(FYI - this is quite long, more like a short story than one of my typical essays)
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For better or worse, I don't have any pictures of me during my internship. Instead, how about this, taken 3 years later. I'm in the middle, in the blue shirt, with hair and a 29" waist! Two co-workers of mine at the time, Vinny and Maria, took me out to lunch to celebrate my birthday, at the TGI Friday's on Broadway, in Lower Manhattan.
(No, I've never been a foodie!)
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In the summer of 1990, I was an idealistic graduate student studying city and regional planning at the University of Texas at Arlington. Part of the program's graduation requirements involved me completing some pertinent internship at a municipality.
One year earlier, I'd acquired an undergraduate degree in sociology, which I'd cobbled together after spending my first two years majoring in architecture. Unfortunately, I had underestimated architecture's daunting math and drawing requirements. Nevertheless, I managed to salvage the credits I'd already earned by combining the architecture with sociology - with no more math, and writing instead of drawing.
I planned to apply all of that towards an urban planning masters degree. And then pursue a planning career in New York City government.
As an amateur adult, I was naively infatuated with New York City. I had been born in Brooklyn and only lived the first three months of my life there, but during high school here in Texas, for whatever reason, I developed an extraordinary pride in being a native Brooklynite. Ironically, back then, most people born in that borough took pride in being able to leave it and move someplace - anyplace! - else.
Those were not stellar times for the Big Apple in general, or Brooklyn in particular. Suburbanization, White flight, the rise of America's sun belt, and deindustralization had gutted much of the city's tax-paying middle class. Violent crime was at all-time highs, and the city's infrastructure was literally crumbling from age and neglect.
Still, I found Gotham enticing. The juxtaposition of contrasts one could find on virtually any block made it seem vibrant, even as so much social, economic, and political decay was wreaking havoc on the place. I took vacations there every year, staying with my aunt in Brooklyn to save on lodging expenses. Whenever I could base a college paper on something about New York City, I did. I read books (this was pre-Internet, kids) about New York's history not for class credits, but out of my own curiosity. I seemed to take personally the tragic atrophy consuming that great metropolis, and I believed I could help change things for the better.
As you will see, my first and only internship brought a swift end to that presumption. My altruism on the subject of New York City collided with reality. I'm not a glass-half-full person by nature, and my friends in high school used to tease me about my lack of optimism. Edith Chen, who is now a college professor in California, used to cheerfully say "'Tim' is part of 'optimism', so you should be optimistic"!
Maybe I suddenly became an optimist, at least for a short time around my college years... but it didn't last.
Not that interning for the city was a complete failure. Quite the contrary - it proved deeply illuminating. Those three months were packed with experiences I still remember vividly. Actually, they began before that summer ever did - in the spring of 1990, when I was surprised to learn they wanted me to interview in New York for one of the few available internships. At the time, Gotham was still grappling with its epic budget problems, and funding had initially been denied for that year's prestigious internship program. However, at the last minute, some money became available, and notice of potential internships was released on a limited basis. It so happened that Nona Volk, a longtime city employee who lived in my aunt's Brooklyn co-op building, snagged a memo about the internships, and passed it on to me. I applied, and heard from a guy in the BEGIN program - whatever that was.
So I flew up to New York, and found my way to a faded Beaux-Arts-styled office pile on 16th Street, down the block from Union Square, on the northern fringe of fabled Greenwich Village. At the time, that neighborhood could hardly boast any trendiness - or even bemoan its gentrification. In fact, the block-long Zeckendorf Towers mixed-use high-rise complex had just been built on 14th Street as an urban renewal project. The development's newness, blandness, enormity, and skeletal rooftop pyramids made it stick out awkwardly among its venerable and ornate neighbors.
Union Square itself was a beleaguered haven for drugs and crime. Only on odd occasions would benches underneath the square's big, leafy trees be empty of vagrants. On the plus side, there was a fledgling farmers' market on Fridays during the daytime, hosting countrified growers from as far away as bucolic Pennsylvania.
Talk about your contrasts! The aroma from their freshly-picked produce clashed with the greasy, exhaust-tinged fumes of ordinary Gotham air, and the farmers themselves seemed downright nervous about being out of their element in gritty, concrete canyons.
Indeed, Union Square was hardly idyllic, or even hip in a bohemian sort of way.
I interviewed with a 30-ish Caucasian manager named Richard, who was originally from the Midwest. Almost immediately, Richard announced that he was gay - as if his announcement was needed at all, he was so flaming. Back then, outside of cities like New York, such public behavior was quite rare.
And by the way, I've changed these names to protect everyone's privacy. Except for Nona's. A free-spirited Montana native, Nona is uniquely feisty, and long since retired. Plus, she's the reason I have this story to tell in the first place. As of this writing, she still lives in my late aunt's building.
