Doubts About Dinkins in Canarsie Keep Area a Citadel for Giuliani By IAN FISHER Continue reading the main story Share This Page Share Tweet Email More Save The article as it originally appeared. View page in TimesMachine , Page 001001 The New York Times Archives Like many people in Canarsie, Rose and Anthony Gardini feel downtrodden this election year. The other day, the couple stood in front of their home, guarded by two pink flamingos and two big dogs named Muffin and Brandy, and spoke of a New York City where they say white people are increasingly locked out. Of course, the Gardinis say, they are voting for Rudolph W. Giuliani. "Dinkins is trying to show that he is good for the blacks and the whites," said Mrs. Gardini, 68. "But he favors his own kind. We gave a black mayor a chance but he did not do enough for us." Mayor David N. Dinkins lost big here four years ago and has no prayer of winning Canarsie this year. This working-class neighborhood, built after World War II by whites fleeing other Brooklyn neighborhoods, provides a glimpse into the equation of racial politics this year. White residents of Canarsie are unlikely to vote for a black mayor, whoever it is, anytime soon. They admit this in whispers. But what many complain about openly is a feeling of alienation, the sense that whites are losing on some invisible playing field, especially over the last four years. "He put his own people first," Frank Benigno, a 41-year-old banker and lifelong Canarsie resident, said of the Mayor. Heart of Giuliani Country That feeling is linked deeply to worries about the neighborhood, which has been a pressure point of the city's racial politics for more than two decades, from explosive anti-busing protests to the more recent firebombings of a black couple's house and a real estate agency. Slowly, blacks have begun to move in as the older Jewish and Italian settlers die off or retire out of the city. Continue reading the main story And though few white people said they believed Mr. Giuliani alone could restore New York City as a land of safe streets, clean sidewalks and homogenous communities -- if such a place ever existed -- a vote for him seemed to be a grasp for a vague sense of control and belonging. This is the heart of Giuliani country, even if some people said they knew little about him, wondered about his compassion or called him, inexplicably, "Giuliano." The candidate's get-tough anti-crime campaign plays big here and he can count on the votes of people in census tracts 1008 and 1010, a roughly 15-block area where nearly two dozen in-depth interviews were conducted, from the commercial strip of Avenue L to the neat attached homes and tidy lawns of Avenue N between East 89th and East 93d Streets. The 1990 census showed that the area was 93 percent white, 6 percent Asian, with 9 percent identifying themselves as being of Hispanic origin. There were no black residents. Cultural Loyalty In the interviews, nearly half the people said they had voted for Mr. Dinkins in 1989. But the voting record shows otherwise. Mr. Giuliani won big, 612 to 69, even though the area is more than two-thirds Democratic, a reflection of how white Democrats outside Manhattan have failed to support Mr. Dinkins. "This is the first time I am going to vote for a Republican," Max Solomon, a 78-year-old retired teamster, said grimly as he walked with his daughter and three grandchildren. "I'm strictly a union person." People like Mr. Gardini argue that it is only natural for people to vote for candidates who are like themselves: If Harlem votes for Mr. Dinkins, he said, why should Canarsie not vote for Mr. Giuliani? "Let's be fair," said Mr. Gardini, 72, who worked for 43 years as a fur tanner. "We're in a city that's 140 different cultures. The Irish vote for the Irish, the Jews vote for the Jews. I don't like it, but that's the way the system is." In the four years of the Dinkins administration, three events appear to have made the greatest impression in Canarsie. In hair salons, on street corners, in the playground of Public School 115, people again and again mentioned the disturbances in Crown Heights and Washington Heights and the boycott of a Korean-owned store in Flatbush. In each case, as they saw it, a nonblack group -- Hasidic Jews, the police and the Korean store owners -- was the victim of an injustice that the Mayor failed to correct. 