New York: A Documentary Film (1999–…): Season 1, Episode 7 - The City and the World (1945-2000) - full transcript
in the spring of 1944 as the Second
World War dragged into its third long
year a 26-year old photographer and
native-born New Yorker named Helen
Levitt carried a 16 millimeter movie
camera up to the crowded tenement
district of East Harlem in New York
once predominantly attended but now
increasingly filled with black and
spanish-speaking newcomers over the next
three years with her friends james agee
and janice load she struggled to capture
on film the countless daily dramas and
heart-stopping beauty of life in New
York's poorest neighborhoods in a
film she called simply in the street
the streets of the poor quarters of
great cities are above all a theater and
a battleground they're unaware and unnoticed
every human being is a poet a masker
a lawyer and in his innocent artistry projects
against the turmoil of the
street and image of existence
James Agee we say what is the city well the
city as many things but one of the things that a
city is is a home to its people if
you think of it the great cities of
history Athens is glorious a Rome is
grandeur a power let's say Paris is
culture what is New York New York is a
home New York's great gift to the world
was that people from all over the world
could come here they could create their
own communities their own neighborhoods
so people felt the sense of community a
sense of belonging a sense of neighborhood
that's really the basis of human
endeavor if people feel they alone they
can go on to other things
now all of a sudden that was going to
be harder for New York than ever before
because at this crucial moment in the
city's history the city loses its way
whereas before neighborhoods were
creative now neighborhoods are destroyed
the Japanese government at 7:01 p.m. on
the hot sultry evening of August 14 1945
after five tense days of conflicting
rumors and false reports word reached
New York that the Japanese High Command
had surrendered at last bringing to an
end the bloodiest and most costly war in
human history
as the news reached through the city
millions of New Yorkers converged on
Times Square laughing shouting
weeping and embracing in a spontaneous
celebration that lasted all through the night
and on into the early hours of the morning
on August the 14th when President Truman
announces the surrender of Japan I mean
the tumultuous scenes in the city of
course we think of celebrations all
around the United States and deed all
around the world but no place like Times
Square that's the moment that's the
place where the real end of the war is
announced and celebrated
twice a month now in the delirious
jubilant days following the close of the
war the two greatest ocean liners in
the world the Queen Mary and the Queen
Elizabeth which in four years had
ferried more than two million men to war
could be seen steaming into port bringing
their fragile human cargo back home
as the great sister ships entered the
upper bay their decks crammed with
American soldiers a gigantic cheer went
up at the site of the ravishing skyline
of New York which had never seemed more precious
or more filled with promise for the future
every inch of land in New Jersey and
Staten Island New York was crowded with
people cheering and and the whole thing
was such an amazing vision but people
brought together which they usually are
not in New York and cheering you know
god bless you boys all that stuff
if I could pick a time to be there I
would probably be in spring of 1946 when
they troops were coming home from the
war and have seen the great ocean liners
loaded to the brim with returning
soldiers from Europe we're at the
pinnacle then New York may have been not
just the greatest city in the world but
that may have been the greatest time in New
York with the great harbor filled with ships
and tens of thousands of factories
churning out goods in record volumes the
halcyon months following the end of the
war were in many ways the highest point
of the city's entire history the
terrible conflict itself had proved
in many ways to be the city's salvation
lifting at last the decade-long
depression and reconfirming New York
status as the unofficial capital of what
was now the most powerful
nation on earth we know her
as Fiorello LaGuardia finished his third
term as mayor and as Robert Moses unable
to build during four long years of war
prepared to throw himself into a frenzy
of construction every force that had
brought New York to greatness seemed to
be operating at peak capacity it
was the apex of the time when it was
like Imperial Rome a standard setter a
trend recognizer a place that translated
the world to America when you look at
New York in the late 40s in the early
50s when it mattered it just mattered in
a way that that other places didn't
don't if you come from other places
don't be upset them it just did and it
was also a place that was producing a
bewildering array of stuff and people
were working ladies hats and musical
instruments and table lamps and printers
inks and shellac and sugar and beer and
bread and skin creams the thing about
New York was that there was no one thing
you know that you said Pittsburgh steel
Detroit cars Akron rubber New York
everything and that's why New York
really sort of looked down on the rest
of America from Olympus and the seeds of
its downfall might have been in that as
well the core of it was that it was still
a manufacturing town which meant that
people like my father with an eighth
grade education Irish immigrant could
put first of all form a family and then
support it and that sense that you would
get a working men permeated the city I
remember one of the things that I missed
the most was what it felt like in the
subway around between the hours of 5:00
and 7:00 and being on packed subway
cars with working men on those cars
guys stained with sweat the smell of
perspiration the raw knuckled hands
toolboxes heading home nobody would mess
with guys like that and they were very
proud in the fact that they were working
in in the biggest city in the United
States they were functioning people
and yet more than most people realized
at the time in the giddy post-war
atmosphere of triumph and success by
1945 much of the fate of the post-war
City had already been written and the
stage had been set for one of the most
complex and troubling periods
in the city's entire history
the war itself had vastly accelerated a
fateful shift in power in America begun
during the Depression and the New Deal
but in the years to come were challenged
New York's once unrivaled claim to
economic supremacy and alter forever the
relation of the city and the country
it is true that there was defense
spending going to New York City but
there is far more of it going to the
south and far more of it going to the
West huge quantities of money weren't
flowing to shipbuilding operations
on the west coast money was going to
develop in the Carolinas new modern
garment manufacturing facilities that'll
turn out uniforms noting these crowded
little sweatshops you know so well New
York comes out of the war in a sense an
unparalleled position of powerful and it
is now in a sense the capital of the world
these under toes have been operating and
the city's long term position although
it's not apparent yet is in fact going
to be a lot weaker than it had been going into
that war certainly no one could have imagined in
the triumphant ears following the war
that in little more than three decades
the mighty metropolis on the banks of
the Hudson would be shaken to its very
foundations and fighting for its very existence
late one night in the waning days of
December 1945 as Fiorello laguardia's
third and final turn wound quietly
to a close an aide named Lewis after
returning to City Hall to attend to some
last-minute paperwork was surprised to
hear the sound of a lone typewriter
clattering down the darkened hallway in
an office at the end of the hall he
found LaGuardia himself hunched over
his Secretary's desk hello Lou the mayor
said I've got these letters to get out
and there was no one else around can
you type but even LaGuardia wore out the
city wore him out you know by the end of his
third term he was an exhausted tired man it had
beaten them up the process of it
remember this a city almost went
bankrupt under as soon as he showed up
when its Depression New York that he was
the mayor of and for all of his amazing
gifts that third term was very very hard
for him by the time LaGuardia left
office in January 1946 to be succeeded
by a tough but genial ex-policeman named
William O'Dwyer the city he loved
her completely rebounded from the
decade-long depression thanks in
large part to the New Deal and the war
but LaGuardia himself was already
seriously ill with cancer of the
pancreas and less than two years later
he died leaving his wife Marie $8,000 in
war bonds and a heavily
mortgaged house in the Bronx
he was 64 years old a city of which he
was apart as much as any public building
awoke to find the little firebrand dead
it's people had left with him and at him
they'd been entertained by his antics
and they had been sobered by his warnings
and they found it difficult to believe
that the voice he'd raised on their
behalf in the Legislative halls of city
and nation on street corners and
on the radio was stilled forever
the New York Times more than most people
realized laguardia's death marked the
end of an era facing in doing for 12
long years he had struggled to reconcile
two competing visions of the city
the shining vision of the city of
tomorrow championed by men like Robert
Moses beholden to the car and the
highway and two forces beyond the city's
borders and the old working city of Walt
Whitman Al Smith and Emma Lazarus the
city of the block and the neighborhood
and the crowded urban street that
however shabby and rundown in appearance
he had always known was New York's great
strength heartbeat and true glory
without him in the years to come
those two cities would come to seem
increasingly incompatible as the forces
of change unleashed by the war pulled
New York into the orbit of an immense
new order increasingly indifferent to
the values and beliefs LaGuardia
had cared for most deeply hey after
LaGuardia was mayor he was sitting one
day in the engineers Club the New York
and a friend of his Walter Binger came
over he said may major which is what
everyone called LaGuardia who really knew
him major you're really looking down he said
Robert Moses has too much power today
and Binger who really disliked Moses
said well who gave it to a major and
LaGuardia said but I could control now
no one will be able to control
by 1945 a bold new attitude towards
urban life had begun to come to the fore
in New York and in cities across America
for more than two decades a growing
number of architects and urban planners
disturbed by the increasing congestion
and chaos of the modern city had been
arguing that the old urban order of
narrow streets and blocks be left behind
and replaced with an entirely new one
consecrated to the car and the highway
and the dream of infinite mobility this
vision of a radiant new city of tomorrow
and found its purest expression before
the war in the awesome public works of
Robert Moses in the ravishing exhibits
of the World's Fair and in the writings
of a visionary Swiss architect and urban
theorist named la Corbusier who had been
amongst the first to sense that cities
themselves had been rendered completely
obsolete by the advent of the automobile
it's a wonderful passage from appreciate
he walks out in the streets of Paris
near the University and he feels very
nostalgic and he says in the good old
days when I was a student we used to
walk these streets and we would stand in
the middle of the street and argue when
we could have races with each other we
could play games but now we're swept
away by the cars and he's very bitter
about that and he says what can we do
and then there's like a kind of
cognitive leap which is we have to
somehow merge with the cars we have to
if we can completely identify with them
and forget this paradise lost from our
youth when the streets belong to us that
because that's the refrain the streets
belong to us then but if you can forget
that and we repress the part of you that
love the streets and felt at home in
them and that feels very angry that you
can't you know that there's too much
traffic for you now but you don't fit in
that like history has surpassed you you
can make a leap and surpass it and the
way that he did was through this concept
of the highway system and the flow that
would never end and the traffic that
would always be moving and what
he wanted to do in Paris in New
York but so basically kill the street
tear it all down and put up giant slabs
connected by highways I think she's probably
the greatest metaphysician of the highway system
anywhere and motives was
certainly his greatest disciple
in the years following the war as urban
planners proposed remaking the city on a
breathtaking scale New York would begin
to take leave of the past as never
before and rush headlong into the future
in little more than half a decade many
of the streets and neighborhoods Helen
Levitt had documented so painstakingly
would be razed to the ground to make
way for block after block of towering
high-rise housing projects the
Courvoisier himself would return to New
York in the boom years following the war
to begin work on an austere new complex
of buildings along the East River
determined to turn Manhattan itself into
a bold new city of the future
New York is not a capital city it is not
a national capital or a state capital
but is by way of becoming the capital of
the world along the East River from the
raised slaughterhouses of Turtle Bay men are
coming out the permanent headquarters of
the United Nations the greatest housing
project of them all in its
tried New York takes on one more
interior city the shelter
this time all governments
and a clear the slum World War eebee wife
the real shift to New York becoming the
cap of the world comes after world war
two when the United States emerges from
the conflict is indisputably the most
powerful militarily an economic force on
earth and I think the placement of the
United Nations in New York City kind of
symbolizes New York's emergence as the
the capitol of the world let's put it this way if
the United Nations hadn't come to New York I think
a lot of people would have killed
themselves would just have gone berserk
it just seemed the right place for
the United Nations to be it wasn't
inevitable that it would come to New
York mccorvey who many ways plays the
evil spirit in this story didn't want it
to come to New York and as the leading
architect he had a great say he wanted
it to be if it had to be near New York
to be on some estate and Pound Ridge or
Westchester they looked at all kinds of
places my god they even thought of Philadelphia
little more than a year after the end of
the war thanks in large part to the
immense power of the Rockefeller family
and to the administrative genius of
Robert Moses a site in New York had been
settled on on the east side of
Manhattan along the East River
the startling shapes that soon began to
arise on a 17 acre tract of land called
blood alley once filled with stockyards
and slaughterhouses were unlike anything
ever built in New York or
anywhere else for that matter
the slab of glass a totally new form
developed out of a core busiest earlier
work shear slab he'd never gone to
extreme glass facing east and west no
windows facing north and south on some
kind of idea of solar orientation then
the assembly building with its swoopy
roof a new kind of shape has nothing to
do with the city ask to be in a
part because of its sculptural force
basically that had never been a building
like that seen in New York or virtually
anywhere else all that glass it's what
everybody's been dreaming about its what
a little bit of what you could have got
a hint of if you'd gone to the fair in
39 and people are thrilled the
arrival of the United Nations was
the harbinger of a new kind of globalism
in New York by the fall of 1952 as
delegates from around the world arrived
for the first general session in the new
headquarters a sleek new international
star had begun to transform the look and
feel of central Manhattan not only
in architecture and diplomacy but in
corporate culture itself the UN building
is decisively in reestablishing New York
and then with the completion of that building
New York enters yet another phase of its life
and it becomes more than ever office
capital of the world more new office
space was built in New York roughly
between 1950 and 1960 than there is in
the entire of the downtown business
district of Chicago all of it not just
what was built there but everything
that every visibility New York becomes
headquarters city every major
corporation even more than in the robber
baron days finds and it has to be in New
York feels that it has to be in New York
because American corporations recognize
they have to operate on an international
stage and New York is the logical place
even as a gleaming new city of glass and
steel thrust skyward in midtown
Manhattan another kind of transformation
was under way far from the white collar
ramparts of Park and sixth avenues as
hundreds of thousands of african-americans from
the rural South poured into the city's poorest
neighborhoods looking for
work and a new beginning
so they came from all parts of the south
the Georgians came as soon as they were
able to pick train fare off the peach
trees they came from South Carolina
where the cotton stalks were bare the
North Carolinians came with tobacco
tar beneath their fingernails even while
planning the trip they sang spirituals
such as Jesus take my hand and chanted
hallelujah I'm on my way to the promised land
Claude Brown
by 1950 as the great black migration
swelled to a flood another immense
influx was underway within a year of
the end of the war the first regularly
scheduled flights had begun taking off
from San Juan Airport on the island of
Puerto Rico bound for New York City
the forerunners of thousands more as
hundreds of thousands of
spanish-speaking newcomers streamed
north from the Caribbean many fleeing
desperate poverty this emigration is
different the Puerto Ricans come not
by ship huddled in the steerage but by
plane paying u.s. citizens they beat
at no immigration bars never had their
picture taken in colorful native costume
behind the wire enclosures of Ellis
Island they simply seeped in landing by
the 20s and 30s from battered planes of
the Guardia Field in Newark suddenly
appearing beside their cardboard
suitcases on the city's sidewalks
outside a hole in the wall Travel Agency
to them the u.s. means in New York City and
300,000 of them now live in it's five boroughs
Time magazine 1949 yesterday it was the
brutal and uncouth Irish then it
was the knife wielding Italians
later it was the clannish
truth with their strange ways
yesterday it was the negro today
it is to Puerto Ricans and the
Negroes who are relegated to the
last step of New York social ladder
exo-skull
like their African American counterparts
many of the Puerto Rican newcomers found
it increasingly hard to rise trapped
in menial jobs and dilapidated slums by
racism and discrimination and by an
ominous new trend stealing over the
city's blue-collar economy within
a decade of the end of the Second
World War it was beginning to be clear
the New York's great industrial engine
for more than a century the first
step on the ladder for newly arrived
immigrants had started to falter and
slow far from taking on thousands of new
workers each year as in the past factory
owners now often struggled simply to
keep the positions they had in the
face of stiff new competition from
manufacturers in the south and west and the city's
own suburbs the writer Earl shorris in his book
Latinos says that one of the great
tragedies of Puerto Ricans in the 20th
century is that they came to New York
of all places had they come to New York
earlier or gone somewhere else when they
came to the United States they probably
would have done a lot better but they
came to a city that was just about to
begin its transition to a
post-industrial economy and they came to
be industrial workers and that was their undoing
in 1945 1950 New York seemed literally
to be on top of the world the largest
city in the world our richest city in
the world the most powerful city in the
world capital of the world everything
seemed to be working in place but we now
see in retrospect that there were
ominous signs on the horizon the first
was the loss of industry New York City
has more than a million industrial jobs
in 1950 those jobs over the next half
century or fall to well below 200,000 so
essentially a whole gigantic sector of
New York's economy believes in this New
York again as a leader we have seen
this happen first in cities and then it
states and now for the whole entire
United States as jobs move out where
they're lower production costs first to
the suburbs into the south then offshore
to Asia or wherever the loss
of industry was the harbinger
of an even vaster transformation as year
after year the center of gravity of the
entire nation continued to shift away
from New York and away from older urban
places everywhere as a massive new
economic order finished taking hold
linked to the highway and the automobile
and incompatible with the structure of
cities as they had existed for hundreds
of years well I think the Second World
War changes the ballgame and creates an
economy on an enormous scale that really
Dwarfs anything that's existed before
and after the war you get a permanent
war economy on one hand it's an
industrial bonanza but New York was
almost entirely left out of this because
it's really very hard to build aircraft
factories say in or close to New York
or any other city the sense of space is
completely different whereas the grid
involves bringing people together and creating
concentration vertically going up the
war economy and the highway system built
in the Eisenhower period builds a
cross and it depends on these enormous
horizontal units and on one hand creates
bonanzas in many areas that were pretty
distressed and on the other hand draws
talent energy and money enormous amounts
of money away from areas like in New
York in the years to come as the entire
nation was integrated into a unified
flow whose lifeblood one man later said
was the automobile the dense fabric of
older urban places and the very concept
of urban public space itself would begin
to come under attack as never before as
cities like New York were increasingly
seen as places to escape from or as
problems to be solved or as
landscapes to be transformed
to a remarkable degree the man in
the middle of the whirlwind of forces
sweeping through New York in the
post-war period was the driven
insatiable builder well by 1945 had
been transforming the city for almost 20
years Robert Moses
if you saw Moses standing in front of
a mat with his pencil going over it in
sweeping gestures you would see the
dream or the visionary the artist he's
suing you were and of course by New York
I mean New York and its suburbs 2,100
square miles and an area in which when
he was building 12 million people he saw
this all as a canvas he was going to
build his roads across that he was going
to build his roads around it there were
gonna be parks here in Park them you see
them we're gonna have public housing
here so we'll do this he saw the whole
thing as one great mural you know one
huge wonderful mural it will had the
Union in the unity of a vision and that
is the vision to which New York and its
suburbs were shape I am privileged to
present the winner of the Grand National
Ward Robert Moses of New York
no one embodied the power and promise of
post-war New York more than Robert Moses
the visionary administrator who had
rebuilt the city in the depths of the
depression intent on uniting the immense
metropolis into a single coherent whole
and linking it to the rest of the nation
by highways he had accomplished more in
20 years than most men dreamed of in
a lifetime and now with the vastly
increased resources of the federal
government behind him looked forward to
realizing his vision on an even vaster
scale the tragedy in the end would be
that such a man and such an era should
have held out such great promise and
that so much of it should have gone so
terribly astray
immediately after the Second World
War Robert Moses is power increased
exponentially to something far greater
than before its base was still these
revenues the toll revenues from war his
bridges and all his tunnels which of
course were increasing as he was
building more but he now gets control of
the city Housing Authority huge monies
are now being spent by the federal
government on public housing low-income
housing in New York those monies were
spent at the command of Robert Moses up
to that point Robert Moses had been
building mostly parks and bridges and
park lands he was building these in a
tabula rasa on the open spaces of Long
Island on Jones Beach where there was
nothing there now he's going to be
building in the city not on an empty
canvas but on the most crowded canvas in
the world that was going to make all
the difference it was going to make the
story of Robert Moses become very dark
because whether he was building in an
area with no people or an area filled
with people Robert Moses was going to
build if you want to create Public Works
in a crowded metropolis he said you have
to swing the meat ax and he
liked swinging the meat ax
I enjoy getting things done that means
exactly there are obstacles that are in
the way by whatever means and that means
being lonely along the way that you put
up with that temporarily right yes that
make us few compromises as possible fun
gives me Rommel had a very funny phrase
a little bit on the cynical side and the
grain of truth in it he said if the end
doesn't justify the means what does
no one could have predicted the
magnitude of the explosion that would
overtake New York in the decades
following World War two greatest was
the federal involvement in Public Works
before the war it was nothing compared
to the massive new initiatives signed
into law as soon as it was ended not
only for highways but for Housing
and Urban Development propelling changes
on a scale city planners had scarcely
dreamed of only a few years earlier
eager to extend his dominion over every
public construction project in the city
Robert Moses quickly moved to wrest
control of the new federal funds before
the ink was even dry on the new legislation
he says I'd like to be Construction Co
ordinate by the way I have a bill here
that the Legislature will pass creating
the office of construction coordinator
nobody realizes that there is a sentence
in there that says that the construction
coordinator shall no choice shall
represent the city in all its dealings
with the federal government that means
that any city request for federal money
is going to go through the office
of construction coordinator
and he therefore has control over public
housing he has control over the federal
highway money and something much huge is
about to happen one day in nineteen the
end of nineteen forty eight an old
classmate of Moses is from Yale Robert
if Senator Robert it comes down to talk
to Robert Moses about a new proposal
that's going through the Senate of the
United States we are gonna coil a title
one it's the slum clearance program the
urban renewal program Moses had this
mind that leaped the power like a
terrier as soon as Taft leaves his
office he is drafting the necessary
documents so that the mayor will have a
slum clearance committee Robert Moses
Jim there had been housing programs
before and attempts to clear the slums
but never on this scale intended
in part to relieve the severe
post-war housing crisis and to provide
affordable housing for the poor the
bills first section known forever after
as title one would go on to become one
of the most controversial and in many
ways catastrophic federal programs ever
visited upon city dwellers anywhere
the bottom line for the urban renewal
program is is that the federal
government is going to pay for the city
to use its power of eminent domain to
confiscate land and to assemble large
parcels of land from lots of little
sort of slum owners and so the blighted
rundown areas then they're going to tear
down that land and they're gonna give it
to private developers to build housing
on theoretically for poor people in the
real world that's not the way it
works out in the real world you get a
constellation of different kinds of
players who have got an interest in
becoming the developers who acquire
title one land there's a huge range of
possibilities but all of these people
share one thing in common they're not
interested in building housing for poor
people they're interested in building
housing at the least for middle-class
people and in fact they're also
particularly not interested in housing
for blacks and Hispanics who are
increasingly in the post-war period
growing percentage of the population
most in need of housing
haled is a victory for the working
poor title one quickly proved to be an
enormous bonanza not for those most in
need but for landowners and real estate
developers who under provisions of the
Act were not required to build housing
slum dwellers could afford or
even to build new housing at all
despite solemn assurances to the contrary few of
those evicted under title one found housing in the
neighborhoods they had once called home
many were not rehoused at all and many
of those that were found themselves
relocated to massive new low-income
housing projects thrown up in district
segregated as never before by race and class
the reality of it was that it was a
massive program of removal of usually
the people who had the least political
clout and those tended to be blacks and
Hispanics and working-class years and
working-class Italians now the man at
the center of this operation is Robert
Moses Moses is the coordinator of all
these title 1 programs and Moses is
cutting deals left and right by 1959
there are 16 huge title 1 projects that
have been completed they have moved out
roughly a hundred thousand for people
Robert Moses personified in age where
the interests of working class and poor
people were very easily dismissed as
secondary to the interests of middle
class upper middle class and wealthy
people so if it meant tearing down
hundreds of old brownstone tenements to
build a new Performing Arts Center that
was gonna happen if it meant clearing
land in the hope that commercial
developers would want to come in and
build skyscrapers instead then that's
what you did and often when really poor
communities were fragmented in this way
where did they go they went to the next
neighborhood over they went to the next
neighborhood that might be showing some
signs of weakness and in the rental
market might be showing some signs of
weakness in the housing market and the
problems of one neighborhood became the
problems of another far away the other
things that Moses does to his shame is
he fills the slum clearance committee
with a bunch of his banker and insurance
and developer friends and they begin to
use this one for clearance committees
power public power to remove non-white
people from areas where the developers
want to create white neighborhoods the
result is that they uproot hundreds
and thousands of black New Yorkers and
forced them into these expanding ghettos
in bedford-stuyvesant Harlem as striking
is the racial politics of the slum
clearance program was it staggering
scale convinced that partial reconstruction of
targeted neighborhoods was doomed from the start
title one made slum clearance funds
available on one condition the nearly
every structure in a designated area be
destroyed over the next 15 years the
maelstrom of destruction that would go
forward in New York in the name of urban
renewal would dwarf anything that had
come before in the city's history as
thousands of acres of teeming city
blocks were reduced to giant swaths of
rubble in New York who needs an atomic bomb
the novelist Bernard Malamud wrote if you
walked away from a place they tore it down
well sometimes I think the United States
embarked on urban renewal out of some
kind of elaborate guilt trip over
bombing so many places in the course of
the Second World War in Europe because
we saw that by clearing these sites
suddenly the bombs made it possible for
new kinds of developments and a way to
modernize cities how to tackle the
problem here we really use the same
techniques we declare whole areas after
some kind of study of the declining
demographics susceptible to demolition
it just simply moved people out it
became incredibly disruptive to people's
lives you scattered neighborhoods which
might have been very very poor but still
had a very dense network of associations
and you began through urban renewal
in a city like Europe but it's true in
Chicago and elsewhere that process which
we are still reeling under of wrenching
communities apart and then families
collapsing the whole support system of
the less well advantage in our society
collapses and we wonder why they then
become increasingly unable to
function in the society as a whole
and there were other problems as well
with what was being created as well as
what was being destroyed though for
many New Yorkers the new public housing
projects rising from the rubble
represented the first decent housing
they had known the structures themselves
shaped almost without exception to the
anti virus of men like la Corbusier had
little in common with the communities
they had known gong towers isolated from
the street on enormous tracts of land
called super blocks planners wanted to
reform the city by sweeping it clean
they hated the grid and all the way that
the grid led to development of the city
and they wanted to turn the city into a
Green Park federal funds would come in
to buy these buildings and you would
write the land down virtually to nothing
so you returned the city 2 degrees 0
under Moses you could get rid of the
gridiron because you'd make super blocks
Moses had no interest in commercial life
on his projects he wanted them strictly
pure of commercial life so he eliminated
streets so makes a bigger gulf between
the new development and the existing
city that's a whole betrayal in my
view a betrayal not only of New York's
traditions and history and natural
structure but also a betrayal of what
makes a community the Uptown slums are
being demolished but the rectangular
tenements that replaced them have not a
trace of invention their bleakness is
absolute
no man has ever dreamed of a
city of such monotonous severity
and there must be some bond between our houses
and our dreams John Cheever
everybody it would seem is for the
rebuilding of our cities with a unity of
approach that is remarkable but
that is not the same thing as liking
cities most of the rebuilding underway is being
designed by people who don't like cities
they do not merely dislike the noise and
the dead and the congestion they dislike
the city's variety and concentration
it's tension its hustle and bustle
the results are not cities
within cities but auntie cities
William hy
title one was only part of the story
title two was the other part of it the
federal government is not only
intervening in this program that is
demolishing vast areas of the inner
city it is also in fact underwriting the
development of the suburbs by saying to
banks that we are going to institute a
program of mortgage guarantees people
who might look like they're dangerous
credit risks and you might not want to
give them a mortgage because they're not
making enough money we the federal
government say to you that if you give
these people mortgages we will guarantee
you that in fact if they default we'll
pay you and because of that money was
available to flow into the private
housing market and unfortunately it was
not allowed to flow into multifamily
housing in the city what are you talking
about you're talking about in fact the
development of the suburbs so between
this mix of programs the federal
government has opted for a policy which
is profound the auntie city and to that
being interstate highways which were
ready to Swiss people out of the city
and take them to those new homes that
were rising in the cornfields and the
potato fields in response to all this
hot loan money being around New York was
suddenly surrounded by the changes in
American life but also got it right in
the neck from various federal programs
that were supposed to help the city that
said that they were about to help the
American people and boy the destruction
that came from these this concentration
of effects coincidental it all started
to happen in the late 40s but and
probably anyone of them New York could
have fought off or somehow accommodated
or made its peace with but all of those
things happening at once just was disastrous
in the end nothing would transform the
landscape of American cities more
dramatically than the billions of
dollars in federal aid streaming out
of Washington to build new arterial
highways culminating in the interstate
Highway Act of 1956 the most important
public works project in America since
the Erie Canal the 41,000 miles system
would reverse the impact of DeWitt
Clinton's great achievement drawing
resources out of cities and diffusing
them out across the American landscape
while committing the economy of the
entire nation to a self-perpetuating
culture of the automobile but the car
has a life of its own and you've got a
more highways so you can sell more cars
and if you make more cars you've got to
have more highways and once you're on
that treadmill then anything that stands
in the way including that vision of the
city is a civilized but dense arena goes
by the wayside and so we've got this
period when on the one hand we're
projecting roads out into the suburbs
and people are in fact motoring off on
them on the other hand were ramming roads
through working class and poor quarters
one way or another Robert Moses
had a hand in it all overseeing the
construction of nearly a billion and
a half dollars in federally funded
highways in little more than 15 years
we wouldn't have any American economy
without the automobile business that's
literally true and believe that that
this is a great industry that has to go
on and has to keep on turning out cause
and trucks and buses and they have to be
places for them to run they have to be
modern Road modern office somebody's got
to fill them and that in order to get
those things done and done properly people
must be inconvenience to her in the way
after the war everyone was beginning
to realize that you had to build great
arterial routes through the cities every
city had plans for expressman but nobody
was able to build the expressway
there were two reasons one the
staggering costs of his Express was
compared to everything that had gone
before in Public Works to build it
through a crowded urban setting the
second thing is this is a democracy you
had to evict from their homes tens of
thousands of people's for for an
ordinary expressway they were voters and
politicians are shied away from the very
thought of evictions on a scale like
that Moses shied away from nothing and
in the fur as soon as the war and he
began to ram six great expressways
right across the heart of New York
of all the federal projects under Robert
Moses control none would have more
devastating consequences for the city
and its people or in still more rage
against its executor than the Cross
Bronx Expressway a two hundred and
twenty five foot wide concrete trench seven
miles long that would carve a path of destruction
New Yorkers would never forget
this used to be a neighborhood the
neighborhood was called East Tremont
than the Bronx in New York I the heart
of it was where this road runs behind
made the Cross Bronx Expressway it was
predominantly Jewish there was
also Irish and Germans in it
and some blacks it was a neighborhood
where everybody knew everybody else it
was a community it was a place with a
heart Robert Moses tore this heart out
the Chrisman's expressway goes through
about 12 or 15 different neighborhoods
and it just like went through the center
of the great many and I mean the idea
was that it was built on a straight line
and there was no account of you know who
that people are and what they're doing
there was no question of can we work
this highway into existing life this
question never came up in the 1940s or
50s they had the power to build in
straight lines and they just did these
were still intact communities people
worked people kept up their properties
people did business where they lived
this was a place where you did your
marketing locally you did your business
locally you got your First Holy
Communion read your haftorah for your
bar mitzvah it all happened right there
it was a culturally and materially
self-sufficient world in a lot of ways
on December 4th 1952 this community was
told that Robert Moses was going to take
their homes what they wore got the same
letter it was a very typical Robert
Moses letter your homes are in the path
of you already approved course price
expressway and you have 90 days to get
out now this was 1952 it was not the
year of protests and what this community
tried to do was then very new and they
thought for a while that they were gonna
win their Assemblyman said they would
never approve it this state senator said
it would never be approved and Robert F
Wagner jr. who was running for mayor
then solemnly promised in his election
campaign that he would never approve
this route for the Cross Bronx Expressway
but of course by this era it wasn't the
mayor's word that mattered or borough
presidents word that mattered or an
assemblyman zora senators the only word
that mattered as to where highway was
going to go in New York with Robert
Moses they seem to think that they have
a choice that they'd rather stay in the
houses that they've lived in August on
the whole federal arterial aid program
running at the billions of dollars
depend upon the votes of a few a very
few people in one section we wouldn't
build anything nothing would be built
there'd be no highways have been all
no housing that there'd be no public
improvements the individual has to yield
it matters of this kind of the entire
country for the advantages
needs of the majority of people
and there's just no other way out no
there's no other way out in the end the
opposition never had a chance on April
23rd 1953 at a hearing of the board of
estimate at City Hall the Bronx borough
president underwent a mysterious change
of heart after a few whispered words
with Robert Moses not long after the new
mayor Robert F Wagner jr. abruptly
switched his position to and in the
summer of 1955 the stunned residents of
East Tremont looked on work began on one
of the most awesome public works
projects in the city's entire history
this is what it's like to build the Great
Highway through the greatest city in the world
when the guy who built the Burma Road
general Thomas F hour came here with his
chief aide Chapin they looked at this
and they said we thought the Burma Road
was tough it was nothing compared to
this when they came here this valley
that you see here was of course filled
with apartment houses so they had to
demolish scores of six and seven storey
apartment houses but that was really
nothing compared to the problem they
were going to have to blast through
the ridge there they knew that building
this road was going to take ten or
twelve years in fact it took 12 year they knew
they couldn't interrupt the subway service
we're gonna have to keep that subway
line running while they blasted through
that Ridge also inside that Ridge is one
of the world's largest storm sewer mains
gas mains electric lines Telegraph
cables sewers of all types a whole mass
of utility lesson moses was going to
have to ram this road through there
while keeping all those things in
operation i remember standing on the
ground parts of the concrete and
watching the engineering job which was
quite magnificent than Sablan because
you could see the destruction in one
direction everything was being smashed
to the east and to the west nothing had
been done yet so it looked like a
completely intact city and yet you knew
it was like the artillery shells were
gonna come down on it you know in a year
in two years in a month they didn't tell
us and all I could think of was that this
didn't have to be now that very
afternoon as it happened I had an
interview with Robert Moses and I was
asking him about this expressway and I
was trying to find a polite way to
address the subject and I said was it
perhaps more difficult to build an
expressway through a crowded City than
to build a Parkway in empty Long Island
he said no no not at all not really I
said well what about the chorus proxy
business I said no there was no real
trouble up there I said what was their
hardship for the people said no no he
said they just stirred up the animals
there so I just held fast and that was
all we had to do and of course it was
all he had to do because that was the
reality of political power
in New York at that time
year after year the rampage of
destruction went on as Robert Moses
rammed one expressway after another
across communities in Brooklyn Queens
Staten Island and the Bronx thirteen
massive roads in all and more than a
hundred and thirty miles of concrete
shattering no fewer than twenty one
separate neighborhoods end up ending
the lives of more than a quarter of a
million people the impact of that
onslaught on the fragile ecology of New
York's working-class neighborhoods would
continue to reverberate for generations
the car is not a neutral actor on the
urban landscape the car brings
mobility and it brings problems
Moses only saw the mobility he never saw
the problems if you owned a store in the
area of the Cross Bronx Expressway
suddenly a third of your customers were
gone and half of those that remained
were now on the other side of the
highway it knocked down all kinds
of places that were the glue of
neighborhood life leaving a world in tatters
leaving pieces of neighborhoods that were known
viable that could no longer attract the
new residents that help keep rents up
that helped keep property values up that
made the whole proposition of living in
a place or owning property in a place
a long-term proposition that you could
sustain so the Grand Concourse you
know just hits rock bottom in these
decades places like Mott Haven hit rock
bottom to become part of the poorest
congressional district in the entire
country because of the many many sorrows
that the Bronx has been inflicted with
I was stood on the ramparts of the
concourse and said someday I'll get that
basket and there were a lot of other
people too who was standing there with
me and watching the job and said we hate
that creep someday we'll get him I mean
he'd made a lot of enemies over the
years you know people who are willing to
do anything to get him we don't pay too
much attention to the crews has too many
critics we ought to get rid of someone
and so the frenzy of building went on
as the expressways drove through and the
tall towers rose and whole districts
were demolished to make room for
high-rise housing projects and building
after building of glass and steel by the
60s we knew that urban renewal was a
failure we knew that it had taken the
heart and the gut out of cities but New
York's urban renewal had started in the
50s and was moving along like an
unstoppable juggernaut and there were of
course deals made between the government
and between the real-estate people and
developers it was nothing that those of
us who cared about could stop there was
a done deal
in 1956 a 30 year old poet named Allen
Ginsberg living on East 7th Street in
the village sought to capture the
increasingly impersonal and alien
landscape of the city which he depicted
as the insatiable Old Testament God
Moloch to whom children were ritually sacrificed
what's fakes of cement and aluminum
packed open their skulls and ate up
their brains and imagination
Maalik the incomprehensible prisons
Moloch the crossbones soulless
jailhouse and Congress of Sorrows
mark whose buildings are judgment
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows
Molly who skyscrapers stand in the
long streets like endless Jehovah's
Maalik Maalik robot apartments
invisible suburbs skeleton Treasuries
demonic industries spectral Nations
invincible madhouses
they broke their backs lifting
Moloch to heaven pavements trees
radios tons
wake up in Moloch like streaming out of the sky
Allen Ginsberg 1956
as the buildings rise as the skyscrapers
get bigger as the mechanism of the city
becomes more and more dehumanized as the
human being a dwarf as finally gigantic
thousand windows Moloch's are created
that look down on the individual and
dwarf the individual and intimidate
the individual and then you find the
individual at the mercy of the people up
in the big towers that the person has no
control over the guy living on these
twelve Street has no idea what's going on
and still the building went on
at the southern tip of the island
hundreds of historic buildings would
soon be razed to the ground to make room
for two immense rectangular towers that
would eventually soar higher than the
Empire State Building itself far
out across the harbour meanwhile
Robert Moses had commenced work on yet
another epic project a mighty bridge the
longest in the world that would
eventually span the great narrows
through which Verrazano and Henry Hudson himself
had first sailed so many centuries before
by then most of the more than 600 miles
of highway Robert Moses would construct
in and around New York were either
complete or well underway and Moses
himself was reaching the very epigenome
well he held 12 public jobs at once
which meant he had the overseeing power
for every piece of public construction in New
York not just the highways the public housing
projects in the parks he built but
everything sewers catch basins no one
could move without Robert Moses approval
Robert Moses who built 627 miles of
highway never drove a car in his life
except for a couple of driving lessons
unsuccessful ones that he took in 1922
his car but he had this huge limousine
of course his license plate and his
car when you were in it with him you
felt like you were insulated from the world
the seats were far back you couldn't see
out the windows and they were covered
