When HBO called, I wasn’t paying attention.
Some might call that a humble brag, or say I was jaded, but I prefer “armored against the reality of constant disappointment.” You see, in my years writing for the New York Times, I had been contacted by Hollywood before.
There was, for instance, the time pre–email and cell phones when a Times security guard called me at home early on a Sunday because the president of an indie film company was standing in the lobby, insisting on speaking to me. He’d read my cover story on something or other in the New York Times Magazine that morning and simply had to buy the film rights. Was I free for breakfast the following day?
Plans made, I was awoken before dawn the next morning by his secretary, saying (other) urgent business had called him back to L.A. and he would contact me shortly because my article was the most important thing ever published and absolutely had to be a movie.
I am still waiting to hear from him.
And then there was my first book, First, Do No Harm, which was about the three years I spent observing the workings of a medical ethics committee at a hospital in Houston. This time the project got as far as an option agreement with a respected producer, who hired a moderately big-deal screenwriter, who took my book—which was filled with dying children, grieving parents, conflicted doctors—and turned it into a script that opened with a naked woman running through a Texas garden in the rain. (That would be the chair of my medical ethics committee, who I assure you stayed completely clothed in every scene of my book.…)
You’ll be surprised to hear that project got no further than the first draft.
I understood that not one bit of this was personal. I cover tough subjects; I’m drawn to stories with no clean endings, no clear good guys and bad guys, no absolute truths. In other words, not the kinds of things that Hollywood likes. The interest was nice—sometimes a little lucrative, often a good story to tell friends at dinner—but never anything I took seriously. Once in a while I would find myself flipping through TV channels marveling that they were filled with anything at all, because from where I sat absolutely nothing ever got made.
So when my book-to-film agent, Sylvie Rabineau, called me late in 2001 about some interest in Show Me a Hero, I mean it when I say I wasn’t paying much attention. The book had been out for three years by then. Like so much else I wrote, it was complex, untidy, and more than a little depressing. So Sylvie talked, and I half-listened. “Gail someone,” she said. “HBO something something. Wants to buy the project for David someone.
“Want me to talk to them further?” she asked.
I think I remember feeling a little bad that Sylvie was wasting her time on yet another project that would go nowhere. I also remember wondering how book-to-film agents made a living, since nothing ever got made.
“Why not?” I said.
Over the next few months Sylvie called periodically, chatting about David, and Gail, and HBO. I knew what HBO was, of course—though back then it was not yet the powerhouse of original content it would become—but we were well past the point where I could admit I had no idea whom she meant by Gail and David. Then one spring day she announced there was an offer, one she thought I should probably accept, and soon after that a contract, one she thought I should probably sign.
Then… someone else called.
“Hi, Lisa,” he said when I answered the phone. “This is David Simon.”
I reacted with complete nonchalance.
“DAVID SIMON!!!!! THE DAVID SIMON????” I screamed into the phone. “David Simon who wrote The Corner????? David Simon from Homicide??? THAT David Simon????”
“Lisa,” he said, less frightened than I would have been by the blathering on the other end of the line. “Didn’t your agent talk to you?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I wasn’t listening.”
Back in 2002, David Simon was the author of two books that he’d brought to TV, remaking himself from writer to producer. He was every journalist’s hero, having navigated his way across the divide, telling messy, complicated, real stories on flat, simple screens. And Gail Mutrux was a producer—of Rain Man, Quiz Show, Donnie Brasco, and, most important to this tale, Homicide: Life on the Street, which was David’s first series. It was Gail who’d read Show Me a Hero, I would later learn, then passed it along to David. Together they’d proposed it as a six-part miniseries for HBO.
I began paying a lot more attention.
During the summer of 2002 David would come to Yonkers, as would his writing partner Bill Zorzi, who had left his editing job at the Baltimore Sun to work on this project full-time. Together and separately, with me and on their own, they made the rounds of Yonkers, seeing how lives had, and had not, changed.
We visited with Mary Dorman in her cherished “brick house on St. John’s Avenue.” She had spent three years on the Yonkers Human Rights Commission by then (appointed by Mayor Spallone in 1990) and four more on the Yonkers Civil Service Commission (appointed by Mayor Spencer in 1995). When she left that position to take a job working as an assistant in the archives of the Yonkers Seminary, she was given a key to the city.
