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New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation by Thomas Dyja
theslozat's review
adventurous
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
Dyja has the unenviable task of compressing 50 years in the life of a city of millions into 400 pages. He does it by assuming that all of the millions who have lived in New York are your neighbors, that you know them in passing, and that he doesn't need to give any more context than a passing reference to a name and recent achievement. This is a book for Newy Yorkers. It's a delightfully gossipy read that know the impact that New York has had on the broader work, and that only falls down when it neglects the greater context that a simple bumpkin like I would need to know who these folks are.
alexisrt's review
4.0
I grew up on Long Island. My dad worked in the city; my mother's family owned a store in Brooklyn. I read the city papers alongside Newsday. New York City was an integral part of our lives. This book spans, effectively, my life; I was born in July 1977, a few months before Koch's election.
People sometimes romanticize New York of the 1970s and 1980s, and they shouldn't. It was exciting, yes. But it was dirty, dangerous, broke and broken, especially in the 1970s--as Dyja himself acknowledges. Koch was elected to a city that had no money, where the subways were covered in graffiti, where the Bronx had burned as landlords set fire to buildings and the city removed FDNY stations from the neighborhood.
His thesis is that the 1977 election marked the turning point in New York's evolution to the contemporary Luxury City, and that thesis has a great deal of merit. The New York of the 1980s was a thin layer of glitz over a city that was still struggling. My family loved Ed Koch. He was one of us, a Jew born in the Bronx with an accent as strong as our own. In the 1980s we didn't think about the cost of his appeal to White Ethnics like us: the damage to race relations in a multicultural city. We didn't think about how Koch actively encouraged the deindustrialization of the city, a process begun by the Port Authority's decision to containerize the New Jersey ports while abandoning the city's piers and the continual failure to invest in rail capacity.
I watched as Giuliani, then Bloomberg, cleaned the city, made it safe, turned it into paradise for the rich. But as Dyja points out, not all of it was bad or unnecessary. The parks are usable now. The abuse of Compstat is real, but the lack of data analysis that preceded it was worse. Crime is down, though in part because the crack epidemic burned itself out. The Post has less material to use for its lurid headlines: "HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR." Dyja successfully captures the contradictions of the past 40 years. He also generally traces the longstanding roots of the contemporary housing crisis, though some areas could have used fleshing out (he refers to the loss of units under rent control without explaining how or why that happened, or the loss of tax abatements and Mitchell-Lama units.)
Dyja is a strongly opinionated writer, and for the most part, I agree with his opinions. However there are some times where he draws conclusions without sufficient evidence, such as saying that Koch's standoff with an illegal transit strike marked "the end of New York as a union town." There are also some places where it threatens to spiral into a rant. The biggest issue is that he crams all of Bloomberg's tenure into a relatively short space and de Blasio is relegated to an epilogue. They don't get the treatment they really need or deserve.
People sometimes romanticize New York of the 1970s and 1980s, and they shouldn't. It was exciting, yes. But it was dirty, dangerous, broke and broken, especially in the 1970s--as Dyja himself acknowledges. Koch was elected to a city that had no money, where the subways were covered in graffiti, where the Bronx had burned as landlords set fire to buildings and the city removed FDNY stations from the neighborhood.
His thesis is that the 1977 election marked the turning point in New York's evolution to the contemporary Luxury City, and that thesis has a great deal of merit. The New York of the 1980s was a thin layer of glitz over a city that was still struggling. My family loved Ed Koch. He was one of us, a Jew born in the Bronx with an accent as strong as our own. In the 1980s we didn't think about the cost of his appeal to White Ethnics like us: the damage to race relations in a multicultural city. We didn't think about how Koch actively encouraged the deindustrialization of the city, a process begun by the Port Authority's decision to containerize the New Jersey ports while abandoning the city's piers and the continual failure to invest in rail capacity.
I watched as Giuliani, then Bloomberg, cleaned the city, made it safe, turned it into paradise for the rich. But as Dyja points out, not all of it was bad or unnecessary. The parks are usable now. The abuse of Compstat is real, but the lack of data analysis that preceded it was worse. Crime is down, though in part because the crack epidemic burned itself out. The Post has less material to use for its lurid headlines: "HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR." Dyja successfully captures the contradictions of the past 40 years. He also generally traces the longstanding roots of the contemporary housing crisis, though some areas could have used fleshing out (he refers to the loss of units under rent control without explaining how or why that happened, or the loss of tax abatements and Mitchell-Lama units.)