She was the first person I ever knew who painted her bathroom a color I'd consider odd, back before such a thing became trendy. In her case, it was completely purple - including the ceiling. She found a fallen tree branch up the block in Sunset Park, brought it home, painted it flat white, and hung it from her bathroom's ceiling. One evening, with lit candles the only lighting, she had me lay in her (dry) bathtub so I could soak in the ambiance of dancing glows and shadows flickering across the delicate white twigs splayed before a purple backdrop. I went back to my aunt's apartment and tried to explain it to her, but my practical aunt couldn't understand why anybody would hang a dead limb from their ceiling.
So, that was Nona. But Richard was interviewing me, remember? Well, I remember being ill at ease in his little cubicle, but not because my interview had become so intensely personal so quickly. You see, that faded building we were in had already unnerved me. It sounded and felt as tired as it looked. I'd never before been in an edifice that was in such poor shape - and was still certified for occupancy! Ancient wood floors sagged and creaked when anybody walked on them. Maybe not so disconcerting in a one-story building, but we were nine stories up! The elevators were rickety and unconvincing as a safe mode of conveyance. Dropped-ceiling tiles likely installed in the 1960s were yellowed with age. The first few floors of the 11-story edifice housed client-service halls for welfare recipients, and those floors were chaotic and filthy, as was the public entryway on 16th Street. Jaded city clerks droned over static-laced public address systems. It was an utterly dystopian setting.
Thankfully, Richard tipped me off about a back stairway for staff that, while itself a bit creaky, provided some respite from the worst of the din. He could tell I wasn't the most savvy candidate, at least in terms of knowing what I was getting into with the city. He also knew that this naive fellow from Texas would - if nothing else - be a clean slate for what the summer had to offer. And he offered me the internship, although - as he bluntly and politically-incorrectly admitted - the fact that I am a White male was two strikes against me in terms of qualifications.
My main qualification involved a class project I'd been doing that semester at UTA, in which a group of us graduate students had undertaken a study regarding poverty here in Arlington.
Several years earlier, some leaders from a number of churches had launched a low-key homeless shelter to address a problem that never used to exist in our suburban city. Social work types had begun exploring technical aspects of this homeless shelter, which was growing exponentially and serving a mix of single men and families, even in 1990. However, nobody really knew how the shelter was impacting its community. It was located in a commercial corridor but right next to Arlington's historically Black "Hill" neighborhood, even though none of the shelter's patrons were from the Hill. So there were a number of socioeconomic factors my group had to consider in our project, and that's probably what attracted Richard to my resume in the first place.
Not that I was going to be a social worker, or that my internship would be about social work. Turned out, I would be interning for one of the first programs in America designed specifically to transition welfare recipients into the workforce. You can imagine the impacts such a program - if successful - would have on any city grappling with poverty and unemployment.
That program had been running for less than two years when I arrived for my internship. Its original iteration doesn't exist today, but then again, the whole "welfare-to-work" strategy looks quite different today, all these years later. Still, it was an ambitious notion at the time - and for liberal New York City, an audacious one as well. Sometimes, welfare programs seem more about enabling people in their current predicaments, rather than empowering them to move beyond them.
My boss, and his boss - the director of the whole program - wanted me to provide a reasonably objective impression of how things were going thus-far, without getting mired in social work group-think. In other words, did I see something they were doing that struck me as extremely odd or counter-productive? Or did I see something that they should be doing, but weren't? If I was too close to the project, I probably wouldn't provide them the type of third-party feedback they were looking for.
I would have access to reams of print-outs and reports, I'd attend various meetings, I'd conduct site visits at various service centers across the city, and I'd interact with clients. I’d even have my own assistant (a public high school student), and a schedule of special meetings at City Hall with other graduate interns like me working in various city departments that summer.
David Dinkins was mayor then, and one morning, along with other interns, I was on the steps of New York's elegant City Hall, waiting for the start of one of our meetings. I am not an outgoing person, and I didn't mingle with the other interns, of which there were a couple of dozen. Actually, my aunt's neighbor, Nona, had procured for herself an intern as well - an eager fellow of Indian descent from New Jersey. She'd already arranged for us to meet, and we would occasionally chat at these events. But he was more interested in networking with the other graduate students, a career-building tactic that I didn't understand in those days.
Looking back, I realize I had no concept of how meeting the right people can help someone climb their own career ladder. Even before people called it "networking", that's what ambitious folks did - they're called "strivers" today - and they seem to possess an innate drive to do it. I, on the other hand, do not.
A year or so after my city internship, while working in Lower Manhattan, I would notice how many men walking the financial district's streets wore club ties (neckties with a solid background color and little shield-shaped emblems patterned across them). Somebody informed me those were from Ivy League schools, and graduates wore them both to discreetly brag about their scholastic pedigree, and to attract networking possibilities from fellow graduates they might encounter by chance in public. Kind of like their own subtle wealth-building code. Did you know that? I surely had no clue.
At any rate, back at City Hall, I watched as a motorcade of police cars and a limousine swept up to the bottom of the steps. A diminutive, gray-haired Black man with a clipped mustache elegantly emerged from the limousine, and effortlessly glided up the steps, right past me. We both cautiously glanced at each other, we exchanged greetings, and that was that! I'd had a personal encounter with the leader of the "world's capital".
