Coming back today from a quick day trip to NYC (from Chicago) another person commented to me, when I told him, I love NYC, I love Times Square, he said “Mark, it didn’t always used to be like this.” Then they tell me how bad it was.
When did it get nice?
I also hear the same about Greenwich Village as well. When did that get nice.
I sort of get what they mean as people always go on about Chelsea but the part I walked thru wasn’t so hot.
Anyway when did Times Square and Greenwhich “get nice”?
Hm, thought you were talking about our ex-mod. Can’t remember him being nice 
Things like this are, probably, a gradual process.
However . . . my very rough estimate is that most N.YC. denizens would date it to ca. 1994. Certainly, by 1996, the “not nice” things your friend was talking about (porn shows and open drug use in Times Sq.) were on their way out, or gone. By 1998, they were (with a very few exceptions, at least as to Times. Sq., in my limited experience) gone.
Conversely . . . from a number of conversations with a number of residents – I have met very few people who lived in the city pre 1994 who did not have a mugging story (by which, for the most part, I mean that they (or in a few cases, a close relative/friend) were mugged, with a weapon, usually)). In my (again, somewhat limited) experience, almost no one has a post 1994-'95 mugging story.
Another benchmark I suppose is vagrancy. The difference is palpable – pre-1994, the “squeegee men” and beggars were very aggressive in seeking alms, as it were. There are still quite a few knights of the road, but their, I don’t know, passivity, is notable. At least until recent visits, I have never had a beggar, post 1994, physically approach or accost me; they tend to sit in doorways. Without passing judgment, pre-1994, they were more “in the face” of passersby, which (rightly or wrongly) tends to spook people. Visit San Francisco’s Tenderloin, even today, and see the difference.
I’ve tried to avoid opining too much – these issues are fraught with political baggage. The era I’ve identified with Manhattan’s “niceness” is clearly largely coincident with the Giuliani era, though I’m neither trying to turn this into a GD/IMHO, nor to boost Rudy/bash Dinkins. Nor am I, here, opining on “root causes of homelessness,” etc., or on whether the “increased niceness” simply reflected extraneous boom-time economic circumstances. Certainly, you’ll find some who say that things are slipping back now, even under the Republican (or, some would say, “Republican,” Bloomberg); I’ve seen a bit more “broken windows” going unremdiated in recent experience.
This also doesn’t address the fact that much of Manhattan, and N.Y.C., still isn’t, and never really was, that nice – and for the guys who continued to get mugged, periodically, in the Village, the “niceness” was no consolation, even in the “nice parts.” As for the “not-nice” parts – Washington Heights? East New York? Parts of Alphabet City, anyone? But . . . at the height of the “renaissance” . . . it was rather amazing to see how much safer the formerly blighted sections (much of East and West Harlem; Inwood; LES; Hell’s Kitchen) had become.
Giuiliani and gentrificiation. The entire Lower East Side for example, was notrious in the 80’s and early 90’s as a den of crime and drugs. Slowly, old buildings started getting renovated, rents started going up (way up), and the poorer classes had to move out. The face of lower Manhattan is much “whiter” than it used to be, and also much richer. And there was the vigorous crusade against the homeless; you almost never see one around anymore (although they are becoming more common in the Bloomberg years). The change was rather dramatic and Manhattan truly feels like one of the safest cities in America.
Of course, the powerful police presence is absent in the rougher neighborhoods like Brownsville and Bed-Stuy. In fact, those places are as bad as ever.
More specifically . . .
GV still is not wholly “nice” – even the Western part has its share of muggings (and a few people have been shot in the Village in recent years).
See, e.g.:
http://www.angelfire.com/pa/sergeman/issues/shootsthree.html
However, and notwithstanding . . .
It does seem the dropoff in serious crime in the “tourist” parts of Manhattan was pretty rapid and notable. I would think anyone walking along any part of Seventh Ave. in Midtown/Times Sq., or Sixth Ave./GV, would be almost certainly safe, at almost any hour, today. Not the case in the past, as I’m given to understand.
Agree with most of this. Anyone visit, say, Rivington St. in 1992 and 2000, for instance? Paradigm shift, indeed.
See also Upper West Side – though relatively “well off” in the early '90s (bastion of professional/Jewish/academic sorts, within certain street boundaries), its prosperity spread, and enlarged, notably post-'95; to the point that chain stores are now widely represented all the way up to 125th St., and yuppification (with all its pros and cons) seem firmly entrenched easily up to 96th St., and possibly beyond, whereas 86th used to be marginal/ghettoesque.
