New York: A Documentary Film | Shadows of the Past - PBS

Trace New York’s turbulent decline and rebirth in the last decades of the 20th century.

Trace New York’s turbulent decline and rebirth in the last decades of the 20th century.

Trace New York’s turbulent journey through the final decades of the 20th century. In this follow-up to the landmark 8-part NEW YORK: A DOCUMENTARY FILM, witness the dizzying story of decline and rebirth that sees America’s largest city plunged into the gravest downturn in its history, only to rise again in a remarkable transformation by century’s end.

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Corporate funding for NEW YORK: A DOCUMENTARY FILM "Shadows of the Past" and "The Future of Cities" was provided by Hudson River Trading. Major funding was provided by the American...More

Trace New York’s turbulent journey through the final decades of the 20th century. In this follow-up to the landmark 8-part NEW YORK: A DOCUMENTARY FILM, witness the dizzying story of decline and rebirth that sees America’s largest city plunged into the gravest downturn in its history, only to rise again in a remarkable transformation by century’s end.

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Before you submit an error, please consult our Video Help page.

New York: A Documentary Film is available to stream on pbs.org and the PBS app.

[Birds chirping] [Kids chattering] ♪ Adam Gopnik: Well, look, the future in New York-- and that's one of the things that makes it addictive-- is always unknowable.

If someone had said to me in 1980, "By 2020, the problem of violent crime "and of a crime epidemic will be largely vanished, "New York will have a lower crime rate, "lower murder rate than it's had since the beginning of 20th century," you wouldn't have called that person an optimist.

You would have called them a surrealist.

It just wasn't gonna happen, but then if they had said, "But there will be "a massive pandemic, larger even than Spanish Flu, "which will entirely shut down the city, "including all of Broadway, every jazz club, every museum, "in a way that's never happened before, each restaurant, for a year," it would have been equally hard to credit that.

The city has rebounded again and again and again from things that seemed to be utterly fatal blows, and whether it was the crime wave of the 1960s and 1970s or a world historical insult like 9/11, every time New York has undergone that kind of fundamentally transformational trauma, it lingers in memory, it lasts in scars, but I think that scars are better than wounds, and New Yorkers' wounds tend to heal remarkably quickly.

That process of self-healing and of recovery has been astoundingly persistent.

[Thunder rumbling] You know, cities are, more than anything else on Earth--more than coral reefs, more than forests, more than anything else-- are self-emerging and self-sustaining forms.

And no place--I say this as a big statement, but I say it with confidence-- no place in the history of the Earth has remade itself more resiliently, more persistently than this-- than this small stretch of city.

[Horns honking] ♪ I'm emotional about it because it's home, but also because the values that New York has incarnated-- inadequately, insufficiently, with great friction and difficulty over the years-- are the values, as I wrote once, of verticality, meaning the possibility of lots of people being together; of variety, meaning many, many kinds, not trying to drive each other out, but trying to learn from and co-exist; and finally of plurality.

It's the most plural city that you could possibly find.

It's plural in its current constitution, but it's also got the incredible pluralism of its history-- that it's been more different in more times than any other city I can think of, and we accept its remaking of itself again and again.

We don't try and cling onto the old New York the way people cling onto the old Paris or the old London.

So the multiple-- the plural pluralisms of New York is what gives me hope.

♪ [Propeller plane flying] Narrator: On the misty cloud-covered morning of July 28th, 1945, just 3 weeks before the end of World War II, the pilot of a 10-ton B-25 bomber heading for Newark Airport somehow lost his bearings in the fog, apparently mistook the East River for the Hudson, and banked his immense aircraft into the forest of towers rising up from Midtown Manhattan.

Pedestrians on the street below looked up in horror as the plane-- intermittently visible through the broken clouds-- passed within feet of the New York Central Building, then banked just in time to miss another tall tower at 500 5th Avenue, rattling windows as it passed.

The pilot had scarcely pulled out of the split-second maneuver when an immense form loomed into view straight ahead.

precisely, as the pilot tried desperately to turn and climb away... [Vroom] ♪ the huge plane crashed headlong into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building, instantly killing every man on board.

Joel Silverman: It just literally hit the building, full speed, 250 miles per hour, in the fog.

[Sirens] Killed a number of people-- obviously the aircraft crew as well as a number of people in the building, but the building was barely rocked.

I mean, there was a fire and there was water damage, but many of the occupants of the building on the lower floors, other than hearing the fire alarms and seeing some water come through their ceilings, literally had no idea that something had happened, other than perhaps just another thud or something.

[Sirens] ♪ Narrator: For New Yorkers, the nightmarish accident was a haunting reminder of just how lucky their city had been.

Overseas, virtually every major foreign capital had been battered or destroyed: Berlin and Tokyo, leveled; Moscow, starved; London, battered, first by the Blitz and then by V-2 rockets.

Almost alone amongst world cities, New York had emerged all but unscathed.

Only in the War's final weeks did Americans begin to understand just how profoundly the world had changed.

In the decades to come, the specter of death by fire raining down from the skies would haunt New Yorkers and city dwellers everywhere.

Voice: The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about, but that is on everybody's mind.

The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible.

A single flight of planes, no bigger than a wedge of geese, can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions.

The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

[Wind blowing] ♪ Narrator: To a remarkable degree, all the great challenges and exhilarating possibilities New York would confront in the opening decades of the 21st century had been forged 50 years earlier in the crucible of the post-war period when the forces of globalization had first begun to accelerate in the years following World War II, propelling New York to unprecedented heights as the greatest and most powerful city on Earth, then plunging it into the gravest existential crisis of its entire history.

Kenneth T. Jackson: New York was the biggest industrial city in the world in the 1950s.

It was the busiest harbor in the world in the 1950s.

Those props are both kicked out from under.

Mitchell Moss: New York had a million people working in manufacturing in 1950, and today, we're lucky if we have 100,000 doing it.

What makes New York important here is that we're at the front edge of the process of globalization during which we would go from an industrial to an information-based economy, but it would take 30 to 40 years for that to occur.

Narrator: As a tectonic shift of historic proportions began to sweep across planet in the post-war period, bringing with it human and economic dislocations on an unprecedented scale, the question of all questions was whether New York could reinvent itself fast enough or whether it would be left behind by the globalizing culture it had done so much to usher in and plummet into the widening abyss opening up between the past and the future.

Jonathan Mahler: New York was America's great working-class city: the bustling waterfront, the millions of good, steady working-class jobs; the powerful labor unions and labor bosses who made sure that everyone could put food on the table.

That was New York in the second half of the 1940s and through the 1950s.

And then it all began to get hollowed out.

♪ Narrator: In just 10 years, blue-collar jobs that had provided a foothold in previous generations were starting to decline with alarming speed-- thanks in part to new global trends in shipping, including one pioneered in New York itself.

In 1955, a trucking magnate named Malcolm McLean, frustrated by the high cost of labor, devised a new system for handling freight.

The tightly locked steel containers he designed could be loaded and unloaded by giant cranes onto freight trains and trucks without being touched by human hands, cutting labor costs, reducing theft, and sparking a revolution in shipping.

Mitchell Moss: Once containerization began, it made it possible for shipping to be automated.

The ship could be loaded, unloaded in one day, not 10 days, but that new shipping technology required massive backup space for storing containers, so shipping left New York.

It left Manhattan first, then it left Brooklyn, and it went to Jersey.

And we still have some people who want to bring back the 18th century.

Narrator: Almost overnight, the Port of New York had pioneered its own obsolescence.

♪ Kenneth T. Jackson: Now, the city tried to preserve those industrial districts on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, along the Brooklyn waterfront, but those industrial jobs, they're not coming back.

The city couldn't fight these large national-- and, really, international--trends, massive changes in manufacturing and shipping.

New York would soon be trying to compete with factories and workers on the other side of the globe, and New York was experiencing these things first.

Jonathan Mahler: By the 1960s, New York was already in trouble, and because it was such a working-class city, it was like an identity crisis, it was like a legitimate kind of existential crisis for the city.

And there were years where it was not clear what the path forward was for New York.

♪ Narrator: Just two decades after the end of the War, America's greatest city had entered a period of uncertainty and decline unlike any in its history.

Ester Fuchs: As deindustrialization starts, cities begin to lose their economic base at the same time that government is disinvesting in the cities and investing in suburban lifestyle.

And the American Dream turns from an urban dream to a suburban dream.

If you want to make it, you make it in the suburbs.

Narrator: Over the next 15 years, nearly 20 million people would leave American cities for the suburbs, propelled by the immense post-war baby boom, soaring car ownership, and the allure of affordable federal housing.

Michael Bloomberg: The conventional wisdom was cities were--maybe they're a necessity, but that's not the future.

The Great American Dream was a detached house and a car in the driveway and walking to school and having your bicycle on the street.

Narrator: It was a dream reserved almost exclusively for white Americans in the post-war period thanks to racially restrictive covenants that barred people of color from purchasing homes in suburban areas.

And with Blacks from the South and migrants from Puerto Rico streaming north now in increasing numbers, every racial, economic, and demographic dynamic at work at the time was increasingly serving to concentrate people of color in urban areas, accelerating white flight and intensifying the city's financial woes still further.

Christina Greer: As we had an increase of people of color, we have this mass exodus of a certain type of person out of the city because it has gotten a little too colorful for some and because there are economic opportunities for some white people to then leave, to have a different kind of life that doesn't involve African Americans.

