In the summer of 1976, New York City hosted the Democratic National Convention. Bathed in the progressive rhetoric of the party and the national pride of the Bicentennial celebration, the city seemed poised to rise above its steadily sinking fortunes. It would not. The metropolis was soon in the grip of hysteria caused by a prowling murderer dubbed "Son of Sam" and, later that year, would experience an unprecedented wave of crime. The following year saw the city continuing to decline, and would come to be defined by two epic struggles: the bitter feud between Yankees phenom Reggie Jackson and team manager Billy Martin, and the battle between Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch for the city's mayorship. Buried beneath these parallel conflicts - one for the soul of baseball, the other for the soul of a city - was the subtext of race. The brash and confident Jackson took every black myth and threw it back in white America's face, all while the ghettoes of New York went up in flames. Koch and Cuomo ran bitterly negative campaigns that played upon urbanites' fears of growing crime rates and declining municipal budgets. These braided stories tell the narrative history of 1977, when the city died but was also reborn - a year that saw an infamous citywide blackout, the opening of Studio 54, the evolution of punk rock, the apex of the graffiti movement, and the dawning of modern SoHo.