The Rise and Fall of New York City
Starr, Roger
THE RISE AND FALL OF NEW YORK CITY Roger Starr/Basic Books/$17.95 Robert Nisbet On February 12, 1946, Lincoln's birthday, the Mayor of the City of New York, William O'Dwyer, ordered the citizens...
...More important, even, was the extent to which the population voluntarily complied with the laws governing such minor offenses as smoking on public transportation facilities or committing nuisances in the streets...
...In other words, they are all three branches of government rolled into one...
...The author continues: "New Yorkers in 1977 had clearly changed since the strike of 1946 had drawn them together into unified action, and so had the city of New York itself...
...Art has even yet a way to go, but it's hard to conclude other than that it like religion will become as often the lair of tyranny as of liberation in the future...
...Housing shortages are of course notorious and in their varied con-figurations are like cancers...
...From decrease in jobs came inevitable decrease in the work-related transportation system, especially the remarkable subway...
...But smaller crowds of riders in subways meant greater space and opportunity for crime, especially violent crime, to flourish...
...His most recent book is Conservatism: Dream and Reality (University of Minnesota Press...
...At the end of 1945 the annual report of the Department of Correction noted that the city's prison population was below .1 (one-tenth of one percent) of the total population...
...It had, in 1946, perhaps the finest transportation to be found in any of the largest cities in the world...
...No doubt, these people mean well and some good has come of their efforts...
...One of the special merits of this book is the author's deft treatment of the artistic world and its correlative encouragement of political and social decay through consciousness-raisingin theatre, museum, foundation, and university...
...Approximately 150,000 bureaucrats, working deep in the bowels of the federal regulatory establishment, rule on every-thing from drug safety to the size of toilet partitions in public restrooms...
...the tragedy Starr presents us with comes straight from the political, economic, and cultural history of New York during the last forty years...
...In 1946, New York was without doubt the most favored great city in the world...
...its harbor was among the best and the busiest anywhere...
...that is, possessed of virtually every talent or skill known to man, a population that was buttressed by a public school system rated among the very best in the country...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986...
...But it is not overreaching to suggest that when the institutional leaders of the city make modern painting and sculpture their most prized art form . . . they demonstrate a set of values that endangers those needed to keep an urban polity on a firm, reasonable, and safe course...
...How and why New York and its citizens had changed Robert Nisbet is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...Civil rights leaders agreed...
...To remove a station invited the instant cry of discrimination against blacks or Hispanics, whose pride would be hurt and opportunities reduced...
...But New York had a good deal more than the glow of triumphant war behind its well-being in 1946...
...and we spent it as if we were under the equivalent not of Martial Law but of the Mardi Gras...
...right down to the thickness of the pickle slices...
...There are no real villains in this book...
...Efforts to rationalize the system by cutting out stations were met fiercely by many of the same people who were at work expelling industry, but in the name of minority rights rather than idyllic socialism...
...There.are many causes of this signal degeneration in New York's re-cent history, but as Roger Starr stresses, by far the largest, and by now nearly ineradicable, of causes is rent control...
...His book falls in the genre of tragedy, but it is in no sense mere Spenglerian exfoliation...
...Moreover, these agencies often enforce their laws and even settle disputes...
...The only phrase in all of Marx's Capital that I know by heart is De to fabula narratur, in which Marx assures his readers that his depiction of the coming agonies of English capitalism is meant for Germans and French as well as the English...
...well...
...Starr writes: "The presence of somuch manufacturing helped to insure the city against the risks of concentrating its labor force in the service sec-tor...
...The aver-age fast-food hamburger, it has been determined, is subject to over 41,000 state and federal regulations...
...Add to OSHA the FPC, SEC, FCC, EPA, CPSC, EEOC, FDA, ICC, FRA, FTC—over 130 agencies in all—and you begin to wonder who really makes our laws...
...Train, subway, bus, tunnel, bridge, private automobile, taxi combined to "concentrate millions of workers in the central business district every day and get them home at night...
...It is hard to remember to-day that down until the immediate postwar period, New York City ranked with Chicago and Detroit as a manufacturing city...
...But so has a great deal of time and money been spent to comply with meddlesome and counterproductive regulations...
