Welcome to New York at Its Core: World City!

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THE WORLD'S PORT, 1898 TO 1914

As the 20th century began, the expanded five-borough city reached new heights of urban density, diversity, and economic energy, as people and goods streamed into what was now the world’s second most populous city after London. By 1914 more than half of the entire nation’s imports and 40 percent of its exports were passing through New York’s seaport. Tens of thousands of mostly small factories created more than two billion dollars in goods each year, almost double that of New York’s nearest U.S. competitor, Chicago. Office towers reached into the sky: the 20-story Flatiron Building (1902), the 47-story Singer Building (1908), the 60-story Woolworth Building (1913), and many others. Along with record-level immigration, these transformations helped make New York the signature metropolis of the modern age—a global city of formidable energy and intense ambitions.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 was a watershed, as New Yorkers supplied arms, goods, and credit to the Allied combatants. By the war’s end, New York surpassed London to become the world’s busiest seaport and leading lender, whose influence stretched to the farthest reaches of the globe.

Capital of Enterprise

New York’s economy was strikingly diverse. Shippers and dockworkers moved goods through the bustling port. New corporate headquarters in towering skyscrapers offered employment to white-collar workers from executives to mailroom clerks. 870,000 men and women churned out an astonishing variety of goods, from garments and lace to solvents and furniture. In this varied economic environment it often required only a small amount of savings for New Yorkers to start their own small businesses and add to the entrepreneurial energy of the city.

Capital of Finance

Wall Street bankers reinforced New York’s pivotal role in the global economy by merging far-flung railroads and steel-making firms into corporations larger than any ever seen before. About 60 percent of all American commercial banks kept deposits in New York banks, which in turn loaned millions of dollars to traders on the New York Stock Exchange.

Immigration

In 1907, as manufacturing boomed, immigration to the United States hit a new high of a million people, most arriving in New York. By 1910 immigrants accounted for 40 percent of the city’s population, the highest since before the Civil War. Most newcomers were from eastern and southern Europe—Russian Jews, Italians, Poles, Greeks, and others. They brought new languages, customs, and political ideas to the nation’s most diverse metropolis.

The new arrivals powered the economy, providing the labor that kept the city’s workshops running, and started an array of new businesses that served their communities.

 

ORIGINS OF THE PROGRESSIVE CITY, 1898 TO 1914

The city’s rapid growth brought new scrutiny to old but increasing urban problems—crowding in filthy tenement districts, low wages and dangerous working conditions, financial volatility, racial discrimination, and unequal concentrations of economic and political power. A generation of New Yorkers embraced a new idea: that these urban ills could be solved by collective action. Joining the reform ranks that defined America’s “Progressive Era,” an alliance of union members, journalists, social workers, academics, and middle-class women rallied for a new kind of government activism to rein in private interests for the sake of the public good. In many of their crusades they were joined by radicals pressing for an even more dramatic transformation of a capitalist society into a socialist commonwealth.

Together they established New York’s reputation as a city that protected its workers, regulated its housing, and promoted public health through legislation, and whose activists sought to control the power of “Big Money” bankers and financiers. The reform spirit seeped into every aspect of urban society. Even Tammany Hall, the city’s famously corrupt Democratic political “machine,” strategically reshaped its agenda in response to the progressive movement. This coalition and its ideas about activist government would shape urban politics— and American liberalism—for most of the 20th century.

The Power of Print

As the nation’s media capital, New York became the base for “muckraking” reporters. Their critique of Wall Street spurred a movement to regulate the power of New York’s banks and helped push bankers to devise one of the era’s lasting reforms: the Federal Reserve System. Meanwhile, African-American newspapers like the New York Age, humor periodicals like Puck, and progressive magazines such as The Survey tackled issues ranging from racial discrimination to poverty and slum conditions.

Organizing Workers

Many New York workers faced low pay and dangerous conditions. “If there is one place in America where the workers have reason to revolt,” Socialist Louis Duchez argued in 1910, “it is New York City.”

The new arrivals brought new militancy to the city’s labor unions, as in 1909, when 20,000 garment workers struck for higher wages and shorter hours. When 146 workers died in a fire behind locked doors at the Triangle Waist Company factory in 1911, many New Yorkers responded with heightened activism.

Tammany Goes Progressive

Facing competition from the leftist politics of new New Yorkers and their unions, Tammany Hall boss Charlie Murphy pragmatically pivoted the city’s political “machine” to a reform agenda. The Triangle fire of 1911 emboldened Tammany politicians, like Alfred E. (Al) Smith and Robert F. Wagner, to champion the idea that government could improve urban life. They put New York on a course to path-breaking, nationally influential laws—at both city and state level—to improve workplace safety, shorten work hours, and provide decent low-cost housing.