in leather so fine that you really felt
that you're in library or find men's
club when you were in his car so he had
no idea in many ways of what he had ruined
but all the new building so much of it
authorized controlled or overseen by
Moses himself could not disguise the
fact that by 1960 New York was a city
that seemed to be spiraling into ever
deeper trouble you're beginning to get
people noticing that these highways and
the new Civic Center's and projects are
in fact destroying vast amounts of space
that had been devoted to manufacturing
all those huge projects along the East
River are replacing in fact acres and
acres of small workshops and
manufacturers the big civic center that
goes up in downtown Brooklyn you know
wipes out vast amounts of thriving
business we're not talking about
eradicating slums anymore I mean they're
using the word they're saying oops
you're blighted you go you know up
you're a slum you go but in fact these
are real working-class neighborhoods and
they're organized around real manufacturing
centers across the five boroughs even
neighborhoods not ravaged by highways
and urban renewal had begun to stagnate
and decline by 1960 not a single mile of
new subway track had been laid in more
than 20 years banks and commercial
lenders had all but written off the
city's aging housing stock and the
census that year revealed an ominous new
trend as the flight to the suburbs begun
ten years before now began to accelerate
dramatically the first challenge for New
York is going to be the decline of the
tax base in the 1950s and 1960s as white
middle-class New Yorkers flee the city
you know after World War two five
hundred thousand white Brooklyn Heights
move out of that borough in 20 years now
the population of the borough remains
the same because more than five hundred
thousand black people move in but
ultimately the effect of it is actually
extraordinary the we've replaced
middle-class communities with poor
communities and we've isolated poor
people inside inner cities with very
few economic opportunities very little
chance of mobility
and there was more trouble to come
a suburbanization and white flight
continued and the flight of industry
begun 10 years before accelerated
dramatically another exodus was underway
on the waterfront where a revolution in
shipping methods was causing the great
port itself the city's lifeblood and
mainstay for more than three and a
half centuries to spiral into decline
where there were a hundred thousand and
more or longshoremen in New York in 1950
as you begin to shift a containerization
you just need one guy in a cab and
somebody else to hook the thing on to
the Container maybe one guy just to kind
of ease it into place and they lift
these whole containers they need lots of
space for that well New York City
doesn't have lots of space you need
hundreds of acres to stack up the
containers to move 18-wheel tractor
trailers trucks to turn around well they
found that from the New Jersey side so
in these two huge areas just these two
industrial jobs Harbor jobs New York
City hemorrhages in those let's say
15 or 20 years really after the end of
World War two and I think it's one of
the ways of noticing how to make the
city work if the port doesn't
work the city's not going to work
and that sense of the thriving noisy
dirty exuberant waterfront it's gone now
take a ride down the west side drive now
what's left of it you see some of the
piers just riding into the river like
bad teeth there's no people working on
them you have the one luxury liner pier
but that's not what it was up until 1962
will you see liner at the liner if a liar
maybe the great symbol of what happened
to that waterfront is one of its
greatest attractions right now which
is the intrepid which is a ship that
doesn't sail it's got a flight deck
covered with ferocious looking jet
warplanes whose noses appointed straight
at H&H bagels it's crowded every weekend
but it doesn't go anywhere so it employs
people really as a function of memory
rather than of anything that's active
with new thriving the museum by 1962 New
York seemed too many people to have lost its
way only 30 years before f scott Fitzgerald
had stood atop the Empire State Building
and gazed out into the endless expanse
of blue and green that stretched beyond
the city's borders filled with despair
to see that the city had limits now a
new kind of despair could be discerned
from the city's tallest towers the
blue and green that had once marked New
York's limits had turned to gray and
brown and signified something more
ominous still the limitless suburban
sprawl that was now superseding the city
an endless agglomeration of highways parking lots
and tract housing developments punctuated by the
deteriorating cores of older urban areas
that now stretched almost continuously
from Boston to Washington New York
itself stood at the very center of what
the French demographer Jean Gutman
called megalopolis an immense area that
by 1960 was home to more than 40 million
inhabitants nearly one in four Americans
but by now many wondered if the very
notion of a center still had any real
meaning or whether cities themselves had
any reason for continuing at all
out for a walk after all week in bed
I find them tearing a part of my block
as usual everything in New York is torn
down before you have had time to care
for it you would think the simple fact
of having lasted threatened our cities
like mysterious fires James Merrill
until the first blows fell no one was
really convinced that Penn Station would
really be demolished or that New York
would permit this monumental act of
vandalism against one of the largest
and finest landmarks of its age
any city gets what it admires and
will pay for and ultimately deserves
and we will probably be judged not by the
monuments we build but the monuments we destroy
ADA Louise Huxtable
one of the worst things that's happened
in New York's history is the loss of
Penn Station Penn was so traumatic
because this was something that belonged
to everybody and that people felt was so
beautiful and that they were so proud of
it I think I stood for granted I
felt that it you know it couldn't
possibly be torn down could you tear
down the Grand Canyon and then in wars
and they put this really disgusting
rabbit warren in its place
how tragic coughs and so many Americans
will never know what it was like to
arrive in New York have the first
time in your life at Penn Station
it was spectacular if you had never been
to New York before you came into the
city for the first time you came out
and there you were in this breathtaking
man-made wondrous architectural place
finsih Scully says that we used to come
in to New York like gods when we came
into Penn Station now we come in to the present
Penn Station like rats it was one of the
worst things to happen to an American
treasure not just in New York in the
whole country Pennsylvania Station the greatest
architectural monument of the Imperial
Age of rail had stood for more than half
a century at the corner of 7th Avenue
and 33rd Street in New York when in the
spring of 1961 the financially troubled
Pennsylvania Railroad announced plans to
tear the Magnificent structure down and
replace it with a high-rise glass and
steel office tower and sports facility
hoping it would bring in more money
though some voices were raised in
protest the coalition of architects
writers and historians who tried to stop
the demolition could do nothing to save
Penn Station from the Wreckers ball
and two years later on the morning of
October 28 1963 the demolition began
it would take more than three years in
all to pull the great stone structure down
one by one the enormous Doric columns
winged eagles and granite angels that
had ornamented its facade were cut
down carted away and dumped in a
foul-smelling swamp in the New Jersey Meadowlands
it is inconceivable that Penn Station
was destroyed demolished for one of the
sorest replacements that one could ever imagine
everything about the ambition of Penn
Station and of the great railroad
stations expresses the kind of power
that had been concentrated in New York
the loss of it was a sad commentary on
the ideology of modernism the belief
that new is better the belief that
modern efficiency or that the profiting
from new construction is an adequate
replacement for the traditions the
heritage and the real meaning
of places in people's lives
the loss of Penn Station seemed to many
an irrefutable confirmation that the age
of rail had come to an end and at the
age of the automobile had triumphed and
in many ways it had but more than
most people understood at the time the
destruction of Penn Station had marked a crucial
turning point in the life of New York City
it's when that comes down that a sense
of sacrilege really activates people
it's destroying the past it is symbolic
of the triumph of the auto era over
the old interconnected mass transit
operations it generated for many people
a different attitude about the new you
know maybe the tradition of the new you
know wasn't something that we should
celebrate someone critically I think
what was game was even more important
than what was lost and what was lost
was of course one of the last really
magnificent boza constructions in terms
of design and space and material and
architectural quality that was lost what
was gained was an enormous groundswell
popular groundswell for preservation
that not everything was expendable and
that some things were worth a struggle
that you had to find uses you had to
find ways to keep the character and the
quality and the continuity of a city
it went far beyond actually losing a
station it really was a sense of what
is the city and how do you have that
resonance really that you get from the
past that makes the city rich and real
and a rewarding place to be that it
isn't sterile it isn't the product of
building by the bottom line which
of course so much construction is
nobody seems to care about New York except
for those of us who live and work here
and we who do care believe the time
has come to put a stop to the wanton
destruction of our greatest buildings to
put a stop to wholesale vandalism it may
be too late to save Penn Station but it
is not too late to save New York Jane
Jacobs and the action group for
better architecture in New York
power is a very unusual weapon but it's
a sword whose health as well as it blade
as sharp as a razor so that it cuts into
not only the people on whom it is used
but it cuts into the man who is using
it changing and we see in the career of
Robert Moses a change a personal change
as he gets more and more power and wants
more power in his early days he wanted
power for the sake of the things he wanted
built more and more you can chart a
decade by decade he chooses the things
to build because of the power that they
will give
by the early 1960s the master plan
Robert Moses had laid out for the
remaking of New York more than three
decades before was all but complete
hundreds of miles of parkways and
expressways and dozens of bridges and
tunnels now connected the city to the
suburban reaches of Long Island and
beyond hundreds more had been driven
through the outer boroughs themselves
weaving together as Moses himself
declared the loose strands and frayed
edges of the Metropolitan arterial
tapestry but in all the frenzy of
construction the master builder had
never been able to penetrate the heart
of Manhattan itself with a superhighway and
in 1961 he resolved to do something about it
fixing in his sights a low-lying area
of lower Manhattan stretching from
Chinatown in the south up through the
wayward lanes and ancient side streets
of Greenwich Village we simply
repeat that cities are created
by and for traffic a city without
traffic is a ghost town the area between
Canal Street and 3rd Street a strip
three-quarters of a mile wide is the
most depressed area in lower Manhattan
and one of the worst if not the worst
slums in the entire city Robert Moses
condemning the West Village as a slum
and the old cast-iron district to the
south as an obstacle to the free flow of
traffic by 1961 he had set in motion to
immense federal initiatives a vast
urban renewal project that would level
fourteen entire blocks along Hudson
Street in the village an 1/8 lane
elevated highway one of his most
cherished dreams that would drive
straight across the heart of lower
Manhattan from the East River to the
Hudson destroying thousands of historic
structures and displacing nearly 10,000
residents and workers it's difficult to
even make anyone understand what would
have happened he would have bulldoze a
swath about 225 feet why right across
lower Manhattan today that's the cast-on
district to Soho what was the vision what was the
aims of a man who would decide for the sake of
the automobile to cut a swath across
a city of course a beautiful vibrant
bustling part of the city and you know
Robert Moses wanted to build three
expressways across New York City not
just the lower Manhattan he will had a
mid Manhattan expressway which would
have run across 30th Street in the air
and he wanted to build one again
at ground level at a hundred and
twenty-fifth Street and Upper Manhattan Express
for decades nothing had stopped the
juggernaut of road building or slowed
the rampage of urban renewal which in
the name of rebuilding the city had torn
the heart out of one community after another
but this time things would turn out different
determined to save Manhattan from the
devastation that had blighted the Bronx
residents of the village banded together
and resolved to fight selecting as their
leader a 45 year old journalist and
working mother from Hudson Street who
had that very year published a
groundbreaking book about the mistakes
of urban planning her name was Jane
Jacobs the book was called the death and
life of great American cities and New
York would never be the same again and
it started out by saying something like
this is an attack on city planning and
then she went through the litany of what
the Corbusier and other ideologues had
imagined what a city should be as
opposed to what a city who really was
Jane Jacobs was taking on the
orthodoxies of planning that had
prevailed in the post-world War two
period the ideas of Luca Busey and the
Bauhaus and and other planners and
who thought that the city needed to be
renewed there were areas that that that
needed help but the kind of help that
she saw that they needed was the
assistance to allow people to continue
living in their brand stones in the
neighborhoods where they had a harmony
with their neighbors and the destruction
of those neighborhoods is one of the
great tragedies of a post-world War two New York
she understood that urban economies are
different she understood the sort of
beehive thousand different
interdependent functions nature of urban
economies and that's what we lose
when we surrender the street to the
automobile when people don't want to be
on the street anymore when they reshape
their lives in a way that they're always
in privatized space rather than sharing
public space Jane Jacobs knew
thirty-five years ago that that was a
recipe for the destruction of
what makes cities wonderful
look what they have built low-income
projects that become worse centers of
delinquency and vandalism than the
slums that were supposed to replace
promenades that go from no place
to nowhere and have no promenade or
express ways that eviscerate great cities
this is not the rebuilding of cities
this is the sacking of cities Jane
Jacobs she hit the nerve at the right moment
with that book it was the right book at
exactly the right moment because she
made people see particulars she made
them see the street this had been a
period of urban renewal when everything
was on a model on a big plan or a
drawing with overlays and she made
people look at the street and what was
there she spoke about the eyes on the
street the smaller buildings where
people looked out and watched their
neighbors she spoke about the small
stores the mom-and-pop stores all of the
things that urban renewal not only
was destroying but didn't acknowledge
insisted she basically said that from
her house at 5:55 Hudson Street in the
West Village from the sidewalk of her
block you could observe what a whole
city was like but it returned the
discussion of what urbanism should be
about what New York should be about from
big land plan games to individuals shops
streets cars crosswalks networks of
people people rich and poor living more
closely together less concerned with
the elevator to the 35th floor and more
concerned with the life of the five-story walk-up
under the seeming disorder of the old
city wherever the old city is working
successfully as a marvelous order for
maintaining the safety of the streets
and the freedom of the city
it is a complex order its essence is the
intricacy of sidewalk use bringing
with it a constant succession of eyes
this order is composed of movement and
change and we may liken it to the dance
not to a simple-minded precision dance
but to an intricate ballet in which the
individual dancers and ensembles
all have distinctive parts which
miraculously reinforce each other
and compose an orderly whole Jane Jacobs
her writing enabled people to imagine her block
but also enable people to see to see other blocks
she created maybe without intending to
do it a kind of empathy and opened up
possibilities for empathy as a political
force in the 60s so that once people
could imagine how other people lived
even if they didn't concretely know they
could help them they could work
for them they could work together
when she comes out with her book in 1961
it's it's not just that it's brilliantly
written it's pithy its punchy its
down-to-earth you know it's enjoyable
it's entertaining its mind capturing
it's not just that it's that what she is
doing is providing a counter narrative a
counter argument a counter vision about
the cities but it's a vision that
says you don't want to break out
manufacturing and send it off somewhere
else you don't want to in fact send the
citizens off to the suburbs you what you
want to have is an integrated community
a way it through used to be in essence
but you want to have people in a
position to walk to work you want
small-scale buildings you want people to
be able to watch the streets I'm in
crime to some extent it's beginning to
explode in the city in the 50s and a lot
of it is you know there's certainly the
pathology of drugs and such but it is
also from shattered communities that
have been renewed and removed and the
highway doubt--and are in turmoil and
are about you know in the 60s to really
explode and not just here again but all
across the country armed with a
philosophy capable of countering those
in power Jacobs and her colleagues
threw themselves into the fight holding
rallies staging demonstrations and
attacking in public hearings and in
print the underlying assumptions behind the
culture of the automobile and of urban renewal
and also you know Jacobs is an activist
she doesn't just simply write about this
stuff but then she's out in the streets
she's demonstrating they are trying to
block the lower Manhattan Expressway
they're trying to stop the plan to run
roadways through Washington Square their
counter planning they're planning a West
Village building project which is based
on rehabilitation as he had in the Bronx
Robert Moses fought them every step of the
way marshaling every weapon at his command
to blunt the opposition that was
personally affected adversely or he
thinks he is he's gonna be opposed to
you don't want it they don't want it
done at all or he wants it done
somewhere else what moved away now he
may be wrong in more than a half the
case of three-quarters of the case he's
wrong from his own point of view what
do you mean by that I mean by that
he doesn't know what's in his own
interest he's an smart enough to
visualize what you're going to do once
you've built the thing he comes around
and he tells you he was always
for it has that happened to you
for decades Robert Moses had simply
written roughshod over all those who
disagreed with him brutally negating the
power of votes Jane Jacobs charged with
the power of money but this time he had
completely misjudged the strength of the
opposition rising up from the streets
of Greenwich Village which had been the
center of political dissent in the
city since the days of the Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory fire and before I
think it maybe couldn't have happened
anywhere else the Lower East Side is
different the village is different it
has a history there were very
experienced organizers we were not
johnny-come-lately 's we not only knew
how to organize we not only knew how to
get publicity we not only knew how to
mobilize the troops but we knew how to
form coalition's mafiosi radical Jews
factory owners Chinese merchants people
who ordinarily never had anything to say
to each other people who ordinarily
hated each other came together to stop
this they discovered that different
kinds of people could work together and
really make a difference and generate
a kind of power that neither of them by
themselves could ever have imagined
they would call a meeting and there
would be three times as many people as
anybody expected they'd have to find a
new hall and there was a particular
thrill in this at the end of the 50s in
the start of the sixties that we might
be able to really make a difference and
that there was a power that was even greater
than the power of cars power of people
at the head of the unlikely coalition
was Jane Jacobs herself frustrated at
one public hearing she and her
colleagues tore up the stenographers
report then declared that since there
was no official record of the hearing
there had been no hearing she was
arrested and charged with riot
inciting to riot criminal mischief and
obstructing public administration but
public support for her actions only grew
mr. Moses says that the expressway must
go through regardless of who stands
in the way do you agree with that
absolutely not if this expressway goes
through it will absolutely be catastrophic
this will set a pattern no doubt there
that will be followed there in other
parts of the city and if he has his way
he'll criss cross the city north south
east and west bisected tri-sector
every which way with expressways
expressways - mr. Moses are ever not
any more important than people seeing
evidence of the need of that thing is
overwhelming from the point of view of
engineering and traffic and that's
all that matters well in the end yes
congestion gets bad enough have to have
it the meantime what happens the Salvio
doesn't want it's a lot
the battle over the lower Manhattan
Expressway came to a crucial climax on
the night of December 11 1962 at a tense
crowded meeting of the board of estimate
on the second floor of City Hall
except for one old man Assemblyman Luis
de Salvio declared I've been unable to
find anyone of technical competence who
was for this so-called Expressway
and this old man is a cantankerous
stubborn old man who has done many
things which may have in their time been
good for New York City but I think that
the time has come for the stubborn old
man to realize the to many of his dreams
turn out to be nightmares for the city
and this board must realize that if it
does not kill this stupid example of bad
city planning but the stench of it will haunt
them and this great city for many years to come
Jane Jacobs led the fight against that
expressway that was Moses's last he had
many lies to Roz but that really did it
every major politician a Lindsay Koch
than a congressman I was in it with the
debates were all over the press
nationally and internationally and
somehow the fate of what an inner city
is stark but still very modern city
would be was being decided on whether
these super projects whether clearance
for housing or foreign expressway
could go forward in an existing city or
whether the people who live there
had rights to their own environment
in the end jacobs and her allies prevailed
what of estimate in an executive session
today voted unanimously to turn down
proposal for a lower Manhattan expressly
I wonder how David felt when he bested
Goliath that's the way we felt we felt
we beat Robert Moses you know sir you
look belly relieved to you lived right
in the path of the proposed Iran's
brewing streak so this is a reprieve
from a long time sentences and yes yes
it was the greatest thing the mayor ever
did for the people in that neighborhood
because everybody was worried that that
and everybody was getting sick over it
so when they hear this news this will be
the best news that they ever hide for
Christmas they selected the Christmas
present for the people on Broome Street
would you say that the result was in
this case a triumph of public opinion
against Moses no there hasn't been
any triumph for anybody yet
Robert Moses always felt that he was a
tremendous failure in Manhattan and he
couldn't communicate his vision to people
he built highways around the edges but
he could never get through the
center people just wouldn't bar it
they stayed attached to their streets
to their Kearny houses to their crummy
neighborhoods and kept him from doing
this they abstained from the flow they
didn't want to be part of the flow what
a result of this is that Manhattan is
