R.I.P. The Village Voice

from Boing Boing:

"Today is kind of a sucky day," Village Voice owner Peter Barbey told newspaper staff in a phone call Friday. "Due to, basically, business realities, we're going to stop publishing Village Voice new material.”


"I bought the Village Voice to save it; this isn't exactly how I thought it was going to end up. I'm still trying to save the Village Voice,” said owner Barbey, who bought the paper in 2015.

Gothamist first reported the sad news that New York's once-great indie newspaper is shutting down. 63 years after it was co-founded by the late Norman Mailer. They'd stopped printing a paper version about a year ago.

Barbey said half the staff (15 to 20 people) will "wind things down," and work on a project to archive the Voice's material online.

Everyone else at the organization lost their job today.

From Gothamist:

The Voice, founded as an alternative weekly newspaper in 1955, has had a number of previous owners, including New York magazine, Rupert Murdoch, Leonard Stern, and New Times (later Village Voice) Media.

Barbey also seemed to indicate that he may have been thinking about selling the Voice for some time.

"I've been having conversations with other entities for months now," Barbey said in the Friday meeting. "This is something we have to do—for some of them this is something we'd have to do before they could talk to us any further."

Barbey has issued a statement, and you can read it here.

[Photo: Village Voice newspaper boxes on a sidewalk in 2013 (Mark Lennihan/Shutterstock)

The Spectacular Personal Mythology of Rammellzee

from The New Yorker:
Drawing from philology, astrophysics, and medieval history, Ramm channelled the chaos of seventies New York through his art and music.
By Hua Hsu

In the late nineteen-seventies, the sociologist Nathan Glazer had grown weary of riding New York’s graffiti-covered subways. The names of young vandals, who identified themselves as “writers” rather than as artists, were everywhere—inside, outside, sometimes stretching across multiple train cars. Glazer didn’t know who these writers were, or whether their transgressive spirit ever manifested itself in violent crimes, but that didn’t matter. The daily confrontation with graffiti suggested a city under siege. “The signs of official failure are everywhere,” he wrote in an influential 1979 essay. Graffiti, with its casual anarchy and cryptic syntax, offered glimpses into a “world of uncontrollable predators.” In the nineties, Glazer’s essay would help inspire the concept of “broken windows” policing—a theory that preserving the appearance of calm, orderly neighborhoods can foster peace and civility.

Graffiti has always had this kind of metaphorical power. It is somehow more than art or destruction (even though it is both), and it prompts awe or dread, depending on your tolerance for disorder. For every Glazer, there were romantics like Norman Mailer, who had written the text for a book of photographs elevating graffiti to the status of “faith.” From his perspective, graffiti forced the upper crust to reckon with the names and the fugitive dreams of a forgotten underclass: “You hit your name and maybe something in the whole scheme of the system gives a death rattle.”

Few people understood and internalized this power as deeply as the artist, rapper, and theoretician Rammellzee (which he styled as The RAMM:ELL:ZEE). He believed that his time in the train yards and the tunnels of New York gave him a vision for how to destroy and rebuild our world. He was born in 1960 and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. His birth name is a closely guarded secret; he legally changed it to his artistic tag in 1979. (He also insisted that The RAMM:ELL:ZEE was an “equation,” not a name.) Little is known about his youth, aside from passing aspirations to study dentistry (he was good with his hands) and to be a model (in a 1980 catalogue, he is identified as Mcrammellzee).

Ramm—as he became known—believed that language enforced discipline, and that whoever controlled it could steer people’s thoughts and imaginations. His hope wasn’t to replace English; he wanted to annihilate it from the inside out. His generation grew up after urban flight had devastated New York’s finances and infrastructure. Ramm channelled the chaos into a spectacular personal mythology, drawn from philology, astrophysics, and medieval history. He was obsessed with a story of Gothic monks whose lettering grew so ornate that the bishops found it unreadable and banned the technique. The monks’ work wasn’t so different from the increasingly abstract styles of graffiti writing, which turned a name into something mysterious and unrecognizable. Ramm developed a philosophy, Gothic Futurism, and an artistic approach that he called Ikonoklast Panzerism: “Ikonoklast” because he was a “symbol destroyer,” abolishing age-old standards of language and meaning; “Panzer” because this symbolic warfare involved arming all the letters of the alphabet, so that they might liberate themselves. He lived these ideas through his art and his music, and by being part of the hip-hop scene during its infancy.

In 1983, Rammellzee and a rapper named K-Rob went to visit the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Though Ramm and Basquiat were friends, they were also rivals. Ramm would later say that Basquiat wasn’t a “dream artist”—he didn’t so much radiate visions outward as take things in like a “sponge,” learning about genius from books. He and Ramm once bet on who could most convincingly parody the other’s work. (Ramm claimed not only that he won but that Basquiat’s art dealer, who wasn’t in on their ruse, told Basquiat that “his” work was the best he had ever done.)

That night, Basquiat invited Ramm and K-Rob to record a song he’d written. Ramm, who had rapped in the movie “Wild Style,” was already known for his unique nasal sneer. (He called it his “gangster duck” style.) The two men looked at Basquiat’s elementary rhymes, laughed, and tossed them in the trash. Instead, they made up their own lyrics—a brilliant, surreal tale of a kid (the earnest, bemused K-Rob) who’s on his way home and a hectoring pimp (Ramm) who tries to tempt him toward the dark side. Basquiat called the song “Beat Bop,” and paid for it to be produced; he painted the vinyl single’s cover art himself. The song was murky and strange, like a spiky funk jam slowed to a sinister crawl. In the background, someone tunes a violin. There’s so much echo and reverb on the track that it sounds like an attempt at time travel.

In the eighties, graffiti gained acceptance in the art world. Despite Ramm’s charisma, the intensity of his work and his stubborn, erratic personality kept him on the movement’s fringes. Where Basquiat and Keith Haring seemed shy showmen, Ramm came across as a nutty professor. His early paintings took inspiration from the psychedelia of comic books and science fantasy, with mazy train tracks running across cosmic reliefs. His palette was attuned to the era’s anxieties about nuclear war and nuclear waste. The colors were bright and garish, suggesting a box of neon highlighters run amok.

In the mid-eighties, he began rendering these ideas in 3-D. He made sculptures that evoked the fossilized remains of twentieth-century life: newspaper clippings, key rings, chain links, and other junk, floating in an epoxy ooze. The most remarkable works were his “Garbage Gods,” full-body suits of armor, some of which weighed more than a hundred pounds. They look like junk-yard Transformers doing samurai cosplay. His most famous character, the Gasholeer, was outfitted with a small flamethrower.

