Little Vito lived large

VITO BATTISTA GO FIGHT CITY HALL
By OWEN MORITZ Daily News Staff Writer
Friday, June 18th 1999, 2:10AM

NEW YORK taxpayers, oppressed or otherwise, never had a truer friend than Vito Battista, a rumpled, fiery son of Brooklyn who spent most of the 1950s, '60s and '70s running for practically every public office in sight - including mayor five times. "I'd rather be right than mayor," he always said, which was good, considering he never came close to getting elected.
But the man could put on a show. A flamboyant architect with a pencil-thin mustache, a black fedora, a vivid imagination and a voice that could shatter the reveries of the laziest bureaucrat, Vito Battista was one of the great artists of New York City political theater.

Park Ave. co-op types were not his people. His were the little people - the small property owners, small landlords and civic associations in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island he claimed as his constituency when, in 1956, he organized his United Taxpayers Party. He made his first independent run for mayor in 1957, managing to capture 70,000 votes in what was otherwise a lackluster race.

That was the most votes he ever got for any citywide office over the next 20 years, and recognizing that he was perhaps not really very electable, he turned his energies to comic opera, devoting himself to crazed stunts that regularly struck terror into the heart of public officialdom.
He brought an alligator to City Hall once, to illustrate the bite being taken by taxes. He strolled through midtown with a camel, warning that one more tax measure would be the straw to break the animal's back. He marched across the Brooklyn Bridge with an elephant and herded sheep through City Hall Park. He appeared on Wall St. wearing a wooden barrel.

He once delivered a black coffin filled with fake homeowner deeds at Mayor John Lindsay's office to make a point about public safety. "The only people making money in New York today are the guys who make electric locks and burglar alarms and those who train dogs," Battista shouted. He rode a horse and buggy down Broadway as the Board of Estimate debated repeal of the $15 auto-use tax: "We'll all wind up in horses and buggies," he yelled.

Politicians. They were all the same, he thundered. Government waste, bloated taxes, rent control, tax abatements, welfare, subsidized housing - the politicians were to blame for all of it. In the mid-'60s, he often made appearances with a pair of pet monkeys, named Rocky and Lindsay, after the governor and the mayor. He liked to stand outside City Hall holding up a Diogenes-style lantern and announcing to all within earshot that he was searching for an honest pol.

"You people accuse me of being a buffoon," he acknowledged to an interviewer on one occasion. "Listen, I'm liberal with my money - just conservative about the money City Hall spends."

No, he never seriously expected to become mayor. "I'd rather be right," he said, again. Serenely.

BATTISTA WAS born Sept. 7, 1908, in Bari, Italy, and came to Brooklyn with his family five years later. As a teenager, he studied at Brooklyn Evening High School while peddling ice during the day, very successfully; at age 18, he sold his flourishing ice company for $27,000 and used the money to pay for an education at Carnegie Tech. Graduate degrees in architecture and planning followed at MIT and Columbia.

He was a designer of the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows. Afterward, working for the city's Department of Public Works, he helped design the Brooklyn Civic Center. Then he went into private practice and started his own architectural school in downtown Brooklyn. The Institute of Design and Construction would turn out 30,000 architects, planners and draftsmen in Battista's lifetime.

But the daily plight of the city's small property owners and "oppressed taxpayers," as he never failed to call them, became a siren song that finally drove him into politics in the mid-'50s.
He never got to be mayor, or controller, or anything else he ever ran for, until 1968, when, running as a Republican, he won the Cypress Hills-East New York Assembly seat. He served three noisy terms, mostly just annoying his fellow legislators. During one particularly do-nothing session, he suggested that everyone just go home. One colleague took umbrage: "There are millions of New Yorkers working, who would not be impressed if we adjourned at 2 p.m." Shot back Battista: "Yes, but they're accomplishing something."

In the post-Watergate elections of 1974, a Democratic challenger turned him out of Albany. One year later came New York City's fiscal crisis - and now, it appeared, everything he had ever said about bloated bureaucracies and overburdening taxes was turning out to be quite true.

FLEETINGLY HE entertained a vision that city voters might now see him a wise elder statesman. Well, no. His final race for mayor, in 1977, as an independent in a crowded field, fared not well at all. After that wild election was won by Edward Koch, Vito Battista folded his tent and stopped running for things.

He did, though, remain an active Republican committeeman, and, in 1984, in an appointment he treasured, President Ronald Reagan named him to a federal commission on architecture and transportation for the disabled.

He died quietly in 1990, age 81.

Notes: BIG TOWN BIOGRAPHY: Lives and Times of the Century's Classic New Yorkers

"A little voice inside my head, said..."

...'Don't look back. You can never look back.'"

Obviously, as a historian, I feel I must disagree with Mr. Henley, yet he does have a point. Occasionally in the process of looking back, your mind just shuts down. You can't move forward nor can you move back; everything simply screeches to a halt as your body and mind scream, " "Enough!" I reached this point last week after repeatedly running into stories of sexual assaults on NYC public school teachers committed by students. Horrifying, depressing-- there are not enough adjectives.

But that did it. I needed a break from Fun City.

Instead of working, I have been doing all of that stuff that I suspect the rest of the world runs around trying to squeeze into weekends-- laundry, groceries, yard work, going to the movies, etc. This included developing rolls of film that are so old that I no longer remembered what was on them.

"The boys of summer have gone..."

One of those rolls included this photo of a friend of mine. His pose says a lot about him and, for some reason, makes me think of that line about the ability to capture the "essence" of someone's personality: "Someone who understood him took that." Of course, if I really understood, judging from his attitude, I wouldn't have bothered trying to photograph him in the first place. His pose also reflects what my topic seems to be saying to me at this moment.

"Those days are gone foreverI should just let them go, but..."

Looking at this picture, I wonder if, when I go back to work, I'll be able to connect with my topic as I did before. Have I lost momentum, broken the flow? Will I be able to fully reconnect or will there be a perceptible gap inbetween pre-break and post-break writing? Maybe the dissertation is something like a friend you have fallen out of touch with. By taking a break, you lose the essential sense of connectedness, the person or topic becomes foreign to you, and you need to work to discover the new pattern of your relationship.

Hopefully, finding your way back might be easier with the dissertation than it is with people.

Dum…da da dum.…da da dum…

On Senator Clinton's website you can find the poll that allows you, the voter, to select the Senator's campaign song. I voted for The Tempations' "Get Ready" because not only is it a classic, but it is also the only song on the list I can stand the thought of hearing repeatedly for the next year+.

This brings me to a question a friend asked me the other day: "Does your dissertation have a theme song?" After pausing to consider the possibility of opening my defense with a song, I told him that there are three songs that run repeatedly through my head as I research. Occassionally, I also hum/sing them quietly, much to the annoyance of others in various reading rooms. So, here they are in no particular order:

• "I Happen to Like New York": In my head, I always hear the Bobby Short version of this Cole Porter song. Woody Allen used it in the opening sequences of Manhattan Murder Mystery as the camera lovingly pans New York from above. The line that gets me: "I like the sight and the sound and even the stink of it." I never fail to hear that and think, "It's true! It's true! I do!"

• "Summer in the City": This choice may be the result of waiting to do all of my research in the summer or it may be the fact that I am stuck in the decade of long hot summers, in which the least of anyone's worries was the actual temperature. And, since the Lovin Spoonful version dates from 1966, it is completely of the period. I find the hopeful chorus pretty reassuring: "Despite the heat it'll be alright..."

• The Barney Miller Opening Music: Really, this doesn't need any explanation, does it? The bass line! The cast (Fish, Chano, Wojciehowicz/Wojo, Yemana and his coffee, Dietrich, etc.)! The 12th Precinct! The squad room! The finest of New York's finest! The show even looks like I imagine my topic looks, if that makes any sense, and just hearing the opening theme brings that all to life for me.

Alas, there is no poll to pick my dissertation theme, but I'll seriously think about bringing a bass to my defense.

[Update: The official theme song of the Clinton campaign has been chosen: Celine Dion's "You and I." No comment.]

"Silence was never written down"...

...goes the old Italian proverb. Playing back my interviews, I realize that there are a lot of spots without any sound. Could it be that my recorder was periodically failing? Nope. The silence indicates things that were said with hand gestures, rather than words.

