Jack: There was a time when New York was seen as one of the most dangerous cities in America.

Tonight, a documentary explores how the city was able to change its reputation and the mayor's who made it happen.

"MetroFocus" starts right now.

♪ >> This is "MetroFocus" with Rafael Pi Roman, Jack Ford and Jenna Flanagan.

"MetroFocus" is made possible by Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III.

Filomen M. D'Agostino Foundation.

Bernard and Denise Schwartz.

Barbara Hope Zuckerberg.

And by Jody and John Arnold.

Dr. Robert C. and Tina Sohn Foundation.

The Ambrose Monell Foundation.

Estate of Roland Karlen.

Jack: Good evening and welcome to "MetroFocus."

I am Jack Ford.

In the 1970's New York City was a lot dangerous than it is today.

Crime was rampant with violent felonies taking place in record numbers.

Tourists were afraid to visit and some residents were afraid to venture outside of neighborhoods.

What changed?

How did New York go from one of the most dangerous cities in the country for the safest big city in America.

That is the subject of a new documentary titled "Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York," available on demand on iTunes and prime video.

The film examines the legacies of New York City's mayors from 1966 to 2013 to show how hard work, New York's leaders were able to turn the city around.

Here is a quick preview.

>> Behind the famous Manhattan skyline, New York is a mess.

>> You had to literally fear for your life.

>>>> It was terrible.

The city was not safe.

>> There was a lot of crime.

There was a lot of graffiti.

>> 500,000 serious crimes reported.

>> It was just -- >> In the 1970's, the consensus view was schools did not make a difference.

>> 1.2 million people on welfare.

>> There was a great sense that the city cannot work.

It cannot be governed and cannot function.

It is going up in flames.

Kids are not learning.

The schools are crumbling.

>> I said to myself, wow, how did we get here?

>> The early 1990's was an exciting period because people were fed up on the federal level and the local level.

People are open-minded and blue to talk to each other across the aisle.

>> There is a sense that the city is no longer un governable.

>> The city could be made safer.

>> To take back the streets of New York.

By focusing on the small things, we disrupted the bigger things from happening.

>> It changed people's perception.

A job opportunity, not a way of life.

>> After being stuck around 50%, it is now 77% kids graduating on time.

>> We had 20 years of Giuliani and Bloomberg and the crowning glory of what we got out of those 20 years was the streets were no longer disorderly.

Jack: Joining me now or the creative minds behind "Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York."

Matthew Taylor, Michelle Taylor and Peter Cove.

Welcome.

Thank you for joining us.

>> Thank you for having us.

Jack: I will ask you the question which is always the first question I ask for documentary film producers.

Why this film and why now?

Peter: Larry, the head of the Manhattan Institute were many of the ideas came from, and my wife and I, who ran America works -- Jack: We will talk about that at the back end.

Peter: We were sitting and talking and leery said, things change in a city but nobody knows who the people were that made the difference -- he said I want to do a documentary about the people who made the difference in your from the 1970's until the 2000's.

We all sat down and said that was a great idea.

Who are those people?

That is basically how it began.

Jack: Matthew and then Michelle.

What intrigued you about this?

What made you say this is a project we want to work on?

Matthew: I have a huge interest in New York City history.

We had been in development and a project on Robert Moses.

When we were approached.

Robert Moses was kicked out during the Lindsay administration, which is where our film begins.

When we were approached, it was the idea we need to commemorate and show the process of how the people did the things they did to turn around -- I think it is the greatest turnaround in American history -- a couple months later, COVID would strike in production would be delayed.

Cities around the country would start to decline.

The project took on a different scope.

Originally, it was primarily focused in a certain area.

We decided to expand it to a much larger scope so you would see a very detailed idea -- or concept of how the city distended to where it got.

A lot of people do not know the dirty details of how it got there and they do not know the details of how would came out of the decline.

Jack: Michelle, let me come to you for this, and it ties into what we just talked about, you start the film in the 1970's, and I will get to Mayor Lindsay in the second, some things about him that are depicted in this, but for those folks watching that were not around in New York City in the 1970's, what was it like in terms of crime and everyday life?

Michelle: I think that is an interesting question for me.

I was also not in New York.

Michael was -- my goal was always to live in New York.

