Yes, for sure, but that’s not unique to NYC. That’s the post-9/11 world.

There was more crime than today. Way more crime. We didn't just have insanely more street gangs than we do today, it was NYC culture for all group of kids to become a gang the moment a group of kids growing together turned 13. On top of that we also had mafias. The mafia was everywhere.

Less powerful police state? The police state was never as bad as it was during Mayor Giuliani. That was the worst NYC has even seen to this very day. Every ten days the NYPD murdered a Latino, Black or Asian civilian.

We had massive protests against police brutality. We had massive protests against the IMF, World Banks, WTO.

Before that we had even more antipolice brutality protests. Watch old Public Enemy videos. We had we had protests for housing, education, Lesbian and Gay rights. Infact the biggest LGBT protests took place on the 1970s.

The 1970s was a whole other era. We had the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Party. The South Bronx wad in never ending fire, with gang wars that had hundreds of participants.

We lost innocence? That is such a disassociated comment if I ever saw one.

The generations today are by far a TRILLION times more innocent than generations prior. We used to break your car window with sparkplug bits just out of boredom. Throw tires over bridges at unsuspecting cars. Shoot people with shotguns just to see them fly back and jump up. Throw kids off roof tops. The NYPD this too. Watch Serpico.

There would be explosions in Queens thanks to the Colombian mafia. Dead bodies found in cars with hundreds of thousands of dollars in the trunk. Bricks would be thrown from rooftops at cop cars. Buildings taken over to make crack. And that's just Queens!!!

The crack epidemic! Young women with multiple children visibly dying from AIDS in our subways. Your generation never saw a sadder sight.

You think homelessness is bad now???? There would be about a dozen to two dozen homeless people in every single park in NYC in the day time. At night time the parks were full of extremely armed street gangs armed with uzis to shotguns. Kids would often help the homeless sleep in building basements and help feed their homeless dogs. Yes children hanging out with the homeless was the norm. Kids never stayed home, we grew up in the streets and the homeless was everywhere.

If you were young and you didn't do graffiti, you really weren't a normal kid. Because that's what normal kids did, write up. Many kids became really amazing artists, and the beautiful epic graff murals EVERYWHERE, were the results. And when we weren't fighting, we had serious dance battles where kids often ended up in hospitals with stab wounds, over dancing.

Needles and pcp in Halloween candy was the norm. Keeping your kids away from windows so they don't get a stray bullet was the norm.

Don't give me this crap that we are less innocent now. That's just so insane. We were called the Rotten Apple with good reason. People who think things are bad now as compared to before, have absolutely no idea what on Earth theyre saying.

Stop pretending like the 1970s and the 1980s or the early 1990s never happened. Just because you're a certain age, doesn't mean everyone else is. Everyone older than you knows how bad things can get. And believe me, not single person on this thread would last a day in NYC 1986 or NYC 1978 or NYC 1991.

Y'all wouldn't survive a single day.

BRRRRAAAAAAAAP!!!!

Things only calmed down, when the whole country started doing better around the mid-later 1990s. And today for the most part, everyone is so innocent they don't remember how things used to be. Much of the csenseless shootings and stabbings we saw rising when covid started came from 50 and 60 year olds relapsing to the old ways.

People don't walk around with gold chains no more, because the memory of old New York lingers.

"Ir isn't like there was no crime, it still existed"

HAAAA!!!!!! You don't know crime. Crime was culture. We weren't home playing Atari and Coleco Vision all day. We were in the streets robbing your parents or running with your parents robbing other parents, at gunpoint or knife point. Your car, gone, to ride to better neighborhoods and rob them.

The biggest and longest student takeovers took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Most activists called themselves, revolutionaries. And we believed, the United States was near collapse. This was a common perspective in the 1970s.

In 2020 people were freaking out over statues being taken down. In the 1970s we used to bomb statues and blow them up in solidarity with radical people of color being arrested for standing up for civil rights and against imperialist wars. Todays activists argue about social democrats saying words.

If I can drag y'all to old New York and give you a tour, y'all would piss your pants and beg me to bring you back to modern day NYC as you run away for your life from the children from the 1980s.

I'm done.

This.

Same, I guess the perspectives different when you have friends who lost their parents and watched the towers collapse for your classroom.