Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00:00The challenge for New York is going to be the decline of the tax base in the 1950s and 1960s
00:00:06as white middle-class New Yorkers flee the city.
00:00:09You know, after World War II, 500,000 white Brooklynites move out of that borough in 20 years.
00:00:17Now, the population of the borough remains the same because more than 500,000 black people move in.
00:00:23But ultimately, the effect of it is actually extraordinary.
00:00:27We've replaced middle-class communities with poorer communities,
00:00:32and we've isolated poor people inside inner cities with very few economic opportunities,
00:00:37very little chance of mobility.
00:00:44And there was more trouble to come.
00:00:47As suburbanization and white flight continued,
00:00:50and the flight of industry begun 10 years before accelerated dramatically,
00:00:55another exodus was underway, on the waterfront,
00:00:59where a revolution in shipping methods was causing the great port itself,
00:01:03the city's lifeblood and mainstay for more than three and a half centuries,
00:01:07to spiral into decline.
00:01:10Where there were 100,000 and more longshoremen in New York in 1950,
00:01:15as you begin to shift to containerization, you just need one guy in a cab
00:01:19and somebody else to hook the thing onto the container,
00:01:21and maybe one guy just to kind of ease it into place,
00:01:24and they lift these whole containers.
00:01:26They need lots of space for that.
00:01:28Well, New York City doesn't have lots of space.
00:01:30You need hundreds of acres to stack up the containers,
00:01:32to move 18-wheel tractor-trailer trucks to turn around.
00:01:35Well, they found that on the New Jersey side.
00:01:38So in these two huge areas, just these two, industrial jobs, harbor jobs,
00:01:44New York City hemorrhages in those, let's say, 15 or 20 years, really,
00:01:50after the end of World War II.
00:01:54And I think it's one of the ways of noticing how to make the city work.
00:01:59If the port doesn't work, the city's not going to work.
00:02:03And that sense of the thriving, noisy, dirty, exuberant waterfront is gone now.
00:02:16Take a ride down the West Side Drive now, what's left of it.
00:02:20You see some of the piers just rotting into the river like bad teeth.
00:02:24There's no people working on them.
00:02:26You have the one luxury liner pier,
00:02:28but that's not what it was up until 1962,
00:02:32where you see liner after liner after liner.
00:02:36Maybe the great symbol of what happened to that waterfront
00:02:41is one of its greatest attractions right now, which is the Intrepid,
00:02:45which is a ship that doesn't sail.
00:02:48It's got a flight deck covered with ferocious-looking jet warplanes
00:02:53whose noses are pointed straight at H&H bagels.
00:02:57It's crowded every weekend, but it doesn't go anywhere.
00:03:03So it employs people really as a function of memory
00:03:07rather than of anything that's active or new or thriving.
00:03:12It's a museum.
00:03:13By 1962, New York seemed to many people to have lost its way.
00:03:25Only 30 years before, F. Scott Fitzgerald had stood atop the Empire State Building
00:03:31and gazed out into the endless expanse of blue and green
00:03:34that stretched beyond the city's borders,
00:03:37filled with despair to see that the city had limits.
00:03:43Now a new kind of despair could be discerned from the city's tallest towers.
00:03:48The blue and green that had once marked New York's limits
00:03:51had turned to grey and brown
00:03:53and signified something more ominous still,
00:03:56the limitless suburban sprawl that was now superseding the city,
00:04:00an endless agglomeration of highways, parking lots,
00:04:03and tract housing developments,
00:04:05punctuated by the deteriorating cores of older urban areas
00:04:09that now stretched almost continuously from Boston to Washington.
00:04:13New York itself stood at the very center of what the French demographer
00:04:19Jean Gottman called Megalopolis,
00:04:22an immense area that by 1960 was home to more than 40 million inhabitants,
00:04:27nearly one in four Americans.
00:04:30But by now, many wondered if the very notion of a center still had any real meaning
00:04:36or whether cities themselves had any reason for continuing at all.
00:04:41Out for a walk, after a week in bed, I find them tearing up part of my block.
00:05:02As usual, everything in New York is torn down before you have had time to care for it.
00:05:12You would think the simple fact of having lasted threatened our cities like mysterious fires.
00:05:23James Merrill.
00:05:25James Merrill.
00:05:35Until the first blows fell,
00:05:37no one was really convinced that Penn Station would really be demolished,
00:05:42or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism,
00:05:46against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age.
00:05:52Any city gets what it admires, and will pay for, and ultimately deserves.
00:05:58And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build, but the monuments we destroy.
00:06:06Ada Louise Huxtable.
00:06:08One of the worst things that's happened in New York's history is the loss of Penn Station.
00:06:19Penn was so traumatic because this was something that belonged to everybody
00:06:24and that people felt was so beautiful and that they were so proud of it.
00:06:27They just took it for granted and felt that it, you know, it couldn't possibly be torn down.
00:06:31Could you tear down the Grand Canyon?
00:06:33And then it was, and they put this really disgusting rabbit warren in its place.
00:06:39How tragic, how sad that so many Americans will never know what it was like to arrive in New York
00:06:47for the first time in your life at Penn Station.
00:06:52It was spectacular.
00:06:54If you had never been to New York before, you came into the city for the first time,
00:06:57and you came out, and there you were in this breathtaking, man-made, wondrous architectural place.
00:07:08Vincent Scully says that we used to come in to New York like gods when we came into Penn Station.
00:07:19Now we come in to the present Penn Station like rats.
00:07:24It was one of the worst things to happen to an American treasure,
00:07:29not just in New York, but in the whole country.
00:07:33Pennsylvania Station, the greatest architectural monument
00:07:37of the Imperial Age of Rail, had stood for more than half a century
00:07:41at the corner of 7th Avenue and 33rd Street in New York.
00:07:46When, in the spring of 1961, the financially troubled Pennsylvania Railroad
00:07:51announced plans to tear the magnificent structure down
00:07:54and replace it with a high-rise glass-and-steel office tower and sports facility,
00:07:59hoping it would bring in more money.
00:08:01Though some voices were raised in protest, the coalition of architects, writers, and historians
00:08:08who tried to stop the demolition could do nothing to save Penn Station from the wrecker's ball.
00:08:14And two years later, on the morning of October 28th, 1963, the demolition began.
00:08:20It would take more than three years in all to pull the great stone structure down.
00:08:39One by one, the enormous Doric columns, winged eagles, and granite angels that had ornamented its facade,
00:08:47were cut down, carted away, and dumped in a foul-smelling swamp in the New Jersey meadowlands.
00:08:57It is inconceivable that Penn Station was destroyed, demolished for one of the sorriest replacements
00:09:06that one could ever imagine.
00:09:09Everything about the ambition of Penn Station and of the great railroad stations
00:09:14expresses the kind of power that had been concentrated in New York.
