Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

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Heh, back in the days when you didn't go above 96th or below 14th (except to the Financial District) and you didn't leave Manhattan for any reason except to visit Grandma.

If you want to find one group who completely and decisively hates Bloomberg though, just talk to cab drivers. The things that he did regarding new medallions and all of the bullshit with the TLC the last 8 years have made most old-timers quit. The mere mention of the guy's name will bring out some pretty big curse words.

The funny thing is though, most of the crime in the city peaked during the Koch era. He started some of the things that Giuliani and Bloomberg later got credit for. Dinkins gets saddled with a lot of the worst memories of it mostly because of how ineffective he was as Mayor.

Koch did some right dickish things to outerborough New Yorkers though. The closing of bike/pedestrian traffic on the Queensboro Bridge will always stick out in my memory. Caused a 3000+ bike protest down Park Avenue... and a couple years ago they named the fucking bridge after him. >_<

The cab drivers are full of shit. He forced them to accept credit cards and GPS in all cars. The drivers complained like crazy, and even went on strike. The result? Revenue increased 14% the following year. Medallion prices are at a record high, and driver revenues are also at a record high.

They literally went on strike to protest a pay increase.

> Revenue increased 14% the following year

Reported revenue increased 14% the following year.

Revenue comes from the meters and is accurate. There can be a discrepancy in the tips, but tips also increased because the credit card tip presets are 20-30%.

The drivers have come around and admitted the credit card machines increased ridership and revenue drastically. There was a big switch from Black cars to taxis primarily because business travelers can now pay with corporate cards.

I think you misread his comment. I think he's saying revenue never really went up. It's just all reported now.

Except that's not really how it works at all. Individual drivers don't really buy medallions anymore. Big money investors who operate cab companies do. A company can buy a medallion and pay for it from their cab fleet in a day. An individual driver can never hope to make that much money anymore.

Also, when all the new medallions were issued and the GPS/credit system put in their cars, some of the companies passed the cost of install onto the drivers, taking more than the maximum lease rate (The current day rate is like $229, whether you're on the road or not).

Cab drivers aren't making that much money ultimately. It has always been bad but it's way worse now than it used to be (my mom drove a yellow from 1978-1992 before she became an RN).

The overwhelming majority of the money earned in a taxi cab goes to the medallion holders -- owning a medallion is basically a guaranteed 5% ROI because the fare price is fixed. Cab drivers are basically little more than modern sharecroppers. I don't disagree that they're full of shit though, I'm just saying it's a shitty life and a lot of them hate Bloomberg's guts.

"you didn't go [...] below 14th"

Say what? No Village, Chinatown, Little Italy, South Street, Battery, etc., etc.? These are the best parts of Manhattan. No 25 cent trip on the Staten Island Ferry?

Staten Island Ferry is free now. Best way to see the Statue of Liberty up closish.

Nope. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/04/nyregion/a-new-gang-s-viol...

Just because they're some of the best parts of Manhattan doesn't mean that they were safe. The East Village certainly wasn't so. All of these areas were pretty damned sketchy and you had some reasonable chance of something bad happening to you. Not a strong likelihood but reasonable enough that you'd only go during the day and be aware of your surroundings.

If you were a gweilo in Chinatown you were pretty much only safe on Canal Street until the late-90s. I've seen with my own eyes people get robbed at gunpoint in the back of Chinatown Fair towards the end of this period and seen gangs beating on each other on Pell Street.

Heck, I saw gangs of kids fighting with chains and baseball bats in the East Village on Rivington as recently as 2007. I've even started seeing junkies back near Tompkins Square Park again. South Street Seaport was still a popular place to find a hooker at night until 9/11.

14th Street, in days past, was a famous dividing line for residents of the city, with many proudly claiming that they either didn't go below it or didn't go above it. I grew up in Midtown, but I still kind of went everywhere. It's only hindsight that gives me the perspective of just how dangerous some of the neighborhoods are, because in my youth I didn't really think about things like I mentioned above.

Thanks for the interesting response, and, especially, the link to a fascinating article.

I grew up in a housing project just East of Chinatown, so I might be calibrated differently. Some people's "dangerous" is my normal.

On the other hand, my time was the '60s and '70s. I left for education in tame New England in '76. This was a high-crime era, but Chinatown and Little Italy were safe if you minded your own business, because organized crime did not tolerate street violence directed at tourists and civilians. This was before the phenomenon of Vietnamese gangs discussed in Fox Butterfield's article. Of course, when I say "Village" I don't mean East Village: Alphabet City was always considered bad.

Smith Houses or further east?

That neighborhood has a really interesting cyclic history of crime dating all the way back 200 years. The history of Five Points is incredibly interesting to read about.

> Some people's "dangerous" is my normal.

Same here, but I tend to try and refer to things from (what I assume is) the reader's perspective. All of this stuff is pretty normal/safe to me. But I have to be careful and tell myself that it isn't so that I don't get nostalgic for something that was actually terrible.

It's hard for me to settle on a particular viewpoint of the city due to the time and place I grew up...coming from working middle class midtown, getting a private school education with upper-crust kids uptown and having my life and friendships all downtown. There really was sort of a classlessness where I could just fit in anywhere growing up and that feeling has totally disappeared in the last 15-20 years.

> Alphabet City was always considered bad.

Even though I saw Hell's Kitchen/The Deuce and (most of) Harlem transformed, still the strangest thing to me as a New Yorker was watching Alphabet City transform almost overnight. I know that it gentrified quietly over a long period of time but it was always really dangerous until suddenly it wasn't. I would keep going to bars in/around there and it was like a completely different neighborhood inside of three months. A thriving bar/club scene developed out of nothing and then died quickly when everyone moved over to 27th Street for their entertainment and bottle service took over Manhattan. For a short time, Bridge & Tunnels swarmed that place. Now all of the traffic seems to be between Houston & Delancey.

Rutgers Houses. It's smack up against the Manhattan Bridge, so I get to see my apartment window in movies now and then.

I was never a Dinkins fan but I seem to recall he started the program that got the cop out of the car on back on the beat which, certainly helped with crime.

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