‘Drop Dead City’: Film Shares the Story of How New York Banded Together  

If you think New York City is chaotic today, you probably weren’t there in the 1970s.

The Bronx was in flames — up to 130 fires each night. In Brooklyn, the 75^th Precinct responded to a homicide nearly every day. Cops and firefighters navigated streets piled with garbage tossed by striking sanitation workers. And if you were a tourist brave —  or crazy — enough to visit, on arrival at Kennedy Airport you received a “Fear City” flyer from policemen warning you not to venture out into the street because of crime.

And then things got a lot worse.

“Drop Dead City,” a new documentary film by Milan resident Michael Rohatyn and Peter Yost, explores a dramatic moment in American history that saw a city of 8 million people brought to the precipice of bankruptcy and social chaos by a perfect storm of debt, greed, ambitious social policy, and poor governance.

The 103-minute film, completed last year, is a thrilling look at why things went so badly wrong, who was to blame, and how the city saved itself at the last hour. “Drop Dead City” also offers useful lessons for troubled cities and towns today.

The great giveaway 

New York City in the 1960s was a generous place, a vibrant working-class hub committed to social betterment. “Politicians — Democrats and Republicans —  truly believed in free education, ultracheap health care, and public subsidies,” said Rohatyn, a wide-eyed Manhattan teenager at the time. “Some people see it as the era of the great giveaway. But in researching the film we realized the city was a great place for most working people to raise a family. If you were in a municipal union, you earned good money and could buy a house.”

“It was all very idealistic and very exciting,” said Betsy Gotbaum, an education leader in the mayor Abe Beame’s office, in a clip from the film.

And then it all imploded. The banks that had been funding the city’s generosity realized this short-term debt was very shaky. An analysis of New York’s accounting practices confirmed their worst fears — the city was $6 billion in debt with no prospect of paying the money back. “There were cancelled checks stuffed in closets all over the place,” said Rohatyn. “It was absurd.”

In 1975 the banks turned off the spigot, leaving New York on life support. Because the city had relied on borrowing not just to build schools but for its payroll, the whole system collapsed like a house of cards. Hundreds of thousands of municipal employees discovered their livelihoods were in danger. Drastic measures had to be taken.    

Throughout the long hot summer of ’75, firehouses and public hospitals closed. Schools were shuttered and rioting cops shut down the Brooklyn Bridge. New York seemed to roll from one crisis to another. Using dramatic footage, “Drop Dead City” documents this gathering storm.

On the night of Oct. 16, Mayor Abe Beame called the White House to inform President Gerald Ford that New York City would declare bankruptcy the next morning. Counselled by his two advisors, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, Ford refused to help, claiming the city had been overgenerous and needed to be humbled.

The next morning, the front page of the New York Daily News proclaimed, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The headline became an instant classic. A year later, Ford would pay for rebuffing New York City: He lost the state and its 41 critical electoral votes to Jimmy Carter who replaced him as president.

But more importantly, Ford’s rejection united the torn city. The police, fire, sanitation, and teachers’ unions, the banks and the politicians, all realized that they depended on one another and stopped feuding. Each entity agreed to sacrifice money for the greater good. The city’s last-minute rescue by these unlikely allies makes for a wild, suspenseful, and unexpectedly moving film. 

“Our goal as filmmakers was to honor the story and the men and women who stepped up to solve this challenge as well as the regular New Yorkers who lived through it,” Rohatyn said.

A shared commitment to survival

“Drop Dead City,” which won the prestigious Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize, is the first feature documentary dedicated to New York’s great fiscal crisis. It’s fresh off a run in New York City, where it played for 14 weeks to sold out audiences.

It’s available on streaming platforms, including Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and Google Play.

The film almost didn’t get made. For Rohatyn, more used to composing film music than filmmaking — he did the score for movies by Meryl Streep and Greta Gerwig — the doc became an albatross that took a decade to finish and emptied his bank account.

“Had I known it would take 10 years to make, I wouldn’t have made the film,” he said.

So why did he do it? “I suddenly realized that a lot of these old lions who were at the center of big events were starting to disappear, and these were incredibly colorful people who had some amazing stories to tell,” said the filmmaker. “I also realized nobody had told this story.”

Finding archival footage proved arduous and almost halted production. But then Yost and Rohatyn had a stroke of luck. “The TV stations had long ago thrown away the footage of their news programs from that time, but when we looked in their basements and storerooms, we found squirreled away in canisters all this amazing b-roll footage,” Rohatyn said. “There were man-in-the street interviews, block parties, chaos, fights, striking cops blocking the Brooklyn Bridge. It was all there and had never before been seen.”  

