10. The Great Fear and the High-Crime Era

We all came to Rochdale to live, not to die.

Rochdale mugging victim, July 1969, quoted in Inside Rochdale

A few months after Rochdale Village opened in December 1963, a new and not particularly proud era in the history of New York City had its defining and emblematic event. On March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens, just a few subway stops from Rochdale, Kitty Genovese, coming home late from work, was stabbed by an assailant in a random, remorseless, brutal sex crime and murder. What gave the case instant and lasting notoriety were the news reports that thirty-eight people had heard her screams for help, heard her death throes, and no one came to her aid. (There have been, in recent years, revisionist accounts that argue that the residents of Kew Gardens were not nearly the massively indifferent bad Samaritans of legend, but whatever the truth of this, it is irrelevant to the contemporary meaning of the Kitty Genovese case.) The crime (with the archetypal black male murderer and rapist and white female victim) was for many a sign of the changing times; a merciless and friendless city, where neighbors flee and lock themselves away at the sign of trouble, a city whose new motto was “better you than me.”1

The high crime era had come to New York City. It had come to the city suddenly, and largely unexpectedly, like, as it were, a thief in the night. As late as 1958 the murder rates in New York City were lower than the national average.2 The following year, in a survey of important issues in New York City politics compiled for Mayor Wagner by a Harris Poll, juvenile delinquency, the highest-ranking crime-related problem, ranked eighth out of fourteen issues.3 (By 1965 public safety was polling as the most important issue for white New Yorkers, across all class and ethnic lines.)4 The high crime era would last for three decades. Between 1955 and 1965 the number of murders in the city increased from 306 to 681, and the rates would double again in the next half decade, reaching 1,201 by 1970, then topping out at 2,245 in 1990. During the decade 1955 to 1965, other forms of crime underwent similar surges, with robberies and car thefts nearly tripling, and assaults and thefts doubling.5

If the lack of civic virtue displayed in the Kitty Genovese case was seen as very troubling, of even greater significance was the apparent inability of the police and other authorities to deal with the rise in crime. It would become central to the era’s political agenda, making and breaking numerous political careers. Many people had solutions; for those on the right, being “soft on crime” was the 1960s successor to “soft on Communism.” (The rejection in 1966 of Mayor John Lindsay’s Civilian Review Board was one of the first indications of this trend.)6 Liberals typically saw the crime wave as American society reaping what it had sown in terms of racial inequality and the creation of new urban ghettos in northern metropolitan areas. They had the satisfaction of knowing that their analysis of the historical roots of the crime problem was probably correct, and the mortification of seeing crime rates continue to escalate despite their best efforts to control them. The crime wave defeated all. Politicians proposed; the crime wave disposed. In 1966 the successful Democratic candidate for Queens district attorney, Thomas Mackell, had advertised in Inside Rochdale under the slogan “Elect Mackell DA, Drive fear from our streets.”7

The debate over crime was inextricably tied to race. For many, crime simply followed demography, with the causality too clear and apparent to have to be elaborated any further; minorities move in; crime goes up; whites move out. Crime was indeed higher in predominantly minority areas (with minorities the predominant victims). But if one side tended to simply blame minorities (and their liberal enablers) for the high rates of crime, the other side in the debate blamed whites for creating the social conditions that led to the increase of crime, isolating minorities in the worst neighborhoods in the city, leaving them prey to a host of social disorders and to the tender mercies of both criminals and a racist police force, and then washing their hands of their profound complicity in the genesis of the situation by reducing crime to a “black problem.” The middle ground in this debate proved remarkably elusive. It had a poisonous effect on race relations, and greatly complicated the cause of integration; whites were increasingly afraid of blacks as neighbors or even fellow citizens, and blacks were increasingly convinced that white fear about crime revealed the true heart of white racism. It was one of the misfortunes of integration in Rochdale Village that it opened just as the era of high crime was getting under way.

South Jamaica was no exception to the general rule that predominantly minority areas of the city had high rates of crime. Worries about run-down structures attracting a criminal element were aired as early as the 1920s. Gang violence in South Jamaica (with the occasional organized-crime shootout or rub out) made headlines in the 1930s. By the end of the decade the New York Amsterdam News was running stories that South Jamaicans were afraid to leave their houses at night, were demanding more police protection, and claiming that their neighborhood was deliberately underserved. In 1944 the Jamaica branch of the NAACP complained of police indifference to the “gangs of young Negro ruffians roaming the streets nightly.” But for a black community such as South Jamaica, calls for police protection cut two ways. They felt that the police at once ignored their neighborhoods, and then when they paid attention, were indiscriminate in their actions, harassing people, especially young men, who had done nothing wrong. By the late 1940s, the Jamaica NAACP was making an issue of local police brutality.8 These problems continued into the 1950s and beyond. Rates of juvenile delinquency more than doubled in South Jamaica between 1953 and 1962. By the latter year it was twice the rate for the borough of Queens as a whole.9

By the time Rochdale was taking applications, in 1961 and 1962, crime in South Jamaica factored into the decision making of many families. Abraham Kazan and other labor leaders were worried from the outset that fear of crime would keep whites from exploring the housing possibilities at the new cooperative.10 According to Harvey Swados, fear of crime entered into the decisions of many families who decided not to move to Rochdale.11 Some people who knew they would be coming home from work late at night decided that there were safer places to live.12 Crime shaped Rochdale from the outset.

