The Three Faces of New York
Bell, Daniel
I In 1956, the Regional Plan Association, a non-profit research agency, asked the Harvard School of Public Administration to conduct an economic and demographic survey of the New York...
...Here our academic authors desert us...
...MORE THAN THIS, the city itself has no Master Plan that would allow it to specify priorities and budget ahead for the area as a whole...
...only a fraction of 1 per cent of the dwellings were replaced per year...
...The nature of these enterprises, and the ethnic cast of the men who ran them, made for an extraordinary large middle class in the New York of the last three decades—probably, though no one has ever measured it, the largest middle-class aggregate in any urban center of this country...
...What draws the rationalized, bureaucratized corporate behemoths to New York is the ancient longing for desire and display...
...To understand New York, one must know all the faces...
...In the postwar decade (1948-57) , 85,000 new dwelling units were built, housing a total of 500,000 persons...
...THESE CHANGES can be matched ecologically in the new population distributions, as well...
...Similarly, in publishing, book houses and magazines keep their editorial offices in New York, but the printing is done out of town...
...The commercial banks and factoring corporations thus advance short-term loans or take over accounts receivable as the way of supplying the small companies with cash...
...The archetypal novel of this period is Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky, a saga (such novels can only be sagas) of the class that moved from the sweatshops of the lower East Side to the lofts of Seventh Avenue...
...Since 1947, over 132 new office buildings (86 since 1954) have been put up in Manhattan (Union Carbide, which had bought land in Tarrytown, erected a fifty-story tower on the Marguery site...
...Yet the base of New York's economic structure is largely unseen...
...As Mr...
...If the New York City economy makes sense only in regional terms, so must the polity...
...In forty-seven industries that are almost entirely single-plant firms, thirty per cent of their national employment is concentrated in New York...
...One sees this in small ways and large—the mushrooming of chic art galleries, and the cultural dominance of the art world...
...The behemoth Authority, while a model of service compared with the inefficient city departments, is organized for ends that are now anti-social because of the failure to institute any over-all plan...
...Its large protected harbor, along with the rail-canal system leading to the West, made for important advantages...
...Because decisions have to be made swiftly, there is scarcely any intra-firm hierarchy, little bureaucratization, and usually only a single establishment...
...Typically, this has meant that the industries moving to New York tend to be small, fast...
...And this was made possible largely by the entrepreneurial wealth of small-unit firms...
...An innovation like "section work" in women's clothes, or the breakdown of skill components in actual production, has also spurred the growth of larger business units...
...Surely, such a solution is madness...
...Manufacturing will barely manage to hold pace with the growth of the region...
...Of these, 2,389,000 used public transport, 577,000 came by auto and taxi...
...New York is now a new bazaar, with sleek symbols glorifying "Seagram" or "Pan Am" or "Lever Brothers" or "Pepsi-Cola"—the new doges of Park Avenue...
...Jean-Paul Sartre, commenting sourly on the grid-shadowed streets of midtown New York, predicted that no new office buildings would be erected in New York...
...For example, the City Planning Commission, which has finally introduced a new zoning code to eliminate the present ziggurat style of skyscraper, has no effective control over the Traffic Commission, and no say in the activities of the Port Authority...
...JUST WHY THE LARGE corporations keep swarming to New York is not a question economists can answer with their particular logic alone...
...Yet in the late forties, the talk of the business world was largely about New York's impossibility as a business center, and the need for decentralization...
...But a high style dress is sometimes conceived and executed in a fortnight...
...Where an enterprise has family roots, the prestige and power of the head of the firm are displayed in the town or city where the enterprise has begun, and where the family has its social power...
...Yet if a study is to have any value for policy makers, must it not consider alternative "models" of what New York can be, so that some political steps could be taken to achieve one or another goal...
...New York has already lost the major share of bulk-cargo shipments—coal, grain, iron ore, and petroleum— which can be loaded and unloaded mechanically, in single-boat units...
...V What is to be done...
