David Brooks: Children of the ’70s
[David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times.]
Today you can walk around the Upper West Side of Manhattan in such ease and safety that you could get the impression it was always this way. But it wasn’t.
On July 5, 1961, a gigantic brawl broke out on 84th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. Two policemen, caught in the middle, fired warning shots into the air to stop the fighting, but a mob of 400 engulfed them. Traffic was halted on Columbus as bottles rained down from tenement houses, lye was thrown into one man’s face and knives flashed out.
That section of 84th Street in those days was one of the most dangerous blocks in the city. The Times described it as “a block of decaying tenements packed with poor Puerto Rican and Negro families and the gathering place of drunks, narcotics addicts and sexual perverts.” A local minister, James Gusweller, said there were five or six stabbings every Saturday night.
The violence built and built. Through the ’60s and ’70s, crime surged. John Podhoretz captures the atmosphere of that time in a wonderful essay called “Life in New York, Then and Now” in the current issue of Commentary. He describes the Upper West Side of his youth as a unique small town, an integrated mixture of professors and psychoanalysts, teachers and social workers, workers and the unemployed....
Yet eventually crime was reduced, and the neighborhoods were restored. It’s easy to be nostalgic for the supposedly more authentic New York of days gone by — for Jane Jacobs’s busy Greenwich Village block. But, as Benjamin Schwarz of The Atlantic recently observed, that golden image of New York really only applied to small parts of the city and only during a transition moment when the manufacturing economy of the mid-20th century briefly overlapped with the information economy of the late-20th century.
As Podhoretz rightly notes, if you grew up in a big city in the ’70s, then life is better for you now in about every respect. Today, most liberals and conservatives have more sophisticated views on how to build and preserve civic order than people did then, and there is more of it.
The Upper West Side is still integrated. And despite all expectations, it’s actually more religious now. For example, there are now 4,000 children attending yeshivas, Jewish schools and Jewish nursery schools in the neighborhood.
The children of the ’70s grew up with both unprecedented freedom and disorder, and have learned, in mostly good ways, from both.
Read entire article at NYT
Today you can walk around the Upper West Side of Manhattan in such ease and safety that you could get the impression it was always this way. But it wasn’t.
On July 5, 1961, a gigantic brawl broke out on 84th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. Two policemen, caught in the middle, fired warning shots into the air to stop the fighting, but a mob of 400 engulfed them. Traffic was halted on Columbus as bottles rained down from tenement houses, lye was thrown into one man’s face and knives flashed out.
That section of 84th Street in those days was one of the most dangerous blocks in the city. The Times described it as “a block of decaying tenements packed with poor Puerto Rican and Negro families and the gathering place of drunks, narcotics addicts and sexual perverts.” A local minister, James Gusweller, said there were five or six stabbings every Saturday night.
The violence built and built. Through the ’60s and ’70s, crime surged. John Podhoretz captures the atmosphere of that time in a wonderful essay called “Life in New York, Then and Now” in the current issue of Commentary. He describes the Upper West Side of his youth as a unique small town, an integrated mixture of professors and psychoanalysts, teachers and social workers, workers and the unemployed....
Yet eventually crime was reduced, and the neighborhoods were restored. It’s easy to be nostalgic for the supposedly more authentic New York of days gone by — for Jane Jacobs’s busy Greenwich Village block. But, as Benjamin Schwarz of The Atlantic recently observed, that golden image of New York really only applied to small parts of the city and only during a transition moment when the manufacturing economy of the mid-20th century briefly overlapped with the information economy of the late-20th century.
As Podhoretz rightly notes, if you grew up in a big city in the ’70s, then life is better for you now in about every respect. Today, most liberals and conservatives have more sophisticated views on how to build and preserve civic order than people did then, and there is more of it.
The Upper West Side is still integrated. And despite all expectations, it’s actually more religious now. For example, there are now 4,000 children attending yeshivas, Jewish schools and Jewish nursery schools in the neighborhood.
The children of the ’70s grew up with both unprecedented freedom and disorder, and have learned, in mostly good ways, from both.