America in the 70s

[garbon]

The public phone booth one is great, what a flashback.

Just go to Quebec City and voila!

[sbr]

The public phone booth one is great, what a flashback.

Just go to Quebec City and voila!

I don't speak French, they wouldn't let me use the phones.

[garbon]

You're in luck as I don't either.

[The Minsky Moment]

The first picture is in the middle of DUMBO, a tiny district in Brooklyn that experienced massive gentifrication starting around the late 90s.  So that gives a rather extreme comparison.

In the other two big street pictures it looks like Canal and West 127th, and the differences aren't as great.

I have pretty good memories of NYC in the late 70s and early 80s.  Clearly more dangerous than it is now, but there wasn't a sense of imminent menace either.  The big difference that stands out in my mind were the subway cars, which of course were covered in grafitti and whose lights were constantly going out in the tunnels.

[Malthus]

The first picture is in the middle of DUMBO, a tiny district in Brooklyn that experienced massive gentifrication starting around the late 90s.  So that gives a rather extreme comparison.

In the other two big street pictures it looks like Canal and West 127th, and the differences aren't as great.

I have pretty good memories of NYC in the late 70s and early 80s.  Clearly more dangerous than it is now, but there wasn't a sense of imminent menace either.  The big difference that stands out in my mind were the subway cars, which of course were covered in grafitti and whose lights were constantly going out in the tunnels.

Would it be fair to say that the preception of New York by outsiders has changed far more dramatically than New York actually has?

In the 70s I had never been to New York; my impressions of the city all came from its depictions in the media - both fictional and non-fictional (like the blackout riots of '77).  The overall impression was that NYC was a distopian, crime-ridden dump on the one hand, and a business and arts powerhouse on the other.

[Capetan Mihali]

The first picture is in the middle of DUMBO, a tiny district in Brooklyn that experienced massive gentifrication starting around the late 90s.  So that gives a rather extreme comparison.

In the other two big street pictures it looks like Canal and West 127th, and the differences aren't as great.

I have pretty good memories of NYC in the late 70s and early 80s.  Clearly more dangerous than it is now, but there wasn't a sense of imminent menace either.  The big difference that stands out in my mind were the subway cars, which of course were covered in grafitti and whose lights were constantly going out in the tunnels.

Would it be fair to say that the preception of New York by outsiders has changed far more dramatically than New York actually has?

In the 70s I had never been to New York; my impressions of the city all came from its depictions in the media - both fictional and non-fictional (like the blackout riots of '77).  The overall impression was that NYC was a distopian, crime-ridden dump on the one hand, and a business and arts powerhouse on the other.

New York has changed pretty dramatically.  My own memories are from the Dinkins era, after 10-15 years of crazy real estate speculation already, and things were pretty different.  It's truly hard to believe Bushwick ever became a desirable place to live.

[derspiess]

In the 70s I had never been to New York; my impressions of the city all came from its depictions in the media - both fictional and non-fictional (like the blackout riots of '77).  The overall impression was that NYC was a distopian, crime-ridden dump on the one hand, and a business and arts powerhouse on the other.

My family first visited NYC in 1981 when Escape from New York was in the theaters.  The city wasn't quite as bad as the movie trailer indicated

[Admiral Yi]

I used to visit a college buddy in the East Village pretty regularly in the late 80s.  Avenue A was a pretty firm no go line at that time.  Now from what I understand Alphabet City is white boy slacker heaven.

[Capetan Mihali]

My parents grew up in NY over the period where things really started to break down, probably forming their real memories starting in the early 60s, graduating high school in the early 70s, and getting married in the early 80s. 

But by the early 70s, my grandparents on both sides had gotten safely ensconced in outer Queens.  Most of my other relatives lived in (and still live in) fairly stable Brooklyn neighborhoods like Flatbush, the only scary ones being adjacent to Coney Island and the projects around there.