one of the very few parts of America
where you can live a whole life without
a car okay and where your daily life can
depend on the street and on interacting
with other people and on seeing what's
gonna happen in ways that you don't plan
and in that way New York is different
from I think probably every other
American city it may be the only
American city without an expressway
going through the center of town and
Moses felt extremely frustrated and
mortified by this but he just couldn't do
it the community protests were too great
it was a crucial turning point in the
life of New York and in the culture of
cities everywhere with their stunning
victory Jacobs and her allies had
reasserted the value of the city block
and by extension that of urban public
space itself challenging the most basic
assumptions upon which New York had
proceeded since the dawn of the modern age
that the new was always better than the old
and there's a sensitivity to history
which is also a new dimension to this I
mean you gotta understand that since the
20s it's been modern modern modern and
modern means dump the past break with
the past think new think Art Deco think
streamline I think projectile think you
know tear down the old stuff not just
because although it may be you know
constraint on our ability to make
profits but because it's old because the
new is intrinsically superior to the old
but Jacob says wait a minute part
of the texture of life in a city is
that people are not just connected to
each other on the street by virtue of
being neighbors but they're connected in
time there's some sense in the buildings
around you that you know remain that
gives you a sense of being part of a
continuum you know the history isn't
dead it's not something which has been
transcended today is not the first day
of the rest of your life people are
beings in time and they need to be
surrounded not entirely but you know to
some extent by the legacy the
built environment of the past
three years later Jacobs triumph would
be codified in an extraordinary new law
when on April 19 1965 Mayor Robert
Wagner signed legislation establishing
the Landmarks Preservation Commission
the agency came two years too late to
save Penn Station but in the years
to come it would save hundreds of
individual buildings in New York from
the records ball along with entire
districts including Brooklyn Heights
Greenwich Village and Soho itself
vibrant places Robert Moses had
yearned so passionately to transform
well the darkside of Moses character was
probably every bit as prominent as the
bright side especially in the context
of New York City on the one hand we can
admit the city needed a rubber Moses to
adapt and become a modern city on the
other hand Robert Moses saw the city in
some sense as a transportation problem
but New York is more than a transportation problem
and having created let's say the kind of minimal
number of new roads and new bridges that
the city needed to sort of function in
the second half of the 20th century then
he began to maybe continue that beyond
what was absolutely essential persons
like Jane Jacobs and others began to say
no wait a minute why do we need this
road that the whole purpose of things is
not to see how fast you can move traffic
that there's a city there that there
people who live in neighborhoods there
are people who like it the way it is and
I think that Moses never really
understood that the man who never drove
but who created an automobile kind of
circumstance a man who was responsible
for planning and building this enormous
metropolis and I think you can't escape
the feeling that he really wasn't comfortable in
the very city that he was responsible for building
by 1965 the worst rampages of urban
renewal were over and the long fateful
career of Robert Moses was drawing
to a close but nothing could stop the
onslaught of forces that in the decade
to come would break over New York City
and over older urban places everywhere
as the bill for nearly half a century of
massive social change physical upheaval
and economic transformation finished
coming do I think that when we finished
the city form the urban formed when
traffic lands and freeways and tall
buildings and business districts become
our priority and we forget about people
in neighborhoods we actually forget
about what is the lifeblood of the city
one of the things that we ended up doing
by focusing on the urban form by
building taller bigger faster better is
that we actually achieved physically
what we wanted to by the 1960's New York
City has actually gone through probably
one of the greatest urban building booms
in the history of mankind the problem
is antonie financial crisis it's in
financial crisis because we
neglected neighborhoods for 40 years
to a startling degree the vast river of
federal funds that had poured into the
city for nearly 20 years and only served
to accelerate anti urban trends begun
long before hastening the flight of
industry in the middle class to the
suburbs and beyond while traffic New
York's most vulnerable citizens in
rapidly expanding ghettos at the heart
of an inner city increasingly plagued by
deteriorating finances rising crime
falling city services and worsening race
relations
with resources dwindle and the needs of
New York's poorest citizens on the runs
years of simmering racial and social
tension began to erupt into open
conflict on the city streets in the
summer of 1964 riots once again ripped
through Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant
when an off-duty policeman shot and
killed a 15 year old boy the violence
that ensued echoing even greater
violence in cities across America would
continue for five full days and cast a
shadow over the last of Robert Wagner's
three terms as mayor his successor a
liberal ex congressman from the Upper
East Side named John Lindsay promised
New Yorkers a fresh start but from the
day he took office on January 1st 1966
the city would be battered by one crisis
after another as the first in a series
of crippling citywide strikes by
municipal employees among the lowest
paid workers in the city brought New
York's Transit System to a complete
standstill
and the working people the Catalan
people in many ways I think New York in
the 60s and 70s embodied the 60s and
70s in all the ambiguities and all the
tensions in American society you have
a civil rights movement that is raising
all sorts of problematic questions for
people about the nature of power in the
nature of access to power at the same
time you have an economic shift you have
money draining off to support the Vietnam
War we can't acknowledge that we're really
fighting the war and so we do deficit
spending it's a terrible blow ultimately
economically and all those things are
happening not only in the country but
right in the city and so you have a very
quick shift in the vision of New York
from a city with promise to a city of devastation
of poor people of complaining people of crumbling
buildings of inadequate services
meanwhile the suburbs are booing people
are moving elsewhere where labor
costs might be less expensive where
opportunities are different and what
you're left with in is a city that
nobody wants to support the 1960s and
1970s were not good for American cities
this was a time when everybody thought
the suburbs were the wave of the future
just a matter of time until really all
cities and all older neighborhoods were
abandoned in favor of the car in favor
of the corporate office park in favor of
the suburban residential subdivision
it was a time of fiscal crisis as the
country essentially spent its money on defense or
Vietnam and is in such money out of cities so that
the early 1970s mad city was had an
amazing financial crisis brought on by
borrowing too much money and perhaps
living beyond its means but also it no
longer had the schools were beginning to
decline the crime rate was beginning an
explosive increase in New York City as
in other places the Bronx was burning
every night there were fires that you
could see and so there was an orange
glow we heard about Fort Apache who's
dangerous police percent by 1970 the
city that had emerged from the
second world war as the most powerful
metropolis on earth and begun to spiral
down into an abyss of urban chaos and
despair almost without precedent in
American urban history well the worst
feature of New York and the period for
me of the neighborhood that were falling
apart a lot of the South Bronx in the
course of the 70s was burnt down the
biggest industry in the Bronx became
Horace the 1976 World Series whether it
was a night game in Yankee Stadium the
Goodyear blimp showed by the model away
a building was burning down and Howard
Cosell said what's wrong with these
people that they burned down their houses
some people began to suggest that it had
to do with the character of the
landlords in the fact that you could
collect more money on insurance than you
could collect in grant on buildings that
were old and needed constant refinancing
and ironically that were redlined
because the whole Bronx was redlined in
this Bureau so you couldn't you couldn't
fix up the building but you could fix it down
by 1973 more than 2000 City blogs had
been burned to the ground more than
43,000 departments had been destroyed
and the South Bronx had become a symbol
around the world of urban decline there
was this brief period in the 1970s
especially where it seemed like New York
was really gonna be further and further
off the chart that really did feel like
neighborhoods were being sequentially
abandoned by their owners you could see
in a lower Eastside landlord arson was
rampant because that was the only way
they'd ever be able to make money they
couldn't get people to move into these
places that they might as well burn them
down and it really seemed like this was just
going to happen all throughout the island
for the city itself there was one final
chapter to come in the long downward
spiral begun three decades before all
through John Lindsay second term as tax
revenues faltered and expenses soared
the beleaguered mayor had refused to cut
the crucial public programs that had
been New York's hallmark since the days
of the depression using hundreds of
millions of dollars earmarked for
long-term capital projects to cover the mounting
shortfall borrowing hundreds of millions more to
make up for that and rolling over the
ever mounting debt from one year to
another very bad accounting practices
the city was in effect borrowing to buy
groceries people and political
institutions should borrow money for
capital reasons we were the city was
borrowing money in order to meet its
current bills and you can't do that forever
I think that's culminated in the fiscal
crisis in the early 1970s because it
kind of brought it all together sure was
partly because the city was living
beyond its means and trying to maintain
this kind of old New Deal attitude of
building a public hospitals and public
colleges and generous public welfare
benefits even when the other estimation
wasn't following behind
by 1975 more than two billion dollars
a year were going simply to service New
York's enormous 11 billion dollar debt
which was increasing now at an alarming
rate with each passing month and
threatening to capsize is the new
administration of John Lindsay's
successor mayor it'd be a I don't want
to know if New York City is going down
the drain now is it safe to say not
going down the drain that October the
apocalyptic reckoning city leaders had
been attempting to stave off for nearly
ten years finally came due when the
consortium of banks that had freely lent
the city billions of dollars over the
previous decade abruptly suspended New
York's borrowing privileges until the
city had put its financial house in order
within days the city was facing a fiscal
crisis unlike any since the darkest
hours of the depression the bank said
looking at how much money in New York
City owed we're not gonna lend you any
more money and nobody believed they
would ever do that and they just shut
the window the bank's essentially sits
in New York give us six billion dollars
back now please and New York City
couldn't do that so in a sense New York
City was bankrupt or virtually Bangor
then the fiscal crisis is the process of
getting six billion dollars to pay back
the banks of the money that they once
loaned to the city with the prospect
of bankruptcy staring them in the face
city leaders turned in desperation to
the one source that could possibly save
the federal government submitting
a request for more than two billion
dollars in emergency loan guarantees the
city's last hope of avoiding complete
financial ruin President Gerald Ford
stunning response came in to speech on
October 29th at the National Press Club in
Washington responsibility for New York City's
financial problems is being left on the
front doorstep of the federal government
unwanted and abandoned by its real
parents and when New York City now asked
the rest of the country to guarantee its
bills it can be no surprise that many
other Americans ask why
municipal default ford concluded would
be a good thing for new york forcing the
city to curtail its traditionally
spendthrift ways no federal loan
guarantees would be forthcoming the next
day a towering black headline loomed
ominously from the front page of The
Daily News Ford to City drop dead
what's astonishing is that the crest of
the United States could essentially tell
the greatest city in the Western world
to drop that because he didn't say it
exactly but remember those daily news
headlines drop dead New York City tells
you just how far in a sense the city and
something a city that had sent so many successful
people out into the world should have
had more friends by the mid 70s it was
surrounded by people who did not wish
the place well and interestingly people
whose own life stories passed through
the five boroughs are decamped in Jersey
and Westchester and out on the island
and when that Daily News headline comes
out for two city dropped dead instead
of recoiling in horror this Aang yeah
drop dead we think you should drop dead too
it was a terrible terrible time it really was
instead of looking at this as a treasure
of the American scene New York was seen
as representing almost everything
that was worst about post-war America
in its blunt and homely way the headline
in the Daily News captured is nothing
else and the basic assumption behind
President Ford's remarks an assumption
that had been growing more and more
commonplace among Americans for years as
the city's social and economic problems
multiplied New York like many of the
nation's older cities was plummeting
into the abyss New York America's
extraordinary unwieldy experiment in
capitalism and democracy hope and greed
had failed New York City of cities
capital of capitalism gateway to America
was going to die and good riddance
grace Paley at one of the great New
York writers has a story written early
seventies South Bronx and one of the
characters who's like a community
organizer there says the buildings are
burning down on one side of the street
and the kids are trying to put something
together on the other and this could be
a parable of one of the great
achievements of that period from a lot
of the neighborhoods that were most
devastated in New York the earliest form
in which most people who weren't part
of that neighborhood saw it with the
graffiti that appeared on the subways in
the 70s and this was on a very rickety
decayed generation of great trains they
painted enormous ly exuberant colored
names and reliefs and mottos
and you can see many films now a great
day a great neighborhood and l-train and
certainly the l-train is like a rainbow
and it's thrilling the next incarnation
was wrapping the earliest form that
people saw would be there would be one
kid wrapping with small speakers in a
drum track in the subway you know with a
hat open for money and you
know these are parables of a
city that's being ruined that's being
destroyed and that's saying we can rise
again we come from ruins but we're
not ruined and I mean in 15 years it's
become the basic form of world music
so it's a field but it's important to
understand that it came from totally
burnt-out ruined districts and that's
where it was born and it was born out of
this suffering and misery and that a lot
of the creativity that New York is
always had has come from the cellars
from the rooms from how the other half
lives so an important part of sharing
space and living city life is being able
to live through the ways in which the
city itself is torn down and is consumed
that is destroyed but also consumes
itself you know if you can do that you
can become human in more alive than
you've been before
in the end of course the city didn't
die despite all the destruction and
heartbreak of the post-war years despite
the demise of neighborhoods and the loss
of industry and the bitter clash of
races and classes despite everything as
it had so many times in the past the
city - almost everyone's surprise got
back up off the floor and began to
revive less than a month after refusing
to come to the city's aid President Ford
reversed himself and grudgingly agreed
to approve the city's request for loan
guarantees warned by advisers that New
York's demise might trigger a
catastrophic domino effect of fiscal
default that would bring down one city
after another across the country with
time to put its finances in order
city officials moved with startling
dispatch cutting services repaying the
city's outstanding loans and balancing
the city budget by 1981 a
full year ahead of schedule
in the end the US Treasury made millions
of dollars out of its arrangement with
New York I think New York became the
experiment ground for a new national
program of austerity to check the power
of labor and to reverse some of the
trends of New Deal liberalism it was put
on display and it was created as a
kind of negative object example this is
liberalism gone amok this is
a kind of degeneration high
moral degeneracy that can only be solved
by the old fashioned medicine of fiscal
austerity and it's a program that in the
sense was then successful New York and
followed in the 1980s in the country at
large the summer of my election I went
for a walk on the Brighton Beach
boardwalk zorka's suddenly I heard a
woman calling mayor mayor and I looked
down the boardwalk and there was this
elderly lady she must have been in her
late 70s and she came towards me she
took my hand and she looked at me and
she said mayor make it like it was
I haven't Stella I still have moose
pimples and I thought to
myself as she said it Madame
it never was the way you
think it was but I'll try
in the years to come despite the
terrible hardships that continued to be
suffered by many of New York's most
vulnerable citizens the city would not
only survive but begin to thrive and
flourish again in large measure because
the urban qualities that had defined the
city since the time of the Dutch began
to reassert themselves not as problems
to be solved but as crucial urban values
to be celebrated nurtured and sustained
what I think accounts for New York's
success and reinventing itself and at
the end of the 20th century for the very
strengths that the Dutch are the first
little settlement in the 17th century
made visible the heterogeneity of the
city so that everyone was welcome maybe
everyone did not be loved we're not
gonna be pleasant we're not gonna hug
you and I can't even say good morning
every time we've seen but in the end
opportunity is here people knew it so we
have this incredible immigration flows
which accelerate after the mid-1960s
with the new immigration laws secondly
we have the same kind of entrepreneurial
spirit that the Dutch West India Company
had established in 1624 it has kind of
run through New York all the time third
I think it's the density and concentration of
deal there's something about the mood of the
place that's directed toward achievement
and getting something done fourthly I
think it's always been a kind of an
openness to change New York City was
always willing to go with what worked
to find the balance to reach a new
understanding by the 1980s
as the city's role within
the widening gyre of an increasingly
global economy continued to shift and
change the relentless commercial energy
that had characterized New York for
nearly four hundred years began to
return with a frantic intensity not seen
on Wall Street since the days of the
Roaring Twenties by the 1990s though the
days of New York's blue-collar glory
were over most of the hundreds of
thousands of jobs that had been lost
had been replaced as thousands of new
companies and small businesses streamed back
into New York eager to draw on the unique
concentration of talent resources
gathered there and attracted
by the very density that had once driven
businesses away cities bring a lot of
people together some people feel too
many people too big crowds but there's a
Great Commandment of urban life that can
be a tremendous source of happiness thou
shalt share space I mean cities in many ways are
expensive and inconvenient and noisy and dirty but
the wonderful thing about them is the
way they bring people together you
design cities that don't let people get
together you're losing what may be most
special and beautiful about them and
then of course make people think why
bother to live in a city at all if you don't
even have what's most special about the city
by the turn of the century the greatest
and most moving sign of the city's
miraculous revival could be seen on the
city streets themselves which within ten
years of the end of the fiscal crisis
were filled with hundreds of thousands
of newcomers from around the world who
had been pouring into New York since the
mid 1960s when the federal government
finally reopened the great human gateway
Emma Lazarus had called the Golden Door
I mean New York became the kind of port
that it had been at the beginning of
the 20th century again and people began
coming in enormous numbers from East
Asia from Latin America from Eastern
Europe colonizing neighborhoods that
really people considered abandoned the
census Department says that now
something like 43% of New Yorkers you
know have been born outside the USA
and they said that they haven't been
comparable figure since 1910
by the end of the 20th century the
fiscal crisis had dwindled to a memory
and New York seemed to have
reinvented itself once again the epic
transformations of the previous
half-century had left the city with a
host of intractable problems
including failing schools a crumbling
infrastructure and immense disparities
of income race and opportunity but the
city had come back and Americans
everywhere had begun to recognize the
crucial role bourbon places had played
in the tapestry of American history
carrying on the experiment New York had
begun on the banks of the Hudson four
hundred years before
the experiment is how close can rich and
poor live before the fabric completely
falls apart how close can you put ethnic
groups that don't like one another much
how much can you promise people about a
rich and privileged future and then not
really be able to deliver before they
rise up and say enough and the answer
here over and over and over again has
been that the fabric becomes tattered
that sometimes the fabric even becomes
torn but the fabric survives
you
you
some unfamiliar with history because
complaints about New York and
predictions of its demise have been so
common for so long and certainly go back
at least a hundred years and more I
think we're living in one of the glory
times I think near the saga of New York
City is nowhere near to being over the
city has had good times and bad times
and it will continue to is Vanitas
George M Cohen or refer to Broadway as
a fabulous invalid well I think New York
City is also in many ways a fabulous
envelope New York City has become so hot
that it's unbelievable in the early
90s it was just the opposite it was the
closest that it's ever been to 1929
Depression today New York City is hotter
than it ever was in the roaring 20s in
the roaring 80s right now New York City
is the hottest it's ever been by far you
feel in New York City the energy coming
up out of the sidewalk she said you know
that you were in the midst of something
tremendous something and if something
tremendous hasn't yet happened it's just
about to happen yeah it's it's always a lot
I can hear now it's it's a maintenance
the sound of maintenance that's it
because it's the ultimate battle with
entropy there's no other more entropic I
mean it's all of the lights the World
Trade Center that are out at night on
allow our sucking Indian point a nuclear
power station it's one big live wire
eight million people jammed together on
a very small amount of space people
talk about how dirty our city is it's
amazingly clean for the huge numbers
of people coming from so many different
experiences Olivia I think that the
story ought to be told and it's amazing
a New York exists and it does and it
goes on from day today today when you
fly into the city at night and you see
the lights in this city and the way this
city lights up like this Crystal Palace
it is an unbelievable sight to see
Manhattan lit up at night from the sky
and so not only are you in awe of
the lights and the beauty of it
but being from New York being in New
York when you come back into that it's a
mo
World War dragged into its third long
year a 26-year old photographer and
native-born New Yorker named Helen
Levitt carried a 16 millimeter movie
camera up to the crowded tenement
district of East Harlem in New York
once predominantly attended but now
increasingly filled with black and
spanish-speaking newcomers over the next
three years with her friends james agee
and janice load she struggled to capture
on film the countless daily dramas and
heart-stopping beauty of life in New
York's poorest neighborhoods in a
film she called simply in the street
the streets of the poor quarters of
great cities are above all a theater and
a battleground they're unaware and unnoticed
every human being is a poet a masker
a lawyer and in his innocent artistry projects
against the turmoil of the
street and image of existence
James Agee we say what is the city well the
city as many things but one of the things that a
city is is a home to its people if
you think of it the great cities of
history Athens is glorious a Rome is
grandeur a power let's say Paris is
culture what is New York New York is a
home New York's great gift to the world
was that people from all over the world
could come here they could create their
own communities their own neighborhoods
so people felt the sense of community a
sense of belonging a sense of neighborhood
that's really the basis of human
endeavor if people feel they alone they
can go on to other things
now all of a sudden that was going to
be harder for New York than ever before
because at this crucial moment in the
city's history the city loses its way
whereas before neighborhoods were
creative now neighborhoods are destroyed
the Japanese government at 7:01 p.m. on
the hot sultry evening of August 14 1945
after five tense days of conflicting
rumors and false reports word reached
New York that the Japanese High Command
had surrendered at last bringing to an
end the bloodiest and most costly war in
human history
as the news reached through the city
millions of New Yorkers converged on
Times Square laughing shouting
weeping and embracing in a spontaneous
celebration that lasted all through the night
and on into the early hours of the morning
on August the 14th when President Truman
announces the surrender of Japan I mean
the tumultuous scenes in the city of
course we think of celebrations all
around the United States and deed all
around the world but no place like Times
Square that's the moment that's the
place where the real end of the war is
announced and celebrated
twice a month now in the delirious
jubilant days following the close of the
war the two greatest ocean liners in
the world the Queen Mary and the Queen
Elizabeth which in four years had
ferried more than two million men to war
could be seen steaming into port bringing
their fragile human cargo back home
as the great sister ships entered the
upper bay their decks crammed with
American soldiers a gigantic cheer went
up at the site of the ravishing skyline
of New York which had never seemed more precious
or more filled with promise for the future
every inch of land in New Jersey and
Staten Island New York was crowded with
people cheering and and the whole thing
was such an amazing vision but people
brought together which they usually are
not in New York and cheering you know
god bless you boys all that stuff
if I could pick a time to be there I
would probably be in spring of 1946 when
they troops were coming home from the
war and have seen the great ocean liners
loaded to the brim with returning
soldiers from Europe we're at the
pinnacle then New York may have been not
just the greatest city in the world but
that may have been the greatest time in New
York with the great harbor filled with ships
and tens of thousands of factories
churning out goods in record volumes the
halcyon months following the end of the
war were in many ways the highest point
of the city's entire history the
terrible conflict itself had proved
in many ways to be the city's salvation
lifting at last the decade-long
depression and reconfirming New York
status as the unofficial capital of what
was now the most powerful
nation on earth we know her
as Fiorello LaGuardia finished his third
term as mayor and as Robert Moses unable
to build during four long years of war
prepared to throw himself into a frenzy
of construction every force that had
brought New York to greatness seemed to
be operating at peak capacity it
was the apex of the time when it was
like Imperial Rome a standard setter a
trend recognizer a place that translated
the world to America when you look at
New York in the late 40s in the early
50s when it mattered it just mattered in
a way that that other places didn't
don't if you come from other places
don't be upset them it just did and it
was also a place that was producing a
bewildering array of stuff and people
were working ladies hats and musical
instruments and table lamps and printers
inks and shellac and sugar and beer and
bread and skin creams the thing about
New York was that there was no one thing
you know that you said Pittsburgh steel
Detroit cars Akron rubber New York
everything and that's why New York
really sort of looked down on the rest
of America from Olympus and the seeds of
its downfall might have been in that as
well the core of it was that it was still
a manufacturing town which meant that
people like my father with an eighth
grade education Irish immigrant could
put first of all form a family and then
support it and that sense that you would
get a working men permeated the city I
remember one of the things that I missed
the most was what it felt like in the
subway around between the hours of 5:00
and 7:00 and being on packed subway
cars with working men on those cars
guys stained with sweat the smell of
perspiration the raw knuckled hands
toolboxes heading home nobody would mess
with guys like that and they were very
proud in the fact that they were working
in in the biggest city in the United
States they were functioning people
and yet more than most people realized
at the time in the giddy post-war
atmosphere of triumph and success by
1945 much of the fate of the post-war
City had already been written and the
stage had been set for one of the most
complex and troubling periods
in the city's entire history
the war itself had vastly accelerated a
fateful shift in power in America begun
during the Depression and the New Deal
but in the years to come were challenged
New York's once unrivaled claim to
economic supremacy and alter forever the
relation of the city and the country
it is true that there was defense
spending going to New York City but
there is far more of it going to the
south and far more of it going to the
West huge quantities of money weren't
flowing to shipbuilding operations
on the west coast money was going to
develop in the Carolinas new modern
garment manufacturing facilities that'll
turn out uniforms noting these crowded
little sweatshops you know so well New
York comes out of the war in a sense an
unparalleled position of powerful and it
is now in a sense the capital of the world
these under toes have been operating and
the city's long term position although
it's not apparent yet is in fact going
to be a lot weaker than it had been going into
that war certainly no one could have imagined in
the triumphant ears following the war
that in little more than three decades
the mighty metropolis on the banks of
the Hudson would be shaken to its very
foundations and fighting for its very existence
late one night in the waning days of
December 1945 as Fiorello laguardia's
third and final turn wound quietly
to a close an aide named Lewis after
returning to City Hall to attend to some
last-minute paperwork was surprised to
hear the sound of a lone typewriter
clattering down the darkened hallway in
an office at the end of the hall he
found LaGuardia himself hunched over
his Secretary's desk hello Lou the mayor
said I've got these letters to get out
and there was no one else around can
you type but even LaGuardia wore out the
city wore him out you know by the end of his
third term he was an exhausted tired man it had
beaten them up the process of it
remember this a city almost went
bankrupt under as soon as he showed up
when its Depression New York that he was
the mayor of and for all of his amazing
gifts that third term was very very hard
for him by the time LaGuardia left
office in January 1946 to be succeeded
by a tough but genial ex-policeman named
William O'Dwyer the city he loved
her completely rebounded from the
decade-long depression thanks in
large part to the New Deal and the war
but LaGuardia himself was already
seriously ill with cancer of the
pancreas and less than two years later
he died leaving his wife Marie $8,000 in
war bonds and a heavily
mortgaged house in the Bronx
he was 64 years old a city of which he
was apart as much as any public building
awoke to find the little firebrand dead
it's people had left with him and at him
they'd been entertained by his antics
and they had been sobered by his warnings
and they found it difficult to believe
that the voice he'd raised on their
behalf in the Legislative halls of city
and nation on street corners and
on the radio was stilled forever
the New York Times more than most people
realized laguardia's death marked the
end of an era facing in doing for 12
long years he had struggled to reconcile
two competing visions of the city
the shining vision of the city of
tomorrow championed by men like Robert
Moses beholden to the car and the
highway and two forces beyond the city's
borders and the old working city of Walt
Whitman Al Smith and Emma Lazarus the
city of the block and the neighborhood
and the crowded urban street that
however shabby and rundown in appearance
he had always known was New York's great
strength heartbeat and true glory
without him in the years to come
those two cities would come to seem
increasingly incompatible as the forces
of change unleashed by the war pulled
New York into the orbit of an immense
new order increasingly indifferent to
the values and beliefs LaGuardia
had cared for most deeply hey after
LaGuardia was mayor he was sitting one
day in the engineers Club the New York
and a friend of his Walter Binger came
over he said may major which is what
everyone called LaGuardia who really knew
him major you're really looking down he said
Robert Moses has too much power today
and Binger who really disliked Moses
said well who gave it to a major and
LaGuardia said but I could control now
no one will be able to control
by 1945 a bold new attitude towards
urban life had begun to come to the fore
in New York and in cities across America
for more than two decades a growing
number of architects and urban planners
disturbed by the increasing congestion
and chaos of the modern city had been
arguing that the old urban order of
narrow streets and blocks be left behind
and replaced with an entirely new one
consecrated to the car and the highway
and the dream of infinite mobility this
vision of a radiant new city of tomorrow
and found its purest expression before
the war in the awesome public works of
Robert Moses in the ravishing exhibits
of the World's Fair and in the writings
of a visionary Swiss architect and urban
theorist named la Corbusier who had been
amongst the first to sense that cities
themselves had been rendered completely
obsolete by the advent of the automobile
it's a wonderful passage from appreciate
he walks out in the streets of Paris
near the University and he feels very
nostalgic and he says in the good old
days when I was a student we used to
walk these streets and we would stand in
the middle of the street and argue when
we could have races with each other we
could play games but now we're swept
away by the cars and he's very bitter
about that and he says what can we do
and then there's like a kind of
cognitive leap which is we have to
somehow merge with the cars we have to
if we can completely identify with them
and forget this paradise lost from our
youth when the streets belong to us that
because that's the refrain the streets
belong to us then but if you can forget
that and we repress the part of you that
love the streets and felt at home in
them and that feels very angry that you
can't you know that there's too much
traffic for you now but you don't fit in
that like history has surpassed you you
can make a leap and surpass it and the
way that he did was through this concept
of the highway system and the flow that
would never end and the traffic that
would always be moving and what
he wanted to do in Paris in New
York but so basically kill the street
tear it all down and put up giant slabs
connected by highways I think she's probably
the greatest metaphysician of the highway system
anywhere and motives was
certainly his greatest disciple
in the years following the war as urban
planners proposed remaking the city on a
breathtaking scale New York would begin
to take leave of the past as never
before and rush headlong into the future
in little more than half a decade many
of the streets and neighborhoods Helen
Levitt had documented so painstakingly
would be razed to the ground to make
way for block after block of towering
high-rise housing projects the
Courvoisier himself would return to New
York in the boom years following the war
to begin work on an austere new complex
of buildings along the East River
determined to turn Manhattan itself into
a bold new city of the future
New York is not a capital city it is not
a national capital or a state capital
but is by way of becoming the capital of
the world along the East River from the
raised slaughterhouses of Turtle Bay men are
coming out the permanent headquarters of
the United Nations the greatest housing
project of them all in its
tried New York takes on one more
interior city the shelter
this time all governments
and a clear the slum World War eebee wife
the real shift to New York becoming the
cap of the world comes after world war
two when the United States emerges from
the conflict is indisputably the most
powerful militarily an economic force on
earth and I think the placement of the
United Nations in New York City kind of
symbolizes New York's emergence as the
the capitol of the world let's put it this way if
the United Nations hadn't come to New York I think
a lot of people would have killed
themselves would just have gone berserk
it just seemed the right place for
the United Nations to be it wasn't
inevitable that it would come to New
York mccorvey who many ways plays the
evil spirit in this story didn't want it
to come to New York and as the leading
architect he had a great say he wanted
it to be if it had to be near New York
to be on some estate and Pound Ridge or
Westchester they looked at all kinds of
places my god they even thought of Philadelphia
little more than a year after the end of
the war thanks in large part to the
immense power of the Rockefeller family
and to the administrative genius of
Robert Moses a site in New York had been
settled on on the east side of
Manhattan along the East River
the startling shapes that soon began to
arise on a 17 acre tract of land called
blood alley once filled with stockyards
and slaughterhouses were unlike anything
ever built in New York or
anywhere else for that matter
the slab of glass a totally new form
developed out of a core busiest earlier
work shear slab he'd never gone to
extreme glass facing east and west no
windows facing north and south on some
kind of idea of solar orientation then
the assembly building with its swoopy
roof a new kind of shape has nothing to
do with the city ask to be in a
part because of its sculptural force
basically that had never been a building
like that seen in New York or virtually
anywhere else all that glass it's what
everybody's been dreaming about its what
a little bit of what you could have got
a hint of if you'd gone to the fair in
39 and people are thrilled the
arrival of the United Nations was
the harbinger of a new kind of globalism
in New York by the fall of 1952 as
delegates from around the world arrived
for the first general session in the new
headquarters a sleek new international
star had begun to transform the look and
feel of central Manhattan not only
in architecture and diplomacy but in
corporate culture itself the UN building
is decisively in reestablishing New York
and then with the completion of that building
New York enters yet another phase of its life
and it becomes more than ever office
capital of the world more new office
space was built in New York roughly
between 1950 and 1960 than there is in
the entire of the downtown business
district of Chicago all of it not just
what was built there but everything
that every visibility New York becomes
headquarters city every major
corporation even more than in the robber
baron days finds and it has to be in New
York feels that it has to be in New York
because American corporations recognize
they have to operate on an international
stage and New York is the logical place
even as a gleaming new city of glass and
steel thrust skyward in midtown
Manhattan another kind of transformation
was under way far from the white collar
ramparts of Park and sixth avenues as
hundreds of thousands of african-americans from
the rural South poured into the city's poorest
neighborhoods looking for
work and a new beginning
so they came from all parts of the south
the Georgians came as soon as they were
able to pick train fare off the peach
trees they came from South Carolina
where the cotton stalks were bare the
North Carolinians came with tobacco
tar beneath their fingernails even while
planning the trip they sang spirituals
such as Jesus take my hand and chanted
hallelujah I'm on my way to the promised land
Claude Brown
by 1950 as the great black migration
swelled to a flood another immense
influx was underway within a year of
the end of the war the first regularly
scheduled flights had begun taking off
from San Juan Airport on the island of
Puerto Rico bound for New York City
the forerunners of thousands more as
hundreds of thousands of
spanish-speaking newcomers streamed
north from the Caribbean many fleeing
desperate poverty this emigration is
different the Puerto Ricans come not
by ship huddled in the steerage but by
plane paying u.s. citizens they beat
at no immigration bars never had their
picture taken in colorful native costume
behind the wire enclosures of Ellis
Island they simply seeped in landing by
the 20s and 30s from battered planes of
the Guardia Field in Newark suddenly
appearing beside their cardboard
suitcases on the city's sidewalks
outside a hole in the wall Travel Agency
to them the u.s. means in New York City and
300,000 of them now live in it's five boroughs
Time magazine 1949 yesterday it was the
brutal and uncouth Irish then it
was the knife wielding Italians
later it was the clannish
truth with their strange ways
yesterday it was the negro today
it is to Puerto Ricans and the
Negroes who are relegated to the
last step of New York social ladder
exo-skull
like their African American counterparts
many of the Puerto Rican newcomers found
it increasingly hard to rise trapped
in menial jobs and dilapidated slums by
racism and discrimination and by an
ominous new trend stealing over the
city's blue-collar economy within
a decade of the end of the Second
World War it was beginning to be clear
the New York's great industrial engine
for more than a century the first
step on the ladder for newly arrived
immigrants had started to falter and
slow far from taking on thousands of new
workers each year as in the past factory
owners now often struggled simply to
keep the positions they had in the
face of stiff new competition from
manufacturers in the south and west and the city's
own suburbs the writer Earl shorris in his book
Latinos says that one of the great
tragedies of Puerto Ricans in the 20th
century is that they came to New York
of all places had they come to New York
earlier or gone somewhere else when they
came to the United States they probably
would have done a lot better but they
came to a city that was just about to
begin its transition to a
post-industrial economy and they came to
be industrial workers and that was their undoing
in 1945 1950 New York seemed literally
to be on top of the world the largest
city in the world our richest city in
the world the most powerful city in the
world capital of the world everything
seemed to be working in place but we now
see in retrospect that there were
ominous signs on the horizon the first
was the loss of industry New York City
has more than a million industrial jobs
in 1950 those jobs over the next half
century or fall to well below 200,000 so
essentially a whole gigantic sector of
New York's economy believes in this New
York again as a leader we have seen
this happen first in cities and then it
states and now for the whole entire
United States as jobs move out where
they're lower production costs first to
the suburbs into the south then offshore
to Asia or wherever the loss
of industry was the harbinger
of an even vaster transformation as year
after year the center of gravity of the
entire nation continued to shift away
from New York and away from older urban
places everywhere as a massive new
economic order finished taking hold
linked to the highway and the automobile
and incompatible with the structure of
cities as they had existed for hundreds
of years well I think the Second World
War changes the ballgame and creates an
economy on an enormous scale that really
Dwarfs anything that's existed before
and after the war you get a permanent
war economy on one hand it's an
industrial bonanza but New York was
almost entirely left out of this because
it's really very hard to build aircraft
factories say in or close to New York
or any other city the sense of space is
completely different whereas the grid
involves bringing people together and creating
concentration vertically going up the
war economy and the highway system built
in the Eisenhower period builds a
cross and it depends on these enormous
horizontal units and on one hand creates
bonanzas in many areas that were pretty
distressed and on the other hand draws
talent energy and money enormous amounts
of money away from areas like in New
York in the years to come as the entire
nation was integrated into a unified
flow whose lifeblood one man later said
was the automobile the dense fabric of
older urban places and the very concept
of urban public space itself would begin
to come under attack as never before as
cities like New York were increasingly
seen as places to escape from or as
problems to be solved or as
landscapes to be transformed
to a remarkable degree the man in
the middle of the whirlwind of forces
sweeping through New York in the
post-war period was the driven
insatiable builder well by 1945 had
been transforming the city for almost 20
years Robert Moses
if you saw Moses standing in front of
a mat with his pencil going over it in
sweeping gestures you would see the
dream or the visionary the artist he's
suing you were and of course by New York
I mean New York and its suburbs 2,100
square miles and an area in which when
he was building 12 million people he saw
this all as a canvas he was going to
build his roads across that he was going
to build his roads around it there were
gonna be parks here in Park them you see
them we're gonna have public housing
here so we'll do this he saw the whole
thing as one great mural you know one
huge wonderful mural it will had the
Union in the unity of a vision and that
is the vision to which New York and its
suburbs were shape I am privileged to
present the winner of the Grand National
Ward Robert Moses of New York
no one embodied the power and promise of
post-war New York more than Robert Moses
the visionary administrator who had
rebuilt the city in the depths of the
depression intent on uniting the immense
metropolis into a single coherent whole
and linking it to the rest of the nation
by highways he had accomplished more in
20 years than most men dreamed of in
a lifetime and now with the vastly
increased resources of the federal
government behind him looked forward to
realizing his vision on an even vaster
scale the tragedy in the end would be
that such a man and such an era should
have held out such great promise and
that so much of it should have gone so
terribly astray
immediately after the Second World
War Robert Moses is power increased
exponentially to something far greater
than before its base was still these
revenues the toll revenues from war his
bridges and all his tunnels which of
course were increasing as he was
building more but he now gets control of
the city Housing Authority huge monies
are now being spent by the federal
government on public housing low-income
housing in New York those monies were
spent at the command of Robert Moses up
to that point Robert Moses had been
building mostly parks and bridges and
park lands he was building these in a
tabula rasa on the open spaces of Long
Island on Jones Beach where there was
nothing there now he's going to be
building in the city not on an empty
canvas but on the most crowded canvas in
the world that was going to make all
the difference it was going to make the
story of Robert Moses become very dark
