Immediately after World War II, New York City became known as one of the world's greatest cities. However, after peaking in population in 1950, the city began to feel the effects of white flight to the suburbs, a downturn in industry and commerce as businesses left for places where it was cheaper and easier to operate, an increase in crime, and an upturn in its welfare burden, all of which reached a nadir in the city's fiscal crisis of the 1970s, when it barely avoided defaulting on its obligations and declaring bankruptcy.
Postwar: Late 1940s through 1950s
As many great cities lay in ruins after World War II, New York City assumed a new global prominence. It became the home of the United Nations headquarters, built 1947â€"1952; inherited the role of Paris as center of the art world with Abstract Expressionism; and became a rival to London as an international art market. Yet the population declined after 1950, with increasing suburbanization in the New York metropolitan area as pioneered in Levittown, New York.
November 15, 1948, saw a turning point in the city's economy: the Interstate Commerce Commission began allowing barges to charge fees for transporting goods from rail terminals in New Jersey to piers in Manhattan. This led to the decline of the port, the piers, and places such as Washington Market in Lower Manhattan.
Meanwhile, Midtown Manhattan, fueled by postwar prosperity, was experiencing an unprecedented building boom that changed its very appearance. Glass-and-steel office towers in the new International Style began to replace the ziggurat-style towers (built in wedding-cake style) of the prewar era. Also rapidly changing was the eastern edge of the East Village close to FDR Drive. Many traditional apartment blocks were cleared and replaced with large-scale public housing projects. In Lower Manhattan, urban renewal began to take shape around 1960, led by David Rockefeller's construction of the One Chase Manhattan Plaza building.
In a built-out city, construction entails destruction. After the old Beaux Arts Pennsylvania Station was torn down, growing concern for preservation led to the 1965 Landmarks Preservation Commission Law. The city's other great train station, Grand Central, was also threatened with demolition but was eventually saved. Meanwhile, New York City's network of highways spread under the guidance of Robert Moses, with consequent increased traffic congestion, but the defeat in 1962 of Moses' planned Lower Manhattan Expressway by community activists led by Jane Jacobs was an indication that Moses would no longer have the free hand he had enjoyed in the past.
1960s
During the '60s, a gradual economic and social decay set in. A symptom of the city's waning competitiveness was the loss of both its longtime resident National League baseball teams to booming California; the Dodgers and the Giants both moved after the 1957 season. A sports void was partially filled with the formation of the Mets in 1962, who played their first two seasons at the Polo Grounds, the former home of the Giants, before moving to Shea Stadium in Queens in 1964.
The passage of the federal Immigration Act of 1965, which abolished national-origin quotas, set the stage for increased immigration from Asia, which became the basis for New York's modern Asian American community.
On November 9, 1965, New York endured a widespread power blackout along with much of eastern North America. (The city's ordeal became the subject of the 1968 film, Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?) The postwar population shift to the suburbs resulted in the decline of textile manufacturing and other traditional industries in New York, most of which also operated in extremely outdated facilities. With the arrival of container shipping, that industry shifted to New Jersey where there was more room for it. Blue-collar neighborhoods began to deteriorate and become centers of drugs and crime. Strip clubs and other adult businesses started filling Times Square in the late '60s.
In 1966, the US Navy decommissioned the Brooklyn Navy Yard, ending a command going back to the early 19th century. It was sold to the city. The Yard continued as a site for shipbuilding for another eleven years.
Mayor Lindsay
John Lindsay, a liberal Republican, was a highly visible and charismatic mayor from 1965 to 1973. The city was a national center of protest movements regarding civil rights for black citizens, opposition to the Vietnam War, and the newly emerging feminist and gay movements. There were jolting economic shocks as the postwar prosperity came to an end with many factories and entire industries shutting down. There was a population transition with hundreds of thousands of blacks and Puerto Ricans moving in, and an exodus of whites to the suburbs. Labor unions, especially in teaching, transit, sanitation and construction, fractured over major strikes and internal racial tensions.
Strikes and riots
The Transport Workers Union of America (TWU) led by Mike Quill shut down the city with a complete halt of subway and bus service on mayor John Lindsay's first day of office. As New Yorkers endured the transit strike, Lindsay remarked, "I still think it's a fun city," and walked four miles (6Â km) from his hotel room to City Hall in a gesture to show it. Dick Schaap, then a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, coined and popularized the sarcastic term in an article titled Fun City. In the article, Schaap sardonically pointed out that it was not.
The transit strike was the first of many labor struggles. In 1968 the teachers' union (the United Federation of Teachers, or the UFT) went on strike over the firings of several teachers in a school in Ocean Hill and Brownsville.
