A Special Installment of “A Helluva Town”
[Many people, New Yorkers or not, remember the iconic Daily News front-page, banner headline on 30 October 1975: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” (Frank Van Riper’s article about President Gerald Ford’s refusal to bail the city out of its financial crisis started on page 3, but the head, accompanying a photo of our only unelected president, screamed out alone on page 1.)
[Well, these days, there’s some of that feeling making the rounds in the Big Apple again. So, about a month ago, the New York Times ran a piece on the mixed feelings about the nation’s largest city held by many of its own residents. It seemed like an interesting addition to my sometime series, “A Helluva Town,” so I’m posting it for you ROTters who wonder how we denizens of that city on the right coast that pretty much floats in the Atlantic Ocean off of New Jersey are coping.]
”LIFE IN A
CONFOUNDING METROPOLIS”
by John Leland and
Dodai Stewart
[Leland and Stewart’s wide-ranging article ran in the New York Times of 22 June 2025 in the “Metropolitan” Section.]
Heading into the June 24 primary for mayor, New Yorkers say their city is in trouble. In four recent surveys, majorities said that the quality of life was fair or poor, that they were afraid to ride the subway at night, that housing and child care were unaffordable, and that city government and the public schools were dysfunctional.
[New York City’s 2025 mayoral primary election was a solely Democratic affair. Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa (b. 1954; radio talk show host and founder and chief executive officer of the Guardian Angels, a nonprofit crime prevention organization) ran unopposed and automatically secured the Republican nomination. He was the Republican nominee for the 2021 election, losing to Democratic nominee Eric Adams (b. 1960; former police officer, Borough President of Brooklyn [2014-21], and New York State Senator [2007-13]).
[Adams, the incumbent mayor and former Democrat, didn’t run in the primary, choosing instead to run for re-election as an independent in the general election. In a major upset, Zohran Mamdani (b. 1991), a state assemblyman and democratic socialist, won the Democratic primary, defeating former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo (b. 1957; lawyer and politician; son of former governor Mario Cuomo [1932-2015; in office from 1975 to 1978]) by 12 percentage points. Cuomo served as Governor of New York from 2011 until his resignation in 2021.
[Also in the race were Brad Lander (b. 1969), New York City Comptroller; Adrienne Adams (b. 1960), Speaker of the New York City Council; Scott Stringer (b. 1960), former New York City Comptroller; Michael Blake (b. 1982), former New York Assemblyman; Selma Bartholomew (birthdate unknown), educator, and Paperboy Prince (b. 1993), artist and perennial candidate.
[Those who will be on the ballot this fall are:
Zohran
Mamdani, the Democratic nominee
Curtis
Sliwa, the Republican nominee
Eric
Adams, the incumbent mayor, running as an independent
Andrew
Cuomo, the former governor, running as an independent
Jim
Walden, a former federal prosecutor, also running as an independent
Yet on a muggy evening in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, that pessimism was nowhere to be found. A skateboard ramp the size of a dollar van had been erected on the cobblestone street outside an art gallery, and skateboarders showed off tricks as onlookers with tattoos, baggy pants and stylish scarves shouted encouragement.
[The venue was Gallery 23 on Little West 12th Street; the exhibit was Harold Hunter ’97, 5-9 June 2025. Hunter (1974-2006) was, as Leland and Stewart note below, a professional skateboarder and actor who had appeared in Larry Clark's 1995 film Kids. The photos were by Jonathan Mannion (b. 1970).]
Inside the exhibition space, a very “if you know, you know” collection of New Yorkers — graffiti artists, skaters, photographers, musicians — mingled, hugged and laughed in front of huge photographs of a deceased actor slash skateboard legend who was being honored. As the D.J. played a mix of old-school hip-hop and Brazilian lounge music, two bartenders mixed bespoke cocktails made from a small batch spirit splashed with a lime-and-yuzu soda. It certainly didn’t feel like a scene from a city in crisis.
