I remember keeping my head at a slight angle down while occassionally looking back, so as to not make eye contact.

Speaking of kidnappings, when I was a kid in the ’60s and ’70s, I was not allowed to tell anyone what work my parents did, for fear of kidnapping. It was so rampant in those days.

I grew up on the block of Alex’s grandparents and I am guilty of being the Upper West Side jewish liberal intelligentsia that Woody Allen makes fun of in Annie Hall. I’m still close by even if we’re infiltrated by observant religious types, whose political affiliation are not known to me.

The kinds of friends I have now are not that different from the ones I grew up with. So not that much has changed.

As for the yippies and subsequently the hippies, i think they were in response to the rigidity and conformity of the ’50s. The hippies, I don’t think affected the crime rate so much as they affected the lawlessness of the ’70s. the pendulum having swung in such a far direction. Those of us in the ’70s were sucked into the aftermath. We were all so under-parented for instance.

I know!!!

I was just talking about that a week or so ago with a friend of mine that didn’t grow up in NY. Getting jumped was something that caused you to always watch your back. You always kept your head in a swivel, especially if you were walking through “foreign lands” – a neighborhood where you didn’t know anyone.

It’s weird, now you go to neighborhoods you aren’t familiar with and you don’t have the same uneasiness you had back in 80s and 90s.

On a very rational level, I think that kind of behavior is absurd in the face of the numbers. As a parent, though, I completely understand it.

I’ve lived on a small street in a small town for over 4 years, and I don’t know all my neighbors – there are some I’ve never even seen. I don’t feel comfortable relying on strangers, even if they are my neighbors, to keep an eye out on my minds. Contrast that with, say, my grandparents, who knew everyone for 20 houses in any direction on their street very well, and never had any worries about me and my brother walking to the corner store by ourselves.

When I came to Boston for law school, one of the first things I learned was what parts of the city you could safely go through at night alone – and what parts you couldn’t (or shouldn’t).

I agree with Podhoretz’s classification of UWS Liberalism as “a lived-in leftism, a legacy leftism, dull and humorless and orthodox, inherited from parents and grandparents.” And I’m saying that as an UES Liberal.

These are the types of people who went to Bella Abzug fundraisers and probably really enjoy Jules Feiffer cartoons….and thats cool, its just a very specific kind of liberalism (urbane, ethnic, Jewish in the sense of “all New Yorkers are at least a little bit Jewish”).

Of course these are also the types of people who eventually rejected that liberalism and went way the hell out the other way and became Neo-Cons. A philosophy that combines the irrational romanticism of old-line liberalism with the utterly terrifying world view of 21st century conservatism. YAY PROGRESS!!

Really I guess all I’m trying to say is that post-Giuliani crime stats are juked to within an inch of their life and Robert Moses was out of his mind.

/end rant.