Cruel Summer

A bankrupt city on the verge of collapse, a blackout, a looter’s paradise, a serial killer, a never-ending heat wave, a million fires… good times.

With Stefan's recent piece here on No Mas ruing the lost madness of King George, I thought that, as May dwindles to a close and the temperature rises, it's time we begin to celebrate a truly No Masian anniversary. It’s thirty years since the summer of 1977, a season in New York that was anything but a summer of love. There was the blackout and the devastating riot of looting that ensued in the outer boroughs. There was the Son of Sam wreaking havoc on the city’s already frayed psyche. There was a bitter mayoral campaign involving Ed Koch, Mario Cuomo, Bella Abzug and incumbent Abe Beame that made it patently clear that, other than insulting each other and courting the city's power brokers and influential lobbies, none of them had any idea how to solve the city’s problems. There was a daily maelstrom of gossip and ill will surrounding the Yankees that apexed with a dugout fight at Fenway Park, captured on national television, between Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin. There was a heat wave that wouldn’t quit, there was punk rock being born in the Bowery and hip hop in the South Bronx, there was rampant poverty and crime and filth and graffiti.

It’s amazing in retrospect that the city actually survived that summer, and yet it’s even more amazing that New Yorkers today manage to have a nostalgia for the summer of ’77. In the post-Friends/Sex and the City era of New York as yuppie paradise of Jimmy Choo skankatroids, hipster restaurants and Disneyland in Times Square, it seems like everyone who lived in the Big Apple in the 70’s (and many, it must be admitted, who did not) have come to yearn for the lawless days of disco.

I remember during the blackout of 2003 driving out to the Hamptons with my girlfriend at the time, and picking up one of her friends in Chelsea, some sort of artist/contractor/philosopher with the requisite bitterness of a middle-aged pothead whose station in life had never quite equaled his own self-regard. My girlfriend pointed out how quiet the streets were in Manhattan in the eerie blackout darkness, and this guy nodded and said, “yeah, it’s not like the last blackout… the city had a little more spirit to it back then.” This from a Chelsea-to-the-Hamptons-type Manhattan snot who knew as much about such “spirit” as he did about brain surgery, who was too stupid really to consider himself lucky never to have endured the ravages of this so-called “spirit”, that spirit in truth having been nothing more than a Molotov cocktail of poverty, desperation, and rage.

For him and for anyone out there waxing nostalgic for the Spirit of ’77, it's worth reading, or re-reading, Jonathan Mahler’s 2005 book, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning - which, as you are all probably aware, has been transformed into an eight-part ESPN original mini-series that will air this July (with John Turturro of all people playing Billy Martin).

As Mahler explains in his introduction, the project began as the story of the ’77 Yankees and ended up growing into a panoramic story of New York in that fateful year. The book is organized around two central narratives - the ongoing Billy Martin/Reggie Jackson war in the Bronx, and the mayoral campaign (it seems that the ESPN mini-series will be ignoring the mayoral plot altogether). With those stories forming the book's skeleton, he runs through the events of the year, giving long and due consideration to the blackout and its aftermath, the Son of Sam manhunt, and the fiscal crisis that threatened to consume a city already halfway gone towards consuming itself.

By the end of the book, I was amazed at how in just 350 or so pages Mahler had managed to paint compelling portraits of so many of the city’s luminary personalities from that period. Reggie, Billy, Thurman and George, Cuomo, Koch, Beame and Abzug, Rupert Murdoch, Jimmy Breslin – they all come startlingly, viscerally alive in The Bronx is Burning. You’d think that a book with such a broad palette might suffer from a lack of focus, and the fact that it doesn’t in the least is a testament to the author's mastery of the narrative and what I imagine was a tireless amount of hard work in making it all come together as a single entity.

I'm looking forward to the ESPN treatment, but I can't say that I don't have grave misgivings. I'll leave it at that for now and close with two of my favorite quotes in the book, with the caveat that there are countless more where these came from.

-Marty Noble, who covered the Yankees for Newsweek, on the vicissitudes of Mr. Jackson: “There was a schizo part of Reggie that he could control and there was a schizo part that he couldn’t control. That made him like four different people."

-After Steve Dunleavy, one of Rupert Murdoch’s smut-spewing “journalists” at the Post, had his foot run over by a snowplow while drunkenly shagging a Norwegian heiress in the wee-hour streets of Manhattan, Pete Hamill quipped, “I hope it wasn’t his writing foot.”