because whether he was building in an
area with no people or an area filled
with people Robert Moses was going to
build if you want to create Public Works
in a crowded metropolis he said you have
to swing the meat ax and he
liked swinging the meat ax
I enjoy getting things done that means
exactly there are obstacles that are in
the way by whatever means and that means
being lonely along the way that you put
up with that temporarily right yes that
make us few compromises as possible fun
gives me Rommel had a very funny phrase
a little bit on the cynical side and the
grain of truth in it he said if the end
doesn't justify the means what does
no one could have predicted the
magnitude of the explosion that would
overtake New York in the decades
following World War two greatest was
the federal involvement in Public Works
before the war it was nothing compared
to the massive new initiatives signed
into law as soon as it was ended not
only for highways but for Housing
and Urban Development propelling changes
on a scale city planners had scarcely
dreamed of only a few years earlier
eager to extend his dominion over every
public construction project in the city
Robert Moses quickly moved to wrest
control of the new federal funds before
the ink was even dry on the new legislation
he says I'd like to be Construction Co
ordinate by the way I have a bill here
that the Legislature will pass creating
the office of construction coordinator
nobody realizes that there is a sentence
in there that says that the construction
coordinator shall no choice shall
represent the city in all its dealings
with the federal government that means
that any city request for federal money
is going to go through the office
of construction coordinator
and he therefore has control over public
housing he has control over the federal
highway money and something much huge is
about to happen one day in nineteen the
end of nineteen forty eight an old
classmate of Moses is from Yale Robert
if Senator Robert it comes down to talk
to Robert Moses about a new proposal
that's going through the Senate of the
United States we are gonna coil a title
one it's the slum clearance program the
urban renewal program Moses had this
mind that leaped the power like a
terrier as soon as Taft leaves his
office he is drafting the necessary
documents so that the mayor will have a
slum clearance committee Robert Moses
Jim there had been housing programs
before and attempts to clear the slums
but never on this scale intended
in part to relieve the severe
post-war housing crisis and to provide
affordable housing for the poor the
bills first section known forever after
as title one would go on to become one
of the most controversial and in many
ways catastrophic federal programs ever
visited upon city dwellers anywhere
the bottom line for the urban renewal
program is is that the federal
government is going to pay for the city
to use its power of eminent domain to
confiscate land and to assemble large
parcels of land from lots of little
sort of slum owners and so the blighted
rundown areas then they're going to tear
down that land and they're gonna give it
to private developers to build housing
on theoretically for poor people in the
real world that's not the way it
works out in the real world you get a
constellation of different kinds of
players who have got an interest in
becoming the developers who acquire
title one land there's a huge range of
possibilities but all of these people
share one thing in common they're not
interested in building housing for poor
people they're interested in building
housing at the least for middle-class
people and in fact they're also
particularly not interested in housing
for blacks and Hispanics who are
increasingly in the post-war period
growing percentage of the population
most in need of housing
haled is a victory for the working
poor title one quickly proved to be an
enormous bonanza not for those most in
need but for landowners and real estate
developers who under provisions of the
Act were not required to build housing
slum dwellers could afford or
even to build new housing at all
despite solemn assurances to the contrary few of
those evicted under title one found housing in the
neighborhoods they had once called home
many were not rehoused at all and many
of those that were found themselves
relocated to massive new low-income
housing projects thrown up in district
segregated as never before by race and class
the reality of it was that it was a
massive program of removal of usually
the people who had the least political
clout and those tended to be blacks and
Hispanics and working-class years and
working-class Italians now the man at
the center of this operation is Robert
Moses Moses is the coordinator of all
these title 1 programs and Moses is
cutting deals left and right by 1959
there are 16 huge title 1 projects that
have been completed they have moved out
roughly a hundred thousand for people
Robert Moses personified in age where
the interests of working class and poor
people were very easily dismissed as
secondary to the interests of middle
class upper middle class and wealthy
people so if it meant tearing down
hundreds of old brownstone tenements to
build a new Performing Arts Center that
was gonna happen if it meant clearing
land in the hope that commercial
developers would want to come in and
build skyscrapers instead then that's
what you did and often when really poor
communities were fragmented in this way
where did they go they went to the next
neighborhood over they went to the next
neighborhood that might be showing some
signs of weakness and in the rental
market might be showing some signs of
weakness in the housing market and the
problems of one neighborhood became the
problems of another far away the other
things that Moses does to his shame is
he fills the slum clearance committee
with a bunch of his banker and insurance
and developer friends and they begin to
use this one for clearance committees
power public power to remove non-white
people from areas where the developers
want to create white neighborhoods the
result is that they uproot hundreds
and thousands of black New Yorkers and
forced them into these expanding ghettos
in bedford-stuyvesant Harlem as striking
is the racial politics of the slum
clearance program was it staggering
scale convinced that partial reconstruction of
targeted neighborhoods was doomed from the start
title one made slum clearance funds
available on one condition the nearly
every structure in a designated area be
destroyed over the next 15 years the
maelstrom of destruction that would go
forward in New York in the name of urban
renewal would dwarf anything that had
come before in the city's history as
thousands of acres of teeming city
blocks were reduced to giant swaths of
rubble in New York who needs an atomic bomb
the novelist Bernard Malamud wrote if you
walked away from a place they tore it down
well sometimes I think the United States
embarked on urban renewal out of some
kind of elaborate guilt trip over
bombing so many places in the course of
the Second World War in Europe because
we saw that by clearing these sites
suddenly the bombs made it possible for
new kinds of developments and a way to
modernize cities how to tackle the
problem here we really use the same
techniques we declare whole areas after
some kind of study of the declining
demographics susceptible to demolition
it just simply moved people out it
became incredibly disruptive to people's
lives you scattered neighborhoods which
might have been very very poor but still
had a very dense network of associations
and you began through urban renewal
in a city like Europe but it's true in
Chicago and elsewhere that process which
we are still reeling under of wrenching
communities apart and then families
collapsing the whole support system of
the less well advantage in our society
collapses and we wonder why they then
become increasingly unable to
function in the society as a whole
and there were other problems as well
with what was being created as well as
what was being destroyed though for
many New Yorkers the new public housing
projects rising from the rubble
represented the first decent housing
they had known the structures themselves
shaped almost without exception to the
anti virus of men like la Corbusier had
little in common with the communities
they had known gong towers isolated from
the street on enormous tracts of land
called super blocks planners wanted to
reform the city by sweeping it clean
they hated the grid and all the way that
the grid led to development of the city
and they wanted to turn the city into a
Green Park federal funds would come in
to buy these buildings and you would
write the land down virtually to nothing
so you returned the city 2 degrees 0
under Moses you could get rid of the
gridiron because you'd make super blocks
Moses had no interest in commercial life
on his projects he wanted them strictly
pure of commercial life so he eliminated
streets so makes a bigger gulf between
the new development and the existing
city that's a whole betrayal in my
view a betrayal not only of New York's
traditions and history and natural
structure but also a betrayal of what
makes a community the Uptown slums are
being demolished but the rectangular
tenements that replaced them have not a
trace of invention their bleakness is
absolute
no man has ever dreamed of a
city of such monotonous severity
and there must be some bond between our houses
and our dreams John Cheever
everybody it would seem is for the
rebuilding of our cities with a unity of
approach that is remarkable but
that is not the same thing as liking
cities most of the rebuilding underway is being
designed by people who don't like cities
they do not merely dislike the noise and
the dead and the congestion they dislike
the city's variety and concentration
it's tension its hustle and bustle
the results are not cities
within cities but auntie cities
William hy
title one was only part of the story
title two was the other part of it the
federal government is not only
intervening in this program that is
demolishing vast areas of the inner
city it is also in fact underwriting the
development of the suburbs by saying to
banks that we are going to institute a
program of mortgage guarantees people
who might look like they're dangerous
credit risks and you might not want to
give them a mortgage because they're not
making enough money we the federal
government say to you that if you give
these people mortgages we will guarantee
you that in fact if they default we'll
pay you and because of that money was
available to flow into the private
housing market and unfortunately it was
not allowed to flow into multifamily
housing in the city what are you talking
about you're talking about in fact the
development of the suburbs so between
this mix of programs the federal
government has opted for a policy which
is profound the auntie city and to that
being interstate highways which were
ready to Swiss people out of the city
and take them to those new homes that
were rising in the cornfields and the
potato fields in response to all this
hot loan money being around New York was
suddenly surrounded by the changes in
American life but also got it right in
the neck from various federal programs
that were supposed to help the city that
said that they were about to help the
American people and boy the destruction
that came from these this concentration
of effects coincidental it all started
to happen in the late 40s but and
probably anyone of them New York could
have fought off or somehow accommodated
or made its peace with but all of those
things happening at once just was disastrous
in the end nothing would transform the
landscape of American cities more
dramatically than the billions of
dollars in federal aid streaming out
of Washington to build new arterial
highways culminating in the interstate
Highway Act of 1956 the most important
public works project in America since
the Erie Canal the 41,000 miles system
would reverse the impact of DeWitt
Clinton's great achievement drawing
resources out of cities and diffusing
them out across the American landscape
while committing the economy of the
entire nation to a self-perpetuating
culture of the automobile but the car
has a life of its own and you've got a
more highways so you can sell more cars
and if you make more cars you've got to
have more highways and once you're on
that treadmill then anything that stands
in the way including that vision of the
city is a civilized but dense arena goes
by the wayside and so we've got this
period when on the one hand we're
projecting roads out into the suburbs
and people are in fact motoring off on
them on the other hand were ramming roads
through working class and poor quarters
one way or another Robert Moses
had a hand in it all overseeing the
construction of nearly a billion and
a half dollars in federally funded
highways in little more than 15 years
we wouldn't have any American economy
without the automobile business that's
literally true and believe that that
this is a great industry that has to go
on and has to keep on turning out cause
and trucks and buses and they have to be
places for them to run they have to be
modern Road modern office somebody's got
to fill them and that in order to get
those things done and done properly people
must be inconvenience to her in the way
after the war everyone was beginning
to realize that you had to build great
arterial routes through the cities every
city had plans for expressman but nobody
was able to build the expressway
there were two reasons one the
staggering costs of his Express was
compared to everything that had gone
before in Public Works to build it
through a crowded urban setting the
second thing is this is a democracy you
had to evict from their homes tens of
thousands of people's for for an
ordinary expressway they were voters and
politicians are shied away from the very
thought of evictions on a scale like
that Moses shied away from nothing and
in the fur as soon as the war and he
began to ram six great expressways
right across the heart of New York
of all the federal projects under Robert
Moses control none would have more
devastating consequences for the city
and its people or in still more rage
against its executor than the Cross
Bronx Expressway a two hundred and
twenty five foot wide concrete trench seven
miles long that would carve a path of destruction
New Yorkers would never forget
this used to be a neighborhood the
neighborhood was called East Tremont
than the Bronx in New York I the heart
of it was where this road runs behind
made the Cross Bronx Expressway it was
predominantly Jewish there was
also Irish and Germans in it
and some blacks it was a neighborhood
where everybody knew everybody else it
was a community it was a place with a
heart Robert Moses tore this heart out
the Chrisman's expressway goes through
about 12 or 15 different neighborhoods
and it just like went through the center
of the great many and I mean the idea
was that it was built on a straight line
and there was no account of you know who
that people are and what they're doing
there was no question of can we work
this highway into existing life this
question never came up in the 1940s or
50s they had the power to build in
straight lines and they just did these
were still intact communities people
worked people kept up their properties
people did business where they lived
this was a place where you did your
marketing locally you did your business
locally you got your First Holy
Communion read your haftorah for your
bar mitzvah it all happened right there
it was a culturally and materially
self-sufficient world in a lot of ways
on December 4th 1952 this community was
told that Robert Moses was going to take
their homes what they wore got the same
letter it was a very typical Robert
Moses letter your homes are in the path
of you already approved course price
expressway and you have 90 days to get
out now this was 1952 it was not the
year of protests and what this community
tried to do was then very new and they
thought for a while that they were gonna
win their Assemblyman said they would
never approve it this state senator said
it would never be approved and Robert F
Wagner jr. who was running for mayor
then solemnly promised in his election
campaign that he would never approve
this route for the Cross Bronx Expressway
but of course by this era it wasn't the
mayor's word that mattered or borough
presidents word that mattered or an
assemblyman zora senators the only word
that mattered as to where highway was
going to go in New York with Robert
Moses they seem to think that they have
a choice that they'd rather stay in the
houses that they've lived in August on
the whole federal arterial aid program
running at the billions of dollars
depend upon the votes of a few a very
few people in one section we wouldn't
build anything nothing would be built
there'd be no highways have been all
no housing that there'd be no public
improvements the individual has to yield
it matters of this kind of the entire
country for the advantages
needs of the majority of people
and there's just no other way out no
there's no other way out in the end the
opposition never had a chance on April
23rd 1953 at a hearing of the board of
estimate at City Hall the Bronx borough
president underwent a mysterious change
of heart after a few whispered words
with Robert Moses not long after the new
mayor Robert F Wagner jr. abruptly
switched his position to and in the
summer of 1955 the stunned residents of
East Tremont looked on work began on one
of the most awesome public works
projects in the city's entire history
this is what it's like to build the Great
Highway through the greatest city in the world
when the guy who built the Burma Road
general Thomas F hour came here with his
chief aide Chapin they looked at this
and they said we thought the Burma Road
was tough it was nothing compared to
this when they came here this valley
that you see here was of course filled
with apartment houses so they had to
demolish scores of six and seven storey
apartment houses but that was really
nothing compared to the problem they
were going to have to blast through
the ridge there they knew that building
this road was going to take ten or
twelve years in fact it took 12 year they knew
they couldn't interrupt the subway service
we're gonna have to keep that subway
line running while they blasted through
that Ridge also inside that Ridge is one
of the world's largest storm sewer mains
gas mains electric lines Telegraph
cables sewers of all types a whole mass
of utility lesson moses was going to
have to ram this road through there
while keeping all those things in
operation i remember standing on the
ground parts of the concrete and
watching the engineering job which was
quite magnificent than Sablan because
you could see the destruction in one
direction everything was being smashed
to the east and to the west nothing had
been done yet so it looked like a
completely intact city and yet you knew
it was like the artillery shells were
gonna come down on it you know in a year
in two years in a month they didn't tell
us and all I could think of was that this
didn't have to be now that very
afternoon as it happened I had an
interview with Robert Moses and I was
asking him about this expressway and I
was trying to find a polite way to
address the subject and I said was it
perhaps more difficult to build an
expressway through a crowded City than
to build a Parkway in empty Long Island
he said no no not at all not really I
said well what about the chorus proxy
business I said no there was no real
trouble up there I said what was their
hardship for the people said no no he
said they just stirred up the animals
there so I just held fast and that was
all we had to do and of course it was
all he had to do because that was the
reality of political power
in New York at that time
year after year the rampage of
destruction went on as Robert Moses
rammed one expressway after another
across communities in Brooklyn Queens
Staten Island and the Bronx thirteen
massive roads in all and more than a
hundred and thirty miles of concrete
shattering no fewer than twenty one
separate neighborhoods end up ending
the lives of more than a quarter of a
million people the impact of that
onslaught on the fragile ecology of New
York's working-class neighborhoods would
continue to reverberate for generations
the car is not a neutral actor on the
urban landscape the car brings
mobility and it brings problems
Moses only saw the mobility he never saw
the problems if you owned a store in the
area of the Cross Bronx Expressway
suddenly a third of your customers were
gone and half of those that remained
were now on the other side of the
highway it knocked down all kinds
of places that were the glue of
neighborhood life leaving a world in tatters
leaving pieces of neighborhoods that were known
viable that could no longer attract the
new residents that help keep rents up
that helped keep property values up that
made the whole proposition of living in
a place or owning property in a place
a long-term proposition that you could
sustain so the Grand Concourse you
know just hits rock bottom in these
decades places like Mott Haven hit rock
bottom to become part of the poorest
congressional district in the entire
country because of the many many sorrows
that the Bronx has been inflicted with
I was stood on the ramparts of the
concourse and said someday I'll get that
basket and there were a lot of other
people too who was standing there with
me and watching the job and said we hate
that creep someday we'll get him I mean
he'd made a lot of enemies over the
years you know people who are willing to
do anything to get him we don't pay too
much attention to the crews has too many
critics we ought to get rid of someone
and so the frenzy of building went on
as the expressways drove through and the
tall towers rose and whole districts
were demolished to make room for
high-rise housing projects and building
after building of glass and steel by the
60s we knew that urban renewal was a
failure we knew that it had taken the
heart and the gut out of cities but New
York's urban renewal had started in the
50s and was moving along like an
unstoppable juggernaut and there were of
course deals made between the government
and between the real-estate people and
developers it was nothing that those of
us who cared about could stop there was
a done deal
in 1956 a 30 year old poet named Allen
Ginsberg living on East 7th Street in
the village sought to capture the
increasingly impersonal and alien
landscape of the city which he depicted
as the insatiable Old Testament God
Moloch to whom children were ritually sacrificed
what's fakes of cement and aluminum
packed open their skulls and ate up
their brains and imagination
Maalik the incomprehensible prisons
Moloch the crossbones soulless
jailhouse and Congress of Sorrows
mark whose buildings are judgment
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows
Molly who skyscrapers stand in the
long streets like endless Jehovah's
Maalik Maalik robot apartments
invisible suburbs skeleton Treasuries
demonic industries spectral Nations
invincible madhouses
they broke their backs lifting
Moloch to heaven pavements trees
radios tons
wake up in Moloch like streaming out of the sky
Allen Ginsberg 1956
as the buildings rise as the skyscrapers
get bigger as the mechanism of the city
becomes more and more dehumanized as the
human being a dwarf as finally gigantic
thousand windows Moloch's are created
that look down on the individual and
dwarf the individual and intimidate
the individual and then you find the
individual at the mercy of the people up
in the big towers that the person has no
control over the guy living on these
twelve Street has no idea what's going on
and still the building went on
at the southern tip of the island
hundreds of historic buildings would
soon be razed to the ground to make room
for two immense rectangular towers that
would eventually soar higher than the
Empire State Building itself far
out across the harbour meanwhile
Robert Moses had commenced work on yet
another epic project a mighty bridge the
longest in the world that would
eventually span the great narrows
through which Verrazano and Henry Hudson himself
had first sailed so many centuries before
by then most of the more than 600 miles
of highway Robert Moses would construct
in and around New York were either
complete or well underway and Moses
himself was reaching the very epigenome
well he held 12 public jobs at once
which meant he had the overseeing power
for every piece of public construction in New
York not just the highways the public housing
projects in the parks he built but
everything sewers catch basins no one
could move without Robert Moses approval
Robert Moses who built 627 miles of
highway never drove a car in his life
except for a couple of driving lessons
unsuccessful ones that he took in 1922
his car but he had this huge limousine
of course his license plate and his
car when you were in it with him you
felt like you were insulated from the world
the seats were far back you couldn't see
out the windows and they were covered
in leather so fine that you really felt
that you're in library or find men's