We went to City Hall to see Nay Wasicsko, who’d gotten her graduate degree in education and post-graduate degree in human resources management and moved up from the City Clerk’s office to become director of Professional Development and Education for the City of Yonkers, where she would stay for the next fourteen years. Yonkers being Yonkers, someone would periodically play politics and try—unsuccessfully—to push her out of her job.
We met Hank Spallone at his favorite table at the Raceway Diner, where he was more than happy to tell us stories from the housing fight, making it clear how he’d relished those days. “It was the best time of my life,” he would say. “It was an unbelievable time, that fucking time.” Soon afterward, he would retire to Florida.
And we visited Alma Febles and her children in their hard-won townhouse, where they were still searching for their happy ending. In the original epilogue of the book I had been optimistic that the move would change their lives, but talking to David, Bill, and me eight years later, Alma described the townhouses as “my nightmare.” Back at Schlobohm, she said, the threats had been clear and she could bar the doors against them, not letting the kids leave home except for school. In the “good” part of town, however, Frankie was free to roam as he demanded and got in with a crowd of “white rich boys who gave the Spanish boy the money and sent him to buy the drugs,” Alma said. He was arrested for the first time when he was fourteen and caused such chaos in the family in the following years that “Virgilio deserted us,” Leyda said, to join the Marines. That left Leyda to live at home while she went to college so that her mother didn’t have to handle Frankie all alone.
We couldn’t meet with Norma O’Neal. She had moved down to Richmond by then, with daughter Tasha and grandson Shaq, to follow Dwayne and his family. Soon she was joined there by Isaiah Spruill, the “nice man” she had met at Guild for the Blind. Norma and Isaiah were married in the early summer of 1998, and he died four weeks after the wedding. (When she called to tell me the news she said those had been the best weeks of her life.) Then, on New Year’s Eve, Dwayne died of a heart attack while making a delivery for his milk company. He was thirty-six. His wife, Libby, would soon be diagnosed with ALS, “Lou Gehrig’s disease,” and Bill would develop a friendship with her long-distance, communicating through an interpreter and a specially equipped computer.
Over the next twelve years I wrote books, magazine pieces, columns, and blog posts of my own while watching David and Bill craft the screenplay version of these people and their stories. Their writing went slowly because one or two things got in the way. David’s next series, a small masterpiece called The Wire, which premiered soon after our first phone call in 2002 and ran for five seasons. Generation Kill, which David filmed in Africa during six months in 2007. Treme, an ode to New Orleans after Katrina, which ran on HBO from 2010 to 2013. I kept my dad job, read about most of these developments from Google alerts and from the dispatches I would receive from David and Bill every year or so: A question here. A “we’re still working on it” there.
Oscar Newman died in 2004, at age sixty-eight, in a hospice outside of Albany, New York. He spent his final years living in the Catskills, where he built towering sculptures in the style of Northwest Native American tribes. Norma O’Neal died of complications from diabetes in 2007, about a week after she turned sixty-six. Libby died of complications of ALS in 2013; she was fifty. Hank Spallone died in retirement in 2009. Mary Dorman died on New Year’s Day of 2011. She was seventy-eight. On her funeral home’s memorial page her daughter, Maureen, wrote: “She was passionate about civil rights in the city, initially protesting court-mandated housing, then working to facilitate its success by assisting new tenants in the community. Mary was known to be an advocate for others in need throughout her life, and will be much missed by family, friends, and many others in her community.”
Including me.
Elsewhere, lives went on.
Nay got married in 2005 to Andrew McLaughlin, a Yonkers police officer assigned to the area around City Hall. They met because he used to come in and use the water cooler near her office while on patrol. “I truly believe that Nick sent him to me,” she says. “I know it sounds nutty, but I just know he did.” They would have two children and move out of Yonkers, though only one town to the north. She would never leave City Hall, though. Now a computer programmer analyst in the IT department, Nay Wasicsko-McLaughlin has, over time, become the institutional memory of the building—the only employee who has been there continuously since the tumultuous summer of 1988.
In 2007, Federal court case 80 CIV 6761, US v. Yonkers was officially settled, twenty-seven years after it was first filed, as the last of the six hundred units of affordable housing, some new, some retrofitted to existing buildings, were completed. Judge Sand was a senior judge by then, which for some means a reduced caseload and semi-retirement, but his docket remained full, often with high-profile cases. Eight years into senior status, for instance, he accepted the trial of the four accused terrorists who were eventually convicted of bombing the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (at one point during that trial one of the defendants jumped over a railing, reached the bench, and lunged at the judge). And fourteen years after other judges might have retired, he oversaw the last hearing in the Yonkers case, as he had the first, with Michael Sussman still representing the NAACP and Mayor Philip Amicone, John Spencer’s successor, signing off for the city. Eventually, as he reached his late eighties, he did slow down, and in 2014 he received the Association Medal from the Bar of the City of New York, a rare honor that’s been given only twenty-three times in sixty years. At the medal presentation ceremony he would be described as “an enduring symbol of physical and intellectual courage.”