Narrator: By the 1960s, more than 1/3 of the city's population was Black or Latino-- a 10-fold increase in 40 years-- while the white population had dropped significantly.

Christina Greer: There's also been--as cities become more colored--a systemic disinvestment by the federal government in the infrastructure and the goods and services that have always been there when it was, say, majority white or significantly white or only white.

Ester Fuchs: So we lose our middle-class population, and by losing the industry and middle-class population, we lose our tax base and the capacity of local governments then to deliver basic services in an effective way.

Kenneth T. Jackson: The city, for so many years, was burdened by federal policies that favored the suburbs, so that if we said, "inner-city problems," you didn't have to spell that out to anybody.

They knew exactly what you were talking about.

♪ Narrator: And there were other factors, too, affecting the city's viability.

By 1960, New York, the city that more than any other had been the nation's premier gateway to the world, could no longer count on new arrivals from abroad to bolster and enrich its economy and culture, a fact starkly inscribed in what remained of a legendary federal complex far out in the harbor, where the great influx of immigrants that had once defined New York and done so much to shape its culture and identity had long since become a distant memory.

Jack Tchen: The Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, we tend to think of ourselves in New York as a nation of immigrants and that we are evidence of that because of the mixtures of immigrants and migrants that we all represent who are living here.

[Wings fluttering, pigeons cooing] But the question is more complicated than that.

♪ Narrator: Immigration had always been a source of tension and conflict in the wide-open port of New York, as in the nation at large, starting with the massive influx of Irish and German immigrants, most of them Catholic, in the decades following the opening of the Erie Canal, seen as a threat by many of the city's then-largely Protestant inhabitants.

Jack Tchen: From 1890, you have a fear of immigrants, resentment being created and built up against Central Europeans-- so Jews-- Eastern Europeans, the Mediterraneans, the Italians.

You have people like Teddy Roosevelt saying, "We are now in danger of being swamped and overwhelmed "by these people, a lot of them unfit to truly be New Yorkers and truly be Americans."

In 1910, the Eugenics Record Office in New York begins to push to restrict immigration based on the so-called scientific racism of eugenics.

The biologist Charles Davenport, who begins the Eugenics Record Office, has some very revealing quotes.

Davenport says, "I believe in a selection "of immigrants that shall not tend to adulterate our national germplasm."

Davenport also said, "Can we build a wall high enough around this country to keep out the cheaper races?"

So how do we begin to change the policies and to impact of policies in a way that will kind of close the spigot, so to speak?

And part of what they're pushing for is a immigrant control law.

♪ Narrator: In 1924, the anti-immigrant movement reached fever pitch when Congress passed the Johnson-Reed act, backed by huge majorities in both the House and the Senate, drastically limiting the number of immigrants permitted to enter each year and all but slamming shut the golden door of the great processing center out in New York Harbor through which more than 12 million people had passed since its opening in 1892.

Jack Tchen: So, they set the cutoff date at 1890, and they say in 1924, we're gonna go to 2% of the number of people coming through in 1890.

In 1924, we closed America's doors.

41% of the city was foreign born in 1910, and of course, that's the reason they closed the doors.

Jack Tchen: So what happens from 1924 into the thirties, into the forties, into the fifties, there's just a tiny number of immigrants coming into New York City.

[Gulls crying] ♪ Narrator: In 1954, with only a trickle of immigrants coming through each year now, mostly white Northern Europeans, Ellis Island finally closed its doors completely, its Great Hall and hospitals and quarantine facilities an abandoned shambles now, where wind and rain blew in through broken windows and weeds grew up through the floors of its empty, echoing halls.

By the start of the 1960s, across the harbor, 4 decades of dramatically reduced immigration had radically changed the demographic fabric of New York City, where 5 out of 6 residents were now native born.

As a 36-year-old Irish-Catholic New Yorker named Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in September 1963, America had moved "beyond the melting pot."

The "Golden Door" Emma Lazarus had extolled 80 years earlier was closed now, apparently forever.

♪ Just two months later, a dark cloud of shock and grief swept across the entire nation when news broke that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.

This is Jules Bergman reporting from Times Square from 44th Street and Broadway in the heart of New York.

There is shock and indignation and most of all sadness at the death of President Kennedy here in the heart of Manhattan.

A crowd of hundreds has gathered still unbelieving, still not quite fully able to comprehend exactly what has happened, but there is sadness on their faces, and there is disbelief.

It's as if we've lost someone who has assumed the responsibility that we should have assumed all along, and now we're going to have to pick up where he left off, where he had to leave off.

Narrator: By the fall of 1963, as people struggled to come to terms with what had happened, a palpable sense of change was in the air across America, and one of the early signs of the new era on the wing would soon be inscribed in a landmark piece of legislation already beginning to make its way through Congress.

It had been the vision originally of the then-junior senator from Massachusetts John F. Kennedy, himself the great-grandson of Irish immigrants.

In 1958, preparing to run for the White House, only the second Catholic politician, after Al Smith, to run for the nation's highest office, Kennedy published a remarkable book called "A Nation of Immigrants," celebrating the immigrant experience as "central to the American faith," he said, and, almost alone at the time, calling for a radical rethinking of the nation's strict immigration rules.

Lyndon B. Johnson: This bill does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice.

Narrator: On October 3rd, 1965, two years after Kennedy's assassination, a crowd of dignitaries gathered on Liberty Island at the foot of the Statue of Liberty with the skyline of Manhattan behind them, where President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Hart-Celler Act in part to honor Kennedy's memory... Lyndon B. Johnson: We are in debt, too, to the vision of the late beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Narrator: with the stroke of a pen, dramatically liberalizing the nation's immigration laws.

Lyndon B. Johnson: This bill says simply that from this day forth those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationships to those already here.

Narrator: It had taken all Johnson's legendary skills of persuasion to overcome the fierce opposition of many of his conservative one-time colleagues in the Senate.

Christina Greer: With LBJ, who was the master of the Senate, he says, "Well, let's just sign "this thing into law.

"These Caribbeans don't have people here.

"These Latin Americans, I mean, they're not gonna come.

"Like, just--let's sign it, and we'll keep moving, "and it will be a small blip in the history of the United States."

Jack Tchen: It was never imagined to be something that would open up the way that it did so that so many people from so many different parts of the world would begin taking advantage of the quotas.

Narrator: The impact of the groundbreaking law was all but imperceptible at first, As over the next 10 years, only a modest wave of new immigrants began to arrive, not through Ellis Island now, but by way of John F. Kennedy International Airport, which by then had replaced the port as America's premier gateway to the world.

Mitchell Moss: The Immigration Act of '65 allowed us to welcome people in who couldn't get in from different parts of the world, and New Yorkers welcomed them, and we welcomed people because we already had a foreign-born base here.

Christina Greer: After the 1965 Immigration Act, it takes a while for implementation, but we do see an opening of non-European immigrants coming to America, and New York, for many immigrants, was the first stop.

Narrator: Overshadowed by other landmark civil rights legislation of the time, the Hart-Celler Act would ultimately have a greater impact on American cities than any other law passed in the second half of the 20th century and proved to be a crucial lifeline as New York entered one of the most challenging periods in its entire history.

[Train clattering] ♪ Narrator: By 1965, despite the 40-year drought in foreign-born immigration, a demographic shift of historic proportions had been underway in New York for more than two decades, as the post-war influx of Spanish-speaking peoples continued to grow fueled not by immigrants from abroad now, for the most part, but by American citizens pouring in from a tiny U.S.

territory in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, and by refugees fleeing revolution and political turmoil in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

Less than two decades after the war, bodegas and travel agencies and repair shops and small businesses of every kind were springing up across the 5 boroughs, giving rise to one of the most vibrantly mixed and intermingling cultures the city has ever seen, which by the early 1960s had become the crucible of one of the greatest musical forms ever created in New York, salsa.

It was born here in New York, and it was born out of my people from all Latino America and all the Caribbean.

They all came together and built--and did for the rest of the world salsa.

♪ I think that salsa does not surrender from its tradition but is able to reframe it, playing with yours and with the others' traditions and putting it all together.

All Latino America flavors mix together, and also the Afro-American, the Harlem experience, so it all, like, really mixes, and the final flavor is Latino American-- well, it's salsa.

You know, it's so new, but, you know, it's not.

It carries its memories perfectly and is going to have first-class polishment because it's going to be done in New York.

This is a city where people want to do the best of their thing, and that contaminates people, and that's good.

[Cheering and applause] [Projector chattering] ♪ Adam Gopnik: You know, at any moment, an old world is collapsing, and a new world is coming into being, and as John Updike once wrote, we always have sharper eyes for the collapse than for the rise because the old world is the one we know, we see its form so clearly, and the new world is much harder for us to make lucid to ourselves.

Narrator: 1965 would prove to be a fateful turning point in the life of the city, the nation, and the world.

That spring, workers began demolishing a 16-acre site in Lower Manhattan to make way for what would eventually become the two tallest towers in the world, rising in the heart in the oldest part of what still seemed, and in many ways still was, the richest and most powerful city Earth.

♪ That fall--not long after President Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act on Liberty Island-- the New York World's Fair came to a close out in Flushing Meadows in Queens.

The strangely surreal, two-year-long celebration of American commercial and technological prowess would come to seem in many ways like the last unbridled expression of post-war optimism.

Before the year was out, American involvement in the Vietnam War had escalated dramatically when, on the pretext that U.S.

ships had been attacked, President Johnson ordered massive air strikes in the north and sent more than 200,000 American troops into action, numbers that would soon rise to more than half a million.