Actually, I willing to step up, and claim things were getting ‘nicer’ during the mid-1980s, under the ‘Kochian’ expansion. There was a lot of real-estate construction in many areas (including the south Bronx and East New York) and some needed infrastructure improvement in roads, transit, parks, muncipial buildings, etc.(though not quite at the level necessary). Different things such as putting cops on foot patrol (which seemed novel in the mid-80s - seriously!) were tried, and in every middle class neighborhood they were shoe-horning multi-family apartments on any slightly-larger than normal lot (much like today…)
I distinctly remember a lot of people thinking NYC was on an upswing after the long dark ages of the mid 70 - early 80s period.
Then the late 80s recession hit us fairly hard, and things rather backslide (which I feel is the main reason Kock lost) Dinkins was a rather uninspired bureacrat, so it took for Giluiani and his definitely different approach for things to appear on the upswing again
I recommend reading the book, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. It provides an interesting account of the reasons behind the cleanup of New York City. In essense: If you eliminate the small, early indicators of urban problems like graffiti and broken windows, the large problems like murders drop in number. The more civil the environment, the more civil the population.
Here are some excerpts from a 1996 article in the New Yorker magazine that forms a couple chapters of his subsequent book. This seems to reinforce Huerta88’s suggestion that 1994 was a turning point.
Deferring to your further-back experience – would the “not so nice” parts that are now “nice” have been closer to nice or to not nice at the height of the Koch expansion? E.g., Times Sq., Washington Sq. Park, Hell’s Kitchen, UWS, LES?
OK, put me on the spot, eh?
Well, from the perspective of a super-genius, dashingly handsome, super-stud college male in 1986 
, things looked to be getting better all around the city at that time, and ‘waves’ of gentrification seemed to be ‘radiating’ out (I know, I’m sorry, but there’s really no other way to describe the perception), and that in 5-10 years there wouldn’t really be super bad neighborhoods (Again, I know, but the Nehemiah housing program was buildling in areas of ENY and the Bronx which hadn’t seen new housing in decades, Koch was moving forward on his plan to rehabilitate thousands of abandoned apartments (instead of just putting window decals (with curtains!) on them as he did a few years before), offices were being built in the outer boroughs (not just in College Point or Kew Gardens, but also the Citicorp building in Long Island City, down town Jamaica, down town Brookln (MetroTech), and so on - plus Time Square itself wasn’t as bad you’d time - the Marroit Maquis had opened, and many firms had offices there (and I think the McDonald’s opened in mid-80s - don’t laugh, it was considered progress) - there were plans for those 4 clunky office towers to replace the remaining ‘seedy areas’ of time square (Note: at the time I speak of [mid 80s], most of the store in Time Square itself were cheesy gifts shops, video stores (specializing in Kung Fun videos), and chain eateries - the ‘p0rn biz’ was mostly on Eight Ave.
Hell’s Kitchen was called Clinton by that time (although not by the residents, some of who put up ‘Anti-Gentrification totem’ when the World-Wide Plaza was being built). Also, I knew plently of people in the Lower East side (Cooper Union, Baby 
), and distinctly remember the new condos going up near Tompkins Square Park (and the riots, too) - to this day the smell of mid-80s NYC to me is the smell of concrete dust and wet mortar (Concrete framed buildings with brick walls were the big trend then).
OK, by the late 80s, not only was there the recession, but (and I forgot about this), the time of the Crack epidemic, which took the crime charts (which till then had been trending down) and turned them around till we got the 2000+ murders of the early Dinkins period.
So, it’s like we were on an unreconstructed N train (I hated the N train) - we were moving ahead slowly in the mid-80s, slammed on the brakes (and rolled back a bit) in the late-80s/early 90s, and then Rudy came in and away we went.
Note: at the time, Washington Square park had a few homeless and some losers going ‘Smoke, Smoke?’, but it was pretty much as active and safe as it is now (well, was…I was there in the spring, and saw a few of the homeless that hadn’t been there for a decade)
April 16, 1003.
Dookie!
That was “1993”.
Homicide Rate in New York City (per 100,000 pop.)
1960: 4.7
1965: 7.6
1970: 12.6
1975: 21.7
1980: 23.5
1985: 24.7
1990: 26.2
1991: 30.2
1992: 27.9
1993: 27.4
1994: 21.9
1995: 16.5
1996: 13.9
1997: 10.8
1998: 9.2
1999: 9.4
2000: 8.9
2001: 8.4
Source: New York City Department of Health.
Homicide Rate in New York City (per 100,000 pop.)
1960: 4.7
1965: 7.6
1970: 12.6
1975: 21.7
1980: 23.5
1985: 24.7
1990: 26.2
1991: 30.2
1992: 27.9
1993: 27.4
1994: 21.9
1995: 16.5
1996: 13.9
1997: 10.8
1998: 9.2
1999: 9.4
2000: 8.9
2001: 8.4 (not includng WTC deaths)
Source: New York City Department of Health.
You stole my answer, you (checks forum) fellow SDMB member, you!