I am blessed at work to interact with a group of young people who weren't yet alive when I moved into New York City from the leafy green of suburbia in 1979. They like, some of them, to hear my stories of Olde New York, where an apartment could be had for $90/month and a cuppa joe at Chock Full o' Nuts was just 32-cents.
Suffice to say, the city seemed to have jumped its rails and was careening, or, better, had careened out of control.
There's no question the city was more dangerous then than it is today--despite the fear-mongering of Donald Trump. In 1979, the year I moved to Manhattan, there were 1733 murders. Murders peaked in 1990 at 2245. In 2015, the last full-year of records, the were 352 murders--fewer than one a day.
Despite the chaos of New York in those days, I was never mugged, nor was my wife. I had a confrontation with a heroin addict on the subway once, and another confrontation on the train some other time. But my prodigious size and scowl stopped those confrontations well-short of fisticuffs.
In fact, the scariest thing in New York in those days occurred in the famous Fairway fruit stand and supermarket on Broadway between 74th and 75th Street.
The Upper West Side in those days was populated primarily by old Jewish widows living in sprawling apartments on tiny pensions and social security payments.
Fairway had something those days called "Bruised Fruit Tuesday." They would place in a giant bin all their damaged fruit and sell it for pennies on the dollar.
Let me warn you now, in case these hard-times ever come back.
If you get in the way of a social security widow on her way to a 19-cent cantaloupe you're as good as dead.
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