00:09:19The loss of it was a sad commentary on the ideology of modernism, the belief that new is better,
00:09:29the belief that modern efficiency or that the profiting from new construction
00:09:36is an adequate replacement for the traditions, the heritage, and the real meaning of places in people's lives.
00:09:42The loss of Penn Station seemed to many an irrefutable confirmation
00:09:53that the age of rail had come to an end, and that the age of the automobile had triumphed.
00:10:01And in many ways, it had.
00:10:04But more than most people understood at the time,
00:10:07the destruction of Penn Station had marked a crucial turning point in the life of New York City.
00:10:12It's when that comes down that a sense of sacrilege really activates people.
00:10:23It's destroying the past.
00:10:24It is symbolic of the triumph of the auto era over the old interconnected mass transit operations.
00:10:33It generated for many people a different attitude about the new.
00:10:37You know, maybe the tradition of the new, you know, wasn't something that we should celebrate so uncritically.
00:10:46I think what was gained was even more important than what was lost,
00:10:49and what was lost was, of course, one of the last really magnificent Beaux-Arts constructions
00:10:56in terms of design and space and material and architectural quality.
00:11:01That was lost.
00:11:03What was gained was an enormous groundswell, popular groundswell for preservation,
00:11:11that not everything was expendable, and that some things were worth a struggle,
00:11:15that you had to find uses, you had to find ways to keep the character and the quality and the continuity of a city.
00:11:25It went far beyond, actually, losing a station.
00:11:28It really was a sense of what is the city and how do you have that resonance, really, that you get from the past
00:11:39that makes the city rich and real and a rewarding place to be, that it isn't sterile,
00:11:47it isn't the product of building by the bottom line, which, of course, so much construction is.
00:11:51Nobody seems to care about New York, except for those of us who live and work here.
00:12:01And we, who do care, believe the time has come to put a stop to the wanton destruction of our greatest buildings,
00:12:10to put a stop to wholesale vandalism.
00:12:13It may be too late to save Penn Station, but it is not too late to save New York.
00:12:23Jane Jacobs and the Action Group for Better Architecture in New York.
00:12:43Power is a very unusual weapon, but it's a sword whose hilt, as well as its blade, is sharp as a razor,
00:12:54so that it cuts into not only the people on whom it is used,
00:12:59but it cuts into the man who is using it, changing it.
00:13:03And we see in the career of Robert Moses a change, a personal change,
00:13:09as he gets more and more power and wants more and more power.
00:13:14In his early days, he wanted power for the sake of the things he wanted built.
00:13:20More and more, you can chart it decade by decade, he chooses the things to build
00:13:27because of the power that they will give him.
00:13:30By the early 1960s, the master plan Robert Moses had laid out for the remaking of New York,
00:13:42more than three decades before, was all but complete.
00:13:46Hundreds of miles of parkways and expressways, and dozens of bridges and tunnels,
00:13:52now connected the city to the suburban reaches of Long Island and beyond.
00:13:55Hundreds more had been driven through the outer boroughs themselves,
00:14:01weaving together, as Moses himself declared,
00:14:04the loose strands and frayed edges of the metropolitan arterial tapestry.
00:14:09But in all the frenzy of construction, the master builder had never been able to penetrate
00:14:14the heart of Manhattan itself with a superhighway.
00:14:18And in 1961, he resolved to do something about it,
00:14:21fixing in his sights a low-lying area of lower Manhattan, stretching from Chinatown in the south,
00:14:28up through the wayward lanes and ancient side streets of Greenwich Village.
00:14:34We simply repeat that cities are created by and for traffic.
00:14:39A city without traffic is a ghost town.
00:14:44The area between Canal Street and Third Street, a strip three-quarters of a mile wide,
00:14:51is the most depressed area in lower Manhattan,
00:14:55and one of the worst, if not the worst, slums in the entire city.
00:15:01Robert Moses.
00:15:02Condemning the West Village as a slum, and the old cast-iron district to the south as an obstacle to the free flow of traffic.
00:15:13By 1961, he had set in motion two immense federal initiatives.
00:15:18A vast urban renewal project that would level 14 entire blocks along Hudson Street in the village.
00:15:24And an eight-lane elevated highway, one of his most cherished dreams,
00:15:30that would drive straight across the heart of lower Manhattan,
00:15:33from the East River to the Hudson, destroying thousands of historic structures,
00:15:37and displacing nearly 10,000 residents and workers.
00:15:41It's difficult to even make anyone understand what would have happened.
00:15:44He would have bulldozed a swath about 225 feet wide, right across lower Manhattan.
00:15:55Today, that's the Kerstein District of Soho.
00:15:58What was the vision, what was the aims of a man,
00:16:02who would decide, for the sake of the automobile,
00:16:06to cut a swath across a city,
00:16:08across a beautiful, vibrant, bustling part of the city.
00:16:14And, you know, Robert Moses wanted to build three expressways across New York City,
00:16:20not just the lower Manhattan.
00:16:21He had a mid-Manhattan expressway,
00:16:24which would have run across 30th Street in the air.
00:16:28And he wanted to build one again at ground level at 125th Street,
00:16:31an upper Manhattan expressway.
00:16:33For decades, nothing had stopped the juggernaut of road building,
00:16:40or slowed the rampage of urban renewal,
00:16:43which, in the name of rebuilding the city,
00:16:45had torn the heart out of one community after another.
00:16:49But this time, things would turn out differently.
00:16:52Determined to save Manhattan from the devastation that had blighted the Bronx,
00:16:57residents of the village banded together and resolved to fight,
00:17:00selecting as their leader a 45-year-old journalist and working mother from Hudson Street,
00:17:07who had that very year published a groundbreaking book about the mistakes of urban planning.
00:17:13Her name was Jane Jacobs.
00:17:15The book was called The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
00:17:19and New York would never be the same again.
00:17:22And it started out by saying something like,
00:17:25this is an attack on city planning.
00:17:26And then she went through the litany of what Le Corbusier and other ideologues had imagined what a city should be,
00:17:35as opposed to what a city really was.
00:17:37Jane Jacobs was taking on the orthodoxies of planning that had prevailed in the post-World War II period,
00:17:45the ideas of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus and other planners who thought that the city needed to be renewed.
00:17:51There were areas that needed help, but the kind of help that she saw that they needed was the assistance to allow people to continue living in their brownstones,
00:18:04in the neighborhoods where they had a harmony with their neighbors.
00:18:07And the destruction of those neighborhoods is one of the great tragedies of post-World War II New York.
00:18:12She understood that urban economies are different. She understood the sort of beehive, thousand different interdependent functions nature of urban economies.
00:18:27And that's what we lose when we surrender the street to the automobile.
00:18:33When people don't want to be on the street anymore, when they reshape their lives in a way that they're always in privatized space rather than sharing public space.
