Jimmy Breslin was voicing this type of thinking back in the mid-1990s during his tirades against Giuliani, when he famously demanded the mayor "bring back the hookers" to Times Square.

The other thing to note about the liberals who are nostalgic for a return to that era is for most of them, actually having to live under those conditions is an option, since they have enough money to either avoid the buses and subways or have homes in the Hamptons or in California when they need a break from the "exciting" New York City lifestyle.

Most residents who don't have that option (and who can remember the days when the graffiti was so thick on the subway cars you couldn't tell if the train about to close its doors as you rushed down to the platform to get on was signed as a Sixth Avenue express or an Eighth Avenue local) aren't all that anxious to go back to the 1971-93 period. But I'm sure those in the other boroughs would have no problems if Upper West Side residents wanted to let the spray painters run wild on the ground floors of all the apartment buildings in that neighborhood while the hookers and crack dealers ply their wares down on the corner.

New York City was more exciting in those days. I remember once getting lost on my first tripto the Fillmore East and ending up on the Bowery on a hot summer night. I was literally stepping over bodies as I walked to the theater. Packs of muggers would size you up as they walked by. Drugs and hookers were common on lower Park Avenue. Abandoned cars littered the streets in what are now very trendy neighborhoods. Up and coming artists and writers liked the authenticity of it all. Now they work for the New York Times and wax nostalgic from their homes in Westchester County. Those were the days!

What I remember about those days was the fiscal crisis and the fact that living in a neighborhood heavily populated by organized crime figures worked to keep the area safe. In the depths of the Depression, my father assured me that it was perfectly safe for 10 year olds to ride the subway on their own, but in the 70s, it would have been inconceivable for him to have let me do it.

Outside of a few walking pieces of excrement like Jimmy Breslin and Fran Lebowitz, nobody is nostalgic for the Lindsay Administration. I'm reminded of Nat Hentoff's columns of the period complaining about the Jews in Forest Hills who objected to busing for racial integration, while he was sending his kid to a fancy prep school on the Upper East Side.

My hat is off. This is a devastatingly on-target analysis of the nihilism of the "artistic community."

People like Liebowitz may not like tourists, because she recognizes that she is the worst kind of one. Like the Ugly American who travels to some exotic locale expecting the natives to be living in authentic traditional poverty to provide the proper atmosphere, she expects her fellow NYC residents to be so many "cast members" of a giant amusement park who are supposed to entertain her on her frequent extended visits.

Ummm, I think Paul and you other folks are being a bit too harsh. It reminds me of the old quip that the Golden Age of science fiction is 14: perhaps the Golden Age of any big city around 25. It's understandable nostalgia. I'm sure if they'd asked people in their 70s, they'd have gotten lots of nice words for the 1950s. True, their comments make them seem blind to the problems of the time, but most things that, in retrospect, seem like exciting adventures of youth were actually far less fun at the time.

As one who lived here during that period and still lives in New York, they can keep the 1970's. I can remember during the middle 1960's when you could still walk around Times Square at nigh without getting mugged and there were restaurants on 42nd street that served real food. By the 1970's that was all gone and the area was a real dump. If you dared to go out there after midnight you stood a really good chance to get mugged. That was also the time when the subways, as a previous poster mentioned, had so much graffiti on the signage that you really did not know what subway you were getting on.

What they also forget is that the people of the Upper East Side and Upper West Side (just starting its ascendancy then) were having benefits to support these graffiti artists as being the coming thing and praising them for their talents. They even made a couple of movies about that.

What I remember is being invited to a party in the East Village and taking a cab to the address. The building where the party was being held was just about the only building on the street that was not inhabited by druggies. The guy whose apartment was the scene of the party told us about how he was sitting in his living room with the lights off and watched somebody try to saw throw the burglar bars on his windows. He also told us that when we left we had to go by cab because it was not safe any other way and he called the cabs for us. We had to be downstairs by the door because the cab drivers told him they would not wait if we were not there.

That was also the period of the start of the Minnesota Strip where the 14 year old hookers from out of town were being pimped all over the place.

These people are seriously demented if that is the kind of place they want to live in. This makes the city of Clockwork Orange look good!!

PapayaSF --

I was in my teens at the time, so I certainly have some good memories of the period. But I also remember most of the electives and extracirriculars at my high school being cut to the bone in 1975 because of the budget crisis that also slashed city services to the bone, while the jumping onto the wrong train because all the signs were covered with graffiti story in the post above really did happen to me at Columbus Circle in 1976 (I mistook a AA 8th Ave. train for the B 6th Ave. one).

I have my nostalgic moments, but I'm also a realist about that time and do remember my father lamenting how far the city had fallen since the 1940s and 1950s. The liberals who pine for life 25-30 years ago may not have had a parental figure to tell them about the city's past glory days, but some of those folks (like Breslin) were old enough then to have actually been working full-time in those conditions, as opposed to a high schooler who lived there but didn't have to deal with the consequences of working or trying to raise a family at that time. (Of course in Breslin's case, the "Son of Sam" slayings in 1977 were the highlight of his career as a columnist, even if they were slightly less rewarding for David Berkowitz' victims).

The older libs nostalgic for the 70s should know better and the younger ones should contemplate what actually having a 9-to-5 job in those kind of conditions was like and how little fun it would be for those same people if the city's condition went back to that level.

