AND “Club 57: Lost Flyers 1979–83,” Alden Projects™, New York

NEW YORK’S rising rents and the proliferation of sterilized boxes (stores, condos, restaurants) promising this or that lifestyle impels a nostalgia for the grittier, anything-goes city of the late 1970s and early ’80s. Evidence of this sentimental retrospection can be found everywhere—in popular blogs like Vanishing New York, restaurants boasting bullet-hole ridden walls, television dramas like The Deuce and Vinyl, and think-pieces that longingly recount the era’s notorious squalor.

The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Club 57: Film,