00:18:43Jane Jacobs knew 35 years ago that that was a recipe for the destruction of what makes cities wonderful.
00:18:50Look what they have built. Low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency and vandalism than the slums they were supposed to replace.
00:19:05Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities.
00:19:16This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities. Jane Jacobs.
00:19:29She hit the nerve at the right moment with that book. It was the right book at exactly the right moment,
00:19:36because she made people see particulars. She made them see the street.
00:19:41This had been a period of urban renewal when everything was on a model, on a big plan or a drawing with overlays.
00:19:52And she made people look at the street and what was there.
00:19:56She spoke about the eyes on the street, the smaller buildings where people looked out and watched their neighbors.
00:20:02She spoke about the small stores, the mom and pop stores. All the things that urban renewal not only was destroying, but didn't acknowledge existed.
00:20:12She basically said that from her house at 555 Hudson Street in the West Village, from the sidewalk of her block, you could observe what a whole city was like.
00:20:24But it returned the discussion of what urbanism should be about, what New York should be about, from big land plan games to individuals, shops, streets, cars, crosswalks, networks of people.
00:20:39People rich and poor living more closely together, less concerned with the elevator to the 35th floor and more concerned with the life in the five story walk up.
00:20:50Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city.
00:21:07It is a complex order. Its essence is the intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is composed of movement and change.
00:21:26And we may liken it to the dance. Not to a simple-minded precision dance, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. Jane Jacobs.
00:21:51Jane Jacobs.
00:21:54Her writing enabled people to imagine her block, but also enabled people to see other blocks. She created, maybe without intending to do it, a kind of empathy and opened up possibilities for empathy as a political force in the 60s.
00:22:11So that once people could imagine how other people lived, even if they didn't concretely know, they could help them, they could work for them, they could work together.
00:22:20When she comes out with her book in 1961, it's not just that it's brilliantly written, it's pithy, it's punchy, it's down to earth, it's enjoyable, it's entertaining, it's mind capturing.
00:22:36It's not just that, it's that what she is doing is providing a counter narrative, a counter argument, a counter vision of what the city is.
00:22:45It's a vision that says you don't want to break out manufacturing and send it off somewhere else.
00:22:50You don't want to, in fact, send the citizens off to the suburbs. What you want to have is an integrated community, the way it used to be, in essence.
00:22:59But you want to have people in a position to walk to work. You want small scale buildings. You want people to be able to watch the streets.
00:23:06I mean, crime, to some extent, is beginning to explode in the city in the 50s, and a lot of it is, you know, there certainly is the pathology of drugs and such, but it is also from shattered communities that have been renewed and removed and highwayed out and are in turmoil and are about, you know, in the 60s to really explode, and not just here again, but all across the country.
00:23:27Armed with a philosophy capable of countering those in power, Jacobs and her colleagues threw themselves into the fight, holding rallies, staging demonstrations, and attacking in public hearings and in print the underlying assumptions behind the culture of the automobile and of urban renewal.
00:23:48And also, you know, Jacobs is an activist. She doesn't just simply write about this stuff, but then she's out in the streets. She's demonstrating. They're trying to block the Lower Manhattan Expressway. They're trying to stop the plan to run roadways through Washington Square.
00:24:03They're counter-planning. They're planning a West Village building project, which is based on rehabilitation.
00:24:09As he had in the Bronx, Robert Moses fought them every step of the way.
00:24:16Marshaling every weapon at his command to blunt the opposition.
00:24:21The fellow's personally affected, adversely, or he thinks he is. He's going to be opposed to you. He don't want it there. He doesn't want it done at all, or he wants it done somewhere else. He wants it moved away.
00:24:33Now, he may be wrong. In more than half the case, in three quarters of the case, he's wrong from his own point of view.
00:24:39What do you mean by that?
00:24:41I mean by that, but he doesn't know what's in his own interest.
00:24:46He isn't smart enough to visualize what you're going to do.
00:24:50Well, once you've built the thing, he comes around and he tells you he was always for it.
00:24:54Has that happened to you all the time?
00:24:57All the time.
00:25:00For decades, Robert Moses had simply ridden roughshod over all those who disagreed with him, brutally negating the power of votes, Jane Jacobs charged, with the power of money.
00:25:12But this time, he had completely misjudged the strength of the opposition, rising up from the streets of Greenwich Village, which had been the center of political dissent in the city since the days of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and before.
00:25:27I think it maybe couldn't have happened anywhere else.
00:25:31The Lower East Side is different.
00:25:33The village is different.
00:25:35It has a history.
00:25:36There were very experienced organizers.
00:25:40We were not Johnny-come-latelys.
00:25:43We not only knew how to organize, we not only knew how to get publicity, we not only knew how to mobilize the troops, but we knew how to form coalitions.
00:25:53Mafiosi, radical Jews, factory owners, Chinese merchants, people who ordinarily never had anything to say to each other, people who ordinarily hated each other, came together to stop this.
00:26:08They discovered that different kinds of people could work together and really make a difference and generate a kind of power that neither of them by themselves could ever have imagined.
00:26:20They would call a meeting and there would be three times as many people as anybody expected. They'd have to find a new hall.
00:26:26And there was a particular thrill in this at the end of the 50s and the start of the 60s that we might be able to really make a difference and that there was a power that was even greater than the power of cars, power of people.
00:26:41At the head of the unlikely coalition was Jane Jacobs herself. Frustrated at one public hearing, she and her colleagues tore up the stenographer's report, then declared that since there was no official record of the hearing, there had been no hearing.
00:26:58She was arrested and charged with riot, inciting to riot, criminal mischief, and obstructing public administration. But public support for her actions only grew.
00:27:09Mr. Moses says that the expressway must go through regardless of who stands in the way. Do you agree with that?
00:27:14Absolutely not. If this expressway goes through, it will absolutely be catastrophic. This will set a pattern, no doubt there, that will be followed there in other parts of the city.
00:27:25And if he has his way, he'll crisscross the city north, south, east and west, bisect it, trisect it, every which way with expressways. Expressways to Mr. Moses are evidently more important than people.
00:27:37The evidence of the need of that thing is overwhelming from the point of view of engineering and traffic.
00:27:44And that's all that matters.
00:27:46Well, in the end, yes. Congestion gets bad enough, you have to have it. In the meantime, what happens? DeSalvio doesn't want it, so what?
00:28:07The battle over the Lower Manhattan Expressway came to a crucial climax on the night of December 11, 1962, at a tense, crowded meeting of the Board of Estimate on the second floor of City Hall.
00:28:22Except for one old man, Assemblyman Louis DeSalvio declared, I've been unable to find anyone of technical competence who is for this so-called expressway.
00:28:33And this old man is a cantankerous, stubborn old man who has done many things which may have, in their time, been good for New York City.
00:28:42But I think that the time has come for the stubborn old man to realize that too many of his dreams turn out to be nightmares for the city.
00:28:49And this board must realize that if it does not kill this stupid example of bad city planning, that the stench of it will haunt them and this great city for many years to come.
00:29:01Jane Jacobs led the fight against that expressway. That was Moses' last, he had many last hurrahs, but that really did it.
00:29:14Every major politician, Lindsay Koch, then a congressman, was in it. The debates were all over the press, nationally and internationally.
00:29:24And somehow the fate of what an inner city, a historic, but still very modern city would be, was being decided on whether these super projects, whether clearance for housing or for an expressway, could go forward in an existing city.
00:29:42Or whether the people who lived there had rights to their own environment.
00:29:49In the end, Jacobs and her allies prevailed.
00:29:54The Board of Estimate, in an executive session today, voted unanimously to turn down a proposal for a lower Manhattan expressway. The board is replaced.
00:30:09I wonder how David felt when he bested Goliath.
00:30:12That's the way we felt. We felt, we beat Robert Moses, you know.
00:30:19Sir, you looked fairly relieved too. You lived right on the path of the proposed expressway.
00:30:23Yes, right on Brune Street.
00:30:24So this is a reprieve from a long time sentence, isn't it?
00:30:27It is, yes. It was the greatest thing the mayor ever did for the people in that neighborhood because everybody was worried at that and everybody was getting sick over it.
00:30:37So when they hear this news, this will be the best news that they ever heard for Christmas.
00:30:41This will act as a Christmas present for the people on Brune Street.
00:30:44Would you say that the result was, in this case, a triumph of public opinion against Bob Moses?
00:30:54No, no. There hasn't been any triumph for anybody yet.
00:31:13Robert Moses always felt that he was a tremendous failure in Manhattan.
00:31:16And he couldn't communicate his vision to people.
00:31:19He built highways around the edges, but he could never get through the center.
00:31:24People just wouldn't buy it.
00:31:26They stayed attached to their streets, to their grungy houses, to their crummy neighborhoods, and kept him from doing this.
00:31:33They abstained from the flow. They didn't want to be part of the flow.
00:31:37One result of this is that Manhattan is one of the very few parts of America where you can live a whole life without a car.
00:31:44And where your daily life can depend on the street and on interacting with other people,
00:31:49and on seeing what's going to happen in ways that you don't plan.
00:31:53And in that way, New York is different from, I think, probably every other American city.
00:31:58It may be the only American city without an expressway going through the center of town.
00:32:02And Moses felt extremely frustrated and mortified by this.
00:32:06But he just couldn't do it. The community protests were too great.
00:32:09It was a crucial turning point in the life of New York and in the culture of cities everywhere.
00:32:19With their stunning victory, Jacobs and her allies had reasserted the value of the city block,
00:32:25and by extension, that of urban public space itself, challenging the most basic assumptions upon which New York had proceeded since the dawn of the modern age.
00:32:35That the new was always better than the old.
00:32:40And there's a sensitivity to history, which is also a new dimension to this.
00:32:45I mean, you've got to understand that since the 20s, it's been modern, modern, modern.
00:32:50And modern means dump the past, break with the past, think new, think art deco, think streamline, think projectile, think, you know, tear down the old stuff.
00:32:59Not just because, although it may be, you know, constraint on our ability to make profits, but because it's old, because the new is intrinsically superior to the old.
00:33:09But, Jacobs says, wait a minute, part of the texture of life in a city is that people are not just connected to each other on the street by virtue of being neighbors, but they're connected in time.
00:33:21There's some sense in the buildings around you that, you know, remain, that give you a sense of being part of a continuum.
00:33:29You know, the history isn't dead. It's not something which has been transcended.
00:33:33Today is not the first day of the rest of your life.
00:33:35People are beings in time, and they need to be surrounded, not entirely, but, you know, to some extent, by the legacy, the built environment of the past.
00:33:46Three years later, Jacobs' triumph would be codified in an extraordinary new law, when on April 19th, 1965, Mayor Robert Wagner signed legislation establishing the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
00:34:02The agency came two years too late to save Penn Station.
00:34:06But in the years to come, it would save hundreds of individual buildings in New York from the records ball,
00:34:12along with entire districts, including Brooklyn Heights, Greenwich Village, and Soho itself.
00:34:19Vibrant places, Robert Moses had yearned so passionately to transform.
00:34:28Well, the dark side of Moses' character was probably every bit as prominent as the bright side, especially in the context of New York City.
00:34:35On the one hand, we can admit that the city needed a Robert Moses to adapt and become a modern city.
00:34:42On the other hand, Robert Moses saw the city in some sense as a transportation problem.
00:34:49But New York is more than a transportation problem.
00:34:52And having created, let's say, the kind of minimal number of new roads and new bridges that the city needed to sort of function in the second half of the 20th century,
00:35:04then he began to maybe continue that beyond what was absolutely essential.
00:35:09And persons like Jane Jacobs and others began to say,
00:35:12Now, wait a minute. Why do we need this road?
00:35:16That the whole purpose of things is not to see how fast you can move traffic.
00:35:19That there's a city there. That there are people who live in neighborhoods.
00:35:22There are people who like it the way it is.
00:35:24And I think that Moses never really understood that.
00:35:28A man who never drove, but who created an automobile kind of circumstance.
00:35:32A man who was responsible for planning and building this enormous metropolis.
00:35:38And I think you can't escape the feeling that he really wasn't comfortable in the very city that he was responsible for building.
00:36:02By 1965, the worst rampages of urban renewal were over.
00:36:13And the long, fateful career of Robert Moses was drawing to a close.
00:36:19But nothing could stop the onslaught of forces that in the decade to come would break over New York City.
00:36:25And over older urban places everywhere.
00:36:28As the bill for nearly half a century of massive social change, physical upheaval, and economic transformation finished coming due.
00:36:39I think that when we fetish the city form, the urban form.
00:36:43When traffic lanes and freeways and tall buildings and business districts become our priority.
00:36:50And we forget about people in neighborhoods.
00:36:52We actually forget about what is the lifeblood of a city.
00:36:56One of the things that we ended up doing by focusing on the urban form, by building taller, bigger, faster, better, is that we actually achieved physically what we wanted to.
00:37:09By the 1960s, New York City has actually gone through probably one of the greatest urban building booms in the history of mankind.
00:37:16The problem is it's in financial crisis. It's in financial crisis because we neglected neighborhoods for 40 years.
00:37:27To a startling degree, the vast river of federal funds that had poured into the city for nearly 20 years,
00:37:33had only served to accelerate anti-urban trends begun long before.
00:37:38Hastening the flight of industry and the middle class to the suburbs and beyond.
00:37:42While trapping New York's most vulnerable citizens in rapidly expanding ghettos.