Rochdale was planned before crime emerged as the predominant political and social concern, and it opened during crime’s ascendance. Rochdale’s design reflected this relative unconcern. The doors to the buildings were permanently unlocked and did not require keys or cards to enter. It was not until 1968 that Rochdale began to seriously consider installing a locked-door and intercom system for the main entrances.13 Rochdale had many of the design features that contemporary critics pointed to as exacerbating crime rates: long corridors in buildings and lonely passageways between sections.14 And to leave Rochdale by public transportation one had to wait at bus stops, across the street from the cooperative proper, that at night tended to be dark and deserted. One woman who worked as a nurse on an evening shift remembers one of her neighbors watching out for her from their windows as she made her way to the bus stop.15 The parking lots were on the open streets, easily accessible by thieves. In many ways Rochdale was ill-designed to secure itself against the surge in criminal activity.

Crime in Rochdale had its own specific dimensions and shape. For all that people read or watched television reports about crime elsewhere in the city, knowledge about crime is local knowledge, generally passed by word of mouth, or through local newspapers. The crime that most worries you is that taking place outside your door or down the street. Crime was a concern at Rochdale from the time the first families moved in, and was brought up in the first cooperative meetings, in early 1964. In the summer of 1964 delays in installing street lighting by Con Edison raised questions about nighttime safety.16 In April 1965 an article in Inside Rochdale decried “the large number of idle persons who frequent certain areas of our community” and reported that local merchants wanted stricter enforcement of loitering laws.17 In October of 1965, 450 people came to a membership meeting on “Security in and Around Rochdale Village.”18 A month later Rochdale residents sent a petition to Mayor Wagner, telling him, “We believe that there is now an insufficient number of police to control crime in the area.”19 Complaining about the litter of empty wine bottles in the shopping mall, a writer in Inside Rochdale claimed in 1966 that the “shopping center is now an annex of the Bowery,” and Rochdale was on its way to becoming the “world’s first air-conditioned slum.”20 In spring 1966 a meeting of the Rochdale Village Democratic Organization called (unsuccessfully) for the hiring of elevator operators between the hours of 9 PM and 6 AM, along with improved street lighting and increased police patrols.21 That year car thefts, purse snatchings, and physical molestation at knifepoint made many Rochdale residents “scared stiff,” convinced that management was ineffectual and turned a blind eye to the growing problem, and the Long Island Press was writing about Rochdale’s “march of crime.”22 In 1967 the local paper observed that the cooperative “is quite susceptible to various forms of criminal activities, such as vandalism, mugging, car stealing, and a host of other crimes.”23 In a straw poll in Rochdale in the fall of 1968, two-thirds of the more than eight hundred who responded thought the “greatest need in the community was ‘law and order.’”24

By 1969 a contributor to Inside Rochdale could write, “Fear seems to reign in Rochdale; women coming home from friends’ homes at night are terrified at the thought of walking to their elevators unaccompanied; the theft of automobiles from the parking lots is steadily increasing; children wanting to go out after dark are discouraged by their parents. Rochdale Village, the utopian cooperative, is steeped in fear.”25 A somewhat hyperbolic letter writer in 1972 summed up the situation thus:26

In the past 8 years the crime rate has boomed. Have you ever been riding on the elevator and all of a sudden it stops between floors and in climbs a thief? He takes your money and ring and you thank God you’re still alive. Perhaps a thief has come through your door or climbed over your terrace. Women have been raped, men mugged, and children molested. Women are afraid to take out their garbage for fear that someone is wanting to do them harm.

“Crime” is a capacious term, a portmanteau into which all manner of acts, from childhood pranks to serious felonies are regularly stuffed. Certainly the greatest fear, in Rochdale and elsewhere in New York City at the turn of the 1970s, was attached to random assaults, muggings, and physical attacks. In late 1966 a Kitty Genovese–type incident occurred: A boy delivering circulars was accosted and stabbed in the arm in the hall of a building and when, bleeding, he rang bells to ask for assistance, people who didn’t want to be involved slammed their doors in his face.27 By the end of 1967 a teenager pronounced that “it is unsafe…to walk around Rochdale after about 10:30 at night.”28 Fears about rapes in Rochdale were of long standing, and these fears took a more sinister turn when John D. Hill, the so-called “Rochdale rapist,” committed eight rapes in Rochdale between February and May of 1970. (He actually lived outside the cooperative proper, on nearby Farmers Boulevard.)29 This incident became so identified with Rochdale that in 1972 the Board of Directors requested that the Long Island Press stop mentioning the “Rochdale rapist” every time a story appeared on Rochdale Village.30 In 1969 Rochdale had its first murder, when that July, Barry Epstein, a twenty-five-year-old Vietnam veteran, was stabbed on the way home from a reserve meeting.31

Another class of crime that was extremely troubling to Rochdale residents was the high incidence of car theft. In Inside Rochdale in December 1966, under the title “When Will the Madness End?” Helen Katz related an account of how her family’s car had been stolen twice in three months and wrecked.32 (This was a month after the newspaper included a helpful article on how to “Protect Your Car From Thieves.”)33 Although car theft was generally a nocturnal pursuit, I well remember the afternoon when my mother’s sister was reduced to hysterics when her vehicle was swiped while she paid us a visit. (From then on, we did all the visiting.) Of course, not many Rochdale residents drove, as did my aunt, a brand-new top-of-the-line Cadillac. One typical response to living in a high crime area is to make oneself a less attractive target by dowdying down, and many Rochdale families, including my parents, combined prudence and parsimony by holding on to older and less desired cars as long as possible. (Our late-1950s Buick was probably, by the early 1970s, one of the last cars in Rochdale with extravagant tail fins.)

Car theft was facilitated by the location of the parking spaces in huge open-air lots. Of the 3,000 parking spaces in Rochdale, one-third were located across Bedell Street, technically part of the cooperative, but separated from the housing and therefore rather deserted at night. It was in this area, according to a 1971 management memo, “that there have been many incidents of crime. Because of this there has been a reluctance of the part of many car owners to use these lots.”34 Although the lots were patrolled by Rochdale security forces, enterprising thieves had little problem gaining access to the lots, and could select from a wide array of late-model used cars to pilfer. The relatively lightly patrolled lots were also dangerous for other reasons—those leaving their cars at night were often accosted, and it was in a Rochdale parking lot that Barry Epstein was stabbed and murdered. Contributing to the prevalence of car theft was Rochdale’s proximity to Kennedy Airport, then a swarming den of organized crime activity, and Rochdale soon became a favored destination for rings of car thieves.35 Although there were various proposals made to build enclosed parking lots, these were abandoned because of their expense.36 However, the UHF learned from Rochdale, and included interior parking garages in the plans for Co-Op City from the outset.37

Thefts and burglaries were also a serious problem. Sometimes thieves entered apartments by means of the terrace balconies, which required only breaking a plate-glass door. As early as 1968 there were advertisements for means of burglar-proofing terraces, and in 1972 the Rochdale Board of Directors discussed the rather alarming fact that for the past several weeks police had been surveilling Rochdale buildings by helicopter to discourage “fire hose climbers” from dropping down from the rooftops to thirteenth-floor terraces.38

However, probably the bigger concern with burglaries were thefts in the stores in Rochdale’s malls and adjacent commercial strips. High levels of theft led many merchants to shutter their shops, and further exacerbated the late-1960s trend of residents’ shopping in suburban malls rather than in Jamaica and Rochdale. The shuttered stores’ contribution to a general sense of desolation was self-fulfilling. (Few want to shop, let alone open up a new store, in a half-empty mall.) Under the headline “Crime Plagues Local Stores,” Inside Rochdale in January 1970 wrote, “The merchants in Rochdale Village are getting restless.”39 Three stores had been robbed in the past two weeks. One merchant who came to his store to find his windows pockmarked with bullet holes complained that the Rochdale security patrols were “not worth a damn.”40 “Let’s face it,” said the owner of a small clothing store that same year on nearby Merrrick Boulevard, with a sociological fatalism typical of New York City during this era, “once a neighborhood starts to go, there isn’t anything one can do about it. I’m just holding on to this place until I decide to retire. I’m 61 years old now. I’ve got a few years left.”41 Another merchant complained that he had been robbed four times in the past two years, and if he “could find someone to take it off my hands, I’d be out in a minute.” He told Inside Rochdale: “You want to know the truth? I wouldn’t want to shop here either, especially after dark.”42

Although Rochdale’s main mall was designed by Victor Gruen, the dominant figure in postwar mall design, by 1970 the mall had a “run down” look and was the subject of unflattering comparisons to Green Acres, the large suburban mall over the city line and just a few minutes away by car.43 Louis Jordan, the president of the Rochdale Village Merchants Association complained in September 1970 that he had been robbed three times in the past year, and as a result (and this was the biggest fear of merchants), his theft insurance had been canceled, and he predicted that the mall, without stores, “may soon be more like a tomb.”44 By 1972 Jordan was putting a better face on the situation: “Reports of widescale robbery [are] exaggerated. It’s no worse here than anyplace else in the city.” This was seconded by Jules Weinstein, Rochdale’s manager, who argued that “the vacancies in the mall were due solely to economic factors, and not crime.”45 Perhaps. But by 1972, for small merchants in many parts of the city, including Rochdale, economic viability could not be separated from fears of crime, on the part of both merchants and customers.

Vandalism was another class of criminal activity that had a profound impact on life in Rochdale. By the early 1970s the rash of vandalism ranged from the annoying (graffiti in the hallways, or burning the plastic elevator buttons into dripping organic blobs reminiscent of early Salvador Dalí), to the distressing (turning on fire hoses in the stairwells, leaving water to cascade down the steps) to the disgusting (urinating in elevators). By 1971 the number of incidents of vandalism in Rochdale was impressive. For the first three months of the year the Security Department reported the following acts of criminal defacement: eleven acts of arson (four in incinerator rooms, three in carriage rooms, three in laundry rooms, one in an elevator shaft), and twenty-five acts of vandalism (eighteen broken windows, two jammed elevators, two fire hoses turned on, three rooms in the community center ransacked).46 The same report indicated that over the same three months, repairs and replacements due to acts of vandalism cost Rochdale Village $20, 598.95, including nineteen glass panels in lobbies, 1,036 panes of building glass in apartments, and assorted elevator mirrors, ceiling grills, alarm bells, building doors, door checks and locks, and sixty cases of lightbulbs stolen or broken.47 Perhaps even more than physical violence, vandalism has a direct and more general impact on the quality of life. Every puddle of urine stepped into in an elevator, every shattered pane of plate-glass window, was a reminder that things were changing in Rochdale, and not for the better.

