Glum in Gotham

...Also absent, curiously, is Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, alarger-than-life figure who shaped the skyline and politics of New York City during much of the period Starr covers...

...It is arresting and sobering to have him make a point I have heard or read nowhere else: "...when the institutional leaders of the city make modern painting and sculpture their most prized art form, and when they devote as much time, intelligence, and, not least, money to its pursuit as the New York leaders of the postwar world have done, they demonstrate a set of values that endangers those needed to keep an urban polity on a firm, reasonable and safe course...

...Executive director, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey If you know or care much about New York, this book will fascinate and challenge you...

...His own belief is that "imposing moral order" is society's job...

...it was also less universally successful...

...that the City University effectively makes a higher education available to poor and lower-middle-class youths of all races...

...Some critical upheavals and programs, notably the generally successful introduction of Open Admissions at the City University in the late 1960s, and the recasting of health and welfare programs in the crucible of the fiscal crisis in 1975-76...

...He approaches his subject in a spirit more open-minded, I'll wager, than will be shown by some of the critics who are likely to label him a knee-jerk neoconservative...

...Starr provides both—nondogmatically, with grace, humor and self-deprecation...

...Comparisons of "the black lag with...

...He pursues his position with disarming directness, suggesting, for instance, that drug addicts "are immoral and that society has not only an excuse for contrasting them with people who are innocently ill, but a duty lo do so...

...Factual density and an analytic sweep distinguish Morris' work...

...Starr's gains distinction from the sureness of its broad strokes, the combined humanity and strength of its moral stance, and the author's ability to quickly dramatize complicated issues...

...He neglects to note, incidentally, the equally important fact that financing the canal stimulated the investment banking industry that would become centra] to the city's emergence as the world's financial capital...

...Starr's careful recounting of the effect of changing mores in New York is thoughtful and deliberately provocative...

...It refreshes and relieves to have so knowledgeable an observer answer knotty questions—e.g., has court reform minimized judicial delays?—by saying, "No one knows...

...and that government agencies—albeit usually public authorities—conceived and executed most of the ventures in public entrepreneurship Starr admires...

...Similarly, he describes the triple threat menacing a large segment of the city's housing stock—decay, welfare projects and rent control—yet in mercilessly exposing the consequences of past policies fully admits the uncertainties of the choices available today...

...Using such milestoneevents as the 1946 fuel-barge tugboat strike, and the transit walkouts of 1966 and 1980, lie vividly and concretely portrays the popular and official attitudes at given times...

...Geographically, the city is mostly a group of islands, separate from the rest of the nation...

...As for bribery, "Municipal government can eliminate graft only by finding a moral equivalent for it"—that is, by functioning efficiently...

...These flaws notwithstanding, Rise and Fall is one of only two first-ratebooks on New York City—the other is The Cost of Good Intentions, by Charles Morris— to appear thus far this decade...

...Amid the facts and opinions, deft observations startle: Middle-class neighborhoods "resent tax-subsidized penthouses on top of museums and welfare families moving in around thecorner...

...The Rockefeller omission is symptomatic of Starr's failing to establish a real state or national context for his study...

...But in addition to decrying the sad decline of mass transit, he makes us understand the political difficulties that prevented successive administrations from reversing the process...

...Unoppressively threaded throughout most of the chapters, too, is a discussion of the importance of values, of a shared set of standards, to the successful functioning of the urban agglomeration...

...Nor is the value transformation that troubles him an exclusively local phenomenon...

...culturally, economically and politically it is not...

...It is easy, while reading it, to forget that health costs in New York City are now moving toward, rather than away from, national norms...

...In numerous ways New York is unique, as Starr demonstrates, but the whole country, not the five boroughs alone, has taken the benighted journey " to the kingdom of the wishful" that he laments...

...No other work on Gotham's recent past sustains such superbly insightful commentary on topics as disparate and complex as rent control, race relations, crime, and welfare dependency, or manages to reflect the ambiguities inherent in any disciplined intellectual approach to them...

...This is not a book of hope...

...Starr's framework is a series of chapters analyzing the "big" problems that have plagued New York since 1946— the deterioration of the subway system, for example...

...Earlyin The Rise and Fall of New York City Starr rightly describes the construction of the Erie Canal as a critical undertaking leading to the growth and dominance of New York...

...For the most part, the failures have no descendants to talk about them...

...Roger Starr, who currently writes most of the New York Times editorials dealing with civic affairs, opens his narrative at the close of World War II, when William O'Dwyer presided over "the world's strongest surviving city.' He then takes up the next 40 years of the metropolis whose history he has lived, whose governments he has served as well as judged, and whose greatness and shortcomings he very clearly perceives...

...What kind of editorial would a Roger Starr of 1810 have written, one is tempted to ask, upon learning of a former mayor's Utopian plan for a 300-mile waterway through the wilderness of upper New York State— to be paid for by " new and creative" financing schemes...

...in fact, he had a greater impact locally than any of the mayors mentioned...

...Indeed, the genius of his candid and witty style is that he tells the story of this moral transformation, passes judgment upon it, and still renders the forces at play so accessible that the reader may come to an entirely different conclusion...

...European immigrant progress" badly need correction, because "The immigrant experience was not only more difficult than Americans choose to remember...

...Good history illuminates, and good commentary instructs...

...What's missing...

...Besides, many of the governmental programs he dissects originated on the state or Federal levels, not in the metropolis...