New York EXPLAINED
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1945–1980

Crisis & Reinvention

The city almost died, then reinvented the culture of the world. A planner with a "meat ax," a writer who stopped him, an uprising at a Village bar, a near-bankruptcy summed up in one tabloid headline, a blackout, and a back-to-school party in the Bronx that started hip-hop.

A New York City subway car covered inside and out with spray-painted graffiti, mid-1970s.
A graffiti-covered subway car on the Lexington Avenue line, 1973. Jim Pickerell for DOCUMERICA / EPA; National Archives. Public domain.
  1. 1959

    1959

    Moses and the Meat Ax

    Moses held unelected power over New York’s parks, bridges, and expressways for four decades and bulldozed whole neighborhoods to build highways.

    When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis you have to hack your way with a meat ax.

    Robert Moses, defending his expressway program (recorded in Robert Caro’s "The Power Broker," 1974)

    His highways displaced hundreds of thousands of people, most of them poor and Black or Latino. He never learned to drive.

    Source: The Power Broker (Robert A. Caro) Read the full story
  2. 1961

    1961

    The Sidewalk Ballet

    Jacobs, a West Village writer with no planning degree, argued that lively, mixed-use streets, not Moses’s superblocks, are what keep a city safe and alive.

    The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet... Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.

    Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," 1961

    Her book is still the most influential argument ever made against the kind of city Moses was building.

    Source: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
  3. 1963

    October 1963

    The Mob Breaks Its Silence

    Lucky Luciano had organized the New York Mafia into five families back in 1931. For decades they taxed the docks, the markets, and the construction unions.

    Cosa Nostra, meaning our thing and our family.

    Joseph Valachi, the first made member to describe the Mafia in public, to a U.S. Senate committee, 1963

    It took an upstate traffic stop, this Senate witness, and the RICO law to break them. The families still exist, much weakened.

    Source: The Valachi hearings (records collected) Read the full story
  4. 1968

    April 1968

    Jacobs Stops the Expressway

    Jacobs’s decade-long fight killed Moses’s plan to run an elevated expressway across Lower Manhattan through what is now SoHo and Little Italy.

    Jane Jacobs, chairing the committee to stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway, was arrested at a state hearing after the crowd rushed the stage and the stenographer’s tape was destroyed; the charge was later reduced to disorderly conduct.

    Account of the 1968 LOMEX hearing, from Jacobs’s biography and preservation records

    SoHo, Little Italy, and much of the Village exist today because she won. It was the moment the city stopped letting Moses draw the map.

    Source: Jane Jacobs (preservation history)
  5. 1969

    June 28, 1969

    It Wasn’t No Riot

    Police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village before dawn on June 28, 1969, and the patrons fought back over several nights, igniting the modern LGBTQ rights movement.

    It was a rebellion, it was an uprising... it wasn’t no damn riot.

    Stormé DeLarverie, performer and Stonewall participant, on the night the patrons fought back

    Much of what gets said about that night, including who threw the first brick, is contested. DeLarverie’s framing is one of the better-sourced lines, and it insists on the right word: not a riot, an uprising.

    Source: Library of Congress, The Stonewall Era Read the full story
  6. 1973

    August 11, 1973

    Hip-Hop Is Born

    At a back-to-school party his sister threw in the rec room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, Kool Herc looped the drum breaks of funk records and invented hip-hop.

    I was noticing people used to wait for particular parts of the record to dance, maybe to do their specialty move.

    DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), on the insight behind looping a record’s drum break

    It started in the borough Moses’s expressway had gutted. Out of the worst-off blocks in the city came the most influential music of the next half-century.

    Source: HISTORY Read the full story
  7. 1975

    October 30, 1975

    Ford to City: Drop Dead

    Weeks from bankruptcy, the city begged Washington for help; President Ford gave a speech refusing a bailout, and the Daily News compressed it into the most famous headline in city history.

    FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD

    New York Daily News front page, October 30, 1975

    Ford never said "drop dead." It was the News’s paraphrase of his speech. He later signed billions in federal loans anyway, and blamed the headline for costing him New York in 1976.

    Source: Ford to City: Drop Dead (history) Read the full story
  8. 1977

    July 13–14, 1977

    A Night of Terror

    A lightning strike cut power across the city for about 25 hours, and in the dark some 1,600 stores were looted and over 1,000 fires set, hitting poor neighborhoods hardest.

    a night of terror

    Mayor Abraham Beame’s description of the citywide blackout

    The 1965 blackout had been orderly and almost romantic. The 1977 one, in a broke and angry city, was the opposite. The two nights mark how far New York had fallen in twelve years.

    Source: TIME, "The Blackout: Night of Terror" (1977) Read the full story

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