In the late 1980s, New York was a city on the brink. Wall Street boomed, and white-collar New York rejoiced; blue-collar New York, after decades of disinvestment, became an inferno, as the Black and Hispanic working class was pitted against white ethnics. Racial strife, embodied by several successive and increasingly high-profile beatings and killings, seized the consciousness of a beleaguered municipality. Tens of thousands slept on the streets every night, many of them poor and mentally ill, while thousands more were ravaged by a mysterious illness. All the while, New York City proved slow and ill-equipped to stop their suffering.