Meanwhile, one of the first residents of one of the final rounds of Sand’s court-ordered affordable apartments was… Alma Febles. By then she had left her job at the Yonkers law firm and was working as a case manager for the Department of Social Services, helping residents navigate the system she knew all too well. Virgilio had left the Marines and joined the Yonkers police force, and was living on his own. Frankie was in and out of prison and no longer an official part of Alma’s household. Leyda was a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology and was working as a media buyer in Manhattan. Together Leyda and Alma qualified for the subsidized rent of $2,000 a month for a two-bedroom, two-bath “affordable” unit on Yonkers Avenue. Large, sunny, and equally far from the towers of Schlobohm and the townhouses of Helena, it was the first home Alma had loved since she’d arrived in the US at the age of fifteen. And she finally had her own bedroom.
In July 2009, Doreen James “friended” me on Facebook. In September 2010 David won a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant.” That same week he was the speaker at a fund-raiser for Nay’s brother-in-law, Roy McLaughlin, a Yonkers police sergeant who had been diagnosed with brain cancer. In the summer of 2013 HBO announced the last season of Treme, which meant, I hoped, that David would need something new to do.
Almost all of these moments brought brief exchanges with David and Bill, and in most of them David would declare, as he had from the start, that Show Me a Hero, the miniseries, would eventually air. Not because public housing policy was a natural subject for television—he was quite clear it was not, which, I think, was part of the reason he took it on—but because I’d been smart enough to write a book without a lot of expensive battle scenes or historical costumes. (Of course, with each year that passed, 1988 became more of a period piece.) Whenever he said this I considered his prediction carefully and decided it had to be wrong because, after all, nothing ever actually gets made. Still, it was nice to tuck the project, and the possibility, into the back pocket of my life.
Then, in the spring of 2014, I started getting quiet word that HBO had given Show Me a Hero the green light. A hint from Sylvie that things were “looking good.” An email from David, subject line “Congrats,” with a one-line message to “keep this under your hat” until everything was official. So I kept very quiet, partly because I’d promised, but mostly because of the jinx factor. And there was always the possibility that when I saw the final script it would open with naked women in rainy gardens arguing about where to locate new townhouses.
Over the next month or two most of my updates came indirectly and electronically. A Broadway actress whose work I knew and admired sent me a note on Facebook saying she was reading for the part of Doreen in two days and was having a heck of a time finding a copy of the book, since it was essentially out of print. Would I mind jumping on a call to describe the character to her more fully? I jumped. She didn’t get the role. (It would go to the amazing Ilfanesh Hadera.)
Next, an instant message, also on Facebook, from Jenny Murphy, who was Mary Dorman’s niece. “Are you the Lisa Belkin author of Show Me a Hero?” she asked. Mary’s husband, Buddy, had recently passed away, and, she wrote, “I have been helping my cousin clean her house and it prompted me to revisit your book. I cannot put it down.”
I remembered the warning not to blab, but I really did want to let Mary’s family know the news. “I am rereading my own book right now,” I answered carefully, “because HBO is probably going to make it into a miniseries and I figured I should remember what it said.” Since that was a sentence that could have been true anytime in the past ten years, I figured it didn’t really count as spilling the beans.
“HBO is definitely making a miniseries,” she wrote back seconds later. “The location manager just came to the house when I was helping my cousin and said they would start filming in the fall. They may use the house.”
Apparently I was the only one in town with a hat to keep news under.
Another email from David brought word that Paul Haggis (Crash! Million Dollar Baby!) was directing and Oscar Isaac (Llewyn Davis! Drive! Just signed to star in Star Wars!) would be starring as Nick. A few weeks after that, while I was getting my hair cut and checking my phone, there was a message from Bill saying, “It’s official,” with links to the announcement stories on the websites for Deadline and Variety. Over the next few weeks my Show Me a Hero Google alerts brought news of more inspired casting. Catherine Keener as Mary Dorman, Winona Ryder as Vinni Restiano, Jim Belushi as Angelo Martinelli, Jon Bernthal as Michael Sussman, Bob Balaban as Judge Sand, Alfred Molina as Hank Spallone, Peter Riegert as Oscar Newman, LaTanya Richardson as Norma O’Neal.
