New York University and the City

New York University and the City
Author: Thomas J. Frusciano
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 1997
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780813523477

An illustrated history of one of America's premier private universities, from its beginnings in 1831, and within the context of the social, political, and economic history of New York City. Vividly illustrated with both historical and contemporary images, the relationship between university and city is examined through biographical portraits of the personalities who made contributions to both. 250 illustrations.

Smarter New York City

Smarter New York City
Author: André Corrêa d'Almeida
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 458
Release: 2018-08-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0231545118

Innovation is often presented as being in the exclusive domain of the private sector. Yet despite widespread perceptions of public-sector inefficiency, government agencies have much to teach us about how technological and social advances occur. Improving governance at the municipal level is critical to the future of the twenty-first-century city, from environmental sustainability to education, economic development, public health, and beyond. In this age of acceleration and massive migration of people into cities around the world, this book explains how innovation from within city agencies and administrations makes urban systems smarter and shapes life in New York City. Using a series of case studies, Smarter New York City describes the drivers and constraints behind urban innovation, including leadership and organization; networks and interagency collaboration; institutional context; technology and real-time data collection; responsiveness and decision making; and results and impact. Cases include residential organic-waste collection, an NYPD program that identifies the sound of gunshots in real time, and the Vision Zero attempt to end traffic casualties, among others. Challenging the usefulness of a tech-centric view of urban innovation, Smarter New York City brings together a multidisciplinary and integrated perspective to imagine new possibilities from within city agencies, with practical lessons for city officials, urban planners, policy makers, civil society, and potential private-sector partners.

Bloomberg's New York

Bloomberg's New York
Author: Julian Brash
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2011
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0820335665

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg claims to run the city like a business. In Bloomberg's New York, Julian Brash applies methods from anthropology, geography, and other social science disciplines to examine what that means. He describes the mayor's attitude toward governance as the Bloomberg Way--a philosophy that holds up the mayor as CEO, government as a private corporation, desirable residents and businesses as customers and clients, and the city itself as a product to be branded and marketed as a luxury good. Commonly represented as pragmatic and nonideological, the Bloomberg Way, Brash argues, is in fact an ambitious reformulation of neoliberal governance that advances specific class interests. He considers the implications of this in a blow-by-blow account of the debate over the Hudson Yards plan, which aimed to transform Manhattan's far west side into the city's next great high-end district. Bringing this plan to fruition proved surprisingly difficult as activists and entrenched interests pushed back against the Bloomberg administration, suggesting that despite Bloomberg's success in redrawing the rules of urban governance, older political arrangements--and opportunities for social justice--remain.

City of Workers, City of Struggle

City of Workers, City of Struggle
Author: Joshua B. Freeman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 560
Release: 2019-04-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 023154958X

From the founding of New Amsterdam until today, working people have helped create and re-create the City of New York through their struggles. Starting with artisans and slaves in colonial New York and ranging all the way to twenty-first-century gig-economy workers, this book tells the story of New York’s labor history anew. City of Workers, City of Struggle brings together essays by leading historians of New York and a wealth of illustrations, offering rich descriptions of work, daily life, and political struggle. It recounts how workers have developed formal and informal groups not only to advance their own interests but also to pursue a vision of what the city should be like and whom it should be for. The book goes beyond the largely white, male wage workers in mainstream labor organizations who have dominated the history of labor movements to look at enslaved people, indentured servants, domestic workers, sex workers, day laborers, and others who have had to fight not only their masters and employers but also labor groups that often excluded them. Through their stories—how they fought for inclusion or developed their own ways to advance—it recenters labor history for contemporary struggles. City of Workers, City of Struggle offers the definitive account of the four-hundred-year history of efforts by New York workers to improve their lives and their communities. In association with the exhibition City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York at the Museum of the City of New York

Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City

Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City
Author: Jonathan Soffer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 526
Release: 2012-01-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0231150334

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.

City Reading

City Reading
Author: David M. Henkin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780231107440

Henkin explores the influential but little-noticed role reading played in New York City's public life between 1825 and 1865. The "ubiquitous urban texts"--from newspapers to paper money, from street signs to handbills--became both indispensable urban guides and apt symbols for a new kind of public life that emerged first in New York.

