Fighting Back

Throughout this country, more often than not unknown to one another, small, heterogenous bands of people, moral guerrillas, are resisting mighty institutions that, in the name of healing, or expanded space to worship God, or higher education, or more rapid transit routes, or just more and more hamburgers, would rape their communities.

The Rape of Our Neighborhoods alerts potential victims--us--to the tricks and coercions that precede institutional assaults on neighborhoods by hospitals, churches, universities, mass transit authorities, and businesses. It links the easy victories of many of these local assaults to a state of mind among the citizenry that also made Watergate and Viet Nam possible. But basically the book provides hints on 'how to do it,' how to resist.

Worthy berates himself for his one failure, in the aftermath of his many struggles against the system, to notice the dangers of citywide expansionist trends. Slowly, as the "tentacles" of the octopus reached into the rooms of his life, he came to realize that only a society which does not permit expansionist institutions to abuse and manipulate its citizens will not abuse and manipulate the citizens of another country.

"There's not choice but to be trained in the arts of community survival," he writes. If people begin on the street where they live to convert moral resistance into concrete legal and political activity, they also prepare themselves to recognize and hopefully thwart the Vietnams when they begin.

Worthy's voice is angry; he has things he wants known--powerful ideas and principles which he believes are reducible, once the fight is enjoined, to such small sustaining acts as changing a light bulb in the apartment of a fellow a light bulb in the apartment of a fellow tenant too old to climb a ladder. But he does not bore the reader with his anger. In stead he spins a fascinating personal yearn about the lengthy battle waged by the tenants fo an old rent-controlled walk-up apartment house in the Gramercy Park section of New York City against the monied force of an expansion-bent hospital across the street.

Psychologically he and his fellow tenants were "naked and disarmed" when the hospital began its secret mission to evict them, tear down their building and replace it with a 27-space parking lot. As a small boy, Worthy had accompanied his physician father on rounds in the hospitals of Greater Boston, acquiring a reverence for these institutions of healing. Most people share a similar attitude toward hospitals, and so they are unprepared to believe that a medical complex or, for similar sentimental reasons, a university or church can, in its relentless drive to force tenants out of a building, resort to such ruthless tactics as shutting off the heat and hot water on the coldest days of winter or setting loose a German police dog to attack the tenants in the hallways of the building.

In effecting the tenants' slow turnaround from paralyzing fear to embattlement, the organizers of tenant resistance met with their most serious obstacle: convincing their fellow tenants that to win the battle they only had to stay ensconced in their apartments "and say no. No to all intimidation. No to harrassment. No to the tireless rumormongers." Overcoming the obedience to authority of the neighbors was so difficult that by the time the small nucleus of organizers had succeeded, the number of occupied apartments had fallen from 47 to 20.

Worthy stresses the vital need for leaders to resist the temptation to "withhold news of negative developments" when the struggle has begun. People can absorb temporary defeats, but they leave the battle if they are lied to, or if their leaders are not fully "accurate in technical, legal and political information" that they disseminate.

Trust and pragmatic concern become essential weapons in a protracted tenant struggle, but the primary one needed to make this counter-power work is the engagement of the media, particularly the neighborhood press Describing a Boston battle Forway vs. Mass. Historical Society, Worthy credits the community's small, monthly tabloid with holding the community together. To assist a resistance movement, he details in vivid example throughout the book, and in two extraordinary appendices, and incisive and brilliant account of how to work with both the community and metropolitan press.

Worthy succeeds in conveying to all threatened tenants the knowledge of how similar their pain is, and how powerful their united response against the perpetrators could be.