The Outer Boroughs in Working Detail

The Two-Fare Zone

In 1990, New York City’s total population was roughly 7.32 million. Of those, approximately 5.84 million lived outside Manhattan — in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island.¹ The publishing industry, the advertising agencies, and the editorial floors of the major magazine titles were concentrated in a corridor running roughly between 34th and 59th Streets, with the greatest density on the avenues between Sixth and Lexington. Four people in five who called New York City home lived somewhere else entirely, and reached this corridor by transit.

The subway system they rode had been merged on paper in 1940, when the city consolidated the IRT, BMT, and IND lines under a single authority, but the three systems continued to operate with the geographic logic of their original private owners. The IRT ran up the East and West sides of Manhattan and into the Bronx and Brooklyn along corridors where dense tenement populations had made the original construction profitable. The BMT served Brooklyn’s brownstone belt and stretched into Queens along older routes. The IND, built by the city itself and finished latest, extended into Washington Heights and the outer neighborhoods that the private lines had not found worth serving. The practical consequence for a rider boarding in Flatbush or Co-op City or eastern Queens was that no single subway line ran a straight path to the commercial core; a bus segment was often the first leg of a commute the subway completed.

The D train ran from 205th Street in the northwest Bronx through the Concourse Line, over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, with stops at 47th–50th Streets at Rockefeller Center serving the Midtown editorial corridor. From Morris Heights, a rider boarding at Tremont Avenue faced a ride of roughly fifty minutes to reach those blocks. The 7 train ran from Times Square through Sunnyside, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Corona, Elmhurst, and into Flushing — a line built to carry immigrants to the factories and garment shops of Queens, repurposed by the end of the century as the route those immigrants’ children took to service and professional work in Manhattan. Neither the D nor the 7 required a bus connection for riders who lived close to the line. But the eastern precincts of every borough did.

The CompStat era did not arrive until 1994 and the data it produced was crime data, not commute data. No city agency tracked, in granular terms, how long the round trip took for a home-health aide in Hollis or a restaurant worker in Bay Ridge. What the record shows is the asymmetry: the editorial floor’s working day began at nine and ended at seven; the outer-borough commute that bracketed it consumed two hours or more. The working-time geography produced, in aggregate, an invisible tax on working-class employment in the city — most visible in those decades as a structural inequality the two-fare zone made literal every morning at the turnstile.

The Bronx After the Fires

The Bronx became a national synonym for urban collapse in the summer of 1977, when the Game 2 World Series broadcast from Yankee Stadium showed aerial footage of a burning building visible from the stadium’s upper deck, and a line attached itself, through Howard Cosell’s broadcast booth, to the borough’s name for the next two decades.³ The fire was not metaphorical. By the time of Cosell’s broadcast, roughly 80 percent of the housing stock in some South Bronx census tracts — Mott Haven, Hunts Point, Morrisania, East Tremont — had been destroyed.⁴ The causes were documented: landlord arson for insurance money, tenant arson in protest of unlivable conditions, the decision by the RAND Corporation, advising the Lindsay administration in the early 1970s, to reduce fire-service coverage in high-density low-income neighborhoods on the grounds that the cost-benefit ratio was unfavorable.⁴ Apartment buildings that had housed working families for four decades were left as shells or rubble. By 1989, what remained in the most devastated tracts was a mix of surviving NYCHA superblocks, older walkups on the Grand Concourse and University Avenue that had come through the crisis, and vast empty lots overgrown with sumac.

The recovery, between 1989 and 2001, was real and uneven in equal measure. Its most visible symbol was Charlotte Street, where 89 prefabricated single-family vinyl-sided ranch houses with driveways and front lawns were built on what had been moonscape. The plan was led by the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes, a community organization headed by Genevieve Brooks, with support from Ed Logue’s New York City Public Development Corporation.⁵ The first houses were delivered in 1983; sales were completed in 1994. Jimmy Carter had walked through the burned blocks in 1977; Ronald Reagan visited the rubble in 1980; Bill Clinton walked the rebuilt street in 1995. The houses were controversial within the urbanist literature — critics argued that vinyl-sided suburban ranch houses in the middle of the South Bronx represented a politically legible image rather than a real urban future; the families who moved in would have described them in different terms, and both descriptions were accurate.