Frankly, I thought Hizzoner would have had a private entrance down in City Hall's basement or something, so the guy wouldn't have to trek all those steps in all sorts of weather. But Dinkins was a tennis fanatic, and in excellent physical shape, so considering the stresses and strains of being New York's mayor, climbing those steps may have been the easiest part of his day!
We interns usually met in the city's press room, a delicate, high-ceilinged hall painted light blue. Once, we were given a tour of the building, and I only remember that overall, it seemed too small to be a city hall for a town of New York's enormity. However, one of our meetings was in the larger, grander Tweed Courthouse, a far more imposing structure right behind City Hall. Historians know the Tweed Courthouse as one of the most visible and lucrative slush funds in American history. Its very construction literally provided a barely-concealed pillaging of public coffers by the city's notorious "Boss" Tweed during the Civil War era. Tweed was one of the most iconic political crooks of the city's unabashedly crooked Tammany Hall society. Their headquarters, ironically enough, used to be in a building that still sits around the corner from where I interned on 16th Street.
Sixteenth Street's more humble environs were redeemed for me when I discovered Gramercy Park, just a few short blocks to the north. On my lunch hours, I'd walk up Irving Place (after Washington Irving, whose house is still there) to the gated oasis, accessible only to residents around the private park. Ringing Gramercy Park were ornate apartment buildings and townhouses, and a couple of exclusive literary clubs, all reeking of refinement. It was truly like stepping back in time, to a grander, more serene New York City (which is rosy retrospection, since New York was never serene). A couple of years later, when I was living up on East 28th Street, I'd often go for evening walks back down to Gramercy Park, circling the patrician enclave for an hour or so - even in the rain! - before heading back to my dreary apartment. I hardly ever saw any other pedestrians, and I never saw anybody inside the park. I presumed all the folks who had access to it were working extra-long hours just to be able to afford the neighborhood... and say they had access to the private park, even though they hardly actually used it.
Back at work, our days were spent with decidedly antiquated furniture and aesthetics that probably dated to the origins of the grand old buildings around Gramercy Park, but were far less satisfying for an office environment! But we made do. The bathrooms still had stickers about water conservation from the 1970s, which at least was newer than the plumbing itself. When typewriters wouldn't work (Google it, kids), city staffers simply hunted for one that did. Employees knew it was useless to complain about chairs that weren't comfortable, or desks with drawers that fell apart. Those creaky, bouncy floors eventually grew on me, although I could never mentally erase the notion of one day, all of us just sagging down, floor by floor, until the ancient floorboards simply popped apart from the strain.
Meanwhile, the city's maintenance union ruled this building like all its others - with impunity and waste. Once, a florescent lightbulb burned out in our office, and maintenance did eventually get around to replacing it. Three guys strode into our office one afternoon, clumping loudly across the creaky floor. One carried a stepladder, one carried a new bulb, and one carried nothing.
They were making such a production out of it, I felt obligated to turn around and watch.
The guy with the stepladder set it up, and stood back. Then the guy carrying nothing climbed up and removed the dead bulb. Then he climbed down and stood back, holding the dead bulb.
The guy with the new bulb then climbed up and installed it. Then he climbed back down. The guy who'd brought in the stepladder moved to reclaim it.
Then the three of them left... three full-time employees to change one light bulb.
I turned to look at Richard, in his cubicle, and he caught my glance. "Don't say anything!" he immediately cautioned me, smirking. Poor guy - he was already used to it.
I truly liked the folks with whom I worked. I liked the diversity of their personalities, races, and backgrounds. Of all the things that bother me or make me uncomfortable, diversity isn't necessarily one of them, as long as we can all get along. And for the most part, I think we all did. At least for those three months I was there. Of course, it helped that I wasn't there to steal anybody's job, or find fault with anybody. And if they didn't like my final report, since I was only an intern, they could ignore it once I was gone. So there was very little pressure, and that helped a lot.
Although not a native New Yorker, Richard could pass as one, with his cosmopolitan vibe and well-honed persona. White, with a receding hairline, he was fairly tall and slender, and while he dressed in business attire, his appearance always tended to be a bit rumpled. Yes, he proved to be flaming as well - he huffed and puffed and flounced about - and he clearly enjoyed a robust social life within Manhattan's vibrant gay scene. Energetic and earnest, Richard garnered respect from everybody in our office, while giving utter loyalty to Ruth, his boss and the director of the BEGIN program.
Ruth was also relatively slender and tall, Caucasian, a career city employee, and surprisingly quiet and reserved for somebody in her senior position. She was married - to a man (in New York, one has to qualify that) - but she never talked about him. I didn't know if it was because she was an ardent feminist, or because they had a poor relationship, or if she simply thought her private life needed to remain private. Ruth never raised her voice, but she controlled any conversation she had with anybody in our office. She
never gave me any instructions or orders - all my assignments came from
Richard. That told me Ruth was a delegator and knew who would get done
what she wanted done. In my opinion, that type of manager is a rare and
valuable breed.