club when you were in his car so he had
no idea in many ways of what he had ruined
but all the new building so much of it
authorized controlled or overseen by
Moses himself could not disguise the
fact that by 1960 New York was a city
that seemed to be spiraling into ever
deeper trouble you're beginning to get
people noticing that these highways and
the new Civic Center's and projects are
in fact destroying vast amounts of space
that had been devoted to manufacturing
all those huge projects along the East
River are replacing in fact acres and
acres of small workshops and
manufacturers the big civic center that
goes up in downtown Brooklyn you know
wipes out vast amounts of thriving
business we're not talking about
eradicating slums anymore I mean they're
using the word they're saying oops
you're blighted you go you know up
you're a slum you go but in fact these
are real working-class neighborhoods and
they're organized around real manufacturing
centers across the five boroughs even
neighborhoods not ravaged by highways
and urban renewal had begun to stagnate
and decline by 1960 not a single mile of
new subway track had been laid in more
than 20 years banks and commercial
lenders had all but written off the
city's aging housing stock and the
census that year revealed an ominous new
trend as the flight to the suburbs begun
ten years before now began to accelerate
dramatically the first challenge for New
York is going to be the decline of the
tax base in the 1950s and 1960s as white
middle-class New Yorkers flee the city
you know after World War two five
hundred thousand white Brooklyn Heights
move out of that borough in 20 years now
the population of the borough remains
the same because more than five hundred
thousand black people move in but
ultimately the effect of it is actually
extraordinary the we've replaced
middle-class communities with poor
communities and we've isolated poor
people inside inner cities with very
few economic opportunities very little
chance of mobility
and there was more trouble to come
a suburbanization and white flight
continued and the flight of industry
begun 10 years before accelerated
dramatically another exodus was underway
on the waterfront where a revolution in
shipping methods was causing the great
port itself the city's lifeblood and
mainstay for more than three and a
half centuries to spiral into decline
where there were a hundred thousand and
more or longshoremen in New York in 1950
as you begin to shift a containerization
you just need one guy in a cab and
somebody else to hook the thing on to
the Container maybe one guy just to kind
of ease it into place and they lift
these whole containers they need lots of
space for that well New York City
doesn't have lots of space you need
hundreds of acres to stack up the
containers to move 18-wheel tractor
trailers trucks to turn around well they
found that from the New Jersey side so
in these two huge areas just these two
industrial jobs Harbor jobs New York
City hemorrhages in those let's say
15 or 20 years really after the end of
World War two and I think it's one of
the ways of noticing how to make the
city work if the port doesn't
work the city's not going to work
and that sense of the thriving noisy
dirty exuberant waterfront it's gone now
take a ride down the west side drive now
what's left of it you see some of the
piers just riding into the river like
bad teeth there's no people working on
them you have the one luxury liner pier
but that's not what it was up until 1962
will you see liner at the liner if a liar
maybe the great symbol of what happened
to that waterfront is one of its
greatest attractions right now which
is the intrepid which is a ship that
doesn't sail it's got a flight deck
covered with ferocious looking jet
warplanes whose noses appointed straight
at H&H bagels it's crowded every weekend
but it doesn't go anywhere so it employs
people really as a function of memory
rather than of anything that's active
with new thriving the museum by 1962 New
York seemed too many people to have lost its
way only 30 years before f scott Fitzgerald
had stood atop the Empire State Building
and gazed out into the endless expanse
of blue and green that stretched beyond
the city's borders filled with despair
to see that the city had limits now a
new kind of despair could be discerned
from the city's tallest towers the
blue and green that had once marked New
York's limits had turned to gray and
brown and signified something more
ominous still the limitless suburban
sprawl that was now superseding the city
an endless agglomeration of highways parking lots
and tract housing developments punctuated by the
deteriorating cores of older urban areas
that now stretched almost continuously
from Boston to Washington New York
itself stood at the very center of what
the French demographer Jean Gutman
called megalopolis an immense area that
by 1960 was home to more than 40 million
inhabitants nearly one in four Americans
but by now many wondered if the very
notion of a center still had any real
meaning or whether cities themselves had
any reason for continuing at all
out for a walk after all week in bed
I find them tearing a part of my block
as usual everything in New York is torn
down before you have had time to care
for it you would think the simple fact
of having lasted threatened our cities
like mysterious fires James Merrill
until the first blows fell no one was
really convinced that Penn Station would
really be demolished or that New York
would permit this monumental act of
vandalism against one of the largest
and finest landmarks of its age
any city gets what it admires and
will pay for and ultimately deserves
and we will probably be judged not by the
monuments we build but the monuments we destroy
ADA Louise Huxtable
one of the worst things that's happened
in New York's history is the loss of
Penn Station Penn was so traumatic
because this was something that belonged
to everybody and that people felt was so
beautiful and that they were so proud of
it I think I stood for granted I
felt that it you know it couldn't
possibly be torn down could you tear
down the Grand Canyon and then in wars
and they put this really disgusting
rabbit warren in its place
how tragic coughs and so many Americans
will never know what it was like to
arrive in New York have the first
time in your life at Penn Station
it was spectacular if you had never been
to New York before you came into the
city for the first time you came out
and there you were in this breathtaking
man-made wondrous architectural place
finsih Scully says that we used to come
in to New York like gods when we came
into Penn Station now we come in to the present
Penn Station like rats it was one of the
worst things to happen to an American
treasure not just in New York in the
whole country Pennsylvania Station the greatest
architectural monument of the Imperial
Age of rail had stood for more than half
a century at the corner of 7th Avenue
and 33rd Street in New York when in the
spring of 1961 the financially troubled
Pennsylvania Railroad announced plans to
tear the Magnificent structure down and
replace it with a high-rise glass and
steel office tower and sports facility
hoping it would bring in more money
though some voices were raised in
protest the coalition of architects
writers and historians who tried to stop
the demolition could do nothing to save
Penn Station from the Wreckers ball
and two years later on the morning of
October 28 1963 the demolition began
it would take more than three years in
all to pull the great stone structure down
one by one the enormous Doric columns
winged eagles and granite angels that
had ornamented its facade were cut
down carted away and dumped in a
foul-smelling swamp in the New Jersey Meadowlands
it is inconceivable that Penn Station
was destroyed demolished for one of the
sorest replacements that one could ever imagine
everything about the ambition of Penn
Station and of the great railroad
stations expresses the kind of power
that had been concentrated in New York
the loss of it was a sad commentary on
the ideology of modernism the belief
that new is better the belief that
modern efficiency or that the profiting
from new construction is an adequate
replacement for the traditions the
heritage and the real meaning
of places in people's lives
the loss of Penn Station seemed to many
an irrefutable confirmation that the age
of rail had come to an end and at the
age of the automobile had triumphed and
in many ways it had but more than
most people understood at the time the
destruction of Penn Station had marked a crucial
turning point in the life of New York City
it's when that comes down that a sense
of sacrilege really activates people
it's destroying the past it is symbolic
of the triumph of the auto era over
the old interconnected mass transit
operations it generated for many people
a different attitude about the new you
know maybe the tradition of the new you
know wasn't something that we should
celebrate someone critically I think
what was game was even more important
than what was lost and what was lost
was of course one of the last really
magnificent boza constructions in terms
of design and space and material and
architectural quality that was lost what
was gained was an enormous groundswell
popular groundswell for preservation
that not everything was expendable and
that some things were worth a struggle
that you had to find uses you had to
find ways to keep the character and the
quality and the continuity of a city
it went far beyond actually losing a
station it really was a sense of what
is the city and how do you have that
resonance really that you get from the
past that makes the city rich and real
and a rewarding place to be that it
isn't sterile it isn't the product of
building by the bottom line which
of course so much construction is
nobody seems to care about New York except
for those of us who live and work here
and we who do care believe the time
has come to put a stop to the wanton
destruction of our greatest buildings to
put a stop to wholesale vandalism it may
be too late to save Penn Station but it
is not too late to save New York Jane
Jacobs and the action group for
better architecture in New York
power is a very unusual weapon but it's
a sword whose health as well as it blade
as sharp as a razor so that it cuts into
not only the people on whom it is used
but it cuts into the man who is using
it changing and we see in the career of
Robert Moses a change a personal change
as he gets more and more power and wants
more power in his early days he wanted
power for the sake of the things he wanted
built more and more you can chart a
decade by decade he chooses the things
to build because of the power that they
will give
by the early 1960s the master plan
Robert Moses had laid out for the
remaking of New York more than three
decades before was all but complete
hundreds of miles of parkways and
expressways and dozens of bridges and
tunnels now connected the city to the
suburban reaches of Long Island and
beyond hundreds more had been driven
through the outer boroughs themselves
weaving together as Moses himself
declared the loose strands and frayed
edges of the Metropolitan arterial
tapestry but in all the frenzy of
construction the master builder had
never been able to penetrate the heart
of Manhattan itself with a superhighway and
in 1961 he resolved to do something about it
fixing in his sights a low-lying area
of lower Manhattan stretching from
Chinatown in the south up through the
wayward lanes and ancient side streets
of Greenwich Village we simply
repeat that cities are created
by and for traffic a city without
traffic is a ghost town the area between
Canal Street and 3rd Street a strip
three-quarters of a mile wide is the
most depressed area in lower Manhattan
and one of the worst if not the worst
slums in the entire city Robert Moses
condemning the West Village as a slum
and the old cast-iron district to the
south as an obstacle to the free flow of
traffic by 1961 he had set in motion to
immense federal initiatives a vast
urban renewal project that would level
fourteen entire blocks along Hudson
Street in the village an 1/8 lane
elevated highway one of his most
cherished dreams that would drive
straight across the heart of lower
Manhattan from the East River to the
Hudson destroying thousands of historic
structures and displacing nearly 10,000
residents and workers it's difficult to
even make anyone understand what would
have happened he would have bulldoze a
swath about 225 feet why right across
lower Manhattan today that's the cast-on
district to Soho what was the vision what was the
aims of a man who would decide for the sake of
the automobile to cut a swath across
a city of course a beautiful vibrant
bustling part of the city and you know
Robert Moses wanted to build three
expressways across New York City not
just the lower Manhattan he will had a
mid Manhattan expressway which would
have run across 30th Street in the air
and he wanted to build one again
at ground level at a hundred and
twenty-fifth Street and Upper Manhattan Express
for decades nothing had stopped the
juggernaut of road building or slowed
the rampage of urban renewal which in
the name of rebuilding the city had torn
the heart out of one community after another
but this time things would turn out different
determined to save Manhattan from the
devastation that had blighted the Bronx
residents of the village banded together
and resolved to fight selecting as their
leader a 45 year old journalist and
working mother from Hudson Street who
had that very year published a
groundbreaking book about the mistakes
of urban planning her name was Jane
Jacobs the book was called the death and
life of great American cities and New
York would never be the same again and
it started out by saying something like
this is an attack on city planning and
then she went through the litany of what
the Corbusier and other ideologues had
imagined what a city should be as
opposed to what a city who really was
Jane Jacobs was taking on the
orthodoxies of planning that had
prevailed in the post-world War two
period the ideas of Luca Busey and the
Bauhaus and and other planners and
who thought that the city needed to be
renewed there were areas that that that
needed help but the kind of help that
she saw that they needed was the
assistance to allow people to continue
living in their brand stones in the
neighborhoods where they had a harmony
with their neighbors and the destruction
of those neighborhoods is one of the
great tragedies of a post-world War two New York
she understood that urban economies are
different she understood the sort of
beehive thousand different
interdependent functions nature of urban
economies and that's what we lose
when we surrender the street to the
automobile when people don't want to be
on the street anymore when they reshape
their lives in a way that they're always
in privatized space rather than sharing
public space Jane Jacobs knew
thirty-five years ago that that was a
recipe for the destruction of
what makes cities wonderful
look what they have built low-income
projects that become worse centers of
delinquency and vandalism than the
slums that were supposed to replace
promenades that go from no place
to nowhere and have no promenade or
express ways that eviscerate great cities
this is not the rebuilding of cities
this is the sacking of cities Jane
Jacobs she hit the nerve at the right moment
with that book it was the right book at
exactly the right moment because she
made people see particulars she made
them see the street this had been a
period of urban renewal when everything
was on a model on a big plan or a
drawing with overlays and she made
people look at the street and what was
there she spoke about the eyes on the
street the smaller buildings where
people looked out and watched their
neighbors she spoke about the small
stores the mom-and-pop stores all of the
things that urban renewal not only
was destroying but didn't acknowledge
insisted she basically said that from
her house at 5:55 Hudson Street in the
West Village from the sidewalk of her
block you could observe what a whole
city was like but it returned the
discussion of what urbanism should be
about what New York should be about from
big land plan games to individuals shops
streets cars crosswalks networks of
people people rich and poor living more
closely together less concerned with
the elevator to the 35th floor and more
concerned with the life of the five-story walk-up
under the seeming disorder of the old
city wherever the old city is working
successfully as a marvelous order for
maintaining the safety of the streets
and the freedom of the city
it is a complex order its essence is the
intricacy of sidewalk use bringing
with it a constant succession of eyes
this order is composed of movement and
change and we may liken it to the dance
not to a simple-minded precision dance
but to an intricate ballet in which the
individual dancers and ensembles
all have distinctive parts which
miraculously reinforce each other
and compose an orderly whole Jane Jacobs
her writing enabled people to imagine her block
but also enable people to see to see other blocks
she created maybe without intending to
do it a kind of empathy and opened up
possibilities for empathy as a political
force in the 60s so that once people
could imagine how other people lived
even if they didn't concretely know they
could help them they could work
for them they could work together
when she comes out with her book in 1961
it's it's not just that it's brilliantly
written it's pithy its punchy its
down-to-earth you know it's enjoyable
it's entertaining its mind capturing
it's not just that it's that what she is
doing is providing a counter narrative a
counter argument a counter vision about
the cities but it's a vision that
says you don't want to break out
manufacturing and send it off somewhere
else you don't want to in fact send the
citizens off to the suburbs you what you
want to have is an integrated community
a way it through used to be in essence
but you want to have people in a
position to walk to work you want
small-scale buildings you want people to
be able to watch the streets I'm in
crime to some extent it's beginning to
explode in the city in the 50s and a lot
of it is you know there's certainly the
pathology of drugs and such but it is
also from shattered communities that
have been renewed and removed and the
highway doubt--and are in turmoil and
are about you know in the 60s to really
explode and not just here again but all
across the country armed with a
philosophy capable of countering those
in power Jacobs and her colleagues
threw themselves into the fight holding
rallies staging demonstrations and
attacking in public hearings and in
print the underlying assumptions behind the
culture of the automobile and of urban renewal
and also you know Jacobs is an activist
she doesn't just simply write about this
stuff but then she's out in the streets
she's demonstrating they are trying to
block the lower Manhattan Expressway
they're trying to stop the plan to run
roadways through Washington Square their
counter planning they're planning a West
Village building project which is based
on rehabilitation as he had in the Bronx
Robert Moses fought them every step of the
way marshaling every weapon at his command
to blunt the opposition that was
personally affected adversely or he
thinks he is he's gonna be opposed to
you don't want it they don't want it
done at all or he wants it done
somewhere else what moved away now he
may be wrong in more than a half the
case of three-quarters of the case he's
wrong from his own point of view what
do you mean by that I mean by that
he doesn't know what's in his own
interest he's an smart enough to
visualize what you're going to do once
you've built the thing he comes around
and he tells you he was always
for it has that happened to you
for decades Robert Moses had simply
written roughshod over all those who
disagreed with him brutally negating the
power of votes Jane Jacobs charged with
the power of money but this time he had
completely misjudged the strength of the
opposition rising up from the streets
of Greenwich Village which had been the
center of political dissent in the
city since the days of the Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory fire and before I
think it maybe couldn't have happened
anywhere else the Lower East Side is
different the village is different it
has a history there were very
experienced organizers we were not
johnny-come-lately 's we not only knew
how to organize we not only knew how to
get publicity we not only knew how to
mobilize the troops but we knew how to
form coalition's mafiosi radical Jews
factory owners Chinese merchants people
who ordinarily never had anything to say
to each other people who ordinarily
hated each other came together to stop
this they discovered that different
kinds of people could work together and
really make a difference and generate
a kind of power that neither of them by
themselves could ever have imagined
they would call a meeting and there
would be three times as many people as
anybody expected they'd have to find a
new hall and there was a particular
thrill in this at the end of the 50s in
the start of the sixties that we might
be able to really make a difference and
that there was a power that was even greater
than the power of cars power of people
at the head of the unlikely coalition
was Jane Jacobs herself frustrated at
one public hearing she and her
colleagues tore up the stenographers
report then declared that since there
was no official record of the hearing
there had been no hearing she was
arrested and charged with riot
inciting to riot criminal mischief and
obstructing public administration but
public support for her actions only grew
mr. Moses says that the expressway must
go through regardless of who stands
in the way do you agree with that
absolutely not if this expressway goes
through it will absolutely be catastrophic
this will set a pattern no doubt there
that will be followed there in other
parts of the city and if he has his way
he'll criss cross the city north south
east and west bisected tri-sector
every which way with expressways
expressways - mr. Moses are ever not
any more important than people seeing
evidence of the need of that thing is
overwhelming from the point of view of
engineering and traffic and that's
all that matters well in the end yes
congestion gets bad enough have to have
it the meantime what happens the Salvio
doesn't want it's a lot
the battle over the lower Manhattan
Expressway came to a crucial climax on
the night of December 11 1962 at a tense
crowded meeting of the board of estimate
on the second floor of City Hall
except for one old man Assemblyman Luis
de Salvio declared I've been unable to
find anyone of technical competence who
was for this so-called Expressway
and this old man is a cantankerous
stubborn old man who has done many
things which may have in their time been
good for New York City but I think that
the time has come for the stubborn old
man to realize the to many of his dreams
turn out to be nightmares for the city
and this board must realize that if it
does not kill this stupid example of bad
city planning but the stench of it will haunt
them and this great city for many years to come
Jane Jacobs led the fight against that
expressway that was Moses's last he had
many lies to Roz but that really did it
every major politician a Lindsay Koch
than a congressman I was in it with the
debates were all over the press
nationally and internationally and
somehow the fate of what an inner city
is stark but still very modern city
would be was being decided on whether
these super projects whether clearance
for housing or foreign expressway
could go forward in an existing city or
whether the people who live there
had rights to their own environment
in the end jacobs and her allies prevailed
what of estimate in an executive session
today voted unanimously to turn down
proposal for a lower Manhattan expressly
I wonder how David felt when he bested
Goliath that's the way we felt we felt
we beat Robert Moses you know sir you
look belly relieved to you lived right
in the path of the proposed Iran's
brewing streak so this is a reprieve
from a long time sentences and yes yes
it was the greatest thing the mayor ever
did for the people in that neighborhood
because everybody was worried that that
and everybody was getting sick over it
so when they hear this news this will be
the best news that they ever hide for
Christmas they selected the Christmas
present for the people on Broome Street
would you say that the result was in
this case a triumph of public opinion
against Moses no there hasn't been
any triumph for anybody yet
Robert Moses always felt that he was a
tremendous failure in Manhattan and he
couldn't communicate his vision to people
he built highways around the edges but
he could never get through the
center people just wouldn't bar it
they stayed attached to their streets
to their Kearny houses to their crummy
neighborhoods and kept him from doing
this they abstained from the flow they
didn't want to be part of the flow what
a result of this is that Manhattan is
one of the very few parts of America
where you can live a whole life without
