Soon after World War II, New York City became known as one of the largest cities in the world. However, after reaching the peak of the population in 1950, the city began to feel the impact of white flights to the suburbs, a decline in industry and commerce when businesses went to places where it was cheaper and easier to operate, increased crime, and progress in load his welfare, all reaching the lowest point in the city's fiscal crisis in the 1970s, when it could hardly fail to meet its obligations and declare bankruptcy.
Video History of New York City (1946-77)
Postwar: The late 1940s to the 1950s
Since many major cities were destroyed after World War II, New York City has a new global advantage. It became the UN headquarters, built from 1947 to 1952; inherited the role of Paris as the center of the art world with Abstract Expressionism; and became London's rival in international financial and art markets. But the population declined after 1950, with increasing suburbanization in the New York metropolitan area as pioneered in Levittown, New York.
November 15, 1948, saw a turning point in the city's economy: The Interstate Trade Commission began allowing barges to charge for transporting goods from the New Jersey railway terminal to the dock in Manhattan. This has led to declining ports, piers, and places like the Washington Market in Lower Manhattan.
Meanwhile, Midtown Manhattan, sparked by postwar prosperity, experienced an unprecedented building explosion that changed its appearance. The new glass and steel office towers in International Style are just beginning to replace the ziggurat-style towers (built in wedge-cake style) from the pre-war era. Also rapidly changing is the east end of the East Village close to FDR Drive. Many traditional apartment blocks are cleaned up and replaced with large-scale public housing projects. In Lower Manhattan, urban renewal began to form around 1960, led by David Rockefeller's One Chase Manhattan Plaza building.
In a city built, construction requires destruction. After the old Beaux Arts Station of Pennsylvania was torn down, the growing attention to conservation led to the Law of the Land Preservation Commission of 1965. Another major railway station, Grand Central, was also threatened with dismantling but was eventually rescued. Meanwhile, the New York City highway network is spreading under the guidance of Robert Moses, with the result of an increase in traffic congestion, but the 1962 defeat of Musa's planned Lower Manhattan Expressway by community activists led by Jane Jacobs is an indication that Moses will no longer has free hands that he enjoyed in the past.
Maps History of New York City (1946-77)
1960s
During the 60s, economic and social decay gradually took place. The symptom of the city's lack of competitiveness is the loss of both long-lived National League baseball teams in California; Dodgers and Giants moved after the 1957 season. The sporting void was partly filled with the formation of the Mets in 1962, which played their first two seasons at Polo Grounds, the former Giants home, before moving to Shea Stadium in Queens in 1964.
Part of the federal Immigration Act of 1965, which abolished the country's quota, set the stage for increasing immigration from Asia, which became the basis for the modern American community of New York.
On November 9, 1965, New York experienced a widespread blackout along with much of the eastern North American region. (The ordeal of the city became the subject of the 1968 film, Where You When the Lights Are Out? ) The postwar population moving to the suburbs resulted in a decline in textile manufacturing and other traditional industries in New York, operating in a very outdated facility. With the arrival of container shipping, the industry was shifting to New Jersey where there was more room for it. The blue collar environment began to deteriorate and became a center for drugs and crime. Strip clubs and other adult businesses began to fill Times Square in the late 60s.
In 1966, the US Navy closed the Brooklyn Navy Yard trail, ending the command that went back to the beginning of the 19th century. It's sold to town. The Yard continued as a site for shipbuilding for eleven years.
Mayor Lindsay
John Lindsay, a liberal Republican, was a very visible and charismatic mayor from 1966 to 1973. It was the center of a national protest movement on black civil rights, opposition to the Vietnam War, and newly emerging feminist and gay movements. There is a shocking economic shock as postwar prosperity ends with many factories and the entire industry closes. There is a population transition with hundreds of thousands of blacks and Puerto Ricans entering, and a white exodus to the suburbs. Trade unions, especially in teaching, transit, sanitation and construction, fractures over major strikes and internal racial tensions.
Strikes and unrest
The American Transport Workers Union (TWU) led by Mike Quill closed the city with a total stop of subway and bus services on the first day of John Lindsay's mayor's office. When New Yorkers experienced a transit strike, Lindsay commented, "I still consider this a nice city," and walked four miles (6 km) from his hotel room to City Hall with a gesture to show it. Dick Schaap, then columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, created and popularized the sarcastic term in an article called Fun City. In the article, Schaap cynically indicates that it is not true.
The transit strike was the first of many labor struggles. In 1968 the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) went on strike for the dismissal of teachers at schools in Ocean Hill and Brownsville.
In the same year, 1968, there was also a nine day sanitation strike. The quality of life in New York reached a nadir during this strike, when the garbage pile was on fire, and strong winds rolled up the dirt through the streets. With schools shut down, police were involved in the slowdown, firefighters threatened job action, the city was flooded with garbage, and racial tensions and religion dismantled to the surface, Lindsay then called the last six months of 1968 "the worst of my public life."
The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous violent demonstrations against police attacks that occurred on the morning of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. They are often cited as the first example in American history when people in the homosexual community oppose a government-sponsored system that persecutes sexual minorities, and they have become a decisive event that marks the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States. and around the world.
1970s
In 1970, the city became famous for its high level of crime and other social disorders. Popular songs by Cashman & amp; West in the fall of 1972, the "American City Suite", noted, allegorically, degraded the quality of urban life. The city's subway system is considered unsafe due to crime and often suffers mechanical damage. Prostitutes and pimps often visit Times Square, while Central Park is afraid of being a place of robbery and rape. Homeless people and drug dealers occupy abandoned and abandoned buildings. The New York City Police Department was subjected to an investigation into rampant corruption, most notably in 1971 testimony against whistle policeman Frank Serpico. In June 1975, a coalition of unions distributed a pamphlet to the visitors, warning them to stay away.
