We’ve been here before, of course. More than once. New York City has died and been resurrected so many times, it’s unsurprising there’s a cottage industry that chronicles the phenomenon.
In the 1960s, a decade that began ushering New Yorkers in like “rats,” as architecture historian Vincent Scully famously described the commuters arriving in the new Penn Station, the city was being assailed by the real-life implications of “urban renewal.” It was a policy that largely demolished poor but vital neighborhoods with the promise of better subsidized housing.
The housing that was built was so destructive to the fabric of neighborhoods, it prompted Jane Jacobs to write The Death and Life of Great American Cities, introducing the now-famous argument that healthy communities needed “eyes on the street,” something the housing developments did not allow for. Parts of New York were almost killed when Robert Moses attempted, and failed, thanks to Jacobs and a mismatched consortium of downtown New York City residents, to ram a highway right through the heart of lower Manhattan and Greenwich Village.
New York most famously died on October 30, 1975, when the New York Daily News ran its “Ford to City: Drop Dead” cover after the president denied the city a financial bailout. Certainly, many residents believed it to be dead in 1977 when the nearly bankrupt city was battered by a heatwave, followed by a 25-hour blackout, during which there was widespread looting in parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx with the Son of Sam serial killer on the loose to boot.
Presumably, residents of neighborhoods such as Brownsville, described once by June Jordan as a place that looked like a “war zone,” believed New York was dead. Or those who lived in the Bronx during the years it famously burned, more for insurance payouts than as a result of bureaucratic ineptitude. Or those who lived in Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant, areas hit the worst by a decade of redlining and white flight.
Nearly 70,000 people in the city did end up dead during the AIDS crisis between 1980 and 1996, taking with them a great deal of the city’s—and world’s—art scene. A “cultural cataclysm” that, as Katharine Duckett wrote last year, “cleared the way for the rapid gentrification and development of areas like the Lower East Side.” The neighborhood, it’s worth noting, also saw significant departures during the first weeks of Covid-19.
For a few months after September 11, New York felt if not dead, exactly, then numb. In May 2002, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik wrote, referring to a famous 1976 Saul Steinberg cover of the magazine, that “A Steinbergian drawing of New York at the moment would show eight million people, each person standing on a pole above an abyss of anxiety — not looking down, never looking down, looking only from side to side, warily.” There were a few terrible weeks this April when I rode through the desolate streets of Manhattan that I did wonder if this vision had finally come to pass.
The flight of those less interested in how the city at large is surviving than their individual presence here opened up space. With their departure, they have taken with them a shiny, self-interested city and left a grittier one that feels vital and determined.
Some declare the city not dead but O-V-E-R, which has less to do with the city itself being in dire shape than the particular city a given writer remembers evolving into its next iteration. “Once there was a city here, and now it is gone,” wrote Pete Hamill in the December 1987 issue of New York magazine. “New York City is over. O-V-E-R. Over.” screamed Kristen Johnson’s washed-up ’80s party girl Lexy Johnson, in the penultimate episode of Sex and the City right before she sailed out the window. It’s likely if you spend enough time in Brooklyn, you’ll still find residents who believe the city ended the day the Dodgers departed for Los Angeles.
It makes sense that during the most flush years of the Bloomberg era, a fascination with 1970s New York developed. There was a while, beginning in the mid-aughts, when it felt difficult to visit a local website, open a book, or turn on the TV and not find some shined-up reinterpretation of the “bad old years.” The decade that gave us iconic art, music, fashion, and real estate prices that allowed artists to live and thrive here, largely had all the bad — and it was very bad — romanticized out of it in the retelling. This past spring, when the New York Times began publishing maps of the city to show the zip codes where people who had fled were having their mail forwarded, I sometimes wished for an overlying map of where all the people idolizing the “bad years” had themselves ended up to see exactly how well they aligned.
Another map I wished for would show all the stores boarded up during the first week of the Black Lives Matter protests in June, when a handful of businesses were looted. As I biked around the city during those weeks, I was struck by the fact most of the boarded storefronts belonged to the chain stores that had invaded the city, pushing out smaller local businesses. If someone was looking for a guide to what had actually been killing New York for the last decade, this map seemed like an obvious place to start.