By now I was paying full attention to every word.
On October 1, 2014, twelve and a half years after my first phone call with David, filming began on the HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero at the actual Schlobohm housing project in Yonkers. I was out of town that first day but appeared on Day 2, and then I showed up once a week or so during the seventy-three-day shoot.
At some point during most of my visits someone on the crew would ask me, “Are you bored yet?” I know what they meant—there is tedium and repetition in filming a scene, as actors recite the same words again and again while the cameras come at them from different angles. But how could I ever be bored? With every take, I saw past, present, and future. I knew how many hours/months of research went into how many paragraphs/pages of my book, and from that I saw how David, Bill, and Paul transformed those months, and those pages, into a quick visual brush-stroke of camera or script. I watched the actors in front of me, and like an apparition, I also watched the real person who’d lived the actual moment. Then I projected forward to the day when their stories, which I’d been trusted with so long ago, would be seen by a wider world. That, after all, had always been the entire point—the telling of these stories to anyone who might want to listen.
Definitely not boring.
And what was my role during all of this? Technically my title was Consultant, but I took to saying, “My job is to stand in the corner and vibrate quietly with happiness.” “Quietly” does not come naturally to me, and I suspect that a few of the producers would be surprised to hear that what they saw during the five months of filming was my very best effort to stay out of the way and keep my opinions to myself. But truly I tried. And basically it was easy. I know that some writers have nightmare tales of watching their book morph into another medium (it was John le Carré who said, “Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes”), and this experience could have been very different if there had been naked women and rainy gardens in the shooting script. But the HBO gods blessed me with a team that felt its mission was to make compelling drama out of fact. The result was a shoot infused with a feeling of respect for the past, and a constant awareness that these were not just stories, but lives.
I had barely been on set for five minutes that first day, for instance, when David’s assistant asked me, “Did they light the tower of City Hall different colors at night in 1988? Because if they didn’t we have to ask them to turn the lights off.” (It had been lit, but not in colors. We confirmed that with archival photos, not my memory.…)
The graffiti on the walls during the Schlobohm scenes had been painted by an artist whose PhD was in the graffiti styles of the 1980s. (And more than a few current residents were unhappy when the scribbles and gang signs appeared, because by 2014 the walls were graffiti-free. The set dressers removed every mark when shooting ended.)
During the scenes in the City Council chambers (all filmed in the actual chambers in the real Yonkers City Hall) Paul Haggis would ask me: “Since this meeting was early on, would the crowd be standing and shouting yet, or were they still being relatively polite?”
During a scene in which Nick downs Maalox for his growing ulcer, art department researchers determined that the label of that medication had looked different back in 1993 and re-created the original. (There was just water in the bottle that Oscar chugged in take after take. Realism doesn’t mean making your leading man legitimately sick.…)
The purse that Catherine Keener carried, and the Virgin Mary medal around her neck, were replicas of ones that belonged to Mary Dorman, lent to costume designer Abigail Murray by Mary’s daughter, Maureen Dorman-Lutz. (“Actors take things home and lose them,” Abigail explained, so “it is very dangerous to have them use the ‘real’ things.” Hence the duplicates.)
The tie clip and lapel pin that Oscar wore in nearly every scene were replicas of ones that Nick wore almost every day, ones that Nay took from his jewelry box and gave to Oscar when they first met, the summer before filming began. The gold Movado watch was also a replica of Nick’s, as was his green sweater in his final scene.
Carla Quevedo, who plays the twenty-something Nay, wore Nay’s matching Movado, as well as a copy of her City Council pin, and a re-creation of her wedding dress. (Nay drove her boxed and preserved gown over so that the costume department could take photos.) Carla wore the same scent, Angel by Thierry Mugler for Women, that Nay favored during the late eighties and early nineties. Winona Ryder wore a copy of Vinni Restiano’s council pin. Alfred Molina held a toothpick in his scenes as Hank Spallone, an evocation of the ones he waved at David and Bill at the Raceway Diner.