...22,000 pages in 1970 to 77,000 pages by the end of the decade...
...The impact of the book is enhanced when we know that its author is a renowned urban scholar and administrator, one of the anointed few indeed who brought the study of housing into its deserved prominence just after World War II...
...It is, may I say, the iron test of whether art serves man or man serves art...
...The regulations pumped out by the new agency ran to more than 800 pages, defining more than 4000 standards for achieving safety in the work-place and on the farm (including the warning to farmers, "Don't fall into manure pits...
...It's time we weighed the benefits of regulation against costs...
...Fourth—and this may evoke sobs among readers —there was a very large housing sup-ply...
...A fifth asset was—again reader, prepare yourself here—the lawfulness of the city...
...One need go no farther than the trash in iron and rust that now welcomes the world to the Federal Plaza...
...Geography served it well...
...Happily, Roger Starr is a great deal more perceptive, and a great deal less befuddled by meta-physics, than Marx was...
...For example, the legislation which created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was about 30 pages long...
...His style is fully up to the drama contained, and there is the same kind of coiled, taut tension from chapter to chapter that one finds in the best of novels...
...The city lost 600,000 factory jobs during the ten years that followed the war...
...The incident heated racial strife...
...New York, we learn, is the only American city that has had rent control continuously since World War II, and that knowledge is made ironic, if not tragic, by the further information that New York was one of the very last cities to be caught up in the toils of federally mandated wartime rent control...
...enough affordable housing to give New York that most precious of demo-graphic treasures: a large and proud middle class...
...with any luck at all, the city could have escaped it...
...The current shameless, cowardly abdication of intellectual authority by artists and art critics, in the name of human freedom and of the precious, divine soul of the artist however inept and vulgar, offers no encouragement at all, either to New York or the rest of the country...
...Its manufacturing rampart began to crumble almost immediately...
...New York, in fact, was the only factory town in the nation that could lose 600,000 jobs and still retain 600,000 people working in factories...
...THE RISE AND FALL OF NEW YORK CITY Roger Starr/Basic Books/$17.95 Robert Nisbet On February 12, 1946, Lincoln's birthday, the Mayor of the City of New York, William O'Dwyer, ordered the citizens to knock off ordinary holiday activities and assist him in effectively closing down the city...
...Other assets possessed by the city included its health system, foremost in the world, one built of public hospitals and clinics and buttressed by a network of voluntary and proprietary health institutions...
...Ordinary problems of civil order became invested overnight with apocalyptic calls to revolution and liberation of the psyche...
...At the end of the war, New York added more value to manufactured products than any other American city, including Detroit and Pittsburgh...
...Now only the rashest would dare even hope for extrication...
...Hillsdale College Hillsdale Michigan 49242 For a series of 36 of these award-winning essays, send $10.00 to Alternatives, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242...
...As I suggested above, Roger Starr's fascinating book is about a great deal more than its most visible subject, that is, New York City...
...Not to be overlooked either for a moment is perhaps the single most decisive asset then held by New York: its manufacturing importance...
...The Federal Register, which annually records all the new regulations which emanate from these agencies, grew from about The branch that's threatening the tree...
...As Starr points out in detail, New York was as rich in urban assets, the kinds of assets which we almost invariably find associated with the great cities in world history, as it had ever been in its spectacular history...
...None are needed...
...That's known as a vicious circle...
...In 1980, it cost taxpayers $8 billion merely to operate these agencies...
...It is a picture of the processes, forces, and passions which are to be found in almost every major city at the present time—even in the larger national polity...
...More significant, it is estimated that the cost of complying with their dictates was a staggering $130 billion...
...Hence the alacrity and grace with which the people responded to the Mayor O'Dwyer's order...
...And in a grim, revolting sort of way, the very poor, the indigent and homeless, are also taken care of...
...But no one, I think,would suggest that the middle class, the historic foundation of all great urban populations in history, is anything but beleaguered and perpetually endangered...
...New York intellectuals, needless to stress, were well prepared ideologically for the work of capitalist destruction...
...A quotation from the New Yorker serves Starr piquantly and pertinently: "It was indeed . . . a feast day...