Ruth struck me as being a good program executive. But just as she didn't order people about like a typical executive, she didn't dress like one, either. She wore plain clothing - certainly nothing that broadcast her authority. She did nothing special with her naturally red hair that was turning gray. She wore no makeup, but maybe that was because she perspired a lot. Her face always looked flushed - kind of like Richard's, actually. Despite its many inadequacies, our building did have a sort of central air-conditioning system, and it worked most of the time. I figured maybe the stress of their jobs - with BEGIN being so new and unproven - made the two of them constantly anxious.
Ruth had a secretary named Nadine, and she was a hoot. Large and gregarious, Nadine was everything Ruth was not. She wore loud clothing and laughed just as loudly, full and throaty. And she laughed a lot, despite her lot in life. A single Latina living in Queens, she had several children and before working for Ruth, lived on welfare. In fact, her income on welfare was more than she was earning working for the city. But Nadine wanted to set a good example for her children, so when her last child went into grade school, she went to work. And fittingly, that work was with BEGIN.
A couple of years after my internship - would you believe it - during the evening rush hour, at the Union Square subway stop on the Lexington Avenue line, I saw Nadine enter the car in which I was riding. I went up to her, she recognized me, and we chatted until my 28th Street stop came. She was still working for Ruth, and Richard was still there.
Just now, typing this out, I realize I should have gone by the ol' office when I had the chance. But to be honest, I don't think I'd ever thought of doing that until today. Maybe if I did think of it back when I was still living there, I decided against it, considering how I'd ended my city planning plans when my internship ended. Not exactly the type of affirmation for BEGIN that Ruth, Richard, and the gang were likely expecting from me!
Richard's secretary was a younger, Black single mother from Brooklyn. I can't remember her name, but she was quite helpful to me and took the time to explain some back-stories to the narratives I'd hear around the office. She and Nadine were good friends. Sometimes I’d see them having lunch at a greasy, grim diner down the block, and go inside and listen to them chat away about all sorts of things.
Next to Richard's secretary sat Paula, a delightful, trim, middle-aged Filipina who always wore a bright smile on her smooth face. She managed a lot of the data and reports for the program along with Mark, a young, athletic Black man who dressed the best of anybody in our office. I could tell Mark was a native New Yorker by the way he said his name: "Muak", kind of like "moo-ark" mashed together. Mark was a very eligible heterosexual bachelor who seemed to have an active social life. He also drove a late-model dark-blue Mercedes sedan and parked in private parking garages, which is a pricey proposition in Manhattan.
His lifestyle seemed so much more extravagant than everybody else's in the office, I presumed he came from a wealthy family. After all, if Mark was White, that's what most of us would presume, right? So I don't want to be racist here and deny him the same presumption just because he is African-American. And to be fair, the other inverse is also true: If Richard was tooling around Gotham in a late-model Mercedes, it would have seemed just as odd to me. New York City simply wasn't known as an employer with highly-paid social workers, even in management.
OK, so yes; I admit I was curious about the apparent disconnect there, but I chalked it up as one of those many contrasts that intrigued me about New York.
Cynthia worked down at the far end of our room. She was round, but not really heavy; Caucasian, with straight black hair that always seemed stuck to her head and face, since like Richard and Ruth, she perspired a lot. Part of the reason was that Cynthia and her husband, who also worked on our floor, but in a different office, walked to 16th Street from their tiny apartment up in the east 30's. And since this was summertime, the city was usually sticky and humid, even in the mornings. Cynthia would come trudging in, wearing sneakers and a dress, with a backpack - and back then, backpacks were not fashionable. She'd plunk herself down at her desk, and immediately begin returning telephone calls - something she spent most of her day doing.
Cynthia was basically in charge of cajoling welfare recipients who were trying to get out of having to go to work. These weren't folks who had physical disabilities, or even diagnosed mental disabilities. These were people who were completely able-bodied, with no young children at home, or elderly parents to tend. They were people whose caseworkers were at their wit's end, trying to convince them the city could no longer afford to pay them to sit around and do nothing.
I particularly remember one man with whom Cynthia talked almost constantly. I'll call him Doug. We all knew when she was on the phone with Doug, because Cynthia treated him like her little brother, she'd gotten to know him so well through their frequent conversations. You see, not only did Doug target Cynthia for his many complaints, but Doug had gotten ahold of then-governor Mario Cuomo’s private phone number, and at least once he chastised Cuomo personally about having to find a job. Doug also had learned a private phone number for Dinkins, and he’d call Hizzoner with the same complaint. The staff for Cuomo and Dinkins would then call Cynthia – and Cynthia would call Doug and tell him in her nasal Queens accent to quit bothering the mayor and governor. They weren't going to
give him any waivers.
