New York in the 70s/80s

[Flynnie]

New York in the 70s/80s

Tubby Isaacs wrote: Times Square is incredible to me. Very much like Soho in London, with sex shops and porno theatres everywhere. Soho was tamed by Shirely Porter, who wasn't exactly Einstein. Why couldn't Koch or Beam at least get rid of the porno shops?

Well as long as they pay their taxes and rent on time, what ya gonna do? Plus there was a certain lax attitude towards it, like this is our fantastically shitty Times Square, how the fuck do ya like that tourist bastard?

This is a guess, but I think what Dinkins did was get rid of some of the worst offenders who were being a nuisance and also engineer demand for the real estate by enticing some businesses to come there and build stores or retrofit theaters.

Mind, there are plenty of people who lament Times Square's current tourist hellhole state (it makes Piccadilly Circus look cool and authentic) and wish it was a combat zone again.

[Tubby Isaacs]

New York in the 70s/80s

Weren't those places rip-off joints? The ones in Soho were generally considered such. They weren't even licenced.

I like the idea of "take that, tourist". I might hang around Brick Lane being lary. The local Banglas aren't doing a good enough job on that front.

Didn't people say to Koch "You're doin' shit, murders are up again"? I can't quite work out what he's supposed to have done.

My cod American history has a big gap in black history. I'm aware of inner city riots in the sixties, but no sure what happened before.

This is great stuff, btw.

[jason voorhees]

New York in the 70s/80s

Why, when crime was falling, did Guliani's law and order talk work against Dinkins?

Flynnie's been on fire, but one other thing was that there was a shootout between the NYPD and a Dominican drug dealer where one of each was killed. Guess what family Dinkins visited.

If you ever youtube "Nightmare 1981" (hell, I'll save you the time - here it is,) there's a scene of Times Square in 1980. Peek Shows were essentially strip clubs before strip clubs.

Now the crack years were something else. Haven't heard too much about the crack years, but the eyes that peered out of the alleys could shake you to the bone. Especially if you were a 15-year-old bringing your dad's coin collection to get a fake drivers license, only to have the "you need lamination" fee to be charged before everyone disappeared. I still see the eyes of the crackheads. Giuliani won, because he took out the mafia, and he would take out the crackheads.

Which he did.

Fuck Crackheads.

[ursus arctos]

New York in the 70s/80s

1) danielmak has literally written a book on Times Square during this period.

Tubbs, if you dm me a postal address, I'll send you a copy (I have two).

2) the crackheads largely died on their own. A significant part of the decline in crime in the 2000s is entirely due to demographics.

[Tubby Isaacs]

New York in the 70s/80s

Thanks a lot, will PM you.

Something I read suggested that the crackheads were already drug users (heroin?) rather than being a whole new group of people who tried it once on a free rock and were hooked. And that there was quite a reaction against crack from younger people against it.

Crack is that drug people who walk really fast take, right?

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/16/nyregion/dinkins-tries-to-heal-rift-with-police-on-shooting.html?ref=josegarcia

Dinkins said that he went to see the suspect's family because he thought it would help order return, and that it worked.

I like the sound of him. Did the New York Post make a big thing of his insensitivity?

[Flynnie]

New York in the 70s/80s

Yeah, crack is one of those drugs that just died out because nobody wanted to be associated with it except hardcore users. Even in its prime, it was kind of an older person's drug (30+).

[jason voorhees]

New York in the 70s/80s

You mean dmak is Josh Alan Friedman ?!!

I had that book when I was interning with Howard Stern.

Again, Wild Style should be required viewing for anyone for 1978-82 NYC.

The director collaborated with Jamel Shabazz with this book, of which the title speaks for itself:

[linus]

New York in the 70s/80s

Yamaha XT350, very good reliable bike, light and fun to ride in the city.

[ursus arctos]

New York in the 70s/80s

Different book, jv.

Much more serious academic take.

[jason voorhees]

New York in the 70s/80s

Phew.

The weirdest bit of Times Square/42nd St for me was when Dinkins started closing those places down, and there were these bizarre messages on the marquees.

I remember one being "The Rich are Crackpot !" I'd love to see if someone took pictures of all of them.

My cod American history has a big gap in black history. I'm aware of inner city riots in the sixties, but no sure what happened before.

Look up the Mount Laurel rulings. Basically it was all white flight and suburban property values that destroyed the inner cities for generations. Also desegregation of the schools.

Post WWII, African-Americans started being able to afford and buying up properties in Trenton, Camden, Paterson, Newark, NYC, New Orleans, Detroit, Anywhere USA. With ample land in the suburbs, and every American gaining access to a car, whites simply abandoned the cities for the suburbs (and were even encouraged to do so, like in Metairie, Louisiana where there were tax breaks for buying a house.)

With home values becoming the chief economic engine of a family, having the city becoming a dumping ground for the poor not only became a racial necessity, but an economic necessity.

So basically after WWII we were one happy family that the power structure decided had to get separated, thus the Southern Strategy and the Mount Laurel ruling and the disintegration of unions and the creation of debt and so on and so forth.

Until hip hop saved many inner cities. For many families that were able to survive Harlem in the 80s, when you could purchase an entire block for $200,000, they would've been able to make a million for a brownstone in the 2000s.

Many of those African-American families were able to buy gigantic houses in Virginia and North Carolina, thus impossibly transforming the capital of the Confederacy and Jesse Helm's homeland into blue states.

[ursus arctos]

New York in the 70s/80s

Tubbs, should you ever finish the Caro, I highly recommend Taylor Branch's trilogy on the civil rights movement.

[Tubby Isaacs]

New York in the 70s/80s

I've done the first two Caro volumes now on LBJ, got the third in the post today. Actually you probably meant the Moses, didn't you?

I'm still confused about Koch. Clip joints in the city's most famous street would have seemed a sensible place to do the law and order thing he made so much of. Quite how he won two more elections, I don't know.

JV, I saw the desegregating of schools and the white flight that followed. So am I right in thinking the blacks were basically there for some time before the collapse of the Bronx? Whereas the Puerto Ricans were much more recent.

The subisdy to move to the suburbs sounds ridiculous. As was the decision to build Co-Op City, which must have just basically taken a load of "respectable" poor out of the Bronx.

I'd be surprised if many old working class made much out of gentrication. Bet they cashed in their chips long before the prices peaked. Unless they were pensioners, I supposed, and didn't want to move until there was silly money on offer, and all their relatives had gone anyway.

[Flynnie]

New York in the 70s/80s

Koch's attention on sex was focused mainly on closing the city's gay bathhouses during the start of the AIDS crisis (and closing the straight ones too when the City realized it was violating an anti-discrimination ordinance Koch had supported). Koch eventually did put together some developments that would have cleaned up Times Square, but they got tied up in litigation.

Koch being frustrated by opponents of change was a big theme of his mayoralty. Sometimes they had a legitimate grievance (judges who resented Koch harassing them to be tougher on crime) and sometimes they were people tying up the legal system to postpone the day of reckoning (the real estate owners who enjoyed the profits from the smut industry around TS).

But what made him electable was that he was very genial to the public (as I said before, How'm I doin'? was his catchphrase), very media-friendly in terms of always being at big events and opening museums, new buildings or dedicating ships, he talked the talk (which nobody was really doing before him) about reforming New York and he did just enough to play into the post-77 mood that the city was getting off its feet and improving. Koch managed to give that impression in a time of sharp fiscal austerity due to the terms of New York's bailout by the feds and the banks which was a reasonable achievement.

Finally he was the Democratic nominee from New York and once he won the first nomination it was going to be pretty difficult for him to lose it. He waltzed through the elections in '81 and '85. What finally did him in was that he was beginning to be all-blowhard, all the time, the black community didn't like him at all, plus it was revealed he cut some very shady deals with the corrupt party bosses in different boroughs in exchange for their backing. Since one of his big slogans in 77 was "Instead of the clubhouse, why not try competence?" that didn't go over very well.

[Incandenza]

New York in the 70s/80s

Tubby, Jeff Chang's book Can't Stop, Won't Stop is a history of hip-hop, and it has three or four chapters that are nice overviews of postindustrial cities in the US and how the black community was affected. The whole first chapter is available to read in the Google Books preview:

http://books.google.com/books?id=LwaXZpD11ukC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepag e&q&f=false

[jason voorhees]

New York in the 70s/80s

Koch, in one of the bigger surprises of my life, is absolutely gigantic. In all of his books, he is made to look 5'3", when he is around 6'7". I met him at K-Rock. When he came down the hall I was like "who the fuck is this giant who looks like Ed Koch ?"

The first season of the Shield, where they were allowing crime to flourish in parts of the city so the mayor could buy up properties on the cheap, was taken from Ed Koch. That's why he was always beholden to Giuliani, because he made his fortune when Giuliani made Manhattan Disney World.

Like Flynnie said, the blacks hated him as the years went on, and I actually give much credit to Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing (and by extension, PE's Fight the Power) in electing Dinkins to the Democratic nomination. One of the few films that actually changed society.

I'd be surprised if many old working class made much out of gentrication.
Again, I straight up know many who did. That number of people that migrated to Virginia and North Carolina was made up of a massive number of New Yorkers. I'll gladly be corrected as my assertion was from personal experience and news stories and the incredible transformation of Virginia and North Carolina to blue states, but I've known at least 10 families who cashed out of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and some from their subsequent houses in the New Jersey burbs to move down Soufha (Ludacris pronunciation.)

So am I right in thinking the blacks were basically there for some time before the collapse of the Bronx? Whereas the Puerto Ricans were much more recent.

Obviously Harlem was one of the first black capitals of America, and by extension the Bronx. Many upper middleclass black families created neighborhoods before WWII and during the Jazz Age in the Bronx. (On a side note, in many ways, blacks were able to capitalize on hip hop and make it permanent in ways that they were unable to do with the Jazz Age.)

