The Power and the Money

New York the way that 40-something white (and Puerto Rican) people see it

 So before I left for Mexico, I was talking with my old friends Guy and Omar and Carlo, and we all agreed that those of us with some connection to the borough of Brooklyn are less likely to bring it up than we used to be. Why? Well, simply put, the hipsters. “Brooklyn” does not mean what it used to. In my case, this is not a bad ting thing, since I have a better claim on Manhattan, including parts that only recently became nice. But for most of us, it kind of sucks. Who are these people? What have they brought, besides the thoroughly awesome Barcade?

Seriously. Go to Barcade. A little while after taking the below photo, I played Asteroids until the muscles on my right hand started to scream. If you are of a certain age, you will be able to find your poison, and without that ever-present fear of violence that hung over actual arcades in the 1980s. Plus, beer!

Upshot: these two videos made me laugh.

and (watch for the hipster bemoaning, even though they have not got to Bay Ridge, AFAIK):

Learn. In the second video, watch the pizza thing at 2:05. That is where I must say that East Harlem beats Brooklyn. (My wife is my witness!) And should you tell me that the whole shit-people-say meme is over, well, then I can respond that the best thing about deactivating my Facebook page is that I do not have to care. 

Department of calm down, state defense force edition

 So, I’ve gotten some hyperventilating emails about the fact that Arizona is looking to establish a State Guard independent of the National Guard. “Facism, racism, separatism, end of the Republic, yadda.” Oh, gosh. This is monumentally stupid, what Glen Beck would talk about if he shared my political beliefs. There is absolutely nothing odd or sinister in the Arizona bill.

Back in the day, I (like anyone who was ever in the NYARNG) routinely ran into people from the New York Guard. What’s the New York Guard? It’s a state defense force, authorized by a 1955 act of Congress. State defense force members do not receive federal military training (National Guard members undergo the same training as members of the regular armed services) and therefore cannot be federalized. Back then, their uniforms were almost indistinguishable from regular NYARNG (IIRC); today it seems they wear standard Army ACUs with a funny black cap and brightly-colored state flag.

It turns out that twenty-two states have state defense forces, although Massachusetts’ is no longer active. New Hampshire seems to want one.

Establishing a state defense force seems like a silly idea: if New York didn’t have its Guard (which has trouble meeting its 1,700-person authorized strength, what with the low pay and benefits) it isn’t clear why you’d want to invent it. But the Arizona bill isn’t a threat to the Republic, and it pains me when American liberals start to travel down paranoid rabbit holes the way too many of their conservative brethern have recently. In short, calm down, there really is nothing to see here.

Race, roads, or regulation? Canadian and American cities

 When asked why Canadian cities are so built-up compared to American ones, Martin Wisse of the Netherlands suggests, “No white flight.” It’s an appealing answer, given America’s massive urban ghettoes, but it’s almost certainly wrong.

 

Consider the differences between Seattle and Vancouver. For an American city, Seattle is very white and disproportionately childless. The city, however, splatters across the horizon, with few high-rises outside the central business district, while Vancouver is relatively compact and its proliferating residential towers reach to the sky. All this despite geography in Seattle that should encourage density!

The Seattle-Vancouver comparison alone should make you doubt the validity of the “white flight” hypothesis. There are other reasons, however, to reject it. Until 1990 none of Canada’s metropolitan areas declined in population — the country didn’t see shifts in economic geography like what turned cities like Buffalo, Detroit, New Orleans, Flint, Akron, Pittsburgh, Dayton, and Syracuse into what they are today. (The 1990s recession changed that, but the places that shrank tended to small, and located in Atlantic Canada or northern Ontario and Quebec.)

More importantly, white flight can’t explain why the nonblack sections of American cities look rather different from their Canadian counterparts. Nor can white flight (by itself) explain why American suburbs strongly resist residential high-rises, whereas Canadian ones (Montreal excepted) take to them with relative zeal. For example, Chicago’s North Side does not look like Toronto, save for a belt along the lake. Nor does Boston’s central and northern urban area — Back Bay, South End, North End, Southie, Brookline, Allston, Brighton, Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea, Watertown, Arlington, Belmont, Charlestown, and East Boston — look much like East York or Scarborough. It is true, of course, that the great American ghetto is an American phenomenon, created by America’s strange racial caste system, but racial tensions don’t explain why Houston looks very different from Calgary.

