Frosty...Cool... Chilly... Cold... Getting Colder... William Finnegan ventured into the real world many of our kids are growing up in and his report is not especially reassuring about their lives or their futures, or ours. He visited four communities not exactly in the mainstream of our so-called prosperity -- one reviewer simply called them "depressed" -- New Haven, Conn.; San Augustine county, in Texas; Washington State's Yakima valley; and Antelope Valley north of L.A. In each he found kids tangled in drugs, gangs, crime, racism, violence -- in other words, the stuff we read about in the papers and see on television every day. They grow up in worlds without parents, surrounded by drugs as an apparently viable option, without a sense of belonging that is supplied by gangs, surrounded by poverty, offered lousy schools, etc. Why in the world would we expect otherwise? from the Amazon.com review: "When I first started going to New Haven," writes William Finnegan, "I was taken on a tour of the city's neighborhoods by two black residents. Their conversation reminded me of others I've heard--in countries suffering from chronic guerrilla war." Cold New World depicts the lives of American teenagers and young adults, struggling to hang onto what little they've got. They are part of a growing underclass whose lives have become saturated with drugs and violence. Whether he's talking to an African American drug dealer who plies his trade in the shadow of Yale or a young woman caught up in the feud between two rival skinhead gangs in the northernmost suburbs of Los Angeles, Finnegan brings his subjects to life on the page with a compassion that doesn't undermine any of his bluntness about their desperate conditions. You may not like what Cold New World has to say about the state of the nation, but it's a book that you ignore at your peril. Chapter One Beulah Morgan had lived in Newhallville, a working-class neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, since 1953. She moved there with her parents from Ansonia, a mill town a few miles west, because, she said, "black people couldn't buy a house in a good neighborhood in Ansonia." By Beulah's parents' lights, Newhallville was a very good neighborhood. Its leafy streets and well-built three-family houses had been home to a stable population of factory workers and their families for more than a century. The neighborhood got its name from George T. Newhall, whose Carriage Emporium was, in 1855, the largest manufacturer of carriages in the world. After the Civil War put Newhall, whose main trade was in the South, out of business, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company became New Haven's--and Newhallville's--largest employer. After the Winchester plant was sold to Olin Industries, a Midwestern ammunition and brass company, in 1931, Olin became the neighborhood's mainstay. Newhall Street, where Beulah's parents bought their house, dead-ended at the Olin plant. In 1953, there was every reason to believe that Beulah's family's social mobility would be, in the American way, upward. New Haven has had an African American community since the seventeenth century, but until the Second World War, its members usually found themselves blocked from the better industrial jobs--compelled to accept instead lower-wage employment as, typically, waiters or porters at Yale

William Finnegan Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country Random House, 1998 (9/98) $18.20 List: $26.00 Save:$ 7.80 (30%)

University. For many years, they were also blocked from living outside a ghetto, near Yale, known as Dixwell. Factory work, like housing in Newhallville, went first to Irish immigrants, later to Germans and Eastern Europeans, and then to Italians. When the era of immigration from Europe ended, however, many of the jobs generated by the wartime industrial boom of the 1940s went to blacks. New Haven's black community grew from 5,000 in 1930 to 10,000 in 1950, then to 23,000 in 1960. Most of the new arrivals were from the South--most came, in fact, from one particular area of North Carolina--and in the 1950s and 1960s many black families settled in Newhallville. The Olin plant was going strong; in 1954, it employed 6,500 people. Although none of the men in Beulah Morgan's family worked at Olin, they all worked in factories. Her first husband worked at Scoville Manufacturing, in Waterbury. Her second husband, Carl Morgan, whom she married in 1954, worked at Simkins Industries, in New Haven. Beulah herself was a doctor's receptionist on Dixwell Avenue for twenty-two years. In 1990, when we met, she was working as a receptionist for a dentist in Newhallville. Her husband was still, after forty-five years, at Simkins Industries.xLike every old industrial city in America, New Haven fell into a steep economic decline starting in the 1950s and 1960s. Factories began to cut back and then to close. Unemployment mushroomed. By 1981, when the Olin plant was sold to a local consortium, it employed barely a thousand people. The city's middle class, which had been trickling off to the suburbs since at least the First World War, started leaving in earnest. And while the overall population of the city shrank, from 150,000 in 1960 to 119,000 in 1994, its black population continued to grow. By 1980, there were 40,000 black people in New Haven; by 1990, there were more than 47,000. An influx of Latinos, mostly from Puerto Rico--and mostly, like the swelling population of blacks, unskilled and ill educated--also began in the 1960s. Poverty came to engulf large parts of the city. The 1980 federal census found New Haven to be the seventh-poorest city in America. The 1990 census found neighborhoods where the poverty rate ran as high as 40 and 50 percent. The arc of New Haven's decline was mirrored by an arc within Beulah Morgan's family. Her parents sold the house on Newhall Street in 1975 and, for their retirement, bought a house in Hamden, just outside New Haven. Their standard of living remained much the same. And Beulah and Carl, when we met, still owned a modest house in Newhallville. But none of Beulah's five children--the youngest was born in 1961; they all still lived in New Haven--owned a house of any kind. Indeed, four of them were unemployed and could not afford even to rent. Two had moved back in with Beulah and Carl. The other two had each lived on and off with their parents since becoming adults, and both were living, at the time we met, in apartments paid for entirely by public assistance. Beulah's six grandchildren, meanwhile, had all lived with her at various times. She had effective custody of one, and her mother had legal custody of three. In other words, none of Beulah's children had been able to form and maintain a two-parent family for their children. And each generation's social and economic prospects were looking worse, not better, than those of their parents. This alarming eversion of the normal American expectation of generational progress was the grim backdrop, as I see it now, for the months I spent with one of Beulah's grandsons. Terry Jackson, as I shall call him, was sixteen when we met. His mother--let's call her Anjelica--was thirty-three, never married, with two sons by different fathers. Let's call Terry's younger brother Buddy.