New York in the 21st Century is the safest big city in America. It's shiny, expensive, and full of young people whose parents fled when it was like this:
If you're a Millennial who has ever moved to or visited New York, chances are one or more of your older relatives freaked out and gave you a lot of unnecessary warnings about not making eye contact on the subway and how you shouldn't leave Times Square (public service announcement: you should go anywhere but Times Square). You probably wondered why anyone would worry about visiting this 8.5-million-strong Disneyland for rich people (in Manhattan, anyway). This is why: because the place used to be a dystopian reality.
This film was created as a companion piece to A Most Violent Year, a feature film about an immigrant who moves to New York and must protect his family and business during the city's darkest era.
The worst year for homicides in New York city was 1990, but the lowest point in the city's emotional history probably came in the period after the 1977 bankruptcy (FORD TO NEW YORK: DROP DEAD) and before the financial market boom of the 1980s. I think. I didn't exist until 1985, so this is just what I've gathered from a lifetime of watching movies and reading books about NYC's history. As it's mentioned at the beginning of the film, 1981 was when Escape From New York was released, and indeed, the period from the late 70s to the early 90s was the heyday of dystopian visions of America's urban future. Between the Escape movies and films like Robocop and The Warriors, it was pretty much a given that by 2015, America's cities would all be governed by roving gangs of psychotic teens on crazy future-drugs.
Yet at the same time, New Yorkers of today complain about the high rents and inauthenticity of the city compared to this period—a period nearly everyone at the time wanted to end ASAP. See this LCD Soundsystem music video for the ultimate expression of 2000s nostalgia for the lost decades of crime and violence:
The 1990s saw a very rapid change in the city as the crime rate plummeted and prices soared. The fact that Jerry Seinfeld, Carrie Bradshaw or the Friends crew could afford apartments like that in Manhattan became a running joke by 2000, but a decade earlier the city was still scaring residents out. I myself can remember driving into the city from 1990 onwards (confession: I'm from New Jersey), and the difference even in the limited amount of the city a suburban child got to see was astounding.
If you've ever been a New Yorker, you might recognize several of these narrators.
In particular, you might have seen performance artist and playwright Penny Arcade (pink hair), who schools us on what the Lower East Side used to be like, and local fashion icon Dapper Dan of Harlem. The most famous is probably Curtis Silva, the red-bereted founder of the Guardian Angels, a not-quite-vigilante group that became somewhat famous in the 80s and 90s for their patrols of NYC's tourist neighborhoods, as well as several high-profile rescues of people on the then-dangerous subway that turned out to be staged. Now, Silva appears as a commentator on local New York television and in commercials for his car dealership. Things have changed a lot.
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He probably wanted a hot towel for his barbed wire wounds.
Artist's rendition of potential Outkast addition.
Trump hates captured soldiers in addition to Mexicans.
