Opposing Sides Have Much in Common : A City of Two Tales: Black, White Version of Yonkers

If Jack Treacy ever meets Walter Williams, the two might find they have a good deal in common.

Their immigrant parents--Treacy’s from Ireland and Williams’ from the West Indies--moved to Yonkers more than two generations ago because they believed it offered a better life for themselves and their children. And for both their families, the city has made good on its promise: Each has managed to buy a comfortable home, and raise his children in a neighborhood where he is proud to live.

But Treacy and Williams, despite the values and achievements they share, find themselves on opposite sides of a controversy that is tearing this city apart, and making it a national symbol of neighborhood segregation. They represent two faces of Yonkers’ complex racial and economic problems, and their conflicting views of the city reflect the very different experiences they have had living there.

Treacy, a 53-year-old assistant fire chief, has been a leader in the seven-year-old fight to stop the government from building low-income housing near his home in Yonkers’ Bryn Mawr section. One night last week, he stood outside City Hall among hundreds of his fellow white homeowners cheering as the City Council voted to defy a court order to put a total of 1,000 government-sponsored apartments in white neighborhoods.

These homeowners say their arguments are economic, not racial. But Williams, a financial consultant and real estate broker, said: “I still see it as bigotry.”

Although he and other blacks have not been as vocal as the whites who carried picket signs and American flags to City Hall, they say their feelings are no less strong.

“We felt that the big fight was in court to see that justice was done,” Williams said. “All this falderal is a bunch of bigots and hotheads trying to make headlines. We in essence feel that the battle has been won.”

In 1985, the court ruled that Yonkers had intentionally and illegally discriminated against blacks by building virtually all its low-income housing in the southwest corner of the city. The only project ever built on the East Side stands in Williams’ neighborhood.

The council decision to continue resisting the court-ordered remedies carries huge penalties--fines that could wipe out the city treasury in less than a month and possible imprisonment for the councilmen who opposed the order.

As a city employee, Treacy himself stands to lose his job if Yonkers is bankrupted, but he said he is willing to pay that price, rather than allow the housing to be built.

Treacy insisted that he has nothing against “decent, honest, low-income blacks.” But his potential neighbors would be “blacks who live in public housing. . . . That’s the most barbaric class of people in the United States,” he said in an interview at his home.

Shunned Politics

Those who denounce Yonkers’ white homeowners as racist simply do not understand the situation, Treacy said, and noted that he himself was once a “liberal Democrat” who shunned political involvement.

He added, “The further you get from public housing, the more moderate and liberal you can be.”

On the other hand, Williams, 59, has lived near a 48-unit public housing project for two decades. From the front window of his two-story raised ranch-style house in predominantly black Runyon Heights, he can see a motel where the city is sheltering an even lower rung of society: the homeless.

“People from all walks of life walk down our streets, and we intermingle,” Williams said. “We’ve proven that we could really deal with it.”

What has been more difficult, he said, is overcoming the racism that has permeated Yonkers in the past--at least four decades of intentional segregation that the courts sought to break. “People are not going to do it voluntarily,” he said.

“White people don’t move from blacks. White people move from crime--and so does everyone else!”

The screened-in back porch of Jack Treacy’s oversized Cape Cod-style home, with its canopy of maple trees, becomes a suburban oasis in the heavy August heat. It was there that Treacy sat one evening late last week and explained how the threat of having public housing almost literally in his back yard made a firebrand of a guy whose favorite pursuit used to be “having a beer and watching the Mets.”

The National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, which spearheaded the desegregation drive, “got me ready to go to war,” he said.

Treacy said he has seen what can happen to a neighborhood when public housing moves in. Across town, his 76-year-old mother, a former cleaning woman, and his brother, who works for the sanitation department, live in a rent-controlled apartment building not far from most of the city’s existing housing projects. Most whites who could afford it fled the neighborhood years ago.

‘Mother Scrubbed Floors’

“Where my mother scrubbed floors, now all they do is sell drugs,” Treacy said. The 76-year-old woman was terrified recently when three young women snatched her purse; his brother has been robbed at least twice in daylight.

“Your mother gets mugged. What’s happening?” he demanded. “They kill down there in Southwest Yonkers for $25 or $30.”

Treacy, the father of four, used to work two jobs to be able to afford the house that he bought for $86,000 seven years ago. His wife, June, works as well, as a secretary.

On paper, they probably appear to be well off, thanks to the fact that the value of their house, along with the Victorians and Tudors around it, has skyrocketed in value. But they and their neighbors, largely the descendants of Irish and Italians, are what Treacy describes as “middle-income people. They’ve got a $200,000 house, but they live from paycheck to paycheck,” he said.

