THE BATTLE OF YONKERS
‘Show Me a Hero’ re-creates ferocious integration fight
He was a most unlikely hero. Harsh reality forced Yonkers’ youngest-ever mayor, Nick Wasicsko, to do the right thing. And while it was a move he initially fought, it was one that he ultimately came to embrace
In the late 1980s, at the tender age of 28, Wasicsko found himself leading Yonkers kicking and screaming — and there was a lot of screaming — into building subsidized housing in a white area.
As a candidate, he had campaigned to resist court-ordered integration, but as mayor he changed his stance when the city’s lawyers explained the position was hopeless.
Some black and Latino residents of the city’s crumbling projects, where drug dealers ruled, eventually got a chance to move into a new kind of public housing, single-family homes in the richer part of town.
The nicer side of town, east of the Saw Mill Parkway, was white. Its residents united to fight, often viciously — with pipe bombs and riots — against the 200 units of housing,
The fight drew a lot of attention to the city, where politics is a blood sport. Among those who noticed was journalist David Simon, who one day would create HBO’s acclaimed series “The Wire.” He wanted to tell this story with writing partner William F. Zorzi even before he landed in the television business.
“After all that time, I wasn’t sure that would be a reality,” Zorzi says. “I was first drawn to it because of the political story.”
Oscar Isaac (“Inside Llewyn Davis”) captures the Maalox-chugging Wasicsko, who harbored one lifelong dream: To be mayor of Yonkers. He had been a cop, then a lawyer, but all he ever wanted was to lead his city. Ultimately, it killed him. True, he ate a bullet from his own handgun at his father’s gravesite when he was 34. But it was the relentlessly nasty politics of Yonkers that did him in.
The miniseries, based on a book by Lisa Belkin, boasts Simon’s signature grittiness and attention to period detail. Oversized glasses, high-waisted pants, gas guzzlers, phone booths and a Springsteen soundtrack are perfect touches. And it was shot in the projects. Paul Haggis (“Crash”) directs, and Alfred Molina plays Wasicsko’s political nemesis, City Councilman Henry J. Spallone.
The fight over housing began long before Wasicsko took office. Backroom pols thought they were setting him up to be a sacrificial lamb, and no one expected him to win the election against incumbent Angelo R. Martinelli.
Isaac delivers a controlled performance reminiscent of a young Al Pacino. He can explode at any moment, yet he’s soft-spoken, gentle. Despite how well-documented this story was, Zorzi says it still feels unbelievable, considering the deep racial divide it revealed and the era when it unfold.
“This is what surprised me,” Zorzi says, “The reaction, the opposition group, the constituents and how vehement they were. It was very difficult for me to believe. (I thought,) ‘This is an exaggeration.’ It is 1987, 1988, this is well north of the Mason-Dixon Line, not Mississippi in 1962. Then, having seen the TV footage, it was ‘Holy s---! These people are nuts.’ It was very real. It was just as crazy as it looked.”
Besides the mayor, the miniseries focuses on four women.
l Mary Dorman (Catherine Keener) loves her home and initially is a vocal opponent of the new housing. But a visit to a woman in substandard housing reveals how similar the two are.
l Carmen Reyes (Ilfenesh Hadera) is a hard-working single mother from the Dominican Republic. She keeps her home immaculate and her three children close. Reyes desperately wants out of the projects, and buys a set of cookware that she
won’t open until she lands a new house.
l Billie Rowan (Dominique Fishback) is also a single mother, but younger and without a job. Her babies’ father, a gangbanger, winds up in prison, and she’s eventually evicted from the new houses.
l As nuanced as they all are, LaTanya Richardson Jackson is the strongest as Norma, a Southern woman in the Northern projects. She works as a home health aide until diabetes blinds her.
In real life, Richardson Jackson was living in Harlem during this long fight and wasn’t aware of it.
“You have to remember, this was New York, and Yonkers wasn’t on the map in that way,” she says. “I just think it is unfortunate now, as we fast-forward, that we are still dealing with a lot of the root issues that they were dealing with.”
“It was a hard dream for Norma to grab and hold onto,” Richardson Jackson says of her character moving into a white neighborhood. “How could she possibly dream that dream?”
After she moved, she was never at ease. “The feeling of rejection, that her daughter was not feeling because she was another generation — Norma was still living inside a racial dream of memory,” Richardson Jackson says. “And she would not allow herself the freshness of something new. She kept to herself.”
The miniseries is not just a look at recent history. Given the charged racial climate today, it could also serve as a guide to the future,
says Richardson Jackson.
“Maybe we could learn something of what has happened in order to get on a track that puts us on a different path other than the one we seem to be traveling on,” she says. “Maybe it will show us the possibilities of how we go forward.”
Bob Balaban plays U.S. District Judge Leonard Sand, who forced Yonkers to desegregate. “Most of the people in the various factions of this contentious situation believed they were right,” says the actor. “They were not just committed racists. They really did believe they had a point.”
Ultimately, Balaban says, “It’s (been) a long time since it was proposed — and long enough to tell that it worked.”
Having seen the TV footage, it was “Holy s---! These people are nuts.” ... It was just as crazy as it looked.