CARTER & CO. MEET NEW YORK

Approaching it on the New Jersey Turnpike just after dusk, a driver stares across sulfurous marshes, the burn-off fires of oil refineries flickering like purgatory. Then all at once, in the distance, he sees the city, a kind of Oz, its lighted crystal buildings like piled diamonds. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that looking at Manhattan from afar was always to behold it "in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world."

Well, illusions cannot last forever. As they gather for the Democratic National Convention, the 5,000 delegates and alternates--as well as roughly 15,000 party workers, families, journalists and hangers-on--may have a considerably less magical view of New York. For one thing, most are taking in the city from the scruffy perspective of Madison Square Garden's environs, and the first impression will not be good. It is a mean and somewhat scrofulous West Side neighborhood, not far from the old Hell's Kitchen. Skells, panhandlers and a brigade of whores are working the streets, trying to avoid the 1,200 uniformed cops and 250 undercover men and women. The marquees of the porn theaters to the north are alight with titles like China Lust and Headmaster: There's Pleasure in Pain. Men at once jaunty and furtive are handing out leaflets advertising massage parlors. One spiel: "Check it out! Don't let Freud tell you what to do with it." At a recent briefing, some of the city's hosts for the convention were asked by New York officials "to do everything you can to prevent the delegates from getting mugged, so they take away a good impression of the city."

On the whole, there are lovelier places in the U.S. to hold a political convention than Eighth Avenue and 33rd Street.

It was strange but somehow dramatically fitting that the Democrats had assembled in such an unregenerate place to nominate Jimmy Carter, from Plains, Ga., a Southern Baptist who in the '60s did missionary work in the Northern slums. At any rate, the contrast between the nimbus around the podium during Carter's acceptance speech and the derelict streets outside promised to be a memorable touch.

The political host for the convention, the New York State Democratic Party, recently contributed some minor squalor to the air. The state chairman was indicted on charges of selling a judgeship and tampering with evidence. Yet it was typical of the new unity of the party that the New York Democrats, so prominent a force in years past, are binding together with others in the old Democratic coalition across the country--labor, minorities and so on. The prospect of victory, the scent of Republican blood, has been a powerful party healer.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Robert Strauss has persistently worked the theme of party unity. It would doubtless be an underpinning of the keynote addresses by Ohio Senator John Glenn and Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. In his acceptance speech Thursday night, Carter himself intends to look further ahead, stressing reorganization in Washington, openness and responsiveness in Government, competence and trust. He will probably not attempt to coin a New Deal-style slogan or spend much time criticizing the Republicans. Carter and his staff are planning a speech to last only about 20 minutes.

This week's convention is the first that either party has held in New York since 1924, when the Democrats nominated John W. Davis on the 103rd ballot in an earlier incarnation of the Garden. The impecunious city government has invested some $3.5 million in the convention, hoping for a return of more than $20 million in business for New York. Among other things, the city is counting on the convention to help repair New York's soiled image, in much the way that the immense and almost unexpectedly peaceful Fourth of July celebrations did.

Inside the Garden, delegates and others are somewhat less crammed together than subway straphangers in rush hour. The oval arena has considerably less floor space than, for example, the hall used at the Miami Beach Convention Center, and everyone is getting along with about one-quarter of the working area normally expected at a convention. The delegates are seated in close array in the center of the arena. Behind them in the first and second loges are the alternates; then, in steeply ascending galleries, politicians and guests. Long desks for the writing press flank the specially built 12-ft.-high podium. Each delegation chairman has a red "hotline" phone to talk with the podium, which is presided over by Convention Chairperson Lindy Boggs, a Louisiana Congresswoman. When the receiver is taken off the hook, a light at the rostrum signals and the caller can ask to be recognized.

