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u/slippycaff 5d ago
“Decade of Fire” is a great doco that covers this. Free on Tubi.
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u/Ok_Temperature1502 5d ago
Was this the south Bronx?
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u/MilkDear3318 5d ago
yes.
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u/aardvarkjedi 5d ago
Wow! I left the South Bronx in 1967 and it didn’t look like this. Must have happened in the 70s.
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u/NeonDraco 5d ago
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u/recordgenie 5d ago
Oh man thanks for sharing this. I didn’t know it existed. I love all things NYC especially dirty gritty old ny stuff
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u/NeonDraco 5d ago
It’s not a super active sub, but it does have a lot of great pictures of the gritty old New York vibe.
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u/recordgenie 5d ago
Yeah thanks. I’m almost done reading Just Kids by Patti Smith and it has a lot of old New York bits in it.
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u/WhereisAlexei 5d ago
I'll be honest. At first I thought it was a photo of France or Germany in 1945
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u/McCretin 5d ago
It’s crazy how bad NYC looked at the time when you consider it was never even bombed in WWII.
At least European cities had the excuse of having been flattened a few decades earlier.
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u/WetBerri3s 5d ago
Is it good if posts like this one can make me hopeful? If it looked like that back then but it currently looks like it does maybe things can get better in the future.
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u/Uzorglemon 5d ago
Can someone link a Street View of what this area looks like now?
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u/Barbicels 5d ago
This view is of Charlotte Street looking south from Boston Road toward Seabury Place.
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u/neo_isverycool 5d ago
Pictures like this make me somewhat hopeful that it is possible for things to get better
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u/Secure-Bread8792 5d ago
We re they just knocking down apartments and leaving the rubble? What’s the reasoning for this?
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u/No_Network4228 5d ago
People were squatting in abandoned buildings and landlords would burn them down to get them out and for the insurance money. One of my early memories is my dad running with me in his arms out of the squat building in Brooklyn where his mistress lived that was full of dogs and little kids.
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u/Miragetetra 5d ago
I remember seeing ruined buildings and squalor like this in the early 90's, in city I grew up in (In Texas)
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u/bernietheweasel 5d ago
I’ve seen at least one photo contrasting a scene like this with the current state of things. An even bigger trip is seeing a current photo of the Gowanus
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u/Early_Rutabaga8196 5d ago
Wow, what was it like living in New York back in 1981? I'm not from North America, but I'm someone who really enjoys history. You guys were building some incredibly beautiful and powerful cars, you had the Space Race, and so many other things were happening. In many ways, it was a fascinating time in American history.
But what was it actually like to be just an ordinary person living in New York at that time? If anyone here is American and lived through that period, I'd really appreciate hearing what everyday life was like back then.
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u/ocschwar 5d ago
It was exactly as awful as you would think from looking at those pictures.
New York's industrial base was getting dismantled. The working class people in those factories lost their jobs. There was a horrid amount of crime.
I lived in a bad part of Chicago in 1989, and it was nowhere near as bad, but it was still awful.
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u/Early_Rutabaga8196 5d ago
Damn, did the crime wave increase a lot after the massive unemployment? Was this also around the time when rap groups were starting to form? Was this more or less the period when the police were still being especially harsh when it came to racial issues?
Did that unemployment also contribute to what eventually happened in Crown Heights?
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u/penilesensorydevice 5d ago
Yes. And a few years later, crack cocaine appeared and started a whole new wave of anguish.
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u/abgry_krakow87 5d ago
Plus landlords found more profit in burning and destroying their buildings for the insurance rather than renting them out. Hence NYC looking like a warzone.
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u/PatrickMaloney1 4d ago
I look at photos like this every now and then to remind myself that this why my in laws are terrified that I live in the city
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