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    The Assassination of New York
    The Assassination of New York
    The Assassination of New York
    Ebook496 pages7 hours

    The Assassination of New York

    By Mark Crispin Miller, Robert Fitch and Peter Kwong

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    The story of how the richest city in the world became one of the poorest in North America, with a new introduction by Peter Kwong

    How did New York City come to be a network of steel towers, banks, and nail salons, with chain drugstores on every block—a place where, increasingly, no one can afford to live except the lords of Wall Street and foreign billionaires, and where more and more of the Big Apple’s best-loved businesses have closed their doors? It didn’t start with Michael Bloomberg—or with Robert Moses. As Robert Fitch meticulously demonstrates in this eye-opening book, the planning to assassinate New York began a century ago, as the city’s very richest few—the Morgans, the Mellons, and especially the Rockefellers—looked for ways to maximize the value of their real estate by pushing Gotham’s vibrant and astonishingly varied manufacturing sector out of town, and with it, the city’s working class.

    The Assassination of New York attacks a Goliath-like enemy: the real-estate developers who maintain a stranglehold on the city’s most valuable commodity. Their efforts to increase land value by replacing low-rent workers and factories with high-rent professionals and office buildings was one of the single most decisive factors in the city’s downturn. In the 1980s the number of real-estate vacancies eclipsed that of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. In September of 1992 there was a staggering twenty-five million square feet of empty office space.

    Are the city’s problems fixable? How will the future of New York play out through the twenty-first century? Fitch comes up with solutions, from saving jobs to promoting economic diversity to rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure. But it will take vision and hard work to restore New York to what it once was while creating a new and better home for coming generations.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateSep 16, 2014
    ISBN9781453234037
    The Assassination of New York
    Author

    Robert Fitch

    Robert Fitch was on the faculty of LaGuardia Community College of the City University of New York. He was a labor organizer, journalist, independent scholar, and author of the highly regarded classics of radical history Who Rules the Corporation?; Ghana: End of an Illusion, with Mary Oppenheimer; Solidarity for Sale, on the topic of union corruption; and The Assassination of New York. Fitch was a contributor to the Village Voice, the Nation, Newsday, and Tikkun. Fitch died at the age of seventy-two.

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      The Assassination of New York - Mark Crispin Miller

      Series Introduction

      I

      We the people seem to have the freest book trade in the world. Certainly we have the biggest. Cruise the mighty Amazon, and you will see so many books for sale in the United States today as would require more than four hundred miles of shelving to display them—a bookshelf that would stretch from Boston’s Old North Church to Fort McHenry in South Baltimore.

      Surely that huge catalog is proof of our extraordinary freedom of expression: The US government does not ban books, because the First Amendment won’t allow it. While books are widely banned in states like China and Iran, no book may be forbidden by the US government at any level (although the CIA censors books by former officers). Where books are banned in the United States, the censors tend to be private organizations—church groups, school boards, and other local (busy)bodies roused to purify the public schools or libraries nearby.

      Despite such local prohibitions, we can surely find any book we want. After all, it’s easy to locate those hot works that once were banned by the government as too obscene to sell, or mail, until the courts ruled otherwise on First Amendment grounds—Fanny Hill, Howl, Naked Lunch. We also have no trouble finding books banned here and there as antifamily, Satanic, racist, and/or filthy, from Huckleberry Finn to Heather Has Two Mommies to the Harry Potter series, just to name a few.

      II

      And yet, the fact that those bold books are all in print, and widely read, does not mean that we have the freest book trade in the world. On the contrary: For over half a century, America’s vast literary culture has been disparately policed, and imperceptibly contained, by state and corporate entities well placed and perfectly equipped to wipe out wayward writings. Their ad hoc suppressions through the years have been far more effectual than those quixotic bans imposed on classics like The Catcher in the Rye and Fahrenheit 451. For every one of those bestsellers scandalously purged from some provincial school curriculum, there are many others (we can’t know how many) that have been so thoroughly erased that few of us, if any, can remember them, or have ever heard of them.

