New York, New York, New York by Thomas Dyja

One of the first non-fiction books that I have ever read that actually reads like a novel, Thomas Dyja has a masterpiece on his hands with New York, New York, New York, a “tour de force” of penmanship, research, and first-hand quotes and accounts of the transformation of the Big Apple over the last four decades. The story begins in the early 70’s when New York City was in total disarray — socially, economically, racially, etc. — and how it emerged from near bankruptcy into the massive, beloved place that it became through the “greed is good” 80’s, the “tech storm” of the 90’s, the horrors of 9/11 and it’s aftermath in the 2000’s, and the racially diverse but fragmented and certainly economically unequal 2010’s to the present day. Dyja is able to capture the essence and spirit of New York and New Yorkers through the years, but also tells the stories of the major players (Rudy, Trump, Warhol, Capote, Cuomo) and the “little people” that truly make the city go, and those tidbits are really the best part of the book because you can almost feel the emotion and tension on the ground as New York transforms itself from chaos and crime into one of the wealthiest, most diverse, and culturally significant cities in the world. New York is still far from perfect, obviously, and the host of issues covered in this book — searing inequality, the have’s vs, the have not’s, the elite vs. the working class, corrupt officers and politicians — are important and vital issues that certainly still exist in 2024, but New York still remains as important and influential as ever for America and Americans. As the Chairman of the Board once sang, “if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”

• how New York became at once kinder and meaner, richer and poorer, more like America and less like what it had always been
• things that brought NYC back — connection, proximity, density — are exactly what sent COVID burning through its streets
• best and worst of a networked world
• everyday New Yorkers rebuilt communities by rebuilding their connections to government and to each other
• keeping a city fertile demands active, daily participation of its citizens
• no one knew when to say when
• flush with cash and full of poor people, diverse but highly segregated, hopeful yet worryingly hollow, wide open to a virus
• September 1975, democracy suspended in NY, Emergency Financial Control Board to take in all city revenue and direct all major expenditures
• EFCB would remain in charge until city hall could deliver three balanced budgets in a row without federal help
• movement from industry to information would prove to be the fundamental economic shift of the next four decades
• knowledge would replace labor, service would replace goods, new knowledge based power class would emerge, increase the role of women in the economy
• Nixon went off the gold standard in 1971, overnight cash lost it intrinsic value, money was now just numbers on a screen
• collecting and moving that information was the future
• finance would be the economy and everything else would be the games to bet on
• growth would come by pampering the finance, insurance, and real estate corporations, the FIRE sector
• growth measured in purely financial terms
• ATMs helped demystify money, soon credit cards would be increasingly easier to get as the once shameful idea of carrying debt would gradually become a sign of financial savvy
• Carter, city governments, businesses, and citizens would have to work together to rebuild
• city government had never been run for max efficiency, point of patronage was jobs, with results a distant second
• build a nonpartisan managerial tier and develop clear strategies and structures that will let them manage for results
• personal accountability and trust had disappeared
• 1/6 of NYC was parkland, higher percentage than any other American city, in terms of acres per person though it was next to last, dangerous and worn
• parks were fundamental to a democracy, changing public spaces and attitudes toward them would transform the city
• for the city’s services to improve, New Yorkers would have to improve too
• parks, open spaces, when they work best, change people’s behaviors
• what a city does best is bring people together, face to face, for the exchange of ideas and goods and services
• short blocks, high density, mixed use, old buildings with new construction
• modern cities shouldn’t bulldoze the past, they should engage it
• Brownstone Movement
• “gentrification” spread through Brooklyn
• Business Improvement Districts
• SoHo was born, NY now had a new official Art district
• the past was a necessary ingredient for the modern
• time was being stopped, progress wasn’t
• choice expressed identity
• living in NY became for many a consumer good
• people went where there were other people
• 1978, tax abatements were fueling commercial real estate
• Fred Trump underwrote his son’s caviar dreams of owning the Manhattan skyline
• underneath the reawakening was a sense that “their” turn was over, time to return the city to a safe sane — White — control
• community organizing would ultimately prove a crucial force in the evolution of NY
• Hip Hop had everything to do with globalization, tech, democratization, freedom
• “Word” as an affirmation, came from the Five Percent Nation
• along with Bambaataa, the Five Percenters bridged 70s gangs and Hip Hop
• let the boroughs develop new identities with their own styles and stars
• most lasting divide in the city would be between Blacks and Koch
