Big City, Big Problems: Challenges to New York's Primacy after World War II

Immediately after World War II, New York stood astride the earth like a colossus. London and Paris were impoverished, and their citizens had all they could do just to purchase food and heat. Tokyo, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, Budapest, and Leningrad were in ruins, and people everywhere were exhausted. Alone among world cities, New York had prospered during the conflict, and many of its great institutions, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, Carnegie Hall, and the Museum of Modern Art, were almost without serious rivals for prestige or resources.

But it was not to last, and by 1975 the city was technically, if not actually, bankrupt. As Christopher McNickle demonstrates in his paper, there were worms in New York's apple by the 1950s. Corporate relocations to the south and west began during the Eisenhower Presidency, and white flight to New Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut, and Westchester County was eroding the tax base even as employers such as sugar and oil refining, brewing, and the shipping industry were in decline. Robert Moses continued to build highways, bridges, housing projects, and parks in large numbers, but the trajectory of the city according to most observers, was downward. By 1980, the population of the five boroughs had fallen by almost a million persons compared to 1960.

But unlike every other city in the northeast and middle west, New York City turned again, this time toward prosperity and growth. Poverty and prejudice of course remained, but Wall Street jobs proliferated, the legal, consulting, and banking industries prospered, and skyscrapers once again raced toward the sky. Most important, Gotham led the nation in the decline of crime so that "Fear City" became one of the world's leading tourist destinations. Kenneth Jackson will focus on these questions.

The great metropolis has never been like a roller coaster, but its rises and falls have been important in the life of the entire nation. This session will speak to the issues of why Gotham has been subject to such "ups" and "downs," and why ordinary citizens have not always shared in the dreams represented by the legends of New York.