Ginia Bellafante

NEW YORK — On Labor Day, a 48-year-old retired sergeant with the New York Police Department was found dead in a car on Staten Island, apparently having shot himself. The department has been shaken by a rash of suicides; this case would mark the 10th in 2019 and the eighth since June, already double the number of suicides the department experiences on average each year.

Given that the city has grown ever safer, the cause of the increase is unclear. But Police Commissioner James O’Neill has spoken honestly and compassionately about what he describes as a mental health crisis, the crucial need for peer support among officers and the importance of erasing the stigma of seeking and receiving counseling. Several weeks ago, Chief of Department Terence Monahan, the highest-ranked uniformed police officer, said in a radio interview that the force was looking to hire psychologists who could be out in the field, and the department was also working to improve access to mental health professionals through the city’s inadequate insurance system.

Little of this seemed to resonate with Patrick Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association, the biggest police union in the world, and arguably labor’s most bellicose figurehead. In a video he posted on Twitter last month, the day after an officer killed himself in Queens, Lynch delivered his therapeutically dubious message to the union’s more than 20,000 members: “If you’re on the edge and contemplating suicide, don’t [expletive] do it, come on.”

He then called on politicians to end “the demonization and anti-cop rhetoric,” and warned officers that if they did kill themselves, good friends on and off the job would feel “betrayed and abandoned — by you.”

To the extent that the department’s senior management has tried in recent years to align itself more with progressive values, union leadership has pursued a different track altogether, one stuck in outdated ideologies about the preeminent sanctity of police work.

What has emerged is an intensifying cultural conflict. One side envisions officers and communities working in tandem in the pursuit of safety. The other sees the world outside the precinct locker room as a place of ever-present hostility and danger, a world in which an officer’s judgment should virtually never be questioned.

Undone by O’Neill’s recent firing of Daniel Pantaleo, whose chokehold led to the death of Eric Garner during an attempted arrest five years ago, the union’s delegate assembly last week unanimously approved resolutions of no confidence in Mayor Bill de Blasio and O’Neill. What this means is that they want the governor to remove the democratically elected mayor, and they want the commissioner to resign because, as Lynch said in a statement, “Both men have displayed an appalling pattern of malfeasance and nonfeasance that disqualifies them from continuing to serve.”

The fact that civic leaders allowed Pantaleo to remain on the force and receive a salary during an interminably long investigation, enraging activists and ordinary people around the country, already seemed like a major concession to the union — to all but the leaders of the union themselves. In their view, anything short of subservience is betrayal.

This was not the first time that a resolution of no confidence was issued under Lynch’s stewardship of the PBA. Fifteen years ago, the union called for the resignation of the commissioner at the time, Raymond Kelly, for “jumping to conclusions” after an unarmed African American teenager was killed by a police officer in a dark stairwell of the Louis Armstrong Houses in Brooklyn. Kelly had merely said that the shooting did not seem justified.

Activists and community organizers have long held that the opinions of union leaders — largely white men in middle age — are out of sync with those in the rank and file. And the administrators of the department, including the commissioner’s office, increasingly agree. The force itself has become more and more diverse over the years: within the department, 155 languages are spoken. Among its uniformed personnel, the number of white male officers has shrunk from just under 16,000 in 1988 to 9,400 today, while the number of Hispanic men has more than doubled.

And yet Lynch’s reign is essentially unchallenged: This summer he was elected to another term as president, running unopposed. After Pantaleo’s firing, he assumed a posture of fatalism, arguing that the department was “rudderless” and that O’Neill would be unable to right things.

Lynch urged officers to proceed cautiously “in this new reality,” when, he believed, operating according to standard protocols could result in dismissals and threats to personal safety. He was, in effect, pushing for a slowdown.

By the end of August, felony arrests rate had fallen which suggested that officers had heeded his call. At the same time, declining arrest rates are just what Lynch’s adversaries among police reform advocates are always seeking.

Lynch’s approach seems engineered to foment anger between police officers and the communities they serve at a time when that anger actually seems to be receding, when neighborhood policing strategies have sought to change the way that beat officers do business, making them look at people as human beings rather than prospective felons.

What does Lynch’s anger ultimately serve?

This article originally appeared in

(Big City)

Is the NYPD at War With Itself?

NEW YORK — In October 1973, the federal government charged Trump Management Corp. with discrimination against African Americans seeking apartments in the 39 buildings the firm operated, most of them in Brooklyn and Queens.

A short time out of Wharton, the company’s then president, Donald Trump, quickly denied the charges as “absolutely ridiculous.”

Between 1970 and 1980, New York City experienced its most significant population decline since the 1780s, but while population fell overall, the number of minorities living in the city grew. This was especially true in Brooklyn; in 1970 blacks made up a quarter of the population and by 1980 they made up nearly a third.

For some white families who didn’t flee the city, a sense that the territory they occupied was theirs and theirs alone bred a siege mentality. In this view, there were those who belonged and those who trespassed. (This was happening most notably, perhaps, in South Brooklyn, where Trump had his office in the early 1970s.)

When the outsiders arrived they were shown, too often by the most violent means, just how resistant to porousness their communities could be.

They were told — just as President Trump told four freshman congresswomen, via Twitter this week, none of them white and all of them thoroughly American — to go back to where they came from, a meme he recycled at a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night to chants of “Send her back!”

Where “they came from” was often merely on the other side of a parkway, a housing complex, a strip mall — beyond the lines and fortresses created for the preservation of a white ethnic dominance that was eroding.

It is this place that the president comes from essentially — a time, a part of the world and a mindset in which access to certain kinds of power, comfort and rights of assertion was not to be universally shared.

New York in the 1980s was characterized, on the one hand, by the moneyed ostentation Trump personified, and on the other, by racial violence that housing segregation helped facilitate.

In two of the decade’s most notorious hate crimes, young black men — Michael Griffith in Queens in 1986 and Yusuf Hawkins in Brooklyn three years later — appeared in neighborhoods where they had no obvious connection only to get chased and killed by throngs of mindlessly enraged white boys.

Griffith, who was born in Trinidad and lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was driving with friends on an empty stretch of road late one night just before Christmas, when their car broke down. He and two of the others walked 3 miles to Howard Beach to get help. Leaving the pizzeria where they had stopped to eat, they were confronted by a mob who beat them. Griffith died running away from them and into a moving car.

Cars, the great American signifiers of social ascension and escape, figured poignantly in these narratives. Hawkins had the misfortune of finding an ad for a used Pontiac he wanted to check out, for sale by an owner in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.

