MOVING TO FRONT FROM THIS MORNING: UPDATED (AND COMMENTS OPEN FOR THOSE ALSO FAMILIAR WITH NYC OVER TIME TO SHARE THEIR VIEWS)
Last week I was at the NYU Colloquium in Legal, Social & Political Philosophy presenting work on Marx (that was great, the best intellectual experience I've had in a long time [special thanks to Sam Scheffler and Jeremy Waldron for making it so!]), and as part of the invitation NYU kindly gave us an apartment for the week, which was the first time my wife and I had been in NYC together in quite a number of years (it was also the first time I was there since the pandemic). Now I was born in Manhattan, and still have distinct traces of the Brooklyn/Manhattan accent I acquired from my father and listening to a lot of Lenny Bruce as a kid, and I later practiced law in NYC and lived there again between 1991-1993 with my wife while finishing my PhD. So I have warm feelings towards my hometown, although it has changed a lot since the 1960s/early 1970s of my youth. (Films that give you a feel for the "look" of Manhattan then include Serpico, The 7-Ups, and, most notoriously, Death Wish.)
The city still has the hustle-and-bustle for which it is famous, not to mention the extraordinary cultural offerings that are matched by only a couple of cities in the world. It also, alas, has a real problem with trash on the street and homelessness, more so than when we left in 1993. And the expense of living here! Oy veh. Grocery prices were 25-50% higher than in Chicago, which blew my mind. The hot dog stands now want $5 for the hot dog whose cost to them is probably 50 cents. Public transport is still not bad, $2.75 per ride, and while the subway stations are hot as hell, as they always were in summer, the cars themselves were reliably air conditioned.
And then, of course, there are the housing costs. In 1992-93, my wife and I lived at 1675 York Ave. (in "Yorkville," at 88th street), in a one bedroom that rented for $1300/month; today, that same apartment is $4700/month, an increase of more than 370% in thirty years. (If rental increases had simply kept pace with inflation, it would be $2700 today.)
I was underwhelmed by the quality of the food. The pizza from John's on Bleecker was outstanding--we ate their twice in a week! The Chinese in Greenwich Village was fine, but unnotable. The fancy, farm-to-table place (highly rated etc.) would have seemed a decent place at half the price. Maybe this is because the quality of cuisine nationally has gone up, so NYC is less impressive than it used to be. But NYC pizza is still sui generis excellent!
Still, the hustle-and-bustle of NYC is invigorating and fun. Hearing people who speak "proper" English makes me feel at home. And NYU Law School is a terrific intellectual community, it was wonderful to spend some time there.
The NYC of my youth was clearly a more dangerous and dirty place than the NYC today. But ordinary people could live there. Now Manhattan is an island for the rich and the subsidized. That's sad.
UPDATE: S. Wallerstein, a longtime reader now in Chile, but who also lived in the NYC of the 1960s and 1970s, suggested Dog Day Afternoon (1975) as another film capturing the "feel" and look of the city back then. Another longtime reader, Howard Berman, a Senior Librarian at the Brooklyn Library, kindly gave permission to share his own impressions:
I am a refugee from the old New York living in the New York of today and I don't care what you have to say about my opinion but I'm gonna tell you anyway
There is much less of a street life, on the subways and in the streets- that is why there is less crime and less vibrancy.
New York used to be the greatest city in the world- now it is just a contender.
From the start till the end of the past century New York was in a golden age.
No more....[T]he fact that all people of all classes join the upper classes with the help of their phones blocking out the rest of the world and having like I think Toqueville said of the nobility, being the center of their social world, is a powerful reason for the transformation and decline of New York.
Think of Temkin from Bellow and Ras the destroyer from Ellison- there are no longer larger than life characters in New York anymore and New York is just a big suburb.
This is totally unscientific, but I stand by it.
I've opened comments for more thoughts from readers with a longtime sense of the city to share their views.
