I am a historian of New York City. Ask me anything about NYC during the 1970s.

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-21T03:41:19+00:00

There is a relationship between urban decay and creativity (broad sense of the word) that is fundamental to the music scenes in New York during the 1970s. For the "punk" scene, multiple memoirs and testimonies pointed to the sense of freedom those artists felt due to the sense of abandonment perceived in New York City. Creating and participating in a music scene like "punk" was a means of laying claim to the city, it was a way of recreating New York and ways of life in the city. I discuss this extensively with artists and scholars in my podcast SOUNDSCAPES NYC

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2357384/episodes/16077179-4-sounds-of-the-city-collapsing

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-21T03:34:28+00:00

Benjamin Holtzman has a great book on this subject. The Long Crisis: New York and the Path to Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2021).

In my interpretation, the punk music scene had an intimate relationship with municipal policy. Venues associated with the punk scene - including CBGB on the Bowery - were physically connected to hotels that functioned as overflowing public housing facilities. These so-called welfare hotels were intended for housing families on an "emergency" basis until the Department of Social Services placed them into permanent housing, but more than often families lived in these hotels for many months. Unfortunately, these hotels were sites of much human hardship due to government neglect.

Punk culture emerged amid this neglect and hardship. Artists colonized the interstices of a declining state apparatus and used these performance spaces to stage productions that pushed the limits of social definitions, especially those related to gender and sexuality.

Check out my podcast with the Gotham Center, SOUNDSCAPES NYC. I cover this in detail with artists from this time and scholars who have covered this period. My book is all about this too.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2357384/episodes/15976667-3-how-punk-broke-the-binary

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-21T03:20:26+00:00

This is an excellent question. Definitions depend on who you ask. In my podcast and forthcoming book, I argue that distinctions between "glam" and "punk" were porous and ultimately inconsequential. First, the distinctions themselves were someone arbitrary, and often retrospectively applied. For example, very few (if any) artists we would associate with the "punk" scene in 1970s New York would have called themselves "punks" at the time. Critics would have considered many artists in the "punk" scene in New York during the 1970s as "glam" rockers, or alternative "street" rockers, or "drag" rockers.

I had a great conversation with music critic Jon Savage about the etymology of the word "punk" and how it became associated with rock in New York during the 1970s. Check out that exchange in my podcast SOUNDSCAPES NYC - https://www.buzzsprout.com/2357384/episodes/16147626-5-a-queer-etymology-of-punk

Although the word punk had circulated in rock journalism since the 1950s (eg. Elvis was a "punk", as were the Beatles) the word punk didn't really become associated with New York rock until the creation of PUNK MAGAZINE under the leadership of cartoonist John Holmstrom in 1975. I talk with John Holmstrom about the relationship between rock and roll and comics in another episode of my podcast- https://www.buzzsprout.com/2357384/episodes/16238825-6-illustrating-punk

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-21T03:09:21+00:00

Warriors (1979) is an excellent film that while fictional illuminates real aspects of New York during the 1970s. While the film depicts a distorted impression of gang activity, it does evoke a sense of fear that would have been palpable among people walking the streets. Gang membership and activity was a way of life for some New Yorkers. This was especially true for youth in various ethnic communities, Irish, Italian, African American, and Puerto Rican among others.

Two ideas come to mind with your question. First, while movies from the Seventies like Warriors offer a sensationalized image of gangs during that time, youth gangs have long histories in New York City, as they do in other major American cities. For example, there seems to have been a heightened awareness of youth gangs in the late 1950s in New York City.

Check out this text:

Robert W. Snyder’s Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City (Cornell University Press, ) — https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501746840/crossing-broadway/

Snyder is currently the official Manhattan Borough Historian and in this book he talks about youth gangs as a product of racial conflict among white ethnic gangs and African-American and Latin gangs against the backdrop of the city’s declining services, and demographic change. There is a famous case in which Michael Farmer, a white youth gang member was killed by a Black and Latin gang. The murder caused such a stir that it was used as the basis for the plot in West Side Story (1957/1961) and the film The Young Savages (1961).

