Optimists see opportunity where pessimists see danger.
In January 1986, my wife Lynn and I stood on opposite sides of this divide. I believed our life in Manhattan was finally coming together. She saw only decay and threats.
Lynn was pessimistic about our future in New York. She was also a narcissist who didn’t care that I had a programming job with a promising future. The company gave me my own project. There were no emergencies. The work was steady and fulfilling. That company is still in business today.
But Lynn had decided. We were leaving.
Manhattan in Decline
To be fair to Lynn, Manhattan in 1985 was a shadow of its former greatness. Budget cuts and corruption wrecked city services. There was never any direct evidence against Mayor Koch. But investigators caught his associates in scandal after scandal.
Koch once said, "New York has marvelously rich street life, and mugging is just one piece of this rich urban tapestry." Crime rose every year during his three terms in office.
Lynn blamed much of the chaos on judges who released insane people instead of sending them to places like Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. This was part of "deinstitutionalization." The idea was humane in theory. Close the brutal state hospitals. Treat people in community settings.
But the funding vanished into political pockets. Thousands of dangerous people ended up on the streets.
Lynn recognized some of these lost souls from an emergency room job. One day, we were waiting for a downtown subway train when Lynn pointed to a woman on the uptown platform. The woman was digging through a garbage can with intense focus.
"I gave her an anti-psychotic injection last year," Lynn said. "I remember her because she needed restraints. The injection worked for thirty days. She was completely different. Coherent. Clean. But the program got cut."
Real estate developers, helped by politicians, put more insane people on the street. Manhattan had many "Single Room Occupancy" hotels for poor people. I briefly lived in one of these hotels.
But someone offered financial incentives to real estate developers and landlords. They replaced single room occupancy hotels with luxury apartments. The Upper West Side was deeply affected.
I enjoyed going out on Sunday morning to get a newspaper and bagels for Lynn. Sometimes I walked to Murray’s Sturgeon Shop for the thinnest sliced lox in the world. The slicer didn’t need plastic gloves. He sometimes offered you a taste of transparent lox balanced on his long carving knife.
I felt like a modern version of the alpha male hunter, returning from a hunt with delectable treats for my sweetheart.
But then my mood would be shattered. At least a dozen people slept on the sidewalk outside the Alexandria Hotel on West 103rd Street. The hotel was filled to capacity.
The sight was sadder during winter when people huddled under awnings during rainstorms. I would turn my head to see luxury high-rise apartments rising on the east side of Broadway. Very few people could afford those exclusive residences.
The new building was another warning to homeless people that real estate tycoons wanted them to leave Manhattan. Where should the homeless go? They had no destination. Nobody wanted them.
As we watched the woman sift through trash, Lynn’s voice turned grim. "She’ll start screaming soon. We can’t raise a child here."
The Daily Assault
Lynn wasn’t wrong about the dangers. We heard occasional female crime victims scream, "He stole my purse!" on West 103rd Street. Right outside our windows.
The thieves targeted that block because it had a pedestrian entrance to Riverside Park. They could disappear into the woods.
We used to love walking down Broadway from 103rd Street to Zabar’s. The gourmet grocery was busy and vibrant. But after Ella was born, psychopathic vagrants started approaching her stroller during these walks. Their behavior terrified us.
Every morning, the same vagrant stationed himself at the subway entrance on 96th Street and Broadway. He practiced aggressive panhandling. It was his regular job. He stood there every single day for over a year.
The final financial blow came from Ella’s daycare center. Our monthly bill was $700. Then they handed us an $875 charge. "This month has five weeks," they explained with straight faces.
The final physical blow ended my bicycle rides. I loved riding my lightweight Atala ten-speed east on 100th Street to the Central Park entrance. I had bought that bike for $225 the day before prices doubled from some new tariff or luxury tax.
But one day, criminals stretched a heavy cable across the road. They had stolen it from a telephone or utility project. People were screaming. Runners were being attacked. Bicycles were being seized.
I turned around and escaped the chaos. But I never rode in Central Park again.
The Compromise That Never Came
I didn’t want to move to the Deep South. But living in a one-bedroom apartment with Ella was getting impossible. Her crib crowded our bedroom. We needed more space.
A two-bedroom condo in our neighborhood cost about $125,000. I had a better idea. "What about Tarrytown?" I suggested. "Let’s buy a two or three-bedroom house for the same money."
We visited Tarrytown and looked at one house. I fell in love with the place. It was only a 26-minute train ride to Grand Central Station. Crime was negligible.
The roads were perfect for bicycle riding. Shopping was a dream compared to Manhattan. There were no panhandlers lurking at every corner.
The stores were clean. The schools were decent and daycare was cheaper. Everything about Tarrytown made sense.
But Lynn dismissed it with a wave of her hand. "If I’m going to stay in New York, I want to walk to work and Zabar’s."
"But you don’t want to raise Ella in Manhattan," I pointed out.
"That’s right," she said. "We’re leaving."
The Final Insults
Even Lynn’s status as a doctor couldn’t protect us from the city’s decay. She got terrific parking privileges from her "MD" license plates and an "emergency medical" card on her dashboard. She parked at hospitals and even in front of fire hydrants.
But thieves broke into her brand new car about ten times. They stole the radio many times until a grinning mechanic finally said, "Nobody will ever steal this radio again."
The mechanic was correct. The last thief could not remove the radio. They left a crowbar jammed in the cassette slot after destroying the radio.
After that, insurance and Lynn stopped replacing the radio.
But the break-ins continued. Insurance kept replacing the shattered glass. Thieves smashed windows to ransack the car.
After the theft of her emergency medical card, Lynn started carrying it with her. She complained that the burden of carrying the card was another reason to leave Manhattan.
Lynn tried one last solution. She paid $100 to park the car safely for one month at a garage on West 100th Street. The garage was between Columbus Avenue and Amsterdam Avenue.
But it was a long walk to reach the car. And if you came home at night, walking back wasn’t safe either.
So, Lynn sold the car.
After that, we rented cars a few times for weekend escapes from Manhattan. Lynn’s favorite destination was the Mountain Manor Inn in Marshalls Creek, Pennsylvania. We played golf on par-3 courses while a babysitter watched Ella.
Lynn had an expensive set of golf clubs in a beautiful bag. I bought my clubs and bag at a pawn shop on lower Third Avenue. I didn’t need a full set to play par-3.
Mountain Manor was a friendly place. “Eddie at the Organ” entertained golfers during happy hour. Mixed drinks cost only 75 cents.
The hotel had no social director or planned activities. Happy hour was the main event. The bar and day care closed at 6:30 PM. Tired children joined their cheerful parents for dinner and sleep. Night owls could buy a bottle of vodka or scotch anytime at the front desk.
Those weekends were some of our happiest times.
Sadly, an arsonist destroyed Mountain Manor in 2019. Nobody rebuilt it because today’s couples want more excitement than a hole in one on a par-3 course or singing along with Eddie at the Organ. Simple pleasures don’t satisfy modern couples. A lovely afternoon together while their child plays with other children under the supervision of a retired teacher is not enough.
The Lure of the Deep South
I didn’t want to leave, but the Deep South was attractive for reasons other than Lynn’s potential earnings.
An ophthalmologist and an orthopedist persuaded a small hospital to offer more surgeries. The eye surgeon made an ambitious proposal. He would buy a van and hire a recruiter to find cataract patients in nursing homes. In exchange, he wanted to use the hospital’s unused operating room.
The orthopedic surgeon heard about this plan and made his own offer. He offered to open an office across the road from the hospital. This arrangement appealed to him because he had just built a custom house near the hospital. He was tired of commuting to other locations for work.
The hospital administrators liked both proposals. They agreed to hire new staff for the operating room and the recovery room. But they faced one critical problem. They needed an anesthesiologist to make the surgeries possible.
