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New York in the 70s/80s
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New York in the 70s/80s
@Tubby
I think so. Pauline Kael thought it "worthy" but basically "a drag" (very sixties.) I guess I'd have gone along with that too. I remember thinking it very actorish, it was probably the first time I saw Raul Julia and Paul Sorvino in anything.
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New York in the 70s/80s
Tubby Isaacs wrote: The actress who plays the mother (Gary Oldman's sister, Leila Morse) ended up in EastEnders, our second most popular sitcom.
Not quite the same thing, but I recently watched Wattstax, and one of the angry, militant young black men they interview between songs I immediately recognized, to my amazement, as Ted Lange, who played Isaac the Bartender in eighties TV schlock-fest, The Love Boat.
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New York in the 70s/80s
No idea, but 'the Bronx is Burning' has a lot on how Ed Koch wangled the democratic nomination in 1977 and the politics of the city. Was looking at this wiki page on the election, and its stunning to see how in that election, the Republicans got 4% of the vote, but have held the mayoralty for 5 terms now. That's some turn around.
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New York in the 70s/80s
Thanks.
This is interesting.
A 982-page report from the Securities and Exchange Commission blamed Beame's mismanagement for the city's financial mess, which his opponents seized on as an electoral issue.[4]
Crime continued going up under Koch, didn't it?
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New York in the 70s/80s
Yet another question. 1993 mayoral election. Dinkins did very badly in Staten Island and Queens. I know he lost loads of Jewish support after Crown Heights, but why did he do so badly in those boroughs?
Why, when crime was falling, did Guliani's law and order talk work against Dinkins?
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New York in the 70s/80s
Tubby Isaacs wrote: That was one hell of a close primary. 4 candidates within 3.25%
Why did so many Puerto Ricans show up in the South Bronx when it was collapsing? How bad was Puerto Rico?
Tubby Isaacs wrote: Thanks.
This is interesting.
A 982-page report from the Securities and Exchange Commission blamed Beame's mismanagement for the city's financial mess, which his opponents seized on as an electoral issue.[4]
Crime continued going up under Koch, didn't it?
Crime did continue to go up under Koch, which feeds into your next point:
Tubby Isaacs wrote: Yet another question. 1993 mayoral election. Dinkins did very badly in Staten Island and Queens. I know he lost loads of Jewish support after Crown Heights, but why did he do so badly in those boroughs?
Why, when crime was falling, did Guliani's law and order talk work against Dinkins?
The Crown Heights riot, which Dinkins is reputed to have bungled (I can't really find the deeper story about that), played its role. A lot of Jews lost confidence in Dinkins and that really turned the election, which was won by a very thin margin by Giuliani. Also, although crime did start to go down during Dinkins's administration, it had gone up for the first 2.5 years (and hit its all-time high in early '92) of his 4 year term, perhaps giving people the wrong impression in spite of the facts.
That said, Dinkins has retroactively won that election. He's been the subject of historical revision several times now, and considering Giuliani's power grabbing and appropriation of 9/11, is now far better regarded by most New Yorkers than Giuliani is. It has become widely known that most of the things Giuliani took credit for (such as the police and Times Square) were instituted by Dinkins, and I've no doubt that if they reran the '93 election today that Dinkins would win by a relatively comfortable margin.
Interestingly, those '89 and '93 elections attracted the two highest totals of voters in recent history. Far higher than recent elections, far higher than the crucial '77 election, the highest since 1969 back when the people were more engaged, I guess, since voting totals then were through the roof.
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New York in the 70s/80s
One thing very different here is that welfare is the responsibility of central government (though some clowns are looking to change that). It's a ridiculous idea that a place hammered by a recession should then have to pay its own unemployment benefit.
Law and Order Koch must have had a lot of mates in the media to win three times with rising crime.
Were the blacks recent arrivals in the South Bronx when the recession hit?
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New York in the 70s/80s
Christ, there's always some horror you haven't heard of from New York at that time, isn't there?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Land_fire
This is the worst thing of its sort I can think of from London.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerkenwell_cinema_fire
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New York in the 70s/80s
Tubby Isaacs wrote: One thing very different here is that welfare is the responsibility of central government (though some clowns are looking to change that). It's a ridiculous idea that a place hammered by a recession should then have to pay its own unemployment benefit.
Law and Order Koch must have had a lot of mates in the media to win three times with rising crime.
Were the blacks recent arrivals in the South Bronx when the recession hit?
I forgot to mention that Lindsay's MO in labor negotiations was to fold like a cheap suit, especially after some incidents (like the transit strike) where he got badly burned. So the city's salary and pension obligations to workers also went way up.
Koch had his friends in the media - the Post, of course, and the Daily News liked him too - but he was more of a media-friendly type than somebody with friends in the media. He was very careful to present himself as the City's biggest booster and as a genial man with the public (How'm I doin'? was his big catchphrase). Also anti-machine too, though that was later found out to be a lie and contributed greatly to his loss to Dinkins.
Koch ran to the right of Bella Abzug and Mario Cuomo, but it was three differing shades of liberal, so when Koch became top dog it was pretty easy for him to win huge majorities as the Abzug and Cuomo Democrats folded in behind him. Cuomo was the real media darling, by the way. Throw a penny in a news room and you'll hit somebody capable of typing out a thousand words about why dear Mario was the best president we never had.
The blacks in the South Bronx came during the war and so got a few years of manufacturing wages in before hitting the breadline but they didn't that much better than the Puerto Ricans overall. One key difference was their language skills enabled them to get city jobs much easier than the Puerto Ricans did, so those city jobs gave blacks a leg up on the Puerto Ricans overall.
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