00:37:47At the heart of an inner city increasingly plagued by deteriorating finances, rising crime, falling city services, and worsening race relations.
00:37:56With resources dwindling, and the needs of New York's poorest citizens on the rise, years of simmering racial and social tension began to erupt into open conflict on the city's streets.
00:38:11In the summer of 1964, riots once again ripped through Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant, when an off-duty policeman shot and killed a 15-year-old boy.
00:38:25The violence that ensued, echoing even greater violence in cities across America, would continue for five full days,
00:38:32and cast a shadow over the last of Robert Wagner's three terms as mayor.
00:38:38His successor, a liberal ex-congressman from the Upper East Side, named John Lindsay, promised New Yorkers a fresh start.
00:38:46But from the day he took office, on January 1, 1966, the city would be battered by one crisis after another.
00:38:54As the first in a series of crippling city-wide strikes by municipal employees,
00:38:59among the lowest paid workers in the city, brought New York's transit system to a complete standstill.
00:39:08And the working people are going to have the power, and the working people together with the people who can...
00:39:14In many ways I think New York in the 60s and 70s embodied the 60s and 70s,
00:39:19and all the ambiguities and all the tensions in American society.
00:39:23You have a civil rights movement that is raising all sorts of problematic questions for people about the nature of power,
00:39:31and the nature of access to power.
00:39:33At the same time you have an economic shift.
00:39:36You have money draining off to support the Vietnam War.
00:39:39We can't acknowledge that we're really fighting the war, and so we do deficit spending.
00:39:42It's a terrible blow, ultimately, economically.
00:39:46And all those things are happening not only in the country, but right in the city.
00:39:51And so you have a very quick shift in the vision of New York from a city with promise to a city of devastation,
00:40:01of poor people, of complaining people, of crumbling buildings, of inadequate services.
00:40:07Meanwhile, the suburbs are booming, people are moving elsewhere where labor costs might be less expensive,
00:40:13where opportunities are different.
00:40:16And what you're left with then is a city that nobody wants to support.
00:40:22The 1960s and 1970s were not good for American cities.
00:40:27This was a time when everybody thought the suburbs were the wave of the future.
00:40:31It was just a matter of time until really all cities and all older neighborhoods were abandoned in favor of the car.
00:40:36In favor of the corporate office park, in favor of the suburban residential subdivision.
00:40:41It was a time of fiscal crisis, as the country essentially spent its money on defense or Vietnam,
00:40:48and in a sense sucked money out of cities.
00:40:51So that by the early 1970s, New York City was in an amazing financial crisis,
00:40:58brought on by borrowing too much money and perhaps living beyond its means,
00:41:01but also it no longer had the means.
00:41:03You can't even explain the layoff in the city.
00:41:06Schools were beginning to decline.
00:41:08The crime rate was beginning an explosive increase in New York City as in other places.
00:41:13The Bronx was burning.
00:41:16Every night there were fires that you could see, and so there was an orange glow.
00:41:21We heard about Fort Apache, these dangerous police precincts.
00:41:25By 1970, the city that had emerged from the Second World War as the most powerful metropolis on Earth
00:41:37had begun to spiral down into an abyss of urban chaos and despair almost without precedent in American urban history.
00:41:44Well, the worst feature of New York in that period for me were the neighborhoods that were falling apart.
00:41:51A lot of the South Bronx in the course of the 70s was burnt down.
00:41:56The biggest industry in the Bronx became Orson.
00:41:59The 1976 World Series, while there was a night game at Yankee Stadium,
00:42:04the Goodyear blimp showed about a mile away a building was burning down,
00:42:09and Howard Cosell said,
00:42:10what's wrong with these people that they burned down their houses?
00:42:15Some people began to suggest that it had to do with the character of the landlords
00:42:18and the fact that you could collect more money on insurance
00:42:21than you could collect in rent on buildings that were old and needed constant refinancing,
00:42:26and ironically that were redlined, because the whole Bronx was redlined in this period.
00:42:31So you couldn't fix up the building, but you could fix it down.
00:42:39By 1973, more than 2,000 city blocks had been burned to the ground.
00:42:44More than 43,000 apartments had been destroyed,
00:42:47and the South Bronx had become a symbol around the world of urban decline.
00:42:51There was this brief period in the 1970s especially,
00:42:56where it seemed like New York was really going to be further and further off the chart.
00:43:03It really did feel like neighborhoods were being sequentially abandoned by their owners.
00:43:09You could see on the Lower East Side, landlord arson was rampant,
00:43:12because that was the only way they'd ever be able to make money.
00:43:15They couldn't get people to move into these places,
00:43:17so they might as well burn them down.
00:43:19And it really seemed like this was just going to happen all throughout the island.
00:43:29For the city itself, there was one final chapter to come,
00:43:33in the long downward spiral begun three decades before.
00:43:38All through John Lindsay's second term,
00:43:40as tax revenues faltered and expenses soared,
00:43:43the beleaguered mayor had refused to cut the crucial public programs
00:43:47that had been New York's hallmark since the days of the Depression.
00:43:51Using hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for long-term capital projects
00:43:55to cover the mounting shortfall.
00:43:57Borrowing hundreds of millions more to make up for that.
00:44:01And rolling over the ever-mounting debt from one year to another.
00:44:05Very bad accounting practices.
00:44:09The city was in effect borrowing to buy groceries.
00:44:12People and political institutions should borrow money for capital reasons.
00:44:17We were, the city was borrowing money in order to meet its current bills.
00:44:21And you can't do that forever.
00:44:23I think this culminated in the fiscal crisis in the early 1970s,
00:44:26because it could have brought it all together.
00:44:28Sure, it was partly because the city was living beyond its means
00:44:32and trying to maintain this kind of old New Deal attitude
00:44:36of building public hospitals and public colleges
00:44:40and generous public welfare benefits,
00:44:43even when the other rest of the nation wasn't following behind.
00:44:49By 1975, more than $2 billion a year
00:44:52were going simply to service New York's enormous $11 billion debt,
00:44:57which was increasing now at an alarming rate with each passing month,
00:45:01and threatening to capsize the new administration
00:45:04of John Lindsay's successor, Mayor Abe Bean.
00:45:06They're going to want to know if New York City is going down the drain.
00:45:09Now, is it safe to say that New York City...
00:45:11New York City is not going down the drain.
00:45:13That October, the apocalyptic reckoning city leaders
00:45:17had been attempting to stave off for nearly ten years
00:45:20but finally came due, when the consortium of banks
00:45:23that had freely lent the city billions of dollars
00:45:25over the previous decade
00:45:27abruptly suspended New York's borrowing privileges
00:45:30until the city had put its financial house in order.
00:45:34Within days, the city was facing a fiscal crisis
00:45:37unlike any since the darkest hours of the Depression.
