A question I’ve asked myself recently: Who is responsible for New York City’s cultural renaissance in the 70s and 80s?
I ask that due to three assumptions: One, that New York City had a cultural renaissance. Two, that city culture is the direct result of urban policy, and three, that a single political regime can be said to be substantively responsible for said urban policy. I’ve lived my entire life with the first two assumptions, which is why I went to school for City Planning: We are our environment, and something had to keep people in this crime/rat-infested piss-soaked heroin-fueled squeegee bum squalor (and I say that with pride). The second is necessarily reductionist, but is still useful as a thought experiment.
In this thought experiment, I think the single biggest influence, obviously, is mayor, and that we can skip state government almost entirely to select the president as second-biggest influence, primarily as supporting role to the mayor in the form of money. I give these parameters because, in New York City, mayors have almost always been authoritarian to the point of being dictatorial, and state and federal support have almost always been very removed: New York politics have, for most of its history, run counter to state and national politics. A New York accent pretty much guarantees political death on the national stage – sorry, Giuliani.
In that stead, I can start listing mayors that have been influential in office leading up to the 80s. Going backwards, then, we have Koch, Lindsay, Wagner and La Guardia. From there, we can start tracking when the pendulum swings in terms of political reformation. My hypothesis, then, is that there are two general eras in recent city history:
1) La Guardia started an era of city service expansion under the New Deal that Lindsay ended by paying for running costs through city bonds. This combined regime started in 1934 and ended in 1973.
2) Beame started an era of city service contraction under the behest of the state’s Emergency Financial Control Board that Dinkins incompletely curtailed by expanding the police force. With that one exception, in which every mayor after Dinkins has effectively been a law-and-order mayor, this combined regime started in 1974 and is arguably the era we still live in.
The first half of this thought is more or less an upward swing:
Supporters of La Guardia, and I count myself among them, argue that he opened merit-based city employment (and in doing so effectively gave Jewish people a niche in civil service), broke the Democratic machine, unified the NYC Transportation Authority, fomented rent control, and brought down a massive influx of capital funds via the Works Progress Administration, Public Works Administration, and Civil Works Administration from the FDR administration – in one of the few times the city and the federal government cooperated with one another – to build public schools, housing and parks. Critics of La Guardia argue that when the feds stopped sending cash in 1945, NYC was saddled with maintenance costs for its public works that it couldn’t hope to meet.
After a couple machine Democrats came and went, Wagner continued that general populist policy, where-in his administration hired many minorities into civil service positions (and in doing so effectively gave Black people a middle class niche in NYC), started the city university system and Lincoln Center, presided over the unification of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and continued construction for public housing. His critics would contend that the Robert Moses’ public housing projects built during this era were massive failures that ended up being urban blights by concentrating the poor in ghettos separated from city services, and that Moses himself ended up being the tail that wagged the dog whose massive public works during Wagner’s and Impellitteri’s regimes were ultimately criticized as explicitly anti-poor.
Lindsay is generally credited with staving off wide-scale race riots when most northeastern cities were going through heavy turmoil and generally criticized for just about everything else: The strikes, the budget woes, and Albert Shanker (where-in Black self-rule was overruled by Jewish unionists). Arguably, the massive demands for all these social services and high-wage jobs came crashing on his head, especially during a national crisis.
So where were we at this point? Well, we had half a million units of public housing and another two million units of affordable housing, a free university system and a public school system that was the envy of the nation, many new arts organizations and institutions, a quarter million permanent unionized middle-class civil service positions, and a unified transit system.
We were also broke.
We were broke, but had just spent an entire generation culminating probably the biggest concentrated investment in human capital ever in the world at that time.
The second half of the story’s a mite more depressing:
Koch followed Beame’s lead (after the federal government under Ford signaled that no support would be given and the state specified budget provisions) and balanced the budget by taking no prisoners. Cops were cut, teachers were cut, cultural institutions were cut, maintenance of the infrastructure was cut, certain areas of the city were abandoned in a controversial decision in favor of consolidating resources in districts deemed “savable,” and a general sense of lawlessness accelerated abandonment of the city by moneyed taxpayers as well as disinvestment by banks and financial institutions.
Landlords frustrated with rent control in poorer areas of the city hired arsons to demolish their own housing stock, and while rent stabilization was a much more effective policy, it arguably came too late. Cuts in police and social services, including mental health institutions, turned public housing complexes built in the 60s into dens of crime. Educational standards started a long decline, and violent crime and drug usage started a long incline, peaking in 1990. Divisions in Black and Jewish residents resulted in a race riot under Dinkins, and domestic and immigrant poor constituencies were put at odds with one another thanks to uneven application of limited city resources.
To their credit, however, Beame, Koch and Dinkins kept the city from falling apart entirely, and Koch and Dinkins especially kept the good fight in maintaining a great deal of our affordable housing stock.
What’s amazing, however, is that despite all this, the arts flourished. They exploded. The city was literally crumbling around them, and New Yorkers prevailed. Even in the poorest, most benighted neighborhoods city residents were creating entire new genres of everything. Why? LaGuardia’s schools. Wagner’s universities. The core and stability of enfranchised middle class civil workers in affordable housing and a comprehensive transit system. A single generation later, that human capital paid off, giving us a generation of educated free-thinkers that maintained New York’s primacy in the cultural and economic worlds and sowed the seeds for its rebound – unique among all northern cities – and competitiveness the world over. A generation of New Yorkers were made that could indeed make it anywhere: Even in New York.
All told, however, I’ve taken from this two conclusions:
1) We could have done things better. From a planning and policy standpoint, there were egregious errors that culminated in problems that remain bulwarked and intractable.
Planning-wise, the public housing projects of the 60s made the word “project” a pejorative term. The highways that criss-crossed the Bronx and Brooklyn wantonly blighted entire districts, a mistake remarkable for how entirely avoidable it was. Investment and infrastructure was applied unevenly, and then revoked unevenly. Lastly, we never did built the MTA’s Second System, which would have pre-emptively solved a lot of problems in today’s overcrowded subways. Getting it right the first time covers a lot of ills.
Policy-wise, both the city and the unions are at fault for their obstinacy and failure to properly budget and govern, and in their interminable battles they have been ultimately responsible for inflaming racial and social divisions and undermining our ability to teach each new generation. Each side’s single-minded zero-sum game made the city in a number of ways ungovernable and ultimately failed to solve the one problem that could have maintained gains made indefinitely.
2) If the 70s and 80s were the result of policy made in the 40s through the 60s, what does that say for the 00s and 10s, considering our policies in the 70s through the 90s? What does it say for the 20s and 30s, considering today’s policies?
Our public school system, aside from magnet schools whose origins date back to either specialized public or private sponsorship and whose statuses were codified in the 70s, is largely abandoned by anybody with half a chance to. Our public universities now cost money. Our housing crisis has only gotten worse, accelerated by the state’s drawdown of rent regulation and our last two mayors’ developer-friendly policies, our cultural institutions are closing, consolidating or begging for money, and our transit system is both more expensive and less useful than it was during its heyday.
We have, in short, lost this generation, of which I am a part, and are on schedule to lose the next one. It’s likely going to be harder than before, unless Obama or Clinton find religion and open their coffers, but it should be treated immediately as the crisis that it is and all sides should take note.