“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning,” said the baseball announcer to a shocked national audience 31 years ago as flames ripped though the desolate South Bronx near New York’s Yankee Stadium. 1977 marked the low point for a city that had narrowly avoided bankruptcy two years earlier and had lost a million residents since 1969.

To the legions of financial professionals who work, live and play in the Big Apple, scenes of dangerous, graffiti-covered subways and burned-out tenements from the 1970s seem like ancient history. But with Wall Street’s money-machine sputtering, it is time to ask how much of this metamorphosis may reverse.