Not every scene was filmed where it happened (another diner, for instance, stands in for the Raceway when Spallone lectures a New York Times reporter), but most of the important ones were. The actual streets of Schlobohm, but with bags of trash brought in by set dressers to augment the playground built by the crew in place of one that was no longer there. Mary Dorman’s real house, with the same kitchen table she and I had sat at for so many hours, the same cookie jar shaped like an old-timey telephone in the corner, the same Mr. Coffee pot near the same stove. The official ornate chambers of Yonkers City Hall, where one day the room became so hot and the roar of the hundreds of extras became so loud that Oscar, the actor, was all but transported into the world of Nick, the mayor, where he simply could not hear himself speak his lines. Later I would learn that many of those screaming extras were longtime local residents who had been at the original meetings shouting much the same words.
That fact—that there were real people stepping out from the past to inform the present—is, I think, what ultimately gives the miniseries its presence and power. It was also what made it a joy and a privilege to watch as a writer. Even more than the locations, and the tie clips, and the era-appropriate graffiti, it was the presence of those who lived the story, and the respect given to them by those who were filming, that elevated every frame of this shoot.
Many of the actors told me they did not aim for an imitation of the person they played, but rather an evocation—what Oscar calls “playing a person who lived” rather than “playing a real person.”
“First there is this person’s life,” he said, explaining his process to me after filming wrapped. “Then you came and wrote the book and you tried to be objective because you’re a journalist, but it’s still filtered through your experience. Then David writes a script, and the story is filtered through him, and then Paul gets it as the director and that’s another layer. And then I come to it. So we’re all basically meditating on this guy’s life and trying to feel what that life was, what he felt, what he thought. By the time it gets to me it’s its own thing. That gives me the freedom to play the character.”
Since the best evocations are grounded in and enhanced by truth, those actors who could do so spent time with their “persons who lived.”
“As an actor, it’s very rare to play a real person, not to mention someone you can actually meet and talk to,” Jimmy Bracchitta, who plays Nick Longo, told me. “It’s like winning the lottery.” He and his counterpart got along so well that they eventually arranged a dinner that included the real Neil DeLuca and Saverio Guerra, who plays Neil DeLuca. Everyone brought their wives and ate a lot of Italian food.
There were also regular visits from the “real” people to the set. John Spencer, now working as a consultant for the Yonkers VA, stopped in briefly to give Bill the infantryman’s badge that he’d worn while in office so that it could be worn by the actor who would play him. Peter Smith, now retired from the housing authority and running the philanthropy founded by ice-cream moguls Thomas and Agnes Carvel, came with his wife and gave a few pointers to actor Terry Kinney on how to spin the lottery drum. Maureen Dorman-Lutz stood surrounded by monitors in what had been her parents’ spare bedroom and watched Catherine bring Mary back home. At one point Maureen had to step outside because the sight of Catherine-as-Mary drinking tea on Mary’s couch was overwhelming.
Jim Surdoval was there. Charlie Cola’s daughter. Ed Tagliaferi and Bill Dentzer, reporters for the Yonkers Herald Statesman in 1988, who had written so much of the raw material for this book and, transitively, this miniseries.
Michael Sussman, still representing plaintiffs in bias cases, brought his wife and five of his seven children to watch the scene where he plays a competitive game of foosball with Paul Pickelle on the last night of the housing fight. In reality, the men had played basketball back in August of 1988, but there was a foot of snow on the ground the day we filmed, in January of 2015, hence the foosball. (Fun fact: the hands you see in close-up in that scene are David Simon’s, since he turned out to be the best player in the room.) True to character, Jon Bernthal talked such smack with Sussman, whom he was portraying, that they might have gone one-on-one on the basketball hoop in the yard but for the weather (and, probably, the restrictions of HBO’s insurance).
Alma, Leyda, and Virgilio were there for the filming of the lottery scene, returning to the same School Street gym where we’d all been twenty-three years earlier. Virgilio, still a Yonkers cop, eyed the costumed versions along the wall next to him. Leyda, now married with a young son, still worked in marketing in Manhattan. Alma still worked in Yonkers social services but lived in yet another apartment. After Leyda married and moved out of their two-bedroom, Alma took a smaller apartment with no public subsidy whatsoever, in a private home about a block from her old townhouse.
Come lunchtime the family shared a table with those who played them—Ilfanesh and the child actors Camilla Harden and David Iacono (who are the ages that Leyda and Virgilio were when we all first met). There were lots of photos and even more hugs.
Doreen James came later that same afternoon, and Natalie Paul raced back from the hair and makeup trailer when she heard the woman whose life she’d been re-creating was actually in the house. They embraced for a very long time. “The title says ‘Show Me a Hero,’” Natalie told Doreen. “To me you are the hero of this story.”