So if isn’t race, then what is it? Another possible culprit is roads. American cities have a lot more freeway-miles per capita than their Canadian counterparts. The logic is not that freeways destroyed the neighborhoods that they cut through. I’m sorry, but speaking as someone who grew up in neighborhoods that had roads driven through or beside them, that argument is just stupid. (Yes, this applies to Toronto.) The plausible logic, rather, is that inner city neighborhoods were always relatively undesirable, but without subsidized freeways it would have harder to leave them for lower-density suburbs.

I am sympathetic to this argument, but I have some doubts. (Not least that my wife and I prefer dense inner city neighborhoods to the suburbs.) It is almost certainly true that American-style sprawl requires massive investment in freeways. Fewer freeways, more density. More density, more high-rises. The problem? If density the key, why does Los Angeles look so different from Toronto despite being denser? The 11.8 million people who live in Los Angeles’s urbanized area (that is, the area defined by the lights visible from space at night, minus fringe areas with a population density below 1,000 people per mile) are packed in at 7,068 per square mile, whereas their 4.6 million Torontonian counterparts live at 6,835 per square mile. Perhaps it is the freeway net that allows Los Angeles to splatter its density more uniformly than Toronto, but that feels ad hoc as an explanation, especially since Toronto’s suburbs are actually very densely-populated compared to Boston, Chicago, or New York.

The other possible explanation is regulation. In this view, roads may have contributed to American sprawl, but zoning is what really keeps it in place. For this view to be correct, Canadian zoning has to be less strict than American zoning. Are Canadian cities more likely to approve density, allow smaller lots and narrower streets, require fewer parking spaces, and permit higher buildings? This is not hard to believe, considering the far greater control that provincial governments exercise over municipalities in Canada, but I do not know the answer.

 

In point of fact, the “roads” and “regulations” hypotheses may be hard to disentangle. If a lack of roads drives up land values (by limiting the effective supply of land), then there will be more political pressure to allow dense development. After all, people need places to live. On the other hand, if it is easy to get out to the burbs (via all those freeways) then there will be less political pressure on inner-city areas to permit taller buildings. Cambridge, for example, saw a high-rise boom in the 1970s, which the city deliberately stepped on. As a result, the Central Square subway stop (where we live) is stupidly surrounded by two-story buildings instead of 20-story towers. Our building was built in the early 1990s, and was effectively capped at five floors. Without Boston’s two ring roads (I-95 aka “Route 128” and I-495), the pressure to build up in places like Cambridge would have been harder to resist.

 

In fact, however, it is possible to disentangle between “roads” and “regulations,” by testing for the effect of zoning changes on land values. Of course, it’s never that easy — endogeneity is always a problem. Ed Glaeser has a paper suggesting that zoning is determinative in shaping American cities in California and the East Coast north of Virginia. He has a particularly-detailed study of Boston that supports the zoning hypothesis: market forces (given the existing road net) would make Greater Boston rather denser were the regulations less restrictive. (Newton would look like Brookline; Brookline would look like Brooklyn; and Boston itself would be filled with high-rise towers.) On the other hand, his same work implies that in most of America it is the road net what produced sprawl, and not race or land-use regulation.

In short, most American cities sprawl because the federal government built roads out to the horizon. The exceptions are along the coasts, where U.S. cities would look more like Canadian ones in the absence of tight zoning laws. The increasing segregation of immigrants appears to be an effect of the above, rather than a cause. Of course, the great American ghetto is a striking and horrible thing, but we would have had them with or without freeways and zoning.

Canadian cities really are different

 I was in Toronto last week. I’ll discuss the reasons in a later post. My wife and I stayed out in the suburbs. Our hotel was in Scarborough, right north of Highway 401.  We spent most of our time (when I wasn’t downtown at the University of Toronto) in the further suburbs of Pickering and Ajax. Most of it could be in the United States.

Downtown Toronto is about as generic as it is possible for a North American downtown to get. This is not news. And some parts of the suburbs, like Ajax (pictured above) look like the more depressing parts of Orange County, California, save for the houses being in a slightly different shade of Caucasian skin tone. But even after saying all that, when my father-in-law said that Toronto really doesn’t feel like America, we knew exactly what he meant.

He meant the high-rises. You see giant towers everywhere, where you wouldn’t expect them to be. We were in a 14-story hotel, for example, across a ten-lane freeway from a sprawling shopping center and not far away from subdivisions like the one above, where every house looked alike. But there were two ginormous 30-plus-story condo towers going up right next door. And there was nothing unique about this. High-rises sprouted in parts of the city where you would be very surprised to see them south of the border. You really need to rent a car and drive around to appreciate the difference; hanging around downtown or taking the subway won’t show it to you.

But I am skeptical of both statistics and personal observation. I won’t relax unless they agree. So I went to the Emporis website, and pulled up statistics on buildings over 35 meters or 12 floors. What do you know?Normalized by population Toronto ranks below the high-rise forests of Honolulu and Vancouver, but looks more like the megalopolis of New York (and the D.C.-Arlington core of Greater Washington) than other mid-sized North American cities. Chicago and Philadelphia don’t come close. 

 

Still, the above chart is misleading, because Toronto proper contains 45% of the metropolitan population. In other cities, like San Francisco or Miami or Seattle, the central city is just a sideshow — an important neighborhood, but not representative of the metropolitan area. Miami-Dade, which I know very very well, has a high-rise core and a couple of clumps elsewhere, but nobody would call the place a high-rise city. Ditto San Francisco — Marin and the East Bay and San Mateo are all low-slung places. So I cut out all the places where the center city holds less than a quarter of the metropolitan population.

 

The result is even more dramatic. Toronto is up there with NYC as an outlier. In fact, all Canadian cities are outliers, even the ones that look like they aren’t. Why? Well, central Ottawa, Edmonton, and Calgary contain respectively 67%, 63%, and 85% of their metropolitan populations. Chicago, Las Vegas, Philly, Houston, and Los Angeles, on the other hand, only contain respectively 30%, 29%, 26%, 38%, and 30% of their metropolitan populations. Their central municipalities are a big part of the metropolis, but the cities as a whole feel a lot more low-slung than the central city figures indicate. Central Calgary and Edmonton, on the other hand, feel like parts of much bigger metropoli than they are when you visit, because they’ve got these big crowded bustling and disorderly urban cores than you don’t associate with North American cities that have only a million or so people in them. 

Canadian cities really are different, and it really is something that you can’t fail to notice without needing to look very hard. The only way you’d fail to notice is if your only exposure to America consisted of Honolulu and New York. Now, that isn’t hard to imagine, but it’s gotta be rare.

But this just raises a question: why do Canadian cities sprout so many more high-rises than their American (or Mexican) counterparts? 

ADDENDUM: Another way to slice the data below the fold.

Four out of nine ain’t bad

 So it’s Elena Kagan. I’m not going to get into the merits; I’m not particularly bothered. I’m much more bothered by the Attorney General’s statement that we need a bill relaxing Miranda rights. That said, there is something very important about the appointment: for the first time, we will have four justices from four boroughs: Elena Kagan (Manhattan), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Brooklyn), Antonin Scalia (Queens), and Sonia Sotomayor (the Bronx). Not only that, but all four of them have New York accents.

Note the way Ms. Kagan pronounces “thought.” Most excellent. Ms. Kagan grew up on the Upper West Side. Aged 50, she may be the last generation of children from that area to possess a distinctive New York accent of the older type. You can still hear the modern type in and around Manhattan Valley, but even there it is fading out in favor a more generic Northeastern accent.

Yeah, that’s Manhattan Valley in 1899! Somebody needs to add a soundtrack.

Black people and the GOP: a road not taken?

 “Dewey beats Truman” is an iconic headline. The election was close (arguments otherwise smack of hindsight bias) and could have gone the other way. What if it had?

Well, the Republican Party might have become the party of civil rights. Why do I say that? Well, this 1947 memo from Clark Clifford to Harry Truman (courtesy of Matt Yglesias):

Since 1932 … the northern Negro has voted Democratic, with the exception of 1946 in New York. A theory … is that the northern Negro voter today holds the balance of power in Presidential elections for the simple arithmetical reason that the Negroes not only vote in a bloc but are geographically concentrated in … New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.

This explains the assiduous and continuous cultivation of the New York Negro vote by Governor Dewey and his insistence that his controllable legislature pass a state antidiscrimination act. 

There are several straws … that the northern Negro is today ready to swing back to his traditional moorings — the Republican Party.  Under the tutelage of Walter White, of the NAACP, and other intelligent educated and sophisticated leaders, the Negro voter has become a cynical hardboiled trader. He believes the rising dominance of Southern conservatives in the Democratic councils of Congress and of the Party makes it only too clear that he can go no further by supporting the present Administration. 

Republican politicians … make no great secret of their intent to try to pass a FEPC Act and anti-poll tax statute in the next Congress.  The Democratic Party can only point to the obvious — that the really great improvement in the economic lot of the Negro of the North has come in the last 16 years only because of the sympathies and policies of a Democratic Administration.  The trouble is that this has worn a bit thin with the passage of the years.  Unless the Administration makes a determined campaign to help the Negro (and everybody else) on the problems of high prices and housing … the Negro vote is already lost.  Unless there are new and real efforts (as distinguished from mere political gestures which are today thoroughly understood and strongly resented by sophisticated Negro leaders) the Negro bloc, which certainly in Illinois and probably in New York and Ohio, does hold the balance of power, will go Republican.

27 and a good cigar

  It wasn’t against the Dodgers, so I didn’t spend the bank to get to the Bronx.  Instead, I watched the games at the Thirsty Scholar in Somerville, which appears to have (as I’ve mentioned before) become an unofficial Yankees bar.  I showed up with my high school buddy Carlo Cerruti; other friends drifted in as the night progressed.  Ultimately, there were six of us; but we were there with around fifteen other fans who’d independently discovered that you were unlikely to be assaulted in Yankees regalia at this place.  I speak as someone who has been told by one Boston bartender that his cheering was “inappropriate” and by another “I’m going to have to ask you to tone it down, if you’re going to root for them.”  And those were in yuppie upscale places that I’d scouted in the Harvard Square area because I thought they’d be more Yankees-friendly. Polite yes, friendly no.

The other good thing about the Scholar is that you can smoke outside in full view of several large vidscreens.

No blow-by-blow of the game.  I mean, it was a bar!  Nothing interesting, the way there woulda been at an actual game, that you can’t get from the sports pages.  There were three Phillies fans in the place, all dressed up with Victorino jerseys and all, but they left in the seventh.  What??  The game was by no means over at that point.  If they hadn’t dressed for the occasion, okay, but they had.  Why put in all that prep work and go to a Yankees-friendly place just to give up and leave before the fat lady has sung? 

There was also a bartender from Terry Francona’s favorite bar.  He bites his tongue about his true allegiance when on the job.  You also had the brother-and-sister team from the Big Apple.  I know, the great thing about New York is that nobody looks like they’re from New York.  But to this native New Yorker, this pair just looked like they should be from New York.   (They were.  The Bronx, in fact.) 

Bartender gave us victory shots.  On top of at least four pints of brown ale and three cigars that proved to be a serious mistake. 

 
Anyway, the Series took my mind off the frightening amount of work I have to do and the depressing sight of the U.S. Senate doing whatever it is that the Senate does.  And it brought a ring back to where it belongs.  Now all we need to do is repeat the feat in 2010.

Is America in decline?

  I don't mean as a world-bestraddling empire and all of that; I mean as a polity with a government capable of responding to the needs of its citizens. Here you can see a moderately-libertarian fellow worrying that the United States is headed the way of Argentina. In comments you can read the counterarguments proposed by my friend and colleague, Carlos. Or you can read this post on the same blog, which summarizes Carlos’s arguments.   

The above picture is of a beautiful woman in the most American part of America, the old stomping grounds of the Chase boys. Clearly not Buenos Aires. Could it become Buenos Aires, without the charm?  Could American political institutions cease working? Read the links, then read the below, and tell me what you think.

CARLOS FOR THE DEFENSE:  And to be fair, I should put up some indicators that I think would disconfirm my idea [that the U.S. is well within historical norms, and looks to muddle through quite well]. There might be too many “veto points” in the Federal system to resolve new problems of government in a timely manner. The military might not accept civilian authority. The monetary and regulatory agencies might be too slow or too unwieldy to deal with unexpected changes in the global economic system. The U.S. population might become apathetic and gullible to the point of civic dysfunction.

Out of those four indicators, I see maybe one-half (and it’s not the last one). I won’t count the experiences of the states, since the Federal system allows them a level of moral hazard that the U.S. as a whole doesn’t have.

Though that would be an additional failure mode: enough states go dingo that the Federal system can’t deal. That hasn’t happened since the 1850s.

Bronx, accents, Supreme Court

  And it goes to the woman who saved baseball™!  Excellent.  But I want to discuss accents.  Sonia Sotomayor is from the Bronx, you see, and will bring a third New York accent to the bench, after Antonin Scalia from Queens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg from Brooklyn.

Sotomayor has an accent of the older type, with modern elements, which many people (of all ages) in the New York region still speak.  The fellow who gives the New York speech lessons certainly does, as do I with my relatives.  But it is not a fully modern accent of the sort spoken by my younger in-laws.  See here at minute 1:52 (it is worth it) or here or here. 

What about the other two New York members of the Court?

Great debate attempt #4: There may be hooptie politics in the U.S. of A., but functioning machines there are not

  Some time ago, I took issue with the use of the word “machine” by two commentators on this blog. Short version: They talked about the role of machines in the election.  I said, “There are no more machines.” They said:  “You’re wrong. Patronage politics lives.”

I now believe that it is time to reassert my contention. There is no more Chicago machine. There may, in fact, be no more political machines in America.

What’s a machine, you ask? Simple. Machine politics happens when politicians make promises and levy punishments on voters at an individual level, and not merely as members of an ascribed group. It isn’t machine politics to support EFCA in return for a union endorsement or union contributions. It is machine politics to tell Joe the Union Leader if he gets his local gets out a certain number of votes, he’s gonna get federal contracts steered his way. 

Obviously, the boundaries are grey. They usually are. (C’mon. This blog has an “empire” tag.) But you can make a strong case that machine politics is dead unless you choose to draw the line so broadly as to make everything into machine politics. 

Consider the Board of Revision of Taxes, in Philadelphia, where I write this. 

In theory, its an independent organization, appointed by elected judges and funded by the school district. In practice, Republican and Democratic Party leaders give jobs away to people who work hard on election day. Machine politics!  Except … uh …. the BRT was originally part of a Republican machine. (Hard as it is to imagine, many northeastern cities, like Philly and Jersey City, were once controlled by left-leaning GOP machines.) As the city became more Democratic, Democrats got control of more of the posts. A real machine shouldn’t let that happen — why would its constituents have an incentive to switch? But the Republican Party has managed to retain control over 20 of the 78 seats on the BRT and give them to the people who get out its votes despite a complete collapse in the ability of the Philadelphia GOP to, you know, get votes out. If one machine replaced another, that shouldn’t happen either. What’s going on in Philadelphia seems more like straight-up corruption rather than machine politics, conventionally conceived.
 
Or consider what a real machine did back in 1972, and try to imagine it happening today. 

In 1972, Richard Daley the Elder could already see the writing on the wall: the days of the classic machine were coming to an end. Royko’s Boss came out in ’71. Michael Shakman began his famous suit arguing that patronage politics violated the 14th Amendment. Ralph Metcalfe defected from the machine with the wonderful quote, “It’s never too late to be black,” and managed to stay in office. His candidate for governor lost. So when a bunch of goo-goos challenged his control over the selection of candidates to the Democratic National Convention, he showed what a real machine does. They attacked the churches where the reformers organized and destroyed their records. Attacked, as in mobs and beatings. The Partido Nacional Revolucionario would have called that a porra. Richard Daley the Younger, I should add, led the porra that assaulted a Catholic Church in the 5th District. They then disrupted the election of the at-large delegates from Cook County. 

Daley lost anyway, save for the at-large. He sued, and when the U.S. Supreme Court punted, he got a machine judge to seat his hand-picked slate over the elected delegates. Except that the judge couldn’t do anything, because, well, the Supreme Court had kicked the problem back into the hands of the Democratic National Committee. Daley’s case wasn’t helped by the fact that in a massive failure of vision his slate contained only one Italian last name and three Polish ones. That’d be like, well, uh … you know, lots of Irish political machines shot themselves in the head over this sort of oversight, be it Chicago’s failure to integrate Italian and Poles and African-Americans, or Boss Flynn of the Bronx trying to pretend for a stupidly long time that all these Jews and Puerto Ricans would just go away. (The Jews did. The Puerto Ricans are. But the machine went away first.) 

Wrap your head around that happening in the 2012 . You can’t. It wouldn’t. Not even in places like San Antonio, where machine-like organizations still exist in a way that they’ve faded in Chicago and Philadelphia. Those cities have a problem with corruption, but I’m just not seeing the machines. (Michael Nutter is many things, including a plausible future President of the United States, but a machine politician is not one of them.) Boston, well, Boston kinda sort has a machine, sorta, but it’s weak, and survived because the Irish were smart enough to turn things over to the Italians. Cambridge has one that survives only out of apathy and indirect elections.

New York City could have replicated machine politics. It had an ethnic base and plenty corruption, while Jews and Italians were replaced by Puerto Ricans and African Americans, who were in turn displaced by West Indians, Dominicans, and Chinese. 

Yeah, I know, hugely diverse immigration stream and all that. But a political entrepreneur could have built a machine on a simple West Indian-Dominican-Chinese tripod … heck, they could have built on West Indians alone.

Only they didn’t. And if you tell me that’s because West Indians don’t make good American politicians or don’t become citizens or otherwise lack the necessary chops I will be unable to contain my laughter. It’s because, I think, American institutions and political culture currently make machine politics impossible. The combination of law, free elections, and prosperity has destroyed the great American political machine. 

In fact, the same combination — or at least two of the three — has also wounded the great Mexican political machine. They hang on in parts of Mexico, but generally the country’s politics resemble U.S.-style interest group politics, not the machine politics of yore. “Porras” cause riots after university soccer games; they don’t assault polling places and beat up opposition politicians. They’re also weakened in Panama. I’m not sure that I’m particularly happy about Martinelli’s victory, but it isn’t a victory for machine politics. 

Now, machine politics isn’t dead in Latin America, despite some bruising. Consider “Daleyismo” in Venezuela. ¡Viva la maquina! The Nestor-Cristina team in Argentina is very good at this sort of thing. Danny Ortega is less good at it, as his need to resort to vote-stealing shows, but even the great Daley had to do that on occasion. Correa and Morales, in different ways, are trying to build machines. Dominican politics is dominated by machines, albeit not hegemonic ones … and I think you could say that Mr. Uribe’s conservatives have built there own odd sui generis electoral machine. 

So machine politics lives on in América, but in America it is almost impossible for me to imagine the kind of tactics used by the Socialists-Peronists-Sandinistas-MAS-Conservatives achieving anything other than a wave of negative news stories followed by indictments.

I know less about the Old Continent. There are some machine-like things in Italy these days, although I think a new word is needed for Berlusconi’s very 21st-century political strategy. But to repeat myself, electoral machines no longer seem to exist in America.

Am I wrong? As always, I’m happy to change my mind. And just to be sure that we’re on the same wavelength, a “machine” doesn’t need to be as powerful as the Cook County Democratic Party under Richard Daley to qualify. It just needs to be able to win elections on the basis of personalistic relationship and individual patronage. 

Supreme court vacancy

  So, Justice Souter is retiring. 

Me, I vote for Sonia Sotomayor. Why?  C'mon, it's obviousFirst, she's from the Bronx.  Second, she ended the baseball strike back in '95. Third, I need a third?

I reserve the right to change my opinion should I discover that she does not have a New York accent of the modern type.

But I'd sure love to have a guest post about the Court from somebody who, you know, actually knows something about it.  Hint.

Dog Day Afternoon blogging

   So I’m at home, cleaning the apartment, missing my wife, thinking about working, and idly watching Dog Day Afternoon on the teevee. 

And about five minutes ago there’s that scene where the cops set up shop outside the bank and the police helicopter waves off a news chopper, and I’m getting this sense of déjà vu. Like, didn’t the actual robbery happen in Midwood or Gravesend or one of those two-family home places? Y’know, like, that street is not in that part of Brooklyn. Actually, it looks familiar. Don’t recognize the stores, but isn’t that Bishop Ford? And that's the Prospect Expressway, no? Dude! That sign says 17th Street! That’s Ninth Avenue! They filmed Dog Day Afternoon in Windsor Terrace!!

Pretty cool.

And that scene where his wife hears what’s happening over a transistor radio in a McDonald’s? That was Queens. Black-on-white street signs, instead of white-on-black, or black-on-yellow, the way God intended.  (Don’t talk to me about this white-on-green thing.) The things you can get nostalgic about.

“He’s one of them Spanish kids.” I love that line.

UPDATE:  This movie could have been made yesterday. I don’t mean in a zeitgeisty sort of way, not at all. And I don’t mean the clothes or cars, of course. But these little things, a discussion of cigarettes and cancer, a newscaster mentioning “the gay community,” Al Pacino’s body language. It seems more recent than 1972.   

Accents, Brooklyn

  Over at Randy's place, he's got a neat post on the survival of Dutch in New York City.  Seems like it held on for a couple centuries after the English took it over.  In the post, Randy suggests that the “Brooklyn” accent derives from Dutch.  Peter takes issue, debate ensues. 

Goin' Back To Brooklyn @ Yahoo! Video

Here, I'd like to say three things about New York accents.

1. There are no geographic variations.  None.  Zip.  Say-roe.  All of what seems to be geographic variation is due to race, immigration, or social class.  All of it.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is either confused or f*@king with you.  I have been asked this question every goddamned time I go to Britain.  It ain't true.  Somebody from New York, they say different, they probably be playing games.   
2. The traditional New York accent is dead.  (For a brief period in college, I tried to affect one, for reasons which are beyond me.  My natural speech is bad enough.)  Its more modern variations are also in fact dying, save for ...
3. ... the accent exemplified by Rosie Perez, held by most children of Latino immigrants in the New York metropolitan area, and now spreading throughout the Northeast. It is somewhat different from the previously dominant version of the accent, and it is replacing that version very rapidly.  Even among non-Latinos.

For your edification, click here for Ms. Perez on Letterman, with the new New York accent.  It's worth it.  (For some reason, the damned embedding won't work.)  My older sister isn't quite young enough to talk like this, although I have some very non-Latino in-laws in their twenties who do.  You can see two more examples of the same accent coming from the eyewitnesses in the below BBC report around minute 2:06.