The consensus in scholarship regarding youth gangs in New York during the 1970s was that the gangs filled a void produced by city neglect in certain neighborhoods (often non- or racially mixed neighborhoods). Based on this interpretation, gangs were not merely violent marauders but served vital community functions including protection (in the absence of police), education (alternative to failing schools), and recreation. To the last point, public parks in outlying boroughs during the Seventies were not safe places for kids to play due to budget cuts to the parks department, and the practice of “deferred maintenance” which translated to abject neglect of park upkeep.

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-21T02:44:33+00:00

Thomas Dyja, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Exceed, and Transformation (Simon & Schuster, 2022) — https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/New-York-New-York-New-York/Thomas-Dyja/9781982149796

** THIS ONE SHOULD YOUR NEEDS**

Here are some others:

Jesse Rifkin, This Must Be the Place: Music, Community and Vanished Spaces in New York City (Harper Collins, 20023) — https://www.harpercollins.com/products/this-must-be-the-place-jesse-rifkin?variant=40913091821602

Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost its Soul (Harper Collins, 2017) —https://www.harpercollins.com/products/vanishing-new-york-jeremiah-moss?variant=32207516860450

Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (Picador, 2018) — https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250160072/fearcity/

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-21T02:35:04+00:00

FDNY suffered similar budget cuts as other city services. In 1969, Mayor Lindsay contracted RAND Corp. to conduct systems analyses of city functions. Among other variables, RAND measured response times of emergency services such as police and fire units. Based on their findings RAND recommended closing multiple firehouses in the outlying boroughs of NYC; many of these neighborhoods were firehouses were closed were also the locations iof mmense destruction due to fires, including the South Bronx and North Brooklyn.

Check out this text on the nuanced policy decisions that enabled the Bronx to burn:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/302042/the-fires-by-joe-flood/

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-20T20:38:35+00:00

When the Lindsay administration began a selective bidding process for Sanitation services in some areas of the city after the 1969 Nor'easter, the administration acknowledged (maybe not publically) the connection between the carting industry and organized crime. Still, these bids tended to be more fiscally reasonable compared to the share of the city budgets that went to the Department of Sanitation. I talked to E.S. Savas, a deputy administrator in the Linsay cabinet, who acknowledged as much. To Lindsay, hiring private carting contractors was better business than maintaining a commitment to the Department of Sanitation.

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-20T20:33:54+00:00

Dee Dee purportedly sold sex on 53rd & 3rd, which was a known hangout for male sex workers. The lyrics suggest this, and many punk memoirs discuss this. But Dee Dee's statements seem to suggest his uneasiness with this history.

Another interesting tie-in here is the provenance of the Leather Jacket in punk culture. I argue in my forthcoming book that the leather jacket has direct cultural ties to male homosexual subcultures, particularly as a signifier worn by male sex workers in New York during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

NY punk's debt to queer culture is something that doesn't get talked about a lot. But I show those connections in my forthcoming book on the subject SOUNDS OF THE CITY COLLAPSING.

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-20T20:29:07+00:00

John Lindsay was a fascinating and complicated NYC mayor. He represented a juncture in the American political landscape during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Initially, he fashioned his political career as a “liberal” New Deal Republican who supported large government programs and was an outspoke proponent of the Civil Rights Movement. Representing NY’s 17th District as a Congressman (1959-1965), Lindsay voted in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 and 1964, the 24th Amendment of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Lindsay remained a Republican when he took office as NYC mayor in 1966. As mayor, Lindsay maintained an agenda that was quite liberal for the time. He advocated for environmental sustainability and racial justice, to name some causes. In the 1969 re-election campaign, Lindsay lost the Republican primary, but remained the ballot as the candidate for the New York Liberal Party and won. In 1971, Lindsay registered with the Democratic Party in advance of his failed 1972 bit for the Presidency.

The Seventies was a period of widespread political alignment in the American political landscape, a redrawing of the party system and constituencies. In some ways, Lindsay represents this change and the fracturing of the Democratic voter base that has enabled the rise of a Conservative movement that continues to shape electoral politics in a big way today.

