00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkambe Election Night, New York City, nineteen ninety three Staten Island. 00:00:28 Speaker 2: Cables first time and that is hooking up all the headquarters live via Tell. 00:00:32 Speaker 1: That is Staten Island Cable's host Frank Sepola. Remember Frank, former assistant press secretary for the Staten Island Borough President, the one who got yelled at in those sham meetings late into the night. He got a new job which gave him a front row seat to the big vote. 00:00:48 Speaker 2: Markie live here on Channel seventy seven from Secession headquarters at the Island Chateau, Channel seventy seven bringing you that live. 00:00:57 Speaker 1: The end of the campaign had been crazy. Staten Island Borough President Guy Maul and Airy drove around the island in something called the Freedom of Us talking Secession. Staten Island politicians worked the rush hour a fair is to try and gin up more votes to secede, and on election night it looked like it had all paid off. 00:01:17 Speaker 2: We go to Monica to Clerico at the Island Chateau with the latest results. 00:01:21 Speaker 3: Monica, there's a new. 00:01:23 Speaker 4: Total coming in. 00:01:26 Speaker 5: Well, there you have it, Flank, that sixty six percent is the total. 00:01:30 Speaker 6: Now. 00:01:31 Speaker 2: The atmosphere here is it's like a party. 00:01:35 Speaker 1: The numbers were huge. 00:01:37 Speaker 7: You know, it's funny ten years ago when Senator Markey first introduced the word secession, if people thought of it as a joke. 00:01:44 Speaker 2: Absolutely, we know very well that this is no joke. 00:01:48 Speaker 1: It was a landslide. People were celebrating all over the island. State Senator John Marky gave a victory speech. He was the chief sponsor on the bill to secede in the first place. 00:02:00 Speaker 3: Do you realize as a city that can plan for its own and doesn't have to say may I, may I do this and may I do that? 00:02:07 Speaker 1: Are you going to people on the island voted almost two to one in favor of secession. 00:02:16 Speaker 4: Javane Borrow, I don't know. 00:02:18 Speaker 5: I think we just might get rid of that nickname. 00:02:23 Speaker 1: Dan Singletary. Was there that artists who had found on those old tapes passionately arguing for secession. 00:02:29 Speaker 4: Dan, Obviously your efforts have not been in vain. 00:02:32 Speaker 5: Did you ever expect to see such political fervor as you've seen tonight? 00:02:36 Speaker 8: This was one of the most wonderful nights I think for. 00:02:38 Speaker 9: Stephane Island, for the New York City, and for New York State. 00:02:43 Speaker 1: It was decisive, or so they thought. As many of you listening already know, Staten Island wasn't going anywhere. It would remain part of New York City. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Singletary knew that too. When did you realize that? 00:03:06 Speaker 9: Well, I was getting done pretty close to the. 00:03:08 Speaker 1: Towards the end of this problem. Since you're like, this might actually not happened. 00:03:13 Speaker 9: I said, but it had to do something. And I said, you know, if we got something out of this was better than what we were. 00:03:21 Speaker 1: The vote was a referendum. It was Staten Island saying we want to leave, but the New York State government was going to have the final say. And the next year, when the referendum came before the State Assembly, the speaker just killed it. It was dead in the water. 00:03:40 Speaker 9: I hoped that it might be possible, but I know the probability of all that is so difficult. 00:03:52 Speaker 1: Someone else had to have known where all this was going, too, Guymullinary. This was supposed to be the biggest night in his borough's history, and yet he was nowhere to be found on the island. Instead, he was in Manhattan with his good friend Rudolph Giuliani, who was at that moment being elected mayor of New York City. When I started this series, I told you that this story would amount to a big argument about where our country finds itself today. There's an old way of thinking about time that I love from the Middle Ages. The idea is that time doesn't just go horizontally where today is closest to tomorrow, but also vertically, that certain days are closer to all their earlier incarnations. Christmas this year is nearer to Christmas last year than it is to December twenty sixth. It's like a wormhole. 00:05:03 Speaker 10: In. 00:05:03 Speaker 1: What I'm proposing is that when voters went to the polls on November two, nineteen ninety three, to a elect a mayor and decide whether or not to break New York City up and send Staten Island off on its own, that day was very close to election Day twenty sixteen, that the era we are living in now has everything to do with that moment. Then that, as a historian told me when I began, all this America really does happen first in New York City, and the America happening now is something you could see first in the Staten Island Secession movement, and even more critically, in the man that movement gave us New York City Mayor, Rudy Giuliani. I'm Ben Mattahaffrey. This is the Staten Island problem. Our final episode Revenge of the Forgotten Borough. Okay, so let's rewind. I want to focus in on the time leading up to that nineteen ninety three election because I realized that Rudy Giuliani and Staten Island Secession were being driven by the same engine, and I wanted to understand what that engine was. 00:06:25 Speaker 8: The practice of politics in this city stinks. 