On December 8, 1980, it was just under two years since the day—January 2, 1978—that Ed Koch, running on an anti-crime platform and promising to restore New York to its former glory, had been sworn in as mayor.
On that same day that the man whose music was known everywhere on earth was shot with a gun on the streets of New York, it had been just shy of four years since Sunday, November 14, 1976, when a box appeared on Page One of the Sunday News announcing: Jimmy Breslin, Starts Today, here.
In the box was a line drawing of hardworking Breslin, collar undone, tie pulled down, cigar in his teeth, smiling from his eyes.
That first column captured the state of New York as Breslin told the story of a young man shot in the back of the head on a Brooklyn street by a young gunman who wanted a coat.
Dies the victim, dies the city. Nobody flees New York because of accounting malpractice. People run from murder and fire. Those who remain express their fear in words of anger.
By the end of 1977, Breslin’s first full year at the paper, 1,557 homicides had been recorded. By the end of the month John Lennon died, there were 1,814 recorded for that year. Two decades earlier, in 1960, there had been 482. Koch’s platform was on an EMS trolley racing to hospital emergency room doors. Here is how Breslin began the year:
The first person murdered in New York in 1980 turns out to be Salvadore Vargas, 36, of Fourth Ave., Brooklyn who was shot at about 8 pm on New Year’s Eve and then took so long to die that he tumbled clear out of the 1979 statistics and on to the top of the list of 1980. Vargas died on New Year’s Day a clear two hours ahead of the next victim.
Statisticians however were fighting over Vargas yesterday. I don’t know why. Vargas was certainly not needed so desperately for the 1979 numbers . . .
Nor was Vargas required to make our murder figures for the first day of 1980 seem impressive. Here in New York on New Year’s Day, amidst our grandeur, our mansions in the sky, why right at the center of our absolute renaissance, we killed 13 people; shot them, stabbed them, strangled them, did everything but chew them to death.
Dies the victim, dies the city.
Breslin, with sadness, with wry humor, with fierceness; from that very first column gave the Daily News the voice that it needed to fulfill its promise to the city’s residents. Tell It to Sweeney is how the paper once defined that voice in a book it published under that title. The book, written by John Chapman, the paper’s drama critic since 1943, was printed at a time when the Sweeneys were the majority audience the editors and publishers aimed for. In 1980, the working class audience from the low rise neighborhoods in the demographically changing four outer boroughs of New York City remained an audience for Breslin. He looked out for those that took the longest rides in the world you could buy for a token; to get to Manhattan and stoke the furnaces, turn on the air conditioners, fuel the egos of the ruling classes: whether political or financial. He never took his eye off of you. The so-often powerless.
In the Bronx, fifty percent of the housing in forty-four census tracts had been burnt down in the 1970s. Ninety-seven percent had been gutted by fire in another half dozen places. President Jimmy Carter, who wore a yellow cardigan when he addressed the nation, encouraging us to lower our thermostats as we continued to experience an OPEC-driven energy crisis, went to the Bronx in 1977. What happened?
A young woman carrying a movie camera walked in the warm sun across the desolation of Charlotte St. in the South Bronx yesterday, her feet clearing away the larger pieces of broken glass. She made her way to the top of a hill of debris and surveyed the desolation. A young man appeared . . .
“We’re making a film,” the young man, Steve Brown, said. “The film is about archeology.” . . . “Archeologists look for what gets left over when buildings and places are let go,” Elle Nagler said. . . .
What his archeologists would find someday are the fire-blackened bricks and beams . . . they also would find motor oil cans, beer cans, broken glass for wine bottlers, syringes, Styrofoam coffee containers, headless plastic dolls and under it all . . . the broken promise of the head of the government of the richest nation in the history of mankind.
It was on Charlotte St. in the South Bronx that President Carter stood in 1977 and told the nation he would have this place rebuilt, born again as it were, in order to personally bear witness to the cities where so many live . . .
Now it is almost the summer of 1979 and nothing has been done and nothing will be done.
“On Charlotte St., a Broken Promise Lies Among Ruins.” That was the headline this column ran under.
Dies the South Bronx, dies the city.
During that time, even as Breslin’s fame had grown, the newspaper’s precipitous decline had begun. A decision would be made to cancel the evening “Bulldog Edition.” Who was going to risk the dark and dangerous streets to walk their dog to the newsstand after 8:00 P.M. for a paper and cigarettes, a paper and ice cream, a paper and condoms, a paper and candy?
In May 1979, a young boy, Etan Patz, was kidnapped, to vanish forever, on the streets of Manhattan. His became the first face of a missing child on a milk carton.
In October the city gained one new, if temporary, resident: the Shah of Iran. With the help of powerful bankers, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, removed from his Peacock Throne by the Islamic Revolution, had come to New York Hospital for cancer treatment. Just a few days later, Iranians stormed our embassy and took our diplomats hostage. This was a situation that went on for more than a year. Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president on January 20, 1981. On January 21, the hostages were freed.
By then, the city’s population had dropped by nearly a million people from 1970.
In January 1980, Richard Ravitch, Chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, announced he would not have his 14-year-old son ride the subway at night.
The decision made by the Tribune Corporation that owned the News to cease publishing the Bulldog Edition was balanced by a decision to invest many millions of dollars in an afternoon paper called Tonight that would attract young, monied Manhattanites on their way home from the white world of finance, publishing, law, commerce, advertising and accounting that was still thriving. It would start in August 1980 and end with layoffs in August 1981. A failure. One that Clay Felker of Esquire, the Trib, and New York magazine had been brought in to help oversee. His magic could not turn blue collar subway and bus tokens into Manhattanite gold.
It was a failure that accelerated a decline in circulation that was matched perhaps only by the decline in the quality of life in the city itself. The Daily News was doing long takeouts on those who saw fit to arm themselves with licensed handguns, from ice cream makers to entertainment moguls to columnists; a memorable series that was a finalist for the Pulitzer titled “How Safe Are Our Subways”; campaigns against dogs fouling the sidewalks while their owners held their own noses in the air; reports that required counting the number of potholes in the city; the start of the state lottery and its impact on the state’s coffers and the state of the numbers business, the most dangerous bus stops, the most dangerous street corners, the decision by the bosses of the Metro-North railroad to bypass the stops in the South Bronx because of the “urchins” on the streets there.
“Tell them he called them roaches,” Michael Daly counseled a young reporter headed to the Bronx to get reactions.
In 126 columns in 1977, 107 in 1978 and 131 in 1979, Breslin cut to the heart of the matter with confident, straightforward prose, with bluntness or grace, humor or chagrin or sadness. He proved to be as incredible a reporter in early middle age as he was when he wrote his first book on Sunny Jim and his column for the Herald Tribune. In more than 1,100 columns published between 1977 and his departure from the paper, his prose shone even brighter than at his meteoric start at the Trib in 1963. Now his voice resonated, loudly when necessary, across the city, the state and at times, the nation. He used it to capture the rift between white New York and brown and Black-skinned New York. He shouted back at the white applause for a white man named Bernie Goetz when he shot four Black youths on the subway after they asked him for five dollars. He used it to capture the rent in the fabric of his soul caused by the death of his wife Rosemary. He used it to capture a most despicable crime committed by police, one that illustrated the divide between them and the communities they served. And he used it to tell the story of two big crime cases where he could offer a unique perspective. They were both committed by Jimmy’s people: the crooks and crooked politicians of Queens.