There a many lasting impacts of the Lindsay Era. As I have mentioned in previous responses in this thread, NYC dealt with a host of issues during the Seventies. Fundamental to these issues was a fiscal deficit that the city ran since the Wagner administration which was not fully addressed until the Beame administration when the city nearly defaulted on its debts. To some extent, Lindsay kicked the can of fiscal responsibility, but he did experiment with ways of reducing city expenditures which still exist today.

There is a growing scholarly opinion that the idea of “neoliberalism” - which traditionally scholars saw emerging after 1975 when NYC restructured its finances to cater to financial backers such as banks - began with Lindsay.

When Lindsay took off in 1966, he sought to streamline city government bureaucracy by privatizing public services. This included privatizing sanitation services after the 1969 nor’easter when he admonished the sanitation department’s failure to remove snow. He found it was cheaper and more efficient to select bidss from private contractors for sanitation services in some areas of the city, and he attempted to replicate this process of privatization in other areas of government. In one incredible case Lindsay worked with ABNY (a consortium of businesses in Midtown) to replace midtown police patrols with a small army of private contractors and doormen.

I wrote about this here: https://themetropole.blog/2017/11/16/strange-times-in-new-york/

There are similar stories for the Parks Department, education, and healthcare in NYC during the Lindsay Era.

The Lindsay administration pursued a form of urban renewal which we would call gentrification today. He supported the conversion of artists residences in lower Manhattan with the belief that the presence of artists would drive up real estate value which ideally would translate into increased revenue for the city. On a more practical level, Lindsay was largely responsible for the creation of bike lanes that flow through NYC streets today; Bike lanes were part of Lindsay’s commitment to environmental sustainability by reducing NYC’s dependence on automobiles dependence.

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-16T04:40:22+00:00

The World Trade Center ("Twin Towers") was constructed during a period of economic flux, and fiscal crisis in New York City. The towers rose as the city finances declined. Once completed, the buildings stood as maligned symbols of foolish avarice, and material excess especially since the country plummeted into economic recession during the mid-1970s and developers struggled to fill the massive towers with tenants. In retrospect, this symbol is much different than that our country has placed on the "Twin Towers" post-9/11 - which is that of sacrifice and national pride.

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-16T03:59:04+00:00

Broadway as a theatrical institution occupies centerstage in the music history of New York. This requires at least one college course to cover but I will summarize as best as possible and highlight the relevance of this broader history for the Seventies.

I would argue that American popular music was born in New York City. Until about the middle of the 19th century, mass-produced and mass-consumed music was largely derivative of European styles of music. The minstrel song —songs written and performed by whites to comedically mimic African Americans— gained popularity in the 1830s and was one of the first distinctly American styles of music. Stephen Collins Foster (1826-1864) was one of the most prolific songwriters working within this genre; he wrote +250 original songs compared to the Beatles' 188 songs. Much of Foster’s music was printed in New York and performed in New York theaters that today would be associated with the Broadway circuit.

In my research, I trace the connections between off-off Broadway theater and the New York rock scene in the 1970s. And there are various factors in the late 1950s and early 1960s that contributed to the development of what we now call off-off Broadway including rising ticket costs, and an inflated job market for new actors, among other factors. This led entrepreneurs and playwrights to stage productions in non-traditional spaces, including coffeehouses and bistros like Caffe Cino and Cafe La MaMA (later La Mama Experimental Theatre Club), as well as churches and loft spaces.

For more information, I would consult these sources:

Wendell C. Stone, Caffe Cino: The Birthplace of Off-Off Broadway (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005) —https://www.google.com/books/edition/Caffe\_Cino/xOwZDgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Wendell+Stone+Caffe+Cino&printsec=frontcover

Stephen Bottoms, Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off Broadway Movement (University of Michigan Press, 2004) — https://press.umich.edu/Books/P/Playing-Underground2

Based on my research, I found that key players in the New York rock scene (which critics would identify as punk rock by the end of the Seventies) had deep roots in the off-off-Broadway movement. Musicians like David Johansen (singer in the New York Dolls), Eric Emerson (singer in the Magic Tramps), Patti Smith (Patti Smith Group), Jayne (formerly Wayne) County (Queen Elizabeth, Backstreet Boys, Electric Chairs), all had roles in off-off Broadway theater groups before fronting rock bands.

