Studio of Catherine (Kitty) Genovese, stabbed to death as neighbors listened and did nothing to help.
Studio of Catherine (Kitty) Genovese, stabbed to death as neighbors listened and did nothing to help. (Handout)

Sorrowed citizens, not particularly including the souls who had actually watched the thing happen from their windows, would reflect over the years that the incident on Austin St. in Kew Gardens in Queens in the early morning hours of Saturday the 13th of March 1964 rang out with a terrible finality any sense that once upon a time there had been something approximating a compassionate human community in the City of New York. It would be noted that the screaming young woman's savage slaying, literally before the eyes of 38 of her neighbors who watched it for half an hour like it was a television show before anyone could be bothered even to pick up a phone to summon police, was a definable turning point in the city's modern social history. It would be observed around the globe that the City of New York, specifically the community of Kew Gardens in the Borough of Queens, was the metaphor for the numbness that had overtaken the urban condition in the mid-20th century. It would come to be felt that the young woman's death was, really, as one observer put it, "the beginning of the end of decency."

Her name was Catherine Genovese. She managed a tavern called Ev's 11th Hour, over on Jamaica Ave. in Hollis, and she lived above an upholstery shop at 82-70 Austin St. It was her custom to park her car outside the Long Island Rail Road station just a fast walk from her flat. Apparently, shortly after 3 on this chilly Saturday morning, she had realized that she had been followed from the bar  followed from Jamaica Ave. to the Grand Central Parkway to Queens Blvd. to 82nd Road to Austin St., followed into the dark LIRR parking lot  and she had started to run.


She was almost at the safety of her door when the man with the knife caught her.

She screamed and she screamed and she screamed, as 38 of her neighbors watched from their windows.

"Leave that girl alone," one of them shouted down.

They watched as the startled attacker fled. They watched as the bloodied woman staggered down the street, stumbled into a doorway and collapsed.

And they watched as, 10 minutes later, her killer sauntered back and, without further interference and altogether at his leisure, finished her off.

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She was just another routine homicide at first. QUEENS BARMAID STABBED, DIES, reported the Daily News. QUEENS WOMAN IS STABBED TO DEATH IN FRONT OF HOME, chronicled The New York Times. It wasn't until a week or so later that police detectives went public with how sick to their stomachs the dreadful residents of Austin St. had made them. Every neighbor they talked to had seen the whole thing, and not a one of them had lifted a finger. Some of them, true, rubbing sleep from their eyes, simply hadn't grasped the gravity of the matter. As for the others: "I didn't want to get involved." "It was none of my business." "I was tired." The man who lived just up the stairwell from where Kitty Genovese had fallen had actually peeped out for an instant and seen the knife-flailing assailant cutting her apart, and then he had slammed his door shut so he wouldn't have to think about it.

She was dead on arrival at Queens General Hospital. The first few knife wounds, inflicted out on the sidewalk, had not been fatal. What killed her were the eight or 10 more she took 15 full minutes after she first shrieked "Help me!" outside her front door. Fifteen full minutes during which the man with the knife had returned to her side and brought his blade out again. Fifteen minutes in which anyone's call to the police would have let 28-year-old Kitty Genovese live another day.

Around the whole world, the mutes of Kew Gardens overnight became the symbols of total indifference, of stone-hearted New York City, of soulless and empty modern times.

The killer, picked up a few days later, was one Winston Moseley, of Sutter Ave. in Richmond Hill, a responsibly employed young family man who, as he matter-of-factly explained to cops, just came down with this urge sometimes to go out cruising for some random woman to cut up. It had been Kitty Genovese's destiny to leave Ev's 11th Hour exactly at the moment he drove past the place, and he had made a U-turn and followed her home. Yes, he said, she had spotted him after she parked her car in the LIRR lot, and she had made a terror-stricken run for her life, but he had been faster.

But, detectives pointed out, there had already been one cry from a window  - Leave that girl alone! - and he had been forced to sprint away. How could he have come back just minutes later to resume the murderous assault? Had he not supposed that people might be watching?

"Oh, I knew they wouldn't do anything," Winston Moseley said. "People never do. That late at night, they just go back to sleep."

A year later, a Journal-American news team quite unsubtly re-created the Kitty Genovese killing on Austin St., and a young woman reporter lay writhing and moaning on the sidewalk for half an hour, and once again not a single person called the law. "I did not call the police then, and I would not call the police now," sniffed one woman who informed the reporters that their questions irritated her. A building super apologetically explained that he had thought about making a call but that his wife hadn't let him.

In October 1965, a Hollywood-handsome Congressman named John Lindsay who was running for mayor on the Republican-Liberal ticket held a campaign rally in the LIRR parking lot and pledged to wipe out crime in the streets with the help of every good citizen of the City of New York.

"We must give to the people of New York faith, so that the double lock will no longer be the symbol of New York," he said. "It will require each citizen willing to be his brother's keeper. It will require citizens to rally to the defense of their neighbors when crime strikes."


John Lindsay stood outside the Kew Gardens station, a fast walk away from the spot where Kitty Genovese had spilled her life's blood, and mourned.

"Something has gone out of the heart and soul of New York City," he said.

First published on October 7, 1998  as part of the "Big Town" series on old New York. Find more stories about the city's epic history here.