TOO cheaply has 1977’s “Summer of Sam” come to symbolize the city’s long decline – a tailspin that began in the mid-’60s and continued mostly unchecked until January 1994, when Rudy Giuliani became mayor.
With its serial killer at large, an arson wave and the blackout looting that occurred 30 years ago today, it’s understandable that 1977 strikes many as emblematic of the awful parenthesis in New York’s illustrious history.
Yet much of what we think we know about 1977 is as wrong as “Saturday Night Fever,” the year’s hit movie supposedly based on real Brooklyn disco dancers, but later found to have been completely made up.
Mythologizing 1977 as a nadir serves to legitimize the preposterous notion that things would begin to improve shortly afterward – a fallacy promoted by former Mayor Ed Koch, who wrote in The Post this week that “soon after” the blackout, “We began our climb back to the top . . . the city gained confidence in itself, and we became the colossus we are today.”
Such facile fast-forwarding from the presumed perigee of 1977 can fool only those newly arrived in town.
Even with riots, 1977 was far from being “a low point.” The killing spree of lone madman David Berkowitz was unrelated to systemic decay. The Bronx had begun burning many years before Howard Cosell immortalized the phrase.
Despite municipal layoffs and loss of private-sector jobs, New Yorkers went into 1977 buoyed by the successes of the Democratic National Convention and the OpSail Bicentennial celebration the year before.
Compared with what would follow, 1977 seems like party time. The Citicorp tower was going up in Midtown. Japanese companies put the neon glitter back in Times Square, and Australian-born Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post and New York magazine, reaffirming that entrepreneurs around the globe believed in the city even as American corporations were moving out.
People flocked to the new Windows on the World and Tavern on the Green. Studio 54 ushered in a glamorous nightlife era that many today miss.
Things didn’t get really bad until after 1977: For the next 17 years, the dominant reality of New York City life was the terrifying level of crime and omnipresent menace that those recently arrived here can scarcely imagine.
Fact: The 1,557 murders in the five boroughs in 1977 were fewer than in either of the previous two years.
Fact: The murder tolls of the late ’70s were much lower than those to come – the body count soared during Koch’s scandal-scarred last term and peaked at 2,245 in 1990, David Dinkins’ first year as mayor.
By comparison, fewer than 600 murders have been recorded every year starting in 2002, even though today’s population is more than 8 million, compared with 7.3 million in 1990.
The murder wave of the late Koch and Dinkins years, inflamed by crack wars and enabled by sluggish policing, took its greatest toll on black and Hispanic residents of poorer neighborhoods. More privileged New Yorkers felt threatened too. Son of Sam’s one-man rampage came to feel quaint when citizens feared armed predators on every block.
For all his good intentions, Koch was incapable of curbing the street anarchy. Muggers enjoyed free rein over parks, kept elderly residents in their homes and intimidated executives leaving offices at night.
Although murders began to fall noticeably after Dinkins made Ray Kelly police commissioner in late 1992, things on the streets and sidewalks actually got worse. “Homeless” thugs and squeegee men ruled the day, taking their cues from Dinkins’ prolonged refusal to take firm action against the racist Korean deli boycott and his feeble response to the Crown Heights riot.
Of course, things changed dramatically under Giuliani, who understood that no economic or civic improvements were possible unless the public felt safe on the streets. He gave his top cops a single mandate – to reduce crime – and backed them up even when The Finest on very rare occasions crossed the line or fatally blundered in the line of duty.
To achieve it required a heroic will that wouldn’t flinch at being called “Adolf Giuliani” for installing pedestrian barriers at a few corners. (Oddly, no one ever calls Mayor Bloomberg a fascist for establishing fines for barking dogs and noisy Mr. Softee trucks.)
By the last months of Giuliani’s second term, the city was again civilized enough to cope nobly and selflessly with 9/11.
Unfortunately, as Giuliani and Bloomberg flex their political muscles, the growing public animosity between them has reinforced the impression of a stark disconnect between their times in office. But there’s more continuity than either man wants to acknowledge.
Yes, Bloomberg and Giuliani are as different as can be – but each in his way has been appropriate to his time.
On many crucial issues to which Giuliani was indifferent, Bloomberg is ferociously engaged. For example, where his predecessor toyed endlessly with zoning reform but accomplished little, Bloomberg has rezoned so much of the city for 21st century use that the full impact won’t be felt for generations.
And then there is crime – the issue that, however inaccurately, still defines the year 1977.
A successor so inclined could have undone all Giuliani’s work merely by sending the wrong signals or gutting vital police reforms. Instead, Bloomberg gave us Ray Kelly again, with orders not to undo the Comp- Stat-driven techniques that make commanders responsible for results in their precincts. Today, violent crime is lower than it was under Rudy.
The real disconnect is not between Giuliani and Bloomberg, but between the era that began in 1994 and the troubled decades that preceded it.
The best way to mark the 30th anniversary of the 1977 riots would be with a photo op of the two embracing to the tune of “I Love New York.” That might remind us how far we’ve come from the worse years of 1978-1993.
Shake hands, guys, and say cheese. [email protected]