Word: bedford
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...silk-stocking districts to scabrous ghettos, responded with neighborliness and even bravery. But what shocked the city, and much of the world, was that tens of thousands of blacks and Hispanics poured from their tenements and barrios?in 16 areas?to produce an orgy of looting. In Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto, in Manhattan's Harlem, in the South Bronx, the violence and plundering approached the levels of the 1968 riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The cry echoed through the ghettos: "It's Christmastime, it's Christmastime!" But to Abe Beame, and countless other New Yorkers...
...from storefronts with crowbars, shattered plate-glass windows, scooped up everything they could carry, and destroyed what they could not. First they went for clothing, TV sets, jewelry, liquor; when that was cleaned out, they picked up food, furniture and drugs. Said Frank Ross, a black police officer in Bedford-Stuyvesant: "It's like a fever struck them. They were out there with trucks, vans, trailers, everything that could roll...
Looters looked on anything movable as desirable boodle. Police caught one man in Bedford-Stuyvesant with 300 sink stoppers and another with a case of clothespins. Two young boys were spotted carrying away an end table. "Where'd you get that thing?" a cop shouted. "My momma give it to me?you can have it," said one of the kids as they dropped their loot and dashed into a crowd that was happily watching a blazing furniture store...
...Vincent Gallo, an activist Catholic priest, summed up the attitudes of people roaming his Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood...
Hungarian Playwright Molnár works this all out like a game of chess with delightful ambiguity, some suspense and a saucy wit. Everything depends on the two leads. In his jealous anxiety, Bedford can twitch his nose like a mouse scenting cheese. He affects a synthetic Russian accent that is weirdly comic and as the disguised suitor, he woos his wife with the ardor of a drawing-room Cossack...