• disco music was born in the lofts of SoHo when Black and Latino gay men were excluded from the white gay scene threw their own parties
• Colab, short for Collaborative Artists
• Warhol, ambiguous essence of everything cool in NY
• world of pop, where Art melted into consumerism and media
• writers were revered and envied as necessary to what made NY superior to all cities
• city had lost control in the 70s not just because of debt, but because it couldn’t effectively manage its information
• what is public and what is private, and what is profit and what is not for profit, is no longer an easy distinction
• 1979, MTA employees went out on an illegal strike, what came next changed the course of history of NY
• traffic jam — birth of the term gridlock — million cars in Midtown
• white collar office workers backed the people who signed their checks, not the workers — end of NY as a union town
• rich and powerful began to make more visible use of their riches and power
• rationalization for greed
• Reagan signed tax cuts into effect
• leveraged buyouts, mergers and acquisitions, sudden existence of twenty something millionaires
• faking it was now at the heart of society
• gay liberation was about f’ing anyone you wanted to at any time of the day and night and the rest is bourgeois nonsense
• Age of the Individual in NY
• worst recession sine the 1930s with manufacturing strangled
• NY was more creative than ever, greedier and more violent, even more deadly
• Bull Market arrived, Reniassance flowered
• cartoon age of garish society and paper profits
• Bull that guilded Renaissance NY did little for most Americans
• 80s wall street was about the institutional money released by deregulation, mergers and acquisitions, debt that made it all possible
• America began to make debt instead of things
• network of corporate raiders, buying and selling companies based only on balance sheets
• jolted American businesses awake
• money was information, information was money
• Bloomberg, produce a computer with a desktop terminal and customized keyboard that would give users data on bonds and also let them develop personalized analytics
• Market Master
• helped turn guesses into educated predictions
• factories pushed out, economy didn’t need low level paper pushers
• philanthropy is the glue that binds high society
• Trump net work only 5M, financed with debt secured by his father, tried to convince a reporter that he was the richest developer in NY, worth nearly a billion
• this was a model Trump would use for the rest of his career
• few topped Trump when it came to taking public money, and a few so avidly handed NY over to foreign investors
• “greed is good”
• young white collar workers now had a name: Yuppies
• Young Urban Professionals
• “like goes to like”
• “status society”
• places created ties
• they only liked to share with each other, was the problem
• personal computing made money only that much more unreal
• computer banking began in 1983
• Yuppies also changed sex and parenting in NY
• intense families driven by their own internal needs more than the needs of any given community
• “formal play dates”
• “gifted child”
• foundation of all this was the Upper West Side was homeownership
• return to upper middle class domesticity
• displacement: brownstones went from multi unit apartments into single family homes
• Yuppies represented a version of hope
• saw things they could fix and put themselves to the task
• gay men were left to confront AIDS on their own
• death of Rock Hudson that summer and controversy over Ryan White made America confront AIDS, though sympathy wasn’t the result
• death of more than 50% of Manhattan’s gay Baby Boomers
• media conglomerates, gobbled up independent book publishers, newspaper chains, and magazines
• Warhol Economy: new economic sector in NY that regarded youth culture as a constant wildcat strike of fashion, music, art, with Media as the prospectors
• 1983, crack had saturated NY
• years ahead, homeownership went up among all races in all boroughs
• Koch housing initiative was possibly the single greatest contribution to the transformation of NY, groundwork for many of the better known improvements to come
• priming growth meant more building, making life easier for the developers
• public involvement also changed the direction of times square
• all power is the willingness to accept responsibility
• racial violence rose with the skyscrapers
• poverty was growing faster here than in the rest of the country
• available jobs and capital were concentrating among a smaller cohort
• skills weren’t the issue
• immigration continued to add to the inequities
• gentrification of Harlem was started by people in Harlem
• Hip Hop was not just an f you to white society, it was an f you to the previous Black generation as well
• suburbanites, white and black, had merged the f you of punk and the f you of Black nationalism to make Hip Hop the primary expression of post Boomer urban youth
• small amounts of rich mans cocaine, cooked, crack rolled out
• devastate a generation of New Yorkers and deepen social and economic divides
• frenzy to have now and have again was the nature of all modern life
• rates of child abuse, child abandonment, homelessness exploded
• police, stopping crime wasn’t in their job description
• “stranger policing”
• racial tensions crackled
• Wall Street, in the thrall of young computer geniuses nicknamed quants, for “quantitative analysts”
• based on the belief that everyone behaved rationally
• first global crisis of the modern financial world
• in two months, a trillion dollars had evaporated
• real estate market melted
• Dinkins term would prove to be an inflection point in NY history
• recession bit hard, between 1989 and 1992, NY would lose almost 14% of its jobs
• police and policing in NY were about to undergo historic change
• crime was about to drop and incarceration would plummet by the end of the decade
• all started underground, cleaner more reliable subway system
• using Broken Windows theory as a pretext to stop people they considered likely criminals
• used disorderly acts as a reasonable cause to snare serious criminals
• as the chat rooms filled up, Prozac became the most widely prescribed antidepressant in the country
• Desert Storm, CNN provided the first drops of what would become the anesthetizing drip of constant information
• hearts were hardening even as crime fell
• new immigrants were creating new communities rich in social and financial capital
• ten years after Bush signed the NAFTA treaty and the Immigration Act of 1990, city’s immigrant population would rise more than 40%
• core of the platform for Giuliani’s run: a city for the deserving who did what they were told
• fully 1/3 of NYPD, openly racist, drunk, belligerent, self pitying, had told New Yorkers exactly how they felt about them, and Giuliani had their backs — panic over losing cultural supremacy
• unmotivated and slightly ill tempered GenXers searching for nonexistent jobs lacked both the optimism and the delusions of their elders
• looming behind it all were the Culture Wars
• Duane Street, city had discovered bodies at the site of what turned out to be until the late 1700s the city’s African burying ground
• estimated 20K people
• stunning reinsertion of brutal enslavement and Black presence into the whitewashed history of NYC
• discovering the erasure inspired new identity
• branding Hip Hop’s Authenticity would establish it as a cultural position
• embrace the ghetto as a site and source of cultural identity
• what mattered was who was making it and why
• Williamsburg was largely a scene apart from the Hasids, Poles, and Dominicans next door
• debate over New York’s public spaces became a proxy war over culture and politics
• all media, retail, politics was soon to be all about You
• Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 loosened up rules in IRAs, corporations to cut pension costs, limited their contributions while giving employees “control” over a nest egg
• everyday Boomers went in search of higher returns, taking on more risk while execs who knew better cashed in
• all the 80s gains in real median household income had been wiped out
• inequality was spreading
• Islamist terrorism had arrived, World Trade Center entered New York’s emotional memory
• 42nd street was a void, turned a risk oriented male dominated area into a safe space for all ages, races, classes, sexes
• control was central to Rudy’s plans
• His City Hall, Us vs. Them
• sudden awakening was the result of policies, plans, and battles of prior administrations and the tireless efforts of individuals who’d fought and labored with their fellow New Yorkers for more than a decade
• New Yorkers came back together on the streets, in parks and through public spaces
• feeling safer, their presence created even more safety
• “stepped up enforcement” of public nuisance laws already on the books to give cops more probable cause for stops
• you’d be arrested now, get a warrant check, and be interrogated
• Reclaiming the Public Spaces of New York
• what changed the force was data
• hot spots, bad corners, larger trends
• misdemeanor arrests shot up, minorities would disproportionately pay the price
• drug use had changed, whatever cachet crack may have had was gone
• weed was the drug of choice
• crack as a business had “matured”
• dealers became more discrete and businesslike
• fewer criminals because they were dying off
• first and second generation immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes than the native born
• Housing Initiative
• restoration of order in the built environment, public spaces, people’s lives
• no one policy or person ended crime as it was known in NY, ending crime was the tipping point that brought Reformation NY fully to life
• Italian mob weakened, Russian Mafiya stepped in
• tech became the story
• everything that can be digital will be
• Telocommunications Act in Feb. 1996 drastically changed all media’s future
• more protein for the top predators
• Republicans continued cutting retraining programs necessary to shift jobs in the New Economy, need for unskilled labor shrunk, economic divide spread wider
• Internet and there was Viagra, infinite wealth, infinite desire — no risk
• same divides of wealth and generation in the city applied in Black communities, and were about to split Harlem apart
• Jay-Z, childhood nickname Jazzy
• Hip Hop was was one true voice
• politically economically amputeed peoples fist
• public housing offered stability through the 70s
• NYPD’s new strategy was essentially criminalizing being a Black kid
• Clinton signed the Welfare Reform in August 1996, by 1997, City had stripped some 300K New Yorkers off welfare
• some 70% of Hip Hop sales were to White buyers and crime was dropping
• re sorting by class, taste, sexuality, faith, and bank account, people produced their own realities and increasingly clumped with only those show shared theirs, a new Us vs. Them
• Rent stood out as unapologetically diverse, young, and welcoming to People with AIDS and HIV