There was, and is, no agreement on the reasons for fluctuations in crime rates, but one factor that surely influenced crime in Rochdale in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a surge of drug use. There was a great concern about the prevalence of drug use in Rochdale in the late 1960s and early 1970s, ranging from the recreational use of marijuana to harder stuff.48 By all accounts there was an epidemic of heroin use in South Jamaica in the late 1960s.49 The Rochdale Village Bulletin had articles detailing the cost to the whole community of heroin use and drug addiction.50 According to one report from 1972, 80 percent of criminal activity in Rochdale was the result of narcotics use.51 One letter writer to Inside Rochdale in February 1972 complained of drug users in the stairways and the litter of narcotics bags.52

Relying on victims’ accounts of crimes has its limitations as a way to understand the scope of the crime problem. Crime statistics have the promise of greater objectivity. As early as October 1965, the Rochdale Village Civic Association was endeavoring to separate “fact from fiction” in gathering statistics on car thefts, vandalism, purse snatchings, and muggings.53 Crime statistics bring their own difficulties, with their mutable and unreliable categories, and the myriad possibilities for biased reporting. Still, crime statistics have their utility, and the few extant statistical analyses of crime in Rochdale from this time certainly depict high levels of crime. A report covering the first three months of 1971, issued by the Rochdale security forces, presents a very troubled situation in Rochdale, with 21 burglaries and robberies, 23 incidents of auto theft and break-ins, 7 incidents of criminal mischief, and 4 incidents of narcotics possession.54

An even more dire picture can be found in statistics released by the NYPD. In 1968 Rochdale and its immediate vicinity there were reports of 6 rapes, 109 robberies, 25 assaults, 285 auto thefts, 72 incidents of malicious mischief, and 85 burglaries. This amounted to 480 serious crimes committed in or near Rochdale, and this already alarming high figure nearly doubled a mere four years later to 850. If we assume one crime victim per family, this would work out to about one family in ten in the area of Rochdale in 1972.55

But as alarming as these statistics are, they bolster the frequently heard contention at the time that, in fact, the incidence of crime was not notably higher in Rochdale than elsewhere in the city, a contention favored by those responsible in some way for security in Rochdale. A security guard, defending his work and that of his peers, said in 1968, “Rochdale has a lower crime rate than most other parts of the city.”56 In 1972 the captain of the local precinct maintained that Rochdale had one of the lowest rates of crime in the area.57 Rochdale manager Jules Weinstein said in November 1971 that “our security is being maintained at acceptable levels,” and that “as a matter of fact, the statistics of crime elsewhere in major housing developments and general residential areas in comparison to Rochdale Village make us look like a beautiful rose.” A few months later he repeated his claim: crime was “no worse here than anyplace else in the city. All you have to do is read the newspapers. We have a fairly well-controlled area. No one can guarantee there will be no crime, but we are providing protection in the best manner we can.”58

Even if Rochdale’s crime levels were lower than those of the city as a whole—and a cursory examination of the citywide statistics makes this seem plausible—this knowledge would have been cold comfort to Rochdale’s crime victims.59 Many Rochdale residents were unconvinced by management’s explanations. A mugging victim who had been to court three times in connection with violent crimes committed against her family wrote irately to Inside Rochdale in March 1972, complaining of the management’s “Pollyanna attitude” about crime and attacking their statement to the Long Island Press that Rochdale’s main crime problem consisted of “petty crimes, malicious mischief, and vandalism.” After offering a catalogue of recent rapes, attempted rapes, murders, and other felonies, she called management’s attitude toward crime “a smokescreen.”60 High crime could serve as a catalyst to bring people together to participate in a common struggle, or it could denature the bonds that held a community, making neighbor fear and distrust neighbor, and dissolve and atomize complex social structures into isolated individuals. One could see both forces at work in Rochdale.

One of the peculiarities of Rochdale Village was that, as a private community, it had its own private security force. This was a matter of much consternation to most Rochdale residents, who frequently made invidious comparisons between Rochdale’s finest, a force 60-men strong in 1972, and the NYPD.61 Rochdale’s security force did not have a good reputation. As early as 1965, the captain of the local precinct was questioned sharply on the effectiveness of the Rochdale security team.62 There were reasons for this disparagement. They were unarmed, could not make arrests (though they could hold suspects for the NYPD), and because they were paid less and had less status than regular police officers, the general suspicion was that Rochdale’s security force was composed of persons (all men in the beginning) who were presumably not smart enough, or whose backgrounds were not clean enough, to make it as police officers.

There was continuous pressure by Rochdale residents to expand the scope of the patrols of the NYPD. By 1966 the local precinct was providing three radio and foot patrols around Rochdale’s perimeter as well as into the five culs-de-sac that provided road access to the cooperative’s twenty buildings.63 A law passed that year by the New York State legislature permitted NYPD patrols one hundred feet into the property of Rochdale Village, and motor-scooter patrols of the parking lots and pathways.64 But the main, day-to-day task of protecting Rochdale was performed by the security force.

Much of the criticism of the Rochdale security force was quite scathing. A writer in Inside Rochdale in 1967, representing the “teen perspective,” complained that “the chief concern of most of these officers” was “(1) making sure that no one walks on the grass and (2) systematically harassing the teenagers of Rochdale.”65 The same author, using a commonly used term among local teens, excoriated them as the “Rochdale Gestapo.” In a similar vein, in answers to a September 1968 feature that asked “What would you do to increase security at Rochdale?,” there were complaints of “so-called security guards” who employed “strong-armed Gestapo tactics.”66 In 1970, a merchant who had been robbed dismissed Rochdale’s security force as “not worth a damn.”67

