You really couldn’t hope to find a better illustration of Rudolph Giuliani’s terms as mayor of New York City than his stance on jaywalking. The practice of crossing the street against traffic or when the light is red or in the middle of the block is probably the single most common form of law-breaking, especially now that littering has become deeply unfashionable, and spitting on the sidewalk has virtually disappeared. Laws prohibiting jaywalking are universally understood to symbolize a city’s parental stance toward its infantile citizens; in cities around the world they are primarily a cheap and easy way for a beat cop to meet his daily ticket quota. New York City, however, might as well be the capital of jaywalking-it could call itself the City of Jaywalkers. It is the inverse of those German cities in which travelers are astonished to find crowds of pedestrians waiting placidly for the light to change even when there is no traffic to be seen for miles in either direction. Jaywalking is a New Yorker’s birthright, a minor but indispensable sign of his or her independence and self-sufficiency. New Yorkers can cross anywhere at any time if they need to, and if they get themselves creamed, they accept that it will be their own damn fault. It is their city, after all, not one lent to them on a merit basis by cops or bureaucrats.

The fact that Giuliani chose to have his police officers aggressively enforce the anti-jaywalking statutes was a flung gauntlet, a proclamation that he intended to remake the city in his own image for his own pleasure. Unlike most mayors, he would not be adapting himself to better serve his city, but would be adapting the city for it to serve him. Not being one for half-measures, he then raised the ante far beyond anyone’s speculations by declaring certain formerly legal street-crossings off-limits-installing fences on Midtown corners to prevent any pedestrian traffic at those points, so as not to impede the flow of motor vehicles on the major arteries. Favoring cars over people flew in the face of most current urbanist thinking, went directly against the trend of cities, such as London and Amsterdam, that had been doing their best to reduce vehicular traffic in their centers-but Giuliani’s actions had far less to do with traffic control than with behavior modification. He was determined to rule over an obedient citizenry. He would effect a personality change in New Yorkers by forcing them to adhere to whimsical and arbitrary mandates.

The enforcement of the statutes on jaywalking was perhaps thinly justified by the “broken windows” theory, a voguish neoliberal construct that held that the number of minor infractions observed in a district-graffiti, panhandlers, subway-fare evasions-was proportional to the amount of significant crimes, of murders, rapes, and felonious assaults. You might as well say that the number of dust bunnies observed under furniture was somehow predictive of the chances that the house would burn down, but it was hardly coincidental that most such “lifestyle crimes”-jaywalking was a notable exception-were largely limited to, and taken for granted by, the poor. In previous decades there had been rashes of enforcement of particular infractions, notably graffiti, which was the focus of a virulent media campaign that just happened to coincide with its flowering as an art form, but most such torts had traditionally been engrained in city life. Begging, for example, went back to the prehistory of cities, and even conservative regimes had long been inclined to view it as an occasion for demonstrative charity, if not as a reproach to materialist self-satisfaction. Unlicensed sidewalk vending of secondhand goods had flourished in the poorer neighborhoods of New York more or less forever, but under the mayoral administration of Ed Koch the police had begun to harass vendors on the pretext that their goods might have been stolen property. Under Giuliani, the enforcement of such petty laws became draconian and unavoidable, and the number of targetable infractions swelled dramatically. Out-of-towners who desired a quick nutshell view of the city’s tone in those years would be taken to the Criminal Courts Building on Monday morning, to observe the endless line of otherwise blameless citizens who had been given a bench-appearance ticket over the weekend for drinking beer-concealed by paper bags-on the sidewalk.

New York City was hardly alone in its attempts to erase these aspects of its fabric that journalists tended to characterize with the adjective “gritty.” It was the era when gentrification went into overdrive, and hardly any urban neighborhood, no matter how ill-constructed and godforsaken, was safe from the incursion of smart boutiques and chic restaurants-businesses that were only affordable for the well-to-do. New York’s transformation differed in the pedantic obsessiveness with which laws were combed to find a basis for extirpating all manifestations of street life, and the harshly punitive way in which those sweeps were carried out. Those items carried Giuliani’s signature. He had first made his name as a prosecutor whose ruthless zeal for conviction suggested some throwback hybrid of Thomas E. Dewey and J. Edgar Hoover. It may have been the late author and columnist Murray Kempton who applied to him Carlyle’s characterization of Robespierre: “a sea-green incorruptible.” He set the tone of his mayoral administration very early, with a speech given at a forum on city crime in which he asserted that “Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it.” That speech struck me as uncomfortably reminiscent of some statements that had been made sixty-odd years earlier. For example, “State and individual are identical, and the art of government is the art of so reconciling and uniting the two terms that a maximum of liberty harmonizes with a maximum of public order. . . . For the maximum liberty always coincides with the maximum force of the state.” Those words were written by Giovanni Gentile, the official philosopher of Fascism under Mussolini. Few made the connection in print, just as only a few publicly noted the then-mayor’s philosophical debt to Girolamo Savonarola, the scold of fifteenth-century Florence, because of an unwillingness to appear in thrall to an ethnic stereotype. Giuliani was tireless. He bullied, hectored, and sought to marginalize anyone who dared oppose him. No sooner had one battle been joined than he opened another front, so that he could ensure the dispersal of outrage. The mayoral podium seemed to be erected in five or six places per day for the benefit of the evening news, and it became exhausting trying to take in all his various but singularly pointed performances. He would be refusing to apologize for the unjustifiable murder of a black man by the police over here, then attempting to abrogate freedom of expression over there, then arguing for tax exemptions for the very rich somewhere else. He long succeeded in outshouting and outrunning the opposition, and coasted in popular esteem on the pretense that he single-handedly lowered the crime rate.

By 2001, however, his public image was somewhat battered, the greatest harm having come to it from his long-running divorce battle rather than from any graver matter. Just when it looked as though he might have lost the support of the city and would be forced to slink from office at the close of his term, he was delivered by a deus ex machina: 9/11. He played the part of embattled leader well-the enormity at hand being sufficient to make his choleric personality seem reasonable by contrast. No one had ever suggested that Giuliani was unintelligent or ill-prepared, and he demonstrated his competence quite conspicuously, even allowing a reporter to witness him consulting a biography of Winston Churchill. In the end, however, a letter to the Village Voice, published later that September, summarized matters rather tersely. Giuliani is forever being credited (I am quoting from memory) with “rising to the occasion,” the writer noted, but the truth is that the horror of 9/11 has dragged the city down to his level.

Giuliani is in an excellent position at present. His consulting firm is hired by cities around the world that seek hints on how to make their intransigent underclasses and surviving dissident fringes disappear from sight. He is favored by the Republican Party as an aggressive speaker and militant presence who has had combat experience; as an operative who might have retained credibility in the traditionally liberal urban enclaves as a man who has gay friends and has been known to read a book. Meanwhile, he has left a New York City that has had much of its identity bled from it. It is a city of chain franchises and million-dollar hovels, of minimized public services and sweetheart tax deals, of a corporate Times Square and a whitened Harlem. There is less discourse and exchange across class lines than there has ever been, and whatever life and vigor and color the city retains has a great deal to do with Giuliani’s inability to entirely vacate the rent-stabilization laws. The city he has left might in a generation or two be interchangeable with Phoenix or Atlanta, but for some geographic quirks. It should be noted, however, that the trains have already ceased to run on time.

