Bushwick BK posted this great video of a 1976 NBC newscast about ‘youth gangs’ in the good old 83rd precinct, which in the 70’s was the precinct with the most crime in all of NYC — and has been my home for the last year. (Interestingly, many of them seem to be skinny white kids in hoodies and denim jackets who look more or less like my friends who live in Bushwick now. Also was surprised by the lack of racial and class commentary in the whole feature, which is of course almost always mentioned as in most of today’s discussions about Bushwick and crime.)
Related and interesting, from the NY Daily News archives — this August 1977 exposé on the “Dying Neighborhood” of Bushwick., covering lootings during the ‘77 blackout and stranger things, such as the eviction of locals for the construction of public housing (weird, never thought about that.) They wrote: “Like the South Bronx, blocks of Brownsville, Harlem and the lower East Side, [Bushwick] is a shell of shattered dreams - the rotted body of a neighborhood consumed by the cancer of urban decay that is even now creeping into other sections of the city.”
