High life
Crumbling Bagel
Taki
Alas, I wish I could say the same thing for the quality of life in New York City. On my way into the city on a Friday afternoon I ran into the kind of traffic jam that could only be compared to the one in front of the American Embassy in Saigon on that fateful April day 13 years ago. One of the bridges leading into the city had been declared unsafe, thus rendering all the good things BA had done in order to get me to a party on time useless, undone in fact by Mr Ed Koch, the mayor of this great metropolis and a man who has done for this city what Bomber Command did for Dresden.
Now I am well aware that Koch is not to blame for the crumbling bridge per se, but he is responsible for courting and becom- ing a hostage of the special interests which squeeze the place dry and make daily existence in the Big Bagel as awful as that in the Big Olive.
Koch is a funny man, always ready with a quip and eager for a photo-opportunity, as these things are called over here, but he will not go down as a hero. He is very chummy with real estate developers of luxury towers, has a high tolerance for crooks (many of his political appointees have been indicted and jailed) and is known for doing to the middle classes what Denis Healey threatened to do to the rich long ago.
The mayor and his buddy Mario Cuomo, the governor with a Hamlet streak (although definitely without the Laurence Olivier accent), are typical Noo Yawk con men. They give figures that show they've spent billions of dollars for the subways and homeless, for more police and sanita- tion workers, but although their figures are real the results say the contrary. There are more homeless than anywhere in America, the crime rate continues to climb and the services — like the bridges and highways — are crumbling.
Needless to say, the very, very rich don't seem to mind. They get in and out of the city in their choppers, leaving the poorer rich like me to battle it out with the proles trying to get to work or to their houses in Queens and Brooklyn. It almost makes one greedy enough to go to work in Wall Street. In fact, things have become so bad that even the intellectuals are leaving in droves. I know this because I have just read an article by Irving Kristol explaining why he left the Bagel, and it all comes down to money, or the lack of it, to attract good people to the universities of the city.
Well, I can live without the intellectuals — especially as so many of that species in America are pompous and left-wing — but I cannot see myself living with those who will one day be the only ones left able to afford to live here: the mega-rich, their minders, and the muggers.
But never mind. All I know is that the daughter of Mario Cuomo — now married to a multi-millionaire shoe manufacturer — fought a long battle not to give up her rent-control (a New York housing regula- tion enacted during the second world war that froze rents at Forties prices) flat in a public housing project despite the fact that she did not have the right to be there. It was par for the course. After all, Bill Vanden Hueval, a Kennedy lackey and a Carter ambassador to the United Nations, and his ex-wife, an heiress to the MCA fortune, are rumoured to keep two rent- control flats in addition to their Park Avenue co-ops. If it's good enough for them, it surely is good enough for Cuomo's daughter.
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