NEW YORK -- By rough estimate, I've lived nearly a year in this city, three or four days at a time. But I haven't been in this neighborhood, Morningside Heights, home to Columbia University and Barnard College, in almost 30 years.
This is where I stayed in the 1980s when it was Ed Koch's city and there was blood in the air. While the New York Post screamed "Rough Sex Killed Jenny," I could watch the drug deals going down on 106th Street from the telescope my hosts kept on the balcony.
I remember that telescope's warm mahogany and cool brass fittings and the satisfying grit in the resistance of its focus knob, the way the images juddered when you swung it round to check the other corners. The apartment was good-sized by New York standards, but I didn't know about New York standards then. So I felt hemmed in and stood outside, tracking down the streets, looking in the glass like Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman. Hoping for a glimpse of a peregrine or maybe Kitty Vaught, I don't know. I was in my 20s and the city was penitentiary gray; it loomed and shadowed and made me feel "dislocated in the universe" like Will in his YMCA room. I never stayed for long.
My generous hosts, friends of friends really, were never there. They were academics who somehow accumulated three apartments in the city. They'd decided to hold onto them all, and the one I borrowed apparently accommodated a steady stream of visitors. There was a list of instructions tacked to a corkboard near the door: It was fairly safe to walk south down Broadway during daylight hours, but Harlem was a no-fly zone. Central Park was the DMZ. The subway was risky.
New York was grim and ugly then, a Balkanized place where racial and tribal instincts held sway over much of the population. Drug crime and homelessness were rampant. Black men were pulled from cars and beaten to death in the streets, chased by mobs onto highways to be killed in traffic. It was a place where police seemed overeager. It was a place where Others were feared.
The last time I was in these parts, someone pointed out Bob Dylan's daughter to me at a party. It was a few days after Christmas in 1988, a few months before Trisha Meili was attacked as she jogged, headphones on, along the 102nd Street Transverse in Central Park.
We wouldn't know Meili's name until years later--then she was just the "Central Park jogger," a fit slip of a 28-year-old career woman who weighed less than 100 pounds. Her attacker, we'd learn in 2002, 13 years after the attack, was a serial rapist and murderer named Matias Reyes, who'd been a juvenile at the time. He'd hit her over the head with a tree branch. He dragged her off the road, north into the woods. She was raped and beaten in her face and head with a rock. He left her to die, tied up with her own shirt in the mud.
Meili lost 75 percent of her blood. Her body temperature dropped into the 80s. She spent 12 days in a coma, from which few thought she'd ever emerge. Neurologists rated her brain function at 4 on the Glasgow Coma Scale, which scores from 3 to 15. When she did wake up, she had no memory of what had happened.
Five boys from Harlem who'd been misbehaving in the park that night--"wilding," the newspapers called it--were reflexively arrested, charged, tried and convicted. Donald Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the re-institution of the death penalty.
Meili somehow recovered. Now she's an inspirational speaker. Now the five teenage boys from Harlem the police reflexively arrested in the moral panic following that case have been exonerated and released from prison. A movie was made about them. After taking office in January 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio finally acknowledged the city's obligation and cleared the way for the men to receive $40 million in compensation. (Trump called that settlement "a disgrace," noting that while the Central Park Five, as they came to be called, might not have been guilty, "these young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.")
I look up and see what was the rooftop I used to spy from. What had been the old apartment is something else now, the windows have been bricked over. There is no telescope. It was a long time ago. And New York City crime levels have decreased every year since 1990.
It's hard to believe I ever worried about walking up Columbus Avenue, behind the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, curving up above Morningside Park, rustling through dry leaves, wending our way toward Harlem. New York is safe now--or at least not dangerous. It seems a miracle.
Sometimes I hear New Yorkers moaning about how their city has changed over the years. Standing in line at a press screening for the New York Film Festival, a woman told me that the revitalization of her Tribeca neighborhood after the 9/11 attacks hadn't been all good--development money roared in and the neighborhood went from being relatively affordable to homes to the most expensive residential properties in the city.
"I bought my loft [in the '70s] for $30,000, and now it's worth $5 million," she says. "But sometimes I think that I'd rather have it worth $100,000 and have the artists and the young families back. The boom has made me a millionaire on paper, but we've lost some vitality too."
I know what she means. Times Square feels artificial now, like a Disney-fied representation of itself. There are still panhandlers, and always, as Jesus said, the poor, but the fear has somewhat dissipated. Bad things still happen, in these swirling eddies of humanity it's inevitable that we will invent ways to hurt each other, but I think things have gotten better, and that it's not all bad.
We make our way up through Harlem and back down Saint Nicholas Avenue, looking for a trace of Little Senegal. Manhattan is the globe compressed, in 10 blocks you march through continents.
And now we're back on Central Park West, headed for the American Museum of Natural History, with the sun slanting down like pyramid sides. I look over and see, in the blank blue above the rocky charcoal and green of Central Park, approximately over the 102nd Street Tranverse, a falcon gliding and banking, writing his wild signature in air.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 10/04/2015