      How have all those books (to quote George Orwell) dropped into the memory hole in these United States? As America does not ban books, other means—less evident, and so less controversial—have been deployed to vaporize them. Some almost never made it into print, as publishers were privately warned off them from on high, either on the grounds of national security or with blunt threats of endless corporate litigation. Other books were signed enthusiastically—then dumped, as their own publishers mysteriously failed to market them, or even properly distribute them. But it has mainly been the press that stamps out inconvenient books, either by ignoring them, or—most often—laughing them off as conspiracy theory, despite their soundness (or because of it).

      Once out of print, those books are gone. Even if some few of us have not forgotten them, and one might find used copies here and there, these books have disappeared. Missing from the shelves and never mentioned in the press (and seldom mentioned even in our schools), each book thus neutralized might just as well have been destroyed en masse—or never written in the first place, for all their contribution to the public good.

      III

      The purpose of this series is to bring such vanished books to life—first life for those that never saw the light of day, or barely did, and second life for those that got some notice, or even made a splash, then slipped too quickly out of print, and out of mind.

      These books, by and large, were made to disappear, or were hastily forgotten, not because they were too lewd, heretical, or unpatriotic for some touchy group of citizens. These books sank without a trace, or faded fast, because they tell the sort of truths that Madison and Jefferson believed our Constitution should protect—truths that the people have the right to know, and needs to know, about our government and other powers that keep us in the dark.

      Thus the works on our Forbidden Bookshelf shed new light—for most of us, it’s still new light—on the most troubling trends and episodes in US history, especially since World War II: America’s broad use of former Nazis and ex-Fascists in the Cold War; the Kennedy assassinations, and the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Orlando Letelier, George Polk, and Paul Wellstone; Ronald Reagan’s Mafia connections, Richard Nixon’s close relationship with Jimmy Hoffa, and the mob’s grip on the NFL; America’s terroristic Phoenix Program in Vietnam, US support for South America’s most brutal tyrannies, and CIA involvement in the Middle East; the secret histories of DuPont, ITT, and other giant US corporations; and the long war waged by Wall Street and its allies in real estate on New York City’s poor and middle class.

      The many vanished books on these forbidden subjects (among others) altogether constitute a shadow history of America—a history that We the People need to know at last, our country having now become a land with billionaires in charge, and millions not allowed to vote, and everybody under full surveillance. Through this series, we intend to pull that necessary history from the shadows at long last—to shed some light on how America got here, and how we might now take it somewhere else.

      Mark Crispin Miller

      Introduction

      I am very glad that Open Road Media has decided to reissue Bob Fitch’s The Assassination of New York as an ebook. Bob would be so excited, for this was his labor of love, on which he spent seventeen years doing on-and-off research, thinking and writing it. He and I first met during our days as investigative reporters for the Village Voice. We became close friends during the final few years of the writing of this book, because I too was laboring away on a book, Forbidden Workers: Chinese Illegal Immigrants and American Labor, and we often talked on the phone and met at coffee shops to commiserate and use each other as sounding boards for our latest ideas. Bob’s problem at the time was to control his already one-hundred-fifty-thousand-word oversize manuscript, to refrain from doing more research and refine his narrative, making it shorter and more succinct.

      At the same time, we shared our worries about the publishing industry, because it was under attack from big retail chains like Barnes & Noble that were interested only in bestselling titles and would return unsold copies to the publishers in short order. As a result, our own publishers had to cut back on the numbers of titles they commissioned and on the budget for editorial and promotional help to the authors. This explains the rawness in parts of Bob’s book that sorely needed editing. Nevertheless, Bob was confident that his analysis of the decline of New York City was compelling enough as is, and that it was a story that needed to be told. He was right! The Assassination of New York did attract a large following and ignited heated debates from many quarters.