[Protestors shouting] ♪ Reporter: Antiwar demonstrators protest U.S.

involvement in the Vietnam War in mass marches, rallies, and demonstrations.

The estimated 125,000 Manhattan marchers include students, housewives, beatnik poets, doctors, businessmen, teachers, priests, and nuns.

Narrator: All through the second half of the 1960s, protest movements of every kind exploded across the country, calling for an end to the war and championing civil rights, gay rights, women's rights, and a new age of freedom.

Jonathan Mahler: There's an incredible confluence of events that happens during these years.

It was the very moment that the city is beginning to bottom out financially.

There's an influx of people, and there is a kind of-- a sort of cultural revolution happening in the city.

Ester Fuchs: There are at least 4 liberation movements really going on.

You have this youth movement of the sixties, the Black liberation movement, the women's liberation movement, and the gay liberation movement, and you can't underestimate the power of these transformative movements to take hold of the city because people who are attracted to change came to the city to do it here.

Ray Suarez: People have always thought that this was the place where you could be you, where you could live the way you wanted to live and unlike your small, judgmental community back home, wherever that was, you could be who you were.

Morris Knight: There is a little bar in the Greenwich Village called the Stonewall.

The police came in to harass the bar, and everyone became so angry, they simply fought back.

Narrator: Police raids on gay bars were standard practice in New York, when, in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 28th, 1969, 6 officers, including two undercover policemen, banged on the black double doors of the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in the Village, shouting, "Police!

But patrons of the bar had had enough, and as the police stormed in and angry customers streamed out into the street where a large crowd was gathering, flaring tempers quickly exploded into a full-blown riot.

Morris Kight: They locked the police up in the bar from which they were just driven.

And they knocked out the windows and threw in Molotov cocktails and then commenced 3 days of vigorous rioting, and it took the police that long to control these homosexuals.

[Protestors shouting] Narrator: There would be no going back.

On June 28th, 1970, on the first anniversary of the historic uprising, more than 20,000 people took part in the first gay Pride march from Greenwich Village up to Central Park.

Reporter: Do you think that homosexuality should be legalized completely, à la Illinois?

Interviewee: Definitely, definitely.

Interviewee: Straight people can do all this carrying on and holding hands and kiss in the park.

Monxo López: One thing that you hear over and over about cities in general, but about New York specifically, it's a place that allows people to be themselves, that you can be your crazy creative self here.

But New York takes it, like, a step further, because it's not so much about expressing yourself but about how the city is equipped to actually listen.

Protesters: Sisterhood is powerful.

Narrator: Less than two months later, on August 26th, 1970, to mark the 50th anniversary of the amendment giving women the right to vote, more than 50,000 women closed down 5th Avenue in the Women's Strike for Equality, demanding equality in the workplace, free abortion on demand, and free childcare.

Betty Friedan: This will continue as a political coalition to win the unfinished revolution of women's equality, and above all, I think its focus will take the form of electing to office not the best man.

We are going to be running ourselves and electing ourselves so it will not take 50 years to get 50 women in the U.S.

Ester Fuchs: One of the things about the women's movement, and you see it play out best in New York, is that women who decide to work and have families, many of them decide "I don't want to live "out there in the middle of nowhere suburb and commute for two hours."

And if you were gay or lesbian or an artist and needed some density, you were better off living in a tighter community.

Wesley Morris: Everybody who comes here, we've all come here from someplace else because we believe in this place.

We came because we didn't want to take no for an answer, and the idea that there'd be some force, whether inherent in the city or exerting pressure on the city from outside, telling the people who live here how they should or should not be living is just, "Oh, no, you won't.

[Distant sirens] ♪ Narrator: No one who didn't live through it at the time would ever be able to fully understand or even begin to conceive what the city had become by the 1970s.

It was in many ways a city caught between two worlds-- one dying and the other struggling to be born-- no longer able, incredible as it seemed, to forge a future for itself, but even as it dipped downward into darkness and decay, still filled with an overwhelming majesty and force, a great towering tragic metropolis that somehow refused to die.

Ray Suarez: The city was filthy, disorderly, economically grinding to a halt, unable to pay its bills.

Reporter: The city, a place of terror.

The home or apartment, a fortress to keep out criminals.

These conclusions from the Eisenhower Commission report aren't just words to the people who live in this corner of the Bronx.

The crime rate has jumped 69%, and the people are frightened.

Ray Suarez: The city was dysfunctional.

The subways were filthy and stank like an open urinal.

There were panhandlers every 5 feet.

Public education wasn't good enough.

Public transportation was collapsing under the weight of decades of deferred maintenance.

The road network was impassible in some places.

When there was a heavy rain, there would be floods in streets.

This was not the way the place was supposed to work, and it was also an open question whether you would be able to live here as an adult, or would have to just get the hell out?

Narrator: By then, New York seemed to have become-- in some ways more than ever before-- a tale of two cities: one rich, and one poor; one white, and one Black and brown; One where people could sustain themselves and even move upward, and one where people struggled simply to survive in a world that was crumbling before their very eyes.

Interviewee: Tomorrow, when I get the moving men.

Interviewee: Because I couldn't stay here.

They've beaten me up, they threw me down the stairs, and they've broken my-- all my windows are broken.

Majora Carter: In the 1970s, growing up in the South Bronx, when I was 7 years old, my brother was killed at the end of the summer as a result of the drug wars that were happening in another part of the South Bronx.

At the beginning of the summer, I watched the two buildings on either end of my block burn.

I remember watching the building up the street from my house burn down, and it took forever for the fire department to get there.

Like, literally, other people from the neighborhood were going up and saving people to get them down the fire escapes, and this went on what felt like an eternity, and I remember being a kid and watching this, going, "No one cares about us.

[Siren blips] Man: Yo, watch my grandma!

Like the cops beatin'-- they--they hit on us.

What, you think-- so you think by just hitting on us, that we're gonna change or we get--no way.

We've been getting hit ever since we were born.

Ray Suarez: Outrage by outrage, small crime by small crime, violent act by violent act, we were slowly circling the drain.

What was scary was that the gulf between rich and poor was getting wider, and it felt like there was nothing in the middle.

The city was unmiddling, and an unmiddling city is a place with no future.

Narrator: And amidst all the disarray, New York was becoming increasingly ungovernable, as well as economically unsustainable, with its population now beginning to plummet and its tax base no longer able to support its still liberal spending habits.

Ray Suarez: Well, Jane Jacobs, the urbanist, believed that the sidewalk was a really important place, that the sidewalk and the street were shared realms, and by the 1970s, New Yorkers had run behind their doors and locked 3 different locks on their front doors, and we lost the street.

Woman: It's not a word in the dictionary even to describe it, how bad it is.

People are so afraid at night, after supper they stay home.

Man: We always went out for newspapers at night, and now we are afraid to go out because you can't walk the streets.

Christina Greer: I was born in the seventies, lived in Queens with my family for the first 5 years of my life.

We were robbed 3 times, and we lived in the good part.

Adam Gopnik: At every moment, you had to gauge where you were and what was around you, and it affected in brutal ways your orbit through the city.

You know, you asked yourself several times at 1:00 in the morning, "Should I go on the subway?

Is it safe to get on the subway at this moment?"

You navigated through the city with a constant consciousness of the possibility of crime and of its omnipresence.

High crime in a city is the equivalent of poison in the water.

That is something that will actually get people to leave the city.

Narrator: 2 1/2 decades after the end of the War, for the first time since New Yorkers had fled the city during the turmoil of the American Revolution, the city's population had begun to decline.

Ray Suarez: When the population of the city began to sink-- and when I say, "sink," I mean New York was losing the equivalent in population over time of entire American cities, lost a whole Atlanta, lost a whole Miami.

If you lose 750,000, you've lost a whole San Francisco, though you've still got 7 million people.

When that happened with the death of manufacturing, the allowing infrastructure to crumble in a lot of places, there was a lot of empty, underused, underpopulated land all over the city.

Ester Fuchs: So either you stay and you fight, or you go, and, of course, the rational actors all leave.

Well, in New York, we're not such rational actors all the time, which is a really lucky thing, you know, and so, lots of people stayed here in the worst periods and fought the good fight to keep the city going and believed in the future of the city.

[Projector chattering] ♪ Narrator: But in the midst of all the abandonment and decay--and in part because of it-- New York was experiencing one of the greatest surges of cultural creativity in its entire history, as artists and unmoored exiles of every kind flocked into the abandoned industrial lofts of Lower Manhattan, squatting illegally, sometimes for years, in spaces zoned for manufacturing, transforming SoHo into the cutting-edge art center of the world.

Ray Suarez: Even during the worst days, there was a hard core of creatives here.

In fact, the worst days provided opportunities to live cheaply, to live in places that had been forgotten and neglected and consigned to the edges.

Jonathan Mahler: And so, you know, you had people repurposing these spaces.

There was a weird sense of regeneration among the decay.

Michael Kimmelman: An entire vein of art developed because SoHo provided an opportunity for young artists to colonize a neighborhood that was inexpensive, and then out of that grew work that was related to the neighborhood, the nature of the loft spaces and streets they lived on.

Adam Gopnik: I can remember so clearly the progress of avant-garde frontiers in the city, when it was in West Village, then East Village, then SoHo, then Tribeca, then the East Village again, and at every moment, there was a place where artists gathered in Manhattan and made art that changed consciousness and changed the world.

This next number is called "(I Belong to the) Blank Generation."