00:06:28 Speaker 11: I mean it is. 00:06:29 Speaker 8: It is an old fashioned way of practicing politics. 00:06:33 Speaker 1: America. First met Rudy Giuliani as a crusader who took on the mob. As US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He went after corruption everywhere on Wall Street and especially in New York City government. 00:06:46 Speaker 8: Crooked politicians and crooked bosses of political organizations that are running counties that are in dire need of honest, decent people running those counties who are raping those counties for their own advantage. 00:06:58 Speaker 1: And one of the very first people encouraging Giuliani to consider running for a higher office was Staten Island's borough president, Guy mulin Aiy. 00:07:08 Speaker 11: I think that they had a special kind of relationship with friendship. It went beyond friendship. It was like extended family. 00:07:17 Speaker 1: Randy Mastro worked with Giuliani in the US Attorney's office and later as his first deputy mayor, and he witnessed Mollinari's relationship with Giuliani firsthand. 00:07:27 Speaker 11: A lot of similarities and backgrounds. Italian Americans, working class family backgrounds shared a lot of the same values. 00:07:38 Speaker 1: Giuliani was born in Brooklyn. He was a very serious child. He would sit on his front stoop and read while the other kids played stickball. He started the opera club in high school. He wanted to be a priest. His college girlfriend remembered quote he liked to say, Rudolph William Louis Giuliani the third the first Italian Catholic president of the United States. Mollinary was with Giuliani from the very beginning. The day Giuliani announced his first mayoral run in nineteen eighty nine, it was Mollinary who went to all five boroughs with him, making introductions. Part of what they shared was an outer borough view of the city. Both were familiar with the politics of white people living on the periphery, and while some Staten Islanders were trying to leave the city entirely, Mollinary was looking for someone who could remake it in Staten Island's image. 00:08:33 Speaker 11: I think that there was definitely a sense in both their parts about being fair to every borough, and that Manhattan had probably been favored by many prior mayors. 00:08:45 Speaker 1: David Dinkins beat Giuliani during the mayoral election of nineteen eighty nine and became the city's first black mayor. But that election had been a warning sign to liberals in New York. Giuliani had lost by the slimmest margin of any mayoral race since nineteen oh five. His supporters were angry. They demanded a recount. 00:09:10 Speaker 11: Please relax and just listen. 00:09:14 Speaker 12: He will be. 00:09:18 Speaker 11: Wait, There's plenty of time. 00:09:23 Speaker 13: The first political campaign I covered in New York City was Rudy Giuliani's second run from very successful run, and I went with him on a to Staten Island. 00:09:33 Speaker 1: What oh yeah. Malcolm Gladwell, reporter covering New York for The Washington Post back then, who somehow waited until our final episode to reveal to me that he had met Giuliani and gone to Staten Island with him. In nineteen ninety three, he wrote about it in an article called Rudy Giuliani's Whispered Revolt. 00:09:52 Speaker 13: I spent the day on a We started in the morning, we took the you know, got in the cavalcade, we went over the bridge, and I ended up came back late at night, and he did, you know, he did events all throughout the day, and it was very clear that like these were his people, even though he's a form me, he's Flatbush, he's not, you know, he's an Italian, but they were. It's the italianness, and it's a sense of grievance. 00:10:14 Speaker 1: It's it's the people who resent Manhattan. 00:10:16 Speaker 13: Resent Manhattan. And the kind of and also his close affiliation. 00:10:21 Speaker 14: With the police. 00:10:22 Speaker 13: It's such a kind of cop guy, and that is that set down as Cop Central. 00:10:27 Speaker 1: Giuliani spoke to exactly the kind of person who might want to secede from New York. He promised to do whatever it took to put New York City to order again. He would be Bruce Wayne to New York's Gotham as US attorney. He seemed to love, to publicly shame his victims with these dramatic purp walks. His message was that all the other mayors had been too tolerant. He promised a kind of illiberalism, zero tolerance. 