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The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City-and Determined the Future of Cities
New York City, 1968. The RAND Corporation had presented an alluring proposal to a city on the brink of economic Using RAND's computer models, which had been successfully implemented in high-level military operations, the city could save millions of dollars by establishing more efficient public services. The RAND boys were the best and brightest, and bore all the sheen of modern American success. New York City, on the other hand, seemed old-fashioned, insular, and corrupt-and the new mayor was eager for outside help, especially something as innovative and infallible as "computer modeling." A deal was RAND would begin its first major civilian effort with the FDNY.
Over the next decade-a time New York City firefighters would refer to as "The War Years"-a series of fires swept through the South Bronx, the Lower East Side, Harlem, and Brooklyn, gutting whole neighborhoods, killing more than two thousand people and displacing hundreds of thousands. Conventional wisdom would blame arson, but these fires were the result of something altogether the intentional withdrawal of fire protection from the city's poorest neighborhoods-all based on RAND's computer modeling systems.
Despite the disastrous consequences, New York City in the 1970s set the template for how a modern city functions-both literally, as RAND sold its computer models to cities across the country, and systematically, as a new wave of technocratic decision-making took hold, which persists to this day. In The Fires , Joe Flood provides an X-ray of these inner workings, using the dramatic story of a pair of mayors, an ambitious fire commissioner, and an even more ambitious think tank to illuminate the patterns and formulas that are now inextricably woven into the very fabric of contemporary urban life. The Fires is a must read for anyone curious about how a modern city works.
Over the next decade-a time New York City firefighters would refer to as "The War Years"-a series of fires swept through the South Bronx, the Lower East Side, Harlem, and Brooklyn, gutting whole neighborhoods, killing more than two thousand people and displacing hundreds of thousands. Conventional wisdom would blame arson, but these fires were the result of something altogether the intentional withdrawal of fire protection from the city's poorest neighborhoods-all based on RAND's computer modeling systems.
Despite the disastrous consequences, New York City in the 1970s set the template for how a modern city functions-both literally, as RAND sold its computer models to cities across the country, and systematically, as a new wave of technocratic decision-making took hold, which persists to this day. In The Fires , Joe Flood provides an X-ray of these inner workings, using the dramatic story of a pair of mayors, an ambitious fire commissioner, and an even more ambitious think tank to illuminate the patterns and formulas that are now inextricably woven into the very fabric of contemporary urban life. The Fires is a must read for anyone curious about how a modern city works.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published May 26, 2010
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December 2, 2020LOL. A book about Fires by someone named Flood.
A must read.
A must read.
April 23, 2023
Stop me if you've heard this story before. In 1960s America, an idealistic reform politician, a young operational technocrat, and the RAND corporation decide to manage a complex social issue via sophisticated data-driven models. For all their vaunted scientific objectivity, the effort collapses into a destructive quagmire that devastates an entire region, kills a whole bunch of non-white people, and wrecks the reputations of everyone involved.
No it's not the Vietnam War, JFK, Robert McNamara, and RAND. It's the South Bronx, Mayor John Lindsay, Fire Chief John O'Hagan, and RAND, and a microcosm of everything that the post-war technocratic liberal order did wrong. Flood orients the story around fire as a central actor in the destruction of the South Bronx, and places the story as part of a broader tide between ad hoc 'branch' approaches to governance which distribute power, and top down 'root' approaches which seek comprehensive theoretically driven explanations.
South Bronx, 1971
Lindsay and O'Hagan are the two protagonists of the story. Lindsay was an archetype common enough in New York City politics, the grand reformer, though the details of his liberal Republican to independent conversion are fairly unique. In Flood's analysis, New York City politics waxes in cycles of clubhouse corruption and reformist mayors. The clubhouse, the system of Tammany Hall ward bosses, is opaque, inefficient, unrepresentative, frequently mired in obvious criminality, but accountable to the ordinary people of the city. Reform programs have grand ambitions, but fail to deliver on their promises, prompting a backlash and return to the clubhouses.