[Cheering and applause] [Strums guitar] Concertgoer: You know, if you want to talk about, like, punk and underground, it's... Everybody is their own person and their own thing.

You call 'em punk because you got nothing else to say about 'em, no other way to link them, but it's like the heartbeat that links them, you know, the beat.

Rock and roll is music that makes you, you know, feel alive.

♪ Narrator: But the biggest revolution of all was taking place not in the lofts and tenements of Lower Manhattan but in burned-out neighborhoods in the outer boroughs, arising from the ruins of the city itself and nowhere more so than in the Bronx.

Rapper: ♪ Ready to roll, let's get this ♪ ♪ Hey, yo, I'm fresh to death, ready to impress ♪ ♪ Forget the rest, say yes to the best in the flesh ♪ ♪ No need to go further, I'm the top of the game ♪ ♪ Fly girls see the chain, and they scream-a my name ♪ Christina Greer: So many of the architects of hip hop music talk about how it came about because school music programs were defunded.

They were completely taken away, and so people created their own music literally on the streets of New York.

Ernie Paniccioli: Originally, it was an outlaw music.

Hip hop gave people a voice that would never have a voice.

♪ Here we are for the first time ♪ ♪ Guaranteed to make any party live ♪ -♪ So just lend us your ear ♪ -♪ If you please ♪ All: ♪ And if you don't want to rock ♪ ♪ Then you might as well leave ♪ Interviewer: Where did you learn to rap and sing?

From your English teacher and your music?

-[Laughing] No, rap--you learn rap from the streets.

-Yeah [Kids beatboxing] ♪ Ian Frazier: There's no dispute.

This was invented by young people in the Bronx, and it went around the world.

Doug E. Fresh: This is called the clicks, right?

[Beatboxing] Ernie Paniccioli: When you have fear, when you have police brutality, when you have a society crumbling, art comes out.

[Scratching] And people need to understand that hip hop is not just rap music.

Hip Hop Group: ♪ Boys on the floor ♪ ♪ Let's spin the back ♪ ♪ Rappin' on the mic, we never been whack ♪ Ernie Paniccioli: Hip hop is deejays.

Hip Hop Group: ♪ We're throwing the mic drop ♪ ♪ Back in their face ♪ ♪ When we back a party ♪ Wesley Morris: There's something really important and true and only-in-New York about hip hop, which is that it wasn't only about how bad it was to live in New York.

It was about how great these people were, how majestic, how talented, how sexy.

It was like, "Hey, we're magnificent.

"Y'all don't think so, and you wouldn't know it "by coming to where we live, but we are.

I think that the beautiful thing about art that was made from, you know, the mid-1970s in New York City about New York City was it was simultaneously capturing the reality of what it was like to live here but insisting that it was still the best place to be living.

♪ [Distant siren] [Indistinct chatter] [Siren continues] [Horn honking, siren wailing] Reporter: New York has been bleeding for the past 6 months.

Savage cuts have been made in the public services to keep bankruptcy at bay.

45,000 workers have lost their jobs, 1,500 of them firemen.

Whole fire stations have been closed down.

Others are dangerously overstretched, and New York's South Bronx is one of the world's worst fire hazards.

Ester Fuchs: This is a period of great economic decline and increasing poverty in most central cities all across the United States, but the federal government is pulling back its role helping to support cities, both in terms of anti-poverty policy, but even in terms of spending on infrastructure.

Think about the struggle New York goes through every year trying to get some aid for, basically, every basic service that we expect from a city-- police, fire, sanitation.

Narrator: In the fall of 1975, the city was plunged into the worst fiscal crisis of its entire history as the reckoning for more than two decades of shrinking tax revenues, rising costs, declining federal support, and increasingly desperate borrowing finally came due, driving the city to the verge of bankruptcy for the first time in its 300-year history.

Reporter: 15 mayors, most from big cities, appealed to the Congressional Joint Economic Committee today for some federal emergency help for New York City, arguing that a New York default would hurt every other city in the country by making it impossible for other cities to borrow money.

And if the federal government does not help us, I think it will find the problem afterwards much more serious.

Narrator: In late October, Mayor Abe Beame's desperate plea for a federal loan that would stave off disaster and keep New York from plunging into an abyss was bluntly turned down by then-President Gerald Ford.

Apparently content to let the country's greatest city die, Ford reversed himself 5 weeks later and grudgingly approved $2.3 billion in loans on condition the city surrender fiscal control of its affairs to a small board of bankers and businessmen overseen, humiliatingly, by the state.

The stark austerity measures now put in place sent even greater shock waves through the already reeling city, slashing budgets, firing tens of thousands of workers, and drastically reducing services, a long-term blueprint for stabilizing the city's finances but one that in the near-term worsened the quality of life in the city dramatically.

[Indistinct chatter] Christina Greer: I always bristle when people start talking about austerity measures, because "austerity" mostly means defunding Black and Latino communities.

When people start saying, "We're gonna have to stop spending," we don't tend to touch certain groups of people.

It means in other communities with people who look like me, and when you take away goods and resources from communities, we know that there're gonna be adverse effects.

Ester Fuchs: In 1975, New York City cut the guts out of their basic services, cut the municipal workforce.

There's a reason why everything declined so dramatically in the post-1975 period and why crime went up and why, you know, parks became dust bowls.

♪ Narrator: By the mid-1970s, it was almost inconceivable what was happening to the greatest city on earth.

[People whistling sharply] News anchor: That is a live picture.

Obviously, a major fire in a large building in the South Bronx region of New York City.

Narrator: The South Bronx was burning and had become a byword around the world for neglect and disorder.

♪ Majora Carter: I learned later landlords were torching their own buildings to collect insurance money because there wasn't gonna be any investment happening in here, so you want to recoup something?

You'll burn your building down, and that's what happened.

I thought and thought about why did that happen?

You know, the power brokers of the city were ready to accept something that was just completely unacceptable.

You know, if you're comparing this to like-- if you're thinking, "Well, Europe has just seen total destruction," Yeah, that was war.

[Sirens] Narrator: The city's vertiginous downward spiral came to a bewildering climax in the summer of 1977 as a strange and delirious fever dream seemed to steal over New York.

♪ For more than a year, a killer had been stalking the late-night streets, killing and wounding couples in parked cars and leaving a trail of taunting notes for law enforcement and the press, signed "Mr.

Ernie Paniccioli: The Summer of Sam.

We used to park, kissing, and he was shooting people in their cars, and I remember nights being out with her.

The next morning, pick up the paper, you know, some couple got shot.

Narrator: By July, as New York lay sweltering in the worst heat wave in its history, 5 people had been killed and 6 wounded with the police baffled, no suspect identified, and no end in sight.

♪ Then on the suffocatingly hot evening of July 13th, as millions of New Yorkers huddled fearfully indoors and millions more sought relief from the heat on rooftops and fire escapes and along the streets... [Thunder rumbles] lightning strikes a few miles up the Hudson knocked out 3 of the massive power plants that fed the city, and at 9:37 p.m., Con Edison itself, the oldest electric power company in the world, shut down completely, plunging the city into complete darkness for only the second time in its history.

Reporter: Less than an hour after the electric lights failed, individual New Yorkers in most neighborhoods were directing traffic, but in the worst slums of the city, the light of mindless violence lit up the sky as the blackout divided the town into two societies, separate and unequal.

Ian Frazier: The lights went out, and we came out, and there was just chaos everywhere, and I had no idea how bad the chaos was because my television didn't work because there was no power, so I didn't see that there was looting in other parts of the city.

Reporter: Thousands of East Harlem residents had taken to the streets in an orgy of looting and burning that shocked many of their neighbors.

Abe Beame: We've been needlessly subjected to a night of terror.

The cost, when finally tallied, will be enormous.

Narrator: In the end, the blackout of 1977 lasted for more than 25 hours, triggered a night of rioting, looting, arson, and destruction that resulted in 4 deaths, 550 injuries, 4,500 arrests, and more than $300 million in damage... ♪ and then, the fever broke.

Reporter: This photograph of the man accused of killing 6 and wounding 7 was taken by police this morning.

Narrator: In August, after one final night of carnage, Son of Sam was finally apprehended.

Reporter: Police transported David Berkowitz from headquarters to Brooklyn Central Booking after my sources say he confessed to being the .44 Killer, after he told them he was a killing machine ordered by a voice speaking through a neighbor's dog to carry out his bloody outrages against young, pretty women.

[Indistinct chatter] Narrator: In November, a new mayor was elected, a gregarious, wisecracking, lifelong bachelor and one-time Greenwich Village progressive, who had veered sharply right to win the election.

Dan Rather: His name is Ed Koch, a liberal Democrat who ran for mayor on a pretty conservative "get tough" platform.

Since his election, one of his critics has called him "Mayor Mouth."

Ian Frazier: I did like when Ed Koch first became mayor, and he would just agree to talk to people.

Ian Frazier: People come, "You are the worst!"

And they just give him all kinds of grief, and he'd go, "OK, that's your opinion.

[Laughing] Ed Koch: You ask me a question, I give you a response.

You provoke me--in the sense of confrontation-- I am not a punching bag.

Narrator: With his down-to-earth style, Ed Koch offered the rudderless city a sense of direction and forward motion it had been lacking for years.

Dan Rather: Why should anyone give a damn what happens to New York?

Ed Koch: Well, I think it should be the pride of America.

It's the premier city of the world, and we've all made an investment-- not just money, but a spiritual investment in this city.