I always went to live there and I finally got to move there in 2014.

It was kind of like a myth to me, the 1970's and 1980's.

I really was not familiar myself at all with what was going on in the city.

This documentary was an eye-opening experience.

It was insane that the highest crime era had 2200 murders a year.

You had less people by quite a bit than you do today.

A massive murder rate and over 500,000 felonies per year.

People just did not feel safe on the streets.

They did not feel ownership of the city.

They could not go about their daily lives without a constant fear of crime, disorder, different things causing -- I think you see people left.

Businesses started flaying.

Economic opportunity declined.

That led to empty storefronts, buildings, the city had to take over neighborhoods.

Resources were not there to build them up in any decent way.

It wasn't economic collapse that started happening.

Really no one was able to figure out, what do we do and where do we go?

It was that frustrating moment with everyone looking at each other.

Nobody with the political courage or even the idea.

Peter: I was there in the 1970's and I remember that we used to put signs in the car windows that said no radio in the car because radios used to be able to be pulled out.

You had a sign so nobody would smash your window.

Jack: I had a radio busted out and taken from my car.

1962 Volkswagen, I was in law school at the time.

I thought, really?

You need to take this.

[LAUGHTER] I walked by a car one time and saw a window busted out and saw a sign with "no radio" and someone had penciled on the sign, "just checking."

I went to law school in the 1970's, I grew up on the Jersey shore, first day I am taking a subway in New York City and a guy comes up with a knife and wants to rob me.

I was thinking, "welcome to New York City."

Peter, you mentioned, who were the people involved.

You start off in the film -- it is a wonderful film -- it is detailed and provocative.

You start off with John Lindsay.

What was important to you in putting this together about his impact on crime?

Peter: I met John Lindsay when he was mayor and he was impressive.

He was in a Kennedy style.

We all felt he would bring to Bjork the change that we were all hoping for.

The trouble was he had no clue.

He did not have any idea of how to change the city.

He did not have the political courage to do ultimately what Giuliani did.

What changed was his ability to present himself, but that did not help at all.

Jack: If you look at John Lindsay, and I met him also when I was in college, I was at Yale and he had gone to Yale and he was talking about the city's problems and it was very Kennedy-esque.

A gentleman who was a very smart man.

During the time he was there, talk about also what assistance, if any -- Matthew, maybe I will ask you this -- was the city getting from the federal government.

People might remember some headlines.

Give us a sense of that.

Peter: This is also the same era as LBJ's reforms and civil rights movements.

Lindsay was with those concepts.

A lot of the things happening socially and racially were very important to advance the quality.

The problem was John Lindsay thought New York City had unlimited money.

He just spent money out of control on things that were not helpful to the city.

He also told the police chief as we say in the film to stop going after narcotics crime to help minorities.

It is linked that not going after narcotics with the police and violent crime are linked.

The murder rate under his administration went from roughly 600 to 1700 people per year.

That record would not break until roughly 1995.

That is a long period of time.

That is a lot of people who died in that 30-year period.

He was completely ignorant of all the kinds of disasters that these super agencies were causing and it would put New York City into a financial crisis for over a decade and would not pull out until Koch.

We do mention Beame very, very briefly.

He was an extremely nice guy, but it was not what the city needed at the time.

That disaster would continue into the 1990's.

Jack: You mentioned Ed Koch.

It is a fascinating array of political figures and characters who have been Mayors of New York City ended this nearly 50-year period you are focusing on.

Ed Koch comes along, often referring to himself as the quintessential New Yorker.

Talk about Ed Koch and his impact on crime.

Michelle: The one thing about Ed Koch that is important is everyone mostly loved him.

It was a very beloved Mayor.

I think a lot of the public felt that until the third term, when people started getting frustrated with him not focusing on New York's problems.

Ed Koch was able to get the fiscal house in order and that was one of the most important things he did.

He started the economic turnaround of the city.

He was not able to get a handle on crime.

It did just keep going up and up each year.

They tried a few different things but I think Koch's priority was love New York.

Bringing that back, more of an economic malaise under both Lindsay and Beame.

He brought back a vibrancy to the city and helped us usher in more of an exciting period.

Wall Street was on its way up.