Also accompanied by three friends, Hawkins, who was 16 at the time and lived in the largely black neighborhood of East New York, ventured into a white, mostly Italian enclave and was shot. Three days later, hundreds of black protesters who marched through Bensonhurst were met by jeering whites who shouted racial slurs at them.

Another murder which predated these but received considerably less attention has mostly faded from memory and could have been prevented. It follows the same bleak arc.

Three black men, transit workers coming off a shift in Coney Island, late one night in June 1982, stopped for something to eat. In this instance it was a bagel shop on Avenue X in Gravesend, outside of which a black police officer and another black man, on his way home to Queens one night, had also been attacked not long before.

Driving away from the shop, the men were set upon by white teenagers who taunted and screamed at them: “What are you doing in this area?” The car stalled. The teenagers smashed the windows and began assaulting the men inside. One of the three victims, William Turks, who had moved to New York from Birmingham, Alabama, was fatally injured, his body landing on a sewer grate.

The first of the young men to go on trial in the case was someone named Gino Bova, who was 18 and lived at 675 Avenue Z in Gravesend. The building was part of the Beach Haven Apartments, one of the large housing complexes built by Fred C. Trump after World War II.

The government’s discrimination case against the Trumps had been settled in a consent decree several years earlier that included stipulations meant to ensure the desegregation of buildings in the company’s empire. In 1978, though, the government accused the Trumps of violating that decree, but while the Justice Department was amassing its evidence, the original agreement expired. The case was ultimately closed in spring 1982.

Four black families lived in Bova’s building, press accounts of the trial pointed out, but how long they had lived there and what feelings they may or may not have triggered in the boy is hard to know.

Despite the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, housing discrimination had been rampant in many parts of the city; other major developers of middle-class apartment buildings, in the precincts beyond Manhattan, had also come under the government’s watch.

What was made all too obvious by 1982 was that it was not safe for black men to wander in New York City in places where they had not been welcomed to live. Bova’s trial ended with a manslaughter conviction, not the murder conviction that prosecutors sought, by a jury that defense lawyers had engineered to include not a single black person on it.

Before the trial had begun, the commanding officer of the local police precinct, Capt. Joseph DeMartini, was asked why nothing had been done sooner to stop the teenagers who had colonized street corners seemingly in a perverse mode of defense against any signs of intrusion.

He responded in the vein of Bova’s lawyer, who claimed that his client was from “a good family,’’ an all too familiar call to exoneration. The police captain described the majority of the local young people who stood on street corners as “good and decent” individuals who were appalled by what had happened, and who would develop into “outstanding adults.”

The community was “typical,” he said, and if a pattern of brutalized prejudice was emerging, he wasn’t necessarily seeing it. “To say a black gets assaulted and to say it’s racial, I don’t know.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/nyregion/nyc-trump-racism.html" id="b53093ce-02e5-3b54-a15b-13084fe5554d">The New York Times</a>.

The NYC Roots of Trump and 'Go Back Where You Came From'

NEW YORK — If you were around Manhattan in the 1990s, you hated Barnes &amp; Noble the way you hated garbage strikes or Celine Dion. The chain seemed to expand on a weekly basis, and it got in the way — of the independent book stores it displaced, of a Jane Jacobs vision of the streetscape, of your belief that you were living in a place that was so much more idiosyncratic than wherever you came from.

When Amazon, even more gargantuan and impersonal, emerged to send Barnes &amp; Noble toward its inevitable descent, you eventually found yourself nostalgic for what you had failed to appreciate.

In no place was the company’s diminished fortune felt as intensely as it was in the Bronx, where gratitude for what it provided far outweighed snobbishness. Five years ago when Barnes &amp; Noble announced that it was closing the only branch it had opened there, residents and local civic leaders were angry and heartbroken and fought to save it.

At the time, there were 90 bookstores in Manhattan. But the Bronx essentially had just the one, and now it would disappear. Those who lived in the Bronx couldn’t help feeling that the gatekeepers of cultural commerce found them unworthy.

Noëlle Santos, who worked in human resources, was especially torn up. In 2014 she was on Facebook when she stumbled upon a petition to save Barnes &amp; Noble. It pointed out how alarming it was that the Bronx was getting more and more cellphone stores and chain restaurants but would be left without a place to buy novels or training manuals or SAT preparation guides. Santos grew up in the Bronx, in Soundview, a rough neighborhood, and she stayed in the Bronx for college and graduate school. But she suddenly felt a radical need to change things.

“Up to that point I had measured my success by how far I could get away from the Bronx,’’ she told me recently. “I was disappointed in myself for thinking about leaving a community in no better condition than I had found it,’’ she said.

“I had never been inside an independent book store before I decided to open one.”

On Saturday, she was to open such a store, The Lit. Bar.

She was in her late 20s and working in an office in lower Manhattan when she called the American Booksellers Association on a fact-finding mission. She heard from the group about a course called “Owning a Bookstore.” She had to pool her vacation days and sick days to fly to Florida to take it. There, she learned how to calculate sales projections; how to negotiate a lease; how to think about layouts, floor plans and foot traffic.

She still had many questions, so when she came home she started volunteering at small bookstores around the city in exchange for mentorship. She also entered a statewide competition for entrepreneurs with promising business plans. Hundreds of others had entered it too, but Santos won.

It was the end of 2016, and the Barnes &amp; Noble in the Bronx was finally closing; advocates who fought to protect it had managed to keep it open for two more years, but its time was up. Santos used her prize money to open a pop-up book shop at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. But she needed real money to open an actual store, so she started a crowdfunding campaign and called it, “Let’s Bring a Goddamn Bookstore to the Bronx.’’ It turned out that there was great enthusiasm for this venture; she quickly raised $170,000.

Her effort has culminated in the opening of what will stand as the only general-interest bookstore in the Bronx, a borough of 1.5 million people. It is in Mott Haven, which has a poverty rate twice the city’s average. As they did when Barnes &amp; Noble was around, people who live in the Bronx will presumably travel long distances to visit.

It so happens that local bookstores are having a renaissance around the country. A decade ago, the American Booksellers Association had approximately 1,400 members in 1,650 locations. Last year it had 1,835 members operating in 2,470 locations. Despite the fact that walking around New York can increasingly mimic the experience of walking around the Mall of America, bookstores are opening now pretty frequently, as if to persuade the doubters to stay, to forget about moving to one of the Portlands or Philadelphia.

In November, Shakespeare &amp; Co. returned to the Upper West Side after a two-decade absence. McNally Jackson Books is expanding to Downtown Brooklyn and the South Street Seaport. Earlier this year, the Center for Fiction opened near the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a membership library for old books, a bookstore, a cafe, reading rooms and writing rooms. On a recent visit on a weekday afternoon, I found the crowd to be both ample and diverse.

