The Daily - The Sunday Read: 'Jim Dwyer, About New York'

Episode Date: October 18, 2020

Jim Dwyer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New York Times, died earlier this month. He was 63.Throughout his nearly 40-year career, Jim was drawn to stories about discrimination, wrongly convicted prisoners and society’s mistreated outcasts. From 2007, he wrote The Times’s “About New York” column — when asked whether he had the best job in journalism, he responded, “I believe I do.”Dan Barry, a reporter for The Times who also wrote for the column, has called Jim a “newsman of consequence” and “a determined voice for the vulnerable.” Today, he reads two stories written by Jim, his friend and colleague.These stories were written by Jim Dwyer and read by Dan Barry. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

My name is Dan Barry, and I've been a reporter and columnist at The New York Times since forever. Today, I'm going to read a few stories by my colleague and friend, Jim Dwyer. I knew Jim Dwyer before I knew him because I had read his columns over the years and I admired his writing and his commitment to justice. Jim's columns often focused on the every person. He made a name for himself by writing exclusively about the subways. a name for himself by writing exclusively about the subways. He wrote about the people who worked for the subway system, who rode the subways, and he understood more than anyone else how the subways connected the city. He would tweak the noses of the powerful, whether it was Mayor Ed Koch, Mayor Dinkins, Mayor Giuliani, Mayor de Blasio, it didn't matter.

And in 1995, Jim won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary for his columns about New York City. The columns at their best were prose poems. You could smell the apartment or the tenement. You could smell the subway. You were there. Jim and I had several connections. For one thing, we were both narrowbacks, which means that we were the children of Irish immigrants.

And the term, which is derogatory to some people, means that you do not have the shoulders as broad as your parents or the people that were back in Ireland, that you weren't as strong. that you weren't as strong. Over the years, we would sit in the cafeteria and chat. I would always approach him, and he would say, Daniel, and I would say, James. And we would sit down and commiserate about the inner politics at the New York Times or about the news of the day in New York City.

And often we would talk about Ireland. He did a pretty good County Kerry accent or brogue. I never really tried. I always sounded silly. Jim died earlier this month after a very difficult battle with cancer. He was 63 years old, and it seems like I've known him forever. I was thinking even this morning about calling him about something.

Yeah, I'm going to miss him. Now I'm going to read a piece by Jim that was written about a month after 9-11 and it appeared in a section that was dedicated to the reporting that followed the terrorist attack. It's called Fighting for Life 50 Floors Up with One Tool and Ingenuity. Now memories orbit around small things. None of the other window washers liked his old green bucket,

but Jan Demser, who worked inside one World Trade Center, found its rectangular mouth perfect for dipping and wetting his squeegee in one motion. So, on the morning of the 11th, as he waited at the 44th floor sky lobby to connect with elevators for higher floors, Bucket and Squeegee dangled from the end of his arm. The time was 8.47. With five other men, Shivam Iyer, John Paskowski, George Phoenix, Cullen Richardson, and another man whose identity could not be learned, Mr. Dempster boarded car 69A, an express elevator that stopped on floors 67 through 74. The car rose, but before it reached its first landing, we felt a muted thud, Mr. Iyer said. The building shook. The elevator swung from side to side

like a pendulum. Then it plunged. In the car, someone punched an emergency stop button. At that moment, 8.48 a.m., one World Trade Center had entered the final 100 minutes of its existence. No one knew the clock was running, least of all the men trapped inside car 69A. They were as cut off 500 feet in the sky as if they had been trapped 500 feet underwater. They did not know their lives would depend on a

simple tool. After 10 minutes, a live voice delivered a blunt message over the intercom. There had been an explosion. Then the intercom went silent. Smoke seeped into the elevator cabin. One man cursed skyscrapers. Mr. Phoenix, the tallest, a Port Authority engineer, poked for a ceiling hatch. Others pried apart the car doors, propping them open with the long

wooden handle of Mr. Dempster's squeegee. There was no exit. They faced a wall stenciled with the number 50. That particular elevator bank did not serve the 50th floor, so there was no need for an opening. To escape, they would have to make one themselves. Mr. Dempster felt the wall. Sheet rock. Having worked in construction in his early days as a Polish immigrant, he knew that it could be cut with a sharp knife. No one had a knife. From his bucket, Mr. Dempster drew his squeegee. bucket, Mr. Dempster drew his squeegee. He slid its metal edge against the wall, back and forth, over and over. He was spelled by the other men. Against the smoke, they breathed through handkerchiefs dampened in a container of milk Mr. Phoenix had just bought.

