WITH THE CITY SLOWLY DYING, BROOKLYN-BORN GOVERNOR Hugh Carey, who was elected in 1974, and his banker friends came riding to the rescue. Felix Rohatyn, the managing director of the investment bank Lazard Frères, was put in charge of overseeing the city’s finances. Rohatyn sold bonds through the Municipal Assistance Corporation. New York City was saved by the bankers.
When Mayor Beame ran for reelection in the fall of 1977, his opponents were two Jews, a black, and an Italian. Congressman Ed Koch and congresswoman and feminist Bella Abzug were the Jews, Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton was the black, and New York Secretary of State Mario Cuomo was the Italian.
Koch, who had defeated longtime Democratic power broker Carmine DeSapio for the position of district leader back in the early 1960s, was backed by the Village Voice. Koch had marched on Washington and had performed pro bono legal work for the ACLU in Mississippi during his August 1965 vacation. In 1968 he won Mayor Lindsay’s congressional seat. His ultimate goal always was to become mayor of New York.
Koch had one problem. He lived in Greenwich Village, had never married, and didn’t date. He needed voters to think he wasn’t gay, so David Garth, his image consultant, paired him with Bess Meyerson, the first Jewish Miss America and chairperson of the Koch campaign.
Despite the city’s financial woes, Beame—the city’s first Jewish mayor—might have been reelected had it not been for the rioting on the night of the blackout. After that happened, there was a backlash against blacks and Latinos, destroying any chance for Percy Sutton and for Mario Cuomo, who was campaigning against the death penalty. Koch won voters with a law-and-order approach. When talking about the riots, he would lace his speeches with the question, “Why wasn’t the National Guard called out?”
During this time serial killer David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, was caught, and Koch ran on a platform calling for the death penalty. Liberals were spitting mad, but the riots had changed the mood of the city. When Koch opposed busing, the liberals were beside themselves. With the support of Australian newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch and his formerly liberal New York Post, Koch won a runoff election over Cuomo in a landslide. Koch, whose hero was Fiorello LaGuardia, became the people’s mayor. He began to rebuild the city, to reshape its image. Under Koch’s leadership, New York crawled back from the depths.
Between 1973 and 1975, 300,000 Jewish voters had moved out of New York City. In the 1980s they slowly began moving back, lured by housing that was cheaper than what you could get in Manhattan and was still just a subway ride away. Harry Schweitzer was one of the young professionals who moved into Brooklyn. After growing up in Bensonhurst, he had moved to Queens and then Manhattan. He settled in Park Slope in 1984, and he has lived there ever since.
HARRY SCHWEITZER “I had gotten married very young, at age twenty-four. I was working at Citibank, and I was married to a very nice young woman, Jeanie Goldstein, and when we got married, I moved away to Queens. I lived there until 1980.
“I got divorced, and for a brief time I moved to Forest Hills, and then I met a woman, a California girl by the name of Diane Simon. We moved to the city, and I lived in the city from 1982 to 1984, and in the interim we got married and we had my oldest daughter. We were subletting on the Upper West Side, when the person we were subletting from told us he needed the apartment for himself. At that point Diane said, ‘We ought to look in Brooklyn.’
“I said to her, ‘Brooklyn? Why do you want to move to Brooklyn?’
“She said, ‘You know the neighborhoods.’
“I said, ‘Yeeesh.’
“We started hunting for an apartment in Brooklyn, though I was not necessarily for it. She suggested we first look in Fort Greene. I said, ‘Suuuuure. I’ll take you to Fort Greene. I remember it very well.’ We started driving around Brooklyn Tech up and down a couple of blocks, and it wasn’t looking anywhere near what Spike Lee has it looking like today. It was seedy and dangerous.
“I said, ‘What do you think?’
“She said, ‘How about Park Slope?’
“Now Park Slope was never known as a Jewish neighborhood—ever. There was one area of Park Slope on Prospect Park West near Grand Army Plaza on the park, which was called Doctors Row, but it was never known as a Jewish neighborhood.
“Park Slope was never known as upper-class. It wasn’t even middle-class. It was more of a working-class area, a lot of longshoremen, dock workers. Along Seventh Avenue there was a string of bars up and down the street.
“In the 1970s the city was on its ass, and Mayor Koch made it imperative that if you worked for the city as a teacher, a cop, a fireman, you had to live in the city. What happened, a lot of people started moving to these close-in areas of Brooklyn where the housing stock was pretty decent—nice brownstones—all SROs [single-room-occupancy hotels—basically rooming houses]. But it would take a while to see the changes.