That same year, 1968, also saw a nine-day sanitation strike. Quality of life in New York reached a nadir during this strike, as mounds of garbage caught fire, and strong winds whirled the filth through the streets. With the schools shut down, the police engaged in a slowdown, firefighters threatening job actions, the city awash in garbage, and racial and religious tensions breaking to the surface, Lindsay later called the last six months of 1968 "the worst of my public life."
The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. They are frequently cited as the first instance in American history when people in the homosexual community fought back against a government-sponsored system that persecuted sexual minorities, and they have become the defining event that marked the start of the gay rights movement in the United States and around the world.
1970s
By 1970, the city gained notoriety for high rates of crime and other social disorders. A popular song by Cashman & West in the autumn of 1972, "American City Suite", chronicled, in allegorical fashion, the decline in the city's quality of life. The city's subway system was regarded as unsafe due to crime and suffered frequent mechanical breakdowns. Prostitutes and pimps frequented Times Square, while Central Park became feared as the site of muggings and rapes. Homeless persons and drug dealers occupied boarded-up and abandoned buildings. The New York City Police Department was subject to investigation for widespread corruption, most famously in the 1971 testimony of whistle-blowing police officer Frank Serpico.
Fiscal crisis
US economic stagnation in the 1970s hit New York City particularly hard, amplified by a large movement of middle-class residents to the suburbs, which drained the city of tax revenue. The city neared bankruptcy under mayor Abraham Beame but avoided that step with the aid of a $2.3 billion federal loan. A statement by mayor Beame was drafted and ready to be released on October 17, 1975, if the teachers' union did not invest $150 million from its pension funds in city securities. "I have been advised by the comptroller that the City of New York has insufficient cash on hand to meet debt obligations due today," the statement said. "This constitutes the default that we have struggled to avoid." The Beame statement was never distributed because Albert Shanker, the teachers' union president, finally furnished $150 million from the union's pension fund to buy Municipal Assistance Corporation bonds. Two weeks later, President Gerald R. Ford angered New Yorkers by refusing to grant the city a bailout. Ford later signed the New York City Seasonal Financing Act of 1975 which extended $1.3 billion worth of federal loans to the city for three years; the loans were repaid with interest.
The first solution proposed was the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which tried to pool the city's money and refinance its heavy debts. It failed to achieve results and the state came up with a much more drastic solution: the Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB). It was a state agency, and city officials had only two votes on the seven-member board. The EFCB took full control of the city's budget. It made drastic cuts in municipal services and spending, cut city employment, froze salaries and raised bus and subway fares. The level of welfare spending was cut. Some hospitals were closed as were some branch libraries and fire stations. The labor unions helped out, by allocating much of their pension funds to the purchase of city bondsâ€"putting the pensions at risk if bankruptcy took place. The city's banks and the state of New York did not have enough credit to handle the entire crisis; Federal loans and loan guarantees were needed, which Congress provided in the "New York City Seasonal Financing Act" of December 1975.
The opening of the mammoth World Trade Center complex in 1972, however, was one of the few high points of the city's history at that time. Conceived by David Rockefeller and built by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on the site of the Radio Row electronics district in Lower Manhattan, the Twin Towers displaced the Empire State Building in Midtown as the world's tallest building; it was displaced in turn by Chicago's Sears Tower in 1973.
A fiscal conservative, Democrat Ed Koch, was elected as mayor in 1977.
Blackout
The New York City blackout of 1977 struck on July 13 of that year and lasted for 25 hours, during which black and Hispanic neighborhoods fell prey to destruction and looting. Over 3,000 people were arrested, and the city's already crowded prisons were so overburdened that some suggested reopening the recently condemned Manhattan Detention Complex.
The financial crisis, high crime rates, and damage from the blackouts led to a widespread belief that New York City was in irreversible decline. By the end of the 1970s, nearly a million people had left, a population loss that would not be recouped for another twenty years. To Jonathan Mahler, the chronicler of The Bronx is Burning, "The clinical term for it, fiscal crisis, didn't approach the raw reality. Spiritual crisis was more like it."
See also
- American urban history
- Timeline of New York City, 1950sâ€"1970s
- New York City mayoral election, 1953
- New York City mayoral election, 1957
- New York City mayoral election, 1961
- New York City mayoral election, 1965
- New York City mayoral election, 1969
- New York City mayoral election, 1973
- New York City mayoral election, 1977
References
Bibliography
External links
- "What Does It Take To Get A Decent Apartment In The Big Apartment Squeeze?", New York Magazine, September 30, 1968 issue.
