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Regarding the blackout..it WAS 24 hours...therefore the blackout occured all night as well....and no looting, no fires, no chaos, no murder rampages, not even a breakout of graffitti! The mentality has changed..and that blackout clearly demonstrates the change.
this is my last post in this thread the fiscal crisis there is no way i can say its a going to happen i cannot tell the future but the way everything is going it has a very very good chance of happening and a recession would make it even worse but i will leave that at that. the 2003 blackout i lived in harlem at that time and in harlem the lights were off so guess where i went??? i went to the bronx where the lights turned on around 7pm right before it got dark. the mentality is the same because other blackouts not as big did happen plenty of times in the city in the 70s and 80s but there was only little looting like 2003 and yes even in the recent blackout people were looting it just wasnt all over and crazy people were running out stores with things when the lights first shut off and then store owners locked their stores. i dont know why you think things are so different from just the 1970s and 1980s where you even around at that time you act like it was some kind of different world it was the same yes a little more crime becuase of drugs and more areas were bad but the same things happened. people deal with the same things today in certain areas but anyway i am done i didnt want to get so far off topic.
I lived on the lower east side from 1980-90 when I was in my mid-20s, and it was *intense.* Avenue B & 2nd St in 1980 was the scariest place I've ever seen. Rivington & Chyrstie Sts in 1982 was exactly what the newspapers said, a big open-air drug supermarket -- mostly heroin & cocaine. People would line up at different times of day to buy drugs and there was always something crazy going on outside, or upstairs, or in the lobby, or in the hall. People getting beat up, getting shot, getting arrested -- this was every day life on that block. Then one day, the cops swept in en masse and boom! just shut the whole thing down. That was it -- Operation Pressure Point, that was the beginning of the way it is now. On Clinton St, I woke up one morning to find a stranger in my bedroom and a knife at my throat (I survived). On Ludlow St, one of the quieter streets, our place was burglarized twice in the first year we lived there. There was heroin and coke being dealt out of the building and on the corner. The east side of the street, across from our building, was totally burned out and boarded up, as were many bldgs on the block north of us. Crackheads eventually started prying their way in. I remember one night I saw a guy crawl out of one of those bldgs and he went down the street breaking the windows of parked cars with a 2x4. There was garbage *everywhere* -- people used to bring stuff from various building sites or just garbage and dump it on Ludlow in front of the abandoned bldgs. There was a woman who lived in our bldg who used to toss her baby's used pampers out the window into the airshaft, because she was too lazy to bag it and take it downstairs. The noise was unbelievable -- altho nothing like what it is now, I'm told, w/ all those trendy bars! The city never did anything about any of this stuff. I remember calling the cops many times about the drug dealing, and finally one of them said to me, "Well, what do you expect? It's where you live!"
That neighborhood didn't start to really change till the early 90s, after they rehabbed the abandoned bldgs and turned them into apts. Now it's a very fashionable, almost upscale neighborhood (altho I'm sure the plumbing is just as bad). I can't quite believe my eyes when I go back there. French restaurants? HOTELS??? It's shocking. It was so terminally beat when I lived there I didn't think it would *ever* come up.
I agree w/ Scatman, you don't really wanna go back to all that. But I understand the nostalgia -- not for the crime and filth and danger, but for the freedom and the excitement and the low cost of living and the sense of things happening. It was a great place to be a young artist, that's for sure -- no rules, no laws, and a whole lotta crazy people! Well, there were laws -- they just weren't enforced very often.
Well since according to you there is a shootout just about everyday in your block/area...it has nothing to do with the blackout..it was inevitable and just business as usual! =)
Some reasons why the Bronx is improving/will continue to improve:
-The city is positioning the Bronx to be the affordable housing resource for the entire city. It is creating housing, developments, and providing mainstream amenities that specifically target this group. They are working to bring the Bronx back to its former glory/purpose..to serve the working/middle class, with incomes from $30,000-$80,000, INSTEAD of the dumping ground for the poor. FACT.
-The city has invested mulit-billions in rehabbing buildings, infrastructure, new subsidized 2/3 family homes, as well as, more recently, pushed market rate housing for the borough to stabilize the area, increase homeownership, and establish roots/options in these communities to keep those with the means from leaving. All of these initiatives have been successful and the city continues, and we are reaping the benefit today and for years to come. FACT.
-The exorbitant cost of living/doing business in much of the rest of the city is FORCING individuals, companies, retailers, investors to look at the Bronx as it is really the last frontier in NYC. The dramatic increased cost of living will not be subsiding anytime soon and will likely continue to escalate..as a result...there is/and will be a snowball effect of increased interest in the borough by all of the entities, not because they necessarily WANT to be here, but there are too few other options. You will be seeing/hearing alot of "is XXXX neighborhood in the Bronx safe/good, close commute, etc" because people have to explore this option....watch more of this going forward. FACT.