Santos wanted to produce something she couldn’t find in the part of the world she came from — an intellectual visibility. In that, the Bronx was not alone. It was facing extinction everywhere.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/nyregion/bronx-bookstore.html" id="478fe43b-c580-38cd-a652-5a883a988562">The New York Times</a>.

A Bookstore, Finally, Comes to the Bronx

NEW YORK — At some point during the winter break last month, someone covered the playground of a public school in the Rego Park section of Queens with swastikas and other anti-Semitic sentiments. Either poor spellers or unfamiliar with the exact phrasing of the Nazi salute, whoever was responsible inscribed the words “Hail Hiter” on the ground in chalk.

Several days later, two boys were arrested and charged with aggravated harassment. They came from the neighborhood, one that has long been predominantly white and Jewish but grown more diverse in recent years with an influx of Asian immigrants.

After the initial arrest, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, Dermot Shea, quickly took to Twitter to commend the “great job” accomplished by his colleagues in the hate-crimes unit he oversees and to say that “no matter the face of hate,” New York will exhibit “ZERO tolerance” for it.

In this case the face of hate was the face of two children of color — one black, the other Asian — who were 12 years old.

The incident occurred within the context of rising anti-Semitic crimes in the city and around the country, which is surely why law enforcement felt compelled to advertise such a negligible victory in the war against prejudice.

There have already been close to 40 such cases in New York this year, a nearly twofold increase over the same period last year. Neither the Police Department nor community leaders in the affected neighborhoods have determined the reason for the upsurge. Surely the bigotry that has been making more frequent appearances on the American stage since the Trump years is partly to blame.

Whatever the cause, it seems fairly clear that arresting 12-year-olds, especially at a time when criminal justice reform has concentrated on diverting young minorities from the system, cannot be considered a solution. There were many other forms a meaningful consequence could have taken.

When I spoke with local politicians and heads of Jewish groups around the city, none thought the boys should have been taken in. (They were arraigned in family court and remanded to the custody of their families until further proceedings.)

“Do you remember the song from ‘South Pacific,’ ‘You Have To Be Taught To Hate?'” asked Toby Ann Stavisky, a state senator representing the relevant district in Queens. “These children were taught to hate, and I’d be very interested to learn where they learned to hate.”

Or perhaps we might also wonder if and where they learned that it is perfectly fine to express a mischievous, rebellious or playful side through the use of such cruel and divisive imagery. This generation of children has grown up with constant screen time, inundated with an endless stream of images that eventually renders many of those visual signifiers meaningless, where Nazi symbolism is just processed as more cartoonish provocation.

This past week during an assembly at Sidwell Friends, the progressive Quaker school in Washington from which Chelsea Clinton and Malia Obama graduated, a student participating in a trivia contest flashed a user name consisting of two swastikas onto a screen visible to the whole auditorium. It was not the first time that swastikas have shown up at the school in recent months.

And in Orange County, California, a group of high-school students came under fire for building a swastika out of red plastic beer cups during a drinking game at a party. Were they bilious members of the alt-right?

When one participant apologized on social media, she said she considered what she and her friends had done as “a joke” and “not a big deal,” until photos of the incident went viral and they realized the seriousness of their antics.

The contemporary school environment emphasizes diversity and inclusion to a point unprecedented in history. Children are put in restorative circles and taught to love and respect one another, to make up and never to antagonize, tease, bully or invalidate. But do these conceptualizations stand up to the corrective lessons of history?

New York is one of a number of states in which Holocaust education is mandated, but the general shift toward a greater focus on science, technology and mathematics and away from the humanities, happening across the education system and around the country, has pushed certain subjects and ideas dangerously into the rearview.

Last year a study conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, for example, interviewed 1,350 American adults and found that 66 percent of millennial respondents could not identify Auschwitz as a concentration camp.

Even if the two boys arrested in Queens are guilty, we may never know whether they understood the weight of their actions, or whether what they were doing was an act born of loathing or stupidity. We do know that the school where the defacements occurred will conduct a read-aloud of “A Picture Book of Anne Frank,” and have students create stenciled murals “around positive messages about diversity and inclusiveness, including around religion,” according to the city’s Department of Education.

In big cities where neighborhood demographics are so often changing and gentrification is often compelling those changes, a truly holistic approach to preventing acts of racial and ethnic bias would involve whole communities — children and their parents — coming together to learn about one another’s cultures, habits, histories, tastes, ambitions, doctrines, similarities. The process would be proactive rather than responsive.

The police would keep from reflexively criminalizing ignorance. Officers would do more than hand out flyers and teach communities how to report hate crimes, which is where New York City’s Police Department places much of its emphasis. It would look at tensions — the broken windows between different groups, so to speak — and try to repair them.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/nyregion/swastikas-playground-nyc-anti-semitism.html" id="9a366cae-64d2-3495-aa90-dbc339a520d1">The New York Times</a>.

Two 12-Year-Olds Drew Swastikas on a Playground. Is That a Hate Crime?

NEW YORK — This week, the city of New York, through its Commission on Human Rights, officially banned discrimination based on hairstyle, making it one of the rare municipalities in the country to codify the link between prejudice and personal presentation.

What this means, essentially, is that employers, landlords, school principals, gym owners, club managers and other institutions and gatekeepers who engage in a persistent form of racism that renders certain judgments of how African-Americans wear their hair, will now be subject to penalties and civil damages should they harass, threaten, fire or deny admission or affiliation to anyone based on a particular set of grooming choices.

While it may defy belief that such a clarification would be needed in such a progressive part of the world at the close of the second decade of the 21st century, examples of bias expressed through rules or policies against cornrows, Afros, Bantu knots and other means of wearing hair that do not conform to European standards, in fact, abound.

Curly hair, coiled hair, black hair is a trigger, it seems, that reveals the bigotry of people who don’t understand themselves as bigoted, people who just imagine themselves as upholding “standards.”

Two years ago, for instance, a young black woman working at a Banana Republic in Westchester County was told by a white male manager that her braids were not “Banana Republic appropriate,” that they were too “unkempt” and “urban” and that he would not be able to schedule her for more shifts unless she took them out. When she told the manager that they protected her hair from becoming coarse in cold weather, he suggested she try some shea butter. Ultimately, he was let go.

More recently, state officials in New Jersey opened a civil rights investigation into the case of a black high school wrestler who was told by a referee that his locs violated competition rules. The wrestler, Andrew Johnson, resigned to getting his hair cut right before a match he would have otherwise been made to forfeit.

Along with the commission’s announcement on new enforcement guidelines, it said that in the span of just the past few months it had received many complaints of discrimination based on hairstyle. It is currently investigating seven cases, one involving someone who was fired from her job simply for wearing her natural hair down.

