PITY THE SKY THAT HAS NOTHING BUT STARS: CRIME AND PSYCHOLOGY ON AND OFF BROADWAY

Mugging; superheroes; comic books; movies; sex trade; serial crime; offender profiling; Mafia; psychiatry; literature; psychometric testing; terrorism

Feb 21, 2024

I kept recalling something a friend had told me. He’d looked over his shoulders with every step, all the way from Grand Central to his hotel. Even so, thieves had somehow managed to open the catches on his backpack before he got to where he was going.

It did not seem necessary to replicate my friend’s walking style. It felt provincial and unsophisticated. I was born to be a New Yorker. And now I was part of it, in the very heart of it. Here - at the top of the heap - everything was in its appropriate, chaotic place – streets with numbers; avenues with more numbers; yellow cabs with yet more, deeply mysterious, numbers; yellowish smoke ghosting out of gratings in the asphalt. I’d seen all this in a thousand cop shows. I wasn’t going to let my friend’s story spoil my first walk along Broadway.

OK, I’ll be honest: my friend’s story really spoilt my first walk along Broadway. Tense and alert, naive as any goggle-eyed bumpkin, I nevertheless completed my virginal, dumbstruck toddle with no problem whatever. No one undid the catches on my backpack. No one mugged me. No one mugged anyone else, either, as far as I could tell. I was relieved and a tiny bit disappointed.

After all, why would anyone mug me? I was hardly loaded with money, and didn’t look as if I was. During four years of postgraduate studies, I’d signed up for every paid Psychology experiment my department advertised and taken every fee straight to the Post Office. A few quid here and there did add up. I was as delighted with my savings account as I was sick and tired of sitting on my own in a dark laboratory, participating in someone else’s experiment into the Psychology of Language.

Welcome to my hotel room. It wasn’t what you’d expect, not after the marbled, muscular, overpowering lobby. The room had just enough space for a bed, wardrobe, chair, chest of drawers. There was a microdot of a bathroom and a view of some bricks crudely fashioned into the shape of a wall. Yet all of life was right outside. That included lots of shouting voices, flashing lights, police-car sirens that reminded me constantly where I was. Those unrelenting sirens. In the city that deosn’t sleep, they kept on waking me up. Crime must be happening everywhere, all the time.

Years later, when I discovered Lawrence Block’s series character, the alcoholic private eye, Matt Scudder, I imagined him living in that hotel room. Scudder sits there even now, owning nothing but a bottle of booze, a pile of dog-eared papers, and a guilty conscience. His bar, Armstrong’s, is just a couple of blocks away. Even more years later, when I read Kenneth Fearing’s crime novel, The Big Clock, I knew that Gil’s Tavern, with its bizarre museum, was nothing more than Armstrong’s in disguise.

Some sort of criminal trial was being broadcast on the hotel-room telly. In Britain we’d never heard of this guy. I switched off. I hung up my shirts and ran water into a glass. I recalled my New York lore: every molecule had been drunk five hundred thousand times before. I got it down, but I’d never tasted water like it. It tasted like the inside of someone else’s mouth after they’d been sucking a potato. Shuddering, I hurried over to catch the view from the Empire State Building. Of course I did. If one single thing could tell me that I’d arrived at the top of the world, that was going to be it. Get this - I was standing right on the spot where superheroes had confronted each other on the cover of the very first book I ever bought with my own money: the Marvel/DC crossover Superman vs The Amazing Spider-Man.

I still have the book. In one memorable panel, Peter Parker himself dashes into the Empire State Building in hot pursuit of Dr Octopus. He shoves aside some hick from out of town. ‘Pushy blasted New Yorker!’ cries the hick. I didn’t quite know what his anger signified, (in those days, I couldn’t have found New York City on a map of New York City,) but I knew it signified something. Something important. The hick wasn’t a New Yorker. He did not belong, not like Peter Parker. Not like me.

