Beame tours the South Bronx with President Jimmy Carter and H.U.D. Secretary Patricia Roberts Harris. Photograph Source: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration – Public Domain

Old New York

The New York City that Zohran Mamdani will likely take responsibility for as the next mayor is a different city than it was in the 1975 when Abe Beame was mayor. During the post-World War II era of 1945-1975, it was the capital of the 20th century, the locus of American life and hub of the great global capitalist recovery. Today, it retains preeminence in financial services, media and glamour, but its relative standing has been eclipsed both domestically and internationally.

The growth of strong regional metropolises like Miami, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC, eroded the New York’s national hegemony. The restructuring of the global economic order has left the Big Apple a steppingstone to Shanghai, the likely capital of the 21stcentury.

The postwar recovery plateaued out during the ‘70s and the social challenges this fostered came to a head in city’s fiscal crisis of 2008. New York was hit hard by postwar suburbanization, the mass “white flight” propelled by the GI Bill and Robert Moses’s mad reconfiguration of the city’s transport infrastructure, parks and public housing. Numerous major New York-based corporations relocated, taking their workforces with them; the city’s tax-base withered.

Paris, during its postwar reconstruction, pushed the poor to the city’s periphery; postwar America lured white, middle-class city dwellers to the Levittown suburbs sprawling across the country. Social life was re-centered, shifting from the city to the ‘burbs. Private homes, cars, TVs and malls became the America’s new reality. This shift profoundly altered life in the nation’s cities, especially Gotham.

1975 Fiscal Crisis

Kim Phillips-Fein opens her carefully researched and pointedly critical study, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (2017), with these memorable words: “On October 30, 1975, the New York Daily News printed the most famous headline in its history: ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’.”

She focuses on the fiscal crisis that gripped the city for much of the 1970s and came to a head in ’75 when the then-mayor Beame considered declaring bankruptcy. As she reflects, “the financial collapse of New York would be the ultimate symbol of American economic decline, a........

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