20 Crazy Things You Could Get Away With in Old School New York

Image via Complex Original

Occasionally you read about the dead guy who spent his last adrenaline-packed moments gulping wafts of dank air and rat shit at 30 mph underground, but subway surfing is extremely rare these days. In the '80s, riding on the exterior of trains was practically a sport, especially for graffiti artists. In the ‘60s, trains were smaller so there was more space between them and the tunnels. Kids would slide off the roofs as trains pulled into stations. “Sometimes a kid would lose his head and we’d be too afraid to tell his mom,” says Larry Romano of the Bronx. “I still have the scars on my back from a few close calls.”

In 2003, the New York MTA did away with the last token collector, thereby putting an end to the most disgusting of transit crimes: token sucking. Yes, token sucking. A token sucker would first shove a piece of trash into a token slot, then stand back and watch as someone dropped a coin into the machine and slam into the unyielding turnstile. Once the commuter went through a separate gate, the thief would put his mouth on the token slot and and suck the token out. At one point in the late ‘80s about 60 percent of the nearly 3,000 turnstiles that required repairs each week had jammed slots. Some MTA employees even resorted to using chili powder and mace to discourage all of the sucking. 

Rudy Giuliani first waged a war against this cuddle weasel in 1999. In June of that year, the New York City Board of Health voted to uphold a ban on ferrets in the city—owning them had been illegal since 1959, but was unregulated—along with various other “dangerous” animals including polar bears, crocodiles, hippopotamuses, Tasmanian devils, and whales. Later, the New York City Council voted to legalize ferrets, but Giuliani vetoed the bill. The ferret-loving community was outraged. When the executive president of New York Ferret’s Rights Advocacy, David Guthartz, called Giuliani’s weekly radio show to complain, the mayor responded with a controversial rant: “The excessive concern that you have for ferrets is something you should examine with a therapist. Not with me…There is something really, really, very sad about you. You need help. You need somebody to help you. I know you feel insulted by that, but I’m being honest with you. This excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness.”

E.E. Cummings described McSorley’s as “snug and evil.” In one of his many classic New Yorker articles, Joseph Mitchell wrote that, “It is a drowsy place; the bartenders never make a needless move, the customers nurse their mugs of ale [...] The backbone of the clientele, however, is a rapidly thinning group of crusty old men, predominantly Irish, who have been drinking there since they were youths and now have a proprietary feeling about the place.”

The bar itself has remained largely unchanged since Mitchell wore away the seats of its wooden arm chairs in the ‘30s—or even since it opened in the 1850s or ‘60s. But the clientele is drastically different. For starters, there are women. Until August 10, 1970, no women were allowed through the threshold to New York’s oldest Irish pub. Owners of the bar fought to uphold the rule for years to honor the philosophy of Old John McSorley, who, according to Mitchell, “believed it impossible for men to drink with tranquility in the presence of women…” If women entered and did not heed his polite request to leave, McSorley would lead her out and say, “Make haste and get yourself off the premises, or I’ll be obliged to forget you’re a lady.”

Oh, your Facebook profile shows you getting arrested during Occupy? You fought injustice. How cute. When a white police lieutenant shot and killed a black 15-year-old in Harlem in 1964, residents of the Manhattan neighborhood, as well many in Bed-Stuy, rioted for six consecutive nights. In 1969 a group of gay patrons at the Stonewall Inn bar decided to fight LGBT police brutality. Several nights of rioting ensued, inciting the modern gay liberation movement. In 1970, when World Trade Center construction workers didn’t approve of students protesting Kent State shootings and Vietnam, they marched over to Wall Street, grabbed them by their long hippie hair and pummeled them with hard hats. When the city enforced a 1 a.m. curfew in Tompkins Square Park in 1988, punks rioted. When a Guyanese child was hit and killed by a car in a Jewish Hasidic motorcade in 1991, African-Americans and Caribbean-Americans rioted. Nowadays when New Yorkers see injustice, they fight with signs and Guy Fawkes masks. Before the millennium, they met it with fists and Molotov cocktails.

