When the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees last met in the World Series in 1981, there was no doubt which city was top dog.

The Yankees had defeated the Dodgers in humiliating fashion in 1977 and 1978 and jumped out to a 2-0 lead in the 1981 Fall Classic.

Beyond baseball, New York still held cultural dominance. Despite being broke and struggling with crime, the Big Apple went over the world as the city, an electric place where anything can happen.

And some New Yorkers loved to mock Los Angeles, from the New Yorker Magazine cover depicting LA as a dot from a view of 9th Avenue to Woody Allen dismissing LA as a city whose “only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn at a red light” (which to be fair is a great cultural advantage).

Los Angeles had recently passed Chicago to become America’s second city, but it still felt far behind with its puny skyline, suburban sprawl and relative lack of cultural sophistication.

“We were in this mindset in the 1970s. Everything car-oriented, smog everywhere,” said Paul Haddad, a Dodgers historian. Haddad remembers going to Dodgers games, and even though he didn’t have a radio with him, he could hear the voice from Vin Scully as he walked through the crowd because so many other fans had their transistors on.

In a sign of things to come for both cities, however, the Dodgers rallied from a 2-0 deficit to win the ’81 championship. The two teams meet again at Dodger Stadium for the World Series, starting Friday, and the civic power dynamic has shifted.

LOS ANGELES, CA – OCTOBER 25: Manager Tommy Lasorda #2 of the Los Angeles Dodgers hugs Steve Yeager #7 after he hits a home run to give the Dodgers the lead as Pedro Guerrero #28 leads the charge out of the dugout during Game 5 of the 1981 World Series against the New York Yankees on October 25, 1981 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Bruce Bennett Studios via Getty Images Studios/Getty Images)

(Bruce Bennett/Getty Images North America)

Fans can look out from the stadium parking lot to another Los Angeles, dotted with skyscrapers sprawling across the basin. LA’s cultural cachet has also increased dramatically over those 43 years. There’s even a subway—though New Yorkers would correctly argue that it doesn’t compare. A recent video released by LA Metro, seemingly without irony, showed that it’s a 25-minute walk from Dodger Stadium to the nearest subway station. In New York, the train is about 100 feet from Yankee Stadium.

And New York? It’s still New York, but these days it’s a little humble. The city is in a state of chaos: Mayor Eric Adams has been charged with accepting bribes in exchange for favors to Turkish businessmen and diplomats. Many of his top aides have resigned or been ousted as multiple federal investigations loom.

Adams — who says every week is a tough week when you’re mayor of New York City — told The Times that the biggest difference between the 1981 World Series and 2024 in New York is public safety. The last time the two teams met was in the middle of the crack epidemic; homicides in 1981 were the highest ever recorded at the time.

Adams remembers the battles between the Yankees and the Dodgers in the 1970s, watching Mr. October – who he called Jesse, but who the rest of the world knows as Reggie Jackson.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA May 15, 2024- Passengers ride the Red Line subway in Los Angeles Wednesday. (Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)

(Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)

“Watching him hit those home runs out of the park, that’s the one I remember the most,” he said, referring to Jackson’s 1977 three-homer game.

He bet a classmate $2 that the Yankees would win. Smart.

Adams claims New York is safer and better when the 2024 World Series begins. But others are less optimistic about the current state of mind in New York.

“The Yankees really carry the hopes and dreams of many New Yorkers, because they are one of the only bright spots we have now that we see the mayor and his coterie under federal indictment,” said Evan Roth Smith, a New York City pollster and campaign consultant .

Roth Smith said the upcoming World Series reminds New Yorkers of another time, when the Bronx Bombers seemed to reach the World Series every year, when they were part of New York’s post-9/11 comeback.

After winning the 2009 World Series, however, the Yankees went into a long championship drought, “and the trajectory of the city seemed to change during that time, too,” Roth Smith said. “That’s when the face of New York started to change — (increasing) cost of living, declining quality of life.”

Still, Roth Smith said, he’s not sure New Yorkers look to the other coast with envy — or at all.