Supes and Spidey first crossed paths in 1976. Ask any Brit what they remember from that summer, and they’ll tell you about the heatwave. It was a scorcher. Ask them about the summer of 77 and they’ll tell you about the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Union flags decorated everything that wasn’t already decorated with a neat colour portrait of Her Maj. Beneath the patriotism, the country was apparently disintegrating. The Sex Pistols released a single called ‘God Save the Queen’ making a half-rhyme with ‘the fascist regime’. They seemed not to understand that, under an actual fascist regime, they’d never have been allowed to record the song in the first place.

Swap events around and they come close to describing New York City in the same period. Banners and patriotism in 1976 – the bicentennial – and an infamous heatwave the following year. 1977 was the Summer of Sizzle: it was the Summer of Sam. While new wave bands tore it up at CBGBs, some random crazy stalked the city, murdering women for no reason anyone could discern. You might say that the citizens panicked despite the heat – but the truth was, they panicked in part because of it. Crime loves the sun; it loves sweat and sunburn and frayed tempers. 1,125,739 crimes were reported in New York that year. It was a record. In the middle of July came a blackout. There was looting: there was worse. On July 13 came the ‘Night of Terror’, memorably and horrifically captured in the Naomi Watts movie, The Wolf Hour.

Spike Lee, too, made a movie about the Summer of Sam. It begins and ends with the New York reporter, Jimmy Breslin, telling us that New York is the city he ‘loves and hates in equal measure’.

I was glad I wasn’t there, back in 77. New York City looked awful. It looked amazing. I was safe and happy on the other side of the world. New York City really did look amazing, though. I wanted to visit.

And kept wanting to visit. How could I not? Just imagine the heroes you could meet, on the very streets of the Big Apple: Jack Kirby; Debbie Harry; Woody Allen. During my first year at university, FilmSoc gave us a season of Woody Allen movies. If the early ones were about the funniest things I’d ever seen, they were nevertheless without doubt movies. Mid-career Allen hit his stride with masterpieces you could only call films. Who doesn’t love Manhattan? Who doesn’t love Manhattan? (This was long before we all learnt things about Woody Allen that we’d rather forget.)

Times Square that evening. Here’s an extract from my diary:

‘There are numbers up in lights everywhere – everyone here must be fantastically well-informed. For instance, at 8.25 this evening in was 70^o, the national debt stood at just over $61 per family, and there were 232 million guns in the US’.

No reassuring thought, that. I ducked into Sbarro and bought a slice. I ate at the window and watched my fellow New Yorkers passing by. Passing was the word. They were all ignoring me. Unignorably ignoring me. Why? Did it mean I didn’t fit, or that I did? I was shaking a little physically. I understood the reason for that, at least. The city I’d imagined so long – the city of fiction – had abruptly collided with the city of reality, with all the shuddering, jarring effects that implies.

At the turn of the last century, Times Square was so infested with criminals that, when a law-abiding citizen at Broadway and 42^nd shouted, ‘There’s the man who stole my watch!’, twelve strangers ran away.[i] Decades passed before the situation improved. In the early 70s, Big Mickey Zaffarano, a Bonnano-connected tough guy, chose to spangle the Pussycat Cinema – at Broadway and 49^th - in cheap and cheerful, beautiful neon[ii]. By the 80s, no fewer than 1200 prostitutes were coming to Times Square every night. The great cross that marked the city’s centre became a trough of crack and sleaze, Mob-financed, barely-policed, chicken-poxed with predators. The worst of them may have been Richard Francis Cottingham, known as the Times Square Killer. In public, the profilers called him a narcissistic psychopath. In private, doubtless, they called him much worse. Cottingham had been put away just a few years before I arrived.

Crime Square in the 90s was no longer quite the sleazepit that Cottingham had loved so much. The clean-up had begun, and this time that didn’t just mean ‘scum-scrubbing’ the peepshows (don’t ask: it was nothing you ever saw on Kojak). Sigmund Freud might have diagnosed the city as a single biological organism, busily repressing its unconscious impulses. He would not have been entirely wrong. And yet crime hadn’t quite given up, not yet. The crossroads of the world still had the quality that TV producers like to call ‘grittiness’ (you could feel it against the teeth; under the fingernails; in the corners of the eyes). The geography was still just a little dangerous. Drug deals were going down in every place that looked like a shadowy corner - not to mention most places that didn’t. ‘Pay up, pay up,’ breakdancers cried. Tablecloths glittering with watches and jewellery vanished as if in a magician’s trick and stall-holders scattered whenever rumours of law-enforcement were heard.

