The action with the most important long-term consequence, however, was the Young Lords’ successful fight against lead poisoning. They did their own testing and showed that over 80 percent of residents in East Harlem were suffering from high levels of lead. As a result legislation was passed banning lead-based paint and forcing landlords to remove existing paint.
Organizing in Mott Haven, South Bronx
In 1970 the Young Lords launched a major offensive in Mott Haven. They focused their effort on Lincoln Hospital, the worst hospital in the city. The hospital had an active group of workers and radical doctors who had graduated from medical school in 1969 and 1970. “The doctors supported us,” Armando Perez (from RGS, now active in planning the Lincoln takeover) told me. “We met at an apartment at midnight in the Upper West Side, for a surprise party. When everyone arrived we said, ‘surprise, we’re taking over Lincoln hospital.’” They drove a truck up the ramp to the emergency room. “We heard the guards say, you can’t do it. Willie [a member of the group] went to the back of the truck, opened it up, and we occupied the building…. It was a public relations action—we occupied it for a day to demand that they raise the minimum wage of health care workers, worker control, and a new building.”
Vincente “Panama” Alba, director of the Coalition against Police Brutality, learned his activist skills with the Young Lords. He told me in 1993, in the first of many conversations, “We adopted the most militant approach—direct confrontation. We needed health care, so we took over a hospital. We worked according to a four-year plan. In four years we’ll be free, in jail, or dead. We built the hospital. The older workers say, ‘this hospital was built by the Young Lords.’” Later they invited everyone who was into drugs to eat free in the hospital cafeteria, initiating a long-term commitment to “harm reduction” (treating drug abuse as a health issue, focusing on reducing the harm associated with it). They enlisted the help of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church, the only church receptive to their demands, in clothing drives, liberation schools, welfare rights, and tenant organizations. Some Young Lords began to do prisoner support, supporting in particular the prisoners in Attica during and following the uprising. Others moved to Puerto Rico and began to do work promoting independence there.
Police and FBI agents infiltrated the Young Lords as part of their Counter Intelligence Program, known more commonly by its acronym, COINTEL. Then terrorist cells began to emerge. “It was so depressing,” Alba noted. “When the Young Lords arose in 1969–70, a lot of other things were happening,” Armando observed. “There were sharp racial tensions, and it was the middle of the Vietnam War…. The country was in an upheaval with Americans trying to figure out ‘is this worth it?’ It was a different time. People felt you had to do something. There was a sense of life and death that you don’t have now. The methods of social control were different.”
The Decline of Black and Puerto Rican Power
By the 1970s the Panthers, the Young Lords, and other organizations were in disarray. Personal disputes and ideological divisions, poor strategic choices, and the COINTEL infiltration all did damage. Not all 1970s radicals dedicated their lives to improving their communities. Some used their organizing skills to amass personal wealth and power. In Williamsburg, Luis Olmedo used his position as chair of Los Sures to run for council in 1973. “Olmedo was a nationalist,” noted local activist Saul Nieves (1996), and as such “able to take advantage. The nationalists supported anyone who supported independence. When he ran for council in 1973, he swept.” He won by large margins until he was indicted for corruption. Meanwhile the neighborhood fell into disrepair.
By 1978 both Schaefer Brewing Company and Rheingold Brewing Company had abandoned the city. Unemployment in Williamsburg reached 12.1 percent, up from 5.8 percent in 1970. The loss of jobs and the deterioration of housing left the community crumbling and threatened by street gangs, drugs, and arson. Street gangs, which had provided an alternative status and identity for young people since the 1950s, gradually became involved in drug trafficking. As Cuso, the local activist and former gang member, told me in 1994, “In the 1950s the gangs were huge…. When they flooded the neighborhood with drugs all the gang members became drug addicts. The presidents of the gangs became drug dealers.” Cuso, Maldonado, and other activists became addicted to heroin. Many later contracted H.I.V. “Poverty is the major reason for drug abuse,” Maldonado said. “You have to offer people something—something to aim for. Drugs are the major economic resource in this neighborhood. There are kids out here with big bankrolls, fancy cars. It is attractive. When I grew up there was a lot of peer pressure—in the 1960s it was what was happening. A lot of kids in this neighborhood got involved—winded up using drugs, getting addicted.”
In Mott Haven, Ramon Velez used his seat on the city council to win millions of dollars in federal antipoverty monies for his own community organizations. After he came under major city and state investigations in 1977, he successfully maneuvered to get his cohorts on the board of directors of the new Lincoln Hospital. He opened a multiservice center that received large city contracts and subcontracted services from other service agencies and businesses connected to the machine, allowing him and his cronies to “load their pocketbooks and enrich their bank accounts,” claimed one local activist. “As the machine grew,” noted another, “it undermined real movements from coming out in the Bronx.”
By 1976 Mott Haven was one of the poorest congressional districts in the United States. City policy encouraged opportunistic arson. “The lag between when the landlord stopped paying taxes, providing services, and collecting rent and when the city acquired, demolished, and finally wiped the structure from its books varied from years to overnight. At each stage of the process landlords, tenants, and squatters could and often did burn their buildings.”89 Poverty, joblessness, and a desolate landscape led to desperation and spiraling crime rates, which were then blamed on and generalized to all black and Puerto Rican residents in the popular press and imagination.90 As Evelyn Gonzalez pointedly notes, “Without the social constraints and community sanctions engendered by such networks [community ties] delinquency, alcoholism, drug abuse and violent behavior increased…. Once stability and safety were gone, the neighborhoods of Mott Haven, Melrose, Morrisania-Claremont, and Hunts Point-Croton Park East disappeared and the blighted area of the South Bronx grew…. Without neighborhoods, the older stock of the South Bronx disappeared.”91
Harry DeRienzo, founder of Banana Kelly and later Consumer Farmer, two grassroots housing organizations active in the 1980s and 1990s, recalled, “People were [literally] burned out. Fires affected especially community boards 2 and 3. The area lost about 70 percent of its population. Everyone who could leave did.” Another neighborhood activist bitterly observed, “We had politicians parceling out power…. Tracts of land in the community were deliberately allowed to fall apart, to pave the way for further development” and personal gain.
In the Lower East Side “the combination of private capital flight and the absence of government response made portions [of the neighborhood] … virtually uninhabitable. Blocks dotted with decrepit or abandoned buildings provided havens for drug users or sellers, with shooting galleries and stash houses.”92 “Social disorganization, violence and ethnic strife marked the East Village…. runaways slept in abandoned buildings, in doorways, in phone booths, or on rooftops, supporting themselves through begging, street selling, dope dealing, petty thievery and prostitution.”93 The Lower East Side “surpassed even Harlem as a retail drug market … as its proximity to transportation routes and landscapes of devastation stimulate ever larger numbers of drug users and traders.”94 Alphabet City, “an area approximately fifty square blocks located near the major tunnels and bridges into Manhattan[,] was in the words of the police, ‘the retail drug capital of the world.’”95
The 1977 Blackout Riots
The 1977 blackout riots accelerated this trend. Unlike with the riots of the 1960s, the triggering incident was not