Progress Report?

Issuing a fat, 140-page annual report to the City Council last week, New York City's Mayor Robert Wagner plainly meant to point with pride to municipal progress under his administration. But what Bumbling Bob inadvertently achieved was something quite different: an ugly picture of a city in which hundreds of thousands live amid squalor, disease and violence. Items:

P: Overall street cleanliness, Wagner boasted, has risen from 56% in 1955 to 85% in 1960. Inescapable conclusion: 15% of the streets are dirty.

P: There are 237 elementary school classes with 40 or more pupils to a class.

P: Families with children will be forbidden to live in single-room dwellings after Jan. 1, 1965.

P: The city operates 110,000 public housing apartments with a total population of 435,000--greater than that of all but 29 U.S. cities and scheduled soon to rise to 600,000. In the housing projects, "doors are now being provided for all closets."

P: Looking into 52,000 slum buildings, the city found 9,000 to be "rat-infested," reported that 7,900 were later "cleaned up," which leaves only 1,100 to go.

P: Inspectors registered 228,098 housing violations in 1960. Offending landlords were fined $625,423. To prevent bribery by slumlords, housing inspectors are now shifted to new districts every 30 days.

P: Buildings with nine or more families must now have a janitor. (Buildings with eight families need not.)

P: Air-pollution complaints amounted to 15,616 in 1960.

P: Thirty-five private laboratories and blood banks surrendered their permits, presumably for violations.

P: "Teenaged girl associates of fighting gangs" were numbered at "up to 3,000 girls."

P: Two wards were opened for adolescent drug addicts.

P: Welfare costs rose to $319 million. On relief were 362,646 persons, including 209,656 children.

P: Increases were reported in gonorrhea (up 16.1%), syphilis (up 79.2%), arrests of children under 16 (up 6.7% to 12,132), major crimes (up 5.9% to 130,162), all crimes (up 4.5% to 410,828), new admissions to jails and reformatories (up 3% to 114,653).

P: During the year, 13,000 New Yorkers were admitted to mental hospitals.

Commented Bob Wagner, who likes being mayor and is likely to run this year for a third term: "We do act to find solutions--even though we must often move in ways which are frustratingly slow." To which 7,781,984 residents of the nation's greatest city could only sadly agree.

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