What if New York never recovered?
 

What if New York never recovered under Giuliani? What if it had parralled Detroit's swoon?

Would LA or Chicago have taken over as the "It" city? Would the city suck but the suburbs be great? Or would the whole region decline? What would NYC be like today?

New York's decline was never really economic was it? It still housed almost every major financial institution and tons of head offices even at the height of its social dysfunction.

I imagine 80s New York extrapolated to today would just look a lot more dystopian, with the ultra rich living and working far above the poor people as opposed to living above the regular old rich people that inhabit it today.

New York didn't "recover" under Giuliani. New York has only registered two population declines in the entire history of the city, in the 1960 and 1980 censuses. Giuliani didn't become mayor until 1994. By comparison, Detroit has posted population declines in every census since 1950.

Population change doesn't always indicate a city's fortunes. And one of the decades you chose was the time period I had in mind. NYC was teetering on the brink at that time. Whether Giuliani enacted policies to change the city's fortunes or not, things changed for the better under his watch.

I thought that the worst period for NYC was during the 1970's when the city went bankrupt.

It's an interesting question. I imagine it would look a lot like Chicago does now. I would assume that most of Manhattan would be pretty gentrified, at least south of Harlem, but places like the Bronx and perhaps portions of Brooklyn would look more like the South Side of Chicago. The city would have probably more or less 'consolidated' into Manhattan, and you'd have the classic tale of two cities between it and the outer boroughs.

If the city never really recovered from its low point in the 70s, I'd imagine more corporations would have fled the city, either to the burbs or to other regions of the country, and we could have experienced something similar to the shift in power between Montreal and Toronto. But that's hard to even imagine, seeing how dominant NYC is in banking, finance, etc.

What materially changed under Giuliani that wasn't already in progress? Crime rates were already falling. The population was already growing. What other metric should we use?

Maybe not population but perception. New York had a reputation right up the mid-90's as sketchy and shoot-y. The only rule I had through high school (early 90's) was that I was not allowed to drive down to NYC. That perception seemed to change during the early Giuliani years.

Back in the 1980s half of New York looked and acted like ratso Rizzo in midnight cowboy.

Another important thing to note in this conversation is that the 70s were a hard time for a lot of US cities. So even though NYC was in a rough spot, it's not like DC, Philly, or Boston were much better. Being on the East Coast and the eastern time zone is critical for a lot of business, so it's unlikely that Chicago or LA or SF could have just taken New York's corporations, should they have decided to start jumping ship.

NYC was recovering well before Giuliani. The nadir was the late 70's. Giuliani deserves credit, however, for his central focus on crime/disorder.

NYC revived due to macro forces (immigration, gentrification, financial services boom, increasing importance of knowledge and creative economies, and plummeting birthrates among the underclass).

Isn't Ed Koch at least partially responsible for its rehabilitation?

NYC did go through a severe decline in manufacturing closing and corporations fleeing, as well as people fleeing. As the largest metro in the country, with significant clusters of critical industries like finance and international business despite losses, its rebound was also probably due to the rebound in the USA in stature in the world stage as well as the city figures so stated. After all, in the late 70s and 80s, Japan was the talk of the world and at one point in the late 1980s, the land in Tokyo was worth more than the entire USA and their stock market reached nearly 40,000 compared to the NYSE of around 3,000. Detroit's decline seems to have been the poster child of the decline of manufacturing in the USA on USA cities. Detroit of course had other issues, like a weak downtown core and high dependence on the domestic auto industry. Detroit was actually a relatively wealthy metro; I recall reading in the late 70s that it had the 3rd highest per capita income of all US metros.

Mayor Giuliani deserves a lot of credit and was given a lot of credit back in the 1990s for the big turn around of NY.

Broken Windows Theory - or basically the complete opposite of what cities are doing now - is one of a few factors in NY's recovery.

The 70's were tough decade for almost every major city. By the Late 70's NYC was pretty rough.

https://flashbak.com/welcome-to-fear...enties-385119/


Some gritty NYC movies if you haven't seen them yet.

Midnight Cowboy (1969)
The French Connection (1971)
Klute (1971)
The Panic in Needle Park (1971)
Super Fly (1972)
Serpico (1973)
Mean Streets (1973)
Death Wish (1974)
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Taxi Driver (1976)
The Warriors (1979)
Fort Apache the Bronx (1981)

Don't forget Escape from New York (1981) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckvDo2JHB7o

I personally think NYC was well enough off during that era, at least coming into the 90s. The 70s sucked financially, but if it never recovered as the most dominant US city (which wasn’t really challenged then from my understanding), it would have just stayed more low-key and affordable at a large scale. It was a very interesting place and was far more down to earth in the 70s,80s, and 90s. This is my opinion (since I was born there during this time), but honestly how else could it be seen if one ignored the violence?

Then maybe it would still be cool and cheap like this from 1985.

• Video Link

By the way, that channel has loads of amazing videos of what life was like for people in Manhattan during the 80's.

I first visited NYC as a kid in 1986 on a bus trip from Upstate my gran and a lot of it looked just liked that. We watched a Camaro get stripped in broad daylight.

Hard to say. A big part of NYC's renaissance was huge growth in the financial services sector. The finance industry benefits from the clustering effect, so it may have chosen NYC regardless of the city's other struggles. From the late 60's through early 80's, financial services were increasingly moving to high growth cities like Dallas and Atlanta. So whether industry fundamentals brought finance back to New York, who knows.