Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City

Author: Jonathan Soffer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231150334
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 526

Book Description
In 1978, Ed Koch assumed control of a city plagued by filth, crime, bankruptcy, and racial tensions. By the end of his mayoral run in 1989 and despite the Wall Street crash of 1987, his administration had begun rebuilding neighborhoods and infrastructure. Unlike many American cities, Koch's New York was growing, not shrinking. Gentrification brought new businesses to neglected corners and converted low-end rental housing to coops and condos. Nevertheless, not all the changes were positive--AIDS, crime, homelessness, and violent racial conflict increased, marking a time of great, if somewhat uneven, transition. For better or worse, Koch's efforts convinced many New Yorkers to embrace a new political order subsidizing business, particularly finance, insurance, and real estate, and privatizing public space. Each phase of the city's recovery required a difficult choice between moneyed interests and social services, forcing Koch to be both a moderate and a pragmatist as he tried to mitigate growing economic inequality. Throughout, Koch's rough rhetoric (attacking his opponents as "crazy," "wackos," and "radicals") prompted charges of being racially divisive. The first book to recast Koch's legacy through personal and mayoral papers, authorized interviews, and oral histories, this volume plots a history of New York City through two rarely studied yet crucial decades: the bankruptcy of the 1970s and the recovery and crash of the 1980s.

New York City For Dummies

Author: Myka Carroll
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470430036
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
For Dummies Travel guides are the ultimate user-friendly trip planners, combining the broad appeal and time-tested features of the For Dummies series with up-to-the-minute advice and information from the experts at Frommer’s. Small trim size for use on-the-go Focused coverage of only the best hotels and restaurants in all price ranges Tear-out “cheat sheet” with full-color maps or easy reference pointers From soaring skyscrapers to rumbling subways, power shopping to bargain-hunting, world-renowned restaurants to neighborhood delis and pizzerias, majestic cathedrals to Times Square—New York has it all. Chances are you can't do it all, but this friendly guide helps you take a big bite out of the Big Apple with: Maps and tips for getting around by public transit, plus sights best seen on foot A calendar of events for every season A shopper's guide, including trendy areas like SoHo, NoHo, and NoLita Information about great free attractions, including the Staten Island Ferry Sample itineraries to help you make the most of your trip Like every For Dummies travel guide, New York City For Dummies, Fifth Edition includes: Down-to-earth trip-planning advice What you shouldn’t miss — and what you can skip The best hotels and restaurants for every budget With information on "must see" attractions like the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Central Park, places to take the kids, an insider's look at the nightlife, tips on getting discount tickets to popular shows, and a Quick Concierge with all kinds of info, this guide will have you saying, "I love New York."

DK Eyewitness New York City

Author: DK Eyewitness
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0744061571
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 517

Book Description
Winner of the Travel Media Awards 2019 Guide of the Year Whether you want to visit the iconic Empire State Building, take a leisurely stroll through Central Park, or sample the sublime cocktails in East Village, your DK Eyewitness travel guide makes sure you experience all that New York City has to offer. Dynamic and diverse, New York City is bursting at the seams with unmissable sights, mouth-watering cuisines, and truly unique experiences. From the soaring skyscrapers of Manhattan to the trendy bars of Brooklyn, the vibrant jazz clubs of Harlem to the cobblestoned streets of SoHo, the city offers everything in abundance. Our annually updated guide brings New York City to life, transporting you there like no other travel guide does with expert-led insights and advice, detailed breakdowns of all the must-see sights, photographs on practically every page, and our trademark illustrations. You'll discover: - our pick of New York City's must-sees, top experiences, and hidden gems - the best spots to eat, drink, shop, and stay - detailed maps and walks which make navigating the city easy - easy-to-follow itineraries - expert advice: get ready, get around, and stay safe - color-coded chapters to every part of New York City from the Upper East Side to Lower Manhattan, Chelsea to Chinatown Have less time? Try our pocket-friendly Top 10 New York City for top 10 lists to all things New York City.

The New York Nobody Knows

Author: William B. Helmreich
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691169705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474

Book Description
"As a kid growing up in Manhattan, William Helmreich played a game with his father they called "Last Stop." They would pick a subway line and ride it to its final destination, and explore the neighborhood there. Decades later, Helmreich teaches university courses about New York, and his love for exploring the city is as strong as ever. Putting his feet to the test, he decided that the only way to truly understand New York was to walk virtually every block of all five boroughs--an astonishing 6,000 miles. His epic journey lasted four years and took him to every corner of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Helmreich spoke with hundreds of New Yorkers from every part of the globe and from every walk of life, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former mayors Rudolph Giuliani, David Dinkins, and Edward Koch. Their stories and his are the subject of this captivating and highly original book. We meet the Guyanese immigrant who grows beautiful flowers outside his modest Queens residence in order to always remember the homeland he left behind, the Brooklyn-raised grandchild of Italian immigrants who illuminates a window of his brownstone with the family's old neon grocery-store sign, and many, many others. Helmreich draws on firsthand insights to examine essential aspects of urban social life such as ethnicity, gentrification, and the use of space. He finds that to be a New Yorker is to struggle to understand the place and to make a life that is as highly local as it is dynamically cosmopolitan."--Publisher's description.

