A Rich Time: New York City in 1975

Drop Dead City, a documentary about municipal bonds and New York city's fiscal crisis, packs an emotional punch-- and knocks me out.

Not that long ago, I was chatting with someone who works at my old high school, and a phrase floated by: “It’s great that you were here at such a rich time.”

The school’s name is not a secret, but I’d rather set it aside. The relevant details are that it’s located in New York City and I graduated in 1983.

“A rich time for the school, or for the city?” I replied.

She thought about it for a moment. “Both!”

The tone of the exchange was sunny, but the remark felt ambiguous. I thought about it for a while, and mentioned it to some friends, asking for their take. A particularly acerbic novelist I know put it under his bullshit detector and came back with the following result:

Translation: “Did you participate in the peak misogyny, rape and racism of this school, or just silently witness it?”

This made me laugh, and with that laughter I let go of the moment, or so I thought.

The line came back to me while watching a documentary, Drop Dead City, about New York City at the dawn of the “rich time” in question – when the drinks and the rent were cheap; CBGB’s was booking bands called The Ramones, Blondie, Television, and The Talking Heads; Soho was an industrial wasteland filled with abandoned lofts occupied by artists who sometimes used the buildings themselves as sculptural material; and something called Hip Hop was bubbling up in the Bronx, a musical style that had ancillary forms of dance and fashion and art, the latter using subways as canvas and the word “tagging,” in place of “painting.”

Several ironies about the phrase emerged as I watched Drop Dead City. The most obvious being that during New York’s long ago “rich time”, the city was broke.