• gay visibility at the cost of gay meaning — gay words under straight control: deeper levels of the “deal” that Rent expressed
• Rudy announced a zero tolerance civility campaign
• more money than space, space is getting more expensive
• since Reagan, top 1% had gotten 86% of stock gains
• Stop and Frisk: Blacks made up 24.5% of the city’s population, they were 62.7% of those stopped
• Wall Street hit bottom in 2000, in one year nearly 4T in paper wealth had disappeared
• from 1982 to 2000, Dow had risen 1,409% and money had become the central focus of American life
• inequality had sharpened, poor got poorer, more of them
• 200K more in poverty
• that fewer than 3K died when it could have been in the tens of thousands spoke to what emergency workers but also average New Yorkers had done in the aftermath of 9/11
• wrapped in the cowl of 9/11, the full grief of past decades was released
• Rudy managed to provide a beacon of empathy and comfort to all New Yorkers no matter who they were, how much they made, or the color of their skin
• grace couldn’t last forever
• shrinking death toll had as much to do with civilian heroics as the first responders
• Beckett suddenly made sense: the world had ended … and yet life continued
• Bloomberg’s term would bring the most dramatic era of physical change since Robert Moses
• most effective City Hall in memory — at what it chose to be effective at
• NY had already been wallowing in its post dotcom recession when the planes hit
• “Philanthropy” was a form of patriotism to Bloomberg
• NY into Bloomberg: innovative, strategic, full of rewards for hard work
• NYPD became the first and only American police force to run international spies, operate its own cyberunit, linguistics team, infectious disease department
• justifying wider powers and bigger budgets
• Bloomberg referred to the city as a luxury product
• anyone with money or sense now worked at, invested in, or ran a hedge fund
• unregulated by the SEC, rich to their own devices
• reimagined NY was delivering on its promise of an enlightened Lifestyle
• its residents were living nine months longer than the average American
• national politics turned Ground Zero from a shared tragedy into a battlefield in the new Culture War
• NY like a gorgeous antique that someone bought, refurbished, and restored, then offered back to you at a price you couldn’t possibly afford
• more saturated with immigrants than it has ever been, more like a microcosm of the whole world
• Dow broke records, Fed raising interest rates, mortgages were adjusting, balloon payments coming due for hundreds of thousands, rendering billions in mortgage bonds worthless
• 1991 to 2005, Americans had borrowed 530B against homes whose values were falling, yet 6 in 10 didn’t have enough savings for three months
• Dow dropped 50% in a year
• even experts admitted that they didn’t fully understand derivatives
• NY had been victimized by their white collar neighbors
• curated self, business of helping you create your identity through your consumption, aesthetic and otherwise, had leapt online to Facebook and Twitter and the like
• Wall Street was its own world, what matters most is your place in the world, not what the rest of the world thinks of you
• galas got shiny again, food stamp use in the city shot up, doubling in the years after the Financial Crisis
• Occupy Wall Street, sense of anger and helplessness, invigorating pushback against Power, Wealth, Style
• its ultimate reality more a performance than a new version of Olmsteadian democracy
• Occupy continued to rely on protest more than active participation in democracy
• NY was now safer than it had ever been
• anger over Stop and Frisk would permanently damage Bloomberg’s legacies
• only .1% of them had resulted in conviction
• immigrants from around the world had rebuilt the day to day economy
• Hip Hop had become NY’s most globally influential cultural invention, a way to live among and against, but also to move forward
• deBlasio quickly became known for a corrosive blend of ego and micromanagement
• whatever belief NYorkers had that this was their city only slipped further away
• I can’t breathe — deBlasio just flipped from one side to the other, pleasing no one
• COVID hit, deBlasio: no, no, yes style would be on full display
• mayor looked like a midlevel functionary
• NYC will not die
• nothing is permanent about a city, even if it’s Cairo
• COVID is forcing a wave of change on NYC, demand for racial justice is forcing another
• NYC is not a zero sum game
• must reengergize itself
• democracy demands more than just shopping, voting, opining
• live IN your community, not ON top of it
• become a regular
• participation creates power
• communities require functioning, dynamic collective power to force and direct the changes they need
• good of the city above all else
• public administration must be as nonpartisan as possible
• reforming the police — department to keep people safe
• definition of “order” must be reached with the whole city in mind, not just to preserve privilege
• NYPD used 9/11 as an excuse to militarize
• set goals that assess impact and change, not just task performance
• future will also be in our parks and streets
• Arts are also necessary for the urban soul
• NY demands that we take our shot
• appearance of inequality in a place increases actual inequality
• NY built on the bedrock of justice, not just noblesse oblige
• focus more on service than naming rights
• constantly adjusting, constantly in flex