A city’s texture remains

In Staten Island, on a working-class street named for a victim of a historic act of religious intolerance, there was a small-scale act of racial intolerance recently.

“No kidding?” said Jack Crockett, an electrician walking his tubby black and white terrier, Ace.

Crocket and Ace were in the small bay-front playground at the end of Armstrong Avenue on a sunny morning this week. Armstrong is also called Walter A. Matuza, Jr. Place after a young father who lived on the block, fished in the bay and died in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. Disproportionately, people who worked in the towers came from white ethnic enclaves from around the city, like Staten Island, a short ferryboat ride from Lower Manhattan.

Crockett helped build the Trade Center. Sixteen guys from his union died there. His eyes redden. He really can’t talk about the anniversary.

Crockett hadn’t heard about the racial incident in the park over Labor Day weekend because he stopped getting the local paper. The delivery boy hurled it too hard against his new glass door.

He hadn’t heard that a gang of white punks from this area, which is called Great Kills, beat up an African American college sophomore and cut up her white and Hispanic friends with broken bottles and a sickle. They allegedly called Rachel Carter “nigger” -- and worse. She demanded they stop and that’s when she got punched in the jaw and head. The police were called but instead of arresting anyone, they advised Carter and her six bloodied friends to go home to New Jersey before they got shot or killed.

“It’s a terrible thing for people to call each other that,” said Crockett, shouting at Ace to stay out of the weeds around the park. “But she should have put her tail between her legs and gotten out of there.”

A mother’s outrage

There were those weeks of clarity after Sept. 11, when New Yorkers came together hoping we were somehow, in some way, fundamentally changed for the better. Two years later, just days before the second anniversary, an appalling little rumble in a city playground reminds us that the true texture of New York has not been erased. Even as Staten Island memorializes the sorrow that came from one group’s failure to understand another, the community is not immediately incensed about the poison of ethnic hatred in its midst.

It wasn’t until days later, when Carter’s mother, Joan, drove over the bridge from New Jersey to Staten Island to file a complaint, that police started an investigation -- of the event and the official response.

Crockett’s explanation for the lackadaisical reaction is that a lot of police and firemen live on Staten Island and he thinks there’s a code among on-duty officers to show lenience to local kids who, for all they know, could be related to a colleague.

“My son was a tough kid,” said Crocket, 61. “With the drinking and partying, they’re always getting in fights.” Luckily, his son grew out of it. Now he’s 34, also an electrician, and a father himself.

Crockett, who is Irish and German, is a little suspicious of the claim that white kids went after a black girl -- he thinks it could have been just another holiday party that got out of hand.

“My parents were from the old school and they didn’t like Italians. They came around and I married an Italian girl. I didn’t like blacks really until I was 40. But I changed. I got to know them in the union.

“These kids,” added Crockett, trying to head off Ace from the water, “I don’t understand them. I’d think they’d be better.”

Joan Carter is not so understanding. After all, it was her daughter who ended up in an emergency room with a swollen face. How, she wonders, could people, born in the 1980s, come to use the word “nigger?” She explicitly taught her daughter not to abide such language, even between people of color.

“I encouraged my daughter to have friends of all backgrounds,” said Carter, a nurse who moved here 20 years ago from Jamaica. “I would like to ask these kids and their parents: What makes them think this is acceptable in America, especially in New York City?”

The lapse by police baffles her even more. “The most illiterate American knows that a police report should be filed when there is such an act of violence,” Carter huffed.

This week, 11 white teenagers were arrested for the brutal attack and some face as much as seven years in prison. A few Staten Island politicians have publicly denounced the attackers and questioned the police reaction. Really, this community is quite capable of outrage. And sorrow.

After 9/11, Staten Island political leaders came together fairly quickly -- and by comparison to other communities rather efficiently -- to agree upon a memorial to the victims of the attacks. They chose a site and a dramatic design that looks like a white, concrete butterfly. They were to break ground Thursday in a ceremony facing the tip of Manhattan where the towers once dominated the skyline.

And New York City Councilman Andrew Lanza has made it his personal mission to have a street renamed for each of the 268 Staten Islanders who died. He’s renamed 135 so far.

Lanza, who grew up a few blocks from Armstrong Avenue, refuses to conclude that what he calls “shocking” intolerance in a park is evidence that his community is loosening its strengthened bond.

“All I can tell you is, on any given Wednesday if I have a street renaming, a couple of hundred people show up in the middle of the afternoon and stand united. I think the spirit lives on.”

The spirit of remembrance lives on. But on a depressing anniversary week in this playground, it’s the spirit of tolerance that seems lost.