I decided to investigate. The park had been much on my mind lately, and I had been expecting trouble there for at least a year. A decade ago, when I first moved into the neighborhood, the park had been the undisputed province of junkies and muggers, and few others, including me, ventured into it after dark. More recently, however, it had regained its position as a public gathering site. On weekend nights it emanated music and hijinks as the traffic among the dozens of bars and restaurants nearby just naturally came to include the park. At the same time it had become an encampment of the homeless. On bitter January nights, as I headed up Avenue A from my office to my apartment, I would see groups of people huddled around trashcan bonfires or packed together sleeping under a tarp. Late in the winter, though, policemen had been coming around and dousing the flames, and otherwise harrassing the occupants of this latter-day Hooverville. When summer came the ongoing party and the homeless settlement had in some fashion fused; it was a mild commotion, a bit boisterous but no threat to anyone. Nevertheless, in view of the cops, it was a ticking bomb. The park’s history for a century had been marked by clashes between the police and area residents, from the gun detachments that were moved in after the 1887 execution of the Haymarket anarchists in Chicago for fear of local anarchist flareups (none occurred), to the violent turf wars of the late Sixties and early Seventies, a three-way tangle among police, hippies, and Hispanic youths. Some of the tension of those post-Summer of Love days had returned, although now largely devoid of racial content and set starkly between locals and the authorities. There had been talk, too, that city officials were unhappy with the park’s design, disturbed by the darkness provided by the dense, ancient trees and the twisting, European-style paths, and were considering revising the landscape to a more open and policeable plan. It did not come as much of a surprise, then, to hear that the cops were intending the close the park at night, nor that the first such effort, on the last weekend in July, was met with vocal if confused resistance. On that occasion some taunting went on and there were a scattering of arrests, but around two in the morning the thirty or forty cops went home and jubliant locals moved back into the park, convinced that they had won.

On this night, though, things looked different before I had even reached First Avenue. Groups of people massed on the four corners of First and St. Mark’s were yelling slogans–”The Park Belongs to the People!” Halfway down the next block a cordon of cops in riot gear was blocking further access in the direction of the park, not even letting through residents of buildings located beyond their post, nor were they deigning to answer questions. Even if one knew that there had been some recent disputes over use of the park–and such knowledge was by no means general in the neighborhood–the obviously hostile police presence appeared inexplicable. Overhead, a police helicopter hovered, coming so low that the roar of its blades seemed to be rising from behind the houses on both sides of the street, and then coming lower still, so that the backwash of its rotors kicked up the debris from the gutters and the trash from the trashcans and drew it upward in spirals.

On Avenue A the helicopter aimed its spotlights at the tops of buildings. Was it looking for snipers? The avenue was full of people, some protesting but many more pulled, dazed, from bars and apartments, some from bed; one guy was wearing a bathrobe and slippers. A group crowded around a man who said he had heard the chief of the Ninth Precinct assert that he was calling for reinforcements due to “Communist agitators” among the protestors. This drew a laugh. Police were everywhere (by the end of the night their numbers would be estimated at 450): beat cops with their caps turned around and badge numbers obscured, plainclothesmen trying with little success to look like locals, riot cops bearing Plexiglas shields, vehicles marked with designations ranging from “Hazardous Materials Squad” to “DWI Task Force,” and, just below the park’s main entrance opposite St. Mark’s Place, an Emergency Services truck the size of a bus, with lamps like Klieg lights aimed up and down the avenue. Suddenly a detachment of mounted cops went tearing down St. Mark’s at full gallop.

On First Avenue, where the horses were headed, all was chaos. Trash cans lay on their sides in the middle of the street, small groups of civilians were being chased this way and that by mounted cops and foot cops wielding nightsticks. The police appeared to be acting in purely random fashion, suddenly deciding to empty a particular corner or stretch of sidewalk of its occupants, or, hearing an insult launched at them from the crowd, undertaking a flanking maneuver, sticks braced, advancing to their own rhythmic chant: “Kill, kill, kill!” More vehicles, patrol cars and paddy wagons, came roaring down St. Mark’s Place the wrong way. Then they parked and the cops just milled around, eventually beginning their own game of patternless rousting and containment actions.

