and PRs haven't put New York into no decline. This city ain't got nowhere to decline from.

"And a word to the wise, amigo. I'm a proud soldier in this war against New York. This is Dinosaur City. It too clumsy. Its brain too small. It had its day. It time for it to sink into the ooze. You know, the city budget is more than 12 billion dollars. The total assessed valuation of the whole town is only 80 billion dollars. That's like if you were spending $8000 a year to keep up a $40,000 house--and one that was antiquated and crowded and kept getting more decrepit the more work you did on it. You'd have to be crazy. With 12 billion dollars a year, in five years you could build a new city for 8,000,000 people anywhere you want. You could call it New New York and everybody could sit around and reminisce about rush hour on the Gowanus Expressway. But you wouldn't build one city for 8,000,000--you'd build 100 cities of 80,000. Propping up New York impedes the next evolutionary step--the creation of a network of ecologically balanced, electronically linked, regional economic and cultural centers. New York is a sponge that soaks up all the energy we should be putting into the future. America knows this intuitively. One of my favorite pastimes is I call up 25 people long distance and say I the Gallup Poll. I ask them whether they would want the U. S. to go to total nuclear war if Russia dropped the H-bomb on New York City. I tape the answers. Make a great comedy record. Me and my mugging minions may be the malefactors of the moment, but we the heroes of tomorrow. We the barbarians sacking Rome so they be room for the Cavalieri Hilton."

Jive tells me he has an appointment downtown at 4:30 p.m. but would like to take me to his "favoritest place in the city." We go downstairs and get into a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow pimpmobile with wide whitewalls, turquoise candy flake with coral striping and a white padded sun roof with gold anodized S bars and an opera light. We run every light in Central Park, exit at 110th Street and drive to 114th Street and Eighth Avenue in Harlem. The sidewalks are packed for blocks with shuffling zombies.

"I a symbolic figment of your febrile imagination," Jive says, pulling to the curb. "But this place is real. This is The Pit--the New York Stock Exchange of heroin. Ain't it beautiful? I let you off here. I got to go down to Maiden Lane and meet with a committee of the city's bankers and insurance executives. We work together driving the middle class out of New York to places where they have investments. I make sure there's no such thing as a good neighborhood in New York and they keep the heat off me." He let me out, lowered the passenger window and leaned across the seat.

"Don't stand on the sidewalk," he advised confidentially. "At this time of day, if you on the sidewalk and you ain't either buyin' or sellin', they start woofing at you, 'If you not in the market, get out of The Pit!' " And with that, he hit his horn, scattering the wretches in the street with the first eight notes of Colonel Bogey March, and sped away to an imaginary sound track by Curtis Mayfield.

I had to jump out of the way of a car that pulled up and take my chance in The Pit. All around me, money was changing hands. Men were milling around, rocking from foot to foot, with looks on their faces like the Clay Men in Flash Gordon with Buster Crabbe, when they first come out of the walls. It looked like a mass audition for an all-black production of Marat/Sade. If Dante had seen anything like this in the Inferno, he would have needed five Valiums.

The buildings along The Pit were decrepit and abandoned, their windows closed with Lindsay gates and galvanized sheets. At the corner of 118th Street was the hulk of

Malach's

Cut-Rate Drugs Perfumes

Its windows were smashed away, the inside had been stripped, wrecked and burned, pissed in, crapped in and puked in, but Malach's was still a drugstore. In the shadowed interior, phantoms and ghouls were sitting on opposite sides of tables, haggling over each other's souls. It would be fair to say that the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel with strolling violins playing The Fascination Waltz it wasn't.

One of the cutest aspects of our universe is the way appropriate names pop up, as if God amuses Himself by playing Charles Dickens--the way a poet just happens to be named Wordsworth or the way John Ehrlichman's last name means honest man. My favorite until recently was the lady who swam around Manhattan Island, Diana Nyad, because naiad happens to mean water nymph in Greek and Latin. But move over, Diana. Moloch is "(1) a deity, mentioned in the Bible, whose worship was marked by the burning of children offered as a propitiatory sacrifice by their own parents, II Kings 23:10; Jer. 32:35, (2) Anything conceived of as requiring appalling sacrifice: the Moloch of war." Swell name for a drugstore, n'est-ce pas?

