Quote of the Day (James Wolcott, on NYC in the ‘70s)

“It wasn’t just the criminality that kept your radar alert, the muggings and the subway car shakedowns, it was the crazy paroxysms that punctuate the city, the sense that much of the city had suffered a psychotic break.”—James Wolcott, Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York (2011)

That sounds like the New York I knew in the late ‘70s, when I began attending Columbia University and became more familiar than I expected to be with the various lowlifes hanging around Gotham’s subways, among many other places. I can still remember as late as 1991 that the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42^nd Street was still a grungy and not-altogether-safe place after the rush hour traffic dissipated. Let’s hope that, in this age of budget cuts, we won’t see a similar “psychotic break” anytime again soon.