“I think a lot of New Yorkers don’t think about anywhere else but New York,” he said.

Die-hard Angelenos feel the same way, in reverse.

Dodger Stadium

(Arash Markazi/Los Angeles Times)

“LA is long past the point where you need to care what New York thinks. LA is a complicated, world-class city on its own terms,” ​​said David Ulin, a Los Angeles historian who grew up in New York City. “It was more of that sense in 1981 that Los Angeles wanted to prove something. Partly it had to do with the fact that the same team had lost two straight World Series to the Yankees.

For Ulin, and for many others who grew up in New York, hating the Dodgers was ingrained in the mind, like hating an ex. The Dodgers had abandoned them, abandoned the city.

“They broke my grandfather’s heart when they left,” Ulin said.

The city’s flamboyant persona was an expression of Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who ran the team with an iron fist, pushing managers and executives out only to roll them back in and then push them out again. He spent more than any other owner in baseball and turned the Yankees in the minds of many purists into the evil empire.

The combative owner even claimed to have gotten into a fistfight with Dodgers fans in an elevator at the Hyatt Wilshire Hotel in 1981 after the Dodgers won three straight in LA to take a 3-2 World Series lead. No one knew if he would believe the fight was real.

“I showed up (to work) the next day with one of my hands bandaged and said, ‘I don’t know what happened but I had to put the guy up,'” said Mike Lupica, a longtime New York Daily News sports columnist who covered the 1981 World Series. “Just cheap New York humor.”

Tuesday’s death of one of the stars of the 1981 World Series, Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, brought into sharp relief how much Los Angeles has changed for Latinos, said Ruben Martinez, a professor of literature and writing at Loyola Marymount University.

Dodger pitcher Fernando Valenzuela competes with Mike Scioscia in their first full workout since the August 1, 1981 strike.

(Los Angeles Times)

“It’s poignant to think how much his presence crystallized something that was in motion and would emerge more clearly in the 1980s, which was the political and cultural presence of Latinos in this city. He was the harbinger of that,” Martinez said.

There were hardly any Latino politicians at the time, Martinez said. The eviction of Latino families from Chavez Ravine in 1959 to build Dodger Stadium was still relatively fresh. Forty years later, things are different.

“We are by no means a perfect, multicultural paradise. We are divided by class and racial divisions. But look at City Hall. Now we can have corrupt Latino politicians like we had corrupt Anglo politicians in the past,” Martinez said.

If New York is mired in investigations revolving around City Hall, Martinez said, Los Angeles is barely emerging from its own City Hall scandal from 2022, when an audio tape of Latino council members makes racist or insensitive comments leaked to the media, leading to the resignation of Council President Nury Martinez.

LA Mayor Karen Bass

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

“The divide on the City Council reflects real divides on LA’s streets as well,” Martinez said.

Although the city is not at a moment’s notice as anxious as it was in 1992, when riots erupted in the streets after the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King, Martinez said there is a tension in the air. There is one homelessness crisis intertwined with a fentanyl crisis on the streets, dealers are lock in more items to deter shoplifters are metal thieves off with entire street lampsand sometimes destructivesometimes deadly street buyouts are increasing.

All of these questions are preparing Los Angeles to deal with when the Olympics come to town in four years, with the World Series serving as a sort of mini-dress rehearsal for the international spectacle to come.

Mayor Karen Bass noted that the same situation occurred in 1981, when the 1984 Olympics were just three years away.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams

(John Minchillo/Associated Press)

“Maybe it’s Olympic magic that adds to the zeitgeist. It’s the same kind of excitement,” she told The Times.

Mayor Adams said he is ready to bet on the Yankees again, this time against Bass.

“It’ll be more than the two dollars I made with my classmate. We’ll come up with some friendly item to exchange,” he said. “She’s invited here for our victory parade.”

Mayor Bass agreed, at least when it came to betting.

“What we’re going to bet on, that’s what we’re working on,” she said.

As for those strong enough to brave Friday traffic with a World Series game, a Lakers game and many other events in Los Angeles, Bass had a message.

“I would say go to Metro,” she said.