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The New York Shooting That Defined an Era | The New Yorker

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On a mild December day in 1984, a man named Bernie Goetz shot four Black teen-agers on a subway. The incident galvanized the city. Are we still living in its wake?

Save this story Save this story The New York of the nineteen-eighties was, warily, a city in transition. The frightening “Taxi Driver” New York of the previous decade—steaming manholes, blackouts, riots—still hung over the town, but so did the potent downtown renaissance that had begun at the same time, stretching from punk music at CBGB to a still intact SoHo, where a genuine village of art reigned and the world crowded into 420 West Broadway on Saturdays to see what might happen next. Yuppies, as they were called, were a real phenomenon. The idea that young professionals might build their li

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