The Bad Old Days
Remember flashing? Abe Beame? Robin Byrd? $300 West Side rents? Wake up and recall the urine! If you can’t, the vets say you’re not a real New Yorker
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The Observatory
“I think a lot of the people that are moving into the city don’t have a full understanding of what is being paved over or forgotten about,” Mr. Casseus said. “It’s a hard thing to swallow sometimes.”
A lot has changed from a quarter-century ago or so, when our fair city was best known for graffiti-decorated subways, blasting boom boxes and the faint smell of urine rising from the summer pavement. There were no Tinsley Mortimers, no hedge-fund gods. No $1,000 pizzas or latte factories, no $50 million mansions or elliptical trainers at Equinox. Indeed, in 1975, the city’s government declared bankruptcy. “Ford to City: Drop Dead” blasted the Daily News, after the President refused to bail us out, and, two years later, it seemed like a serial murderer named Son of Sam was determined to deliver the sentence.
The rest of the country thought we were goners, collapsed in a sputter of crime, crack and fiscal disaster. There were landlords burning down their buildings—you couldn’t give ‘em away! Hookers hanging out on 83rd and Broadway—right near Zabar’s!
But you know what? We liked it.
The dog shit was piled so high in the streets you needed a mountain ax just to traverse the sidewalk—but we liked it. The buildings were so blackened by grime you could barely see them in the dark—but we liked it. The subways were so dangerous you felt you were descending into Hell—and we liked it, we loved it, hallelujah!
For a certain generation of New Yorker—a generation that came of age at the city’s economic nadir, but also in the glory days of Bella Abzug, checker cabs and CBGB—this city of yore seems as perversely lovable as some long-lost episode of The Magic Garden.
“It seems kind of weird to say that one would be nostalgic for times when you were scared to get mugged going out at night and riding the subways was taking your life on your hands,” said Dalton Conley, 37, an Alphabet City kid turned New York University sociology professor, who memorialized his childhood in the book Honky. “Yet I think there is something that’s lost.
“The old New York is kind of like an old spouse that you just complained about the whole time,” he said, “but then, when it’s gone, you realize you loved him or her.” Next Page >
Ahh.. the days when you told people you lived in NYC and they feared/respected you. Now all they ask about real estate costs and celebrity sightings. I grew up in a NYC where 96th street was referred to as the DMZ and there was still a place called Hell's Kitchen. Sadly it's all gone.
I grew up in upstate New York, with a rather cheesy poster of the downtown New York skyline on my wall. I moved here after I graduated from college, in 1998. Not for fancy restaurants or celebrity sightings, but to work and live and raise a family in a stimulating, endlessly fascinating, entirely unique place. New York. Despite rising rents, despite being the victim of a life-threatening assault in 2004 (yes, serious crime does still happen here, and it's not glamorous or exciting to those of us it happens to), I am still here, and intend to stay. People born here may never think I am a real New Yorker, but I beg to differ. Isn't there room for us all?
I think some of the finger pointing misses the point. NYC was much more vibrant a generation ago because it had an edge to it and there was a larger cross section of people coming to live here (and afford it). We are becoming a less tolerant society with more uniformity in the population, the higher incomes and rents rise.
Previously, people came from all over the nation/globe to make their mark in various fields, from art to music, publishing, advertising, you name it. They all got together at night and weekends and this created an special type of informed, edgy culture that was open to new things, and demanded new things. We got them in the 1970s.
Today there is only one career path that matters: Wall Street, and you only get the money/jock mentality of this type of career, not the complexity or the chaos of all types of persons and professions, meeting, trading ideas, and competing.
I have a million great memories from that "good old days" period, although it was a little more dangerous, and it was not as clean cut as the Manhattan of today, which is a millionaires playground but a desert for anyone seeking unique, kookie, idiosyncratic local culture. The good stuff is gone forever, I am afraid.
Um, how can you write a story about nostalgia for New York in the late 70s and early 80s -- 25 to 30 years ago -- and only interview people who were children at that time? Great idea; totally ridiculous execution.
Why didn't the author interview anyone - heaven forbid - working class? Or who went to a public school? Or from - dare I say it - the Bronx! A smattering of St. Ann's and Brearly graduates is hardly representative of what New York is really about.
I’m trying to think of something more antithetical to the spirit of the late 70s and early 80s in New York than Zoe Schneider’s Magic Grand club. That time wasn’t just about native New Yorkers, it was about people from all over the world—actors, poets, rock musicians, painters, novelists, etc--who came to New York in order to realize themselves creatively. I guess your club wouldn’t include Jim Jarmusch (from Akron), Madonna (from Detroit), Anne Magnuson (Charleston), John Lurie (Minneapolis) and thousands of other people who made the scene what it was in those days. We all came here because we could. We traded our safety for cheap rent (I don’t understand what cheap rent meant to the 8-year-olds in your story). Despite Bloomberg and the Hedge Fund traders, New York today is still a magnet for a lot of young people—they’re just sharing a $3000 East Village studio with a bunch of friends. It’s way harder for them than it was for us, and hats off to them.
Excellent article! I lived in the Far West Village, now a theme park for the rich and the overextended. Trannies roamed the nearby meatpacking district, now a leper colony for maxed-out trendies. Manhattan is to be the top part of a socio-economic pyramid. Yet what happens when the middle and lower segments of the pyramid are removed? Residential prices escalate, begging the question: do the trees grow to heaven? If not trees, how about glass boxes?
St. Ann's? Come on those kids were lame...and while the city is safer I still bet Dalton Kids are getting mugged all the time.
I remember every single thing in this article, but I am not 37, I am (horrors!) 55. How can you remember the 70's if you are 37? Anyway, Flashing, yes, what ever happened to that? As a schoolgirl in the 60's, I had to take the Broadway line from 79th street all the way up to Fieldston in Riverdale and I saw quite a few peckers along the way, including my first black dicks. My first studio apartment on Lex and 93rd cost me $150/month, a bargain even then (1976). Again, that was 31 years ago, so these 37 year olds are reminiscing about what? First grade? Yeah, it was gritty back then. As a single girl, I never took the subway after dark. I'd make long bus rides from wherever, instead. But I did used to walk through Central Park at night with my boyfriend-- we'd see a movie at the Thalia, and have drinks at the West End Bar, and then he'd walk me all the way home to my family's townhouse on East 78th, even though my parents had made me promise not to do that. We never had a problem. But one bright weekend afternoon, I was making out on a boulder in Central Park with another boyfriend who looked like Bob Dylan, and a Frenchman approached us and invited us in French to make love in his apartment while he would watch. My boyfirend shouted "Jamais! Jamais!" It was wonderful back then. We had no chain stores and we liked it that way. Very few tourists. Lovely! I was there for the two blackouts, Son of Sam, Ford to City: Drop Dead, all of it. But the times they are a-changing...
If you long for the bad old days, and want that edge back -- hop onto the PATH subway -- 5min from Christopher Street or from the WTC then get off at the Grove PATH stop or if you really want to be edgy and ride 5 more minutes to Journal Square.
Too bad you can't just move your rent controlled apartment over there.
You have ruined a fantastic opportunity to report on a timely and actually quite poignant subject by interviewing only people who had just been born during those years. Each of your interview subjects must be suffering from False Memory Syndrome: They were all still in Pampers in the 70s. Maybe you should have focused on the 80s, when New York was still plenty edgy and your paper's target demo were, gosh, just entering puberty.
I guess the Observer is just so hip and young that it would have been, like, so uncool to talk to anybody 40 and up, who actually had credible memories of those amazing times. Pathetic.
What, you don't like the fact that New York City has turned into an uninhabitable playground for the idle rich not-so-young-anymore urban parasites, who have no sense of human values (or anything else except the trip to the vomitorium they'll have to make in order to swallow their trendy foody plate du jour tonight in the company of their vapid friends)? The fact that the fashion industry has died a miserable death, that Broadway consists of the dregs of Disney World and Andrew Lloyd Rubber? Not to mention what has happened to live music, bookstores, movie theatres, and on and on? You don't like being the backyard for entertaining Christian losers from Iowa, and the rest of the rumpkins who worship Donald Trump et al? You mean you're.... not hip anymore?
As George Clinton used to say, "if you don't like the effects, don't produce the cause!" Too much money, too little taste! Pass the sick bag, John Badum, wherever you are.... and please, do NOT foist Guiliani on the rest of the country. We can smell a manipulative, corrupt liar from across the Hudson, and it ain't sweet.
While the idea of interviewing 30-somethings who were just kids in the 70s may seem silly, people even younger than they sense that the city has changed drastically and what made New York unique has been irretrievably lost. When I moved to the Washington Market area in 1974 - now TriBeCa - it was empty and adventurous. Now it's Triburbia, making the world safe for nannies and strollers, and a living hell due to all the construction going on. When all the artists, musicians, actors, and workers have been ethnically cleansed from Manhattan, it will truly be a high-rise Podunk-on-the-Hudson. To see what it was really like back then, check out Allan Tannenbaum's photo book, New York in the 70s.
What happened to editing? Needle Park was never at 72nd and Columbus--try the intersection of 72nd, Broadway and Amsterdam for accuracy.
