When New York Was ‘Drop Dead City’

On Oct. 29, 1975, Mike O’Neill, the editor of The Daily News, and Bill Brink, the managing editor, returned from lunch and requested whether or not President Gerald R. Ford, whereas addressing the National Press Club in Washington, had agreed to assist New York City keep away from chapter.

The editors have been learn the definitive sentence from Ford’s tackle: “I am prepared to veto any bill that has as its purpose a federal bailout of New York City to prevent a default.”

As I recall — I used to be a reporter and editor at The Daily News on the time — Brink initially summed up the president’s rejection with what was typically quaintly described again then as a two-word barnyard epithet. Then they refined the hulking entrance web page tabloid headline, a cri de coeur that encapsulated Washington’s response to the town’s plight and that might assist value Ford the presidential election the next yr, in the end changing into a metaphor for New York’s resilience: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

Those days of city desolation, despair and painful restoration a half century in the past are captured within the forthcoming documentary “Drop Dead City — New York on the Brink in 1975,” which on Monday was awarded the fifth annual Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film.

“Drop Dead City” was directed by Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn, a filmmaker and musician who had a novel perspective: It was Michael’s father, Felix G. Rohatyn, an funding banker, who was recruited in 1975 by the heroic Gov. Hugh L. Carey of New York to assist stave off the state’s municipal chapter.

Michael Rohatyn was solely 12 when his father helped save the town. Perusing the outdated footage from that point and filming 200 further hours, he stated in an interview, “I was very moved to see his charm and his intellect right there on the surface. I think he would be really proud of the film. He might think there’s not enough of him in it, and he might be right.”

The prize, awarded by The Better Angels Society, the Library of Congress and the Crimson Lion/Lavine Family Foundation, and funded by Jeannie and Jonathan Lavine, features a $200,000 grant for remaining manufacturing and distribution of the movie, a sum that, the award-winning documentarian Ken Burns recalled, was greater than the complete funds for his first movie, on the Brooklyn Bridge, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1982.

“Drop Dead City” serves as a vivid reminder for at present’s negativists of how dangerous the dangerous outdated days have been. The contrasting scenes are poignant: a theater poster for “Man of La Mancha” — the Impossible Dream — and streets clogged with cabs juxtaposed with the carcasses of burned-out buildings, deserted skeletal public works, graffiti-shrouded subway automobiles, and mobs of justifiably choleric municipal employees whose promise of lifetime civil service job safety was immediately jeopardized. Its protagonists have been largely males with lengthy sideburns in smoke-filled rooms, palpably fearful over the uncharted penalties if the town may now not idiot a few of the folks the entire time to pay its payments.

Who would have first declare? The bondholders from whom the town had borrowed? Or the law enforcement officials, firefighters, sanitation employees and lecturers on whom New Yorkers depended each day? Or the beneficiaries of public help who trusted the town?

And who would bear the blame? Former Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, whose worthies conceived of “moral obligation” bonds to allow extra borrowing for good causes? Former Mayor Robert F. Wagner, who was re-elected in 1961 after granting the unions collective bargaining rights? His successor, John V. Lindsay, undone by the price of good intentions? Or his successor, Abraham D. Beame, who had warned towards fiscal gimmickry when he was the town’s comptroller however sanctioned it anyway by voting for the unbalanced budgets, solely to search out that the buck stopped with him when he was elected mayor?

And who ought to bear the brunt of the sacrifice? Public officers had lengthy maintained low mass transit fares, free tuition at City University and different providers, and had granted organized labor beneficiant advantages not solely to get re-elected, however to protect the town’s legacy as a world beacon of alternative. Bankers ought to have recognized that the town was promoting tax anticipation notes with out having the slightest notion of how a lot tax income was anticipated, whilst they reaped hefty commissions on every borrowing that despatched the town deeper into debt.

“They made the accounting sexy,” Burns stated of the filmmakers. “They made the people who get dismissed human and dimensional. The headline became the haiku of the fiscal crisis.”

Hundreds of movies have been submitted to the Better Angels Society, a nonprofit group whose objective is to coach Americans about their historical past by way of documentaries. It winnowed the submissions to 6 and offered two to Burns and to Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. The runner-up was “The Disappearance of Miss Scott,” directed by Nicole London, which recounts the story of the jazz pianist and civil rights pioneer Hazel Scott, who went into exile through the Red Scare of the Fifties.

The mid-Nineteen Seventies evoked by “Drop Dead City” are much more distant from at present’s audiences than the traditional historical past of the 1929 inventory market crash was from New Yorkers who lived by way of the town’s fiscal disaster. But, as Hayden defined, what offers the movie vitality and relevance is that “it puts history at the forefront.”

“Drop Dead City” deftly melds archival footage of pissed off and gravely conflicted negotiators, extraordinary New Yorkers and aggrieved rank-and-file union members with candid reflections by the surviving protagonists. Unfortunately some, like former Deputy Mayor John Zuccotti, didn’t survive lengthy sufficient to be interviewed on video. (Zuccotti died a day after the filmmakers spoke with him off-camera.)

Viewers may also have welcomed extra of Felix Rohatyn’s pithy observations. (He as soon as likened default to “someone stepping into a tepid bath and slashing his wrists — you might not feel yourself dying, but that’s what would happen.”)

The metropolis got here so near default {that a} declaration was signed by Mayor Beame’s shaky hand, however by no means invoked; it later hung within the residence workplace of the New York company lawyer Ira Millstein.

Asked on the time, although, whether or not an settlement with the municipal unions and the State Legislature to fend off chapter would survive, Felix Rohatyn replied: “I don’t give odds any more. I think it has to work.”

But Rohatyn was conscious of the prices, predicting that the sacrifices inflicted to fulfill the banks and the Ford administration would imply that even when New York survived, “this city will be a much lesser place.”

Yost, the movie’s co-director, defined why, although New York stays very a lot alive, “Drop Dead City” remains to be very related.

“Intellectually, it’s resonant at a time when we’re all at each other’s throats,” he stated. “That was a moment when it could have gotten ugly and rude like New York, but seemingly irreconcilable things came together to keep the city from going over a cliff. To me that holds a lot of lessons for us today.”