Thomas Dyja > Quotes

“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

“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

“Protest is good; involvement is better; doing both is the best.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“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

“Everywhere a sudden light shone down. The all-type cover of New York’s Christmas issue harked and heralded the news that “NEW YORK IS BACK.” “The death of this city has been declared so often,” it read, “that almost no one realizes life here is actually getting better—safer, nicer, tastier, cheaper, snazzier, more sensible and exciting than it’s been in years. Who knew?” Inside, the “celebration of the new, improved metropolis” began “Admit it: You’ve been feeling better, but don’t know why,” though it certainly hinted by naming Rudy himself one of the thirty-eight “new, improved” things about New York: “Rudy Giuliani’s first year as mayor, though far from perfect, has been so eventful, so thrillingly New Paradigmatic that the Dinkins administration seems even less accomplished in memory than it was in fact.” Yet out of the thirty-seven other reasons cited, little was new or in any way related to Giuliani. From Times Square, Chelsea Piers, and Bryant Park to better subways, bustling flea markets, and a wave of coffeehouses, this sudden awakening was the result of policies, plans, and battles of prior administrations and the tireless efforts of individuals who’d fought and labored with their fellow New Yorkers for more than a decade.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“We no longer have the luxury of dogma, assumptions, and unexamined opinions about New York, not from any side of the many divides that separate us in this city. A fourth evolution of New York is clearly imminent; economics, public health, and social justice demand it.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“Unfortunately, the Bull that gilded Renaissance New York did little for most Americans. Eighties Wall Street was about institutional money released by deregulation, mergers and acquisitions, and, most of all, the debt that made it all possible. As John Kenneth Galbraith points out, financial euphoria always starts with new ways to borrow money; this time it was triggered by the Savings & Loan crisis. Volcker’s rocketing interest rates had forced S&Ls to offer double digits to new depositors while only getting back single digits on the old thirty-year mortgages on their books. S&Ls were going under, and getting a mortgage was nearly impossible, so in March 1980, with the banking system and the housing market on the brink, Carter had signed a law to allow them to issue credit cards, invest in commercial real estate, and offer checking accounts in order to stay in business. Reagan then took it a step further with a change that encouraged S&Ls to sell their mortgages in search of higher returns, freeing up a $1 trillion that needed to be invested in something. Which takes us back to Salomon Brothers, where in 1978 one Lew Ranieri had repackaged an old investment product the government had clamped down on during the Depression: A group of home mortgages all backed by government insurance would be bundled together, then sliced into bonds, thus converting the debt some people owed on their homes into an asset for others. Ranieri had been a bit ahead of the curve then—the same high interest rates that killed the S&Ls also made his bonds unattractive—but now deregulation let Salomon buy up the S&Ls’ mortgages at a deep discount, bundle them into bonds, and sell them back to the S&Ls who believed they’d diversified into the bond market when in fact they’d just bought ground meat made out of their own steaks. In June 1983, Salomon Brothers and Freddie Mac together issued the first collateralized mortgage obligation bonds (CMOs), which bundled up debt and cut it into tranches based on the amount of risk: you could choose between ground chuck and ground sirloin. It would be years before technology would allow doing this on a huge scale, but the immediate impact was that all kinds of debt, not just mortgages, were bundled, cut into bonds, and sold: credit card debt, car loans, you name it. Between 1983 and 1988, some $60 billion of CMOs were sold; GM’s financing arm became more profitable than its cars. America began to make debt instead of things. The”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“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

“schmoozing”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“The movement from Industry to Information would prove to be the fundamental economic shift of the next four decades, and it was hardly some secret conspiracy even then. Going forward, as Daniel Bell had explained, knowledge would replace labor, services would replace goods, and a new knowledge-based power class would emerge that would increase the role of women in the economy.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“One thing he'd learned in ten years on the New York Stage was this: don't make friends with the man who plays Hamlet; make friends with the man who pays Hamlet.”
― Thomas Dyja, Play For A Kingdom: A Brilliantly Imagined Civil War Novel – Enemies Find Brotherhood Through Baseball

“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

“This work ahead will require leaders who put the good of the city above all else. The greatest failures of Dinkins and de Blasio were their failures of leadership, not of policy. They let the city go adrift, but worse, they made everyone who lived in it feel adrift.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“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

“Wall Street,” said a sadder but wiser Henry Blodget, “is its own world… what matters most is your place in that world, not what the rest of the world thinks of you.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“In theory, bad economic times should pull prices down, but the glut of global petrodollars kept pushing inflation up while high unemployment held wages down, giving birth to Stagflation. Lindsay raised taxes to make up for sliding revenues, but it wasn’t enough, and here’s where the nosedive began. State funds and property taxes come to the City twice a year, so to maintain cash flow it has to regularly borrow hundreds of millions of dollars.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“The tide began to turn in Rudy’s favor when he endorsed Clinton’s crime bill and its funds for social programs he’d just gutted. “My city comes first,” said the mayor to congressional Republicans. “Political parties come second.” His approval rating broke 50%, something Mario Cuomo noticed as he ran for a fourth term, this time against D’Amato’s guy George Pataki. Despite giving signals that he’d sit this one out, Giuliani endorsed Cuomo on live television on October 25, a “Dirty Deal” Republicans packaged to represent everything they hated about New York City. Massive Upstate turnout gave Pataki an easy win, but Rudy had made himself look like the Fusion mayor he’d promised to be, transforming perceptions of his Reaganomic takeover into the rough but necessary medicine of Koch’s emergency budgets.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“In November, Random House had published The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump, whose disdain for tradition and good taste had by now convinced striving classes that he was one of them. The people who resented him were the meritocracy who followed the rules; those on top and those on the bottom both knew Balzac had it right: “Behind every great fortune,” he’d written, “there is a great crime.” For Liz Smith, the love of money could still excuse anything. “It is refreshing,” she wrote of “The Donald,” “to find a rich person who isn’t pretending to be broke or modest and unassuming, hopping and skipping on hot coals to avoid being called crass and vulgar when it comes to the most absorbing subject known to the average man and woman in 1988: money…” She finished, “Let’s not kill Donald. Don’t you want to see what happens when he grows up?” In the meantime, he borrowed $407.5 million to buy the Plaza, taking out full-page ads promising to make it “perhaps the greatest hotel in the world.” He mulled public office. “I’m not running for president,” he said, “But if I did… I’d win.” The Helmsleys, on the other hand, were sacrificed for the sins of their class; Giuliani indicted them for tax evasion.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“As early as June of 1981, Brighton Beach was known as Little Odessa, with a quarter of its businesses owned by Soviet Jews.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“New Yorkers fervently deplore the city,” he wrote. “It is their favorite form of self-praise. Only the heroic, they imply, could cope.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“Grassroots leaders must weave a hundred voices and wills into a single, strong thread to wind with others into a cable that can, with more cables, hold up a bridge in partnership with bigger forces. Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood and Yolanda Garcia, for example, weren’t afraid to hold power. They understood that for all the danger it presents, sometimes the righteous must wrap their hands around the live wire in order to achieve the greater good. In short, people have to step up and find the courage to lead, but no one can lead all the time. They must also let themselves be led by others.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“To Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois, Bigger Thomas was more stereotype than sociology; to White Chicago, he just inspired fear. The deepest impact of Wright’s success, though, was that he’d achieved it without the Rosenwald Fund, the NAACP, or any of the other institutional sources that usually supported black artists.”
― Thomas Dyja, The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream

“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

“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

“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

“Identity is above all else the product of shared experience, so Hip Hop let the boroughs develop new identities with their own styles and stars, all connected by subways bombed by artists like Lee Quiñones, Dondi, and Zephyr.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“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

“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

“Public administration must be as nonpartisan as possible. Though it’s never been a sexy platform for any politician to run on, maintaining infrastructure, budgeting funds, and using them well to keep it updated and in good working order matters more than splashy new capital projects. The failure of basic things like transit, sanitation, and water, streets, fire protection, and parks undermines confidence in the city more than any particular crisis, but rather than guaranteeing reliable, efficient, equitable services, the answer to problems has usually been more “catalytic bigness,”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“Blustery as Chicago's weather could be, its nickname "The Windy City" actually referred to the regular cycles of boosterism and Babbittry produced by its business community.”
― Thomas Dyja, The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream