Why Can’t We Stop Talking About New York in the Late 1970s?

[Gantz]

Originally Posted by pdxtex

is it naïve of me to think that once you leave manhattan and parts of Brooklyn that new York of old is still alive in the outer boroughs and new jersey?

The New York of old is only alive in cities like present day Detroit. Even the worst hoods in current NYC like ENY and Brownsville don't even come close to what it was like in the old NYC. I think even Central Park of that era had worse crime rates than the worst hood in present day New York... think on that for a second. I think the current murder rate for all 5 boroughs is somewhere close to Portland, OR where you live.

[Centropolis]

up next - manhattan of the 90s: why we love white sneakers, mom jeans, and seinfeldian new york.

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by Gantz

The New York of old is only alive in cities like present day Detroit. Even the worst hoods in current NYC like ENY and Brownsville don't even come close to what it was like in the old NYC. I think even Central Park of that era had worse crime rates than the worst hood in present day New York... think on that for a second. I think the current murder rate for all 5 boroughs is somewhere close to Portland, OR where you live.

the closest thing to old new york (in the sense of the combination of affordability, authenticity, high urbanity, and creative energy) that I think that exists anywhere in north america is philadelphia, which is urban, packed with amenities, and relatively affordable (i just returned from there).

just look at where so many bands are moving to and coming out of these days... philadelphia.

[STLgasm]

There's just something about movies and TV shows of the '70s and '80s in New York that takes me back to my childhood, because it's the New York I remember growing up visiting my uncle who lived on W. 85th Street & Amsterdam. In those days, pimps and hustlers were as common on the Upper West Side as strollers and frozen yogurt shops are today. I remember walking around his neighborhood as a kid and seeing signs taped in the windows of practically every car parked along the streets that said "NO STEREO"-- every New Yorker with a car had a Buddy Box-- a removable carrying case for car stereos. Ahh, the good old days. Those early memories profoundly influenced my love of cities today. Here are a few of my favorite depictions of the old New York in film and TV that embody everything I love about that city:

Fame


Sesame Street


Maude


Welcome Back, Kotter


Tootsie


Arthur


Annie Hall


Saturday Night Fever


Moscow on the Hudson


This poster, which is prominently displayed in my shop in St. Louis, pretty much sums it all up for me:


And even though New York is a lot wealthier and cleaner today, it certainly hasn't lost all its grit and character. No city of 8 million+ can be written off or put in a box. It is, and always will be, the one and only New York City. Oy, I'm farklempt!

[Centropolis]

Tha mets are still pand scum

[destroycreate]

I don't get the hype either...the NYC of the 1970s (and nearly every city during that time) looks incredibly greasy, heroin-addicted and depressing. No thanks.

[pdxtex]

Originally Posted by Gantz

The New York of old is only alive in cities like present day Detroit. Even the worst hoods in current NYC like ENY and Brownsville don't even come close to what it was like in the old NYC. I think even Central Park of that era had worse crime rates than the worst hood in present day New York... think on that for a second. I think the current murder rate for all 5 boroughs is somewhere close to Portland, OR where you live.

I guess I wasn't thinking in terms of blight, but rather neighborhoods that haven't seen dramatic demographic changes over the past generation or so. Get x amount of miles out of Manhattan and its just normal neighborhoods doing normal neighborhood things. Not overrun with wall street types or hipsters.

[kool maudit]

Detroit is nothing like the New York of the 1970s. The thing that made that era interesting was the extreme compression; the poor and the rich, the comfortable and the desperate, were around each other a lot. Detroit is a city characterised by the opposite, by extreme suburbanisation and the abandonment of the city by the region's wealth.

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by destroycreate

I don't get the hype either...the NYC of the 1970s (and nearly every city during that time) looks incredibly greasy, heroin-addicted and depressing. No thanks.

it was also a time of great opportunity - culturally and economically - for the baby boomers, which many capitalized and many squandered. cities were re-made and broken by the decisions that were made during that time. for example - 1970s NYC arguably made Donald Trump (and his daddy) - and others like him.

[maru2501]

Originally Posted by destroycreate

I don't get the hype either...the NYC of the 1970s (and nearly every city during that time) looks incredibly greasy, heroin-addicted and depressing. No thanks.

it was alive, is sort of the issue.

not covered in a layer of american corporatism that now seems determined to force everyone into a homogenized experience of a space. no one appreciates a tourism machine on any visceral level

[emathias]

Originally Posted by kool maudit

Detroit is nothing like the New York of the 1970s. The thing that made that era interesting was the extreme compression; the poor and the rich, the comfortable and the desperate, were around each other a lot. Detroit is a city characterised by the opposite, by extreme suburbanisation and the abandonment of the city by the region's wealth.

Yeah, and despite all its troubles, it still had core infrastructure that Detroit lacks. Sure, the Bronx was burning, but many other parts of New York were structurally intact, even if run-down. And the subway was there. Dirty and in dire need of maintenance, but there. Detroit has huge swaths of destroyed areas - by some estimates at least 27% of land in Detroit is vacant now, or up to 40 square miles out of 149 total square miles depending on the source and the measure. That's far worse than New York in the 1970s.

