“New York, New York, New York; Four Decades of Succuss, Excess, and Transformation” Thomas Dyja (Simon & Schuster, 2021)

The great goal of social science is to amass large amounts of data relating to a social phenomenon, and then organize and synthesize that data in order to explain how that phenomenon works – essentially separating the out the signal from the noise. In “New York, New York, New York; Four Decades of Succuss, Excess, and Transformation,” Thomas Dyja sets out for himself that extremely high bar. He pulls together an overwhelming amount of information about the governance and culture of New York City from 1978 to the present and attempts to tease out what actually happened. It is nearly impossible to believe that one author could accumulate and one mind could retain and come to an understanding such an avalanche of facts. In telling this story, he succeeds beyond any reasonable expectation. 

I came to New York in 1978 and have lived here continuously ever since. I began working in the public sphere in 1991. So, in a very material sense, this is my (along with a great many other peoples’) story. I was in, or near, the room where some of the stuff he describes happened. I worked with or knew a significant double-digit percentage of the people he talks about. I generally come out where he does in his broadest conclusions, but as is absolutely inevitable in the blizzard of information Dyja has digested, some of the “facts” and figures he cites either are incorrect or can’t be right (There have never been 50,000 people sleeping on the streets of New York. There have been 50,000 people receiving services for the homeless from the City – mostly living in shelters, most of them families – and not the single adult men who most New Yorkers have in mind when they think of the homeless. While he cite’s Kaiser’s The Gay Metropolis, can it be true that 50% of gay baby boomers died of AIDs?). Dyja also accepts as true a number of the basic assumptions that constitute the conventional wisdom regarding public policy in the city over the last forty years, some of which are just aren’t true or are gross over simplifications (gentrification leads to displacement, homelessness is caused by lack of housing). But, certainly, Dyja’s heart is in the right place, and he is willing to call “bullshit” on a good many self-serving and false claims. I certainly can’t argue with his placing our work on the Bryant Park restoration, and the thinkers we relied on like Holly Whyte and George Kelling, at the dead center of his epic. 

The book relies on press reports and interviews with high profile players for much of its factual foundation. Unfortunately, the New York press often gets the details of local coverage wrong (and more than occasionally gets the entire story wrong), taking the press releases of public officials at face value – and while newspaper reporting may be the first draft of history, it constitutes an unreliable basis on which to write its later versions when it comes to New York City government. It has also been my experience that folks in public life in New York tend to gild their lilies – they take credit for stuff they didn’t do and they seem to remember that positive results they stumbled into were things they planned. Relying on those sources without questioning them will lead to false positives. But when bringing together so many stories, checking them all out would be a lot to ask. 

The book’s great accomplishment is to highlight the policies of the Koch administration that laid the groundwork for New York’s revitalization (particularly in housing and public space) that continues through today, and the cadre of smart, effective professionals that Koch attracted to government the like of which has not been seen since (unfortunately). My personal recollection of third term Ed Koch was of a bullying narcissist. As the New York Times recently reported on at length, Koch remained in the closest during the AIDs crisis and actively worked to cover his personal tracks. Koch also deployed racially inflammatory rhetoric, amping up the city’s most debilitating division. To put it mildly, he consciously failed to attempt to understand, and even dismissed, the concerns of New York City’s large Black community. But, at the end of the day that didn’t drive Koch Administration policy, which, using clever financing mechanisms, built tens of thousands of new affordable housing units (which over decades ultimately became hundreds of thousands), transforming the city’s most neglected, abandoned and disinvested neighborhoods into desirable places. And speaking of places, Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis thought up the idea of private non-profit entities to secure resources for and improve the management of parks – leading to the restoration of Central, Bryant (in which I was directly involved) and Prospect Parks. I am convinced that those two programs, in housing and parks, were the key elements that changed the perception of cities and sparked the return to urban centers across the country – a force so powerful that it has continued through 9/11, the financial turbulence of 2008, hurricane Sandy and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Dyja’s writing about 9/11 is particularly beautiful; capturing the moment perfectly. He avoids the solipsism and self pity that infects so many other attempts to describe that horrific day. It was a primary election day, on which I was working the polls for mayoral candidate Mark Green in the northeast Bronx. I ended up in a four hour walk to the Upper West Side, with a non-functional transit system, limited information and an inability to get through to home on the phone. All along the walk home I had a view of smoke rising from lower Manhattan as I moved south. When I got home and turned on the television, the video of the time between the planes’ flying into the buildings and their collapse was the worst thing I have experienced before or since. Dyja bravely and frankly identifies the forces that made the return to normal at the former World Trade Center site impossible and that have left us with a permanent, disheartening gash in New York’s side (which will never be remedied), and a collection of inhumanely scaled towers. 

