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AHC: Kill New York

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Walpurgisnacht

It was in the Year of Maximum Danger
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Through most of the Seventies, New York was on the rocks; deindustrialisation, white flight, a corrupt police department, crime, debt, and fire ravaged the city. Various factors—the Wall Street stock market boom and the corresponding real estate boom, and the shift to a service economy—helped it rebound, but plenty of cities in similar straits didn’t make it. How can you make sure the infamous headline is fulfilled, and New York genuinely drops dead?
 
Walpurgisnacht said:
Through most of the Seventies, New York was on the rocks; deindustrialisation, white flight, a corrupt police department, crime, debt, and fire ravaged the city. Various factors—the Wall Street stock market boom and the corresponding real estate boom, and the shift to a service economy—helped it rebound, but plenty of cities in similar straits didn’t make it. How can you make sure the infamous headline is fulfilled, and New York genuinely drops dead?
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A worse 1971 gold standard situation somehow causes a global recession.

Alternatively,just have JFK survive and thus the Oil Scam causes a recession and Barry Goldwater becomes Prez.
 
One obvious candidate to me would be to have the City fail to avoid default in October 1975. It was something which came down to the zero hour and which IOTL was only really avoided (arguably) by a pension fund (The NYC Teacher's Retirement Fund) betraying their fiduciary duty to pensioners.

How nasty that bankruptcy gets is anyone's guess- at the time it was predicted a default and movement to payment prioritization would lead to multiple bank failures, and it is an open question of how hardline Ford would remain on not doing some kind of bailout, but bankruptcy would make everything for the City more difficult moving forward and would accelerate movement out of the city, especially because teachers were targeted for a reduction in force and schools were expected to see interruption of service.
 
Do you need another big American city to take off as well? New York could hang on for dear life until circumstances improve as long as there's not somewhere else that business/culture/immigration decides to go instead
 
Charles EP M. said:
Do you need another big American city to take off as well? New York could hang on for dear life until circumstances improve as long as there's not somewhere else that business/culture/immigration decides to go instead
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No shortage of Sun Belt cities which have benefitted at the expense of Chicago and New York (and Philadelphia and Detroit) basically since the advent of cheap air conditioning.

Just looking between 1970 and 1980, NYC lost 820K people without bankruptcy. Detroit by contrast only lost around 300K in the same period.

EDIT: I will say I guess it depends on what you mean by 'dead'. The city could be smaller, less wealthy and more crime ridden even until today (say, negative population growth from 1970 to now) and would still be America's largest city.
 
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The thing is, what do you actually mean by 'killing' New York?

You could have the 70s go even worse, double the number who left and have that continue through the 80s so that 3.2 million people leave over 20 years - an utterly calamitous decline that is unprecedented in human history outside of war or natural disaster.

It would *still* be the nation's largest city. Maybe number 2 if LA absorbs a large chunk of that missing number.
 
Alex Richards said:
The thing is, what do you actually mean by 'killing' New York?

You could have the 70s go even worse, double the number who left and have that continue through the 80s so that 3.2 million people leave over 20 years - an utterly calamitous decline that is unprecedented in human history outside of war or natural disaster.

It would *still* be the nation's largest city. Maybe number 2 if LA absorbs a large chunk of that missing number.
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Yeah back of the envelope, if NYC suffered the same population trajectory as Detroit did (which is exceptionally unlikely) 1970-2020 it would end up being America's second largest city and would still edge out Chicago.
 
Walpurgisnacht said:
Through most of the Seventies, New York was on the rocks; deindustrialisation, white flight, a corrupt police department, crime, debt, and fire ravaged the city. Various factors—the Wall Street stock market boom and the corresponding real estate boom, and the shift to a service economy—helped it rebound, but plenty of cities in similar straits didn’t make it. How can you make sure the infamous headline is fulfilled, and New York genuinely drops dead?
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To take it on a different path, OBL manages to get a hold of one of the loose Soviet nukes in the 1990s and has suicide bombers detonate it in the city. That would very much count as dead, just not "naturally" as you seem to want here.
 
SpanishSpy said:
Stanislav Petrov sleeps in.
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Leaving aside any issue of how much impact he actually had (It's widely accepted that if he hadn't called it off a false alarm, someone else probably would have in the same chain), a nuclear Fuldapocalypse that would destroy a lot more than just NYC feels like cheating.

History Learner said:
To take it on a different path, OBL manages to get a hold of one of the loose Soviet nukes in the 1990s and has suicide bombers detonate it in the city. That would very much count as dead, just not "naturally" as you seem to want here.
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This, while not impossible, is highly implausible. Despite the 1990s being the high water mark for potential nuclear terrorism in a variety of ways (fall of the USSR, general rise in terrorist audacity until 9/11), none of the few known attempts came even close to making/acquiring a working bomb. And even if they did get a device that they could detonate at full triple digit kiloton+ power and could reliably get it into position without being detected or even more likely, ratted out...

...I have a feeling (yes, this is a subjective character judgement) that bin Laden didn't have the psychology to actually order something he knew would have made him world public enemy number one. Again, there's no way to conclusively prove any of these, but A: There's evidence or at least reasoned speculation that he underestimated both how much damage the kamikaze strikes would have actually done and the response. It's harder to feel that way with a full-power nuke. And bin Laden comes across to me as less of a mega-fanatic and more of a rich radical chic terrorist dilettante who chose radical Islam because it was cool at the time. More subjective but yet another strike against it.

(Look, I've read so much about potential nuclear terrorism that I felt I had to give a long response :p )
 
Charles EP M. said:
Do you need another big American city to take off as well? New York could hang on for dear life until circumstances improve as long as there's not somewhere else that business/culture/immigration decides to go instead
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That's something I've wondered about previously – if the city defaults in 1975 and things continue to decline with conditions getting bad enough could the stock exchange decide to relocate?
 
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JesterBL said:
Yeah back of the envelope, if NYC suffered the same population trajectory as Detroit did (which is exceptionally unlikely) 1970-2020 it would end up being America's second largest city and would still edge out Chicago.
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TBH, the difference between NYC and Detroit is 1) it does not nearly have the same parasitic suburbs problem that plagues midwestern metro areas and 2) Detroit is not at first approximation one of the best natural harbors on the planet.
 
Roger II said:
like it is very hard to beat the combination of "world's best natural harbor" and "easiest route across the Appalachians into the interior US"
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I'm really not sure that this is a good explanation for New York's preeminence in the modern era, because the Port declined in importance over the whole time period (its only 4th by tonnage nowadays) and passenger freight was more or less gone by the late Fifties.
 
OK fair. I will say one other thing, which is that AIUI the transition of NYC from industrial center to financial/operational World Capital was already underway in the 50s (see The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn; when will I ever not love that book?)
 
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