 

OUT AND UP, 1914 TO 1929

In the 1910s, the physical development of the five-borough city accelerated. Reformers, entrepreneurs, and politicians joined forces to spread the subway to four of the five boroughs, opening new neighborhoods to the growing population. Together with new East River crossings—the Williamsburg (1903), Manhattan (1909), and Queensboro (1909) Bridges— the subways dramatically diminished the crowding in lower Manhattan by enabling people to move to less congested areas across Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. In neighborhoods like Jackson Heights in Queens, Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, and Riverdale in the Bronx, developers rapidly transformed farmland into residential districts for New Yorkers who now crisscrossed the city between work and home.

As the other boroughs built out, Manhattan built up. In the 1920s, New York became the great skyscraper city, surpassing its rival Chicago in the sheer number and height of its corporate office towers. The city’s soaring skyline became a symbol of its new supremacy as an international metropolis. By 1925 New York had replaced London as the world’s most populous city, leading port, and financial center, and was aspiring to challenge Paris as a global arts and style capital.

Mass Transit

New York’s subway began in 1904 with the privately operated Interborough Rapid Transit Company. Soon reformers argued for expanding the system in order to relieve crowding in lower Manhattan. Massive construction began in the 1910s, followed by the first fully public lines in the 1920s.

Although plans for a subway to Staten Island were foiled by the Depression, the multiple lines enabled the development of block upon block of new apartment buildings and single-family homes in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. By 1929 annual rides reached over 2 billion (versus 1.25 billion today).

Skyscraper City

Corporations erected the world’s tallest office buildings in Manhattan’s business districts, leveraging new techniques in steel construction and elevators that enabled skyscrapers to pass 50 stories by 1909. On Manhattan’s crowded blocks, these towers became “machines for making the land pay,” in the words of architect Cass Gilbert.

Reformers argued that the massive buildings were depriving New Yorkers of light and fresh air. In 1916 a citywide zoning law, the first in the nation, required “set back” upper floors to provide light and air at street level, creating a distinctive profile for New York’s 20th-century skyline.

 

NEW YORK ROARS INTO THE TWENTIES, 1914 TO 1929

By the mid-1920s, New York was a dramatically different place than it had been a generation earlier. Although World War I and federal restrictions sent new immigration plummeting, more than one-third of the city’s population—over two million people—had been born abroad. The city was home to as many people of Italian descent as Naples, Italy, and to more Jews than any other city on earth. New York’s newest wave of arrivals were African Americans leaving the South during and after World War I; they made Harlem the nation’s largest and most famous urban black community.

This multiethnic, multiracial city encouraged experimentation. Women stepped into the city’s public life as never before, enjoying a daring new nightlife just as men did. Openly gay men and women found enclaves of acceptance that could not be found elsewhere in America. Black and white New Yorkers, newcomers and old-timers, mingled their cultural traditions with fresh ideas to create art forms that reshaped national tastes. Together they established the city as a beacon of the edgy, the sophisticated, and the sensational. New York had become the capital of the “Jazz Age.”

Harlem

The Great Migration brought black newcomers fleeing oppression and economic hardship in the South. Joining them were new American citizens from Puerto Rico, other Caribbean immigrants, and black New Yorkers leaving midtown after racist attacks in the early 1900s. By 1930 over 200,000 African Americans lived in Harlem.

The new arrivals included intellectuals, writers, artists, performers, and activists who built a new cultural movement: the Harlem Renaissance. Their energy opened opportunities for entrepreneurship, spawning businesses that catered to black consumers and marketed the talents of Harlem artists.

Broadway: Cultural Crossroads

Broadway theaters and nightclubs of the 1920s promoted a jazzy, hybrid popular culture. Jewish, African-American, Irish-American, and other entertainers learned from each other’s music, dance steps, and jokes on the stages of music halls, vaudeville houses, and cabarets. Sophie Tucker, the Marx Brothers, Adelaide Hall, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and George M. Cohan were all stars on Broadway, performing music composed in New York’s music publishing district, “Tin Pan Alley” on West 28th Street.

1920s Style

As nationwide Prohibition (1920–33) made drinking illegal (but also chic), New Yorkers created a new type of nightlife in clubs and secretive “speakeasies.” By 1925 the city had 35,000 illegal saloons, five times as many as Chicago. They ranged from Harlem and midtown nightclubs to Greenwich Village “nooks” and tenement kitchens.