In the dusty containers they found a collection of hugely entertaining characters, strivers, heroes, fixers, and blowhards. Take Anthony Lofaso, a rough-hewn sanitation worker who eloquently talks about what it was like to grow up in a working class family, tearing up with pride when describing his tightly knit neighborhood.

On the wilder side, there’s media prankster Alan Abel, who responded to the crisis by starting Omar’s School for Beggars, which instructed the newly unemployed on how to panhandle more profitably. The media fell for the story and issued serious prime-time reports about the new “school.”

It’s not some miracle that brought the city back. Rather it was a shared sense of commitment to a place. “New Yorkers came from many different places but they all embraced the city’s identity,” said Rohatyn. “That was the glue. The banks that lent the money were based in New York City. The unions that were earning that money, spent it in New York. The press that reported the story were all based in the city. Nowadays everything is global. There’s much less attachment to place.”

Even President Ford found a reason to help. He was advised that if he allowed New York City to crater, a nationwide depression would ensue. At the last hour, the federal dollars flowed.    

The film highlights the individuals who worked together to save the city, including the remarkable alliance that emerged among labor, Gov. Hugh Carey, and Felix Rohatyn, the filmmaker’s father who, after twice escaping Nazi occupied countries became an investment banker and was appointed by Carey to oversee the city’s rescue.

“My father loved the opportunity to be a public servant,” said Rohatyn. “That’s what he would tell us when he would come home long after midnight. It made him proud. He believed deeply in the ability of government to improve people’s lives.”

For years Rohatyn did not dwell on his father’s role in saving the livelihoods of millions of people. He was busy growing up. He put the events of that mad summer behind him, including the day in July 1975 when, while he was reading a magazine on the porch of his family’s rented house on Long Island, a helicopter suddenly landed in the backyard. Carey stepped out and said, “I need to speak to your father.” 

Rohatyn screened the finished documentary for many of the officials who ran the city at the time, including Harrison Goldin, the Comptroller and the man who uncovered the disaster. “One of the most gratifying things for me was showing the film to the people we wanted to honor, and them liking our film and feeling good about it.”  A few weeks after seeing the film, Goldin died.

Help from Bob Dylan

One of the joys of the film is its killer soundtrack, ranging from the song “Frankenstein” by the Edgar Winter Group, to “Cut the Cake,” by the Average White Band to “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” by WAR. “I wanted every song to be from 1975,” said Rohatyn. “Fortunately, it was an awesome year for music.” But there was a problem. The songs he chose would cost a fortune to acquire. An unlikely savior appeared in the person of Bob Dylan and his manager, Jeff Rosen. “Jeff suggested we use Dylan’s ‘I Threw It All Away” and they gave us the song at a cut rate price,” said Rohatyn. “That allowed us to leverage the rights to the other music.”

The film often feels like a wild time machine ride to New York in its good old bad days, with a gaudy display of electric street life, great music, polyester suits and terrible haircuts.

Still, Rohatyn cautions against romanticizing that era. “I asked every person we interviewed, ‘Would you go back to the city as it was in the 1970s?’ Every one of them said no way, which surprised me, because I am very nostalgic for that period,” he said. “But I was a kid. If you actually had something on the line — a job, a family, or a business to run, it wasn’t fun — it was terrible.”

One of the lessons the film imparts is the limits of liberalism.  “We now know you can’t just pay unions whatever they want,” he said.

Rohatyn wisely does not praise his father in the film. Instead, he calls New York’s rescue “a low point for democracy. You are not supposed to put the affairs of 8 million people into the hands of an unelected group of people.”

Can the solutions that saved New York be applied to troubled cities and towns today? Rohatyn is unsure. “We live in a polarized time. People are nervous about the future. There’s more division than there was back then.”

“But if you look locally, you do see examples of unlikely allies cooperating for the common good.” He cites the example of Red Hook’s new affordable housing project (40 units are in the works). “Not many towns succeed in creating affordable housing projects,” he said. “In Red Hook, a lot of people were against the project for various reasons. But ultimately, people found a shared purpose. People agreed it’s important to make this town more affordable for working families. That required trust.”  

Seen this way, New York City in 1975 was simply following the example of rural America. What the city’s leaders did, and what saved them, is what small towns have always done:  Overcome disagreement and identify something worth saving and sacrifice mutually for the common good, with each group respecting the skills of the other.

For Rohatyn, a more important lesson is that New Yorkers chose to save public institutions. “More than ever, we need to support our public institutions — our schools, our firehouses, our police,” he said. “They are your identity. So step up. Try and be part of civic life in your town. Be where you are from.”