While this sort of discrimination is common in the retail sector, it is hardly exclusive to the sales floor. Recently, I spoke with Marissa Jackson, a deputy at the Commission on Human Rights, about her own experiences encountering disapproval of the way she put herself together during a past professional life.

Several years ago she worked as a summer associate at a prominent Wall Street law firm and routinely straightened her hair. “I went through a period of my life of wanting to fit in and straighten it,” she told me. After she graduated from Columbia Law School and studied at the London School of Economics, she came back to the firm with less of a compulsion to conform and decided to get locs.

This was hardly welcome. One partner would never talk to her or make eye contact. “There was this idea that I had tricked people and would be jeopardizing my career,'’ she told me. “'Oh, what are you doing? You should have straight hair!’ My white colleagues didn’t say this to me. It was my black colleagues who had internalized these racist ideas and were afraid of what this assertion of identity would mean.” She left the firm and went to work for a black judge.

The insidious irony here is that prestigious law firms and big corporations have made efforts to relax the workplace for decades. This usually played out in selective ways for a select group of people. Casual Fridays, which gained popularity in the 1990s, were the vehicle by which middle-age white men could more comfortably be themselves, accommodating expanding waistlines in pleated khakis and fleece vests. These were baby boomers, rebellious in their own minds, who were liberated from the suits that did not speak to who they believed they really were.

The rise of Silicon Valley startup culture gave white men — young white men in particular — even further license to express their authentic identities. When he began his career, Mark Zuckerberg could walk into any boardroom in the country wearing a hoodie, the style signature of fetal billionaires.

But how would a young black man be perceived, even today, in the same situation, styled in similar adolescent fashion and with hair that made him look like Questlove? Young black men are told to pull up their pants and look responsible if they want to earn a decent living; young white men have learned that they can rule the world looking like 15-year-olds who have been gaming for the past 36 hours.

The casual workplace is, in the end, just another manifestation of white privilege. In 1992, the city of Santa Cruz, California, with a population that was 79 percent white, passed an ordinance that made discrimination against appearance unlawful. Santa Cruz was the city of surfers and skateboarders and hackers in tattoos and piercings. Someone thought to protect them a very long time ago.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/nyregion/black-hair-decriminalization-ny.html" id="f57d390a-02d4-3028-add8-9684460ecde7">The New York Times</a>.

The Battleground of Black Hair

This past week, as the world was made aware, Chicago hedge fund manager Ken Griffin bought the most expensive home ever sold in the United States, a $238 million, 24,000-sqare-foot penthouse on Central Park South in New York City. What do you do with 24,000 square feet? You could hoard, presumably, and never require the advice of Marie Kondo, because who would ever notice that you hold on to all your old adapters and Ping-Pong balls? Each one of them could have its own guest wing.

The current taste for huge residential real estate and the fortunes that underwrite it have brought obvious comparisons to the Gilded Age for some time now. You can find some contemporary version of early 20th-century Newport, Rhode Island, in many places. Under construction for 15 years, a house modeled after Versailles in Windermere, Florida, for instance, will be the largest in the country when it is finished, with 11 kitchens, five swimming pools and a 30-car garage.

It is easy to imagine that outsize American wealth always sought to express itself in immense square footage, but there was a protracted period in which aesthetics took a different course. In the years after World War II and for much of the mid-20th century, the consumption habits of the rich were guided by more modest ambitions. This happened to be a time when top marginal tax rates were high, at various points much higher than what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and many on the left are proposing now. Between 1945 and 1980, those rates never fell below 70 percent and for many years they exceeded 80 percent.

As it happens, you can see the cultural transition from opulence to discretion unfold in the history of a single Fifth Avenue apartment: the 54-room penthouse triplex built for cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in 1925 (when, for what it’s worth, the top marginal tax rate was 25 percent). Post — who was already building the 126-room Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach — sold the mansion she had been living in to make room for the apartment building that would take its place, but she saw no point in sacrificing any of the luxuries and the accommodations to which she had been accustomed.

However, it no longer exists. After Post’s lease expired in 1941 — she paid $75,000 a month in rent — the apartment sat vacant for a decade. The building was then converted to a co-op in the early 1950s, and the Post apartment was divided into six units.

By this time, the wealthiest New Yorkers were not seeking apartments the size of sports arenas, and at any rate, there would have been little to meet the demand if they did. Brooke Astor lived, until her death, in an apartment on Park Avenue that was not in excess of 5,000 square feet. In the 1970s, David and Peggy Rockefeller quietly redecorated their East 65th Street town house. At 10,000 square feet, it was not tiny, but it was the couple’s primary residence and the house in which they raised their six children. Griffin, who has houses and apartments in Chicago, Miami and London, plans to use his place in New York only occasionally.

There was a prevailing sense that too much was distasteful. A generation had just emerged from the suffering of the Depression and World War II. “You just didn’t see the kind of enormity you see now,” Frederick Warburg Peters, a long-standing broker of Upper East Side co-ops and the chief executive of Warburg realty, mentioned to me. “It was considered un-American.” These values were reflected in the city’s architecture during the postwar years, when the concern was with the conservation of space — with low ceilings and narrow corridors and the elimination of rooms no one would ever use.

It is also true that the 1950s and ‘60s did not give rise to the creation of massive fortunes. The ethos of conformity that persisted for much of that time arguably suppressed the will to take the kind of risks on which large sums of money are accumulated. Big money was mostly old money, and old money still subscribed to certain virtues.

In 1949, John Hay Whitney, known as Jock, heir to the vast Whitney fortune and later the publisher of The New York Herald Tribune, built a Modernist beach house on Fishers Island, New York, a patrician summer colony off the coast of New London, Connecticut. He had other houses that had been passed down to him, but this one was small by today’s standards — it had five bedrooms and a carport for two cars. A Sports Illustrated article on Fishers Island that ran in 1965 and mentioned the house alluded to a single excess: an in-ground sprinkler.

What did people do with all their money? They bought horses and art and raised cattle; they gave money away, in part, to relieve tax burdens. In 1931 there were 250 foundations in this country; by the mid-1950s there were thousands. Certainly, some of them, as sociologist C. Wright Mills argued in his indispensable book, “The Power Elite,” existed as a dubious means of self-dealing. Many operated with a greater deal of sincerity. In 1946, Whitney created his own foundation to which he contributed $1 million a year, far from an inconsiderable sum as he died, in 1982, with $200 million.

The foundation had a singular focus, to help “those groups that experience racial, gender or economic discrimination.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/26/nyregion/ken-griffin-238-million-penthouse.html" id="6acc2783-0221-3ba2-a6ed-6fe2b4aaff73">The New York Times</a>.