00:10:54 Speaker 13: But the thing about Rudy is that Rudy is not fun right, He's not genteel, He's not sophisticated in the way that some of these other characters are. There's something angry and kind of mean and kind of course about him. And coming into the New York City political scene for the first time, he realizes he has to He realized is not going to he's himself at that point. It's not going to fly. It's too much of a departure. So he has to kind of play it down, play down his true essential roodiness. 00:11:31 Speaker 1: For a few years now, I've had a question about that true essential roudiness. Is he the same guy now as he was then? People used to think of him as America's mayor, the guy we depended on during nine to eleven, or the guy who cleaned up New York City. They don't recognize that guy in Rudy today, standing in the parking lot. Four seasons total landscaping, spreading lies about stolen elections. That's why I'm so interested in understanding the Giuliani of long ago, because I think that actually he's always been the same Rudy, And there's a specific moment back in the nineties when you could see it clearly. One morning, a year before the ninety three election, Rudy Giuliani and Guy Mullinery met up for a very faithful day. The police union had organized a protest. They were angry about a series of riots where they felt Mayor Dinkins had betrayed them Washington Heights and Crown Heights. They were angry that he had a big plan to put more civilian oversight on the police. So they gathered outside a place where they knew they'd get some attention. 00:12:40 Speaker 7: It was a show, of course, on the steps of New York City Hall. Ten thousand off duty cops banded together in protest, set up and angry with a city they claim doesn't back them up. 00:12:52 Speaker 1: There were ten thousand off duty cops. Many were drunk, and things started getting out of hand. They began to climb on cars, chanting Dinkins must go. They held signs with racist caricatures of Dinkins with huge lips and a gigantic Afro, calling him a washroom attendant. They intimidated a black councilwoman as she tried to cross the street. People hurled racial epithets. Then they charged up the steps of City Hall. A reporter told CBS what he'd seen. 00:13:28 Speaker 10: They climbed the very steps of government and felt comfortable to call the mayor of the city a nigger. It's outrageous. If David Duke had a police department, it would look and sound like this group of people who assaulted our senses. 00:13:45 Speaker 4: I was in city Hall at the time. 00:13:47 Speaker 7: The mayor wasn't. 00:13:48 Speaker 1: First deputy mayor at the time, Norman Stizel. Dinkins was actually uptown at a funeral, and so you're the highest ranking person at city. 00:13:58 Speaker 3: Hall, yes, I was. 00:14:00 Speaker 11: They decided to basically they were thinking about storming city Hall. 00:14:04 Speaker 1: Police inside told Steizel they had an evacuation plan through an unused stable in the back. At some point in all this, Rudy Giuliani arrived at City Hall. The head of the police union asked him to try to calm things down. He said, he led a small group out of the main area and over to a protest outside the plaza where there was a stage on a truck bed. Guy Moulin Airy had already spoken there. Giuliani got up. He'd seen the out of control rage and hate at Dinkins and had a choice calm things down or feed the fire. He chose the latter. 00:14:44 Speaker 2: The raven the burrale of the Police Department of the City of New York is so low with one raven and one raven alone Ramon. 00:14:57 Speaker 1: He said the move to increase oversight on the cops was just quote to protect David Dinkins's political ass. He said Dinkins's policies were quote bullshit. Steizele still inside City Hall heard. 00:15:11 Speaker 15: Everything, and there's no question on my mind that that's what he talked about. 00:15:18 Speaker 7: When he got up on the stage. 00:15:20 Speaker 4: You could hear him. 00:15:20 Speaker 16: It was, you know, right outside where we were, so. 00:15:25 Speaker 1: I don't know, you felt he was inciting, Well, there was no question about it. 00:15:28 Speaker 14: Yeah. 00:15:35 Speaker 1: The rioters veered away from City Hall and blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. Instead, they threatened drivers. One rider kicked a New York Times reporter in the stomach. Another group of cops found a car with older black people inside and began to shove it back and forth. Dinkins was outraged. 00:15:53 Speaker 4: For Rudy Giuliani to. 00:15:56 Speaker 6: Urge them on. 00:15:56 Speaker 8: As it were, he demonstrates an irresponsibility on his behalf. 00:16:06 Speaker 1: I started having this weird feeling as I work on this series that I've think of as the flicker. Like when I'm riding the subway listening to Wu Tang. The cars have less graffiti, but they're basically the same tim cans, and sometimes something shifts and I feel like I'm looking at the world thirty years ago. The same thing happened when I watched what little tape remains of the riot. Something flickers and suddenly I feel like I'm looking at the twenty twenties. After the break, I want to take you to a rural part of Wisconsin that helped me understand why. Sometime in the year two thousand and seven, a political scientist living in Wisconsin decided to leave the city of Madison and start driving around the state. 