The Dying City

The Dying City
Author: Brian L. Tochterman
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2017-05-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469633078

In this eye-opening cultural history, Brian Tochterman examines competing narratives that shaped post–World War II New York City. As a sense of crisis rose in American cities during the 1960s and 1970s, a period defined by suburban growth and deindustrialization, no city was viewed as in its death throes more than New York. Feeding this narrative of the dying city was a wide range of representations in film, literature, and the popular press--representations that ironically would not have been produced if not for a city full of productive possibilities as well as challenges. Tochterman reveals how elite culture producers, planners and theorists, and elected officials drew on and perpetuated the fear of death to press for a new urban vision. It was this narrative of New York as the dying city, Tochterman argues, that contributed to a burgeoning and broad anti-urban political culture hostile to state intervention on behalf of cities and citizens. Ultimately, the author shows that New York's decline--and the decline of American cities in general--was in part a self-fulfilling prophecy bolstered by urban fear and the new political culture nourished by it.

New York City Politics

New York City Politics
Author: Bruce F. Berg
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2007-11-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0813543894

Most experts consider economic development to be the dominant factor influencing urban politics. They point to the importance of the finance and real estate industries, the need to improve the tax base, and the push to create jobs. Bruce F. Berg maintains that there are three forces which are equally important in explaining New York City politics: economic development; the city’s relationships with the state and federal governments, which influence taxation, revenue and public policy responsibilities; and New York City’s racial and ethnic diversity, resulting in demands for more equitable representation and greater equity in the delivery of public goods and services. New York City Politics focuses on the impact of these three forces on the governance of New York City’s political system including the need to promote democratic accountability, service delivery equity, as well as the maintenance of civil harmony. This second edition updates the discussion with examples from the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations as well as current public policy issues including infrastructure, housing and homelessness, land use regulations, and education.

Activist New York

Activist New York
Author: Steven H. Jaffe
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2018-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1479804606

Activist New York surveys New York City's long history of social activism from the 1650's to the 2010's. Bringing these passionate histories alive, Activist New York is a visual exploration of these movements, serving as a companion book to the highly-praised Museum of the City of New York exhibition of the same name. New York's primacy as a metropolis of commerce, finance, industry, media, and ethnic diversity has given it a unique and powerfully influential role in the history of American and global activism. Steven H. Jaffe explores how New York's evolving identities as an incubator and battleground for activists have made it a "machine for change." In responding to the city as a site of slavery, immigrant entry, labor conflicts, and wealth disparity, New Yorkers have repeatedly challenged the status quo. Activist New York brings to life the characters who make up these vibrant histories, including David Ruggles, an African American shopkeeper who helped enslaved fugitives on the city's Underground Railroad during the 1830s; Clara Lemlich, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who helped spark the 1909 "Uprising of 20,000" that forever changed labor relations in the city's booming garment industry; and Craig Rodwell, Karla Jay, and others who forged a Gay Liberation movement both before and after the Stonewall Riot of June 1969. Permanent exhibition: Puffin Foundation Gallery, Museum of the City of New York, USA.

The Soft City

The Soft City
Author: Terry Williams
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2022-04-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231555016

There is no rawer human experience than sex, and in a city as diverse as New York, sexual experiences come in many forms. In the pre-Giuliani days, temptation flooded Times Square on theater marquees and neon signs. Behind unmarked doors downtown, more adventurous experiences awaited for those in the know. In The Soft City, the ethnographer Terry Williams, with the help of accomplices and informants, ventures deep into the underground world of sex in New York. The book explores different aspects of the “perverse space” of the city: porn theaters, sex shops, peep shows, restroom cruising, sadomasochism clubs, swingers’ events, and many more. Featuring field notes taken between 1975 and the present, The Soft City documents the ways that New Yorkers on the social periphery have thought about and pursued sex, whether for recreation or to make a living. It also presents an unconventional account of New York City’s many transformations, showing how the soft city—its people and their unique character—evolved in response to official and social pressures. Featuring Williams’s unmistakable portraits of the demimonde as well as the accounts of other ethnographers challenging themselves to dive into the city’s hidden crannies, The Soft City is as irreproducible as it is provocative.