The year doesn’t have to be part of the decade, either- for example, if the 80s were your fave decade but 1997 your favorite year, that’s fine!
I’ve been here a short while, but my first “real” NYC/Manhattan experience was in 2013, so it kinda blew my young-ish late 20s mind just in Times Square alone.
The people, the businesses, the culture, the EXPERIENCE- consider all these in your answers
I want to add that 42nd Street between 7th Avenue And 8th Avenue has this giant movie theater called AMC Empire 25 (so named because of its 25 screens) across from a Regal that is much smaller but has 4DX (the chair moves and also sprays along with certain things in the movie, but you can turn both off basically (or at least the spray part)), the Regal’s next to Five Guys, there’s a Dave and Buster’s next to the AMC and Madame Tussaud’s is right there- what have you experienced in this little stretch of Times Square 42nd, specifically any experiences you had at the AMC Empire 25, I love that huge multi multi level theater, it’s cool!
I lived on Long Island but briefly but have been visiting NYC and Manattan for work or pleasure regularly for nigh on 40 years now. it’s different every time and yet always the same.
I struggle ideologically with the idea of favorites in general.
Further, if e.g. 1992 NYC was especially wonderful to me, was that because of how NYC was in 1992 or how I was in 1992? My point being that if it was something about the City, others might reasonably be expected to share in my opinion. Or at least have shared my experience even if they rated it differently. OTOH, if it’s really about me, there’s no portability to anyone else there at all.
You’ve directly hit on something that I consider a great thing about my topic here- it’s not just “what was different about NYC then or happening then in NYC” but it’s also about “where I was in life then, who I was then, who I was not then”, that’s one of the most romanticistic (and admittedly subjective) things about a place like New York City 
Exactly. Case in point: I lived in Manhattan twice, once from 1977 to 1981, and again from 2000 to 2002. Those years are widely considered among the worse periods in New York history; to me, though, they were wonderful.
Not sure if this a thread shit, as my only experience of NY is via cinema and TV.
But I am going with the depiction of NY in the movie “Gangs of New York”
The film is set from 1846 to 1902. Pretty brutal, but still relatable.
I have very fond memories of NYC in the 70s when I was growing up. Despite the crime, the blight and the open depravity of the area around Times Square my mother insisted on taking us to the city to see shows, ride the Circle Line and go to movies at Radio City Music Hall. I remember asking her some very uncomfortable questions about the very graphic signs in Times Square. Yet my favorite year would be 1986, when I was a senior in high school and my friends and I took the train into the Village whenever we had free time. We would wander around the boutiques on MacDougal and Bleecker streets, talked our way into CBGB on several occasions, or just hung out watching street performers in Washington Square park.
These days, the city makes me very uncomfortable and I avoid it. I can find a reason to go there about once every 2-3 years, but after being trapped in NYC on both 9/11 and during the 2003 blackout I have very little desire to go. I did make the trip to have dinner with an old shipmate a few months ago, but that was more about seeing him than the place. Before that, my last trip in was in 2022 because my stepdaughter wanted to go to MNH for her birthday.
My father lived in NYC for three years in the late 70s* (I was a child), so I’ll go with that. Billy Joel, great Yankees teams… bookmarked by the Summer of Sam, and John Lennon’s murder.
*Looks like I may have crossed paths with Alessan. Maybe at the Bagel Nosh in Yorkville? 
Bear in mind that I six years old when I left… so who knows? We were living in Washington Square Village, and we’d eat at the Second Avenue Deli a lot. Also, I knew which Ray’s Pizza was the original one, and it was yummy.
My high school was located in Manhattan just off Times Square, so I was exposed to a lot of the glitz, XXX outlets and grime of the late 60s-early 70s, including settings featured in The French Connection and Marathon Man.
When our HS string orchestra practiced on the uppermost floor during warm weather with the windows open, derelicts would hang out on the fire escape of the flophouse opposite, to listen to us.
Good times.
