![]() Crime, and violent crime, had been increasing rapidly for years. ![]() Yet a frightening truth lurked beneath much of the pamphlet’s calamity howling. 45 handgun and the charming instruction, “Now Hands Up, Motherfucker!” Jaded New Yorkers quickly turned the cover of Fear City into a tee-shirt, sold back to tourists in souvenir shops alongside other classics such as the “Welcome to New York” shirt – with its image of a. The pamphlet read like one more piece of the dystopia porn then filling American cinemas these were the years of Taxi Driver, The French Connection, Marathon Man, Escape from New York, Death Wish and The Warriors, to name a few. There were still many safe and secure neighbourhoods outside Manhattan, and there was neither a spate of “spectacular” robberies nor deadly fires in hotels. The city hadn’t “had to close off the rear half of each train in the evening so that the passengers could huddle together and be better protected”. The streets of midtown Manhattan weren’t “nearly deserted” after six in the evening, and they were perfectly safe to walk on. Many of the warnings in the Fear City pamphlet were, of course, ludicrous exaggerations or outright lies. The city was compelling in its contradictions: a vibrant and very cheap place to live, it attracted talented young people in droves. I remember the New York of that era well, having arrived to start college there in 1976 and never left. They were produced and to be distributed by something called the Council for Public Safety, an umbrella group of 28 unions of “the uniformed services”, representing some 80,000 police and corrections officers, plus the city’s firefighters – all infuriated by the city’s plans to lay off thousands of their members. The pamphlets were to be followed up with a couple of equally alarmist tracts, entitled “If You Haven’t Been Mugged Yet” and “When It Happens to You …” aimed at New York residents. Reportedly one million Fear City pamphlets were printed for distribution, with a further million on order if those ran out. A time when the American president, Gerald Ford – egged on by his young chief of staff, one Donald Rumsfeld – sought not to succour New York but to deliberately shame and humble it, and perhaps even replace it as the world’s leading financial centre. It was a time when the wholesale disintegration of the largest city in the most powerful nation on earth seemed entirely possible. New York’s fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s is surely one of the weirdest moments in the history of the city – indeed, of the United States. Photograph: Alain Le Garsmeur/Getty Images Residents of South Bronx play cards in an abandoned cafe – the Bronx, bastion of upper-middle-class living until the mid-60s, burned regularly a decade later. “But ‘Fear City’ – that went out to the whole world.” “Those comments don’t get broadcast outside New York,” worried the bureau’s president Charles Gillett, as he announced the dispatch of his goodwill ambassadors. Tourism was one of the city’s few remaining industries, still drawing 10.5 million visitors to the city each year, despite reports of massive city budget cuts. The New York Convention and Visitors Bureau immediately dispatched emissaries armed with slideshow presentations to London, Paris, Frankfurt and Brussels, to “prove” to European travel agents just how attractive the Big Apple still was. ![]() Justice Frederick E Hammer agreed that the members of “New York’s Finest” distributing the pamphlet were violating “a public trust” – but ruled that this was a “reasonable dissemination of opinion” under the US constitution, even if it struck at the heart of public confidence. “A new low in irresponsibility,” fumed New York’s embattled mayor at the time, Abe Beame, who sent the city’s lawyers into court to try to ban distribution of the pamphlet. They might have been even more shaken had they known that the men in casual clothes handing them these strange, badly set little pamphlets – with their funereal black borders and another death’s head leering at them inside next to the smirking wish “Good luck” – were members of New York’s police forces. Tourists must have been baffled, if not horrified. “Hotel robberies have become virtually uncontrollable, and there have been some spectacular recent cases in which thieves have broken into hotel vaults.” And oh, yes: visitors should try “to avoid buildings that are not completely fireproof” and “to obtain a room that is close by the fire stairs”. They were also instructed to engrave their possessions with special metallic pens, to clutch their bags with both hands, to hide any property they might have in their cars, and not even to trust their valuables to hotel vaults.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |