My parents did the best job possible to insulate my sisters and me from the worst of New York's scuzz, focusing us on education, family, church, and a steady stream of social activities with other striving middle-class families as we came up in the southern part of the Bronx. But there was no denying what we saw from the windows of our Ford station wagon as we drove along Bruckner, Westchester or Southern Boulevards, Gun Hill or Boston Road, 161st or 223rd Street in the Boogie Down. The New York I learned to love was one where you could get mugged on the street, have your gold chain snatched off your neck on the subway, and where hookers and pimps walked openly around on 42nd Street in between the Triple X movie theaters and 3-card Monte scammers. (My mother gave me a hatpin when I first started riding the subway to junior high in mid-Manhattan; the pearl-topped sharp was for stabbing perverts and ripoff artists who preyed on innocents and I got to use that sucker!) Something about the Big Apple's very unforgiving nature in those days fascinated me. (So many stories! thought the burgeoning writer in me.)
There was a lot of talk about the black and Puerto Rican street gangs in the early '70s, particularly as we lived in the Soundview neighborhood adjacent to Hunt's Point and then Fort Apache. Tales of shootings, warnings of burglaries, news reports of murders, and rumors of impending gang rumbles abounded. As I recall there were the Black Spades, the Savage Skulls, the Savage Nomads, the Young Saints, and an Italian gang called the Golden Guineas. It was easy for me, a girl who went to all-female schools and had only a faint idea of the violence and risk involved in gang life, to romanticize these streetwise toughs.
My nostalgia for those gritty days have been triggered by two films: One is yet to be released, called Rubble Kings. This is an upcoming documentary about the New York gangs of the late 70s, and how the historic gang truce they effected in the city ultimately fed into the evolution of hip hop culture of the '80s. Afrika Bambaataa, a former leader of the Black Spades, is one of many personalities interviewed for the film. Rubble Kings is reportedly getting a theatrical release and will be released on DVD. See the trailer below.
Looking into the background for Rubble Kings helped me find the 1979 documentary 80 Blocks From Tiffany's. The title is a reference to the distance between the cool and pricey interiors of the legendary jewelry purveyor on Fifth Avenue and the crumbled and dangerous wild west of the South Bronx. 80 Blocks may not have access to Tiffany diamonds but it what it mines is pure historical and sociological gold, capturing raw snapshots of the lives of some of the Savage Nomads and the Savage Skulls of the South Bronx in the 1970s.
From interviews with members about gang life, to cheesy reenactments of some of their basic crimes, to interviews with the gang division officers committed to keeping the upper hand, to a local woman determined to broker peace between the gang members and the neighborhood residents, to reformed gang leaders reminiscing, this doc is astonishing because it lets their narratives speak for themselves. There is no voiceover, there are no title cards with statistics or warnings, and the film doesn't sermonize about right or wrong. The film just unspools, letting the viewer draw his/her own conclusions. Some might see that as the film's drawback -- the filmmakers don't take a deep dive on the more negative impact that gang culture had on the neighborhoods, springing from poverty, crime, and drug use to perpetuate those cycles. The film even makes it a point to show how in some cases -- like the New York Blackout of '77 -- gang members even protected local residents.
Most revealing are two segments: first, a tense and hilarious attempt at negotiation by one gang member with a hated rival to postpone the date of their fistfight because he hasn't yet recovered from a previous beatdown. And two, the fun of a summer block party is almost destroyed by one gang member's jealousy over a romantic rival, with a scene-ending cut to an interview with the gang moll in question who -- now sporting a busted eye -- offers a flimsy story about how it happened.
80 Blocks From Tiffany's isn't well known, but the documentary was enough to inspire the name of a 2013 mixtape put together by none other than Pete Rock with Camp Lo.
If you want to take a trip back to experience the gang codes, train graffiti, burned and abandoned buildings, the beat and the look of '70s New York, 80 Blocks From Tiffany's is your vehicle. And I'm looking forward to checking out Rubble Kings.