The U.S. Supreme Court in June refused to hear Yonkers’ appeal of the court order.

“All of a sudden we’re just left out there hanging,” Treacy said, “but there isn’t one Supreme Court justice who would let himself or his family live next to a public housing project.”

Proponents of the housing have promised that it will be nothing like the concrete towers of the present projects on the city’s southwest side.

The first 200 units of low-income apartments are slated to be low-rise buildings, many of them townhouses. The next phase--800 units for people earning between $13,000 and $32,000 a year--would be mixed in with at least four times as many market-rate apartments.

Mayor Nicholas Wasicsko, one of the council minority voting to follow the court order, insisted that the housing “is not going to produce a South Bronx in an affluent community like Yonkers.” He described the neighborhood backlash as “irrational fear and overreaction.”

Treacy is not buying these assurances.

“I know what public housing is. It’s the people who live in public housing,” he said. “The people who live in public housing don’t sit home and read the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. They travel right through your neighborhood and rob your house.”

The north-south streets in Yonker’s Runyon Heights section come to abrupt dead ends at a strip of land that makes it impossible for residents to drive directly from that black neighborhood into the adjacent Homefield area.

In its finding, the court took note of that thickly wooded strip, and what it says about the history of race relations in Yonkers.

“As the neighborhood developed, any contact with the overwhelmingly white Homefield area immediately to the north was severely discouraged when the Homefield Neighborhood Assn. purchased and maintained a four-foot strip of land as a barrier between the streets of the two neighborhoods,” Judge Leonard B. Sand wrote in his landmark 1985 court opinion.

Walter Williams’ father, a postal clerk, bought a home in Runyon Heights a couple of years before Walter was born. He was one of the first of a group of blacks moving to the area to escape the high rents of Harlem.

The Williams family prospered in Yonkers, but along the way, it had to overcome barriers far more formidable than a strip of real estate.

‘Gentleman, Scholar’

Asked at the age of 7 or 8 what he wanted to be when he grew up, Williams recalled that he replied “ ‘a gentleman and a scholar . . .’ That’s the kind of brainwashing I got at home.”

But in Yonkers’ segregated public school system, such aspirations were not encouraged in black children. Williams’ father was outraged to learn that a teacher once told his son that blacks were not as smart or talented as whites because their blood was thinner.

When it came time to choose a career, Williams and his brother, Henry, were advised to “try to work with our hands.” Walter got his masters degree in educational psychology instead; Henry is a physician practicing in Yonkers.

Nor was buying a home outside Runyon Heights any easier. During the 1960s, Williams recalled that he and his wife, Beverly, once dropped by a model home in a white area. The agent greeted other potential customers enthusiastically, Williams said, “but as soon as he saw our black faces, he just folded up his book and walked away.”

Still, Williams said he is content with the life that he made for his wife and three children in Runyon Heights. Their house is only a few blocks from the house where Williams was born.

Despite the housing project and the nearby motels that board the homeless, Williams said housing values in his neighborhood “have still gone up tremendously.” Some of the brand-new contemporary homes being built alongside Runyon Heights’ 50-year-old bungalows are selling for $300,000 he said.

Williams made a point of driving a visitor past the Hall Court project, a group of three-story apartment buildings that stands on the lot where Williams’ elementary school used to be. Unlike its battle-scarred counterparts in Southwest Yonkers, Hall Court appeared well maintained. “I don’t view it as any hotbed of crime,” he said.

“What they’re doing again is stereotyping poor people,” Williams said of the white activists. “Poverty does not equal lack of values, lack of morals. . . . Their values are on a par, if not superior, to those of the people who are protesting their presence.”

Williams and Treacy agree on at least one thing: Neither is comfortable with the hotly charged atmosphere that has surrounded the fight over housing desegregation. In recent days, it has grown even uglier.

For Williams, the depth of the divisions in the community became clear a few weeks ago, one night when he and his wife were watching a television news account in which white homeowners were “lashing out viciously,” he said.

Beverly Williams was stunned to recognize among the demonstrators a white woman who belonged to her bowling league. “My God! There’s Mary!” she gasped.

“It made us feel terrible, really,” Williams recalled. “She and I had come to mix so easily with blacks and whites on the league. It was such a contrast, such a Jekyll and Hyde situation.”

However bitter the situation already is, Treacy warns that worse things--including violence--could follow.

“It’s building up,” he said. “It’s going to happen--maybe not this year or next year” if the court persists in pursuing “these programs that the white loony fringe and the NAACP are putting forth in Yonkers.

“They’re creating racism in areas where there was never racism,” he warned. “They better watch out. If the tide turns, it don’t stop.”