Trillin on Peloso

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When I heard that the mayor of Newport, Kentucky had a plan to span the Ohio River, I naturally sought him out. Over the past decade, I have heard so many civic boosters explain their plans for what they often call “putting this place on the nap” or “getting this town moving again” that I have gradually become a fancier of Grand Urban Schemes. I am attracted to a city that can offer a four-color architect’s rendering of a downtown marina-condominium-shopping-mall-ice-skating-rink complex in the same way that devout observers of bird life are drawn out of their way by wetlands said to be prime feeding grounds for the snowy egret. Collectors of Grand Urban Schemes, like spotters of snowy egrets, have their work cut out for them these days, the supply of big-scheme money having dried up even faster than the supply of undeveloped wetlands. A few months ago, I read that the mayor of Utica, New York—who, it should be said, was considered somewhat eccentric even before he fired virtually the entire Department of Public Works—planned to transform the center of Utica into something he calls La Promenade, which would include not only the usual shops and the mandatory ice-skating rink but a reproduction of the Spanish Steps that presumably could, on days when the temperature was above zero, lead some romantic shoppers to believe that they had been transported from upstate New York to Roma. Except for La Promenade, though, a connoisseur of Grand Urban Schemes had little to talk about lately until it became known that a plan to span the Ohio had been hatched by the mayor of Newport—John Peluso, a television-repair-shop proprietor who has his own reputation for eccentricity and is known locally as Johnny TV.

The Ohio River has been spanned before, of course, but only conventionally—by bridges. In fact, Newport being directly across the river from downtown Cincinnati, there are several bridges within the view of anyone standing on high ground—including a nineteenth-century suspension bridge built by the Roeblings as a sort of dress rehearsal for their heroic span between Brooklyn and the United States, as well as a recently completed bridge whose arch, painted bright yellow, is said by some locals to resemble the world’s largest McDonald’s sign. What Johnny TV Peluso has in mind is not another bridge but a system of huge aerial cable cars that would carry passengers high over the river between a hotel to be built on a Newport bluff and a landing pad somewhere near the stadium-and-colosseum complex that was constructed on the Cincinnati river front several years ago—a complex that itself qualified as a Grand Urban Scheme, with a projected cost of just under one hundred million dollars. Someone unfamiliar with the attraction of such schemes might, of course, question the necessity of spending millions of dollars—twenty million, by the Mayor’s latest estimate—on a cable-car system that would connect two riverbanks already connected by nine bridges. That is not the sort of question that leaps to Mayor Peluso’s mind. What he asks instead, while standing on a bluff in Newport that he has arranged to buy, lo9oking directly across the river at a hundred-million-dollar stadium-and-colosseum project, is how two such points can possibly remain unconnected by the country’s longest urban aerial-cable-car system. Peluso has a number of selling points to make about the desirability of his scheme, but the remark he makes most often about is “It’s a natural!”

The person who told me about the cable-car scheme said something like “I hear the mayor of Newport, Kentucky, wants to put cable cars across the Ohio, so people can be brought over from Cincinnati to sin.” So much for Mayor Peluso’s notion that the cable cars would “change the image of the town and erase the stigma of being a sin city.” Newport’s reputation as a center of vice has been so strong for so many years that changing the city’s image with a grand stroke of engineering would require considerably more than a twenty-million-dollar aerial-cable-car system. It some grand schemers in Newport managed to dismantle an Egyptian pyramid, transport it to Kentucky, and reconstruct it on the banks of the Ohio River, many people who had visited Newport over the years would assume that the purpose of the proj3ect was to provide an authentic ----------- for some particularly imaginative Egyptian belly dancing. As recently as the early sixties, Newport had open gambling, controlled by a syndicate from Cleveland, and some brothels that had operated long enough to have the reputation of old established firms. The elected officials of Newport tended to respond to any effort at reform by saying that gambling was good for business, which was at least true for many of them personally, since payoffs were thought to constitute a secondary industry of some importance. There was even a wide-spread theory that open gambling in Newport was good for business in Cincinnati, then known as a center for good-government advocates and respectable burghers, since part of the attraction Cincinnati held as a convention city was the opportunity it presented to be entertain3ed in northern Kentucky—or, as the prospect has always been expressed in Cincinnati, to “go across the river.”

The end of Newport’s big-time gambling and prostitution industry came in a way that added more notoriety to the town than could have been accumulated in ten or fifteen more years of steady sinning. In 1961, George Ratterman, who had been a Notre Dame quarterback of national renown, announced that he planned to run for sheriff of Campbell County with the intention of closing the gambling casinos of Newport, Ratterman had some obvious advantages over previous reformers. As a Notre Dame football hero who was the father of eight children, he could hardly be dismissed—as some of the local ministers had been dismissed in Newport, a largely Catholic town—as another Protestant zealot whose teeth were set to gnashing at the thought of people having a good time this side of the hereafter. Running for a county rather than a city office, he could draw support from a higher-income suburb that was beginning to find Newport embarrassing. Not long after he announced his candidacy, Ratterman was arrested for assorted misdemeanors by some Newport policemen who said they had found him in a hotel room above the Tropicana Club in bed with a dancer who appeared at the club under the professional name of April Flowers.