...But even this subsidy pales compared with that made to truckers and the industries they serve...
...In all, 44,700,500 square feet of office space—or half as much as existed before 1947— has been added to Manhattan since the end of the war.* Some of this growth has been in response simply to the need for more space, as the administrative ranks of business, reflecting the new complexities of corporate management, expanded...
...The suburbs will soon become as clicked as the city...
...Time, Inc...
...Political and literary magazines, written and edited by the children of immigrant businessmen, dominated the scene...
...Why not bar private cars from midtown...
...But merely to blame the banks, real-estate lobbies, or powerful bureaucratic interests for the chaos of the city is too easy...
...they turn out the added value that sustains the region...
...A single volume, Metropolis 1985, by Raymond Vernon, the director of the survey, interprets the results of the more detailed researches...
...In short, why not begin with a social calculus, and restore the city to its people...
...But] the central office of a large corporation produces no easily defined product whose costs can be 'priced out' at alternative locations...
...If one asks why an enterprise chooses one region rather than another, the answer is that for some, the main need is to be near the supply of raw material...
...For instance," Mr...
...The lower East Side now is a warren of jerry-built public barracks inhabited by Puerto Ricans and old, retired Jewish working people...
...Without such dovetailing, none of the area's fundamental problems—transportation, housing, the port—can be solved...
...But if the heart of this economic category has been the dress industry, the same problems turn up in an array of small-unit, single-plant firms —small companies engaged in printing, plastics, electronics, and smallscale machine work...
...But here significant shifts, reflecting forces already in motion, will take place...
...It might even cause some firms to bring their production back to New York instead of farming it out...
...And yet, because so many of these businessmen were Jewish, it was a middle class that hungered for culture and self-improvement...
...And the New York market is losing its share of business...
...Proposals for public housing in the open spaces of Staten Island, where garden-type developments would have been possible, or on the outskirts of the city, or even in the outer ring, were decried—by property owners in these areas, who didn't want Negroes...
...In 1956, with the inflow slightly reduced (3,316,000 persons came in each day), 736,000 came by auto or taxi, an increase of almost twenty per cent, while the number using public transit had dropped to 1,970,000, a decrease of more than 12 per cent...
...The upper East Side, once the slum, has become an area of luxury co-operative apartments selling for ten thousand dollars per room...
...Financial institutions like brokerage houses and insurance companies can draw upon many different economic analysts...
...They see the growth of cities largely as a function of changes in market patterns, and these, in turn, as a function of resource location, transportation costs, and labor supply...
...Such an explanation is, admittedly, speculative, and difficult to prove statistically...
...The breakdown of the latter group is surprising: New York is usually thought of primarily as a business and finance center, yet two out of every three jobs in its national-market activities are in manufacturing...
...an advertising agency needs a large number of type faces and since it would not be profitable for one firm to have on hand all the specialized fonts that may be called for, smaller printing companies thus find a place for their services...
...for still others, to be able to draw on a pool of skilled or low-cost labor...
...Vernon points out, producers of made-to-order giant turbines and generators are not found in the Region because they operate on production schedules which call for delivery three or four years after the placement of an order...
...Take the more mundane and less utopian question of traffic...
...Consider the radio business, for example: it originated in the New York area because, with its technology untried, its production methods unsettled, its markets uncertain, and its need for sub-contractors crucial, this region, with its vast pool of specialized facilities, offered the most attractive location...
...A large floating labor supply, crudely organized, assured a cheap reserve of labor and a quick, profitable turnaround for the ships...
...Why, for example, should New York City continue to maintain piers along the lower West Side and the rim of East Side Manhattan, when such piers are inefficient, and the side-street warehouses and the dilapidated wholesale markets that serve them are even more so...
...Reading a book is a solitary affair, and one needs likeminded friends to discuss its content...
...But even here a further distinction has to be made...
...Each manufacturer being, so to speak, a retailer, behind him are the smaller wholesalers who supply his needs...
