DROP DEAD CITY: NYC in Film During the 1970s – Essay by Yael Friedman (Guest post)
Fifty years ago, New York City famously found itself at the precipice: of bankruptcy; of crumbling infrastructure, with hollowed out buildings and empty lots that gave a visual language to the city’s many woes. This disfigured urban landscape seemed to both bear witness to and play a central role in the city’s fading fortunes, its ebbing safety nets and rise in crime, its white flight and arson epidemic, the ravages of the municipal workforce and tax base, and the anger and indignation that spilled over from every open window and overflowing trash can.
The wonderful recent documentary Drop Dead City by Michael Rohatyn and Peter Yost about the 1975 fiscal crisis is a fittingly dramatic retelling of this pivotal moment in the city’s history. It is, of course, titled after the famous Daily News headline from when President Gerald R. Ford allegedly told the city to “drop dead,” after Mayor Abe Beame and Governor Hugh Carey arrived in Washington, hats in hand, asking for federal aid. Ford did not use those words, but he absolutely articulated the same contempt, aided and abetted by two young staffers named Cheney and Rumsfeld. Ford described New York’s woes as being left on the front doorstep of the federal government, saying, “I am prepared to veto any bill that has as its purpose a federal bailout of New York City to prevent a default.”
The film shows the disdain for New York held by politicians and folks elsewhere, and the righteous indignation of New Yorkers after seeing the headline. Ultimately, President Ford’s conviction to let New York City fail did not prevail, his coarse morality tale about the role of government and the spendthrift Sodom was disrupted. With aid from Washington and a new austerity plan created by the newly formed Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), New York pulled back from the brink–––even if to emerge a lesser city in many ways.
The film is somehow the first documentary about this moment. And yet when one watches it, the images are almost too familiar–––like looking at the reels of a home movie–––even for those of us not yet born or living elsewhere at the time. It is a period endlessly summoned as a warning and romanticized in equal measure. In the recent mayoral elections, as in past campaigns, cynical candidates drew from its well by warning of a 70s-type hellscape that awaited if they were not chosen: an urban nightmare lurking in the shadows, waiting for the right conditions to overtake civilization, to mug you or worse. As Guy Trebay writes of those years in his beautiful lyrical memoir Do Something (2024), “New York, in short, is on the skids, and if its inhabitants are abandoning it in droves, who can blame them? Even in the fanciest sections sidewalks glisten with ominous carpets of shattered glass, residue of smash-in car thefts.”
However, Trebay also captures the haunting beauty of that city: “What is too little remarked on is how somnolent and dreamlike the city could be, how in many ways magical appeared this wrecked and depopulated metropolis, my classroom.”
This is the city that Colson Whitehead, Rachel Kushner and Garth Risk Hallberg used as the canvas for some of their most electrifying novels–––Crook Manifesto, The Flamethrowers, and City on Fire, respectively. Whitehead and Kushner were born in the late 1960s and Hallberg in the late 1970s. They captured an urban landscape they recalled in flashes of memories, in stories heard second hand, in the nightly news, in the myths of the city that beckoned maverick pilgrims. Whitehead grew up here; Kushner and Hallberg did not. While Whitehead may have more firsthand knowledge, the myth overtakes reality for even those who experienced it–––or at least makes that reality more vivid. Their veritable odes are full of grit and glamor so intertwined and baked into the idea of this city that no amount of gentrification could ever truly extinguish them. This sense of the city is far more potent than nostalgia, somehow continuing to guide those who feel it as a birthright.
Why is this image of the city so easily conjured, forever (and forever and forever) inscribed in the collective imagination across generations? It’s partly because it was such a pivotal moment: New York transformed so profoundly from a city defined by how it cared for its citizens–––a thriving working- and middle-class city–––to a portrait of decadence and decay with the devil’s bargain of 1975. The new austerity measures adopted then may have “saved” the city, but they also gave rise to the new globalized city and the FIRE industries (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) forming its new, more sterile core and filling the post-industrial vacuum. From a city with an already iconic skyline rose more, higher, thinner spires and an ever-widening gap between rich and not rich, with a housing crisis and cost of living that make it ever so concrete, so palpable to all.
As Drop Dead City recounts, 20th Century New York was a “pillar of opportunity,” a place where “the liberal spirit was not confined to Democrats,” with a trenchant belief that government could do everything. Indeed, it was two Republicans–––Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and Mayor John Lindsay––– who expanded government programs even further. It was a union town animated by a fundamental belief that everyone could be afforded the same opportunities, with extensive public services, well-compensated public servants, and the only free public university in the United States. Continue reading on THE FEMALE GAZE
ABOUT YAEL FRIEDMAN
Yael Friedman is a journalist based in New York. She covers art and culture and their intersection with economics, politics, and history. She has written extensively about urban history and urban planning, particularly New York’s, analyzing its past and assessing its present and future. Her articles have appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, 1843, The Conversationalist, The Economist, The Daily Beast, Haaretz, Forward, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Urban Omnibus.
