NEWSLETTER

BY SAM MCPHEETERS, ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHRISTY KARACAS



New York City’s comeback has been an odd thing to watch from afar. When I moved out of Manhattan in 1990, the city was every inch the pee-smelling woe zone I’d known since childhood. When I returned this spring, I couldn’t even find key graffiti on subway windows. Taxi rides are like something from a science-fiction movie now—not because New York cabs have televisions in them, but because these televisions actually work. People still talk to themselves in the streets, only now there’s someone on the other line.

And yet the changes aren’t nearly as strange as the nostalgia. A lot of people seem to miss the lawless megatoilet city of a generation ago. In the 1990s, it was possible to write off this wistfulness as a natural reaction to the excesses of Mayor Giuliani. But as the city has grown cleaner and safer over the past decade, so has the melancholy grown more mawkish and the mawkishness more entrenched. In 2006, the schmaltz surged with the drawn-out funeral(s) of CBGB, a dank dive bar that’d lingered two decades past its expiration date. For $24.50, you can still visit the club’s original awning at the new Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex on Mercer Street. If you have any money left over, you can take the “underbelly tour” through the refurbished South Bronx with Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa.

Here’s the thing: Outrageous prices and sweeping gentrification are symptoms of the economic booms and collapses of the last 20 years. These problems aren’t unique to New York City. The current nostalgia for bad NYC runs deeper than these problems. “There are too many healthy people in New York now,” one friend grumbles when I press him on the issue. Most locals I know offer some version of this same beef. The new New York is too soft. Too clean. Too Disney. Not enough dirtbags. Inconvenient for perverts. Inauthentic. No soul.

Writer James Wolcott compressed all these gripes into his article “Splendor in the Grit” in last June’s issue of Vanity Fair. Of the bad old days, Wolcott writes,

One key difference between the 70s and today is that in the 70s the tourists looked scared. Getting back to the hotel alive was one of the main items on their checklists. Now they beam as if they find everything on display cute and flaunt their bulging shopping bags like hunting trophies... In the 70s there was a much sharper divide between Us... and Everybody Else.

Wolcott seems unmoved by New York’s current cleanliness and security (as of 2002, the city is safer than Provo, Utah). Contrasting the city of the 70s with the city of the 00s, his conclusion is stark:

Really, I much prefer rubble.

How bad were the old days? A brief recap is in order. During the administrations of mayors John Lindsay, Abe Beame, and Ed Koch—1966 to 1990—the city’s murder rate jumped 340 percent. In the late 60s, sanitation and transit strikes forced New Yorkers to wade through rivers of filth. By the mid-70s, the city was broke, staring down bankruptcy, slashing jobs, crippling its own police department, and leaving infrastructure to rot. A deliberate withdrawal of firefighting service—the “planned shrinkage” of poor zones—obliterated whole neighborhoods. For every shock of Watergate/malaise-era America, New York City matched the emergency and raised the stakes. Where America had an energy crisis, New York had a blackout; where America had pollution, New York had cascading garbage; where America had failure in Vietnam, New York had failure in the Bronx.

An entire generation of New Yorkers grew up with an expectation of violence and apathy. There was the private shame of “mugger money” that citizens carried to placate criminals, and the public pathos of “No Radio” signs in parked cars. For a year following the bicentennial, Son of Sam terrorized the city with killings and unsigned letters explaining, “I love to hunt.” By the 80s, the city was awash in crack and grappling with AIDS, and few public surfaces remained unsplorched by graffiti or bodily fluids.

Add to all this the uniquely New York problem of concentrated mass insanity. After deregulation in the mid-60s and Reaganomics in the early 80s, thousands of insane people scattered across the city, screaming and muttering from doorways and dumpsters. One could plan for crime—crazies struck anywhere. In the mid-90s, Times columnist Bob Herbert described the fear “that from out of the chaos some maniac will emerge to... cast you into oblivion.”

It’s a safe bet that New Yorkers of the 1880s didn’t pine for the time of the Draft Riots. New Yorkers of the 1950s probably did not yearn for the “authenticity” of the Great Depression. Even the current Muscovite nostalgia for Soviet days is at least based on lost prestige. When have people of another city so hankered for a time past when “things”—all things—were noticeably worse? Why does New York look back?

The answer hides in plain sight. Other failed cities don’t have awesome movies made about them. New York had four: Death Wish, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, and Escape From New York. And if oral history has driven folklore throughout the ages, imagine how cinema will shape mythology from here on out. These four films—along with their countless derivatives—helped redefine the Big Apple as the Bad Apple, a label that still holds serious weight even now that the city has gotten its act together.

