There was some funky stuff going on in NYC, particularly in bad parts of town, all the way through the 1980's crack epidemic. But there was a lot of other stuff going on in the city too. I suppose that Davidson was searching for the grim underbelly of the city. I reacted the way I did above, because I never felt the sense of peril he expresses in my daily commutes. To the contrary, the main time I ever felt at risk in the city was when there was no one around. No witnesses = danger. A cab driver was in an impossible position in those days as the nature of his job kept him isolated and a fare with nefarious intentions could ask to be taken to a spot of his choosing. But if you weren't looking for trouble, you learned a certain wariness (like the woman Davidson approaches who claims to have a "6th sense" for danger). This came out as a certain "don't be a victim" streetsmart sense: don't flash wads of cash, don't dress in flashy clothes, don't be drunk and passed out in public, etc. I think a lot of these rules were internalized by those who grew up there, and had to be learned by transplants and out-of-towners. In fact, most of these rules still apply, in my mind at least, for a big urban area like NYC. But what I question is that the sense of threat necessarily translated into actual danger. Not all of the places that had bad reputations were dangerous to those who knew how to navigate them; and many of those places (Times Sq., Thomkin's Square Park, Washington Square Park, Lower East Side, Alphabet City, Washington Heights etc.) have since been reclaimed by ordinary folks just living their lives.
Ben
