Murder, Inc. and the Moral Life: Gangsters and Gangbusters in La Guardia's New York focuses on the dramatic trials of a group of Brooklyn gangsters in 1940 and 1941. The media nicknamed the gangsters ..."Murder, Inc.," and that nickname quickly became a kind of free-floating "meme," linked at various times to criminals in general; to a record label; and even to a Bruce Springsteen song. The 1940-1941 trials inspired a wave of media coverage, several books and memoirs, and a sub-genre of the gangster film. The trials concluded with a notorious and unsolved murder mystery. Murder, Inc. narrates the life and times of the Brooklyn gang, and also relates their lives both to New York's Roaring Twenties and Depression era gangs and to the wider "gangster" culture expressed especially in the film. At the same time, Murder, Inc., is a moral reflection on the gangsters; the gangbusters, like Fiorello La Guardia and Thomas Dewey, who opposed them; and popular culture's fascination with "gangsterism." It is especially this combination of crime story and moral reflection that makes Murder, Inc. unique.
During the Progressive Era, reform candidates in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago challenged the status quo--with strikingly different results: brief triumph in New York, sustained success in ...Cleveland, and utter failure in Chicago. Kenneth Finegold seeks to explain this phenomenon by analyzing the support for reform in these cities, especially the role of an emerging class of urban policy professionals in each campaign. His work offers a new way of looking at urban reform opposition to machine politics. Drawing on original research and quantitative analysis of electoral data, Finegold identifies three distinct patterns of support for reform candidates: traditional reformers drew support from native-stock elites; municipal populists found support among stock immigrant groups and segments of the working class; and progressive candidates won the backing of coalitions made up of traditional reform and municipal populist voters. The success of these reform efforts, Finegold shows, depended on the different ways in which experts were incorporated into city politics. This book demonstrates the significance of expertise as a potential source of change in American politics and policy, and of each city's electoral and administrative organizations as mediating institutions within a national system of urban political economies.
Can the cinema imagine a different way of developing, using, and living in the city? Is it possible to do so using images of the extant city? Seeing Symphonically shows how a group of independent ...experimental, documentary, and feature films made in and about late modern New York City did just this. Between 1939 and 1964, as the city was being utterly remade by a combination of urban renewal projects, suburbanization, and high-rise public housing, the New York avant-garde reinvented the city symphony, a modernist form that depicted a day in the life of an urban environment through complex montage, optical effects, and street portraiture. Erica Stein documents how these New York City symphonies subverted and critiqued urban redevelopment through their aesthetics, particularly their rhythms, and, through those same rhythms, envisioned a world in which urban inhabitants have the absolute right to remake the city according to their needs, outside the demands of capital.
Hell's Kitchen is among Manhattan's most storied and studied neighborhoods. A working-class district situated next to the West Side's middle- and upper-class residential districts, it has long ...attracted the focus of artists and urban planners, writers and reformers. Now, Joseph Varga takes us on a tour of Hell's Kitchen with an eye toward what we usually take for granted: space, and, particularly, how urban spaces are produced, controlled, and contested by different class and political forces. Varga examines events and locations in a crucial period in the formation of the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, the Progressive Era, and describes how reformers sought to shape the behavior and experiences of its inhabitants by manipulating the built environment. But those inhabitants had plans of their own, and thus ensued a struggle over the very spaces - public and private, commercial and personal - in which they lived. Varga insightfully considers the interactions between human actors, the built environment, and the natural landscape, and suggests how the production of and struggle over space influence what we think and how we live. In the process, he raises incisive questions about the meaning of community, citizenship, and democracy itself.
Choice's Outstanding Academic Title list for 2013
"There is no comparable book on this tunnel. Highly recommended."-Choice Reviews
Every year, more than thirty-three million vehicles traverse the ...Holland Tunnel, making their way to and from Jersey City and Lower Manhattan. From tourists to commuters, many cross the tunnel's 1.6-mile corridor on a daily basis, and yet few know much about this amazing feat of early 20th-century engineering. How was it built, by whom, and at what cost? These and many other questions are answered inHighway Under the Hudson: A History of the Holland Tunnel,Robert W. Jackson's fascinating story about this seminal structure in the history of urban transportation.
Jackson explains the economic forces which led to the need for the tunnel, and details the extraordinary political and social politicking that took place on both sides of the Hudson River to finally enable its construction. He also introduces us to important figures in the tunnel's history, such as New Jersey Governor Walter E. Edge, who, more than anyone else, made the dream of a tunnel a reality and George Washington Goethals (builder of the Panama Canal and namesake of the Goethals Bridge), the first chief engineer of the project.
Fully illustrated with more than 50 beautiful archival photographs and drawings, Jackson's story of the Holland Tunnel is one of great human drama, with heroes and villains, that illustrates how great things are accomplished, and at what price.
Highway Under the Hudsonfeatured in theNew York Times
Listen to Robert Jackson talk about the book on WAMC Radio
New York is often described as the greatest city in the world. Yet much of the iconic architecture and culture which so defines the city as we know it today from the Empire State Building to the ...Pastrami sandwich only came into being in the 1930s, in what
Originally published in 1978. Millions of immigrants seeking a better life came to New York City in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ronald H. Bayor's study details how the relative ...tranquility among the city's four major ethnic groups was disturbed by economic depression, political divisions arising out of ties with the Old Country, and factional strife stirred up by local politicians seeking ethnic votes. Also evaluated are the effects of such emotional and political issues such as Nazism and Fascism upon the allegiances of Germans and Italians; the rift in the ethnic community caused by the communist scare; and the influence of such figures such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Father Charles Coughlin, and Fiorello La Guardia.
Defining Democracy examines struggles over electoral reform in New York City to clarify our understanding of democracy’s evolution in the United States and the world. In 1936, New Yorkers approved a ...radical change in local democracy by instituting proportional representation (PR) in city council elections. Rather than traditional winner-take-all elections between two candidates representing two political parties, PR allowed voters to rank candidates on their ballots in order of preference and guaranteed victory to anyone polling more than 75,000 votes. This system enabled the election of the most diverse municipal legislatures in New York’s history, including the city’s first African American legislators and unprecedented numbers of women and third-party representatives. With their authority threatened, the Democratic and Republican parties allied against PR and the system’s coalition of supporters. Following several unsuccessful repeal attempts led by the two major parties, the election of two Communists spurred a red-baiting campaign that ultimately led to PR’s abolition in 1947. The first election following PR’s demise found all but one of the PR-elected progressives removed from office, with the Democratic and Republican parties positioned to monopolize power in city affairs for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond. This history of democratic reform and voting rights in New York City reveals how activists challenged the boundaries of who could be elected, what interests could be represented, and ultimately what policies could be implemented in urban America.
In this eye-opening cultural history, Brian Tochterman examines competing narratives that shaped post-World War II New York City. As a sense of crisis rose in American cities during the 1960s and ...1970s, a period defined by suburban growth and deindustrialization, no city was viewed as in its death throes more than New York. Feeding this narrative of the dying city was a wide range of representations in film, literature, and the popular press--representations that ironically would not have been produced if not for a city full of productive possibilities as well as challenges. Tochterman reveals how elite culture producers, planners and theorists, and elected officials drew on and perpetuated the fear of death to press for a new urban vision.It was this narrative of New York as the dying city, Tochterman argues, that contributed to a burgeoning and broad anti-urban political culture hostile to state intervention on behalf of cities and citizens. Ultimately, the author shows that New York's decline--and the decline of American cities in general--was in part a self-fulfilling prophecy bolstered by urban fear and the new political culture nourished by it.
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