Inner city decay

On Wednesday, my oldest friend was coming uptown to spend the evening with me or, if you like, now that after Labor Day everybody's back to work and the wives are back from the country, to mourn or celebrate the last days of the summer bachelor. He's usually a punctual man, when he doesn't fall asleep in the bathtub, but 5.45 came and six o'clock and then a desperate phone call.

He lives only 30 blocks south of me, which is to say a mile and a half, but he found the subway, the underground entrances choked, the bus stops with queues going interminably round several corners and hundreds of people out in the streets waving for cabs, like the crew of a sinking battleship going frantic with semaphore signals.

I assumed that he was exaggerating and that all he was saying was he couldn't get a taxi. However, 40 minutes later he came sagging in, puffing like a walrus, his eyes popping like ping-pong balls. 'There's been a blackout,' he said. 'I need a drink.' 'What do you mean,' I said, 'a blackout?' 'That's what people were saying,' he said, 'I don't know what it means.'

A blackout has come to mean an electrical power failure but neither of us was any the wiser until we turned on the television and heard the sorry story. Our main power company had an explosion in a generator downtown at 14th Street, oil came spurting out and caught fire and the power was out on five of Manhattan's 30 electric distribution networks. Only five, but it was enough to cause a power failure, what we now call – brace yourselves! – an 'outage' for most of the island from 42nd Street to the Battery.

This meant no lights, no refrigeration, no air-conditioning in any of the hundreds of office buildings, of course, no lifts running, so hundreds of people were either trapped in the lifts for anything up to three hours or, if they were lucky and had started home too late, they walked down endless flights of stairs. It also meant that all the underground trains were stalled. It happened at 3.30 in the afternoon and went on for four hours, the worst possible time for a city population in movement.

So, thousands hiked home, two, four, ten miles. The Brooklyn Bridge looked like the people of Sydney tramping to their doom in Nevil Shute's novel about the Australian population waiting for the drift of the ultimate atomic cloud across their continent.

Well, to be callous about our private situation, it explained why the buses, by the time they reached uptown, were too jammed to stop for anybody and why all the taxi drivers, hearing about the death of the subways in the southern end of the island, beat it downtown to help, of course, but also to strike a bonanza.

Well, after causing frustration, panic, anger and fatigue in, say, half a million New Yorkers, it was all over in four hours. It reminded young people of the complete transit strike last year. It reminded older people of the total blackout not only of New York City, but of much of the north-eastern seaboard on the spooky evening of 5 November 1965.

However, it gave some old politicians other and graver thoughts. It's fashionable nowadays, it's also true, to assert that the cities, the old, big cities especially, are falling into decay. Much admirable indignation and head-shaking are indulged about such things as street crime, drug addiction – which is most often allied to street crime – about rotting tenements and overcrowded slums. Why, people cry, don't the cities do something about it?

Well, most of the big cities have been trying to do something and the federal government has been helping for at least 20 years but it's never enough because the root cause of the cities' decay is at the roots, namely, the grid, what we now call the 'infrastructure' of the cities. That's to say the... the underground water pipes and sewage system, the electrical grid, the structural foundations of the old buildings and the bridges.

In most big American cities, these fundamentals were planted anywhere between a hundred and 80 years ago. They were made of the tried and true, raw materials – iron and copper and steel and rubber insulation wires. The fact is, which I doubt one New Yorker or Philadelphia or Chicagoan in a thousand ever stops to consider, the fact is that it's these things that are giving out. The physical roots of the cities are wearing out.

I remember once during the late years of the Queen Mary's transatlantic voyages asking the captain why he thought that the ship would be retired, dry-docked, destroyed or whatever, by, he thought, the mid or late 1960s. 'She seems,' I said, 'in splendid shape.' 'So she is,' he said, 'on the surface but the limit is about 25, 30 years. By then the electric wiring of the whole ship, the guts, the nervous system would have to be replaced. It's never worth it.'

