Tompkins Square Park Riot (1988) - 31 May 1991

There is a park in New York City. There are many parks but I'm talking about one that's called Tompkins Square Park way down on the Lower East Side, 16 acres of walks, greenery, playgrounds, which for about 100 years have meant to provide relief from what even so long ago was a seedy dreary district of tenements. By the turn of the century, this part of town known as the East Village housed for the most part Russian and Polish immigrants and for as far back as anyone living can remember, a regulation sight in Tompkins Square Park was the facing couples of old men playing chess. By this time the racial mixture is of the new and the old, still the children, grandchildren of Russians, Poles, Ukrainians mingling now with blacks and Puerto Ricans.

In the past year or two, the park has come to be called a "tinder box". For a while here and there old men still play chess and children of all sorts and colours bounce around the jungle gyms or strut up and down blazing the air with their booming radio tape players. The new element since three-four years ago is the homeless. There are about 100 of them, not vagrants, a new permanent population hemmed in at nightfall by makeshift pallets, blankets, department store trolleys and other nondescript possessions that greatly reduce the area for strolling, meditating and otherwise peacefully enjoying the greenery.

Nobody seems to be able to agree on the actual social group that causes trouble, they have been respectable working-class families settled in and around the park for a long time and now some young professional people who gentrified one section, they're the ones who accuse a small army of young ragtag radicals who are known even to themselves as "the anarchists".

Three years ago, there was a night-and-day riot that left 50 people injured and 31 arrested. The riot left also a lot of physical damage to the amenities of the park. There's been more sporadic violence throughout the past three summers and last Monday there was another outburst of rage and fighting, which injured 18 police officers. Whoever started this riot, most parties are agreed that the problem is the homeless, they are never the instigators, they are the least violent characters around, young and old, single, families, white, brown, black, they constitute a big visible nuisance the ever present obstacle to having the park used and enjoyed as it was meant to be.

Of course, Tompkins Square Park is not unique; I've picked it as typical of a situation that exists in parks, squares, railroad and bus stations in hundreds of cities across the nation and no doubt in many other cities too. Sooner or later a committee is formed and the city council comes into it and the mayor. That has all happened in Tompkins Square and whatever local grievances are in dispute, one conflict is common to all the cities that try to face the problem.

On the one side, tenants or neighbourhood associations that want the park closed. On the other and amalgam of young families who want the parks left open for their children, but ask for more patrolling police, which the city can't afford. In between are other people, politicians, neighbourhood shopkeepers, young mothers who want a curfew that would amount to an eviction order for the homeless. A minority, but a strong and vocal minority, believes it is right that the homeless should find refuge in the parks, they are content – they'e the only people who are content with the status quo.

The local assemblymen, the politician who represents this district says bluntly to keep the status quo for the summer of 1991 is, to quote, "absolute disaster". A young friend just moving out of his teens said to me, "I don't remember all these homeless everywhere, was it always like this?" The answer I think is double barrelled, "no you didn't see them when you were a toddler and yes it was always like this only more so".

If that sounds cryptic, let me enlarge. For some reason I can't figure, the homeless have in the past 10 or more years grown bolder, maybe it has something to do with the decline of respectability as a working-class ideal. The homeless used to congregate exclusively in the slummier parts of town – they now litter the great concourse of Grand Central Station – but the main reason why everybody is aware of something you used to have to trek down to the slums to see is again television. And I'm sure that New Yorkers who'd never heard of Tompkins Square Park have now seen it as a tinder box of social strife. As for "was it always like this?", the middle-aged people who are outraged by the homeless are either people whose normal daily itinerary between work, home and pleasure never took them into the slummier parts of their town or they never read any history or both.

