MEAN STREETS?

Ten years ago, I was teaching an introductory composition course a branch of the City University of New York, which pretty much epitomizes urban public higher education. The student body was composed largely of immigrants or the children of immigrants: Russians whose families ran importing businesses in Brighton Beach, Koreans whose parents owned vegetable markets on Atlantic Avenue, black and Latino kids from tough ghetto neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy, almost all of them the first members of their families to attend college. In English 1, when I asked them to write about their lives, what I often got was narratives of crime, with which, usually as victims but sometimes as perpetrators, they claimed to live on intimate terms. This was early in the Giuliani administration, before felony rates in New York began to decline dramatically, and the city’s parks, streets, tunnels and minority neighborhoods were still synonymous to most of America, and indeed the world, with lawlessness and peril. I think my kids wanted to impress me with the grittiness of their lives -- the crack houses, the drive-by shootings, the muggings and beatings that seemed to be woven into the fabrics of their young lives. And often I was at least semi-convinced, even by Jimmy Wang (not his real name) who wrote plausibly of his on-going attempt to resign from the Ghost Shadows, a Chinatown mob whose activities closely resembled those detailed on The Sopranos and who, he claimed, were determined to kill him rather than let him secede.

Most of the other students in the class accepted the law of the jungle with resignation and equanimity. The way of the world was opportunism, competition, the strong preying on the weak; human life was, as Thomas Hobbes put it, nasty, brutish and short; they couldn’t imagine a place where that wasn’t the rule. I could, however, having owned a small second home in Springs for twenty years. On an impulse, I typed up and distributed to the class three items from the Star’s police log for the current week, and asked them to compare them to three typical crime stories from the Post or the News and then to write an essay about what they felt they could conclude about the differences between Brooklyn and East Hampton based solely on this evidence.

The New York newspaper stories they came up with were predictably horrific: a child slain by a stray bullet, someone pushed by a stranger under the wheels of a subway train, the Abner Louima torture case which was then in the headlines. These played off nicely against the items from the Star, which I had chosen with some care. The first reported that after the girlfriend of a Springs man had left him, her mother had repeatedly telephoned him, “threatening and yelling.” The second recorded the fact that for-sale signs kept disappearing from a property on Fairlawn Drive in Montauk. The third read, in its entirety,

An Egypt Lane resident called police Saturday afternoon to turn in a group of boys playing football on the lawn in front of Hook Mill. They were not breaking any law, however, and police declined to interrupt the game.

The results were illuminating. Some of the students had heard of the Hamptons, but only as a playground for the rich and celebrated; they never imagined that ordinary life went on there, and certainly not life as ordinary as the police log suggested. The were baffled both by the innocuousness of criminal activity on Eastern Long Island and by the fact that anyone would take the time to read about such trivial events. In the classroom discussion that followed the assignment, some accused me of having manufactured the news -- of foisting on them an imaginary Utopia of middle-class white homeowners living lives of stultifying if harmonious security. If the events had actually happened, they were cause for scorn: you call that “crime”? Hector, both outraged and amused, couldn’t get over the wimpiness of a grown man calling the cops because an old lady had yelled at him over the phone. “What is point of taking for-sale sign?” demanded Sergei. “Is prank? Act of revenge? Why not blow up car or set fire to house?” And as to the touch-football caper, the whole class, even the girls, threw up their hands and rolled their eyes. Boys who broke no windows, trespassed on no one’s property, set off no fireworks, stole nothing, sassed no one, merely whiled away an afternoon throwing a football around -- and some guy dials 911? What lesson, asked Jamal, were those kids being taught? If they got rousted for playing sports, what happened when they did things that were really fun, like hanging out in parks and parking lots all night, smoking weed and listening to rap?

I was forced to admit that I had to an extent misrepresented East Hampton, by deliberately not choosing reports of higher crimes and misdemeanors (though in truth, the worst offenses recorded that week were two obscene phone calls made to identical twins and a license plate stolen and found the next day by the side of the road). Yes, I confessed, from time to time bad stuff happened out there -- murder, arson, theft -- as it did everywhere else, but no one was going to nickname the Town Police Department “Fort Apache,” like that fabled besieged precinct in the Bronx. And I assured them that East Hampton was not a fantasy oasis of peace and amity, but closer to the norm of American life, which was at that time still lived more in small towns than urban jungles.

I no longer teach at Brooklyn College, so I can’t really judge how the perceptions of its students about their city and human behavior have changed, and what they would make of the Star’s crime beat these days, which features (along with occasional horrific stories like the murder of a wife by her husband) reports of growing ethnic friction on the East End, which make it sound a lot more like the world in which my students lived. And the more perceptive of them might point to the corresponding gentrification of some of those tough New York neighborhoods -- Harlem and Red Hook and even Midwood, where the college is located. Midwood in the 1960’s was largely a middle-class Jewish and Italian neighborhood; its public high school graduates went to the nation’s top colleges. Then began “white flight,” and by the 70’s it had become a black ghetto; I remember a number of gun incidents at Midwood High, and it wasn’t safe to park your car on the street even in daytime. Now Midwood is being re-colonized by white middle-class home buyers who can’t afford Manhattan, and there are animosities between these newcomers and the people they’re displacing.

What does it all add up to? That two communities which ten years ago seemed like polar opposites are becoming more and more alike -- the sleepy hamlet not so sleepy, the mean streets not so mean -- so that ten years from now, if the trend continues, only topography and architecture will distinguish them? The immigration debate is as alive here as it is there; will Springs become the new Crown Heights? I don’t know what it all means, but it occurs to me that I might have planted a seed by assigning that paper: maybe Jimmy Wang decided that East Hampton might be a good place to start over, change his name, open a plant nursery or landscaping business.