...In his acute recognition of the timeless relations between art and society—and society's essential values and bonds—Roger Starr thus joins such recent, powerful critics as Tom Wolfe and Edward Banfield...
...People fear the subway today, and that just may be the single largest, most haunting fact in the whole saga...
...From war New York had drawn not only economic prosperity but a strong sense of the human bond...
...decline to such an ugly state as that on July 13, 1977 when in the great blackout that hit the city suddenly at night, large sections were vandalized, looted, and turned into virtual war zones, with 4,500 people arrested for a spectrum of misdemeanors and crimes...
...As a bonus, we will also send you a free subscription to our monthly journal Imprimis...
...In his emergency proclamation, the mayor gave only the sketchiest justification for his action, probably because there was no balance sheet on which the savings of fuel could be quantified and related directly to the strike...
...The Unelected Lawmakers The textbooks will tell you, and most people believe, that Congress makes our laws...
...The strike had been under way for more than a week, and at the height of winter the fuel situation was becoming critical...
...Third, the city had a high quality population...
...The strike ended within a day...
...Its 20,000-member police force was quite professional by American standards, and its criminal justice system worked...
...How, he asks, do we ac-count for the melancholy decline of New York and of the relation between citizens and government symbolized on Lincoln's Birthday, 1946...
...It had profited from the war, but unlike London, Paris, Berlin, and other European capitals, it was unscarred by any of the grim toll of war...
...And, of course, the consumer ultimately bore this cost, about $2,500 per family, in the increased price of goods and services...
...Neighborhood associations, environmental groups, lawyers, and politicians on the make began to find it intoxicating work to beat down the factory system...
...Factories by the thou-sand were dotted all over Greater New York...
...That is Roger Starr's arresting beginning of his book...
...And decisions of this magnitude should again be made by elected representatives who are regularly accountable to taxpayers at the ballot box...
...He served as Commissioner of Housing and Development under Mayor Beame when the city underwent its fiscal agonies in the 1970s...
...But the number of riders will not increase until passengers feel safe...
...Hence the Mayor's bold act of resistance to the strikers...
...It was the Mayor's response to a potentially devastating strike by the tugboat workers, those who brought to Greater New York vital fuels such as oil and coal...
...Between 1970 and 1979, 20 new regulatory agencies were created, the number of bureaucrats tripled, and expenditures grew six-fold...
...Black leaders accused the administration of inhuman treatment...
...Now to the decline and fall of one of the world's greatest cities—still a great city but diminished all the same in every single one of the respects just cited here from Starr's account...
...its world famous opera and symphony, its museums, universities, baseball teams, publishing houses of magazines as well as books, its newspapers, and so on and on...
...Art began to replace religion about a hundred years ago in America as the chief haven of the sacred...
...The fact that the people of the city took the mayor's order in stride, obeyed it, and for the most part did not complain about its interference with their plans may have helped direct O'Dwyer's action to its target...
...From it the rest of the book follows as logically as it does sequentially...
...Not even painting and sculpture were spared such ideological frenzy: It would surely be overreaching to suggest that the spirit of nonobjective art forced New York into its financial difficulties of 1975, or that it continues to hold before the city the specter of other severe difficulties that it may face in the future...
...This mammoth bureaucracy has grown at an alarming rate...
...so drastically is the subject of Roger Starr's engrossing and captivating book...
...No great city in history has ever appeared or maintained itself except under the impress of commerce, trade, and manufacture...
...The harm thatgood men do has been ample: the city never at a loss for eager, pious, nobly intentioned politicians, administrators, foundation executives, and all-purpose intellectuals ready on a moment's notice to place the label of "suffering situation" (the phrase is Kenneth Minogue's) on whole aggregates of people and to spare no effort in coming up with solutions on the grand scale, to be underwritten of course by the taxpayers...
...Himself a life-long resident of New York, currently a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, as aware of national currents as those of local origin, Starr is cut to order for this book...
...But experience suggests otherwise...
...Its larger importance lies in the fact that it is a morality story for Americans, not just New Yorkers...
...The very rich are unbothered of course...
...As Starr notes, fear is legitimately generated by the crime rates, which in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 43 turn are generated by the loss of rider-ship...
Vol. 19 • July 1986 • No. 7
