13 Things That Were Normal in 1970s NYC but Would Be Insane Today

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Well, uh Mayor Lindsay and his politics, that's what I dislike about New York.

[00:00:05]A 9-year-old kid walks out of a tenement on East 103rd [music] Street at quarter past 10:00 on a Tuesday night, alone, no phone, no supervision.

[00:00:15]He is going to the bodega on the corner to get a quart of milk and a pack of cigarettes for his mother. The bodega owner sells him both.

[00:00:23]The kid walks home, hands his mother [music] her change, and goes to bed.

[00:00:27]That entire sequence would land somebody in a courtroom today.

[00:00:30]And yet, that was Tuesday.

[00:00:32]The shocking thing is not [music] that this happened. The shocking thing is that nobody who lived through it remembers it as shocking.

[00:00:39]13 pieces of 1970s New York, the city absorbed [music] without flinching.

[00:00:44]One of them is the reason your rent is what it is today.

[00:00:48]Stay until the end. The last one [music] explains the city you actually live in.

[00:00:53]1690, that is the official homicide count for 1975 in New York City. By 1990, it climbed to 2,245.

[00:01:03]Compare that to roughly 386 [music] in 2024, and the math becomes a different country.

[00:01:10]Bartenders in Hell's Kitchen, garment workers in the garment district, cab dispatchers in Long Island City, all had a version of the same story.

[00:01:19]You walked to the train at 6:00 in the morning, and there was somebody who had not made it [music] through the night.

[00:01:24]You stepped around, you kept walking, you went to work.

[00:01:28]That is not a memory [music] anybody is proud of.

[00:01:31]The denial is part of the trauma.

[00:01:33]The city did not have the bandwidth to grieve correctly, so it stopped grieving at all, and an entire [music] generation of New Yorkers walked into adulthood with a calcified empathy reflex that takes decades to thaw.

[00:01:46]If you grew up here in that decade, [music] and you wonder why you have a hard time crying, this is part of the answer.

[00:01:55]The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1977 officially reported that 95% of the subway fleet was covered in graffiti, wall to wall, ceiling to ceiling. Inside the cars, outside the cars, into the conductor booths.

[00:02:11]Most New Yorkers did not see this [music] as damage. They saw it as the way the train looked.

[00:02:16]A teenager on the 6 in the Bronx was not horrified by a top-to-bottom burner painted by Tracy 168 or Lee or Phase 2.

[00:02:24]The teenager was looking at the ad for Newport cigarettes [music] next to the burner.

[00:02:30]Roughly one in four New York City residents in 1976 had no health coverage of any kind. Not [music] bad coverage, none.

[00:02:38]What you did when you got sick was you got sick. You took aspirin. You waited.

[00:02:43]If it got bad enough, you went to a city hospital, which were Bellevue, Kings County, Lincoln, Elmhurst, Harlem, [music] where you sat in a waiting room for 9 hours and got treated by a resident who had been [music] awake for 36.

[00:02:58]People walked around with broken fingers that healed crooked because nobody set them.

[00:03:04]Women gave birth in apartments because the wait at Bellevue was longer than the labor.

[00:03:09]Cancers got found at stage four because [music] stage one was a luxury you could not afford to investigate. There is a missing demographic in this city.

[00:03:17][music] People who would have been 65 today and are not. The reason is not mysterious.

[00:03:25]There were 125,000 pay phones in New York [music] City in 1976.

[00:03:30]10 cents got you a local call. Every corner, every diner, every subway [music] station.

[00:03:35]People used them to fight with spouses, to call bookies, to set up drug deals, to tell their kids to come home, to call ambulances when somebody collapsed in the street.

[00:03:45]You memorized numbers, >> [music] >> your own, your mother's, the deli, three friends.

[00:03:50]People who came of age in that decade [music] can still recite the phone number of a kid they last saw in 1979.

[00:03:56]If your car broke down on the Cross Bronx in 1980, you walked to the next [music] exit, found a payphone, called for help.

[00:04:04]If your car breaks down today and your phone is dead, you are doing the same walk, except now there is [music] nothing on the other end of it.

[00:04:12]The payphone was a piece of public safety infrastructure [music] pretending to be telephone infrastructure.

[00:04:17]We took it down without replacing what it actually did.

[00:04:22]A real bodega in 1975, Washington Heights, or East Harlem, or Sunset [music] Park, was open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

[00:04:32]Christmas, New [music] Year's, the blackout, the garbage strike, open, open, open.

[00:04:39]The owner lived in the back, or upstairs.

[00:04:42]The store sold milk, eggs, lottery tickets, [music] single cigarettes called Lucy's for a quarter, beer in brown paper bags, plantains, [music] La Vaquita cheese, sandwiches called chopped cheese before chopped [music] cheese had a name on the internet, and small loans at interest rates that were not technically legal, [music] but were nobody's business.

