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Show IKsiiPiFieit Vaann nflnnime Pretty windows in the Bronx "We're all in the gutter," wrote Oscar Wilde, "but some of us are gazing at the stars." That was Oscar, the romantic snob, assuring us that only superior gutter dwellers had the capacity to see those stars, thereby diverting the mind from the surrounding squalor. Now, it is precisely that starry illusion that New York City's greathearted great-hearted housing commission hopes to create with an unprecedented stroke of urban renewal. What's in store is a bit of legerdemain, a touch of theatrical magic, if you believe in such devices. Or a cheap, patronizing insult if you don't. Aesthetics are involved here, as well as a sense of social justice. What the city proposes is bringing an illusion of bourgeois tidiness in the rottenest slum in the land, the "bombed-out" South Bronx. Plans call for painting pretty pictures on the rotting walls and boarded windows of abandoned tenements. Sounds mad, but that's what they're doing. When the artwork is finished, depressed Bronx folk, slogging through the gutters that pass for streets, can look up and see "windows" with dainty white curtains blowing in the breeze. Country-style windows with pots of geraniums and maybe a fat cat asleep on the sill. Windows out of the Ladies' Home Journal. It's all to be done with vinyl decals and an infinite faith in man's capacity for self-deception. City officials concede that these decals and murals along with repairs to the masonry are merely "cosmetic brush strokes." The allotted budget of $300,000 is not enough to rehabilitate even one tenement. But it is enough to give the illusion that pockets of gracious living have somehow survived sur-vived in an area of high crime, drug addicition and permanent squalor. It's a new version of the Potemkin village, just as bogus as it was in the 18th century. Marshall Potemkin, a huge, one-eyed one-eyed bear of a man, was the favorite lover of Catherine the Great of Russia. It was he who ordered picturesque sham villages to be constructed in front of miserable peasant settlements, settle-ments, thereby shielding the eyes of the empress from her people's poverty. The principal lives on in these sham windows with their illusion of a clean, cozy life being lived behind the crumbling walls of the Bronx. The pretty decals are bound to lift morale, says Anthony Gliedman, New York's commissioner of housing, preservation and development. "Perception," "Per-ception," Mr. Gliedman solemnly told the press, "is reality." Maybe so, but the commissioner could be underestimating the sensibilities sensibili-ties of Bronx dwellers. They know their mean streets. They also know a hawk from a handsaw. They'll see the cheerful painted windows for what they are a cheap token of the decencies denied them. In a broader sense these kitschy windows with their phony flowerpots are a metaphor of our time. They are part of the national mania for denial. It's a mania that is blurring the true shape of things and corrupting the language. It is denial that has given us "gender-speak," with chairmen becoming be-coming chairpersons, unisexing our heterosexual society. It's denial that has renamed prisons correctional facilities and lumped the gifted and retarded together as "exceptional children." Simple, honorable words like deaf and blind have been replaced by the condescending "hearing impaired" im-paired" and "non-sighted." A letter to the editor of Newsweek urges that alcoholism be called "Jallinek's disease." di-sease." Indians are suddenly "native Americans," a wholly inaccurate term, since anybody born on American soil is a native American. A nation that lives by euphemisms is living a lie. Painting pretty windows in the Bronx is but a small part of the lie. Such trickery should remind us that God will not be mocked nor will reality. 1983 Harriet Van Home Distributed by Special Features Syndication Sales |