-The dramatic growth in the commercial sector provides further evidence of a turnaround for the borough and a forcast for continued improvement. There is NO WAY that the savvy developers would build Class A buildings (Class A = Highest Quality) for hundreds of millions if they did not believe that the Bronx will continue to progress. The amount of Class A space that has been built in the last 3 years, and is planned to be built in the next 5 years in the borough is the highest in the past 35 years. The borough now supports Class A tenants (Highest Quality tenants) and the demand continues to outstrip supply. FACT.
-The Bronx is now shifting from concentrating solely on crime to also quality of life issues. 10 years ago the crime rate was everyone's concerns, and rightly so. With the Bronx's crime rate now FAR LOWER than it has been in 30 years, quality of life issues are coming to the forfront. Community activists are driving many of these changes, with greening of the borough (parks, trees, flowering plants), revitalization projects like the Bronx River, bike paths linking the entire borough and Manhattan, as well as a concerted effort to decrease the amount of pollutants in the air by decreasing the amount of trucks coming in and out of the borough by relying more on the train, using boats, as well as preventing further environmentally insensitive companies from relocating to the Bronx and shutting down/cleaning up those that are already here. They have also installed electric stations along the Food market so trucks can hook in and not leave the trucks idling (fines are over $500 per violation). FACT.
I am done typing but these are SOME of my reasons!
Emily back in the early 80s much of the city was a toilet. The beautiful parks we have today...Bryant, Madison Square Park, Washington Square Park, just to name a few, were to be avoided at ALL costs as they were just drug dens, full of the homeless, and rife with prostitution and crime. 42nd street? No Disney back then...it was all peep shows, criminals, perverts, prostitutes, and filth. Hell's kitchen was just like 42nd street but with more violence....Chelsea....lol..not a homo in sight..but there were plenty of abandoned buildings, drugs, and crime. I can go on....but the entire city was a wreck..yet people lived here...loved the city...and businesses and life went on.
alphabet city is unrecognizable today compared to what it was in the 80's and even the 90's! unless you were a prostitute, drug dealer, or drug user... you didn't venture out past avenue a alone. now, it full of yuppies.
nyc is just not fun anymore... when i was out in california in 96, people would ask me "did you ever get mugged" when they found out i was a new yorker. now it's all about who knows what. we use to be the scariest most unfriendly city and now people talk to you for no reason. what's up with that? once upon a time, one would be afraid to take the train alone at night or even walk around 42nd street. now it's practically owned by disney.
Snforstuff....your post was absurd at best and psychotic at best. I suspect if you had a family, and people that you loved in this city at that time, and now, you would not be wishing for the days when people would get mugged and attacked constantly on the trains...murders were well over 2,000 people, or fear to go into any of the parks because robbery, rape, or worse were so prevalent...if it happened to your daughter, or mother...I think you would be singing a different tune.
If you really do miss all the fear, crime, and chaos...Mexico....and many other 3rd world countries await....enjoy!
NYC was an absolute s-hole in the 70's and 80's. It wasn't until Giuliani came in that things changed- and that's no political BS either. Koch and Dinkins did nothing but absolutely gorge themselves on the public teat for years
The subways stunk of homeless people and were not safe. Cops defending themselves were called racist pigs and sued, so they just stopped caring. You were acosted on almost every corner by panhandlers and worse.
Giuliani made a lot of changes and made the old power establisment (read: Democrat voting machine) very uncomfortable. The actress Bebe Neuwirth refused to shake his hand at an event because he closed down an offensive art exhibit. That was all before 9-11, of course, and then everyone on the planet wanted a picture of him. Oh yeah, do I need to mention that he kept NYC together after an attack worse than Pearl Harbor?? 9-11 made everyone in NYC wake up.
How about the Tompkins Square Park Riot? I remember listening to that on the police radio & it was insane. There was a total breakdown... among the demonstrators & the police. What ever happened to the guy with video camera (a radical man before his time!) I think his name was Clayton or something like that.
I just finished watching the movie Fort Apache:The Bronx, im sure you all know what it's about but for those who dont basically it's 1981 in the Hunts Point neighborhood in the Bronx. The main focus is on the 41st precinct and what they encounter throughout the neighborhood. I looked at the buildings they passed while driving and it's astonoshing. 5-6 story tenements all basically turned to rubble. You have boarded up windows and sometimes just an empty space. Then graffiti on the trains, and graffiti everywhere (although you still see that today). A very ugly neighborhood. Then you had trannies trying to jump out of buildings, drug dealing in hospitals, prostitutes killing cops and citizens, pimps slapping their hoes on the street, a guy with a WW1 helmet robbing people on site, cops throwing teens off roofs, cops fighting each other, hospitals being held hostage, and nurses dying of an overdose.
Since I wasn't born until the late 80's..........is the movie an exageration or is it spot on?
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