The Rest Is History - 360. Fear City: New York in the 1970s

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

“A cloud of black, acrid smoke hung over the area. It was a scene from a warzone, a battlefield - it was a scene from the end of the world…” New York in the 1970s was a city decimated by economic stagnation, unemployment and ever-rising crime rates, haemorrhaging its population to the suburbs and to the more business-friendly South. Join Tom and Dominic as they look at the 1977 power blackout, the looting of New York, and life in the real Gotham City. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. ivy stevens had been looking forward to the 13th of july for weeks she and her husband had planned their big night out long in advance and as it approached it was hard not to be excited it had been a dreadfully muggy oppressive day with temperatures heading well into the 90s and manhattan's crowded streets sweltered with noise and sweat and heat. It was still dreadfully hot and humid that evening, and it was a relief, therefore, for Ivy to walk into the air-conditioned light and coolness of the World Trade Center,

its gleaming towers still only a few years old, and ride the elevator 107 floors up to Windows on the World, the elegant restaurant that looked out across the city. And of course, the evening was every bit as exceptional and memorable as she had hoped. From her table, she could see the whole of the city laid out beneath her, a patterned blanket of blinking lights beneath a darkening sky. It was amazing, she said later. We were looking out at the most spectacular view in the world, New York at night, when suddenly it disappeared. Now that, Dominic Sandbrook,

was written by a top historian of 1970s America in his magnum opus, Mad as Hell. And that author, I think, was commissioned to write 140,000 words, and he ended up writing 500,000 words. So hundreds of thousands of words had to be cut. Shaming. And that author, Dominic, was yourself. But these chapters on 70s America that had to be cut are all so good. So never let anything go to waste, Dominic. Listeners may remember the two episodes we did on The Fall of Saigon,

which we kind of cannibalized um chapters that you'd had to cut and today we are doing the same with a chapter on new york in the 70s yeah and we're doing that because um we're recording um this episode as part of the tour that we're doing of the united states um we did a show in Washington. And as part of that, we did an episode on Martin Luther King's great speech, I Have a Dream, which was the previous episode that went out. And now we've come to New York. We're in Central Park. And we are recording an episode that kind of begins with a blackout, the great blackout on the 13th of july 1977 yeah um so this is what um ivy stevens is looking from exactly the world trades the top of the world trade center she's

watching the lights across manhattan go out the city vanishes tom the city vanishes yes hello everybody we are in central park which is looking particularly fine today i have to say so if you hear a bit of noise in the background, that's what that is. Central Park, of course, today, Tom, a more salubrious place, I think it's fair to say, than it would have been if we'd been there in the summer of 1977, as we will see. And the blackout itself, which will be familiar to some American listeners, but probably not so familiar to those outside america and maybe even outside the city the story of the blackout itself we'll start with that and then we will widen it out to talk about

crime and the politics of new york in the 70s which is a fascinating story so the the blackout happens for various complicated reasons you want to go into them sure the technical reasons explain it in detail when people when people listen to the rest is history then they listen to it mainly for my knowledge of electricity generation techniques. The rest is industrial technology, is what we're all about. So New York and cities like it occasionally did suffer blackouts and brownouts, as they were called, in the 60s and 70s. And this one happens basically when lightning strikes an electricity substation on the Hudson River. So in that bit of purple prose that you read out there

about Ivy Stevens and her evening out, I mentioned how humid it is. I mean, anyone who's been to New York in midsummer knows it can be suffocatingly stifling and kind of, you know, thunderstorms in the air, which is exactly what happened this night in July 1977. So lightning strikes this substation, and there's a particular company

that provided the electricity to New York, Con Ed, Consolidated Edison. And it had a systems operator on the day called William Durith. He basically is in charge of blacking out individual bits of the city to reduce demand on the other power lines so the power lines won't burn out. Yeah. And he's slow to do it. Because reading your account it actually reminded me of chernobyl so you know you always think things could always be worse yeah so he's in the control room and it's all going wrong and he's paralyzed because it

happens within a very short space of time he has very bad luck because he's fiddling with the lines and then lightning strikes again and knocks out another line. Now, what that means is that the remaining lines are carrying more load than they can bear, and they start to burn out. Unless you reduce the demand, then more lines will burn out. And that, of course, piles more pressure on the lines that are remaining. And you're into a situation where they'll all burn out. God, this is so impressive. This is absolutely very detailed knowledge, Tom.

The power pool dispatcher of New York State, a man called William Kennedy, he rings Dureth and he says to him, you've got to start shutting bits of the city down because otherwise the whole thing is going to blow. The minutes tick by, one line after another goes down. Eventually, there are only two lines into the city left carrying electricity. They're from Long Island and from New Jersey. And he is given the direct order,

you have to basically shut this down now. And he's again slow to react. All lines out of the city, or into the city rather, end up burning out. So the city is reliant just on its own generators. And at 9.27, I think it is, the whole system collapses. The whole system grinds to a halt.

And all five boroughs of New York City. Yeah. In that instant, every light in the city flickered off. All five boroughs quite suddenly lost power. Subway trains wheezed to a halt. Elevators, air conditioners, televisions, refrigerators, everything stopped. Yeah. So very dramatic and like a movie.

