The New York City Board of Estimate - 24 March 1989

In the good old days – of course they weren’t the good old days, the ones I have in mind were the ones of the Great Depression, but whenever old or middle-aged people recall the good old days what they mean is the days when they were young.

Well, way back there in the bad old days before the Second World War, we hadn’t very much to live on but truth to tell the difference between going hungry and going on the town was about 2 to 3 dollars. Dinner cost 55 to60 cents, 75 if you were flush and wanted the filet mignon. A movie cost at most 50 cents.

You could order one shot of rye, keep pouring in water and nurse it for a whole evening while you sat up at the Hickory House on 52nd Street and listened to Joe Marsala’s gliding clarinet, his brother on trumpet, Buddy Rich on drums and the teenager Joe Bushkin rippling away on the keyboard, not to mention Joe’s angelic wife Adele Girard, plucking good jazz notes on – believe it or not – a harp. Next night you could skip the movie and nurse two drinks, one a block east listening to Lee Wiley, another cross the street with Mr Teagarden.

One whole winter my oldest and youngest friend from Yale was in New York as an apprentice lawyer. We’d have dinner at home, the four of us, and then go off and catch a movie and then another at midnight. After that we’d wind up at two in the morning eating pancakes and sausages at one of the all-night lunch counters and whenever we fell to reminiscing about some crazy or engaging college friend we’d remember another all-night Broadway institution which never lost its charm as a mischief maker.

It was a novelty store where you could buy tropical fish, toy snakes, masks of King Kong and Al Capone. It also had a printing press, very rudimentary. It printed headlines of your devising on a standard front page – same page down the years – of the New York Times. Where a full six-column banner headline should be there was a blank. It was up to you to fill it.

You picked out the big block letters one at a time, pulling a lever, as in a child’s printing set, then you fed it into a roller and out came, for 25 cents, the joke of your invention.

We had a friend named, say Vincent Price – that, in fact, was his name. He was a large, affable, easy-going fellow with a southern – at least a Missouri – accent. He was a rich boy, one of the few around in the Depression and we had no idea, he had no idea, what he was likely to do with his life. One thing was certain, it would be nothing dynamic.

He was fond of painting and, as a boy, had been sent off to rattle around the museums and galleries of Europe. So we’d bang out a headline and see that the paper was delivered to him. He would wake up and read, streaming across the front page of the New York Times, “Vinnie Price arrested for Mona Lisa theft”. He would later get genuine headlines for doing nothing more heinous than stealing the show Victoria Regina from Helen Hayes.

Or now how about my young lawyer himself, when he wasn’t along? One night, for instance ,this one seemed uproarious, “Eugene V Rostow named Secretary of State”. Exclamation mark. Forty-some years later that wasn’t so far off the mark, he was made under-secretary of state. Some fun! Laugh? We thought we’d die.

Well, last Thursday morning I woke up and something had happened overnight that didn’t make the previous evening’s television news. I thought at once that some old, long-unseen crony had been in town and had been down to Broadway and slipped under my back door one of those jokey headlines.

The New York Times very rarely has full banner headlines, unlike Mr Murdoch’s New York Post which has blood-curdling banners every evening. But with the Times, it has to be a war, or the bomb.

Well, on Thursday morning there it was – the biggest, blackest type across the whole width of the paper, “Justices void New York City’s government”.

What? We have no government in the big apple? No wonder the sub-head read, “Confusion growing”. The lead sentence was just as blunt, “The United States Supreme Court decided today that New York City must devise a new government.” It went on, “In a unanimous decision the court rules that the powerful Board of Estimate is unconstitutional because it violates the principle of one person, one vote."

Well, considering that the Board of Estimate has been there for almost a hundred years it’s taken them long enough to find out that the very engine of New York city’s government violates the Constitution.