But yes, blacks were living along the Bronx river since close to when the city was founded, in the 1600s. They were there in various concentrations over the next few centuries, then WWII then brought workers from the islands, be they Spanish speaking (the Newyouricans) or the Jamaicans (Kool Herc, whose Jamaican sound system DJing in the parks led to the creation of hip hop.)

Aw hell, I'm praying Mrs. V ends up with something permanent in the city, so we can just follow Satchmo's footsteps and end up in the city, if not Queens.

[Tubby Isaacs]

New York in the 70s/80s

Did Koch have a point re judges? Even with the increase in crime, the imprisonment rate was falling.



Actually, it seems it was rising quite a lot during his time as mayor, so maybe Beame could have more legitimately made that point. Or maybe it was down to fewer convictions.

Obviously, I think there are limits to using prison to reduce crime, but it's odd that it should rise quite substantially with the imprisonment rate staying the same or falling.

[Tubby Isaacs]

New York in the 70s/80s

Actually, I bet the prisons were full, weren't they?

[danielmak]

New York in the 70s/80s

jasoñ voorhees wrote: Phew.

The weirdest bit of Times Square/42nd St for me was when Dinkins started closing those places down, and there were these bizarre messages on the marquees.

I remember one being "The Rich are Crackpot !" I'd love to see if someone took pictures of all of them.

This is Jenny Holzer's work. She is best known in Times Square for her work on the spectacolor sign at 1 Times Square (the building where the ball drops) but she also did some work on the marquees.

That Josh Alan Friedman book is interesting, but as Ursus notes, my study is about the transformation of the area and how the changes are imbued with larger fantasies about how an urban center should look and feel. Friedman's book is about the porno business (more generally).

Dinkins doesn't get a lot of credit for Times Square's transformation, since Koch was mayor when the first large-scale redevelopment plans were floated and the space truly changed during Giuliani's tenure, but Dinkins helped broker the deal to bring David Letterman to the Ed Sullivan Theater. That deal was huge in terms of helping refashion Times Square's image nationally.

[Tubby Isaacs]

New York in the 70s/80s

I'm going to request your book from Ursus. Right now.

Sounds like it'll be relevant to London.

[Tubby Isaacs]

New York in the 70s/80s

Should 41 year olds wear T-shirts referring to the old days.

[Tubby Isaacs]

New York in the 70s/80s

Interestingly, this news clipping suggests Ford's Drop Dead might have been less final than it sounded. Though perhaps this is Nelson Rockefeller trying to smooth things over.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2209&dat=19751112&id=ApwrAAAAIBAJ&s jid=e_sFAAAAIBAJ&pg=6880,2219446

I note the City had 315,000 employees. That sounds a heck of a lot. Teachers must have been quite a chunk- there are 75,000 now with (presumably) fewer students. And 35,000 police now. Where were the rest?

[ursus arctos]

New York in the 70s/80s

There are over 1 million students in the public schools now. I wouldn't be so sure that there were more in the 70s.

You also have to understand that the City was running everything at that time. In addition to police and fire, you had largest public transit system in the world (with its own police force), the largest public housing system in the world (also with its own police force), a huge sanitation system (collection, processing and disposal), a very large city hospital system, a large system of courts and jails, municipal radio and television stations, etc.

The scope of municipal government was and is completely different than in Britain.

None of which should be taken to mean that the total didn't include significant numbers of patronage employees. It did, and the Board of Education was particularly notorious for "feather bedding".

[Tubby Isaacs]

New York in the 70s/80s

I was thinking the boroughs employed people as well- they didn't, or not many, right?

Were these borough bosses the ones with power over the patronage? Don't tell me- the patronage employees were white, right?

Lindsay seems to have tried a decentralisation of power at the Board of Education. Did that make things worse?

[ursus arctos]

New York in the 70s/80s

Not really, the borough presidents generally ran Tammany Hallesque machine operations, rather than their own bureaucracies. Their power came from the their automatic positions on the Board of Estimate (holding five of the eight seats), which controlled budgets and spending.

The Board of Estimate was ruled to be unconstitutional in 1989, and as a result, we got a City Council with a modicum of power for the first time and a much stronger mayor.

It's safe to assume that the majority of the patronage employees in the 70s were white, though that certainly isn't the case today.

Public education in the 60s and 70s was a constant disaster. Among other things, you had the '68 teacher strike and the layoffs of the mid-70s, which caused class sizes to rocket.

[Tubby Isaacs]

New York in the 70s/80s

I read about that teachers' strike. There was a "racially charged" dispute in Brent in the eighties, though nothing like as serious, nor as complex, no workers' rights angle. I can't recall the headteacher's name.

Obviously things weren't as bad as that for teacher lay offs in Gloucestershire, but I recall some very large (by modern standards) class sizes when I started school in the Callaghan days.