No matter how safe, clean, and hospitable New York City becomes, its dark days cannot rest easily in the past: The bankrupt, burned-out urban moonscape of 30 years ago holds a tantalizing allure for artists and tastemakers too young to have been slimed by its perils and deprivations.

But one generation’s hell is the next generation’s heaven. As the late author and New Yorker editor Peter De Vries once wrote: “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.” Which goes a long way in explaining why the specter of New York City in the 1970s and ’80s is popping up in film, art, and popular culture. Though only the misguided would wish for a return to the realities of life among the financial and social ruins of 1977 Fun City, the larger-than-life era can seem like a belle époque alongside real-life anxieties about the city’s post-terrorism future.

If the current wave of nostalgia has a locus, it may well be the drawn-out closing of CBGB. Priced out of its original location, the Bowery punk destination was only saved from the humiliation of relocation to Las Vegas by the August death of owner Hilly Kristal. But the venue did close, just in time for the venerable Lower East Side — an art and music crucible that in the past nurtured true originals such as the Velvet Underground, Jean Michel Basquiat, and Richard Hell — to become a new cultural crossroads.

Is it any wonder that as that transition has taken root, filmmakers have sought to revive what once was? ESPN’s summer miniseries “The Bronx is Burning” (released on DVD a fortnight ago) re-enacted the volatile love-hate triangle among Yankees’ owner George Steinbrenner, team manager Billy Martin, and superstar player Reggie Jackson. This emotional fight was against a dramatic canvas encompassing the Yankees’ 1977 World Series win, the city’s late’70s fiscal crisis, the New York City Police Department’s search for the Son of Sam murderer, and the devastating 1977 blackout.

The latest vision of New York’s recent past is “We Own the Night,” writer and director James Gray’s somber homage to Sidney Lumet’s local character-driven crime dramas such as “Prince of the City,” “Serpico,” and “Q & A.” Set in 1988, Mr. Gray’s film depicts a nightclub owner’s shift from civilian life to his multigenerational badge-wearing family after both his brother and his father are targeted by crack dealers and Russian mobsters. By invoking the NYPD street crime unit’s motto and fashioning a redemption drama, “We Own the Night” looks ahead to Mayor Giuliani’s term, when policing efforts began to tip the scales in favor of law and order.

Last month’s multi-week box office champion, director Neil Jordan’s “The Brave One” is a particularly telling study in calling back to the Big Apple at its most rotten. Set in the present, the film hoists New York radio commentator Erica Bain, played by Jodie Foster, on her own nostalgic petard. It promotes her from telling “stories of a city that is disappearing before our eyes,” to being the center of a particularly nasty and increasingly rare homegrown saga after she is assaulted and her fiancé is murdered in a savage, unprovoked street attack.

Pre-assault Erica equates “the beauty and loneliness” of the vanished city with Kay Thompson’s children’s book hero “Eloise.” But in the aftermath of tragedy, Erica’s road to recovery and acceptance requires her to court the city’s ’70s lawlessness and crime movie legacy by inviting New York’s criminal class to make her night. “The Brave One’s” peaceful liberal pushed to acts of frontier vigilantism evokes Michael Winner’s 1974 “Death Wish,” and Mr. Jordan stages his film’s key attack near the stone stairs of Central Park’s Stranger’s Gate, a location that visually evokes the staircase execution immortalized on the film poster for “Death Wish.”

Universal Pictures’ tent-pole fall release”AmericanGangster”gives some of the city’s darkest days the big-budget, biopic treatment. “American Gangster” casts Denzel Washington as the local ’70s heroin kingpin Frank Lucas. In the time-tested “Godfather” and ” Good fellas “tradition, “Schindler’s List” screenwriter Steven Zaillian portrays Lucas’s Machiavellian ascent to power as a series of canny backroom manipulations engineered by a rising star in a shadowy corporate arena who is more than willing to make business personal and vice versa.

Even William Friedkin’s notorious 1980 gay-themed thriller “Cruising” has made a comeback of sorts. Though the film was excoriated by the city’s gay community when in production, and ignored by audiences when released, a new print of “Cruising” did brisk business when it was booked into a Chelsea multiplex in advance of the film’s mid-September special edition DVD debut.

As for the Lower East Side, the soon-to-open New Museum of Contemporary Art and a fresh round of art galleries have transformed the neighborhood—which once offered venues such as Gracie Mansion Gallery for artists unable or unwilling to occupy SoHo wall space — into one of the major arteries feeding the city’s fine arts scene. And the art that was generated from the area in the bad old days is fetching attention and noteworthy sums. Last May at Sotheby’s, Basquiat’s “Untitled” (1981) doubled its estimate and sold for $13 million — making it the third-highest-selling work in the sale. Phillips de Pury’s London sale in June saw Basquiat’s “Grillo” (1984) go for $10 million.

At the same time that the city has fought back against graffiti outlaws with increasingly stiffer penalties, graffiti art has become so legitimized that it’s the subject of an MTV contest called “Art Battles.” Patterned after a series of similar gallery-based competitions in which taggers paint and compete with both the clock and the tastes of an audience of judges, MTV’s “Art Battles” adds the brand-conscious stipulation that its own tag, the network’s ubiquitous vintage 1981 logo, must be included somewhere in each finished painting.

If there’s any lesson to be gleaned from films and the urge for proximity to a onetime center of creative force, perhaps it’s that the dark side of New York life will always be a perversely alluring part of the city’s identity.