Books in the Columbia History of Urban Life series

In 1978, Ed Koch assumed control of a city plagued by filth, crime, bankruptcy, and racial tensions. By the end of his mayoral run in 1989 and despite the Wall Street crash of 1987, his administration had begun rebuilding neighborhoods and infrastructure. Unlike many American cities, Koch's New York was growing, not shrinking. Gentrification brought new businesses to neglected corners and converted low-end rental housing to coops and condos. Nevertheless, not all the changes were positive AIDS, crime, homelessness, and violent racial conflict increased, marking a time of great, if somewhat uneven, transition. For better or worse, Koch's efforts convinced many New Yorkers to embrace a new political order subsidizing business, particularly finance, insurance, and real estate, and privatizing public space. Each phase of the city's recovery required a difficult choice between moneyed interests and social services, forcing Koch to be both a moderate and a pragmatist as he tried to mitigate growing economic inequality. Throughout, Koch's rough rhetoric (attacking his opponents as "e;crazy,"e; "e;wackos,"e; and "e;radicals"e;) prompted charges of being racially divisive. The first book to recast Koch's legacy through personal and mayoral papers, authorized interviews, and oral histories, this volume plots a history of New York City through two rarely studied yet crucial decades: the bankruptcy of the 1970s and the recovery and crash of the 1980s.

Charles Abrams (1902-1970) stood at the center of the policies, problems, and politics surrounding urban planning, housing reform, and the public and private interests involved in the expansion of the American state. He uniquely combined in one person the often divergent roles of "e;public"e; and "e;policy"e; intellectual. As a "e;public intellectual,"e; Abrams's voice reached the American public through the pages of The Nation, The New Leader, and The New York Times, with accessible explanations of civil rights legislation, mortgage financing, government policies, and urban renewal. As a "e;policy intellectual,"e; he helped to create the New York Housing Authority, lobbied President Kennedy to issue an executive order barring discrimination in federally subsidized housing projects, and combated the growing threat of a federally initiated "e;business welfare state."e; Housing and the Democratic Ideal is the only comprehensive work on Charles Abrams to date. Though structured as a narrative biography, this book also uses Abrams's experiences as a lens through which we can better understand the development of American social policy and state expansion during the twentieth century. In his left-leaning critique of centrist liberalism, Abrams took aim at the use of fiscal and monetary policies to achieve social objectives-a practice that allowed business interests to maximize private profits at the expense of public benefits. His growing concern over racial discrimination prefigured its emergence as a highly contested aspect of the American state.A. Scott Henderson not only provides clear insight into Abrams's role in American policymaking and his individual achievements as a pioneering civil rights lawyer, scholar, and urban reformer, but also offers an in-depth analysis of modern state-building and the government-private sector relations ushered in by the New Deal.

Since its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century as the nation's "e;metropolis,"e; New York has faced the most challenging housing problems of any American city, but it has also led the nation in innovation and reform. The horrors of the tenement were perfected in New York at the same time that the very rich were building palaces along Fifth Avenue; public housing for the poor originated in New York, as did government subsidies for middle-class housing.A standard in the field since its publication in 1992, A History of Housing in New York City traces New York's housing development from 1850 to the present in text and profuse illustrations. Richard Plunz explores the housing of all classes, with comparative discussion of the development of types ranging from the single-family house to the high-rise apartment tower. His analysis is placed within the context of the broader political and cultural development of New York City. This revised edition extends the scope of the book into the city's recent history, adding three decades to the study, covering the recent housing bubble crisis, the rebound and gentrification of the five boroughs, and the ecological issues facing the next generation of New Yorkers. More than 300 illustrations are integrated throughout the text, depicting housing plans, neighborhood changes, and city architecture over the past 130 years. This new edition also features a foreword by the distinguished urban historian Kenneth T. Jackson.

Upsetting the Apple Cart surveys the history of black-Latino coalitions in New York City from 1959 to 1989. In those years, African American and Latino Progressives organized, mobilized, and transformed neighborhoods, workplaces, university campuses, and representative government in the nation's urban capital. Upsetting the Apple Cart makes new contributions to our understanding of protest movements and strikes in the 1960s and 1970s and reveals the little-known role of left-of-center organizations in New York City politics as well as the influence of Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns on city elections. Frederick Douglass Opie provides a social history of black and Latino working-class collaboration in shared living and work spaces and exposes racist suspicion and divisive jockeying among elites in political clubs and anti-poverty programs. He ultimately offers a different interpretation of the story of the labor, student, civil rights, and Black Power movements than has been traditionally told. His work highlights both the largely unknown agents of historic change in the city and the noted politicians, political strategists, and union leaders whose careers were built on this history. Also, as Napoleon said, "e;An army marches on its stomach,"e; and Opie's history equally delves into the role that food plays in social movements, with representative recipes from the American South and the Caribbean included throughout.

Examining race, class, and society in Brooklyn over three centuries from the colonial period to the present, A Covenant with Color maps out the genesis, transformation, and dissemination of racial beliefs-observing them in action "on the ground."

In the first comprehensive investigation of the role tenement landlords played in shaping the urban landscapes of today, Jared Day explores the unique case of New York City from the close of the nineteenth century through the World War II era.