Ramm’s art, thought, and music are the subject of the exhibition “RAMM∑LLZ∑∑: Racing for Thunder,” at Red Bull Arts New York. Befitting the popular drink’s own sense of iconoclasm, “Racing” bathes in Ramm’s frenzied, free-associative, and occasionally overwhelming energy. There are his early canvases and sculptures, along with flyers, business cards, manifestos, and patent applications. A small theatre screens previously unseen videos of Ramm rapping at night clubs. The most impressive part of the survey is a floor devoted to his “Garbage Gods” and “Letter Racers”—skateboards representing each letter of the alphabet, armed with makeshift rockets, screwdrivers, and blades.

Throughout the exhibition, you can hear moments from Ramm’s lectures on Gothic Futurism—a thrilling jumble of street-corner hustling and technical language, all “parsecs,” “integers,” “aerodynamics.” As I was examining a collection of hand-painted watches, I kept hearing Ramm pause as he reached the end of a long disquisition on ecological catastrophe and graffiti-as-warfare, and then bark, “Next slide!”

In early May, the Red Bull Music Festival staged a Ramm-inspired concert to mark the opening of the art show. Ramm had continued to make music after “Beat Bop,” never wavering from his philosophies, just declaring them against increasingly turbulent, industrial-sounding backdrops. The eclecticism of the bill spoke to his wandering ear, and ranged from the terse hardcore of Show Me the Body to the wise-ass raps of Wiki. K-Rob, wearing a T-shirt featuring a mushroom and the words “I’m a Fun Guy,” reprised his verse from “Beat Bop,” grinning the whole way through. Gio Escobar, the leader of the deft punk-jazz band Standing on the Corner, dedicated a song to a late friend. The departed are everywhere around us, he said, as a groove emerged from the band’s dubbed-out chaos. “And they’re waiting.”

As hip-hop and art changed, as graffiti vanished from New York’s trains and walls, Ramm delved further into his own private cosmos—namely, the enormous loft in Tribeca where he lived, which he called the Battle Station. His obscurity wasn’t a choice. In the early eighties, he offered to send the U.S. military some of the intelligence he had gathered for national defense. (It declined.) In 1985, he wrote an opera, “The Requiem of Gothic Futurism.” In the nineties, he tried to promote his ideas by producing a comic book and a board game. He thought that toy manufacturers might want to mass-produce his “Garbage Gods” models. He was the first artist to collaborate with the streetwear brand Supreme. There was a series of infomercial-like videos to seed interest in “Alpha’s Bet,” an epic movie that he hoped would finally resolve the narrative arc of his extended universe.

By the time Rammellzee died, in 2010, after a long illness, New York City had been completely remade by mayoral administrations that took broken-windows policing as gospel. The Battle Station became condos. The Internet has made it easy to take what the culture provides you and rearrange it in some novel, cheeky way. It’s much more difficult to build an entirely new world—to abide by an ethical vision with a ferocity that requires you to break all the rules. I was surprised by how moved I felt standing underneath Ramm’s “Letter Racers” and studying the textures of the “Garbage Gods.” To see their meticulous handiwork up close was to believe that Ramm’s far-flung theories, his mashup of quantum physics and “slanguage,” made sense as an outsider’s survival strategy. I noticed all the discarded fragments of city life—bulbs and screws, a billiard ball, a doll’s head, old fan blades and turn-signal signs, visors stacked to look like pill bugs. His commitment was total. These are works of devotion.

This is where Ramm wanted to live—at the edge of comprehensibility, but in a way that invited others to wonder. Cities are filled with strangers who possess an unnerving energy, who hail us with stories, songs, and poems. Ramm was one of these. In an interview filmed in the aughts, Ramm sheds light on his everyday life. Sometimes, he says, he’ll be walking down the street or sitting at a bar, and people will just look at him. And sometimes they’ll come up to him and ask, “Who are you?” He’s explaining all this while wearing one of his “Garbage God” masks. You notice his paunch, the warm crackle of his voice at rest. “I’m just an average Joe,” he says, and he sounds like he believes it. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the May 28, 2018, issue, with the headline “Graffiti Prophet.”

One of my all time favorite records:

Tony Alva and I made some photos yesterday over at Pier 62 skatepark

Here are a few of the digital images i made with the iPod touch and a cheap lens attachment.







(I'll post the film images once i finish the roll and get them developed.)

Cool as Fuck Young NYC Photographers Doing Their Thing!

I am stoked to know this is going on now.

Sunday History Lesson on NEW YORK CITY Interesting indy mini Documentary FILM

"The South Bronx burned, Harlem overdosed, and Brooklyn was ruled by the knives and bicycle chains of feral gangs. Then it got worse. The Mafia poured tons of China White onto the street and 13 year old warlords peddled vials of cocaine to passing cars. The media, and our own memories, present us only with a photo album of these times; an incident here, and incident there; the 77 Blackout, Bernie Goetz, crack heads, John Gotti. Streets of New York brings the fragments of New York s social unraveling circa 1970-1990 into a contiguous form, so that we may inspect it for clues about how we may more precisely control the social order in all of our cities. The documentary subtly explores issues of race, and the media prism that separates criminal events into levels of importance by geography and social standing of criminals and victims. A treasure of archival television footage was unearthed to catalogue such phenomena as the Devil s Rebels gang terrorizing Bushwick Brooklyn in 1976, police involvement in Harlem s heroin trade, crack users getting high on camera, the worst mass murder in recent New York history, and the implementation of Rudy Giuliani s Compstat program in the War on Crime. Eleven New Yorkers talk about their own experiences from the streets to Riker s Island. We follow NoNo, a former gang member from 70 s era Sunset Park, Brooklyn, from being stabbed in a pizzeria at age 11 to crossing paths with the Son of Sam in prison; noted rapper Thirstin Howl III (former partner of Eminem) from his days robbing people for their coats in Times Square to starring on MTV s Lyricist Lounge television show in the late 90 s; and the best friend of the infamous Pistol Pete Rollack tells us how the Soundview section of the Bronx still has the cloud of death and prison hanging over it to this day. The tales of crime are placed within the larger socio-economic context of ethnicity, gentrification, and politics, through unique statistics and visual elements.

from: http://www.alprofit.com

When New York was New York Mother Fuckin' City

from The Guardian:
by Kevin Baker

"'Welcome to Fear City' – the inside story of New York's civil war, 40 years on"

‘Stay away from New York City if you possibly can’ was the stark warning that greeted visitors 40 summers ago – courtesy of a mysterious ‘survival guide’ that symbolises one of the weirdest, most turbulent periods in the city’s history

Travellers arriving at New York City’s airports in June 1975 were greeted with possibly the strangest object ever handed out at the portal to a great city: pamphlets with a hooded death’s head on the cover, warning them, “Until things change, stay away from New York City if you possibly can.”

“Welcome to Fear City” read the stark headline on these pamphlets, which were subtitled “A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York”. Inside was a list of nine “guidelines” that might allow you to get out of the city alive, and with your personal property intact.

The guidelines painted a nightmarish vision of New York; one that made it sound barely a cut above Beirut, which then had just been engulfed in Lebanon’s civil war. Visitors were advised not to venture outside of midtown Manhattan, not to take the subways under any circumstances, and not to walk outside anywhere after six in the evening.



