2
" The impulse here is to add “again,” but making New York “work” had not always, and maybe not ever, been a goal for those who welcomed disorder as the way to overtime or a palmed twenty. City government had never been run for maximum efficiency; the point of patronage was jobs, with results a distant second. Management was the province of reformers and the public agencies, foundations, and advocacy groups who’d erected a virtuous scaffolding around City politics, assuring things actually got done while City Hall focused on giving special interests their taste. Everyone else got pinched, especially the middle class and small businessmen who paid for their independence by having to slash through thickets of red tape, following absurd union rules and paying inflated prices. Koch liked to tell about the time an old woman tugged his sleeve and said, “Mr. Koch, Mr. Koch, make the city what it once was.” To which he said, “Lady, it was never that good. "
― Thomas Dyja , New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
3
" New Yorkers liked Sadik-Khan’s bike lanes and the plazas; they liked the 800 more acres of parks—though Parks had cut its staff 40% between 2008 and 2012 even as the Central Park Conservancy boasted a $183 million endowment—and three-quarters of a million more trees. A certain texture was gone though, easy to see on the Upper East Side where almost a third of the apartments between 49th and 70th between Fifth and Park were vacant ten months a year, owned by shell companies and LLCs. The neighborhood was a kind of jewelry store now, apartments tended and traded for their speculative value. Yet the idea of New York City was bigger and broader than it had ever been. By 2010, 37% of New York’s residents were immigrants, two-thirds living in Brooklyn and Queens, and as much as globalization had helped gut the city’s manufacturing base, they’d been at least as much responsible for hatching its evolutions as anything done at One Police Plaza or City Hall. While Wall Street had been mining wealth for itself, immigrants from around the world had rebuilt the day-to-day economy; from 1994 to 2004, businesses in neighborhoods like Flushing and Sunset Park grew by as much as 55%. Half of the city’s accountants "
― Thomas Dyja , New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
4
" The gameboard became what I imagine as a galaxy of 8 ½ million lives connected to each other in ways beyond counting: those with the most connections—and therefore the most access to favors, advice, job tips, and string pulling—shone the brightest, and the reconnection and reorganization of New Yorkers sent new tastes, ideas, resources, and behaviors coursing through every borough, unleashing financial, human, and social capital. Like a giant brain, the more connections, the more synapses firing, the higher functioning New York became. Those without wide connections, or with none at all, were left behind. "
― Thomas Dyja , New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
5
" More than ever, balancing public and private, inside and out, me and we, will be central tensions of New York, and if we intend to hand a peaceful, prosperous, and generative city to our children, then we must all play active roles in its next evolution and consciously participate in civil life beyond work, shopping, and leisure. We will have to rethink our networks; our own personal networks—who’s in them and what are they connected to—but also carefully and inclusively rebuild collective powers to confront the ones that have torn us apart, ones that can guarantee everyone access to basic resources like health care, housing, and justice. "
― Thomas Dyja , New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
7
" For the first time in twenty-five years there was no Person of Color on the Board of Estimate, whatever traditional roles they’d had in City government erased. Squeezed by growing immigration, the breakdown of old political networks, a changing economy and soon, waves of drugs, crime, and disease, New York’s African Americans would be forced over the next thirty-five years into new cultural and social strategies that would in turn change the world. "
― Thomas Dyja , New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
10
" The monastic brotherhood was long gone, replaced by man-children fueled by what Lewis called the “eerie popular feeling that no job was worth taking outside investment banking.” John Gutfreund himself led the way; at a dinner party that year he reportedly looked his table partner in the eye and said, “Well, you’ve got the name, but you don’t have the money.” It was a question as to how long he’d have his own: a slipping bond market forced Salomon to fend off a hostile takeover by Ron Perelman. Everyone was a speculator: in 1987, $1 billion were spent on baseball cards; $350 million were spent on tickets to actual baseball games. Everyone was a gambler: State lotteries spread, Las Vegas and Atlantic City became family destinations, and Indian gaming would soon be legal. Easy credit was now a way of life—the pleasures of the ’80s had been charged to credit cards; $375 billion worth in 1987 alone—Robert Heilbroner predicted “a vast crisis” if the US continued to send industrial jobs to Mexico while it concentrated on “handicrafts. "
― Thomas Dyja , New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
12
" New York, to Whyte, needed to produce more than just money; it needed to produce social capital. Even as New York careened, he celebrated its street life—“Characters are flourishing,” he wrote. “It is the work of a great city to be tolerant of them, and New York is. "
― Thomas Dyja , New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
14