The first time I was in NYC was in 1980-1981, on a whirlwind East Coast trip with my grandparents that also included Washington, Gettysburg, and similar sites. I was 10-11, as was my cousin. So imagine two uptight Midwestern grandparents and their two tween grandchildren walking through Times Square when it was at its seediest*. My grandparents were horrified, but my cousin and I were fascinated. We knew obliquely what porn theaters were (a few years later I’d drive past one every day on the way to and from high school), and of course our hometown (Springfield, IL) also had homeless people openly using drugs there on the street. But we’d never seen such things in such concentration and such abundance. It was gritty and gross and disgusting and sad, but in the best possible way (if that makes sense).
I believe that I’m not wrong in thinking that many New Yorkers openly miss the days when Times Square was a dump. Something something character. Anthony Bourdain, for example, openly mourns the disappearance of pre-Disney Times Square in one of his books, and I kind of got the impression that he felt New York was worse for it.
*I’m not qualified to say when Times Square reached Peak Seedy, but certainly in 1981 it was quite gritty. The emergence of the home-video market a few years later killed porn theaters, so I think in some ways the beginning of the end of Dumpy Times Square was a few years after I split town. But I could be wrong.
Despite everything wrong with NYC in the 1970s, it was still my favorite decade. This was a time when there were countless mom and pop stores. It felt like every street held hidden treasures to explore. 1977 was probably my favorite year.
The gentrification that followed certainly made things safer and cleaner, but it also robbed the city of much of its unique charm. Today, when I look down the streets on Google Earth, I see many of the same stores that are available to me on the west coast. That wasn’t the case when I was a kid.
Precisely this. It also made it unaffordable to actually live in the city.
The early-mid through the end of the 1980s for me, though as others have expressed above, it too was the shaped by it being a specific time of my life, in this case, enjoying the wondrous freedom and discovery of being a young adult.
Being from the northern exurbs but still enjoying the frequent and reliable rail service, we often ventured there for day trips, concerts, or nights of painting the town red. when a cousin had moved there, and lived in mid-town and the east village areas it really opened up the experience for me since visits often involved my crashing there for the night. In that way I saw the city from the perspective of a resident.
I prefer this term:
(To its credit (and likely due to some strategic zoning), MacDougal Street between Bleecker and West Third remains a hotbed of quirky independent shops and restaurants with nary a nationwide chain in sight.)
That’s good to hear!
I started my my new job in Manhattan across the street from the World Trade Center and signed my lease for a standard East Village studio apartment with one exposed brick wall the week before 9/11. So I was actually able to get to experience 9/11 as a “New Yorker” just under the wire.
But generally I’d say early 2000s to 2010s would be my favorite period. I was in my late 20s / 30s, not yet married with kids, and had enough money and friends to just kind of enjoy doing New York stuff.
Yeah, everyone mourns how much “better” NYC was back in the day. That’s why they all moved to NJ, Westchester and Long Island.
It’s hard for me to give a favorite decade- but if I had to pick ten years, it would be from 1977-1986. But that’s mostly because that’s when I was in high school and college - if I had been ten years younger or older, the years would have been different.
As far as
I believe that I’m not wrong in thinking that many New Yorkers openly miss the days when Times Square was a dump.
You’re not completely wrong - but I don’t think it it’s exactly that they miss the seediness. At first , the seediness was just pushed out of Times Square itself. I started to work near 40 St and 8 Avenue in 1994 and it was still pretty seedy then. Slightly less now, but there’s still a parole office there and I think the liquor store even though there are at least 3 or 4 not-cheap hotels on the block. Show World was around until 2015 or so. From my perspective , I miss the days when Manhattan wasn’t the same as every suburban mall , with chain stores and chain restaurants and second hand shops with cheap clothes rather than thrift stores with $149 rain hats and $499 shoulder bags. I don’t miss the seediness itself - but I don’t like some of the things that coincided with the “cleanup”.
Whenever people mention this idea I always think of the hypothesis that the reason New York City pizza is the world-best is because the water in NYC has just the right amount of dirtiness/grime/chemicals/whatever that it makes the bread and everything else the best, and that’s not a joke, some people think that could be the/a factor
It’s like those ads in magazines for Las Vegas a few years back: “Just The Right Amount Of Wrong.”
I’ve heard of bakers going to New York and bringing home gallons upon gallons of NYC tap water because, somehow, it makes their bread, and bagels in particular, taste and chew way better than the local tap water. I have no idea if this is true.