"Evidence of the city’s decline was everywhere: subway cars bruised with graffiti." (Image by JJ Special.)

Jonathan Mahler, author of the incredible book about NYC in crisis during the 1970s, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, wrote a New York magazine article in 2005 that recalled how Rupert Murdoch’s rise to media domination was largely driven by the Aussie’s gambit that the beleaguered city would return to prominence. An excerpt:

“The year was 1976, and evidence of the city’s decline was everywhere: subway cars bruised with graffiti, arson fires that swallowed whole ghetto blocks, soaring murder rates, and annual six-figure job losses. The city put on its best face for the Democratic convention, hastily enacting an anti-loitering law that enabled cops to round up most of the prostitutes in the vicinity of Madison Square Garden. For a few days anyway, even Times Square was more or less hooker-free. But the area soon returned to being America’s most infamous erogenous zone.

Around the country, cartoonists poked fun at New York in its apocalypse: The city was a sinking ship, a zoo where the apes were employed as zookeepers, a stage littered with overturned props. Central Park had become a running joke in Johnny Carson’s nightly monologues (‘Some Martians landed in Central Park today . . . and were mugged’). The syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak understated the matter considerably when they wrote, ‘Americans do not much like, admire, respect, trust, or believe in New York.’

It’s easy now to look back at this moment and see it for what it was—a classic market bottom. But at the time, few recognized it as such. One man who did was Murdoch. Where others saw a city in financial distress, he saw a place ripe for entrepreneurship. Where others saw a failed experiment in social democracy, he saw an opening for simple supply-and-demand capitalism.”

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Walter Cronkite on New York City’s financial emergency, 1976: