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Of course there are slums and there are slums, as Spiro Agnew did not know. Every impoverished area of New York is a few notches better off than Charlotte Street, but that fact gives no consolation to those who live in sagging wooden tenements or in squat red apartment houses with laundry strung like paper necklaces from window to window. In the summers what passes for life in these areas moves out to the fire escapes or up to the roofs among the antenna forests, or out to the doorways where teen-agers and their elders mill, hang out and wait. They have not the Jordache look. A good pickup game is as exciting as an N.B.A. playoff in these places. Otherwise there are few signs of vitality. Street lamps arch like deacons over the relentless streets. Open hydrants shoot water at passing cars the way fire boats sprayed the tall ships in the Bicentennial festival of 1976.
There are millions of New Yorkers who live like that. There are millions, more who live somewhat better, but hardly well, who are not to be officially classified as poor, but whose lives limp on a few miles, and spiritual lightyears, away from the perpetual midtown Easter Parade. Donald Petty, 48, of Astoria, Queens, is trying to bring up four kids in a small row house. "I hear a lot of talk about how great New York's doing, about all the new money coming into the city," he says. "I don't see any of it out here. I've been complaining about my street for five years. If you try to drive more than ten miles an hour, you'll leave your whole front end in a hole."
A tale of two cities, then: the best of times and the worst. Says Arthur Taylor, former president of CBS and now head of a business organization called the New York Partnership: "What we have in the city right now is an island on which enormous wealth is being created, surrounded by a sea of economic deprivation." What New York has, in short, is a problem. The problem was not created in the past four years, but it has been made more apparent than ever within that time by the fact that on the whole, the city is up. On the whole. Yet there is also the fact that 16% of New Yorkers live below the poverty line. To put no fine point on it all, the question that haunts New York is: Can the city survive in the long run only by killing off its poor?
The man who must deal with that question, along with all the other questions that feed into it, is Edward Irving Koch, 55, mayor since 1978 and, as Sydney Greenstreet said of Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, a real character. If New York is a taxi, Ed Koch is its driver—quick-tempered, belligerent, opinionated, chatty, protective, frank and possibly nuts. He usually speeds, and sometimes he drives on the sidewalk. His enemies are "crackpots." To everyone within earshot he asks, "How'm I doing?" Two out of three of those surveyed have answered: good.
Whether or not they are right will be more fairly judged in a year or so, perhaps after Koch balances the city budget, as he has loudly and frequently promised. At present he is little more than halfway through his term. While there is no question that he is the most colorful mayor the city has seen since Fiorello La Guardia (1934-45), the hard issues he faces will not be resolved by style: