When I interviewed Mikhail Baryshnikov in 2010, he told me that by the time GW Bush was elected, “New York was not as attractive to me as it was in the ‘70s. It had become very conservative. The young people were pushed out because of economic pressures. They couldn’t just rent a little studio and be in Manhattan. You have to live somewhere in Brooklyn, or in Jersey or Queens, somewhere and travel for an hour sometimes from the suburbs in to wait tables, audition.”
In ’74 [the year he’d defected] what was your impression of New York? I asked.
“It was wonderful.”
“That it was still bohemian?”
“Of course,” he said. “You could go anywhere, you could buy a ticket to the opera. You could afford everything. It was all fun. It was a lot of fun.”
I should say that –that is not to say that he doesn’t continue to find NYC attractive, vide for one thing the Baryshnikov Arts Center.