The hospital hired a recruiter to find someone qualified. But the remote location created challenges. The area’s negative reputation for racism made the search even harder.
So when Lynn expressed interest, they were eager to hire her. She needed a medical license and had to pass a few personal interviews. But she did not need a recommendation or reference from her Manhattan program. The hospital’s desperation helped her.
Meanwhile, the chief of anesthesiology at Lynn’s Manhattan residency program wanted her to stay and work for him. When Lynn refused his offer, he withheld his recommendation out of spite.
Lynn had no professional experience or references. But this little hospital ignored liabilities and focused on profit. They wanted Lynn to revive their vacant operating room and encourage more surgeons to use it.
So we flew down to this little town on a Friday. The hospital had reserved a room for us at the only hotel. The hotel featured a special "all you can eat buffet" in its restaurant. On Friday nights, they offered crab legs. These were huge crab legs.
Obese men wearing t-shirts and overalls lined up for the seafood feast. We got a table near the line to watch the joyous gluttons return for seconds and thirds.
People behaved well and actually ate what they took. But the huge piles of empty crab leg shells on some tables were frightening.
Lynn watched the spectacle and said, "We needed to see something different."
The following day, Ella and I lounged by the hotel pool while Lynn attended meetings. I was normally afraid of strangers approaching Ella in Manhattan.
But three charming young men traveling together kept making her laugh and giggle. They turned out to be The Oak Ridge Boys, relaxing before their evening concert. They assured me that Ella would be happier and I would live longer if we left Manhattan behind.
We visited two more times before we moved. I walked around town pushing Ella’s baby carriage while Lynn went to job meetings. Many pickup trucks decorated with Confederate flags filled the streets. Many car horns played the first eight notes of "Dixie."
On one visit, a handsome young fellow wearing a suit and tie stood outside the courthouse with a portable microphone and speaker. He screamed, "Protect the purity of your children!" Few people paid attention to him.
I described the scene to Lynn after her meeting.
"It doesn’t matter," she said, "because I can retire in ten years."
Lynn’s parents raised her on a dairy farm. She missed driving tractors and planting vegetables. The rural South promised space and soil and the chance to create something instead of just surviving each day.
The cost of living was a fraction of Manhattan’s crushing expenses. We wanted to own land instead of renting a cramped apartment.
Instead of listening to screams and car horns in the morning, we heard all types of cheerful birds calling to each other, in their own dialects. No sirens wailed at 3 AM. No aggressive panhandlers blocked our path to work. We deserved a safe, peaceful morning.
The hospital administrator referred Lynn to a car dealer for a full-sized pickup truck with four-wheel drive. After the dealer handed Lynn a bottle of soda, she told him, "You treated me nicer than anyone in my life."
"Because you are polite," he said. "Most of my customers are polite. They might want a lower price, but they ask politely."
He lowered his voice. "We had one bad guy. He went to Tennessee for a test drive and didn’t want to come back. Now we can only keep one gallon of gas in the tank of the floor models, and we lock up our keys at night."
On our first drive in Lynn’s new truck, we went to the shopping center to buy a toy for Ella. Our blood pressure dropped during the two-mile drive. There was only one traffic light. No drivers honked their horns.
In the parking lot, almost every vehicle was a late-model Ford or Chevrolet pickup truck. Over half had shotguns or rifles mounted on racks near the rear windows. Most had open driver windows, daring someone to steal their weapons.
We were in the safest parking lot on Earth. But as I watched this secure scene, I wondered what would happen if a Black person or someone who wasn’t white came here accidentally. We were safe because we had white skin.
Tomorrow morning would be peaceful. No one would honk for an hour because alternate side parking blocked them. No one would stick their hand in our faces asking for money. Insane people would not approach Ella’s stroller.
But the safety came with conditions we were just beginning to understand.
So in January 1986, we packed our dreams and our one-year-old daughter and headed south. Lynn was thrilled to escape the urban decay. I mourned leaving behind the programming career I had worked so hard to build.
Neither of us imagined what waited for us down those peaceful country roads.