Ratterman claimed that he had been drugged and set up, and, some dramatic testimony having been offered by others to that effect at his trial, the charges were dropped. Shortly before the election, six people were indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiring to frame Ratterman, and two were eventually convicted. April Flowers apparently decided to assist the prosecution, but even she did not remain unpunished, since the acting governor of Kentucky publicly revoked the Kentucky-colonel’s commission she had displayed to reporters while waiting to testify before the grand jury. The acting governor, in fact, seemed somewhat bewildered as to how Miss Flowers had come to be awarded a Kentucky colonelcy in the first place—particularly one whose official commission he had signed himself. A reporter I know in northern Kentucky says that April Flowers was at least able to continue her stripping career with the advantage of billing herself as “the only defrocked Kentucky colonel,” but he offers no documentation. Ratterman, of course, was elected, winning a countywide plurality in a three-man race. He did not, however, carry the city of Newport itself. Newport was carried by the Democratic candidate—Johnny TV Peluso. It should be noted that during the campaign Ratterman, who was not considered eccentric, proposed spanning the Ohio River with a seventy-thousand-seat stadium that would also include a six-hundred-room hotel, inside parking for forty-five hundred cars, bowling alleys, covered gardens, and a boat dock. He reminded reporters that a similar project had been suggested for New York City by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller.

During the campaign for sheriff, George Ratterman said that new industry would come to Newport just as soon as the unsavory characters associated with gambling departed. As it turns out, Newport’s inventory of what a reformer would consider legitimate industries is more or less the same as it was fifteen years ago. There is still a brewery and a steel plant and a clothing factory; the main shopping street is still a grimy line of two-story brick buildings with tired-looking retail stores on the ground floors. The population has dropped almost twenty-five per cent to twenty-three thousand, although—half of Newport’s work force having traditionally worked elsewhere in the area—northern-Kentucky planners tend to attribute the population loss to normal suburbanization rather than the sudden shortage of positions for blackjack dealers.

Newport’s attempts to find a replacement for gambling seem to have concentrated on the field in which it has had the most experience—sinning. For a while, Newport was the scene of what the local papers sometimes referred to as “commercial-type charity bingo.” Through a legal loophole that a judge soon closed, night spots were allowed to attract customers with bingo as long as the game profits went to a designated charity. In the first five weeks of operation, it turned out, Newport’s four bingo clubs took in three hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars, with the two clubs that filed reports on charitable contributions having distributed to the needy some seventeen hundred dollars—figures indicating that the appropriate name for the sport might have been “high-over-head bingo.” Newport has had more success with the strip-joint industry. Conventioneers or respectable Cincinnati citizens who are, as the taxi-drivers say, “looking for a little excitement” still go across the river. Strip joints are hardly a replacement for a gambling industry whose annual gross receipts were always estimated in the millions, although in a trial last year a Cincinnati insurance executive testified that in five and a half months of crossing the river to a place called the Pink Pussycat he personally managed to spend almost sixteen thousand dollars without placing a bet. When I first heard that Saturday-night bridge traffic between Newport and Cincinnati was still brisk, it occurred to me that, there being pretty much of a buyer’s market in public nudity these days, Cincinnati residents might merely be reacting to some atavistic twitch that associates northern Kentucky with sin. The strip-joint marquees seem the same as those in any other town. There is even a featured stripper named Trixie Delight, raising the possibility that the industry’s copywriters may have run out of names and started over again, like a longtime dog breeder who finally give up and names the new puppy Fido. Local connoisseurs agree, though, that Newport strip shows tend to be gamier than what is normally allowed in Cincinnati. In fact, a Cincinnati businessman I know who hadn’t been across the river for a little excitement in some time volunteered to visit a couple of the shows while I was in town, and pronounced himself shocked at the total nudity—precisely the reaction expressed by a friend he encountered outside one of the clubs, a man who said that he had himself wandered over for the first time in several years, because he had been driven out of the house by his wife‘s Tupperware party. “They had open prostitution in the old days, of course,” the businessman said. “But they would never have allowed this!”

Mayor Peluso says it’s irritating to have Newport’s past as Sin City dragged out over every little incident—most recently in accounts of a nude wedding held in one of the clubs—but Newport’s past is remembered often because its present is constantly providing reminders. The reformers still have not carried Newport. The Pin, Pussycat burned down last Christmas—with the help, fire investigators said, of some gasoline and a timing device. The proprietor was at the time appealing a conviction for promoting prostitution, and people were bound to be reminded that her late husband, a Newport “night-club figure” named Sammy Eisner, was murdered in 1971—and that he has not been the only night-club figure murdered in recent years, any more than the Pink Pussycat has been the only night club burned with the help of gasoline. They may even have been reminded that while working unsuccessfully to solve the Eisner murder state police brought indictments for various crimes against such Newport citizens as the chief of police, a former detective, a city commissioner, and the vice-mayor—Johnny TV Peluso.