To illustrate my point, here's a random sample from the middle of one interview:

Me: So was he upset?
Interviewee: [Frowns and makes the cosi cosi gesture then shrugs]
Me: [Makes the capisco gesture] Would he have been happier if you had completely assimilated? Became a medigan?
Interviewee: [Laughs as we both "fare la corna" to ward off the malocchio] No, I don't think so.

The dilemna is trying to capture the "true" meaning of this exchange. Putting it all into words, the tone is a little different:

Me: So was he upset?
Interviewee: [Sure, he was a little upset sometimes; other times it didn't bother him. But what could I do about it? You know how it is, how they can be...]
Me: [ You so don't have to tell me!] Would he have been happier if you had completely assimilated? Became a medigan?
Interviewee: [O god forbid! How could you even say that?! What a terrible thing that would have been!] No, I don't think so.

I think I have hit upon the major difficulty that Italian Americans may encounter when simply making an audio recording of their interviews with other Italian Americans. Unless I switch to video, I guess I'm going to lose about half of all of my interviews. [Eh. What are going to do?]

As American as...

Spent the weekend prepping for my first set of "oral history" interviews, which I will conduct based out of a snazzy New Haven hotel room. For me, this means agonizing over how I am going to sound on tape. This seems petty, I know; I should be worrying about what questions I am going to ask, how to draw information out of people or making sure I have my facts straight. Bah! That's kids' stuff compared to having to sit through the sound of yourself while transcribing.

Seeking inspiration, I turned to Terry Gross and Fresh Air. She doesn't seem to have a problem with her voice hitting millions five days a week. Nor does she have any problem getting information from people. Anyway, while searching the archives, I came across a 2000 interview with David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos.

In this interview, Gross asked Chase about his response to Italian-American organizations that have protested against the show's perpetuation of the depiction of Italian Americans as Mafiosi. Chase responded (after describing his inability to disassociate the idea of Italian anti-defamation from Joe Colombo):

But I don't know what is with these people why they never stop and say to themselves, just possibly let this thought into your head: What am I missing here? What is it that so many of my fellow Americans see here? And see in a very deep, seemingly profound and endless way. Is it possible that I am overlooking something that a lot of even my fellow Italian Americans like? And for whatever reason, and I don't understand this, the Italian-American gangster story has become a national myth. And why people persist in these kind of parochial concerns in the face of that, I sometimes want to ask them, 'Are you an Italian American or are you an American?' Because this is an American story.

So, is Chase right? Is the Mafia image American or Italian? Every Italian American "defending" their neighborhood, from Chicago's Little Hell in the 1940s to Bensonhurst in 1989, has claimed something along the lines, "We're just doing what all Americans do." Yet, the press has depicted them, not as average Americans, but as Italians acting in the image of the Mafia. If Chase is right, maybe both are correct: For Italian Americans, acting in the Mafia image is simply acting American.

In this light, Al "Kid Blast" Gallo's defense of "we only done what any red-blooded American boys would do" sounds a bit more credible.

A thought on writing: Fridays with Joe

"We'd like to know how close you've got your ear to the ground. There's a gang of bunks in town. They're working hard," says Jack Webb, with the famous staccato Joe Friday delivery.

Nobody tells it like Jack. If Joe Friday talked any other way, the lines would lose their camp credibility. Striking the right tone when writing is so important. I want my topics to sound as fun as I think they are, but I worry that my tone is too flippant.

The less "serious" a topic is, the more "serious" the writing style should be? Or is that how those horridly pretentious bits of cultural history are created? I think so. The best way to admit that you realize the potential criticisms of the validity of your topic is to address it tongue planted firmly in cheek. The more serious you sound about things like tomato sauce ads or The Wizard of Oz as lesbian fantasy, the less credible or believable you are. If you write as if there is an inside joke between you and your reader, there will be an inside joke and a connection with that reader.

Now, if only there were such a thing as "just the facts", we'd be all set.

“Here the skeptic finds chaos and the believer further evidence that the hand that made us is divine.” --Robert Moses

For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to start the day with a long walk. And, even though the train to Penn was running two hours (two hours!) late, I chose my route carefully, wanting to swing by ABC Home, Madison Square Park, Washington Square, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory building, and so forth and so on, wending my way ultimately to the Surrogate Court building where my papers were waiting.