Narrator: And during his 3 terms in office-- cheered on, for the most part, by the middle class, if not by poorer New Yorkers on whom the harsh cuts of the crisis years continued to fall-- New York would begin a long, hard climb out of the abyss into which it had fallen, even as many of its troubles remained unresolved and some even made worse by the mayor's severe economizing measures.

Mitchell Moss: Koch shrunk the police department dramatically during the financial crisis.

Koch had a budget director who didn't believe in hiring police because he didn't think they'd make a difference.

Christina Greer: Koch said, "We have to tighten the belt," and that created a city that was no longer safe for anyone because everyone's getting mugged, right?

It's not just African Americans in particular communities.

It's not just Latinos in particular communities.

You have now made the city relatively unsafe for all.

[Indistinct chatter] [Bell ringing] Narrator: And yet, while city services suffered, by 1980 5 years of painful austerity was finally bearing fruit, and with its books balanced, credit newly restored, and finances stabilized-- however precariously-- New York began to restore confidence in its reputation, badly tarnished by the crisis-- as the center of world finance.

♪ And all through the darkest days of the 1970s, meanwhile, as people left the city in record numbers, almost unnoticed a steadily increasing influx of immigrants had been coming into the city, made possible by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, an increasingly diverse and far-flung cohort, whose numbers had continued to grow year by year.

Kenneth T. Jackson: The major change, the 1965 law, didn't really kick in in a big way till the 1980s, and when New York really became again what it had always been, an immigrant metropolis.

Narrator: In just 10 years, more than 800,000 immigrants had arrived, newcomers whose striking diversity was transforming the composition and culture of whole neighborhoods.

Jonathan Mahler: 1985 was when the city became a majority non-white city for the first time in its history, and it was a product of the Hart-Celler Act that brought lots of immigrants from Asia and Africa and the Caribbean, Latin America, and in 1985, the city tipped.

Narrator: The vast majority of the new arrivals were settling not as before into crowded tenements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but across the vast low-rise, outer-borough reaches of Brooklyn and Queens into once-predominantly white ethnic neighborhoods, whose second-generation families had been fleeing the city for years, leaving behind empty storefronts and declining main streets.

Ester Fuchs: If you, you know, grew up in Bayside like I did, you saw Flushing destroyed.

The whole retail sector left, there was nothing there, and then, new immigrants and new folks are coming in and reclaiming neighborhoods that have been lost.

Koreans move into Flushing and revitalize what was essentially a dead retail area and take it over and bring it back.

Reporter: A block in a state of metamorphosis, the kind of ethnic evolution that weaves the tapestry that is New York City.

Ester Fuchs: This transformation at the neighborhood level, this is as important as bringing in the big fish on the economic side of things.

♪ Suketu Mehta: When I came here at 14 in the eighties, I grew up in Jackson Heights which is arguably the most diverse neighborhood in the United States, and I grew up in this building which had Indians and Pakistanis and Haitians and Dominicans and Jews and Muslims, and the super was Greek, and the owner of the building was a Turk.

So these were all people who were killing each other just before they got on the plane, and here we are living next to each other.

And it's not that we quit our ancient tribal hatreds.

We often said horrible things about other people when we were alone in our own homes, but we got along.

Our identity was that we lived in Jackson Heights, and there wasn't this pressure on us, or even our children, to give up what we had come from-- the culture, the food that we ate, the dress that we wore.

More than any other city that I've been to, this kind of diversity was celebrated and encouraged.

Adam Gopnik: Globalization is not a new thing.

It's a very old thing, and the story of New York in the 40 years I've been here is largely a story of immigration.

It's a different kind of immigration than the Irish and Italian and Jewish immigration, which created the foundation of my own experience, but New York is an inherently cosmopolitan and global city.

♪ Narrator: Thanks to the influx of new immigrants, growing year by year, the city's population-- once dropping precipitously-- had begun rising again, reaching 7.3 million people by the end of the decade, and as new people from new places began to pump new life into the battered city, another global trend was beginning to get underway as the world's economy began to globalize as never before with Wall Street at its center.

Jonathan Mahler: There's an incredible confluence of events that happens during these years.

You have this surge of immigration.

You have the hollowed-out economy of New York finding a new path, reorienting itself around different industries-- no longer around shipping and manufacturing but rather around Wall Street, around finance, around real estate.

You have the emergence of computer-driven trading, the rise of technology that was enabling people to trade overseas.

This was the beginning of the global economy in a sense, and New York was at the heart of it.

♪ Narrator: On October 1st, 1981, a 39-year-old investment banker named Michael Bloomberg, who had recently been fired from his job at one of the biggest firms on Wall Street, used his $10 million severance package to start a company of his own based on the novel idea of making computerized financial information available to traders right on their desktops terminals in continuously updated digital streams of news and information.

The risky venture, launched from a one-room office and built on a technology-- the personal computer-- unused and untested in the marketplace, was widely expected to fail, but the stubborn, fact-driven, risk-taking entrepreneur pushed ahead anyway based on a longshot hunch, shared by no one at the time, that the mountains of paperwork Wall Street had relied upon for generations would soon be replaced by globally interconnected networks of digital data.

For about 300 years, we had an industrial economy, and now we're in the first decades of really a knowledge and information economy.

It was the globalization of markets, it was all kinds of countries around the world using the tools of financial services born here in America.

New York City always had a strong position in the financial services industry... [Bell ringing] but in the eighties, financial services really had an extraordinary period of growth.

[Cheering and applause] Narrator: Accelerated by a wave of financial deregulation, the Wall Street boom of the 1980s now began lifting the city's economy to a place of precarious equilibrium.

Jonathan Mahler: Wall Street single-handedly revived New York.

The money generated on Wall Street was spilling out from the canyons of Wall Street uptown, sloshing around, building new skyscrapers.

That explosion fed the real estate explosion in New York, and that led to the rise of Donald Trump, who builds Trump Tower and fills these million-dollar apartments with people from all over the world, many of whom have shadowy financial histories.

♪ Narrator: For years, the Queens-born heir to the outer-borough fortune created by his father Fred Trump had been trying, without success, to break into the rarified realm of Manhattan real estate.

At the age of 32, he had finally broken through, when at the height of the fiscal crisis he had acquired the rights to convert a battered hotel next to Grand Central Terminal, using a 40-year tax abatement his father had helped arrange for him to get, along with another $70 million in construction loans his father had cosigned on his behalf.

Reporter: The tax holiday that the Trump Organization was given to build this hotel on 42nd Street is worth $45 million.

Donald Trump: What's happened is phenomenal.

I've never seen anything to the extent that I have in New York.

It's probably become the hottest city in the world.

People are flocking here by droves.

I would have never built the development if I didn't get the tax abatement.

Narrator: 4 years later, in July 1982, a second tower topped out further uptown, a shiny gold-plated condominium called Trump Tower, marketed for the most part to the wealthy new overseas buyers now coming in to New York.

Ed Koch: Having a building like this occupied by wealthy people who, as Donald Trump has said, could live in other cities and chose to live here, I think is a credit to this city.

By the way, he is a chip off the old block.

Donald Trump: 8 years ago, I must say, I was embarrassed to say I was in the real estate business in New York.

Today, I can honestly say I'm proud of it, and it's the number one city in the world.

Narrator: Trump's habit of playing fast and loose with the truth for his own purposes had already become familiar to the public well before the dedication ceremony for what he proudly called his "68-story" tower-- which, as reporters noted at the time, was in fact only 58 stories tall.

♪ Adam Gopnik: The first time I was ever aware of Donald Trump, I was working for a men's fashion magazine as a copy editor, and we did a cover story about this young real estate entrepreneur Donald Trump, and the single thing I remember most about it was that he referred to 6th Avenue as "Avenue of the Americas," and no New Yorker I've ever known, ever, has referred to 6th Avenue as Avenue of the Americas, though, obviously it's its official name, and I remember what struck me was here you had a truly authentic imitation New Yorker, a truly authentic fake New Yorker.

He was somehow both from New York but not of New York at the same time.

♪ Narrator: In the fall of 1985-- with the worst years of fiscal austerity over and memories of the fiscal crisis receding, Mayor Koch was reelected in a stunning landslide to a third term in office in a city that seemed by then to be leading a strange double life.

In Manhattan, gleaming new office towers and condominiums continued to rise along with a shiny new world of glittering restaurants and night-spots filled with a new class of young urban professionals now lending the city a patina of prosperity.

Adam Gopnik: You know, I remember moving here in the 1980s.

It was still the height of the crime wave, and yet, you were suddenly aware of the preponderance of young urban professionals on 1st and 2nd Avenue at 2:00 in the morning, and you said, "Something is changing fundamentally.

Something is different in the city."

Ray Suarez: There were the richest people in the world living here.

They got in and out of limousines, they danced at Studio 54, they used drugs that cost hundreds of dollars a gram.

What was scary was that the gulf between them and us was getting wider.

Narrator: Much of the city's poor population, meanwhile, continued to struggle simply to get by amidst the ruins left by the fires of the South Bronx and the empty looted storefronts of Brooklyn, and by then, the city's gay population was being ravaged by a mysterious viral disease, which before the worst was over would kill over 80,000 New Yorkers, more than twice the number who would later die in the COVID pandemic.

Larry Kramer: You try not to think about it.

You just know that your best friend has died.

You just know that a person you had a love affair with is in Lenox Hill Hospital with PCP, which has an 80% fatality rate.

We have to get the information around.

We are putting out a leaflet that's gonna blanket the whole city-- 500,000 copies--that says, "Guys until we know better, cool it.

