Replies

A fantastic article. As I was reading this, I thought of the movies from that era that depicted NYC. Not just movies such as Taxi Driver but other movies such as Death Wish, Fuzz, Mean Streets but other movies such as The Last Detail which showed cities such as DC, Philly, and NYC as gritty, dangerous places to be.

I remember for years that I never wanted to go to NYC. Then my wife dragged me up there with her brother as a guide - he doesn't live there but knows his way around - during the Giulinai era. I was shocked at how pleasant it was. We also went up once to see the Rocketts - part of a MWR bus package. We walked a few blocks up the road from our hotel to the Garden and then back down. Nothing happened to us. Ate a fine restaurant around the corner from our hotel. An excellent meal. A couple years later we took our grandsons up there. No problem. Is it still that way or with Bloomberg, has it started to slide back down?

“Is it still that way ...?”

We just returned from a long weekend in NYC. We stayed on W. 79th St., and enjoyed wonderful, reasonably priced dinners on two consecutive nights at a couple of local Italian restaurants. What was most remarkable to me was the transformation of the area around Columbia University, in Morningside Heights (116th St. between Broadway and Amsterdam). (I spent two days at a conference there.) This area (at least the Broadway side) is completely gentrified. The street scene there is almost identical to that of Broadway in the lower 80’s. This is a major change from 15-20 years ago.

We felt completely safe everywhere we went at night in Manhattan, from 8th St. through SoHo and the Village, Times Square, and up to the mid 80’s. Judging from what we saw from the taxi en route to LaGuardia on Sunday morning, however, I wouldn't recommend venturing on the upper East side along Madison Ave. above 110th St. That part of town won't change until the city demolishes the large housing-project towers in that area.