Films Captured Times Square’s Grimy Golden Age

It may be difficult to remember that fifty years ago New York was headed the way of Detroit. New Yorkers fled the city by the hundreds of thousands, arson was measured by the square block, and each year the city’s debt grew by a billion. A national poll in 1977 found that the percentage of Americans who considered New York to be a “good place to live” had fallen to six. The city was only marginally more popular among its residents, a million of whom had been forced onto the welfare rolls. Four hundred fifty thousand manufacturing jobs vanished, thirty thousand apartment units were abandoned annually, and there were ten fires a day in the Bronx alone. After a long prosperous run, it seemed the city was finally coming to ruin. By the time President Ford told the city to drop dead, it already had.