[00:05:04]A bodega was a bank for people the bank would not serve, a post office for people who could not read, a babysitter when your mother had to run two blocks to pay the gas bill.

[00:05:13]A piece of immigrant infrastructure [music] built in real time by people who did not sleep because the math did not work if they slept. There are still bodegas in this city that operate that way, fewer every year.

[00:05:27]A typical July night in 1976 on [music] 65th Street in Bensonhurst.

[00:05:32]15 kids on the sidewalk, ages 7 [music] to 14, playing stickball with a broomstick handle and a Spaldeen until 11:30.

[00:05:41]Their parents were on the stoop drinking cold Schaefer beer.

[00:05:45]The kids were unsupervised in the technical [music] sense and completely supervised in every meaningful sense because every adult on the block knew which kid belonged to which family and would deliver a kid home with a smack on the back of the head if the kid was being an idiot. The phrase [music] free-range parenting did not exist because parenting had not yet been turned into a verb. By 2005, a 7-year-old playing alone on the sidewalk at 9:00 at night looked to most adult eyes like [music] neglect. In 1976, it looked like Tuesday. Something was traded. Anybody who tells you the trade only went one way is selling you something.

[00:06:24]A United States Postal Service letter carrier in 1975 made roughly $12,800 a year, equivalent to $79,000 in 2025.

[00:06:36]That mailman lived in a one-bedroom apartment on West 88th Street and rented for $210 [music] a month. His wife worked part-time at a doctor's office on West End Avenue.

[00:06:46]They had two kids in public school.

[00:06:49]That mailman would now need a household income of roughly $250,000 a year to live in the same apartment.

[00:06:56]The apartment exists, the same apartment [music] on the same block.

[00:07:00]It is just no longer for him.

[00:07:03]This is not a real estate story. [music] This is a class story. Manhattan in 1975 was the home of working-class people, cops, teachers, transit workers, plumbers, doormen. They all lived on the island. By 2025, they all live in the outer boroughs >> [music] >> or in Westchester or in Pennsylvania, commuting 2 hours each way to clean offices in buildings owned by people who fly home to Connecticut. It was not an accident. It was a series [music] of policy choices.

[00:07:33]The mailman did not lose his apartment.

[00:07:36]The apartment was taken from him. There is a difference, and the difference is the entire [music] story of the city you live in.

[00:07:44]42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenue in 1975 [music] had 33 adult businesses, 15 pornographic theaters, four arcades, [music] and a homicide rate per square block higher than any other district in the United States.

[00:08:00]The Deuce, as it was called, was not a metaphor.

[00:08:03]>> [music] >> What shocks the contemporary viewer is not that the Deuce existed, it is that ordinary people walked through it on the way to [music] work. The Times Square subway station handled 450,000 passengers a day. Most were secretaries [music] from Queens, accountants from the Bronx, nurses heading to St. Vincent's.

[00:08:21]They walked through. They kept their head down. They got on the train.

[00:08:26]A young woman from Forest Hills knew, by the time she was 19, exactly which side of 8th Avenue to walk on at 6:00 in the morning, which subway car to choose at midnight, which doorways were safe to stand in if it started raining.

[00:08:40]Nobody taught her.

[00:08:42]She absorbed it from her mother, her older sister, her cousin who got mugged on 44th >> [music] >> in '73.

[00:08:49]A lot of New Yorkers will tell you they preferred the old version.

[00:08:52]A lot of New Yorkers, particularly women who walked 8th Avenue at 6:00 in the morning in 1976, will tell [music] you those people are full of it.

[00:09:00]Real cities are allowed to have lost something and [music] gained something at the same exact moment.

[00:09:08]July of 1975, >> [music] >> the city is bankrupt. Mayor Beame lays off 5,000 sanitation workers. The remaining workers go on strike.

[00:09:17]>> [music] >> Garbage piles up on every sidewalk in every neighborhood.

[00:09:21]Eight days, the piles reach the second-story windows on some blocks in Crown Heights.

[00:09:25]>> [music] >> Rats the size of cats colonize the piles.

[00:09:29]The smell at noon on Atlantic Avenue is something a person who was there can describe with their eyes closed 50 years later and start [music] gagging. Nobody fled the city.

[00:09:39]99% of New Yorkers got up the next morning and went to work.

[00:09:43]They walked around the piles.

[00:09:45]They put scarves over their faces in July.

[00:09:48]They got on the train.

[00:09:49]They came home.

[00:09:51]They did it again the next day.

[00:09:55]New Yorkers have a tolerance for malfunction that looks from the outside like indifference. It is not indifference. It is a muscle that gets built over decades of being failed by the people [music] in charge and finding out that you can actually still get to work without them. That muscle was forged in the '70s. It is the reason the city did not fall apart on September 11th and the reason it did not fall apart in March of 2020.

[00:10:19]The muscle has a price. The price is a city full of people who have a hard time admitting [music] when something is wrong.

[00:10:27]October 30th, 1975.

[00:10:29]The front page of the Daily News reads in 72-point Tempo Bold the words >> [music] >> "Ford to City, Drop Dead." President Gerald Ford had just announced he would veto any federal bailout. The city had defaulted.

[00:10:42]250,000 municipal employees were facing layoffs. What was normal was the reaction, >> [music] >> which was not panic. It was a tired shrug. New Yorkers had been told their entire lives >> [music] >> that the rest of America did not like them, considered them un-American, considered them a problem to be managed rather than a city to be supported. The Drop Dead headline [music] was not a revelation. It was a confirmation.

[00:11:08]The fiscal crisis ended when the Municipal Assistance [music] Corporation, controlled by a private banker named Felix Rohatyn, took over the city's finances.

[00:11:17]They closed the City University free tuition program that [music] had been free since 1847.

[00:11:23]They closed firehouses. The bankers saved the city. The bankers also took the city.

[00:11:28]That priority order has not been reversed [music] in 50 years.

[00:11:34]Between 1970 and 1980, the South Bronx lost between 40 and 80% of its housing stock to fire, depending on the census tract.

[00:11:43]Some of those fires were accidents. Most were not.

[00:11:46]Landlords paid arsonists $300 to $500 to torch buildings the landlords could no longer afford to maintain and then collected on insurance policies [music] underwritten by companies that knew exactly what was happening.

[00:12:00]A typical job in 1976 [music] involved a torch hired through a bar in Hunts Point, a 5-gallon can of gasoline poured down a stairwell at 3:00 in the morning, and a phone call to the fire department made by the landlord himself [music] 30 minutes later to establish his innocence.

[00:12:17]The fire department was running on a budget cut by 20%.

[00:12:22]They could not [music] save the buildings.

[00:12:24]Tenants jumped out of fourth-story windows. Children burned in cribs. The landlords collected. This is not a metaphor for capitalism.

[00:12:32]>> [music] >> This is capitalism. This is what capitalism does when an asset becomes worth more dead than alive and there are no countervailing forces to stop it. The buildings burned. The land sat vacant.

[00:12:45]20 years later, the same land was rezoned and sold to developers who built market-rate housing on it.

[00:12:51]The original tenants did not [music] return. The answer was not a market correction. The answer was a deliberate restructuring of who was allowed to live in this city, and the restructuring was performed by fire because fire is faster than eviction and harder to prosecute.

[00:13:08]Ridership on the New York City Subway in 1976 dropped [music] to 1 billion annual riders, the lowest in 50 years. Felony assaults on the subway in 1979 averaged [music] six per day.

[00:13:21]The Guardian Angels, founded by Curtis Sliwa, started patrolling the trains in 1979 because the transit police could not. What was normal was that you had a backup plan. You took the bus, you walked. You did not take the train after dark if you had a choice.

[00:13:38]If you did, you knew exactly which car had the fewest people in it and you avoided it because the empty car was empty for a reason.

[00:13:46]That set of skills is gone.

[00:13:48]The reading was a form of paying attention.

[00:13:52]The not having to read is a form of not paying [music] attention.

[00:13:55]There are second-order consequences to that and we do not know yet what they all are. Tell me one thing your parents or grandparents did in 1970s New York that you as an adult in 2025 would call the cops on if [music] you saw a kid doing it today. The specific story, the one your family still tells at Thanksgiving. Write it in the comments.

[00:14:15]The 70s are mostly remembered through movies and the movies [music] got most of it wrong and the only honest archive left is in the heads of the people who lived through it. That includes the people in your family who are not going to be around forever.

[00:14:30]A New Yorker in 1975 did not wake [music] up and think they were living in a dystopia.

[00:14:35]They woke up and thought they were living.

[00:14:37]The graffiti on the train was not a sign of civilizational collapse.

[00:14:41]The graffiti on the train was the train.

[00:14:43][music] The body on the sidewalk was not a national emergency.

[00:14:47]The body on the sidewalk was Tuesday.

[00:14:50]The shock you feel watching a documentary about that decade is a category error.

[00:14:55]You are looking at a system in equilibrium and reading [music] it as a system in crisis because your equilibrium is different. They lived it.

[00:15:04]They survived it. They built the city you live in now on top of it and you are walking around inside the architecture of their compromises without realizing they were compromises.

[00:15:14]The real shock of the 70s is not what New Yorkers accepted.

[00:15:21]The real shock of the 70s is that 50 years from now somebody is going to make a video about 2025. [music] And the audience watching that video will sit there with their mouths open and ask how you possibly accepted any of what you accept right now.

[00:15:37]The list will be long. The people on the list will be you.

[00:15:41]The decade the kids will be shocked by is the one you are currently calling normal.

[00:15:46]That is the trick.

[00:15:47]That has always been the trick. Every decade is the strange one if you live long enough to see the next one judge it.