Today’s NY Times reports on the crackdown on break-dancers in the subway.
The young dancers, Peppermint and Butterscotch, scanned the scattered
faces aboard the New York City subway. One caught their eye.
“Are you a cop?” a performer asked, as their Q train rumbled toward
Canal Street. The man waved them off. Peppermint and Butterscotch were
satisfied.
“It’s showtime!” they shouted.
Music filled the train. Legs curled around the car’s graspable bars
like creeping ivy. Then came a finale that surprised even the dancers:
four plainclothes officers converging in tandem, and two sets of handcuffs.
Cheered by tourists, tolerated by regulars, feared by those who frown
upon kicks in the face, subway dancers have unwittingly found themselves
a top priority for the New York Police Department — a curious collision
of a Giuliani-era policing approach, a Bloomberg-age dance craze and a
new administration that has cast the mostly school-age entertainers as
fresh-face avatars of urban disorder.
There’s probably nobody more opposed to being a captive audience on the
subways than me. I have been riding NYC subways since they cost 15 cents
a ride. When they were this cheap, they lacked air conditioning and were
as noisy as hell, but you could at least be assured that you would never
be forced to watch a musical performance, begged for spare change, or
listen to a sermon.
That was a function of the city being a lot more economically and
socially viable than it has been ever since the fare reached the dollar
level at least. In 1961 the city was home to a million and one small
manufacturing plants that provided jobs for Blacks and Latinos. This is
not to speak of the jobs in heavy industry just across the river in New
Jersey, such as the Ford plant in Mahwah. In those days, jobs were like
low-hanging fruit for recent immigrants from the Deep South or Puerto
Rico. They disappeared long ago, leaving the grandchildren of those
worked them forced to beg for change or break dancing just one step
ahead of the law.
full:
http://louisproyect.org/2014/07/29/bratton-de-blasio-and-the-subway-break-dancers/
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