      By reissuing it at present time, Open Road Media will enable a whole new, younger generation of readers to appreciate this timeless masterpiece whose analysis of New York City is as relevant today as it was when it first came off the press. No book has succeeded in presenting a more comprehensive understanding of the process of transformation of New York City from a dynamic, diverse mixed-use manufacturing economy into a hollowed-out city, dependent on the narrow finance, insurance, and real-estate industries, collectively known as FIRE.

      Bob argued that the city’s de-industrialization process was not a natural order of things as it was in one-industry towns like Detroit, where the auto industry declined and outsourced. De-industrialization of New York City was a result of an explicit strategy to rid it of its low-rent workers’ residents and factories and replace them with high-rent professionals and office buildings. The rationale behind the strategy was that this would be a more intense and profitable use of land, creating better jobs and more prosperity for New York City than manufacturing did.

      The clear beneficiaries were real-estate interests and their partners, the banking and financial institutions that gained from extending loans to enable construction and expansion. Their rallying call was the building of a postindustrial economy, which made factories and low-wage workers superfluous. They used all the instruments of state power to get their way and were indifferent to those who were being displaced. They deliberately shrank manufacturing by ridding the city of its deep-water port, eliminating its freight-rail system, and changing zoning laws to drastically limit areas that allowed for manufacturing. Yet this transformation was heavily subsidized. The developers got tax incentives for new construction, public money to build infrastructure benefiting office buildings, and eminent domain to wipe out slums and replace them with high-rises and office buildings. All the costs were borne by taxpayers.

      New York had, since the nineteenth century, been a city with a stable economy anchored by the mixed use of commercial, industrial, residential, and shipping areas. But FIRE promised a different future. So what happened to its promise?

      Once FIRE squeezed out the manufacturing industries, workers lost their jobs, creating high rates of unemployment. Many were forced to migrate out, seriously shrinking the local tax base, which was suddenly unable to fund normal city functions. At the same time, the least mobile, most dependent residents were left behind, causing dramatic increases in social and welfare costs.

      The first serious consequences of this planned shrinkage occurred in the mid-1970s. New York City, its tax roll reduced due to subsidies to the rich and the loss of a taxable population base, took out short-term, high-interest-rate loans to meet operation expenses and pay off long-term debts. But the building boom never brought about economic expansion. Eventually, the city went into default, as it was not able to meet its debt obligations. Instead of slowing down this failed policy, the government cut deeper into social and municipal services, turning the city into a hellhole for the average citizen. During the time of Bob’s writing, New York City declined from the richest city in the world to one where the number of people living in poverty soared to 25.2 percent, with an official unemployment rate of 13.4 percent, one of the highest in the United States.

      After all the talk about office building leading to prosperity, there was never enough demand for the sixty-five million square feet of new office space. In fact, years after the twin World Trade Towers were built, the city and state had to move their own offices there to fill in the vacancies. Even today the postindustrial economy is simply not creating enough jobs to replace the loss from manufacturing. As if this were not bad enough, FIRE is based on speculation and is constantly experiencing boom or bust, offering the city no long-term economic stability.

      Bob’s analysis continues to be relevant in the years after his book was published. In 2007 the very financial institutions that made New York the financial capital of the world imploded, dragging the rest of the world into depression. Even with the injection of $700 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds, and years of the Federal Reserve pumping liquidity into the banking system under the name of quantitative easing, the city’s growth continues to be anemic, job losses persist, and polarization of wealth has reached an extreme comparable to that of the Gilded Age.

      Meanwhile, the march to build more high-rise office buildings has continued, particularly during the twelve years under the Bloomberg administration. With rezoning, tax rebates, and inclusionary zoning, practically the whole of Manhattan has been gentrified. This process has spread to parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and most waterfront areas, wiping out more manufacturing and working-poor residential neighborhoods.

