Was the south bronx really this bad back in the day?
- Thread starter FreedS[ohh]lave
- Start date
Francis White
i been away to long, my feeling died.
Ozone Park? okay, i went to Christ the King and i know that Howard Beach crew ran everything, i got stabbed my freshman year there and HB handled the Ozone Park guy who did it in a permanent way. I transferred out right away , that school had zero control at the time.Exactly. I grew up in a mob neighborhood (Ozone Park), the mob was a normal way of life. People watch movies like Goodfellas and love it for the characters and the stories and just how out there everything was. Coming from that environment, we love it just as much but for us it's like watching a movie about the neighborhood. We laugh at things the average viewer doesn't even notice. Around middle school my parents moved out to Long Island and it was such a culture shock for me that my peers didn't know who John Gotti was. I went from being 7-8 years old seeing some mobsters pistol whiped a guy right in front of me and thrown into the back of car like it was nothing to being around Italian kids that didn't even know what the mafia was.
It wasto me lol.
Even if you're a law abiding citizen and you do the right thing with your life, you would be surprised how deep some of the negative things run in you. And I'm not even talking crime wise just ways to handle yourself in public. I remember the first time I went to dinner with my GF and her friend the friends husband. And I was amazed how no one cursed at the dinner table or was loud when speaking lol.
MoneyBags
Dapper Don Don Boss of Bosses Chief of Chiefs
what y'all know about that fear of uncertainty as you get off a train and go up the stairs like "what am i about to run into" and seen crowds of people and fires everywhere and it sounding like a coliseum outside. crazy.
tremonthustler1
aka bx_representer
And let's be honest: the danger hasn't really gone away. Now you deal with a bunch of kids who kill just to kill, who have no morals, no principles, no value for life. They'll murk anyone, and in some ways that's more dangerous.
Even in the early '90s, the music was better. The style was fresh. Everyday there was something new. Everything now is a rehash of something done before. It forces you to grow up quicker, so by the time you're an adult you have a Ph.D in street smarts.
NYC Rebel
...on the otherside of the pond
That's the thing. The drug game of the 80's and 90's fueled lots of the killing. Outside of strays, the people who usually got got were caught up in the game. While the violence has dropped, the senseless for nothing killings have risen IMO. Cats do shyt just for GP now.
The funny thing is, most of those kids are byproducts of the drug trade destroying their families in the 80's and 90's. I worked for the Legal Rights Division in Brooklyn and the Bronx in the mid 90's. If you read the case files I had access to with that amount of kids in both boroughs born with a "Toxicolgy to Cocaine" and streets like Clay in the Bronx and Blake in Brooklyn, the shyt was outright scary and felt AWFULLY segmented and systematic. I dont' care what ANYONE says.
the next guy
Superstar
THE NATURE BOY ENJOYS THESE STORIES AND WANTS MORE WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
The Warriors was actually a documentary.
I grew up in the bronx and in the early parts of the 80s it was a shythole. Truthfully there's a lot of dudes that are dead and locked up that didn't deserve to walk this earth. Foul nikkas with zero regard for human life. They fukked with my childhood because I believed certain things were normal. shyt like "its normal for cars to get broken into", or hearing about people who got shot, or dudes who sold crack. Back in the day there was an abundance of foul dudes that like. Today? Not so much
FreedS[ohh]lave
Banned
But Harlem is far from being the worst ghetto in New York. In the South Bronx, where European movie companies now shoot their footage on the destruction of Germany after WW II, there are districts where nine out of ten people die an unnatural death - from murder, hunger, overdose, rat bites, etc.
DaRealness
I think very deeply
TBH one of the good memories I have of the old NYC is the fact that back in the late 80s to early 90s when I was there, it had that whole 'birthplace of hip hop' aura to it and it was like no other city.
Aside from all the madness, there was a lot of positive energy and creativity. I used to see tons of rappers around the way all the time and been around the corner where videos were being filmed plus every other corner you went there was a group of dudes and chicks freestyling for the love of it.
Back then, you actually CARED about the music that was coming out because most artists had credibility and you didn't have nearly as much of the clown shyt you have now. There was a respect for the culture that I just don't sense anymore.
Aside from all the madness, there was a lot of positive energy and creativity. I used to see tons of rappers around the way all the time and been around the corner where videos were being filmed plus every other corner you went there was a group of dudes and chicks freestyling for the love of it.
Back then, you actually CARED about the music that was coming out because most artists had credibility and you didn't have nearly as much of the clown shyt you have now. There was a respect for the culture that I just don't sense anymore.
NYC Rebel
...on the otherside of the pond
Ehhh......I think that respect for the culture thing is way too overrated. We just called it living everyday and niqqas moved on.
Put it this way....the cats I came up with were great graff artist, tagging trains and were the best break dancing clique in Brooklyn back in the early 80's. A couple of them used to go to school uptown, so they were always up to speed on the illest shyt since BK was really not on pace with the BX and Queens like that when it came to hip hop. So nice were these cats, they came in 2nd place out of 100 contestants for a spot in this scene in Beat Street at the Roxy which they narrowly missed out on.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu3X7rf9i5A"]Beat Street Subway Battle - YouTube[/ame]
Well...the next year, crack came around, and two of them started going uptown for very different reasons. They wanted to hustle and sell drugs and went uptown to get their work. The others kept up with it and was the producer for X-Clan before passing.
did they "respect" the culture going that route? Please....it wasn't about "the culture." It was just a bunch of NY niqqas living everyday and changing with the socio-economic changes all around us. Niqqas moved on from that. Niqqas weren't on some "we need to hold on to this." We were just living. People see those days in hindsight and do this "preserve the culture thing." That's cool........but it isn't real. shyt got real. Niqqas weren't getting stabbed anymore. Wasn't just a cat letting off in the air at a hip hop party. Niqqas started dying. That fun loving moment of the early 80's came to pass. No one cared to look back.
Im just putting this here for future reference
Download: Camp Lo And Pete Rock - 80 Blocks From Tiffany's Mixtape | The Smoking Section
Download: Camp Lo And Pete Rock - 80 Blocks From Tiffany's Mixtape | The Smoking Section
Sansprix
Around the way girl.
I remember us kids not knowing what they were and collecting them
like it was cool and shyt.
42nd street is like Disney World compared to how it was back then. I remember my mom going in on my brother because he skipped school to go to 42nd street because it was like the forbidden fruit for us.
Nicely said. Even with all the crazy shyt that I witnessed growing up in the BX, it was still the best times of my life. I cherish those memories and my childhood as a whole and it's really because of where I grew up.
Link? I saw that copies of the film were fetching for $300 on ebay 