of Black and Puerto Rican Power
By the 1970s the Panthers, the Young Lords, and other organizations were in disarray. Personal disputes and ideological divisions, poor strategic choices, and the COINTEL infiltration all did damage. Not all 1970s radicals dedicated their lives to improving their communities. Some used their organizing skills to amass personal wealth and power. In Williamsburg, Luis Olmedo used his position as chair of Los Sures to run for council in 1973. “Olmedo was a nationalist,” noted local activist Saul Nieves (1996), and as such “able to take advantage. The nationalists supported anyone who supported independence. When he ran for council in 1973, he swept.” He won by large margins until he was indicted for corruption. Meanwhile the neighborhood fell into disrepair.
By 1978 both Schaefer Brewing Company and Rheingold Brewing Company had abandoned the city. Unemployment in Williamsburg reached 12.1 percent, up from 5.8 percent in 1970. The loss of jobs and the deterioration of housing left the community crumbling and threatened by street gangs, drugs, and arson. Street gangs, which had provided an alternative status and identity for young people since the 1950s, gradually became involved in drug trafficking. As Cuso, the local activist and former gang member, told me in 1994, “In the 1950s the gangs were huge…. When they flooded the neighborhood with drugs all the gang members became drug addicts. The presidents of the gangs became drug dealers.” Cuso, Maldonado, and other activists became addicted to heroin. Many later contracted H.I.V. “Poverty is the major reason for drug abuse,” Maldonado said. “You have to offer people something—something to aim for. Drugs are the major economic resource in this neighborhood. There are kids out here with big bankrolls, fancy cars. It is attractive. When I grew up there was a lot of peer pressure—in the 1960s it was what was happening. A lot of kids in this neighborhood got involved—winded up using drugs, getting addicted.”
In Mott Haven, Ramon Velez used his seat on the city council to win millions of dollars in federal antipoverty monies for his own community organizations. After he came under major city and state investigations in 1977, he successfully maneuvered to get his cohorts on the board of directors of the new Lincoln Hospital. He opened a multiservice center that received large city contracts and subcontracted services from other service agencies and businesses connected to the machine, allowing him and his cronies to “load their pocketbooks and enrich their bank accounts,” claimed one local activist. “As the machine grew,” noted another, “it undermined real movements from coming out in the Bronx.”
By 1976 Mott Haven was one of the poorest congressional districts in the United States. City policy encouraged opportunistic arson. “The lag between when the landlord stopped paying taxes, providing services, and collecting rent and when the city acquired, demolished, and finally wiped the structure from its books varied from years to overnight. At each stage of the process landlords, tenants, and squatters could and often did burn their buildings.”89 Poverty, joblessness, and a desolate landscape led to desperation and spiraling crime rates, which were then blamed on and generalized to all black and Puerto Rican residents in the popular press and imagination.90 As Evelyn Gonzalez pointedly notes, “Without the social constraints and community sanctions engendered by such networks [community ties] delinquency, alcoholism, drug abuse and violent behavior increased…. Once stability and safety were gone, the neighborhoods of Mott Haven, Melrose, Morrisania-Claremont, and Hunts Point-Croton Park East disappeared and the blighted area of the South Bronx grew…. Without neighborhoods, the older stock of the South Bronx disappeared.”91
Harry DeRienzo, founder of Banana Kelly and later Consumer Farmer, two grassroots housing organizations active in the 1980s and 1990s, recalled, “People were [literally] burned out. Fires affected especially community boards 2 and 3. The area lost about 70 percent of its population. Everyone who could leave did.” Another neighborhood activist bitterly observed, “We had politicians parceling out power…. Tracts of land in the community were deliberately allowed to fall apart, to pave the way for further development” and personal gain.
In the Lower East Side “the combination of private capital flight and the absence of government response made portions [of the neighborhood] … virtually uninhabitable. Blocks dotted with decrepit or abandoned buildings provided havens for drug users or sellers, with shooting galleries and stash houses.”92 “Social disorganization, violence and ethnic strife marked the East Village…. runaways slept in abandoned buildings, in doorways, in phone booths, or on rooftops, supporting themselves through begging, street selling, dope dealing, petty thievery and prostitution.”93 The Lower East Side “surpassed even Harlem as a retail drug market … as its proximity to transportation routes and landscapes of devastation stimulate ever larger numbers of drug users and traders.”94 Alphabet City, “an area approximately fifty square blocks located near the major tunnels and bridges into Manhattan[,] was in the words of the police, ‘the retail drug capital of the world.’”95
The 1977 Blackout Riots
The 1977 blackout riots accelerated this trend. Unlike with the riots of the 1960s, the triggering incident was not police abuse but rather opportunity. The spatial pattern, repertoire, and characteristics of the riot differed in striking ways from those of the earlier wave.96 As Wohlenberg notes, “[T]he first riot of the decade occurred in Harlem in 1964 and the riot syndrome—the innovation—spread outward from the initial occurrence to other cities and attained widespread adoption by 1968.”97 The blackout riots hit all neighborhoods in the city simultaneously, which made them extremely hard to police. Riots that begin in one neighborhood can often be contained if a police commissioner chooses to concentrate his forces there. Riots that explode everywhere at once are far more difficult to control. For this reason alone, the 1977 blackout riots were particularly combustible.
Another defining feature of the blackout riots was that most of those arrested on the first day had established criminal records. It was only in the later hours that residents without any previous criminal record participated in the looting (what Spike Lee remembers ruefully as “Christmas in July”98). During the 1960s, riots had followed the opposite course, with the first wave of arrests being individuals previously unknown to police. Moreover, the 1960s rioters had avoided looting stores owned by local blacks or Latinos. The 1977 rioters did not make such distinctions: all stores were hit at the same rate. Lacking insurance for anything but fire, many vulnerable storeowners set their own shops aflame, escalating the destruction of neighborhoods.
The blackout that triggered the 1977 riots struck during an unusually severe heat wave. The extra energy being used to cool commercial buildings and apartments taxed the poorly maintained circuit breakers, steam units, and service remote controls, none of which had been upgraded or replaced in years. When a bolt of lightning hit the Buchanan South generator, those outside the plant were unable to regulate the distribution of electricity across the units, and the employee ordered to operate the load-dumping equipment turned the master switch the wrong way or “didn’t lift the protective cover from the console before trying to depress the buttons.”99 All at once, millions of New Yorkers were without lights and air-conditioning. They took to the streets, fleeing the heat and darkness of their apartments. Some thousand began looting, and others joined in.
The Bronx and Brooklyn were hit especially hard. A total of 473 stores in the Bronx were damaged and 961 looters arrested. When Mayor Abraham Beame issued the call for policemen to return to duty, he told them to report to whichever precinct was closest. That left the Bronx virtually without police. The Bronx precinct reported a total of 38 officers. “Ten times that number would have been necessary to cope with the spontaneous incidents of looting, fires and attacks on police officers,” the precinct head told Jonathan Mahler.100
It was worse in Brooklyn, where a five-mile stretch from Sunset Park through Williamsburg, Bushwick, Brownsville, and Flatbush became the scene of massive looting. “Seven hundred Brooklyn stores were plundered; 1,088 people were arrested.”101 One of the worst-hit neighborhoods was Bushwick,