For their part, the security guards complained about lack of support and lack of respect from the cooperators. Needless to say, the Nazi comparisons were not appreciated. One guard said in 1968, “I feel that security could be increased through increased cooperation on the part of Rochdale citizens. Instead they call us the ‘Gestapo’ when we try to perform our duty of protecting them.”68 They claimed they were expected to do the job of the NYPD, but without the same tools or salaries. Moreover they had inadequate equipment; walkie-talkies that didn’t talk, vehicles (commonly known as “Roach coaches”) that constantly broke down as they patrolled the interstitial pathways.69 In 1971 the head of Rochdale’s security department wrote the security guards were “policemen in the true sense of the word with all the dangers and problems inherent with such employment within the inner city without the tools, manpower, and legal powers of governmental police agencies.”70 They were spread thin—generally no more than six men were on patrol at any one time, and to some extent they agreed with the teen gripes that their responsibilities for investigating dog harboring, walking on the grass, and nuisance complaints took them away from more serious crime prevention duties.71 In 1974 the head of the security department was quoted in the Rochdale Village newsletter saying that “we are mobile and flexible, making every effort to give you the best protection possible. However, there are those of you who criticize us unjustly…. Our men face grave danger with no weapons other than pure courage and a night stick.” He added that over the previous ten months the Rochdale Village security department had answered “7,060 telephone complaints, made 42 arrests [with the help of the NYPD] for robbery, criminal trespass, grand larceny, criminal mischief and harassment, stickered 6,204 illegally parked automobiles, responded to 258 roof alarms, aided 88 sick and injured cooperators, and investigated 637 complaints for dogs, sub-tenants, washing machines, noise, and other nuisances.”72 But the steady rise in crime did lead to a steady increase in the size of the Rochdale security force, which hired retired city police officers to serve as supervisory personnel, and made numerous attempts to improve their professionalism and esprit de corps. But the relations between Rochdale’s residents and its security forces would remain contentious.

One thing that came naturally to Rochdale residents was to call for civic activism and enhanced cooperator involvement as a means of dealing with the crime problem. As a man who caught several bicycle thieves said in 1965, “Rochdale is a big place, and everyone who lives here must share the responsibility for keeping it safe.”73 A writer in Inside Rochdale avowed in early 1968, “The most urgent subject in our village is security. The blame for the situation rests on our shoulders.”74 Organizations were created to attend to possible causes of the crime wave. Some called for enhanced recreational activities for teenagers, more basketball courts, and more activities in the community center, to wean them from more destructive pursuits.75 Several organizations were set up to address drug use by Rochdale residents and drug sales on cooperative property. The Committee Against Drug Abuse in Rochdale and Southeastern Queens, as the name suggests, tried with some success to establish links between Rochdale and South Jamaica on drug-related issues.76 The Rochdale Black Society set up “rap sessions” with teenagers living inside and outside Rochdale, to gauge their levels of disaffection, and to suggest constructive ways to channel anger.77

There were also more direct methods of crime prevention. There was an attempt in 1967 to establish “Operation Blinker,” a group of people who would meet buses and trains arriving from the hours of eight to midnight and escort people home. Because of a lack of volunteers, this effort proved short-lived.78 There were several attempts to establish an auxiliary police force consisting of Rochdale volunteers. An attempt in 1967 evidently petered out, and was restarted, more effectively, in 1972.79 But in the end most of the efforts at civic involvement in crime prevention were ineffective.

The Board of Directors in May 1971 noted that in previous years Rochdale Village had “started or tried to start such anti-crime programs as Auxiliary Police, Operation Blinker, and Building Hall Patrols. Except for a few buildings still maintaining hall patrols, all have gone by the wayside.” This, the board opined, was because of “cooperator apathy and a willingness to surrender our grounds, lobbies, and buildings to the lawless elements of society.”80 This assessment was not entirely fair, and whether a fully engaged citizenry would have done much to stanch the growing rates of crime is perhaps doubtful; but desperate times bring forth preachers of jeremiads. In any event, whatever expedient was tried, whatever remedy was suggested, the one inescapable reality of New York City during the Great Crime Wave from the late 1960s through the early 1990s was that however bad things were, they would soon be worse.

The rising rates of crime tended to increase a sense of isolation, to slam shut the psychological portcullis between Castle Rochdale and the rest of South Jamaica. For many in Rochdale the lens through which they glimpsed crime was the distinction between “insiders,” those who lived in Rochdale, and “outsiders,” those who did not, the latter term being, by 1966, as Harvey Swados noted, the preferred local designation for those who lived in the surrounding areas.81 The notion of “outsiders” runs through discussions of crime in Rochdale in the 1960s and 1970s. Three boys caught in 1965 stealing bicycles, as reported in Inside Rochdale, “said they were Rochdale residents, but later admitted that they lived on Linden Blvd.”82 The next year a local police captain, when speaking to a community meeting in Rochdale, denied the reports of a number of rapes in the cooperative, though he did allow that one rape had occurred in Rochdale, but neither the victim nor assailant had been residents of Rochdale. (This was thought to be encouraging news.)83 Harvey Swados interviewed a group of white teenagers, writing that “these kids were being harassed and so in fact were some of their Negro friends by ‘outsider’ adolescents demanding dimes, stealing lunches, taking their bicycles. Incidents have increased to the point where these teenagers are uneasy about going to school during the day and fearful of going beyond the village grounds at night.”84 In 1967 a writer in Inside Rochdale complained that “on some nights gangs of roving ‘outsiders’ gang-up on groups of teenagers—and nary a cop in sight.”85 A storekeeper in the larger Rochdale mall complained in 1970 that the “troublemakers aren’t from Rochdale. They’re generally not from the area. They come in packs.”86 Eddie Abramson thought that the problem of outsider teenagers became worse after the beginnings of the population shift: “All of a sudden there were a lot of black youngsters around, and they might not have been all bad kids, don’t misunderstand me, but you couldn’t tell the difference between a tough black or a decent black. And because a lot of blacks had friends on the outside, they would invite them over here, so before you know it there were loads of black kids here, some belonged here, some didn’t, and it became easy to commit crimes, and this led to people running away.”87

There were some drastic suggestions for separating outsiders from insiders by creating a cordon sanitaire of some sort. One suggestion for dealing with crime in 1971 was that a large fence be built separating Rochdale from the rest of South Jamaica.88 One man in 1966 recommended that all bicycles be given a Rochdale Village identification sticker so “we would be sure which bikes belong and which do not.”89 Understandably, blacks inside the cooperative sometimes resented the unstated implication that all whites were insiders by definition, and blacks were outsiders until proven otherwise, or that, as Eddie Abramson’s comments indicate, they were somehow more responsible than whites for crime committed in Rochdale by nonresidents.