" Between the lines, though, was concern about the age, quality, and training of his cops, something Bratton had once tweaked Kelly for. Despite “taking the handcuffs off,” the commissioner raised the minimum age for the NYPD to 22 along with higher physical standards and two years of college. He let go of 148 probational cops in 1994, more than the last three years combined, and banned the chokehold. "
― Thomas Dyja , New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
15
" There’d been 350 fewer murders in 1994 than in 1993; 650 fewer than in 1990. Even Bratton didn’t take all the credit: “Nobody can be sure exactly what is going on,” he told the Times in an article titled “When Crime Recedes: New York Crime Falls, But Just Why Is a Mystery.” What the NYPD could own was the start of a virtuous cycle. At first, “fear,” wrote Fred Siegel, “declined even more rapidly than crime.” Subway ridership was up, and more New Yorkers spending more time in public space dampened opportunistic crime. The next year, murders fell to a 25-year low, making the panic over young Black superpredators appear less like science and more like White panic, but theories on both sides were being disproved. Three-quarters of New Yorkers below the poverty line were statistically in “extreme poverty,” and by 1998, more than 600,000 people a month relied on emergency meals, more than twice the number as when Giuliani took office, so if hunger made you a criminal, crime should have been shooting up. Nor were the moral measures that a Manhattan Institute type might look for—single-parent homes, for example—getting any better. "
― Thomas Dyja , New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
16
" So what ended crime as it was known in New York? Jack Maple said it wasn’t about literally fixing broken windows. “Rapists and killers,” he wrote, “don’t head for another town when they see that graffiti is disappearing from the subway.” Incarceration wasn’t the deciding factor either, at least in New York; murders took a quick dive once Compstat was in place, but other crimes continued down the same trend line that had started under Dinkins. Something else was happening. The changes in the NYPD had a profound impact, but they were meeting a unique confluence of conditions. First, "
― Thomas Dyja , New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
17
" The murderers were overwhelmingly poor, Black or Latino, young, and 95% male, which also described most of those murdered, pointing to network theory’s tenet that who you know has an enormous influence on you. The best indicator of whether someone is a delinquent is the proportion of their friends who are, and between 1980 and 1990, the demographic of young, poor men of color fell by 30%, leading economist Steven Levitt to surmise that the national crime drop was an unintended result of legalized abortion; others linked it convincingly to the abolishment of lead paint. Many of the social programs now being cut had further helped shrink that risk pool. "
― Thomas Dyja , New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
18
" But there were two more hopeful causes and both pointed to the fundamental role communities had in transforming New York. First, immigration. First- and second-generation immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes than the native born, and hundreds of thousands of them had been moving into at-risk neighborhoods, diluting the percentage of criminals. And many were there because of the second reason, the Housing Initiative that replaced urban entropy with homes. “What happened,” says Trina Scotland of the East Brooklyn Congregations, “was that as the mind-set changed, and as the police changed, that’s when the crime rate started going down.” A Melrose Court resident in the "
― Thomas Dyja , New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
19
" His first target was Sanitation. New York had a toxic relationship with its sanitation workers, many of whom rode the trucks only because they’d flunked Police or Fire exams. If a garbageman ever woke up ready to do a good job, he faced decrepit work conditions and New Yorkers who blamed him for filthy streets while they dropped trash where they stood. So Leventhal went positive. His Productivity Council and Labor-Management committees forced Sanitation head Norman Steisel to make nice. New trucks were ordered. Koch visited repair depots and transfer stations; Jets tickets and days off were handed out for high performance, and productivity and Project Scorecard numbers crept up, allowing Steisel and Leventhal to begin negotiations over trimming three-man truck crews down to two. Fixing Sanitation didn’t mean cuts; it involved giving workers self-worth, responsibility, and the right tools. In City Hall, Leventhal added analysis of mistakes and problems to the Mayor’s Management Report, lending it heft and accountability, and got Operations a voice on the budget. With Koch offering political cover for any tough choices, he began to move the needle. "
― Thomas Dyja , New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
20
" Tech is the heart and soul of the American economy,” wrote James Cramer, “the chief driver of its prosperity, the keeper of its newfound world dominance, and the place where its biggest profits are.” If you wanted to pay for college and retire in a place that did more than change your bedpan, you had to invest in Tech. Awash in money, mutual fund managers shoved money at Tech, watched it grow, and then plowed their profits into even more Tech. Wall Street had finally Gotten It. The prospect of Java’s landing in 1996, for instance, sent Sun’s stock price up 157%, which sounded to the unconvinced like proof of tulip mania, but Java would soon bring all those static websites to life with movement and sound, ending Stacy Horn’s cyberspace built of words. "
― Thomas Dyja , New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
