Managing Fear Itself
By Stacy Torres
I like to see myself as a tough and seasoned lifelong New Yorker. I pride myself on quickly distinguishing real urban dangers from visibly troubled city dwellers who may talk to themselves or act erratically but are much more likely to suffer harm than to hurt me. But despite declining crime, recent random attacks on strangers have rattled me and many residents in cities across the country.
On New Year’s Day, a subway train hit 45-year-old Joseph Lynskey after a stranger shoved him onto the tracks in Chelsea, the neighborhood where I grew up. He miraculously survived, landing in the deep trench between rails. And two days later, 36-year-old letter carrier Ray Hodge was stabbed to death at a Harlem bodega by another customer over an argument over who was first in the sandwich ordering line. “People have low tolerance,” said one person interviewed about the killing. “I feel safe because I’m vigilant, but anything can happen at any point in time.”
Such proximate horrors have made me revert to the anxious hypervigilance of my childhood, while also testing the limits of the safety protocols I’ve amassed over a lifetime. These events puncture my illusion of control—one moment of inattention, a wrong turn, or brush with a violently angry person could end my life. Revisiting memories of my parents’ protectiveness stirs a kind of twisted nostalgia alongside midlife melancholy as my world grows a little more circumspect.
I was born five years after President Gerald Ford denied a federal bailout to a near-bankrupt New York City, prompting that infamous Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” I hated growing up in Chelsea, longing for the placid suburban malls, backyards, and houses with stairs I saw on TV. Those sitcom kids (save for Good Times) didn’t worry about the urban dangers that haunted my nightmares. They didn’t avoid stairwells, watch Mom tend to Dad’s knife wound after a mugging, or hide their valuables in a hollow book and empty cereal box, as I had, thinking I’d cleverly outsmarted would-be thieves.
My parents reared us as if the apocalypse unfolded outside our apartment’s steel door. In 1990, the year I turned 10, New York City’s murder total peaked at 2,605 homicides. The news provided plenty of fodder to fill our heads with urban ghouls: kidnappers, rapists, muggers, subway pushers, and for a time someone who waited in dark corners, plunging hypodermic needles into strangers at the height of the AIDS epidemic. With military-style discipline, Mom drilled us on our situational awareness in public: Have your backs against the wall on the subway platform and make sure not to step on subway grates, manhole covers, or sidewalk cellar doors.
She got swept up in the missing children moral panic that terrified many parents in the 1980s, quizzing me on my address, phone number, and area code (“in case you get kidnapped and taken out of state.”) It didn’t help nerves that the highly publicized 1979 abduction of 6-year-old Etan Patz in SoHo, while walking two blocks to the school bus stop, hit so close to home—he attended an annex of my elementary school, P.S.3. The specter of this missing ghost boy haunted me, as Mom warned whenever I wandered a little too far ahead on crowded sidewalks, “Remember, Etan Patz.”
“At least I can trust you. You’re cautious,” Mom said when she finally allowed me outside by myself at age eleven, handing me house keys I wore on a string with matching whistle around my neck, ready to defend myself against any attacker that dared sneak up on me.
During my first nerdy solo excursion to a library three blocks away, I dutifully crossed only at streets where cars came to a complete stop and didn’t turn on green. But I soon found myself pulled anywhere Mom didn’t want me to go. 14-year-old me marched up seedy, Mom-unapproved 8th Avenue, past Penn Station and the Port Authority bus terminal, and looped around 42nd Street. The derelict theaters carried the grimy residue of a city that played a leading role in iconic films such as Taxi Driver.
While I never fully abandoned my vigilance, its grip loosened with gentrification and plummeting crime. I took the stairs, smiled occasionally, chatted with strangers. Popular shows like Friends and Sex in the City made my hometown palatable for middle-America consumption, leaving me more perturbed by the threat of rising rents and tourists than street crime. Finding an inch of unobstructed sidewalk space became near impossible among this zombie invasion of distracted, slow-moving people that walked four- and five-abreast and posed with picture-pretty cupcakes on West Village brownstone stoops, oblivious and unconcerned about whether I reached my destination in peace.
At its most extreme, fear of crime can morph into restrictive action, a self-imposed isolation and form of social control, evoking the Thomas theorem in sociology: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
As a sociologist, I know that news is manufactured to feature those sensational crimes that provoke our “fascination, fear, and outrage.” To protect my mental health, I’m trying to limit my consumption, especially of viral videos, knowing that I’ll never un-see certain things. And I remind myself that nationwide crime is dropping, including a 7.3 percent decline in homicides and 5.9 percent decrease in reported subway crimes in New York City since 2023. Most violent crime is committed by someone known to the victim, such as murder felonies, not strangers.
As I manage my anxiety about crime anew in midlife, I’m embracing fear to overcome it. Those rare attacks that defy personal vigilance have eased the burden on myself, helping me recognize the limits of what I or anyone can do to prevent them.
And I’m unwilling to give up many wonderful moments of connections with strangers. Sociologist Elijah Anderson characterizes the treasured venues for such interactions as a “cosmopolitan canopy,” pointing to Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market as an exemplar of those great urban spaces where we practice civility and getting along with each other across racial, ethnic, and other social boundaries.
Watching video of someone shoved in the subway shakes me to the core, but I counteract that terror with the memory of countless helping moments I witness during an average day. I think of the time recently when I dropped my scarf, and two passersby informed me before I could reach for it. Later that day, multiple people rushed to help a woman with a cane scooping up groceries that escaped from her paper bag ripped apart by the wind.
Life is precious—I’ve learned this lesson through significant loss in my lifetime. But life is also more than simply staying alive. Getting through each day and enjoying those pleasures that make life worth living requires a team effort. I don’t have an athletic bone in my body, but when it comes to the game of life, like that old John Fogerty song goes, “Put me in coach, I’m ready to play.”
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