hi! hopefully you'll get some direct responses, but meanwhile, don't miss this really interesting related discussion from a few months ago..

Was New York of the 1970s the shithole movies make it out to be?

New York City was on a slow decline in the 1960s, and recovered slowly from the 1969 recession. During the 1950s and 60s, many manufacturers found it cheaper to operate elsewhere, uprooting and relocating to the suburbs, nearby states like New Jersey and Pennsylvania or, in some cases, the deep South. The deindustrialization of the city during this period deeply affected blue collar workers, who moved away in droves, leaving behind entire blocks of abandoned tenements and houses across the city. Manufacturing jobs declined by 35% and thousands of New Yorkers found themselves employed. At the same time, New York State increased its income tax, prompting twenty two major companies (including GE, Xerox and Union Carbide) to decamp to New Jersey and Connecticut; in 1968 there had been 128 corporate headquarters in the city, and in 1975 there were 90). The financial, insurance and real estate industries also suffered, losing more than 50,000 jobs from 1969 to 1977.

The city was faced with declining job numbers, a change in population dynamics (beginning in 1965 the city saw a new wave of immigration from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean) and mounting financial debt that was the result of municipal overspending (between 1970 and 1975 city debt ballooned more than 350 percent). Soon, New York was heading towards bankruptcy. In 1975, the State created the Municipal Assistance Corporation to help bail out the city; the trade-off was that the city relinquished much of its control to the State, which fired thousands of city municipal workers and ended free tuition at CUNY. Of course, it was the State that also helped the city rescue its subways and railroads; in 1965 Governor Nelson Rockefeller created the Metropolitan Transit Authority, merging the commuter railroads, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (taking away Robert Moses’ base of power) and the subway system.

Beginning in 1977 the city’s financial sectors began to recover from the deep recession. The finance, insurance and real estate industries also recovered well, comprising 47% of metropolitan job growth by 1980; service industries also grew rapidly. To generate more income, the city created the Office of Economic Development, which vigorously marketed the city (using the 1971 I <3 NY campaign and promoting New York, New York, which was recorded by Frank Sinatra in 1979, as well as resurrecting the “Big Apple” as a nickname for the city) to attract new companies and visitors. By the end of the decade, the yearly OED budget for tourism topped one million dollars, and the city began looking towards revitalizing the seedy Times Square area (the hulking Marriott Marquis Hotel, which opened in 1985, rose on the site of five historic Broadway theaters, its back significantly turned on Times Square).