4.9/The Lived Worlds/Class and the City

The Outer Boroughs: Tribal Underlay, 1989–1993

The Instrument of the Boundary

The schoolyard sat inside a neighborhood built, seventy years earlier, on a different kind of instrument. Edward A. MacDougall’s Queensboro Corporation bought the drained farmland in 1909, marketed it as Jackson Heights, and coined the term garden apartment for blocks of housing wrapped around private interior parks.² In 1919 the corporation opened Linden Court, the first of the co-ops, under what it called the Cooperative Ownership Plan: residents bought shares in the building rather than deeds to a unit, and the shareholders — not any deed restriction filed with the city — decided who could buy in after them. The screening was not a byproduct of the form. It was the selling point. The early buildings carried restrictive covenants as well, and the neighborhood’s own recollection of how the discretion was used, preserved in its histories, was blunt — no Catholics, no Jews, no dogs.²

The covenants did not hold. State and federal courts made racial covenants unenforceable in the late 1940s, and Jewish families moved into the apartment blocks through the 1950s; Black residents remained effectively barred until the Fair Housing Act of 1968.³ By 1990 the neighborhood held the opposite of what its founders had built it to exclude. The stretch of 74th Street south of Roosevelt Avenue had become one of the metropolitan region’s densest concentrations of South Asian shops — sari houses, jewelers, electronics dealers, groceries, several dozen businesses in a few blocks. Roosevelt Avenue, under the elevated tracks of the 7 line, carried a Colombian and Ecuadorian commercial strip that the borough called Little Colombia. Jackson Heights held one of the largest concentrations of gay men in Queens. The most exclusionary residential instrument in the city’s history had produced, within seventy years, one of the most heterogeneous square miles in the United States — the interior gardens still private, still keyed and hedged, the streets around them now filled with arrivals from every part of the hemisphere, among them the bartender the schoolyard would take.

In the autumn of 1991, after three days of deliberation, two of Rivera’s assailants were convicted of second-degree murder — the first killing prosecuted as an anti-gay hate crime in New York State.¹ In June 1993 the neighborhood held the first Queens Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade, an answer to the schoolyard carried through the open street.⁴ That October the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated roughly thirty-six blocks of the garden apartments a historic district, placing the architecture of the old exclusion under the permanent protection of the state.³

The Garden and the Compromise

Forest Hills had been built to the same purpose by different hands. In 1909 the Russell Sage Foundation bought a hundred and forty-two acres and hired Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and the architect Grosvenor Atterbury to lay out Forest Hills Gardens as a model English village, with a commuter station at its center at Station Square and curving streets of Tudor houses behind it.⁵ The Gardens’ covenants named no race and no religion; they operated on price and architectural control, and the effect was the exclusion of the working class by the cost of the door. North of the Long Island Rail Road, in the apartment houses and co-ops that were not the Gardens proper, a Jewish professional and managerial class settled through the postwar decades — the doctors, lawyers, teachers, and accountants for whom Forest Hills was the achieved address, neither the tenement left behind nor the Manhattan that had never been available.

The genteel version of the boundary sat at the neighborhood’s own center. The West Side Tennis Club, inside the Gardens, hosted the U.S. National Championships — the U.S. Open after 1968 — every year until the tournament left for Flushing Meadows in 1978, and it barred Jews and Black applicants from membership. It did so without a written rule, through the proposal-and-blackball procedure by which a handful of negative votes could reject any candidate; the arrangement became public in 1959 when the club refused Ralph Bunche, the United Nations undersecretary and Nobel laureate, and his son.⁶ The instrument was the same one the co-op board used and the same one the Gardens’ covenants used: exclusion by manner rather than by statute, defensible as private taste. The Jewish professionals filling the co-op blocks a few streets away could not join the club at the heart of their own neighborhood.

The neighborhood’s defining public fight was not a killing but a hearing. In 1971 the city’s Board of Estimate approved a plan to build eight hundred and forty units of low-income public housing in three twenty-four-story towers in the middle of Forest Hills.⁷ The organized residents — the largely Jewish middle class of the surrounding blocks — resisted with a ferocity that stopped the project cold and carried its opposition to the door of the lawyer Mayor Lindsay eventually appointed to mediate. Mario Cuomo produced a compromise by the end of the summer of 1972: the project cut roughly in half, its height reduced, forty percent of the apartments reserved for the elderly.⁷ The instrument that defended Forest Hills was procedural and legal — the zoning hearing, the co-op board, the deed — and it left no body on the ground. It did the same work the covenant had done, by other means.

By the 1990s the covenant was two generations dead, the tennis club’s championships had gone to Flushing Meadows, and the boundary in Forest Hills was purely a matter of money. The co-op board remained the screen, and it screened for the ability to carry the maintenance and the manner that the balance alone could not buy. The neighborhood absorbed the decade’s new arrivals accordingly — Bukharian Jews from Central Asia and Iranian families settling into the neighborhood’s apartment blocks, admitted through the screen rather than turned back by it, because they met its price. The families who moved in were not the families the Sage Foundation had drawn its village for, and it did not matter, because the mechanism had never been about who they were. It had always been about who could pay. Class had become the whole of the boundary.

The Avenue and the Bat

Bensonhurst had neither the garden co-op nor the restrictive covenant. It was a neighborhood of attached two-family brick houses, owner-occupied and handed down through families, the upstairs unit rented to a cousin or a newlywed and the mortgage carried by both floors. Its commercial spine was 18th Avenue, co-named Cristoforo Colombo Boulevard, lined with small Italian family businesses — the salumeria, the pork store, the social club with the espresso machine and the folding chairs — many held in the same families across three generations. It was the largest Italian concentration in Brooklyn, still the borough’s Little Italy at the decade’s end, and by the late 1980s an aging one, its population beginning to thin as Chinese and Soviet arrivals reached its edges. It had no legal instrument for controlling who bought in and who did not. What it had instead was the collective certainty of who belonged on the block, enforced on the sidewalk by whoever happened to be standing on it.

On the night of August 23, 1989, Yusuf Hawkins, a sixteen-year-old from East New York, came to Bensonhurst with three friends to look at a used car advertised for sale. A crowd of young white men had gathered on the block, expecting Black or Hispanic men said to be coming to the birthday party of a neighborhood girl, Gina Feliciano, who had quarreled with a local youth and let it be known she had Black and Hispanic friends; several of the crowd carried baseball bats and at least one a handgun. They took Hawkins and his friends for the expected visitors, surrounded them, and shot Hawkins twice in the chest.⁸ The instrument here was the body — the bat, the gun, the crowd that formed on the corner within minutes because a rumor had said the boundary was about to be crossed. There was no board to appeal to and no covenant to invoke; the screening happened in the street, in real time, at the speed of a phone tree. In May 1990 Joseph Fama was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five years to life; Keith Mondello, who had assembled the crowd, was acquitted of murder and convicted of riot and lesser counts, and most of the young men charged were acquitted of the killing itself — an outcome that kept the marches coming for another year.⁸

The marches came through the neighborhood in the weeks after the shooting and returned for a year and a half, met on the sidewalks by residents who held up watermelons and chanted the boundary in the plainest available terms. On January 12, 1991, as the Reverend Al Sharpton stepped from a car to lead a demonstration with Hawkins’s parents, a Bensonhurst resident named Michael Riccardi broke from the assembling marchers and drove a knife into his chest, one block from the corner where Hawkins had died.⁹ Sharpton survived. The neighborhood had defended, with a blade of its own, a line that appeared on no deed and in no covenant and lived only in the shared and unwritten knowledge of whom the block was for.