While Dotty was talking, my double life struck me. I already knew I was going, and I could see it in my mind’s eye. The prison yard at Attica would be filled with desperate men who faced consequences from the state that beggared the imagination. And the prisoners’ only real hope was that the activists who were summoned to be on the observers’ committee might somehow do something to avert bloodshed. Immediately the old familiar conflicts stared back at me. The facts were anything but simple. I had three little kids and my wife, Kitty, and we were concerned that I might be putting myself in harm’s way.
With help from my grandmother Bessie Warner, Kitty and I had it pretty good. We enjoyed some distance from the overwrought fears that 1970s New York City conjured for many. Crime was on the rise. There were muggings in Central Park and in the streets and subways late at night. The anger in black and Spanish Harlem was very real, but we lived where the police created islands of safety, and Central Park West was a well-patrolled strip of fine-looking apartment buildings, houses of worship, schools, and the Museum of Natural History. Our building had a doorman and a floor captain. We even had a housekeeper to protect us from the lesser evil of a messy apartment and to help with our children. I was just starting out at the NAACP when we bought the place, and I didn’t make much money—nowhere near what it cost to live the way we did. But I had no issue with getting help from my family. My dad had gotten a lot of help over the years from my grandmother, and it just seemed to be the way we did things. Though I made a point of not being as showy as my parents, that’s not to say that the highly polished, mostly Jewish 55 Central Park West wasn’t a nice place to live. The point for me was that it didn’t scream wealth and power. I was a civil rights lawyer, so appearances mattered. Our building was about a block from a giant construction site that was slowly becoming Lincoln Center. To many of the people I grew up with, it was still just around the corner from overcrowded, cut-up brownstones converted into deteriorating tenements and condemned buildings to the north of Hell’s Kitchen. To me, however, it was just what I was looking for: lots of room and on the liberal West Side.
New York was in free fall, the decades-long aftermath of blockbusting, white flight, and urban blight writ large everywhere on graffiti-covered subway cars, smut-touting marquees lining Times Square, and block after block in poor minority neighborhoods with boarded-up buildings. Property values guttered. Some landlords set fire to buildings to get the insurance money or opened vacant apartments to a squatter army of heroin addicts and prostitutes to drive renters away, sometimes right down the block from where we lived. The city was on the brink of bankruptcy. So there was something edgy about even our area, but it let me live in a way that resembled what I was used to from childhood on the East Side, where the upper classes lived. It was my Park Avenue.
I made an all-cash offer for the apartment, which was generally considered a green light for co-op board approval. The broker assured me we’d get a rubber stamp, but when that didn’t happen there was some back-and-forth until the broker told me that we wouldn’t be approved until the co-op board saw a picture of my wife. I was pretty sure it was a race thing. I worked at the NAACP, and my wife could well have been black. I produced a picture of my very Irish Catholic wife, and we got in, but I was painfully aware of the contradiction of being a NAACP lawyer who lived in a building that apparently wouldn’t allow blacks to live there. Soon after moving in, I got a confirmation of sorts. The building had rules about which workers for apartment owners could use the passenger elevators and which had to ride the service elevators that were used for deliveries and to take out the trash. Just like in the South, a person’s color was the key.
“That’s the way it’s always been,” the manager told me.
The board’s misgivings about approving a lawyer from the NAACP were not entirely frivolous. I grew up with a