Curious what other Cities are as bad as NYC? Portland, Seattle and Chicago as well as DC come to mind:
I love NYC. When I first moved to NYC, it was a dream come true. Every corner was like a theater production happening right in front of me. So much personality, so many stories. Every subculture I loved was in NYC. I could play chess all day and night. I could go to comedy clubs. …
jamesaltucher.com
This race to become 1976 in NYC has happened so rapidly, its unreal.
For you younger guys, from the mid 1960-1990, NYC went from a very livable big city to a city so in ruins with crime and such that it was the city of the Apocalypse. Remember that films like T
axi Driver,
The Warriors,
Death Wish, E
scape from New York, Jason Takes Manhattan, and
Fort Apache, the Bronx were all made during this time period, and were all about how awful and crime-ridden and filthy NYC had become.
Heck, it got so bad that when
The Godfather film came out in 1972, and other retrospective gangster movies came out as well during the 1970s (the 1970s saw a boom in films set in the 1920s and 1930s, especially about Prohibition-type gangsters), depicting mafioso family running their parts of the city with an iron grip that kept riffraff and random violent crime low, many people began to wistfully half-jokingly argue that maybe we should stop arresting the Mafia and just allow them to run the neighborhoods again, as at least it kept them clean and orderly.
1976-1979 were the peak awful years for NYC, but until 1991 it was all awful. Graffiti was everywhere, people jumped subway turnstiles without paying and littered with impunity, and business either closed and boarded up or locked down hard core at night.
In 1976, the city went bankrupt. In 1977, the serial killer David Berkowitz (the Son of Sam) ran amok in the city, and during the 1977 World Series the Bronx was lit on fire as the Yankees played for the title just a few blocks away. The 1980s got little better; in 1983 a famous NY headline was about a "Headless Body Found in a Topless Bar."
By the mid 1980s things got so bad that in 1984 a quiet weirdo by the name of Bernie Goetz got a hold of a gun an executed a gang of four "youthful" muggers on the subway; he was acquitted of most charges as the city largely made him into a hero, doing what the authorities refused to do. (Goetz's assault is famously the inspiration for the one in the film
Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix, but of course they changed the "ghetto youths of color" to....4 blond wealthy Wall Street traders randomly harassing people.)
Thankfully, in 1991 Giuliani was elected on a law-and-order platform and radically cleaned up the city. By 1998 the crime had dropped from a madhouse rate to a quiet suburban rate. Bloomberg followed Giuliani, and, despite his swerve left in the this last election, stayed committed to his law-and-order policy (i.e. Broken Windows, Stop-and-Frisk).
I'd never thought it would come back so swiftly. But the commie NYC mayor de Blasio has, in 8 years of his rule, made it a 1976 sh*thole again.
Will NYC come back? It could if a law-and-order guy like Giuliani got elected again. But really, that would require a mass change in how race and crime are viewed. BLM and Antifa and the Left are hardcore against race realism when it comes to crime, and the average folks are scared to even broach the subject, even if they believe the truth.