People were wanting to move back to the city but the crime even then was going up and up and having huge consequences.

For New Yorkers.

Jack: David Dinkins comes in, the first African-American mayor.

What changes did he bring with him, either positive or negative on crime?

Peter: I saw none.

I saw him acting in a very traditional liberal way to look at crime.

That was not working.

We will talk about that later.

His ability to come in and try to run the city was on a political and theoretical level not viable for the time.

Jack: Why not?

What was it that was not working?

Peter: That is what we asked ourselves later on.

Why are things not working?

Why is crime not going down?

Why is wealth are not going down?

Why do we have schools that are a wreck?

Something is wrong.

I will tell you what was basically wrong -- it was all tethered to ideology that was based pretty liberally and was not based in reality.

Jack: I will get to some of the other Mayors and other concepts.

You also talk about something that many New Yorkers today would have no idea what you were talking about, and that was the Board of estimate in New York City.

You talk about the power that the borough leaders had as opposed to the city Council and this influence wielded by the board of estimate.

I suspect number of people are watching this and asking, what is the board of estimate and how was it impacted?

Matthew: It is interesting.

As I was going through all of the content and information, what struck me was the Board of Estimate was the most important part of the film.

A lot of people said, why are we talking about this?

Michelle: Including me.

[LAUGHTER] Matthew: This obscure thing that happened, etc.

I did not see it that way.

I saw it as one of the major pivot points that brought the city under control.

Give the audience a general idea that you had a board of 11 people and made up of each borough president, the city Council and the mayor and the each had two votes.

If Queens wanted a school, they would have to get more votes and go into the smoky dark rooms and make these deals.

It became this thing were each borough president only cared about their borough.

They cared about nothing citywide.

They cared about policing their borough, hospitals in their borough, Brooklyn did not care about Staten Island.

It made the city a smoky backroom deal.

Peter when he came into office in 1974 said this is absurd.

He said why do Staten Island which has over 300,000 people get the same vote as Brooklyn with roughly 2.3 million people?

He went after the Board of Estimate to take it down.

It would take 17 years to break the Board of Estimate.

In 1989, the Supreme Court would throw it out based on the fact it should be one-man-one-vote.

The city Council was created with 54 seats.

What this did was the mayor was roughly irrelevant in the votes.

It was a weak mayor system and created a strong mayor system.

It get the city Council be ability to legislate as a legislative body and give the mayor actual power over all sorts of things.

The film does not even cover the extent of the power that the mayor got out of this.

In this change, the first thing that would happen was Staten Island would lose its power.

In the 1990's, they actually voted to secede and won.

Giuliani during his second run was basically able to pull Staten Island from the brink and they put him over by 3500 votes.

The Board of Estimate effectively helped vote really Giuliani by a tiny, tiny number.

Once he had power, he was able to work with Peter Vallone, who became the first speaker of the Council.

He was a Democrat and Rudy Giuliani was a Republican and they were able to rush through extremely complicated legislation very quickly.

And now that the mayor had power, he could help with everything from prime reform to welfare reform, all of these things were linked.

A lot of the mechanisms that link them together was whether the mayor would allow a budget to work.

There was a lot of political infrastructure that came into play.

This would probably be the single most powerful change to restoring governance to the mayor in the history of New York City.

Of course, Bloomberg would continue by getting control of the schools.

Jack: Let me jump in for a second and we will get to Bloomberg.

I am fascinated by how getting rid of this impacted somebody things, including crime.

Matthew, you mentioned Rudy Giuliani, Peter, I will bring you in on this, reputation as a crimefighter.

I first met Rudy with the courts.

Anyone who follows him knows he was an effective prosecutor.

He becomes the mayor.

Peter, talk about his personality.

Matthew mentioned the technical changes but talk about how he approached the issue of crime in New York City and how it was impacted based upon his approach.

Peter: I have more familiarity with him with welfare and how we approach that and if you don't mind I would like to segue to that for a moment.

Jack: Sure.

Peter: I remember him coming into our office where there were many welfare recipients.

He was running for mayor and trying to figure out how to govern.

He came out and he looked at me and said, you know, Peter, they really want to work, don't they?

He had walked into that room as a conservative Republican thinking they were bums and they did not want to work.

