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A New Deal for New YorkAvailable Now“A New Deal for New York is lively, acute, and packed with usable information. Everyone interested in the future of our town should read Mike Wallace’s book.”
In the wake of the September 11th attacks, Wallace argues that we not just rebuild and memorialize the World Trade Center site, but rethink and plan more broadly for the entire city’s future. He tells the fascinating and largely-unknown history of the financial center, exploding myths about the city’s success in recent years. He summarizes a wide variety of ambitious but viable projects to improve all of New York by launching what he calls “the new New Deal”—a multipronged plan that, mindful of both the successes and disappointments of the original New Deal of the 1930s, would feature such longed-for improvements as a revitalized port, improved mass transit, and more affordable housing. We need, says Wallace, “a touch of Jane Jacobs and a dash of Robert Moses,” and he provocatively shows how we can afford it all. Perhaps most of all, A New Deal for New York is an elegant and powerful rebuttal to the conservative attack on the liberal underpinnings of the “old” New Deal. “Tax-cutters love to say they are simply giving us back our money to spend as we wish,” writes Wallace. “But that is to overlook the fact that many of the things we most wish for can’t be provided through the market. You can’t buy public health, or mass transit, or a clean environment, or a competent military at the nearest Wal-Mart.” In short, he argues, September 11th has provided us an “opening, as a city, to make our own course corrections on the river of history—if we have the desire, if we can summon the will. Happily, there are substantial grounds for believing that, under the press of hard blows and hard times, our audacious metropolis will again lead the nation in recalling our history, reimagining our future, and seizing hold of our collective destiny.”
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October 2002 Published by Distributed by |
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Written
with the same verve and gusto that helped win the 1999 Pulitzer Prize
in History for his and Edwin G. Burrows’ Gotham: A History
of New York City to 1898 (Oxford University Press), A New
Deal for New York is a stirring call-to-arms from the distinguished
historian Mike Wallace.