Op-Ed: Can Kids Walk the City’s Streets Alone?
I was 18 when 6-year-old Etan Patz disappeared in 1979, and like everyone else who lived in New York at the time, I find myself consumed with the details of the news accounts of the search for his missing body nearly 33 years later.
This one little, horrible story was a crystallizing event that helped change the way New Yorkers live. It forced everyone in the city to come to grips with how feral and barbaric things had grown over the 15 years after 1964, when the crime rate in New York and the United States began its vertiginous rise.
I grew up on the Upper West Side. And here is how I lived before Etan Patz: At the age of 5, I was allowed to cross Broadway by myself to go to the deli. At 6, I was walked to the subway at 103rd Street and sent on my own on the subway to Crown Heights in Brooklyn, where my grandmother picked me up on the platform.
At 7, I was playing handball and other street games on the sidewalk in front of my building with a gang of kids. I handed out Humphrey-for-president literature on Election Day — traveling by myself on the 104 bus down Broadway to the West Side Democratic club on 87th street to pick up leaflets.
By 8, my gang and I were going to Riverside Park as a group to the playground and to play ball, and to movies in the neighborhood half a mile away. And I was going to school by myself (or with my three-years-older sister) on two city buses. By 9, my friends and I were taking the No. 1 train north to a skating rink on 238th Street in Riverdale.
It was all little different from what New York City kids had always done. My father, who grew up in a Brooklyn slum in the 1930s, had lived much the same way. This was what it meant to be a New Yorker.
And not just a New Yorker. In the classic children’s book “Ramona the Pest,” a 5-year-old girl living in Portland in 1968 walks to the neighborhood school by herself, and it’s not around the corner.
I was born in 1961. In 1964, there were 3,200 felonies in the 24th Precinct, where I lived. By 1969, the number had risen 20 percent. By 1979, when Etan disappeared, the number was up another 20 percent.
Between the ages of 9 and 14, I was mugged four times. Practically everybody I knew got mugged in the 1970s — adults, as well as kids. Crime was everywhere.
A criminal known as “Charlie Chop-off” castrated and/or killed five boys in a four-block radius around my apartment building in 1972 and 1973 and was never caught.
A deinstitutionalized schizophrenic ran up to a sweet-faced young man with long hair on my corner in 1974 and, babbling in a secret language, stabbed him with a pen knife.
The general reaction to this explosion of urban barbarism was a kind of shell-shocked acceptance. Everything had gone to hell, no one knew how to stop it, and so all one could do was live with it.
Then came Etan Patz, disappearing only steps from his own door on the way to school.
At that moment, the romance of the New York City street kid, resourceful and independent, gave way to the reality of the New York City child in jeopardy.
Kids ceased their own explorations of their blocks, their neighborhoods, their city. They were accompanied. No more would kids gather on street corners. Instead, the age of the “play date,” the maternally organized and supervised get-together, began.
For another 16 years after Etan, New York remained awash in crime and menace. Then, in 1995, crime began to fall and fall and fall. The streets became safer than, in some reckonings, they’d ever been.
Yet children are still being raised as though the streets are too dangerous for them to manage alone. And there can be no event to change this perception.
Once the paramount concern for children isn’t guiding them toward independence but ensuring their safety, giving the rope some slack may seem at best indulgent and at worst criminally negligent.
Again, it seems, perception has lagged reality.
Or has it?
There are worrisome signs that things might be worsening when it comes to urban crime in the United States. Chicago and Washington, DC, are experiencing crime waves unseen for a generation.
And in the 24th Precinct? Felonies are up 25 percent since the beginning of the year.
sam
And who can forget Leiby Kletzky
not like it used to be
When I see 6, 7, 8 year olds cross the streets…walk alone to school…I’m sick to my stomach. I don’t know how parents can go on with their day?!
Not a suicide pact
Kids? It’s not safe even for adults. Even if you have a gun you have to be able to draw first.