The convention is fairly dry in more ways than one. The Democratic National Committee decreed that no liquor or beer can be sold inside the Garden. The Democrats are also doing without balloons, streamers and other traditional convention frills--though of course Carter fans may bring their own confetti into the Garden. Even with a "clean convention," it costs more than $8,000 a night to sweep up after the delegates.

The delegates' hotels are scattered up and down Manhattan, ranging from the Waldorf Astoria at $47 to $66 a night for a double, to the Abbey Victoria at $30 to $33. Early on in the primary season, Carter's forces had been booked into the City Squire Inn. When Carter became the assured winner, his workers demanded--and got--250 rooms in the much larger Americana, a flashy plastic version of Miami Beach set down on Seventh Avenue. Carter and Wife Rosalynn were assigned a five-room suite with a canopied bed on the 21st floor.

There are phone links from the suite to the floor of the Garden, 20 blocks away. Though victory is assured, Carter has roughly a dozen staff members on the floor and "designated delegates" in a number of key delegations to see that everything goes smoothly. Says Press Secretary Jody Powell: "You never take anything for granted."

Carter has received so many invitations to brunches, lunches, cocktail parties and dinners this week that his staff stopped counting at 200. Said one Carter man: "His approach to the convention is that he's got a lot of work to do. This is a working session, not a vacation." Over the weekend, Carter's organization was to give a huge party for 4,000 or so guests at Pier 88 on the Hudson. He was planning appearances at a few other gatherings. Scores of parties, public and private, were in the works. Shirley MacLaine planned an ice cream party in honor of Bella Abzug. The Arthur Schlesingers invited a fairly small number of friends and VIPs. Said the invitations: "Peanuts will be served."

To help the visitors deal with New York City, a convention committee has assigned a host or hostess to each delegation. Many are dispensing words of advice and caution about money (do not carry much, use traveler's checks, and do not leave cash in hotel rooms), crime (stay away from Eighth Avenue around 42nd Street) and transportation (the subway is safe in the daytime, somewhat less so at night).

New Yorkers may be too surfeited with magnificent spectacles, after the tall ships and the Bicentennial festivals, to work up much enthusiasm for the convention. Some sounded a note of welcome mingled with the city's ineffable condescension. Wrote Daily News Columnist William Reel: "Don't blow this opportunity, New York. The Democrats are coming. Let's give them a good impression. If you see a guy wearing a ten-gallon hat and a cowboy shirt and talking too loud, bite your tongue. Remember, the guy probably owns Texas. Maybe he can do us a favor, maybe co-sign a note for us. So swallow all comments about hayseeds and huckleberries. Kill the guy with courtesy."

Authorities have taken elaborate precautions to cushion what for some delegates may be a culture shock. For weeks, police have been sweeping the area around the Garden, trying to scare off the prostitutes. That may be something of a losing battle. Said one cop: "We are making more arrests, but it's difficult to keep them inside because of the courts." Police have also been raiding the seedy nearby hotels where hookers take their customers. Quick tricks usually cost $25, but some of the women are trying to inflate the rates by 100% during the convention week. Many prostitutes have moved to the Garden area from their regular beats uptown, but the vice squad has not noticed any large influx of outsiders swelling New York's estimated total of 3,000 streetwalkers--1,000 hard-core regulars and 2,000 casuals; another 2,000 are attached to massage parlors and brothels. However, a number of off-street prostitutes--the better-class ($50 to $200) call girls--have migrated into the city for the occasion. "New York is a hard town," said one 20-year-old pimp. "But we gonna be making more than double on the convention."

Police have also been raiding some of the 100 porn shops in the area. But New York, from 50th Street down through Times Square, is pretty much an Augean stable, where the instinct for self-preservation dictates more than ordinary caution.

Around the Garden there are numerous cops--approximately one for every ten people attending the sessions. They are keeping an eye on the assorted demonstrations planned during the week by, among other groups, the Right to Life movement, the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War, the surviving remnants of the Yippie movement and the National Coalition of Gays. One major problem: the Garden is uniquely difficult to police, with five levels aboveground and three below.

What will the visiting Democrats, including Carter & Co., make of the quick immersion in New York? Despite qualities of surpassing crumminess, the city possesses brilliant energies and a highly developed variety of nearly everything that urban society produces: the world's widest variety of and often its best --restaurants, bookstores, shops, theaters, ballets, jazz clubs, museums. The city is the nation's stage, its bank, its fashion model, the hub of its publishing, advertising and public relations. It is the central nervous system of TV networks, two wire services and two newsmagazines. Despite a serious hemorrhage, it remains the leading town for corporate headquarters. It is still the closest thing to an American Athens that an artist--or his audience--can find. The hospital care is magnificent--1) if one can afford it and 2) if the hospital employees are not on strike, as many were last week.

New York's numerous theaters--Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway and then some--remain among the most vigorous in the world. Broadway's lineup now includes A Chorus Line, Equus, Neil Simon's California Suite, Chicago, a revival of My Fair Lady and Julie Harris' one-woman performance as Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst. Tickets can still be obtained for most shows, except A Chorus Line. After 3 p.m. on the day of performance, half-price tickets for many shows may be available at the TKTS booth on Broadway at 47th Street.

The city is, of course, expensive. It also offers sometimes astonishing bargains if the shopper knows where to look. Between Fifth and Sixth avenues on 47th Street, for example, is the diamond district, one of the world's largest. Here diamond merchants, among them Hasidic Jews in black garb, pull around tens of thousands of dollars' worth of jewelry in black suitcases on wheels. Discounts are large and bargaining is advisable. Down on the Lower East Side, on Orchard, Grand, Canal and nearby streets, stores offer first-quality, name-brand merchandise (shoes, linens, handbags, clothing, for the most part) at discounts that average from 20% to 25% and sometimes more.

A wonderful town but, as Writer Edward Hoagland has asked, "Is it worth the blood in the throat?" With a bit of the self-dramatizing that New Yorkers love, Hoagland writes: "Sometimes when I'm changing records at night I hear shrieks from the street, sounds that the phonograph ordinarily drowns out."

Everything said about New York City is true, but it is almost always an incomplete truth, like, say, describing Tolstoy as a religious nut. By the standards of Knoxville, Tenn., or St. Paul, Minn., New York's streets are filthy and sometimes dangerous--though among the six largest cities, only Los Angeles has a lower murder rate. Some visitors may be tempted to commit a mugging or two when they encounter New York waiters; many waiters, on the other hand, are the best anywhere. The taxis can be gritty and claustrophobic behind their plastic mugger shields; now and then they seem to be driven by surly crackpots exploring new frontiers in rudeness and reckless endangerment. New York cabbies also include some of the funniest, most charming characters around. (Advice to delegates: If possible, look for the oversize Checker cabs or the radio-dispatched fleet cabs with telephone numbers on their doors; radio cabs are more likely to be cleaned and air-conditioned, less likely to have mugger shields.)

The city has an immense ability to disprove the skeptical expectation. In the first place, no city could be as awful as New York has so often been said to be. The rest of the U.S. has frequently regarded New York with a certain hostile suspicion. Barry Goldwater was probably thinking of New York some 15 years ago when he suggested that the country might be better off if the Eastern seaboard could be sawed off and allowed to float out to sea. In this opinion. New Yorkers were arrogant, crass, rude. They presumed to tell the rest of the nation--through television, magazines and books--what to think, how to dress. New York was everything that was wrong with citification: intellectual dandyism, supercilious radical chic in the penthouses, while the streets turned into a slough of welfare and crime. Limousines brought the anchor men to work, while welfare families--or landlords--burned down their own tenements in the South Bronx.

For such reasons, a lot of the country was not unhappy to watch New York City in the past year tottering like a Charlie Chaplin drunk on the brink of bankruptcy. The city is now able to lurch from payday to payday only because of revolving federal loans administered by a disdainful Republican Administration in Washington. New York has refused to redeem certain of its outstanding short-term securities on schedule. It has cut nearly 50,000 full-time employees from the city payroll in the past 18 months, reducing the total to some 250,000, but the end of the crisis is nowhere in sight.

In recent years, of course, millions have fled the city for quieter destinations--New York has lost some 400,000 people in the past five years. Many of the 7,500,000 who remain,* however, represent a durable breed. Often they have a sense of the city as something splendidly special.

Many Americans have regarded New York as something of a foreign country. In many ways, it is--or at least it is a halfway house between the rest of the world and the U.S. In another perspective, New York is the most uniquely American of U.S. cities, precisely because of its incredible diversity. It is one of the oldest American cities--dating to 1626, when Peter Minuit bought Manhattan from the Indians and established the first permanent settlement. But it is still a city of aliens--spiritual, cultural and legal.

Somehow, the wildly disparate mix in its 320 sq. mi. works out better than anyone has a right to expect. It has become a cliche to note that New York has more blacks (1,650,000) than Lagos, more Puerto Ricans (910,000) than San Juan, more Jews (1,230,000) than Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa together, more Italians than Palermo, more Irish than Cork, along with Germans, Arabs, Chinese, Eastern Europeans and others. From spring to fall, New York resounds with different ethnic parades. Emigre Tibetans maintain an Office of Tibet on Second Avenue. Then there are the Caucasian-Sircoisian Cultural Center, the Grupo Folklorico Paraguayo, the Korean Community Foundation, the Serbian Folklore Group, the Casa Galicia.

The city contains a variety of neighborhoods almost cloned from the originals: Chinatown, just below Manhattan's Lower East Side, with its more than 200 often excellent coffee shops and restaurants, its shops selling salted fish, smoked duck and preserved eggs. Or Little Italy, next door, where one can sit at a side walk cafe with a cappuccino and time-warp 50 years back to some Neapolitan atmosphere. Ninth Avenue from 38th to 53rd streets is a rapid collage of Italian, Greek, Philippine and African shops and stalls. Yorkville around 86th Street and Third Avenue is somewhat homogenized now, but abounds with German gourmet shops, Irish bars and Hungarian restaurants. Harlem remains the capital of black America. On its eastern edge is Spanish Harlem, with its large concentration of Puerto Ricans. Down in Brooklyn are Atlantic Avenue's Lebanese and Yemeni specialty shops and inexpensive restaurants.

For all the racial ingatherings, New York can be a bleakly lonely place. That isolation-in-multitudes can yield a kind of privacy that allows an individual to choose his own friends and his own life without being monitored. The other side of the privacy is what one hears at 4 a.m. on insomniac radio call-in shows -- a loneliness blank and white as an emergency room.

Most habitual New Yorkers simply develop immunities, become tough as Hudson River fish that swim in a punch of sludge and orange rinds. An interesting thing about New Yorkers is that they take life more seriously -- or so they think -- than some other Americans do. That intensity produces neurotics, but it also keeps the mind quick. The suggestion of New York's intensity and occasional neuroticism, however, also tends to perpetuate a bigotry against New York. Images are, almost by definition, exaggerations.

Some of the images emanating from the convention will also be slightly exaggerated. Despite the fact that all elements of the party are united behind a national ticket for the first time since 1964, in many quarters there remains a lingering skepticism about Jimmy Carter. Many of the delegates are getting their first close-hand look at the Carter phenomenon. They are still alternately dazzled and puzzled by it all, by what the long primary season has yielded.

Many of the delegates are also getting their first look at the nation's foremost city, and they may have something of the same reaction. As millions of other visitors will discover this year, New York has an immense capacity to surprise. The most remarkable part is that the surprises are sometimes pleasant.

* The entire "Greater New York area," embracing also suburbs and exurbs in New Jersey and Connecticut, numbers some 20 million.

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