Back on Avenue A, the block between Sixth and Seventh streets just below the park was now an empty zone between police lines at either end. A handful of cops were stalking the block demanding that shopkeepers and the owners of bars and restaurants shut their gates. A middle-aged cop who looked a bit like the actor Brian Keith was shouting himself hoarse ordering the owners of the large mid-block Korean grocery to lock their doors. “With a key!” he screamed again and again. Earlier I had heard someone in a crowd say, “You know who’s really hurting tonight? S.Y.P.” I tried to decipher the acronym: Socialist Youth Party? Now I realized they had been referring to this popular albeit grossly overpriced convenience store, locally known as Save Your Pennies, which under ordinary circumstances would have been doing its heaviest business at just that hour. I watched the activity for about fifteen minutes, virtually the only civilian on the block, until finally a small cop came up to me and yelled, half-pleading, “What are you doing? Go home!” as if I were an errant toddler and he a nervous young father.

Below Sixth Street the heaviest concentration of police stood cordoning off the block from a crowd of several hundred locals. Every sort of attitude was present on both sides. There were cops who wanted to talk, for example, trying to reason it out with their opponents, although they were a distinct minority among the blue ranks. The civilians comprised a wide range of ages, dispositions, and sartorial adornments. One long-haired peacock in an incongruous black duster paced around in confusion, preening as if reflexively. A shirtless man paced in front of the crowd with the air of a prophet, lifting his cane in the air as he instigated chants. Most people simply looked dazed. Others kept appearing, homeward bound from work or bars and entirely unprepared for the situation; most ended up staying with the crowd. A knot of people on a corner clustered around two priests, who seemed to have been among the complainants responsible for the police presence. That is, they had asked the precinct to try to reduce the volume of noise emanating from the park, and now they were alternately embarrassed and defensive in the face of the semi-military occupation. A couple of reasonable-sounding passers-by had seen the beginnings of the fray, around eleven o’clock, when the cops had evacuated the park, a group of youths had turned around and rushed the fence, sticks had been wielded and bottles thrown. From there matters had escalated. The passers-by, avoiding ideological argument, were making the point that bad policing had been and was manifest. The priests kept insisting that a large police presence was necessary to protect their parishioners from the crack trade. They didn’t seem to register the fact, even when it was pointed out to them, that such trade does not take place in the park but in derelict buildings on side streets that are raided every now and then but reopen almost immediately. Finally, one of the priests lost his cool. “You think this is bad?” he said, having by his own admission perceived that a number of his interlocuters looked Jewish. “You should go to Israel, see what the Israelis are doing on the West Bank. They’re really cracking heads there!”

Over the next few hours events became increasingly repetitive as cops and crowd were locked in a face-off, which would momentarily be broken when somebody (always someone invisibly in the rear of the crowd) would lob a bottle and the cops would charge and club heads. A young woman who had done nothing but stand in the wrong place was clubbed so badly her shirt was soaked through with blood. After she had been taken away in an ambulance, others raised her shirt on a stick like a flag. Onlookers wept, screamed in frustration, exhorted their fellows to take up sticks and do battle; the crowd had no leaders and no logic. Neither did the cops, apparently; they spent a great deal of time dispatching units to investigate rooftops from which nothing was being thrown. Periodically cops would go around dumping garbage cans and smashing the empty bottles with their clubs and feet, invariably drawing applause from the crowd. They seemed to be particularly vehement in going after bicycles, deliberately damaging them with their truncheons. Every now and then a fire truck would pull up and, after a few minutes, depart. This remained inexplicable until a radio report the following day quoted police officials as saying that the crowd started fires along the avenue, but no fires were seen, at least by me. A negotiating session between locals and cops, mediated by a third priest, became a circular bout of reiterated arguments.

Finally, about five o’clock or so, I was getting so sleepy, having been up since seven the previous morning, that the tableau before my eyes began to look imaginary. I decided to go. Just then the huge Emergency Services truck began broadcasting news of a Community Board meeting to be held the following Wednesday. Then somebody threw a bottle and the cops charged yet again. All night I had been pretty deft at staying out of their path, but this time I did not move quickly enough down Sixth Street, and I was slammed against a building, and then dragged along the sidewalk. I limped home, fingering the gashes in my shirt and pants, wishing I hadn’t been wearing new clothes that night.