The Shook-Up Generation
Of all the pains that plague a modern city, none is more corrosive than juvenile delinquency, and the one city in the U.S. that has a giant's share of pain is New York. There, in the weltering tenements and public-housing complexes that pimple district upon district of the city's 299 sq. mi., roam the "bopping clubs," the teen-age street-fighting gangs. They call themselves Centurians, Demons, Villains, Stonekillers and Sand Street Angels, organize themselves with the precision of military combat teams, with an officer hierarchy . Their code of ethics is a distorted boy's-eye view of the underworld, laced with real touches of bravado and evil that are gleaned from television and the movies—and from relatives who have firsthand experience. They prowl the dark streets, kill and maim one another, dabble in narcotics, drink themselves into a rage with cheap wine called "sneaky pete."
In Search of Defense. Last week the New York Times took a long, authoritative look at the city around it, reported its findings in a seven-part analysis of the street-gang cancer and the damage that it produces. The series, written by Harrison E. Salisbury, for five years the Times's Moscow correspondent, dramatized by understatement the grim, everyday facts of warfare on the streets of the big city.
Typical of the 75 to 100 gangs in the city are the Cobras, half of whose 40 to 50 members live in a Brooklyn housing project. All but a few of them are Negro; there are separate Puerto Rican gangs, and thoroughly integrated ones. The members are, in their own language, all "shook up" and cling together for defense against others as well as for the comradeship they can find nowhere else. They range in age from eleven to 20, occupy themselves chiefly with the protection of their own "turf" . Trespassing on one gang's turf by another gang—or the stealing of another's property or girl, even an insult—may bring on councils of war, choice of a battleground, scouting forays. Finally comes the "rumble," a bloody combat with knives, machetes, guns, rugged garrison belts and—a favorite weapon —skin-slashing automobile-radio aerials stolen from any handy car.
Heart Above All. Most gang members cannot envision a time when there will be no warfare. The only way to stop it, says one leader, would be "for you to be free to go anywhere in the city and nobody would touch you." Throughout the flock of boys he interviewed, Reporter Salisbury found the same theme: hatred for the life they lead, bitter frustration at being unable to cope with it. In Salisbury's gallery:
THE CHIMP, 18, nephew of a "famous Brooklyn gangster," belongs to a gang that is largely Italian and Irish, was expelled from parochial school for bad conduct, was arrested once for larceny, will probably gravitate to the Brooklyn docks where, as he well knows, bigtime crime is rampant. "Sometimes guys come to work on the docks," he says. "They hope to make money, save it and get away and go into business. But they never make it. How can they? Where else can you earn that kind of dough?"
PEPITO, 14, valued in his gang for "heart" , lives with his grandmother, who is on relief. He is on probation for shoplifting, smokes marijuana cigarettes. His world, beyond his gang's turf: comic books, gunplay movies.
CHOCOLATE, 16, comes from a poor home, is—like many gang boys—illiterate, avoids the subway because he cannot read the station names, is usually half-drunk, has tremendous heart.
SEVEN UP, 16, is an orphan from South Carolina, lives, at the moment, with an elderly aunt who is on relief. Essentially illiterate, he is looked after by no one, says Salisbury, "and no one except his fellow gang members cares for him."
SMOKEY, 17, like most leaders of gangs, is alert, intelligent. "People don't understand," he says. "I would much rather not bop. It isn't any fun. You don't know what will happen. You may be killed. Or you may kill someone. Would you think it funny if I said that my real ambition was to become a policeman?"
Sex & Slums. Heart is a gang member's most valued attribute, says Reporter Salisbury, and the coward who "punks out" is likely to be punished by his own gang; the "cheesy," or traitorous, may well be killed. Some gangs sport ladies' auxiliaries, called "debs," who not only supply sexual favors but carry their gangs' weapons as well. In times of peace, the gangs and their debs frequent neighborhood community centers and candy stores. Their favorite pasa slow-tempo, pelvis-to-pelvis dance called "the fish."
Surprisingly, 75% of New York's juvenile delinquency is attributable to 20,000 so-called "multiproblem" families. Of these, 2,000 families live in the city's 100,000-family, low-rent housing projects. Brooklyn's famed Fort Greene Houses, one of the world's biggest housing projects is a $20 million slum with a third of its families on relief. At Fort Greene some residents prefer to use the stairs rather than face the "stench of stale urine that pervades the elevators." "Nowhere this side of Moscow," writes Salisbury, "are you likely to find public housing so closely duplicating the squalor it was designed to supplant." A heavy portion of the 300,000 Puerto Ricans and many of the 300,000 Negroes who have arrived in the city in the past seven years have settled in such projects and in older tenement slums.
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