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There is, of course, another tune to New York. It is played on a cornet isolated from one of the George Gershwin songs in Manhattan and then carried above 96th Street and out to pockets of The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, where, alone, it sounds less like a horn than a siren. The city's slums have also changed dramatically in the past four years, but not for the better. "Look at this," says Mrs. Wilma Burroughs, who lives in the area of now infamous Charlotte Street in the South Bronx. "It's bee four years. Four years of promises. Four years of nothing. I've got three children You think this is any place to bring them up? We're trapped up here. The businessmen and the politicians are always putting up new buildings downtown and talking about how good things in New York are getting. They haven't been up here. It's as if those people at city hall are afraid they'll fall off the edge of the world if they come up above 110th."
In fact, a great many politicians, including Ronald Reagan, are traveling up to Charlotte Street these days, claiming that Jimmy Carter reneged on his vow in 1977 to rebuild the South Bronx. None of the new visitors to the area need fear what the President might have feared three years ago—that a building would fall on his head—because almost all the buildings have fallen in the interim, and are now nicely disguised as two lawns of gray-yellow dust on either side of Charlotte Street. The dust is thicker than the ash from Mount St. Helens. It fills the air. It smells of nothing organic but manure, yet even that smell is not precise; it is tinged with an odor at once dead and sweet. Only fragments in the rubble-wire nettings, a square of bathroom tile —suggest that life ever existed in that place. Beyond the dust lawns, sudden green weeds have begun a crazy garden, as if the wilderness had decided to reclaim the neighborhood.
What buildings do remain stand agape and hollow. There is no broken glass in the windows, because there is no glass in the windows at all. The garbage in the doorways is not a pile but a growth. On a street north of Charlotte a green Chevy lies on its back like a cleaned fish. Such things are seen not only in the South Bronx but also in Harlem and the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, formerly a Jewish ghetto, now black. These areas too are worse off than they were four years ago. From a tenement roof in Long Island City, stately Sutton Place is in plain view across the East River. On the wall of a burned-out building in Harlem one sign of commerce remains: ADVERTISE IN THIS SPACE.