a car okay and where your daily life can
depend on the street and on interacting
with other people and on seeing what's
gonna happen in ways that you don't plan
and in that way New York is different
from I think probably every other
American city it may be the only
American city without an expressway
going through the center of town and
Moses felt extremely frustrated and
mortified by this but he just couldn't do
it the community protests were too great
it was a crucial turning point in the
life of New York and in the culture of
cities everywhere with their stunning
victory Jacobs and her allies had
reasserted the value of the city block
and by extension that of urban public
space itself challenging the most basic
assumptions upon which New York had
proceeded since the dawn of the modern age
that the new was always better than the old
and there's a sensitivity to history
which is also a new dimension to this I
mean you gotta understand that since the
20s it's been modern modern modern and
modern means dump the past break with
the past think new think Art Deco think
streamline I think projectile think you
know tear down the old stuff not just
because although it may be you know
constraint on our ability to make
profits but because it's old because the
new is intrinsically superior to the old
but Jacob says wait a minute part
of the texture of life in a city is
that people are not just connected to
each other on the street by virtue of
being neighbors but they're connected in
time there's some sense in the buildings
around you that you know remain that
gives you a sense of being part of a
continuum you know the history isn't
dead it's not something which has been
transcended today is not the first day
of the rest of your life people are
beings in time and they need to be
surrounded not entirely but you know to
some extent by the legacy the
built environment of the past
three years later Jacobs triumph would
be codified in an extraordinary new law
when on April 19 1965 Mayor Robert
Wagner signed legislation establishing
the Landmarks Preservation Commission
the agency came two years too late to
save Penn Station but in the years
to come it would save hundreds of
individual buildings in New York from
the records ball along with entire
districts including Brooklyn Heights
Greenwich Village and Soho itself
vibrant places Robert Moses had
yearned so passionately to transform
well the darkside of Moses character was
probably every bit as prominent as the
bright side especially in the context
of New York City on the one hand we can
admit the city needed a rubber Moses to
adapt and become a modern city on the
other hand Robert Moses saw the city in
some sense as a transportation problem
but New York is more than a transportation problem
and having created let's say the kind of minimal
number of new roads and new bridges that
the city needed to sort of function in
the second half of the 20th century then
he began to maybe continue that beyond
what was absolutely essential persons
like Jane Jacobs and others began to say
no wait a minute why do we need this
road that the whole purpose of things is
not to see how fast you can move traffic
that there's a city there that there
people who live in neighborhoods there
are people who like it the way it is and
I think that Moses never really
understood that the man who never drove
but who created an automobile kind of
circumstance a man who was responsible
for planning and building this enormous
metropolis and I think you can't escape
the feeling that he really wasn't comfortable in
the very city that he was responsible for building
by 1965 the worst rampages of urban
renewal were over and the long fateful
career of Robert Moses was drawing
to a close but nothing could stop the
onslaught of forces that in the decade
to come would break over New York City
and over older urban places everywhere
as the bill for nearly half a century of
massive social change physical upheaval
and economic transformation finished
coming do I think that when we finished
the city form the urban formed when
traffic lands and freeways and tall
buildings and business districts become
our priority and we forget about people
in neighborhoods we actually forget
about what is the lifeblood of the city
one of the things that we ended up doing
by focusing on the urban form by
building taller bigger faster better is
that we actually achieved physically
what we wanted to by the 1960's New York
City has actually gone through probably
one of the greatest urban building booms
in the history of mankind the problem
is antonie financial crisis it's in
financial crisis because we
neglected neighborhoods for 40 years
to a startling degree the vast river of
federal funds that had poured into the
city for nearly 20 years and only served
to accelerate anti urban trends begun
long before hastening the flight of
industry in the middle class to the
suburbs and beyond while traffic New
York's most vulnerable citizens in
rapidly expanding ghettos at the heart
of an inner city increasingly plagued by
deteriorating finances rising crime
falling city services and worsening race
relations
with resources dwindle and the needs of
New York's poorest citizens on the runs
years of simmering racial and social
tension began to erupt into open
conflict on the city streets in the
summer of 1964 riots once again ripped
through Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant
when an off-duty policeman shot and
killed a 15 year old boy the violence
that ensued echoing even greater
violence in cities across America would
continue for five full days and cast a
shadow over the last of Robert Wagner's
three terms as mayor his successor a
liberal ex congressman from the Upper
East Side named John Lindsay promised
New Yorkers a fresh start but from the
day he took office on January 1st 1966
the city would be battered by one crisis
after another as the first in a series
of crippling citywide strikes by
municipal employees among the lowest
paid workers in the city brought New
York's Transit System to a complete
standstill
and the working people the Catalan
people in many ways I think New York in
the 60s and 70s embodied the 60s and
70s in all the ambiguities and all the
tensions in American society you have
a civil rights movement that is raising
all sorts of problematic questions for
people about the nature of power in the
nature of access to power at the same
time you have an economic shift you have
money draining off to support the Vietnam
War we can't acknowledge that we're really
fighting the war and so we do deficit
spending it's a terrible blow ultimately
economically and all those things are
happening not only in the country but
right in the city and so you have a very
quick shift in the vision of New York
from a city with promise to a city of devastation
of poor people of complaining people of crumbling
buildings of inadequate services
meanwhile the suburbs are booing people
are moving elsewhere where labor
costs might be less expensive where
opportunities are different and what
you're left with in is a city that
nobody wants to support the 1960s and
1970s were not good for American cities
this was a time when everybody thought
the suburbs were the wave of the future
just a matter of time until really all
cities and all older neighborhoods were
abandoned in favor of the car in favor
of the corporate office park in favor of
the suburban residential subdivision
it was a time of fiscal crisis as the
country essentially spent its money on defense or
Vietnam and is in such money out of cities so that
the early 1970s mad city was had an
amazing financial crisis brought on by
borrowing too much money and perhaps
living beyond its means but also it no
longer had the schools were beginning to
decline the crime rate was beginning an
explosive increase in New York City as
in other places the Bronx was burning
every night there were fires that you
could see and so there was an orange
glow we heard about Fort Apache who's
dangerous police percent by 1970 the
city that had emerged from the
second world war as the most powerful
metropolis on earth and begun to spiral
down into an abyss of urban chaos and
despair almost without precedent in
American urban history well the worst
feature of New York and the period for
me of the neighborhood that were falling
apart a lot of the South Bronx in the
course of the 70s was burnt down the
biggest industry in the Bronx became
Horace the 1976 World Series whether it
was a night game in Yankee Stadium the
Goodyear blimp showed by the model away
a building was burning down and Howard
Cosell said what's wrong with these
people that they burned down their houses
some people began to suggest that it had
to do with the character of the
landlords in the fact that you could
collect more money on insurance than you
could collect in grant on buildings that
were old and needed constant refinancing
and ironically that were redlined
because the whole Bronx was redlined in
this Bureau so you couldn't you couldn't
fix up the building but you could fix it down
by 1973 more than 2000 City blogs had
been burned to the ground more than
43,000 departments had been destroyed
and the South Bronx had become a symbol
around the world of urban decline there
was this brief period in the 1970s
especially where it seemed like New York
was really gonna be further and further
off the chart that really did feel like
neighborhoods were being sequentially
abandoned by their owners you could see
in a lower Eastside landlord arson was
rampant because that was the only way
they'd ever be able to make money they
couldn't get people to move into these
places that they might as well burn them
down and it really seemed like this was just
going to happen all throughout the island
for the city itself there was one final
chapter to come in the long downward
spiral begun three decades before all
through John Lindsay second term as tax
revenues faltered and expenses soared
the beleaguered mayor had refused to cut
the crucial public programs that had
been New York's hallmark since the days
of the depression using hundreds of
millions of dollars earmarked for
long-term capital projects to cover the mounting
shortfall borrowing hundreds of millions more to
make up for that and rolling over the
ever mounting debt from one year to
another very bad accounting practices
the city was in effect borrowing to buy
groceries people and political
institutions should borrow money for
capital reasons we were the city was
borrowing money in order to meet its
current bills and you can't do that forever
I think that's culminated in the fiscal
crisis in the early 1970s because it
kind of brought it all together sure was
partly because the city was living
beyond its means and trying to maintain
this kind of old New Deal attitude of
building a public hospitals and public
colleges and generous public welfare
benefits even when the other estimation
wasn't following behind
by 1975 more than two billion dollars
a year were going simply to service New
York's enormous 11 billion dollar debt
which was increasing now at an alarming
rate with each passing month and
threatening to capsize is the new
administration of John Lindsay's
successor mayor it'd be a I don't want
to know if New York City is going down
the drain now is it safe to say not
going down the drain that October the
apocalyptic reckoning city leaders had
been attempting to stave off for nearly
ten years finally came due when the
consortium of banks that had freely lent
the city billions of dollars over the
previous decade abruptly suspended New
York's borrowing privileges until the
city had put its financial house in order
within days the city was facing a fiscal
crisis unlike any since the darkest
hours of the depression the bank said
looking at how much money in New York
City owed we're not gonna lend you any
more money and nobody believed they
would ever do that and they just shut
the window the bank's essentially sits
in New York give us six billion dollars
back now please and New York City
couldn't do that so in a sense New York
City was bankrupt or virtually Bangor
then the fiscal crisis is the process of
getting six billion dollars to pay back
the banks of the money that they once
loaned to the city with the prospect
of bankruptcy staring them in the face
city leaders turned in desperation to
the one source that could possibly save
the federal government submitting
a request for more than two billion
dollars in emergency loan guarantees the
city's last hope of avoiding complete
financial ruin President Gerald Ford
stunning response came in to speech on
October 29th at the National Press Club in
Washington responsibility for New York City's
financial problems is being left on the
front doorstep of the federal government
unwanted and abandoned by its real
parents and when New York City now asked
the rest of the country to guarantee its
bills it can be no surprise that many
other Americans ask why
municipal default ford concluded would
be a good thing for new york forcing the
city to curtail its traditionally
spendthrift ways no federal loan
guarantees would be forthcoming the next
day a towering black headline loomed
ominously from the front page of The
Daily News Ford to City drop dead
what's astonishing is that the crest of
the United States could essentially tell
the greatest city in the Western world
to drop that because he didn't say it
exactly but remember those daily news
headlines drop dead New York City tells
you just how far in a sense the city and
something a city that had sent so many successful
people out into the world should have
had more friends by the mid 70s it was
surrounded by people who did not wish
the place well and interestingly people
whose own life stories passed through
the five boroughs are decamped in Jersey
and Westchester and out on the island
and when that Daily News headline comes
out for two city dropped dead instead
of recoiling in horror this Aang yeah
drop dead we think you should drop dead too
it was a terrible terrible time it really was
instead of looking at this as a treasure
of the American scene New York was seen
as representing almost everything
that was worst about post-war America
in its blunt and homely way the headline
in the Daily News captured is nothing
else and the basic assumption behind
President Ford's remarks an assumption
that had been growing more and more
commonplace among Americans for years as
the city's social and economic problems
multiplied New York like many of the
nation's older cities was plummeting
into the abyss New York America's
extraordinary unwieldy experiment in
capitalism and democracy hope and greed
had failed New York City of cities
capital of capitalism gateway to America
was going to die and good riddance
grace Paley at one of the great New
York writers has a story written early
seventies South Bronx and one of the
characters who's like a community
organizer there says the buildings are
burning down on one side of the street
and the kids are trying to put something
together on the other and this could be
a parable of one of the great
achievements of that period from a lot
of the neighborhoods that were most
devastated in New York the earliest form
in which most people who weren't part
of that neighborhood saw it with the
graffiti that appeared on the subways in
the 70s and this was on a very rickety
decayed generation of great trains they
painted enormous ly exuberant colored
names and reliefs and mottos
and you can see many films now a great
day a great neighborhood and l-train and
certainly the l-train is like a rainbow
and it's thrilling the next incarnation
was wrapping the earliest form that
people saw would be there would be one
kid wrapping with small speakers in a
drum track in the subway you know with a
hat open for money and you
know these are parables of a
city that's being ruined that's being
destroyed and that's saying we can rise
again we come from ruins but we're
not ruined and I mean in 15 years it's
become the basic form of world music
so it's a field but it's important to
understand that it came from totally
burnt-out ruined districts and that's
where it was born and it was born out of
this suffering and misery and that a lot
of the creativity that New York is
always had has come from the cellars
from the rooms from how the other half
lives so an important part of sharing
space and living city life is being able
to live through the ways in which the
city itself is torn down and is consumed
that is destroyed but also consumes
itself you know if you can do that you
can become human in more alive than
you've been before
in the end of course the city didn't
die despite all the destruction and
heartbreak of the post-war years despite
the demise of neighborhoods and the loss
of industry and the bitter clash of
races and classes despite everything as
it had so many times in the past the
city - almost everyone's surprise got
back up off the floor and began to
revive less than a month after refusing
to come to the city's aid President Ford
reversed himself and grudgingly agreed
to approve the city's request for loan
guarantees warned by advisers that New
York's demise might trigger a
catastrophic domino effect of fiscal
default that would bring down one city
after another across the country with
time to put its finances in order
city officials moved with startling
dispatch cutting services repaying the
city's outstanding loans and balancing
the city budget by 1981 a
full year ahead of schedule
in the end the US Treasury made millions
of dollars out of its arrangement with
New York I think New York became the
experiment ground for a new national
program of austerity to check the power
of labor and to reverse some of the
trends of New Deal liberalism it was put
on display and it was created as a
kind of negative object example this is
liberalism gone amok this is
a kind of degeneration high
moral degeneracy that can only be solved
by the old fashioned medicine of fiscal
austerity and it's a program that in the
sense was then successful New York and
followed in the 1980s in the country at
large the summer of my election I went
for a walk on the Brighton Beach
boardwalk zorka's suddenly I heard a
woman calling mayor mayor and I looked
down the boardwalk and there was this
elderly lady she must have been in her
late 70s and she came towards me she
took my hand and she looked at me and
she said mayor make it like it was
I haven't Stella I still have moose
pimples and I thought to
myself as she said it Madame
it never was the way you
think it was but I'll try
in the years to come despite the
terrible hardships that continued to be
suffered by many of New York's most
vulnerable citizens the city would not
only survive but begin to thrive and
flourish again in large measure because
the urban qualities that had defined the
city since the time of the Dutch began
to reassert themselves not as problems
to be solved but as crucial urban values
to be celebrated nurtured and sustained
what I think accounts for New York's
success and reinventing itself and at
the end of the 20th century for the very
strengths that the Dutch are the first
little settlement in the 17th century
made visible the heterogeneity of the
city so that everyone was welcome maybe
everyone did not be loved we're not
gonna be pleasant we're not gonna hug
you and I can't even say good morning
every time we've seen but in the end
opportunity is here people knew it so we
have this incredible immigration flows
which accelerate after the mid-1960s
with the new immigration laws secondly
we have the same kind of entrepreneurial
spirit that the Dutch West India Company
had established in 1624 it has kind of
run through New York all the time third
I think it's the density and concentration of
deal there's something about the mood of the
place that's directed toward achievement
and getting something done fourthly I
think it's always been a kind of an
openness to change New York City was
always willing to go with what worked
to find the balance to reach a new
understanding by the 1980s
as the city's role within
the widening gyre of an increasingly
global economy continued to shift and
change the relentless commercial energy
that had characterized New York for
nearly four hundred years began to
return with a frantic intensity not seen
on Wall Street since the days of the
Roaring Twenties by the 1990s though the
days of New York's blue-collar glory
were over most of the hundreds of
thousands of jobs that had been lost
had been replaced as thousands of new
companies and small businesses streamed back
into New York eager to draw on the unique
concentration of talent resources
gathered there and attracted
by the very density that had once driven
businesses away cities bring a lot of
people together some people feel too
many people too big crowds but there's a
Great Commandment of urban life that can
be a tremendous source of happiness thou
shalt share space I mean cities in many ways are
expensive and inconvenient and noisy and dirty but
the wonderful thing about them is the
way they bring people together you
design cities that don't let people get
together you're losing what may be most
special and beautiful about them and
then of course make people think why
bother to live in a city at all if you don't
even have what's most special about the city
by the turn of the century the greatest
and most moving sign of the city's
miraculous revival could be seen on the
city streets themselves which within ten
years of the end of the fiscal crisis
were filled with hundreds of thousands
of newcomers from around the world who
had been pouring into New York since the
mid 1960s when the federal government
finally reopened the great human gateway
Emma Lazarus had called the Golden Door
I mean New York became the kind of port
that it had been at the beginning of
the 20th century again and people began
coming in enormous numbers from East
Asia from Latin America from Eastern
Europe colonizing neighborhoods that
really people considered abandoned the
census Department says that now
something like 43% of New Yorkers you
know have been born outside the USA
and they said that they haven't been
comparable figure since 1910
by the end of the 20th century the
fiscal crisis had dwindled to a memory
and New York seemed to have
reinvented itself once again the epic
transformations of the previous
half-century had left the city with a
host of intractable problems
including failing schools a crumbling
infrastructure and immense disparities
of income race and opportunity but the
city had come back and Americans
everywhere had begun to recognize the
crucial role bourbon places had played
in the tapestry of American history
carrying on the experiment New York had
begun on the banks of the Hudson four
hundred years before
the experiment is how close can rich and
poor live before the fabric completely
falls apart how close can you put ethnic
groups that don't like one another much
how much can you promise people about a
rich and privileged future and then not
really be able to deliver before they
rise up and say enough and the answer
here over and over and over again has
been that the fabric becomes tattered
that sometimes the fabric even becomes
torn but the fabric survives
you
you
some unfamiliar with history because
complaints about New York and
predictions of its demise have been so
common for so long and certainly go back
at least a hundred years and more I
think we're living in one of the glory
times I think near the saga of New York
City is nowhere near to being over the
city has had good times and bad times
and it will continue to is Vanitas
George M Cohen or refer to Broadway as
a fabulous invalid well I think New York
City is also in many ways a fabulous
envelope New York City has become so hot
that it's unbelievable in the early
90s it was just the opposite it was the
closest that it's ever been to 1929
Depression today New York City is hotter
than it ever was in the roaring 20s in
the roaring 80s right now New York City
is the hottest it's ever been by far you
feel in New York City the energy coming
up out of the sidewalk she said you know
that you were in the midst of something
tremendous something and if something
tremendous hasn't yet happened it's just
about to happen yeah it's it's always a lot
I can hear now it's it's a maintenance
the sound of maintenance that's it
because it's the ultimate battle with
entropy there's no other more entropic I
mean it's all of the lights the World
Trade Center that are out at night on
allow our sucking Indian point a nuclear
power station it's one big live wire
eight million people jammed together on
a very small amount of space people
talk about how dirty our city is it's
amazingly clean for the huge numbers
of people coming from so many different
experiences Olivia I think that the
story ought to be told and it's amazing
a New York exists and it does and it
goes on from day today today when you
fly into the city at night and you see
the lights in this city and the way this
city lights up like this Crystal Palace
it is an unbelievable sight to see
Manhattan lit up at night from the sky
and so not only are you in awe of
the lights and the beauty of it
but being from New York being in New
York when you come back into that it's a
mo