They were also instructed to engrave their possessions with special metallic pens, to clutch their bags with both hands, to hide any property they might have in their cars, and not even to trust their valuables to hotel vaults. “Hotel robberies have become virtually uncontrollable, and there have been some spectacular recent cases in which thieves have broken into hotel vaults.” And oh, yes: visitors should try “to avoid buildings that are not completely fireproof” and “to obtain a room that is close by the fire stairs”.

Tourists must have been baffled, if not horrified. They might have been even more shaken had they known that the men in casual clothes handing them these strange, badly set little pamphlets – with their funereal black borders and another death’s head leering at them inside next to the smirking wish “Good luck” – were members of New York’s police forces.

“A new low in irresponsibility,” fumed New York’s embattled mayor at the time, Abe Beame, who sent the city’s lawyers into court to try to ban distribution of the pamphlet. They failed. Justice Frederick E Hammer agreed that the members of “New York’s Finest” distributing the pamphlet were violating “a public trust” – but ruled that this was a “reasonable dissemination of opinion” under the US constitution, even if it struck at the heart of public confidence.

Near panic ensued. The New York Convention and Visitors Bureau immediately dispatched emissaries armed with slideshow presentations to London, Paris, Frankfurt and Brussels, to “prove” to European travel agents just how attractive the Big Apple still was. Tourism was one of the city’s few remaining industries, still drawing 10.5 million visitors to the city each year, despite reports of massive city budget cuts.

“Those comments don’t get broadcast outside New York,” worried the bureau’s president Charles Gillett, as he announced the dispatch of his goodwill ambassadors. “But ‘Fear City’ – that went out to the whole world.”



New York’s fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s is surely one of the weirdest moments in the history of the city – indeed, of the United States. It was a time when the wholesale disintegration of the largest city in the most powerful nation on earth seemed entirely possible. A time when the American president, Gerald Ford – egged on by his young chief of staff, one Donald Rumsfeld – sought not to succour New York but to deliberately shame and humble it, and perhaps even replace it as the world’s leading financial centre.

Reportedly one million Fear City pamphlets were printed for distribution, with a further million on order if those ran out. The pamphlets were to be followed up with a couple of equally alarmist tracts, entitled “If You Haven’t Been Mugged Yet” and “When It Happens to You …” aimed at New York residents. They were produced and to be distributed by something called the Council for Public Safety, an umbrella group of 28 unions of “the uniformed services”, representing some 80,000 police and corrections officers, plus the city’s firefighters – all infuriated by the city’s plans to lay off thousands of their members.

I remember the New York of that era well, having arrived to start college there in 1976 and never left. The city was compelling in its contradictions: a vibrant and very cheap place to live, it attracted talented young people in droves. It was also coming apart at the seams.

Many of the warnings in the Fear City pamphlet were, of course, ludicrous exaggerations or outright lies. The streets of midtown Manhattan weren’t “nearly deserted” after six in the evening, and they were perfectly safe to walk on. The city hadn’t “had to close off the rear half of each [subway] train in the evening so that the passengers could huddle together and be better protected”. There were still many safe and secure neighbourhoods outside Manhattan, and there was neither a spate of “spectacular” robberies nor deadly fires in hotels.

The pamphlet read like one more piece of the dystopia porn then filling American cinemas; these were the years of Taxi Driver, The French Connection, Marathon Man, Escape from New York, Death Wish and The Warriors, to name a few. Jaded New Yorkers quickly turned the cover of Fear City into a tee-shirt, sold back to tourists in souvenir shops alongside other classics such as the “Welcome to New York” shirt – with its image of a .45 handgun and the charming instruction, “Now Hands Up, Motherfucker!”

Yet a frightening truth lurked beneath much of the pamphlet’s calamity howling. Crime, and violent crime, had been increasing rapidly for years. The number of murders in the city had more than doubled over the past decade, from 681 in 1965 to 1,690 in 1975. Car thefts and assaults had also more than doubled in the same period, rapes and burglaries had more than tripled, while robberies had gone up an astonishing tenfold.

It’s difficult to convey just how precarious, and paranoid, life in New York felt around that time. Signs everywhere warned you to mind your valuables, and to keep neck chains or other jewellery tucked away while on the subway. You became alert to where anyone else might be in relation to you, augmented by quick looks over your shoulder that came to seem entirely natural.



I knew few people who had been mugged or worse, but everyone I knew had suffered the violation of a home break-in. Worst was the idea that anything could happen, anywhere, at anytime. Female colleagues working in midtown routinely found their handbags had somehow been rifled during lunch hours, their credit cards and wallets gone.

While watching a movie once in an uncrowded theatre, my wife-to-be looked over to see her handbag moving on the seat beside her. A man had crawled down an aisle, crouched behind her chair, and was rummaging through her bag with his hand. Discovered, he simply ran out through the fire door. All the manager could do was shrug, and offer us two free tickets.

There was a pervasive sense that the social order was breaking down. Most subway trains were filthy, covered in graffiti inside and out. Often only one – and sometimes no – carriage door would open when they pulled into a station, and in summer they were “cooled” only by the methodical sweep of a begrimed metal fan that just pushed the sordid air about. The trains ran late, and were always crowded; their denizens included chain-snatchers, raggedy buskers and countless beggars, including at least two legless individuals, manoeuvring with remarkable agility between the cars on their wheeled boards.

The roads were in no better condition. Public restrooms were almost non-existent; dangerous and dirty when they were available at all. Men could often be seen pissing in the gutter down side-streets. Times Square’s venerable old theatres and spectacular movie palaces were torn down for office buildings or allowed to slowly rot away, showing scratchy prints of cheesy second-run films or pornography, which any casual visitor might have thought was the city’s leading industry.

Countless storefronts advertised live sex acts, X-rated videos, books, costumery and assorted knick-knacks. There were porn theatres even in respectable neighbourhoods, and corner newsstands routinely featured a vast array of pornographic magazines, with stunningly brazen acts depicted on their front covers.

Vandalism was incessant, with the expectation that anything not firmly bolted to the ground and covered in some protective coating would be stolen, broken, graffitied, spat on, pissed on, set on fire, used as a shelter, or tossed on to the subway tracks. Public mirrors (in reality, polished metal) were strategically placed by subway staircases so you could glimpse any lurking assailants.

Communities in each of the city’s boroughs were in advanced states of decay. Neighbourhoods, such as East New York or Brownsville in Brooklyn, were regularly compared to Dresden after the second world war. The Bronx, which had been a bastion of desirable upper-middle-class living until the mid-60s, was now burning nightly; once-magnificent apartment houses going up in flames lit by junkies or landlords looking to dispose of buildings they could no longer let or maintain.