How could you confine your article to kiddies in the 70's, and ignore the recollections of sentient adults of the time? I'd thought that only baby-boomers were so self-centered as to selectively erase the rest of the world, but I'm glad to see that younger writers can be equally solopsistic. Congratulations on your parochialism! Always remember: people outside your age group are historical fiction. They are as germane as the ancient Mayans. Do not consult them at any cost.
Funny. My mom and I were discussing “the bad old days” recently as we walked through the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris where she and my father, an Astoria Jew who drove a checkered cab in the early to mid 70s, have adopted as home.
There was a bit of nostalgia in our conversation, albeit I can only be nostalgic about going to pre-school on West 83rd Street, near where we lived – above the Plimptons while Shelly was getting famous for her performance in “Hair” and Martha was the girl next door. Mom worked with stage designers and was a counter girl at Bloomingdale’s for a while. We lived in the Upper West Side when it was a war zone and people were drug dealing and stabbing each other on the street.
My mom made an interesting comment: She says when she goes back to New York she often runs into those type of people who never left New York City from the bad old days, whose entire world resides in a handful of blocks in Manhattan and whose are the most provincial people in the world, seemingly devoid of anything going on in the outside world. I knew exactly the type of person she was talking about, having returned later in life to live in New York City from 2000 to 2004 after five years abroad.
It may be a platitude to point out that many New Yorkers (the real one, not the imports from out west who rehearsed for their New York lifestyle by watching “Friends”) are provincial, and there may be plenty of reasons for that – most notably that New York has so much to offer. But there’s also something kinda sad about it.
My dad, born and raised a New Yorker, doesn’t share this “bad old days” nostalgia. And has says he doesn’t like New York City and, with the exception of the occasional a funeral or wedding, has pretty much chosen to stay out of the Big Apple for the past 30 years.
If you would like to see some footage of a subway ride from Back In The Dayz , go to see my 1987 footage at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRdx6nAVYvc.
The fare was an outrageous 90 cents then - up from 50 cents in 1980,60 cents in 1983 and 75 cents in 1985.
was it all a dream?Yes,yes the Upper West side,but how many people remember Chelsea,not the fast fading Gay Chelsea into condo/gallery/handbag girl metrosexual Chelsea.No I mean the Chelsea where all the shops on 8th Ave were unrentable,and you wouldn't walk at night.It was 1983 and my apartment was $300 a month,yes I'm still there!It was all Puerto Rican then,and the boys were HOT!
I am a Native New Yorker.
Here is why I am not a fan of what NYC has transformed into:
THERE ARE A HIGH PERCENTAGE OF PEOPLE that move here NOW who would never dream of living here in the 70's and 80's. Those years the city was deemed "sketchy" by most outsiders and had a not so good reputation. The graffiti, broken glass, hookers, pimps, transvestites, homeboys, garbage, car alarms, police sirens, rapists, muggers, bums, and torched buildings kept many out in the suburbs and smaller cities where they were safe from these big city elements.
NOW MANY FLOCK here because their friends told them it is safe, clean, and they are not at risk to those elements that once were. Many neighborhoods now have the same stores as any mall in America like: Starbucks, McDonalds, Blockbuster, Diesel Jeans. "HEY NEW YORK CITY IS SO MUCH LIKE OTHER PLACES NOW WE CAN LIVE HERE ! YAY, NO MORE GRAFFITI!" Times Square looks like fucking Disneyworld. The Village now looks like an upstate college town!
PEOPLE MOVED HERE AND ACCEPTED THE CITY ELEMENTS because they wanted the diversity, unique culture, and different classes of neighborhoods. They came here to find a place to live in and were accepted in no matter who they were and how much they made. Now money and big business is driving out all of the unique elements of New York faster than a corner bodega in Hells Kitchen.
The desire to live in this city is no longer fueled by the pursuit of diversity, culture, and tolerance of many classes and ethnicities. Now the pursuit is to live in a million dollar loft in Soho because it is cool to be there.
Hey nobody is at fault... buying a $500,000 condo in Chelsea is just like buying a pair of Diesel Jeans, it has to be done to keep up.
Thanks for listening.
I finally moved out of NYC last September for exactly these reasons. It's a shame, but I really dislike NYC these days. Fuck NYU.
Yeah, New York feels like it's over. The Chelsea hotel is the canary in the mine. All authenticity and sincerity is lost. There's a sinister politeness around, people are paid to smile at you. (In the the old days, even when they were paid to smile at you, they wouldn't unless they felt like it). Working people and artists have been pushed out while the city is invaded by hordes of people from middle america who OD'd on Sex and the City reruns and seem to want New York to be a cross between Peoria and Beverly Hills. Sure, the murder rate was high back then, but hey, the crime kept out the riff raff. You took a risk to live in New York, and the risk paid off for almost everyone. That's how you made your bones and were accepted as a New Yorker. The murder rate was high, but really, how many lives did Giuliani save, net? I believe 9/11 eradicated any gains. Maybe he shouldn't have focussed so much on the squeegee guys and should have paid more attention to anti-terrorism watch around city landmarks.