Papaya - If I agreed that "their comments make them seem blind to the problems of the time," then I would agree that I had been too harsh. But I think the passages quoted indicate that they were not blind to the problems, but that it was precisely the problems that made the time attractive to them.

There's a simple answer for the folks nostalgic for New York during its Taxi Driver/Death Wish period: move to San Francisco. Since it's never had its own Giuliani who takes the "broken windows" style of law enforcement seriously, it's still doing a pretty good impersonation of New York in the 1970s.

Paul, you've taken the crown of heterodoxy away from Orrin.

At least, when I was a Christian, it was very clear that the more abundant life started after this one was over, that the many mansions were not on West 73rd Street.

It was obfuscated, and since we Catholics were discouraged from reading Scripture, I did not realize until later that Jesus was so antifamily.

I don't believe I was ever in New York City during the '70s, but I was there in the '50s, '60s, '80s, 90s and '00s. It wasn't fit for man nor beast at least up through 1985, when I was warned by friends at the New York Times that I should be careful walking in the front door to visit them, lest I get a urine bomb on the head from the hotel across 42d Street.

By the early '90s, my daughter-in-law was riding the subways alone at night and not thinking anything of it.

It's still a rotten place to be poor.

Well, Harry, maybe if Patacki/Bloomberg would announce that while we may not have won their hearts and minds, the major operations of WWII are over and we really should get rid of rent control. AFter all, we are in the 21st century, not the mid-20th.

Harry -

Jesus said, "Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life."

What places, especially cities, are good places to be poor? What makes them good places to be poor?

Sheer idiocy. EVERYONE knows the most creative period for NYC was in the 1920's with the Harlem Renaissance.

Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, and Paul Robeson.

Versus Breslin, TWO good Scorcese movies (Taxi Driver, Mean Streets), and Warhol/Bastiat?

Gee? Pops or Breslin, Pops or Breslin?

Bunch of real estate hungry idiots nostalgiac for the time urine, feces, rats, drugs, and out of control crime kept prices low. Idiots.

Like I said, the 70's were to the Harlem Renaissance like the Love Boat was to Citizen Kane.

Sandy,

Rent control is the biggest problem. If it were eliminated, it would then make sense for land-hungry working class people to essentially homestead all across the city.

Raoul,

Pretty much any major continental European city of any size is livable for poor people. In NYC, to live halfway decently in Manhattan, you probably should have about 250K annually after taxes.

The late 60's early 70's period was also marked by anticipation for the collapse of "capitalism" among the "intellectual class". NYC was loaded with them among the media, radical union leaders and on the college staffs. Radical chic was in the air. The Democratic Party has been taken over by the true beliver, New Deal redistributionist, central planners and nowhere was the result more evident than the city. The party leadership had a deer in the headlights response to everything that went wrong. The unions were out of control. The confusion created by the Warren Court rulings regarding the treatment of criminals was having it's effect on the police and all that was left was the small scale corruption that once went hand in hand with localized and rather strict law enforcement. The deterioration of the schools followed the neighborhoods as police no longer walked their beats. The city was the laboratory for New Deal liberalism. The left is still in denial about it. The largest contributing factors to the city's renewal were the common sense approach to "quality of life" law enforcemnt of the Guiliani administrationand the fall of the Soviet Union. The town's manufacturing base is no more and Albany is as out of control ever. As long as real estate and financial services reamin strong the city should do well although the broadly diversified economic base whic once characterized the city is long gone and it will probably be more sensitive to the gyrations of the business cycle than anywhere else. There is hardly a middle class anywhere to be found. The city is modern liberalism in action. The great wealth and mobility that are the result of free enterprise and visionary leadership created in old New York are soon destroyed by political demogoguery and large scale corruption as the political class grabs the spoils.

Bart: in your dreams.

Real estate in Manhattan is over $1000/sq ft.

When we lived in Manhattan, we lived up near Columbia. We owned a 1400 sq ft 2Br Apt with full sun south and east. We sold it and we moved to ohio.

We bought a 4500 sq ft house for a few bucks less. We have put a fair amount into the house, which is in a very nice neighborhood. If we sold the house, we might get $900,000. I am not sure that we could buy back the old Apt. And it was not in this nice a neighboorhood.

My guess is that to move back to Manhattan, buy an appartment, about the same size as the old one, with the kind of ammenities we have grown to expect, like central air, in a nice neighborhood. We would have to spend more than $1.5 Mill.

Then there is the car. We did not own a car back then, living in Manahattan we would not need two, but I still would want one.

And so it goes. You cannot live in Manhattan without a weekend getaway place at the beach or in the mounatins. Cha Ching.

Bottom line: $250K is a fair estimate of the cash burn, if you have the capital to set up in the first place. If you have to borrow any thing to buy the stuff or the real estate, you cannot afford it at that income level.

Paul, I don't know anybody who has a hundred mothers. I do know a few who have a hundred houses, I guess.

Like I said, we were discouraged from reading the Scriptures, and it was made clear that the more abundant life was next time 'round.

I guess a communist would have said that we were objectively Hindoos, but us simple rednecks were not that sophisticated.

Robert,

You can get a decent, no-frills 2BR apartment for about $2500-3000/month rent on the UES or UWS. Anybody who purchases NYC real estate now who expects to make money on it in the near future is delusional. If you buy and hold, you'll make money.