Major pieces of infrastructure, such as the East River bridges, were allowed to rust until they were in serious danger of collapse. Grand Central Terminal was nearly lost to developers when Judge Irving Saypol – best known as the attorney who sent the Rosenbergs to the chair, and soon to be indicted on corruption charges himself – overturned the city’s landmark preservation law. Only Jackie Kennedy Onassis, in a handwritten letter, was able to convince Mayor Beame to risk scant city funds on an appeal, asking: “Is it not cruel to let our city die by degrees, stripped of all her proud monuments, until there will be nothing left of all her history and beauty to inspire our children? If they are not inspired by the past of our city, where will they find the strength to fight for her future?”

Beame found the money, and Grand Central was saved on appeal. But the first widow’s anguished words might have served as an epitaph for the era: was it not cruel to let our city die by degrees?

New York, like F Scott Fitzgerald, had gone broke in the usual way: slowly at first, then all at once. The city was no worse run, nor more corrupt, than it had been through most of its history, but for 10 years it had relied on a disastrous policy of funding its operating budget with short-term debt: Rans (“Revenue Anticipation Notes”), Tans (“Tax Anticipation Notes”) and even Bans (“Bond Anticipation Notes” – that is, notes drawn against future notes). The city’s financing had become so slipshod and haphazard that it no longer even maintained an official set of books. “In New York State, we haven’t found only back-door financing, we’ve got side-door financing,” lamented Governor Hugh Carey.



By early 1975, New York City owed $5bn to $6bn in short-term debt, out of an operating budget of $11.5bn. According to the then-city budget director, Peter Goldmark Jr, “Many people believe there is little or no real security or receivables behind these obligations.” Wall Street bankers, who had enabled much of this reckless behavior, now abruptly refused to take up any more of the city’s notes, leaving it teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

In fairness, New York was still paying out much more than it received in state and federal taxes. It was also expected to pay out a higher share of support to its indigent citizens than any other major American city – and no city had anything like the number of welfare recipients that New York did: over a million by 1975. In the years since the second world war, the poor and the aspiring had flocked to the city just as they always had. What they found, though, were not jobs and hope, but heroin and firearms. The city had lost a million manufacturing jobs since 1945; 500,000 of them since 1969.

New York could no longer serve as both poorhouse and cash machine for the nation. The city turned to Washington for help, asking the federal government to back its bonds while it got its fiscal house in order, by making draconian budget cuts and reforms. It was then that President Ford decided to advance his own political prospects by holding New York up for ridicule to the rest of the nation.

Ford, an accidental president about to face a stiff primary challenge from Ronald Reagan, went before the National Press Club in Washington on 29 October 1975 and called New York’s mismanagement “unique among municipalities through the United States”. He blamed its situation on “high wages and pensions … its tuition-free university system, its city-run hospital system and welfare administration”. Ford insisted that the city’s “day of reckoning” had come, and promised he would “veto any bill that has as its purpose a bailout of New York City to prevent a default”.

The speech provoked the most famous headline in the history of the (usually conservative) New York Daily News, a tabloid boasting the highest circulation of any paper in America at the time. In 144-point type, its front page proclaimed: “Ford to City: drop dead.”

Reagan or no Reagan, Governor Carey – who had just spent a desperate summer fighting to cut New York’s budget to the bone – was baffled by such intransigence from the genial, deal-making Ford. Down in Washington to lobby for a bailout plan, Carey was told why by Melvin Laird, a former US defence secretary under Richard Nixon. “Jerry’s been told by somebody that when New York City collapses, Chicago may become the financial centre of the US,” Laird informed him.

But who could be spreading such nonsense? “Well, Rummy comes from Illinois,” Laird confided. “Rummy – he’s your problem!”

Donald Rumsfeld, then Ford’s 43-year-old chief of staff, was apparently operating under the delusion that Chicago could shortly become the world’s financial centre. Carey would have to look elsewhere for help.

New York’s budget cuts fell heaviest on the city’s public workforce. In May 1975, Mayor Beame had announced severe reductions in salaries, pensions and working conditions, plus the layoff of 51,768 city workers – more than one-sixth of its employees – with the proviso that these cuts might be averted if all the city’s workers agreed to work four days a week, for a commensurate salary.

But the municipal unions were not in a giving vein. Their members had borne the brunt of the social chaos over the past 10 years: workers in public hospitals had dealt with hundreds of thousands of heroin junkies; subway workers had got their deteriorating, antique trains back out on the rails every day, 24 hours a day. The police had engaged in almost open warfare with the Black Panthers and other would-be revolutionaries. Firefighters rushed to thousands of false alarms, and were repeatedly bombarded with bricks and garbage, or even shot at, while they tried to keep the city from burning.

“The mayor has a right to discuss a four-day week. Let him discuss it as a monologue,” responded Victor Gotbaum, the feisty executive director of District Council 37 (DC37), an amalgam of some 60 union locals representing 110,000 workers in different lines of work. Albert Shanker, the even more belligerent leader of the city’s largest teachers’ union – already lampooned in Woody Allen’s sci-fi comedy Sleeper as the man who set off the third world war – demanded a 21% raise for his members, saying he would rather see the city go bankrupt than give in.

The most audacious and ruthless tactics, however, would come from the uniformed employee unions of the Council for Public Safety. The vast majority were police – especially the roughly 40,000 members of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA), the rank-and-file street cops who were scheduled to suffer nearly 11,000 layoffs.

“Cops tend to like to hit back a little,” Richie Steier – editor of The Chief, a newspaper for New York’s municipal employees – told me recently. Steier expressed some sympathy about the cuts the police were facing, but allowed: “They’re not big on diplomacy. It’s a volatile union.”

In 1966, the New York Police Department had defied Mayor Beame’s predecessor, John Lindsay, and won a bitter fight against the appointment of an independent review board with a racially tinged campaign that included lurid adverts depicting a terrified young white woman standing alone by a darkened subway station.

The new head of the PBA, Ken McFeeley, decided on a similar tactic: “Fear City”. McFeeley, a broad-chested, 36-year-old Navy veteran, had been on the force for 13 years before being elected head of the association, most recently driving a patrol car around the crime-infested Crown Heights neighbourhood of Brooklyn.

The creation of Fear City was “strictly McFeeley and the PBA”, Steier said, quoting one former city union commissioner. Certainly it was McFeeley, and McFeeley almost alone, who was willing to become the public face associated with the pamphlet. Urging business leaders to stop the police cuts, it looked for a long moment as if his defiance might carry the day.

On 30 June 1975, the city laid off an initial 15,000 workers, including thousands of cops and 1,600 firefighters – 20% of the city’s entire force. Some 26 fire companies were simply disbanded. By September, 45,000 workers had been laid off – and the unions reacted with rage.

Ten thousand municipal workers demonstrated in front of First National City Bank, whose arch right-wing president, Walter Wriston, had led the bankers in demanding city cutbacks. McFeeley’s cops held a mass demonstration around city hall, blocking traffic and letting the air out of motorists’ tyres when they complained. Highway workers picketed on major roadways during rush hour, while bridge workers cranked up three of the city’s drawbridges and simply walked away.

