Drop Dead City: New York on the Brink in 1975

This movie is about the financial crisis of New York City in 1975, when the City missed going bankrupt by the grace of German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt telling Gerald Ford that if New York City went bankrupt then the dollar was scheisse, Governor Hugh Carey willing to commit political suicide to save the City, and the calm and honest diplomacy of Felix Rohatyn. Did you know the director of this documentary is Rohatyn's son? Yes, both of those last two statements are true.

Any documentary is going to have to choose a side, and this one does so in a simplistic fashion: Democrats Good, even when they were busy piling up the debt, or, in Mayor Abe Beame's case, City Comptroller with a department that had no idea of who owed what to whom or even what the notes issued in anticipation of tax receipts were liens against. Instead, the real villains were folks like Nelson Rockefeller, who aided and abetted New York City's bad financial controls, or Treasury Secretary William Simon, because he had been a bond salesman in his career, and had sold New York City bonds. Bad Republicans! Imagine the problems of being Abe Beame, who had been in politics since the Jimmy Walker administration (which may explain a lot), and had just completed four years as City Comptroller. How was he supposed to know about any of this stuff?

One thing we can all agree on is that Albert Shanker, head of the UFT, was a colossal jerk. I see he was a Stuyvesant grad. Figures.

Drop Dead City is a fascinating documentary on the fiscal crisis and near bankruptcy of NYC in 1975.

Yet, it is more than just a snapshot of that fateful year, the movie goes through how over the course of decades, NYC provided more and more government services, including generous labor contracts, with the full complicity of the large base of middle class taxpayers (until white flight took hold), the State of New York and the bankers that were financing it all. It then encapsulates how under the newly elected Mayor Abe Beame along with the independent Comptroller Harrison Goldin the financial house of cards all began to collapse. Not just a profile of a City on the ropes, but of many of the dashed dreams of expansive, big government and what happens when there are no controls in place. Beame comes off as a tragic, and at times comic, figure, often unjustly so - a career, party hack suddenly caught between the switches of a changing world. Goldin and the financier Felix Rohatyn, along with Governor Hugh Carey, come off in a shining light, justifiably so, yet also since Rohatyn's son (?) was involved in making the movie. The one villain, again justifiably so, is US Treasury Secretary William Simon. Simon should not only bear shame for his heartlessness in dealing with the NYC fiscal crisis, but also for being one of the greatest proponents and donor of the extremes of neoliberalism that has driven this country to its current plight of disarray and decay.

The movie is an absolute gem, summarizing life in NYC beyond the glitz and glamour of Manhattan by really shining a spot light on the working, middle class nature that was NYC - and America - until it all began unraveling. Well worth seeing.