      Nonprofit organizations and elite universities, whose business schools continue to espouse the virtue of de-industrialization, are getting into the act of real-estate development as never before. NYU and Columbia University spread their tentacles into middle- and working-class neighborhoods in various parts of Greenwich Village and the East Village, and Washington Heights and Harlem, cashing in on the real-estate bubble with the help of low-interest loans and nonprofit right of way. Meanwhile, three hundred thousand city employees, including police, transit workers, and firefighters have worked without contracts until the De Blasio administration—in the case of the teachers, for as long as nine years. City University has raised tuition repeatedly, public libraries are facing steep cuts, and affordable housing has disappeared. New York City, which claims to be the nerve center of global capitalism, has no money for infrastructure repairs. Is it at all surprising that Vice President Joe Biden blasted LaGuardia Airport as being like it’s in some third-world country?

      For Bob to arrive at his enduring and comprehensive analysis of the demise of New York City was not easy. Most academics would start out with the subject matter, go on to research the interested parties involved, and come up with a conclusion on who got what and who did what to whom in the process. Bob did not think this conventional approach was adequate. The way Bob saw it, the de-industrialization of New York, from its inception to its realization, took decades, because in a democratic system, the economic elite could not impose its will bluntly. So Bob was interested in understanding how the elite, in this case FIRE, tried to popularize its project in the civilian arena by first turning to the universities, the think tanks, public intellectuals, and policy wonks, then winning over politicians, in part through campaign donations. But the politicians and the economic elite did not want to shrink the city through edicts; rather, they passed on that responsibility to nonpolitical and neutral entities like city commissions to implement the plan with minimum public input. This was necessary in order to conceal their role in the project, so as not to be blamed when it failed. That’s why when New York City defaulted in the mid-1970s, few understood what had actually caused it; most people accepted the popularized notion that the city was overburdened by overpaid city workers and lazy welfare recipients.

      To avoid this kind of misperception, Bob mapped out a large canvas to tell the story, starting with the analysis of the obscure, rarely-referred-to 1929 Regional Plan of New York, in which the idea of de-industrialization was first raised. From there he navigated through relevant policy papers, city plans, and legislative bills over the years. He explained complex urban planners’ data and statistical charts by cutting through technical phraseology, which was meant to deter laypersons from understanding. Then he connected these ideas and actions with names and players, attributing specific quotes and deeds through the use of recorded speeches and actual interviews.

      He was relentless in pursuing answers from whatever sources, wherever the research led him. This called for extensive knowledge and the ability to crisscross fields of urban planning, history, political economy, and public policy. Few scholars have such multidisciplinary sophistication; even fewer could muster that large amount of research material to good effect. That’s why this book is persuasive. That’s why reissuing it honors Bob as a unique scholar.

      But Bob was also an excellent storyteller and in this book he provided readers with rich details about New York City. Reading it is like traveling with him on a journey of discovery of almost every part of the city. His book is a godsend to progressive policy makers, urban planners, and those interested in the city, particularly indispensible to those fighting against gentrification in their communities today.

      To Bob, digging up facts was pure joy. We would sit down to talk, usually after I picked him up in front of NYU’s Bobst Library, where he spent much of his time, before going to a coffee shop. The moment we sat down, he would ask: Guess what I found today? and proceed to say that he had just discovered in the stacks a document that had long eluded him, and which was exactly the evidence he needed to prove his point. Is that amazing or not? he would shout, like a kid who had just discovered a hidden stash of candy bars.

      While Bob’s scholarship is impressive on its own, so is his ability to narrate a complex subject in a lucid, engaging, and witty manner. Some people refer to him as a journalist, yet how many journalists have the inclination to tackle such a massive project and the luxury of spending seventeen years to complete it? Others classify him as a muckraker, which usually identifies a reformer aiming to expose social ills and political corruption. But Bob’s writing goes well beyond targeting a few hateful culprits. He was tackling one of the most important controversies in social transformation of our time. Many recognize him as a writer in the George Orwell mode. Like Orwell, he strived for clarity, so as to make the work accessible to his readers. Like Orwell’s, his writing was political, setting out, as Orwell put it, from a feeling of partisanship, [and] a sense of injustice.

