In the year alone, a total of 72, abandoned cars were towed away from New York. Above, four young boys play atop the hood of an abandoned car. Many people, like the man above begging on West 42nd Street in Manhattan, were desperate for money and for jobs.
In , 10, sanitation men went on strike in order to protest the 2, layoffs that the city had administered to their department. Here, garbage sits uncollected outside of a subway entrance on East 14th Street near Union Square.
Covered in graffiti and littered with trash, Grand Centralnd Street station was still a hub for commuters. On the night of Wednesday, July 13th, , the power went out in all of New York City and parts of Westchester County, leaving eight million people in the dark. The power failure was attributed to lightning that struck several critical transmission lines in northern Westchester County during a severe thunderstorm.
The blackout began on the first night of a sweltering nine-day heat wave that would become the hottest in New York City's history. Here, people stand outside on Greenpoint Ave. In some neighborhoods, looting began almost immediately after all power was lost at pm. Along upper Broadway, mannequins were stripped of their clothes and strewn among broken store windows. Author Jonathan Mahler recalls that "just minutes after the lights [went] out, you [had] people just streaming into Broadway, smashing the windows of stores in every conceivable way.
Some people continued their daily routines despite the fact that all of New York City and its boroughs were in the dark. Here, people at Chapman's Restaurant in midtown Manhattan ignore the blackout and continue their drinking by candlelight. The only lights visible in this NYC skyline from Queens are those of a Waterside Con Edison plant, where employees were working urgently to restore power.
In terms of lifestyles, the cultural and political revolution of the 60s ceded to hedonism and decadence. Sex and drugs were a big part of what was going on in the s. As a subject for art, nudes were only a starting point, with painting and sculpture getting more graphic.
Happenings and performance pieces often contained nudity. Public nudity and sex were accepted, commercialized, and even glorified. Times Square became a center for the production and distribution of pornography. Sexual freedom, fought for and won in the s, expanded into forms of expression, especially in the gay world, where cross-dressing in public was now permissible.
In the nightworld, sex was the motivator and the objective, from the singles bars uptown to the hip clubs downtown.
As discos returned remember the Peppermint Lounge of the '60s? Cocaine made it possible to stay awake and dance for hours and hours. It also facilitated picking up a member of the opposite sex. Unlike smoking a marijuana joint, it was discreet to use. Cocaine was definitely the drug of choice for the nightworld. Legal but misused drugs such as amyl nitrate provided even more stimulus on the dance floor.
While sex was an ingredient of the disco and club scene, it was the main theme at other places. Plato's Retreat was the biggest and wildest club for straight swingers, with an orgy room as its centerpiece.
There were also gay bathhouses where men could have totally anonymous sex with others. These were closed down when a fire killed several men at one, but the real end to these kinds of places was the scourge of AIDS. Nightlife itself became a casualty of AIDS, as more and more people became reluctant to have casual sex. As certain places and trends were popular, so were certain people, many becoming pop icons like Andy Warhol and John Lennon. Warhol was an extremely prolific artist, working in painting, graphics, film, photography, and publishing.
No wonder he called his studio "The Factory. Andy was always on the scene, both as documentarian and celebrity. Lennon had settled in New York City after the breakup of The Beatles, finding it a place where he could be himself and be left alone. He too collaborated with other artists, such as downtown protest singer David Peel. Several solo albums and joint efforts with Yoko Ono were recorded in New York.
Lennon withdrew almost completely from view after the birth of his son Sean. After five years of seclusion, he emerged in the summer of bursting with creative energy and enthusiasm. With his tragic assassination, New York City - and the world - lost a big part of its heart and soul. So when Warhol, Lennon, and many other creative people left the scene, a cultural vacuum ensued which has remained unfilled. Other intangible elements of the time made it unique. Besides the overflowing creativity and experimentation, there was receptiveness to new ideas.
There was a sense of community and sharing with others. There was a lack of greed or sense of entitlement. There was excitement, enthusiasm, and optimism. New media such as video spawned artists and groups seeking to explore the possibilities of this new technology and ways of expression.
Outlets for new media such as public access cable TV provided new ways of communicating with larger audiences, and satellite made it global. Again, the cheap large spaces made it possible not only for artists, but for video co-ops, filmmakers, dance troupes, and experimental theater companies to work and live. New York has never been an easy place to live. It's a crowded megalopolis that is magnificent but not charming like Paris or London.
People work very hard and often act rude. But despite the adversity of the s - the crime, dirt, and decay - life was more simple and pleasant than it is today. We didn't have, and didn't know we needed, such modern conveniences as cellphones and personal computers.
We didn't know that money was everything and the only thing, because we didn't need much to live decently. Money killed the SoHo scene, as stockbrokers and lawyers discovered that lofts would make great luxury apartments. Real estate values skyrocketed and many artists were forced out of their studios.
Galleries too were forced out, to be replaced by designer boutiques and chain stores. Many galleries relocated to west Chelsea, a really charmless area lacking the transportation convenience of SoHo. Artists relocated to the East Village or parts of Brooklyn. The result was that the community was shattered and the creative synergy of a concentration of artists in a non-commercial environment was lost forever.
Although a few artists still live and work in SoHo, there are only a few galleries left. SoHo today isn't much more than a shopping mall. This is it - the break I've been waiting for! Having been graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in Art, and having studied with professors who came from the New York art world, it was natural for me to gravitate to SoHo.
It was the raw fear and perception of vulnerability that seeped into every interaction of daily life…. March New York. Jersey City. July It was said that about one million of them were printed. And not to walk anywhere after six in the evening. Kevin Baker in an article for the Guardian wrote,.
It was a time when the wholesale disintegration of the largest city in the most powerful nation on earth seemed entirely possible. Of course the warnings were over-the-top, although the crime rate in New York had more than doubled over the preceding ten years and many other crimes had increased ten-fold.
Meanwhile New York City had an unprecedented fiscal crisis in , and two years later the city descended into chaos after the power went out for 25 hours. The population declined to just over seven million from eight million ten years before. June The World Trade Center hovers over unrestored 19th century tenements.
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