The Rich Didn't Always Need $238 Million Penthouses

Perhaps at no other time of the year is it clearer that elective self-denial is just another privilege of affluence. If you indulged in December without abatement, then you are likely to approach January with the intent to say no — to cheese, to craft beer, to Shake Shack, to cake doughnuts, to the braised short ribs you have perfected in an Instant Pot. You will stay home and make salads and eat undressed grains, and presumably the money you save will be spent on virtuous things.

During these exercises in asceticism you may often feel hungry, but in most cases you will not think about hunger in any broader or meaningful sense. This is not (necessarily) because you are cold and indifferent to the misfortunes of others.

Hunger as a defining symptom of poverty in the United States is rarely discussed, either at the level of engaged civilian conversation or as a political talking point. To do so would be to admit to a failure of democracy for which too many are to blame.

According to government statistics, 1 in 8 households in the United States is food insecure, meaning those households are unable to afford a consistent supply of nourishment throughout the year. In New York City, the number of people living with food insecurity has decreased during the past six years, but the figure is still higher — by 22 percent — than it was before the recession. In the Bronx, more than one-third of all children go hungry regularly.

On Jan. 1, the new minimum wage, set at $15 an hour, went into effect in New York City, and most companies employing more than 10 people have to pay it. The increase, considered a crucial step in the fight against poverty, is the result of a hard-fought grassroots organizing effort begun seven years ago and championed as a great victory by liberal politicians, even those who were initially not liberal enough to embrace it. But how much will the new standard do to alleviate some of the most punishing aspects of the city’s affordability crisis?

Last year, San Francisco and Seattle enacted a $15 minimum wage. Though both cities are also fantastically expensive, it is too soon to draw any comparison to New York, which presents its own challenges. (What we do know from a study examining the experiment in Seattle is that as wages increased on the path to $15 an hour, experienced workers benefited most from higher pay at the expense of reduced opportunities for workers with less experience.)

Buried under the relentless flood of news during the last months of 2018 was a report, sponsored in part by City Harvest, New York’s largest supplier of food to pantries and hunger charities that suggested less-than-optimistic predictions for what a new wage standard might achieve. The authors of the report calculated a self-sufficiency standard, meant to determine how much income is now required to meet basic needs — housing, child care, food, transportation, health care — without help from public subsidies, for families of different sizes living in different parts of the city.

The study found that more than 2 in 5 households in New York City lacked the income to cover necessities. And yet just a third of those households were considered poor by measures used by the federal government — measures typically used as qualifiers for certain kinds of public assistance and ones that do not account for family composition among many other variables.

You begin to understand some of the animosity directed at Amazon around its impending move to Queens, for example, when you see how much money is actually required to live there already, before housing prices are destined to be driven up even further by the company’s expansion. A single parent with two school-age children, for example would need to make nearly $69,427 a year, according to City Harvest’s Self-Sufficiency calculator. That amounts to an hourly wage of just under $33.

So to live comfortably enough in all but the most expensive quarters in Brooklyn, a two-parent family with two children would need to make about $70,000 a year, which would mean that each parent would need to earn just over $16 an hour. That figure accounts for the $433 the family would receive in child-related tax credits. All across the city, the cost of basic needs is rising faster for low-income families than conventional inflation metrics actually indicate. Also dispiriting is the fact that nearly a quarter of households that fall below the self-sufficiency standard include an adult with a bachelor’s degree.

What this tells us is that the arrival of a $15 hourly minimum wage cannot be considered the end of something. New York may be a city of self-invention, but it is not a city of self-sustenance. We are reminded of this every time we encounter the financial diary of a millennial — a new publishing subcategory — that breaks down expenses for rent and restaurants and Uber and so on and all too often reveals that a pair of parents in Greenwich, Connecticut, or Marin County, California, or somewhere, is supplementing the meager salary of a fashion or media hopeful.

In many, many cases, a $15 hourly wage will not bring a family, or even a single person, to an adequate living standard. That hardly means the fight was worthless; it just means the war is continuing.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/nyregion/the-15-dollar-minimum-wage-is-not-enough.html" id="57f1f8dd-da4f-366f-a5f8-7ccef7246c16">The New York Times</a>.

The $15 Minimum Wage Is Here. It's Not Nearly Enough, but It's a Start.

NEW YORK — The drama of the past year played out locally in big civic and social changes: surprise political upsets and reversals, decent reputations gone bad and bad reputations gone much worse. Here, a highly subjective (and in some cases exaggerated) list of who and what seemed to morph into someone or something else.

When Bill de Blasio Became Donald Trump (*Wait, What?)

Let’s just say from the outset that we are not 100 percent serious when we suggest that the liberal mayor of New York City appeared indistinguishable from the divisively nationalist, immigrant-unfriendly 45th president of the United States. But certain Trumpian characteristics in the mayor revealed themselves this year so much so that The New York Post featured a picture of him on its cover with a photoshopped head of orange hair and the line, “Don Blasio.” The catalyst for this new impression was the court-ordered release of thousands of pages of emails from his administration showing the mayor to be aggressive, insecure and deeply contemptuous of a press corps he believes has covered him unfairly. Also, he uses all caps sometimes. Also, he loves real estate developers.

When Sheryl Sandberg Became Ayn Rand

Many women in New York’s pop intellectual and publishing communities embraced Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In” when it came out a few years ago. Its simple advice for female empowerment: Women need to just buck up and assert themselves if they wanted more from the patriarchy. For some of us — I will say smugly — that did not pass the feminism smell test.

The #MeToo movement should have confirmed to any doubters that women weren’t the problem — social structures were the problem. But it wasn’t until damaging reports of Sandberg’s role in subverting democracy at Facebook and selling out its users that her dethroning was complete, and that it was clear that someone so committed to greed and corporate narcissism was not going to lead American women to a better place. On her book tour, Michelle Obama called the Lean In movement a “lie.”

When an Unknown Bartender Became a Che Guevara T-Shirt

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rose from obscurity over the summer to defeat the longtime incumbent Joseph Crowley in the Democratic primary to represent the city’s 14th congressional district. But that is easily the dullest and least relevant way to describe her change of fortune. On the left, she has become a symbol of working-class grievance, of an urban youth class mired in student debt and locked out of domestic comforts by a national housing crisis. On the right, she has become a lightning rod for those who fear and loathe a rising progressive energy. Is she weak on policy? Does it matter? She is leading an emotionally charged movement.

