The Assassination of New York. - book reviews

Monthly Review, July-August, 1994 by Robert Engler

The Assassination of New York is not a suspense whodunit. From the outset sociologist Robert Fitch is explicit in identifying the targets of his indictment. In the lineup appear investment bankers; very large property owners and developers; railroad, insurance, and foundation executives; and the specialists in architecture, housing, and planning who serve them. With David and Nelson Rockefeller, backed by various family funds, as contemporary ringleaders, these figures are seen as possessing "the social cohesiveness of a Millsian elite. And the shared economic focus of a Marxist class."

Two decades of sleuthing by the author unearth documents which, he submits, lay bare the basic intentions of the defendants. The Regional Plan of 1929 and its successor in 1968 were comprehensive studies, complete with before and after maps, which highlighted what they were determined the new New York and its environs ultimately should look like. Although there were significant differences, both were concerned with the most advantageous uses of space. The first plan emphasized the location of highways, bridges (but not mass transit), parks, and other elements of land-use planning which would implement the vision of a decentralized future and who should live where in metropolitan New York. The second plan, favoring a more centralized design, stressed the projections and preferences for the development of Manhattan. The two sets of studies were drafted by the Regional Plan Association on whose board sat representatives of the power forces cited by Fitch. These scenarios are central to his charge that the unchanging target has been the dismantling of the industrial base of the city's mixed economy, including the port activities which had been integral to its history and growth. In its place a white-collar structure was to emerge as dominant. This would function as the electronic command post of what subsequently became known as "post-industrial society." Fitch concludes that to a striking degree the region has taken on the form and focus championed by this planning elite. He is outraged by the undemocratic nature of this planning and by the crippling social costs which have been shifted to much of the public.

The great variety of interdependent enterprises in such trades as garment-making, printing, and machinery had once kept the city's economy vibrant and resilient. Small plants had the flexibility to innovate. Many of the products were not standardized and required an intelligent and skilled labor force. The docks brought raw materials and employment. Hops for local breweries came by freight cars on the lighters which used to ply the waters of the port, since the rail freight lines from the west terminated on the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River. Fitch insists that he is not romanticizing this past. There was poverty among exploited workers whose lives were frequently bound by hazardous sweatshops and unhealthy tenements. But there also was opportunity to rise out of these circumstances. And the city generated sufficient revenue to support a network of public hospitals, free higher education, and other services.

Why would Fitch's assassins put out a contract on an economy that was working and keeping them in power? Why would they want to relocate or close down factories, shift the port facilities to New Jersey, and pulverize neighborhoods of Gotham's labor force? Because, the author argues, they had something far more rewarding in mind. Their city of the future was to be built upon the control and exchange of information and knowledge as well as capital. These were the long-run keys to wealth and dominance in a global economy.

Towering office buildings would house many more higher paid employees than did factories and at far greatAr rentals per square foot. Public subsidies and investment could be obtained from a pliant political system, thus minimizing private risk in the name of progress and the public good. The twin towers ("David" and "Nelson") of the World Trade Center were built by the Port Authority, a regional public agency. These skyscrapers displaced some 30,000 small business people and blue collar workers in what had been the electrical supply district. Established neighborhoods were destroyed and their residents scattered. Urban renewal, as often noted, meant urban reAoval, without consulting the displaced. One recalls accounts of the reactions of people living in the projected path of the Cross Bronx Expressway (part of the circumferencial highway network conceived by the planners) which was drawn through their densely populated communities. They felt frightened and powerless. less asked what might finally stop the bulldozers, one woman replied that Eleanor Roosevelt wouldn't let it happen.

Marshall Berman offers a sensitive interpretation of such construction and its impact in his review of Robert Caro's The Power Broker. Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.(1) Fitch, however, believes that the bureaucratic arrogance of Moses made it easy for critics such as Caro to exaggerate the importance of New York's master builder in reshaping the metropolitan area. "The scapegoat for two decades of planning failures," he "simply poured the concrete on the dotted lines" of the earlier plans.