Walk on By

In which our man in Washington contemplates campaign finances, holy cows, and raw sewage.

Michael W. Lynch from the June 2000 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Do you feel bad about your leather goods? If so, do what Chrissie did and walk into a Gap and return your jacket, assuming you purchased it there. Try it even if you didn't. I followed Chrissie into the Gap and can assure you that there are no hard feelings over returns. She'd already returned cow coats in Chicago, Vancouver, Toronto, and Boston and she'd always found the clerks accommodating.

She even recommends the store, confessing that it's the source of all her husband's T-shirts. "I do wish they would change their policy," mused Chrissie, who would be thrown in jail a few days later for pulling a similar stunt in Rudy Giuliani's New York. "I'm running out of places to get my cool fashions."

Date: 3/23/2000, 6:11:59 p.m.
From: [e-mail]
Subj: A Message from the Mayor

"Sounds pretty grim," responded New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. to a constituent who said she had raw sewage and rats in the basement of her house. Other than that, though, said the resident, her family absolutely loves New Haven.

If national pols make you want to puke, you ought to try stomaching the locals. (I was in town because I live here part of the month, the lovely wife having snagged a faculty post at Yale, a local college often confused with a lock company.) Mayor DeStefano was speaking at the school this afternoon.

"People focus on New Haven when we talk about New Haven," he explained as he fired up his PowerPoint slides. He wanted to "talk about New Haven because that says a lot about New Haven." But he also wanted to talk about New Haven by focusing on the suburbs--which happen to be whiter, less densely populated, and more likely to be home to people with jobs. "If we were like other American cities we'd be large," he said, a graphic of New Haven compared to Scottsdale, Arizona, on the projection screen. "Jobs and taxes are a problem for us." Like they aren't problems for the rest of us.

He spoke of the city like it's his, which perhaps it is, at least the part that Yale doesn't own: "I got 50,000 units of housing, 20,000 single-family housing." He then rattled off a bunch of statistics, sort of a list of excuses. Fifty-seven percent of New Haven's kids qualify for free lunch; one-third of housing units are directly subsidized by government; 27 percent of kids made the mistake of choosing parents who don't speak English. He confused sociologist William Julius Wilson with basketball's Dr. J, referencing "William Julius Erving's When Work Disappears."

Just like the family with rats and sewage in the basement, I actually like New Haven, especially after spending some time in Camden, New Jersey (see "Eminent Domain & the GOP National Convention," page 36). New Haven has three good restaurants and a cigar shop where they actually let you smoke.

So I asked hizzoner to say something positive about the town and to tell me why I should buy a house there instead of in the suburbs. His response: I'd know my neighbors, I could walk to the grocery store and to my children's schools, and I would have a greater sense of community. It all sounded pretty good to me. I only wondered why he hadn't put any of that on a PowerPoint slide.