Death, Destruction, And Debt: 41 Photos Of Life In 1970s New York

June 30, 2016 1:27 PM

Today, we look at 41 poignant photos that capture a New York City on the brink of implosion...

Reeling from a decade of social turmoil, in the 1970s New York fell into a deep tailspin provoked by the flight of the middle class to the suburbs and a nationwide economic recession that hit New York’s industrial sector especially hard.

Combined with substantial cuts in law enforcement and citywide unemployment topping ten percent, crime and financial crisis became the dominant themes of the decade. In just five years from 1969 to 1974, the city lost over 500,000 manufacturing jobs, which resulted in over one million households being dependent on welfare by 1975. In almost the same span, rapes and burglaries tripled, car thefts and felony assaults doubled, and murders went from 681 to 1690 a year.

Depopulation and arson also had pronounced effects on the city: Abandoned blocks dotted the landscape, creating vast areas absent of urban cohesion and life itself.

In totality, the decade was a transformative one for New York, as it reconfigured the economic and social realities of America’s most prominent city. By the conclusion of the 1970s, over a million people had left the city.

posted by anarch (26 comments total)

In 1977, New York experienced a 25-hour citywide blackout that led to looting and arson. When all available police were ordered to duty, 40% of the off-duty force refused to show as a result of the escalating animosity between the police union and the city.

So, what's changed exactly? sounds about right
posted by emptythought at 1:36 PM on June 30, 2016

I have memories of 80s New York and it seemed both warmer and more terrifying
posted by Faith Connors at 1:40 PM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is the New York of my teen years. I don't miss it.
posted by tommasz at 1:53 PM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

That's certainly a particular narrative of '70s New York; it's not the city I knew from visits, but of course it was real, especially if you lived in certain parts of town. I moved there at the start of the '80s, which in retrospect was the sweet spot: conditions were improving, but it hadn't gotten soulless and Disneyfied. It will always be a great city, but it had stopped being my city by the time I moved away.
posted by languagehat at 2:00 PM on June 30, 2016

The early 80s were no picnic either, frankly.
posted by The Bellman at 2:08 PM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

I hate it when people show the Fear City brochure without context. It was a piece of propaganda produced by the police unions.
posted by dame at 2:12 PM on June 30, 2016 [10 favorites]

And now look at it.
I'd like to see Snake Plissken escape from the Times Square Bubba Gump.
posted by Senor Cardgage at 2:32 PM on June 30, 2016 [10 favorites]

dame: The Fear City brochure was indeed police union propaganda. But nonetheless, you cannot understate the climate of fear that prevailed across the city -- even on the Upper East Side. (Actually, I think the Turtle Bay area and most of East End Avenue were the only near-peaceful pockets of Manhattan.) These photos only hint at the pervasive awareness of crime, and how it affected everything you did: What streets you took, where you shopped, what bus or subway you took, how you locked your doors (triple or quadruple with a steel bar) and windows (cages, bars and barriers were necessary). Everyone got robbed, or knew more than one person who had been. I personally had my door smashed in twice by robbers, and once was robbed by window entry.

I like the way these pictures show how the Bowery was. Actually, it had cleaned up a little by the 1970s. In the mid-sixties, the sidewalks of the Bowery were almost unnavigable at midday because of the bodies of dead drunk men, one every three feet or so. Also in the 1970s, streetwalkers were everywhere, with, of course, some neighborhoods being more crowded than others. Interestingly, they were pioneering many of the clothing combinations and styles that are mainstream today.
posted by Modest House at 3:21 PM on June 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

i thought this was going to be a bunch of current photos of empty multi-million dollar apartments and "hunger games" style elite fashion.
posted by ennui.bz at 4:36 PM on June 30, 2016

This is the world of my childhood. I was out wandering the streets every day from the time I was 11, just like all my friends. By the time I turned 14, I had already been mugged three times on the Upper West Side. The first time, when some slightly older kid pointed a knife at me and took my bus pass, my mother was a lot more upset than I was. It all just seemed normal to me, always watching over my shoulder, the graffiti and the empty lots and the gigantic piles of garbage on the sidewalks everywhere.

In 1977, New York experienced a 25-hour citywide blackout that led to looting and arson.
The blackout is one of my strongest childhood memories, probably the only time I can remember really being afraid. My battery-powered transistor radio told me that under no circumstances was I to go outside. So I sat in the dark in my room, looking out the window at total blackness, and listened to the nonstop sirens and wondered if the world was coming to an end. Going outside the next day felt like crawling out of a fallout shelter after the bomb had dropped to see if anything of civilization had survived.

I go back to New York today and it still seems weird to me that that world has so completely disappeared.
posted by fuzz at 5:41 PM on June 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

That was the New York that I used to visit as a kid. I grew up about a half-hour west in NJ and "The City" was this terrifying but fascinating place that seemed so divorced from the little town I lived in. We were only thirty miles away but the nightly TV news seemed like dispatches from some far off war torn state.

