Shoe Leather

In season two, New York Drop Dead, reporters step back into the 1970s. They go beyond the bell bottoms and disco to explore what made this decade notorious in New York’s history. A decade in which the Big Apple went by a far more sinister nickname — Fear City. The city was broken and broke. When city officials asked the federal government for a bailout — President Gerald Ford told them they were on their own. The next day the New York Daily News ran the now infamous front page headline– Ford to City: Drop Dead.

It was the decade the lights went out and The Bronx was burning. When peaceful protestors turned to making bombs, when the legendary Apollo Theater nearly closed for good and the man who saved it went to prison. The decade in which women’s rights would take center stage.

Find out how things have changed since the 1970s – and how they’ve stayed the same.

In the 1990s, in the shadow of the FBI’s large-scale takedown of New York’s most infamous mafia family, an Indian immigrant was quietly building his own criminal organization. Gurmeet Singh Dhinsa came to the United States from the Punjab region of India

On a hot summer night in 1991, seven-year-old cousins Gavin and Angela were getting ready to play. Gavin was undoing his bike chain while Angela eagerly stood nearby.

Only a few moments separated them from Yosef Lifsh’s car and what would soon become one of the worst periods of unrest New York City has ever seen.

In this episode, we go back to that fateful accident that sparked what many know as the Crown Heights Riots. Over the next three days, this Brooklyn neighborhood fell into chaos with residents, police and community leaders clashing.

In looking back at what happened on August 19th, 1991, we explore Crown Heights itself, a neighborhood with many cultures and communities living side by side and ask: why did this happen and how did it get so bad?

In the late afternoon of February 3, 1990, two-day-old Steven Lyons was kidnapped from a Brooklyn hospital— a feat that seems nearly impossible with hospital security measures in 2020. Now, 30 years later, Shoe Leather reporters, Rachel and Elize, follow in the footsteps of the brazen baby-napper with the help of news archives, child abduction experts, and social media.

To read the full transcript, visit shoeleather.podcasts.library.columbia.edu

In the 1990’s, one organization dedicated a decade of work to gain FDA approval of a drug that promised to revolutionize abortion in America. Shoe Leather: the Abortion Pill follows the Population Council’s effort to bring mifepristone – and medical abortion – to the United States. Three decades later, we’ll relive the fight alongside those who were in the center of the ring and explore why some are still waiting for that revolution to arrive.