Letter from America

The Big Apple is rotting

Crime is raging in Manhattan – and some New Yorkers like it Philip Delves Broughton

A friend of mine was mugged recently in Central Park.

He and a friend visiting from France were wandering along the bridle path in one of the park’s more genteel stretches, near John Lennon’s old building, the Dakota.

Two men stepped out of the shadows and demanded their wallets and phones. The American handed over his iPhone, the Frenchman his sustainably made Fairphone. The criminals pocketed the iPhone and smashed the Fairphone to pieces, not believing for a minute the Frenchman’s bleating that it was a real phone – just better for the planet. Sustainability is not yet a thing for New York’s criminal underclass.

Once their assailants had gone, the victims ran and found someone who called the police. Within minutes, there were a dozen cars, lights flashing, sirens wailing, as if, my friend said, there had been a mass homicide. The muggers were swiftly caught.

The good news was the police response – swift, effective and solicitous. The bad news was the mugging itself.

After three decades of falling crime rates in New York, robberies and assaults are suddenly surging again. In March, they were up 60 per cent on a year ago.

The pandemic seems to have unleashed the ghosts of old New York – the ramshackle, crazy and violent crime which used to be the city’s hallmark, until it got cleaned up in the 1990s.

One day, it’s a woman assaulted with a hammer; another, a man pushed onto the train tracks, a child punched in the head in Times Square, a man in a gas mask opening fire on commuters at a subway station. There is an edgy madness to it all.

The former NYPD Chief of Detectives, Robert Boyce, recently told one of the local TV stations, ‘We’re in different times, now. This is not a spike. It’s not a trend. We’re in a crime surge right now.’

The city’s new mayor, Eric Adams, a former policeman, has promised to stop the surge. But he’s a hard man to read. He showed up at the Met Gala recently wearing a tailcoat embroidered with a gun with a red slash through it, a message to end gun violence delivered amid popping flashes and nipple-baring Kardashians.

There is a school of thought that New York needs a period of cathartic social ruin. That the whole place has become Disneyland, a place for billionaires and their servant class, for influencers and the influenced. The theory, articulated by melancholy types at beer-sodden bar tops on First Avenue, is that for New York to remain New York, it needs to be nasty.

No good comes out of marble apartments, money managers and their waxen acolytes. Every season of vanities needs a bonfire, to replenish the nutrients in the soil.

If you want the Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads, punk, post-punk and a new wave, you need the mosh-pit filth of CBGB, the East Village dive bar which closed in 2006, with, naturally, a concert by Patti Smith. The bohemian world Smith described in her memoir Just Kids has long since given way to coffee chains and yoga studios.

There is the sweat of a hot yoga class of junior lawyers – and then there’s the shoulder-to-shoulder sweat of a punk venue. One evokes the psychic pain of modern work; the other an explosive cultural genesis. What do you want from your city?

The problem with seedy glamour, of course, is the seediness. There is nothing glamorous about the number of homeless people on the streets at the moment.

I felt no pang of nostalgia when I discovered recently that someone had climbed onto the bonnet of my car and defecated. No sense that what is bad for my car must be good for the underground music scene.

In any case, New York is big enough and ruthless enough that there is always room somewhere for experimentation and misbehaviour. If the Lower East Side becomes one long strip of contemporary loft spaces and cheese shops, the bohemians shuffle off to Bushwick and Bed-Stuy. When that fills up with furniture designers and mixologists, there is deepest Queens and the Bronx.

During COVID, there was a moment when Manhattan emptied out to the point where rents downtown plummeted within reach of ordinary wage-earners, who swirled back in from the outer boroughs. But that window has closed again.

Not long ago, I met a billionaire’s wife who prodded forlornly at her salad as she told me that for all the comforts of her wealth, New York remained ‘the stress capital of the world’. Keeping up at every level is brutal, whether you live in the Architectural Digest version of the city or the punk, grime one. It’s a city on the edge of a nervous breakdown – a challenge that makes it such a draw.

Philip Delves Broughton was New York correspondent for the Daily Telegraph