The glamour and energy of Prohibition-era New York reached a national audience through a community of writers, cartoonists, and editors who captured the city’s sophistication and wit in fashionable “smart” magazines, including The New Yorker (founded 1925).

 

FACING THE DEPRESSION, 1929 TO 1941

Wall Street’s stock market crash in 1929 abruptly ended New York’s era of prosperity and exuberance. Radiating out from New York, the Great Depression brought economic growth to a halt across the country. By 1935 one-third of all employable New Yorkers—about a million people—were jobless. Journalist Martha Gellhorn summed up the city’s mood as one of “fear, fear… an overpowering terror of the future.” In the nation’s business center, capitalism itself seemed to teeter on the brink of collapse.

Necessity and despair drove New Yorkers to improvise. As reformers and bankers fought to remake the city’s financial system, middle-class families saved pennies and doubled up in apartments, newly homeless people built shantytowns, and the unemployed sold apples on street corners. Some were convinced that the economy had broken down completely and embraced the call for radical change by visionaries of the far left and the far right.

Disaster

The city’s vibrant 1920s economy evaporated in 1930–31. A wave of bank failures, followed by massive layoffs, spread panic throughout the city’s and nation’s economies. By 1932 New York State had run out of relief funds, leaving 88,000 New York City residents without aid. Jobless, homeless men set up makeshift shantytowns throughout the five boroughs, while others swelled the population of the Bowery’s Skid Row. “There they are,” journalist Lorena Hickok wrote, “all thrown together into a vast pit of human misery, from which a city, dazed…is trying to extricate them.”

Coping

New Yorkers used a variety of survival strategies. Some took in boarders to save on rent. Some peddled goods in the streets. Others staged rent strikes, marched on City Hall to demand jobs, or joined radical groups, including the Communist Party, the left-leaning Catholic Workers Movement, or the right-wing Christian Front.

Meanwhile, a range of private charities and public agencies sought to offset the worst effects of poverty. By 1933, 1.25 million New Yorkers—more than one of every five city residents—received some form of relief to help them withstand the crisis.

 

NEW YORK'S NEW DEAL, 1929 TO 1941

In 1933 New Yorkers elected a feisty maverick as mayor, who tackled the Depression through bold experimentation. Building on the reforms of the previous generation, Fiorello La Guardia made New York the showcase for a new kind of urban liberalism, with massively expanded government spending and services. This vision of a city transformed and uplifted by its government relied on the support of labor unions and a diverse coalition of voters—Jews, Catholics, African Americans, and others— that would sustain the liberal city for decades to come.

The Republican mayor forged a relationship with his fellow New Yorker, Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal programs drew heavily on New York’s progressive traditions. Armed with funds from Washington, La Guardia and his parks commissioner Robert Moses put New Yorkers to work building public housing, parks, bridges, swimming pools, health clinics, concert halls, and a public university that would provide tuition-free education and upward mobility to generations of New Yorkers. The New Deal did not cure New York’s economy, but in no other American city did the crisis inspire a more far-reaching government reshaping of daily life.

La Guardia, Moses, and Roosevelt

Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia forged a formidable relationship with Washington, D.C., as President Franklin D. Roosevelt channeled millions of federal dollars to New York City. La Guardia and Robert Moses used these funds to hire legions of workers to update and expand the city’s infrastructure and public realm. By augmenting Moses’s power over public money and construction, the New Deal also clinched his role as New York’s “master builder,” whose massive, often controversial, construction projects would radically transform New York over the next three decades.

Building Jobs

Mayor La Guardia used grants, taxes, and loans to put tens of thousands to work in construction, social services, and the arts. Though African Americans had to fight to gain access to some of these opportunities, public jobs were a lifeline for New Yorkers of all races.

But the New Deal was about more than paychecks. The mayor envisioned a metropolis where government actively enriched daily life: new public hospitals would safeguard health; new housing and community centers would end crime; and new universities and concert halls would enrich the lives of New Yorkers.

City of Parks

Among the many changes in the city’s fabric under the New Deal, none had a greater impact on the dense city than the parks programs— by far the largest in the nation. As New York’s first citywide Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses more than doubled the amount of parkland in the city. Eleven state-of-the-art pools, accommodating 5,000 people each, opened in the summer of 1936 alone. Moses also built 255 playgrounds, 17 miles of beaches, and, in 1939, a World’s Fair in a massive new park built in Queens on the site of a former ash dump.