"Give up your drugs, lay off the number of people you're having sex with until we know better."

Activists: Act up, fight back, cure AIDS!

Act up, fight back... Narrator: By 1986, New York had become the worldwide epicenter of the disease, but despite mounting pressure from the city's gay population to respond more aggressively, officials in Washington and New York were disastrously slow to respond to the crisis or, in President Reagan's case, even to acknowledge that it existed.

Ed Koch: We are diagnosing or treating more than 1/3 of the New York AIDS cases in... Narrator: And by the time Mayor Koch himself finally took action--only halfway through his third term-- nearly 10,000 New Yorkers had died of the disease, and more than 70,000 fatally infected-- nearly 1/3 of all the cases in the entire United States.

Reporter: The people who've died from AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, are being remembered tonight at a candlelight vigil here in Central Park.

Narrator: And there would soon be other crises to contend with far downtown.

[Bell ringing] Reporter: They're calling it the "Monday Massacre," the worst drop in Wall Street history.

Jonathan Mahler: Wall Street had become the engine of New York's economy, and then--boom-- the Black Monday market crash in 1987.

On Monday morning, the markets couldn't even open because there were so many sell orders kind of waiting.

That kind of crash was so much a product of the new technology that had transformed Wall Street and these massive blocks of sell orders so massive that the bottom would just kind of drop out.

Narrator: Black Monday, the worst crash on Wall Street since 1929, couldn't have come at a worse time, prompting new austerity measures just as crime in the city surged upward again, fueled by the rise of crack cocaine and an explosion in the use of deadly automatic weapons in the drug trade and as long-simmering tensions between communities of color and the police department deepened.

It was in this context that in the fall of 1989, with the end of Ed Koch's third and final term looming, New Yorkers went to the polls and by a narrow margin chose Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins over the aggressive U.S.

Attorney for the Southern District of New York Rudy Giuliani, whose negative, often race-baiting campaign failed to put him in City Hall for now.

For many New Yorkers, David Dinkins' victory was a heartening affirmation of the city's long-standing culture of hope and change and of its sometimes-faltering commitment to equity and inclusion.

Being Mayor or the City of New York-- if you like people and you like public service-- is the greatest job in the world.

The only one possibly better is being president of the United States.

We got 8 million people of all customs, races, religions.

What a magnificent city, and to be the leader of that city is as good as it gets.

Christina Greer: When we're moving from Koch to Dinkins, there is this fundamental reimagining of what New York could look like from this very dignified man who had already successfully led Manhattan, so I think that there was this beautiful mosaic of hope in a David Dinkins.

Narrator: And so it was that by the waning days of December 1989, as New Yorkers prepared to welcome into City Hall the first black mayor in the city's history and as a dizzying decade of growth and change, challenge, and transformation, drew to a close, New York stood on the brink of one of the most harrowing chapters it would ever have to contend with.

[Sirens] Ernie Paniccioli: 107th and Manhattan Avenue was at the cocaine and crack epicenter on the planet-- drug deals everywhere, and I remember one night they killed two cops, and next day, they were right back on that same corner.

They were out there, like, 40 thick, and I was like, "What did I just witness?

That is so--you killed two cops and nothing stops?"

♪ I knew a lot of these kids growing up because I was in the neighborhood, and they were the sweet kids, and then they became drug dealers, and, you know, you shake hands with them one day.

The mortality rate was, like, incredible.

♪ Narrator: Even in a city numbed by decades of crime and disorder, few were prepared for the wave of crime that swept over New York in 1990 in what would prove to be the deadliest 12 months in the city's history.

Chris McNickle: New York city experienced its worst crime wave ever in the late 1980s, 1990, in particular, and murders were off the charts.

Major crimes--robberies, rape, murder, car theft-- over 700,000 major crimes a year, and it was a horrible set of circumstances.

Narrator: The violence began on New Year's Eve when, in a single 8-hour period, no fewer than 13 New Yorkers were murdered-- 10 shot, two run down by cars, and one man beaten to death-- all before, at noon on New Year's Day, David Dinkins had even been sworn into office-- vowing, he said, to be "the toughest mayor on crime this city has ever seen."

We must reaffirm the rule of law and fight back against the pushers and muggers and take back our streets and subways and our parks.

[Cheering and applause] We had, as always, budget problems, but the big thing was crime, so we started with a program we called Safe Streets, Safe City.

The problem was to get this done we needed money.

If you need more cops, you need more people in parole and probation and DAs and legal aid and on and on.

When David Dinkins became mayor, he inherited this horrible crime wave, and it also came at a time of great fiscal stress for the city.

There was a national recession having a horrible impact on the city's economy and government revenue, and so it fell to David Dinkins, who was dealt this very bad hand, to play it, and he very early on instructed his police department to do a systematic analysis of how many police would it take to police New York City effectively and what would it cost and to devise a plan for paying for it, and yet, the crime kept on coming.

Reporter: A man was shot twice in the chest on a number 6 train in Upper Manhattan.

To make matters worse, the police force monitoring these subways is shrinking.

Officer: We have two radio cars covering an entire station house.

Woman: I walk around and I'm scared that somebody's gonna attack me.

My own city has really gone to the dogs.

Reporter: Experts agree the breakdown has been underway for years and that the crisis seems overwhelming now only because no one can avoid it.

[Siren] Narrator: Month by month, the death toll mounted: multiple drive-by shootings in February; a fatal stabbing in a subway in Queens during an argument over a leather jacket; a 44-year-old Vietnam veteran named James Zappalorti chased and stabbed to death by two men on Staten Island because he was gay.

Chris McNickle: Many of the killings were random.

There was an assistant district attorney shot by accident while he was buying a doughnut.

There was a advertising executive making a telephone call at a payphone, murdered.

Narrator: As it almost always did, the violence that year crested with the coming of hot weather in a city now so inured to the endless body count that only the most unusual crimes or those involving white, middle-, or upper-middle class victims received much attention.

One of the most shocking incidents came that summer when on September 2nd a 22-year-old tourist from Provo, Utah, named Brian Watkins, who had come to the city with his family for the U.S.

Open was stabbed on a subway platform in Midtown Manhattan as he tried to fend off a group of teenagers attempting to rob his father and mother, who looked on in horror as he bled to death in front of them.

The murder made headlines around the world, further confirming New York's growing reputation as a place to be avoided at all costs.

Chris McNickle: And it shocked the city, and Mayor Dinkins asked the city to be patient, and it backfired, and the "New York Post" had one of the most memorable tabloid headlines in New York City history: "Dave, Do Something!"

And David Dinkins almost never recovered from the lack of credibility that followed from that.

Christina Greer: We have to sort of think about Black mayors the same way we think about Black coaches.

You're given a very limited amount of time to turn things around, and if you can't, then you're out.

Narrator: But for all the shock and public outrage sparked by the murder of a middle-class tourist, Brian Watkins' death was the exception, not the rule.

Another killing, coming not long after, and scarcely noticed at all, was far more typical.

On Sunday, September 23rd, 1990, a 12-year-old girl named Laykama Taylor was playing in the courtyard of her housing project in Brooklyn... [Gunshot] when a loud bang resounded through the complex.

"The girl's friends saw her fall," the "New York Times" reported, "thought she was joking, and tried to pick her up, then saw the blood."

[Siren] She was pronounced dead at Brookdale Hospital, a police spokeswoman said.

She was, the "Times" noted, the third child in the city to have been hit by gunfire that weekend.

As the cataclysmic year ground to a close, the statistics left in its wake would be staggering.

A total of 2,245 people had been murdered in the 5 boroughs of New York City.

Suketu Mehta: In the nineties, in much of the rest of the country, people were afraid of New York, so there was this sense that New York was, you know, "a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to die there."

And it seemed inexorable and incurable.

Everybody who talked about it, talked about it that way, that the cities were dying and dead, and though some of us might still have a kind of morbid fascination for the cities, the cities were hell and New York in particular was unrecoverable.

Narrator: As 1991 began, a feeling of helplessness had fallen over the city.

Something had to be done, but the sheer scale of the problem and the fact that no one seemed to know what to do about it had become paralyzing.

[Sirens] To make matters worse, the city's first line of defense, its large but chronically understaffed police force, was itself in a state of disarray.

Demoralized after years of failing to fulfill its most basic mission-- keeping the city safe-- and bruised by repeated charges of corruption and brutality, much of the department had increasingly withdrawn into an insular culture that put a premium on group loyalty and avoiding trouble of any kind, making accountability all but impossible.

Mitchell Moss: We shrunk the police department dramatically during the financial crisis, so Dinkins inherited a police department which was really small, but the killing of Brian Watkins created a moment to hire more cops.

Narrator: Stung by the anger and criticism following Brian Watkins' murder, Mayor Dinkins finally began to take action and called for a record expansion of the city's police force-- nearly 10,000 more patrol officers in all-- then tried to convince reluctant state legislators to pay for it.

David Dinkins: The city doesn't have the ability to tax itself, so we went to Albany to seek permission to put a surcharge on personal income tax, and we got the money.

Ester Fuchs: Mayor Dinkins did something major.

He was critical in bringing 3,000 cops back to the police department.

Narrator: But though the surcharge had been approved, Dinkins, faced with chronic budget deficits, put off hiring the bulk of the new recruits for 2 1/2 years to nearly the end of his term, forfeiting any political benefit he might have received for the transformation he had set in motion.

Dinkins' rhetoric never allowed him to take full credit for that.

Mitchell Moss: So by the end of his term, crime would go down 19%.

