A Londoner Dies in New York

Sid Vicious died of an overdose on Bank Street, in Manhattan’s West Village, on February 2, 1979.

Two weeks earlier, on January 13, schizophrenic soul legend Donny Hathaway jumped to his death from the Essex House on Central Park South. (I was staying in the hotel at the time but didn’t find out about his death till I was back in London. Such is the unremarked privacy and secrecy of the modern international city.)

Manhattan was no longer the undisputed center of the music business — and hadn’t been for fifteen years or so, not since the Beatles brought London to the game’s forefront. More recently, New York had been eclipsed by Los Angeles. The heart of its old show business district was barely beating. That office on West 42nd Street from which my writing was first published in Trouser Press was steps from Times Square. As you walked down 42nd Street, there was a background hum in the air: the rhythmic chant of drug-dealers running their stock line: weed, blow, smack, angel dust, that kind of item. Pimps — or rather their drug-washed representatives — handed out business cards, promoting and displaying their products.

All decades and cities have their nostalgias, visions of their lost selves. These nostalgias are generally fictions. But 1970s New York’s romantic remembrance of its recent past was particular and fervid, shaped by a graphic, frightening sense of what really had been lost and changed.

People, for a start. Like London, New York’s five boroughs had been depopulating fairly rapidly from the city’s 1950 peak. Over three decades, the city had lost nearly a million citizens — down from 7.9 million to a low of 7.0 million in 1980. This population loss was citywide, but it was sharpest in Manhattan. The island metropolis experienced a steady drop from its 1910 peak of 2.3 million, when the city’s unofficial anthem was the bouncy, celebratory “The Sidewalks of New York.” By 1980, it was down to just 1.4 million. That’s a forty percent loss. Every day for seventy years, twenty-seven people or so left Manhattan and didn’t come back. Imagine that happening to your town or city. It would feel like a kind of never-ending dying. Ceaseless, unremitting loss that you would sense even if you couldn’t actually see it happening. The streets would be just a little emptier every day. A city turning inexorably into a ghost town inhabited by anxious survivors.

 

AUDIO: Nat Shilkret “The Sidewalks of New York”

The demographic slump happened in two distinct stages. First, Manhattan was depopulated by affluence, as the (mostly white) immigrant ghettos emptied their upwardly mobile strivers into the more spacious suburbs. Then it was emptied by fear, as the city’s white middle class fled from riots, crime and the black, brown and beige people they tended to blame for the disorder, violence and robbery.

As it emptied, New York became a distinctly darker city. Its white population fell by 1.2 million between 1970 and 1980: the number of white children halved. It became poorer, too: in 1969, median New York family income was almost exactly the national average; by 1979, it had dropped to eighty-four percent. More than 600,000 jobs left the city between 1970 and 1976, moving west or to the suburbs, creating an unemployment rate of (a then unprecedented) eleven percent, with fourteen percent of the city on welfare.

And New York became dramatically more violent: By the late 1970s, its murder rate was five times what it had been twenty years earlier, when the gangs depicted in West Side Story were at their chaotic peak. In round figures, New York’s 1979 murder rate was sixty times the 21st-century UK rate. Reported rapes doubled. “City of night like you wouldn’t believe,” wrote Michael Herr in a 1977 essay, The Hook. A former Vietnam war correspondent and author of Despatches (1977), a great account from the U.S. troops’ frontline perspective, Herr knew what danger looked like.

There are, as an old TV crime show had it, eight million stories in the naked city. I’ll pick just one of those stories because, well, because it happened in 1979, just around the corner from Struth’s picture, on Prince Street — which crosses Crosby Street — and just a few months before Sinatra recorded “New York, New York.”

On May 25, 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz, who lived with his parents in comfortable bohemia, went missing. All too soon, he became a symbol for metropolitan decline and anomie. If a child can just disappear like that, in the daylight hours, well… His face appeared on milk cartons and Times Square billboards; May 25 became National Missing Children Day. As the Dreyfus affair was a touchstone for turn-of-the-20th-century Paris, so, in a very different way, Etan’s story was for late-1970s New York. An army officer destroyed by antisemitism; a young boy abducted and possibly murdered. Pre-WWI Paris and 1970s New York. What the two stories have in common is this: Each city looked itself in the face and found it didn’t much like what it saw.

 

VIDEO: Murder conviction in Etan Patz case

It’s hard to exaggerate the state of the city. I remember the emptiness of the streets at night, the constant whoop-whoop of sirens and the almost hyperbolically anxiety-inducing 4:00 a.m. subway journeys. It was the underground hellopolis of The Warriors, the subway-set gang movie that also came out in 1979. Subway stations were a set designer’s idea of a modern urban Styx. The subway cars were covered with elaborate graffiti. Inside, every surface was spray-canned with young men’s tags.