...But if housing is to be subsidized, why shouldn't its beneficiaries pay for this, in part, with travel time—particularly when the social gains would have been greater—in larger rooms and more open space...
...The recent popularity of casual wear and sports clothes has brought mass-production methods into the industry, to a previously unheard-of extent...
...IV And the future...
...A dress house, therefore, will need to have immediately available a wide variety of buttons, buckles, embroidery, rhinestones, or other trimmings, without wanting to carry full stocks of these items or machinery for making them...
...New York City, instead of discouraging cars from coming into the city center, has begun to build a large chain of municipal garages in midtown to accommodate the cars...
...Counties like Dutchess, Orange, Rockland, and Morris promise to triple or quadruple their populations...
...The complications arise not only from added numbers but from changing modes of transportation...
...What has been done so far has made barely a dent in the mountain of need...
...AND YET THIS ECONOMIC FACE of New York, which has dominated the city in the past three decades, is changing...
...And, as a result, the art market has boomed...
...the residential construction has been along the upper East Side...
...And competitively, the growth of the St...
...Few of these firms have sufficient capital for expansion, and often don't even have enough money to cover current production costs...
...But equally, as an intangible fact, the convergence of corporations on New York can also be seen as the final stage in the breakup of family capitalism...
...Fewer people are taking trains, more are taking private cars into the city...
...To indicate one example: the expansion of corporate headquarters has given a "new face" to New York, from the unbroken lines of the new glass houses on Park Avenue to the towering high-rental apartment houses along the upper East Side...
...Alcoa, for example, was on the verge of abandoning Pittsburgh and coming to New Y6rk after the war, but Richard Mellon, for family reasons, held the firm back and initiated the move that resulted in the renovation of the "golden triangle...
...Frequent ship sailings, the concentration of freight forwarders, insurance specialists, banks to facilitate credit, wholesalers to distribute imports— all these spurred the development of the port...
...hence the lure of New York...
...With the decline of these small industries has come a change in the temper of Broadway entertainment...
...This would be an added expense to the individual firm, but a social gain for the rest of the community...
...These industries are characterized by uncertainty, by the capacity to make quick-change production shifts, the search for an item or product that will be a sudden hit...
...One need not look on these men as "villains" (such as the slum landlords of Harlem) who are out merely to exploit the city...
...In the last decade, the middle class traded space for time—more open area for the home, as against a longer haul in getting to work...
...The port gave New York much of its rough nineteenth-century character: the sailor dives along Water Street, the brawling underworld of the Five Points section, the open brothels along Greene Street—features duplicated in every port city of the world, from Marseille to Shanghai...
...The number of such one-plant firms—averaging about twenty-five employees each—is enormous...
...Within one decade, the prices of the best contemporary painters (de Kooning, Rothko, Kline, Baziotes, Gottlieb, Guston) appreciated more than ten times, an arithmetical increase of a hundred per cent per year (something few stocks can match), and even the younger painters (Hartigan, Rivers, Brooks) can now command several thousand dollars for a single painting...
...In essence, New York is a bazaar in which speed, variety, and specialization are the hallmarks of the services it offers...
...Inevitably, the finance agencies achieve a commanding position in the city...
...The larger ecological consequences of this shift in axis is the new housing design of the city...
...or that the distinctive tempo of New York life in the first decades of the twentieth century reflected the emergence of a fast-moving and new type of manufacturing enterprise, with easy access, high turnover rate, and sudden rises and falls in wealth...
...by Negro politicians in Manhattan, who feared the loss of bloc support through dispersals...
...Many of them are sincerely concerned with the amenities of life, and express it in such projects as Lincoln Center or the Downtown-Lower Manhattan redevelopment plans...
...Let us take as a useful starting point the fact that the economic life of the area—the kinds of employment, the number of jobs, the distribution of income—is basic to any understanding of the region...
...the white-collar force about three per cent a year, in the last two decades...
...It has not been transport savings or labor costs that have attracted industry, but "external economies," the availability of a pool of specialized facilities and skills that could be shared by firms without their having to carry these items as part of permanent overhead costs...