00:17:08 Speaker 5: I knew that if I wanted understand how people make sense of politics, the best way to do that is to listen to them. 00:17:14 Speaker 1: Catherine Kramer, professor at the University of Wisconsin. 00:17:18 Speaker 5: There's something going on in these rural communities. That's very similar all across the state. 00:17:30 Speaker 1: She started hanging out at gas stations, athletic clubs, diners, any place she could find a civic association outside one of the big cities. She realized that she kept hearing the same conversation in all of them. 00:17:46 Speaker 5: Like a simmering emotion, right, it's different from anger, and that it's just kind of this we might say, like a chip on your shoulder, a sense of like these people pissed me off. I'm trying to make you a nicer way of saying, but like those people piss me off, and they just don't understand me. Those people don't respect me. This sense of I'm not getting my fair share in like three important respects. 00:18:14 Speaker 1: Those three respects, Kramer says, our money, the feeling that all the jobs and resources are somewhere else, namely the citi's power, the idea that all the decisions are also made in the cities. And finally, respect, also something cities get more of than rural places. Together, this all adds up to a feeling resentment. 00:18:40 Speaker 5: It's not that they just don't understand us, they don't care, and they don't like us like they think we're not worth listening to because they think we're uneducated and backward and sexist and homophobic and what have you. 00:18:54 Speaker 1: This feeling has always existed, country focating city folk, city folk thinking country folk are backwards. But what Kramer found is you could put numbers to it, and it had gotten a whole lot more intense starting in the nineteen seventies. And it wasn't just rural urban It was about anything on the periphery of the big cities, which were only getting bigger. 00:19:17 Speaker 17: These sentiments show up in so many places and parts of our population, right that sense of low boiling resentment towards the people in charge, like who doesn't feel that? Right now? 00:19:38 Speaker 1: Secession was the manifestation of that same feeling, and it expressed itself in two ways. A vote for secession and a vote for Giuliani on election night after they'd lost. That had been very clear to the Dincoin's campaign. 00:19:55 Speaker 4: What defeated us was the succession issue on the ballot at Stanton Island, which stimulated churn out there way out of proportion. Would exp roal trentot. 00:20:05 Speaker 1: So many people had come out to vote for secession on Staten Island way more more than had voted in nineteen eighty nine. In eighty two percent of the people on Staten Island voted for Giuliani. The vote from the forgotten borough is a big part of how we got Mayor Giuliani, the first Republican mayor of New York City in decades, taking the stage at the New York Hilt him I'm. 00:20:28 Speaker 3: Standing before you as the next mayor of New York City. 00:20:38 Speaker 1: The next day, Dinkins's chief political officer said, quote, the only surprise, as far as I am concerned, was the size of the Staten Island numbers. You can show what I consider minor increases for Rudy across the board, but not major ones. If you fit Staten Island into the mix, there is the difference. Staten Island was part of a movement of people saying we don't believe the sum is greater than the parts, and we'd like to go our own way. Actually, it was the most outer borough of the outer boroughs saying they wanted to be the center, not the periphery. For some it was absolutely about race, but it was also about respect, about geography. It was about not wanting to be the dump anymore, and they started a movement that changed their reality by electing a leader who was outer Borough himself, who understood what it meant to be on the periphery and both hate and need the center. Giuliani made the ferry free. He invested almost half a billion dollars in the Staten Island waterfront. He got them that baseball park I used to go to in the summers when I just moved to New York City. But the biggest thing he gave them is that he and Guy Mullinery managed to close the dump. On March twenty second, two thousand and one, the last barge of trash sailed out for fresh kills. Giuliani stood on his porch and saluted as it passed. The dump was, at that point the largest man made object on earth. 