NEW YORK, NEW YORK, NEW YORK

The fall and rise of today’s New York City—for better and worse.

It wasn’t long ago, writes novelist and historian Dyja, when NYC, or at least parts of it, was held up as “a ruin so apparently complete that the rest of the falling nation could say that at least they weren’t there.” That was when Jimmy Carter was president, after Gerald Ford had told the city to “drop dead,” when South Bronx alone experienced 63,000 arsons in two years and the rest of the city was grim and gritty. Thirty-odd years later, the city had undergone “the most dramatic peacetime transformation of a city since Haussmann rebuilt Paris.” The result is a theme park for the conspicuous consumer, a place very different from the “workers’ paradise” of public housing, schools, transit, and other public goods promised by Fiorello La Guardia not long after the five boroughs joined. The low that preceded the high was profound; in the 1970s, the city “lost control…not just because of debt, but because it couldn’t effectively manage its information,” requiring an overhaul of its budgeting and reporting processes. But getting to emerald-city status took more than making the city’s finances transparent. It also involved the rise of Rudy Giuliani, who, long before he became Donald Trump’s latter-day Roy Cohn, divined that “the Irish, Italians, Catholics, and Jews were…all part of White Western Civilization, which needed no explanation or defense,” and used this insight as cause to crack down on non-White populations. Under Michael Bloomberg, money became ascendant. The industrial New York of old became a technological and financial capital par excellence, “a ‘Luxury City’…more upset when a Chanel store has its windows broken than when police murder a man.” Dyja is no fan of the authoritarians and plutocrats, clearly, but he does not spare more liberal mayors like David Dinkins and Bill de Blasio, who “let the city go adrift.”

Morally and politically charged, an urgent, readable story of Gotham’s fortunes.