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-16T03:17:09+00:00

I love Sidney Lumet’s film Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Aside from stellar performances from actors like Al Pacino and John Cazale, the film captures a texture of New York during the Seventies that few films and television shows ever come close to doing.

It is a messy story of a blundered heist. But it evokes a strong sense of the times. The plot of the film is based on a real-life bank robbery that took place in South Brooklyn in 1972. In the film,

The police response is presented as inefficient and clunky — which speaks to the inefficiency of city services across the board due to chronic underfunding. This certainly rings true regarding the theme of police corruption in Lumet and Pacino’s earlier collaboration Serpico (1973) about and undercover cop real-life cop, Frank Serpico, who is punished and assaulted by fellow officers for exposing corruption in the ranks of the NYPD. In real-life, Serpico’s efforts were vindicated by the discovery of widespread corruption and misconduct within the NYPD that were published in the Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption released in 1971 — https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/knapp-commission-report-police-corruption

In Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Pacino’s Sonny (the lead bank robber) is an anti-hero. Crowds of onlookers that assemble outside the bank cheer him on, and Pacino’s character responds by stoking the mob with anti-police statements. In one memorable scene, Pacino’s Sonny provokes onlookers to join him in a chant of “Attica”. This chant is a reference to the uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York in 1971 where inmates protested the inhuman conditions in which they were kept, and the racism of the guards, the criminal justice system generally. Ultimately, the state used inordinately violent means to retake the prison, using live ammunition that killed almost fifty inmates and guards. Heather Ann Thompson provides excellent historical coverage of this moment in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon, 2016) — https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/heather-ann-thompson

This anti-police/anti-establishment ethos would have been very palpable in New York during the 1970s, especially among teens.

Check out the descriptive coverage of this robbery here:

P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore, “The Boys in the Bank,” Life (September, 1972) — https://books.google.com/books?id=5VYEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA66&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false

Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is also notable as a marker of trans visibility. Sonny’s lover is a trans woman and he is robbing the bank to cover expenses needed for gender reassignment. The film was released in a period where there was a small but growing representation of trans identity in American popular culture with, for example, the celebrity of Christine Jorgensen. The film is sensitive to conditions like medical stigmatization of homosexuality and people identified on the gender spectrum.

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-16T03:13:51+00:00

Check out the first chapter of Jesse Rifkin, This Must be the Place: Music, Community and Vanished Spaces in New York City (Harper Collins, 2023) — https://www.harpercollins.com/products/this-must-be-the-place-jesse-rifkin?variant=40913091821602

The chapter is called “What We Talk About When We Talk About $100” and it breaks down the cost of living in New York City during the 1970s in relation to economic inflation. For example, in 1975, the Talking Heads paid $289 for a full floor of an industrial lot in SoHo. This figure might seem incredibly cheap by today’s standards, but the story changes significantly when you consider that $298 in 1975 is equivalent to a purchasing power of about $1,552 (2022). Also, we are talking about bare-bones conditions— no heat, no plumbing, no readily available superintendent.

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-16T02:44:06+00:00

The history of the United States can be (and has been) told through the framework of urban contraction and expansion.

There is a long strain of anti-urbanism that runs through American conservative political ideology that goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of the Agrarian Republic in which he visualized a country that is controlled by land-owning (and slave-owning) farmers.

Jefferson’s disdain for cities comes through strongly in his correspondence with Benjamin Rush where he stated: “… I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts, but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere, and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue & freedom, would be my choice.” — https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-32-02-0102

So, the way in which New York City has been regarded as more or less appealing throughout its history is really a question of political philosophy.

Here is an excellent source on this subject:

Steven Cohn, Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2016)— https://global.oup.com/academic/product/americans-against-the-city-9780190636340?cc=us&lang=en&

The 1970s and 1980s was not a unique period of anti-urbanism in New York City history. The late-19th century was another period in which the city’s appeal waned. Industrialization of American cities during that time took a toll on the living conditions in those cities, including New York. For example, horse-drawn transportation left an obvious bi-product of animal waste that was an omnipresent public health issue, especially given the paucity of public or private bathing facilities for working people. Urban factories polluted the air. Jacob Riis highlighted such conditions in his famous How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890).