 

CHANGING CITY, 1941 TO 1960

World War II—and the federal government’s wartime spending—finally restored New York’s Depression-stalled economy. The city reached full employment as New Yorkers flocked into war plants. Wartime jobs also drew growing numbers of African Americans and Puerto Ricans seeking work and a better life. Their experience in the city proved complex. Many found upward mobility and established vibrant neighborhoods, even as discrimination in housing and employment hurt their ability to accumulate wealth to the same extent as their white counterparts.

As the economy boomed after the war, newly powerful unions protected the security of many of the city’s blue-collar workers, promoting an expansion of New York’s social benefits and securing a middle-class life for many people across the five boroughs. The postwar era’s ambitions also took physical form. City officials modernized the metropolis, tearing down acres of aging buildings, constructing massive apartment complexes for middle- and working-class New Yorkers, and expanding a sprawling highway system that made New York the center of a metropolitan region reaching into three states. The transformation was profound, erasing much of the 19th-century city, uprooting entire neighborhoods, and formulating new ideas about how the density of the city could be shaped and managed.

Race and Place

Hundreds of thousands of African Americans and Puerto Ricans settled in Harlem and East Harlem or put down roots in central Brooklyn, the South Bronx, and Queens. In 1940–60, the number of black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers tripled, from 510,000 to 1.6 million.

Middle-class black families created their own neighborhoods, but discrimination limited housing options. As in other cities, New York realtors and lenders continued federal policies from the 1930s, denying loans in minority neighborhoods and discouraging integration. The resulting racial geography would shape New York for decades to come.

Urban Renewal

A housing shortage, competition from the suburbs, and availability of new government funds drove a massive overhaul of New York’s built environment. Under Title I of the American Housing Act of 1949, Robert Moses partnered with private developers, razing “blighted” areas to make way for subsidized high-rise apartments and other projects.

Along with new public housing, these towers provided an affordable alternative to the suburbs for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. But many also found the bulldozing of countless neighborhoods to be a profound, unsettling change in the life of the city.

 

CAPITAL OF THE WORLD, 1941 TO 1960

Riding the wave of newfound prosperity, and with Europe’s capital cities exhausted, postwar New York became, in the words of writer E.B. White, “the capital of the world.” Wall Street was the international center of banking and securities trading, Madison Avenue dominated American advertising, and Seventh Avenue had become the world’s fashion capital. Gleaming new modernist glass towers in midtown housed corporate headquarters and the offices and studios of the nation’s leading radio stations, television networks, advertising agencies, and magazines. From Broadway stages to Rockefeller Center’s broadcasting studios, money and influence fueled and followed the city’s dominance of the nation’s entertainment, news, and information industries.

New York also became a global hub of fashion, glamour, artistic and intellectual movements, and cultural sophistication. European artists and intellectuals who had fled Nazism fostered cultural innovation in opera, dance, and fine art, as did African-American and Hispanic innovators who pioneered new forms of music and visual arts. New York City was not only the world’s largest and richest city, but its most influential.

Ab Ex

At the close of World War II, New York emerged as the undisputed international capital of the art world. Emigrés from Europe, like Piet Mondrian and Hans Hofmann, influenced an emerging generation of artists. Among them were founders of the “New York School” of Abstract Expressionism (Ab Ex), including Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Mark Rothko. Working in Manhattan and then in his Long Island studio, Pollock, in particular, was celebrated in New York’s galleries and press for putting the city’s new generation of painters at the cutting edge of modern art.

Jazz

Musical seeds planted during the 1920s bore fruit in the 1940s and ’50s with an explosion of creativity in Harlem and West 52nd Street nightclubs, where artists crafted “bebop”—a new form of jazz that was soon heard around the world.

New York’s community of Afro-Cuban musicians also inspired the rise of Latin jazz or “Cubop,” a fusion of African-American and Caribbean musical forms. Along with “Beat” writers, modern dancers, experimental filmmakers, and others, they helped establish New York’s reputation as the world’s most exciting laboratory of artistic invention.

Capital of Fashion

After decades of being overshadowed by Paris, New York fashion came into its own after the shutdown of Parisian ateliers during World War II. Driven by the new popularity of American-designed clothing, New York’s largest industry—garment manufacturing— reached its peak in the 1950s, selling the work of Seventh Avenue celebrity designers like Anne Klein, Claire McCardell, and Norman Norell. New York couture attained a global audience in the pages of Vogue and Glamour magazines, published by Condé Nast in Lexington Avenue’s Graybar Building.

