Grim and Gritty New York in the 1970s: Powerful Photos by Jean-Pierre Laffont

New York City in the 1970s was broke, dangerous, and falling apart — and French photojournalist Jean-Pierre Laffont was there to document all of it.

The city was in a full financial crisis by the mid-70s. Garbage piled up on streets during sanitation strikes. The subway system ran on neglect — trains were covered in graffiti inside and out, tracks were unreliable, and riders took their chances every time they went underground. Entire neighborhoods in the Bronx were burning down, landlords torching their own buildings to collect insurance money rather than pay to maintain them. Arson was so common that the South Bronx looked like a bombed-out city.

Crime was climbing every year. In 1971, the city recorded 1,466 murders. By 1979, that number had risen to over 1,800. Times Square was the center of the sex trade, lined with peep shows, adult theaters, and street prostitution operating in plain sight. Police were underfunded and understaffed. Response times stretched. People learned to keep their heads down.

Laffont moved through all of it with his camera. He photographed the street-level reality of a city that had been abandoned by its own government — Washington famously refused to bail New York out in 1975, prompting the New York Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Laffont didn’t just photograph decay. He documented the people living inside it. His frames captured the tension between a city rotting at its edges and the millions of residents who still had to wake up every morning and get on with their lives.

#1 Two men ‘flip the bird’ at the Central Park crowd that’s formed as they compete in the kissing contest during New York’s inaugural Gay Pride celebration on 28 June 1970.

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#2 A fist raised in protest from behind the bars at Toms Prison, Manhattan, on 28 September, 1972.

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#3 Muhammad Ali finger-pointing during the weigh-in before his second boxing match with Joe Frazier on 23 January, 1974, in New York. Ali won the fight and regained the title.

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#4 Two homeless men squat in the shadow of the recently completed World Trade Center in October, 1975. New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy and the World Trade Center sat largely vacant.

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#5 A Ku Klux Klan meeting in Dunham Springs, LA, December 1976.

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#6 Valerie Mayers shows off her biceps backstage before winning the Ms Empire State Competition in New York, 20 June 1981.

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#7 On Fox Street in the Bronx, an abandoned Plymouth Savoy becomes a jungle gym for kids to play on in the summer of 1966.

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#8 Presidential candidate and New York senator Robert Kennedy greets supporters on a campaign stop in Fort Greene, Brooklyn on 1 April, 1968.

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#9 A young couple kisses as the chaos of the crowd whirs around them with an estimated 600,000 rock fans on July 28, 1973. The Summer Jam at Watkins Glen was a 1973 rock festival which once received the Guinness Book of World Records entry for “Largest audience at a pop festival.”

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#10 A prostitute leans playfully on a cop car on 42nd Street Times Square, May, 1980. The police struggled to keep up with the onslaught of crime in the area, and at times seemed to be playing a friendly game of cat and mouse with the hookers.

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