However, he didn't make it an issue.

He didn't campaign "Crime's on the way down."

Narrator: Over the next 3 years, New York's courtly and conciliatory mayor would struggle to bring the brutal crime statistics down with some success, but not nearly enough.

He would also find himself increasingly caught between communities of color, angered by repeated incidents of police brutality, and the police department itself, many of whose members were enraged at the mayor for, as they saw it, taking sides against them.

[Cheering] Reporter: They marched around City Hall Park in a peaceful and orderly fashion, but then minutes later, thousands of cops stormed through the barricades and ran on top of cars as they charged the stairs of City Hall.

Christina Greer: We can't forget how the police officers, not all, but many, treated David Dinkins.

Turning their backs on him, threatening him inside of City Hall.

Essentially a riot of police and fire, but largely police officers spearheaded by Rudy Giuliani.

The reason the morale of the police department of the City of New York is so low is one reason and one reason alone-- David Dinkins.

[Cheering and applause] Christina Greer: They would not see David Dinkins as someone who should be respected or listened to.

David Dinkins: And for Rudy Giuliani to urge them on, as it were, is a demonstration of irresponsibility on his behalf.

He who professes to be a lawyer... Chris McNickle: At the end of Dinkins' term, crime had begun to come down, but it's not what people remember.

People remember just the horrible period in New York City history when people were afraid to be out on the streets at night.

Narrator: As David Dinkins' first term wound to a close, though some kinds of crime had begun to abate, the murder rate in New York remained virtually unchanged year after year, still totaling 2,000 killings a year.

It was unsustainable and apparently insurmountable.

Chris McNickle: There is this undertone in New York that we're very liberal as long as the streets are safe, and there are more than a few New Yorkers who are very much in tune with Americans who are focused intensely on public safety, law and order, and that's the starting point for what they want out of government, and they don't want other things out of government until and unless that's accomplished first.

So I constantly remind people who always say, like, New York is so liberal "Slow down.

"We've had 20 years of Republican mayoralties-- 20 consecutive years in the 20th and 21st centuries," so let's cool it on the New York's this progressive bastion that's, like, hyper-blue.

We're many shades of blue, but it's very clear that New Yorkers are not averse to voting for something that-- whether it's economically conservative, whether it's socially conservative-- seemingly is a little more conservative.

♪ Narrator: By 1993, New York stood on the cusp of an enormous change.

That fall, propelled by 2 1/2 decades of violence and disorder, New York's crime-wearied citizens went to the polls and by a slim margin elected the same man David Dinkins had defeated 4 years earlier, the hard-driving, law and order candidate Rudolph Giuliani, only the second Republican in half a century to reach City Hall.

The era of fear has had a long enough reign.

The period of doubt has run its course.

Change in many forms is coming to our city, but it must be built around respect for the law and justice.

Narrator: A former prosecutor fond of the limelight, who had risen to prominence jailing Mafia dons and perp-walking white-collar criminals, the mayor-elect suggested to some a latter-day Peter Stuyvesant a stern, competent, little-loved political figure who brought the mentality of a sheriff to City Hall, vowing to clean up the woefully dangerous and disorderly city.

Chris McNickle: Rudy Giuliani comes along and spoke in tough terms.

He said he was going to banish the criminals.

He was going to restore law and order to New York City.

He has the benefit of a bigger police force-- thanks to Dinkins-- and then he expands it by merging the police with the housing and the transit cops, which had been separate, so we had well over 40,000 police officers.

♪ Narrator: An innovative career crime-fighter who had once run the city's transit police and who had most recently led the Boston police department, William Bratton set right to work, quickly implementing a new approach to policing that focused on so-called "quality of life" offenses.

Reporter: They called it "broken windows," the idea being that if you tackled the smaller crimes that affected your quality of life like graffiti, street selling, drinking in public, and broken windows, you'd have an impact on the more serious violent crimes.

Mitchell Moss: Well, Bratton came in, and he said, "We're gonna adopt a policy of zero tolerance.

"If you're peeing, you're arrested.

"If you're doing anything that's breaking the law, we're gonna prosecute you," on the theory that smaller crimes lead to disorder and that if you don't maintain public order, you will create an ambience of tolerating crime.

So the policing became aggressive and active.

Narrator: The new tactics increased public order appreciably, but they also sparked anger in many poorer neighborhoods, where residents often felt singled out by the police simply for their skin color and above all by the aggressive deployment of a tactic soon called "stop and frisk."

[Siren blips] Reporter: Men in blue stopping young men of color as tensions rise... Eric Adams: Stop and frisk, which was really supposed to be stop, question, and frisk, but we just went to stop and frisk--it created negative relationships between the police department and the communities they were supposed to serve.

There was a blanket response based on zip code.

Just about every Black and brown child in those communities was stopped.

Young Man: You just be walking down-- down the street, and they'll--just look at you and just follow you for a minute.

Young Man: 'Cause they think you got something.

Eric Adams: Although we decreased crime, we also decreased trust because of the abuse of the tool of stop, question, and frisk.

[Clatter] Narrator: The impact of stop and frisk would haunt the city for decades to come.

It also scarcely scratched the surface of the city's nightmarish crime problem, and for help, Bratton now turned to a little known subway cop named Jack Maple, one of the most unusual law enforcement officers in the history of the New York Police Department, destined to become a legend among all the officers who knew him.

Mitchell Moss: Well, he's a transit cop, and that's where Bratton found him.

You know, there's often a genie behind the wizard.

Without Maple, there'd be no Bratton.

♪ Narrator: Decked out in a bow-tie and two-tone shoes and often referred to as "Jack the Hat" by some of his colleagues, he was once described by a reporter as "a short, fat, funny-looking, "derby-clad former transit cop, who also happened to be a genius."

An inveterate night owl and man-about-town, he preferred working not at police headquarters but from his favorite table at Elaine's, the fashionable East Side nightspot, where, in the winter of 1994, he set to work on the towering problem Bratton had assigned him-- cutting crime not just in the subways but across the entire city.

It was a task, he knew, that would require nothing less than a complete paradigm shift in the way policing was conducted in New York City.

Mitchell Moss: The police had long ago gotten into cars, and they rode around, and they reacted to phone calls.

There had been a culture of the police waiting to be called because they felt that police interaction led to corruption, so the police kind of waited to be called, and they would come, and the normal response is "We'll send a car."

Narrator: It was a shift that would also require collecting and continuously updating real-time data on crimes as they occurred instead of compiling essentially useless statistics only once or twice a year, as was customary.

Eric Adams: And Jack knew that we could use technology to create a real-time crime-fighting apparatus.

Jack started analyzing crime, looking at how to go from reactive to proactive and almost predictive in finding how crimes were going to occur.

Narrator: And here, too, Maple's favorite watering hole proved invaluable.

Watching Elaine at the register keeping constant tabs on an ever-changing flow of orders and requests and deploying her waitstaff accordingly, he took a cocktail napkin and scribbled down an 11-word strategy: "Accurate, timely intelligence, rapid deployment, "effective tactics, relentless follow-up, and assessment."

"The principles," one man later said, "may seem basic in retrospect, but at the time, they were extraordinary."

Maple, for his part, was sure the new approach could cut crime in half if not more.

"We will be relentless," he declared, "until New York is, in fact, the safest city in America."

♪ But the first obstacle lay, unsurprisingly, within the police department itself and its deeply entrenched culture-- long hostile to change of any kind.

To penetrate the wall of resistance with which his plan was immediately greeted by commanding officers at the city's 77 precincts, Maple quickly took a different tack.

"From now on," he said, "they're gonna come to me."

Mitchell Moss: Maple, first of all-- apart from being a flashy dresser and everything else-- you know, was kind of a cop with a brain who also saw that they could do things differently, and it's very easy to be in a bureaucracy and become a victim of the culture.

Narrator: On Wednesday, April 6th, 1994, with Commissioner Bratton's full support, Maple convened the first gathering of what was soon called "CompStat," short for "comparative statistics," at police headquarters in lower Manhattan.

Jack Maple: We've got transit on standby to discuss the... Narrator: Attendance was mandatory.

On Bratton's orders, every precinct chief in the city was required to show up.

Jack Maple: The CompStat process is bringing a borough in where they have to stand together and demonstrate the plans they came up with to address the problems that they face.

Are we prepared to discuss robberies?

Narrator: Using maps and charts of every major crime committed in New York in the previous 72 hours, Maple and his team went borough by borough, precinct by precinct, grilling each commander in turn... Jack Maple: How could we not know about this?

We've got a couple of characters going around with some badges and a pit bull now doing stick-ups.

Why wouldn't we have a pattern on that so everybody knows about it?

Narrator: about what crimes were taking place and where, how the police had responded, what had worked and what hadn't, and what could be done differently next time.

Mitchell Moss: The biggest change was that Maple really pushed putting data into computers, and instead of waiting for months for the information to go from the precinct to down there, you put it on the computer, it comes in, and suddenly you can react within a week.

Now, this is what Bloomberg did with finance, but Maple did it with crime, and that became the breakthrough in mapping where crime was.

Narrator: Thereafter, the ritual unfolded twice a week in what one man called "riveting if uncomfortable theater" with each commander held personally accountable for the crime rate in his or her precinct.

Jack Maple: We saw a narcotics division that didn't work nights or weekends.

Unfortunately, the criminal element, they work nights, they work weekends.

Narrator: Officers who pushed back, prevaricated, or repeatedly failed to perform were threatened with demotion or told it was time to retire or, in more than a few cases, simply fired.