God bless all the freedom in America but the bad guys have too much. The constitution was written for our protection it’s not a suicide pact the libral judges always forget.
declasse- intelectual
No way!!!!! This is New York!!!We have had too many instances of child molestation, kidnappings and murders. It was not how long ago that the horrific incident in Boro Park took place. The assumption that is a reality–New York and Brooklyn streets are not a safe place for kids to walk alone. Even adults alone have been targeted not too recently. And, no comments are necessary about the police in Crown Heights!!!!!!
please
thousands of kids walk to school every day alone while we must do all we can to protect ourselves we cant live in fear, if something terrible will happen then it will happen, its all in hashems hands.
look at the major story now with the missing girl who was kidnapped from her bedroom so should we not let kids sleep in their beds?
Ch Mom
It’s a scary world out there!
Better to be safe than sorry, even though it means kids are not spending as much time out-doors.
it’s a big shame, but what are the choices?
The bad old days.
Growing up in Crown Heights in the early 80’s, I remember that crime and even murders were relatively common. Fortunately, it is much safer in Crown Heights and New York today.The Leiby Kletzky case is a horrifying reminder of the dangers that still exist. However, that case was perpetrated by one of our own.
Get off high horse
With cases like Leiby Kletzky, molestations and other abuses committed by our own, nebach,can we come off of our high horse, and stop bad-mouthing the goyim so much?
Leiby Kletzky
DO NOT FORGET ME!!! WATCH YOUR KIDS!!! WAKE UP!!! HOW MANY HAVE TO DIE BEFORE YOU (WE) LEARN???
Milhouse
People die in car accidents all the time, but we don’t stop driving or crossing the street! An entire generation of children has been stunted by being kept indoors and under supervision the whole time, instead of roaming free as children have done for thousands of years, all because of a paranoid fear of what was a very rare occurrence even in the bad times, let alone now. http://freerangekids.wordpr…
Michoel Dovid
What ever happened to parents spending time with their children. Plenty of times have I seen children walking around the streets of Crown Heights at night by myself. Chas VShalom anyone should see them as easy targets. Now sometimes I even see mothers leaving their strollers, baby included, sitting outside of a store while they walk in! That is inappropriate and irresponsible. Having children is a tremendous brocha and many seem to brush them to the side as they are “getting in the way” of the parents’ activities. I know of mothers who put their kids in daycare just so they can go to Starbucks. Yes, things were different decades ago. And yes even now there is a good chance nothing would happen to your kids, but on the other hand… why play Russian roulette?
My childrens- best friend
For parents who want to justify neglecting the supervision of their children, no answer is sufficient because they are ‘their’ kids, so who are you to say (as false as this is) that they aren’t being appropriately careful,
However,
Children are one’s most prized ‘gems’.
Were I to live in a peaceful suburban paradise, and had gems that needed sunlight would I leave my most prized gems sitting on my outdoor windowsill, even were I inside with them in view?!
I wouldn’t!
I would go outside and sit them directly in front of me, and wait as long as I needed to until they could be brought back to security, and if I had to go in for minute, I would bring them in with me!
If my most prized precious gems had feet, would I let them walk around the block on their own at their leisure sparkling in the sunlight?!!!
I wouldn’t!
Not if I lived in a suburban paradise.
I live in New York City.
The only safety that exists is, safety in numbers.
But I will not risk my gems, just as I won’t leave my cardoor unlocked, even though probably no one would know.
I would not leave my house unlocked, even though strangers never try my door.
I would not have precious children strolling about on their own, even though strangers ‘probably’ won’t harm them.
Does raising children mean someone must be available to supervise them? Obviously!
Until when you ask?!
Until I can leave my house and my car unlocked, and my gems on the windowsill.
Until what age?!
At what age is my little girl no longer a gem sparkling in the sunlight?!
Do you think it is over-protective for my children to grow up feeling like a gem instead of a street cat?!
I don’t!
As long as my children are under my supervision, I will supervise them better than any other job I do, even if it means I end up spending more time with them than I would have otherwise allotted, and even if it means that I am a chaperone when there is somewhere they want to go.
Did I sign up for this as a parent.
I sure did.