      I think of Bob as the conscience of our time. To reissue his book is to honor him as a public intellectual, because even before being a scholar and a writer, he was an activist. Bob was in Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, he was one of the founders of the Revolutionary Union, and he later became an editor of the once-popular, leftist Ramparts magazine. When he arrived in New York, he became involved in union organizing and kept at it to the end. His writing was inspired by activism and it was meant to provoke and to mobilize people into taking action.

      Bob believed that common working and productive human beings should be given their fair share. They should not be exploited or lied to. His loyalty to the workers seemed so old-fashioned. I love the labor movement both for its history and its promise, he used to say, and stress that only a powerful, inclusive labor movement has the potential to realize our democratic values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. As I have been a labor activist and critic of America’s organized labor myself, he would often urge me to join him to build a new workers’ movement.

      Bob stood on the principle of social justice and was never afraid of speaking up or offending. However, he paid for his honesty. The establishment shunned him, but academia ostracized him as well. It found him too extreme and lacking in the objectivity required of a scholar. Unable to secure a regular teaching position, he had to work as an adjunct professor, teaching as many courses as regular professors do and more, at sweatshop wages, in order to make ends meet and to hold on to his health-insurance benefits. His material situation was meager and for years he lived in a tiny walkup studio apartment, crammed with books. Yet he rarely complained, only revealing his worry to me a couple of times that one of his department chairs might be under outside pressure to fire him because of his outspokenness.

      During our friendship, he did not care for small talk. Only, we did share a love for classical music and would exchange information on the latest recordings that we had found. Otherwise, we always tackled big problems: the world economy, the labor movement, socialism, and American politics. Bob is someone who lived for ideas, constantly questioning assumptions and challenging what he considered to be stale beliefs. Our discussions often turned heated, but I learned that to be his friend I had to be willing to be challenged, and to survive our friendship I needed to stand my ground. The experience of spending time with him could be draining, but invariably I was rewarded with new insights.

      I hope that with the reissuing of this book new readers will be challenged and rewarded the same way I was, knowing Bob.

      Peter Kwong

      PREFACE

      THE PERSONAL ORIGINS OF this book reach back to the days of New York City’s mid-seventies fiscal crisis. Living on a dairy farm just outside Ithaca New York, where I was teaching in Cornell University’s Human Affairs Program, I got a call from a former Ramparts magazine colleague in Berkeley. Could you find out what’s wrong with New York in about 3,000 words and have it ready in a month? asked Adam Hochschild, the Editor of Mother Jones?

      Somewhat reluctantly, I accepted the assignment. A month to figure out New York? This was a city as famous for its complexity as for its size. Besides, I was a Chicagoan, an outsider, and knew far less about Abe Beame’s New York than about Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana—the subject of my first book. Dutifully, though, I began carrying out interviews in New York.

      One of the first took place over the ’phone, with a public relations official from the Municipal Assistance Corporation, the state-backed corporation, that had been formed to help restore New York City’s finances. Can you explain what the MAC thinks are some of the underlying reasons for New York’s fiscal problems, I asked.

      It’s the fucking blacks and Puerto Ricans, the spokesman shot back. They use too many city services and they don’t pay any taxes. New York’s in trouble because it’s got too many fucking blacks and Puerto Ricans.

