Kagan’s Diverse, ’Decrepit’ Manhattan Helped Shape Her Outlook
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In the Manhattan neighborhood of Elena Kagan’s youth in the 1960s and 1970s, drug addicts and prostitutes conducted their business minutes from the doormen and marbled lobby of her childhood home.
The future U.S. Supreme Court nominee’s mother, a schoolteacher, and father, an attorney, were typical residents of the Upper West Side’s grand boulevards. Three blocks away in Sherman Square, a scrap of greenery where Broadway crosses Amsterdam Avenue, heroin was being sold in the open, a scene memorialized in Jerry Schatzberg’s 1971 movie “The Panic in Needle Park” starring Al Pacino.