00:45:41The banks said, looking at how much money New York City owed,
00:45:45we're not going to lend you any more money,
00:45:48and nobody believed they would ever do that.
00:45:50And they just shut the window.
00:45:52The banks essentially said to New York,
00:45:54give us $6 billion dollars back now, please.
00:45:58And New York City couldn't do that.
00:46:00So, in a sense, New York City was bankrupt,
00:46:04or virtually bankrupt, and the fiscal crisis
00:46:07is the process of getting $6 billion dollars
00:46:09to pay back the banks with the money
00:46:11that they once loaned to the city.
00:46:13With the prospect of bankruptcy staring them in the face,
00:46:18city leaders turned in desperation
00:46:20to the one source that could possibly save them,
00:46:23the federal government.
00:46:25Submitting a request for more than $2 billion
00:46:27in emergency loan guarantees,
00:46:30the city's last hope of avoiding complete financial ruin.
00:46:34President Gerald Ford's stunning response
00:46:37came in a speech on October 29th
00:46:39at the National Press Club in Washington.
00:46:43Responsibility for New York City's financial problems
00:46:47is being left on the front doorstep
00:46:50of the federal government,
00:46:52unwanted and abandoned by its real parents.
00:46:57And when New York City now asks the rest of the country
00:47:02to guarantee its bills,
00:47:06it can be no surprise
00:47:08that many other Americans ask why.
00:47:17Municipal default, Ford concluded,
00:47:19would be a good thing for New York,
00:47:22forcing the city to curtail its traditionally spendthrift ways.
00:47:26No federal loan guarantees would be forthcoming.
00:47:33The next day, a towering black headline
00:47:36loomed ominously from the front page of the Daily News.
00:47:40Ford to city, drop dead.
00:47:45What's astonishing is that the president of the United States
00:47:48could essentially tell the greatest city
00:47:50in the Western world to drop dead.
00:47:52Of course, he didn't say it exactly,
00:47:54but remember those Daily News headlines,
00:47:56drop dead, New York City,
00:47:58tells you just how far, in a sense,
00:48:00the city had sunk there.
00:48:03A city that had sent so many successful people
00:48:07out into the world
00:48:08should have had more friends by the mid-'70s.
00:48:11It was surrounded by people who did not wish the place well,
00:48:16and interestingly, people whose own live stories
00:48:19pass through the five boroughs
00:48:21are decamped in Jersey and Westchester and out on the island.
00:48:25And when that Daily News headline comes out,
00:48:28Ford to city, drop dead,
00:48:30instead of recoiling in horror, they're saying,
00:48:32yeah, drop dead.
00:48:33We think you should drop dead, too.
00:48:35It was a terrible, terrible time.
00:48:38It really was.
00:48:41Instead of looking at this as a treasure of the American scene,
00:48:46New York was seen as representing almost everything
00:48:49that was worst about post-war America.
00:48:54In its blunt and homely way,
00:48:56the headline in the Daily News captured as nothing else had,
00:49:00the basic assumption behind President Ford's remarks,
00:49:04an assumption that had been growing more and more commonplace
00:49:07among Americans for years
00:49:09as the city's social and economic problems multiplied.
00:49:14New York, like many of the nation's older cities,
00:49:17was plummeting into the abyss.
00:49:21New York, America's extraordinary unwieldy experiment
00:49:25in capitalism and democracy,
00:49:27hope and greed, had failed.
00:49:30New York, city of cities, capital of capitalism,
00:49:35gateway to America, was going to die.
00:49:39And good riddance.
00:50:01Grace Paley, one of the great New York writers,
00:50:04has a story written early 70s, South Bronx,
00:50:08and one of the characters,
00:50:10who's like a community organizer there,
00:50:12says, the buildings are burning down on one side of the street,
00:50:15and the kids are trying to put something together on the other.
00:50:18And this could be a parable of one of the great achievements of that period,
00:50:27from a lot of the neighborhoods that were most devastated in New York.
00:50:30The earliest form in which most people who weren't part of that neighborhood saw it
00:50:33with the graffiti that appeared on the subways in the 70s.
00:50:38And this was on a very rickety, decaying generation of gray trains.
00:50:42They painted enormously exuberant colored names and reliefs and mottos.
00:50:48And you can see many films now.
00:50:53A gray day, a gray neighborhood, an L train,
00:50:57and suddenly the L train is like a rainbow.
00:50:59And it's thrilling.
00:51:05The next incarnation was rap.
00:51:07The earliest form that people saw would be,
00:51:09there would be one kid rapping with small speakers and a drum track in the subway,
00:51:13you know, with a hat open for money.
00:51:19And, you know, these are parables of a city that's being ruined,
00:51:23that's being destroyed, and that's saying,
00:51:25we can rise again.
00:51:26We come from ruins, but we're not ruined.
00:51:30And, I mean, in 15 years, it's become the basic form of world music.
00:51:35So it's a thrill, but it's important to understand
00:51:37that it came from totally burnt-out ruined districts,
00:51:41and that's where it was born.
00:51:43And it was born out of this suffering and misery.
00:51:45And that a lot of the creativity that New York has always had
00:51:48has come from the cellars, from the ruins,
00:51:51from how the other half lives.
00:51:56So an important part of sharing space and living city life
00:51:59is being able to live through the ways in which the city itself
00:52:02is torn down and is consumed and is destroyed,
00:52:06but also consumes itself.
00:52:07You know, if you can do that, you can become more human
00:52:11and more alive than you've been before.
00:52:13In the end, of course, the city didn't die.
00:52:16Despite all the destruction and heartbreak of the post-war years,
00:52:18despite the demise of neighborhoods and the loss of industry,
00:52:22and the bitter clash of races and classes,
00:52:25despite everything, as it had so many times in the past,
00:52:27the city, to almost everyone's surprise,
00:52:29got back up off the floor.
00:52:31And the city, to almost everyone's surprise,
00:52:32got back up off the floor.
00:52:33And the city, to almost everyone's surprise,
00:52:35got back up off the floor.
00:52:36And began to revive.
00:52:37Less than a month after refusing to come to the city's aid,
00:52:39President Ford reversed himself,
00:52:40and grudgingly agreed to approve the city's request
00:52:41for loan guarantees.
00:52:42Warned by advisers, that New York's demise might trigger
00:52:45a catastrophic domino effect of fiscal year.
00:52:47The city, to almost everyone's surprise,
00:52:49got back up off the floor and began to revive.
00:52:52Less than a month after refusing to come to the city's aid,
00:52:55President Ford reversed himself,
00:52:57and grudgingly agreed to approve the city's request
00:52:59for loan guarantees.
00:53:01Warned by advisers, that New York's demise might trigger
00:53:05a catastrophic domino effect of fiscal default
00:53:08that would bring down one city after another
00:53:10across the country.