The opening of the mammoth World Trade Center complex in 1972, however, was one of the few high points of the city's history at that time. Presented by David Rockefeller and built by the Port Authorities of New York and New Jersey in the electronics district of Radio Row in Lower Manhattan, Twin Towers replaced the Empire State Building in Midtown as the tallest building in the world; it shifted in turn by the Chicago Sears Tower in 1973.
Fiscal crisis
The stagnation of the US economy in the 1970s hit New York City very hard, reinforced by a large movement of middle-class population to the suburbs, which drained the city of tax revenues. In the spring of 1975, New York City faced a serious fiscal crisis. Under the mayor of Abraham Beame, the city had run out of money to pay normal operating costs, could not borrow more, and faced the possibility of defaulting on its obligations and declaring bankruptcy. The city recognizes an operating deficit of at least $ 600 million, although the city's total debt is actually more than $ 11 billion and the city can not borrow money from the credit market. There are many reasons for the crisis, including overly optimistic earnings estimates, lack of pensions, use of capital expenditures for operating costs, and poor budgeting and accounting practices. The city government is reluctant to confront city unions; an announcement of a "freeze on recruitment" followed by an increase in city salary payments of 13,000 people in a quarter, and layoffs announcing eight thousand workers resulted in only 436 employees leaving the municipality.
The first solution proposed was the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which was trying to raise the city's money and refinance its heavy debts. Founded on June 10, 1975, with Felix Rohatyn as chairman, and the board of nine prominent citizens. Meanwhile, the crisis continues to deteriorate, with a recognized city deficit of $ 750 million; municipio bonds can be sold only with significant losses to the underwriters.
MAC insisted that the city undertook major reforms, including wage freeze, massive layoffs, subway tariff increases, and tuition charging at City University of New York. The New York State Legislature endorsed MAC by passing laws that changed the city's sales tax and share transfer tax to state taxes, which when collected were then used as collateral for MAC bonds. The State of New York also passed a state law that created the Emergency Financial Control Council to monitor the city's finances, requiring the city to balance the budget within three years, and required the city to follow accepted accounting practices. But even with all of these measures, the value of the MAC bonds is falling in price, and the city struggles to make money to pay its employees and keep operating. MAC sold $ 10 billion in bonds.
Failed to achieve results quickly and the country issued a much more drastic solution: Emergency Financial Control Council (EFCB). It is a state institution, and city officials have only two votes on the seven-member board. EFCB takes full control of the city budget. It makes drastic cuts in city services and spending, cuts city jobs, freezes salaries and raises bus and subway fares. The level of welfare spending is cut. Some hospitals are closed like some branch office libraries and fire stations. Unions help, by allocating most of their pension funds to buy municipal bonds - puts pensioners at risk if bankruptcy occurs.
A statement by Mayor Beame was prepared and ready to be released on October 17, 1975, if the union teacher did not invest $ 150 million of his pension in the city's securities. "I have been advised by financial inspectors that the City of New York has enough cash to meet its debt obligations today," the statement said. "This is a standard we strive to avoid." Beame's statement was never distributed because Albert Shanker, the union's president, finally provided $ 150 million of union pensions to buy Municipal Assistance Corporation bonds. Two weeks later, President Gerald R. Ford angered New Yorkers by refusing to give a bailout to the city authorities. Ford subsequently signed the Summer Financing Act in New York in 1975, a Congressional bill that extended a $ 2.3 billion federal loan to the city for three years; the loan has been repaid with interest.
In return, Congress ordered the city to increase fees for municipal services, to cancel wage increases for city employees and drastically reduce the number of people in the workforce. Rohatyn and the director of MAC persuaded banks to delay the maturity of the bonds they held and received fewer interest. They also persuaded the city and state employee pension funds to buy MAC bonds to pay off the city's debts. The municipality slashed the number of its employees by 40,000, the deferred wage increases agreed on in the contract and keeping them below the inflation rate.
A fiscal conservative, Democrat Ed Koch, was elected mayor in 1977. In 1977-1978, New York City had wiped out its short-term debt. In 1985, City no longer needed the support of Municipal Assistance Corporation, and he chose his own from his existence.
Blackout
The 1977 New York City blackout took place on July 13 of that year and lasted for 25 hours, where black and Hispanic neighborhoods fell prey to destruction and looting. More than 3,000 people were arrested, and the overcrowded city jail was so burdened that some suggested reopening the recently condemned Manhattan Detention Complex.
The financial crisis, the high crime rate, and the damage caused by the blackouts gave rise to the widespread belief that New York City suffered an irreversible setback. By the late 1970s, nearly one million people had left, losing a population that would not be recovered for another twenty years. For Jonathan Mahler, the author of The Bronx's history is Burning, "The clinical term for that, the fiscal crisis, is not near the raw reality. The spiritual crisis is more like that."
See also
- American urban history
- New York City Time line, 1950s-1970s
- the mayoral election of New York City, 1953
- the mayoral election of New York City, 1957
- the mayoral election of New York City, 1961
- the mayoral election of New York City, 1965
- the mayoral election of New York City, 1969
- New York mayor election, 1973
- New York City mayor election, 1977
References
Bibliography
External links
- "What Does It Take to Get a Decent Apartment in a Large Squeeze Apartment?", New York , 30 September 1968.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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