      Was my interlocutor drunk? Had the ’phone lines gotten crossed with the George Wallace for President Campaign Office? As I continued interviewing other establishment sources, though, I discovered that their analyses, while adding qualifications and explanatory dimensions, and avoiding bad participles, didn’t differ all that much. George Roniger, former Chase Manhattan Bank economist, working for the Economic Development Council, for example, told me that city had an oversupply of blacks and Puerto Ricans too. They suffered from a then newly identified malady: jobs-skills mismatch. The city was undergoing an inexorable shift to white collar industries and the blacks and Puerto Ricans had only blue-collar skills. There was no basis to maintain the city at the old industrial population levels. Blacks and Puerto Ricans would be better off, Roniger explained, in the suburbs or in the sunbelt where the jobs are.

      These were the rough intellectual foundations of the city’s famous planned shrinkage policies of the mid-seventies. The strategy, articulated by the city’s Housing and Development Administration chief, Roger Starr, aimed to cut back transit, sanitation, police and fire protection in poor neighborhoods to the levels which the tax base could support. We should not encourage people to stay where their job possibilities are daily becoming more remote, observed Starr. Stop the Puerto Ricans and the rural blacks from living in the city … reverse the role of the city … it can no longer be the place of opportunity. … Our urban system is based on the theory of taking the peasant and turning him into an industrial worker. Now there are no industrial jobs. Why not keep him a peasant?¹

      The remarks caused a furor. Starr, the former Executive Director of the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Council, the main real estate developers’ planning and lobbying group in the city, had to resign. (And was immediately hired to write urban editorials for the New York Times.) But city-wide awareness of the dimensions of planned shrinkage really only dawned on a late summer evening in 1976 when Howard Cosell, broadcasting a Yankee game on national TV, scanned the skyline, and noticed that vast areas of the south Bronx were aflame. No one, it seemed, was too concerned with putting out the fires.

      The whole debate about who caused the fiscal crisis dissolved ultimately into a cynical exercise in blame-shifting. Starr, and the city’s developers knew full well what caused it.² The size of New York’s welfare population, the share of minorities in its population, the wages and pensions paid to its municipal workers were nothing special in urban America—and yet among American cities, only New York was broke.

      What was sui generis and ultimately fatal to the city’s solvency was the harebrained strategy devised by Nelson Rockefeller at the state level and (Mayor John) Lindsay at the city level, to borrow billions in the short-term money market to enable local housing companies to get long-term mortgages. The greatest office building boom in the city’s history—30 million square feet were built in 1969—equal to seven of the original Rockefeller Centers—had raised land prices prohibitively and dried up mortgage money even for luxury housing.

      A powerful coalition formed. Residential developers who were screaming for billions in subsidies so they could keep on developing. Investment bankers who made good commissions selling bad debt. And the tax shelter industry that syndicated the equity in these money-losing projects.

      New York City had 3 percent of the U.S. population. Still, it was able to borrow nearly half of all the money borrowed for short-term purposes by all the cities in the country. But New York borrowed not just to pay expenses, until revenues arrived, but to make mortgages. No other city borrowed even a dollar for this purpose. New York borrowed more than $3 billion.

      Starr’s solution, which he proposed at an Albany hearing, was to create what he called a fairy godmother to buy up all the bad paper. But New York really needed two fairy godmothers. One for the city and one for the state. The state and the city were in a kind of competition to see who could manufacture more mortgages to please their number one political constituency—the city’s finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) industry. The state just beat the city over the defaulters’ line.

      The competition, however, was unfair, because Nelson’s vehicle for insolvency was so much more high-powered. In 1968, he had invented a community crushing juggernaut called the Urban Development Corporation which had more functions than a Swiss Army knife. UDC borrowed vast sums, cleared out wide swaths of the city with eminent domain, overrode zoning laws, built thousands of units of upper-middle-class housing—Roosevelt Island was UDC’s biggest project—and then simply collapsed.

      I attended the Moreland Commission hearings into UDC’s demise at the ornate New York Bar Association on W.44th Street, just across the street from the Yacht Club. Evidently, the prime culprit was Nelson Rockefeller. But none of the members of the blue ribbon commission chaired by Orville Schell, the head of the New York Bar, seemed terribly anxious to discommode him. Rockefeller finished his testimony in a few hours.