If Times Square was slowly turning into Tom Hanks in Big, 42^nd Street was still more like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle should’ve been shambling about, banging his own soul against the bars of the only world he knew. Today’s tourist can barely imagine such a down-and-dirty sleazefest. Every wasted heap lying in every dried pool of urine in every unused doorway had pockets hanging wrong-way-out like Hoover flags. They’d been sliced open by dirtballs funding a crack habit. The oldest building on the Deuce was and is a church, go figure. Everything banged up against everything else, no wonder I felt dizzy.

What I had to do was, I had to walk down Broadway: Times Square to Battery. That would surely be my New York. No less a writer than Damon Runyon had immortalised the street for me; alchemised it into something that was not merely fictional but very nearly mythical. Fellow Runyonites will be able to guess precisely how excited I was to walk down Broadway, looking left and right and hoping to glimpse Harry the Horse or Sky Masterson. More than somewhat.

For the second day in a row – out here on the mean streets of New York City, where dog ate dog and the only law was the law of the jungle - not one single person took the trouble to stick me up or shake me down. It was getting repetitive. Evidently my city had decided not even to notice me.

‘Pity the sky that has nothing but stars.’ Go south down the Great White Way and you pass through a reverse chronology of the city’s construction. A century or so earlier, it would have meant brothel after brothel in upside-down order of cost. Clinton Place was plush and relatively free from disease; Canal Street, not so much. Fortieth Street south to Twenty-fourth, between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, was once the area known as Satan’s Circus.[iii]

Out of Satan’s Circus, and across into Hell’s Kitchen: ‘a locality where law and order is openly defied, where might makes right and depravity revels riotously in squalor and open filth’[iv]. When the journalist Jacob Riis wrote about it at the turn of the last century, he said that ‘there is nothing that can outdo [it] in wickedness’[v]. None of that seemed true any more. In fact, there seemed to be some kind of yard sale going on.

Slightly relieved, slightly disappointed, I wandered eastwards until I’d glimpsed the New York Public Library, another sight to tick off the list. The Library was one of the favourite targets of George Metesky, Mad Bomber of New York. He was active in the years around the Second World War. His capture is a legend in profiling circles, owing to the involvement of the psychiatrist, James Brussel, known as ‘the Sherlock Holmes of the Couch’. Brussel created one of the very first modern criminal profiles. It mentioned the old-fashioned phrasing the Bomber used when he wrote to the press (‘dastardly deeds’). He appeared to have learnt English from Victorian books. Metesky, child of immigrant parents, who was given no compensation when he suffered an industrial accident, took hideous, violent revenge on the city that betrayed him.

The north end of Greenwich Village. The Strand Bookstore. I could have stayed forever. ‘Twenty-two Thousand Miles of Books’, its advertising promised, or something like that. I bought about half an inch – all I could afford – and walked on.

Along Sullivan Street the Mob leader Vincent ‘Chin’ Gigante had once shuffled daily, talking to himself, drooling, and marking his territory in the same manner as a dog. Hence his nickname, ‘the Oddfather’. Gigante appeared to be suffering from dementia, not to mention a psychiatrist’s textbook full of other syndromes. The reality was otherwise. Gigante was a fake. He was simply trying to avoid prosecution[vi]. Clever man, he fooled a generation of psychologists, psychiatrists, and medical doctors.

Manhattan grew only more interesting the further south I walked. Washington Square Park was really interesting - so much so, I felt pleased to get out alive. Just south of there, in 1878, George Leonidas Leslie, ‘King of the Bank Robbers’, walked away with $2.5 million. Or thought he did, until he discovered that his getaway bag wasn’t full of money at all. He was lumbered with a big pile of non-negotiable bonds[vii]. One of Leslie’s accomplices was the beautifully-named Old Man Hope[viii]. That feels as though it ought to mean something.

In the late 19^th century, people said, you could fire a shotgun on the corner of Broadway and Houston and not hit an honest man. Indeed, the whole area from SoHo to City Hall Park was once run by members of the Five Points gang. So densely populated was it, and so criminal, its name became an international byword for a wise spot to avoid. Its Old Brewery supposedly saw a murder every night for fifteen years. Herbert Asbury’s book (not to mention Martin Scorcese’s film) The Gangs of New York was set there.

Canal Street was the site of the first ‘cigar-store battery’[ix]. Walk into one of those stores and a cigar might not be what you’d end up buying. More than a few unprepared customers must have wandered out bemused, wondering what had just happened, what their wife was going to think, and where their trousers were.

In 1842, PT Barnum – the infamous advertiser who had almost nothing to sell beyond a glimpse of half a monkey sewn to a slice of fish - purchased the old American Museum at Broadway and Ann Street. He stuffed that elegant old marble building with ‘human wonders’ and ‘sundry frauds’[x]. Fraud, in fact, was all part of Barnum’s game. Not for nothing did this plausible rogue call himself the ‘King of Humbug’. In the infinite phone book of New York fakers, hucksters, and carnival barkers, Barnum’s name is listed in bold. You can doubtless think of several others.

Wall Street, down towards the island’s southern tip, has its name because it used to be a barricade. It protected Manhattan’s citizenry from actual pirates, not to mention the English, who nevertheless managed to overthrow what they called ‘the iniquitous government of Peter Stuyvesant’[xi]. That was back in the old days, of course, when New York was still called New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant was nobody’s hero, and no one had the least idea of the marvels to come.

My guidebook assured me that the Staten Island Ferry was the greatest 50c ride in the world. It wasn’t lying. There’s nothing like standing at the stern and watching Manhattan drift away, Jersey and Brooklyn opening up like some giant book. ‘Eight million stories in the Naked City’, says Jimmy Breslin. Eight Million Ways to Die, says Lawrence Block.

The Statue of Liberty passed by, recommending you send ‘your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’. Nearby was Ellis Island. Over a period of 62 years, immigrants had to pass tests administered by the US Public Health Service. The tests were sprung upon them as soon as they left their ship. Communists, anarchists, bigamists, the poor – all were turned away. Others were suspected of some sort of ‘mental defect’ and subjected to intelligence tests. Overseeing the procedure was Howard Knox[xii], who was linked to the eugenics movement that provided intellectual credibility for the Nazi movement that was defiling Europe at that very time. When ships full of desperate refugees were sent back across the Atlantic, psychological science was able to lend those sickening decisions a shine of respectability.

Most notorious of the ships was the St Louis, whose 937 passengers returned to Europe after having been within actual sight of the New World. Meanwhile, the SS Drotningholm did at least manage to dock in New York. One of its passengers was Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr. He turned out to be a Nazi spy, trying to sneak into the US. The FBI used his story to convince President Roosevelt that immigrants posed a severe threat to national security[xiii]. Keep them out, the FBI cautioned. Keep them out.

Mid-afternoon. I took the high-speed elevator to the highest point in New York City. The Twin Towers gave me mixed feelings. Fantastical for their very size, they resembled someone’s acid dream. They loomed over Lower Manhattan as if designed for a different place entirely, or imagined into place. The towers swayed perceptibly in the wind. Apparently this had made office workers anxious in the first few years after they were opened. ‘They said they were frightened and didn’t want to come to work,’ our guide told us. ‘But the buildings are designed to do that. The day they don’t sway in the wind, that’s the day you don’t want to come to work.’

Image courtesy of www.robinfrowley.com

PITY THE SKY THAT HAS NOTHING BUT STARS: CRIME AND PSYCHOLOGY ON AND OFF BROADWAY

Mugging; superheroes; comic books; movies; sex trade; serial crime; offender profiling; Mafia; psychiatry; literature; psychometric testing; terrorism

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