—To the 70s, and 80's too.
You didn't love it for the drugs, or the violence, or its bad conditions. You loved it because it was real. You could smell it, taste it, live it. Maybe you were young back then, your 20s probably—when everybody seemed to live here—and just about anyone could find a place to call home here. If you couldn't afford the city there was Brooklyn. It was a broken city but it had character it had life. The technology that was to overtake us and put us all in some virtual world had not yet been invented.