...Point-counterpoint followed with easy economic logic...
...Yet if one is trying to deal with the forces that shape the character of New York, such speculation is necessary...
...But today, the next generation, which now finds money-mak ing respectable, buys art...
...Vernon comments, "we find that in these three boroughs...
...by liberals, who felt it was wrong to penalize public-housing residents by increasing the time they travelled to work...
...It is now changing, but enough survives, as does something of the character of the city's early history, and if New York is now beginning to enter a third phase—that of domination by the large corporate headquarters— the three faces exist as on a palimpsest...
...Meanwhile the basic and obvious need for an integrated rapidtransit system, to link the entire metropolitan region and tie in, as well, the commuter railroads of New Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut into the New York City subway system, fails to receive any recognition for lack of political and financial support...
...Vernon and most of his associates are economists (with the exception of the historian Oscar Handlin, who did the volume on "The Newcomers," and the political scientist Robert Wood, who is writing the study of local government...
...Now, more than ever, it is a crosshatching of canyoned streets congested by trucks, private cars, buses, taxis, and all the other debris of an industrial civilization...
...1I In economic terms, New York is an iceberg...
...The core boroughs of New York (Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn) will decline in resident population, and Staten Island will grow...
...Vernon's concluding volume is curiously bloodless, the result of its failure to speculate on the ways in which the admitted defects of the city—broken-down housing, choking • Since 1947, two billion dollars in private capital have been expended for construction in Manhattan...
...But he couldn't get the financing for as much as a narrow tower...
...In 1948, 3,691,000 persons came into the central business district (defined as Manhattan south of Sixty-first Street), each day...
...The chief contribution of the Jews to the City of New York, as Nathan Glazer noted a few years ago, has been in their role as "consumers of culture...
...Today, 135 of the 500 largest industrial corporations in America have their headquarters in New York...
...These factors make for an extraordinary reliance on agents, banks, and other finance outfits for survival...
...So, high-rising, high-density barracks were built on the most expensive land in the world...
...And the city center...
...There are, to be sure, some "external economies" available in New York to the mammoth corporation...
...This is what has given New York its particular beat and distinctive character...
...or, if it is proved that such costs would mean competitive disadvantages and a reduction of jobs in New York, one could subsidize these firms by reducing taxes, and thus rents, in the area—and allow them to pay for off-time loading...
...The large symphony orchestras, the theaters, trade-book publishing, the avant-garde magazines, the market for drawings and paintings—all have, as their principal audience and consumer, the Jewish middle class...
...Each of these industries depends upon a whole range of auxiliary services...
...The middle class has the choice either of moving still further out—but where...
...There are hints here and there of what should be attempted, of the vested interests that must be overcome, of the obstacles involved, but it is all said with innuendo and diminuendo ("Our task here, of course, is not to appraise the desirability of any such measures...
...For example, Erwin Wolfson, who is putting up the giant Pan American building—the sixty-story megalith behind Grand Central Station which will pile forty thousand people into one workplace at the hub of the city—has remarked that the "only" valid argument he heard in opposition to his project was the idea of turning the three-and-a-a-half-acre site into a plaza...
...The industrial map of nineteenth-century America— the location of heavy industry between the coal deposits of western Pennsylvania and Kentucky, and the iron ore at the end of the Great Lakes, the whole intertwined by the lakes and the Ohio River Valley system— was shaped by these considerations...
...Art, however, is "open"—paintings, particularly large Abstract Expressionist canvases, are attention-getting devices...
...Mr...
...Port employment will probably decline...
...Today, the garment industry—the prototype of small entrepreneurial business—is undergoing a small-scale revolution...
...Yet in the age of the telephone and private company airplanes, distance is less of a barrier to communication than ever before...
...In Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, where "renewal" has made the greatest progress, only 1.4 per cent of the total land area has been utilized...
...moving, risk-taking, and highly competitive in a rough-and-tumble race...