Now of course, NYC is all cleaned up but there's no way that I could afford to live there. You'd think that there could be some mid-state between Mad Max and The Hunger Games.
posted by octothorpe at 6:27 PM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

I grew up in that New York, well, Brooklyn, anyway (and had a friend whose father was murdered protecting the family business in that blackout). And yeah, there was a lot of crime and Times Square was awful at night, but even with Ford telling us to drop dead, as that one slide buried in that collection of 41 death slides says, "it wasn't all misery." It was still possible to get a good education at a neighborhood high school, even one like mine that was on triple session, there were still amazing and wonderful things all across the city, hey, it was still New York. I don't miss the old Times Square (except for that one store that stocked all the foreign newspapers and magazines; the money I spent there!), but in its own way, the current sterile Times Square is awful, too, if safer.
posted by adamg at 7:39 PM on June 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

As a heads up, the site is serving a malicious ad at least some of the time and the contact information for the site goes to dead e-mail addresses. The mods might add a note that this is a risky click..
posted by Candleman at 8:28 PM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

#24 for the win.
posted by buzzman at 8:57 PM on June 30, 2016

More on the Fear City brochure (including some of the same pictures) from the Guardian in May 2015.
posted by gingerest at 11:06 PM on June 30, 2016

It was all those bad things, but it had soul, and a fire inside. What new genre of music and art will this sterile New York produce? It has pretty clothes and nothing to say.
posted by kanemano at 3:20 AM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

#14 looks like a scene from Taxi Driver.
posted by tehjoel at 5:40 AM on July 1, 2016

#13, uhhhh, dilapidated side streets that look exactly like that are common right this very second in pretty much any major American city?

#23, appears to have been captioned with a slightly deficient sense of irony. I mean, it's a great photo and kids enjoying an open hydrant is a special sort of joy, but weren't we just talking about the fires that plagued the city?
posted by desuetude at 6:50 AM on July 1, 2016

GTFO of here with your 41-item slideshow. What the fuck was wrong with image galleries, exactly? Why have seemingly all major web outlets replaced them with this hot garbage? I went in all excited to see these pictures, but they want to drip-feed them to me one by one instead of just letting me fucking look at them like God intended, and I noped right on out of there because I cannot be having with that shit.

Maybe I'm just having a grouchy day, but does anybody actually prefer slideshows? What problem are they trying to solve? Who are they for? Whose bright idea was it to make viewing spectacular artwork or fascinating historical imagery or important journalistic photography more like sitting through a PowerPoint presentation on quarterly sales goals? Do Kids These Days like this stuff? Am I just old now? Did some gaseous thinkfluencer tell everyone that it would maximize engagement to make readers click on your page again and again and again like some kind of Skinnerian rat in a cage, and everyone believed him? Is this about metrics?

I want the old web back.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:50 AM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

It was all those bad things, but it had soul, and a fire inside. What new genre of music and art will this sterile New York produce? It has pretty clothes and nothing to say.

Man, I don't know you or your experiences, but I am completely fucking boggled by this statement. The amount of hopelessness, squalor, filth, and suffering in these pictures is overwhelming to me, and the thought that that somehow they provided more or better experiences for music or art ... well, let's just say I don't agree.

I'm not a New Yorker, but if I was, I would be kind of insulted to think that my city was less vibrant because the quality of life was better. By that argument, wouldn't failed states and war zones be creating better art?

My apologies if I sound upset, but this nostalgia for crime and violence and arson and homelessness etc, etc makes no sense to me.
posted by jpolchlopek at 8:15 AM on July 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

No one is nostalgic for the suffering. But sometimes I'm nostalgic for all the other things that were also part of what New York was. There were no chain stores, cafes, or restaurants, and so every street was full of unexpected surprises. People of all races, accents, and incomes mixed freely on the street and in the subway, and actually talked to each other. Those open fire hydrants gave us kids spontaneous block parties in the heat of the summer. And it was all so cheap that young people could come to the city without a job, find a place to live, and get together with a group of like-minded people to create their own thing.

All those things were wiped out in the process of pushing the suffering out of Manhattan. The poverty hasn't been eliminated, it just got hidden away somewhere else where the affluent don't have to see it. Today, everything on the street in New York is tightly controlled. Only people with money can make a life there. The experience of Manhattan is closer to a generic US shopping mall than what it used to be: something unique and constantly changing. Sure, it's nice not to have the surprise of getting mugged, but like octothorpe, I often wonder if it's possible to have an environment that's safe without it being so homogeneous and predictable.
posted by fuzz at 8:58 AM on July 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

> I'm not a New Yorker, but if I was, I would be kind of insulted to think that my city was less vibrant because the quality of life was better. By that argument, wouldn't failed states and war zones be creating better art?

This is ridiculous. It's less vibrant because it's less vibrant. Nobody misses the arson or the crack. Calm down and maybe wait for a subject you know something about and thus can comment upon with more signal and less noise.
posted by languagehat at 11:28 AM on July 1, 2016

Fuzz, that was a really good response; really thought provoking and I appreciate it. If I wasn't phone posting, I'd engage with your safe vs. spontaneous points, a bit more.

Languagehat, you just .. keep on being you, man.
posted by jpolchlopek at 1:34 PM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've always been interested in how containerized shipping contributed to the mid-century decline of NYC, but other than a few scholarly articles there isn't much mention of it.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 2:15 PM on July 1, 2016

I thought that most shipping had moved over to Newark and Hoboken long before containers took over but I could be wrong on that.
posted by octothorpe at 4:54 PM on July 1, 2016

My interest was piqued mainly by this article by Marc Levinson.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 8:39 PM on July 1, 2016