The New York Shooting That Defined an Era

"The New York of the nineteen-eighties was, warily, a city in transition. The frightening "Taxi Driver" New York of the previous decade-steaming manholes, blackouts, riots-still hung over the town, but so did the potent downtown renaissance that had begun at the same time, stretching from punk music at CBGB to a still intact SoHo, where a genuine village of art reigned and the world crowded into 420 West Broadway on Saturdays to see what might happen next."

"Yuppies, as they were called, were a real phenomenon. The idea that young professionals might build their lives in the city rather than flee it was still a novelty, with the "consumption benefits" of urban living now outweighing the "production benefits." You came because this was where the life was, not because this was where the jobs were. Ed Koch was mayor, with an expansive Jewish-uncle manner-"How'm I doin'?" was his constant refrain-memorably captured in a Claymation version in an Oscar-winning short."

"Old-school New York in style, he was quietly rumored, despite his public romance with a Jewish former Miss America, to be a closeted gay man. By 1984, an obscure real-estate striver named Donald Trump had slipped onto the cover of GQ -the last man you'd want to sit next to on a plane, perhaps, but also the last man you'd imagine as the agent of democracy's undoing."

Bernie Goetz shot four Black teenagers on a New York subway in December 1984, an act that galvanized the city and intensified debates about crime, race, and self-defense. The shooting occurred amid a transitional 1980s New York, where lingering urban decay coexisted with a downtown cultural renaissance, rising yuppie residency, and changing attitudes toward urban life. Political figures and emerging real-estate personalities shaped the era's public life. The subway served as an emblem of both disorder and creative energy, and the incident crystallized anxieties that continued to influence civic discourse and policy.

Read at The New Yorker