The Odd Couple: 2020, 1975

While living in a fast-paced technological age has its pitfalls, it also has its benefits. Information, for one, is at our fingertips. It’s a moment, for instance, when people can broadcast the most trivial bits of nostalgia and strike a resounding chord with those of us who remember a slower-paced, less technological time. A time when Los Angeles PI Jim Rockford had a rare telephone answering machine at home and, while on the road, pulled over to street pay phones to retrieve his messages.

Today, by the way, is November 13th—Friday the 13th if you are keeping score—the day that “Felix Unger was asked to remove himself from his place of residence.” And in case you’ve forgotten: “That request came from his wife.” Although it never did especially well in the ratings, The Odd Couple, starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, was nonetheless a classic 1970s television series that lasted five seasons. In my opinion the show’s humor holds up rather well. Yet, it rarely appeared or appears in syndication. The opening theme and montage of the lead characters, Felix Unger and Oscar Madison, out and about on the streets of the Big Apple gave the show a real New York feel, despite it being filmed before a live audience on a Hollywood sound stage.

When The Odd Couple ran in prime time, New York City was a gritty metropolis slipping and sliding towards insolvency. Crime was up and services, like sanitation, down and it certainly showed. I’ve heard some contemporary talking heads compare the goings-on of the 1970s with the present decline. Short and hapless Abe Beame was the mayor when the excrement finally hit the fan in 1975, the year the last episode of The Odd Couple aired. Tall and hapless Bill de Blasio is the mayor when the most recent excrement hit the fan—and it's splattering all over us as I speak. But there the similarities end.

There’s a great photo site on Facebook called “Dirty Old 1970's New York City.” It’s a pictorial tribute to the New York of the 1970s and, too, the early-1980s, which—you guessed it—was dirtier in look and feel than what came before and what came after. A friend of mine remembers his father’s reaction to what New York City had become in the 1970s. Born in 1915 Manhattan, this man moved north to the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx in the 1940s, which was then positively quaint—an urban enclave with empty lots and a distinctive small town feel. New York City subways were clean and relatively efficient back then. By the 1970s, the very same subways were prone to breakdowns and covered in unsightly graffiti. So, understandably for a man of his generation, he felt palpable despair. The city he lived in for his entire life had morphed into a veritable sewer on life support.

I, on the other hand, was a teenager in the 1970s. I noticed the graffiti on the subways and just about everywhere else. I noticed the parks were rundown, filthy, and not being maintained. There were a lot of muggings and break-ins in the neighborhood, too. But I found it a great time to be a kid growing up in New York. When many of us look at pictures of Dirty Old New York City, we remember when—when, for one, The Odd Couple was on the air and Shea Stadium stood proudly in the flight path of LaGuardia Airport. I recall an episode when Felix and Oscar’s apartment was burglarized. It was the 1970s, after all, and that was a fitting plotline for a sitcom fictionally situated in New York City. Food for thought: Murray the cop was on the same police force as Theo Kojak, while Jim Rockford independently plied his trade three thousand miles away.

Let’s queue up the opening themes now: The Odd Couple, Kojak, and The Rockford Files. Listen, this is precisely why there is no comparing 2020 New York City to its 1970s predecessor—or Los Angeles in Jim Rockford’s case. Dirty Old New York City unofficially marked the beginning of the end of old New York. It was often coarse, sometimes scary, but very, very colorful. Look at all those mom-and-pop stores, luncheonettes serving up egg creams, and neighborhood bars with Schaefer Beer neon signs in the window. “But he also knew that someday he would return to her”—and he did. Happy November 13th!

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)