Arthur Schwartz

New York: Love It Or Leave It

 

Your article about New York City's degenerating climate for small business is right on target. I'm a Brooklyn native, and I left the New York area in 1959. New York was turning into a city run by the very rich for the benefit of themselves and the very poor -- at the expense of the rest of us.I was called a racist, bigot, and, that dirtiest of all words in the Flatbush lexicon -- a Republican.

After all these years, I turn out to have been a damned good prophet. I regret that the greatest city on the planet has been turned into an incipient desert. But for the past 40 years, people have been voting for the kind of chaos that is now developing. Do you blame immigrants for going elsewhere?