If this was really the case, then why haven’t they had as many school shootings as rural and suburban America?
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In all fairness it is also one of the cheapest systems to use when you factor in how far you can travel in the system on a single ride.
But most stations need renovation. Lots of it.
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I would argue that the Big City moral panic has been around since at least Rome, and possibly Ur. Mind you, at least in Rome the paranoia and fear was somewhat justified, I found a fascinating discussion on quora about roaming gangs of thugs, an emperor who like mugging people, and how buildings even in a resort town like Pompeii had thick walls, armored shutters, and, in case of slave revolt, internal barricades in the homes to keep the slaves from murdering the household.
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I wonder how many people thought the countryside was any safer, though. I know patricians who don’t work for a living like to dream about the idyllic life of farmers, but it’s not the impression I get of ancient peasants.
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Go, Motown!
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Thanks, blackanvil, for mentioning this conversation. It was all new to me and quite fascinating.
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The crime and sleaze is a feature in Satyricon by Petronius. I also remember my teacher referencing a literary trope called “the city of awful night” (or something to that effect) when we were discussing it.
Luc Sante drew extensively on those guidebooks for his wonderful history of that period in NYC.
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I thought the most dangerous city in the galaxy was Mos Eisley?
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Also, citation needed for the most dangerous “intergalactic” city. Shouldn’t it be “intragalatic”?
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When the galaxy gives you a hive of scum and villainy, use the honey to make mead!
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It moves around, but with really small populations it is better to not use per capita. It gives you nonsense numbers. For really small areas you should probably use time for your reporting (x years between murders).
Yes and no. They are tops of cities above a certain population cutoff. Any small unicorporated community with a single murder tops all of them. When the Pike County murders happened in Ohio a few years ago each of the villages body where a body was found nominally had a higher homicide rate than any city over 100,000.
I would extend that into the 90s. NYC hit its peak rate and number of homicides in 1990 and 1991, slightly ahead of the national peak. This combined with raw numbers of people meant that they topped the homicide count in most years in the period (despite other cities already having far worse rates). You also have an explosion in media about crime in the city, Law and Order, certain albums, and NYPD Blue. This is also the period where perceptions of crime strongly detach from reality.
Kings and New York counties, New York are two of the largest sources of incoming migrants to Cleveland, frequently beating its own outermost suburbs. The same is true in Chicago and Detroit. In no sense is New York mysterious or exotic to people from the Midwest. New York is close enough to Cleveland that I know very few people who haven’t made a quick weekend trip or gone for a concert.
I always find crime panic fascinating. When I took a trip to Chicago a few years ago I had people trying to warn me out of going, because of the crime. Their homicide rate is meaningfully lower than ours and I was staying in the loop. It is such a strange insight into how people process information.
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… inspired by places like Stockton, Modesto, and Bakersfield, not Chicago or New York
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You are Jerry Fletcher and I claim my £5!
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Han Dold City.
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Seriously how is it that people kept being friends with her?!
YMMV.
Cleveland and Ashtabula may be close to the border, but once you start getting out towards Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas, you’re not talking about a quick road-trip to catch a concert in NYC.
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Correct. Queens and Brooklyn are neither “The City” nor part of Long Island, despite Queens containing “Long Island City.” The Bronx is where the Yankees are and what you drive through to head north, and Staten Island is practically New Jersey.
/s, I left LI as soon as I finished high school.
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which was my point, not the actual crime rate… Most people who clutch their pearls over violent crime in cities do not live in said cities, but are just afraid of them because of the nightly news and because of crime shows or films that make them seem far more dangerous than they are. How can they be direclty impacted by crime happening in a city that they don’t live in… yet they still act like this crime has a direct impact on their lives…
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To some extent I agree and it is part of why I hate the concept of the Midwest as a category (My life in de-industrializing Cleveland looks a lot more like someone in Philly than Omaha). But on another level I think it still stands. Hennepin county (Minneapolis) Minnesota gets more in migration from Kings county than it does from its outer suburbs. Even once you are out to Burleigh county ND (Bismarck) you have more people moving in from Brooklyn than some adjoining counties (note the margins of error are huge at that point and can easily swallow the data). I think a more reasonable divide in this case is urban versus rural and suburban rather than regional. Someone in Cleveland or Chicago may not take the subway into their office job in Burnham designed skyscraper, but they would take the rapid or the ‘L’ then go relax in a park designed by the Olmsted Brothers firm.
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Every big city in the 70s was grungy. San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego and Long Beach on the west coast were either grungy or had very grungy areas. Economies were changing and that’s when people bought properties and fixed them up. The Long Beach I live in now is nothing like the LBC of the 70s. Several of the high-priced areas (downtown, Belmont Shore) were super icky when my family visited relatives in the 70s.
I remember visiting my cousins in KS in the late 70s and we went to KC. Grungy. I visited my cousin in KC during the mid-2000s and it was fabulous!
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