If ever the best of times were also the worst of times, it was New York in the 1970s. With crime soaring, the middle class fleeing and a killer named Son of Sam on the loose, the city was brought to its knees, and there was no help in sight. You could have called it Armageddon-on-the-Hudson, or New York Pity, but perhaps the Daily News said it best in 1975 when, on the White House's response to the city's looming bankruptcy, it famously summarized: "Ford to City: Drop Dead."

That indelible front-page headline is the first thing one sees at "Anarchy to Affluence: Design in New York, 1974-1984," an exhibition at Parsons (through April 2) organized in conjunction with "The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984," at New York University (through April 1). Together, they pay tribute to one of the most brazenly creative periods in the city's history, when everything from punk rock and aggressive gender bending to industrial chic and graffiti, performance and post-minimal art overtook its gritty hovels below 14th Street. New York may have been swallowed up by a giant sinkhole, but spit back out was an underground subculture that would help define popular culture—indeed, the very image of the post-industrial city—for the rest of the century.

Both shows start in 1974, when the enactment of the city's Loft Law opened SoHo's warehouses to artists, and end in 1984, when the re-election of Ronald Reagan made it clear that the country had gone conservative. Divorced from the feel-good innocence of the Summer of Love, but not yet overshadowed by the shoulder-padded excesses of the age of Dynasty, New York's downtown scene exploded with an intensity that was at once angst-ridden and makeshift.

One can sense it in the Buzzcocks, Richard Hell and Pyramid Club posters at Parsons—the smaller of the exhibitions, covering design, fashion and graphics—and the willful amateurishness and cut-and-paste collages that made the show's curator, Christopher Mount, liken them to ransom notes. Or it can be seen in the paper and sweatshirt fabric dresses of fashion designer Norma Kamali, and the barbed-wire and bullet emblazoned frocks of Stephen Sprouse. This was a time that took its cues from the street, and occasionally, the street wound up inside: the show also includes an interior vignette that recreates the "High-tech" style that made things like scaffolding and industrial lighting a part of do-it-yourself home décor.

But if the Parsons exhibition is like having a few friends over for drinks, then the NYU component is the rowdy bender afterwards. Guest curator Carlo McCormick has taken over the university's Grey Art Gallery and Fales Library with hundreds of works by nearly 200 wide-ranging artists, from Karen Finley, Eric Bogosian and Ann Magnuson to David Armstrong, Martin Wong and Robert Mapplethorpe. Comprising six of the show's eight sections, the Grey gallery is the mother ship, with works across all media, as well as magazines and other ephemera, that begin to speak of the rise of performance, the obsession with mass and disposable culture, the manipulation of sexuality and identity and other themes that charged the era. McCormick characterizes it all as a conversation among the artists, and one does get that feeling: in Peter Hujar's portrait of David Wojnarowicz; in Barbara Kruger's missive "When I Hear the Word Culture I Take Out My Checkbook;" or the vases decorated by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and others at the behest of Keith Haring.