      Soon the press targeted UDC chief Ed Logue. But Logue was just a hired hand. Nelson had brought him in from Boston where he’d gained notoriety and experience pulverizing neighborhoods in the local urban renewal program. Along with aide Alton Marshall, who became head of Rockefeller Center, Inc., MTA chief William Fido Ronan, later head of the Port Authority, Logue was one of the state officials who received a regular stipend to be Nelson’s friend. He wound up taking the blame. He’d been a bad manager, it was said. (In 1979, Logue was brought back by Mayor Ed Koch to run south Bronx redevelopment.)

      Logue could have had the managerial skills of W. Edwards Deming and not avoided financial collapse at UDC. They teach you in first year finance not to borrow short and lend long. Any sensible person could have foreseen New York would collapse. Even Abe Beame, when he served as City Comptroller, warned of imminent disaster. Here, in fact, carefully coordinated across state and city lines, was one of the lamest urban development strategies ever concocted. Yet the elites who promoted the debt-propelled housing program were never targeted as fiscal crisis villains. That role was reserved for welfare moms, municipal workers, and incoming freshmen at CUNY.

      If revolutions are festivals for the poor, New York’s ever-recurrent fiscal crises are tailgate parties for the rich. Municipal workers’ wages and pensions never recovered. Welfare allowances fell by one-third. The city imposed tuition on poor students at CUNY. It got rid of the stock exchange tax, halved the personal income tax, and set the real estate tax at a record low.

      The New York fiscal crisis stood as a world-class example of political unaccountability. The elites had made a terrible mess. But far from having to suffer any political consequences, they actually seemed to gain in prestige as the new ethic of austerity and faux laissez-faire took hold. The whole performance was highly reminiscent of the irresponsible, semi-authoritarian, one party regimes I’d studied as a graduate student in economic development at Berkeley.

      Meanwhile, in a corner of the Uris Library, back in Ithaca, I stumbled on the Regional Plan of New York and its Environs—the 1929 Plan. Cornell just happened to have one of the few complete sets of the regional plan volumes in the U.S. It revealed an astonishing correspondence between its highway, parks and port plans and the shape and location of the networks we have today.

      There, snaking across Tremont, ran the infamous Cross Bronx Expressway. You could see the outlines of the Flushing Meadow Park, jutting down like an iron gate, protecting the estates of the Long Island barons from the advance of small working-class homes. Winding around the whole city was the great system of circumferential highways that the Regional Plan Association (RPA) had conceived to encircle the region. And sure enough, too, the Port of New York had been removed from downtown Manhattan and transferred to Elizabeth, New Jersey—just as recommended in the plan.

      What made the similarities of more than geographical interest, was that the plans expressed a strong, single-minded desire to get rid of the city’s blue collar industry and replace it with offices, apartment houses for the rich, and department stores. The RPA’s chief economist observed:

      Some of the poorest people live in conveniently located slums on high-priced land. On patrician Fifth Avenue, Tiffany and Woolworth, cheek by jowl, offer jewels and gimcracks from substantially identical sites. Childs Restaurants [the McDonalds of its day?] thrive where Delmonico’s withered and died. A stone’s throw from the stock exchange the air is filled with the aroma of roasting coffee; a few hundred feet from Times Square, with the stench of slaughter houses. In the very heart of the ‘commercial’ city on Manhattan Island south of 59th Street, the inspectors in 1922 found nearly 420,000 workers, employed in factories. Such a situation outrages one’s sense of order. Everything seems misplaced. One yearns to re-arrange the hodgepodge and to put things where they belong.³

      The RPA’s directors not only had a yearning to put things where they belonged. As the region’s philanthropic, social, financial and propertied elite—they had the power. The directors of the first Regional Plan included representatives from the House of Morgan, the Long Island barons, the outer borough real estate developers like the Pratts, the William Sloane Coffins, the Cord Meyers, representatives from the Rockefeller Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, the First National City Bank. Franklin Roosevelt’s uncle served as the Plan’s chairman.

