To practice plunder; to commit robbery. In time of war, rapacious men are let loose to spoliate on commerce.
I lived in Washington Heights during the riots of July, 1992, and have long been impressed by the fact that I did not know about them.
My ignorance comes with a bit of a handicap: I was in Philadelphia the night the riots began, and news in the early 1990s did not travel like it does now.
I came back to New York the next day to find the neighborhood in ruins. Windows of cars and buildings smashed to bits formed a frosting of broken glass on the sidewalk and street. Traffic signs were twisted and toppled. The contents of garbage cans had been set on fire, with charred hulks of I-don’t-remember-what sitting at pulverized attention.
The neighborhood was mostly silent as I walked home from the subway, thinking "Looks like they had one hell of a July 4th party."
Aware of the damage I nevertheless thought little of it. I wandered among it like it was normal. The neighborhood was hardly idyllic, and I thought the damage I saw might have meant the street-cleaners had gone on strike or that some other tipping point had been reached.
I eventually became aware of the situation as police patrolled the neighborhood with clubs drawn, anticipating altercations. I watched one police officer warm up for battle on the George Washington Bridge, swinging his club like a baseball bat, chuckling to his fellow police officers that that’s what these kids have in store if they come anywhere near him.
I approached Broadway, where stores had been looted and businesses ransacked. The A&P was boarded over and the street felt nervous.
On Broadway, as in other places during the days of the riots, I could always spot someone going about business as normal. Through my window I saw a man who lived in my building amble home with his briefcase in hand, adjusting his gait to dodge piles of shattered glass. Later I saw a postal worker deliver mail by stepping through the frame of a door that had been entirely destroyed.
The riots never got the national attention of the earlier Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. People were hot, unemployed, and frustrated about a lot of things, and when word got out that the New York police had shot and killed a man the stories swirled that the police had brutalized a helpless citizen. Stories I heard at the time told of a dramatic roof-top chase in which the victim was forced to jump from the top of a building.
Few people in my circles of influence knew about the riots. I worked at a company where most of my co-workers lived in Connecticut, Queens, Long Island, and other places which at the time seemed remote. Most people I knew thought Washington Heights was a remote planet, a place beyond "Upper Manhattan" which to them began and ended at 96th Street.
