New York's Golden Age

"The city 'was a wreck; it was going bankrupt. And it was pretty lawless; everything was illegal, but no laws were enforced. It was a city for city-dwellers, not tourists, the way it is now.' Laurie Anderson, a well-known New York artist and performer, admits the '70s were considered 'the dark ages' but 'there was great music and everyone was broke.'

...Many of the city's most creative people in the 1970s (as now) were high IQ boys and girls from Smalltown who fled to the Apple and had the smarts to survive and thrive in a city beset with drugs, welfare dependency and housing stock distorted by World War II rent controls."