Edition: U.S. / Global


Published: June 30, 2002

I GREW up hearing stories about the New York of my father's childhood, the New York of the 1940's and 50's. The lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx that was thick with semidetached houses; the broom handles swiped from his mother's closet, the pink Spaldeens sailing over manhole covers. That was my mythology.

The images were especially resonant because we lived far away from this world, in Palm Springs, Calif., where the streets are named after Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra and the landscape alternates between spiky shrubs and golf courses. Those supernaturally green fairways, kept lush by constantly whirring sprinklers, were my reality; the bustling streets of New York were my fantasyland. That is, until the summer of 1977, when we came to the city for the first time.

I was only 8, but it didn't take long to figure out that this wasn't the place I had imagined. When we climbed into a taxi, my parents would immediately roll up the windows and lock the doors. When we took the No. 4 train to Yankee Stadium, my father kept a tight grip on my arm as I tried to decipher the anarchic swirls of graffiti that covered nearly every inch of our airless car.

Twenty-five years have passed since the summer of '77. It was a summer when a serial killer stalked young, brown-haired women with a .44-caliber pistol, a summer when a power failure plunged the city into darkness and looting. It was the summer when the white manager of the Yankees, the brawling, blue-collar Billy Martin, and the team's strutting, self-conscious black superstar, Reggie Jackson, nearly came to blows. It was the summer when the Mets traded Tom Seaver, their ace, and it was the summer of Studio 54 (''the summer of our discothèques,'' as Anthony Haden-Guest said).

Few events from this mean season inspire nostalgia, but it is now possible to appreciate that summer for what it was: the pits, yes, but also a transformative moment in which New York broke with the grand visions of its past.

The city that once dared to fly in the face of capitalism with its public hospitals, powerful municipal unions and free university system had crashed and burned. Call it realism, call it a dream deflated, but the result was the same. New York would no longer aspire to be all things to all of its people.

''Nineteen seventy-seven was the break-point year,'' says Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political consultant who was then a city police officer. ''The romantic vision of what the city once was died. Social democracy went into the toilet. People were less interested in free college than they were in safe streets.''

The Gathering Storm

No one saw the clouds gathering. The previous summer, the summer of our nation's bicentennial, had been a triumphant one. On the eve of July 4, 1976, Leonard Bernstein directed the New York Philharmonic through a program of patriotic songs in Central Park. The next morning, more than 200 tall ships from around the world chugged up the Hudson from the Statue of Liberty. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers dotted the shoreline, roaring on cue when the 21-gun salutes began at noon.

About a week later, the city was host to the Democratic National Convention. An ebullient Mayor Abraham D. Beame opened it with an old-fashioned partisan attack on the G.O.P.: ''It has been New York's misfortune, and the misfortune of this entire nation, that the very men who should have been healing and uniting this land have chosen instead to divide it.''

For two years, New York had been pleading with Washington for help in resolving its financial woes, and President Ford had been anything but sympathetic. The rest of the nation agreed. Political cartoonists portrayed New York as a zoo where the apes were zookeepers, as a naughty puppy being swatted by a rolled-up newspaper, as an apple-shaped bowling ball on a collision course with a row of pins.

''Americans do not much like, admire, respect, trust, or believe in this city,'' wrote the syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.

But the Democratic candidate, Jimmy Carter, campaigning that summer and fall, apparently did. He had given Mayor Beame his word: he'd never tell New York to ''drop dead.'' The mayor was now hopeful and said, ''I think we've turned the corner and seen the light at the end of tunnel.''

As it turned out, to continue the cliché, that light was on an approaching train.

The Emergency Financial Control Board, which had been created to baby-sit the city until it could be trusted to manage its own finances, spent nearly two hours in June 1977 poking holes in Mr. Beame's new budget. And once he was elected, Jimmy Carter changed his tune. Federal loans would be forthcoming -- just as soon as City Hall, the banks and the unions made peace. Many interpreted the message to mean that New York would be bailed out when it no longer needed to be bailed out. New York magazine updated the famous ''Ford to City: Drop Dead'' headline in The Daily News to ''Carter to City: Heal Thyself.''

Relations were further strained when, within a few weeks of his inauguration, Mr. Carter found himself in the middle of an international crisis, courtesy of a small community in Queens.