I will not wax sentimental about the beautiful coffee mug I have from ABC Home, nor will I remark upon the soothing nature of the parks. Instead, I'll borrow from Rebecca Read Shanor theme [The City That Never Was] and take this opportunity to mention what isn't there-- for example, the Lower Manhattan Expressway or Lomex, the six-lane elevated highway that Robert Moses proposed run the length of Canal Street to connect the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges.

Noooo, that wouldn't have changed the Village and SoHo too, too much. As Jane Jacobs' wrote, expressways like this "eviscerate" cities: "This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities." Luckily, Rocky put the final kibosh on the plan in 1971.

One of the streets that would have fallen victim to Moses' expressway is Mercer Street, one of my favorites. It is quiet and cobbled, and always feels as empty as a Sunday morning. Many of the buildings are former small factories with beautiful cast iron fronts. Walking along there is very soothing and sorta time-warpy; yet, it is difficult to picture it either as a street of working factories or in the Fun City years, crowded with trash, etc. Therefore, I am not sure exactly to where or when one is warped back to, but there is a definitely a sense of removal from both the present and the "true" past.

This feeling is intensified as you look down Mercer towards Canal. Looking up, you should see the Twin Towers and, again, you are hit with the feeling that time, to borrow from Shakespeare, is out of joint. Yet, if Moses had had his way, it is the street that would be missing. Maybe that is why things are not where they belong on Mercer Street and, right down to the buildings' facades, they are not what they seem. Perhaps this isn't really New York after all.

Grab your kroj and let's go

My mom, a proud Czech-American, clipped this article for me from today's American Profiles magazine (an insert in the local Sunday paper). What, you may well ask, does a kolache festival in Nebraska have to do with Italian Americans in Fun City? Well, not much really, except that it illustrates the resurgence of celebrations of ethnicity prior to the late 1960s:

The town’s Czech Federation began the celebration honoring Czech food and community spirit in 1939. It was held intermittently until the 1950s, when it became an annual event hosted by the Verdigre Improvement Club with the help of local organizations, youth groups and churches.

Seems pretty odd that a bunch of Americans in the middle of America would wake up one morning in the decade of super-Americanness and just say, "Hey, we need to remind people we're Czech and celebrate our desserts!" I'm guessing that their motivation was part economic and part cultural, which begs the question why? What is the bigger meaning of this not-so-much-isolated-as-ignored-1950s phenomenon of ethnic return?

It is also interesting that this particular festival was originally run by an ethnic fraternal organization; yet, its post-war sponsor is the very generic, very typical 1950s community group. Did ethnicity become synonymous with community identity?

Sigh. I'll stop. If I continue in this vein, I'll be right back to my criticism of Elaine Tyler May, who, judging by Homeward Bound, never ate anything more ethnic than Wonder Bread.

“Mary, we crown you,” she sang softly

Margaret Ruta, 84, crowns the statue of Mary Help of Christians (Maria Ausiliatrice) at the last clebration of her Feast Day in the East Village. Parishioners at the church, an Italian national parish, celebrated their last Mass today. The 109 year old church was one of 21 closed by the Archdiocese of New York this year.

Keep your eye on the pallino

Out of the five boroughs, Queens, not surprisingly, has the most public bocce courts. One of them is located in Corona at William Moore Park. Despite the area's largely Hispanic population the locals refer to it as "Spaghetti Park" since the area surrounding the park retains such a strong Italian identity.

How does an area remain "Italian" even as the population shifts? Well, in this case, the bocce court helps, but many of the businesses surrounding the park appear Italian-- for example, not only are there multiple restaurants displaying the Italian flag, but this is also the home to the Lemon Ice King of Corona, where you can get the best Italian ice in the City. So, more than the reality of population composition, it is the presence of recognizable ethnic identifiers that, as Philpott shows, leads a neighborhood to be defined as an ethnic enclave.

From there, I made my way to another of Queens' bocce courts. This one is at Astoria Park, in the shadow of the Hell Gate Bridge. this morning, I found six old men playing a game that was sedate in comparison to the roiling water under the bridge. It is easy to understand why the river at this spot got the reputation it did, but the quiet Italians were definitely defying stereotypes.