00:53:12With time to put its finances in order,
00:53:15city officials moved with startling dispatch,
00:53:18cutting services, repaying the city's outstanding loans,
00:53:22and balancing the city budget by 1980.
00:53:25The city, the city, the city, the city,
00:53:28and balancing the city budget by 1981,
00:53:32a full year ahead of schedule.
00:53:35In the end, the U.S. Treasury made millions of dollars
00:53:39out of its arrangement with New York.
00:53:43I think New York became the experiment ground
00:53:48for a new national program of austerity,
00:53:51to check the power of labor
00:53:52and to reverse some of the trends of New Deal liberalism.
00:53:56It was put on display,
00:53:59and it was created as a kind of negative object example.
00:54:02This is liberalism gone amok.
00:54:05This is a kind of degeneration,
00:54:07a kind of moral degeneracy,
00:54:09that can only be solved
00:54:11by the old-fashioned medicine of fiscal austerity.
00:54:15And it's a program that, in a sense,
00:54:17was then successful in New York
00:54:19and followed in the 1980s in the country at large.
00:54:23The summer of my election,
00:54:26I went for a walk on the Brighton Beach boardwalk.
00:54:31It was August.
00:54:33Suddenly, I heard a woman calling,
00:54:37Mayor, Mayor!
00:54:38And I looked down the boardwalk,
00:54:40and there was this elderly lady.
00:54:42She must have been in her late 70s.
00:54:45And she came towards me.
00:54:47She took my hand,
00:54:49and she looked at me,
00:54:52and she said,
00:54:53Mayor, make it like it was.
00:54:56And I must tell you, I still have goose pimples.
00:54:59And I thought to myself as she said it,
00:55:01Madam, it never was the way you think it was,
00:55:07but I'll try.
00:55:13In the years to come,
00:55:14despite the terrible hardships
00:55:16that continued to be suffered
00:55:17by many of New York's most vulnerable citizens,
00:55:20the city would not only survive,
00:55:22but begin to thrive and flourish again.
00:55:25In large measure,
00:55:27because the urban qualities
00:55:28that had defined the city
00:55:29since the time of the Dutch
00:55:31began to reassert themselves,
00:55:33not as problems to be solved,
00:55:36but as crucial urban values
00:55:38to be celebrated, nurtured, and sustained.
00:55:43What I think accounts for New York's success
00:55:45in reinventing itself
00:55:47at the end of the 20th century
00:55:49are the very strengths that the Dutch,
00:55:51the first little settlement
00:55:53in the 17th century made visible.
00:55:56The heterogeneity of the city
00:55:58so that everyone was welcome.
00:56:00Maybe everyone would not be loved.
00:56:02We're not going to be pleasant.
00:56:03We're not going to hug you.
00:56:04We're not going to even say
00:56:05good morning every time we see you.
00:56:06But in the end,
00:56:07opportunity is here.
00:56:08People knew it.
00:56:09So we have this incredible immigration
00:56:11flows which accelerate
00:56:12after the mid-1960s
00:56:13with the new immigration laws.
00:56:16Secondly,
00:56:17we have the same kind
00:56:18of entrepreneurial spirit
00:56:20that the Dutch West India Company
00:56:22had established in 1624
00:56:24that has kind of run through
00:56:26New York all the time.
00:56:28Third, I think,
00:56:29it's the density and concentration
00:56:30of New York.
00:56:31There's something about
00:56:32the mood of the place
00:56:34that's directed toward achievement
00:56:36and getting something done.
00:56:38Fourthly,
00:56:39I think it's always been
00:56:40a kind of an openness to change.
00:56:42New York City was always willing
00:56:44to go with what worked,
00:56:46to find the balance,
00:56:48to reach a new understanding.
00:56:50By the 1980s,
00:56:55as the city's role within
00:56:56the widening gyre
00:56:57of an increasingly global economy
00:56:59continued to shift and change,
00:57:01the relentless commercial energy
00:57:03that had characterized New York
00:57:05for nearly 400 years
00:57:06began to return,
00:57:07with a frantic intensity
00:57:09not seen on Wall Street
00:57:10since the days of the roaring 20s.
00:57:12By the 1990s,
00:57:13though the days of New York's
00:57:14blue-collar glory were over,
00:57:15most of the hundreds of thousands
00:57:16of jobs that had been lost
00:57:17had been replaced,
00:57:18as thousands of new companies
00:57:19and small businesses streamed
00:57:20back into New York,
00:57:21eager to draw on the unique
00:57:22concentration of talent
00:57:23and resources gathered there,
00:57:24and attracted by the very density
00:57:25that had once driven businesses away.
00:57:27Cities bring a lot of people together.
00:57:42Some people feel too many people,
00:57:44too big crowds,
00:57:45but there's a great commandment
00:57:47of urban life
00:57:48that can be a tremendous source of happiness.
00:57:50Thou shalt share space.
00:57:52I mean, cities in many ways
00:57:54are expensive and inconvenient
00:57:56and noisy and dirty,
00:57:57but the wonderful thing about them
00:57:58is the way they bring people together.
00:58:00You design cities that don't let people
00:58:03get together,
00:58:04you're losing what may be most special
00:58:06and beautiful about them.
00:58:08And then, of course,
00:58:09make people think,
00:58:10why bother to live in a city at all
00:58:12if you don't even have
00:58:13what's most special about the city?
00:58:19By the turn of the century,
00:58:20the greatest and most moving sign
00:58:21of the city's miraculous revival
00:58:23could be seen on the city streets themselves.
00:58:25Which, within ten years of the end
00:58:28of the fiscal crisis,
00:58:29were filled with hundreds of thousands
00:58:31of newcomers from around the world,
00:58:33who had been pouring into New York
00:58:35since the mid-1960s,
00:58:36when the federal government
00:58:38finally reopened the great human gateway.
00:58:40Emma Lazarus had called the golden door.
00:58:42I mean, New York became the kind of port
00:58:47that it had been at the beginning
00:58:49of the 20th century again.
00:58:51And people began coming in enormous numbers
00:58:54from East Asia, from Latin America,
00:58:58from Eastern Europe,
00:59:00colonizing neighborhoods
00:59:02that many people considered abandoned.
00:59:04The Census Department says that now
00:59:07something like 43% of New Yorkers,
00:59:09you know, have been born outside the USA.
00:59:11And they said that they haven't been
00:59:14comparable figures since 1910.
00:59:20By the end of the 20th century,
00:59:22the fiscal crisis had dwindled to a memory,
00:59:24and New York seemed to have reinvented itself once again.
00:59:31The epic transformations of the previous half century
00:59:34had left the city with a host of intractable problems,
00:59:38including failing schools,
00:59:40a crumbling infrastructure,
00:59:42and immense disparities of income, race, and opportunity.
00:59:47But the city had come back,
00:59:49and Americans everywhere had begun
00:59:51to recognize the crucial role.
