‘Drop Dead City’ explores how New York (almost) went bankrupt

Michael Rohatyn and Peter Yost look back at the 1970s moment when the president, sort of, told New York City to drop dead.

“The city was on the balls of its ass,” is the term I remember being used, in a documentary whose name I don’t remember, for the financial condition of New York City in around 1975.

That year, due to years of fiscal mismanagement, the nation’s largest city was on the brink of municipal bankruptcy, with the president of the United States, Gerald Ford, announcing that he would oppose a federal bailout of the city.

“Ford to City: Drop Dead” was the famous headline, although Ford never used the words “drop dead,” and was always annoyed at the implication that he had. Aside from his pardon of Richard Nixon, it was probably the most famous moment of Ford’s brief presidency.

Now, 50 years after those events, we have an outstanding archival doc about that moment. Drop Dead City is directed by Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn; Yost is a veteran documentarian, while Rohatyn is the son of the one of the architects of the rescue, although this is something not acknowledged, directly, in the film.

A DOC NYC premiere last fall, Drop Dead City, naturally, opened in New York City last week, and will land on VOD platforms later this year.

It’s the fall of 1975. Abe Beame, an outer-borough clubhouse politician, wildly equipped for the moment, is the mayor, while Hugh Carey is the newly elected governor. And Ford was president, the first ever not to be elected; the film tries to make the case that Ford’s callousness towards New York cost him the election in 1976.

An audit by the city’s new comptroller — the previous comptroller was Beame himself — has made it clear that the city is deep in the hole, to the tune of $6 billion, and that only rudimentary standards of municipal accounting have been practiced for a long time (they were doing the books, essentially, in crayon.) And the city didn’t even have a Yankees World Series run that year to soften the blow (it was the Reds and Red Sox that year, although the Yanks would return to the series the next year and win it all in ’77, against the backdrop of more crazy New York stuff.)

Ultimately, a solution was reached, one that made no one happy — the unions, in particular, had to take a haircut — but at least avoided an actual municipal bankruptcy.

Through vintage interviews and other archival footage, we get the whole story of how this happened, and how New York clawed its way out. And it’s told through a large procession of heavily accented New York Characters, from city officials to union stalwarts. There’s a combination of the usual “we’re New Yorkers- we’re tough!” cliche, and wonkish descriptions of urban financial minutiae- and if you like that combo, you’re likely to enjoy the film.

It’s an exploration of a New York that doesn’t really exist anymore, although from the dirtiness to the danger to the fiscal calamity, there’s a strong case to be made that things there are better today. It did produce some great culture, though, including some outstanding music that’s included here, like Loudon Wainwright’s song about the moment: