News & Events
Professor Looks at Today's Youth Gangs in New York Magazine Article
Author and City Tech English Professor Greg Donaldson, who has taught at the College for 25 years and is currently on a leave of absence, wrote a companion piece in the December 16, 2002, issue of New York magazine to Alex Williams' feature story on the new Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York.
Based on Herbert Asbury's 1928 book of the same name, the Scorsese block-buster is set in "the years leading up to the Civil War in the infamous downtown Manhattan slum known as the Five Points, home to flamboyant Irish gangs like the Plug Uglies and the Dead Rabbits. Donaldson's New York magazine article looks at the city's youth gangs today, or what's left of them. His article suggests that they are, by and large, "on the verge of extinction."
"When it comes to large numbers, group loyalty, and active criminality," Donaldson writes, "today's gangs of New York are limp and demoralized, if not completely clueless."
It wasn't always so. Donaldson reminds us of how "in the sixties, the black Jolly Stompers held sway in Brownsville, Brooklyn; and the mostly Latino Savage Nomads prowled the South Bronx in the early seventies. But what gangs are battling for turf now? Are Colombians jousting with Chinese and Koreans for control of the parks and playgrounds of Flushing? By all accounts the answer is no."
Donaldson asks where all of the city's gangs have gone. He answers by telling us that the NYPD's sizable Gang Division has done an effective job of greatly decreasing their numbers. And so has urban renewal. Donaldson quotes CUNY colleague Ric Curtis, an anthropology professor at John Jay College, on the subject: "So many neighborhoods were destroyed, there was nothing left to fight over."
The explosion in the use of drugs likely also played a major role in their decline, as "the heroin epidemic of the seventies and the crack boom of the eighties actually weakened the ethnic street gangs. With the demand for drugs came corporate-style drug-selling organizations, and for young men in New York's poorest areas, the lure of fast money quickly replaced neighborhood fealty and gang affiliation."
Donaldson is no stranger to the subject of gangs. His 1993 book, The Ville: Cops and Kids in Urban America (Anchor Books), which received national acclaim, chronicled young gang member Sharron Corley's growing up on the streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn. The book was a powerful portrait of the human problems that abounded in the Brownsville of the era. It compellingly focused national attention on the darkness of drugs, crime, violence and poverty in that neighborhood.
Donaldson's book, which The Los Angeles Times hailed as "smart, noble and potentially restorative," also helped Corley land the lead role in the 1995 Gramercy Pictures major release, New Jersey Drive. A Daily News Entertainment section feature story examined the transformation in the young man's life and his eventual relocation from Brownsville to Brooklyn's upscale Clinton Hills that Donaldson's book helped make possible.
Professor Donaldson, named City Tech Scholar on Campus in 1997, was on campus earlier this year to participate in a Professional Development Advisory Council panel presentation for faculty on "Critical Thinking and the CUNY Proficiency Examination."