Garbagemen staged a two-day wildcat strike that left 48,000 tons of trash to mellow in the June breezes. On the picket lines they yelled, “This isn’t Fear City, it’s Stink City!” Shanker’s teachers staged a one-week strike at the start of the school year in September, after the city laid off 7,000 teachers. They marched with signs that read, “Fear City, Stink City and now, Stupid City.”

Yet the tide had already begun to turn. Most of New York’s municipal unions condemned or distanced themselves from the Fear City campaign, including the unions representing police sergeants, lieutenants and captains. When the PBA won the right to distribute its Fear City pamphlets, Sergeant Harold Melnick, head of the Sergeants’ Benevolent Association, told the press “it’s time that reason took over”, adding that everyone “recognised an obligation to the City of New York ... Most police officers who stop me – 99% – are not happy about the Fear City tactic,” he claimed.

Other unions had also begun to reassess their slash-and-burn tactics. “We could stop the collection of millions of dollars a day, turn off the water supply, pull out the ambulance drivers, leave Coney Island without lifeguards,” ruminated Gotbaum, the DC37 union’s executive director, during the crisis, with a frankness no American union leader would dare voice today. “We could rape the city. [But] to me, this would be disgraceful for any union to do. I never think there’s validity in destroying the city. I really believe that a union has a responsibility to the public.”

Soon, even McFeeley and the PBA backed off. After a day or two, the pamphleteering ceased. Plans to hand out Fear City at train and bus stations were never implemented, though the threat remained. Instead of destroying New York City, the unions ended up saving it.

Where the banks and federal government baulked, Gotbaum and other union leaders persuaded their members to throw $2.5 billion in pension funds – often their entire savings for old age – behind the city’s bonds. If the city still went bust, there was a chance they would lose it all.

Throughout the morning of 17 October 1975, a car idled dramatically outside City Hall, waiting to rush out legal documents officially declaring New York bankrupt. Gotbaum and others sought to persuade the teachers’ union boss Shanker to stack the nearly half-billion dollars of teachers’ pension funds behind the city’s bonds, too (there were rumours that the bearish Gotbaum had threatened to throw him out of an eighth-storey window if he didn’t go along). In fact, Shanker had already begun to pull in his horns, getting his teachers to go back to work even though the city only restored 4,500 of the 7,000 positions it cut, telling them, “A strike is a weapon you use against a boss that has money. This boss has no money.”

The union leaders and government officials negotiated hurriedly in the Manhattan apartment of longtime city powerbroker Richard Ravitch, absently devouring slabs of matzoh, the only thing they could find to eat, and scattering the crumbs all over the carpet. At one in the afternoon, “the matzoh summit” broke up when Shanker declared simply, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

The city was saved – for the time being.

Governor Carey, meanwhile, was seeking out other pressure points to use on Jerry Ford; some of these would be found abroad. In London, the Times newspaper called Ford’s position denying aid to New York City an “act of monumental folly”. At the International Monetary Fund’s October 1975 summit in Washington, Ford reportedly approached the West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and asked amiably, “How’s the Bundesbank? How’s the mark?” only to be told: “Mr President, never mind the Bundesbank or the mark. If you let New York go broke, the dollar is worth Scheiße!”

Schmidt went on to announce publicly that a New York default would have “a domino effect, striking other global financial centres such as Zurich and Frankfurt”. At a later summit in France, the French president Giscard d’Estaing joined Schmidt in insisting that the bankruptcy of New York “would be seen as the bankruptcy of America”.

At home, public sentiment seemed to shift. Polls showed nearly 70% of Americans supporting some kind of aid for New York, as long as the city balanced its budget and taxpayers outside New York didn’t have to foot the bill. In late November 1975, Ford urged Congress to pass a bill making $2.3bn a year available for three years to New York in direct loans. It quickly passed and was signed into law by the president.

The federal credit line was vital to restoring financial confidence in New York City. But it mollified no one: not Reagan conservatives, and not New Yorkers. The following year, the city handed presidential candidate Jimmy Carter – whose local adverts included the line, “I’ll never tell the people of the City of New York to drop dead” – a majority of more than 700,000 votes over Ford. This was more than twice Carter’s narrow margin of victory in New York State, whose 41 electoral votes put him in the White House.

Twenty-five years later, Ford was still insisting to a former aide to Hugh Carey, “I never said ‘New York City, drop dead’.” But New Yorkers knew better.

The city would not go bankrupt, but years of austerity and cutbacks still lay ahead, many of them imposed on the same men and women whose sacrifices had just rescued the city. Those city workers who kept their jobs generally lost their cost-of-living raises, at a time when inflation reached 16% to 18%. The NYPD shrank from more than 42,000 police officers to less than 27,000 by 1990 – the same year that murders in New York reached a record high at 2,245. The bitterness lingered as well. When a blackout set off a riot of looting and mayhem in the summer of 1977, some 10,000 cops – 40% of the off-duty force – ignored orders to report for duty.

“Municipal workers’ wages and pensions never recovered,” claimed Robert Fitch in his 1993 history, The Assassination of New York. At the same time, he noted, the fiscal crisis proved to be a great boon to New York’s elite as the city “got rid of the stock-exchange tax, halved the personal income tax, and set the real-estate tax at a record low”.

Today, New York City is a vastly different place than it was 40 years ago: cleaner, brighter, safer, more orderly – and richer. According to the US Census, its population is close to a record 8.5 million people – up by more than 300,000 since 2010. Once destitute and crime-ridden neighbourhoods such as Crown Heights, or Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, are rapidly being gentrified – something that would have seemed unimaginable in the days of Fear City.

Other neighbourhoods, such as the High Line and the Meat-Packing District, seem to spring up overnight, complete with towering glass residences and chic new shops and restaurants. At times Manhattan looks, and sounds, like a single, gigantic construction site.

Crime here has been dropping exponentially for more than 20 years, making New York one of the safest cities in America. In 2014, murders fell to 328 – according to The New York Times, “The lowest figure since at least 1963, when the Police Department began collecting reliable statistics.” This new “Safe City” is reflected in a huge increase in tourism: there were more than 56 million visitors to New York in 2014, over five times the number that came in 1975.

And yet, a fear of returning to “the bad old days” appears to linger in the psyche of many New Yorkers of a certain age. The Republican candidate for mayor in 2013, one Joseph Lhota, tried to openly evoke that fear in his campaign. He was trounced, losing by nearly 50 percentage points to a little-known and little-regarded city councilman, Bill de Blasio.

Since then, the local outlet of the Murdoch press and sensationalist TV news programmes have trumpeted any uptick in crime or social disorder, especially since the city ended its police’s wildly unconstitutional “stop and frisk” programme.

This past February, however, the city set a modern record of 12 straight days without a murder, and crime continues to drop. For better and for worse, New York’s bad old days are not coming back. The average cost of a condominium or apartment in Manhattan is now $1.5m, for instance; no one is about to walk away from such investments the way many people fled their rental apartments in the 1960s and 1970s.

