The Assassination of New York

by Robert Fitch, Peter Kwong (Introduction), Mark Crispin Miller (Editor)

The story of how the richest city in the world became one of the poorest in North America, with a new introduction by Peter Kwong

How did New York City come to be a network of steel towers, banks, and nail salons, with chain drugstores on every block—a place where, increasingly, no one can afford to live except the lords of Wall Street and foreign billionaires, and where more and more of the Big Apple’s best-loved businesses have closed their doors? It didn’t start with Michael Bloomberg—or with Robert Moses. As Robert Fitch meticulously demonstrates in this eye-opening book, the planning to assassinate New York began a century ago, as the city’s very richest few—the Morgans, the Mellons, and especially the Rockefellers—looked for ways to maximize the value of their real estate by pushing Gotham’s vibrant and astonishingly varied manufacturing sector out of town, and with it, the city’s working class.

The Assassination of New York attacks a Goliath-like enemy: the real-estate developers who maintain a stranglehold on the city’s most valuable commodity. Their efforts to increase land value by replacing low-rent workers and factories with high-rent professionals and office buildings was one of the single most decisive factors in the city’s downturn. In the 1980s the number of real-estate vacancies eclipsed that of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. In September of 1992 there was a staggering twenty-five million square feet of empty office space.

Are the city’s problems fixable? How will the future of New York play out through the twenty-first century? Fitch comes up with solutions, from saving jobs to promoting economic diversity to rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure. But it will take vision and hard work to restore New York to what it once was while creating a new and better home for coming generations.

Genres: History, New York, Nonfiction, Politics, Economics, Cities, Urban Studies

465 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 1, 1993

About the author

Robert Fitch was on the faculty of LaGuardia Community College of the City University of New York. He was a labor organizer, journalist, independent scholar, and author of the highly regarded classics of radical history Who Rules the Corporation?; Ghana: End of an Illusion, with Mary Oppenheimer; Solidarity for Sale, on the topic of union corruption; and The Assassination of New York. Fitch was a contributor to the Village Voice, the Nation, Newsday, and Tikkun. Fitch died at the age of seventy-two.

Reviews

[Karen Kohoutek · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is currently out of print, so I had to order it from the UK. There should be a new edition, with a new chapter connecting it to the present day! It's a little bit inside-baseball, with a lot of facts and dates and the names of commissions and people I'd never heard of, but it's well worth reading, both for its investigative quality and the broader conclusions it draws. The author's basic premise is looking at the dramatic changes to New York City in the '80s and '90s, and showing that all the large-scale plans match up to the plans proposed by the city's wealthy overseers prior to the stock market crash of 1929. So even as the players and financial conditions changed, the same underlying goals persisted, that of making specific plots of land more profitable to their owners, regardless of the impact on the rest of the population, while veiling this in the language of abstract progress, growth, and market forces. There's some up-front bias, but the author is still pretty persuasive, and there's a "follow the money"/Occam's Razor quality to the question of why things like manufacturing were driven out of the city at a time when they were not faltering for financial reasons.

There are all sorts of insights which perfectly describe some elements of our current situations all over the country, like gentrification, the increasing use of TIFS and "public-private partnerships," and what Fitch calls "SOBs": "speculative office buildings," built by developers with tax incentives, and no clear demand. This book came out in 1993, and lays out in great detail the failure of these projects to create jobs or help the economy, but since then, the tactics have become even more widely used. Crazy. Just like he describes in New York in the 1990s, my small Midwestern city has, in the 2010s, prided itself on getting rid of the only manufacturing concern still existing in the downtown area, and -- just like here! -- did so with the language of redeveloping a waterfront! Fitch has quotes about the desire to redevelop waterfronts, turning them into leisure areas, going back to NYC's "Gilded Age." So I read this book constantly alternating between "Wow!" and "Huh."

[Mike Boyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scholarly Study

This is a very deep look into the economic problems that New York City is still facing today. The book was completed in 1993, but is still evident in NYC’s current economic issues. The basic premise of the book is the elite class hijacked the planning and economic future of NYC back in the 1920’s. Their reimagining led them to seriously reduce manufacturing, rail services and eliminated shipping ports which ended up in New Jersey and elsewhere. What the elites planning did was replace a diverse flexible economy with elite office buildings and amenities. Not only has job loss and population loss occurred, but the tax base as well is negatively affected.Now it instead of an international hub, it is currently a handcuffed, dysfunctional urban area with a recognizable name that relies on it’s past reputation to survive if at all. Most of the industries that made this a hub relocated elsewhere in other countries or in more southern cities which are more friendly to manufacturing. The moral that I understand from this work is, successful urban areas rely on diverse and friendly business economies. Not an economy by the elite for the elite. Basically that type of economy and planning produces nothing but constant recession and empty elite office space. The book was deep and heavily cited at the end of each chapter. An excellent work by Mr. Fitch who also relied on a wide range of others related to content and direction of the book. This was not a work of just one person’s observations.

[Robert Cowen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clear explanation of why our vibrant city was brought to its knees by greedy developers. I am old enough (82) to remember all the industries in NYC in various business districts. Now almost all gone replaced by empty office buildings built in the mistaken belief that NYC should become a city of professional services rather than manufacturing. Those who planned and oversaw this transformation were enriched while the rest of us became poorer.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a wickedly simple explanation of how New York became the way it is.