Because the thing about New York is that almost everything that happens in New York is like a movie and new york is the great home of the disaster movie and this is the disaster movie to end all disaster movies tom so the only lights that are left are the aircraft beacons on top of the city bank building and the world trade center and the flame and the torch of the statue of liberty so everything else has gone completely pitch black. And the thing is, this is not unprecedented. So it had happened before in 1965, when 25 million people in New York, New Jersey, and New England had been left for hours without electricity. And in parts of New York, again in 1977, it's fine. So Ivy Stevens, I mean, she tells her story to the newspapers. She's just somebody

who's interviewed. And she'd gone out to the restaurant and actually it's lovely. It's all very civilized. You know, it's all very civilized. People bring champagne.

They have a lovely time at the Metropolitan Opera. The harpist strikes up dancing in the dark. Yeah. On the Upper East Side of the restaurants, they move all the tables

out into the streets. It's too hot to be inside. No air conditioning. And they illuminate them with car headlights. people improvise and it's very fun and memorable and so this is the new york of uh annie hall of a woody allen comedy yeah um it's you know the civilized city exactly but new york in the 1970s is increasingly becoming a byword for urban dystopias exactly exactly and so what happens elsewhere when everything goes so the extraordinary thing is that within moments of the blackout happening the looting and the fighting starts so in alphabet city for example down towards the

bottom of the island of manhattan people almost immediately start ransacking the shops smashing the windows grabbing stuff on the upper west side there are stories that store after store is pillaged 61 shops between 63rd street and 110th street alone on broadway just south of columbia university there are stories about people driving up to hi-fi shops with their trucks. They attach a hook to the grill, to the kind of gate, and then they drive away, rip the gate off, and then it's open season, everyone gets in and helps themselves. Well, you've got a very, I mean, a particularly poignant episode on Amsterdam Avenue.

A crowd break into a clothing store and just kind of make off with everything. And there's this middle-aged black woman outside pouring feebly at the looters with a broomstick. No, don't do it, please. They worked so hard. Don't, don't. Yeah. So they're actually quite tragic.

Quite tragic scenes. People, you know, some of these are family businesses who are effectively on the verge of losing everything when people start looting. So Manhattan is bad. It's bad in Manhattan, but it's worse.

In the Bronx. So in the Bronx, 473 shops attacked. 961 looters are arrested. There's an Ace Pontiac car showroom and 200 people force their way into the showroom. Because of drive-off.

And they just drive off with the cars. They drive off with 50 cars. One by one. In sort of single file, through the glass, out into the street. Brooklyn, even worse than the Bronx, 700 stores in Brooklyn were gutted, looted, burned, 1,000 people arrested.

And there's one neighborhood in particular that becomes synonymous with the blackout of 1977. It's called Bushwick. So Bushwick is off in northeastern Brooklyn. And by this point, it is predominantly black and Puerto Rican. And we'll talk a little bit later in the podcast about these neighborhoods where the demography had changed massively in the 1960s and 1970s. So Bushwick already in the 70s had a reputation for very high levels of people

on welfare, very high levels of violence and vandalism. It's basically not a place where tourists go Tom. So it's the kind of the reaches of Gotham city that Batman would be clearing up. The Batman will be clearing up or Batman might be slightly out of his depth. Really? Okay. Okay. That bad. So in Bushwick, I mean, we don't need to go through all the sort of stats and stuff, but all the descriptions of it are that in the center of the neighborhood, gangs are moving through within moments.

It's as though they've been prepared, they've been ready, which of course they weren't, but people start moving through, looting shop after shop. They use trucks, they load furniture, hi-fis, televisions, all of these things. I mean, the thing is that I remember living through the London riots in 2011 when basically, I mean, it was a kind of a frenzy of looting and people just kind of got caught up on it. It all seemed, everybody was just piling in. And this is what happens, basically. It is what happens.

So it's, I mean, here's one quote. People were grabbing shirts, pairs of pants, anything, running around and laughing. It was that they were suddenly free. So that's a radio reporter who's up in Harlem. This is a cop. A cop says, the looters swept through here like locusts. I've seen looting before, but this was total devastation.

Smashing, burning as if people had gone crazy. They were like bluefish in a feeding frenzy. And it's not just, you know, the urban poor, is it? It's kind of affluent shoppers in midtown in Manhattan. Right. Kind of breaking in, grabbing pants. I mean, you've got the story of a woman who's spotted stuffing a bag of ice

into her very expensive designer handbag. Her Louis Vuitton handbag, Tom. She's stuffing a bag of ice into it. And the manager or somebody sees, another customer sees her and says, I'll call the manager. And she drops it and flees. But you think, what the hell?

If she's got enough for a Louis Vuitton handbag. I mean, this is very much a kind of Gotham City theme, isn't it? Oh, yeah. Of the crowds going wild. Yeah. It's that fear that underpins so many stories about New York, actually. The Batman story about batman as the

vigilante bringing order to this city that is permanently on the brink of right and that has kind of currency because the nypd new york police are overstretched and deeply mistrusted yes and kind of ravaged with corruption yeah and so they also are not in a good state. They're in a terrible state. And we'll get onto this in the second half, just why the NYPD are in such a terrible state in the 70s. But to go back to Bushwick, this place, which is the absolute epitome, the embodiment,

the symbol, the avatar of the lawlessness of that evening in the summer of 1977. The looting doesn't die down in Bushwick until just round about dawn. And when the sun rises, it reveals this neighbourhood that has been, it's basically been gutted. It's as though the people of the neighbourhood

have sacked their own city. Well, can I read from your book, Dominic? Please do, Tom. Do you think the listeners would like to hear more of your prose? They probably wouldn't, but I'm sure you're going to do it anyway. Okay, I'm going to read it.

