Past Event: The Megaprojects that Transformed New York

As a new generation of "Master Builders" transform our city at a breakneck pace, we take stock of the megaprojects that have shaped New York, from Rockefeller Center and Roosevelt Island to the newly-minted Hudson Yards. Distinguished urban historians Lizabeth Cohen, Daniel Okrent, and Samuel Zipp join urban planner Regina Myer to consider the complex legacies of NYC’s sprawling real estate projects, then and now. Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger moderates.

Reception to follow.

This program is part of Dr. Lizabeth Cohen’s tour for her new book, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2019), which will be available for purchase and signing. 

About the Speakers: 
Lizabeth Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies at Harvard University and an expert on 20th century American social and political history. She is the author of several books including Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939, which won the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest book, Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2019), considers the benefits and costs of rebuilding American cities through the life and career of urban planner Edward J. Logue.

Regina Myer is the president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. She was previously president of Brooklyn Bridge Park and from 2006-07 served as the senior vice president for planning and design at the Hudson Yards Development Corporation. Prior to that, she was the Brooklyn Borough Director for the New York City Planning Department where she directed the redevelopment of the Greenpoint/Williamsburg waterfront and the rezoning of Downtown Brooklyn.

Daniel Okrent is the prize-winning author of six books including, most recently,The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America (Scribner, May 2019). Okrent formerly served as the first public editor of The New York Times, and was previously an editor at large at Time Inc., managing editor of Life magazine, and founding editor of New England Monthly magazine. His book Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center (Penguin, 2004) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.

Samuel Zipp is a cultural, intellectual, and urban historian with a particular interest in 20th-century cities, United States cultural and political history since World War II, the built environment, and nonfiction writing. Zipp is the author of Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford University Press, 2010), and co-edited Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs (Random House, 2016) with Nathan Storring. He has also written articles and reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Nation, among others.

Paul Goldberger (moderator) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic and a contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine. From 1997 to 2011, he was the architecture critic for The New Yorker, writing the magazine’s celebrated “Sky Line” column. He is the chair of Design and Architecture at The New School and was formerly dean of The New School’s Parsons School of Design. His most recent book, Ballpark: Baseball in the American City (Knopf, May 2019), offers a new look at the history of baseball old through the stories of the vibrant and ever-changing ballparks where the game was and is staged.