I have been in the casbah of Algiers, where the prices of the unrefrigerated sheepheads drop each day until the flies and maggots gnaw them to gobs of stinking black mung. I have been in Antigua, Guatemala, where mothers will come up to you and implore you in the name of Christ to take their starving children home with you. But there is no place in any city where I have been or hope to be where there is anything as utterly desolate, as totally depraved, as Malach's drugstore. Malach's drugstore is a malignant tumor, a sore that does not heal, that metastasizes throughout the tissues of the city. If New York had the will to live, it would raze Malach's drugstore to the ground, round up the legions of the undead that stalk The Pit and go one way or the other--either shoot them at dawn on the Today show or give them free heroin. The fact that Malach's drugstore continues to exist as you read this is proof that New York City is as dead as a mashed roach.

•

The current debacle of New York can be comprehended more clearly if the roots of the political right's animus against the city are understood. Though conservatives are always glibly said to have it in for the city, the press has never given a clear picture of why, beyond the obvious identification of New York with liberalism, Jews, blacks and other right-wing pet peeves. It's interesting to note that anybody who can tie his shoelaces knows what the extreme left believes, whereas you show me a cocktail party where even one person knows what the extreme right thinks and I'll show you open house at an American Opinion Bookstore. Just as liberalism is 14th-carbon communism, conservatism is 14th-carbon Birchism, so it is helpful to know what Birchers believe.

To begin with, the chief culprit of the John Birch Society is not communism. No, not Washington, either. It's New York's investment-banking firms--the partnerships that arrange corporate financing at the highest level--and an organization they are seen as controlling called the Council on Foreign Relations, located in a palazzo in Manhattan's posh East 60s. The Birchers see the C.F.R., whose membership includes the top industrialists and financiers in the country, as being the ruling body of American capitalism. They believe that the C.F.R. is the modern-day survival of the Bavarian Illuminati, a masonic sect founded in Germany in 1776, dedicated to world government by a secret, self-perpetuating elite. Far from believing in an international Communist conspiracy, they entitle one of their major tracts The Capitalist Conspiracy. They say that New York's investment bankers finance Communist revolutions and left-wing activities throughout the world for the purpose of conjuring up a specter of international communism to divert attention from the true threat to freedom in the Western democracies--de facto world government by the capitalist elite headquartered in the city of New York. They see the UN building as the seat of the puppet legislature of the emerging world government and point out that it stands on land donated by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. They see the Rockefellers as being the most influential element in this conspiracy and view Nelson as its pivot man.

My liberal and radical friends profess to be mystified at why the right hates Nelson so, what with his support of the Vietnam war, Draconian drug law and harsh handling of Attica. The best they can do is figure that conservatives oppose Big Government and must be down on Nelson because when he was governor, he made the state's government bigger. But the right sees Nelson's lack of fiscal conservatism as the tip of the iceberg. They believe that he and his ilk foot the bill for liberalism in its entirety and that the program of their world government would be the creation of a global welfare state. To them, when Nelson arrived in Washington, it looked as if New York capitalism's choice for Emperor of the World Without Laurel Wreath were taking his place under the basket. They had to stop him, and they did. Because to the right, New York isn't a city--it's a plot.

Mind you, the organization that believes the above also thinks that fluoridation of water is a capitalist plot to turn the human brain into textured vegetable protein. But, crazy as it may sound, Birchism is the wellspring of popular conservatism in America. Not the William F. Buckley and Man at Yale brand--after all, Buckley is a New York capitalist and therefore suspect--but the kind you find among the Abortion Is Murder and If Guns Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Guns set in Houston, Dallas, Phoenix and Southern California, who have lately developed the political clout to hobble what tendency there is for the Federal Government to cosign New York's markers. They intuit that as long as the city's capitalist elite has got its hands full managing the fiscal crisis, it will have to put its program for world government on the back burner.