 

WHAT IS THE CITY FOR? 1960 TO 1970

Despite its postwar ascendance, by the 1960s New York was feeling the effects of a nationwide economic shift. Manufacturers, finding the cost of doing business in the city too high, had started moving to suburbs or other states with more space, lower taxes, cheaper energy, fewer regulations, and weaker unions. New technologies (and increasing air traffic) profoundly affected the port—another pillar of employment— by eliminating thousands of jobs, a shift confirmed when the city’s shipping operations moved across the harbor to more spacious quarters in New Jersey. With century-old factories, warehouses, and piers shuttered and emptied, the city’s very identity seemed open to question.

New Yorkers responded in varied ways to these changes, as diverse (and sometimes discordant) visionaries once more worked to reshape the metropolis. Some planners envisioned a white-collar economy for the city. Preservationists, cherishing the architecture, community values, and human scale of older neighborhoods, asked whether the whole thrust of postwar development, with its massive new office and apartment complexes, had sacrificed the city’s soul. Artists reoccupied former industrial spaces as lofts and studios, activists like Jane Jacobs rescued and repurposed historic sites, while business leaders reimagined downtown as a center for maintaining New York’s hold on world trade, embodied in the world’s tallest skyscrapers.

Business Exodus

In the 1960s and ’70s, industrial and maritime firms seeking lower costs and more space began to leave the city, taking jobs and tax revenues with them. In 1950, 917,000 New Yorkers worked in manufacturing and 430,000 in the port. By 1980 those numbers had declined to 507,000 and under 200,000. During the 1960s alone the city lost one-fifth of its factory jobs, emptying entire districts of their plants, stores, and warehouse businesses.

New Visions

What to do with the deindustrializing landscape? One solution was to reinvent the port. In the 1960s, the Port Authority razed a district of electronics shops to build a grand new office complex. The World Trade Center was promoted as home to global maritime trade, but it became a symbol of the white-collar future, occupied by government and financial offices.

As office skyscrapers and high-rise housing replaced older buildings, New Yorkers pushed back, asserting the value of low-rise urban density. Artists and others joined preservationists in the fight to save endangered buildings and reclaimed abandoned lofts as studios and homes.

 

DIVIDED CITY, 1960 TO 1970 

As New York lost its factories and port businesses, the supply of well-paying, blue-collar jobs dwindled. The decline hit the growing African-American and Puerto Rican communities especially hard, as the ladder to middle-class success wobbled. Many minority New Yorkers faced growing poverty, sharpened by racism that limited where they lived and worked. Between 1960 and 1972, the city’s public assistance rolls more than tripled. Meanwhile, many middle-class New Yorkers moved to the suburbs, leaving racially changing neighborhoods behind.

The city also became one of the era’s most important incubators of cultural and generational ferment. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty programs funneled federal funds into poor neighborhoods, but also fueled rivalry and conflicting visions over control of the money. Uprisings against the Vietnam War and for civil rights; for black, Latino, and student power; and for women’s and gay liberation galvanized many New Yorkers. Although the hands-on approach of Mayor John V. Lindsay’s City Hall (1966–73) helped fend off much of the violence that shook other American cities in the late 1960s, new tensions challenged the coalition that had sustained the city’s liberal politics since the New Deal.

Crisis and Confrontation

The “urban crisis” became a focus for journalists, politicians, and activists. Wearied by decades of efforts to integrate the city’s public schools, housing, and job market, some activists called for racial self-determination. Rent strikes targeted slumlords and picket lines protested racist hiring. In 1968 local black activists won control of the public schools in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn. A resulting series of teachers’ strikes—pitting the heavily white and Jewish teachers’ union against “community control” advocates—inflamed already tense race and ethnic relations.

Power and Pride

The 1960s saw a wide range of self-help initiatives, as black, Puerto Rican, and Asian-American activists took their communities’ future into their own hands by organizing local garbage cleanups and medical testing, building low-income housing, and reclaiming abandoned lots for gardens and playgrounds. They also partnered with neighbors, clergy, students, and each other to lobby for government funds on behalf of their neighborhoods. Racial and cultural pride infused the work of young intellectuals, artists, writers, and performers across the city.

Activism

Across the city—on college campuses, in central Brooklyn, Harlem, the East Village, even on Park Avenue—the Vietnam War and anger over racism, poverty, and inequality spurred crusades for power and liberation in the late 1960s. The Black Panthers, anti-war protesters, feminists, gay militants, and the Puerto Rican activists in the Young Lords all proved willing to challenge officials, police, business leaders, and the press to fight for change. While the new militancy influenced local and national events, it also tested old ties that had bound together a coalition of white and black leftists, liberals, moderates, and labor unionists in New York’s politics since the 1930s.

