NEW YORK CITY IN THE 70’s

Look familiar? 35 years ago in New York City.

When The Going Gets Freaky In New York City In The 70’s, Fly That Freak Flag If You’ve Got One.

I found comparison pictures of before/after Detroit, with today looking worse for wear.

At the same time New York City photographers started showing their city in the seventies.

It’s called everything from gritty, to terrifying, to the face of future America.

Times Square was trashed. Hustlers guided tourists into upstairs places with signs promising, “Nude Live Women.”

A walk through Chinatown meant dodging those damn mechanical flying birds the peddlers launched and caught. If you did buy one and try the same move it would hit the ground and break.

I moved there during a garbage strike, so the iconic towers of the financial district had trash stacked twenty feet up the sides on the sidewalk.

To make it worse you could hear rats thrashing around when you walked by.

Who would move to New York City in the 70’s instead of Portland with all this going on?

At the time I lived in Delaware, traveling from Oregon on a marriage expedition. Once my fiance snapped out of it and dumped me, I wasn’t heading home to cry it out.

Instead I joined the broken hearts of America’s greatest city and fit right in. I found a job, an apartment, and planned on being one of those New York writers for the next forty years who either makes it or dies trying.

The dying part was pretty easy, writing not so much. I lived in an area that’s been newly gentrified. Back then I was the rare white face in the neighborhood. All I had to do for trouble was go outside at night.

One warning against the local night life in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park area was the street I lived on. It was a dead end with a fence blocking a freeway.

The fellas in the know used the street to stash their stolen cars, then burn them. That’s right, car fires on a regular basis. The guys would light one up, dance around, then light another. They never ran out of cars.

To make your neighborhood as safe as possible you might buy a gun, or take on the persona of someone to avoid. I chose the second.

My EF Hutton ID card shows how I rolled. It wasn’t styling as much as cover. At six three, 190 lb, and crazy hair, I felt pretty safe on the subway.

Portland was getting favorable reviews then with the new downtown bus mall and mayor Neil Goldschmidt named as President Carter’s Secretary of Transportation. His dirty secrets were revealed decades later.

Yes, Portland was blossoming and New York City sunk further into urban mulch. It smelled bad, too.

Now it’s the other way around. NYC got Disneyfied and Portland’s getting funky.

The North Park Blocks are full of homeless campers who leave garbage all over. The sidewalks littered with laundry and carts.

New York had the Bowery where you stepped over sidewalk sleepers, or at least their legs if they sat against a building wall.

In Portland it feels like a homeless shelter without the shelter. Look under bridges on both sides of the river; Tom McCall Waterfront Park; outside city hall until that shut down.

Will Portland dip into a decade of decline like NYC in the seventies? The vibe is growing stronger in favor.

What will it take to break the current cycle? Whatever it is, my hair won’t be part of it.