crime and punishment

I live in Gotham, but I haven't been robbed yet. (knock on wood) Maybe I have Giuliani to thank? But then, in this town, you would never contemplate leaving your milk and bagels outside the door. That seems so Mayberry. Even the newspaper arrives in the lobby, behind two locked doors. I have not yet figured out how the paper guy gets inside because I have never been awake and in the lobby that early. We have a super, who deals with the packages that arrive by UPS, FedEx and USPS, but no 24-hour or even part-time doorman.

I have seen a car window broken in Cobble Hill, though only once. And late one night not long after I moved here, entering the F line station at Bryant Park, I saw a man being arrested. Or detained. He was a young man, black, normal-seeming, not gangsterishly dressed. He ran down the stairs, passing me. I thought he was just in a hurry to catch a train. Then he glanced back, a look of abject terror on his face. One policeman ran past me, then another. The first one was trying to yell Stop! but he was so out of breath it was just a gasp. By the time I got down the stairs, to the long open corridor on the way to the token booth and the turnstiles, the two policemen had the man facing the wall with his hands up. They kept saying something, the same thing, and sort of pushing him up against the wall, but I couldn't understand what it was they were saying, which scared me for some reason. I kind of wanted to linger and see what would happen, but I didn't. It was late, and if you miss one train, there might not be another for half an hour, so I kept going. There are a million stories in the Naked City, and I never got to see how this particular one ended.

Crime has declined drastically in New York since about 1990. That's what the numbers say, and you can see it in other ways, too. The liquor store we go to sometimes at Court & Baltic with the plastic bulletproof glass -- you can't actually touch the bottle you want, you have to just point at it, and you pass your money through a little slot -- seems like a survivor from another era. I shop there sometimes simply for its oddity.

And yet -- last weekend, we walked some friends visiting from out of town, who had spent the night, to the apartment of some other friends. We live on the edge of genteel Cobble Hill; they live on the edge of genteel Park Slope. What we walked through inbetween, due east on Baltic, through several small housing projects, was a scary no-man's land of broken glass and desolation. Four adults, one fox terrier, early on a Sunday morning. No one challenged us; there was no there, practically. But it was the most frightened I have been since moving to New York.