[Yuzu soda is a carbonated beverage featuring yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit that has a unique flavor profile often described as a blend of grapefruit, lemon, and tangerine.]
New York, which was hit hard as the country’s epicenter of the Covid pandemic, remains a beacon for people across the country and the world, a destination for immigrants, artists, entrepreneurs and business scions. Watchful outsiders and New Yorkers themselves anxiously question whether the city is “back” from the troubles of recent years. And every New Yorker could have a different answer about what a comeback looks like — what the city should be, and what it is right now.
“From where I’m sitting, it looks pretty good,” said Lloyd Blankfein [b. 1954], who grew up in public housing in Brooklyn and went on to run Goldman Sachs until his retirement in 2018. He compared the city today with the one of the late 1970s, when the Son of Sam serial killer terrorized locals [1975-77] and the city was on the verge of default [1975-85].
“If you had no perspective for the long view, you’d think we were in the depths of crisis,” Mr. Blankfein said. “If you take the long view of New York, it’s a straight line going up.”
The data paint a mixed picture. Subway crime is down, but the number of people in homeless shelters remains way above what it was just a few years ago. Broadway revenues smashed records this season, but one in four New Yorkers lived in poverty as of 2023, nearly double the national average.
[The 2024-25 Broadway season was a record-breaking year for revenue, reaching $1.89 billion in grosses. This surpasses the previous record of 2018-2019 season, which brought in $1.83 billion.]
In one survey, by the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, 80 percent said the city was heading in the wrong direction, and 58 percent said they seriously considered moving out.
Unemployment is down from its pandemic peak, but only one in three workers in New York has a “good job” — one offering a living wage, health insurance and safe working conditions. Housing costs are astronomical — but for some people, no problem.
“People are buying,” said Penny Toepfer, a broker with more than 25 years of experience in luxury real estate. She pointed to the new Armani Residences building that opened on Madison Avenue in the fall of 2024, where apartments range from $8 million to $32 million. “It sold out,” she said.
It’s a very good time to be a broker, she said. “We’re making money. We are making money! I’m talking about big, big money.”
How the city looks, and what you want from the next mayor, depend in part on your place in the food chain, said John Mollenkopf [b. 1946; political scientist and sociologist], director of the Center for Urban Research. Though many parts of the city look fully recovered from the pandemic, the rebound has been uneven.
“One reason it is hard for those of us in upper-middle-class occupations and neighborhoods to understand this is that conditions are objectively much better in our places but that working class and poor neighborhoods are still feeling quite a bit of stress,” Mr. Mollenkopf said.
When New Yorkers emerged from their homes after the worst of Covid, Mr. Mollenkopf said, they saw a city that seemed to have slipped its reins: bicyclists flouting all traffic laws, commuters jumping turnstiles, public drinking and pot smoking, emotionally disturbed people ranting at passers-by. “There was this feeling that the city was out of control,” he said.
Valerie Iovino runs the Facebook group Moms of the Upper East Side, where 35,000 members discuss all aspects of raising children in New York. She grew up in the neighborhood and is now raising her 10-year-old daughter there.
She said she doesn’t consider the city to be in crisis currently. But if you’d asked her a year or two ago, she might have said it was. Restaurants were closing early, everyone was stressed, there were constant protests and, she said, “a very bad rat problem.”
But lately, she has felt a shift, with new businesses opening, a reduction in rats, and restaurant trash in bins, instead of on the street. She was out at 10 p.m. one night and restaurants were packed. “The city, it’s starting to be fun again,” she said. “I mean, it’s not fun like it was in the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s. But it’s fun.”
Still, affordability, especially where families are concerned, is often top of mind for her and her fellow mothers.
“Child care is prohibitively expensive for a lot of families,” Ms. Iovino said. “And that’s why a lot of people move out of the city.”