It was a silly, farcical circle of obstinacy through which Cynthia patiently suffered. Once, Cynthia told me that she’d tried to reason with Doug; “Do you realize, with your skills at finding private phone numbers, needling major politicians, and deceiving your caseworker, you could be making a killing on Wall Street with less effort than you’re using trying NOT to work?!”
I remember several case managers who'd frequently hang out in our office but worked in other locations. Two of these regulars were Roz, another gregarious Latina, and a short, gay Hispanic man whose name I no longer recall. Roz wore flashy, skin-tight clothing, lots of makeup, and big hair, while the gay Latino wore softer clothing. They'd come back from meetings with Richard and animatedly "dish" on all sorts of things.
There was one afternoon when Richard and another gay caseworker were going to a protest after work to denounce New York's Roman Catholic diocese and its stance against abortion. They were trying to cajole the gay Latino caseworker into joining them, but he was refusing to go. Finally, exasperated, Richard exclaimed, "But you have to protest against the Pope and Catholics! You're gay! We're pro-choice!"
"Yes, I'm gay," the Hispanic caseworker replied, "but I'm also Catholic, and I'm pro-life. I can be pro-life and still be gay, right?" And Richard slumped backwards, obviously stumped at the concept. A person could be gay and also pro-life? It was as if the two couldn't be reconciled in Richard's mind. Still, he and the other gay caseworker stopped pestering their co-worker about attending the protest.
In my mind, meanwhile, sitting off to the side, listening to their conversation, I thought to myself, "This is what New York's hallowed 'diversity' is all about, right? Even gay people can be against abortion."
Sexuality played an outsized role in my internship that summer in a far more disturbing fashion.
Neither Richard nor I had a say in who my high school intern would be, since the teen would be assigned to us by the public school system. So Richard and I were pleased to meet a shy yet competent 17-year-old young woman who was an immigrant from China. I believe she was the only person in her family who spoke English, and she spoke it quite well - when we could hear her! She spoke so softly and timidly.
To be a high school intern, her scholastic record must have been stellar, yet she was not there to wow us with her accomplishments. The high school intern program was basically about exposing the city's brightest young people to the workaday world, giving them a taste of what careering in an office was like. Richard gave her pamphlets about the program to read, she tailed his secretary as she went about her tasks, and she attended some of our meetings. Otherwise, she'd sit off to the side and watch the rest of us interact. Her hours were only part-time, so she could still be a kid enjoying her summer break. She hardly interacted with me, so she wasn't really "my" intern. Since she didn't have the typical teenaged attitude, she seemed to get along well with everybody. The only issue was getting her to speak up so we could hear her during the few times she did talk!
Unfortunately, another issue did crop up, and it proved far more sinister. My intern and I were paid, and we had to clock-in and clock-out at the human resources desk on the third floor. Or was it the fourth floor? At any rate, the human resources desk was comprised of a time clock and the usual slots for time cards, positioned next to a long counter that seemed to be constantly manned by a thin, middle-aged Black man who sat perched on a tall stool. I saw him twice a day, every day, when I came and left, and I don't think he ever spoke one word to me. I knew that basic New York City protocol was not to talk to anybody else anyway, so I doubt I ever said anything to him either.
My intern, however, suddenly arrived to work one day crying softly. Richard asked her what was wrong, and she brushed it off. But it happened again another day, and we all became quite concerned. Was there something wrong in her family? We thought she communicated well in English, but was there a problem we didn't understand? Was the internship too hard for her? Were we not treating her well?
Richard finally coaxed from her the ugly claim that the Black man at the human resources desk was making sexually vulgar remarks to the 17-year-old. The teenager had never experienced being the recipient of such things. She was still relatively new to our country, and yes, she was a naturally-shy person. Hardly the type to welcome, or fully understand, or appreciate such unwarranted advances. She was also Asian, and apparently her cultural background featured in some of his remarks and suggestions. So it was a mix of really bad things, and the rest of us were appalled. Ruth personally met with the teen - Ruth never met personally with me about anything - and then went to higher-ups in the city to get some justice for her.
Would you believe - the man in human resources was a shop steward (or supervisor) for his union, which for all practical purposes, made him something of an "untouchable." It would be the young high school intern's word against his, and his union had massive financial and political resources to throw at the high schooler. She didn't have the money or clout to fight such opposition, and the city would provide no defense for her, because she wasn't an official city employee. Just an intern. The fact that racial bias was involved didn't matter. The fact that she was underaged didn't matter, either. So Ruth and Richard advised the intern that she could simply quit the program, and they would credit her with completing the whole thing so she could include it on her scholastic resume.
And with that, Mark went to get his Mercedes from a nearby parking garage, and he and I drove her back home. She even lived on Mott Street, one of the quintessential parts of Chinatown. The whole thing was so demoralizing.
I hope that young woman was able to make something positive out of such an awful experience.
Today, I can see how people can become jaded to all sorts of wrongs, especially after being exposed to situations such as my high school intern's. The more we're exposed to a continuous stream of antisocial behaviors, the more jaded we can become. And like bacteria in a petri dish, New York City is a vast incubator of antisocial behavior.