New York city used to be free, and special, and painfully, beautifully real. Now it's capitalist theme park. It was sincere, now it's fake. It used to lead the way in the world, now it follows and imitates. It's insanely expensive and worst of all, it's boring now.
Yeah, New York feels like it's over. The Chelsea hotel is the canary in the mine. All authenticity and sincerity is lost. There's a sinister politeness around, people are paid to smile at you. (In the the old days, even when they were paid to smile at you, they wouldn't unless they felt like it). Working people and artists have been pushed out while the city is invaded by hordes of people from middle america who OD'd on Sex and the City reruns and seem to want New York to be a cross between Peoria and Beverly Hills. Sure, the murder rate was high back then, but hey, the crime kept out the riff raff. You took a risk to live in New York, and the risk paid off for almost everyone. That's how you made your bones and were accepted as a New Yorker. The murder rate was high, but really, how many lives did Giuliani save, net? I believe 9/11 eradicated any gains. Maybe he shouldn't have focussed so much on the squeegee guys and should have paid more attention to anti-terrorism watch around city landmarks.
New York city used to be free, and special, and painfully, beautifully real. Now it's capitalist theme park. It was sincere, now it's fake. It used to lead the way in the world, now it follows and imitates. It's insanely expensive and worst of all, it's boring now.
Hello,
Im a representative of the Church of Whats Happening Now...founded by a free thinking friend of mine. Anyhow, I love the reminiscing of the days of yore. Im sure the Native Americans thought Manhatten was a tremendous place before the Dutch came and killed their family members and kicked them off their land. Or i'm sure the people who were coming of age in the 40's and 50's hated when their beloved city fell way to drugs and transvestites and murders and all the other great things the 70's and 80's brought. Point is, nothing lasts forever and bitchin and moanin about what happening to the city and how it is ruined is just plain foolish. Where do you all live? In Connecticut maybe? Fill up your SUV's and drive up to your ski house in VT and daydream about shooting dope in Thompkins Square park while you are listening to Bob Dylan on your iPod....Maybe you should move to Mexico City. Theres some grit left on the streets there and I'll bet the rent is pretty cheap to boot!
If you seek the authenticity of the Bad Old Days, fear not because such an urban experience still exists. Move to Philadelphia.
At age 54, I agree and can relate, A 35 year old knows nothing about the 70's ny. I went to Catholic high school late 60's 70's in Astoria and would ride the R train and while I was reading the great gatsby or some other classic a guy would be wacking off on the other side of the train car. Life in the city.
For prom nite we went to Club 82 when they still had the drag shows. Lived through the decadent music days and clubbing days where you didn't have to be paris hilton to be let in.
At age 54, I agree and can relate, A 35 year old knows nothing about the 70's ny. I went to Catholic high school late 60's 70's in Astoria and would ride the R train and while I was reading the great gatsby or some other classic a guy would be wacking off on the other side of the train car. Life in the city.
For prom nite we went to Club 82 when they still had the drag shows. Lived through the decadent music days and clubbing days where you didn't have to be paris hilton to be let in.
As a 70 year old former born and bred New Yorker, today I decide to write an era in my life from 1956 to 1966. "Memoires of a Junkie"
By the way. I used to live near Needle Park on 72nd street across from the Dakota by Central Park West. Needle park was just below 72nd street along Broadway down to the upper 60's. And the movie "Panic in Neele Park" was full of crap.
Life magazine did an article years ago around the time I lived in the Bel Air Hotel where they said you could gat a bag of heroin faster than a ham on rye at the Waldorf. it may have been 1965ish.......all True. After someone jumped out my railroad apartment window the place was raided and I moved next door to the Bancroft hotel.
As a 70 year old former born and bred New Yorker, today I decide to write an era in my life from 1956 to 1966. "Memoires of a Junkie"
By the way. I used to live near Needle Park on 72nd street across from the Dakota by Central Park West. Needle park was just below 72nd street along Broadway down to the upper 60's. And the movie "Panic in Neele Park" was full of crap.
Life magazine did an article years ago around the time I lived in the Bel Air Hotel where they said you could gat a bag of heroin faster than a ham on rye at the Waldorf. it may have been 1965ish.......all True. After someone jumped out my railroad apartment window the place was raided and I moved next door to the Bancroft hotel.
“I remember, there was just this fear,” Alison said. “I remember having to carry mugging money—$5.
$5. for a mugger, they would beat you up.........That was not enough for a bag of dope, even in the 60's. I always carried at least a 10 readily available, with my real money in a glove or sock.