Beyond Charlotte Street, the working-class texture of the borough’s surviving neighborhoods remained intact and specific. Morris Heights, in the northwest Bronx along University and Sedgwick Avenues, was built on 1920s and 1930s brick walkups — five- and six-story buildings with cast-iron radiators, single-pane windows, and basement boilers that fired before six in the morning. In 1989, the neighborhood was roughly 55 percent Hispanic, largely Puerto Rican, and roughly 37 to 40 percent Black, with the Dominican wave that would reshape the area just beginning to register. Median household income ran in the low twenties in 1989 dollars. A clock radio on the kitchen counter, the steam pipes clanking through the wall, the BX12 bus on Fordham Road beginning its crosstown run at dawn — this was the working-class Bronx that the arson crisis had not destroyed, the Bronx that got up at 5:30 and commuted to jobs that the D train made possible.

Belmont, eight blocks east of the Grand Concourse on Arthur Avenue, was a different Bronx: the Arthur Avenue Retail Market, built in 1940 and still operating, anchored a stretch of old Italian-American fish markets, butcher shops, and bakeries that survived intact through the period. By 2001, there was significant Albanian and Mexican presence on the side blocks, but the eight square blocks around Arthur Avenue held their character. Riverdale, in the northwest, was different still: affluent, heavily Jewish, apartment buildings on Henry Hudson Parkway with views of the Palisades across the river, the cluster of private schools — Horace Mann, Fieldston, the Riverdale Country School — that served families whose address was technically the Bronx but whose working social world pointed toward the Upper East Side. Co-op City, in the northeast, housed roughly 43,000 residents in one of the largest planned residential communities in the United States, completed in the early 1970s, by the 1990s predominantly Black and Latino.

The crime arc across the decade was steep. Citywide murders peaked at 2,245 in 1990 and fell by roughly two-thirds by 2001; the Bronx was overrepresented in both the early-decade peak and the subsequent decline. The on-the-ground experience of that decline was granular: the corner crews thinned out through the mid-1990s, the sirens grew less constant, the empty lots slowly gave way to new low-rise housing under city-supported rehabilitation programs. By 1998 the moonscape was largely gone. What did not change was the underlying income picture: median household income in the South Bronx remained under $20,000 in 2000. Hunts Point carried the highest pediatric asthma rate in the country. The recovery was real; the poverty that had produced the collapse persisted. The Bronx in 2001 was a borough where the murder rate had fallen dramatically, in apartments whose residents had not acquired new options for leaving.

Brooklyn, Holding and Tipping

Brooklyn was the borough where the editorial floor’s social class was most visibly in motion, neighborhood by neighborhood, across the period — a slow migration of small capital into working-class fabric that produced different outcomes on different blocks and different decades of lag time depending on which subway line ran through.

The mechanism was well established by 1989 in the neighborhoods closest to Manhattan. Park Slope had been heavily middle-class gentrified for years; its Seventh Avenue was the established brownstoner spine through the 1980s, lined with health-food stores, bookshops, and the kind of cafe whose clientele pushed strollers. Fifth Avenue, two blocks west, remained Latino working-class commercial: bodegas, dollar stores, glass storefronts, Latin restaurants. Between roughly 1990 and 1995, Fifth Avenue tipped.⁶ Cafes opened. Independent restaurants arrived. By 1996 the stretch from Union Street to 9th was a recognizable secondary commercial strip, its rents just high enough to signal that the first-wave tenants were beginning to move. The mechanism was the standard one: Seventh Avenue rents had risen out of reach for the second wave of small-business owners; Fifth Avenue still had storefronts available; the demographic walking between them was already in place.

Williamsburg followed a few years later and from a different starting point. In 1989 its north end was predominantly Polish, Italian, and Puerto Rican, with the large Hasidic Satmar community south of Division Avenue constituting a neighborhood within the neighborhood that showed no signs of moving. The industrial blocks around Bedford Avenue and the cross streets running west toward the East River — North 6th, North 7th, North 8th — were largely empty warehouses and small factories. The artist-organized loft scene arrived first on Berry Street and the side streets west of Bedford, where raw industrial space was cheapest.⁷ By 1994, galleries were opening — Pierogi 2000 at 177 North 9th, Galapagos at 70 North 6th from 1995. By 1998, the Bedford Avenue stop on the L was a different street than it had been four years earlier: cafes, music venues, vintage shops, a visible demographic shift in who was getting off the train. DUMBO, under the Manhattan Bridge overpass, followed a different sequence: David Walentas and Two Trees Management Company acquired much of the neighborhood across the 1990s, and the first Dumbo Art Under the Bridge Festival in 1997 marked the threshold before mass luxury conversion began around 1998.

