How bad was New York during the 80's

I was born in '74 my Grand Parents lived up on Riverside Drive and I'd visit them a half dozen times a year with my parents. I'd also go see the Yankees, got to see Goose Gossage and Reggie Jackson play which was awesome. I've been living here myself since 1996 and they are two completely different cities.

The Bronx was largely a war zone with blocks and blocks of burned out buildings. Check out the beginning of the original Wolfen to get a sense of what it looked like.

Brooklyn was a place you only heard of and never actually saw yourself.

You'd see muggings quite often, even on busy streets in Manhattan. I saw a guy get his SLR camera ripped off his neck in broad daylight.

Time Square was all sex shops, strip clubs, prostitutes and Johns waiting on the street. It was very scary, and very gross. You felt like you could get an STD just by sitting down... and you probably could.

Port Authority was a place you just didn't go.

Grand Central was an unofficial homeless shelter.

The subways were terrifying. Covered in graffiti. The insides were really bad graffiti, but the outside pieces were often unquestionable works of art. You felt like you could get mugged at any moment. The bathrooms in the subways were the most terrifying of all.

Central Park was very dangerous. Especially the Bramble. The Bramble was still dangerous up into the mid late 90s. It's still kind of creepy to this day.

That being said there was probably never a greater time for art in the city than the late '70s / '80s. Hip Hop, Disco, and Punk Rock were all invented in the late '70s in NYC.

The art scene was the center of the world with guys like Warhol and Basquait. Street art was beginning to flourish and gave us legends like Dondi, Revs, Trap, Zephyr, Iz the Wiz, and Futura. B-boying was invented.

For good movies that take place in that time period you can check out. 90 blocks to Tiffany's which is free on Youtube and documents gangs of the South Bronx, mainly the Savage Skulls and the Savage Nomads. I also recommend Style Wars which covers the birth of street art, hip hop and b-boying. It was a multicultural thing not owned by one race, sad to see how the culture is portrayed today.

For dramas check out Fort Apache the Bronx and The French Connection (which I'm sure you've seen). If you look close you can see the World Trade Center being built in the background.

That being said... Most Violent year does a very good job of recreating what it looked like although they avoid showing the twin towers which is kind of a shame. From what I can tell the majority of the movie takes place around Greenpoint Brookyln and Long Island City Queens. Not sure where the nice house is, maybe Riverdale or Westchester? I thought Jersey at first but he'd have to drive pretty far to get to the nice parts of Jersey back then.

Have you seen The Warriors? That's like the Disney version.

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I moved to NYC in 1977, just as it hit rock bottom - there's an infamous headline, I think it's either the New York Post or the Daily News, that says "Ford to City: Drop Dead" and Mayor Abe Beam quoted as saying, by means of a compliment "New Yorkers are like street rats". Such was the besieged mentality of New Yorkers, that this was taken as a compliment, a badge of pride.

The city was on its knees, it was broke and it was a dirty, dark and dangerous place. In 1981 I moved down to E14th Street, on the edge of the East Village which was...well, way different from what it is now. It was a no-go zone, basically. I once walked along 13th St between 1st and A and seriously didn't think I'd make it alive. It truly was a different landscape. I can't speak for corruption, but I knew one upstanding drama student who talked about carrying a gun, and I was punched out on the subway by a junkie and, on another occasion one sunny spring afternoon in Central Park, three guys tried to mug me (I outran them). In the ensuing two years that I lived there, under Koch, you could feel the change, but it wasn't making life better for people like me, it was just making it more expensive. Due to illness I left in '83 and moved back to the UK (god bless the NHS) but I've been back several times. Last time, a couple of years ago, I met up with a couple of people I knew from before, and we walked through the now gentrified and unrecogniseable East Village to a chic restaurant and a blues bar, and I tried to describe how it had been to my (UK) girlfriend. Oddly, I feel that it's lost a bit of its character. I feel strangely privileged to have witnessed it as it was.