So along Broadway, this is in Bushwick, no fewer than 34 stores had been looted. 45 had also been set on fire. Most of Bushwick's buildings were made of timber and asphalt, a devastatingly flammable mixture. At one point, two entire blocks had been ablaze. When fire crews had reached the scene, they had been bombarded with rocks and sticks by jeering looters,

and the police had even resorted to using a water cannon to protect the firemen. Now, in the cold light of morning 20 fires still burned and a cloud of black acrid smoke hung over the area it was a scene from a war zone a battlefield it was a scene from the end of the world yeah the potency of that scene from the point of view of those you know in the broader world is again that this is new york right exactly there's a a line by a guy i think he's from the miami chamber of commerce i was going to come up with it a bit later in the podcast but it's appropriate now he said um we knew exactly what to expect from new york and they didn't let us down uh which i think is a very sort of telling moment so to cut

to the chase more than almost 2 000 stores were looted there were a thousand fires across the city roughly 4 000 people arrested and that is merely a fraction of the numbers that could have been arrested the police at one point tom are told to stop arresting people because they can't fit them into the cells and they're also told the time you're taking arresting people is time where you could have been on the streets. So they just beat looters up. So they just say, go and crack heads. Yeah.

Go and crack heads to try and stop it. So the costs are in the hundreds and hundreds of millions. And when does the power cut finish? So the power comes on towards the end of the following day. Right. So the 14th. So there's only one night. So it's one night and the best part of one day.

Yeah. And intense heat. Anyone who's been to New York in the summer, imagine what it's like with no air conditioning, no fans, just stifling, stifling heat. And of course, for the press at the time, they see this as a symbol of all that's gone wrong with New York, which we'll get into.

And there's one paper in particular, which we should talk about, which is the New York Post, whose headline is 24 hours of terror. It's a banner headline. why the new york post because the new york post just a few months earlier had been taken over it'd be founded by logan roy by logan roy exactly so the new york post a newspaper founded by hip-hop star alexander hamilton had been taken over by rupert murdoch so logan roy is the fictional incarnation of rupert

murdoch right in uh succession the tv drama british listeners will know rupert Murdoch. So Logan Roy is the fictional incarnation of Rupert Murdoch in Succession, the TV drama. Our British listeners will know Rupert Murdoch very well, as of course our American listeners will too. At the time,

British newspaper readers would have known his name because he was the owner of The Sun. He's Australian, isn't he? He's Australian, the most aggressive tabloid, the most popular tabloid

that someone should. That year, 1976, at the time when he took over The Post, had just overtaken the Mirror to become the biggest selling newspaper in Britain. Now, at the time, people said Murdoch will never hack it in America. He won't be a success. We won't like his formula. And they were, of course, completely wrong. So the Post, which was a kind of working class democratic newspaper, he said, we need to beef this up. What our readers want, they want a lot of stuff about crime they want scandals they don't have the the page three topless they don't have

topless girls in america which is a notorious thing that the sun has which yeah the sun had in britain everybody attacks murdoch and says he's a carpetbagger who cares about australians he brings in loads of british and australian journalists to run the new york post which is very controversial among American journalists. Because the London newspaper scene is actually much more competitive than the New York scene. Much more competitive. And frankly, Tom, much more exciting.

You know, because it's more cutthroat, you get better papers. And to Murdoch, the New York scene is very staid. And so he and the Post seize on the blackout, and they run story after story, front page after front page. And it sells kind of massively. They sold tens of thousands of extra copies

based on their coverage of the blackout, of the looting. So Rupert Murdoch is, I mean, he's very conservative. He's very much on the right. Yes. So is he going in with a kind of law and order, string them up kind of approach? Absolutely, Absolutely. So the New York Post's attitude is the word that recurs again and again,

which will make, I should imagine, many of our listeners shudder, is animals. They say again and again, the looters are animals, the looters are scum, the looters are the lowest of the low, all of this kind of thing. Now, that's a very common refrain on the right in America in the 70s. Are the left saying it's poverty? They are indeed. Deprivation. So to give you an example, somebody who's appeared on that podcast before,

Ronald Reagan, Tom. Well, he, yes. He blames the 60s. He says this is the legacy of the 60s. Hippies. All the conservative papers, the conservative columns are full of all this stuff. Human animals, the lowest of the low, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The liberal papers, including the most famous New York paper of all,

the New York Times, are shocked by this. This is racist. You can't call people animals. And actually, the cause is unemployment. So Jimmy Carter, who was president in 1977, he does not condemn. He does not say this is all because of criminality he says it's because of unemployment it's a protest against unemployment that is the most common refrain among liberals now the new york times runs editorial after editorial on precisely these lines and gets an absolute

torrent of letters from readers who are appalled so i'll just read you um a couple of letters so this is from a fellow in Long Island. He says, your editorial was overloaded with a type of decrepit cliches, still believed only by sentimentalists, professional liberals, and your editorial board. The scars were inflicted by publicly funded demagogues who pander to our permanently established rabble. It's bad form to tell these parasites that looting, vandalism, arson, other violent crimes are no-nos. It's bad form to tell these parasites that looting, vandalism, arson, other violent crimes are no-nos. It's so much more profound, so much more chic to blather on about the debts which our society owes to its destroyers. It's a very strong, pungent stuff,

Tom. Pungent, yes. Pungent stuff. A man from Manhattan, Hendrik Root, I can't remember how to pronounce his name, Hendrik Root. Rootenbeek. Hendrik Rootenbeek. Maybe came over with the Dutch. With the Dutch, yeah. A Dutch holdout from New Amsterdam. He says, the warning should have gone out that every looter should be shot on the spot. The Puerto Ricans can go back to Puerto Rico. They belong there anyway. And if the blacks don't shape up, they can go back to the South. Now, these are shocking sentiments to us and to many of our listeners, I imagine.

