I grew up hearing stories about the New York of my father’s childhood, the New York of the 1940s and 1950s. The working-class Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx that was thick with semidetached houses; the broom handles swiped from his mother’s closet, the pink spaldeens sailing over manhole covers: That was my mythology.
The images were especially resonant because we lived so far away from this world, in Palm Springs, California, where the streets are named after Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra and the landscape alternates between spiky desert shrubs and golf courses. Those supernaturally green fairways, kept lush by constantly whirring sprinklers, were my reality; the bustling streets of New York were my dreamworld.
The California Angels played their spring training games in a small ballpark just a short bike ride from our house. We would get season tickets every March and dutifully cheer on the home team, which was owned by one of the community’s many aging celebrities, Gene Autry. But I never cared much for the Angels. I knew that baseball loyalty was generational, not geographic. You don’t choose your team; you inherit it. So I became a Yankees’ fan from afar, methodically monitoring their daily performances through The Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, and our West Coast edition of The New York Times.
In the summer of 1977 we visited the city. I was only eight, but it didn’t take long to figure out that this wasn’t the place I had imagined. Whenever we climbed into a taxi, my parents promptly rolled up the windows and locked the doors. When I drifted toward a group of men dealing three-card monte, my mother quickly yanked me away.
The highlight of our stay was a Yankees’ game. We took the
No. 4 train north from Eighty-sixth Street on a sticky July afternoon. My father, a starched white button-down shirt tucked stiffly into his high-waisted chinos, kept a firm grip on my arm as I tried to decipher the swirls of graffiti that covered our car. The train rumbled into one station after another. At each stop a dozen more people in Yankees caps and T-shirts pushed their way aboard. Finally, I saw the glimmer of natural light that meant we had crossed into the Bronx. The train climbed out of the tunnel, and there was Yankee Stadium. I recognized only one feature from the gauzy photographs in my Yankees books: the ring of white wooden trim running over the bleachers like a picket fence. It was the last vestige from the Yankee Stadium of old, an anachronistic detail on top of this concrete fortress. The ballpark was surrounded not by the cheerful brownstones and flower boxes that I had imagined but by grim tenements with screenless windows thrown wide open in the heavy summer air.
The team inside the ballpark also bore little resemblance to the neatly pressed, fair-haired Yankees of my father’s generation—“heroes who summed up the ideals of manhood, courage and the excellence of an entire generation,” as one of the bent-up paperbacks on my bookshelf described them. The Yankees of the fifties won with ease and grace. They scored eight runs in the first inning … and then slowly pulled away. The 1977 Yankees were racially and ethnically mixed. They were life-size, loutish. On the field they did everything the hard way, with the maximum of stress and strain on their fans. Off the field, they bickered, backstabbed, and demanded to be traded.
When I first embarked on this book four years ago, my intention was to write about the ’77 Yankees against the backdrop of New York during this infamous era of urban blight. As the months passed, though, the city slowly advanced into the foreground, and the two stories became one.
I might have anticipated this. I moved to New York after graduating from college in 1990, and while it was obviously a much
cleaner, safer city than it had been in the late seventies, I nevertheless felt nostalgic for the New York that I had caught only in fleeting childhood glimpses, a New York that still felt wild, unsettled. And so, as my research progressed, I sought out people who had once roamed this urban frontier: disco devotees who frequented underground dance clubs; cops who patrolled the streets during this period of soaring crime; firemen who fought the epidemic of arson that swept through the city’s ghettos; gays who cruised the abandoned West Side piers; artists and musicians who homesteaded in cheap, dingy lofts in the postindustrial wasteland of SoHo.
On September 11, 2001, I happened to be researching the orgy of looting and arson that had accompanied the twenty-five-hour citywide power failure in July 1977. There are, of course, obvious differences between a localized blackout and a terrorist attack that killed thousands. Still, both were extraordinarily trying moments for the city, and I couldn’t help pondering how different New York felt in their respective wakes. In the aftermath of 9/11, there was a sense that our tallest towers had been felled but that our foundation was more secure than ever. We were able to identify (if not locate) our enemy, and the rest of the country, not to mention most of the free world, was on our side. During the days and weeks that followed the blackout, New York had felt shaken to its core, and America had been anything but sympathetic.
At the same time, though, as it sank to a new low in the summer of 1977, the city was also revealing its endless capacity for regeneration. I gradually came to regard ’77 as a transformative moment for the city, a time of decay but of rehabilitation as well. New York was straddling eras. You could see it everywhere: in the mayoral race, which featured a hotheaded radical (Bella Abzug), an aging creature of the city’s smoke-filled political clubhouses (Abe Beame), and a pair of unknowns who went on to play starring roles in the modern history of New York (Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo). You could see it in Rupert Murdoch’s reinvention of the New York Post, formerly a dutiful
liberal daily, as a celebrity-obsessed, right-wing scandal sheet and in the battle to stop the spread of porn shops and prostitutes across midtown.
You could see it in the Yankees too. The team’s two biggest personalities, Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin, were locked in a perpetual state of warfare, and it was hard not to see race, class, and the tug-of-war between past and future at the root of their dispute. Reggie Jackson was New York’s first black superstar. He was also a perfect foil for the scrappy, forever embattled Martin, the hero of New York’s fed-up working class and a powerful reminder of the team’s—and the city’s—less complicated past, the yellowing image of what New York had been and the still blurry image of what it was becoming.
This book is the story of that change.