On the afternoon of December 22, 1984, shots rang out beneath the streets of New York, from the subway’s 2 Seventh Avenue express train.
A Greenwich Village man named Bernhard Goetz shot four black teenagers who he believed were about to assault him.
The incident made international news, amplified by the city’s shameless tabloid newspapers because it so perfectly embodied all the cultural stereotypes about New York City in the 1980s.
Goetz became a sort of folk hero, the so-called Subway Vigilante, who took things into his own hands because the city’s weakened and inept services could not…