When Andrew Cuomo Became the Bartender Who Became the Che Guevara T-Shirt

More than any other year, this was the one in which the governor really wanted you to believe that he had become a firebrand left-of-center liberal. Challenged by Cynthia Nixon in the Democratic primary, he started to adopt her positions on the legalization of pot, the evil of plastic bags, the need for less punishing teacher evaluations and so on. Is he really looking like Ocasio-Cortez? Not when he is wearing a windbreaker roaming through a subway tunnel in Canarsie, but he has proposed a Green New Deal just as she has, and he is sounding like he wants to be a revolutionary.

When the New York City Housing Authority Became the Ultimate Slumlord

In June, the federal government delivered a brutal rebuke to the nation’s biggest public housing authority, accusing it of gross mismanagement and failure to provide a safe living environment for residents, especially children who had been exposed to lead paint. The city was supposed to move quickly making repairs; it didn’t. Reports of squalid conditions continue, and in one complex, thousands of residents didn’t have heat or hot water on Thanksgiving.

When Eric Schneiderman Became Ike Turner

Previously regarded as a friend to feminists, the New York attorney general was accused of beating up several former girlfriends, in an article in The New Yorker, and he resigned immediately after it appeared. His degradations followed the familiar narrative of domestic violence: His assaults were accompanied by his cruel assessments of the women he was dating. Initially he insisted that everything that transpired with these women was consensual. It was only after a special prosecutor determined that limitations in the law made it impossible to level criminal charges that Schneiderman accepted “full” responsibility for his conduct and committed to “making amends.”

When Amazon Became Philip Morris

So it turned out that Amazon was more or less just kidding when it solicited proposals from cities around the country hoping to be home to the company’s second headquarters. The company affirmed its elitist commitments when it chose to locate in New York and suburban Washington over, say, Detroit or Pittsburgh. And while that was maddening enough to plenty of urbanists, many New Yorkers have greeted the impending arrival of Amazon with a rage toward the company that was not necessarily foreseeable. Amazon’s encroachment into Queens, where the terror is that it will drive housing prices up even further and deny jobs to the people who really need them, has made the retailer the brightest new emblem of corporate malevolence.

When Juul Became Crack

As rates of drug and alcohol use have declined among adolescents for years, Juul became the beloved vice of teenagers across the city and around the country. The company, which has more than 70 percent of the e-cigarette market in the United States, was supposed to help grown-ups quit conventional cigarettes. Instead, the easily concealable and cool-looking vaping device has spurred a nicotine addiction among young people who had never smoked. All along, the company — disingenuously, it would seem — maintained that this was not its intent. And yet Juul offered its product in flavors like Crème Brûlée and something akin to Froot Loops, unlikely to appeal to anyone old enough to vote.

When Rudy Giuliani Became Alex Jones

If you enter “Rudy Giuliani” and “unhinged” into Google, you get a lot of entries. Had Giuliani stayed out of the Trump scrum, he would have had a decent chance at an enviable legacy in which the world would have remembered him as the strong and calming mayor presiding over New York City during 9/11. Instead he went full throttle into his role as the president’s cable-news consigliere, giving interviews so erratic and illogical that even Fox News has been confounded.

When New York Became Peoria

This is not a delusional post about how a slightly softened real estate market has turned the city into a quaint center of simplicity. No; this is a post about the ways in which New Yorkers, who famously strain themselves not to look twice at celebrities and pretend to disregard their power, went bonkers over the mysterious arrival of a Mandarin duck in Central Park. Suddenly, everyone was Ron Galella, desperate for a picture and obsessed with where this gorgeous patchwork quilt of a creature would show up next.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/nyregion/the-year-that-bill-de-blasio-became-donald-trump-and-9-other-improbable-transformations.html" id="d87d2af8-29c8-30bf-add9-297359c4b683">The New York Times</a>.

The Year That Bill de Blasio Became Donald Trump* and 9 Other Improbable Transformations

NEW YORK — Earlier this week, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that he would push to make pot smoking — for fun — legal in New York state. It was quite a statement for a governor who had repeatedly questioned the wisdom before, calling it an enabler of more pernicious habits.

The “facts have changed,” he had said several months before, meaning really that the polling had changed — in October of 2017, support for the legalization of marijuana reached its highest point in five decades with nearly two-thirds of Americans surveyed by Gallup expressing enthusiasm for the revision.

The governor made his argument deploying the progressive rhetoric he has turned to increasingly as his neoliberal leanings have become less politically expedient. That rhetoric rightly maintains that legalization of the drug is essential to redressing injustices in a criminal justice system that has overwhelmingly penalized young men of color for carrying or smoking pot.

Two days after Cuomo made his commitments known, in fact, Brooklyn’s district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, asked a judge to obliterate more than two dozen past marijuana convictions; his office vacated open warrants for more than 1,400 people who had missed court dates for possession cases. In the absence of such erasures on a broad scale, merely legalizing the drug would do nothing to remediate the damage inflicted on thousands of people ensnared in a legal universe that so severely handicaps them for doing what white people pull off with impunity. This is why Mayor Bill de Blasio followed the governor’s announcement with his own endorsements of legalization — this too a reversal — recommending that convictions for marijuana-related crimes be expunged automatically.

In previous eras, decriminalization had been championed largely by libertarians, who saw a lot of government waste in a system that needlessly locked people up, and by hippies, who just wanted to be left alone to get stoned.

It is only recently that pot has been widely imagined as an almost holy vessel of redemption, a cure-all for a full range of 21st century maladies — social division, chronic pain, chronic distraction, chronic boredom. Leafly, a journal of cannabis news, describes Cinex, a particular weed strain as providing a “wired euphoria that feeds creativity” while making daily chores less of a “drag.”

Of course, lawmakers in New York are not primarily motivated by the desire to make our daily chores less of a drag. They quickly suggested that taxing marijuana could fix the transit system, in need of $60 billion worth of repairs. They invited us to envision a world in which pot really was a gateway — to more efficient infrastructure!

Leaving aside for a moment whether these ambitions are all too utopian, it is easy to see what is problematic about legislators relying on our escapist pleasures to perform some of the most necessary functions of government. In 1951, for example, the federal excise tax on cigarettes was raised to help finance the Korean War. Given that the previous year had produced five separate epidemiological studies confirming the growing suspicion that smokers were more likely to contract lung cancer than nonsmokers, 1951 might have been a good time to mandate warning labels on cigarette packaging but, as it happened, that would take another 14 years to accomplish.

The enthusiasm for revising the legal status of pot around the country has for the most part obscured any debate about consequences to public health. That pot is regarded as relatively harmless is troubling, because much of what we know about it is based on studies conducted nearly 50 years ago at a time when what was consumed was much less potent than it is now.