It is fascinating to read the right's fear that New York economic elitism threatens American democracy against the activities of an organization called the Trilateral Commission. Despite the governmental ring of its name and the fact that it calls its Manhattan headquarters its Secretariat, it is a private organization comprising panels of top industrial and financial executives from North America, Japan and western Europe. The U. S. contingent is, to all intents, a delegation of the Council on Foreign Relations. The group's single biggest contributor was--Birchites, please copy--David Rockefeller. Its stated purpose is to coordinate the interests of the financial/industrial community of the "trilateral world"--i.e., the non-Communist industrial countries. Its unstated purpose is to assess the damage done to the geopolitical position of the financial/industrial elite by the loss of the Indochina war and chart a strategy for cutting losses.

The Trilateral Commission's most important project has been the preparation of a report titled The Crisis of Democracy, which came out just as the city's fiscal crisis was hitting the home screen. The gist of this remarkable document is that (A) citizens' expectations of what government can do have risen too high since the Sixties and (B) democracy has gone too far, so that the inordinate expectations of competing groups threaten a governmental breakdown. The only way the Trilateral countries will be "governable" in the immediate future is if both the level of expectations and the degree of participation in the democratic process by groups demanding satisfaction of these expectations are quickly scaled down. Excessive schooling is blamed for increased expectations, and one of the report's major recommendations is that access to education be restricted. Lefties and righties can now join in a chorus of I-told-you-sos as the International Ruling Class/Capitalist Conspiracy comes out of the closet and sends out a bulletin to its members to stop paying the lip service to democracy that elites from Periclean Athens to Jeffersonian Virginia considered politic and start putting the screws on.

Just as the Trilateral report appeared, the banks suddenly refused to give the city credit, New York was threatened with default and the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC)--a junta of financiers and industrialists, chaired by an investment banker--was established to sell bonds on the city's behalf and thereby give them de facto power over the city's finances. The goal of MAC's coup is the same as that of any other junta: Overthrow the popularly elected government and wait for Washington to start throwing money at you. It was David Rockefeller who bank-rolled the Trilateral Commission and David Rockefeller who instigated the creation of MAC. MAC's policies have been in precise accord with the Trilateral recommendations. The stripping of New York's democratically elected mayor of the basic power vested in him by the voters--control of the city's purse strings--speaks for itself. New York is now run by a board of directors indistinguishable from that of a multinational oil company. It is the only city in the world whose government is officially in the hands of a private corporation. The city's sales and stock-transfer taxes now flow directly to MAC through a state trust fund--at no point can the elected officers of the city get their hands on them. MAC's insistence that the city scale down its services dovetails with the Trilateral recommendation that citizens' expectations of what government can do must be reduced. And MAC's emphasis on forcing the City University to charge tuition and cutting the budget of the city's miserable public schools puts into practice the Trilateral mandate for downgrading education. I managed to insinuate myself into a closed meeting of a top body of city government at which an ashen-faced MAC board member, who described himself as belonging to the board's "outer circle," reported that the corporation's crucial decisions--e.g., the transit-fare hike--are made by MAC heavies without a vote of the board. Apparently, democracy even among the elite would be ungovernable.

Where all this leads has been pointed toward by L. D. Solomon, publisher of New York Affairs, in a New York Times Op-Ed piece earlier this year.

Whether or not the promises of social and economic enticements of the Sixties can be rolled back to a lower order of magnitude without social upheaval is being tested in New York City.

New York was not selected by political design for this role but rather by circumstance. But had the selection been a conscious one, it could not have been more fitting. For New York has been the nation's leading protagonist of social equality and upward mobility.

If New York is able to offer reduced social services without civil disorder, it will prove that it can be done in the most difficult environment in the nation. . ..

For the moment, New York's emerging policies of less are not being widely discussed publicly. Nor are they being viewed by conservatives and liberals alike as the beginning of structural social change. These policies are being adopted not for any long social view but under the umbrella of fiscal necessity. . .. In the name of fiscal survival, the entire political power base of this city has been emasculated and constitutional privileges abridged. . ..

The emerging policies of less . . . challenge the idea of rising expectations.