Scientists call growing bacteria a "culture". Ironically, New Yorkers call theirs a city of culture, too. But what kind of culture?
Indeed, during my internship, almost every day included yet another bizarre New York City tableau. One time, building security called Richard and told us all 11 floors were in lock-down because an angry welfare recipient visiting a lower floor had brandished a gun (a big enough deal in conservative Texas, but an absolutely enormous deal in liberal Manhattan), threatened his social worker, and stormed up a stairwell to elude guards. We all simply closed our doors and kept on working.
Another day, in our staff stairwell in the back of the building - which featured tall windows that were never closed, making them airy and often fragrant with questionable aromas from the alleyway below - I passed two young welfare recipients... well... being very friendly with each other. I took the opportunity to practice my burgeoning jadedness and continued descending the stairs.
About the only part of my internship I didn't like involved visiting our building's lower client service floors. They were always jammed with welfare recipients who were confused, loud, angry, smelly, and extremely stressed. Small children cried in fright at the cacophony, with city clerks and social workers also physically and emotionally overwhelmed by it all, despite their jadedness.
One afternoon, I can't remember what possessed me to use our building's main elevator, but I took it to run an errand to the first floor. The elevator car was absolutely packed. When its doors wheezed open, we would have spilled out like beans from a burst sack into the lobby, except the lobby was equally jammed with people waiting to go up. And New Yorkers rarely part like the Red Sea when elevator or subway doors open. Each person either embarking or disembarking needs to independently fight the surge and claim their territory on either side of the imminently-closing doors.
I managed to run my errand just fine, but apparently that gave me a false sense of optimism when it came to attempting a ride back up the same elevator to the ninth floor. Maybe I figured it was a cultural exercise, since I was the only White person trying to use the public elevator. And I did manage to get into the elevator with an astonishingly large crowd of other people. Except there was a mother with a child trying to get on, and the doors were closing, and her child - a young, small Black boy - got trapped in the elevator with us, and his mother yelling on the wrong side of the doors as they slammed shut.
With a disconcerting lurch, the elevator began chugging upwards. Above all the other din in the lobby, from inside the stuffed elevator car, we could hear the mother screaming. And the little boy started screaming. But nobody in the elevator let it affect them.
The doors slid open at the second floor. I grabbed the sobbing child by his arm and, as quickly as I could navigate the crowds on that floor, I went to the stairwell with him in tow, through a constant sea of humanity, rushing us back down to the first floor, and over to the lobby, where I found his mother, still by the elevator.
"Here he is," I stated, handing her little boy back to her. I don't know why I thought an appreciative "thank you" would have been in order, so I was surprised to receive a mean, angry glare from the mother as she grabbed her son's arm from me.
Why did I suddenly feel like I was guilty of something?
I simply turned around to go and use the employee elevators in the back of the building. That's what I should have done in the first place! Now I knew why nobody else in the elevator bothered to help the little boy. In New York City, no good deed goes unpunished.
One bright morning, I went on a site visit to a foreboding, dilapidated city building west of the Port Authority bus terminal. Child care was being offered there to BEGIN participants, and ESL classes were being conducted. I sat in on a session in a big, airless room where Hispanic, Russian, and Bangladeshi immigrants – mostly women, mostly in their 30’s or older – were smiling and laughing along with their gregarious instructor. Their good nature filled the dark hallways of that poorly-maintained, poorly-lit building, although I never understood what was so funny. I also didn't understand why none of the lights were on - was the city trying to save money on their electric bill?
Or was the city's maintenance union running seriously behind in replacing its burned-out light bulbs? Good thing it was a sunny day, and the building had lots of windows.
Richard and his staff made a big deal out of another of my visits, this time to a client site on 125th Street, in the heart of Harlem. With me being a suburban White boy from Texas, and Harlem at the time still being very much a Black ghetto, there was little to exaggerate in the contrasts. For his part, Mark especially got a kick out of me going up there, telling me wild stories about surviving 125th Street as a Black youth. My aunt, a lifelong Brooklynite, was particularly fretful about the idea. So when the day arrived, I didn't know what to expect.
When I'd go for evening walks in Brooklyn, my aunt had already taught me the mugging victim's protocol:
1. Don't wear a wallet.
2. Put a $20 bill in a front pocket.
3. Put your drivers license in one of your socks, or under your foot before you put on your shoes.
4. Put your health insurance card in the other foot, along with another $20.
The $20 in your pocket was usually enough to satisfy most muggers so they wouldn't beat you up or even kill you; so you kept it in a readily-accessible place. The drivers license was so cops could ID you in case the worst happened, and the insurance card was so you could convince paramedics that they shouldn't deliver you to a public hospital, but a private one (for much better care). And the extra $20 was to pay for car fare in case your mugger left you unable to walk very far for help.
And by the way, this wasn't just my aunt being paranoid. I'd heard these protocols repeated by other New Yorkers, at least back in the day, when crime was so much worse in the city.