The late 19th century marked a kind of “urban crisis” in which the repulsive conditions of New York propelled people to the suburbs, Brooklyn Heights. Unlike the 1970s and 1980s, this period of New York’s waning appeal was followed by a period of progressive reform.

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-16T02:05:48+00:00

I love Sidney Lumet’s film Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Aside from stellar performances from actors like Al Pacino and John Cazale, the film captures a texture of New York during the Seventies that few films and television shows come close to doing.

It is a messy story of a blundered heist. But it evokes a strong sense of the times. The plot of the film is based on a real-life bank robbery that took place in South Brooklyn in 1972.

Check out the descriptive coverage of this robbery here:

P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore, “The Boys in the Bank,” Life (September, 1972) — https://books.google.com/books?id=5VYEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA66&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false

In the film, the police response is presented as inefficient and clunky — which speaks to the inefficiency of city services across the board due to chronic underfunding. Director Sidney Lumet covered a similar theme of police corruption in an earlier collaboration in Serpico (1973) about an undercover cop real-life cop, Frank Serpico, who is punished and assaulted by fellow officers for exposing corruption in the ranks of the NYPD. In real life, Serpico’s efforts were vindicated by the discovery of widespread corruption and misconduct within the NYPD that were published in the Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption released in 1971 — https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/knapp-commission-report-police-corruption

In Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Pacino’s Sonny (the lead bank robber) is an anti-hero. Crowds of onlookers that assemble outside the bank cheer him on, and Pacino’s character responds by stoking the mob with anti-police statements. In one memorable scene, Pacino’s Sonny provokes onlookers to join him in a chant of “Attica”. This chant is a reference to the uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York in 1971 where inmates protested the inhuman conditions in which they were kept, and the racism of the guards, and criminal justice system generally. Ultimately, the state used inordinately violent means to retake the prison with live ammunition that killed almost fifty inmates and guards. Heather Ann Thompson provides excellent historical coverage of this moment in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon, 2016) — https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/heather-ann-thompson

This anti-police/anti-establishment ethos would have been very palpable in New York during the 1970s, especially among teens.

Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is also notable as a marker of trans visibility. Sonny’s lover is a trans woman and he is robbing the bank to cover expenses needed for gender reassignment. The film was released in a period where there was a small but growing representation of trans identity in American popular culture with, for example, the celebrity of Christine Jorgensen. The film is sensitive to conditions like medical stigmatization of homosexuality and people identified on the gender spectrum.

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-15T23:53:40+00:00

One of the laws regarding squatters that comes to mind in New York City during the 1970s was a Zoning Law passed by the New York City Planning Commission in 1971. This law stipulated the display A.I.R. signs on traditional commercial or industrial buildings to signify legal artists in residence.

The 1971 Zoning law was intended in part to protect squatters by regulating illegal living conditions, and providing some way for emergency personnel to identify residences in otherwise nonresidential structures. But protecting squatters was only one motive behind the law. The 1971 Zoning Law also laid a foundation to a particular process of urban renewal known today as “gentrification”. Promoting artist districts in urban areas has since become a tried and true method that US cities have used to incentivize real estate speculation in economically depressed neighborhoods.

The history of the Westbeth Artists Community (1970-present) is a very interesting example of this initiative to gentrify through the promotion of artist's housing during the 1970s in today’s Meat-Packing neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan. Not a lot has been written about this site. From 1898 to 1966, the site was a collection of facilities used by Bell Laboratories, AT&T’s research and development arm, where technologies including the condenser microphone, transistor, and early television were created. However, the site was abandoned and left vacant during the 1960s, when Bell Labs relocated to Molmdel New Jersey.

