Canap

Of all the hostile environments that have challenged the fortitude of man, few have proved so obdurately unconquerable as one that he created for himself -- the 23 sq. mi. of Manhattan. In the past two years alone, the metropolis has undergone ordeal by blackout, smog, race riot, drought, blizzard, transit strike and about every other affliction that can visit a city. Last week 250,-000 long-suffering Manhattanites were subjected to a new kind of hazard: trial by garbage and stairway. As usual, they responded with inventiveness, insouciance and ire.

The latest crisis was triggered by a strike of 7,000 apartment-house service employees--doormen, elevator operators, handymen-- against the landlords of 1,500 rent-controlled dwellings. The workers, whose average weekly pay is $85, sought an $18 raise. The owners responded by demanding repeal of the city's rent-control law, an anachronistic World War II anti-inflationary measure that makes no economic sense but is beloved by voters-- and politicians-- because it keeps many rents below market levels. Caught in the bind, a quarter of a million tenants found themselves without hot water, heat, elevator service, garbage disposal or doormen.

Back-seat Psychiatry. New Yorkers, however, are born survivors. The immediate challenge was to operate the elevators--if possible. Steve Frenkel, a 19-year-old Hunter College engineering student living in a West Side building, pried open a stricken lift with a bent coat hanger, taught himself how to operate the machine, then enlisted other tenants on a rotation watch schedule. In many another highrise, kids gleefully took over the elevator controls. One East Side boy, pressed into service to spare his parents' dinner guests the rigors of the stairway, demanded--and got -- $1 for his stint behind the lever.

Many elevators, however, remained inoperative. Rather than hike up a dozen or more stories by the stairways, many lazy, elderly or angina-prone tenants stayed home or moved to hotels--and resolutely refused dinner invitations.

Even pets were affected. Said a dachshund-laden woman on one stairway: "I don't dare let him climb. They got discs, you know." In some buildings, striking service employees--among the few New York workers who actually have a sense of service--winked at the labor laws and carried their favorite tenants up in the elevators anyway. Many apartment-based professional men, forced to close their offices, threatened to sue striking Local 32B and/or the landlords for their losses. On the other hand, a psychiatrist on Central Park West kept up his thriving practice by couching his patients in his car.

Apartment security was easily solved in most dwellings by impromptu tenants' committees, which set up guard-duty rosters, or else imposed a levy of up to $10 a tenant to hire moonlighting cops as part-time guards. Garbage was another matter. One East Side matron, accustomed to having the trash picked up twice daily from her back door, shrilled: "But where do I take it?" Many took it to their front sidewalks, but since sanitation-department drivers--good unionists all--refused to violate the picket lines, ripening hillocks of garbage forced nose-holding pedestrians into the street. Some West Siders demonstrated their disgust by instituting communal "toss-outs," and the heaps of cans, bottles and more malodorous detritus on the streets made much of the city look more like Marrakesh than Manhattan. Atop a garbage heap near Park Avenue stood a sour sign: "Fun City."

Plungers & Brooms. Mayor John Lindsay, who pinned that name on New York City, tried to restore the jollity by offering the hard-nosed landlords a 15% rent increase. As the garbage mounted higher to draw flies and rats, Lindsay declared a health emergency and ordered sanitation crews to launch a cleanup. At the same time, an irate mob of some 600 landlords stormed down to city hall carrying toilet plungers, brooms, mops and angry signs, such as one that read: "Dictator Lindsay makes New York City a concentration camp."

At week's end, Lindsay's pressure broke the impasse. The workers won their raise, some of the landlords will get rent increases and the tenants can now look forward to the city's next crisis wiser in the ways of garbage disposal and elevator operation.

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