The black church has always played a vital role in urban US settings. This study examines the impact of the church on blacks and the church's efforts to meet the arduous demands and sacrifices of urban life. It explores the ministers' role of leadership in African-American communities.

Revered and reviled in almost equal amounts since its inception, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has been responsible for creating and maintaining much of New York and New Jersey's transportation infrastructure - the things that make the region work. This book traces the evolution of the Port Authority.

From Tammany Hall to the election of David Dinkins, this work offers insights into the effect of ethnic competition on the demise of urban political machines. It traces the effect of the arrival of large numbers of Jewish and Italian immigrants - and later black and Puerto Rican migrants - on the Irish-dominated political machine.

McShane examines the uniquely American relation between auto-mobility and urbanization. Deftly combining urban and technological history, McShane focuses on how new transportation systems-most important, the private automobile-and new concepts of the city redefined each other in modern America.

America's remarkable explosion of industrial output and national wealth at the end of the nineteenth century was matched by a troubling rise in poverty and worker unrest. As politicians and intellectuals fought over the causes of this crisis, Henry George (1839-1897) published a radical critique of laissez-faire capitalism and its threat to the nation's republican traditions. Progress and Poverty (1879), which became a surprise best-seller, offered a provocative solution for preserving these traditions while preventing the amassing of wealth in the hands of the few: a single tax on land values. George's writings and years of social activism almost won him the mayor's seat in New York City in 1886. Though he lost the election, his ideas proved instrumental to shaping a popular progressivism that remains essential to tackling inequality today.Edward T. O'Donnell's exploration of George's life and times merges labor, ethnic, intellectual, and political history to illuminate the early militant labor movement in New York during the Gilded Age. He locates in George's rise to prominence the beginning of a larger effort by American workers to regain control of the workplace and obtain economic security and opportunity. The Gilded Age was the first but by no means the last era in which Americans confronted the mixed outcomes of modern capitalism. George's accessible, forward-thinking ideas on democracy, equality, and freedom have tremendous value for contemporary debates over the future of unions, corporate power, Wall Street recklessness, government regulation, and political polarization.

Home to the New York Yankees, the Bronx Zoo, and the Grand Concourse, the Bronx was at one time a haven for upwardly mobile second-generation immigrants eager to leave the crowded tenements of Manhattan in pursuit of the American dream. Once hailed as a "e;wonder borough"e; of beautiful homes, parks, and universities, the Bronx became-during the 1960s and 1970s-a national symbol of urban deterioration. Thriving neighborhoods that had long been home to generations of families dissolved under waves of arson, crime, and housing abandonment, turning blocks of apartment buildings into gutted, graffiti-covered shells and empty, trash-filled lots. In this revealing history of the Bronx, Evelyn Gonzalez describes how the once-infamous New York City borough underwent one of the most successful and inspiring community revivals in American history.From its earliest beginnings as a loose cluster of commuter villages to its current status as a densely populated home for New York's growing and increasingly more diverse African American and Hispanic populations, this book shows how the Bronx interacted with and was affected by the rest of New York City as it grew from a small colony on the tip of Manhattan into a sprawling metropolis. This is the story of the clattering of elevated subways and the cacophony of crowded neighborhoods, the heady optimism of industrial progress and the despair of economic recession, and the vibrancy of ethnic cultures and the resilience of local grassroots coalitions crucial to the borough's rejuvenation. In recounting the varied and extreme transformations this remarkable community has undergone, Evelyn Gonzalez argues that it was not racial discrimination, rampant crime, postwar liberalism, or big government that was to blame for the urban crisis that assailed the Bronx during the late 1960s. Rather, the decline was inextricably connected to the same kinds of social initiatives, economic transactions, political decisions, and simple human choices that had once been central to the development and vitality of the borough. Although the history of the Bronx is unquestionably a success story, crime, poverty, and substandard housing still afflict the community today. Yet the process of building and rebuilding carries on, and the revitalization of neighborhoods and a resurgence of economic growth continue to offer hope for the future.

Rockaway Beach was once a popular seaside resort in southern Queens with a small permanent population. Shortly after World War II, large parts of this area became one of New York City's worst slums. This is an account of this transformation, exploring issues of race, class and social policy.

Traces the shifting tides of New York's ethnic past, from its beginnings as a Dutch trading outpost onwards. This work explores the processes of cultural adaptation to life in New York, giving an account of immigrants new and old, and of the streets and neighborhoods they claimed and transformed.

Morningside Heights, the institutional heart of New York City, is also one of the city's architecturally distinguished neighborhoods. This book explores the architecturally varied complexes built by these organizations. It is suitable for those interested in architecture, urban development, or the history of New York City.

An analysis of immigrant life in the USA which focuses on the habits of consumption. The author describes how Jews responded to the prospect of mass consumption, familiarizing themselves with such activities as installment buying, advertising and vacationing.

In telling the story of how New York has grown from Dutch colonial outpost to the global city, 'the capital of the 21st century', Francois Weil also examines the social tensions that have arisen from this evolving role and how the New York experience has affected American notions of urban space.