00:22:11 Speaker 8: The process of Staten Island bearing the burden of the rest of the city's garbage was inequitable, and now it's over for good. 00:22:20 Speaker 1: For the rest of the city, particularly it's black and brown residents, the results were more mixed. There was a viciousness to his efforts to clean up the city. Homeless people were denied shelter or forced to pay. Giuliani often refused to meet with black leaders. Cops were sent out to quote empty the streets. Executives at the local public radio station said that at some point they heard Juliani say that his goal was to get poor people to leave New York. Today we call that self deporting. Frank Sapola, the cable news guy, remembers you couldn't challenge him on any of it. 00:22:56 Speaker 3: I had screaming arguments with him at press conference because I would ask a question and he would say, Ah, that's a stupid question. 00:23:03 Speaker 10: I said, according to who I'm asking the question, and I wasn't the only one. 00:23:06 Speaker 14: He would just look at reporters and say, you're an idiot. 00:23:08 Speaker 4: That's a stupid I'm not going to answer that stupid question. 00:23:13 Speaker 1: And there was another New Yorker, I'm guessing you're familiar with, who grew up in the outer boroughs too, and thought, this is what a great leader looks like. 00:23:24 Speaker 3: Donald Trump announcing tonight the formation tomorrow of a committee to look into the possibility of his running for the presidency of the United States. 00:23:35 Speaker 1: This is a clip from Larry King Live in nineteen ninety nine, one of the first times Trump flirts with running for president. That year, Hillary Clinton was gearing up for her race against Giuliani from New York Senator, what do you. 00:23:49 Speaker 3: Make of the Hillary Julian here. I know you're a big fan of Juliani. 00:23:53 Speaker 2: I am, and I like her very much. But I think Rudy and as I said before, he's been the greatest mayor in the history of the city of Mire and people maybe some people don't like him and some people love him totally. I happen to be in love because the guy, not because I love Rudy, because he's done an incredible job. 00:24:08 Speaker 10: He's the best. 00:24:09 Speaker 2: I mean, he's just done a great job. 00:24:12 Speaker 1: Trump grew up in Queens in an environment a lot like Giuliani, wanting, like Giuliani, to put his mark on Manhattan, to build the biggest towers and put his name on them, to be respected, even though it would always elude him. Giuliani was the model. 00:24:30 Speaker 2: I mean the polls generally speaking. National Inquiry did a poll that's unbelievable, that says a win, that you beat everybody right into the White House. 00:24:48 Speaker 1: When Rudy Giuliani took the stage at the New York Hilton to celebrate his election, it was the same stage Donald Trump would take thirty three years later, celebrating his presidency, the. 00:24:59 Speaker 2: Forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. 00:25:06 Speaker 1: There's a history to that term forgotten, the forgotten borough, the forgotten men and women. Around the time in the middle of the twentieth century that the civil rights movement had really picked up, there had been a shift, and white middle class and working class people started thinking of themselves as forgotten, that they had been left behind in the name of progress. Those are the threads that political scientist Katharine Kramer was teasing a part in Wisconsin, and she wrote it up in a book about all this, called The Politics of Resentment. That book came out in March twenty sixteen, eight months before Trump got elected, riding a wave that looked exactly like what she described. An economic geographer, picking up on some of what Kramer had discovered, wrote what is, to my mind, one of the most satisfying explanations for Trump's election. It's an essay called the Rise of Populism and the Revenge of the Places that Don't Matter, and it points out that you might expect a populism of resentment to come from the disenfranchised, the very poor or ethnic and racial minorities, to put it in his terms, among the people that don't matter. But that's not what happened. It was the places that don't matter, even the wealthy people there who voted for populism. And that same pattern held all around the world. The forgotten places, forgotten no longer. 00:26:35 Speaker 16: The forgotten borough. 00:26:36 Speaker 14: I don't know. 00:26:37 Speaker 5: I think we just might get rid of that nickname. 00:26:41 Speaker 1: A vote for Giuliani in nineteen ninety three is not the same as a vote for Trump in twenty sixteen. But they share that engine. There is some kind of deep cosmic tie between these men, these movements, these places, in these times. Because twenty nine years after Giuliani riled up a group of drunk, angry cops at City Hall, he did the same thing, but this time as someone in Trump's corner. 00:27:10 Speaker 14: But Gus where right. A lot of them will go to jail, So let's have trial by combat. 00:27:24 Speaker 1: To some who'd been in New York in nineteen ninety two, what unfolded at the Capitol on January sixth, twenty twenty one all seemed very familiar. 00:27:33 Speaker 16: Absolutely. There was much chatter among the Dinkins alumni of about three parallel. 00:27:42 Speaker 1: We've seen this before, Yeah, Marcia Smith, who worked with David Dinkins. 00:27:49 Speaker 11: It's so parallel. 