![]() “If some girl wanted to mess with you, she’d come kick you in the shins. “First of all, don’t stand with your back to the street like you’re doing,” she told an observer, pantomiming grabbing a shoulder from behind and yanking a body down to the sidewalk. “If you don’t have street smarts, that’s just sad,” Madonna said. (Like Batman or Elena Ferrante, Angels can be leery of sharing their identities with the press.) Madonna described herself as “American-born Chinese,” with family in the neighborhood she said that she had joined up “because of all these Asian hate crimes here in N.Y.C.” She demonstrated an easy sense of command, cracking jokes as the group gathered but turning all business once on patrol.Īngel training involves lessons in street smarts. The captain was a forty-nine-year-old woman who goes by the name Madonna while on duty. Each wore the classic uniform of black pants, a red beret, and a white T-shirt emblazoned with the Guardian Angels logo: a winged version of the creepy Masonic eye on the back of the dollar bill. On a Friday evening, six Angels assembled in front of a bank on Canal Street for a patrol of Chinatown and its environs. The Angels still hit the streets and ride the trains seven days a week. Lately, the Angels have had a cozier relationship with both the cops and the public, although, as Arnaldo Salinas, the group’s longtime senior director, recently admitted, “we’ve gotten into our scuffles.” Membership waxes and wanes it’s now around three hundred and fifty, by Salinas’s count. The organization is a civilian crime-watch group whose recruits became street icons for patrolling scuzzy subway cars, intimidating chain snatchers, making the occasional citizen’s arrest, and irritating the police. The Guardian Angels, founded in 1979, remain with us, too. No one gives him much of a shot, though he has garnered slivers of media attention for sharing an Upper West Side studio apartment with sixteen rescue cats, and for doffing his signature red beret at a rally and thereby revealing a dramatic tan line above his brow, the effect of which, the Times said, “brought to mind a black-and-white cookie.” Further evidence: Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels and a Koch-era tabloid fixture, is the Republican candidate for mayor. Crime is up, subway ambience is down, the Yankees are World Series starved. To many New Yorkers, it has become axiomatic that the city is reverting to its bad old nineteen-eighties self.
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