She also pointed to some basic quality-of-life issues that she described as “lingering”: “The mental health crisis on the street, with the unhoused,” she said. “There have to be services for people who need them.” Meanwhile, her daughter’s chief complaint is “the obstacle course of dog poop.”
A few miles north of Ms. Iovino, in the South Bronx neighborhood where Pablo Muriel works as a high school dean, there are also signs of fresh development, including new high-rises. But they only add to his students’ and their parents’ feeling that they’ve been cheated. “They were promised law and order,” Mr. Muriel said. What they got was families having to double up in public housing, working two or three jobs, and a view of new buildings that are near them but not for them.
“They don’t feel that they count,” Mr. Muriel said. “A lot of them feel that society has given up on them.”
Many students have not caught up developmentally from the Covid lockdown, when schools were closed fully or partially for 18 months, Mr. Muriel said. “I have 14-year-old kids that catch tantrums as an 8-year-old, something that I never experienced before,” he said.
The city’s stresses — economic, emotional, political — come together in the subway, where a fraying infrastructure meets a surging mental health crisis. “You can’t ride the subway without at least one homeless person in your car, acting disturbing,” said Stan Lawson, a train operator for 11 years. In a survey by the Citizens Budget Commission, only 22 percent of New Yorkers said they felt safe on the subway at night.
Lately, Mr. Lawson’s work has been made even more stressful by young people surfing the trains or pulling the emergency brake. “When a conductor goes to investigate, they’ll break into the conductor’s cab and steal the bag, take the keys,” he said.
He is now contemplating the previously unthinkable: moving out of New York. “It feels like staying here is not going to be something I want to do later on,” he said.
Ting Ting, 30, a content creator and native New Yorker who lives in Flushing, Queens, also has a problem with the subway: The 7 train always seems to be under construction, and it’s way too hard to get from Queens to Brooklyn. “It’s like that empty chunk on the subway map that no one cares about,” she said.
But she said that cellphone videos of negative incidents on streets and subway create an exaggerated feeling of chaos, whereas positive aspects of living in the city don’t blow up on social media. “There are more good things in New York than bad things,” she said. And even if the subway doesn’t improve, she’s not leaving. “I have traveled to other places,” she said. “I just don’t think I can live anywhere but New York.”
Gregory Purnell, who cuts hair at the confluence of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and East New York, in Brooklyn, knows where to take the city’s pulse. “Black barber shops are the internet of the ’hood,” he said, shaving a palm leaf into the back of a client’s head. “You go there and find out what’s going on, who’s who, this and that.”
At his shop, an unmarked door beneath two clattering elevated train lines, customers pay what they can — sometimes nothing. Mr. Purnell, 50, gives free haircuts at homeless shelters and said he sees people’s struggles but also a recent movement to create small-scale, affordable outlets — basement house parties, sober bars, vegan kitchens.
“So, little things are popping up around the city where it feels a little more underground or not as promoted,” he said. “It’s becoming more and more D.I.Y.”
Often the city’s vibrancy and its struggles live on the same blocks. Think the downtown arts boom of the ’70s, when artists and galleries reclaimed abandoned buildings of SoHo [Lower Manhattan], or hip-hop, which bloomed in a devastated South Bronx. Fast-forward to South Richmond Hill, Queens, near Kennedy Airport, where Sikh men in colorful turbans stroll through Little Guyana and new arrivals from Trinidad add a calypso beat to Little Punjab.
This churn of immigration and diversity has long been New York’s secret sauce, said Ric Burns [b. 1955; collaborated with brother Ken Burns (b. 1953) on The Civil War (1990); New York: A Documentary Film (1999-2003)], now filming a follow-up to his documentary series “New York.” As these values have come under fire in Washington, Mr. Burns said he sees New Yorkers defending them more ardently, in the same way that many embraced the city during the economic collapse of the ’70s.