Within the academic community, Jonathan P. Caulkins, a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon, has been a leading voice warning of marijuana’s attendant dangers. As he has put it, beyond the fact that pot use has been correlated with a wide variety of negative outcomes in terms of physical and mental health, the real issue is that more than half of marijuana is consumed by people who are high more than half of all their waking hours. Pot shouldn’t be dismissed simply because it won’t kill you.

Caulkins’ research also shows us who is likely to bear these health burdens to a disproportionate degree — and it is not snowboarders in Vail. Looking at a decade’s worth of federal surveys on drug use, he and a partner determined that Americans with a household income of less than $20,000 accounted for close to 30 percent of all marijuana use, even though they make up less than 20 percent of the population.

One fantasy that advocates of legalization have is that changes in the law will energize a redistribution of wealth, not only because tax revenue from pot sales can be funneled to various worthy causes but also because the poor will reap new entrepreneurial opportunities — in every neighborhood a Stringer Bell.

De Blasio has made a big point of saying that a legalized pot industry should not be overly corporate, and that retailers in parts of the city that have been so adversely affected by punishing drug laws get licenses and the chance to make money. But this is the same mayor, who during five years of presiding over the city, has been wholly unable to stop the onslaught of chain stores in New York, wholly unable to preserve the fortunes of a longstanding local merchant class.

I asked Mark Kleiman, of the Marron Institute at New York University and one of the most sought-after experts on drug policy in the country, what the future looked like. He foresaw a world in which pot, legal in ever more states and eventually at the national level, will get cheaper and cheaper. The expected tax windfalls would become less likely, unless pot is taxed at the level of potency rather than sale price. The trend toward vaping means there will be greater demand for oil, and if you can melt everything down for oil, pot will be less expensive to produce, because at that point you can grow it like corn.

“You can produce all the intoxicant used in a year on 40,000 acres,” Kleiman said. “That’s 20 family farms in Iowa.” Eventually a joint could cost a nickel; Nabisco will take over edibles. “You will have pot grown in Iowa, processed by Cargill and sold by Amazon,” Kleiman said. “No one will make money except Jeff Bezos, who always makes money.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/nyregion/legalized-pot-isnt-going-to-save-us.html" id="017db7b0-a0ea-3027-acac-016773238c74">The New York Times</a>.

Marijuana and Murky Promises

NEW YORK — The animosity directed at Amazon and the legislators who have opened the velvet rope to the city has been fomenting for weeks, but on Wednesday it reached peak rage. It was then that Amazon executives faced members of the City Council, a body that was locked out of the process of wooing the company here, as well as protesters whose numbers were large enough that the council chamber could not accommodate all of them.

Both officials and civilians wanted to know why Amazon needed billions of dollars in subsidies when it had so much money, why it was getting a helipad, and how it imagined it could be considered a good neighbor when the city’s public land use process had been bypassed.

Ever since the announcement was made last month that Amazon had chosen Queens for its second headquarters over Detroit or Pittsburgh or anywhere else that would have welcomed it with far less ambivalence, the move has served as a projection screen for a wide and emotionally charged set of apprehensions about corporate tyranny, displacement, inequality, democracy, unfairness, loss.

How much of the anger at Amazon and its enablers is justified? Those in favor of the deal have repeatedly argued that 25,000 new jobs in New York make all the compromises worth it. Even if unemployment in the metropolitan area is low, and the city has added tens of thousands of jobs in the technology sector in recent years, civic leaders, like hypochondriacs in perfectly good health, live in perpetual fear that those sorts of gains could easily evaporate.

Since the beginning of time, it would seem, Republicans have played out that fear in rhetoric about tax policy, insisting that unless local tax rates were kept low, companies and jobs would flee to other states and cities. In New York, that has not proven to be true. But deteriorating infrastructure could emerge as the real threat to job growth and retention.

These concerns are hardly irrational. In May, Alliance Bernstein, the prominent investment house, announced that it was moving its headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee. Although the firm would retain a presence in Manhattan, close to 1,000 jobs would be lost to a place that has evolved in the past decade as a nexus of urban cool. Like so many revitalized cities around the country, Nashville has great food, great design, great style.

When Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, the business advocacy group founded in part by David Rockefeller in the 1970s, heard what was happening, she organized a meeting with the company and a group of political figures to try and better understand what had motivated Alliance Bernstein to relocate.

Although there were several factors at play, the first grievance mentioned by the firm’s representatives, Wylde said, was that New York had gotten tough to live in: a company survey revealed that average commuting times for employees were reaching the 90-minute mark. “Then,” she said, “they listed all the other reasons.”

Last year, as it happened, the Partnership set out to study the dozens of foreign companies in its membership, talking to them about the attractions and obstacles of operating in New York. The resulting report noted that “in every interview conducted,” the condition of airports, subways, roads and trains was cited as a major challenge.

“The number one reason companies chose not to expand in New York,” Wylde told me, “was the condition of transportation infrastructure.” This is not a small thing. Foreign companies currently employ close to 300,000 New Yorkers and contribute 11 percent of the city’s total $761 billion economic output.

In the mind of the chief executive, inconvenience is vanished profit. The delays stemming from the failures of the R train or the incapacitations of suburban rail lines is money gone to the winds.

Two years ago, in anticipation of a New Jersey Transit strike, the Partnership calculated what lost time actually costs. Looking at all the data, it discovered that for every hour commuters are delayed, New York City employers would lose $5.9 million. The impact of catastrophic weather on ailing infrastructure amplifies these losses. Two years ago, Deanna Mulligan, chief executive of Guardian Life Insurance, noted that the shutdown of the tunnels connecting New Jersey to the West Side of Manhattan for five days during Hurricane Sandy cost the company $40,000 an hour in lost wages and productivity.

So when does New York, with its cramped spaces and soaring housing prices that force people farther and farther away from Manhattan, making them even more beholden to unreliable means of getting to work, stop being worth it? When do certain businesses say, Enough, and invest in the idea that talent is mobile, that good pizza, in the 21st century, can be found anywhere? Amazon’s move to New York is a vote for the belief that the city, despite how generic it has come to seem in so many places, really is unlike anywhere else. Can that optimism survive?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/nyregion/maybe-its-not-taxes-that-scare-off-business-but-failing-subways.html" id="fb23b1cb-63cb-310b-a402-47a4af618ba0">The New York Times</a>.

Job Growth Gets Stuck on the Subway

After several speeches addressing the need for cyclists to be better protected on the road, those who came to the park staged a die-in, lying down in mournful silence — a response to what has become known in the biking community as “the crisis.”

Just two years ago, the city’s transportation department issued an encouraging report on cycling in the city: over the preceding 20 years it had become safer and easier to navigate streets that were increasingly clogged with cars and trucks.

