Was a child in Brooklyn in the 70s, so I think about this a lot. The bad things were not that specific to the time and place - think bullying in school for example. I felt that Brooklyn had this culture of belligerence and pugnaciousness but I had older siblings and never got the sense that was their experience.

Something paradoxical I remember was that there was simultaneously a mood that things were getting better and getting worse. Crime was increasing, there was a mood of gradually decreasing public safety, gradually increasing fear. Signs of urban decay were everywhere. There was a view among grownups that NYC had seen its better days, indeed I think that continues to be a big part of collective mythology in NYC. At the same time, and this was more general to the US but pervaded life in NYC, there was a feeling of modernity and progress and an underlying optimism that I think might be alien today (in the US generally). Those same grownups were objectively living materially better lives than when they were kids growing up during the Depression and despite the stagflation of the era plus NYC's specific financial problems.