The Abandoned City

Earlier this morning I was leafing thru reviews of The Warriors and it dovetailed nicely with a thread I’ve been poring over at the ever fantastic Skyscraper City, a forum dedicated to all things urban and architectural. The pictures below are taken from a thread entitled Brutal New York, a lively discussion about New York's more insalubrious neighborhoods of the 70's and 80's. I've always been drawn to abandoned spaces and forbidden zones - I remember well seeing the first teaser trailers for I Am Legend and getting excited by shots of Times Square chocked with marauding plant life and streets strewn with car wreckage. I think Omega Man would have greatly benefited from these broke down NYC locations – despite scenes with Charlton Heston driving around an impressively empty Los Angeles, the film still looks a little too antiseptic for my liking. Leave it to the Italians to take advantage of NYC's ready-made apocalypse, and I'm particularly fond of 1982's Bronx Warriors in this regard, which features some very dilapidated neighborhoods… Some interesting links to follow for your reading pleasure. Should you be looking for a musical accompaniment I would highly recommend the title track from Harold Budd’s dark and ominous 1984 masterpiece Abandoned Cities...

Brutal New York
NYC in the 70’s
NYC filming locations for The Warriors