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Following racial tensions in the 1950s there was a general exodus of the white middle classes out of New York - the Great White Flight as the media labeled it. Between 1950 and 1970 more than a million families left the city. Things went from bad to worse during the 1960s with race riots uptown in Harlem and in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The World's Fair of 1964 was a white elephant to boost the city's international profile, but on the streets the call for civil liberties for blacks and protest against US involvement in Vietnam (1964-75) were as strong as any in the rest of the country.
Manhattan reached crisis point in 1975. By now the city was spending more than it received in taxes - billions of dollars more. Essential services, long shaky due to underfunding, were ready to collapse. Tourism, caused by cheap transatlantic airfares, and a new mayor, Edward I. Koch helped save the city. Despite the fact that New York was no longer facing bankruptcy, it was still suffering from the massive nationwide recession, and the city turned to its nightlife for relief. Starting in the mid-1970s, singles bars sprang up all over the city, gay bars proliferated in the Village, and Disco was King. Studio 54 was an internationally known hotspot, and drugs and illicit sex were the main events off the dance floor.
In the 1980s the real estate and stock markets boomed and another era of Big Money was ushered in; fortunes were made and lost overnight and big Wall Street names, most notably Michael Milken , were thrown in jail for insider trading. A spate of building gave the city yet more fabulous architecture, notably Battery Park City downtown, and master builder Donald Trump provided glitzy housing for the super-wealthy.
In 1989, Koch lost the Democratic nomination for the mayoral elections to David Dinkins, the first African-American mayor of New York, yet the stock market crash in 1987 had started yet another downturn. By the end of the 1980s New York was slipping hard and fast into a massive recession : in 1989 the city's budget deficit ran at $500 million; and one in four New Yorkers was officially classed as poor - a figure unequaled since the Depression. In the 1993 mayoral elections, Dinkins narrowly lost to the brash prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani . New York, traditionally a firmly Democratic city, wanted a change and with Giuliani - the city's first Republican mayor in 28 years - it got it.
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