Recently, I came on this passage in Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the Poor in London. He's writing about the 1890s and he says "90% of the population of London dependent for its pleasures, its glimpses of pleasure, its bean feasts, its pints at the pubs on windfalls. And working men got the price of a pint of beer for hailing a cab on a wet night. A char woman got an old dress given her and sold it in a rag and bone shop for the price of a quartun of gin. Old women with puffety pockets slank up and down area railings, their pockets would contain pounds of dripping, mutton fat and with the price of them, the cook would get some tobacco for her father in the workhouse." You lived in slums in Seven Dials, Whitechapel, Notting Dale. You burned the stair rails and the banisters and the window frames for fuel, the rest of the world was no better.

In Paris, half the population was insufficiently fed. In Berlin, the greater part of the population never thought of tasting meat. In St Petersburg, the condition of the poor would not bear thinking about.

I have to say that I never really thought about the scale of homelessness in London in the mid-19th century, except to recall that Dickens had a large heart and generous sympathies towards it, until I came on the story of Susan Rye and the so-called "home children". In 1869, she began something I don't believe had occurred to anybody else, an attempt to deal with one frightful consequence of the industrial revolution in the country that started it. The throwing out of work of thousands of hand labourers, their retreat to the cities to swell the population of the unemployed and to swell the population of children who couldn't be cared for – who, if they were the lucky ones, went into the workhouses, if not were abandoned to the streets.

In the 1860s, the streets of London and Manchester most notably teemed with listless armies of homeless urchins. The government did next to nothing for them, so this Englishwoman Susan Rye had the idea of literally taking small children off the streets, fumigating them, clothing them, herding them and accompanying them on ships to Canada to place them with farming families. Like the United States, Canada found once it had a transcontinental railroad that it needed people, farmers most of all, to populate the now reachable west. Miss Rye started with 68 aboard one ship in 1869. During the next 45 years, until the outbreak of the Great War, she brought over to Canada over 100,000 English homeless children; they became known as the "home children".

It's a stirring tale and like the American story of the huddled masses pouring into New York in the first decade of this century, it has passed over into legend, but unlike our legend, this one has not been so generally sanitised and sentimentalised. The published letters of the home children reveal that every sort of good and dire fortune happened to them.

You may have spotted the phrase in that recital "the government did little or nothing for them". For most of us, what we didn't see didn't exist and it was up to high-minded religious people, usually Methodists, to start small orphanages and similar missions. Now this brings us up against the perennial the everlasting argument: how much ought government, town, counties, state, national government to do for these people the problem? When did the conscience on the middle classes, the majority of voters first come out into the open and propound the quite new idea that government, not private charities had a prior obligation to take care of the homeless, the poor, the sick, the disabled? I suppose historically, we can put it down in the beginning to Bismarck from whom Lloyd George and his fellow battling liberal Winston Churchill picked up the idea of the welfare state, which frankly Roosevelt a quarter century later adopted as his own.

Thereafter, we recall the names of Beveridge and Bevan and now across the so-called civilised Western world it's generally assumed that government should not do something but everything, but we are now at the point where even the richest governments cannot afford to do anymore. Even Ronald Reagan, who was elected on the Jeffersonian promise to have as little government as possible, found that he was stuck with a budget into the foreseeable future, which earmarked at least 44% for social security and welfare untouchable.

And as succeeding generations have come to take for granted the government's obligation to feed, clothe, heal them and compensate them for being out of work, so there has been a drastic decline in the voluntary aid given to the poor or the homeless, the immigrants by fraternal societies, the churches, the masons, the fraternal insurance societies, the Community Chest. I now know if anybody's done a study of the proportion of income different classes give to charity in this country, it's a striking fact that the middle class and especially the lower middle class gives more proportionately than the rich. The heroes, if any, in this social consciousness competition seem to be the solid citizens who were suspicious of Franklin Roosevelt and the entire New Deal, were always scared of socialism, who organised the Community Chest, took the hat round for the hospital and the wounded servicemen. The Babbits, I'm afraid to the extent that they're still at it, they justify their obstinate prejudice against big government.

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