Rather, New York’s main problems today are those of wealth, and its distribution. Thanks to the seemingly endless real-estate boom, some estimate there are as many as one million millionaires in the city – as well as some 85 billionaires. At the same time, more than 21% of the city’s population is living in poverty; about the same proportion as in 1980.

Every mechanism of New York’s current economy widens these disparities. Much like London, the city has suffered the Invasion of the Foreign Building Snatchers: tycoons from around the world scooping up residences as boltholes or tax havens they visit for only a few days each year.

Meanwhile, those apartment and condo owners who are full-time residents routinely join landlords in jacking up commercial rents, driving out beloved small businesses and neighbourhood eateries, and reducing the cityscape to a monoculture of faceless chain stores, nail salons, bank branches and overpriced restaurants.

More and more, the new buildings of the super-rich turn their denizens inward, justifying their extortionate prices by offering amenities such as gyms, screening rooms, wine bars and even libraries – and thereby further reducing the street life that any great city depends upon.

There arises, for the first time in its history, the possibility that New York will no longer be a place where talented young people want, or can afford, to go – becoming instead the world’s largest gated community: incalculably wealthy, sterile, and dull. This, surely, would be the real Fear City.

Kevin Baker is a novelist and historian who lives in New York City. His latest book, The Big Crowd, is based on the greatest unsolved murder in mob history. @kbbakerauthor

------------------
summer note:

Growing up when this was what was going on in NYC is part of the reason I think it's disrespectful to wear shoes with your feet exposed, or shorts (unless it's above 90 degrees) in the city EVER. Manhattan may be an island but it ain't a fucking beach "cornballs", (as Ricky Powell would say) show some god damned respect to the concrete, steel, asphalt, bricks, and subways, suburbanites! This is NEW YORK MOTHERFUCKIN' CITY leave your sandals at the beach. - GEF

Seedy Film Footage from Times Square in the early 1980s

from Dangerous Minds

 

Everyone agrees that the changes that occurred in Times Square during the early 1990s were emblematic for the city, regardless of what you make of it. For tourists and the local suburbanites, cleaning up Times Square was a prerequisite to visit. For many Manhattanites, the signs portended a neutered, sterile city geared to the wealthy and lacking all noteworthy spark or grit. The best treatment of the changes in Times Square is most likely Samuel Delany’s 1999 meditation Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, a book that my friend Lawrence Daniel Caswell has urged me to read but I haven’t gotten around to yet. (Do check out Caswell’s account, told in comix format, of the meaning of Delany’s book as applied to Cleveland, courtesy of that city’s Scene alt-weekly a couple weeks ago.)

 



 

Those who are old enough will remember the enchantingly seedy—and dangerous—Time Square of the Mayor Koch years (ahem, that’s the 1980s in case you didn’t know). I barely caught the tail end of it, starting to hang out in Manhattan in a serious way in 1988, when I was a teenager. But college and travels abroad intervened, and by the time I came back for another look, it was 1995 and Times Square was very, very different. (The vast majority of the shuttering of the smut shops and sex cinemas took place in a matter of months—with movie marquees that had once advertised Cannibal Holocaust and Inside Seka turned over to artist Jenny Holzer for her brand of signature sloganeering. It was not a long drawn-out process.)

 



Doin’ Time in Times Square, which we found courtesy of Gothamist, is an artful montage of footage that movie director Charlie Ahearn took from his apartment building on 43rd Street. This footage was shot between 1981 and 1983, the exact period during which Ahearn was working on the groundbreaking hip-hop classic Wild Style featuring Fab Five Freddy, Lady Pink, the Rock Steady Crew, and so on. In between the surreptitiously recorded scenes of religious freaks, cops, and a handful of epic, er, disagreements of a physical nature, Ahearn throws in some moments from inside the apartment as his family members celebrate birthdays and the like. A godforsaken New Year’s Eve gets its due as well, no worries.

Doin’ Time in Times Square has been dubbed “the home video from hell” for a reason. It appeared at the New York Film Festival in 1992, and you can get it on DVD here.

 

 

Mighty Manhattan, New York's Wonder City 1949

Dirty Old New York - Subway Special

A mix of clips of the New York City subway system on film, mostly from the '70s and early '80s, when graffiti was a mainstay on train cars and everything underground was, for the most part, grittier and more worn than it is today. The exact date range is 1966 to 1984...in other words, Lindsay to Koch.

Dirty Old New York aka Fun City part 5

The conclusion of DIRTY OLD NEW YORK AKA FUN CITY. This segment begins with a recap of the previous installments; this includes scenes that are unique to Part V, but are connected by motif to scenes collected in DIRTY OLD NEW YORK SUBWAY and Parts I - IV. As with the other videos, I've attempted to connect the scenes by location, film, actor, or theme.
This video contains some nudity so it may be NSFW depending on where you work.
You will also notice my continued pre-occupation / obsession with analog, often obsolete, technologies...pay phones, turntables, tube television sets, 3/4" video tapes, VCRs, etc.
knifeinthehead.blogspot.com/2014/03/dirty-old-new-york-aka-fun-city-part-v.html

Even more Things You Probably Didn’t Know About NYC

31. There was one homicide on 9/11, and it remains unsolved. 

32. There are “fake” buildings in the city that are used for subway maintenance and ventilation. The building below in the middle, located in Brooklyn, has a fake facade. There is no brownstone within. 

Google Maps 

33. Chernobyl is closer to New York than Fukushima is to L.A. 

34. There are more undergrad and graduate students in NYC than Boston has people. 

35. New York City’s 520-mile coastline is longer than those of Miami, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco combined.  

36. The Empire State building has its own zip code. 

37. The East River is not a river, it’s a tidal estuary. 

38. There is a secret train platform in the Waldorf Astoria hotel. 

Charles Mostoller / Barcroft Media / Getty Images

39. When the Dutch first arrived to Manhattan, there were massive oyster beds. In fact, Ellis Island and Liberty Island were called Little Oyster and Big Oyster Island.

from BUZZFEED

Dirty Old New York aka Fun City part 4

Part IV. Baseball, punk vs. disco, Travolta vs. Gere, Blaxploitation, teen romance, goofball cops, crooked cops, fake cops, Gordon Parks movies, Gordon Parks Jr. movies, Joe Spinell, and a whole lot more...
knifeinthehead.blogspot.com/2013/09/dirty-old-new-york-aka-fun-city-part-iv.html

MORE Things You Probably Didn’t Know About NYC

21. There’s a wind tunnel near the Flat Iron building that can raise women’s skirts. Men used to gather outside of the Flat Iron building to watch. 

Via mcnyblog.org 

22. The borough of Brooklyn on its own would be the fourth largest city in the United States. Queens would also rank fourth nationally. 

23. New York City has the largest Chinese population of any city outside of Asia. 

24. New York has the largest Puerto Rican population of any city in the world. 

25. PONY stands for Product of New York. 

i.imgur.com 

26. In 1920, a horse-drawn carriage filled with explosives was detonated on Wall Street killing 30 people. No one was ever caught, and it is considered to be one of the first acts of domestic terrorism.  

27. In nine years, Madison Square Garden’s lease will run out and it will have to move. 

28. UPS, FedEx, and other commercial delivery companies receive up to 7,000 parking tickets a DAY, contributing up to $120 million in revenue for the city of New York. 

29. It can cost over $289,000 for a one-year hot dog stand permit in Central Park. 

The New York Times / Via nytimes.com 

30. Sixty percent of cigarettes sold in NYC are illegally smuggled from other states.

Dirty Old New York aka Fun City part 3

Dirty Old New York aka Fun City continues with the third, but not final, installment. As it turns out there will be a Part IV, which is already about halfway done. Perhaps that will be a good place to stop. I will continue to augment previous pieces, if I come across footage that fits too well to exclude. Footage is connected by film, actor, character, location, signage, motif, theme, or some combination thereof.

more Things You Probably Didn’t Know About NYC

10. According to New York City’s Office of Emergency Management, the last hurricane to pass directly over the city was in 1821. The storm surge was so high that the city was flooded up to Canal Street.  

11. Hog Island, a one-mile-long island south of Rockaway Beach, was never seen again after the hurricane of 1893. 

12. New York City’s leading hurricane historian, Nicholas Coch, a professor of coastal geology at Queens College, believes that this is the only reported incidence ever of the removal of an entire island by a hurricane. 

Via en.wikipedia.org 

13. Up until 1957, there was a pneumatic mail tube system that was used to connect 23 post offices across 27 miles. At one point, it moved 97,000 letters a day.

Via untappedcities.com 

14. Albert Einstein’s eyeballs are stored in a safe deposit box in the city. 

15. There are tiny shrimp called copepods in NYC’s drinking water. 

16. On Nov. 28, 2012, not a single murder, shooting, stabbing, or other incident of violent crime in NYC was reported for an entire day. The first time in basically ever.

17. About 1 in every 38 people living in the United States resides in New York City. 

18. New York City has more people than 39 of the 50 states in the U.S. 

19. There is a birth in New York City every 4.4 minutes. 

20. There is a death in New York City every 9.1 minutes.

from BUZZFEED

Dirty Old New York aka Fun City part 2

The second installment of a multi-part series devoted to the Fun City years. Again, shots are connected by actor, location, character, film, recurring object or motif.

10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About New York City

1. Pinball was banned in the city until 1978. The NYPD even held “Prohibition-style” busts.

2. It is a misdemeanor to fart in NYC churches.
3. It costs $1 million to get a license (medallion) to operate a taxicab.

4. The first pizzeria in the United States was opened in NYC in 1895.

5. In 1857, toilet paper was invented by Joseph C. Gayetty in NYC.
6. The Jewish population in NYC is the largest in the world outside of Israel.

7. Up until World War II, everyone in the entire city who was moving apartments had to move on May 1.

en.wikipedia.org 

8. The city of New York will pay for a one-way plane ticket for any homeless person if they have a guaranteed place to stay. 

9. There’s a man who mines sidewalk cracks for gold. He can make over $600 a week. 

10. According to New York City’s Office of Emergency Management, the last hurricane to pass directly over the city was in 1821. The storm surge was so high that the city was flooded up to Canal Street.

from BUZZFEED 

We will post more from this list every friday for the next 5 weeks ;-)

Dirty Old New York aka Fun City part 1

Another installment in a continuing project that aims to document the life and times of New York City--on film--from the Lindsay years through the first two Koch terms. As indicated, this piece will likely be revised / supplemented with additional footage. The project will continue with a second installment, which will pick up in some way from where Part I ends. All shots are connected by at least one of the following: location, film, character, actor, signage, repeating object, or recurring motif. I've tried to source everything from 16x9 DVDs, but have had to compromise this standard in some cases.

knifeinthehead.blogspot.com/2013/06/dirty-old-new-york-aka-fun-city.html

Astor Place Reconstruction is coming . . .

Just in case you were as freaked out as I was that they cut down the trees by the uptown Astor Place subway entrance, that I saw grow up from saplings to be nice size trees over the last 20 years, I did some research, made some calls, and this is what I found out:

(click to enlarge on each, the architectural "proposed design" images from Astor Place down to the bottom of Cooper Square)



the 6 trees will be replaced with somewhere around sixty! OK, i can live with that I guess . . .
More space for people and less space for cars, YEA!

Probably Our New Mayor and His Family

fromThe New York TImes:

Luck and a Shrewd Strategy Fueled de Blasio’s Ascension

By MICHAEL BARBARO

The commercial that changed the course of the mayor’s race almost never happened.

Bill de Blasio’s campaign team had mused about building an ad around his wife, Chirlane McCray, a telegenic African-American poet, then abandoned the concept.

They then turned to his 15-year-old son, but nothing seemed to go right. The de Blasio family kitchen in Brooklyn was not big enough for the camera crew, so they borrowed a bigger one from a neighbor.

The neighbor’s kitchen turned out to be too fancy, sending the wrong message for a populist candidate. So a long lens was used to blur out the expensive fixtures.

But when the commercial was finally shown to the candidate and his wife, they seemed overcome, instantly recognizing the power of its message: that the aggressive policing of the Bloomberg era was not an abstraction to Mr. de Blasio, it was an urgent personal worry within his biracial household.

“This,” predicted the campaign’s pollster, Anna Greenberg, “will be huge.”

The ad exploded, transforming the fortunes of a fourth-place campaign and confirming the convictions of a long-shot politician who had banked his candidacy on a series of big bets: that a relentless critique of the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactic would resonate with white New Yorkers, not scare them off; that in a city of tribal politics an Italian-American could win the hearts of black voters; that a tired-seeming message about a tale of two cities would stir those people still hurting after a traumatic economic recession; and, most of all, that there was far greater unhappiness with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg than polls had registered or Mr. de Blasio’s rivals had realized.

On the outside, Mr. de Blasio’s improbable ascent in the Democratic mayor’s race, from afterthought to front-runner in just four weeks, looked meteoric and spontaneous.


Behind the scenes, though, it required shrewd maneuvers and hardball politics that seemed incongruous with the candidate’s high-minded image: sidelining the Rev. Al Sharpton, who could have ignited the passion of black voters for William. C. Thompson Jr., the sole African-American candidate in the race, and making the case to the city’s powerful health care workers’ union that their longtime ally, John C. Liu, was doomed to fail.

Underlying it all was a message of indignant liberalism, sketched out by Mr. de Blasio at a Manhattan restaurant in 2012, that was simple, sellable and penetrating enough to transcend class, gender and race.

This account of the campaign’s strategy is drawn from interviews with top aides, consultants and friends of Mr. de Blasio as well as his rivals, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity so they could talk candidly without inflaming powerful public officials.