...In terms of an economic calculus, yes...
...business and professional services about seventy per cent...
...New York, in fact, is the largest manufacturing city in the world...
...This second face, which materialized with the emergence of the Jewish community, is the New York of the small enterpriser...
...Why not force all truck loadings to be undertaken before eight in the morning and after seven at night in the midtown district...
...The city—needless to say— needs the revenue...
...The use of midtown-area city streets for private cars represents a subsidy to their owners of twenty feet of public space, at a penalty of waiting time, gas fumes, and other social costs that must be borne by everyone else who works in the area, as well as a financial loss to the rapid-transit networks, whose revenues are thus reduced...
...Most of the new office construction has been in the midtown area, from Fortieth Street to Fifty-ninth Street...
...And will this wholly inadequate rate be stepped up in the future...
...Sixty per cent take in each other's wash (i.e., engage in "local-market" activities...
...The number of jobs will rise as well, probably to 9,500,000 by the target year—an increase of about forty-five per cent over 1954...
...The visible portions are the theaters, art galleries, museums, universities, publishing houses, restaurants, night clubs, espresso cafes, smart stores—all the activities that give the city its peculiarly glittering place as the metropolis of America...
...Although the resident population at the core of the city may shrink slightly, half a million new jobs (in business and finance) will be added to Manhattan's central business district by 1985...
...for others, to be close to markets, in order to reduce transport costs...
...The moral of all this is that New York exists really because of its fantastic variety of non-rationalized enterprises and services, easy to break into because of low capital requirements, but in which survival depends upon ingenuity, "shmearing," cutting a corner, trimming a margin, finding some other way to make a fast buck in the swift race...
...Slum clearance, as a reform slogan, won the day —but it was a pyrrhic victory...
...But with the future increases in population, what will happen to residential densities...
...over six million went for high-rental apartment houses (e.g., Imperial House, at Sixty-eighth Street and Lexington Avenue, where rentals are from fifty-five hundred to fourteen thousand dollars a year...
...Why not rebuild the waterfront areas, with their spectacular abundance of -light and vistas, with imaginatively constructed houses and promenades, and locate the cargo piers on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, where freight can more easily connect with trunkline railroads or highways going West and South...
...CLEARLY NO EFFECTIVE PLAN for New York can be possible in the next twenty-five years (since so many of its problems spill over into the region) as long as the existing helter-skelter of fourteen hundred— yes, fourteen hundred—local governments, each with its own decisionmaking powers about taxes, traffic, schools, parks, housing, sewage, water, police, fire, and other municipal services, continue to exist in the New York metropolitan region...
...This bourgeoisie, unlike the traditional small-town Protestant middle class, was quick, sharp, shrewd and, like as not, cynical...
...an advertising brochure may be only hours or days in the making...
...Even when we add private buildings to public renewal," Mr...
...In the garment industry, therefore, design, cutting, and display are now done in New York, but the actual sewing—the chief labor expense—is farmed out to contractors in the hinterlands of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut...
...or that the remarkable efflorescence of corporate building in New York in the nineteen-fifties was due to prestige rather than to economic need—all are awkwardly suggested, rather than elaborated and explored...
...and government jobs more than sixty-five per cent...
...By granting or withholding mortgage money, by adding size and trimming space, by assessing any project primarily in terms of costprofit, these financial interests have been the major power centers of New York...
...Over one billion three hundred million went into office buildings...
...The Port Authority finances its operations by the floating of bonds, on the basis of credit status, and it now has a vested interest in increasing vehicular traffic through the tunnels and bridges...
...Still another complication is the fading mirage of suburbia...
...The horizontal axis of New York has shifted from Seventh Avenue to Madison...
...The mechanization of freight-handling, beginning initially with pallets and extending now to fishy-backs—i.e., the hoisting of truck trailers directly onto the ship from pier or railhead—means a decrease in the need for unskilled labor...
