Book recommendations about 1970s-1980s NYC

October 26, 2016 2:26 AM

I have a very specific interest in NYC during this period. What are some good non-fiction books about it? Think the New York of Taxi Driver and A Most Violent Year.

I've already read 'The Bronx is Burning' which was alright but the forced baseball & politics structure didn't work that well for me.

I'm okay with something more academic and don't need a popular history that's just about 'colorful characters'. I'm just as interested in facts and figures.

Doesn't necessarily have to touch on it at all but I do have a particular interest in the disco and post-disco scenes and the AIDS crisis.

There was a similar thread apparently several years ago that seemed to be mostly fiction responses.

posted by basehead to Society & Culture (11 answers total)

Sarah Schulman's writing (both fiction and nonfiction) about the AIDS crisis and its impact on art, gentrification, etc., in New York is pretty amazing. I'd recommend Rat Bohemia for fiction and The Gentrification of the Mind for nonfiction.

Samuel Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue might also be of interest? It's about cruising and urbanism, basically.
posted by ITheCosmos at 3:47 AM on October 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Christodora

Starts in the 80s, moves through to the near future (which I thought would bug me but didn't.) From the Amazon description:

Moving kaleidoscopically from the Tompkins Square Riots and attempts by activists to galvanize a true response to the AIDS epidemic, to the New York City of the future, Christodora recounts the heartbreak wrought by AIDS, illustrates the allure and destructive power of hard drugs, and brings to life the ever-changing city itself.
posted by lyssabee at 6:05 AM on October 26, 2016

Shit, I'm sorry. That's fiction - I got so excited that I could suggest a book I recently liked and finished that I didn't read the entire original post.

That said, this book had a fair amount of medical jargon and activist plot points.
posted by lyssabee at 6:07 AM on October 26, 2016

I don't have specific recommendations, but maybe biographies and autobiographies of Mayors, John Lindsay, Abe Beame and Ed Koch would fulfill the historical items.
posted by AugustWest at 7:43 AM on October 26, 2016

"Turn the Beat Around" by Peter Shapiro is a well-written history of disco music and its New York roots.
posted by Umami Dearest at 8:00 AM on October 26, 2016

Working Class New York by Josh Freedman is excellent, particularly for understanding the the 1970s fiscal crisis.

It runs from the post-war period to the 1990s, and the chapters on the 1970s/1980s are particularly good, but I recommend reading it in entirety.

Also, Patti Smith has a few memoirs from this period:
Just Kids
M Train
posted by veery at 8:50 AM on October 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Not academic, but not fictional either, is the oral History of the rise and fall of Edie Sedgwick, called "Edie: American Girl," by Jean Stein. This largely spans the period 1964-ish to 1971. So: the pre-disco Warhol years, but it paints a vivid picture of the New York that leads into the disco years.
posted by baseballpajamas at 9:33 AM on October 26, 2016

Very music focused: Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever
posted by Clustercuss at 1:32 PM on October 26, 2016

Kimberly Phillips-Fein's Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (Metropolitan Books) is due out in April 2017.
posted by Sonny Jim at 12:30 AM on October 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Kill All Your Darlings by Luc Sante. Here is all of "My Lost City" online.
posted by Violet Hour at 2:55 AM on October 27, 2016

At that time much of Manhattan felt depopulated even in daylight. Aside from the high-intensity blocks of Midtown and the financial district, the place seemed to be inhabited principally by slouchers and loungers, loose-joints vendors and teenage hustlers, panhandlers and site-specific drunks, persons whose fleabags put them out on the street at eight and only permitted reentry at six. Many businesses seemed to remain open solely to give their owners shelter from the elements. How often did a dollar cross the counter of the plastic-lettering concern, or the prosthetic-limb showroom, or the place that ostensibly traded in office furniture but displayed in its window a Chinese typewriter and a stuffed two-headed calf? Outside under an awning on a hot afternoon would be a card table, textured like an old suitcase with four metal corners, and around it four guys playing dominoes. Maybe they’d have a little TV set, up on a milk crate, plugged into the base of a streetlight, issuing baseball. On every corner was a storefront that advertised Optimo or Te-Amo or Romeo y Julieta, and besides cigars they sold smut and soda pop and rubbers and candy and glassine envelopes and sometimes police equipment. And there were Donuts Muffins Snack Bar and Chinas Comidas and Hand Laundry and Cold Beer Grocery and Barber College, all old friends. Those places weren’t like commercial establishments, exactly, more like rooms in your house.

From "My Lost City"
posted by Violet Hour at 3:06 AM on October 27, 2016