Solomon's perception of MAC's attempt to lower expectations and services in New York as a pilot project for the rest of the country is brilliant and ominous. But though it is true that "New York's emerging policies of less" are not being viewed as the beginning of social change, they are the beginning of structural social change. These policies are being adopted for a long social view--that of the Trilateral report. Yes, they are being adopted "under the umbrella of fiscal necessity." But who created that fiscal necessity? The big banks who suddenly refused to roll over the city's tax-anticipation notes--whose chief spokesman is the ubiquitous David Rockefeller.

New York has been, as Solomon notes, the nation's leading protagonist of social equality and upward mobility--the very trends that the Trilateral report's author, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, sees as endangering the "governability of democracies." Where better to set about attacking these trends? At the same time, New York happens to be the home of the financial/industrial elite that is speaking to itself through that report--and therefore the most convenient and plausible place for it to begin lowering the boom. What's going on in New York is an attempt on the part of the city's financial titans to test their post-Vietnam social theories on 8,000,000 human subjects. This theory becomes especially compelling when you consider this: They had to lower the boom somewhere.

Lower Manhattan, the financial capital of the world, amounts to a separate city from midtown Manhattan. It is physically separated by miles of industrial and residential buildings. It is ethnically separated by the exclusion of the Irish, Italians, eastern European Jews and, of course, blacks and Puerto Ricans from decision-making roles in the financial industry. Most New Yorkers seldom venture into it. Even people who are born in the city and work all their lives in midtown almost never go there. It doesn't even feel like New York--it could just as well be Philadelphia.

We should not, however, be surprised that Wall Street has taken over the government of the city. The financial district was the original city of New York. It was the hub of commercial activity when Park Avenue and Madison Avenue were cow pasture. After the Civil War, as the city crept up the island, it became the neighborhood from which the Morgans and Goulds and Fisks directed the construction of America's railroads and the cornering of its natural resources. New York visualized itself as colonizing the interior and called itself the Empire City. It is the only area of New York that still performs essentially the same economic function it did 100 years ago. It is the embassy of the 19th Century in a city lurching toward the 21st. Mercifully, it left the city's government alone until now. It was more interested in tinkering with governments in Latin America and Asia and didn't want to soil its cuffs scrabbling with micks, wops, yids, niggers and spicks over comfort stations in parks. But now it has no choice.

What the media have presented as a fiscal crisis of the city's government is, in fact, a capital crisis of the city's financial community. The city government borrowed for ten years to cover its deficits and made all its loan payments on time. What precipitated the current debacle is not that the city was delinquent on its loans but that the banks have no money to lend it.

The biggest problem facing capitalism today is not enough capital. That is, not enough money left over after the 'immediate demands of society are met to pay for the replacement and expansion of its physical plant, residential and industrial. The underlying reason for this capital shortfall is the creation of an unprecedentedly vast middle class. This has put more and more of the national income into the hands of people who want to use it to improve their current standard of living and have little left over to invest in replacement and expansion. At the same time, in order to build housing and industrial facilities to service this vast group, more and more capital is required.

Wall Street's great hope for averting a capital crisis was the idea of opening the Asian mainland to Western industry as a source of inexpensive raw materials and labor. Less capital would have to be extracted from the middle class if the goods they demanded could be manufactured from dirt-cheap raw materials by coolie labor. Our war with Japan was over who would get to rip off China and Indochina. But while the U. S. and Japan were at each other's throats, the Communists took over and shut out capitalism forever.

That left Indochina. The Vietnam war was a project of the State Department, the CIA and the Defense Department--respectively the diplomatic, intelligence and military arms of New York's investment banks and downtown law firms, whose partners shuttle from roles in Wall Street to roles in those Washington agencies. It was undertaken on behalf of Wall Street's primary clientele, the multinational corporations headquartered in the city. Its ultimate purpose was to head off the capital crisis in three ways--by turning Southeast Asia into a market for the multinationals' products, with the resultant profits to be used for capital purposes; by creating an additional pool of cheap labor to delay the need for radical automation, with its enormous capital requirements; and by undercutting Japan, Taiwan and Korea as assembly points for clothing, cars and electronic equipment bound for the U. S., so that Americans would be able to bank savings that would then be available as capital.

