April 7, 2011
Before Going Dark, One Last Attempt at Explaining New York City
By CLYDE HABERMAN, NY TIMES

Eons ago, the student newspaper that I wrote for and edited at City College of New York had a tradition for former editors who were graduating. It gave them a final crack at the typewriter to produce what we called a Thirty column.

Literally, they had 30 column inches to say their piece. The title was also a nod to a newspaper custom in precomputer days. The number 30 at the bottom of a reporter’s story (typically rendered between hyphens: -30-) signaled to the editor that nothing more was coming. Why 30? Various theories have been offered, none that would seem proof positive.

This is my Thirty column.

Not that I am graduating. There is time for a new adventure or two at this place. But after 16 years and something on the order of 1,500 columns, NYC will go dark. Decisions were made. Let’s leave it at that.

I might point out that with the demise of NYC and its outsize Y in the ink-on-your-fingers version, New York will have lost one of the last homages extant to an old subway token. The title NYC was my suggestion, based on a thought from a now-absent friend, Herb Weissenstein. The big Y was proposed by Joe Lelyveld, the executive editor who brought me home in 1995 after a long stretch overseas. Joe seemed rather proud of that Y.

City columns for this and other newspapers come in all shapes and sizes. Some dwell on cops and robbers. Some columnists are investigative heavyweights. Some like to hang out with politicians; go figure. No one would sensibly cast me as any of those types.

My goal was simply to make a desperate stab at explaining the maze called New York City. When I failed, people let me know. But the reward was the thousands of generous messages over the years from readers, many of whom accused me of having consistently made them laugh.

There was also a tangible result now and again, little of it world-shaking.

One column led to a long-overdue medal for a former Coast Guardsman whose valorous actions with shipmates in World War II averted a cataclysmic explosion in New York Harbor. Another column helped preserve city funds for a suicide hot line. Still another may have influenced a state parole board to free a onetime political militant who did the crime but also did the time and earned a new shot at redemption.

And while it is too soon to tell if any good will come of this, it was ego-pleasing to have my name connected with a city law requiring stores to close their doors on hot summer days and end, in this era of high energy costs, their wasteful air-conditioning of the streets.

But no columnist and no newspaper can make something happen if those who hold true power do not wish it. That’s natural law. My own experience bears that out.

Certain themes recurred in NYC:

Hate-crime laws, for example, essentially punish thought deemed impure by adding prison time for certain acts that are already crimes. The steady expansion of state-sponsored gambling lifts dollars from the pockets of those who can least afford it. The rejection of civilian trials for terrorism suspects is a capitulation to fear. The knee-jerk cancellation of political activity every Sept. 11 makes a mockery of the chest-thumping about how the terrorists didn’t win. Democracy took a severe pounding when the mayor and the City Council overrode the expressed will of the people to give themselves third terms.

And the Catch-22s of bureaucracy make the mind reel. A man named Marc La Cloche was taught how to be a barber while in a New York prison on a robbery conviction. After his release, the same state then denied him a license to work his trade because he had been in prison.

NYC focused on all those subjects more than once. At last sight, hate-crime laws are intact, state-sponsored gambling continues to expand, terrorism suspects are headed for military tribunals, politics is still taboo on Sept. 11 and the mayor is well into his shaky third term. As for Mr. La Cloche, he died without ever getting his barber’s license.

So much for the power of the press.

Still, you can make the day better for people. An opportunity arose three weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Around the country, there were expressions of love for New York. Remember? I wrote a light-hearted column to the effect that this was unnatural and that it was fine for people out there to hate this city again.

Frankly, I was concerned that perhaps it was too soon for humor. But not long after, a colleague was at a dinner party where the novelist Jonathan Franzen was her seatmate. Somehow, my column came up in conversation. “You know,” she reported Mr. Franzen as saying, “I read that column, and I knew we were going to be O.K.”

It doesn’t get better than that.

-30-

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com