Crown Heights, in central Brooklyn, was a different kind of geography: not tipping but coexisting, with the specific friction that coexistence between two communities sharing one neighborhood on unequal terms produces. Eastern Parkway — the tree-lined boulevard Frederick Law Olmsted designed to bisect the neighborhood — functioned as both a physical and social line. The predominantly Caribbean community (Trinidadian, Guyanese, Jamaican, Haitian) occupied the blocks to the north; the Lubavitcher Hasidic community centered on 770 Eastern Parkway, the Chabad-Lubavitch world headquarters, occupied the blocks to the south. The West Indian American Day Carnival on Labor Day Monday drew between one and three million participants and spectators along the Eastern Parkway route, the largest public event in the city.⁸ On August 19, 1991, a car in the Rebbe’s motorcade struck and killed Gavin Cato, a seven-year-old Guyanese boy; three days of civil unrest followed, and Yankel Rosenbaum, a twenty-nine-year-old Australian rabbinical student, was fatally stabbed.⁹ The aftermath — political, legal, communal — extended through the decade. The two communities shared the neighborhood through the 1990s, in the way communities often share space when they have no other choice.¹⁰

Bensonhurst, at the borough’s southern end, was predominantly Italian-American and working-class. On August 23, 1989, Yusuf Hawkins, sixteen, was shot and killed by a white mob on 20th Avenue near 68th Street; he had come to the neighborhood to look at a used car.¹¹ The Bensonhurst of 1989 was a borough argument made visible in a single event, and it remained that for years.

Brighton Beach, at the far southern tip, was a different geography again: the elevated B and Q train tracks running above Brighton Beach Avenue, the commercial strip lined with food markets selling black bread and smoked fish with signs in Cyrillic, the Soviet-style variety-show restaurants (the Odessa, the National, the Winter Garden) where large family parties sat at white-tablecloth tables through the night with vodka in carafes while performers worked the room.¹² The neighborhood’s Soviet Jewish community had been established by a first wave of roughly 40,000 émigrés who arrived between 1975 and 1980. After the Soviet collapse in 1991, a second and larger wave followed; by various counts more than 20,000 Eastern European immigrants arrived in New York in 1992 alone, many of them passing through Brighton on arrival. The banya — the Russian bath — served as a social institution for both waves, the community’s internal parliament conducted in steam.

Bedford-Stuyvesant, Fort Greene, and Clinton Hill held their own trajectories. Bed-Stuy was predominantly African-American, brownstone-rich, and not yet, through the period, under serious gentrification pressure. Fort Greene and Clinton Hill were moving, brownstone by brownstone, with Brooklyn Academy of Music and Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule production house anchoring the cultural identity. Coney Island held its working-class character through the period — the Cyclone operational, Astroland running, the boardwalk rough at the edges, KeySpan Park opening in June 2001. Red Hook, physically isolated by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, had no subway and no visible gentrification; it was the NYCHA Red Hook Houses and the industrial piers, and it would remain so for years.

By 1995, the borough that was tipping and the borough that was holding were both Brooklyn, and both sat in a single editor’s mental map under the same label, accessed only when a reason to think about them arose.

Queens, the International Express

The 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act abolished the national-origins quota system that had governed American immigration since 1924, and its most legible consequence, in New York City, arrived neighborhood by neighborhood along a single elevated train line. The 7 train ran from Times Square through Sunnyside, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Corona, Elmhurst, and into Flushing. By the late 1990s, Time magazine had given it a name that stuck: the International Express.¹³ By 2000, Queens as a whole was approaching half foreign-born, placing it among the most ethnically diverse counties in the United States.

Astoria, directly across the East River from Midtown, was understood through the late 1980s as a Greek neighborhood — the largest Greek community outside Greece, its advocates sometimes claimed, though the demography behind that claim was already softening. The core Greek institutions were concentrated between Ditmars Boulevard, Steinway Street, 36th Avenue, and the East River: the Greek Orthodox churches, the coffeehouses where older Greek men played backgammon, the fish markets stocking octopus and anchovies, the bakeries selling koulouri and tsoureki, the restaurants on 23rd Avenue and Ditmars Boulevard with their retsina in carafes. The Greek population was declining through the 1980s — children of the 1960s immigrants moving to Bayside, Whitestone, and the Long Island suburbs — and the streets they left were being layered over.¹⁴ By the mid-1990s, Steinway Street between 28th Avenue and Astoria Boulevard had become a concentration of Egyptian-run shops, restaurants, and coffeehouses; Bangladeshi immigrants had settled east of Steinway; Brazilian immigrants were arriving around 36th Avenue. The Greek coffeehouses remained. The Colombian restaurant had opened next door.