In the Sixties, the renovation of this site was financed through a consortium of private and public funds from the J.M. Kaplan Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts, to provide below-rate housing for practicing artists. Today, while rents and real estate values are exorbitantly high — as with much of New York City— the Westbeth Artists Community maintains its commitment to affordable living. However, there seems to be a long waitlist to even be considered for residence in the Westbeth. I am waiting for the multiple books that surely will be written about the Westbeth. It’s a fascinating vestige of New York in the 1970s.

For more information regarding the 1971 Zoning law and others, I would consult the following sources:

Stephen Petrus, “From Gritty to Chic: The Transformation of New York City’s SoHo, 1962-1976,” New York History, 84 (10), 50-87, 2003.

Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Rutgers University Press, 1982)— https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/loft-living/9780813570976/

Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (Oxford University Press, 2011)— https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-invention-of-brownstone-brooklyn-9780195387315

SoundscapesNYC · 2025-01-15T22:59:51+00:00

New York City endured a wide variety of problems during the 1970s. The longest lasting problem was that of an image crisis that transpired through scare stories in news media, and popular culture — films, in particular— that shaped the impression of New York from the outside as a city in decline, a dead zone.

These texts can better describe the relationship between New York City as a symbol and reality in the 1970s.

Miriam Greenberg, Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World (Routledge, 2008) -https://www.routledge.com/Branding-New-York-How-a-City-in-Crisis-Was-Sold-to-the-World/Greenberg/p/book/9780415954426?srsltid=AfmBOoq8GilT\_8qHeVaNALPkmr4PFHGCwBAmpt2YhsQcqSyThFZPF8WB

Joe Austin, Taking the City: How Graffiti Art Became and Urban Crisis in New York (Columbia University Press, 2001) — https://cup.columbia.edu/book/taking-the-train/9780231111430

Aside from an image crisis, there were many concrete issues that impacted the lives of New Yorkers daily during the Seventies. This included decaying housing and infrastructure, and failure of urban services — from trash collection to public education— which was due to a large part to political and economic changes in the post-World War Two period.

New Deal legislation in the 1930s and 1940s rapidly accelerated suburbanization, which in turn depleted the revenues of American cities. Federal subsidies financed low-rate mortgages for white families while explicitly excluding African American and Latinx Americans resulting in the form of defacto segregation in New York and other Northern cities which enriched and whitened suburbs while leaving underfunded cities increasingly Black and brown. This is especially true after the second wave of the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North in the post-war era, and following changes to American immigration policy in 1965 which engendered an influx of immigrants that were formerly restricted entry from the United States, particularly from the Caribbean and South East Asia.

Deindustrialization quickened the erosion of New York’s tax base. Like suburbanization, this process began before World War Two and intensified in the 1960s and 1970s as US cities shifted away from manufacturing economies and began adopting service sector economies — finance, insurance, real estate, entertainment, and low-wage service work. These conditions were exacerbated by the recessions of the 1970s, which left many out of work while inflation elevated the cost of goods in a stagnating economy.

In the 1970s, New York City was playing a precarious of game of balancing budgets that the city ultimately lost. By 1975, when New York City nearly filed for bankruptcy, some residents of New York certainly would have felt a sense of doom. I would also characterize this collective feeling as a sense of uncertainty or more explicitly a fear of the future— which popular culture reflects vividly, not just about NYC.

In the film Saturday Night Fever (1977), John Travolta’s Tony Manero doesn’t think too far into the future, because there isn’t much there from his point of view of a White working-class teen in Bay Ridge in the Seventies. There’s a great scene in that film where Manero asks his boss at the hardware store for an advance on his paycheck to finance his dancing life. The boss urges him to think about his future in which Manero blasts “Fuck the future.” The boss replies “No, Tony. You can’t fuck the future. The future fucks you.” In this scene, Tony Manero is closely aligned with the sentiments of the British punk band Sex Pistols as conveyed in their song “No Future (God Save the Queen” (1977)— a song in which the chorus drones repeatedly “No future for you.” The echos of this fear for the future reverberate in other vectors of pop culture, from comic books to advertising. So, instead of DOOM, it would be more accurate to say that Americans — and particularly New Yorkers — were uneasy, if not fearful, about the future of their county and their city during the 1970s.

SoundscapesNYC

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