ED GLAESER: America's urban decline first began during the 1950s.
The process of suburbanization, abetted by prosperity,
massive automobile ownership, and the highway system,
plowed along during this era, as did the deindustrialization of older cities.
During the 1920s, industries had left cities for suburbs,
like Detroit's River Rouge.
But after World War II, industry was more likely to leave the north all together.
The Taft Hartley Act of 1948 enabled some states to pass Right to Work laws which
made unionization far more difficult, and many southern states passed these laws.
The work of Tom Holmes compares manufacturing growth
after 1947 in counties right on the border of two states,
one of which has a right to work law, the other which is pro-union.
Holmes found that manufacturing grew far more in the pro-business
states than the pro union-states.
And almost all of America's older, colder cities were in those pro-union states.
So the 1950s were a tough time for many of those cities.
Boston lost 100,000 people during the decade, a 13.7% drop in its population.
Detroit's population shrank by 180,000 or 9.7%.
Pittsburgh also lost more than a tenth of its population.
But during the 1950s the population of New York City fell by only 1.4%,
120,000 people.
New York was already proving to be remarkably resilient.
Over the longer haul of the ten most populous cities in 1950,
8 of the 10 are at least 20% less populous today.
The two exceptions are Los Angeles and New York, both of which have grown.
New York's future looked enormously bright in the early 1960s.
This was the rea in which glistening glass skyscrapers,
like Gorden Bunshaft's Lieberhaus and
Mies van der Rohe's Secrum building were built along Park Avenue.
The United Nations was growing in Turtle Bay,
giving New Yorkers the feeling that they were citizens of the capital of the world.
Broadway's musicals, the works of Rogers and
Hammerstein still helped define American culture.
And Ed Sullivan reached out from Broadway into tens of millions of American homes
every Sunday at eight.
The Yankees dominated baseball, and
in 1961 Roger Marris finally bested Babe Ruth's home run record.
It was the age of Mad Men, and New York was on top of the world.
16 years later, New York was essentially bankrupt.
The city's population fell from 7.8 million in 1960 to 7.1 million in 1980.
By the deadly burning summer of 1977,
it seemed as if all that bright future was gone.
What went wrong?
How did such bright urban promise dim so quickly?
We should start with the economics.
The largest industrial cluster in America in the 1950s was not
automobile production in Detroit, it was garment production in New York.
As transportation costs plummeted, it became much cheaper to sew
ordinary garments in low-wage southern states than Manhattan.
It was easy to ship them.
In later decades, it would be even cheaper to make them in China and Bangladesh.
In a few short years during the 1960s, the garment industry, which had been
a mainstay of New York City since the 1820s, shed hundreds of thousands of jobs.
This same story repeated itself throughout New York's once mighty manufacturing base.
New York City's Harbor still thriving when Elia Kazan and
Marlon Brando made On the Waterfront in 1954 was now made obsolete
by New Jersey's new Elizabeth Marine Terminal.
The parent company of Domino Sugar Refining,
once the city's most important industry, decided to expand its facilities in Texas.
Rather than it's landmark Brooklyn factory.
In later years, other industries, most notably finance, would make up for
the lost manufacturing employment.
But between 1969 and 1976, New York lost about 600,000 jobs.
Social distress accompanied economic dislocation.
For centuries, New York city has attracted the world's poor,
the worlds huddled masses yearning to be free, as Emma Lazarus put it.
Ellis Island was the port of entry for millions of immigrants to America.
And New York was also the port of entry for
hundreds of thousands of African-Americans fleeing the Jim Crow south.
Between 1940 and 1970, the number of African Americans in New York City
rose from 460,000 to 1.7 million.
New York has benefited enormously from this flow of talent.
The genius of the Harlem Renaissance lit up the city and the world.
Queens was blessed with the presence of Louis Armstrong, who was born
in New Orleans, for almost 30 years.
Yet the legacy of slavery meant that many African Americans were poor,
like past immigrants from Ireland and Eastern Europe.
By the 1960s, cities weren't willing to just accept urban poverty.
Urban reformers like Jerome Cavanaugh in Michigan and
John Lindsay in New York tried to use city resources to make poverty less awful.
A completely laudable aim, but one that's difficult sometimes to square with
the limitations on what cities can do.
Poverty also came into the spotlight because of New York City's rise in
crime rates.
In 1957, there were 304 murders.
By 1961, that number had increased to 483.
In 1967, the year of the summer of love and far less notably my birth on
the island of Manhattan, the number of New York homicides reaches 746.
By the time I was 5 in 1972,
the number of homicides has doubled again to 1,691.
The number of annual homicides would remain over 1,500 the rest of the decade.
And hit 1,814 in 1980, almost 6 times the figure in 1957.
There were safe parts of the city when I was a kid, but
they had shrunk into small amounts of walkable space.
And children who grew up in poverty also grew up looking over their shoulders,
fearing robbery or worse.
Mayor Lindsay's fun city had become a city of fear.
Abandoned spaces like the South Bronx bespoke urban decay.
The graffiti that seemed to be everywhere radiated both urban chaos, but
also the creativity that still surged in the heart of the city.
Lindsay may not have been able to stop the crime wave, but
he does deserve the credit for helping to keep New York essentially riot free.
In the tense hours after Martin Luther King's death when New York,
like much of urban America seemed on the edge of explosion,
Lindsey walked the streets of Harlem.
He was a calming, caring presence,
reminding African American New Yorkers that he was on their side.
And they largely believed him.
Lindsay had flaws, but his commitment to racial justice could not be questioned.
Why did crime explode in New York from 1957 to 1972?
Crime is disproportionately an activity of young men and
the Baby Boom had given America and New York a lot of young men by the 1960s.
But changing demographics can only explain a small amount,
maybe a fifth of the rise in crime found in New York and elsewhere.
Certainly, there was breakdown in police effectiveness.
Some experts have cited a loss in morale due to investigations of
police corruptions or malfeasance, but it's hard to quantify that theory.
I think that the best explanations are largely social.
The first line of defense against crime is not the police force, but
society as a whole.
Parents who restrain their children's excesses,
communities that keep a watch on the streets.
The social organization that once brought some order to New York's neighborhoods
seems to have weakened dramatically after 1957.
The most famous example of this breakdown was the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese
in Queens.
The dying girl's cries for help were ignored by her neighbors.
Even if this social hypothesis is correct,
we don't know why New York society changed.
Jane Jacobs, the great urbanist, would lay some blame on public housing projects,
which replaced the defensible space of old tenements with tall towers and
open, often empty space.
In the old neighborhoods, there would be eyes on the street as people looked out
their windows from short buildings.
In the new towers, the streets were divorced from the apartments, and
consequently, there were fewer people watching when someone was mugged.
My own work with Bruce Sasido documents that street crime is higher in
neighborhoods with taller buildings, even holding income constanta, although
apartments are actually less likely to be burglarized than single-family homes.
The city responded to poverty and rising crime by spending more.
Lindsay had been elected on a good government ticket and
immediately tried to reign in spending by getting tough with public sector unions.
This silk stocking Republican didn't know the street brawl that he was going
to start.
Mike Quill, the tough as nails head of New York's transit workers,
went to jail for leading a 12 day strike in 1966.
Lindsay got an injunction ordering the subways to start rolling again.
Lindsay knew how to work the courts.
But Quill just ignored the injunction,
saying that the judge can drop dead in his black robes.
I don't care if I rot in jail, I will not call off the strike.
Quill won, and his workers' wages rose by almost a dollar an hour.
City spending rose while the city's economy was sputtering.
The Lindsay Administration responded with accounting ledgered men.
When Lindsay left office in 1973,
the new mayor, Abe Beam, former accountant himself, was left to pick up the pieces.
Beam couldn't do it, maybe no one could have.
By 1975, New York was on the brink of bankruptcy.
Beam sought federal help But President Ford wasn't going to give cash without
some promises that New York would reform.
Promises that Beam couldn't really make and certainly couldn't keep.
When Ford turned to him down,
the daily news headlines screamed Ford to City: Drop Dead.
Surely one of the most famous headlines in history.
Ford didn't actually say those words, but
in those years it seemed like not just the White House, but history itself.
Was telling New York City to drop dead.
New York only avoided bankruptcy by turning to the state.
Governor Carey established the Municipal Assistance Corporation that would keep
New York City liquid, but would also take over fiscal control.
Proud New York had lost the ability to manage its own finances.
By the end of Beame's term the city seemed like it was in total chaos.
TV Cameras during the 1977 World Series caught Bronx buildings burning.
The Fire Department's ability to respond had been reduced by budget cuts.
A Summer black-out set off a crime spree.
Which sharply contrasted with the 1966 blackout when the city had stayed safe.
The murderous Son of Sam terrorized the city.
In the midst of the maelstrom,
Ed Koch managed to get himself elected mayor over the discredited Beame and
the unforgettable Bella Abzug who once owned the liberal heart of the city.
Koch had also been a liberal lion.
He became famous besting the last boss of Tammany Hall, Carmine DeSapio.
But as crime rates rose, Koch morphed into the get tough on crime candidate.
1977 was his year.
As New Yorks voters cast away traditional ethnic politics and
cast away the liberal hopes of the 1960s, the cities madness needed to be managed
and voters thought that Ed Koch was the man for the job.