 

ON THE BRINK, 1970 TO 1980

By the 1970s, New York City was running out of money. Vietnam-era inflation and the rising cost of city services, education, healthcare, and welfare had more than doubled the budget in under a decade. For the first time in New York’s history, its population shrank significantly, as the postwar trend of white middle-class migration to the suburbs accelerated. Together with the departure of many businesses, a sharp national recession, and a shift of federal and state funds to the suburbs, this meant that New York had shrinking resources to cover escalating costs. Mayors John V. Lindsay and Abraham Beame turned to the problematic strategy of short-term borrowing to keep the city afloat.

By 1975 New York City faced fiscal catastrophe, as it teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. The sense of urban deterioration spread well beyond the “inner city,” as crime, garbage, and real estate abandonment contributed to fears that New York was on the brink of collapse. Many neighborhoods were overrun by poverty, arson, and drugs. As budget cuts reduced public services, the city seemed to be on a downward spiral. Its survival became a test of the very idea of the livable modern city.

City on Fire

Budget cuts meant slashed services as the city laid off 25,000 employees and closed firehouses. Fires swept through neighborhoods in the South Bronx, central Brooklyn, and southern Queens, as landlords and lenders wrote off whole neighborhoods. Vandals set some fires in abandoned buildings, while others were set by landlords seeking insurance payouts. Some officials called for “planned shrinkage”—cutting off services to “dying” neighborhoods to save money and to accelerate the abandonment of these poor, largely minority communities.

Budget Woes

When banks refused to buy or sell the city’s bonds, President Gerald Ford initially refused to provide loans to bail out the city. Working with bankers, labor leaders, and officials, New York Governor Hugh Carey, himself a Brooklyn native, forged a pact under which municipal labor unions used their pension funds to loan the city money. New York avoided default, but the liberal city of expansive public services and big spending— the New York of the New Deal generation— seemed to be a thing of the past.

“Fear City”

Reports of crime soared in the 1970s, hitting all-time highs at the same time that the city’s police force was reduced by a third. Heroin addiction, muggings, and arson became part of the city’s image in the global media. Fear accelerated in the summer of 1977, when looting broke out across poor neighborhoods during a power blackout, and David Berkowitz, a serial killer who called himself the “Son of Sam,” was caught after shooting 13 New Yorkers in nighttime attacks.

 

AGAINST THE ODDS, 1970 TO 1980

Even as the city’s economy hit a low point, and as New York lost over 800,000 residents in the 1970s, many people refused to give up on urban life. Indeed, many of those who remained seized upon the relatively affordable space and the freedom that New York offered. They created new opportunities, from urban homesteading to community gardens to new arts organizations. Some embraced the city’s gritty reputation itself as an opportunity for celebration and for once again making money out of culture.

Hollywood cashed in on New York’s image as a dangerous, crime-ridden place with such movies as Death Wish (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976). But television shows like Sesame Street, Barney Miller, Saturday Night Live, and even All in the Family celebrated the irrepressible urban spirit. Simultaneously, the city’s nightlife generated business and new cultural forms, from disco at Studio 54 to punk rock at CBGB on the Bowery to experimental theater at La Ma Ma in the East Village. Most enduringly, the birth of hip hop in some of the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods planted the seeds of one of America’s most far-reaching and lucrative cultural exports, and demonstrated the ability of diverse New Yorkers to create something new in the city’s streets.

Hip Hop

Hip hop was born in the South Bronx and spread to Brooklyn and Queens during the 1970s as a new generation of African-American, Caribbean, and Hispanic New Yorkers shared musical styles. Budget cuts to music programs drove young musicians to DJing instead of performing live music.

By the mid-1970s, public parks and school-yards served as settings for rap, DJ, MC, and B-Boy (breakdance) contests among members of rival gangs. In 1979 Sylvia and Joe Robinson’s Sugar Hill Records began recording New York hip-hop artists, launching the national and global success of the music.

Resilience

Amidst laments about decline, New Yorkers expressed their faith in the city. They invented new institutions and movements— block associations, neighborhood gardens, environmental programs, a defiantly open gay subculture—that sustained and enlivened New York.

“Urban homesteading” offered rebirth in the midst of decay. Middle-class families rejuvenated older neighborhoods. Residents of “blighted” areas formed nonprofits to revive their neighborhoods. Gay New Yorkers created new social space on abandoned piers, in bathhouses and dance clubs, and in a host of new organizations.

Nightlife

New York became the main incubator for disco and the rise of a new kind of dance club. With roots in the city’s gay clubs and loft dance parties, by 1977 disco moved into the mainstream with the popularity of the movie Saturday Night Fever (set in Brooklyn) and the opening of Studio 54 in midtown. The club drew would-be patrons from around the region, who crowded at the door because they were not on the club’s legendary guest list. The decadent nightclub sustained the idea of New York as a center of glamour.