“We drove down Seventh Avenue, and in those days it didn’t look anything like what it looks like now. It looked like Dresden after the bombing.
“The apartments had gone by the by. The landlords, saddled with rent control and crime, abandoned them. The area had a heavy Latino population and was gang-infested. It was drug-infested.
“As we drove along Seventh Avenue, we came to the corner of Seventh and 12th Street, and there was this factory-looking building with a banner on a pole saying, CO-OPS AVAILABLE. My wife said, ‘Stop.’
“I said, ‘What?’
“She said, ‘I want to go in there.’
“I said, ‘Why?’
“She said, ‘Let’s go in.’
“Well, we went in, and inside, the building had been all rehabbed. It looked very European. It had a quadrangle courtyard, a third-of-an-acre grassy area. It had a fountain. And patio decks. It was to die for.
“We walked in, and we said, ‘We need a three-bedroom.’ The Realtor said, ‘We have two available, and one is under contract.’ We didn’t want the other one, and when the contract fell through on the other, we bought it. Thirteen-foot ceilings. Hardwood floors. It wasn’t cheap. We paid $151,000, which in 1984 was a lot of money.
“I came in with 10 percent down. I had $5,000 from a life insurance policy. I borrowed $5,000 from my dad, and I borrowed $5,000 from Diane’s dad. And we moved in.
“The neighborhood was dead, scary dead. It was eerily quiet at night. I had to walk Diane home from her job. We were only three blocks from the subway, but it was frightening enough. You could get drugs on any corner: marijuana, heroin. Whatever you needed, you could get. We used to see drug paraphernalia on the streets. We would have a rash of car break-ins. That was endemic.
“My mother had been very proud that I had moved to the City. She would say to me, ‘I can always say my son lives in the City.’ It was a big thing to her. After we bought the co-op, my mother called me on the phone all upset.
“She said, ‘Why did you move to Brooklyn? Why do you want to live in Brooklyn? I hated living in Brooklyn! Why are you moving back? You were so excited when you lived in the City!’
“I said, ‘Ma, wait till you see this place.’
“I went to meet her at the front door, and she came in, and I gave her the treatment through the hallway into the courtyard. Her mouth dropped. This is a gorgeous place. And when she walked into the apartment—we have 1,600 square feet. ‘Where do you get that in Manhattan?’ I asked her. She said, ‘Beautiful. But still, why in Brooklyn?’
“But it was the best move I ever made. The Park Slope neighborhood had so much going for it, and little by little the word got out that Park Slope was really where it was happening, so we started getting throngs of people.
“Park Slope had a number of things going for it that a lot of other neighborhoods didn’t. At the time it had affordability. From the late 1970s through 1987, when the stock market crashed, the housing was affordable for people like myself, yuppies, boomers, who wanted to live close to the city but who couldn’t afford to live there, people who couldn’t swing $2,800 a month or didn’t want to pay $151,000 for a one-bedroom apartment. For that money I was getting three bedrooms. It was three blocks from the subway. I could be in New York in a half an hour. And I had a neighborhood, a candy store. I could walk with a carriage. I had Prospect Park two blocks away. This was amazing.
“At first the nice thing about my building was that everybody was like me, pocket-poor. No twelve-figure bonuses. And we had one of everything. We had cross-dressers, we had black/whites, we had green/yellow, everything in the building, and it was the friendliest place. It was a co-op in the true sense of the word. And I was president of the co-op for two and a half years starting in 1985, until I separated from Diane, and that was it. She left. She was itching to move.
“I said, ‘You want to move, move. I’m keeping the place.’ Eventually we worked it out. She was from California. She was never much interested in staying here. My first mortgage was a variable. I had no idea I was going to stay as long as I did. The neighborhood is amazing.
“The area is no longer affordable. The Brooklyn real estate market has kept its own. We’re seeing a little softening, but not much. My apartment right now is probably worth $1.2 million. Somewhere in that range.
“The co-op is still very family-oriented. We started getting people from out of town, people who had gotten jobs in the city. In our building we have a lot of people who relocated from the Midwest, the South, Texas. And the people who moved into the building in the last eight, ten years are coming in with buckets of cash. They have a certain sense of entitlement we didn’t have. Young kids, very nice people, but they think the co-op should be providing. What was the Kennedy line about asking not what your country can do for you? They want to know, ‘What can the co-op do for us?’”