Dyja is a strongly opinionated writer, and for the most part, I agree with his opinions. However there are some times where he draws conclusions without sufficient evidence, such as saying that Koch's standoff with an illegal transit strike marked "the end of New York as a union town." There are also some places where it threatens to spiral into a rant. The biggest issue is that he crams all of Bloomberg's tenure into a relatively short space and de Blasio is relegated to an epilogue. They don't get the treatment they really need or deserve.
kategci's review
5.0
This was recommended by Bill Goldstein of WNBC's Weekend Today in New York and then a friend was reading it, so I picked up a copy. I heard the author on the NYT Book Review podcast and then I attended a Zoom pop-up book group with him. So well-written and thoroughly researched, this book covers my adulthood in NYC. (I am an outer borough girl who left for college and came back). He covers it all through the Mayors: Beame (briefly), Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, and Bloomberg. In the epilogue, DiBlasio is addressed. There are so many details, some of which I never knew or may have forgotten. This is a love story to the city, but not always that early rush of blind infatuation. Rather, Thomas Dyja, who arrived in 1980 and has only left briefly, presents the good, the bad and the ugly sides of New York. He gives the residents their due, acknowledging how hard it can be to live here day to day. And how much harder it has become for anyone not among the highest wage earners. This is a must read if you like or love New York!
toddlleopold's review
3.0
You’ve heard of “breezy”? In its beathless sentences, now-you-see-‘em name drops, and constant movement, “New York, New York, New York” is more gusty, like one of those Hollywood calendars in which the days peel off in rapid succession thanks to a high-speed fan.
There are occasional incisive throughlines and syntheses — the rise of hip-hop, the changing neighborhoods, the greater expensive footprint of Wall Street — but too often, Dyja needs to slow down instead of hurtle forward. (See Rick Perlstein for pointers.)
So, though I learned a few things about a city that fascinates me, I wanted a bigger picture, not an express subway ride through 40 years. Sometimes even New Yorkers need to slow down.
There are occasional incisive throughlines and syntheses — the rise of hip-hop, the changing neighborhoods, the greater expensive footprint of Wall Street — but too often, Dyja needs to slow down instead of hurtle forward. (See Rick Perlstein for pointers.)
So, though I learned a few things about a city that fascinates me, I wanted a bigger picture, not an express subway ride through 40 years. Sometimes even New Yorkers need to slow down.
silvej01's review against another edition
5.0
I loved this book.
I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s in what was then at best the outer fringe of suburban New York. For many of my peers, the city was a far-off, dirty, and dangerous place of little interest. But for me, it always carried an undeniable, magnetic charge. Crossing the George Washington Bridge was entering into a fantastic and fabulous amusement park where anything might happen. So, naturally, after graduating college (Oberlin), I moved into the city in 1978 and never left.
This nearly-perfectly coincides with the beginning of Dyja’s all-encompassing, fully engaging, funny, thoughtful and wise history of the city. From the Koch years through those of Dinkins, Giuliani and Bloomberg, it deftly conveys the politics, high finance, arts, culture, crime, race relations, disasters, street life, public spaces, and much more (in an epilogue, Dyja gives a quicker but apt consideration of the de Blasio years up through our current pandemic situation.) For me, this was a rollicking recounting of the New York City’s people, places and events through the years I’ve lived here. But what was even more important than my fun trip down memory lane was the immense amount of knowledge I gleaned from Dyja about the politics, ideas, movements, and economic forces that shaped the city in those years.
Still, for someone who does not know New York well, the book may not have the same appeal. Certainly, Dyja sometimes casually refers to places and people that will leave many outsiders feeling left in the dark. For those who know and value New York City, it’s not only an exciting blast of a book that vividly brings its recent history to life, but has important and penetrating things to say about what – for good, bad, and otherwise – has made the city what it is, and how we might make use of this experience to help shape its future.
I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s in what was then at best the outer fringe of suburban New York. For many of my peers, the city was a far-off, dirty, and dangerous place of little interest. But for me, it always carried an undeniable, magnetic charge. Crossing the George Washington Bridge was entering into a fantastic and fabulous amusement park where anything might happen. So, naturally, after graduating college (Oberlin), I moved into the city in 1978 and never left.
This nearly-perfectly coincides with the beginning of Dyja’s all-encompassing, fully engaging, funny, thoughtful and wise history of the city. From the Koch years through those of Dinkins, Giuliani and Bloomberg, it deftly conveys the politics, high finance, arts, culture, crime, race relations, disasters, street life, public spaces, and much more (in an epilogue, Dyja gives a quicker but apt consideration of the de Blasio years up through our current pandemic situation.) For me, this was a rollicking recounting of the New York City’s people, places and events through the years I’ve lived here. But what was even more important than my fun trip down memory lane was the immense amount of knowledge I gleaned from Dyja about the politics, ideas, movements, and economic forces that shaped the city in those years.
Still, for someone who does not know New York well, the book may not have the same appeal. Certainly, Dyja sometimes casually refers to places and people that will leave many outsiders feeling left in the dark. For those who know and value New York City, it’s not only an exciting blast of a book that vividly brings its recent history to life, but has important and penetrating things to say about what – for good, bad, and otherwise – has made the city what it is, and how we might make use of this experience to help shape its future.
k80uva's review
4.0
A really rollicking, entertaining, kaleidoscopic look at New York City from the 1970s to now. The author really covers a lot of ground and I think is pretty evenhanded in dealing with the conflicts and controversies that have shaped the city over the past several decades. It certainly rings true to me in its description of the years I personally remember. One slight detraction is that this is really a very engaging description rather than something with a strong argument, so in that respect it's not quite a history in the most useful sense. Nevertheless definitely worth reading and especially worth bouncing off your own memories and impressions if you're a New Yorker or spent any significant amount of time in New York.