“…because you could dream in it.”
This obviously first-rate, professional-grade short was produced by A24 marketing to promote J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year (2015). It’s not pushing fiction — Manhattan, Brooklyn (I never even visited Williamsburg until sometime in the mid ’90s) and Queens were unquestionably rougher, scrappier, grimmer and less hygenic 40 years ago.
Not to me and my semi-struggling journalist-photographer friends and the neighborhoods in which we lived (West Village, Soho, Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen, Upper West and East Sides, Murray Hill) but certainly to people living in the marginalized areas and shittier nabes.
This is a tired, soggy cliche, of course, but Manhattan was a much richer, livelier and more flavorful place in ’81, certainly from a cultural standpoint. The Manhattan of Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City was a real, actual thing back then. Repertory cinemas were plentiful and doing okay. A degraded but half-alluring version of Studio 54 was still in business. Cafe Central (my home-away-from-home in late ’81 and ’82) was the greatest actor-hangout bar in the world; and Nishi was the greatest Japanese restaurant of all time. The greedy ’80s were just beginning (Ronald Reagan had recently taken a bullet), but the storied Pearl Paint, which gave up the ghost in ’14, was thriving. I would have that time again.
Today’s Manhattan is cleaner, tidier and safer but unaffordable unless you earn a mid six-figure income or better. And millionaires fare all the better.