Reply With QuoteI remember grafiti EVERYWHERE in NYC when I was a kid in the early 80's. I believe they strated to clean up tremendously in the 90's though. I think it really all started 70's/80's not 80's/90's. Even the trains were covered in tag back then.
80's/90's New York
I'm looking to see if anyone here knows of any books, or websites, that describe the history, situation, and condition of the city during the 80's and 90's. I want to know about the time that NY received its bad rap. Pictures are also seeming to be difficult to find.
I did find this thread though:
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=402544
After seeing the pirctures in the above post, I can't help but wonder. Did the entire city look this way, or did certain blocks. Because I could easily go out today and take photos of run down, graffiti covered areas and put them together, say "This is NY" and people unfamilar would gasp in horror.
I remember grafiti EVERYWHERE in NYC when I was a kid in the early 80's. I believe they strated to clean up tremendously in the 90's though. I think it really all started 70's/80's not 80's/90's. Even the trains were covered in tag back then.
Areas as little as 10 years ago look completely different today. The Far Westside/Times Square/Harlem/Chelsea/Lower East Side/Atlantic Avenue/Williamsburg/Rockaways/Long Island City. 10 years ago NYC still had most neighborhoods in place, sure Tribeca and Soho were gone but even they still had a little bit of an edge. Manhattan was expensive but it wasn't impossible to get a studio for $500, even expensive neghborhoods has grit around the edges. Manhattan has become so unrecognizable and whitewashed that I’m seriously considering a move to Brooklyn.
I would seriously consider getting a copy of "SPY: The Funny Years" . . . the Rat City cover alone
http://fawny.org/spy/spy-illos/SPY1988-05cover.jpg
says a lot about how far we've come.
ali r.
{downtown broker}
Here is a non-sequitur post on the subject from the hilarious blog www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com:
"New York in the 80s
In reflecting on classic New York proto-douche Mickey Rourke recently, I realized that the seeds of modern scrotey go back before the Grieco/Bleeth coupling of the mid 1990s.
The 1980s.
When I was a kid growing up in the 1980s, New York never felt like a real place. It was this dreamland, with all of its danger, chaos, glitter and toys. An otherworldly playground fantasy.
A kaleidoscopic maelstrom of sex and parties, beautiful people and never-ending pleasures. Private schools with slutty drinking teenage hotts. Central Park in Fall. Sexed up model sluts with shoulder pads and big hair and boobs. Home of the hated Yankees and the illicit inverted-Disneyland porn palaces of Times Square.
New York in the 1980s was the land where adults did whatever the hell they wanted. Where everyone acted like kids.
At least, that's how I saw it through my film/TV prism and twelve year old mind.
Letterman's velcro suit. Griffin Dunne running through Soho. Eddie Murphy looking for his bride in Queens. Woody Allen wandering up 5th Avenue. Spike Lee ranting in Brooklyn. Switchblades for sale on 9th avenue and full frontal nudity on Broadway. Terrible art. Champagne parties in Trump Tower.
On the occasional trips when my parents would take me for a weekend visit I would breathe New York smog in joyously, watching the chaos blurring by outside my taxi window as we raced through the city of guns, murder and graffiti subways.
The ghost of Warhol. The Beasties. Katz's pastrami. Charlie Sheen and Darryl Hannah buying condos.
New York was a pastiche. A collage of illegality and immorality. A place where kids my age seemed twice as old. World weary in a way I could only dream about being. A place where parents were absent and bars didn't card. I wanted to hop the bus and camp out with Tom Hanks in a seedy motel eating cold pizza and squirting silly string.
Movies, TV, books and theater, mixing in my fevered Junior High mind with a siren song of promise. Endless adventure. The unlimited adulthood that would soon be mine.
When I finally got my ass to New York for college in the early 1990s, it was never quite what I'd hoped. Never quite the delivery of 1980s fueled fantasy. Letterman got the 11:30 slot. Rudy came in with his fascist thugs. Crime dropped and the web boomed.
The danger diminished. No magic lurking around every corner in the way that I'd hoped. But then again, it never could.
Reality is never like you imagine it in the crazed dreams of childhood, when you lie awake reading about Sallinger's phonies, Bret Easton Ellis's coke parties and Tama Janowitz's lower east side. MTV music awards and Kurt Loder news updates. A sick summer sweatland myth of a city that only exists as artistic creation blasted through the prism of media reinvention. Blasted into my eager young psyche with the power chords and glitter of a pure visceral high.
The New York I was promised in the 80s. Where I could kick pansy-ass Mickey Rourke's douchey ass and whisk Kim Bassinger off to my penthouse apartment, where we'd play with toys from the Shaper Image before watching the Playboy channel and rubbing each other with oils.
1990s New York was great, but also kind of a letdown. AIDS and Rudy's fascism. K-Mart in the Village. Yuppies and then the internet boom of endlessly replicating hipster douchefaces, clones produced by the bushel in the irono-factories of suburban sprawl. Coming from all corners of the country to turn New York into just another mall. Minnesota with cabs.
But every so often, the dream would spark back alive. Become real. Become everything promised. The beauty and danger and illicit aliveness outside of the pre-determined bounds of cowardice packaged as "normalcy."
New York is still there. Buried, maybe. Different. But still there.
Dammit. I need to go for a visit."
^^ nice writing.
i hope new york is still alive, if it isnt im gunna wake it up!
Originally Posted by Doug
"NYC Transit Police use K-9 dogs on the subway"
42nd Street - 1993
http://www.nyc-architecture.com/MID/...treet_1993.jpg
Times Square 1989 (Year of Batman)
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/36/10...a0258fb860.jpg
42nd Street - 1993
Same view, today (in HDR no less) :
My four longest visits to NYC were in 1979, 1996, 1999 and 2006. I had several occasions for brief (work-polluted) visits between 1995 and now.
In 1979, it was really gritty and scary. Too much so for me to want to, for instance, live there( mind you, I was a high school kid). But I loved it.
By 1996 it had been so cleaned up that it was more pleasant -- didn't seem to ahve lost any of its allure tom, at least. Yet, SoHo was still a desert on a Sunday. By 1999, I felt safe walking up from Greenwhich Village to 19th St at night with my wife in tow.
In 2006, SoHo on Sunday was a madhouse. The village was overrun and Nolita was pretty darn busy.
= Having your cake.
= Not being able to eat it.In 2006, SoHo on Sunday was a madhouse. The village was overrun and Nolita was pretty darn busy.
My first summer job in NYC was at the old Canal Jean Co. on Broadway in Soho, in the vintage clothing department. We used to like Sundays because it was fairly quiet and we could goof around all day.
I used to love being chosen to stand in front of the store and watch over the bins of clothing we placed out front. You would find the weirdest clothing in those bins for 99 cents. The sidewalks weren't very crowded, and most of the people that were there were the pleasantly offbeat characters who lived in the area. I miss that time before it became an outdoor mall of mostly chain stores. Now I avoid Soho completely on the weekends.
Its almost worse than times square down there now.
I wish they could pedestrianize a section of Broadway, the sidewalks can no longer handle the crowds. Something should be done in response.
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