Criminals and Culture Makers
Detroit’s story of bankruptcy and rust is a quintessential Great Recession tragedy, but it is not the first major American city to grapple with bankruptcy amid structural economic change, class tensions, and pervasive urban desolation. At the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, the country’s biggest city was also instructed by the federal government to fix its own financial problems.
Tourists absorbed in the neon hive of Times Square and young professionals who have fled the heartland for $2,200 per month studio apartments on the Lower East Side would hardly recognize the city that elected Ed Koch as mayor in 1977. New York City had spent the preceding few years flirting with insolvency, leaking white middle-class taxpayers, and inspiring apocalyptic media catchphrases, such as “Ford to City: Drop Dead” and “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.” During Koch’s first term, felonies rose and austerity measures crippled city services. The decline of the subway system became a particular obsession for the New York Times, which chronicled the system’s failures and the daily fears of its riders throughout 1981. Constant malfunctions led to delays traveling to work in the morning and home in the evening; sometimes the trains derailed and crashed.
The restructuring of New York’s economy wiped out new manufacturing jobs for working-class teens, who were dubbed the “Lost Generation” by labor officials and the “chronic teen-age jobless” by the Staten Island Advance. This joblessness particularly applied to black teens, whose unemployment ratio—less than one person employed for every ten unemployed—was double the average ratio for teens. The rising retail sector, with its low pay and scant career motivation, was the main source of jobs for those who lacked the access to join the burgeoning white-collar sectors of finance, insurance, and real estate.
The particular way that the city was rebuilt in the following years determined much of its current personality. The New York City of commercial developers, Michael Bloomberg, and Rudy Giuliani was not inevitable, but was rather the result of power struggles fought along class and racial lines. These battles played out in the city’s most public spaces and were often symbolized by a spray paint can.
The Times first explored graffiti in 1971, after a seventeen-year-old boy from Washington Heights scrawled his tag “Taki 183” in marker all over the city. In the Times article, “Taki 183 Spawns Pen Pals,” a Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) patrolman explained that tagging had become a fad among “teenagers from all parts of the city, all races and religions and all economic classes.” It could be any daring kid with a marker in his or her pocket and the desire to send his or her nickname and street name hurtling through the city on a subway car...