00:59:53Urban places had played
00:59:55in the tapestry of American history.
00:59:57Carrying on the experiment New York had begun
01:00:00on the banks of the Hudson,
01:00:02400 years before.
01:00:12The experiment is,
01:00:14how close can rich and poor live
01:00:17before the fabric completely falls apart?
01:00:20How close can you put ethnic groups
01:00:23that don't like one another much?
01:00:25How much can you promise people
01:00:29about a rich and privileged future
01:00:32and then not really be able to deliver
01:00:35before they rise up and say enough?
01:00:39And the answer here over and over and over again
01:00:44has been that the fabric becomes tattered,
01:00:47that sometimes the fabric even becomes torn.
01:00:50But the fabric survives.
01:01:06For over a century,
01:01:07people have talked about New York's exceptionalism
01:01:09as if it's a place apart from the American experience.
01:01:12I would submit at the beginning of the 21st century
01:01:17that New York is one of those places
01:01:18that you can use to understand
01:01:20the entire American experience.
01:01:22From a string of Indian villages
01:01:26out on the tip of the eastern seaboard
01:01:30to a place where blacks and Dutch and Jewish refugees
01:01:35and people from the four corners of the earth came in.
01:01:40To the America factory
01:01:42that sort of brushed people off from Ellis Island,
01:01:44taught them some English
01:01:45and taught them what they needed to know
01:01:47to head out into the rest of America.
01:01:51To a place that helps us understand industrialism,
01:01:55post-industrialism, marketplaces, cultural production.
01:02:00It's this massive, belching place, sending out ideas.
01:02:07It's like everything is more intense here.
01:02:10The membrane is thinner.
01:02:12So when it's hot, you sweat.
01:02:14When it's cold, you shiver.
01:02:16But New York lives that life
01:02:18and explains America both to the world
01:02:22and explains America to America
01:02:24in a way that I don't think people have ever given it full credit for.
01:02:28Today, as it becomes this new ingatherer of nations,
01:02:35people from Belize and Nigeria and Guyana and Taiwan
01:02:41and Vietnam and Colombia and Venezuela
01:02:44and the Dominican Republic
01:02:46are making this new thing, this new place.
01:02:49So we are, we New Yorkers are constantly self-inventing
01:02:54and sending ourselves out into the rest of the country
01:02:57like a jolt of electricity.
01:03:00America should thank us, you know,
01:03:03take a little pause in the resentment
01:03:05and say, thank you, New York,
01:03:08because you are that intensifier of all things that are American.
01:03:14Americans need New York because New York is one of the few places in the country
01:03:23that allows difference to be celebrated,
01:03:26that allows people to reach their full potential.
01:03:29And that's, in a sense, what drives civilization, what drives freedom, what moves us forward.
01:03:36And it's really the hope of the future.
01:03:38New York represents the hope of the future
01:03:40because it's there for all of us.
01:03:42Whether we never go there, whether we never see New York,
01:03:45wherever small town or small city we're from,
01:03:48it's important that we know that somewhere in the country
01:03:52there is a place where we can go,
01:03:55no matter what we believe, no matter who we are,
01:03:58no matter what we want to do,
01:04:00and we can find in that place other people like ourselves
01:04:03and a possibility of reaching our full potential.
01:04:33I think New York is over in the sense that it's no longer really a city.
01:04:49I mean, I think that, at this point,
01:04:51it's kind of the most densely populated, noisiest, dirtiest,
01:04:55suburban environment in the history of the world.
01:04:58It's become a kind of theme park.
01:05:01I mean, everything's a replica, you know,
01:05:03just by the fact that they name streets, you know,
01:05:0557th Street's called Swing Street.
01:05:07It's like, you know, Disneyland without the parking.
01:05:11So many common haters are fond of saying
01:05:13that New York is not like it used to be and it's going down.
01:05:16But, you know, that shows some unfamiliarity with history
01:05:19because complaints about New York and predictions of its demise
01:05:23have been so common for so long
01:05:25and certainly go back at least 100 years and more.
01:05:28I think we're living in one of the glory times.
01:05:30I think, you know, the saga of New York City
01:05:32is nowhere near to being over.
01:05:34The city's had good times and bad times and will continue to.
01:05:38I think it was George M. Cullen who referred to Broadway
01:05:41as a fabulous invalid.
01:05:43Well, I think New York City is also in many ways
01:05:45a fabulous invalid.
01:05:47New York City has become so hot that it's unbelievable.
01:05:51In the early 90s, it was just the opposite.
01:05:54It was the closest that it's ever been to 1929 depression.
01:05:59Today, New York City is hotter than it ever was in the roaring 20s,
01:06:04in the roaring 80s.
01:06:05Right now, New York City is the hottest it's ever been by far.
01:06:09You feel in New York City the energy coming up out of the sidewalks.
01:06:14You know that you are in the midst of something tremendous.
01:06:18And if something tremendous hasn't yet happened, it's just about to happen.
01:06:22Yeah.
01:06:23It's always alive.
01:06:25I can hear it now.
01:06:30It's maintenance.
01:06:32The sound of maintenance.
01:06:34That's it.
01:06:37Because it's the ultimate battle with entropy.
01:06:40There's no other more entropic, I mean,
01:06:43it's all of the lights in the World Trade Center that are on at night,
01:06:46on low, are sucking Indian Point, a nuclear power station.
01:06:50It's one big live wire.
01:06:53Eight million people jammed together on a very small amount of space.
01:07:02People talk about how dirty our city is.
01:07:05It's amazingly clean for the huge numbers of people
01:07:08coming from so many different experiences who live here.
01:07:11I think that the story ought to be told that it's amazing that New York exists.
01:07:17And it does.
01:07:20And it goes on from day to day to day.
01:07:24When you fly into this city at night, and you see the lights in this city,
01:07:30and the way this city lights up like this Crystal Palace,
01:07:34it is an unbelievable sight to see Manhattan lit up at night from the sky.
01:07:43And so not only are you in awe of the lights and the beauty of it,
01:07:49but being from New York, being a New Yorker,
01:07:52when you come back into that,
01:07:54it's, phew, I'm home.
01:07:58Now that we open it up,
01:08:00the biggest Vancouver one of the city,
01:08:01it is the most impressive,
01:08:02and the way this city!
01:08:03It's really fun to walk back up around the city,
01:08:05and if you lose it,
01:08:06it's true to the city and having to reduce it.
01:08:07It's very easy.
01:08:08And I think the area is really good.
01:08:09Good night.
01:08:10I've got a lot of reasons.
01:08:11It's been a long time.
01:08:12It's been a long time.
01:08:13It's been a long time.
01:08:14Theность of the city,
01:08:15The city lights of the city lights have been a very small.
01:08:17The city lights seem to be changed.