So I ventured to Harlem that morning, with my protocols in place. I did bring along some extra money for lunch, however. I was planning on being there all day.
I stepped out of the Lexington Avenue 4-5-6 subway onto the platform, only to find myself immediately engulfed in a swarm of police officers. What an auspicious way to begin my visit! That evening, I heard on the local news something about a major drug bust and a gunman running into the station.
To my credit, I didn't just cross over the station and take the next downtown train back to the office. I may have been the only White guy in sight, but this was New York. I was born here (even if I only lived here for three months afterwards). I had as much right to be on 125th Street as anybody else of any skin color. So I briskly hustled down 125th Street, trying hard not to look conspicuous, and found the client site, a remodeled walk-up that boasted clean, fresh paint outside. It was a stark contrast to its neighbors.
Inside, I found equally new carpeting, paint, light fixtures, furniture… but no clients. Actually, I think before I left for the day, one or two clients did come in to meet their case worker. But that was it. The only people for most of the day were some friendly city employees.
Friendly, but also embarrassed, and candid. One of the slightly embarrassed social workers admitted they were having a hard time getting welfare recipients to keep their appointments for counseling in preparation for entering the workforce. Apparently, the idea of transitioning from welfare to work hadn’t yet gotten a lot of buy-in from their client base. But the workers there gave me a tour of their surprisingly comfortable facility, which was much nicer than the place near the Port Authority bus terminal. And all the lights worked!
For lunch, I went back out onto 125th Street and recognized the familiar logo for Burger King. But that logo on the sign out front was all that was familiar about this fast food joint! I opened its steel front door, and faced a long, foreboding hallway lined in brown metal - the same ribbed brown metal with which many of the city's storefronts were sheathed for security. At the end of the hallway was a big sign listing the available menus. Next to the sign was a big window of bullet-proof glass, with a speaker system so I could tell the employee behind the thick window what I wanted to eat.
I passed my money through a metal drawer, like at a motor bank. None of the employees were smiling. Security cameras were everywhere. My meal was assembled quickly, and placed in a big plexiglass turnstile, which was then rotated so I could open a bulletproof glass door and retrieve it on my end. I turned around, and there was the dining room - a dim, unwelcoming place even by the worst fast food standards. In the middle of the room was a tall stand, with an armed security guard sitting on top of it, watching customers eat. All over the room were security cameras. I got the distinct impression that this restaurant had a history of crime problems.
The BEGIN program's 125th Street outpost was called the "St. Nicholas site". At first, that confused me, because I'd never heard of Harlem having any particular association with Santa Claus. I learned later that before the turn of the 20th Century, as Manhattan's northern reaches were being built-out, a new public park in Harlem was christened "St. Nicholas" in honor of the Dutch immigrants who originally helped settle and finance the development of Manhattan. St. Nicholas is the patron saint of Amsterdam, and New York used to be called New Amsterdam.
Still, whenever I heard my co-workers talk about the St. Nicholas site, it would take me a minute before I'd remember they were talking about Harlem.
When folks today complain about gentrification, they often point to Harlem as an example of ethnic displacement, which is one of the unfortunate side-effects of the gentrification phenomenon. In the 2010 Census, it was discovered that more Caucasians than Blacks live in Harlem - the neighborhood that for generations defined quintessential Black urbanity. When I lived in New York City, tour companies would bus tourists - mostly from Europe and Asia - around Harlem, as if to show off the city's Blacks as some sort of caricature. I found that notion entirely distasteful and even racist. But it brought in much-needed revenue to the Black churches and other neighborhood stakeholders who would put on shows - including entire Sunday "worship" services - for gawking out-of-towners.
Contrasted with Harlem - excuse me, "St. Nicholas" - was my visit to the “Yorkville” site on East 34th Street, several blocks from Macy’s. Like most New Yorkers, I would call this neighborhood Murray Hill, not Yorkville. Nevertheless, 34th Street is a major two-way cross-town boulevard. Its eastern side is mostly middle-class apartments with some public housing mixed in. Quite safe and pleasant, at least by New York standards.
Unlike St. Nicholas, the Yorkville site was more typical of the city's municipal aesthetic - grimy windows, dreary grays, and dim lighting. On the day I visited, it was bustling with clients, and I was the last person any of the staff wanted to see, talk to, or tour around the place. So I didn't really end up talking with anybody, and Richard never got around to re-scheduling the visit. Apparently this site was usually pretty busy, which for the program's sake, was a good thing.
When the end of my internship arrived, I wrote up a nice report. I presented it to a large meeting of program managers who didn't seem sure why my opinion of how they were doing their jobs mattered to anybody. Nevertheless, they appeared content to hear that my opinion was positive. And that was that.
Was there a farewell lunch with Richard and Ruth? No, not that I can recall. I finished the day, clocked out next to that awful fellow who forced my teenaged intern to quit, and spent a couple of weeks helping my aunt around her apartment before returning to Texas. I do remember that Nona - the only one to celebrate my internship - bought two pricey tickets at City Center for us to see some avant-garde dance group wearing nothing but body paint gyrate about in huge plexiglass tanks of water.