And what comes after rioting? That’s right, children—looting. When Hurricane Sandy left lower New York powerless, few store owners felt any need to board up their windows and stand watch with a shotgun, ready to fight off hoodlums on a rabid hunt for iPads and Beats headphones. But in 1977, when a lightning storm caused a 25-hour blackout, there were 3,700 arrests made, 1,000 fires reported, and 1,600 stores looted. The incident cost the city more than $300 million.

Hip-hop consumed the city back in the day. Perhaps the equipment upgrades many DJs and rappers enjoyed after the blackout of 1977 helped, but the movement really began four years earlier. On August 11, 1973, hip hop was born in the recreation center of an apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in West Bronx. It was on that night that 16-year-old Clive Campbell, also known as Kool Herc, played music for a back-to-school party his sister had arranged. Herc debuted a style he had been perfecting for months. He combined the breaks of songs—extending them by using two copies of the same record—to make music that was easier to groove to. When Hurc’s friend Coke La Rock spontaneously grabbed a mic and began speaking over the music, the attendees witnessed an entirely new genre of music. Hip-hop legends like KRS-One, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, and Busy Bee have since claimed they were all there that fateful night. 

Graffiti came of age on the steel hides of 1970s New York subway cars. For nearly 20 years, riding the subway was like entering a museum where the fare was 30 cents and whatever personal harm or loss you might experience along the ride. But in 1984, David Gunn, the president of the New York City Transit authority began a long-term program to completely rid the subway of artwork that hadn’t been previously approved by the MTA. 

For nearly eight decades, until the last Automat closed in 1991, New Yorkers could buy an entire meal from a machine. When the first Automat was built in Times Square in 1912, all a hungry New Yorker had to do was choose one of the many selections featured below the Sandwich, Soup, Salad, Pie, or Cake section, pop in a nickel, open the glass case, and pull out a dish that had been prepared just hours earlier. What’s remarkable was that the food was usually sanitary and healthy, and the restaurants themselves were fairly classy. If you’ve been in a fast food restaurant recently, then you understand why the golden age of the Automat was amazing.

The Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Beastie Boys, The Misfits, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Television, and The Police were just a few of the acts that played Lower East Side music club CBGB in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Punks rarely had to pay a cover to press up against the three-foot-tall sticker-infested stage and immerse themselves in a wall of sound and sweat.

Before Giuliani, it was easier to find a prostitute in Times Square than a furry-costumed Disney character. Beginning with the Depression, Times Square was your go-to for all things sex: peep shows, grind houses, burlesque. By the ‘60s there were sex shops. By the ‘70s there were topless bars and massage parlors chock-full of crack-fueled sex workers. Now, there's M&M's World.

For about 120 years, the Church of the Holy Communion, located in the Flatiron District, was one of the city’s most respected religious establishments. New York elite like Jay Gould, Jacob Astor, and Cornelius Vanderbilt attended the Gothic Revival church, which was deemed a New York City landmark in 1966. However, by the ‘70s most respectable human beings had fled the neighborhood. The church became a cultural center and then a rehab before being bought by New York club king Peter Gatien. In 1983, Gaiten reopened the deconsecrated location as Limelight—Rudy Giuliani’s worst nightmare.

Limelight featured S&M dancers suspended in cages above a dance floor overflowing with provocateurs and gender-benders, and a maze of lounges where socialites, celebrities, supermodels, and club kids penetrated each other with body parts and syringes. It was a raver’s mecca and where some of the most influential musicians and DJs of the '90s got their start. The mayor was determined to close it down. Giuliani and the DEA did everything in their power to put an end to this devil’s den of dance and drugs. They succeeded in 1997. Limelight reopened a few times, but never returned to its full unholy glory. Now the Limelight is a sad retail center. Peter Gatien lamented the current state of clubs in a 2011 Complex interview.