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Comments

Anonymous, on Oct 30, 2009 wrote: The previous poster is a known sexual predator.
Anonymous, on Oct 10, 2009 wrote: I am so very glad that someone like you doesn’t ever want to live here again. Makes it nicer for us real New Yorkers.
Anonymous, on Oct 8, 2009 wrote: someone needs to shut the fuck up and respect mr. sam mcpheeters.
Anonymous, on Oct 7, 2009 wrote: someone needs a better editor.
Anonymous, on Oct 6, 2009 wrote: What no mention of the band Suicide! Otherwise great article.
Anonymous, on Oct 6, 2009 wrote: i don’t know if mcpheeters and karacas is a match made in heaven or hell but i would like to see it again.
	hi fructose, on Oct 6, 2009 wrote: jesus... this is a novella. worth it though. great read. i shouldn’t have been surprised. it’s mcpheeters, after all.
	captain cheesepuff, on Oct 6, 2009 wrote: i had compeltely forgotten goldblum was in death wish!
Anonymous, on Oct 6, 2009 wrote: is she fondling him?
Anonymous, on Oct 6, 2009 wrote: you know what? if anyone can pull off the shutter shades, it’s ms. statue of liberty.
	Kirby Puckett, on Oct 6, 2009 wrote: "going to have to revisit ’death wish.’ i was blown away the first time and i went in thinking it would be good for only laughs. it was good for laughs, no doubt, but so much more. and i was surprised by the amount of violence shown for a 70s film. makes me wonder why folks like tarantino, etc. are given hell for their films when this was going on 20 years earlier." If anything, this just shows you how underrated Death Wish was when it was released. I wasn’t alive but I was under the impression it WAS controversial when it was released. Too bad it’s been largely forgotten. Okay, that’s an overstatement, but keeping with your Tarantino comparison, it is when put up again either Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs.
	anonymouse, on Oct 6, 2009 wrote: going to have to revisit ’death wish.’ i was blown away the first time and i went in thinking it would be good for only laughs. it was good for laughs, no doubt, but so much more. and i was surprised by the amount of violence shown for a 70s film. makes me wonder why folks like tarantino, etc. are given hell for their films when this was going on 20 years earlier.
Anonymous, on Oct 6, 2009 wrote: The Warriors has only gotten better over time. When I first saw it, I thought it was so cheesy and ridiculous (which it is) until about halfway through the film, when I found myself really into it. Sure, the baseball uniforms are ludicrous and some of the radio announcements are so outlandish they could fall outside the realm of believability, but when you take it as a whole, and factor in the city of New York being a canvas/character, it’s a great movie.
	DabblesInPacifism, on Oct 6, 2009 wrote: Maybe the best McPheeters piece yet. Don’t let the length scare you, this one is a must-read.
	shelby, on Sep 29, 2009 wrote: these are the most accurately stereotypical african noses and lips i have ever seen put to microsoft paint pixels.
Anonymous, on Sep 29, 2009 wrote: Did i just read all of that? Fuck, it actually is 2019....
Anonymous, on Sep 29, 2009 wrote: Did i just read all of that? Fuck, it actually is 2019...
Anonymous, on Sep 29, 2009 wrote: best thing I read all three months.
Anonymous, on Sep 28, 2009 wrote: we always look to the past. come on people get over it!!!!
Anonymous, on Sep 28, 2009 wrote: Cro Mag Skinhead Breakout
Anonymous, on Sep 25, 2009 wrote: it seems as if bringing back the old ways of the crime and uncouth activity gives New Yorkers back their pride and to also say that they’ve lived and endured in "the streets." It actually adds a nice tough-edged pump. Perhaps the nostalgia is also saying some want to have their pride of the "old" York when the image of the city had once imposed a dangerous and fearful stereotype on their natives towards the nation. NY streets vis-a-vis rest of society. Now some fear that since they’ve changed the city into practically an amusement park their pride has been tampered with, making many NYers feel like pansies? I really liked this article- intriguing point of view.
Anonymous, on Sep 24, 2009 wrote: Best thing I’ve read since "Nightmare USA." Collectively, the films mentioned really DO form a subgenre in itself...I never took time to consider that. Furthermore, you inspired me to start a new "wing" in my movie collection. I already have ten of the films you mentioned, and "Little Murders" is definitely something to behold. Great job!
Anonymous, on Sep 21, 2009 wrote: cash money and hoes, what ny is about.
Anonymous, on Sep 21, 2009 wrote: nostalgia is cyclical. the human psyche will forever long for the past it didnt have.
Anonymous, on Sep 21, 2009 wrote: what are you talking about? there is still tons of key graffiti in the subways. New york is still gritty, dont worry
Anonymous, on Sep 21, 2009 wrote: i wonder how different this article would be if it were written by someone who actually was in the shit and not some scared white guy who takes serious urban references from shitty movies.
Anonymous, on Sep 17, 2009 wrote: HOLY CRAP IS this boring to anyone but New Yorkers ?!
Anonymous, on Sep 16, 2009 wrote: also there is still local culture im from deep brooklyn, not williamsburg or park slope but actual brooklyn, u just need to leave the trendy places and go to where real people live, go to the boroughs theres still a lot of mom and pop shops
Anonymous, on Sep 16, 2009 wrote: its both good and bad, i still love the city and we still have creative people, its terrible in that its hard to afford to live here but, whoever actually remembers the bad days, not the o so cool hipster pining for a time they never saw and would not have even then because they come from upper middle class backgrounds anyway, they will say its nice not to get robbed, its nice to not worry about getting stabbed. if you want somthing like that theres still plenty of cities in america like that. i guess theres a sacrifice to be made but i like that fact that nowadays i dont have to see my dad come home from driving a cab bloody from a stab wound by a heroin addict -true story. p.s. thanks for making me remember mugger money
Anonymous, on Sep 15, 2009 wrote: I don’t know what to think about "glory days," etc. Kind of a double-edged sword, you know?
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