Some of that culture in which New York revels, don't you know!
At first, having just been exposed to Gotham's stark poverty and neediness, the expense and practical non-necessity of such an "artistic" performance struck me as wasteful. Then again, Jesus Christ's fallen disciple, Judas, professed a similar reaction when a bottle of expensive perfume was poured on the Messiah before His crucifixion. Don't many of us tend to have that type of reaction when we don't like or understand something that is lavish?
In those moments, perhaps it's better to prevent our lack of appreciation for something from being a moral decree of its worth. Maybe, too, that's why there's so much art in New York City. It provides an escape valve from all of the poverty that exists alongside the creativity.
And what Christ said in response to Judas certainly remains true today: He prophesied we would always have the poor with us.
Indeed.
Another friend of our family's arranged for me to interview with a business associate of his who owned a freight forwarding brokerage in Lower Manhattan. You see, even before my internship had officially ended, I had decided that working for New York City was not for me. The absurd indignities and injustice of my high school intern's experience was the last straw, but there was more to it. I saw how hard city employees worked for very little pay. I witnessed the laughable waste of the city's unions and administrative bureaucracy. And I got a pretty clear idea of how hard it is not to get chewed up by the cogs of the city's vast machinery - both figuratively, and even literally!
Maybe New York City was still the place for me, but being employed by it wasn't.
So in a way, the internship did do its job as an educational career tool. It exposed me to what employment with the City of New York is typically like. For many people - since, obviously, many people work for the city - the indignities of city employment are worth whatever they're trading off to keep their jobs. And I guess that's OK for them. But at the end of the day, it all seemed so depressing to me, even though my literal experience with the BEGIN team wasn't bad at all. Of course, that was mostly because it was a temporary thing, and I had no clout. I was just there to observe. And I think I observed what I needed to observe. I can say with complete honesty that I have never once regretted my internship, or my decision not to go back to my masters program that fall, and finish my degree.
Many years later, I got a call from the new head of the city planning program at UTA. She'd been going through old files and found my name, with a record of coursework that ended abruptly after the spring of 1990. Had I gone off to another school? What happened to my degree plan?
I agreed to meet with her in her office, and I gave her a very abridged version of what I've just told you (how fortunate for her, right?). She nodded her head and admitted that to make a difference as a city planner, one has to mostly be told by politicians what they want to have done. City planners offer expertise in planning cities, but politicians are the ones who decide what planning they deem important, because they are technically beholden directly to their voters. It's not a perfect system, but in a democratic republic, that's how we operate. After listening to me regale her with my experiences, she admitted that I'd probably made the better choice in not pursuing a city planning degree. It didn't sound like I would have fit very well into the job description.
So there you have it, folks - confirmation from an expert!
But getting back to BEGIN: What has history told us about this then-groundbreaking program? Has it worked? How many New Yorkers have been moved from welfare to work?
Well, of course, a lot of the answer depends on who is running the statistics. Overall, however, the numbers aren't terribly favorable for BEGIN. And as I've already noted, the program as I knew it does not exist today. The City of New York used to have a report on its website stating that approximately 100,000 people, or 10% of the eligible BEGIN participants, transitioned from welfare into work, but that report has been taken down.
Several years after the program began, a city leader went under-cover, posing as a welfare recipient to see for herself what going through the BEGIN program was like. And what she found wasn't pretty. In addition to being shocked at the physical conditions of some BEGIN sites, she complained that city employees simply didn't advocate harder for her (actually, the welfare recipient she was impersonating).
It's hard to tell how much of her account to take seriously, however, since this particular city leader had her own problems with the public's perception of her, as well as one of the unions representing the city's social workers. Indeed, for most city executives, popularity is not going to be a reward for all of one's work and devotion, especially in as contentious a place as New York.
In this case, the city leader was Barbara Sabol, a Black transplant from Kansas - of all places - who was quoted by union leader Charles Ensley as saying the city's promotion list for social workers was "too White and too male". Mayor Dinkins had hired Sabol to run Gotham's vast Human Resources Administration during his tenure, but Ensley was trying to root out corruption in the city's unions. Ensley, himself African-American, believed the best way to do that was to promote based on merit, not quotas. Needless to say, there was deep friction taking place even beyond our offices on 16th Street and our client service sites.
During my internship, I was unaware of all this sociopolitical drama behind the scenes, but when I learned of it later, I remembered Richard's off-handed comment to me during my interview, about me having two strikes against me because I was both White and male.
I did end up back in Gotham, however, within several months. During the winter, I received a call-back from where I'd interviewed after my internship. So I moved up to the city of my birth and lived there another two and a half years.
Looking back now, I can safely say I've long since gotten New York City out of my system. I'm grateful for the time I was able to spend there, and for all the people I met, and for all the experiences I had. Especially the folks back at BEGIN who were part of something bigger in my life than they probably realized.
Since they participated in making me the person I am today, perhaps that helps explain a lot!
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