The great Magnum (and Manhattan) photographer Bruce Davidson captured those extraordinary surfaces forever, in rich, deep Kodachrome 64, in his book Subway. However horrid, violent and intrusive the graffiti might have been, Davidson found a certain strange beauty in it

I talked to him about his pictures some thirty years later. “If people asked me what I was doing,” he said, “I told them I was recording the state the subway was in. What I didn’t tell them was that I saw the subway as both beauty and beast. Some things that were horrible were beautiful and some things that would be thought beautiful were banal.”

It was the era of Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime,” written by David Byrne in the depths of Lower Manhattan’s Alphabet City. The song’s title was metaphorical, yes, but only just. “Crime was at its highest level in the history of the city,” said Robert McGuire, New York’s police commissioner from 1978 to 1983. “There was a crack-cocaine epidemic, and certain neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and parts of the Bronx had totally deteriorated. We had a city out of control. It was the Wild West.”

 

AUDIO: Talking Heads “Life During Wartime”

Below ground, the subway had become dangerous enough that twenty-five-year-old Curtis Sliwa (Polish Catholic from Brooklyn) decided to protect the public by starting a uniformed citizen protection force. He and his volunteers began patrolling the subway in February 1979, operating under the grandiloquent title the Magnificent Thirteen Subway Safety Patrol. By September, they rebranded themselves as Guardian Angels. As a former McDonald’s manager, Sliwa understood branding. His Angels wore red berets and red nylon baseball jackets. And, as the whole world knew, New York was the native home of uniformed citizen crime-busters, in its fictional life, anyway — Batman, Superman, Supergirl, Spiderman, etc.

In 1982, the Clash recorded “Red Angel Dragnet” for the Combat Rock album. It was a tribute to one of Sliwa’s volunteers, Frank Melvin, who was killed on duty — not by a criminal on the subway in Manhattan but in a New Jersey housing project, by a cop. In 1992, Sliwa himself was shot, although not fatally. John A. Gotti, a don in the Gambino mob family, was charged but never convicted. Sliwa became a “conservative” radio host. He supported future Trump presidential lawyer Rudolph Giuliani’s 1993 run for the city mayoralty. In 2021, Sliwa ran for mayor himself — as the Republican Party candidate. Again, I think of Strummer singing about people who fuck nuns. (Sliwa lost by a landslide.)

Despite spending a good amount of time in New York during its dark years, I never saw much in the way of violence or danger myself. A friend — a female New Yorker — told me that might be because of the way I regularly dressed, in leather jacket, jeans and biker boots. Like a street criminal, my friend said, adding that she’d seen people cross the street to avoid me, worried I might rob them. Later, and more flatteringly, someone else —I can’t remember who — told me I looked like the fifth Ramone, the English one with blond hair and a blue, not black, jacket. It was a Lewis Leathers Bronx, named for New York but bought in London, just up the road from the BBC’s Broadcasting House. (It disappeared into the undead realm of lost luggage very early one spring morning in the Portland, Oregon airport. I made it across the country in time for dinner on Christopher Street, but my blue leather jacket never joined me. All that remains of it is a photo of me in it.)

 

 

I can’t be certain, but I should think I was wearing it the one time I did have a brush with violence in 1970s New York. I was witness to a small but determined and messy scuffle one very early morning breakfast in a midtown diner. I was with Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. We’d come from an all-night session at the Record Plant on West 44th Street. With the rest of the Clash left back in London, they’d been working on finishing off their second album, Give ’Em Enough Rope. This night, they were in search of a rhyme — that benighted, elusive rhyme for “London town.” They were after a hometown echo of Jamaican toaster Dillinger’s New York rhyme on his 1976 hit 45 “Cokane in My Brain,” on which the toaster explained how to spell and rhyme New York — with a knife, fork, a bottle and a cork.

It took Mick and Joe pretty much all night to get a chorus overdub right. So, sometime around dawn, there was an after-work diner breakfast — and ringside seats for a fracas by the doorway. There was a lot of shouting and a good bit of argy-bargy. It went on for a few minutes and looked like it might progress into something more serious, more violent. Then a small, wiry, persistent New Yorker joined in — and persuaded the combatants to stop. With well-chosen words, he told them, among other things, that he was a cop and that they were disturbing his coffee break. He also showed them his gun. We Brits were all quite thrilled by this. Cop. Gun. We were all in the movie inside our heads — our transatlantic equivalent of Scorsese’s “New York, New York” dream of New York, New York.

The coda to this story is that the “London town” rhymes — “a crown” and “half a pint of brown” — appear a half-minute from the end of “All the Young Punks.” Both very London and redolent of my Stoke Newington childhood. A crown was an obsolete coin worth one-quarter of a pound, 25 pence in today’s money — virtually nothing now but a lot of pocket money back in 1971 when it was last in circulation. Brown ale, a sweet-nosed relation of London’s traditional porter, was first brewed in the 1700s, and by the time of “London Calling” was almost exclusively an old man’s drink.

London Calling New York New York: Two Songs, Two Cities is available now on Trouser Press Books. Pick up your copy here. 

 

© 2025 The Estate of Peter Silverton

Used by permission of Trouser Press Books.