The compression, as kool maudit calls it, is what has always fascinated me about New York in the 1970s. Ever since I was a little kid (I was born in 1973), I loved looking at photos of cities in the 1970s. The 70s were a time coming out of the Civil Rights Era, when huge social change had been jaded by high-profile assassinations, economic turmoil created by massive changes in economic structure such as wage freezes, abandonment of the gold standard, huge fluctuations in oil prices and the withdrawal from Vietnam. At the same time the groundwork for a conservative political retrenchment were in the works, in part because of a spike in crime and drug use. And the early seeds of the current technology age were just starting to germinate, and after decades of real concern over the Soviet Union it was starting to be possible to believe that the West just might be able to win the Cold War. Ronald Reagan got a lot of credit for that, but it was really in the 1970s that close observers could see that Western technology was starting to seriously outpace Soviet technology, which ultimately played a significant role in the collapse of the Soviet empire - think of all the changes tech has brought the West since 1970, and realize that the Soviets were easily a decade behind in many areas when it comes to computing. Trying to run a centrally-planned economy even with today's technology would be very difficult, and trying to do it when your competitors are outpacing you technologically is practically impossible. Capitalism may be theoretically less efficient than socialism, but if it can innovate technologically faster, the difference in theoretical efficiency becomes less relevant than the practical impact of innovation improving future efficiency.

All of that played a role in the U.S. as a whole in the 1970s, and given that New York even then was the cultural and economic leader of the U.S., it hit New York sooner and harder than other places in the U.S., and New York worked through it sooner than the rest of the U.S. Current tech flattens that sort of experience, making it possible for small town America to see and feel cultural and economic changes faster than before, but in 1970, New York was, by far, the most global city in the U.S. and felt those changes faster and deeper than other places.

[Gantz]

Originally Posted by maru2501

it was alive, is sort of the issue.

not covered in a layer of american corporatism that now seems determined to force everyone into a homogenized experience of a space. no one appreciates a tourism machine on any visceral level

Again, this is all bs. What do you mean by "alive"? Nowadays it is MUCH more alive. It is not that dangerous anymore, so people are out on the street longer hours during the night. Its much more dense and packed, since the city is literally bigger (NYC added 1.4 million people since then and its at historical population peak. Today's NYC is the largest NYC has EVER been). Today's NYC has A LOT more night clubs, bars, lounges, concerts, theaters, music venues, art galleries, etc. Today's NYC is also A LOT more diverse in terms of demographics, 70s-80s NYC had a lot more vanilla corporate white people. Just look at the census figures, the number of immigrants in NYC is almost double compared to what it was back then. The shopping and food options are A LOT more diverse nowadays as well.

Originally Posted by kool maudit

Detroit is nothing like the New York of the 1970s. The thing that made that era interesting was the extreme compression; the poor and the rich, the comfortable and the desperate, were around each other a lot. Detroit is a city characterised by the opposite, by extreme suburbanisation and the abandonment of the city by the region's wealth.

So was the 70s-80s NYC. Entire subway lines were brought down, abandoned, and demolished. Entire city blocks were burned down. The city was losing people at an extreme rate.

[fflint]

Kool is right. Detroit is nothing like the New York of the 1970s.

[Gantz]

Originally Posted by fflint

Kool is right. Detroit is nothing like the New York of the 1970s.

The comparison was in terms of crime rates and population loss.

If NYC would not have turned it around, I'd say a good third of the subway system would be abandoned/demolished by now, and entire neighborhoods would be turned into "urban farms".

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by Gantz

So was the 70s-80s NYC. Entire subway lines were brought down, abandoned, and demolished. Entire city blocks were burned down. The city was losing people at an extreme rate.

detroit lost 25% of it's population between 2000 and 2010 and detroit has been plummeting in population for 60 years. NYC had a decade and some change of decline of about 11%. basically a blip compared to the collapse of detroit.

it's not even close.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Centropolis

detroit lost 25% of it's population between 2000 and 2010 and detroit has been plummeting in population for 60 years. NYC had a decade and some change of decline of about 11%. basically a blip compared to the collapse of detroit.

it's not even close.

NYC was arguably worse off than Detroit back in the 1970's, though.

The population loss in much of NYC was catastrophic, with entire neighborhoods being depopulated in a few short years. The core neighborhoods, especially the ungentrified ones, were really undergoing demographic collapse. Keep in mind that in 1960 NYC had basically no neighborhoods of severe distress. Within a decade it had some of the worst distress of any city in the developed world. The pace of decline must have been astonishing. There are plenty of stories of young men going off to Vietnam and coming back to the old neighborhood, and it had basically disappeared.

And it was a much more dramatic physical change than in Detroit, as the areas undergoing demographic collapse consisted almost entirely of large apartment buildings and generally very dense urban infrastructure. There were never any 1970's South Bronx-type situations in Detroit.

Then of course there's the fiscal collapse.

The differences people are pointing out (in NYC the rich and poor rub shoulders, NYC had and has vast wealth and resources. etc.) are a function of the inherent comparative differences between the cities, and don't really speak to the relative differences in patterns of decline during the 1970's.

[Centropolis]

well, i'd certainly argue that the downward fortunes of new york city were much more of a collective shock to america - as it was and is the undisputed primate city of the united states, and for a time the world. it just was a much bigger deal to everyone than the decline of a midwestern manufacturing city out on a lake. the giant megalith looked like it was going to come down and crush everyone, and this was much scarier.

certainly in some very specific instances in the bronx and elsewhere in nyc the physical scenes were (and are) unmatched in north america.

[maru2501]

this is what we are talking about

http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/



and it's happening in SF on a grand scale and in pockets of Chi too, for the record

[Gantz]

Originally Posted by maru2501

this is what we are talking about

http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/

A blog made by 40-50 year olds writing about their nostalgia trips, and the "good old days".

[themaguffin]

^ You have disdain for any interest in this subject, but you return to shit on people's comments. There are countless threads that might be of more interest to you.