Well, it's the same with the cities and what's rough on the city fathers, on the politicians in charge, is that the true decay is invisible to the citizen out on the streets. Today, for instance, is a glittering day of early fall. Smog seems a quaint word you'd have to look up in a dictionary. You can see ten miles away. The skyscrapers are like shafts of crystal. If you stay away from the East Village and the South Bronx and about half of the rest of the city, you're looking at a modern city in rude and shining health. But, if a water main explodes or part of the electric grid crumbles with rust, the people upstairs, naturally, set up a terrific hullabaloo.

The city, any city, must try to keep in constant repair these crude elements of its essential services. Sewage, for instance, and a pure water supply are so basic that no amount of money dare be spared to see that they're kept apart.

The successive mayors of New York City come in on ringing, carefree promises to build new housing, new highways, to repair the cracking streets, to invite industry, to have more music, more theatre, to polish up the Big Apple. When they get into Gracie Mansion, which is the city's little eighteenth-century White House on the East River, they find that while all these things are very wonderful and desirable, first things must come first. And first things are such humdrum, vastly expensive and unseen necessities as strengthening the stanchions of the old Queensboro Bridge, improving the pylons of the electric power cables, de-rusting the pipes that carry the city wastes to the river banks.

Mayor Koch, who's running for a second term, has done very well indeed with mending the thousands of potholes that afflicted the city streets after one Arctic winter and a following tropical summer. These improvements can be seen but no mayor, no politician can run a campaign on such an honest speech as this: 'I promise you I will repair the roots of the city's life. If we can't find the workers who are experienced in these underground skills, and there are alarmingly few of them around, we shall train armies of new ones. This means we shall have to spend less, of course, money on urban renewal, on patching up the slums, on new housing and we shall have to ask new industries who might want to move in to wait until we can guarantee them the electric power, the sewage facilities and the toxic waste disposal facilities. All this will cost billions of dollars and I'm sure that no true New Yorker will mind if we have to double the city income tax.'

Imagine any politician running on such a platform!

New Yorkers have grumbled for years that, apart from the usual rates on property, electricity and so on, they're the only citizens in the country who pay a national income tax, a state income tax and a city income tax. This is as if every Londoner paid his national income tax, his Middlesex income tax and his Westminster or Kensington income tax.

Ed Koch, the present mayor, is, as I said, running for a second term and the primary election to choose the candidates who will run against each other in November were supposed to be held last Thursday, the day after the power company's explosion. Well, the election didn't take place. It was forbidden by three judges of a federal court who conceded the protest of several black and Hispanic – Puerto Rican mainly – groups who said that a new plan re-drawing the election districts for the city council discriminated against blacks and Hispanics.

I don't believe a city election has ever been postponed by court action before. Naturally, the candidates who were pretty sure they were going to be voted in went into a legal tizzy. They rushed off to Washington to try and get the United States Supreme Court to overturn this ruling. The court can never be hustled into a decision, it usually proceeds with, as the constitutional phrase goes, 'all deliberate speed', which means months of hearing arguments, of meditation and, at last, the publication of a majority and a minority opinion.

In cases of extreme urgency, it can perform, it has performed, with despatch and this seemed to be one of them. There was no time to have the nine judges of the court assemble, Judge Thurgood Marshall is responsible for the trials and troubles of Greater New York and he was up on the issue but he decided, after hearing the arguments of the city and the opposing blacks and Hispanics and after getting the approval of six other justices he'd phoned, decided it was too serious to be decided by him alone.

So the election is off – for a week, a month, who knows. It must be a great relief to Mayor Koch and especially to the council men who represent the districts where the Big Bang came. It must have been a relief, also, to Justice Marshall who is the only black on the Supreme Court and who might have been accused, in turn, of prejudice in favour of the plaintiffs.

Meanwhile, or rather before, all this happened President Reagan whipped into town for Labor Day. It was the 100th anniversary of the Trades' Union Movement in this country and there was a big parade up Fifth Avenue to which the president, no idol of union labour, was not invited but he grabbed the spotlight anyway by appearing at Gracie Mansion and presenting the mayor with a cheque for $85 million to start the rebuilding of the riverside highway on the west side which had, literally, crumbled and fallen down.

The cheque was called 'symbolic'. It was six feet wide and three feet deep, or down. In all the fretting over the invisible decay of the city, it was certainly something you could touch and see.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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