South Bronx Rising by Jill Jonnes

Author:Jill Jonnes [Jonnes, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781531501211
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2022-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

29

The President’s Magic Visit

1977–1978

BY the time President Jimmy Carter came to New York in early October 1977 to visit the United Nations, Mayor Beame was a lame duck. The UN trip was the declared purpose of Carter’s presence in beleaguered New York, but he also had a secret itinerary known only to a handful of City officials. The planning for this hush-hush mission had been hurriedly arranged during the previous three weeks.

In mid-September Victor Marrero, now the City’s planning commissioner, got a phone call from John Zuccotti, his mentor, who had just resigned as deputy mayor. The two, both Yale Law graduates, had first met when Zuccotti helped Marrero set up the South Bronx Community Housing Corporation in 1970. Zuccotti had some very exciting news. He had heard through his grapevine that President Carter, piqued by post-blackout criticisms from Vernon Jordan and other black leaders that he was inattentive to the plight of the urban poor, was planning to visit an inner-city neighborhood. Patricia Harris, Carter’s secretary of housing and urban development, was thinking of Bushwick or Bedford-Stuyvesant, but Zuccotti thought it might be possible to steer the tour up to the South Bronx. Marrero would have to act quickly, however, to convince Harris’s aides and then secretly prepare an itinerary in advance. A short tour was drawn up, and in late September Alan Weiner, area director for HUD, escorted Mrs. Harris over the proposed route.

On the morning of October 5, 1977, the president asked an astonished Mayor Beame, who had not been let in on the secret, to accompany him up to the South Bronx. No other local officials were invited, or even informed. As the president’s motorcade passed the Bronx County Courthouse, borough President Bob Abrams looked out the window and wondered who was traveling through the Bronx in such style.

The cream-colored limousine, flags flying, raced up the Grand Concourse, three helicopters whirring overhead. Startled pedestrians saw that it was the president of the United States and yelled out, “Give us money!” “We want jobs!” The motorcade of officials and media all watched the passing sights — the mothballed Concourse Plaza Hotel, the ever-impeccable Andrew Freedman Home, the fenced-off Roosevelt Gardens. They went east on Tremont Avenue, a major shopping street that had been hit badly during the previous summer’s blackout. Some stores were still boarded up.

At the end of his show “The Fire Next Door,” Bill Moyers had stood inside a burned-out building and said, “So the vice-president travels to Europe and Japan, the secretary of state to the Middle East and Russia, the UN ambassador to Africa. No one of comparable stature comes here.”1 Well, Jimmy Carter changed all that as his cortege headed south on Washington Avenue. He was seeing firsthand the shattered buildings with only shards left in the dark windows, the broken sinks ripped from the wall and smashed in a hallway, the packs of scrawny strays sniffing at strewn garbage, the quiet of the morning streets where few people had to be up and off to work.

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