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Not long ago, actor Kevin Sorbo shared a video of the “peaceful” bustling streets of Manhattan in 1975. “Look at how everybody seems to be enjoying their lives,” he noted, “… contrast it to today. Our country has been ruined.”
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It’s trendy for populists on both right and left to romanticize American life in the ’60s and ’70s. But the real New York City of 1975 was a massive, litter-strewn, putrid, dangerous dump. There were 1,654 homicides in the city that year, in comparison to 303 in 2025. There were over 83,000 reported muggings of people “enjoying themselves on the streets” of New York in 1975. Thousands more went unreported because of impotent policing.
Pimps and muggers might have been “enjoying their lives” around Times Square, but normal people weren’t. Taking a heavily graffitied subway into the city with my parents from Queens meant descending into a filth-laden tunnel with an intolerable stench, a place where people casually threw whatever was in hand on the floor. By the mid-1970s, there were 250 felonies — not misdemeanors, felonies — on the subways every week.
Middle- and working-class New Yorkers got sick of wading through garbage and crime and began leaving for the suburbs. My family joined the exodus from New York in the late 1970s, a decade in which the city lost around a million residents. The parents of virtually every kid I knew growing up had taken a similar journey. While big cities in the Midwest emptied out due to deindustrialization, New York became unlivable due to the policies of its leaders.
It’s worth remembering all of this as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani remains hospitalized and in critical condition. Let’s hope he recovers. But for many people, the 81-year-old will be remembered as a cartoonish, now-disbarred defender of President Donald Trump during the 2020 election, rather than an impressive political force that saved America’s greatest city.
The son of working-class Brooklyn parents, he first came to national attention as a prosecutor by outmaneuvering corrupt New York politician Bertram Podell during a cross-examination until he pleaded guilty on a bribery charge. By 1981, at only 37, he’d secured the third-highest position in the Justice Department, responsible for the entire criminal division, including 94 prosecutors.
After moving to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Giuliani gained national fame for his prosecution of mafia families and his freeing of the Fulton Fish Market. That was courageous. He also had to fight the powerful New York unions to get it done — even more courageous for anyone with political ambitions in the city.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that Giuliani put crooked high-profile financiers such as Ivan Boesky and Michal Milken in prison, and obtained a then-record $200 million settlement from trader and fugitive Marc Rich, later pardoned by former President Bill Clinton.
As a political matter, Giuliani was never a movement conservative. His later presidential ambitions were always something of a fantasy, considering his progressive views on social issues. He was a liberal of the old school, an outlook that predated the radical and permissive variants of ’60s-’70s leftism that began degrading urban American life.
“For purposes of ethics and of law,” he once said, “we elevate human beings by holding them responsible. Ultimately, you diminish human individuality and importance when you say, ‘Oh, well, you’re not really responsible for what you did. Your parents are responsible for it, or your neighborhood is responsible for it, or society is responsible for it.’ In fact, if you harm another human being, you’re responsible for that.”
By 1989, when Giuliani first ran for mayor, the city had rebounded from the precipice of bankruptcy, but not from crime. Giuliani ran as a reformer on both the Republican and Liberal Party tickets against Democrat David Dinkins, who had upset incumbent Ed Koch in the primaries. Giuliani lost by the thinnest margin in the city’s history. It was the next year, not during the bleak 1970s, that New York experienced its record high of 2,245 murders. The hapless Dinkins’s term was punctuated by race riots and inept governance.
Giuliani came back and won in 1993. During his two terms, crime in the city was halved, dropping in every category. For decades, critics argued that Giuliani was the beneficiary of an organic national trend in crime reduction and urban gentrification. And conditions were certainly improving around the country by the 1990s. Still, the violent crime drop in New York greatly outpaced the national average.
Giuliani also signed a slew of tax cuts that helped bring back businesses and improve neighborhoods far faster than any big city. Over 1 million New Yorkers were on welfare rolls when Giuliani was inaugurated. Around 460,000 remained when he left office in 2001.
As mayor, Giuliani famously adopted the “broken windows” theory of James Wilson and George Kelling, which argued that forcefully enforcing minor offenses and illegality would stop the slide into more violent crime. Many people of my generation, myself included, were critical of Giuliani’s stripping New York of its “character.” A bit of danger, mayhem, and relative affordability was a draw for the young. Not so much for those with families or businesses.
And whenever I’m back in New York these days, it feels like the city is regressing. Not because I worry about being mugged or murdered. Crime is still relatively low. It’s the turnstile jumpers, graffiti, beggars, and litter. When you hear New York Times podcasters rationalizing “microlooting,” you know where it ends. The small things foreshadow worse to come.
Giuliani was forever being smeared as a racist by his critics. It’s true that the mayor’s base was white Catholic and Jewish voters in Staten Island, Queens and Brooklyn, but he increased his totals across the board in his second run in 1997 — including the share of the black vote from around 5% to around 20%. As his biographer Fred Siegel noted, “Giuliani treated crime in Harlem or East New York as every bit as seriously as crime on Fifth Avenue or Park.”
My personal favorite Giuliani moment was his ejection of terrorist leader Yasser Arafat from a performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony by the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 1995. This “extraordinarily gross gesture,” according to the Washington Post, occurred after the first bombing attempt on the World Trade Center in 1993, which included two Palestinian terrorists, and a few years before al Qaeda utilized Arafat’s hijacking innovations to take down the Twin Towers. Today’s progressive mayor of New York would probably rename Elie Wiesel Way after Arafat.
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The brand of unwavering moral certitude that would grate at liberal sensibilities, would also lift the mayor to national fame after 9/11. It was often said that anyone would have rallied the city after the attacks. Giuliani, who had already governed an ungovernable city, would display the kind of energy and confidence after unprecedented trauma that no other politician has in memory. He mirrored the emotional resonance and righteous anger of the people.
Giuliani left a safer and more prosperous city than he inherited, changing the place forever. His endorsed successor Michael Bloomberg, more or less, kept the city on the track. Far from perfect, Giuliani was a politician who genuinely loved his town and kept the promises he made. That’s more than most can say.