It was a thrill to catch up with Doreen, to hear about her work for a nonprofit for women in Yonkers, about her son, now twenty-seven and working in retail, about her plans to go back to school to study for a career in social services “as soon as I can pay for it without a student loan.” She had reread the book in anticipation of the miniseries, she told me, and reliving the journey that got her off drugs and out of the projects was part of her motivation for waiting to complete her education.
The “real” person to whom these set visits meant the most, and for whom the watching was the hardest, was Nay Wasicsko. During the summer of preproduction she was generous with her time and her possessions, meeting often with the producers, the costumer designers, and with Oscar Isaac, who would play her husband. But back then he still looked like Oscar, without the mustache and wardrobe that would turn him into Nick.
Her first encounter with him in character came accidentally. She left City Hall one lunchtime to pick up a sandwich and noticed the streets were filled with all the stuff—trucks, lights, cameras, people dressed like the 1980s—that comes with a TV shoot. Standing at the deli counter, she happened to run into Nina Noble, an executive producer, who gave her a hug and brought her over to the sidewalk where Oscar, in costume, was handing out campaign fliers. “Hi, I’m Nick Wasicsko,” he said, and she burst into tears.
After that she visited often. She became close friends with Carla Quevedo, who captured the steel and innocence of Nay’s younger self. Nay’s relationship with Oscar was more complicated.
“Sometimes seeing him was eerie,” she says. “It took its toll.”
“Sometimes she would look at me a little bit like a ghost,” he says.
During the scene at City Hall when he could not hear himself over the extras, he found himself turning to Nay for help. “What would you do for Nick, how would you help him here?” she remembers him asking. She answered that she would probably rub Nick’s shoulders and give him a pep talk, something like “You are on the right side here, you can do this, go get mad back.”
“He was angry?”
“Yeah, he got mad.”
So he went back out and clobbered the scene. “She reminded me how angry the guy was,” Oscar says. “I found that anger, and let it affect me, and it worked.”
If the question I was asked most often was “Are you bored?” and the one posed to the “real” people most often was “Isn’t this surreal?,” the words Nay heard with each visit were “Are you okay?”
She always answered that she was, and after her initial street-corner crying jag she worked hard to keep her tears to herself. Only when filming had ended did she admit how tough it had been. “I had to tell my daughter that I’d been married to Nick,” she said of her eight-year-old. “I hadn’t planned to do that this young.”
“We went to his grave together,” she told me. They had been there before, but the little girl had always thought this man was her mother’s friend. “She looked at me and said, ‘Now I think I understand.’”
When I called Nay while writing this epilogue she said she had decided to stop talking about the past for a while because that felt too much like still living in it. She did ask that I mention the Nicholas C. Wasicsko Scholarship Fund here, which I gladly do. You can donate online.
There are others in Yonkers who would like to stop talking about this part of their history, too. While the filming was a time of nostalgia for some, it brought deep discomfort for others, who believed that this was not a story that needed to be retold.
“What we went through is long past,” Peter Smith told Gannett reporter Jorge Fitz-Gibbon, who covered the crisis of 1988 and also the making of the TV version nearly thirty years later. “Yonkers deserves better than to have its reputation knocked again and again.”
John Spencer wasn’t in favor, either. “Those were embarrassing times,” he told me. “I love my city. We’ve overcome a lot. Why should we regurgitate that negative shit?”
But the current mayor, Mike Spano, chose to welcome the production to town, believing it would highlight how the people of Yonkers had grown and matured. “We are a better city today,” he said. “There’s the past, and there’s the postscript. We can’t rewrite the past, but we’re going to embrace the postscript. We now celebrate our diversity.”
It was lost on no one that all this pro and con, this looking ahead and looking back, played out against the backdrop of a nation still struggling with all the questions raised years ago in Yonkers. Questions of race, and community. Of whether you have to turn around and face past wrongs before you can move forward and overcome them.
While we were filming, the city of Ferguson, Missouri—where a mostly African American population was governed by a mostly white city council—was exploding in protest. And as I write these words, it’s David Simon’s beloved Baltimore that’s burning.
Which makes the lessons of Yonkers not just history, but prologue, not a discrete chapter but a part of a continuum, with lessons that resonate through the decades. As Jim Surdoval was quoted as saying in the local paper when filming first began, “Obviously the underlying issue was race, and we see that playing out today in Missouri. It’s a discussion that the country still needs to have, and hopefully this miniseries will further provoke that conversation.”
This time we should all be paying attention.