...Lawrence Seaway—through a single great port development on the Great Lakes, as is now being planned along the Indiana dunes below Chicago —may hasten the decline...
...But this was impractical, he said...
...For it has been the decisions of these controllers—the large insurance companies and the banks—that have determined the contours of New York, particularly in building...
...It seems unlikely...
...With the expansion of road transport, industries could begin to separate those operations dependent upon the "bazaar" from those primarily in need of low-paid labor...
...traffic, inadequate services—might be remedied, a task the researchers eschewed...
...beyond Westport to New Haven, or beyond Princeton to Trenton?—or of surrendering the open suburban spaces, and still have to take the long train ride to the city...
...Sociological nuances—such as the thought that New York triumphed over Philadelphia in the early nineteenth-century race for commercial supremacy (the physical port advantages of each were about equal) because the freewheeling traders found the fluid ways of New York more congenial than the already rigidified class structure of Philadelphia...
...The National City Bank, which took over the site, put up a squat building that covers the entire footage...
...When the "deracinated" manager "makes it" in the impersonal world of corporate capitalism, he wants other people to know about it, these other people being the tribe of corporate managers...
...The largest growth in jobs will come about in white-collar employment...
...But the port had given New York its initial impetus for growth, and the pattern of "external economies" was duplicated in the city's next epoch...
...a lawyer's brief is often printed between midnight and morning...
...As production methods became standardized and markets enlarged, the radio firms grew in size...
...As Mr...
...From a different perspective, Mr...
...The authors of the study estimate that the region's population will grow to 16,800,000 by 1965, to 19,000,000 by 1975, and—barring a large migration such as the spectacular Puerto Rican one of the last decade—to 22,000,000 by 1985...
...Financial personnel will grow about eighty-five per cent...
...Shortly before his death, Vincent Astor wanted to create an open plaza on Park Avenue at Fifty-third Street, which, combined with the open space in front of Mies van der Rohe's building for Seagram, would have formed a new focal point for the city, similar to Rockefeller Center...
...The labor force as a whole has been growing about one per cent a year...
...Yet how wrong all this talk was...
...The traditional small-unit industries—clothing and printing—will lag, while large increases will occur in metal-product and electrical-machinery manufacturing, reflecting the new technology of the times...
...Yet this program has had astonishingly little effect on the way land is used...
...Each morning and each evening, midtown streets are all but impassable because of the large forty- and fiftyfoot trucks that crowd the streets and back up across the avenues—with the countless burdens of noise, harassment, lost time and other multiple indignities such congestion creates...
...Take, for example, the postwar decision to deal directly with slum clearance in Manhattan...
...What, then, do we know...
...How will people get there...
...With the growth of the city, the rough spots became localized—along the edges of the piers in Chelsea, around the rim of Red Hook—or they were shoved across the river, to Hoboken and Jersey City...
...The growth of the inner ring (Nassau County, for example), which has burgeoned in the last decade, will slow down, while the perimeter areas—the only ones still with open space—will show a spectacular jump...
...The New York of the thirties had a "literary" culture...
...One cause of it is the growing rationalization of industry...
...Time Inc., which owned the site of the Hotel Marguery, sold it and took an option on land in Rye...
...Six and a half million people are employed in the region...
...Speculators, take notice...
...Vernon points out, in manufacturing, "an economic version of the Darwinian principle, feeble and dilute though its effects may be, operates to push industries towards the location which yields the largest return...
...But they are part of a system that assesses costs through a narrow economic calculus, by individual decision units, rather than in terms of social costs and social gains...
...It has become a necessary means of achieving cultural cachet...
...i.e., they produce goods and services sold in the national market...
...The raucous-toned, vulgar, smartaleck jokes of a George Jessel, a Myron Cohen, or a Joe E. Lewis reflected the wise-guy quality of the old garment trades...
...Increasingly, the critically competitive elements became labor costs and transportation to national markets, rather than production design, and so the industry began moving from New York...
...Immigrants poured in, and many of them stayed right in the city...
