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See the Bronx in the Days of The Get Down

2 minute read
Teenagers in the South Bronx in 1977.
South Bronx teenagers in front of abandoned tenement burnt-out buildings, South Bronx, New York, August 1977.Alain Le Garsmeur—Getty Images
By Lily Rothman and Liz Ronk

New York City in 1977 was notoriously tough. With the Son of Sam murders, economic disaster and a July blackout that was the occasion for widespread looting and crime, the city was in bad shape. And nowhere exemplified that situation like the South Bronx did.

Mary Cronin, a TIME Correspondent sent to the South Bronx in the wake of the blackout, noted that, with some 2,000 stores affected by crime during that episode, “store owners gaze angrily at the rubble, the empty shelves and the twisted grilles hanging from their windows.”

As the magazine reported late that year, President Jimmy Carter called his visit to inspect the region “a very sobering trip” and noted that he toured “several blocks of burned-out buildings, rubble-choked vacant lots and garbage-strewn streets in the South Bronx of New York City” before ordering an aide to “devise a salvage plan for the 3-sq.-mi. area, where about 400,000 people now live (compared with about 530,000 in 1970).”

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But, as these images of the Bronx in the 1970s show, a place of great need was still very much alive. One facet of that life—music—is the subject of the new Netflix series The Get Down.

The musical series finds its characters in the South Bronx in 1977, in the early days of hip-hop. And there’s no doubt that, in that “very sobering” time, something new was being born.

“Originating in the South Bronx in the mid-’70s, rap music is a cultural anthropologist’s mother lode,” TIME would note in 1983. “It combines musical influences as disparate as disco, George Clinton funk, conventional R & B and Ennio Morricone scores for Italian westerns, cross-pollinates them with the Jamaican disc jockey’s art of ‘toasting’ (talking over the instrumental breaks in records) and a street kid’s fondness for boasting, synthesizes the results with some distinctly contemporary audio technology and winds up with a sound that invites deejays at local dance palaces to ‘scratch’ the surface.”

Bronx Day Parade, May 1971.
Bronx Day Parade, May 1971. Tom Cunningham/NY Daily News Archive—Getty Images
Group portrait of members of Bronx street gang the Dragons, 1975.
Group portrait of members of Bronx street gang the Dragons, 1975.Robert R. McElroy—Getty Images
View of the number 6 local subway train as it passes through the South Bronx neighborhood, New York, New York, 1975.
View of the number 6 local subway train as it passes through the South Bronx neighborhood, New York, New York, 1975. Allan Tannenbaum—Getty Images
Two members of Bronx street gang the Outlaw Makers as they sit on a couch in their clubhouse, 1975.
Two members of Bronx street gang the Outlaw Makers as they sit on a couch in their clubhouse, 1975.Robert R. McElroy—Getty Images
Child sits in doorway of rundown building at 135th St and Willis Ave. in the South Bronx, 1976.
Child sits in doorway of rundown building at 135th St and Willis Ave. in the South Bronx, 1976.Dan Farrell/NY Daily News Archive—Getty Images
South Bronx residents playing cards in abandoned luncheonette, 1977.
South Bronx residents playing cards in abandoned luncheonette, 1977.Alain Le Garsmeur—Getty Images
Teenagers in the South Bronx in 1977.
South Bronx teenagers in front of abandoned tenement burnt-out buildings, South Bronx, New York, August 1977.Alain Le Garsmeur—Getty Images
Blackout in New York City, 1977.
Cops contain suspected looters at Grand Concourse and Fordham Road in the Bronx during the blackout of July 1977. New York Daily News Archive—Getty Images
People walking by abandoned burnt-out shops in the South Bronx,1977.
People walking by abandoned burnt-out shops in the South Bronx,1977.Alain Le Garsmeur—Getty Images
A Woman Walks Among Abandoned Buildings In The South Bronx
A woman walks among abandoned buildings in the South Bronx, New York, March 1979. Allan Tannenbaum—Getty Images

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Write to Lily Rothman at lily.rothman@time.com