Holidays In Hell

Back in late 2005, Daniel Henninger noted that a surprising number of New York’s artistic “elites” miss the hell that was the Big Apple of the Death Wish/Taxi Driver 1970s:

This past Sunday a New York Times feature in its City section asked famous New Yorkers to identify New York’s golden age. At least four identified the 1970s as the golden age. This is worth notice because in the 1970s banks said New York had spun its credit rating into dross and refused to lend more money to a city whose accumulated deficit reached $8 billion. Today its budget office reports that starting in FY2006, per-annum deficits for three years will be $3.7 billion, $4.5 billion and $3.7 billion. There is a mayoral election this November when we’ll get the opinion of all New Yorkers on the city’s current alchemists. But perhaps we should regard the famous Times’ commentators yearning for the 1970s as canaries in the gold-plated mine shaft.

The actor John Leguizamo: New York in the ’70s “was funky and gritty and showed the world how a metropolis could be dark and apocalyptic and yet fecund.” Fran Lebowitz, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair: The city “was a wreck; it was going bankrupt. And it was pretty lawless; everything was illegal, but no laws were enforced. It was a city for city-dwellers, not tourists, the way it is now.” Laurie Anderson, a well-known New York artist and performer, admits the ’70s were considered “the dark ages” but “there was great music and everyone was broke.”

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One of the better-known artifacts in the archaeology of New York is the movie “Death Wish.” Released in 1974, it stars Charles Bronson as a Manhattan liberal who snaps under the burden of New York’s violence and goes into the subways to mow down thugs the cops can’t or won’t catch. Back then the city’s audiences cheered and screamed as Bronson smashed one civil-liberties platitude after another.Peter Hall, in his magisterial study of history’s great urban centers, “Cities in Civilization,” remarks offhandedly that “not for nothing did New York develop so rapidly after the first subways . . . brought their trains into the center of Manhattan.” The subways, of course, aren’t for the tourists but for unwealthy city-dwellers. Starting in 1970, fires, collisions and derailments routinely wrecked New York’s subways, injuring and even killing passengers. In August 1973, a chunk of concrete fell from the roof of the IRT Steinway tunnel and killed a passenger. A 1975 fire trapped 12,000 evening rush-hour passengers. But the cars were colorful. They were covered with graffiti, celebrated by Norman Mailer in a famously provocative paean to the graffiti painters.

The ’70s golden-agers in the Times story don’t deny what was going on then–but they kind of miss it. The photographer Mary Ellen Mark remembers “it was a time of costume and excitement, a time of youth and great energy.” Caleb Carr, the novelist of old-time New York, thinks the city has been “sterilized by the Giuliani years.” He says that “like a troublesome child taking Ritalin, New York may be more manageable now, but it has also sacrificed its personality.”

And for those looking for that “personality”, the New York Times has a novel solution! Jet on over to the swinging slums of the London suburb of Deptford. As the London Daily Mail reports, in an article headlined, “You Gotta Be Kidding”:

It has everything to make a U.S. tourist feel at home – murder, muggings and stabbings, plus a long-standing share of inner-city poverty.

Why, there’s even some of that gang-tag graffiti the Americans were kind enough to introduce us to a couple of decades ago.

Little wonder that Deptford is apparently the jewel in the crown for the thinking Yank’s UK vacation.

For budget trimming reasons, one of the seedier suburbs of London substituted for Charles Bronson’s New York war zone in the mid-80’s sequel,  Death Wish IV. It’s fascinating to see the New York Times recommend such as a locale as a tourist destination for those wishing to drop in on the not-so-Velvet Underground.