Counting Losses in the Rubble

A week after looters wrecked the R & M furniture store on East Tremont Avenue in the South Bronx, Co-Owners Irving Wiener and Richard Margolin stood in their showroom--empty except for four Day-Glo orange overstuffed chairs--and wondered if they could reopen. They had lost $100,000 worth of merchandise during the blackout and had not yet learned whether their personal disaster was covered by insurance. Explained Wiener bitterly: "Our policy covers damage by riots, but the mayor hasn't declared this a riot." Down the street, Polish-born Harry Sperber figured that he had to restock his clothing store or risk losing his whole building. Said he in heavily accented English: "If I close, the building will be empty, and it will be burned down or pulled apart."

On Manhattan's upper Broadway, Chris Stola had replenished his stock of stereo equipment, put in a solid steel door in place of the vulnerable metal gate and was back in business. He was lucky; police had chased looters away from his store, so his losses totaled only about $2,000. But he got the jitters last week when some teen-agers bobbed their heads in the door and warned: "Next time we'll get you harder."

Broken Glass. A few blocks away, Lawrence Spanier was also concerned about the future. He had replaced the broken windows in his store and obtained enough clothing from his suppliers to reopen, at least temporarily. Said he: "We haven't decided whether we'll stay, whether it's worth the investment. This could happen all over again."

Scenes like these were endlessly repeated in New York City's black and Hispanic ghettos, as shocked and angry owners of some 2,000 stores counted their blackout losses and thought hard about sticking, or fleeing the battle zone. One of the worst hit was Fedco Foods Corp., the nation's largest black-owned retailer, which had eight supermarkets looted. By last week, six were back in operation, as were several other well-capitalized, chain-owned markets and high-volume discount stores. But hundreds of tiny shops--most of them mom-and-pop operations that barely scraped by even" in the best of times--stayed gutted and shuttered. Reported TIME Correspondent Mary Cronin about the South Bronx: "Store owners gaze angrily at the rubble, the empty shelves and the twisted grilles hanging from their windows.

Broken glass glints in the streets. Garbage clogs the gutters. Burned-out buildings smell of smoke. Yet many of the merchants will open again--if they can get the money."

For starters, Mayor Abraham Beame proposed a "rescue fund" of $1 million from the city and $2.5 million from its companies; by week's end, businessmen had pledged about $2 million, and His Honor donated $100 of his own money. The Carter Administration put up $11.3 million in relief, and Governor Hugh Carey promised $500.000 in state aid. This will hardly dent the storekeepers' losses, which city officials estimated at $155 million (a sharp drop from their ballpark guess of $1 billion a week earlier). Merchants and property owners are also eligible for low-interest (6 5/8%) Small Business Administration loans, but City Councilman Ramon Velez exclaimed: "The forms are so difficult it is unbelievable!" Nonetheless. 1,699 people got applications for loans, and SBA officials anticipated a total of about 3,000 applications for $60 million by their deadline of Sept. 16. Community leaders were confident that at least two-thirds of the stores will reopen. Explained Julio Vazquez, a Spanish Harlem congressional aide: "In most cases, they've invested all they've got. Besides! where else are they gonna go?"

Hard Labor. Many merchants and city officials, black and white alike, called on the courts to set an example by dealing harshly with the 3,772 people arrested for looting and other crimes during the blackout. Said Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton. a black who is running in the Democratic primary for mayor: "If we go easy on the looters, we are obliterating the moral distinction between them and the vast majority of poor people who are law-abiding." As an alternative to prison, the New York Amsterdam News, the nation's largest secular black weekly (circ.: 67,000), suggested that the looters be given "a year of hard labor in the streets," rebuilding the stores they devastated.

But the prospects for such imaginative treatment were none too good. For several days after the blackout, the looting suspects swamped the city's already overburdened judicial system. They spent up to six days waiting for arraignment, packed in overcrowded, sweltering cells where faucets often dispensed only a trickle of water and toilets sometimes did not work.

Conditions outside the cells in the courthouses were almost as grim. From criminal court in Brooklyn, TIME'S Paul Witteman reported: "The smell of vomit permeated the lobby. There were puddles of urine on the floor. In one corner, a Hispanic woman shrieked uncontrollably. Court officers administered oxygen to two women who had been felled by the heat and the strain of not knowing what had happened to relatives locked up in the cells. Police broke up a group of people being interviewed by a radio reporter. In the midst of the shouting and shoving, one man was arrested and put behind bars along with the friend for whom he was waiting."

Court officials almost doubled the number of judges at work and lengthened the bench shifts. But paper work and the difficulty of getting arresting officers to court--many were off duty or back on patrol--slowed arraignments before some judges to as few as two an hour. The delays may jeopardize some cases: the law requires that suspects be arraigned within "a reasonable time."

Moreover, a number of them were innocent bystanders, swept up by police during the blackout. Said Supervising Judge Richard A. Brown: "The only crime many of these people committed was being in the wrong place at the wrong time." Scoffed a policeman who thought otherwise: "These people are con artists." About three-quarters of those arrested were released: charges against some were dropped, and others were let out of jail to await hearings or trials that will begin this week.

Even if the looted stores reopen and the guilty are punished (maximum sentence for larceny: 15 years), many black and Hispanic people are afraid that New York's night of terror will accelerate the decline of the worst ghettos, which for years have been losing jobs and population. The Amsterdam News said that the looting "illuminated" the fact that "there is a massive vacuum of leadership in black communities" and that "all of us--leaders and ordinary people are too willing to tolerate lawlessness, abuse, violence . . . without damning those from within the community who would destroy what we have been so long building." Brooklyn Assemblyman Woodrow Lewis, a black, noted that many of the looting victims were also black and declared: "How can I buy excuses that no jobs and poverty motivated this mob action? We can't coddle or pamper acts of violence."

The fears of the community were symbolized by the South Bronx police station, long known to officers as "Fort Apache" because they felt surrounded in a hostile, high-crime neighborhood. Now the officers call it the "Little House on the Prairie" because it is one of the few buildings in the area not abandoned or leveled by arson.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.