New York, New York, New York
Thomas Dyja
Simon & Schuster, March 2021
Hardcover | 6 x 9 inches | 544 pages | 45 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781982149789 | $30.00
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
Dangerous, filthy, and falling apart, garbage piled on its streets and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble; New York’s terrifying, if liberating, state of nature in 1978 also made it the capital of American culture. Over the next thirty-plus years, though, it became a different place—kinder and meaner, richer and poorer, more like America and less like what it had always been.
New York, New York, New York, Thomas Dyja’s sweeping account of this metamorphosis, shows it wasn’t the work of a single policy, mastermind, or economic theory, nor was it a morality tale of gentrification or crime. Instead, three New Yorks evolved in turn. After brutal retrenchment came the dazzling Koch Renaissance and the Dinkins years that left the city’s liberal traditions battered but laid the foundation for the safe streets and dotcom excess of Giuliani’s Reformation in the ‘90s. Then the planes hit on 9/11. The shaky city handed itself over to Bloomberg who merged City Hall into his personal empire, launching its Reimagination. From Hip Hop crews to Wall Street bankers, D.V. to Jay-Z, Dyja weaves New Yorkers famous, infamous, and unknown—Yuppies, hipsters, tech nerds, and artists; community organizers and the immigrants who made this a truly global place—into a narrative of a city creating ways of life that would ultimately change cities everywhere.
With great success, though, came grave mistakes. The urbanism that reclaimed public space became a means of control, the police who made streets safe became an occupying army, technology went from a means to the end. Now, as anxiety fills New Yorker’s hearts and empties its public spaces, it’s clear that what brought the city back—proximity, density, and human exchange—are what sent Covid-19 burning through its streets, and the price of order has come due. A fourth evolution is happening and we must understand that the greatest challenge ahead is the one New York failed in the first three: The cures must not be worse than the disease.
Thomas Dyja is the author of the award-winning The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream, as well as three novels. He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
Thomas Dyja's The Third Coast is one of my favorite books about Chicago, for the way the author draws attention to some figures usually overshadowed by more famous, outsized personalities, and the way he weaves their stories together into a narrative that is enjoyable to read and capably immerses readers in a particular period. For that book it was the decade and a half from the end of World War II to 1960, when Chicago was the setting for cultural creations that would influence popular culture around the country. For Dyja's new book, New York, New York, New York, it is the last fifty years, from the election of Ed Koch as mayor in 1977 to the end of Michael Bloomberg's three tenures as mayor in 2013.
The similarities between the two books are mainly found in Dyja's skillful way of intertwining stories, turning phrases, and dropping names and events to paint vivid pictures of historical moments. New York gives much more weight to the politicians leading the city, though not at the expense of the artists, musicians, developers, activists, and other figures that helped shape the city during "the most dramatic peacetime transformation of a city since Haussmann rebuilt Paris." The book basically depicts the "three different New Yorks" that evolved over four mayoral administrations, with alliterative sections capturing the transformations under their watch: Koch (Renaissance) and Dinkins (Reconsideration); Giuliani (Reformation); and Bloomberg (Reimagining). Seven themes spelled out by Dyja weave through the book, one of them of particular interest to architects: "how the built landscape and public space were fundamental to new growth and community while also creating inequality and new forms of control."
This is a book meant to be read from cover to cover, a departure for someone like me, who tends to use non-fiction books as references, dipping into different parts of them as needed for research. Focusing just on the theme of the built landscape and public space in New York between 1977 and 2013 is not possible, given Dyja's way of entwining stories and events. My usual approach would also be a disservice to Dyja's writing, which uses the themes to portray a grand narrative that is incomplete, hard to grasp without digesting the whole book. Bryant Park is one of the important pieces in the public space theme, as is William H. Whyte, who helped direct its transformation decades ago. Another book could tell the story of that park in one chapter, but Dyja sprinkles it about the book, fitting it into the narrative's chronology and among other no-less-dramatic transformations happening across the city.
An epilogue that brings the story as close to the present as is possible in the world of publishing (to June 2020, after the worst of the pandemic's days in NYC) rolls Mayor Bill de Blasio into the picture. Dyja, who lives on the Upper West Side, clearly isn't a fan of the de Blasio administration, even if their progressive views appear closely aligned; and no doubt the city's dramatic evolution in the preceding decades would not have happened if someone like de Blasio was in charge rather than Koch or Giuliani. Dyja gives weight to people with power but in the end encourages readers, those living in the five boroughs at least, to wield as much power as they can, by attending Community Board meetings, joining the PTA, and doing other things beyond just voting. Such a call is needed because, even though New York's dramatic change over the last half-century has been good for many of its residents, it certainly hasn't been good for all of them.