It was New York that lost the Vietnam war. The fall of Indochina precipitated a capital crisis on Wall Street. First the market in new stock issues collapsed. Then the Arabs, emboldened by the spectacle of a U. S. rout, jacked up the oil price, immediately reducing the amount of money the Western middle class had left over for saving and investment. Inflation simultaneously increased the cost of capital goods and decreased further the middle class's capacity to contribute capital.

The New York banks found themselves in the position of a loan shark with ten customers who finds that his bank roll has been cut by ten percent. He has the choice of lending each of his customers ten percent less than he needs or giving nine everything they need and throwing the tenth to the wolves. The first way. he's got ten people mad at him. The second way, he's got nine who love him and one being eaten.

Wall Street decided to take the second course. One major customer had to be cut loose. It had to be a governmental entity, because the Street owes its primary allegiance to the business community. New York was a likely fall guy. For one thing, it was the biggest borrower in the country, public or private, besides the Federal Government. To be sure, it had always paid the vigorish on time. But it had such a reputation for being a spendthrift that the nine other customers would figure that the shark had good cause to be nervous. What about the money the guy already owed? The shark decided to send some of his boys in to run the guy's candy store and make sure the guy didn't put his hand into the till to pay for his own survival. That is, the Municipal Assistance Corporation was created by the banks and investment banks to stand at the city's cash register and supervise the reduction of services. Wall Street, you see, doesn't need any municipal services. It's packed in the daytime and empty at night, so there's no street crime. Garbage collection is done by private carters. Nobody lives there, so it doesn't care about schools. Its key personnel come from Harvard and Yale and Princeton, so it has no need for the City University. Its buildings are fireproof and there are no beds to smoke in. Its employees all have Blue Cross, so it doesn't need city hospitals.

So the main domino that has fallen after Saigon is New York City. Wall Street couldn't take Hanoi, so it has taken New York. Its rationale for doing so is identical to its rationale for having become involved in Vietnam. Felix Rohatyn, the investment banker who heads MAC. says as much. The city's default, he told The Wall Street Journal, would create a "social and cultural catastrophe. I've been telling people we'd probably have to bring the troops home from Germany to keep order." We had to destroy the city in order to save it . . ..

Rohatyn is explicit on the relationship between the capital crisis and New York's troubles. "Lockheed, Eastern Airlines and New York all have fundamentally the same problem of a large organization that has been used to living in an environment where capital is in surplus," he says. "But that's coming to an end in Western democracies. You're going to find greater dislocations in our systems because capital is in short supply."

New York's current crisis, then, goes deeper than a temporary fiscal crisis of its government. MAC's enforcement of the Trilateral demand for a lowering of expectations represents the initiation of the final terminal process. The city's moral raison d'être has historically been the fulfillment of expectations--by using intensive municipal services in the areas of health and education to process the poor into the middle class. High expectations are New York's basic natural resource. Lowering them will be like lowering the amount of sunshine reaching Miami.

•

My quest for a level of urban truth that goes beyond even the penetrating insights expressed to me recently by Milton Berle--that New York is in a sad state and that Mayor Beame is a little short--has taken me to the two cities on earth that are most unlike each other, and I don't mean L.A. and San Francisco.

One is Tikal. Tikal is located in the midst of the Petén wilderness of northern Guatemala, a vast, steaming flatland overgrown with mahogany and sapodilla. The sapodilla is the tree from which chewing gum comes, and the chicle gatherers who hacked their way into the Petén spoke of hills in the midst of the jungle. These hills were excavated and it was discovered that they were not hills at all but huge temple pyramids on which soil had collected and trees had grown. Inscriptions were found identifying the pyramids as the temples of Tikal, the fabled Lost City of the Mayans. University of Pennsylvania archaeologists restored a small portion of Tikal, which for 1000 years was the foremost center of Mayan culture. They say that 1100 years ago, at the height of Mayan civilization, Tikal was suddenly abandoned by its residents. There is no evidence of flood, plague, pestilence, famine, earthquake or war. fiscal crisis or white flight. All the Mayans just picked up their marbles and split. No one has the slightest idea why. I climbed the Temple of the Giant Jaguar, which at 254 feet was the tallest structure in the Western Hemisphere until the construction of New York's Flatiron Building in 1902. I looked out over what was once Tikal and aside from the restored temples at the center, there was nothing but the green canopy of mahogany and sapodilla extending to a circular horizon that rippled in the heat.

