From Menace to Boisterous Life: The Transformation of Union Square
This piece is a New York Post adaptation from the 25th anniverary issue of City Journal.
I moved to Union Square in 1977, so I have been living near the square long enough to mark two great eras in the life of the city. The eras were cultural periods as distinctive as the Renaissance, the Gold Rush or the Time of Troubles.
Union Square, when I moved in, was marked by decrepitude, menace and uneasy bustle. Now it is refreshing, safe and bursting with life.
“The greatest enemy of Union Square’s success is not ideology but success itself. In the new era, things have been good for so long that young people or newcomers cannot imagine them any other way.”
When we lived in the first era, the second was unimaginable; and after living so many years in the second era, the first has become almost irrecoverable.
In 1977, the subway cars throbbed with color — the spray-painted tags of vandals. Apprentices left black scrawls, but masters covered entire flanks of cars with fat doodles, bulbous or zigzag, of stylized numbers and letters. These were ads — this is me; and markers — I was here. They competed, the latest defacer defacing not only the car but the work of his peers. The graffiti was proprietary — technically, the MTA owned the cars, but the scribbling said: We own the underground.
Aboveground were different forms of desolation. The core of Union Square is a park. It is raised above street level, and in 1977 could be entered only by steps — short flights, seven or eight steps apiece, but enough to isolate it psychically. The park’s edges were lined with bushes that enclosed the park further and made it even more uninviting. The grass had been worn away to soil, and the soil compacted as hard as a floor. Young men loitered in the park, murmuring “Smokes? Smokes?” as you passed.
I came to live amid all this in 1977, the year of the blackout and the Son of Sam. New York’s life seemed unnatural, like that of M. Valdemar, the tubercular patient in the Poe story who is hypnotized at the moment of death and keeps going in a trance, talking after a fashion; when the hypnotist finally ends his trance, he crumbles into “a mass of loathsome — of detestable putrescence.”
A generation later, all is changed. There was a city-wide effort to clean subway stations and paint subway cars, and keep repainting them until vandals tired of seeing their handiwork obliterated. Petty criminals started getting arrested for petty crimes, such as turnstile jumping; many of them, when booked, turned out to be serious criminals wanted for other offenses.
Similar methods were applied aboveground, with equally dramatic results. Union Square Park was replanted and, in part, re-landscaped. The walkway was graded and widened so that police patrol cars could drive up and across. The prowling vigilant cars announced that those in charge were in charge, and cared. After a while, it was no longer necessary for them to patrol the park.
New businesses came to existing spaces. One was the Green Market that occupies the paved outer rim of the square, hooking around the northern perimeter and down the west side to 15th Street. The Green Market actually began in the bad old days of the seventies, but it expanded as conditions improved.
Another, on Union Square West, was the Coffee Shop. A trio of models took over Nick’s Coffee Shop, a classic Greek diner with a counter. They expanded the space, put a lounge in the basement and tables outside in the warm weather, and hired pretty young women as waitresses.
How did we get from film noir to La Grande Jatte? Good economic times helped; more money is better than less.
“More important... was Rudy Giuliani, the mayor who put smart cops in place, understood their tasks as well as they did, and backed them to the hilt.”
But good policing gave what cash cannot buy — the sense of ease. William Bratton, chief of the transit police (1990–92) and police commissioner (1994–96), was the marquee top cop. Equally important was Jack Maple, Bratton’s deputy police commissioner, who devised CompStat, the computerized system that tracks the daily flow of crime, precinct by precinct, and allows the police to respond quickly.
More important than either was Rudy Giuliani, the mayor who put smart cops in place, understood their tasks as well as they did, and backed them to the hilt. Michael Bloomberg maintained Giuliani’s policies and improved on his record.
Square and city enjoyed a decades’ long summer. They even survived an act of war. The morning of 9/11, I saw the Twin Towers, three miles to the south, burning from Union Square. That night, the maître d’ of the Coffee Shop, a young Dominican, walked to the site to see if he could help somehow.
There was nothing he could do. So what did people who could do nothing do? They came to Union Square and talked. The evangels of the perfect society, which can only be established by murder, had had their say; the inhabitants of a good society, which is maintained by good stewardship and thousands of daily individual efforts, were having theirs.
The greatest enemy of Union Square’s success is not ideology but success itself. In the new era, things have been good for so long that young people or newcomers cannot imagine them any other way. Anyone who lived through the previous era has memories, but they, like clippings in an album, have become brittle and faded. No, you never walked through the park at night when Reggie Jackson was a Yankee, but you still had sideburns then. Now?
This piece originally appeared in New York Post