According to Bill de Blasio, “If you live on Park Avenue you got everything you need. Nannies and housekeepers.” This will come as news to the tens of thousands of mostly underprivileged people who live on Park north of 96th Street.
Hasn’t this mayoral candidate who laments the plight of the poor heard of the Carver, Clinton, Johnson and Lincoln houses — all large New York City Housing Authority projects with Park Avenue addresses?
Of course he has: He even slept over at 1960 Park Ave., one of the decrepit Lincoln Houses buildings, in a Democratic candidates’ publicity stunt organized by Al Sharpton in July.
So why didn’t de Blasio, he of the “two cities” trope, cite a “tale of two Park Avenues”?
True, Park Avenue’s dual personality is a distinction lost on many New Yorkers. But shouldn’t he sound as if he knows more than a bus-tour guide? Isn’t the omission an insult to the community de Blasio claims to be fighting for?
In fact, his feigned amnesia served a purpose. To parse symbolic “Park Avenue” along a stark, geographic dividing line would subject his whole case to some tough critical thinking — and render it ridiculous.
The boulevard de Blasio invoked to stand for a rarefied, Michael Bloomberg-blessed, upper-crust way of life is a grim, largely impoverished stretch from East 96th Street almost to East 135th Street — fully as long as the avenue’s gilded residential corridor from East 59th to East 96th Street.
It’s not quite the wasteland evoked in Paul Goldberger’s classic 1978 book, “The City Observed,” which said of the Park-96th Street intersection: “There is no other place in which the very rich live in such proximity to the very poor without a hint of the middle-class buffer on which they both depend.” Since then, East Harlem has benefited from modest new investment.
Yet the upper avenue remains a bleak backwater astride the stone railroad viaduct. A stroll in the trestle’s shadow, past endless projects and tenements, brings on a suffocating gloom deepened by the rumble of trains overhead.
It’s a useful exercise because the eyes have a way of blowing away abstractions. De Blasio’s fantasy that the “rich” owe more to the “other New York” than they’re already paying crumbles when you stand at Park and 96th Street and look south and north.
The disparate vistas of luxury residences and blank-faced projects might well lead you to ask: What’s the value of all the government subsidies that Park Avenue residents above 96th Street already receive? How many pay no state or city income tax? (A clue: 53 percent of all city households, meaning those earning less than $30,000 a year, pay none at all, according to Crain’s.)
NCYHA suffers a $100 million annual operating deficit. Of the “rich” who live on the avenue south of 96th Street, what percentage of their incomes is taxed to support the housing, medical and social needs of those living above it? (A clue: the city’s top 1 percent of households pay 43.2 percent of all city income taxes, again as Crain’s reported).
And, most crucially: How in any event could a little more tax revenue from lower Park Avenue do any good for upper Park Avenue? Would it pay for even more ghastly government-built public-housing projects like the ones that blight most every neighborhood they touch?
The harshest aspect of life in the projects is their high crime rate — due not to insufficient largesse by those living south of 96th Street, but to local predators who prey on residents overwhelmingly hard-working and law-abiding. Of course the perps will be more free to victimize without police stop-and-frisk, which de Blasio deplores as “racial profiling.”
No wonder his fable of “two cities” has room for only one Park Avenue, where nobody has to worry about a thing — except for Mayor Bill de Blasio.