Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Our City
The 1960s were the highwater mark for American suburbs, as white people abandoned the cities in favor of new housing development creating the suburbs . Ring roads allowed fathers to commute by car to work. Wives bought food and clothing at spacious shopping malls strategically distant from distressed urban communities.
The suburbs were the New Eden for the Adams and Eves of America and their white spawn. Segregation now and forever.
I attended a 100% white Catholic school, wore a uniform, and was instructed by the Sisters of St. Joseph on our purpose on Earth according the the Baltimore Catechism.
"To love, obey, and serve God." I parroted every word to perfection, because the nuns regarded atheists such as myself as Servants of Satan. The newspapers and TV portrayed the cities as hellholes of sin rebelling against God's order. I didn't believe a single word. After my best friend drowned in Sebago Lake I became godless. Since 1960 till now. Never a glance backward to the Old Religion.
And I hated the suburbs. Mowing the lawns, the racism, Towns with no life after dark. Clone houses, whose bedrooms shone with the TVs' blue glow. Every other window black as the night.
By 1965 youth were rising in rebellion. White kids knew the words to James Brown's I'M BLACK AND I'M PROUD. Not all, but enough to make a little difference. We protested against the racism, the Viet-Nam War, the police, the Pentagon, the Draft, and marijuana laws. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and RFK were assassinated in 1968 and Richard Nixon's election to the White House showed the truth. Whites were in control on this nation and the world.
America hated disbelievers in the Great White Way. Hippies, fags, black revolutionaries, Puerto Rican rebels, draft dodgers, poets, intellectuals, pacifists et al threatening Pax Americana.
We abandoned our hometowns to repopulate the cities with no ambition to change a thing. We cut almost all contact with the Silent Majority hiding in the suburbs. In 1976 I moved from a split-level ranchhouse on the South Shore of Boston to an SRO hotel on West 11th Street in Manhattan. A dump, but as my Irish Nana said, "Better a bad apartment with a good address than a penthouse in a slum."
After a few months I with my hillbilly girlfriend to the burned-out East Village with all the punks, junkies, poets, strippers, Ukrainains, Puerto Ricans, blacks, et al living as the good, the bad, and the in-between. We knew our place in the scheme of things and our place away ftom that pkace was New York City and Chaos was my God.
Decay was the city's next stage of evolution.
Oblivion was easier to achieve than enlightenment and who cared, if the best minds of our generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the black streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.”
We were less than all that and nothingness gave our souls succor. Or so spoke Allen Ginsburg
Then inthec1980s it all vanished like the exquisite wickedness of the Witch of the East after a little water. We had made the city not safe, but safe enough and more importantly more prosperous for the banks and the rich were coining wealth on the stock market fueled by the cocaine moeny-laundering of the CIA.
Crime was a black thing. The cops were white. Slowly white investors recognized the rising value of the cities. But only if us were replaced by them. Luxury Condos for business school and marketing grads. Hedge fund racketeers earned six-figure salaries to pay off their massive education loans.
This is the new vision of New York for the M'zoongoo.
They wanted a city without a brother or sister, punk or poet left in sight, but we weren't going anywhere. New York is our city, as it had been in the 1970s and this month Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor replacing Trump whote Eric Adams. We eleceted a socialist. Not a Democrat. A socialist.
As for the corporate ethic cleansing to make New York City theirs. I say, "4Q." This will be our city again.
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