It was interesting to read of the yin and yang during the Bloomberg Administration of Amanda Burden and Dan Doctoroff, which I didn’t understand at the time, while I was toiling ten miles away from City Hall in the neighborhood development fields of Jamaica, Queens: Burden having worked for William H. (Holly) Whyte, the advocate for small scale urbanism and close observation, and Doctoroff being the purveyor of grand plans (like the failed New York Olympics) and big ideas (like the failed Hudson Yards). The bastard child of this dynamic is the hugely popular tourist attraction of the High Line, which isn’t really a successful public space (because it is mostly a place to walk through, rather than linger in) but has been a powerful engine for real estate development along its flanks, and a model for similar projects across the country.

There is a lot in the book about the commercial worlds of hip hop and the art market, which may be useful scene setting – but about which I, personally, don’t very much care and think aren’t particularly culturally important. The New York of the late 1970’s and early-to-mid 1980’s may have been one of urban decline, but it was also a uniquely yeasty and important era for high culture here – particularly in music and dance. To me, it would have been much better to use the work of people like Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, Trisha Brown and Twyla Tharp as the cultural yard stick against which to measure changes in the city over the period. The transformation of Carnegie Hall from an overheated place where paint chips fell from the ceiling on to your head during classical concerts to the glamourous outpost of European high culture fostered by Sandy Weill is a story worth telling. The book has no mention of other cultural innovators like Stephanie French. But, Dyja wrote his book, not mine. 

On the homelessness front, Dyja only briefly quotes Rosanne Haggerty, my social entrepreneurial heroine, and instead relies on testimony from the crafty, sly fox of the unhoused, Bob Hayes. I would like to know more about the Haggerty’s departure from the path-breaking Common Ground and that organization’s transformation into Breaking Ground, now a central institution in what Haggerty calls the homeless/industrial complex. The current state of services for the homeless in New York is the result of bad data, misinformation and worse public policy, which Dyja doesn’t clearly explain. 

Oddly, NY x 3, provides more detail and moves more slowly through the early Koch years and accelerates the narrative pace during DeBlasio Administration. It’s the opposite of how history is usually recounted – with the past receding and the present in the forefront. As a result, the beginning of the book is a rewarding slog, and the end of the book feels rushed and less detailed. There is a great deal about David Rockefeller (Chase) and Walter Wriston (Citi), but nothing about Jamie Dimon (Chase) and Dick Parsons (Citi) (another one of my heroes). That, notwithstanding, Dyja provides the most telling analysis of the eight years of DeBlasio’s mayoralty of which I am aware; which is impressive, given that we’re it is only months behind us. While I was a middling official in City government during DeBlasio’s last four years, I wasn’t sure of what was hitting me. I was a believer in DeBlasio’s attempts to improve the situation of the city’s worst well off, but was mystified by the chaos, lack of direction and just plain bad decision making that seemed to be trickling down from above. Dyja sympathetically explains DeBlasio’s lack of managerial skills, diffidence and indecisiveness.  

The book made me long for the New York of my youth. Not because the era was more fun or interesting, but because City government during the 80’s effectively implemented policies that made a difference – and the Mayor and Deputy Mayors (like Ken Lipper, Nat Leventhal and John Zuccotti) backing up risked taking innovative managers like Gordon Davis at Parks and Paul Crotty at Housing. What we are now left with is a sclerotic, risk averse local government that is strangled by its outdated, dysfunctional personnel, legal and contracting procedures. What we have inherited is ineffectual public administration by press release. I was privileged to be a part of the private sector effectiveness of New York’s largest business improvement districts, which Dyja also focuses on (although, in a small detail that perhaps only matters to me, he glancingly misses why Rudy Giuliani had Dan Biederman and me fired from Grand Central Partnership). So, I don’t really have much to complain about on that score.

The book’s epigraph is a quote from the wonderful and underappreciated Whyte, whom I also knew and tremendously admired. Whyte was the father or godfather of Bryant Park. Perhaps Dyja’s recognition of Holly, whom he cites through out the book, and Richard Rein’s revelatory recent biography, will give Holly his day. As Deja makes clear, Holly Whyte has given us the tools to create create great urban places. I, for one, will ever be grateful to Dyja for his superhuman research and telling this story with so much elan and passion. I’m assigning New York, New York, New York to my children, who take a safe and vibrant New York City for granted, so that they can get something of a feel for what Dad was doing while they were growing up.