00:27:51 Speaker 16: You know, you're talking about the first black mayor and the reaction to that, the first black president and the reaction to that though, you know, and it's a real reaction, you know, and it's it is emotional, you know, it literally is psychological emotional. Who gets to be in this position? What's fair and what's not? Who gets to wheel power, who doesn't. 00:28:13 Speaker 1: It's all here in seed form in the nineteen nineties in New York City. It's the story of the past decade, thirty years ago. 00:28:23 Speaker 14: So how does it end? 00:28:40 Speaker 1: This whole series has been about where we put our trash literally and metaphorically. So as we reached the end of it, my producer Lucy Sullivan and I decided we had to make a pilgrimage. So I wish it were a little warmer, but I'm happy that it's going to be like sunny up. 00:28:57 Speaker 14: Yeah, Chris, we. 00:28:59 Speaker 1: Were going to Fresh Kills, once the biggest landfill in the world. Now it's on its way to becoming one of the largest parks in the city. We brought its biggest fan with us, the anthropologist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, Robin Nagel. Of the many reasons I love this city, the fact that this position exists has got to be top five. 00:29:22 Speaker 11: Real treat about you all are my You're like giving me a gift. 00:29:27 Speaker 1: Herea We met with two administrators for the park, Chris Ricker and Mark Murphy. We all drove out to one part of the park called the North Mound. Chris and Mark are native Staten Islanders and they care a lot about the transformation of this place. Do you remember what you thought about it when you were growing up, Like, how did you feel about the dump? 00:29:49 Speaker 15: Well, we don't call it to dump, we call it the landfill, but we have our dump jar downstairs. You put a dollar in it when everything somebody says you thank you. This was like the dark side of the. 00:30:00 Speaker 14: Moon and your parents. 00:30:02 Speaker 15: My dad would say to me, look, go, you know, wed garbage out in the gar I clean the garbage out, take it out to the landfill. And if you say, takes that and you'd throw it in the back of the station wagon. 00:30:11 Speaker 14: You drive out. 00:30:12 Speaker 15: And it was just this fast place with telephone poles in the ground, and ropes on them, and you'd tied around the stuff in your car and you would drive away. It would all fly out wow, and you'd close the doors and you wouldn't look back because number One, you wanted to get out of that place, but it was like where everything you didn't want went. 00:30:32 Speaker 1: It's clear that this is going to be a beautiful park. It's not fully open to the public yet. Rolling hills are dotted with little pipes pumping methane out of the trash underneath to make it safe for the public. Benches and paths, wide open spaces, green grass, but not many trees. Turns out you can't plant things with deep roots on garbage. I turned to my left on top of the mountain of buried trash, and in the clear distance I saw the buildings of Manhattan gleaming. Some day people are going to go out of their way to come to this place. Can you what are we standing on top of right now? 00:31:13 Speaker 18: So, as an anthropologist, we're standing on the story of New York City. If you lived here between nineteen forty eight and two thousand and one, you're here somewhere, maybe not in this exact mount but some piece of you even if you just passed through, some piece of you is underneath us. And this is an archaeologist dream in five hundred years, let's say, like long in the future, just the daily lives of normal folks, people who's they don't become famous, they don't make headlines, but their material record is under our feet. 00:31:49 Speaker 1: Osprey circled overhead and then Robin said something that I've been thinking about ever since. 00:31:56 Speaker 19: Someday, to my regret, people won't even know that they're standing on mounts of garbage. It's just this extraordinary green space, which I think is its future. Because we don't remember that Orchard Beach and the seventy ninth Street boat Base and all of Lower Manhattan from a Pearl Street to the water is built on phil We don't remember that we walk on our garbage history all the time. 00:32:25 Speaker 1: This whole series, I've been thinking about an unresolved tension at the heart of this country. The idea that every person is equal and deserves an equal vote is at odds with the way our government's actually built. That every state is equal and deserves equal representation, regardless of how many people live. There are we a country of places or of people? This is a question that New York City resolved in nineteen eighty nine. Remember, shutting down the Board of Estimate was like killing the electoral College in the Senate. In one fell swoop, New York City became a democracy of people and not of place. But when they did, they missed a crucial fact. Place does actually matter. The politics of resentment are a politics of place and