But at the time, they are shocking sentiments to us and to many of our listeners, I imagine, but at the time they are absolutely widespread. There was this sort of, you know, America is in the grip of a kind of backlash, I guess, against what's seen of the excesses of the 60s. So Reagan's election is three years away and you can see the outline of the, well, tough on crime basically, not so much tough on the causes of crime. Absolutely. So Reagan, who's already been going around campaigning against welfare queens, as he calls them.

We talked about this in our Reagan podcast. So Reagan, who... Well, I mean, shocking stuff from Patrick Buchanan. Oh, Patrick Buchanan, he writes. I mean, much further to the right than Reagan, right? Yeah. If hunger was in the back of it all, how come some of the welfare mamas

filmed ripping off jewelry, clothing, and liquor stores lumbered about like overfed heifers who could use six months on a liquid protein diet yeah i mean that is pungent stuff that is yes um but he's i mean he's a quite a serious political figure isn't he well he had been he worked for nixon and then become a columnist at the new york post rival the daily news i think it was but um dominic one i mean one thing about this perhaps a point of intersection between the left and the right, between liberals and critics of the permissive society, is that a lot of the looting, you know, rather as that woman who I mentioned saying, you know, please don't do it, please don't do these stores are black owned. So in somewhere like Bushwick, those stores are owned by sort of black families, often a husband and wife operation,

kind of family businesses, and, you know, a lot of those people are ruined. They're not covered by insurance. If you don't have insurance, you're in real trouble. And actually one of these sort of great historic African-American papers in New York, the Amsterdam News, ran a front page editorial that was either reprinted or quote or extensively quoted by every

other newspaper in the city this is a newspaper by african-americans for african-americans and they had no time for the unemployment excuse we'll come on to the levels of unemployment in the second half they said it would be self-destructive and suicidal for us even to imply that we accept joblessness as a reason justifying looting. The looting was criminal, outrageous, and damnable. We cannot accept this behavior of our young people. We love them too much. We love our communities too much. We love those striving black businessmen and businesswomen too much. It has taken us too long to get where we are to accept such destructive behavior. What comes across from all this, whether it's on the left or the right,

black or white, whatever, is basically a kind of feeling of impotence and paralysis, a sense of a crisis that is so enormous that people don't really have solutions that they're kind of falling back on their gut political instincts their gut prejudices to explain this but the scale of the crisis is is really too great for any explanation and again just to reiterate because new york is what it is you know it is the the representative city of america which is the city that people imagine when they think of urban america therefore it is amplified globally in a way that it wouldn't be even in i don't know la or chicago i mean which i think that's right tom but i think something else on top of that which is that cities have riots i mean any city has the potential for a riot or for

disorder these things happen they happen after you know how often do they happen after football matches or we talked about the 2011 riots in london exactly but the 1977 business feels different even to people at the time because it resonates because it expresses a kind of deeper truth about 70s New York, which is what we're going to get into. This sense that this wonderful urban project has turned into a living nightmare, that the city is a cesspit of crime, of corruption, which you see in so many Hollywood films in the 70s.

And that, I think, is a fascinating story. And that's what we'll get into. Should we do that after the break, Tom? Let's do that. Okay, very good. We'll take a break now, and we will return in the cesspit of crime and corruption of 70s New York. Fun times.

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Hello welcome back to The Rest Is History and we are looking at New York in the 70s. Because I remember I was growing up in the 70s. You're not in New York, Tom, you're growing up in Wiltshire. I was growing up in Wiltshire, exactly, I was. Very much a place without drive-by shootings and graffiti and all that kind of thing. And my sense of New York was absolutely that it was the most terrifying place on earth. If I went there, I would probably get shot. So my association in New York was a terrifying place.

It wasn't home of glamour. It wasn't the place that you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. It wasn't kind of Mad Men or anything like that. It was, I will get shot if I go there. I was kind of eight. I was going to tease you and say this is penetrating analysis. But actually, it's true. That's what people did think in the 70s.

So it's kind of gut instinct. And had you been born 20 years earlier, you wouldn't have thought that. No. Because New York in the 50s and 60s was perceived abroad and in America as the epitome of everything that was most glamorous, most dazzling about American life. It's Don Draper in Mad Men. It's people drinking martinis.

It's breakfast at Tiffany's. Audrey Hepburn. If you've ever seen, lots of our listeners would have seen North by Northwest. You know, Cary Grant.

The cool of the city. The stylish lines of the buildings. Sharp suits. Sharp suits. Great dresses. Exactly. And that begins to change,

I would say, towards the end of the 60s. So at the beginning of 1966, New York gets a new mayor who's called John Vliet Lindsay. He is the person for whom the phrase, which some of our Americanists will be familiar with, limousine liberal, was applied to. And he is the absolute personification of kind of patrician, old money, the old elite, if you like. An elite that you can sort of trace back to the novels of henry james needed thwarton kind of gilded age new york so lindsey went to a boarding school americans don't often talk about this but a large part of their elite go to boarding schools so um lindsey went to a boarding school and he went to yale he's a very jfk-ish figure he's uh young handsome sporty civilized and in this symbolic moment on the day he takes office, there's a transport strike and he has to walk to work. And that sets the tone for the whole of his

administration. So there's constant strikes, money problems, rising crime. And actually, the issue is that something has gone badly wrong for New york as it has for so many american cities in the 60s and actually that anticipates what's going to happen to lots of cities elsewhere in the western world right so with your marxist hat on yeah um thanks what is happening is the expression of very very deep-seated economic revulsions and changes so what are they so the flight of manufacturing new york had been a great manufacturing city. The garment district in New York is the great symbol of that. People making all these clothes. Well,

that's been outsourced and as all has been, you know, it's happening abroad. Suburbanization, white middle-class people in particular are moving out to the suburbs, but also there's a big shift in America generally from what's called the rust belt. So those are the old industrial.

Detroit is the kind of classic detroit pittsburgh cleveland cincinnati great cities great cities that have been the powerhouse of america but in the 70s the booming cities are dallas phoenix because they've suddenly got air conditioning because they've got air conditioning exactly i mean it seems like such a banal thing but air conditioning is one of the great transformative moments in American demographic history. Because now you can go and establish factories in the South and Southwest,

where, by the way, they have quite restrictive anti-union laws. So for an employer, it actually makes sense. But also, isn't there also a sense that you can build factories and things from scratch there? Yes. Whereas in a city like New York, the infrastructure will often be quite antiquated. Exactly, yes.

Crumbling, crumbling infrastructure. Crumbling infrastructure, yes. So, lots of particularly sort of more affluent, more educated white families moving out of New York and lots of new people moving in. I mean, this is nothing new. The whole thing about New York, the Statue of Liberty, huddled masses,

is that waves and waves of immigration come in and the city gives them jobs. But is it the case in the 70s that for the first time, there aren't the jobs available? There are two things. One, there is a class of people that had always been there in New York,

who are now leaving, who are the more affluent people. Or someone like Brooklyn, or the Bronx even, white, working class, kind of inverted commas, and I know it's a heavy loaded word, sort of respectable working class families, they are moving out to the suburbs. And the people who are moving...

To New Jersey. Yeah, exactly, to purpose-built estates and things. Whereas the people who are moving in, there are lots of migrants from the Caribbean, from Central America, from Puerto Rico, or African-Americans from the South. Now, in the past, as you said, loads of such people arrived in New York City,

but there were jobs. But actually now, there are not jobs. The economic obstacles to the newcomers are much greater than ever before. So in the month of the blackout july 1977 seven out of ten african-americans in new york are out of work and eight out of ten of the hispanic population so massive massive unemployment rates now as a result of that you get into a vicious spiral and tom i warn you there's going to be a tiny tiny bit of economics oh goodness so we've

had industry yeah we've got economics well we've had the analysis of electricity generation yeah and now of tax bases because of course when you've got high unemployment you've got fewer people paying a lot of tax but you also have much bigger welfare roles yeah so what you have is that new york is making less money but it's liabilities. But having to spend more. And having to spend more. And that's not just New York. So Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, some of those cities we mentioned. Well, Detroit, I mean, is basically collapsing. Well, it's not yet collapsing, but it's approaching the brink of it.

So they're running up tens and tens of millions of debts. But nowhere is it worse than New York. So the merity of that guy that I mentioned, John Lindsay, ends up in a complete sort of disaster as he runs into financial problems. The city is losing hundreds of thousands of jobs every year. The deficit is getting bigger and bigger. So 1974, when Lindsay gives way to a new mayor, already the city has this reputation as a financial basket case i mean this is the new york times itself tom talking about its own city in 1974 new york city has become a metaphor for what looks like the last days of american civilization it's run by fools its citizens at the mercy of its criminals who often as not are protected by an unholy alliance of civil libertarians and crooked cops. The air is foul.

The traffic is impossible. Services are diminishing, and the morale is such that ordering a cup of coffee in a diner can turn into a request for a fat lip. New York City is a mess, and it's getting worse all the time. So great stuff for the New York tourist board. Yeah, it's a great advert for the city. January 74, a new mayor comes in,

and he is basically a symbol of New York. He's a guy, he's very short. He's called abraham beam and uh he is the son of jewish immigrants from poland classic kind of people you'd get they're moving to the lower east side where so many eastern european jewish immigrants did he was born in 1906 like so many bright jewish poor boys he benefited from free education at the city College of New York. And then he became a democratic kind of machine politician. Was the financial controller.

So he's meant to be the person with the figures. He becomes the mayor. When he comes in, the city is facing a complete financial meltdown. So he is basically having to borrow money at rates of 10%, interest rates of 10% just to pay the city's workers.

Which presumably include cops, firemen, and people who collect the litter. All of those things. But people weren't lending the money. By the spring of 1975, he's basically staring into the abyss. He gets a loan from the state, New York State, but that even won't cover his own payroll.