...Even more significant, because the numbers involved are larger, will be the growth of Suffolk, Monmouth, and Middlesex Counties: in absolute terms, Monmouth is projected as raising its population from 280,000 in 1955 to I,157,000 in 1985, an almost incredible growth...
...Yet the only "solution" to this congestion is the proposal of the redoubtable Robert Moses for a number of east-west arterial flumes which would bounce the traffic even more violently against itself...
...Where politics is played as a brokerage game, all groups defend private interests against some generalized social desideratum...
...Today, the new sophisticates— raconteurs and satirists like Shelley Berman, Mort Sahi, Elaine May and Mike Nichols—reflect the new face of New York, a white-collar dominance of the large corporation and its advertising-media satellites...
...Otherwise one simply extrapolates existing trends and calls it analysis...
...Many parts of West End Avenue, once the haute banlieue of the garment district, are now transient slums...
...In comparing the magnitude of these new problems with the ineptitude of the public authorities, one begins to despair...
...If this trend continues, as seems inevitable, where will all the cars be put...
...The fruits of the three-year study have been recorded in nine books (one of which has yet to be published) , and they constitute the most exhaustive analysis of the region (or of any detailed area of the United State) since the original nine-volume New York Regional Plan studies, which were concluded three decades ago...
...built a forty-eight-story building west of Rockefeller Center...
...New York has offered a peculiarly different attraction...
...Of all this, more later...
...Corporations with problems ranging in diversity from taxes to advertising commercials can arrange for quick consultations with experts...
...The major fault of these volumes, despite the care that has gone into the gathering of small bits of data, comes of the failure to deal with the economic controllers of New York, and with their intentions...
...but is it impractical in terms of space and light, a haven for pedestrians, a resting place in the center, an enhancing of light and vista...
...Whether utopian or mundane, the point remains that few of these problems are ever explored from any cost calculus other than the individual economic unit, and often in this reckoning, the City of New York (with a Lawrence Gerosa as controller) thinks of itself simply as an economic unit, and has no conception of social costs and gains...
...The second, and larger problem, particularly for New York City, is housing...
...The suburbs have become bedroom cities for the white-collar salariat of the corporations, and each morning as they push their way into the city, they pass increasing swarms of outward-bound Negro and Puerto Rican workers commuting to the outer ring of the region, where the new, small-manufacturing plastic, electronic, and machine-shop firms have located...
...General Foods moved out to Westchester...
...Take, first, the problem of transportation...
...But in a properly integrated region, taxes could foot the costs for the whole area...
...A second influential factor has been the role of the truck...
...But here the internal shifts will be more important than the small growth...
...As a collector, one can acquire a cultural reputation...
...Yet no picture of an urban civilization can be complete without such sociological considerations, for, just as good will is often an intangible yet real element in the assets of a business firm, so do status structure, cultural environment, and entertainment resources become inextricable components of the character of a city...
...I In 1956, the Regional Plan Association, a non-profit research agency, asked the Harvard School of Public Administration to conduct an economic and demographic survey of the New York metropolitan region—a 7,000-square-mile, 22-county complex that, with its core, inner ring, and outer ring radiating forty miles out from the Empire State Building, and a population of sixteen million persons, forms the largest urban aggregate in the United States—and to project these economic and demographic trends as far as 1985...
...Vernon chastely observes, "The projected magnitudes are large enough to suggest that present and projected facilities will be under a real strain to bear the expansion of daily commuting...
...Any wholesale uprooting, in a city where the vacancy ratio has diminished almost to zero, could result only, as this operation did, in dumping the slum population from one section of the city onto another...
...Indeed, the projected growth is sufficiently large to permit one to say that public policy in this field may prove a key variable in determining how New York's central business district develops in the future...
...It is no longer the ethnic-dominated, nervously swift city of "I Can Get It for You Wholesale...
...Forty per cent—and this is the crucial group—are in the "export trade...
...III New York began as a port city...
Vol. 8 • July 1961 • No. 3