However, while “outsiders” was a racialized category—everyone living outside the cooperative was black—“insiders” included both whites and blacks, and the terms were asymmetrical. Many Rochdale residents tried to resist the racial implications of the insider/outsider distinction. An article in Inside Rochdale in 1969 about crime tried to make the point that because there was a fair amount of black-on-black crime, it was wrong to think that the crime surge was racially motivated. “While most of it [the crime] seemed to be committed by Negroes…many felt that these crimes were not racially motivated, and that any person, black or white, was a potential victim.”90 Many argued that the basic distinction was one of class, rather than race, pitting middle-class Rochdale against those outside from more impoverished backgrounds. Blacks who lived in Rochdale, as well as whites, sometimes complained about crime committed by outsiders, and the inclination to argue that much of the crime problem was imported into the cooperative survived the departure of Rochdale’s whites, and on into the 1980s, when the cooperative had become more or less exclusively black.91

As with many stereotypes, there was truth in the underlying insider/outsider distinction, but its truth was exaggerated and distorted. It is impossible to know how much crime in Rochdale was committed by outsiders; there was probably more in some categories than others. But if much of the crime in Rochdale was committed by black “outsiders” by no means all of it was. Probably the biggest class of criminal activity in Rochdale, vandalism, was probably largely committed by residents. In 1971 the Board of Directors warned Rochdale residents that “it has become increasingly evident in recent months that cooperators themselves, and/or their children, are destroying our property at a rate faster than maintenance can repair.”92 This admonishment was echoed three years later by Rochdale’s manager when he wrote that “it has been established by the police department and our security force that most of the damage [the vandalism] is caused by youngsters who live here. The building inspection sweeps can never be effective unless parents will seriously accept the responsibility for disciplining their children.”93

And crime not only tended to separate Rochdale residents from those outside the cooperative. It also pulled apart the sense of community within Rochdale, and the cooperative ideal that animated it. Crime placed great pressure on Rochdale’s political and civic institutions. A few months later a letter writer stated management wasn’t “doing anything about making it safer here. They don’t care.” He had complained to an assistant manager after a mugging that had put him in a hospital, only to be supposedly told, “What do you want? A cop in every house?” (On his way to work one morning, getting off the elevator, he was grabbed by “a young, husky Negro” who put a knife to his throat and told him, “Give me your money or I will kill you.”)94

Crime would become a major issue in Rochdale’s increasingly factious and fractious politics. In July 1969 one political faction, the Tenants Council, organized a demonstration against cutbacks in the security staff, and demanded guards in every building during night hours, more patrols in the parking lot, a more effective lighting system, and the locking of side doors at night.95 The Tenants Council won a majority on the Board of Directors that fall, and when they came up for reelection the next year, the main issue was crime. The Tenants Council spokeswoman, Barbara Rabinowitz, allowed that the “security issue was a legitimate one,” but argued that her figures showed that crime had declined in Rochdale over the past year, and that Rochdale guards might soon have the power to make arrests and carry weapons. (This didn’t happen.) Rabinowitz argued that “things are improving around here. We are no longer an open hunting ground.”96 Perhaps, but the Tenants Council lost their majority on the Board of Directors that fall. Their replacement, the Concerned Cooperators, who had complained bitterly about their predecessors’ handling of the crime situation, had their chance, but were no more effective in dealing with the rising rates of crime.97

Given the seriousness of the crime problem in Rochdale and its racial overtones, what is perhaps most striking is the extent to which it did not become a divisive racial issue. If there were complaints against current management (and claims by those wishing to replace them that they could do a better job in terms of crime prevention), they were not defined in racial terms. Most of the discourse on crime remained within a recognizable liberal context. Those who called for better security also called for better understanding, and invoked the power of cooperation to address the problem.

The Rochdale Black Society was as vigorous as any organization in calling for community involvement with the crime problem, and made this clear in almost every issue of their newsletter, along with their complaints about crime, the apathy of most Rochdalers, and suggestions that black people in Rochdale could play a special role in linking Rochdale to the rest of South Jamaica.98 The African American commander of the Rochdale Auxiliary Police wrote in early 1973 that in its first year of operations they had helped cut crime in Rochdale by 60 percent, thereby “making Rochdale Village one of the safest communities in New York City.” The commander urged his fellow society members to join in order to “help develop a means of communication between our Police Department and the Black Citizens in this Precinct.” But the main reason to get involved in the auxiliary force was that “we, as Black People Must Be Involved in Every Aspect of Community Life…. When the opportunity of self-policing is offered, don’t you think it’s Power to the People? [emphasis in original]”99 In Rochdale, the primary response to crime remained broadly congruent for blacks and whites. It was a cooperative problem, and required a cooperative solution.

But if crime was a crisis that spurred calls for greater community involvement and cooperation, crime cut the other way as well, and engendered a sense that the civic institutions, in Rochdale and without, couldn’t or wouldn’t deal adequately with the problems, and for many there was a turning inward, as people looked to their own resources and abilities. The Rochdale security forces regularly complained that when they held people for various criminal activities, the victims were afraid to press charges, out of fear of retaliation.100

The fear engendered by crime sparked a rise in illegal dog ownership in Rochdale. Pets were banned by Rochdale Village management, though one could sometimes sneak in a cat or a parakeet. A dog was another matter; management thought them noisy and messy, and the sort of dog one obtained to intimidate potential muggers was likely to scare dog-phobic neighbors as well. In the UHF’s opinion, giving up the right to own a dog was one of those limitations of personal choice necessary to build a cooperative community—like dishwashers and laundry equipment in apartments, likewise proscribed—a sacrifice for the common good.

