New York City in the 1970s was a city under serious pressure. The middle class had largely fled to the suburbs, taking their tax dollars with them. A national recession hammered the city’s manufacturing sector, wiping out roughly 500,000 jobs between 1969 and 1974 alone. Unemployment climbed past 10%, and by 1975, more than one million households in the city depended on welfare to get by.
The financial collapse left deep marks on daily life. Crime exploded across every borough. Rapes and burglaries tripled. Auto thefts and felony assaults multiplied. Murders surged from 681 per year to 1,690 — a staggering rise in a short span of time. Budget cuts slashed the police force just as the streets were becoming more dangerous.
Depopulation reshaped whole neighborhoods. When people left and buildings were abandoned, arson followed. Landlords burned their own properties for insurance money. Entire blocks were reduced to rubble and empty lots, leaving behind stretches of the city that looked more like a war zone than one of the world’s great urban centers.
Into this fractured landscape walked photographer Ernie Viskupic with a camera. He documented New York during this turbulent decade with a sharp, unflinching eye. His black and white photographs capture the texture of a city that was struggling — but still alive, still loud, and still full of character.
Viskupic didn’t only point his lens at decay. He found the city’s rhythm in ordinary moments — street vendors, neighborhood kids, commuters rushing through Penn Station, and musicians playing for anyone who would listen. His photographs show a city that refused to be only one thing.
The bridges and waterways of New York appear throughout his work. The Manhattan Bridge looms over scenes of street life below. The Statue of Liberty, viewed from unexpected angles — from inside, from below — becomes something more personal than the iconic monument most people recognize from a distance.
Gene Palma was one of the subway’s best-known drummers during this era, banging out beats for commuters underground. Viskupic captured him — a small but vivid portrait of the informal culture that thrived in New York’s transit system even as the subway itself was deteriorating, covered in graffiti and plagued by crime.
Greenwich Village in Viskupic’s photographs carries a different energy from the rest of the city. The neighborhood was a hub for artists, musicians, and activists throughout the decade, and its streets have a restless, creative quality that his black and white frames preserve well.
Long Island appears in several of his photographs too — the hot dog stands, the power plants, the welcome signs. These images push out from the city itself into its surrounding region, showing that the struggles and textures of the era extended well beyond Manhattan’s streets.
The World Trade Center towers appear in Viskupic’s collection as newly built landmarks — still fresh against the skyline, still a symbol of ambition at a moment when the city itself was on the edge of bankruptcy. New York came within days of defaulting on its debt in 1975 before a last-minute financial rescue kept the lights on.
Stripped and burned cars show up in Viskupic’s work as a symbol of the auto theft epidemic. A gutted Corvette sitting on a city street says more about the crime rate of the era than any statistic. These weren’t rare sights — they were a routine feature of 1970s New York neighborhoods.
Public gatherings and parades also made it into his lens. The Steuben Day Parade, held annually in New York to celebrate German-American heritage, provided a burst of organized civic life against the backdrop of a city that often felt like it was barely holding together.
There is a quietness to some of Viskupic’s most striking frames. The Wall Street area on a Sunday morning, empty of its weekday crowds, becomes something almost eerie — wide streets, tall buildings, and no one in sight. The city that never sleeps had its still moments too.
Viskupic’s collection is a ground-level record of a city at a crossroads. He photographed the infrastructure — road work, heavy industry, power plants — alongside the people living beside and beneath it all. Together, these images build a detailed portrait of New York in one of its hardest decades.
What makes Viskupic’s work stand out is the range. A sharp-dressed man on a sidewalk. Kids hanging out on a stoop. A carnival ride on a rainy day. He moved between the serious and the everyday without losing his eye for what made each scene worth stopping for.
The black and white format strips away distraction. Without color, every frame comes down to light, shadow, and subject. The grain of the film and the contrast of the prints give the photographs a rawness that matches the decade they were made in. Viskupic’s New York looks exactly like what it was: real, unfiltered, and impossible to look away from.
