All language subtitles for PBS.New.York.A.Documentary.Film.7of8.x264.AAC.MVGroup.Forum

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