The Assassination of New York

by Robert Fitch

Robert Fitch argues that, within a generation, New York City has been transformed from the richest city in the world to one of the poorest in North America. The pillars of its economy—Macy’s, the Daily News, Citibank, Olympia and York, the Trump organization—have cracked or collapsed. Today, the officially poor in New York number nearly 2,000,000 and more than 400,000 residents of the city are without jobs.

In this indictment of those who have wrecked New York, Robert Fitch points to the financial and real-estate elites. Their goals, he argues, have been simple and monolithic: to increase the value of the land they own by extruding low-rent workers and factories, replacing them with high-rent professionals and office buildings. The planning establishment has been able of raise the value of real estate inside the city boundaries over twenty-fold. In doing so, Fitch suggests, it effectively closed New York’s deep-water port, eliminated its freight rail system, shuttered its factories and destroyed its capacity for incubating new business.

Now the real-estate values have collapsed. The city is left with 65,000,000 square feet of office space—enough to last, without any new building, to the middle of the twenty-first century. In pursuit of those who are responsible, Fitch arraigns the great and the bad of the city’s establishment: Roger Starr, architect of “planned shrinkage” (the withdrawal of fire, police and mass transit services from black and Latino neighborhoods); the Ford Foundation, which proposed converting vast tracts of the South Bronx into a vegetable garden; City Hall fixers like John Zucotti, Herb Sturz and James Felt, who cut the deals between government and real estate by working for both sides; and the Rockefeller family, whose involuntary investment in the Rockefeller Center became a gigantic “tar baby,” nearly swallowing up their entire fortune.

Drawing on never-before-published material from the Rockefeller family archives, as well as other archival documents, this book aims to expose those responsible for the demise of New York. 

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

318 pages, Hardcover

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.