Photographs by Harvey Wang
[From tribute]
In 1983, the Mobil Oil Corporation, to show Mayor Edward Koch why it was contemplating leaving New York, videotaped the sordidness around its 42nd Street headquarters, near Grand Central.
[. . .]
Mobil’s answer, in 1987, was to move to Fairfax, Virginia. More than 100 of some 140 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Gotham in the 1950s asked the same question and reached the same conclusion, pulling out their tax dollars and leading their well-paid workers into greener pastures in those pre–Rudolph Giuliani decades. They were among the million New Yorkers, many of them the elderly rich and the well-educated young, who fled Gotham in the 1970s and 1980s.
[. . .]
Those New Yorkers who could afford it tried to insulate themselves with doormen and limo services, as in Tom Wolfe’s 1987 bestseller The Bonfire of the Vanities;
[. . .]
That people were leaving town all around us came as no surprise.
[. . .]
A Manhattan Institute seminar on Gotham school reform I attended in the late 1980s, as Koch’s 12-year mayoralty drew to a sadly sordid close, caught the temper of the times. Its chairmen were wily national teachers’ union chief Albert Shanker and New York Board of Education president Robert F. Wagner III, a long-valued friend. Maybe we could try X, a panelist suggested. No: union work rules forbade. How about Y? No: the state legislature . . . the budget. . . . And so on for two hours. The profoundly depressing expert consensus: the more you knew about New York, the more you knew that there was nothing nothing nothing we could do to fix a calamitous mess. After all, wasn’t this the “ungovernable city”?
[. . .]
Heather Mac Donald
Bratton cracked down on fare-beating, littering, and pickpocketing, using uniformed cops as well as plainclothes decoys, seemingly easy marks until they snapped on the handcuffs. For the first time in decades, subway riders like me began to think that problems created by human failures, even those as deep-rooted as New York’s, were capable of human solution. And the first issue of City Journal, appearing in the fall of 1990, breathed just that can-do spirit.
[. . .]
When Rudolph Giuliani became mayor in January 1994, and Republican George Pataki won the governorship that November with a pledge of fiscal restraint (honored for one year) and crime control, it seemed that City Journal could have some real influence
[. . .]
The results turned out better than any journalist’s wildest dream. Imagine having a politician actually listen to your proposals! Giuliani, to whom we always sent preview copies of the magazine, once flourished a copy of City Journal in a speech and said, “I don’t know if you can plagiarize policies, but if you can, this is where I plagiarize mine.” Beyond having that dream come true, imagine further getting to see those policies actually work!
[. . .]
Desperate over rampant crime, New York’s mostly Democratic voters had elected Republican Giuliani, a mob-busting ex-U.S. prosecutor, expressly to restore law and order. He sharpened his crime-fighting knowledge in seminars with Manhattan Institute scholar George Kelling on the Broken Windows policing theory that Kelling had framed with political scientist James Q. Wilson and had further expounded in City Journal, starting in the magazine’s second issue and continuing to this day.
[. . .]
The Left never abandoned its belief that crime could fall only if we ended its supposed “root causes”—racism, lack of opportunity, and inequality—despite the dazzling evidence of their error unfolding before everyone’s eyes. Nevertheless, solving those unjust “root causes” was the heart of the liberal faith in those days, and faith is stronger than reason. So in the pages of City Journal, lawyer-turned-writer Heather Mac Donald, as brave and tenacious a reporter (fluent in Spanish, to boot) as she is a brilliant analyst, with an assist from fellow writer and then–family court chief prosecutor Peter Reinharz (a recruiter for “Attica Prep,” he ruefully cracked) and occasionally even from Bratton himself, tirelessly piled up the evidence—which Giuliani took to the voters, more clear-eyed than the experts.
[. . .]
Kay Hymowitz
Because we were in New York, City Journal’s staff felt free of that Washington “realism” that prides itself on its skill in counting legislative votes and rejecting novel ideas as impracticable or unorthodox. We felt, and fostered, that exhilarating sense of intellectual freedom that nurtures new ideas.
