Purgatory & Paradise SASSY ’70s Suburbia & The City

Meryl Meisler’s affection for New York City in the ‘sassy’ 1970s is clear. The throbbing, thrusting city of “big visions, noisy ambitions and brash art”, of grim wonderment and violent menace, reeled, rolled, grabbed its keys and avoided eye contact in the 1970s. The city was down on its luck, out of money, plagued with crime and mistrust. And, boy, was it vibrant and bursting with life, a grim and nuanced composite mix of the parochial and the grand, a city energised by its contradictions that typified the American way and seemed apart from it.