Epilogue

Assessing the landscape since the 1960s in the pages of Dissent, Marshall Berman noted that “things that happen in New York are beamed instantly all over America, indeed, the world, thanks to all the mass media that are located here. Facts become symbols instantly—often long before they are understood.” During the urban crisis, “New York came to symbolize ‘urban violence.’” These words appeared in the Fall 1987 issue, “In Search of New York,” after ten years of postcrisis restructuring under Mayor Edward Koch. ...

Farewell to the Universal City

Focusing on the Summer 1961 issue of Dissent, which was a multifaceted examination of New York City and its problems, this chapter shows how the image of the city in decline played a role in the unravelling of the “New York Intellectuals.” Contributors from the “Old Left” split with contributors from the “New Left” in their depictions of New York at this critical juncture. This had implications not only for ideology at a personal level for these intellectuals, but for the governing ideology around urbanism during a period of crisis.

Fear City on Film

This chapter considers how films produced in New York City played to an emergent anti-urban political culture. With crime and disorder as the feature antagonist in the New York film cycle of the late 1960s and the 1970s, the vigilante became a vital counterpoint to the perceived incompetence of municipal police departments. Escaping the dying city also served as a powerful motif in the period’s films. The motion picture industry brings the homegrown narrative of New York to a national audience.

Untangling the Pathologies of Ungovernability

In The Other America, Michael Harrington highlighted the persistence of poverty in New York City in an otherwise affluent era, hoping to spur federal policy that could help struggling neighborhoods like Harlem and the Bowery. As this chapter highlights, however, Harrington’s work ignited a debate on “urban pathologies” centered on New York. Conservative commentators took up Harrington’s representation of an urban “culture of poverty” to perpetuate a narrative of a pathological “underclass” destroying cities like New York

On Planning Necropolis

This chapter explores the use of fear in the written critiques of postwar redevelopment in New York City. With a special emphasis on the celebrated urban thinker Jane Jacobs, it examines how deploying the image of urban death at the hands of planners effectively slowed large scale redevelopment. However, it also considers the contingencies of that narrative for the discipline of planning itself and the political economy of urban development.

Mickey Spillane’s Necropolis

This chapter links the biography and ideology of best-selling pulp author Mickey Spillane with the emergent image of the dying city after World War II. Spillane crafted an image of New York City as physically decaying, demographically in flux, and overrun by violent criminals. These problems required an authoritarian response, illustrated by the character of Mike Hammer, a private investigator turned vigilante who skirts due process to restore order. Spillane’s work offered a template for various critics of New York in the postwar era, as demonstrated in the chapters that follow.

The Lure of Decay

This chapter examines the appropriation of the dying city by New York City natives and migrants drawn by the lure of decay, and the cultural explosion that followed, which birthed the downtown art scene, hip-hop, and new wave or punk music. This moment epitomized “the right to the city,” a more radical interpretation of Cosmopolis, making New York an open city in the 1970s.

Introduction

In July 1975, with the threat of bankruptcy looming, the New York Times asked eighteen “urban experts,” mostly prominent economists, social scientists, and theorists, “What should be done to solve New York City’s dilemma?”1 Since 1969 the city had lost nearly 500,000 jobs, and twice as many middle-class taxpayers had left New York in the decade prior. The city’s woes were indicative of broader trends, as the national economy foundered as a result of geopolitical conflict with countries in Southeast and Middle East Asia, deindustrialization, and the fitful transition to a postindustrial order at home. In this context, New York’s generous social democracy, structured around inclusive unionized public employment and equal access to public services, struggled to survive. In the spring of 1975, as Saigon fell, New York effectively defaulted on its debts, unable to pay its bills and with nary a willing lender....

The Case for Municipal Surgery

This chapter examines the popular writings of New York City’s master builder Robert Moses. In newspaper and magazine articles Moses framed the need for slum clearance and redevelopment through the lens of the dying city, labelling slums a cancer that could kill New York. Thus, he employed fear to allow room for his technocratic experts to remake the city on a large scale.

E. B. White’s Cosmopolis

With particular attention to E.B. White’s “Here is New York,” this chapter considers the place of the cosmopolitan narrative of New York City in the post-World War II era. White argues that in the new atomic world order, New York must continue to attract migrants from around the country and the world in order to survive. While this narrative of “Cosmopolis” echoes throughout the postwar era, it is drowned out by the image of the dying city until the 1980s.