remoteness. And if you don't attend to that, people elect a strong man who favors them over others. You get Giuliani, you get Trump, the revenge of the places that don't matter. The reality is we're stuck together, and if we don't want to keep getting periodically rocked by the forgotten places, we're left with one option. Figure out a news story we can tell that makes this whole place make sense again, that remembers all of it and everyone. And so now, in closing, let me share with you just one last excellent staten Isle In fact, one day, decades after Woody Guthrie died, his daughter Nora got a call. It was her father's manager, and he. 00:34:09 Speaker 4: Said, you know, I'm going to retire soon, so I need someone to come in and kind of learn this stuff of there's stuff here of your father's boxes of stuff. So I went in and then I pulled out a three whole notebook and is filled with lyrics, just like one hundred and fifty, page after page after page, just turning the page. And then there's this land. And I took it out of the book. I said, have you ever seen it? And he said no, No one had opened these boxes for forty years. 00:34:46 Speaker 1: This Land is Your Land is basically the unofficial national anthem. Nora discovered that her dad had written it soon after he first arrived in New York in nineteen forty. 00:34:57 Speaker 4: He's basically describing his trip from California to the New York Island. 00:35:04 Speaker 1: That is the crucial lyric, the very first couplet, this Land is your land, this Land is Myland, from California to the New York Island. But looking at that page of his notebook, Nora realized that's not the line he originally wrote. 00:35:25 Speaker 4: The original lyric had from California to Staten Island. Why I have no idea. 00:35:37 Speaker 1: The most crucial part of the first draft of probably the most famous song in American history goes from California to the Staten Island and then he crossed it out and wrote another version, the one we all know. Word of this got out in the nineteen nineties, around the time of secession. 00:35:58 Speaker 4: I did have a group of people come many years ago from Staten Island and petitioned me to go back to the original lyric. They wanted Staten Island you know, Are you serious? I'm serious. They were like, so, why did he cross out this Staten Islander? I don't know. And do you think we could get it back? I don't think so. By that point, it has already been published and was widely known. 00:36:33 Speaker 1: Staten Islanders they love a petition and hate being forgotten, and honestly, who doesn't. So since the New York State Legislature decided they weren't going to let Staten Island go its own way, I think it's the least we can do to put them back in the song. I asked my friend Sam Lewis and Nashville to record it for us. 00:36:55 Speaker 6: This land is your land, This land is miland Film, California to the stand Island, from the River Ys to the Golf Stream water, this land was made and me is I was walking Drivon of Highway. 00:37:27 Speaker 12: I solved me Laddie and Liz Kyoway. I saw below me that Golden Valley this Land was made. 00:37:46 Speaker 1: The Staten Island Problem is written and reported by me Ben Matt of Haffrey. He was produced by Lucy Sullivan with Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Schakerji. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Fact checking by Sam Russick, Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorsky. Original music by Stellwagen Sinfinet, Luis Garra and Jake Gorsky. Special thanks to Todd Reynolds for his the solution from the album Outer Borrow, and thanks of course to Malcolm Gladwell. So many people shared their time and expertise with me as I made this series. You don't hear all their voices, but it wouldn't have been possible without them. Thanks in particular to Derek Alvez, Chris Bauer, Chris Beacham, Ed Burke, Jerry Camarada, Gretchen Dikstra, Art Eisenberg, Richard Emery, Ray Fasano, Fernando Ferrer, Ken gold, Eric Lane, Jill Lapour, Thomas Main, Thomas Matteo, Chris McNichol, Marty Melosi, Susan Mulineri, Patrick Nugent, Carol o'claraken, Philip Pappis, Jose Ramirez, Garoffalo, David Schleicher, Eric Vitaliano, Joseph Vederetti, and Kevin Wade. Several archivists were, as always, the backbone of this story. Huge huge thanks to James Kaser and Rebecca Lambert at the College of Staten Island Archives, to Danny Spardella w n y c Into the whole staff of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services at Pushkin. Thanks to Staten Island's own Morgan Ratner, and to Greta Cone, Jake Flanagan, Eric Sandler, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, and Grace Ross. And thanks also to Julia Conrad for teaching me to love this city and its history as much as she does. I'm ben Matafaffrey is Land issue. 00:39:42 Speaker 6: This land is maland from Caliphone. 00:39:48 Speaker 11: To this. 00:39:52 Speaker 14: On the river foes. 00:39:55 Speaker 6: Through the ghost stream world, this land mavy. 00:40:10 Speaker 14: I don't do anything A fact