Punk

Punk rock was born in the clubs of New York City, invented by native New Yorkers and newcomers seeking freedom in the rough-edged world of 1970s New York. The vibrant energy that surged through the city in the 1970s gave rise to this brash new form of rock and roll, which reflected the gritty discontent of that era. With a creative legacy that encompasses icons ranging from Lou Reed and Patti Smith to the Ramones and the Talking Heads, the punk era and its aftermath represented a true creative revolution that played out in downtown nightclubs, most notably CBGB and Max’s Kansas City.

 

NEW YORK COMES BACK, 1980 TO 2001

By 1981 New York’s financial house was returning to order, as Mayor Edward I. Koch’s fiscal restraint and budget cuts encouraged investors to lend to the city again. Along with national and global financial trends, Koch’s pro-business strategies helped spark a remarkable turnaround. This was especially notable in the growth industries of finance, insurance, and real estate, as jobs in banking increased from 97,000 in 1969 to 171,000 in 1986. By 1995 financial companies and related services made up 15 percent of the city’s workforce and almost 30 percent of its gross economic output. With concentrated flows of computerized information, credit, and investment money, New York became a global city in new ways, linked to other “world cities” like London, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.

New wealth made Wall Street moguls powerful and glamorous, but it also accentuated increasingly stark social divides. In many ways, New York remained a middle-class city. Yet as manufacturing (and its unionized jobs) continued to decline in importance, many New Yorkers felt priced out of the new economy, with their incomes failing to keep up with the rising cost of living in the city. And, as many of New York’s poorest faced homelessness or addiction, the sense of two New Yorks—one of “haves” and one of “have-nots”— resonated in ways not felt since Jacob Riis’s day a century earlier.

A New Gilded Age

Wall Street produced jobs, revenue, and prestige for the city in the 1980s. It also invented an alluring array of new financial products and strategies that attracted global investors and traders, from junk bonds and leveraged buyouts to mortgage-backed securities. As the world’s resurgent money capital, New York was the setting for the consolidation of dozens of banks into a smaller number of mega-banks, including Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, which changed the way the world did business.

A Tale of Two Cities

While financiers and others benefiting from New York’s rebounding economy enjoyed the city’s culture and energy, a very different New York surfaced in the city’s streets, parks, public housing, and tenements. Cuts in social services made homelessness a highly visible problem. The AIDS crisis (starting in 1981), the increased prevalence of crack cocaine (1984-90), and tensions over gentrification sharpened the sense of a city divided between the privileged and the needy.

 

NEW IMMIGRANT CITY, 1980 TO 2001

The energies of immigrants from around the world added to New York’s turnaround in the last two decades of the 20th century. By the 1980s, the effects of more open federal immigration laws were in full force, as newcomers helped to reverse the city’s population decline. New York’s population increased from seven million people to just over eight million in only 20 years. Whereas earlier in the century most immigrants came from Europe, these newest New Yorkers came from a wide range of countries across Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa. They helped transform neighborhoods from Flushing in Queens to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, from Concourse Village in the Bronx to Tompkinsville in Staten Island, injecting fresh ambition and cultural variety into the fabric of the city, and restoring the population density that had been diminished in the preceding decades.

By the century’s end, New York was one of the world’s most ethnically diverse cities, with 36 percent of its population born overseas and no one group dominating. Although the city absorbed and incorporated the new arrivals, demographic change, economic competition, and cultural tensions sometimes sparked tensions and conflicts between New Yorkers that tested the cohesion and tolerance of the city.

The New Immigrant Economy

The new immigrants brought a wide range of skills and educational levels. Many filled professional or managerial jobs; others created small businesses, often serving their own communities. Still others staffed the service, manufacturing, and construction industries, where immigrants provided more than half of the workforce in 2000.

The new New Yorkers were from everywhere, but by 2000, the city’s four largest immigrant groups were from the Dominican Republic, China, the former Soviet Union, and Jamaica.

Neighbors in Conflict

Where groups competed for resources and turf, their members sometimes clashed. In 1990 African Americans launched angry boycotts against Korean grocers in Flatbush and Brownsville, Brooklyn, charging that they mistreated black customers. A year later in Crown Heights, rioting between black Caribbean immigrants and Hasidic Jews left one man dead. While bitterness and mutual suspicions lingered, members of these communities also sought to heal the wounds and find ways to live side-by-side as New Yorkers.