Jackson Heights was a different density of arrival. At 74th Street and Roosevelt Avenue, the South Asian commercial cluster — Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani — occupied two block-faces under the 7 train’s elevated structure: sari stores with display windows of red and gold fabric, Indian-music cassette shops with hand-lettered Hindi and Urdu signage, Punjabi sweet shops with trays of barfi and ladoo in the windows, vendors selling South Asian periodicals from folding tables. North on Northern Boulevard, the Latin American commercial layer ran Colombian, Ecuadorian, Argentine, Peruvian. Both communities rode the same train. Neither required English at the transaction; the commercial infrastructure of each had developed to the point where a new arrival from Lahore or from Cali could spend a full day on those blocks without it.

Flushing, at the 7’s eastern terminus, was completing a transformation into the most commercially significant Chinese and Korean neighborhood on the East Coast outside Manhattan’s Chinatown. Main Street north of Roosevelt Avenue carried bilingual and tri-lingual signage; banks, real-estate offices, doctors, and restaurants all served a population that had organized its daily life in Mandarin and Korean. The transformation accelerated through the period: by 2001 Flushing was a self-sufficient commercial district whose connection to the rest of the city ran primarily through the 7 train.

Long Island City, closest to Manhattan on the Queens side, remained mostly industrial and warehouse through the period. The P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, founded in 1971 and a MoMA affiliate by 2000, anchored an avant-garde presence against the backdrop of Silvercup Studios at Queens Plaza and the auto-body shops and warehouses that surrounded it. Residential conversion was a later story. Rego Park and Forest Hills, farther east along Queens Boulevard, were absorbing a significant Bukharian Jewish community — Soviet Jews from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan — arriving in numbers after the Soviet collapse.¹² Northern Queens — College Point, Whitestone, Bayside — carried a more suburban character and a more homogeneous population, until August 1999, when the first West Nile virus cluster in the United States was identified there.

By 2001, Queens was the demographic future of the city, legible in any stop-by-stop reading of the 7 train. The City section ran an occasional piece keyed to a specific street — Jackson Heights as the South Asian commercial hub, Flushing as the new Chinatown — but the conviction that the borough as a whole was the central story of the American immigration decade had not yet formed on the editorial floor.

Staten Island Apart

Staten Island was politically and culturally the most distant of the outer boroughs, not in miles but in disposition. The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which opened in 1964 and connected the island to Brooklyn at its narrowest crossing, was the only road link to the rest of the city. The Staten Island Ferry, running between St. George and Lower Manhattan, was the only direct transit link to the island that did not require a car; it became fully free in 1997. Most of the island’s residential fabric was single-family suburban — split-levels and ranch houses built after the bridge opened, on land that had been farms and marshes — working-class to upper-middle-class, white ethnic, and heavily Italian-American.

In November 1993, 65 percent of Staten Island voters approved a referendum on secession from New York City.¹⁵ The state legislature did not act on the vote; the referendum had no legal mechanism for implementation; secession did not happen. But the vote was a structural political fact for the rest of the decade, a registered preference that sat in the permanent record of the city’s relationship to its southernmost borough. Staten Island’s congressional representation and its relationship to every subsequent mayoral administration bore its mark.

St. George, the ferry terminal neighborhood, and Stapleton, a mile north along the waterfront, were the only parts of the island that felt urban — dense, mixed, connected to the street life of the shore. Tompkinsville, on Victory Boulevard, had become by the late 1990s the largest Sri Lankan community in the United States, with restaurants, grocery stores, and a temple oriented to a population that had arrived largely after the early years of the Sri Lankan civil war.¹⁴ Port Richmond, on the north shore, was absorbing Mexican immigration through the period. The Fresh Kills Landfill, among the largest in the world through the 1990s, occupied roughly three square miles of the island’s western shore; the Department of Sanitation closed it on March 22, 2001, and reopened it briefly six months later to receive debris from the World Trade Center.

The borough that voted to leave. The borough whose residents drove rather than rode. The borough whose name the City section invoked perhaps three or four times a year, always with the faint implication of exceptionalism, as if the island’s relative separateness exempted it from the conditions that governed the rest.