One particularly notorious event, which took place four decades ago on a New York City subway car just three days before Christmas, both reflected and fueled this dramatic political shift. On December 22, 1984, a downtown-bound 2 train rattled out of the 14th Street station, its walls layered in graffiti, its riders reading newspapers or staring silently in the exhausted intimacy of a city still struggling to rebound from a major fiscal crisis in the 1970s—and finding this new decade even more challenging.