Still a number of cooperators obtained large dogs for their protection. A typical account is provided by a cooperator who was mugged at knifepoint on entering an elevator: “[I] now have a dog and my wife doesn’t go down unless my dog goes with her.”101 A letter to the Rochdale Village Board of Directors in the summer of 1972 spoke of hundreds of dog owners in Rochdale and said the “tremendous exodus” from Rochdale might have been prevented if dog ownership had been allowed.102 Leaflets were distributed with the heading, “Fight Crime! Not Dogs!”103 Dog fanciers pointed out that, somewhat hypocritically, the Co-op Supermarket did a thriving business selling dog food.104 An anonymous dog lover wrote in early 1972, summarizing the crime problem in Rochdale: “Everyone in Rochdale Village has heard or read ‘dogs must go.’ Yet no realistic reason for this ‘law’ has ever been given.” After going through a litany of crimes, including the litter of narcotics bags in the stairways, he argued, that “if we were allowed to have dogs not only would we be provided protected but thefts and rapes would be dramatically reduced. If the urine in the elevator and halls were tested, I am sure that it would be found to be a human source, so let’s not blame ‘man’s best friend.’…Don’t let the lack of protection in Rochdale Village cost your life. Remember to obtain a dog.”105

Rochdale’s management was unmoved, and remained adamant in their opposition to dogs, as did many cooperators. It argued in 1971 that “roving packs of dogs in Rochdale…have been attracted by the sight and spoor odor of dogs that have been walking on paths and grass areas.”106 (Perhaps, but I don’t remember packs of roving dogs—and “outsider” dogs at that—menacing Rochdale in 1971.) And of course if one failed to clean up after one’s pet there was the usual problem, as someone wrote in 1972. “Suddenly there are dogs all over the place. One does not walk on our paths, in playgrounds, or parking lots looking skyward. We must keep our eyes peeled to the ground because we don’t know who has been walked before us.”107 (There was no “pooper scooper” law in New York City until 1978, and modern dog walking etiquette was in its infancy.) The Security Guard force complained that much of their time was taken up with investigating reports of dog harboring, and this complaint had merit.108 A report from October 1974 reported 442 complaints about dog harboring, with eighty-six dogs removed, and thirty apartments vacated because of dog ownership through legal actions.109 The prevalence of dogs, and the extent to which dog owners were willing to retain their pets, even at the expense of losing their apartment, was a sign of how serious the crime problem was in Rochdale.

In the end the crime in Rochdale made it seem less attractive, its problems less tractable, and its future far less certain. Crime moved, in a few short years, from being one of those things that could be rationalized as the price of living in the big city (a certain residuum of insecurity amid all the city’s pleasures and advantages), to a metaphorical plague, a matter of personal and social life and death, a clear and present threat to the possibility of an ordered and rational existence. A fairly typical progress on this pilgrimage of fear was charted by Eddie Abramson, the editor of Inside Rochdale and aspiring politician. In 1966, writing about an incident in Rochdale, he waxed philosophical, and argued that a certain level of unease about personal safety was the price to pay for living in Rochdale. “I wish we all had the right answers. The world at large seems to be unsafe…[We must] ensure greater security within Rochdale, however, we must not let our alarms reach panic…. It may be a very difficult thing to follow, but we should weigh the advantage of living in Rochdale against accidental hazard.”110

But by 1969 the problems of “accidental hazard” were looming larger, and Abramson was panicking. “If the management won’t provide the necessary protection and police won’t, then perhaps the residents of Rochdale Village should do it themselves. ‘Vigilante’ may be a dirty word to the liberals of the world, but if that’s the only way to make Rochdale safe, then that’s the way it should be done. The Rochdale management had better wake up to what’s happening, before the moving vans clog up the streets.”111 Not surprisingly given this rhetoric, that fall Abramson headed the Rochdalers for Procaccino committee, supporting the bid of Mario Procaccino, the very conservative Bronx Democrat in that year’s mayoral contest, who ran largely on a get-tough-on-crime platform. Abramson argued that “Procaccino stands for the kind of law and order that strengthens the bonds of a united people.”112

But vigilantism never became common in Rochdale. Rochdale Village was not Canarsie; people formed committees, not mobs. (The one partial exception to this, the Jewish Defense League, will be discussed in chapter 11.) And Rochdale’s politics remained proudly liberal; they strongly supported McGovern in 1972, the same year that the Board of Directors voted nearly unanimously to bar U.S. military recruiters from setting up tables in Rochdale’s malls.113

But if most Rochdale residents continued to support liberal causes, it was a sober, chastened liberalism. For some, this involved a political conversion, the famous phenomenon of erstwhile liberals “mugged by reality” and turning conservative, which many have seen as indicative of the shift in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. There was some of this, to be sure, but the more dramatic conversions occluded a wider, more subtle shift in attitudes, a new type of liberalism, wary and cautious. Consider my mother, the ex-Communist, who arranged playdates for us with black children from our earliest years, and who remained in the same decidedly left-of-center ideological ambit her entire political life, reliably anticapitalist and anti-imperialist. But she was very worried about crime, and first praised and then eventually voted for politicians such as Ed Koch and Rudolph Giuliani, for their tough stance on crime. And while she never called attention to this, after living in two Mitchell-Lama cooperatives, in the Bronx and in Queens, she wanted to move to a predominantly white neighborhood, one in which the level of crime was low, and was in little danger of undergoing a change in its racial composition. She didn’t become conservative, but her left-liberalism had changed, and she became far more aware of the costs, as well as the benefits, of social transformation.

The lesson of crime in Rochdale would reverberate elsewhere, and for many it seemed a commentary on the prospects of integrated living in New York City in general. Rochdale had been a model for the future, and those contemplating new projects elsewhere in the city would occasionally glance at Rochdale to see how the future was working. In the early 1970s no housing scheme was more at the center of the city’s attention than the effort to build apartments for low-income people in Forest Hills. In 1972, Nathan Glazer, writing about Forest Hills in the New York Times Magazine, argued that crime was the major reason for the white exodus from the city. “If one had to give the predominant cause of the movement away from the older areas of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan, one would have to say it was the search for safety…. Many forces come together to make ever stronger in the minds of the whites of Forest Hills the equation, black equals crime.” Glazer opposed scatter site housing in Forest Hills but suggested that there were viable alternatives:114

The economic improvement we have seen in the black community in the 1960s, if it could be maintained through the seventies, would raise a larger proportion of blacks out of poverty and increase the black middle class, thus permitting more of the relatively trouble free integration of black and white middle classes that is so common in New York City—in middle income co-ops (for example, Rochdale Village) and in other middle-income neighborhoods. In the long run one hopes that the high level of crime and violence in New York and other cities will be reduced, in part through higher income and better living conditions.

That was one view, that so long as crime could be kept low, middle income cooperatives like Rochdale would pave the way for the “relatively trouble free integration of black and white middle classes” in New York City. But of course there were other lessons to be learned from Rochdale. Mario Cuomo, whose efforts to negotiate a settlement to the Forest Hills controversy catapulted him to political stardom, noted in his book Forest Hills Diary, “I spoke with Congressman Joe Addabbo on the phone. He said the Rochdale Project in his area of Queens was a mess with a serious crime problem, so serious that they have their own auxiliary police. He says the project at Forest Hills must be scaled down.”115 Those in the 1970s who pondered the chances for genuine racial integration in New York City, from Nathan Glazer and Mario Cuomo, to Eddie Abramson and my mother, had discovered, in the growing problem with crime, Rochdale Village’s soft underbelly.

A short postscript. In telling the above story, I have felt something of a conflict between my roles as a historian of Rochdale and as a memoirist, one who lived there during almost all the events described above. As a historian, I stand by the above account. Crime was a frightening specter in Rochdale, and one that grew worse over time, and I have constructed my narrative by amassing the appropriate quotations, trying to tell that story as effectively as I can.

But I think that this was only part of the story. Certainly this was only part of my story. I really do not remember my life in Rochdale as one dominated by crime or the fear of it. And in fact, though Inside Rochdale certainly had its share of articles about crime, it was hardly its main feature, in large part because I don’t think that most people, most of the time, let crime prevent them from going about their business. I know I didn’t. Perhaps this was in part due to the foolishness and presumed invulnerability of youth, and no doubt teenagers are the most likely age cohort to ignore prudential advice about what to do and where and when to do it. I don’t think that we were natural risk takers. (I certainly wasn’t.) I had internalized a geography of safe and less-safe places, and generally took appropriate precautions to avoid being caught in dangerous situations. And for the most part, I succeeded. I remember a certain residual level of fear, and the natural wariness that all New Yorkers develop about potential menaces. There was a mugging or two along the way, probably the most distressing during my second year in Rochdale, on Halloween, when a friend and I were not so gently relieved of our accumulated goodies. But in the nine years I lived in Rochdale, I did not live my life in fear, or retreat to a cocoon. There was a life to be lived outside of the fear of crime. A classmate of mine remembers her Rochdale years as a time of personal growth and exploration, in Rochdale and South Jamaica, with both white and black friends. “When we kids got older and had a hand in it, we just naturally of our own inclination and based on our own experiences there as kids broke down a lot of the doors and walls in the neighborhood as well as the world.”116 That is how I would like to remember my years in Rochdale as well.

Teenagers are probably not representative of attitudes to crime as a whole. But neither are senior citizens, of whom there were many in Rochdale, and who on the average were more frightened about crime than the teenagers, and were more likely to write letters to local newspapers than any other age group. Attitudes to crime vary greatly with individual circumstances. Crime victims (and their relatives and close friends) are likely to respond to crime in a very direct and visceral way. For those left relatively untouched, the problem is more abstract. In the end, crime comes down to a matter of probabilities. And generally, the odds are pretty good. On any given day, even in high crime areas, in any given week, month, or year, most people are not going to be crime victims. For most people crime was not an immediate problem. You were aware of it, you acted appropriately, you went about your business, and you took your chances.

In this, crime’s relative abstractness, it was unlike another serious problem in Rochdale, its increasingly troubled schools. Schools were, by contrast, a five-day-a-week reality. School-age children and their parents were regularly reminded of inferior or inadequate schools; students felt trapped, and parents felt they were failing their children in one of the most important ways imaginable. When it came to seeking the best possible education for their child, no one wanted to compromise. And if crime had a racial component in Rochdale, it was easy (or relatively easy) to depict it in nonracial terms, by emphasizing a shared victimhood across racial lines, and a commitment to an interracial effort to fight it. For various reasons, the educational problems of the late 1960s and early 1970s were far more stark in their racial polarization. As serious a problem as crime was in Rochdale in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the crisis in Rochdale’s schools proved far more explosive.