The Board of Estimate is a weird amalgam, unique in city government in the United States. It’s an executive body with no exclusive executive power. It’s also a legislative body that makes no laws. It consists of eight members, there is the mayor, there is the president of the town, the city council, and there is, if you like, the treasurer, known as the comptroller. They are ex-officio members of the board. So are the other five members, recruited from the five boroughs, the presidents of the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, Staten Island, one delegate from each.

In the beginning, under a new city charter passed in 1898, a Board of Estimate and Apportionment was given the power to pass on quote “street and park plans for each borough”. Sounds simple enough but it is a grant of enormous power to say which parts of the city shall be built up for housing, trade, industry, to buy land either to be built on or left open for development as parks, gardens, zoos, whatever.

Along with the power of signifying what is to be done with every parcel of land in the five boroughs went the power, from the beginning, to authorise sales or leases of city property, have final control over financial policy. The Board can approve franchises, which means it can say what use any land, huge or tiny, can be put to.

It fixes water and sewage and garbage disposal, the means and the rates. Best or most daunting of all its powers, it and it alone assigns municipal contracts for every sort of building and facility.

This means it controls or indulges or baulks the entire building industry and, historically, there are many rocky regimes in the past hundred years – the construction industry, the maintenance of the city’s underground grid, the new high-rises, the housing contracts, the disposal or repair of warehouses, piers, subways etc etc.

These have been the lively breeding grounds of corruption. Four or five famous or infamous mayors have been brought down by underhanded dealings through them, or their subordinates, with contractors. And because New York City has been for so long under the domination of the Democratic party – it is in effect a one-party town – the pathway to corruption has been made all the smoother.

Jimmy Walker was not the last mayor to resign in disgrace and beat it to Europe. Another, closer to our time, discreetly retired to Mexico. The untouchable power of the Democratic party’s ruling body, Tammany Hall, was badly fractured only once in our time by a cocky, explosive, little Italian American name of Fiorello LaGuardia, the rarity of an absolutely incorruptible public servant who transformed the city’s government for three terms.

But he didn’t break the structure, or dent the dangerously large powers, of the Board of Estimate and once you get behind or below Thursday’s shattering headline there’s no suggestion that the Board of Estimate is an institution that has too much power.

The Supreme Court’s decision is seen to be – on the face of it – an order for a rather prime correction in the voting powers of the board’s members. In fact, the ruling is directed to the special privilege of one borough, Staten Island, which is the least populous of the boroughs.

It has 350,000 people, whereas Brooklyn has 2.2 million people, yet the Borough President of Brooklyn has one vote on the Board of Estimate and so does the Borough President of Staten Island. Unfair, says the court. The votes of the borough presidents should reflect the population of their boroughs. By the way, the mayor and the president of the city council and the comptroller have two votes each, the boroughs one.

What difference would a more equitable vote make? Well, the most knowledgeable reporter of the Supreme Court says this morning, “The ruling is a potentially deadly blow to the fundamental structure of New York City government.”

Well if that’s so, the confusion is compounded for even knowing New Yorkers by the fact – well and sorrowfully recognised everywhere – that Mayor Ed Koch, while generally admitted to be an honest man, now presides over a city government that is worm-eaten with corruption.

At best he has been too egotistically closeted in his mansion and been, in the result, too tolerant of a whole flock of seemingly able subordinates who turned out to be crooked or, at best, incompetent. In the latest polls the mayor’s popular rating, which for several years stood well above 60%, is now down in the low 20s.

A dazzling, or rather a startling, note for Easter. A new nationwide poll taken across this famously materialist nation reveals that 77% of all Americans believe there is an actual heaven and 58% of these people – who have always boasted of their pragmatism and reasonableness – 58% believe there is a hell.

A man who’s been always on the fringes of New York City government, and sometimes deep in it with the homeless shelters, the drug pedlars, the high proportion of mentally-disturbed homeless who scorn the shelters, shown these figures about the majority’s belief in hell said, “Don’t tell me. I live there.”

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