For some reason I kept thinking of the HBO ‘Vinyl’ series.
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It’s going to be weird when Google street view has a long history everywhere. Not as artistic, but still a useful peek into our present for people living in the future.
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Everything looks worse in black and white.
Kodachrome / They give us those nice bright colors / They give us the greens of summer / Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah.
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Son of Sam, brown/blackouts, garbage strikes, MTA strikes, hookers, junkies, muggers, harry fishnuts, unemployment, urban blight and so on.
Real indeed.
I was a bit too young to experience that myself but by my memory the Times Square movie houses were all XXX most of the 70s.
I remember visiting as a child and teenager in the late 70s and 1980s and get the same feeling from those photos. Living in NYC the 1990s/early Oughts was a completely different experience.
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It makes Law and Order marathons really interesting… the way the setting changed from the beginning of L&O to the end (interiors and exteriors) is almost like looking at a time lapse.
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Wasn’t quite as hard in the 70s. Still required a bit of driving around.
ADDENDUM: On one visit, we parked out old station wagon in a lot a few blocks down Carmine from my aunt’s building. Right near a municipal swimming pool and library my cousins went to . . . I bet I could find even now.
This was just an empty lot. When we got back at the end of the day a couple of sharpies had set up shop. They jimmied into the cars and put hand-written parking passes on the dashboards. Literally, pencil on lined paper. (They might have moved the car as well.) When my mom complained one of the guys got mildly huffy, and started making up a story about another attendant having gotten heart trouble moving our elicitly parked car. Mom gave the guy a few bucks and we left.
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NYC was never as dirty and dangerous as the movie portrayals.
If you gentrify the urban center enough to drive the poor into the corners and price the artists out of the garrets, you end up with a Disney resort. That was the goal of the NYC power elite during the 80s, and they succeeded.
[quote=“Israel_B, post:24, topic:101587”]
I was a bit too young to experience that myself but by my memory the Times Square movie houses were all XXX most of the 70s.[/quote]
It was a mix, and some of the art houses also rotated in porn to help with the finances.
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Those are just the things I remember seeing from my childhood.
My parents both grew up in NYC and never considered it the Big Bad City, even at its lowest. They never had a problem with us kids, as teenagers, taking the train in to do stuff of visit cousins.
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[quote=“Israel_B, post:31, topic:101587”]
Those are just the things I remember seeing from my childhood.[/quote]
Some things look scary when you are very little…depending a bit on how your parents reacted to them. As per another thread, we now have a generation of adults who grew up with shredded rubber on their playgrounds (instead of gravel and broken glass like in my childhood) and think that see-saws are dangerous.
Didn’t you do a stint in the Israeli army? Surely that was much worse.
My dad and I visited his old neighborhood in the South Bronx in the early 70s; I confess I did find that genuinely rather awful.
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My parents were quite blazé about it, we just steered through the obvious stuff like every other non country mouse types.
I didn’t serve in the IDF or the US Army.
Yeah, a google image search for that is pretty bleak
In the Heartland we called them “fenderbergs” (fender + icebergs). I think the word even wound up in Rich Hall’s collection of Sniglets.
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Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away!
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That burned-out church wasn’t real, it was built as a set for a werewolf movie. However, there were at least 3 synagogues that would have been in this photo.
Was just one photo I pulled from GIS of “south bronx 70s”. The rest looked just as bad.
As a side note, it’s interesting to look at google street view of the same locations where it’s been well defined here.
There’s a flip side though. From the blight and strife of the South Bronx along with the 1977 blackout, hip-hop was born.
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Apologies, I misunderstood your anecdote
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I believe some folks from Queens would take issue with that 