In 1977, my mother lived in Carroll Gardens, which was a pretty safe, traditional Italian neighborhood (where she caught a lot of dirty looks for being a single woman living alone), and my father lived in Washington Heights, which was pretty depressed/dangerous, mostly Puerto Rican and Dominican with a dwindling number of German Jewish emigres from the 30s, but not nearly as violent as it would be during the crack years.

[garbon]

I used to visit a college buddy in the East Village pretty regularly in the late 80s.  Avenue A was a pretty firm no go line at that time.  Now from what I understand Alphabet City is white boy slacker heaven.

Except for the C to D area. Not particularly bad but not lovely either.

[11B4V]

America in the 70s, Scaramento, Ca

Me and my sisters riding in a open truck bed, sitting on the wheel well flying down the freeway at 65mph. Step dad drinking a can of Ole (Olympia) Beer.

Walking my sisters to and from preschool/kindergarten alone when I was 8 y/o.

Height of board wargames.

Fishing salmon, sturgeon, steelhead with my drunk grand father.

etc.

Good times

[The Minsky Moment]

The "stable" neighborhoods that Mihali talks about were far from affluent.  Carroll Gardens was middle class, basically an ethnic Italian Catholic variant on Archie Bunker, but with brownstones and bakeries.  (now it is gentrified and filled with $2million + townhouses).  Flatbush was (and is) a quintessential working class community, although the ethnic mix has changed. While some boroughs and neighborhoods followed the "white flight" paradigm epitomized by Detroit (e.g. South Bronx) others did not, and in other cases immigrants filled in.

Mihali's memories seem to be influenced by the late 80s/early 90s crack epidemic era, where there was a big spike in violent crime and certain areas became no go at all times of day and night.

[CountDeMoney]

KRonn or gumbler, did these cars really look cool back then, or did they always give off this "piece of sloppy shit" vibe?

HEY NOW

[Ed Anger]

I hate hipsters. That is all.

[Capetan Mihali]

The "stable" neighborhoods that Mihali talks about were far from affluent.  Carroll Gardens was middle class, basically an ethnic Italian Catholic variant on Archie Bunker, but with brownstones and bakeries.  (now it is gentrified and filled with $2million + townhouses).  Flatbush was (and is) a quintessential working class community, although the ethnic mix has changed. While some boroughs and neighborhoods followed the "white flight" paradigm epitomized by Detroit (e.g. South Bronx) others did not, and in other cases immigrants filled in.

Mihali's memories seem to be influenced by the late 80s/early 90s crack epidemic era, where there was a big spike in violent crime and certain areas became no go at all times of day and night.

  I think I gave pretty apt (or at least the same as you) descriptions of Carroll Gardens and places like Flatbush. 

"Stable" was by no means meant to suggest anything other than working-class; on his family's trajectory up the NYC neighborhood social ladder, my dad lived for a long time growing up in Howard Beach, which last I checked is still pretty ethnic white working-class.  And certainly got a lot of notoriety for such in 1986.

I used to visit Sheepshead Bay pretty frequently to see my great-aunt until she died two years ago, and she (a Macy's retail employee from the 1938 until she retired) described the neighborhood as "like the League of Nations over here" due to the immigrant influx (starting with Soviet Jews in the late 70s, and intensifying dramatically post 1991).  Actually, it was the Russian kids who were the menace in her building, vandalizing things and assaulting people.

I loved living in the city as a kid (especially when we lived in Manhattan in the weird DMZ between Yorkville and Spanish Harlem) and hated when we moved to the suburbs, but yeah, crack vials piled up in mounds, getting X-rayed for a cough since tuberculosis was the big fear, the Central Park Jogger hysteria (and the park generally being a scary place), hiding the car radio under a blanket in the back seat every time you parked... the peak crack-era experience is strongest in my memory.  And no more subway graffiti by that point, really, but lots of "scratchitti" (which somehow the MTA seems to have stopped, I would've that would last forever) and definitely the lights still going out on the subway, usually for just a couple seconds, but sometimes those adrenaline-inducing 10 seconds plus of total darkness.  And the last relics of porno theaters in Times Square, had my mother inefficiently try to cover my eyes when we walked a couple of blocks on 8th Ave under the marquees...