So he has to go to the federal government ronald reagan tom your mate who you impersonate so well ronald reagan said uh new york can just save itself he said new york must prove that it can handle its handle itself we shouldn't lend them any money but ronald reagan's rival gerald ford is president he obviously can't really allow the city to sink. But there is a famous headline, isn't there? There is. In the New York Post. Ford to city, drop dead, was the headline. Because they've asked him for a loan. They asked him for a bailout and he said no initially. Actually, that's a bit unfair on Ford. Ford does change his mind. He gives them a $2 billion loan guarantee bailout

because if he didn't, the city would have collapsed. So the point where he does it, Abraham Beam, the mayor has just fired 63,000 people, including 10,000 teachers, 4,000 hospital staff, and thousands upon thousands of police and firemen. And this is an absolutely extraordinary story. So he fires all these people. He has to fire them. Thousands of people walk out. And the police, in particular, the police union, go absolutely ballistic.

So if you'd flown in, Tom, on holiday for a wheelchair, they would have given you at the airport, the members of the union would have greeted you with a leaflet that said, welcome to Fear City, and would have told you, don't use the subway, or don't leave your hotel after dark.

You see, my father, I mean, basically he didn't like going to Salisbury. So there was no prospect of us going on holiday to New York. Well, to Fear City. Also, there are kind of millions of very fat rats scurrying everywhere on there. Yeah, that's right. So you're the winter discontent in Britain.

Yeah, it's nothing. It's pitiful. This is like years of the winter of discontent. But with police handing out these leaflets saying you're going to be shot. I mean, at one point um police policemen who've been sacked block brooklyn bridge and then they put up barricades on brooklyn bridge and then throw beer bottles at people's cars it's absolutely i mean it really is like a batman film or. But Dominic, just to reiterate, I mean, the impact of this is in part because America and the world has a sense of New York.

What happens in New York is always kind of extreme. It is, you know, the ultimate global city and basically has been throughout the 20th century. I love New York. I don't want to sound like we're reveling in this sort of dystopian nightmare because I actually love new york yeah of course but you can love new york and revel in in dystopia i mean that's kind of the whole point that you know you have awful things happening in new york and somehow it's material for a movie yeah of course it's material

for a movie so i mean we'll get into the films in just a second just on the last word on the nypd by the way the nypd i mean tony our producer who's listening to this is just in disbelief at some of these stories but the nypd had an appalling reputation in the 70s so there'd been a very famous story about this guy called frank serpico some people may have seen the film al Pacino serpico had been the first officer to speak out publicly about corruption, for which his colleagues had shot him in the face and then set him up and sort of framed him during a drugs raid. And he had testified and the story ended happily and he ended up being played by Al Pacino.

But basically, there's a big investigation called the Knapp Commission into corruption in New York City. And they find out that basically lots of officers have been taking bribes from drug dealers from pornography merchants they've been selling um heroin and cocaine they have been but they betray their own informants to the mob one thing they haven't been doing really is solving crime so you give the amazing stats between 1966 and 1973 the murder rate in new york went up 173% and rape by 112%. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, New York becomes... This is a problem, by the way, not just in America. It's a problem in lots of cities across the Western world. I don't want to sound like we're beating up on either New York or America. But New York does become the embodiment of this problem. Because then New York recovers. So the depth of the decline is what then sets up the of course the recovery in the 1990s and after and there are two elements by the

way let's go back to the blackout for a second in that summer july 1977 that captured public attention so the first is the problem of gangs of young people's gangs so just a few days before the blackout time magazine had run a cover story on what it called the youth crime plague. Most extraordinary claim. People have always accused kids of getting away with murder. Now that's all too literally true. Across the US, a pattern of crime has emerged

that's both perplexing and appalling. Many youngsters appear to be robbing and raping, maiming and murdering as casually as they go to a movie or go to a baseball game i mean this is kind of standard moral panic isn't it i mean oh there is a moral panic absolutely we had it with mods and rockers in britain yeah but this is on a different league so tom do you remember i i went to a summer camp when i was a boy and um in america no in england and they're sort of the teenage volunteers who meant to be looking after us

who are about nine, decided that the appropriate film to put on was a film directed by Walter Hill released in 1979 called The Warriors. Have you ever seen that? I remember The Warriors.

Yeah, it's based on Xenophon. About the March of the 10,000. The March of the 10,000. So a Greek army of mercenaries who get stranded in the middle of Iraq and have to get back to the... Back to Greece.

Back to the sea. And they have to sort of march their way fighting. Yeah. So this is what happens in the film. iraq yeah and have to get back to the back to greece back to the back to the sea and they have to sort of march their way fighting and yeah so this is what happens in the film there's even a character called cyrus yes so either the gang is called cyrus yes and he says let's all the gangs join together and take over the city and one gang gets stranded or something have to fight their way out of new york i think i mean it was absolutely terrifying when i saw it was i was eight and i think it's a 18 certificate. But anyway, so there's a massive moral panic about gangs and about youth crime. But I mean, obviously, the scale of that is not accurate. I mean, they're hyping that up.

These are the armies of the night. They are 100,000 strong. They outnumber the cops five to one. They could run New York City. That's the tagline of the posters. No, but there were 20,000 gang members in New York City. That's the tagline of the posters. No, but there were 20,000 gang members in New York City. So a lot. Yeah. The other thing that's a big panic is, now some of our listeners will have been waiting for this because they'll remember it.

Son of Sam, the serial killer. So the disco killer, as he's called. He killed six people in Queens and in the Bronx between the summer of 1976 and the summer of 1977. And he is basically the kind of, the love child of Jack the Ripper and the Joker of 1977. And he is basically the kind of, the love child of Jack the Ripper and the Joker. Right. Golly.

