# When did Manhattan "get nice"? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 6, 2003, 3:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807 "2003-10-06T03:21:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Markxxx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5daacb/32.png) [@Markxxx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Markxxx)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 3:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807/1 "2003-10-06T03:21:18Z")
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”? ---
**Author:** ![green\_bladder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/73ab20/32.png) [@green\_bladder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/green_bladder)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 4:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807/2 "2003-10-06T04:26:17Z")
Hm, thought you were talking about our ex-mod. Can’t remember him being nice 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 5:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807/3 "2003-10-06T05:37:49Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Headcoat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/6bbea6/32.png) [@Headcoat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Headcoat)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 7:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807/4 "2003-10-06T07:08:44Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 7:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807/5 "2003-10-06T07:10:17Z")
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](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. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807/6 "2003-10-06T07:16:33Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Headcoat \* > \*\*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. \*\* 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. ---
**Author:** ![SirRay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/cc9497/32.png) [@SirRay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SirRay)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 12:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807/7 "2003-10-06T12:58:46Z")
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 ---
**Author:** ![Algernon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a183cd/32.png) [@Algernon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Algernon)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807/8 "2003-10-06T14:01:57Z")
I recommend reading the book, [The Tipping Point](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0316346624/qid=1065449237/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-9307879-9556651?v=glance&s=books) 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](http://www.gladwell.com/1996/1996_06_03_a_tipping.htm) that forms a couple chapters of his subsequent book. This seems to reinforce **Huerta88’s** suggestion that 1994 was a turning point. > [@](#): > > In 1993, there were a hundred and twenty-six homicides in the Seven-Five, as the police call it. Last year, there were forty-four. There is probably no other place in the country where violent crime has declined so far, so fast. > > Once the symbol of urban violence, New York City is in the midst of a strange and unprecedented transformation. According to the preliminary crime statistics released by the F.B.I. earlier this month, New York has a citywide violent-crime rate that now ranks it a hundred and thirty-sixth among major American cities, on a par with Boise, Idaho. Car thefts have fallen to seventy-one thousand, down from a hundred and fifty thousand as recently as six years ago. Burglaries have fallen from more than two hundred thousand in the early nineteen-eighties to just under seventy-five thousand in 1995. Homicides are now at the level of the early seventies, nearly half of what they were in 1990. Over the past two and a half years, every precinct in the city has recorded double-digit decreases in violent crime. Nowhere, however, have the decreases been sharper than Brooklyn North, in neighborhoods that not long ago were all but written off to drugs and violence. On the streets of the Seven-Five today, it is possible to see signs of everyday life that would have been unthinkable in the early nineties. > > Some of the best new ideas in preventing violence borrow heavily from the principles of epidemic theory. Take, for example, the so-called “broken window” hypothesis that has been used around the country as the justification for cracking down on “quality of life” crimes like public urination and drinking. In a famous experiment conducted twenty-seven years ago by the Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo, a car was parked on a street in Palo Alto, where it sat untouched for a week. At the same time, Zimbardo had an identical car parked in a roughly comparable neighborhood in the Bronx, only in this case the license plates were removed and the hood was propped open. Within a day, it was stripped. Then, in a final twist, Zimbardo smashed one of the Palo Alto car’s windows with a sledgehammer. Within a few hours, that car, too, was destroyed. \*\*Zimbardo’s point was that disorder invites even more disorder-that a small deviation from the norm can set into motion a cascade of vandalism and criminality. The broken window was the tipping point. \*\* [bolding mine] > > The broken-window hypothesis was the inspiration for the cleanup of the subway system conducted by the New York City Transit Authority in the late eighties and early nineties. Why was the Transit Authority so intent on removing graffiti from every car and cracking down on the people who leaped over turnstiles without paying? Because those two “trivial” problems were thought to be tipping points-broken windows-that invited far more serious crimes. > > Which brings us to North Brooklyn and the Seventy- fifth Precinct. In the Seven-Five, there are now slightly more officers than before. They stop more cars. They confiscate more guns. They chase away more street-corner loiterers. They shut down more drug markets. They have made a series of what seem, when measured against the extraordinary decline in murders, to be small changes. But it is the nature of nonlinear phenomena that sometimes the most modest of changes can bring about enormous effects. What happened to the murder rate may not be such a mystery in the end. Perhaps what William Bratton and Inspector Mezzadri have done is the equivalent of repairing the broken window or preventing that critical ten or fifteen thousand new H.I.V. infections. Perhaps Brooklyn-and with it New York City-has tipped. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807/9 "2003-10-06T14:44:51Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by SirRay \* > \*\*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 \*\* 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? ---
**Author:** ![SirRay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/cc9497/32.png) [@SirRay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SirRay)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807/10 "2003-10-06T19:16:08Z")
> [@](#): > > 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) ---
**Author:** ![lieu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c2a13f/32.png) [@lieu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lieu)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807/11 "2003-10-06T19:33:13Z")
April 16, 1003. ---
**Author:** ![lieu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c2a13f/32.png) [@lieu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lieu)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807/12 "2003-10-06T19:36:14Z")
Dookie! That was “1993”. ---
**Author:** ![Walloon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/fbc32d/32.png) [@Walloon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walloon)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807/13 "2003-10-06T21:06:29Z")
**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. ---
**Author:** ![Walloon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/fbc32d/32.png) [@Walloon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walloon)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807/14 "2003-10-06T21:09:17Z")
**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. ---
**Author:** ![manhattan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/manhattan/32/7_2.png) [@manhattan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/manhattan)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-manhattan-get-nice/205807/15 "2003-10-06T22:49:53Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by green\_bladder \* > \*\*Hm, thought you were talking about our ex-mod. Can’t remember him being nice 😃 \*\* You stole my answer, you (checks forum) fellow SDMB member, you! 😃