[. . .]
[William J. Stern] had run two of his tennis buddy Mario Cuomo’s political campaigns and then found himself head of the Urban Development Corporation, charged with building the vast Convention Center on Manhattan’s West Side. The job title was grand; the job wasn’t. Everywhere Bill looked, he saw mobsters, corruption, and flagrant pilfering. Every contract, even for window cleaning, was not so much a business as a political negotiation, involving an exchange of cash or favors. Horrified, he called his friend the governor.
“Mario,” he said, “you can’t believe the amount of stealing going on here.”
Long pause.
“Well, Bill,” replied Cuomo at last, “isn’t that the way construction is done in New York?”
[. . .]
Gotham’s byzantine zoning laws and building code made real-estate development less an engineering and construction enterprise than a political operation, needing lots of well-paid and well-connected expediters and heavy political contributions for variances and approvals. Developers participated both out of fear of blowback from refusal and because they knew that the complexity of the racket ensured them a cartel that outside developers lacked the arcane political savvy to crack. And the gains could be staggering, as witness Extell Development’s recent $66 million tax abatement at Manhattan’s One57 in exchange for building $5.9 million worth of “affordable” housing in the Bronx.
[. . .]
With reform so hard to achieve, shameless corruption, both political and moral, flourished like weeds on dung—as witness the current indictments of the chiefs of both legislative chambers. And Bill learned from Times Square that, beyond freeing police to chase out the hustlers and rezoning to root out the pornographers, government played no role in the area’s revitalization—another Broken Windows confirmation. Private enterprise, not central planning, worked the rest of the magic.
[. . .]
With the rents of so many of Gotham’s apartments under government control, people don’t move when their kids grow up and leave, so as not to lose their city-protected bargain-rate housing, and landlords have little financial incentive to improve their properties.
[. . .]
But with experience as our most trusted teacher, we learned that better policing was the sine qua non, producing dramatic improvement by itself. Once ordinary citizens felt that they were safe in the streets and in their houses and hotels, New York’s legacy advantages—the world-class cultural institutions that Gotham’s Gilded Age tycoons had built; the city’s finance, publishing, journalism, and design enterprises within a highly diversified economy [. . .] its restaurants and entertainment, its cosmopolitan tolerance, its beautiful beaux-arts and art-deco architecture, and its fast (if still gritty) subway—all these allowed Gotham to spring back to vitality almost overnight.
[. . .]
But we also saw how a small group of New Yorkers generated so many of the city’s problems. This was the minority underclass, defined not just by its high crime rate (blacks and Hispanics, a combined 53 percent of the city’s population, were 92 percent of its murder suspects and 97 percent of its shooting suspects in 2013) but also by intergenerational poverty and welfare dependency, unwed childbearing, drug abuse, school failure, and nonwork
[. . .]
[what] had brought the underclass into being. The cause couldn’t be the legacy of slavery and racism, for economist Thomas Sowell had already documented the strong improvement by every measure that black America had made after World War II, which suddenly reversed around 1964. It wasn’t too little opportunity or too much welfare, since immigrants easily found jobs, and welfare had existed since the New Deal, three decades before the underclass arose.
[. . .]
Everything in underclass culture, where fathers are absent and marriage is dismissed—as useless as a bicycle to a fish—tells girls that sex before 14 is normal, and an out-of-wedlock baby at 16 is the mark of maturity. The grandmas in their thirties are as excited about the new baby as the teen moms, who imagine that finally someone will love them unconditionally and who revel in showing off their shiny new strollers and cute baby outfits. When the babies begin to toddle, their signs of independence and contrariety spark maternal disappointment. An all-too-common underclass cultural pattern has the oldest sibling left in charge of the younger ones when the grandmother won’t babysit, while the mother goes off on new adventures. As for careers or even work, most of Kay’s informants had only adolescent dreaminess, not plans.