Just as Jack the Ripper sent a letter to the police. Yeah. So Son of Sam sends a letter to the Daily News columnist, Jimmy Breslin. He does. Hello from the gutters of NYC, which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood.

So more excellent copy for the New York tourist board. Hello from the seters of NYC, which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood. So more excellent copy for the New York tourist board. Hello from the sewers of NYC, which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks. Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of NYC and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed on the dried blood of the dead that has settled into these cracks. So great stuff. I mean, you said about york being like a film set i mean the son of sam stuff feels like a batman movie a really dark batman movie yeah i mean he kills six people and presumably is an influence then on oh and subsequent kind of

dystopian undoubtedly because batman in the 60s is adam west it's all you know it's a joke it's kind of yeah very funny but then subsequently batman has become a much darker figure right and presumably that is kind of drawing on the legacy of this age oh undoubtedly so the um yurkin phoenix portrayal of the joker i mean it sounds very son of sam yeah the hacking phoenix um or the heath ledger joker actually yes in the christopher nolan films exactly because son of sam who's actually a person he's a loner classic serial killer guy called david berkowitz he's constantly sending letters to jimmy brislin to this columnist i am the monster i love to hunt i'll be back i will haunt you all this sort of thing so you might well say well why just before we get into the

more about the films why is crime out of control? There's one very banal reason. Well, if they've sacked all the police. Well, they've sacked all the police. That's not helpful, is it? But crucially, they've opened the floodgate. They've opened the gates of New York's psychiatric hospitals. Again, very Batman.

Yeah, Arkham Asylum. So in a series of decisions, partly there's been pressure for years for community care, community mental health, don't institutionalize people um the supreme court had ruled in 1975 that people who are mentally ill can't be detained unless they are definitely a threat to other people so across america hundreds of thousands of people who previously have been in hospitals i mean it also helps if you want to make cuts by the way the budgetary reasons

so they have basically been decanted onto the streets many of those people are now homeless roaming the streets in manhattan and elsewhere those scenes that many of us who've been to new york particularly went to new york in the bad old days will recall of people pushing their possessions in kind of shopping trolleys or dragging them behind them. I mean, these people are often former psychiatric patients who have basically been abandoned by the system, thrown out onto the streets. So there are some estimates that in the early 1980s, about between a third and a half of the city's homeless population

were previously people who'd been having treatment, who were basically thrown out onto the streets. So there's this sort of sense, and you take that that the lack of jobs this the degradation of the urban environment because of the financial problems there is this the lack of human resources the lack of police of exactly sanitation workers of firefighters then there's drug addiction and then there's also the fact the city's environment itself has been radically reshaped by planners are planners like the most famous guy, a guy called Robert Moses. Robert Caro wrote this fantastic book called The Power Broker about how you reshape New York with expressways, cutting through what had once been settled, kind of contented working class neighborhoods,

you know, buildings, entire streets, entire blocks ripped out to make way for these kind of under passes and over passes and things so there's a sense that the city has lost its self-belief it's it's lost its sheen lost its soul yeah lost its soul all the glitter and glamour i mean there's a very famous moment that epitomizes this in the bronx so the south bronx have been eviscerated by the cross bronx Expressway this disastrous project that ripped through neighbourhoods and is that the

expressway that in Bonfire of Vanities oh yeah it might be actually the Tom Wolfe novel where the yuppie accidentally

goes off the wrong I think you might be right actually Tom I mean you're right because Bonfire of the Vanities the Tom Wolfe book is written I suppose you would say

at the very end of this period in the 1980s the masters of the universeities, the whole Tom Wolfe book, is written, I suppose you would say, at the very end of this period, in the mid-1980s. Yes, so it's the masters of the universe have returned to Wall Street. Right. But there's still that kind of dread of what happened. Well, I suppose it kind of haves and have-nots by that point. Exactly.

But the Bronx is also home to Yankee Stadium. And in the World Series in October 1977, so we're talking just a couple of months after the blackout, the Yankees are playing the Los Angeles Dodgers. And while the game is on tv there's a building behind the stadium that has caught fire and the the announcer this guy howard cosell who was one of the most famous american sports commentators says there it is ladies and gentlemen the bronx is burning and those words kind of the bronx is burning became this kind of catchphrase this metaphor for the immolation of the kind of the bronx is burning became this kind of catchphrase this metaphor for the immolation of the kind of east coast urban dream and that of course is the background tom for all those films

so we said we'd talk about films we could spend the rest of the podcast just listing them saturday night fever saturday night fever they embrace disco because they want to escape the reality of a decaying decrepit brook And it's a pretty depressing film. Very depressing film. Not as depressing as Dog Day Afternoon or Death Wish. Death Wish is a very dark film. Or the most famous one, which lots of our listeners will be familiar with, is Taxi Driver. So amazingly, given what we're saying about Son of Sam,

Taxi Driver comes first. So Taxi Driver. So that's the still fecund Robert De Niro. Yes. I didn't think you'd be going there, Tom, but you did. He's about 120 now, isn't he? He is. But he's still fathering those children.

He is. So he plays in that film, 75. He plays Travis Bickle. He's a Vietnam veteran traumatized by the war, drives a yellow cab in New York City. He is deeply disturbed. He is disturbed by the seediness, the sleaze, the crime. I mean, he famously says the city is an open sewer full of filth and scum. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the

streets. Yeah. And he becomes a hero. I mean, that's the irony of the film. This very damaged, disturbed man becomes a crime-fighting hero at the end of the film. He's lauded by the city for having, in a very bloody fashion, cleaned the scum off the streets, as it were. And he's a sort of a sick hero for a sick city, I think that's the... A sick hero for a sick city.