In the ‘80s, drivers in Manhattan didn’t have to worry much about dirty windshields, thanks to an abundance of squeegee men. They did have to worry about unsolicited squeegee men cleaning their windows then threatening to smash the clean windshield if they didn’t receive payment for their service. Giuliani put squeegee men on his kill list—up there with ferrets and ravers—and they were virtually eradicated during his tenure in office.

In the ‘70s, many buildings in New York City, and especially in the Bronx, were refused mortgages and insurance. Unable to maintain property or pay taxes, many landlords hired arsonists to burn their building so they could collect insurance. By the end of the decade, about 40 percent of South Bronx properties had burned down. Retired Bronx firefighter Tom Henderson told the New York Post: “That smell of burning—it was always there, through the whole borough almost.”

Here’s a fun experiment: Try walking into one of New York’s iconic buildings with a bow and arrow and 450 pounds of steel cable. Then see what happens. That’s exactly what French high-wire artist Philippe Petit and two assistants did on the night of August 6, 1974. Once they made it to the roof of World Trade Center’s south tower, they shot a line to the north tower, then used that to pull the cord across. The next morning, Petit walked out into the 130-foot gap between buildings. He spent the next 45 minutes performing for thousands of gawkers watching from a quarter mile below. The remarkable event is now the subject of a great documentary.

Kokie’s existed during a period when Williamsburg, the industrial wasteland, was evolving into Williamsburg, the wasted bro land. Opening in the early 1990s in a spot that allegedly had been used for cockfighting and gambling, Kokie’s was a Puerto Rican bar that livened up the neighborhood. It had Salsa night with live music and dancing. It had karaoke night. It was just your typical local dive—except for the fact that you could buy cocaine from a man sitting in a booth in the corner. As the area became gentrified and more popular among recent transplants, word spread and Kokie’s was busted several times, leading to its closure in 2001. 

In September of 1994, as a German tourist sat eating gummy bears and taking pictures on the upper-deck of a sightseeing boat cruise passing through the Harlem River, he was shot through his shoulder by a bullet that came from either Manhattan or the Bronx. Fortunately this wasn’t a common occurrence, but as the boat docked nearby at a Bronx park and locals and reporters gathered around the shore, one resident told The New York Times, “At night they’re always shooting out of those buildings,” pointing towards a cluster of housing projects. 

There was no shortage of empty buildings in 1980s Manhattan. So if someone didn’t want to pay to live in an occupied building, they could simply move into an unoccupied one. What they saved in rent they lost in creature comforts like heat, running water, and not having to fight off other squatters willing to kill for a good spot. The most famous squat house was C-Squat, located on Avenue C between 9th and 10th. The tenement gained popularity because it was known as the punk squat—a graffiti-covered part-time venue. The homesteaders welcomed punks to party, bands to play, and skaters to ride the half-pipe in the basement. C-Squat is one of 11 Lower East Side squat houses that became co-ops in 2002. After spending millions of dollars to force occupants out, the city finally approved a plan to give about 250 squatters the chance to become homeowners. Bloomberg’s administration sold the buildings to not-for-profit organization, the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board for one dollar each.

If a squat house was too much stability for you, you could always just camp out in Tompkins Square Park, also known as Tent City. In the ‘80s the Lower East Side park was lined with makeshift shacks. And it wasn’t just the homeless who hung out there. “It was like the old Depression-era Hoovervilles,” says longtime New Yorker Henry Deguara-Pagan. “We used to pass through there all the time. There was a different tent for every drug. A different tent for every need.” 

Bummed that soon you won’t even be able smoke an e-cig on public property? Imagine how pissed New Yorkers were when Ed Koch signed a law banning public drinking in 1976. Before that you could enjoy a “roadie” on the subway if you damn well deserved it after a long work day. OK, you still can. It’ll just cost you a $20 fine if you get caught. Worth the risk, if you ask us. Think of it as your subtle way of slowing down the march of progress.