Author: Robert Mayo (page 1 of 1)

Our visit to Capitol Hall was wonderful. Meeting the residents and speaking with the employees of the Goddard Riverside Community Center did a lot to make the problem of homelessness more real for me. Though I’ve met quite a few homeless people in the past through my volunteer work, I never thought about the practical side of housing New York City’s homeless residents. This visit brought to light not only a possible solution to the problem, but emphasized the necessity for a change in current city policy.

The people I saw walking through Capitol Hall were just that: people. One of the speakers even shared my name. It’s hard to empathize with suffering if all you do is read about it on the news. It’s even harder when you politicize it and forget that there are actual humans behind the statistics and press releases. This visit and the people we met, however, made it easier for me to care.

One of the things that stood out to me was the social service aspect of Capitol Hall. I think that’s a great idea! It seems to me that Capitol Hall understands that dealing with homelessness has to happen, at least to some degree, on an individual level. Instead of expecting people to “pull themselves up”, as Mario said, the good people at Goddard realize that some folks just can’t manage the climb on their own. By providing them services like medical care, financial support, and free meals (to name a few), Capitol Hall makes the pulling up much easier.

Robert Mayo

Our discussion in class this Wednesday about the efficacy of “Broken Widows” policing definitely got me thinking about the “slippery slope” logical device. Arguments that utilize this device claim that relatively small first steps in the wrong direction can lead to larger and larger subsequent steps in the wrong direction, with disastrous results. The idea that if small, mostly harmless crimes like turnstile hopping and public intoxication go unpunished criminals will be encouraged to commit larger crimes seems to be the basis on which Broken Windows policing is justified.

I only bring this up because logically, Broken Windows is sound. What Bob Gangi sees as a problem is the way the theory is enforced. I don’t have a problem with police cleaning up the streets; but if the statistics Bob supplied are true, and this method has resulted in the establishment of “quotas” which are biased towards minority neighborhoods, then somewhere along the line the police lost the plot.

I think the article we read had a great closer: “…the police ought to protect communities as well as individuals”. The problem, I think, is that cops are people, and incapable of separating their personal biases from their enforcement of the law. The historical influences of racism and discrimination are still at play in society’s subconscious. This extends, unfortunately, even to the cops, who have the power to define which communities are more important to protect. I’m glad there are people like Bob taking steps to bring this issue to light.

Robert Mayo

It seems like this question is a pretty simple one: do the ends justify the means? The ends in this case being the convenience of millions of commuting New Yorkers, and the means being the destruction of the hundreds of families’ homes the highway would have to go through. But maybe it’s more complicated than that. As Robert Caro points out, East Tremont wasn’t just a neighborhood; it was an urbanizing zone for immigrants of all colors and creeds. When it was destroyed, the Bronx didn’t just lose out on its benefits, the entire city did.

Additionally, the poverty left in the Cross-Bronx’s wake rippled throughout the entire metropolitan area. To this day the borough of the Bronx remains significantly low-income, perhaps in part because of the destruction of the middle-class stronghold of East Tremont. The abandoned buildings and vacant lots left once the residents had been relocated became locusts for crime and vandalism. The taxes the residents were paying were lost, further contributing to the decline of the borough at large. In my opinion, the building of the Cross Bronx should have been handled more carefully. It should only have been built had these consequences been taken into consideration, which it seems likely they weren’t. Robert Moses ought to have accounted for the highway’s immediate effects on the citizens and city it was supposed to convenience. Infrastructure is important, but not important enough to merit uprooting families and destroying neighborhoods as important as East Tremont

Robert Mayo

Robert Moses’ ineffable power stemmed from one source: dishonesty. In The Power Broker‘s opening scene, Moses describes to the captain of his Yale swimming team how he plans to manipulate Og Reid, the team’s financial backbone, into putting his money into Moses’ newly conceived “Minority Sports Association” by lying to him that he would be, as usual, giving it directly to the swimming team. This association, Moses believes, is the solution to the team’s financial woes; he’s afraid Og Reid will see it differently. The captain, uncomfortable with dishonesty, prevents Moses from going forward with his plan. Moses, in a fit of self-righteous fury, resigns immediately. This anger stems from a second falsehood present in the scene, unspoken by either character. The falsehood that Robert Moses is infallible. This was the lie that would make the boy who conceived of the Minority Sports Association into the man who’d level New York and raise it back up in his own image.

When, early in his career, idealism failed him, Robert Moses turned instead to this belief in himself. He lied plain-faced to the press and the public that he was above the dishonest tactics of politicians when it was textbook political maneuvering which burgeoned him to the top of the public authority’s pecking order. But this was justified, because Robert Moses knew he saw the way. He maneuvered public funds into politicians’s pockets, silenced rivals with blackmail, lived and ruled with the wealth and impunity of a Roman emperor. But all of this was justified, because Robert Moses knew he saw the way.

Some might say it was money that granted Moses his power. And it’s true that it was money which lubricated his titanic political machine, bought materials and laborers enough to raise his innumerable public works, and allowed him to circumnavigate the laws of the land from his headquarters at Triborough. But this money was not Robert Moses’s. It was the taxpayers’. Taxpayers who entrusted it to Robert Moses because they believed in the lie he told them: that he was a man above corruption, negligence, and deceit. Perhaps this lie was so convincingly told because Moses believed it himself. Regardless, it was of this lie that the power and empire of Robert Moses were born.

Robert Mayo