[. . .]
it’s hard not to worry that even the best schools can’t fully make up the deficits in childhoods that are so culturally, intellectually, and often emotionally impoverished.
[. . .]
Hearing that Gotham’s Catholic schools were successfully educating the siblings, cousins, and housing-project neighbors of the minority kids who were failing in the public schools, I sent Sol to find out if that was true—and why. [. . .] Here were schools that fostered a culture of self-discipline, orderliness, and hard work, beginning with their students’ neat uniforms, and that rejected the condescending multiculturalism and “social justice” pedagogy taught in the ed schools, believing instead that their largely minority and non-Catholic pupils could master the basic skills and fundamental texts of Western civilization. Much higher graduation rates and standardized test scores than the public schools achieved with the same low-income kids vindicated that faith in high intellectual and disciplinary standards. And all this success came at one-third the per-pupil cost of the public schools, with a tiny administrative bureaucracy and with no unions or tenure to shield incompetent teachers.
[. . .]
Steve Malanga
I came to think, though, that America’s decades-long emphasis on closing the racial achievement gap was misplaced, since policymakers seemed not to care if it got closed by lowering the top performance or by raising the bottom. New York, I thought, should return to its old model of providing talented or ambitious or hardworking kids with as much opportunity as they can take advantage of, both for the kids’ sake and for the city’s.
[. . .]
If Sol Stern had shown how malign was the influence of teachers’ unions, Steve showed how the public unions all together, through their contributions and campaigning, composed the most powerful force in local politics, essentially getting to elect their own bosses. Long before other journalists were on to the story, Steve showed how this power had won public workers higher salaries than similar private-sector workers while enjoying lax work rules and low performance standards and—much more important—how these public workers boasted health-care and pension packages much richer than the taxpayers funding them would themselves receive. Since these were benefits that today’s politicians could promise but tomorrow’s officials would have to pay, the sky was the limit—until tomorrow finally arrived, and municipal bankruptcy loomed. In this way, public servants had become the public’s master and the potential destroyers of the cities that they supposedly served.
[. . .]
Sol Stern
We even asked our architect friends from Franck Lohsen McCrery to draw up a plan for restoring the street grid at Ground Zero and designing the buildings that might rise there, while the great Scottish sculptor Alexander Stoddart designed a beautiful memorial, so much more profound and moving than what actually arose (or sank, more accurately) there. We had long written about architecture—on Winston Churchill’s apt insight about cities: “We shape our buildings, and then our buildings shape us”
[. . .]
Daniel Pipes wrote the first of our many articles on Islam, as we struggled to understand that even though all Muslims are not terrorists like those who attacked us, Muslim terrorism is nevertheless a logical, if extreme, outgrowth of Islam, not an utter distortion of it, and that a troublingly large number of Muslims approve of jihadi violence. That first article cautioned that, while safeguarding the rights of peaceful Muslim-Americans, the United States should carefully scrutinize Muslim would-be immigrants and bar radicals. Since then, Muslim immigrants to America have increased in number, from an estimated 1.7 million to 2.7 million, and New York Muslims have become the largest group on the National Counterterrorism Center’s watch list. City Journal began to pay close attention not just to Islamic immigration but to immigration in general.
[. . .]
You cannot make democratic republicans, faithful to the rule of law, out of tribal people, with tribal loyalties and hatreds—not easily, certainly, and not in a single lifetime—wrote anthropologist Stanley Kurtz in our pages. Nor did American democracy spring up as the magical production of nature, wrote George Will in City Journal. It wasn’t an expression of “the universal values of the human spirit.”
[. . .]
Nicole Gelinas
the freelance New York Post opinion pieces of an irreverent, insightful financial analyst named Nicole Gelinas, whom I rushed to hire in 2005. I’d never met anyone who learned so quickly—skills, information, ideas—than this soft-spoken, independent-minded, and sharply observant young woman.
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_4_city-journal.html
Myron Magnet
What City Journal Wrought
An editor looks back.
Autumn 2015
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