Finally, here is a fellow who gives pretty good lessons in the older version of New York English, the one I speak with my siblings.  He does confuse class and geography, presumably ingenuously, when he describes his accent as a mix of Westchester and Staten Island.  There is no speech difference between a blue-collar dude from Rosebank or one from southeastern Yonkers, or between the child of Ivy League graduates in Todt Hill or in Scarsdale.  He is simply cottoning on to the fact that there are a lot more upper-class types in Westchester County than in Richmond County, and a lot fewer plumbers and police officers. 

Now that you been schooled in the Kings English, what sort of English do you speak? 

America returns, with a New York accent

  Below is an example of intellectual heroism. It was strange to see Senator Cornyn (R-Texas) ask a question that boiled down to: “If you concede that my argument is correct, then isn’t my argument correct?” Do you think he noticed the chuckles?

Newsflash: Boychick from Brooklyn loses Senate race, and word he deserves it

  Official it ain't, but Norm Coleman of James Madison High School in Midwood, Brooklyn, New York appears to have lost to Al Franken. Now, Coleman has always been an a--hole, but he was once the sort of a--hole that I could respect, having unfortunately been a similar one myself.  Frex, the dude wrote, in the late 1960s, “I know these conservative kids don't f--k or get high like we do (purity, you know). Already the cries of motherhood, apple pie, and Jim Buckley reverberate thorough the halls of the Student Center.  Everyone watch out, the 1950s bobby-sox generation is about to take over.”

Nor do I fault Coleman for becoming a Republican in the 1990s; once again, I did that myself, and the past can be forgiven. And my priors are always in favor of the candidate who sounds most like Jerry Ferrara. 

But Norm took a dive off the right end of the pool, hit his head, and never came up for air. That I fault him for.

Plus, Al Franken is whip-smart, right on the issues, and a great writer. I gave dinero to his campaign, to my wife's great amusement, and I think he will make a great senator. Icing on the cake is that Minnesota is one of the few states that deserves no more and no less than its two seats. Go, Al!

Once was Kings

This is increasingly hard to imagine, but Brooklyn wasn't always cool.  Once upon a time, the other name for Kings County brought up visions of overweight white men in tank tops, women with very big hair and very tight clothes, and people who actually said "neighbuhud" and "fuggedaboutit." Or, conversely, visions of howling wildernesses of burnt out buildings and blighted lives, someplace going the way of the Bronx.  In fact, you'd hear people say, "TheBronxandBrooklyn," as one combined place.  Hell, other than in bad World War 2 movies or good Mafia ones, you could probably have lumped Brooklyn in with Cleveland in the popular American imagination.  It was a great place to be from.  It wasn't really where anyone would want to go to, unless from happened to be someplace like Fujian or Tajikistan. 

But that's not Brooklyn anymore.  Nope, now Brooklyn is cool. And all those cool people in Brooklyn want you to know about how cool and special and hip Brooklyn is.

Which is why I have grown to appreciate Queens.  Queens is not cool.  The producers of Entourage picked Queens for their guys' home town because Queens is not cool.  And while rents have risen, thus far, thank God, Queens shows no sign of becoming cool.

So when two cars crash into eachother on Hillside Avenue, and the driver at fault gets out gesticulating wildly at the much calmer person he hit, and skateboarding local kids start cracking wise about the show, it's just another car accident and not a deep metaphor for the inassailable uniqueness of place or whatever.

Which is ironic, because nowadays Queens is hella more exotic than most of Brooklyn.  Just not in a cool, hip, attitudinal way. 

And it's still a good place to be from.

(Hat tip:  Marcia.)

Really Weird Stuff in the Washington Post

OK, there's a lot of very weird stuff in the Washington Post.  It's not a very good newspaper, and it's getting worse.  (Not all of it, of course; and some of its reporters are the best in the biz ... even if they seem to save their best stuff for their independent books and not their articles in the paper.)  One of the problems is the editorial page, which publishes increasingly strange things, like the following from Robert Maranto of Villanova University.  Starting in the second paragraph of his piece, right after a brief quote from Larry Summers, Maranto writes:

I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I've been on the "far right" as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights. All these views -- commonplace in American society and among the political class -- are practically verboten in much of academia.

Whaaaa?  I supported and continue to support the replacement of AFDC with TANF ("welfare reform") on the grounds that the evidence shows that it has helped the poor.  I certainly believe that resisting Soviet aggression was a good thing.  And I happen to approve of applying cost-benefit analysis to environmental regulations.

