Beame tours the South Bronx with President Jimmy Carter and H.U.D. Secretary Patricia Roberts Harris. Photograph Source: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration – Public Domain

The New York City that Zohran Mamdani will likely take responsibility for as the next mayor is a different city than it was in the 1975 when Abe Beame was mayor. During the post-World War II era of 1945-1975, it was the capital of the 20th century, the locus of American life and hub of the great global capitalist recovery. Today, it retains preeminence in financial services, media and glamour, but its relative standing has been eclipsed both domestically and internationally.

The growth of strong regional metropolises like Miami, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC, eroded the New York’s national hegemony. The restructuring of the global economic order has left the Big Apple a steppingstone to Shanghai, the likely capital of the 21stcentury.

The postwar recovery plateaued out during the ‘70s and the social challenges this fostered came to a head in city’s fiscal crisis of 2008. New York was hit hard by postwar suburbanization, the mass “white flight” propelled by the GI Bill and Robert Moses’s mad reconfiguration of the city’s transport infrastructure, parks and public housing. Numerous major New York-based corporations relocated, taking their workforces with them; the city’s tax-base withered.

Paris, during its postwar reconstruction, pushed the poor to the city’s periphery; postwar America lured white, middle-class city dwellers to the Levittown suburbs sprawling across the country. Social life was re-centered, shifting from the city to the ‘burbs. Private homes, cars, TVs and malls became the America’s new reality. This shift profoundly altered life in the nation’s cities, especially Gotham.

Kim Phillips-Fein opens her carefully researched and pointedly critical study, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (2017), with these memorable words: “On October 30, 1975, the New York Daily News printed the most famous headline in its history: ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’.”

She focuses on the fiscal crisis that gripped the city for much of the 1970s and came to a head in ’75 when the then-mayor Beame considered declaring bankruptcy. As she reflects, “the financial collapse of New York would be the ultimate symbol of American economic decline, a demonstration to the whole world that the United States was no longer the preeminent nation it has been over the postwar years.” The city did not declare bankruptcy, but what did occur is more telling. It set the stage of a new phase in the New York’s historical development and the rise of global financial capital along with corporatists neo-liberalism.

Phillips-Fein, author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (2014), brings a strong sense of drama to her reconstruction of one of the most pivotal moments in the city’s long history.  Like a good documentary filmmaker, she tells a compelling story that combines portraits of key people involved in the crisis with a wider view of the social context in which the crisis took place.

At her best, Phillips-Fein writes empathically on the toll the crisis bore on city residents, especially the poor and people of color. She also dissects its impact on representative neighborhoods (e.g., Greenpoint-Williamsburg) and public institutions (e.g., public hospitals). She documents how the mounting crisis led to innumerable popular demonstrations, marches, strikes, sit-ins and culminated in the wide-spread looting and fires in the Bronx that accompanied the blackout of July 13, 1977.

As memorable as the Daily News headline, in ’75 the Council for Public Safety, a front group representing police, firefighters and other unions, published Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York with a skull on the cover. It warned tourists not to walk after 6 p.m., or leave Midtown, or take the subway. It was released as city workers faced the threats of layoffs, wage freezes and mounting insecurity.