Why would you think that we're down at that level?

Commander: Well, the answer's simple, commissioner.

The people I had doing the job last year weren't doing it well enough.

Narrator: But within a few months, most began to come around, then grew increasingly enthusiastic, recognizing that this foppish deputy, obsessed with maps and statistics, was giving them an effectiveness they had never had before, letting them focus their patrols and manpower with pinpoint precision.

Gary, what does it look like on the 104 side?

What kind of a week have you been having?

Gary: 16 robbery arrests so far last month.

Commander: If you look at the robberies, the majority are occurring in sector John.

For the record on that 7-3 precinct case, crime scene was never notified.

We'll hope that that gets corrected.

The difference between this time and every other time is that we have not left that location.

We still have two officers assigned to that place 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.

Jack Maple: That map could be used on a much grander scale to move scores of officers to hot spots to knock down crime and affect crime in the whole city.

The logic of it is extraordinarily obvious.

Where are high-crime neighborhoods with higher needs?

Let's move the resources there, and maybe another neighborhood, which has less crime, doesn't need as many resources.

That was the impact of CompStat, amazingly, which was "We're gonna follow the crime and move our capacity and our resources to solving this problem."

Narrator: The results were staggering.

In just 24 months, the crime rate in New York had plunged by nearly 50%, as Jack Maple had brashly predicted it would over martinis at Elaine's, and then just kept falling.

Reporter: The good guys are finally winning one in the war against crime, and nowhere is the victory more obvious than in New York City.

Narrator: Less than 5 years after the first CompStat meeting, the number of murders in New York had dropped by 70% from nearly 2,000 a year to just over 600, a level not seen in the city since the early 1960s.

♪ Nearly every other criminal activity in New York had fallen with it, accounting for 1/3 of the decline in crime in the entire United States in that period.

♪ Ester Fuchs: The important transformation for New York at the end of the 20th century that really the story would have been dramatically different if it doesn't happen is the decline in the crime rate.

Narrator: Though the revolution in policing had without question played a huge role in the plunging numbers, policing alone couldn't have accounted for a change so rapid and monumental.

Chris McNickle: The reasons why crime goes up and why crime goes down is a problem that criminologists have been studying for years, and they're often at a loss to explain it with any kind of convincing consistency, but there were a series of factors that began in the 1990s across the nation but with greater intensity in New York City.

There was a crack epidemic that surged and declined, mostly for reasons that we don't quite understand.

In part, there was almost a cruelly Darwinian element to it that people who got addicted to crack ended up dying in disproportionate numbers, and the crime went with it.

Ray Suarez: There were demographic changes afoot that helped spur the drop in crime, not only here but all over the country.

It was dropping more here and further here.

[Laughter] Narrator: Of crucial import in many of the most ravaged places was the rising influx of new people from new places, growing every year, who helped bring new life to once-blighted neighborhoods and begin to restore what the urban activist Jane Jacobs had called the "eyes on the street."

♪ Chris McNickle: New York City has long been a city that attracts immigrants to a disproportionate degree, and immigrants are a lower source of crime than Americans who are born here because they're always afraid of being deported.

Narrator: The biggest change would come to the poor and working-class areas of the city, which had always suffered the most painful consequences of violent crime and where, even in the worst of times, the residents had kept New York afloat even as thousands of others fled each year.

Esther Fuchs: People in New York City were not giving up on the city by any stretch.

They didn't give up in the worst periods of the city.

Unlike other great American cities, where so many people just left and left the city to decline-- like Detroit and, in many ways, Chicago and Philadelphia-- we didn't have that in New York.

Adam Gopnik: Community action, above all, seems to have been a crucial transformer-- the way that communities organize themselves against crime and the way that societies are self-instructive.

Positive virtuous circles certainly got started.

You know, if there are 10 people on the subway at 1:00 a.m., that invites another hundred people on.

It wasn't one big idea or one big transformation.

It was a thousand small sanities working simultaneously to produce this extraordinary transformation.

Narrator: The argument over the complex causes responsible for the decline would be debated by sociologists and urban scientists for decades to come, but one thing could not be contested, What had happened in New York in a bare handful of years towards the end of the 20th century represented one of the greatest transformations in the peacetime history of cities.

[Cheering and applause] In the fall of 1997, Rudy Giuliani-- hailed now by many New Yorkers as the savior of the city-- was reelected in a landslide.

By then, the limelight-loving mayor-- angry at having to share credit for the triumph-- had fallen out with his hugely popular police commissioner Bill Bratton, who had left to become police commissioner of Los Angeles and bring New York's hard-won lessons to the nation's second-largest city.

Chris McNickle: By demanding credit for it, Rudy Giuliani became the hero.

Rightly or wrongly, he became the person who was associated with the decline in crime.

To be fair, crime did go down when he became mayor.

Michael Kimmelman: The change in safety in the city was so dramatic that no discussion of New York in the 21st century can begin to have any meaning if you don't talk about the way the city has become improbably safe, one of the safest big cities in the world.

Those changes had to do with lots of factors, some of which we have yet to really figure out, some of which have to do with policing, some of them seem generational changes.

Those changes created the possibility of a completely different city in which it is really hard now to find any neighborhood where you would find yourself threatened.

I mean, that certainly wasn't the New York I grew up in.

♪ Narrator: Little by little, New Yorkers began to adjust to the new reality around them, which only a few years earlier had seemed impossible to even imagine.

Chris McNickle: And it changed the psychology of the city.

It helped people to move from the sense that they were always under threat when they were in New York City to the sense that this was a city where you could live and enjoy yourself, where you could go to the parks, where you could go out at night and be safe and be happy.

Michael Kimmelman: And that has, of course, allowed this organic growth, that people can move into neighborhoods, that they feel safe to move into, that they wouldn't have thought of moving into before.

That's part of, of course, a globalizing trend, at least among the educated and more affluent, but that's happening because cities are safer, and New York is, you know, Exhibit A of that.

Glynnis MacNicol: I don't think anyone could have envisioned the transformation the city experienced, and I remember when I first moved here in the late nineties.

The former editor-in-chief of the "Observer" once described late-nineties New York as the Emerald City.

My arrival in New York was as the city was ascending at such meteoric rates that it felt like you were in the Emerald City.

[Distant sirens] ♪ Narrator: But it was not a feeling shared by all New Yorkers, and even as the crime rate continued to fall and a mood of cautious optimism began to spread across New York, Mayor Giuliani's second term in office would be marked by the some of the most searing incidents of police violence and brutality in the city's history.

In August 1997, a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima was falsely arrested outside a popular nightclub, savagely beaten by the arresting officers, then strip-searched and sodomized with a broomstick.

Reporter: First of all, tell us how you're doing.

I could say I'm doing OK because I'm still alive.

Narrator: In February 1999, a 23-year-old Guinean student named Amidou Diallo, returning home from dinner, was standing outside his apartment building on Wheeler Avenue in the Bronx when plain-clothed police officers in an unmarked vehicle pulled to a stop, ordered him to show his hands, and, when Diallo turned and tried to run into the building, the officers fired 41 shots at the unarmed student, hitting him 19 times and fatally wounding him.

Al Sharpton: This is the worst form of police brutality that I have ever seen or heard of.

Narrator: By then, relations between the police department and communities of color in New York had fallen to an all-time low.

Monxo López: The South Bronx is a place where we have stories of police officers staging mock executions of people that they arrested.

We have stories of, obviously, stop and frisk, of the police using unnecessarily lethal action against mostly Black and brown teenagers.

Narrator: As the century drew to a close, more and more New Yorkers were filled with a conviction that something had to be done.

Adam Gopnik: The end of violent crime began to produce the new attention that New Yorkers paid to the problems of New York's inequality for the first time.

Contrary to the opinion that somehow the end of violent crime produces complacency and indifference, no, I think it's just the opposite.

I think the end of violent crime produces the possibility of inspecting the flaws and fractures in the city.

♪ Narrator: By the summer of 2001, as the new millennium got underway, the city had in large measure left the trials and tribulations of the past few decades behind.

As the auspicious new century got underway, New York's financial institutions led the world in trade.

Its population had passed 8 million for the first time and was growing increasingly global.

Y2K had come and gone without apocalypse, and a dot-com boom had been followed by a dot-com bust without meaningfully impeding the city's upward trajectory.

The same could not be said for Rudy Giuliani's approval rating, which by the summer of 2001-- as he looked to close out the last few months of his final term--had plummeted following yet another incident of police brutality in which the mayor himself had repeatedly sided with the police and not their victims.

♪ But New York was back, though the one man who had done more than any other single person to turn New York from one of the most dangerous cities in America to its very safest Jack Maple would turn out to have no more than a few years to savor his extraordinary, if little known, achievement.

On August 4th, 2001, Maple died of colon cancer at the age of 48.

"In a mere 27 months," one man later said, "Maple had obliterated decades of accepted wisdom "about police work and crime fighting.

"He challenged the way things were done.

He was perhaps the most creative cop in history."

♪ What no one could have imagined was that less than 5 weeks later, the city would be plunged into the single worst crisis of its entire history.

Trace New York’s turbulent decline and rebirth in the last decades of the 20th century. (31s)

Writer Adam Gopnik reflects on New York’s remarkable resilience and its ability to reinvent itself. (3m 19s)

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Corporate funding for NEW YORK: A DOCUMENTARY FILM "Shadows of the Past" and "The Future of Cities" was provided by Hudson River Trading. Major funding was provided by the American...More