The other city is Jerusalem. It is located in the midst of the Judaean desert of Israel. Jerusalem was founded by the Jebusites 4000 years ago. It has been conquered by the Israelites, the Egyptians, the Philistines, the Arabians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Seleucids, the Romans, the Saracens, the Crusaders, the Mamelukes, the Ottomans, the Jordanians and the Israelis. Five times it has been razed to the ground and its population scattered. Five times it has been rebuilt and repopulated. Many who live there today are descendants of the people who lived there 3400 years ago. At the heart of the Old City is the Western Wall, which is a portion of the retaining wall of the Temple Mount built by Herod the Great 1996 years ago. Just to the left of the wall is a gallery in which there is a hole four feet in diameter, dug by an archaeologist who was looking for the base of Herod's wall but was not able to reach it. I looked into this electrically lit well. The neatly dressed stones of Herod's wall were visible all the way to the bottom of the hole, some 45 feet. The hole had been dug through what looked like solid rock. In other words, the floor upon which I stood was at least 45 feet higher than the street level of 2000 years ago. And somehow, seven and one half stories of solid rock had accumulated above the ancient street--obviously, the rubble of buildings built and destroyed, built and destroyed, built and destroyed, built and destroyed, built and destroyed. And at the time that Herod built his wall, the city was already 2000 years old. Directly opposite the wall is the new Jewish Quarter, which is being built on the rubble of the old Jewish Quarter, which was destroyed by the Jordanians after they conquered the city in 1948. The process of destruction and rebuilding continues.

So there are two polar types of cities. There are those whose residents walk away from them while their buildings still stand and there are those that are rebuilt again and again--and again and again and again--on the same spot by the spiritual descendants of the same people.

Which type of city do you think New York is? Do you think that archaeologists 1100 years from now will be clearing ailanthus trees away from the walls of the Waldorf-Astoria and speculating as to why its occupancy rate suddenly dropped to zero? Or do you think that 1996 years from now, the level of Times Square will have risen seven and a half stories and that you will be able to look down through 45 feet of solid rock and see the top of a sign that says A New Comedy by Neil Simon?

It is clear to anyone who isn't either deluding himself or selling something that the day of New York, the Empire City, the Big Apple, is over. The fiscal crisis is the least of it--it is as if the patient in the hospital dying of cancer runs out of money. The Federal Government may pay his bill, but it can't cure his disease. New York's residents are, indeed, walking away from it. To counter that they are walking away from Cleveland and Detroit, too, that the city's problems are not peculiar to New York but typical of America's cities, is to argue that the guy in the hospital isn't really dying, comparatively speaking, because the symptoms of the moribund men in the adjoining room are just as bad.

But New York is only 361 years old--I say only because from the standpoint of a Mexican, an Italian, a Greek, an Egyptian, an Israeli, an Iranian, an Indian, a Chinese or an urban historian, 361 years in the life of a city is an infinitesimally brief snippet. On the one hand, this makes New York such a recent phenomenon that to assume that it will continue to exist indefinitely is the height of presumption. On the other hand, the city is so young that what now seem to be terminal processes may merely be childhood diseases that it will outgrow and that will supply it with antibodies that will make it immune to recurrences. New York was originally founded as the port of the Dutch beaver trade. If the city was able to survive the falling out of fashion of beaver hats, it is conceivable that it could survive the falling out of fashion of imperialism.

"This happens in history," Lewis Mumford told me. "Cities the. But sometimes they've got enough residual toughness to hang on until a new generation arises to breathe life into them again."

So tune in to the November 2976 Playboy and find out the answer to the journalistic question, "Is there life after urban death?" In the meantime: New York is dead! Long live New York!