In Midtown Manhattan, in a trendy area evocatively known as Hell's
Kitchen, the squeegee man has made a quiet comeback on the street
corners from which Mayor Giuliani's administration banished him during
the zero-tolerance policies of the mid-90's
The Big Apple is the city that never sleeps, but the massive
layoffs on Wall Street and the precipitous drops of the markets have
forced Manhattan to at least take a little nap, while the New York City
pedestrian commute dwindles.
The Squeegee men are still prohibited by city ordinance, but some have returned and it seems to be a trend
If you talk to older New Yorkers who remember the FDR Depression,
you might pick up on a sense of pride, like veterans who survived a
battle, senior citizens will tell war stories of how they adapted to an
ailing America. Times had changed and even cash strapped students lug
hundreds of dollars of electronic equipment with them to class every
day with very little fear for their personal security.
The words "grit" and "New York" are no longer wedded since the Sex
and the City image dominates the media and Times Square has become a
major tourist attraction for family entertainment and not the seedy sex
destination for lonely, suburban men or the work place for
entrepreneurial, wayward women.
I came to Manhattan during the mid-90's and only caught part of
what the city had been like during the crime wave of the 70's and 80's,
when the yearly murder rate peaked just above 2000 compared to the
record-breaking 2007 total of under 500.
So, what does a guy armed with a dripping sponge attached to a
stick and a bottle of diluted Windex have to do with a drop or increase
in the rate of violent crime?
According to the theory espoused
by law enforcement and explained in the book Fixing Broken Windows:
Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities, the devil behind
delinquency was mostly in the details. The authors of the then
controversial study George L. Kelling and Catherine Coles argued that
by controlling the minor infractions: graffiti, litter, and the
symbolic broken windows, law enforcement primed the crime prevention
pumps for curtailing the bigger crimes: drug dealing, rape and yes,
murder.
In the author's own words:
"Consider a building with a few
broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for
vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break
into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or
light fires inside.
Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter
accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from
take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.
In 1993,
Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his police commissioner Howard Safir adopted
the "Broken Windows" strategy and sold it to the pubic under the "zero
tolerance" and "quality of life" initiatives.
Loud noises met with fines, adult book stores were strictly
zoned, traffic tickets were increased for "blocking the box", and the
squeegee man became persona non-grata on the streets.
I'm back on the
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