When I was growing up in Chappaqua, a suburb north of New York City, in the 1970s, my parents would take my five sisters and me to visit our Uncle Leo and Aunt Ruth. A bachelor for a good part of his younger life, Leo married Ruth sometime after the war, and they ultimately settled in Co-Op City in the Bronx. I vividly remember the drive there, the big dip on the Bronx River Parkway that made my stomach leap into my mouth, and then the view of Co-Op City from afar, a towering Oz of white buildings that stood out from the surrounding marshes and waterways of the Bronx. I also remember the parquet floors of their apartment, though […]

If you haven’t been following the situation in New York City since Saturday, things are getting tense. On Saturday, a gunman shot and killed two police officers at close range in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The murders come on the heels of weeks of protest in New York (and elsewhere) against the rampant lawlessness and brutality of the police. Instantly, the police and their defenders moved into high gear, blaming the murders on the protesters; NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio, who had been gesturing toward the need for police reform; and US Attorney General Eric Holder. Many have called for the mayor’s resignation. The police union and its head, Patrick Lynch, were the most forthright: “There is blood […]