pogo88 Carter’s Visit to the Blighted Bronx Blazed a Trail
Accompanied by six motorcycle escorts and a convoy of police cars, a cream-colored limousine maneuvered past rubble-strewn lots and burned-out buildings before stopping, amid bricks bulldozed into piles as much as eight feet high, to let out an important passenger.
On Oct. 5, 1977, in a trip that was as symbolic as it was sudden, President Jimmy Carter visited the South Bronx to reinforce his commitment to cities and, more specifically, to New York.
Amid shouts of “Give us money!” and “We want jobs!” Mr. Carter surveyed the desolate landscape on Charlotte Street, The New York Times reported. It was a remarkable sight: a sitting president paying a personal visit to a neighborhood gutted by disinvestment, redlining, the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway and the collusion of arsonists and absentee landlords eager for insurance payments.
Only two years earlier, his predecessor, Gerald R. Ford, had denied federal assistance that would have spared New York from bankruptcy, prompting The Daily News to blare (imprecisely) on its front page, “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” Mr. Ford’s decision damaged his re-election bid, and Mr. Carter, nominated by the Democrats in New York, narrowly carried the state in the 1976 election.
slots bonusNot even nine months after taking office, Mr. Carter rewarded the state that had powered his presidential triumph, deviating from business at the United Nations to tour the South Bronx and draw attention to some of America’s worst urban blight.
Mr. Gray served three terms as a Democratic mayor, up through 2005. Barack Obama won the area in the 2008 presidential election, and Democrats cornered a vast majority of the county’s legislative seats. Jon Tester, the Democrat who has long represented the state in the U.S. Senate and farms in the same northern plains region, holds his election-night celebrations in Great Falls.
“It was a very sobering trip for me to see the devastation that has taken place in the South Bronx in the last five years,” Mr. Carter said after his trip. “But I’m encouraged in some ways by the strong effort of tenant groups to rebuild. I’m impressed by the spirit of hope and determination by the people to save what they have. I think they still have to know we care.”
Moved by the experience, Mr. Carter promised to help rebuild the area. He vowed to supply more jobs. But despite Mr. Carter’s $1.5 billion pledge, little improved, or changed. In 1997, Edward I. Koch, the former mayor, recalled to the The Times that he had been told by one of Mr. Carter’s aides, Jack Watson, that he had “some very bad news” for him.
“The president cannot keep his commitment to you on the billion,” Mr. Koch said Mr. Watson told him. “He doesn’t have it to give.”
Mr. Carter had at least begun a tradition: The South Bronx would become a regular stop for presidents and presidential candidates. In 1980, Mr. Reagan, who was running against Mr. Carter, visited a vacant lot on Charlotte Street and denounced the president for failing to solve urban blight. Four years later, Jesse Jackson spent a night in the South Bronx during the Democratic primaries to draw attention to the plight of the urban poor.
By 1997, when President Bill Clinton went, The Times reported that “he hailed the South Bronx as a model for renewing inner-city areaspogo88, a once-unthinkable statement.”