Drop Dead City–Hope and Nostalgia from NYC
www.imdb.com/video/vi1941424153/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
It wasn’t until I watched “Drop Dead City “that I realized what optimists my parents and uncle had been. The Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn documentary fashions a gripping drama from the highly technical and now largely forgotten saga of New York City’s 1975 near bankruptcy.
Artfully spliced together from miles of old news footage, the film is a masterpiece of story that leaves viewers chewing their fingernails, wondering if the city, in a way, the hero will make it. The hero is, of course, the city.
We know it ended well, but back in those dark days, the successful resolution was not obvious. The film shows the city fathers, including then-Mayor Abraham Beame, going hat in hand to Albany and most famously to Washington, D.C., only to be refused.
Those were tough years for New Yorkers. The city was a dirty and dangerous place, clearly failing as a metropolis, yet right in the middle of all of this, my parents’ uncle and aunt made a bet on its future. They put together every spare cent they had to buy a 17-story commercial building in the heart of the Garment District. This was a leap for them. It was, in short, the biggest purchase they would ever make.
Whatever possessed them to do that? Firstly, the building was a bargain. My family loved nothing more than a bargain.—My parents and uncle were tipped off by a friendly bank officer who told them that it was coming up in a foreclosure sale..
I was a teenager at the time. To me the fiscal crisis was not on my radar. . At camp that summer, my friends and I climbed on each other’s backs to form a human triangle, yelling “New York City Default,” as if the whole thing were a joke, but for my parents and the other adults, it was real. Drop Dead City features brings to life the very real stress of that period especially among the people who relied on city government for their livelihoods.
My parents weren’t among them, but they could have invested elsewhere, in another state, or in stocks or bonds. Why did they go through with the deal, and why were they so pleased with it?
I think the answer lies in their story. All four were holocaust survivors. In those years, they called themselves refugees, and New York had given them a chance.
It was like the Frank Sinatra song,” If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.” And my parents did. My father, uncle, and aunt landed in the city in 1949. My father was completely penniless. My aunt and uncle were better heeled; they arrived with a small cache of earnings from my uncle’s career as a DP camp smuggler of coffee and chocolate
. Together, they pooled together to open a jewelry factory. They were a perfect team—my father, a master jeweler, and my uncle, a master salesman. Before long, their jewelry was displayed in the cases of stores all around the US, and they were no longer poor but comfortably middle-class. Back then, the city was a manufacturing hub for jewelers and many other trades.
They remained forever grateful, so much so that they continued to believe in the city which had rewarded them so richly, even when the city seemed to be falling apart. As survivors, they had experienced much worse. This too shall pass, they told themselves, as they handed over what was to them a colossal fortune in exchange for the keys.
And it did. As the film shows, within the year, the city solved its financial woes, and the good times were back. My parents’ investment kept them in middle-class comfort even after their jewelry business contracted due to rising gold prices and a shift to costume jewelry.
Hope is the thing with feathers, wrote Emily Dickinson in her famous poem, which compared hope to a bird that lives inside the heart. After watching Drop Dead City, I could see that my parents and uncle had it in abundance.
In these times of bombings and war I hope their DNA is alive within me. END