My feeling about him was this man is able to change his mound and how you go about -- change his mind and how you go about doing things.

As for crime, his ability to latch onto ideas from the Manhattan Institute that really made a difference in crime, and others can talk to that better than I, but a broken window as a theory was a key thing.

Jack: Michelle, you can jump in on this.

Commissioner Bill Bratton, along with Mayor Giuliani and this notion of broken windows policing.

Explain quickly, what was that and how effective was that?

Michelle: Broken windows was a unique idea that if you see a broken window when a neighborhood it gives the idea to people walking by that nobody really cares about my neighborhood and that is the first step in additional crime or activities happening that are negative in that area.

If you fix the window immediately it shows people live on the streets and people want to take care of the neighborhood and criminal activity stays away.

That is very much in a nutshell.

Mayor Giuliani took this idea and put it on steroids more or less throughout the city and focused on first crime and disorder at the street level.

He would go to the community meetings with all of his statistics and say crime is going down here.

All people were asking me, what about the broken car that has not been moved or the prostitute on the corner or the criminal gangs that are coming out at night?

That is what they wanted to fix.

That is what people saw and their experience day to day.

In the city of 8 million, people were not seeing the murders everyday themselves but they were seeing the disorder.

By going after the disorder and cleaning it up, people began to feel safe.

They began to feel like it was their home.

They.

.

Would go out with their kids parts were being cleaned up.

That had a massive -- Parks were being cleaned up.

Jack: Let me get to a couple things before we run out of time.

There was pushback.

There was pushback about was this directed too much at certain communities of color?

Looking at it then, and the pushback, the criticism, is there a belief that broken windows policing would be effective today?

Peter: Absolutely.

Absolutely.

The whole theory worked very well.

One of the things they noticed was the people who jumped over the turnstiles in the sub waves were people who were more likely -- in the subways were people more likely to commit worse crimes.

It worked very well.

Appropriately at different points, it was pushed back.

It perhaps was a little too aggressive near the end.

Jack: I will say this, the documentary is so wonderful, we will not have a chance to talk about Mayor Bloomberg, you deal with the effect of this and the criticism of stop, ask and frisk.

I have a couple minutes.

Peter, one of the things talked about was the company you started called America works.

Tell us about the impact that has had.

Peter: The difference in what we did from what had been done before was we said people really want to go to work.

They do not want to sit in classrooms.

They have been failed by educational systems.

We said get them into a job and give them all the support they need.

If they need daycare, housing, whatever it was.

Get them working.

The difference was people went to work as opposed to the past 40 years with welfare, where the cap going up and up and up.

When the 1966 law was passed, welfare reform that President Clinton and Newt Gingrich worked on, welfare reform made such a difference within 10 years, the welfare rules went down 60% because people were told if you have a daycare and you are able-bodied and there is a job, you have to go to work.

Jack: an interesting illustration of bipartisan.

For those of you who grew up in that era knew there was a lot of headbutting between President Clinton and Newt Gingrich but they work things out.

I have one minute left.

I will ask one of you.

What lessons did you want folks to take from this documentary?

Matthew: I think the movie shows that if you can turn New York City around, you can turn any city around.

It was the hardest city, it had the highest welfare numbers, highest crime, everything.

Everything is bigger and better in New York, including crime and disaster.

We just need to realign incentives to make sure these governmental bodies do what they are designed to do and that is what the film shows.

Jack: Also the notion of people willing to work together across political aisles for a greater good.

Once again, the film is called "Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York."

As I said before, it is a wonderful documentary.

It does what documentary should do, it informs us and makes us think.

I want to thank all of you for the work you did and for joining us.

♪ Thank you for tuning into "MetroFocus."

You can take our award-winning program with you anywhere you go with "MetroFocus: The Podcast."

Simply ask your smart speaker to play "MetroFocus: The Podcast."

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♪ >> "MetroFocus" is made possible by Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III.

Filomen M. D'Agostino Foundation.

The Peter G. Peterson Fund.

Bernard and Denise Schwartz.

Barbara Hope Zuckerberg.

And by Jody and John Arnold.

Dr. Robert C. and Tina Sohn Foundation.

The Ambrose Monell Foundation.

Estate of Roland Karlen.

♪