[New York is a series of eight two-hour episodes. The project in progress may be episodes 9 and 10, “The Future of Cities (2000-2025),” which, according to Wikipedia, will be “A dramatic and compelling consideration of the forces that have transformed New York at the start of the 21st century: the most stunning era of growth and change, challenge and opportunity since the events of September 11th, and since the New York series’ last look at the city as a whole. The release date(s) is/are yet to be determined.]
“The forces of history are on the side of urban places,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be incredible conflict, and that’s deeply upsetting to consider, and we’re right in the middle of that. But I don’t know historians who see a bleak future for New York, even in the middle of the crises that have been going on.”
Today, entrepreneurs like Alex Kwan and Mahmoud Aldeen embody this overlay of hustle and anxiety. Both 37 and friends from Pennsylvania, they run a pair of halal Asian food trucks in Queens and Manhattan called Terry and Yaki.
“The mood I see is hesitant, shaky,” Mr. Kwan said. Their employees are worried about their immigration status, and customers are sometimes sharing a $12 plate of food. “If I had a family, I would move out,” he said. “But for business, there’s no better place than New York City.”
Yet he lamented a change in the city’s mood, from the community spirit and mutual aid that arose out of Covid to a harder edge today. “It’s a little less caring about your neighbor and a little bit more caring about myself,” he said.
For all the hand-wringing about artists being priced out of New York, applications for the fine arts program at Pratt Institute [Brooklyn] are up, said Jane South [British-American; b. 1965, Manchester, England; known for large-scale installations, mixed media constructions, and fabric wall pieces], chairwoman of the department [appointed Chair of Fine Arts in 2017].
She has noticed pop-up art shows in apartments, or students forming collectives after graduation. “They generate opportunities for themselves, for others,” Ms. South said. “There’s a tremendous amount of that going on.”
Which is not to say everything is perfect. There’s the lack of affordable housing and affordable art studio space. “But in times of crisis,” Ms. South said, “art helps us make meaning when meaning feels unstable. We bear witness, we record the moment.”
And, of course, Ms. South has heard “New York is dead” before. “When I came here in 1989, that’s what people were saying: ‘Oh, you should have been here in the ’70s.’”
Ada Calhoun [b. 1976], author of the book “St. Marks Is Dead” [W. W. Norton & Company, 2015], about the often declared demise of her East Village neighborhood, has spent much of her life debunking such reports. St. Marks Place, like the rest of the city, isn’t what it once was, but it never is.
[St. Mark’s Place is a three-block stretch of East 8th Street from 3rd Avenue east to Avenue A, named for the nearby St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery on 10th Street at Second Avenue. West of 3rd Avenue and east of Avenue B (the street is interrupted between Avenues A and B by Tompkins Square Park) the street reverts to the designation East 8th Street.
[The Episcopal St. Mark's Church sits on the site of a family chapel built in 1660 by Peter (Petrus) Stuyvesant (c. 1610-72), governor of New Netherland from 1647 to 1664. Stuyvesant is buried beneath the chapel.]
“People in 1811 said the grid ruined the city, and it’s never going to be good again,” she said. “And they’ve always been wrong.” [Manhattan’s rectangular grid street plan was conceived in 1811 and implemented over the succeeding 60 years.]
She’s glad that her son’s East Village is safer than the one she grew up in. The musicians and struggling artists may be gone, priced out to Bushwick [Brooklyn] or Ridgewood [Queens], but there’s a new very indie bookstore and gallery [Village Works] on St. Marks where people hang out until 1 a.m.
“When people are like, ‘New York’s not that good’ — compared to what?” she said. “Oh, other places can be more livable, if you really care about the school district, or you care about comfort. But nothing is the same as New York.”
Bianca Pallaro contributed reporting.
[John Leland is a reporter covering life in New York City for the New York Times.
[Dodai Stewart is a Times reporter who writes about living in New York City, with a focus on how, and where, we gather.
[Todd Heisler is a Times photographer based in New York. He’s been a photojournalist for more than 25
years.]
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