That progress, though, now appeared harder to identify. Between 2006 and 2015, the study noted, the number of bicycle trips made in a single year increased from 66 million to 164 million, and this presumably played a role in impeding the dangers coming from motor vehicles. For years, researchers in the field of traffic safety have posited that the more cyclists there are out on the streets, the safer the riding experience is for everyone. But recently that theory had begun to seem less reliable.

This year, 15 cyclists have died, struck by cars and trucks — more than the total, 10, killed during the whole of 2018. And while the crisis refers in the immediate sense to these fatalities, it speaks more broadly to the continued, reflexive privileging of automotive culture even as the urgencies of climate change mount and terrify.

Over the past two decades, urban planning has demonstrated little will to stem the forces of suburbanization resulting from the choice made by many families to remain in New York with the belief that they should forfeit none of the conveniences of living in Greenwich. Just this week The Daily News reported on one neighborhood’s rage over a financier who manage to carve a driveway for himself in front of his enormous townhouse out of a patch of public sidewalk.

About 45% of all households in New York City have cars according to recent census data, with close to 93,000 of them owning three or more. This reality has unfolded alongside the rise of Uber and Lyft and our growing reliance on getting everything — pet food, tennis balls, cocktail shakers, bulk ancient grains — delivered to us within 24 hours via the use of panel trucks. These developments not only threaten the cyclist’s sense of autonomy but also undermine the use of small alternative vehicles that reduce our carbon footprint.

Last month this increasingly congested streetscape absorbed 1,000 shareable mopeds. They arrived seemingly out of nowhere from a newly formed company called Revel whose chairman and co-founder Frank Reig, a former chef, wanted to ease the complications involved in moving from one part of Brooklyn or Queens to another. (“You’ve got a girlfriend in Williamsburg; how do I get there from Crown Heights?” he said by way of explaining his inspiration, a scenario that within certain demographics has a relatability factor upward of 99%.)

Alarmingly, the city has very little jurisdiction over these vehicles, and motorists in New York are not accustomed to sharing the road with a guy whose major qualifications to ride one is that he has a credit card and a girlfriend in Williamsburg. The rules surrounding these vehicles are minimal and governed not by the city but by the state, which simply requires you to have a standard driver’s license — not a motorcycle license — to operate them.

Revel is activated by an app that demands proof of that license (and prohibits usage if you have certain traffic violations). But although the company offers free instruction, you as a rider are not mandated to take a single class and might likely be inclined to dismiss the whole idea on the grounds that it would defeat the free-spirited, when-in-Rome ethos of a moped in the first place.

Perhaps in a different city a highly visible public-education would accompany this kind of roll out but at the moment, New York is not that city. It is a city managed by a mayor who, as Charles Komanoff, a former director of Transportation Alternatives, a prominent advocacy group put it, “is car culture.’’

The description applies not only because Bill de Blasio is chauffeured 12 miles to the gym on mornings that he is not out of town running for president, but also because the values of his administration can seem as if they are buried in the 20th century.

This was especially clear last fall, when a stretch of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway was revealed to be in dire condition. The first impulse from the city was not to eliminate it or to reduce the number of car and trucks dependent on the artery. Instead it proposed shutting down a heavily used pedestrian thoroughfare — the Brooklyn Heights Promenade — for several years as the BQE was returned to the state of polish in which it was created during the era of Robert Moses. The idea was regressive enough to attract almost no support.

One of the most moving speeches given at the Washington Square rally came from Hindy Schachter, whose husband died five years ago after he was hit by a cyclist while he was jogging in Central Park. She was there, she said, because she blamed inadequate road design and infrastructure for her husband’s death, not the cyclist who ran into him.

Of the city’s 1,240 miles of bike lanes, 337 have been added during the de Blasio administration, which is significant, in theory if not always in practice. The lanes are often obstructed by parked cars and the police, who have long maintained a skeptical if not hostile disposition toward cyclists, blame them in many cases for crashes that are ultimately the fault of motorists.

City Councilman Brad Lander has proposed a bill that would use camera technology to identify the city’s worst offenders — those with many speeding tickets and other infractions on their records — committing them to improving or impounding their cars. The City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, has pushed for the city to increase the number of bike-lane miles it creates each year to 50.

Ideally, New York would be ribboned with continuous bike paths that made street driving virtually unnecessary. But even if cost were not a factor, our system of governance empowers local community boards to have outsize influence over what gets built in their neighborhoods. Communities have fought back against bike lanes on the grounds that they will take away parking spaces, that they are aesthetically dubious, that they are a sign of further unwanted transformations.

At the rally in Washington Square I met a woman named Kweli Campbell, relatively new to cycling but someone who has been committed to expanding biking opportunities in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, where her family has deep roots. The resistance that she and others there have met comes from those who fear that bike lanes signal more insidious forms of gentrification. In neighborhoods where there has traditionally been little investment in infrastructure, bike lanes might feel hard to justify. But the biking world, something obvious from rallies and reflected in the recent deaths — among them an artist’s, a courier’s, a middle-age man’s from Brownsville in Brooklyn — is huge and diverse, spanning many demographics.

And the dangers do not discriminate.

New York Was Supposedly Getting Better for Cyclists. What Happened?

NEW YORK — On a particularly humid evening this week, hundreds of cyclists gathered in Washington Square Park for an action reminiscent of the years when AIDS summoned so many to protest bureaucratic indifference to tragedy.

Ginia Bellafante

Articles written by the author

Is the NYPD at War With Itself?

The NYC Roots of Trump and 'Go Back Where You Came From'

A Bookstore, Finally, Comes to the Bronx

Two 12-Year-Olds Drew Swastikas on a Playground. Is That a Hate Crime?

The Battleground of Black Hair

The Rich Didn't Always Need $238 Million Penthouses

The $15 Minimum Wage Is Here. It's Not Nearly Enough, but It's a Start.

The Year That Bill de Blasio Became Donald Trump* and 9 Other Improbable Transformations

Marijuana and Murky Promises

Job Growth Gets Stuck on the Subway

Job Growth Gets Stuck on the Subway

New York was supposedly getting better for cyclists. What happened?

'Everybody ain't surfing this rainbow wave': Class divisions in gay rights

Gloria Vanderbilt: The inventor of the personal brand

The empty storefront crisis and the end of the American dream

Really, Mr. Mayor? President? Really?

Where are the statues of LGBTQ pioneers? Here are 11 worthy New Yorkers

No end to the abuse of Evelyn Nesbit

Women take the cosmic fall for male greed

'The Lehman trilogy' criticizes capitalism, at $2,000 a seat