For those who remember, or who have seen any number of movies set in NY at the time (Death Wish, etc.): New York City resembled a disutopian vision of a dark future. The city government was so broke the police had to go on strike to get paid. The perception, true or false, that crime and gang activity were threatening the survival of the middle class. Garbage strikes, decayed infrastructure, rat infestation. New York was a mess in a league of it’s own. How did things get so especially bad then (New York has always had problems), and how did it get better?
I don’t know the whole story but part of it was Rudy Giuliani’s crime control tactics that really cleaned NYC up. Much of this is controversial but he did pioneer a tactic in the city to crack down hard on certain types of smaller criminal behavior like graffiti, prostitution, open drug dealing with the idea that “crime breeds crime”. The NYC police force was reengineered around this philosophy and crime dropped rapidly especially by NYC standards. The rest of the country was seeing a drug in most crimes at the same time as critics point out buy NYC’s was more dramatic and different in many respects than other places.
I was a kid but I was also part of the traditional middle-class that fled the city in 1971. The city was extremely dangerous and riots were occurring and the South Bronx was burning. In a short time the city went from bad to much worse as the middle-class fled, the tax income decreased, property values lowered and more people fled the city.
City planning in the late fifties and sixties by Robert Moses destroyed many traditional strong neighborhoods. There was much racism so that as blacks and Hispanics moved in Jews, Italians and Irish moved out. Lower Middle-Class neighborhoods quickly turned to Ghetto.
It was frightening and scary as a child going to visit my Grandmother almost weekly. The sirens never seem to stop. The smoke was always rising visibly above the South Bronx along the Major Deegan. Cars that broke down on the Deegan were strip quickly, sometimes with the passengers still in them. This lasted a long time.
Things started improving under Mayor Koch and regressed a bit under Dickens and completely reverse for the better under Rudy Giuliani’s heavy-handed guidance.
The above is a subjective remembrance of what happen and what my parents relayed to me. Moses has an especially bad name with many ethnic New Yorkers. He destroyed many great neighborhoods.
Jim
New York was so broke by the mid-70s that they only avoided bankruptcy with a massive loan from the federal government. It was a loan because President Ford refused to make it an outright grant, leading to my favorite New York Daily News headline – “Ford to City: Drop Dead”.
Here is a link to the headline: Ford to City: Drop Dead | New York Daily News headline (1975… | Flickr
or here File:Ford to City.PNG - Wikipedia
This is a good article on the loan and some of the economic details of what led NYC to the brink of failure.
Jim
Actually, it wasn’t a method that Giuliani pioneered; it had existed for years before hand, but merely as a theory. The approach is called Broken Windows Policing and it was first instituted in the New York subway system in the mid-80s by focusing, at first, on grafitti. Guiliani, to his credit, just ran with it, which led to the drastic crime turn-around in New York. According to the Wikipedia article, Guiliani called it a “zero tolerance” approach, but it’s definitely the same thing.
Actually, it was implemented long before Giuliani took office (cite), and it’s effectiveness is highly debated. Especially since many cities without a “zero tolerance” policy experienced similar drops in crime.
I am curious about your use of the word similar. I recall seeing many reports stating NYC had the largest drop in crime of any large city in the US. Which cites had similar drops?
The history of Times Square is fairly interesting. In the 70s, it was the epitome of urban decay, popularized in such films as Taxi Driver as a haen for prostitutes, crackheads and the like. One of the things I heard that Gulianni did was partner with Disney to bring in many of the musicals (Lion King, etc) but only if the area could be cleaned up.
Hey, I don’t know if Broken Window Theory works, but at least the neighborhood doesn’t look like such a shithole! I’m inclined to think that it does. People tend to behave in whatever manner they think they can get away with. If a building looks like no one cares if someone smashes a window, some punk will up and smash one. People who can afford to live where windows aren’t being smashed all the time will up and move.
Basically, it’s a combination of providing incentives for “evil corporations” to set up shop in new york while also making the city the kind of place the people who work for the companies would want to live.
Guilliani takes the credit because he was in charge but a lot of the credit for the lowering of crime has to go to Jack Maple. He started charting crimes in the subways on maps in his bedroom. He used the statistics to effectively combat crime. When Bratton because commisioner he brought Maple with him and they implimented COMPSTAT. It took Maple’s maps and drawings, put them on computer and made it city-wide. The commisioner could see what crimes were happening where. The precinct commanders were held accountable for the crime rate in their districts. If there was an increase in one area it was easy to see and measures could be taken. This has been widely copied throughout the country.
Jack Maple went on to help create the TV show The District but died soon after of cancer.