It’s been a busy month for local news here in the big, bad city.
Flipping through a few copies of this month’s Post, we find, “Here We Ho Again! Spitzer Running for Comptroller.” There’s also been, “Prison for Cat Killer: Rat Blames Feline,” “Cubism, Boobism: Nude of Art in Times Square,” “Sharknado: Could It Happen Here?” “ ‘Versed’ Pickup Line Ever: Sex-Poem Harass Suit,” “Snack Is Wack: NYers Weigh in as the Twinkie Returns,” “The Oy of Sex! Kosher Lube a Blessing for Religious Jews,” “Orlando Bloomin’ Hot in the Apple,” “No Money, No Monet at the Met” and “Angels Fear to Ped – Models: Citi Bike? No Way!”
Twenty years ago, my first July as a journalist in New York City (at The Associated Press), I remembered things being a little different. So I pulled some copies of The Post from that month to remind me.
July 1993 was a month of unbelievable levels of random mayhem. Headlines included “Desperados Shoot Up Bus,” about teens who robbed 22 passengers in Queens, “Cab Ride to Hell,” about some Australian tourists who saw their cabdriver slain and “Savage Slaying Shocks Tribeca,” about a building worker who was killed execution-style.
A Staten Island man was surrounded by a gang of 20 to 30 youths and beaten to death. Two Washington Heights firefighters responding to a fake call about a gas leak were instead firebombed (then, when they bailed out of the truck with second-degree burns, surrounded by an angry crowd that threw bottles at them). A mother of eight was killed in a crossfire on a Brooklyn street while pushing a 3-year-old in a stroller and carrying an infant in her arms. A 21-year-old Hunter College student was shot to death on a 5-train for his Nike Air sneakers.
In Queens, a 4-year-old girl was hit by a stray bullet while she slept. And on the Upper West Side, a group of men lit an M-80 and put it on the face of a homeless man as he slept on a sidewalk. The same neighborhood cringed at the news that Larry “the Wild Man” Hogue, a deranged homeless person who roamed upper Broadway, hurling trash cans and once pushed a toddler into traffic, was being let out of a mental hospital. Two plain-clothes cops were mugged at 2 p.m. in the Brooklyn museum subway stop.
In 1993 Mets news, center fielder Vince Coleman lit a firecracker and threw it at a group of fans, injuring three including a 1-year-old girl. He and fellow players laughed as they walked away.
This month, Matt Harvey joined Coleman as front-page material: “Meet the Matt: The Lowdown on Mets’ All-Star: Photo Fashion Spread: Pages 31-34.”
New York City has become a neo-Mayberry where we have the luxury of getting riled up about Amber Alerts on cellphones waking us up too early in the morning.
If you think the Travis Bickle era was the high point for the Gotham mayhem industry, you’re wrong. The fourth-worst year for murders in New York City was 1993, with 1,960 (Nos. 1-3 are 1990-1992, the other three years of the David Dinkins administration).
In the first half of this year, in a city that is home to about 20% more people, there were 156.
It wasn’t so long ago that things were completely crazy, when guests at cocktail parties chatted about strategies for dealing with muggers (it was widely believed that you should always carry what we called ”mugger money” so as not to anger your attackers). Those who were brave enough to park cars on city streets made sure to remove the stereos when they parked, then place “No radio, nothing valuable in car” signs on their dashboards. If you fell asleep on a subway train, you awoke with an X neatly cut over your pocket and your wallet gone.
In his forthcoming memoir, Dinkins blames “racism, pure and simple,” not residents fed up by a city out of control, for his narrow 1993 defeat by Rudy Giuliani.
Now it seems likely that we’re going to elect another conventional liberal mayor, for the first time in two decades. As Dinkins did during his successful 1989 campaign, most of the rival Democratic candidates for mayor are playing for votes by trying to turn citizens against the police (though a recent poll found that Commissioner Ray Kelly, who is rumored to be the next head of Homeland Security in DC, enjoys an approval rating of 75%, including more than 60% among blacks).
The 20 years of the Giuliani-Bloomberg era have been a pleasant vacation from the decades-long decline that preceded it. Today we joke about soda bans instead of how to react to armed robbers. But soon New York may be back doing what it does best: Being Crazytown, USA.
kyle.smith@nypost.com