Copyright 1988 Newsday, Inc.  
Newsday (New York)
December 1, 1988, Thursday, CITY EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 2
Other Edition: Nassau and Suffolk Pg. 88

LENGTH: 984 words

HEADLINE: Concrete Proof City Teeters on Insanity

BYLINE: Jimmy Breslin

BODY:
They were standing in the street outside the district attorney's office and watching the doors.

"Who are you waiting for?" I asked.

"Nussbaum," somebody said.

Hedda Nussbaum was upstairs, going over the testimony she starts giving today against her former lover, Joel Steinberg. He is charged with beating their adopted daughter, Lisa, to death. I understand that many statements given so far about Steinberg center on how he became so wildly upset over other people's stares. Many times, when he didn't like how Hedda was looking at him, he formed a V with the index and middle finger of his hand and then stabbed the fingers, one on either side of the nose, into Hedda Nussbaum's eyes. It was said this accounted for Nussbaum's swollen eyes when the case broke. That was when he wasn't smacking Lisa. Therefore, he is the first guy I ever heard of to be charged with beating a child to death because she looked at him wrong.

As Steinberg comes up a cocaine junkie, the trial, like everything else wrong in the city these days, is about drugs.

This caused the curiosity about seeing Nussbaum to diminish and I walked. Around the corner, an old friend, Tony Gazzara, was standing in Joe Domanti's law office on Baxter Street. Tony works as a paralegal.

"We had a kid here the other day, he looked like he didn't belong here. A nice looking young guy - 20, maybe. He was in here for something minor. He started to cry. Now he fell apart completely. He said he needed help. Crack."

"What do you do?"

"We're going to ask the judge about getting him into some kind of treatment program."

"Where?"

He shrugged. "I guess that's the problem."

There is a six-month wait to find a place in a drug treatment program.

As Tony talked, he was looking across the narrow street, where a new city prison is going up.

At first when you looked at it, rising out of the debris and mud of a lot, it seemed more visible proof that we have gone insane. The building will cost something like $ 75 million and house about 450 inmates and it won't be ready for a year and a half. If prisons are built for everybody who could be convicted of crack right now, it would cost about a billion dollars. Then when they get out of jail, the same crack that put them into jail will be waiting out on the street.

But now you noticed all these construction workers walking confidently on the steel girders, performing the act that made this city great - hard, competent work. Suddenly, a jailhouse stood as the symbol of how this city became great, and the only way it can save itself. For a city where everybody works needs no new jails.

At the job yesterday, a proud construction worker, Kevin Quigley, 35, a foreman for mason tenders, said the new prison building was going to be a "state-of-the-art prison. A library, gym, whatever. There's a lot of intricate stuff with locking devices inside. It's a big job. I've been on this one two years. Since it was in the hole. We'll be here another year and a half."

"What do you get working here?"

"What do we get - 20, don't we?" he said to another worker, Ray Monel, 45, of Bay Ridge.

"Twenty dollars an hour," Monel said.

Quigley took me to a large stone section that was on a flatbed truck. The stone, brown and with a little pink showing in the afternoon light, was a panel that would form part of the outside shell of the new prison. A crane lifts it into the air and up against the building and workers fasten it to columns.

"It come over the road, all the way down from Canada. Near Montreal," Quigley said.

John Newhouse, who works as a stone derrickman, came over and said it was known as a sandwich panel. He led me down to the end of the section and tapped a streak of brown material, which made up a layer of= the inside of the section. "See the brownish material? That's the insulation. The whole thing weighs 17,500 pounds. It's a single unit. We got double units that weigh 35,000. They are putting one of them up right now."

I looked up to see where the 35,000 pound slab was, and Quigley said that it was on the other side of the building and that, to see it, you had to walk around to Canal Street.

I left them, but stopped to take note of campaign posters on a tool shed. They were for candidates running for the important offices in the Enterprise Association, Local 638, which is the proper title for a steamfitters union. The posters called for the re-election of Peter J. McCarron as business agent for Local 638. Also John J. Torpey and Bobby Bartels, and William (Billy) Abbate. There were two insurgents, Patrick (Paddy) Dolan, running for business agent, and Bobby Bartels Jr., who was running for the union finance board. The posters said the election will be held at Aviation Trades High School on Queens Boulevard in Long Island City on Dec. 10, with polls open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

This show of political activity by the men building the new jailhouse caused me to immediately hope that much of the spanking-new prison would be used for the incarceration of city politicians.

I walked across Canal Street and stood in front of a jewelry store. It afforded a clear view of the 35,000 pound slab of stone being slapped onto the side of the building at about the ninth floor. On the floors above it, workmen leaned out from the bare steel girders and looked down at the stone, hanging in the air on crane cables, which moved the slab slowly into position. I glanced inside the jewelry store. A young man was having his finger fitted for a wedding band while his fiancee and a woman who obviously was her mother watched carefully.

Across Canal Street, the bare steel girders on the building now had small light bulbs shining in the fading light. They looked like Christmas decorations, but of course they were there for safety of the workers, who were building so carefully and with so much skill the new prison for our city.