Absolutely none of these positions has ever caused me political problems in the university.  Obviously not in economic or political science departments, but not even in history departments. 

In fact, I have a good friend in a major political science department who is advising Rudy Giuliani and a excellent colleague in a similarly major history department who is doing the same.  We won't mention my opinion of their presidential choice, but I can't possibly think more highly of their academic work, and their careers are doing more than fine. 

In short, I just don't know what to make of an editorial that starts by telling me that my own experience of reality is wrong, and then proceeds to make its argument via series of anecdotes reported in ambiguous ways.  For example, is it the following really true?

Despite New York City's 15-year-long decline in crime, most criminologists still struggle to attribute the increased safety to demographic shifts or even random statistical variations (which apparently skipped other cities) rather than more effective policing.

Actually, considering how the above is phrased, how would you know it weren't true?  It implies that any attempt to test the causes of the crime decline is "anti-conservative." 

The whole thing is just a little ... bizarre.

Nostalgia

As a fan of the Green Bay Packers, I have to say that this is shaping up to be a most exciting football season. I've been a Green Bay fan since becoming friends with Carlos. 

But my football loyalties are shallow. I'm a baseball man, a fan of the once and future dreaded (but always hated) New York Yankees.

I follow them around. That's me at Fenway. I had doffed my hat at the moment that photo was taken, but look at the two guys standing below my right arm.  Yankees hats.  And look at the fellow seated in front of them. A Derek Jeter jersey.  We are there, in the bleachers of Fenway. The opposite would not occur in Yankee Stadium, not unless the Red Sox fan in question wanted humiliation. Or possibly violence.

The Bleacher Creatures of the Bronx are the fellows who learned to chant obscene comments about the sexuality of Dice-K's mother in Japanese. Two senior professors once took me to a Red Sox game against Toronto. They weren't surprised, exactly, at my comportment. 

In some ways, Boston and New York are inverses. In NYC, nobody could care less if you wear Red Sox paraphenalia. In fact, Manny Ramírez managed to blow a shot at turning most of Washington Heights and a big chunk of the Bronx into part of Red Sox Nation. (Guess how he blew it.  Right.)  In Boston, though, people feel free to yell at me in the street for wearing a Yankees hat. (And so I mostly don't, except around Harvard Square.) On the other hand, Yankees fans do fine inside Fenway, even in the bleachers ... and the reverse ain't true in the Bronx. (I wouldn't risk it on the D-train after a game neither, to be honest.)    

So why am I a baseball fan? Three reasons. (1) I actually played it back in the day.  Sure, now I have trouble throwing a ball ninety feet, but I played the real thing, unlike football.  I think I played tackle football maybe, like, twice in my life, and even then it was way way watered-down because we used neither pads nor helmets and I am still here to talk about it. (2) I understand baseball.  People who don't understand baseball won't admit this, but the game is actually simpler than football. And (3) ... history.  Baseball's just got hella more history than football. 

Which brings me to nostalgia. I rarely give Brink Lindsay props. After all, he has no idea what really caused the Great Compression, mistakenly believes that the Democratic Party lost white male votes outside the South during the 1960s and 1970s, and claims that the Great Society contributed to "an explosion of crime, urban riots, family breakdown, and welfare dependency."  But he did say one very very clever thing about nostalgia for the 1950s, when baseball ruled supreme, and today's political debates:

"Republicans want to go home to the United States of the 1950s, while Democrats want to work there."

True or false?

Guest-blogging with Leon Maurer, part one

HDTD readers may know Noel Maurer as an occasional commenter and guest poster here. Some of you may even know that he and I have been working on a project together. But most of you don't know Noel's dad Leon; and you should. The word 'raconteur' was devised to describe him. I remember sitting spellbound at a diner on Broadway, listening to the man's tales. He was a young man in World War Two:

Did I tell you the story of how I was picked on by the gumba Mafiosi tough guys when I first arrived in the company and had to beat up a punk twice my size to get my reputation as someone to contend with in the company? Besides the supply sergeant named Goldstein, I was the only other Jewish guy in outfit, but they soon forgot all about that. The rest of the outfit were Midwesterners and Southerners whom I got along with easily. The gumba guys later became my buddies too when I told them all about Meyer Lansky, Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano and the rest of the Brooklyn mob that were my Dad's high school buddies.

But maybe we should start at the beginning. Mr. Maurer?

Well, the story goes like this...

It was around February 1944. There I was, hanging out at the overseas staging camp in Newport News, Virginia, waiting for a bunk on the next departing ship.