Sheetrock comes in panels about one inch thick, Mr. Dempster recalled. They cut an inch, then two inches. Mr. Dempster's hand ached. As he carved into the third panel, his hand shook. He fumbled the squeegee, and it dropped down the shaft. He had one tool left, a short metal squeegee handle. They carried on with fists, feet, and handle, cutting an irregular rectangle about 12 by 18 inches. Finally, they hit a layer of white tiles. A bathroom. They broke the tiles.

They broke the tiles. One by one, the men squirmed through the opening, head first, sideways, popping onto the floor near a sink. Mr. Dempster turned back. I said, pass my bucket out, he recalled. By then, about 9.30, the 50th floor was already deserted, except for firefighters, astonished to see the six men emerge. I think it was Engine Company 5, Mr. Iyer said. They hustled us to the staircase.

On the excruciating single-file descent through the smoke, someone teased Mr. Dempster about bringing his bucket. The company might not order me another one, he replied. At the 15th floor, Mr. Iyer said, we heard a thunderous metallic roar. I thought our lives had surely ended then. The South Tower was collapsing. It was 9.59. Mr. Dempster dropped his bucket. The firefighters shouted to hurry. At 23 minutes past 10, they burst onto the street, ran for phones, sipped oxygen, and, five minutes later, fled as the north tower collapsed. Their escape had taken 95 of the 100 minutes. It took up to one and a half minutes to clear each floor longer at the lower levels, Mr. Eyre, an engineer with the board authority, said. If the elevator had stopped at

the 60th floor instead of the 50th, we would have been five minutes too late. And that man with the squeegee, he was like our guardian angel. Since that day, Mr. Dempster has stayed home with his wife and children. He has pieced together the faces of the missing with the men and women he knew in the stations of his old life. The security guard at the Japanese bank on the 93rd floor who used to let him in at 6.30. The people at Car Futures on 92. The head of the Port Authority. Their faces keep him awake at night, he says.

His hands, the one that held the squeegee and the other that carried the bucket, shake with absence. Now I'm going to read a column by Jim about a police shooting in 1973 of a 10-year-old boy named Clifford Glover. Jim wrote the column in 2015 after another police shooting in South Carolina, that of a man named Walter Scott. It's called A Police Shot to a Boy's Back in Queens, Echoing Since 1973. It was 1973, long before anyone could imagine hashtag declarations of solidarity and protest, the kind of message to the world that today might read hashtag I am Clifford Glover in the fourth grade. No one could pull out a phone to make a video of Clifford Glover, a 10-year-old running from a plainclothes police officer with a gun, who had just jumped out of a white Buick Skylark in Jamaica, Queens, on a spring morning in 1973. I am sure a camera would have helped, but the ballistics were

clear, Albert Gaudelli, a former Queens prosecutor, said this week. The bullet entered his lower back and came out at the top of his chest. He was shot T-square in the back, with his body leaning forward. He was running away. That bullet killed Clifford Glover. Its trajectory, through a family, a neighborhood, a generation, can be traced to this day in injuries that never healed in a story with no final word. When a black man named Walter Scott was shot by a white police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina on April 4th, a cell phone video made by a passerby showed that Mr. Scott was also running away when he was killed

and that he was not, as the police officer claimed, carrying a police taser. With all this killing and stuff, said Pauline Armstead, a sister of the dead boy, they need to go back to Cliffy Glover. Clifford, a black boy, had been shot by Officer Thomas Shea, a white man, who said he had tried to question him and his stepfather because they fit the descriptions of cab robbers. They ran. The officer said he fired when Clifford, in flight, pointed a gun at him, which the mortally injured boy had then managed to toss or hand to his stepfather. In the hours and days that followed the shooting,

armies of investigators scoured the streets and sewers, poured over court records, and arrived, without warrants, to search the homes of Clifford's family and relatives. without warrants, to search the homes of Clifford's family and relatives. Guys were trying to help Shea and coming up with all kinds of stuff, said Mr. Gaudelli, who was the chief homicide prosecutor in Queens at the time. Someone showed up with a starter's pistol, but as soon as he pressed them on it, they folded. There was no gun. People in Jamaica rose in protest. The streets were blocked with heavy construction equipment owned by a black contractor. Mr. Shea became the first police officer in nearly 50 years

to be charged with committing murder while on duty. Shea says that the kid turned and appeared to have a gun, Mr. Godelli said. That's what got him indicted. The ballistics made Shea a liar. But not apparently a murderer, at least in the eyes of the jury of 11 white men and one black woman who found him not guilty. Afterward, many of the jurors joined Mr. Shea and his lawyers at a Queens Boulevard restaurant to celebrate. They told reporters it was possible Mr. Shea had been telling the truth about seeing a gun. That same day, word of the verdict reached a baseball field on the grounds of the South