The charge against Peluso was eventually dropped, and, being based on the origin of some bonds Peluso once used as collateral, it had no connection at all with the traditional Newport charge of bribery which was brought against many of the others indicted. (“Why they put me in with these other people I’ll never know.” The Mayor said. “It doesn’t look good.”) Like anyone who has served in a variety of Newport offices over the years, Peluso has had more experience than the average citizen in testifying before grand juries, but his style of politics has always been thought of as too personal and impetuous to suit the role of a syndicate patsy. (“I never took nothing from nobody,” the Mayor often says, although he tries not to be puritanical about those who have.) Peluso tends to interpret political life as a series of personal battles—arguments with the police chief about the mayor’s right to have a police radio, arguments with the city manager about whether the city is responsible for fixing a street that leads to some Peluso property, even arguments with the syndicate about flunkies from the gambling clubs feeding parking meters in front of his repair shop, Johnny’s TV. He is the sort of public official who arrives quickly at an accident and drops everything to search for a lost pet. Those who have observed Johnny TV Peluso’s career for some time believe that one of his most characteristic adventures was distributing eggs to the poor at Christmas, being sued some months later for failure to pay the bill for the eggs, and offering half payment on the ground that the eggs were so small they looked as if they had been laid by pigeons.

Peluso says he always opposed syndicate gambling and bust-out joints—establishments where the odds on a player’s going home a big winner were reduced by a rigged wheel or a large man in the parking lot. But he still calls himself a liberal—a term that in Newport refers strictly to one’s views on gambling. He has occasionally called for a return of gambling (“It was helping the poor”), and, perhaps because one of his business flings was as the operator of a “Commercial-type charity bingo,” he still favors the return of bingo. During periods when he is in favor of blotting out the memory of gambling instead of reinstating gambling, he has been for the Grand Urban Scheme—putting a huge marina on the river front, building the Cincinnati Riverfront Stadium in Newport instead of in Cincinnati. “You gotta think big,” he told me as we drove to the bluff that would be the site of the cable-car hotel.

The Mayor’s ideas about financing the scheme seem to be in flux. Sometimes he treats it as a private venture that will merely have the side effect of revitalizing Newport; sometimes he says he will donate the land, then try to raise funds through federal grants and local bond issues; sometimes he talks about selling stock in small lots, so people will feel that they have a piece of the project, “like a piece of the rock.” Whatever the financing, Peluso is clear about the logic of the scheme. Like other people with Grand Urban Schemes, he finds the sheer size and novelty of the project compelling. Grand Urban Schemes are normally promoted with such enthusiasm for building the only or the largest that it seems almost superfluous for some citizen to ask, “The only largest what?” Peluso, like other scheme promoters I have met, has a four-color architect’s rendering and figures on how many jobs would result and, of course, a list of reasons the scheme is a natural. ---------------- between Ohio and Kentucky,” he told me as we gazed toward Cincinnati from the bluff, where Peluso already operates a sort of banquet hall. “What we’re talking about is plugging into a ninety-six-million-dollar project. Twenty million dollars is chicken feed; you’d pay it off in five years. If I can strike on the right party, I’ll get the job done.”

One could ask why there needs to be a twenty-million-dollar link between Ohio and Kentucky, or why a ninety-six-million-dollar project has to be plugged into. But then why did there have to be a forty-seven-million-dollar arch in front of St. Louis? What did Nelson Rockefeller sound like when he first explained why it would be beneficial to construct what turned out to be a billion-dollar government mall in Albany? What makes Johnny TV Peluso’s Grant Urban Scheme different from some others I’ve seen, I realized while the Mayor pointed out the sights cable-car riders would be able to take in, is not that his sales pitch is so much different but that nobody seems to have bought it. Newport is hardly in a position to ignore opportunities for revitalization, but there have been no statements by business leaders on how gross retail sales would be affected. There have been no angry letters from environmentalists opposed to further development of the river. The local papers have barely mentioned Peluso’s project. Johnny TV’s reputation for being rather erratic would limit the seriousness with which his scheme was taken, of course, but there is no rule that the man who thinks of a Grant Urban Scheme has to run it; the last time I saw the man who thought up the Louisiana Superdome, he was running a small antique shop in the French Quarter. It occurred to me that, after a decade or so of visionary projects all over the country, Johnny TV Peluso may have accomplished something of at least minor historical note—he may have thought of a Grand Urban Scheme so divorced from reality that even an American city paid no attention to it. “It would be a novelty,” the Mayor was saying. “And here’s the beauty part: it’s above the smog area.”
--Calvin Trillin

from The New Yorker, March 22, 1976