A People's Guide to New York City

Author: Carolina Bank Muñoz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520964152
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 579

Book Description
This alternative guidebook for one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations explores all five boroughs to reveal a people’s New York City. The sites and stories of A People’s Guide to New York City shift our perception of what defines New York, placing the passion, determination, defeats, and victories of its people at the core. Delving into the histories of New York's five boroughs, you will encounter enslaved Africans in revolt, women marching for equality, workers on strike, musicians and performers claiming streets for their art, and neighbors organizing against landfills and industrial toxins and in support of affordable housing and public schools. The streetscapes that emerge from these groups' struggles bear the traces, and this book shows you where to look to find them. New York City is a preeminent global city, serving as the headquarters for hundreds of multinational firms and a world-renowned cultural hub for fashion, art, and music. It is among the most multicultural cities in the world and also one of the most segregated cities in the United States. The people that make this global city function—immigrants, people of color, and the working classes—reside largely in the so-called outer boroughs, outside the corporations, neon, and skyscrapers of Manhattan. A People’s Guide to New York City expands the scope and scale of traditional guidebooks, providing an equitable exploration of the diverse communities throughout the city. Through the stories of over 150 sites across the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island as well as thematic tours and contemporary and archival photographs, a people’s New York emerges, one in which collective struggles for justice and freedom have shaped the very landscape of the city.

New York, New York, New York

Author: Thomas Dyja
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982149809
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book A lively, immersive history by an award-winning urbanist of New York City’s transformation, and the lessons it offers for the city’s future. Dangerous, filthy, and falling apart, garbage piled on its streets and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble; New York’s terrifying, if liberating, state of nature in 1978 also made it the capital of American culture. Over the next thirty-plus years, though, it became a different place—kinder and meaner, richer and poorer, more like America and less like what it had always been. New York, New York, New York, Thomas Dyja’s sweeping account of this metamorphosis, shows it wasn’t the work of a single policy, mastermind, or economic theory, nor was it a morality tale of gentrification or crime. Instead, three New Yorks evolved in turn. After brutal retrenchment came the dazzling Koch Renaissance and the Dinkins years that left the city’s liberal traditions battered but laid the foundation for the safe streets and dotcom excess of Giuliani’s Reformation in the ‘90s. Then the planes hit on 9/11. The shaky city handed itself over to Bloomberg who merged City Hall into his personal empire, launching its Reimagination. From Hip Hop crews to Wall Street bankers, D.V. to Jay-Z, Dyja weaves New Yorkers famous, infamous, and unknown—Yuppies, hipsters, tech nerds, and artists; community organizers and the immigrants who made this a truly global place—into a narrative of a city creating ways of life that would ultimately change cities everywhere. With great success, though, came grave mistakes. The urbanism that reclaimed public space became a means of control, the police who made streets safe became an occupying army, technology went from a means to the end. Now, as anxiety fills New Yorker’s hearts and empties its public spaces, it’s clear that what brought the city back—proximity, density, and human exchange—are what sent Covid-19 burning through its streets, and the price of order has come due. A fourth evolution is happening and we must understand that the greatest challenge ahead is the one New York failed in the first three: The cures must not be worse than the disease. Exhaustively researched, passionately told, New York, New York, New York is a colorful, inspiring guide to not just rebuilding but reimagining a great city.

Gotham

Author: Edwin G. Burrows
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199729107
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1412

Book Description
To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe. In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heights, the destructive seven years of British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial center, the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of immigrants, the rise of mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast of thousands--the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich Village from the city's street-grid plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life; and Walt Whitman, who happily celebrated that same life. We meet the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Boss Tweed and his nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis and Horace Greeley; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel Waring and his "white angels" (who revolutionized the sanitation department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their mark on this great city. The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America, and a book that will mesmerize everyone interested in the peaks and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth. Gotham is a dazzling read, a fast-paced, brilliant narrative that carries the reader along as it threads hundreds of stories into one great blockbuster of a book.

A History of Housing in New York City

Author: Richard Plunz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231062978
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 470

Book Description
Since its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century as the nation's "metropolis," New York has faced the most challenging housing problems of any American city, but it has also led the nation in innovation and reform. Plunz traces New York's housing development from 1850 to the present, exploring the housing of all classes, discussing the development of types ranging from the single-family house to the high-rise apartment tower.

New York

Author: Jill S. Gross
Publisher: Megacities
ISBN: 9781788212038
Category : New York (N.Y.)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A comprehensive analysis of the political, economic and social dynamics that have made New York a megacity today.

Homelessness in New York City

Author: Thomas J. Main
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479846872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
Introduction -- The beginnings of homelessness policy under Koch -- The development of homelessness policy under Koch -- Homelessness policy under Dinkins -- Homelessness policy under Giuliani -- Homelessness policy under Bloomberg -- Homelessness policy under De Blasio -- Conclusion.