Shoe Leather

In the 1970s, New York City was broke. Today, we know the city eventually bounced back, but at what cost? When a city is broke, who pays?

In 1970, Bella Abzug took on an incumbent Democratic Congressman––and won. A tough Jewish lawyer raised in the Bronx, Bella would become one of the icons of second-wave feminism, passing laws that changed the lives of men and women. 50 years after she first ran for Congress, Bella has had a resurgence. In the past few years there have been plays, movies, and TV shows about her life. Why does she still spark such fascination today? How did she rise to power so quickly? And why didn’t she stay in office longer? All we’ll say for now is that everyone we interviewed for this podcast couldn’t stop talking as soon as we said the words “Bella Abzug.”

On March 6, 1970, a townhouse in New York City’s Greenwich Village blew up. After unearthing large quantities of dynamite in the wreckage, local officials determined that the townhouse’s basement had been used as a makeshift bomb factory.

Three people died in the explosion and the two women who survived would be on the run for the rest of the decade. They were a group of white, upper class, twenty-somethings, who only a few years before demonstrated in peaceful protest against the Vietnam War.

What drove them to start building bombs in the basement of a Greenwich Village townhouse? The answer begins on college campuses in the late sixties.

On the night of July 13, 1977, a citywide power failure plunged New York’s ten million residents into darkness. Chaos ensued. There was looting in every borough, with hundreds of fires set and thousands of arrests — but just one murder. The victim was 17-year-old Brooklyn native Dominick Ciscone.

Over 40 years later, the Ciscone case is still unsolved, despite multiple witnesses, decades of police attention, and even some anonymous tips. Because that murder might not have been part of the Blackout’s chaos at all — it might have been planned, not by someone who anticipated the power going out, but by someone who saw an opportunity to kill in the dark.

The Apollo Theater — the venue that shaped 20th-century Black music more than any other — shut its doors in the mid-1970s and stayed closed for years. It almost disappeared for good. But a mysterious buyer purchased the theater and reopened it in 1978. According to unofficial histories of the Apollo, the new owner was a man named Guy Fisher, one of the biggest heroin kingpins New York City has ever seen. The official history of the Apollo doesn’t ever mention Guy Fisher, and we wanted to know why. Our investigation uncovered a story of ambition. Of a love triangle. Of violence. And of redemption.