 

A SAFER CITY? 1980 TO 2001

Nothing symbolized the revival of New York more than its physical transformation. By the 1990s, New York was cleaner and safer than it had been in decades. Developers transformed Times Square from a maze of X-rated theaters into a gleaming family entertainment district; Central Park received a major physical restoration; neighborhoods of formerly abandoned buildings were repopulated; and crime fell dramatically, with the murder rate down by more than 65 percent in the 1990s alone. But the transformation of New York into the safest large city in the nation came with tensions of its own. Angry conflicts broke out over policing policy. Facing the “Disney-fication” of midtown, New Yorkers debated whether the city was losing its identity.

On September 11, 2001, arguments over the city’s character were abruptly silenced—and the city’s sense of invulnerability shattered—when terrorists piloted two airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center killing 2,753 people, including over 400 first responders: firefighters, police, and paramedics. As New Yorkers grieved, they reconsidered the meanings of urban safety and wondered how the city’s spirit— and economy—would recover.

Policing

In the 1990s, crime rates fell in New York for the first time in decades. Many credited an increase in police officers and more coordinated policing. Others linked the drop to broader shifts, including an aging population and the decline of the crack epidemic.

Critics pointed to the negative impacts of high incarceration rates, stop-and-frisk, and the nation’s strictest drug laws, especially on black and Hispanic New Yorkers. High-profile incidents—the 1997 police abuse of Abner Louima in Brooklyn, the 1999 police shooting of Amadou Diallou in the Bronx, and others— highlighted ongoing questions about policing in the city’s minority communities.

Cleaning Up

In the wake of fiscal crisis cutbacks, the city mobilized private dollars to maintain its public spaces. Public-private partnerships took the form of nonprofit conservancies and business improvement districts (BIDs) that cleaned up neighborhoods and parks from Times Square to Fordham Road in the Bronx, Forest Avenue in Staten Island, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and downtown Flushing, Queens.

While some lamented that government was not taking the lead on these urban problems, others praised BIDs and conservancies for leveraging the energy, private money, and expertise of the city’s business community.

9/11/2001

By the time terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 2001, the complex was a workplace for 50,000 people; over 2,700 lost their lives that morning. The site at “Ground Zero” became a symbol of the tragedy, but also a beacon of resolve. Volunteers streamed in to aid in rescue and recovery—and many of them continue to suffer from health problems long after.

Debates soon emerged over how to rebuild and how to balance public safety and civil rights. Despite dire predictions, the neighborhood’s rapid rebound signaled the city’s continued vitality and global importance.

 

DEBATING THE CITY, 2001 TO 2020

Despite the terrible setback of September 11, 2001, New York City experienced dramatic growth in the new millennium, as ambitious new development swept all five boroughs. Signs of change were everywhere throughout Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s 12 years in office. New York’s density underwent a dramatic change, as bicycle lanes and pedestrian plazas transformed the streets; new parks, housing, and businesses reclaimed the waterfront; and property values (and the cost of living) soared in neighborhoods that some had written off just a generation earlier, causing some to wonder whether the city might become a victim of its own success.

Money, density, diversity, and creativity remained distinguishing features of life in New York. But pressing questions remained about the city’s future: How should money be spent? Who would benefit from new developments? Among the city’s diverse communities, who would control the direction of change? Who would be able to afford to live in the city? These questions have become even more urgent as the city has faced its vulnerability to climate change and rising sea levels, and in 2020 became one of the early epicenters of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the virus tore through communities, and the city shook with the racial justice uprisings of the summer of 2020, these dual crises laid bare some of the New York’s fundamental vulnerabilities, with the toll of pandemic seemingly rooted in density and the very nature of urban life.

New Developments

During the Bloomberg administration (2002–13), the post-9/11 city reclaimed its confidence as a growing center of corporate enterprise, high finance, and real estate development. Rezoning policies encouraged new office and residential construction across the city, along with “greening” of urban spaces. The mayor’s policies also sparked arguments over the direction of New York’s economy, control of the city’s streets, and the role of government in regulating the public behavior of individuals.

Pandemic

In early March of 2020, the first cases of COVID-19 appeared in New York City. Within weeks, the city was on lockdown, as schools and non-essential businesses were required to close and New Yorkers adjusted to urgent instructions to stay at home. By April, New York was the epicenter of the global pandemic, at one point contending with an estimated 800 deaths on a single day.

For the city’s community of healthcare workers, the pandemic brought challenges not seen since the early days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. As hospitals and morgues reached capacity, New Yorkers found creative ways to come together: to mourn, to cheer for each other, and, at times, to find joy.