Jamaica Houses, known locally as the Forty Projects. Eric Adams, who was then a 13-year-old from the neighborhood, was waiting to bat. We were playing a Long Island team that happened to be all white, said Mr. Adams, who became a police officer and is now the Brooklyn Borough president. When the news came out, about 200 people emerged on the field. They just took the baseball bats and started beating the white players, chanting, Shea got away. Later, Mr. Shea would be fired despite a rally by police officers and the pleas of his lawyer, Jacob Evsaroff, who said his client was needed on the force, quote, to protect us from the animals who roam the streets of New York, end quote. The Long Island baseball team had come to Queens as part of an interracial

interneighborhood thing, Mr. Adams said. It was their first visit. The Jamaica team tried to stop the assault but could not. That was all the outrage, he said, adding that because of what happened, a lot of our guys quit the team, never played baseball again. For his generation of black boys and girls, Mr. Adams said, the verdict brought a lot of despair. The year after Clifford Glover died, the number of shots fired by officers declined by nearly half. In 2013, the number of shots fired was 248, the fewest since the police department began keeping detailed records in 1971. At the peak, in 1972, officers fired 2,510 bullets. Because Mr. Shea had spoken freely with his superiors, the largest police union began a campaign,

urging its members not to talk after a shooting until a union lawyer had arrived. For Clifford's family, his death changed everything. For Clifford's family, his death changed everything. They wrote that we were poor, Darlene Armstead, a younger sister, said this week. As she and three other siblings, Kenneth, Pauline, and Patricia Armstead, described the household this week, the family may not have had much money, but before Clifford's killing, it was sound. Darlene's father, Ad Armstead, who was Clifford's stepfather, went to work every morning at a junkyard. The family had dinner each night at the same time around one table, Ms. Armstead said, then watched cowboy shows on television.

On summer weekends, neighborhood children feasted in the backyard on watermelon laid out on a door covered by a sheet that rested on two clean garbage cans. Ad Armstead and his brothers enjoyed cigars and burgers. My father taught us structure, Darlene Armstead said. She had to make beds. One brother had to clean the yard and bring out the garbage. Clifford, a fourth grader at Public School 40, went with his stepfather on weekends to the junkyard, carrying his own little wrench. On the morning of April 28, 1973, a Saturday, On the morning of April 28, 1973, a Saturday,

Ed Armstead woke Clifford before dawn so they could be at the yard to move cranes into place for a delivery. They walked a few blocks along New York Boulevard, known today as Guy R. Brewer Boulevard, when an unmarked car pulled alongside them. Mr. Armstead, carrying wages that he had been paid the day before, said he and Clifford ran, afraid that they were going to be robbed. Hearing shots, he flagged down a patrol car, not realizing that Clifford had been felled. Mr. Shea testified that he did not realize that Clifford, who stood just five feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds, was a child. After the shooting, prosecutors said, Mr. Shea's partner, Walter Scott, was recorded on a radio transmission saying,

die you little, adding an expletive. Mr. Scott denied it was his voice. Clifford's death sent his mother, Eloise Glover, into a tailspin. My mother turned on my father. Did you have a gun? They said you had a gun, Darlene Armstead said. It caused them to break up. My mother lost her mind. The family received a settlement from New York City that, in the memory of the children, came to about $50,000, most of which the mother lent to local churches, but never got back. most of which the mother lent to local churches, but never got back.

My mother didn't want no one to know when she was going outside, Ms. Armstead said. She always used the back door. Ms. Armstead recalled sleeping nights on chairs in hospital emergency rooms while her mother was being treated and living off restaurant handouts. She was going to pay this guy to board up the house, and she would pay him to bring the food to us, she said. The children went to foster care and group homes. One brother was in a psychiatric institution for about 10 years. Her mother, who had diabetes, died in 1990 at age 54. Ad Armstead died in 2005 at 83. They put guns on him. They said he had guns at work, at home, Kenneth Armstead said. To demonize him would help Shea's story. Mr. Shea, who moved out of the state after his marriage broke up, could not be reached. Shea, who moved out of the state after his marriage broke up, could not be reached.

I've lost it all, he told the author Thomas Hauser, whose 1980 book, The Trial of Patrolman Thomas Shea, is a comprehensive account of the episode. The defense lawyer, Mr. Evsarov, said a video would have changed nothing. The case was resolved as a result of a trial, he said. nothing. The case was resolved as a result of a trial, he said. For Mr. Adams, the quick termination of the South Carolina police officer in the shooting this month of Walter Scott was a positive step. That mayor said, you know what, it has just gone too far, Mr. Adams said. The pathway of Shea's bullet physically stopped when it hit Clifford Glover, but the emotional pathway probably still continues to this day. This was recorded by The New York Times. Special thanks to Dan Barry.