NEW YORK: Abzug: Rage and Asphalt Glamor

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For Bella Savitzky Abzug, there are two New Yorks. Her mayoral candidacy evokes responses from cool to hostile among those most influential and sophisticated in city affairs. Businessmen feather, and so do civil service union leaders. The three daily newspapers will support one or another of her six opponents for the Democratic nomination. Most party sachems are lining up behind either Incumbent Abraham Beame or Governor Hugh Carey's choice, New York Secretary of State Mario Cuomo. Yet if the vote were held now, the other New York would choose Bella. TIME Bureau Chief Laurence I. Barrett reports:

It is a sultry night in Queens, thirsty for a thunderstorm that will come too late, but 250 middle-class homeowners stay dutifully in their hard little folding chairs. They are at the Bell Park Jewish Center to inspect mayoral candidates. Congressman Ed Koch leads off—witty, whimsical, wise—and he suggests that Abzug is a demagogue for promising that she would wrest more federal help for the beleaguered city. He gets polite applause.

Then it is Abzug's turn. A year or two ago, "Battling Bella" might have hollered some rib-cracking ripostes. Instead, she manages to look dainty in her white straw hat. Despite the heat and her bulk, she gives her most benign smile, a cultivated mannerism that accentuates the Oriental cast of her eyes. Sweetly, she says: "I disagree with Mr. Koch. I think that I am magnificent." The crowd exhales delight.

There are a few more grace notes —she talks about her Depression girlhood in New York, the Live and Let Live Meat Market that her father ran on Ninth Avenue—and then she is back into her real number. Her delivery takes on the timbre and pace of a pneumatic hammer. "This is a city that can attract and hold business, that can make its subways and its buses fit for human beings and can give us cleaner streets and air and can reduce crime and restore learning in our schools and ..."

The litany goes on. Bella, Cuomo and others say the same thing—that the city's weak managerial system must be reformed to,save many millions. She would sack incompetent hacks and hire professional administrators. She would tidy up the sloppy procedures that keep New York from getting the maximum out of federal subsidies. Hundreds of millions in real estate and sales taxes now go uncollected each year; Abzug pledges to go after them: "I know where the money is and how to get it."

Now she is perspiring. Her left fist kayoes phantom adversaries in the air. Candidate Carter promised a federal takeover of welfare, and Candidate Abzug would hold him to it. "The city of New York has to organize and seek coalitions of the people, and mayors, and Governors and members of Congress and labor and the banks to insist that there is a national movement, and we in the city of New York need a billion dollars to take care of our streets, our teachers, our sanitation, our housing, our hospitals, our senior centers, our child-care centers..."