Getting his button

Ok, I admit it. I took a couple of days off. I'm calling it a post-semester mini-vacanza.

Having momentarily gone astray, I was nudged back on track by this 2005 headline from the Post: "WI$EBUY! Fakefella tried $1M bribe to be Mafia made man." Ooh! An excuse to write about gender! I felt better immediately, since I rarely get a chance to do so anymore.

The headline seems to indicate that the Mafia is, at least, financially solvent and that they are upholding their own code of ethics. You can't be made with money, can you?

This idea raises an interesting question about masculinity. You are a "made man" after you "make your bones" by whacking someone. The killing does not bring you into manhood (not a traditional rite of passage), but brings you into a different type of manhood. There is no implication that prior to being made, you are not a man.

How many of these rites of passage within manhood exist? Probably more than we think, meaning that the things men do are not continual rites of passage into manhood, but through manhood. But, bringing them ultimately where? Is there a finite level of manhood or masculinity? Can it be achieved or even identified? Hmm.

That old joke

"Do you know why New Yorkers are so depressed?"
"No. Why?"
"Because the light at the end of the tunnel is New Jersey."

This is not an anti-Jersey rant. Really, I have no strong feelings about the state either way and I haven't spent enough time there to form an opinion. Having said that, I did spend a good deal of time yesterday in and around Newark Liberty Airport. The airport itself is lovely- efficient, well-organized with nice shops and waiting areas- a traveler's dream. The short term parking was even cheap and close to the terminals.

My gripe is not with the airport or even Jersey; it is with whomever laid out the escape route from Newark. Having gotten there with little problem (admittedly, some may consider reading directions while sailing down the Garden State Parkway at 80 miles an hour to be a problem), heading home, I found myself inexplicably poised on the brink of crossing the GW with little idea of how I got there. Did I miss the signs? Did I confuse the Turnpike and the Parkway? Should I have been better prepared? Somehow I think it is a combination of all three.

Yet, in the case of Newark, I have to go south to go west to go north because, if I go north, I must go east? A lot of highways seem to be laid out with a Robert Moses-like disregard for common sense and the basic considerations of neighborhood, town or just plain humanity. I am not unique in making this statement, but I feel it bears repeating.

Of course, it was Mayor Vincent "Impy" Impelitteri, a Connecticut native (via Sicily), who gave Moses a blank check to rip down, crossover and cross out a lot of NY's neighborhood core (for fun, mention the Expressway to anyone who grew up in the Bronx in the '50s or'60s and see how they react). Maybe all this really points to is the triumph of immigrant pragmatism over sentiment. Odd, since both are considered core "Old World", "ethnic" values.

Tabloid history

Spent another day with microfilm, the New York Daily News and the New York Post from the first few months of 1969. Today, both papers are considered to border(?) on tabloid, but I think a distinction must be made. At least in the late '60s, the Daily News is far more sensational, in both headlines and reporting style than the Post. If anything, the Post is far stodgier and conservative (regardless of the editorial endorsement of Herman Badillo Sr. in the mayoral primary)-- sensational and tabloid-esque in a, "Hrumph, look what those kids are doing now" sort of way. Or maybe it was, as one of my committee members said, "sensibly liberal"? I think the best description would be old-school, New Deal Democratic, whereas the Daily News was inching more and more to the right every day.

Regardless of political slant, they both, unlike, say, the Times, capture the reasons why Fun City wasn't very much fun. Murders, rapes, school riots (high school, universities), garbage strikes and a fabulously ridiculous mayoral race set the city up to spiral out of control in the next decade. Even the Yankees and the Mob were in trouble. That never means anything good.

All this chaos, coupled with the breakdown of these two NY institutions, made me think of some dialogue from The Sopranos:

Uncle Junior: What happened to the '50s? Even rival families were able to settle their differences amicably.

Tony: Yeah, I remember that picture of Albert Anastasia lying there all amicable on the barbershop floor.

This explains why we look back nostaligically to the City in the 1960s, as in, "Gee, the murder rate in 2005 was at its lowest level since..." I guess we always do remember better than it was, even when confronted with evidence that proves otherwise. Of course, if you only read the Daily News, you'd wonder how anyone managed to avoid being shot, stabbed, choked, and/or chased.