'Favors His Own Kind' Like many people, Robert Alexander, 67, was especially angry about Crown Heights. "People were being stoned and one guy got killed and what did he do about it?" he said. "Nothing. He just favors his own kind. It definitely bothers me. If you are a minority you should really show you are going to take care of everybody." Even though race was a major factor, residents found many shortcomings in Mr. Dinkins's record on its own. Steven Rosenfeld, a 34-year-old electronics consultant, said he was concerned about how crime has risen over the last four years, though he acknowledged a recent drop. He said he worried about education, that there were 35 children in his son's first-grade class. And he said he had misgivings about Mr. Dinkins as a leader, from his handling of disturbances like those in Crown Heights to his monotone when reading speeches. Right now, he said, the city needs Mr. Giuliani. "Almost like Clinton, he represents change," he said. "He'd be a little more hard-nosed. Dinkins is too soft." Two people said they would vote for Mayor Dinkins. One man, who would identify himself only as Steve C., said he wondered whether Mr. Giuliani had enough compassion to run a city as diverse as New York. And Joseph Dorsey, 33, said that in his job traveling around East New York for Brooklyn Union Gas he has seen more police officers on the streets, as Mr. Dinkins had promised. "You don't fix what ain't broke," said Mr. Dorsey, expressing an apt if unusually directed sentiment for conservative Canarsie. "So far he has been doing a good job." Feeling Let Down But Richard Nathanson, a 49-year-old product manager for a chemical company, said he had high hopes four years ago for Mr. Dinkins as a conciliator among the races and a person who might inspire confidence among businesses. He now feels let down on every front -- "crime, drugs, homelessness, race relations, you can take your pick" -- and plans to vote for Mr. Giuliani. The last straw came when his own employer, a chemical company, closed down in Long Island City, Queens. The Dinkins administration, he said, was not interested in keeping it in the city. "In the last four years, I don't think anything has changed here," he said. "Well, we got water meters." In interview after interview, race crept into the conversation -- the sense that the balance of power between white and black has shifted, perhaps forever, away from whites, and that Mr. Dinkins was in part to blame. "I was a very big liberal years back," said Ron Chenensky, 65, a retired production manager for a large clothing manufacturer, who said he is voting for Mr. Giuliani. "I'm still liberal but it's teetering. You see the riots, everything else, that has a lot to do with it." Any other reason he is voting for Mr. Giuliani? "I think the administration right now could be a little lopsided," he said. How? "Racist." Pressure From Blacks Joann Ryder, 35, said that Mr. Dinkins has been under too much pressure from blacks, and has been paralyzed as he tries to please both blacks and whites. She called Mr. Dinkins a fair, "well-groomed and professional man" but felt that blacks on the whole have been trying to keep whites from getting their fair share. "I feel I'm not generally prejudiced," she said. "I think they have proven themselves to be a hostile race. They have put us in the position where we really have to watch our P's and Q's with them. I don't think they are any better or worse than we are." Nothing seems to contribute so much to Canarsians' unease than the shifts in the neighborhood in recent years. In 1980, Canarsie and neighboring areas, including Mill Basin, Flatlands and Bergen Beach, were 88 percent white. Ten years later they were 70 percent white -- and the tension was revealed in the 1990 firebombing and a similar attack the next year of a real-estate company showing houses to blacks. "If a neighborhood starts to go from all white to all black, it's all going to go to pot again," Mr. Chenensky said. "You will have an exodus of whites again. That's what happened in East New York. That's what happened in Brownsville. And it's starting to happen again." 'Egotistical Maniac' Even those with the harshest words for Mr. Dinkins expressed worries about Mr. Giuliani. Many voters said they did not know enough about him, either as a leader or a person. Mrs. Ryder called him "an egotistical maniac." "I think he loves himself too much and that's going to cause problems," she said. Jerry Kanowitz, the 62-year-old owner of Canarsie Books and Comics on Avenue M, said he wished someone else were running. "Right now I'm going to vote for the man in the moon," he said. "I'll be honest with you. They both stink. Giuliani to me, I think he is a fascist. Dinkins is a nobody. The whole city is going down the drain." "When I get to the polls," he said, "I'm going to say eeny-meeny-miney-moe. And that's it."