      And the great railroad interests—the New York Central and the Pennsylvania—were represented too. The railroads owned the land on both sides of the Hudson whose conversion from rail yards and docks to office buildings and luxury residential towers would later prove so lucrative and strike so deeply into the heart of the city’s blue collar economy.

      Now the de-industrialization of New York—its conversion to FIRE industries and office buildings—has been presented as a strictly objective process. The unfolding of history’s stern, impersonal and inexorable logic. It was accelerated, we are told, by the movement of industrial plants to the suburbs in search of more space on a single floor. As well as growing competition from cheap labor abroad.

      Of course market forces exist. Decentralization and global competition are not myths. But the sudden destruction of New York’s promising industrial culture of diversity starting in the mid-fifties after more than half a century of stability can’t be explained as an objective, impersonal process. Those who took charge of planning the city—who decided where the subways and highways would run; who zoned its neighborhoods; who granted tax abatements and incentives to its real estate—they weren’t indifferent as to whether office buildings displaced factories. They owned the land.

      How could they be indifferent? There is a nearly 1000 percent spread between the rent received for factory space and the rent landlords get for class A office space. Simply by changing the land use, one’s capital could increase in value many times. Presently, a long-term U.S. bond yields something on the order of 6 percent. An increase, say to 10 percent, could probably draw capital from the outer planets. Imagine the incentive for increasing income by a factor of ten.

      So if there is an inevitable path to de-industrialization, we have to note that the path of change follows a narrow and predictable route. Just look at the industrial land uses closest to the city’s office districts—the west and south midtown areas and the areas around the two rivers downtown. They come under first and greatest pressure. As industry, docks, factories disappear, the path of conversion extends to more outlying areas—from the garment district to industrial Long Island City just across the east river where Citibank and Lazard Realty hold land. From the Water Street area east of the Chase, redeveloped in the fifties and sixties, to downtown Brooklyn just across the river redeveloped in the eighties with back office complexes like Metrotech.

      Whatever the vagaries of the market, there is a strict real estate logic with spatial and temporal coordinates that has driven de-industrialization in New York. To generalize broadly, you can even say that the development history of the city since the fifties can be understood in terms of the efforts to conquer the twin real estate Golcondas of the downtown and midtown.

      These are the goals of the RPA’s 1968 Second Regional Plan financed by the Rockefeller Brothers and Ford. Read thoroughly, it provides all the maps you need to understand where the action will be, as well as a rough order of battle, targets and priorities.

      Sent sprawling by the fiscal crisis and the overbuilding of the late sixties and early seventies, however, these plans had to be shelved until office leasing and business confidence revived at the end of the decade. Tremors of another building boom—albeit not the magnitude of the sixties—could now be felt.

      The problem for those who’d been accumulating vast plots of West Side property like the Dursts, the Rockefellers, the Tischs was that they could not get any developers to build on them. The wild West Side had served as the graveyard of so many would-be prospectors in the sixties nothing could tempt them back. All the building in the early eighties was taking place on the East Side. It was at this point that the Rockefellers, with a consortia of foundations including Ford and J.M. Kaplan intervened in the city planning process with consequences that continue to affect the life chances of every New Yorker.

      They persuaded Bobby Wagner, Jr., then head of the City Planning Commission, to shut down real estate development on the East Side, and make developers build on the West Side. Overbuilding was destroying the East Side, they argued. The West Side should have a chance at being overbuilt too. For too long it had been real estate’s stepchild getting no infrastructural attention at all. Wagner couldn’t have agreed more. Nor was there any trouble persuading Mayor Ed Koch.

      The RBF consortia negotiated the terms, timing and payment for the plan. City Planning agreed to withdraw zoning

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