By the Seventies, the city, which had been idolized both negatively and positively through the Sixties, had become untenable: cities were nasty to live in, unmanageable, self-destructing. New York, the god of cities, went down the tubes, given the kiss-off when Johnny Carson moved The Tonight Show to Burbank. Having lost all this, the city even ceased to be a viable subject for comedy, as the mean-spiritedness of the Neil Simon school shows. A piece of suggestive folklore, parallel to girls in the early Sixties worrying about hatching black widow spiders in their bouffant hairdos: New York City began to think that all those circus souvenir caymans they flushed down toilets were breeding and living below, and that, in fact, the sewers of their city belonged toalligators….

-"What's Your 10-20?" Redneck Movie Travel Notes, Richard Thompson, Film Comment 16(4) July-August 1980.