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Unmugged by Reality

Christopher Caldwell, nostalgic for nasty New York.

Jan 16, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 17 • By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
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A friend told me at dinner over New Year’s break that people had started walking at night in New York’s Central Park again. In the year just ended, the New York Times reports, there was about one robbery in the park every three weeks. Back in the 1980s, when I started visiting, there were two a night. I can more easily imagine Wrigley Field in July without baseball than Central Park after dark without random violence.

Drawing of a girl running through Central Park

DAVID GOTHARD

In the wake of power
outages in 1977, Lord of the Flies-style looting spread across the city. Longtime residents—the kind of people who could remember strolling at midnight with their sweethearts by the Central Park Reservoir shortly after arriving from the Midwest in 1946—asked what this world was coming to. But by the time I got to college, not so many years later, it was taken for granted that the place was a garrison city. New York became one of those places like, say, Beirut or Belfast, where you could die of crossing the wrong street. Central Park was even more dangerous than that. 

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