Yeah. You should be writing movie strap lines. I'm wasted on history. So, of course, the other thing that all those films are are the background for the blackout so when the blackout happens that quote it was i i anticipated in the first half from the miami chamber of commerce of course miami is one of those cities that has prospered while new york has decayed it's just about what you would expect from new york most of us expected the worst they didn't let us down joe biden tom yeah joe biden said new york is seen as the seed of corruption and duplicity you know all this i mean people don't feel sorry for new york that's the astonishing thing there's

a line in annie hall where uh where woody allen says everybody thinks we're communist left-wing draft dodging pornographers yeah and he said nice says that and i live here and um and i think that's, you know, that terrible, terrible image. But New Yorkers take a pride in it,

don't they? I mean, there's a kind of sense that, you know, we're the meanest of the mean, we're the baddest of the bad to a degree. I think after July 1977.

Well, because the city then does stage a miraculous recovery. It's not instant. No, but by the late 80s, you know, Manhattan again is a byword for wealth and glamour and sophistication. It's not instant. No, but by the late 80s, you know, Manhattan again is a byword for wealth

and glamour and sophistication. It does. And actually, that's another story in and of itself, which we don't have time to get into. But we could maybe do it sometime.

Which we can maybe do it sometime. Yeah, how the city turns it around, all the controversies about policing in the 1990s. What was the film in which New York becomes a prison

and the president kind of crashes into it or something? Escape from New York. Escape from New York. With Kurt Russell. Yeah. Plays a character called Snake Plissken. Let's watch that again.

So two notes on which to end. First of all, two consequences that both happened here in New York, Tom, where we are today, but both had wider national consequences. So the first comes just a few months after the blackout. So there's going to be a mayoral election. And Abraham Beam, this guy we described, Lower East Side, Jewish immigrants, the sort of soul of the old-fashioned

social democratic New York, I suppose, he is dumped by the Democrats and replaced with a guy who's the future. He's a guy called Ed Koch. And Ed Koch had had been i thought it was ed koch ed koch but you can call him that if you like i think it's i believe it's ed koch ed koch okay i mean wisely a wise choice from ed koch if you want a political career i think anyway he um he had been a loyal liberal democrat and now he says i'm a liberal but with sanity meaning tough

on crime tough on the causes of crime exactly so he runs in 1977 as a populist and he says you know he's kind of abrasive and he's tough talk he says i'll i'll crack down on the unions i'll crack down on crime he talks about he's very keen on the death penalty all this sort of stuff and when he comes in he takes what he sees as the tough decisions that beam wouldn't take he slashes the city's budget he raises all the subway fares he confronts the unions and tom he thinks that the way to one of the ways to rebuild the city is to allow private developers more of a free hand private i now hunch where you're going with this so i mentioned developers this is the other thing one man's crisis is another man's opportunity yeah so as new york declines decays

you've got burned out hotels and all the rest of it some people see in this a chance to make some money now there's one place in particular where they say this is a corner of midtown manhattan it's right next to grand central station grand central of course decaying at the time but a symbol of an earlier golden age kind of new york so on east 42nd street between lexington and park avenue not a million miles from where we are now there was a hotel called the commodore and it had been known by the pen central railroad which had gone bust in 1976. And the hotel was derelict. At the time of the blackout, the hotel is completely derelict.

There are rats in the basement. A lot of the rooms have been taken over by prostitutes. Super villains are plotting death rays in the basement. Right. All that kind of thing. And there's sort of drug dealers everywhere. It is this sort of vision of an urban hell. And one ambitious young developer, Tom, I wonder if you can possibly guess who it is, sees this and he thinks he can turn it around.

So he does a deal with the Defunct Railroad and with the Hyatt Hotel Corporation. And crucially, he needs a tax deal from Abraham Beam, from the outgoing mayor. As luck would have it, his father has precisely the contacts he needs. And Beam and the city give him a 40-year tax break to redevelop this hotel. So a few months after the blackout in the summer of 1978, well, a year after the blackout, I should say, he starts work on it. And it opens in September 1980, just weeks before the election of Ronald Reagan. I mean, the timing is unbelievable it opens as the hyatt grand central hotel and it's a new kind of hotel covered with

shimmering glass lots of bling very gold fittings absolutely massive atrium fountains so it's right on the cusp of the 1980s and it is this temple to what you mentioned, the Bonfire of the Vanities, 80s success. Now, one last thing, that tax break that I mentioned, that his dad got him, it cost the city of New York $410 million. That's the art of the deal, Dominic. That is the art of the deal. And Tom, the name of that young developer. Should he leave it hanging? Well, if you can't guess by now,

shall I put them out of their misery? It is, of course, Donald J. Trump. And on that bombshell, on that bombshell, we will bid farewell to Gotham City

in the 70s. On the cusp of the 80s. So, yeah, so I think that we should definitely do New York in the 80s. It's such a great subject. Yeah. I mean, as iconic as New York in the 70s, really. So, thank you, Dominic. Tom, why don't we go down to the Hyatt Grand Central and I'll buy you a martini.

That'd be fantastic. We'll head there. See you all very soon. Hope you've enjoyed it. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly

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