"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?
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?
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.
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.
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.