Sleaze is a cockroach

Will Klein’s expression “Sleaze is a cockroach” turns the apparent cleanup of New York City into a question of visibility rather than victory. In his account, vice survives by burrowing out of sight; the metaphor links the changing streets around 42nd Street to the harder, less visible work of reaching the young people who once could be found there.

The cleanup and its limits

The 42nd Street Cleanup Period altered the setting in which Covenant House’s rescue van operated. Before the cleanup, the van’s route through the area was easier to read: runaways were more exposed, and the shelter’s workers knew where to look. Once the street was cleaned up, those young people were less obvious, making the task of locating them less clear-cut.

Klein’s point is not that the city became wholly clean. It became “cleaner to look at.” The distinction gives the metaphor its force: a change in what passersby see does not establish that the underlying problem has gone away. The expression names persistence beneath a tidier surface.

What the image conveys

The cockroach image makes survival, concealment, and persistence one idea. Klein follows it with the claim that sleaze survives, burrows, and hides, then doubts that it can be killed. The sequence moves from a memorable comparison to a broader conclusion: what has been driven from view may endure in less visible forms.

The metaphor also turns the cleanup into a practical concern. When the signs of street life are less apparent, the rescue van loses the obvious places and cues that once guided it. The expression therefore describes more than an urban mood; it captures a consequence for people trying to reach runaways.

Visibility, judgment, and moral contrast

Klein considers why visible sleaze can seem easier to confront: people can scoff at it and feel superior. Its concealment removes that simple target and, in his formulation, replaces an obvious frontal assault with a danger moving through high grass. The contrast suggests that respectable appearances may obscure risks rather than resolve them.

He extends the thought into paired oppositions, arguing that a front implies a back and that light, purity, and goodness cannot be considered apart from their counterparts. Within this reflection, “Sleaze is a cockroach” is both a compact image of what survives a civic makeover and a warning against mistaking reduced visibility for disappearance.