The Turnstile Jumper

November 19, 2013

     When you have lived in New York City as long as I have, there are signs you watch for that the City is changing --for the better, or the worse.

       For example, in the fifties, robberies of grocers were frequently "crimes of opportunity" as the police call them.  My father was a grocer who ran a basement store above a tenement in the 1950s and early 60s, so I can testify to what that means from personal experience.

      In the 1950s and 1960s, grocery stores were more common than supermarkets, and "superstores" like "COSTCO" or Trader Joe's didn't exist.  The grocery stores were run either by chains, like A&P, KeyFood, Red Apple, or --in the up-market neighborhoods-- Gristede's.  Or they were "Mom and Pop" operations.  On weeknights, the "Mom and Pop" groceries stayed open much later than the chains, and they would open on Sundays, when the chains were closed.  They would flout the "blue laws" by selling beer, which was prohibited, but frequently requested on weekends.  And they paid out a sort of "protection" to the police by making them free sandwiches and letting them take a beer without taking payment.  (The practice outraged my mother, but my father knew better than not to play along.)   Small grocers in poor or marginal neighborhoods worked longer hours than everybody else, and being available at all hours without the benefit of the security guards supermarkets employed, made grocers vulnerable to armed robbery.  

      My father's grocery was smack dab in the middle of the north side of 65th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenues, a rather posh block.  However, it was down the street from "Lincoln Square", which itself adjoined a famously crime-ridden area known as "San Juan Hill".  And while the other side of the street was affluent, if not elegant, our side of the street was dicey, with prostitutes working the "Lido Hotel" down the street towards Columbus Avenue.  (The former "Lido" is now a perfectly respectable apartment building that survived the building of Lincoln Center, unlike where we lived.)

    My father kept the cans and quart bottles of beer in a refrigerator at the end of the corridor customers came into off the stairs into the store.  If a customer could not find what he wanted in the refrigerator, or my mother was not there to help, he would have to leave the register unattended and walk down his side of the corridor to the refrigerator to get beer for them.  The quart bottles were on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator.

     One day a young man came in and, after snuffling in the refrigerator, said he could not find what he was looking for.  My father came out and kneeling down in front of the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, handed him the quart bottle of "Colt 45" malt liquor he asked for.

     The young man broke the bottle over my father's head, ran to the register and emptied it, leaving the store as fast as his legs would carry him.  My father actually managed to overtake the thief in an alley, with the police in hot pursuit.  The thief was apprehended and my father went to Roosevelt Hospital and had his head tended to.  My mother kept with her important papers a newspaper report (including a photo of my father, with bandaged head) of the incident carried in The Daily News.  The story described my father as a mild-mannered man whose outrage at the manner of the robbery spurred him to action.  That the two policemen at the scene were the O'Hara brothers, who worked in adjoining precincts, gave the piece that added local color that was a specialty of Daily News stories then.

     A few years later, heroin began its relentless incursion into the lives of the vulnerable poor, who had previously resorted to alcohol to blur the hard edges of their existence.  The nature of the crimes committed changed with the coming of heroin to the neighborhood.  The compulsion to feed the habit made addicts steal and to use guns to intimidate those they wished to rob.

     When I was growing up in the 1960s, Sherman Square and adjoining Verdi Park were jointly called "Needle Park", because of the prevalence of heroin addicts shooting up amid the green spaces.  Those were also the days when no one walked in Central Park after dark unless it was before or after a performance of Shakespeare in the Park, when there was some protection in leaving with the crowd.

      In the 1980s and 90s, New York took another nose dive, with crime spiking, "squeegee pests" terrorizing out-of-towners, and "soft" drug use out in the open.  The 1990 stabbing death of 22-year old Brian Watkins, a young man from Utah killed on the Columbus Circle subway platform when he attempted to prevent a thief from stealing his mother's purse, was emblematic of the "fear factor" that reigned in the city.  The four defendants --all about the age of the victim-- had wanted to rob someone so they could go dancing at Roseland, they confessed.

     Now we have a new Mayor who suspects that New York can remain as safe as it has been over the last twenty years without the use of the "stop and frisk" tactic by police.  Interestingly, a few weeks ago, a shooting that had two men killing a third on the street in front of a convenience store on 87th Street and Amsterdam at 12:30 a.m. provoked the following related comment from a man of color:

     The word is out, "no more stop and frisk".  So guys looking  for trouble are likelier to carry a weapon, 'cause they know they won't be caught and sent to jail just for that.

     Ten days ago, two men entered a Columbia University building on my block, 111th Street, in the early hours of the morning, barged into an apartment and pistol-whipped two students.

     And today, while I was getting ready to swipe my Metro Card through the turnstile on the downtown 110th Street IRT #1 stop, I saw an agile young man, his face hidden by the broad-striped "hoodie" he wore, vault the turnstile and move swiftly down the subway platform to where the first car stops, barely observed by the morning commuters.

      A young man of about thirteen years old did see what happened.  He was alone, wearing a yarmulke and the sweatshirt of Ramaz, a Jewish boys' school on the Upper West Side.  I could tell from his face that he registered the same sense of threat I felt seeing the shadow of the turnstile jumper glide down the subway platform.  I hope he grows up in a New York as safe as that of the last twenty years, although I fear that the city is coming to the end of an era, with what will follow anybody's guess.