"Well, he has done much to improve the quality of garbage disposal within the last year and a half."
"Yes, yes, he means well, but just can't command anyone's respect these days. Look around here. This part of New York used to be beautiful. We had a canopy over the front door, and a doorman a long time ago, and everyone took care of themselves then. But something seems to have changed, Lots of new people have been moving in. A lady down the hall just came over to this country from Jamaica, and she has seven children that she supports on welfare. Now, these people don't care.
"Now, I'm not prejudiced or anything. I don't pretend to be a son of the American Revolution, because my father came from Italy and my mother from France, but I fought in the First World War. There's a picture of my ship on the wall. Things were different then, There are just too many people moving in here. Let me tell you something. During the last century, thousands of Chinese came to California. The Governor imposed restrictions upon their would have been simply overrun."
"Well you don't want the Mayor to do that, do you?"
"I'm not saying that, I'm just saying that it's hard to assimilate all these people that come from places where they don't care about order and sanitation, and the things that are important to New Yorkers."
He sighed. "How do you explain the police? Two policemen sit up there on the hill in a police car all night long smoking cigarettes, while we never see a single cop on this street."
"That's true," his wife added. "Just two weeks ago, these kids threw firecrackers in the mailbox, and I called the police station, and it was a full forty-five minutes before anyone arrived."
"Supposing it was an emergency." he interrupted. "Do you know that we've had muggings and robberies right here in our very elevator? Yes, right in the elevator. I won't let my wife walk into this building alone at night. I leave the car in front, bring her upstairs and then go back down to park the car in a garage. We're taxpayers. What does he do with all that money? This city just isn't safe anymore."
I grabbed the opportunity to speak about taxation, and its relation to Vietnam, and also managed to slip in a few statistics about the success of New York's new auxiliary police force, the Fourth Platoon.
"Sure, there are thousands of them guarding his opera his opera house," he said, "but when we need a policeman, they're just not around. You know,I went down to his opera house last year just to see the way those people still dress, I hadn't been to one since the twenties. By accident, I got in, and when I got home, I felt so fancy that I didn't even talk to my wife. Now, none of those people have to worry about law and order."
Everywhere, we seemed to get similar responses. Half the tenants of the orthodox Jewish community were afraid to open their doors for fear of death, while groups of young Spanish speaking children went running up and down the stairs, playing happily, totally unaware of frightened faces behind closed doors.
Occasionally, a not-unhappy face would peep through a tiny slot to tell us, "Yes, I'll vote for Lindsay, what choice do I have ?" or perhaps to tell us, "He's well-intentioned but..."
No one denied his good intentions, most even thought he was "smart," yet nowhere did we find a spark of belief that New York's youthful Mayor could solve even the most basic of the city's problems.
They blamed him for the teachers' strike, the sanitation workers' strike, bad snow removal, and even dirty streets. They blamed him for high taxes, high prices, deteriorating neighborhoods, loss ob jobs, smog, pollution, traffic jams, subway malfunctions, and once, even for turning clocks backwards for daylight saving time.
Lindsay was "cute" and he was "nice," yet no one would have liked to vote for him. It was hard to "Vote for New York" when everything seemed wrong, yet harder to vote for "that man from Staten Island who wants the war" or the village idiot with the Groucho Marx moustache.
Most voters were angry; including the man who slammed his door shouting, "I don't vote, I'm a Communist."
They were angry at Lindsay's performance. But he won, and, after all, it is the "second toughest job in America."