From the start, Mr. de Blasio understood the perils of running an anti-establishment campaign against a capable and generally well-regarded incumbent: In large numbers, Democrats in New York approved of the job that Mr. Bloomberg was doing, and thought the city was on the right track.

But over drinks at Friend of a Farmer cafe in Gramercy Park last summer, Mr. de Blasio told his chief media strategist and ad maker that he saw no alternative, given his history as an activist and record of assailing the mayor.

“It would be phony of me to be anything but a critic,” Mr. de Blasio told the strategist, John Del Cecato.



He assembled an inner circle with a history of electing insurgent-style Democrats. Mr. Del Cecato had worked on the Obama campaign in 2008. The de Blasio campaign manager, Bill Hyers, ran Michael A. Nutter’s come-from-behind bid for mayor of Philadelphia in 2007. And Jonathan Rosen, a communications strategist, shaped the victory of Eric T. Schneiderman in the 2010 race for New York State attorney general.

Together, they embraced a doctrine entirely distinct from those laid out by the candidates Mr. de Blasio was trailing in the polls, who seemed to be tinkering around the edges of Mr. Bloomberg’s approach, not wholly rejecting it. After 12 years of any mayor, they reasoned, the electorate craved something fundamentally different in substance and style. A survey conducted in the fall of 2012 by the de Blasio campaign’s pollster put hard numbers behind the theory: a slight majority of Democrats wanted a change in direction in the mayor’s office.

Even some who approved of Mr. Bloomberg, the pollster found, felt oddly disconnected with him, believing that he had emphasized his own pet issues — soda sizes, bike lanes, pedestrian plazas — rather than the real-life worries that filled their days.

“A vanity mayor,” the de Blasio campaign called him.

The problem was that few Democrats knew much of anything about Mr. de Blasio. His position as the city’s public advocate was low-wattage, his personality could seem professorial and his candidacy was being outshone by the flamboyance of former Representative Anthony D. Weiner.

Inside Mr. de Blasio’s campaign, tensions erupted over how to handle the threat of the former congressman from Queens, considered flawed but formidable. Mr. de Blasio, feeling overlooked and stalled, had concluded he had to attack Mr. Weiner, whom he openly disdained.

But his political team aggressively pushed back, counseling the candidate to remember who his real target was: Mr. Bloomberg.

“Keep your eye on the ball,” the campaign’s manager, Mr. Hyers, told Mr. de Blasio.

The campaign prided itself on its discipline: it did not indulge in any stray attacks and it zealously husbanded its resources.

Mr. Hyers, pudgy and brusque, was determined to plow every available cent into television commercials that could overcome the city’s fractured constituencies and build Mr. de Blasio’s citywide appeal. So he cut corners everywhere else, starting with the campaign’s ninth-floor headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn.

Furniture was not bought, it was salvaged from Craigslist, free. Broken ceiling tiles were not fixed, they were left crumbling on the floor. “Disgusting,” Ms. Greenberg said affectionately of the décor.

The austerity even extended to campaign literature. Traditionally, New York City candidates pour tens of thousands of dollars into glossy, micro-targeted brochures offering customized appeals to lure groups like Caribbeans, Chinese immigrants and observant Jews to the polls. In July, when the campaign staff met, its members rejected that idea, deciding against sending out a single piece of mail and pouring that money into television — a decision even Mr. de Blasio’s director of mail endorsed, at no small cost to his business.

The penny-pinching worked. Mr. de Blasio accomplished something almost unimaginable in a race in which every candidate abided by the same spending cap: he outspent his nearest competitor by about $200,000 on TV ads.

His biggest buy and most talked-about commercial, of course, was the tribute from his son, Dante, known for his towering Afro. It was downloaded 100,000 times before it was even advertised online and was watched well beyond the five boroughs, including by 2,000 people in Texas.

It marked a crucial moment for Mr. de Blasio: he had begun to assert ownership over the volatile issue of the stop-and-frisk tactic, which Mr. de Blasio’s aides knew from focus groups was roiling the city’s African-American neighborhoods.

They expected a fierce battle with Mr. Thompson, a former city comptroller, over who would be the most fervent opponent of the practice and became increasingly puzzled throughout the summer when the fight never materialized. Instead of calling for an end to the tactic, Mr. Thompson refused to support two City Council bills cracking down on the Police Department and scored the endorsement of unions representing law enforcement officers in the process.

“We were floored,” recalled a top adviser to Mr. de Blasio.

Suddenly, the black vote seemed to be up for grabs and the de Blasio campaign moved aggressively to exploit the opening. The political establishment took it for granted that Mr. Sharpton, a friend of Mr. Thompson’s since their youth and a cheerleader for his rise through the city’s black power structure, would endorse his Harlem neighbor.

But Mr. de Blasio, who had long courted Mr. Sharpton, attending his rallies and flattering him by soliciting his advice, now deployed his team to block Mr. Thompson’s path, seeking to snatch the endorsement for himself.

Mr. Sharpton, it turned out, needed little nudging to turn on Mr. Thompson. He was privately furious over Mr. Thompson’s opposition to the two Council bills, asking a friend, “What kind of a campaign is he running?”

Thompson aides reassured themselves that Mr. Sharpton would eventually come around.

Then, days after the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, Mr. Thompson got a call: Mr. Sharpton could not grant his blessing, and would stay out of the race entirely. Mr. Thompson was crestfallen. He asked Mr. Sharpton to reconsider.

“I can’t reconsider what I believe in,” Mr. Sharpton responded.

Mr. de Blasio also got lucky: One by one, his opponents stumbled. Mr. Liu, the city’s current comptroller, was handcuffed by a campaign financing scandal; Mr. Weiner, of course, saw his candidacy collapse amid bizarre new revelations about his online behavior. Christine C. Quinn pursued a message of upbeat continuity, not to end the Bloomberg era but to improve it, never grappling with the still raw feelings toward the mayor and the term limits extension she helped engineer for him.

Gifts came from unexpected sources, including the mayor.

In the final days of the campaign, New York Magazine published an interview with a clearly irritated Mr. Bloomberg, who denounced Mr. de Blasio’s campaign as “racist,” all-but-endorsed Ms. Quinn and wondered aloud how fabulous it would be if New York City attracted every last Russian billionaire.

As they scrolled through the article, Mr. de Blasio’s advisers privately rejoiced. The mayor had unwittingly made the entire case for their campaign in the most public and last-minute way possible.

E-mails buzzed around de Blasio headquarters. “Forty-seven percent,” read one of them, comparing Mr. Bloomberg’s remarks to the near-fatal moment when Mitt Romney suggested that he was not concerned about nearly half the nation’s voters.

As the polls opened on Tuesday morning, Mr. Del Cecato fired off a cheeky message on Twitter: “Annoy Bloomberg. Vote de Blasio today.”

By the end of the day, hundreds of thousands of voters did just that.