Notes
WHEN news of Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the New York Post first hit the Daily News and The New York Times—the sleepy Post had been scooped on its own sale—on November 20, 1976, the city’s response was a collective “Rupert who?”
Rookies were taught a few important lessons when they reported for duty at the Eight-Three. Don’t walk too close to the buildings (someone might drop a brick on you). Don’t let neighborhood kids wear your hat (lice). Always check the earpiece on call boxes before using it (dog shit).
The Post, Murdoch told Koch, was going to endorse him. In the event, the paper did much more than that, playing the editorial on its front page and generating enough pro-Koch copy in the ensuing weeks to prompt fifty Post reporters and editors to sign a petition complaining about their tabloid’s biased coverage.
“For those who have lived through this mad week in New York there is a shared sense of outrage and impotence,” the Times editorialized on Friday, August 5. “Is New York City, after all, a failed ultraurban experiment in which people eventually crack, social order eventually collapses, and reason ultimately yields to despair?”
The few New Yorkers who did know Ed Koch in the spring of 1977 thought of him as a lumpy liberal from Greenwich Village. A middle child, he’d been born in the Bronx, though his parents, Jewish immigrants from Poland, had started their New York journey in a scabby, peeling tenement on the crowded Lower East Side.
The counterculture was starting to migrate from San Francisco to New York, a trend evidenced by Rolling Stone’s plan to relocate from Haight-Ashbury to midtown Manhattan in the summer of ’77.
ON the morning of June 16, 1977, the city woke up to the news that the Mets had traded Tom Seaver to the Cincinnati Reds.
A 1977 New York City Planning Commission report counted no fewer than 245 pornographic institutions in the city. In 1965 there had been 9.
I knew that baseball loyalty was generational, not geographic. You don’t choose your team; you inherit it.
Reminders of the city’s decline were already everywhere. In 1972 the Tonight Show had moved from midtown Manhattan to Burbank, California.