Books: "City of Fortune" By Mason B. Williams

 

City of Fortune: Inequality and the Making of Contemporary New York

By Mason B. Williams

W.W. Norton & Company; hardcover, 400 pages; $38.99

Mason B. Williams has written about New York history, as he is the author of City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York, which was an Editor's Choice of the New York Times Book Review. He is a teacher at Williams College.

City of Fortune: Inequality and the Making of Contemporary New York is Williams' new book, and it chronicles the last half century of the city's history, from the 1970s fiscal crisis to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Williams asserts that New York has gone from one characterized by middle-class aspiration to one of entrenched inequality. He focuses on three dimensions that drive the evolving city, housing, schooling, and policing. 

Finance and real estate are what fuels the city's growth, and each of them became more exclusive and, thus, less democratic. Affordable housing became scarce, while working-class New Yorkers faced rents well above the 30 percent standard of affordability, and the homeless population surged. One of the starting off points for the book, and one that should be familiar to people who know New York City history, is the destruction of the 1970s, especially in The Bronx, characterized by scenes of arson seen around Yankee Stadium.

Public schools became underfunded, and overwhelmed by charter schools with better resources, as well as academies, magnet schools, and gifted-and-talented programs. The pivotal turn came in 2003 when Mayor Bloomberg won the right to have direct authority over the school system, and along with Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, took earlier reforms and set about dissolving the district-based structure of decentralization in place since the late 1960s. As a result, students could list 12 schools they would prefer to attend, and were not limited to where they live. This brought about the implementation of small schools and targeting those who undeperformed, along with the rise of charters, such as Success Academy, led by former City Council member Eva Moskowitz.

Williams also spends a lot of time on policing, as he contends it was the most volatile flashpoint of the last half-century. Mayor Rudy Giuliani's Broken Windows strategy of attacking low-level offenses turned into Mayor Michael Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk policy of targeting young Bkack and Latino New Yorkers. All that did was show that the inequality was being racialized, making New York similar to many other cities across the United States.

In this excerpt, Williams writes how his study of the city is different than other works: One way to tell a story that defies a straightforward thematic narrative is to follow the people. And indeed, to sketch this book's cast of characters is to suggest something essential about its argument. Many of its major figures were famous politicians, the types whose names adorned front pages before they moved onto bridges, tunnels, and municipal buildings across the city and state: Governor Nelson Riockefeller, a political titan struggling toward the one prize that had eluded him; the liberal Republican mayor John Lindsay, his mid-1960s idealism derailed by the harsh realities of the early 1970s; the boisterous, irrepressible, sometimes tetchy Ed Koch and the brilliant, enigmatic son of immigrant shopkeepers, Mario Cuomo; the thoughtful, courtly, and at times languorous David Dinkins and the operatic, self-righteous Rudy Giuliani; the business data maven and philanthropist turned mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who bestrode the city as no mayor since LaGuardia until his power splintered on the shoals of the city's inequalities; and another duo in a long line of disputatious chief executives, the high-minded (and sometimes high-flown) progressive Mayor, Bill de Blasio, and the imperious prince of Albany, Andrew Cuomo, a commanding political tactician whose core principles, unlike his father's, often remained shrouded in mystery.

Other key politicians and political activists, famous in their own times, may be less familiar today. Still, the mention of their names will cast a spark in the memories of longtime New Yorkers. Because so much political power in New York City resides not in City Hall but in Albany, the leaders of the state legislature are essential to this story - people like the phlegmatic, calculating Lower East Sider, Democratic Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, and his primary antagonist, the pugnacious upstate conservative Joe Bruno, leader of the Senate Republican majority. So, too, are a host of nonelected public officials: police commissioners Benjamin Ward, Raymond Kelly, and Bill Bratton above all, but also the people who actually ran the city agencies and gave New York a sense of continuity through time, like the omnipresent commissioner, adviser, and keeper of the city's civic flame, Bobby Wagner. And so are political strategists and advisers such as the legendary, mysterious Republican pollster Arthur Finkelstein, who, after lifting conservative Republicans Alfonse D'Amato and George Pataki to power in New York State, would help do the same with Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Victor Orban in Hungary.

But political history is incomprehensible if told only through the stories of politicians, politicos, and public officials. And so this book is also filled with people who wielded power in other ways. Some, like the outer-borough real estate scion Donald Trump - whose business interests, personal ambitions, and sense of grievance led him repeatedly into the center of the city's political life even before he made his unlikely entry into politics - sought to leverage the post-crisis city's economic anxieties to advance their own agendas. Some introduced and circulated new ideas: people like the Harlem education advocates Preston Wilcox and Babette Edwards; the progressive educator Deborah Meier and her adversary-turned-ally Diane Ravitch; the scholars James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, authors of the Broken Windows approach to policing; and the scores of intellectuals and journalists who debated housing policy. Still others brought everyday New Yorkers together to make their numbers felt in the halls of power - union leaders and charter school advocates, police reform activists like the Reverend Al Sharpton; the heads of the big state- and citywide tenant groups and their neighborhood-level counterparts - all those people whose success, to borrow from the novelist Don DeLillo, depended on expressing their dissatisfaction in interesting ways.