Hello! Thanks for checking out the inaugural issue of Fun City.
I’m a writer and editor who’s lived in New York for seven years, and somehow each year I’ve become a little more obsessed with this city: its people, its history, its nooks and crannies. In this newsletter, I’ll share what I’m reading, researching, and thinking about when it comes to all things New York.
The title comes from a snarky old NYC nickname. During the 1966 transit workers’ strike, which began on the first day of Mayor John Lindsay’s first term, a reporter asked Lindsay how he liked his new job. “I still think it’s a fun city,” Lindsay replied. New York Herald Tribune writer Dick Schaap then used “Fun City” in a column, helping popularize the phrase during Lindsay’s turbulent tenure.
(“Fun City” then begat “Fear City,” the title of scaremongering pamphlets distributed to tourists in 1975 by NYPD, FDNY, and correction officer unions angry about impending layoffs. )
But I’m calling this newsletter “Fun City” with a glimmer of sincere hope. Between the eye-gougingly repetitive trend pieces about people (read: rich people) leaving New York, police brutality, last month’s looting, the recent rise in shootings and the city’s very real budget crisis, many are invoking the specter of the 1970s—when the city teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, social services were decimated, crime soared, and neighborhoods burned—as the city continues to struggle with the pandemic and its fallout.
No one knows what’s going to happen. At least a million New Yorkers have already lost their jobs, and we’re in the midst of a massive fiscal crisis. But I find it helpful to keep a few things in mind:
1) People love to worry about returning to the ‘70s : In 2009, during the financial crisis; in 2014, after the assassination of two NYPD officers in Bed Stuy. Meanwhile, we can’t get enough of Patti Smith’s memoirs or tales of Studio 54 debauchery. As Mark Richardson so colorfully observes in this 2015 piece for NY Mag:
The ‘70s are a Jekyll-and-Hyde of New York eras. On one hand we fear the terrors of the time, the junkies on the fire escape scheming to steal a $50 rabbit-ear TV, the return of jazz fusion. After the 2008 crash there were cries that the Bad Old Days were coming around again, as if the malfeasance of Wall Street ganefs would instantly cause armies of crum bums selling counterfeit Tuinals and Valiums — “Ts and Vs” was the hawker cry — to rise from the manicured shrubbery of Union Square Park. The onset of De Blasio Time has rewound the harbinger chorus. As the bullets fly in Staten Island, the mayor stays in his Park Slope gym squat-thrusting, the tabs scream. It is only a matter of time before Manhattan again falls off the edge of the earth at 96th Street (for white people, anyway) and Gerald Ford tells the city to drop dead.
2) Some historical context on the resilience of plague-ridden cities, via this recent Richard Florida essay in in Bloomberg’s CityLab:
Even the deadlier pandemic of the Spanish Flu, which killed a significantly greater share of New York’s population at the time, did not dim the city’s ascent as the world’s leading economic and cultural center. In the decades that bracketed that pandemic, spanning 1910 and 1930, greater New York’s population surged from 4.8 to 6.9 million. Far deadlier pandemics did little to damp down the long arc of urbanization. Although the Black Plague killed as much as half the population of Italy’s great urban centers like Siena, Orvieto, Florence, and Milan, people flocked to them from the countryside in the decades and centuries after because they offered not just higher wages, but tax exemptions, and in some cases, even citizenship, to attract foreign merchants, artisans, and laborers. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year describes how the combined blows of a pandemic that killed a quarter of London’s residents in a matter of months, followed a year later by a fire that burned most of the city to the ground, laid the foundation for a spectacular economic rebound, as people rushed into the city to rebuild it.
3) The ways that New Yorkers are showing up for each other, whether through mutual aid groups, community fridges, or the continued protests and vigils for racial justice.
I’m going to attempt to put this newsletter together once a week. There will be one main post, a roundup of other noteworthy stories, and a few other elements I’ll switch up week to week.
Around town:
-The NYPD’s own stats debunk claims of bail reform leading to a spike in gun violence. (NY Post)
- Activists in Crown Heights successfully stopped this evil landlord—who, incidentally, is the owner of this stupid store —from evicting tenants. (Gothamist)
- I’m l i v i n g for the pettiness of these Upper West Siders who transcribed the inane conversations of loudly talking Trader Joe’s shoppers and made them ART. (NYT)
-House of Yes has reopened… as the “House of No”? (Queens Eagle)
Stat of the week
11.5: “disruptions per mile” of bike lane, “meaning that some other car or truck is invading and endangering a bike lane every other block.” (NYT)
Thanks for reading, and see you next week! And don’t forget to subscribe:
Looking forward to your takes on things. Best wishes!!
Thanks and good luck 😃