In 1988, 29-year-old Nicholas Wasicsko took office in the city of Yonkers. He defeated Angelo R. Martinelli, the six-term Republican most identified with the struggles over court-ordered integration of affordable housing in the city, to become the youngest mayor in the country. He was a “young professional with a new image,” he told the New York Times, which set him apart from his older opponents, even though their positions were not that different. A product of the public school system in Yonkers, he paid his way through four years at Manhattan College by working at a factory, spent a year as a police officer, and had already gained a seat on the City Council before he became mayor. Five years later, Wasicsko was found dead in Oakland Cemetery in Yonkers, where his father was buried, with a gunshot wound to the head, an apparent suicide. He was 34 years old.“Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once jotted down in his notebook, and the phrase serves as a sort of mantra and gives a title to “Show Me a Hero,” a new HBO miniseries from David Simon, creator of “The Wire.” Based on the book of the same name by Lisa Belkin, the show, which airs August 16, stars Oscar Isaac as Wasicsko, the brash mayor who’s a Springsteen fan and likes the occasional cigar. Hoping to walk into office and make a big splash, he finds himself stuck in the mud left behind by his predecessor Martinelli (Jim Belushi), especially when it comes to the never-ending fights against public housing, which are being protested by groups of white residents nervous and angry about an influx of African-American and Spanish residents moving into their neighborhoods from the other side of town. Their property values and quality of life, they scream, will diminish.One of those residents is Mary Dorman (Catherine Keener), a longtime native of East Yonkers who’s in favor of keeping low-income housing on the other side of the Saw Mill River parkway, where it has always been. Henry J. Spallone (Alfred Molina), a local councilman, leads the white residents in their campaign against the public-housing units, instigating the protestors. If the city does not comply with federal regulations for the integration of housing, Yonkers will begin to be fined daily, pushing the city into bankruptcy.All that’s only in the first hour. “Show Me a Hero” packs a lot of story, and a lot of history, into its total six-hour running time. Like “The Wire,” the narrative is bifurcated, giving equal attention to the politicians and the people on the street. We see Norma (LaTanya Richardson-Jackson), a woman who is going blind and is having trouble finding a nurse who wants to take care of her in the projects; Billie (Dominique Fishback), a young mother of two who gets in trouble with the housing authority because of her criminal boyfriend; and Alma (Ilfenesh Hadera), a single mother who has to keep sending her kids back to the Dominican Republic because she can’t afford to feed them all with her low-paying job.And there’s more: Jon Bernthal plays an NAACP attorney; Peter Riegert plays city planner Oscar Newman, who developed the “defensible space theory”; and Winona Ryder plays Vinni Restiano, a local councilwoman who is friends with Wasicsko. There are a ton of characters that make their way through “Show Me a Hero,” and the series gives ample time to let them develop. It’s a show that demands patience. At times it seems like not much is happening. But “Show Me a Hero” pays off in the end because of its attention to detail and its refusal to reduce its characters to stereotypes. Even the worst of the people in this story — and there are lot of bad, or at least misguided, people — are given room to change, breathe, and grow. It doesn’t happen overnight, but there is a transformation in place. Whatever happens in the court might not have an immediately visible effect. People may move into affordable housing finally, but they will still face the racism of their neighbors.This is difficult for Nick Wasicsko. People are constantly telling him that politics and life shouldn’t mix, that one is a game and the other is real. Wasicsko wants to believe that assertion but knows the truth — that politics and life are one and the same. To see something he put in place finally come together proves his worth to the world; that he was on the right side of history. Without that confirmation he is purposeless. And when others begin to take the credit, Wasicsko finds himself aggressively trying to climb back into the city government that pushed him away, with tragic results.The problems with affordable housing never truly went away. White people fled Yonkers at alarming rates, choosing to leave instead of integrating. Allowing for Fitzgerald’s declaration that gives the miniseries its title, Wasicsko is the tragic hero in the story who paid a personal price for the politics of his city. But at the same time, “Show Me a Hero” works against that idea by showing that there are real heroes, without tragic consequences: the people who made the journey from West to East Yonkers, who faced harassment and scorn in the name of a better life.
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