O'Hagan was a bit more unusual. A paratrooper in the Pacific in WW2, he joined the NYFD and rose through the ranks, becoming the youngest fire chief in NYFD history, and later one of only two people to simultaneously be Fire Chief and Fire Commissioner. O'Hagan was a tough bastard, a tenacious analyst capable of breaking a problem down into elementary components and assembling a solution. His essay question on the chief's exam, about how to prepare fire safety for the upcoming 1964 World's Fair became the actual plan. O'Hagan introduced new technology, like self-contained breathers, bigger hoses, better ladders, and early version of the hydraulic jaws of life. He obsessed over architectural plans and how to fight fires in the new lightweight steel towers of Manhattan.
In Lindsay's first term, he and O'Hagan worked closely together to find new efficiencies in the fire department. O'Hagan was eager to prove his tough budget cutting credentials to his superiors, and Lindsay needed winds as his administration struggled though labor disputes, rising crime, and race riots. While the situation in the city was not great, much of the chaos was a media exaggeration. New York had almost always been crowded, noisy, chaotic, and with its fair share of crime and corrupt, though the actual numbers were better than the nation's average. The South Bronx was a concern, a mostly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood with some alarming indicators, but nothing out of the ordinary.
New York had always been able to change with the times, but the difference in 1970 was an ideology of urban renewal which had gripped the city in the prior decades and rendered it extraordinarily fragile. Major commercial streets had been torn out in favor of Robert Moses' grand freeways, whisking people above rather than through neighborhoods. Various administrations deliberately pursued a policy of de-industrialization, eliminating hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs that had served as the first step on the ladder to prosperity for generations of immigrants, just as internal migrants from the Jim Crow South and Puerto Rico arrived. While the housing stock had often been crowded, racist red lining loan policies made it impossible to secure money for basic improvements to apartment buildings in the South Bronx, like a new furnace or roof repairs, and small landlords who lived in and invested in their buildings, a second step to the middle class (and one my family used at about this time) were barred from doing business, leaving housing to parasitic corporate landlords who saw buildings as a rapidly deprecating asset, and the grim public housing of the projects. Finally, one of Lindsay's labor deals had allowed city workers to live in the suburbs, transferring tax dollars out of the city and making fire, police, sanitation, and education a matter of "us vs them" rather than all of us together.
The hollowing out of New York City is complex and multifaceted, a long story with a lot of moving parts that Flood can only partially tell. But the spark was the clever idea to get RAND to find efficiencies in the fire service. RAND was looking to diversify from military contracts as the Vietnam War went sour, and O'Hagan had a suspicion that ordinary fire fighters were slacking off in bull session rather than doing their jobs. Or perhaps on an emotional level, O'Hagan wanted absolute control over the department, and sought to break the old boys networks and union leaders which served as alternative centers.
The situation was a tinderbox, and RAND provided the spark. In an absolute fiasco of applied social science, RAND decided that their primary measure of fire fighting effectiveness was response time between a call and the arrival of a truck on scene. And response time matters, but it isn't everything. A false alarm can be dealt with in minutes, or a simple fire in an up-to-code building with accurate plans. But the dangerous fires are the complex ones: old buildings retrofitted into mazes of room and hidden channels for fire without filed plans. Fire in high rises. Or fires in densely crowded apartment buildings, where hundreds of people might have to be rescued. Unable to quantify workload, RAND went with the simplest proxy.
Worse, their data methodology was horrendously flawed. 14 stop watches were distributed to the hundreds of fire companies, and most of those stop watches went to companies in Manhattan. The data was obviously fiddled with, as most fire fighters considered the whole effort a waste of time that could only harm them. Modelling the complexity of fires proved intractable, so RAND divided the city into seven classes of districts, and only considered adjusting stations in the same class of district. And then O'Hagan adjusted the final recommendation to save politically important stations, the ones near the home of a judge or a congressman.
The end result was that South Bronx lost fire companies just as the population increased and social pressures got worse. The people involved weren't racist per se,. Lindsay was in fact an ardent advocate for civil rights. But O'Hagan regarded apartment fires as technically uninteresting, fire fighters from the outer boroughs as unintelligent, and evaluated the inhabitants of the South Bronx as having the least political influence in the city. A law suit was brought over O'Hagan's closure of South Bronx stations, which was dismissed because the judge glanced at the RAND report and decided that anything with that much math was based on objective science rather than racism.
Fires served as both a leading indicator and a cause of social collapse. While landlord arson made headlines, the majority of fires started as ordinary domestic fires, amplified by the lack of maintenance. And fires in one building caused a rippling decline through the neighborhood. Inhabitants of the building were rendered homeless, and either went to the suburbs, public housing, or squeezing into other overcrowded buildings. Burned out apartments became shelter for junkies and gangs, putting pressure on the remaining honest residents. And junkies nodding off with cigarettes, various people starting fires to stay warm, or bored kids, all burnt semi-abandoned buildings repeatedly, until someone with a can of gasoline put the torched shell out of its misery. One census tract in the South Bronx suffered a 90% population decline between 1965 and 1975 as its housing stock was systematically destroyed.
Any chance that O'Hagan could have recognized the pattern and recovered was stalled by New York's financial crisis of the 1970s. Deficit spending in the previous decade had been covered up with bond measures, and worsening economic conditions finally made the bill due. While liberal welfare policies attracted much of the scorn, a larger share of the burden was tax breaks and developer incentives, such as the ones used to build the World Trade Center, which directly cost the city money through incentives, replaced stable manufacturing jobs with unstable financial services ones, and made existing office space and luxury apartments unprofitable without meaningfully decreasing rents for ordinary people. Every city department needed to make cuts, but O'Hagan had made his first. There was no fat to trim from the fire department, and scarcely any muscle. Any cuts started with bone.
So the South Bronx burned, becoming a byword for urban decay. Lindsay went from a presidential hopeful to one of the most despised mayors in America. O'Hagan resigned as chief and commissioner in 1978, his political ambitions dead, and became a technical consultant on fire fighting. RAND's New York-based urban issues branch was shut down, though RAND-style quantified systems analysis has become the parlance of planning.
The Fires is a persuasive and compelling history, verging onto the polemical. This is not just about New York in the 1970s. This is a valuable lesson about the limits of grand reforms and the dangers of complex models that hide asinine assumptions. Computers have only gotten faster, data more accessible, and many companies are working towards a vision of the smart city, centrally monitored and managed in real time from an urban command center, even if that managerial vision is a dangerous lie. And finally, I live in San Francisco, which feels a lot like New York in the mid 1960s, with a prosperity built on temporary conditions of tech and real estate that create a situation where the city is both too damn expensive and also empty, and where ordinary life flows around a quagmire of human misery the city is unable to fix and so prefers to ignore. And even if you don't live in the city America loves to hate, as the Strong Towns Project has extensively documented, low-density suburbs and exurbs cannot raise enough property taxes to fund infrastructure and services at a level residents expect, leading to a similar version of fragility.
Things haven't started burning yet, but if I smell smoke I'm not sticking around.
No it's not the Vietnam War, JFK, Robert McNamara, and RAND. It's the South Bronx, Mayor John Lindsay, Fire Chief John O'Hagan, and RAND, and a microcosm of everything that the post-war technocratic liberal order did wrong. Flood orients the story around fire as a central actor in the destruction of the South Bronx, and places the story as part of a broader tide between ad hoc 'branch' approaches to governance which distribute power, and top down 'root' approaches which seek comprehensive theoretically driven explanations.
South Bronx, 1971
Lindsay and O'Hagan are the two protagonists of the story. Lindsay was an archetype common enough in New York City politics, the grand reformer, though the details of his liberal Republican to independent conversion are fairly unique. In Flood's analysis, New York City politics waxes in cycles of clubhouse corruption and reformist mayors. The clubhouse, the system of Tammany Hall ward bosses, is opaque, inefficient, unrepresentative, frequently mired in obvious criminality, but accountable to the ordinary people of the city. Reform programs have grand ambitions, but fail to deliver on their promises, prompting a backlash and return to the clubhouses.
O'Hagan was a bit more unusual. A paratrooper in the Pacific in WW2, he joined the NYFD and rose through the ranks, becoming the youngest fire chief in NYFD history, and later one of only two people to simultaneously be Fire Chief and Fire Commissioner. O'Hagan was a tough bastard, a tenacious analyst capable of breaking a problem down into elementary components and assembling a solution. His essay question on the chief's exam, about how to prepare fire safety for the upcoming 1964 World's Fair became the actual plan. O'Hagan introduced new technology, like self-contained breathers, bigger hoses, better ladders, and early version of the hydraulic jaws of life. He obsessed over architectural plans and how to fight fires in the new lightweight steel towers of Manhattan.
In Lindsay's first term, he and O'Hagan worked closely together to find new efficiencies in the fire department. O'Hagan was eager to prove his tough budget cutting credentials to his superiors, and Lindsay needed winds as his administration struggled though labor disputes, rising crime, and race riots. While the situation in the city was not great, much of the chaos was a media exaggeration. New York had almost always been crowded, noisy, chaotic, and with its fair share of crime and corrupt, though the actual numbers were better than the nation's average. The South Bronx was a concern, a mostly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood with some alarming indicators, but nothing out of the ordinary.
New York had always been able to change with the times, but the difference in 1970 was an ideology of urban renewal which had gripped the city in the prior decades and rendered it extraordinarily fragile. Major commercial streets had been torn out in favor of Robert Moses' grand freeways, whisking people above rather than through neighborhoods. Various administrations deliberately pursued a policy of de-industrialization, eliminating hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs that had served as the first step on the ladder to prosperity for generations of immigrants, just as internal migrants from the Jim Crow South and Puerto Rico arrived. While the housing stock had often been crowded, racist red lining loan policies made it impossible to secure money for basic improvements to apartment buildings in the South Bronx, like a new furnace or roof repairs, and small landlords who lived in and invested in their buildings, a second step to the middle class (and one my family used at about this time) were barred from doing business, leaving housing to parasitic corporate landlords who saw buildings as a rapidly deprecating asset, and the grim public housing of the projects. Finally, one of Lindsay's labor deals had allowed city workers to live in the suburbs, transferring tax dollars out of the city and making fire, police, sanitation, and education a matter of "us vs them" rather than all of us together.
The hollowing out of New York City is complex and multifaceted, a long story with a lot of moving parts that Flood can only partially tell. But the spark was the clever idea to get RAND to find efficiencies in the fire service. RAND was looking to diversify from military contracts as the Vietnam War went sour, and O'Hagan had a suspicion that ordinary fire fighters were slacking off in bull session rather than doing their jobs. Or perhaps on an emotional level, O'Hagan wanted absolute control over the department, and sought to break the old boys networks and union leaders which served as alternative centers.
The situation was a tinderbox, and RAND provided the spark. In an absolute fiasco of applied social science, RAND decided that their primary measure of fire fighting effectiveness was response time between a call and the arrival of a truck on scene. And response time matters, but it isn't everything. A false alarm can be dealt with in minutes, or a simple fire in an up-to-code building with accurate plans. But the dangerous fires are the complex ones: old buildings retrofitted into mazes of room and hidden channels for fire without filed plans. Fire in high rises. Or fires in densely crowded apartment buildings, where hundreds of people might have to be rescued. Unable to quantify workload, RAND went with the simplest proxy.
Worse, their data methodology was horrendously flawed. 14 stop watches were distributed to the hundreds of fire companies, and most of those stop watches went to companies in Manhattan. The data was obviously fiddled with, as most fire fighters considered the whole effort a waste of time that could only harm them. Modelling the complexity of fires proved intractable, so RAND divided the city into seven classes of districts, and only considered adjusting stations in the same class of district. And then O'Hagan adjusted the final recommendation to save politically important stations, the ones near the home of a judge or a congressman.
The end result was that South Bronx lost fire companies just as the population increased and social pressures got worse. The people involved weren't racist per se,. Lindsay was in fact an ardent advocate for civil rights. But O'Hagan regarded apartment fires as technically uninteresting, fire fighters from the outer boroughs as unintelligent, and evaluated the inhabitants of the South Bronx as having the least political influence in the city. A law suit was brought over O'Hagan's closure of South Bronx stations, which was dismissed because the judge glanced at the RAND report and decided that anything with that much math was based on objective science rather than racism.
Fires served as both a leading indicator and a cause of social collapse. While landlord arson made headlines, the majority of fires started as ordinary domestic fires, amplified by the lack of maintenance. And fires in one building caused a rippling decline through the neighborhood. Inhabitants of the building were rendered homeless, and either went to the suburbs, public housing, or squeezing into other overcrowded buildings. Burned out apartments became shelter for junkies and gangs, putting pressure on the remaining honest residents. And junkies nodding off with cigarettes, various people starting fires to stay warm, or bored kids, all burnt semi-abandoned buildings repeatedly, until someone with a can of gasoline put the torched shell out of its misery. One census tract in the South Bronx suffered a 90% population decline between 1965 and 1975 as its housing stock was systematically destroyed.
Any chance that O'Hagan could have recognized the pattern and recovered was stalled by New York's financial crisis of the 1970s. Deficit spending in the previous decade had been covered up with bond measures, and worsening economic conditions finally made the bill due. While liberal welfare policies attracted much of the scorn, a larger share of the burden was tax breaks and developer incentives, such as the ones used to build the World Trade Center, which directly cost the city money through incentives, replaced stable manufacturing jobs with unstable financial services ones, and made existing office space and luxury apartments unprofitable without meaningfully decreasing rents for ordinary people. Every city department needed to make cuts, but O'Hagan had made his first. There was no fat to trim from the fire department, and scarcely any muscle. Any cuts started with bone.
So the South Bronx burned, becoming a byword for urban decay. Lindsay went from a presidential hopeful to one of the most despised mayors in America. O'Hagan resigned as chief and commissioner in 1978, his political ambitions dead, and became a technical consultant on fire fighting. RAND's New York-based urban issues branch was shut down, though RAND-style quantified systems analysis has become the parlance of planning.
The Fires is a persuasive and compelling history, verging onto the polemical. This is not just about New York in the 1970s. This is a valuable lesson about the limits of grand reforms and the dangers of complex models that hide asinine assumptions. Computers have only gotten faster, data more accessible, and many companies are working towards a vision of the smart city, centrally monitored and managed in real time from an urban command center, even if that managerial vision is a dangerous lie. And finally, I live in San Francisco, which feels a lot like New York in the mid 1960s, with a prosperity built on temporary conditions of tech and real estate that create a situation where the city is both too damn expensive and also empty, and where ordinary life flows around a quagmire of human misery the city is unable to fix and so prefers to ignore. And even if you don't live in the city America loves to hate, as the Strong Towns Project has extensively documented, low-density suburbs and exurbs cannot raise enough property taxes to fund infrastructure and services at a level residents expect, leading to a similar version of fragility.
Things haven't started burning yet, but if I smell smoke I'm not sticking around.
August 19, 2010
This is a really fascinating book for people interested in the Bronx (and Brooklyn and parts of lower Manhattan) during the 70s. I never quite understood why my parents were so terrified when I announced to them I'd be teaching in the South Bronx, but after reading this book, I realized what their memories were of the South Bronx during this time period. (My dad, who is prone to exaggeration, compared it to Apocalypse Now... a war zone... hell... etc... but I see now he wasn't joking.)
It's frustrating to read about the actions of city leaders who truly believed they were doing the right thing by purposely starving the city's poorest enclaves of resources (in this book, fire services) based on simplistic computer models, but it's also a lesson for future generations. Though the appeal of this book is probably pretty narrow, and parts for me were a bit dry, I thought the author gave a good overview of the circumstances surrounding the fires. I would have liked more perspective from people who lived through the events.
It's frustrating to read about the actions of city leaders who truly believed they were doing the right thing by purposely starving the city's poorest enclaves of resources (in this book, fire services) based on simplistic computer models, but it's also a lesson for future generations. Though the appeal of this book is probably pretty narrow, and parts for me were a bit dry, I thought the author gave a good overview of the circumstances surrounding the fires. I would have liked more perspective from people who lived through the events.
May 12, 2017
This story starts out as a "Let's champion rationality and progressivism in city government" with the story of the rise of power of Mayor John Lindsay, and the lateral rise of power of the Robert McNamara "Whiz-Kids" that helped JFK and LBJ run the Viet Nam war.
And then the story shifts to the difference between "large root-cause fixers of problems," like the power broker Robert Moses and the "small branch-and-twig fixers of problems," like the Tammany/machine street politics found in most big cities.
The hero of the story is, John O'Hagan, who is widely regarded as a giant in the modernization of the fire service in America. But like many great men, hubris and desire for power had unintended consequences.
The victim of the story is New York City, a city whose industrial base hollowed out by zoning, thriving neighborhoods ruined by "urban renewal", and some serious systemic revenue problems.
Thanks to a combination of "big ideas" gone bad, razor-thin budgets, and political disenfranchisement, the NYFD ended up in "The War Years" where fires raged in the Bronx and elsewhere. Despite having the "best and brightest minds" working with the most respected Fire Chief in America. And, according to the author, Because of them.
This is primarily a story of good intentions gone wrong and how focusing on the problem from the wrong angle can make things much much worse. And as a person interested in cities, disasters, and how communities recover, it's a sad tale, well told.
The conclusion offers a story about how cities can thrive _despite_ the mistakes humans make running them. And this makes me feel better. Cities don't suck. They aren't hopelessly flawed. They bounce back from the harm we inflict upon them. Because cities aren't things, they're people, and people are the most flawed, resilient, and tenacious things this world has ever come up with.
Recommended to fans of cities, city politics, and especially fire fighting.
And then the story shifts to the difference between "large root-cause fixers of problems," like the power broker Robert Moses and the "small branch-and-twig fixers of problems," like the Tammany/machine street politics found in most big cities.
The hero of the story is, John O'Hagan, who is widely regarded as a giant in the modernization of the fire service in America. But like many great men, hubris and desire for power had unintended consequences.
The victim of the story is New York City, a city whose industrial base hollowed out by zoning, thriving neighborhoods ruined by "urban renewal", and some serious systemic revenue problems.
Thanks to a combination of "big ideas" gone bad, razor-thin budgets, and political disenfranchisement, the NYFD ended up in "The War Years" where fires raged in the Bronx and elsewhere. Despite having the "best and brightest minds" working with the most respected Fire Chief in America. And, according to the author, Because of them.
This is primarily a story of good intentions gone wrong and how focusing on the problem from the wrong angle can make things much much worse. And as a person interested in cities, disasters, and how communities recover, it's a sad tale, well told.
The conclusion offers a story about how cities can thrive _despite_ the mistakes humans make running them. And this makes me feel better. Cities don't suck. They aren't hopelessly flawed. They bounce back from the harm we inflict upon them. Because cities aren't things, they're people, and people are the most flawed, resilient, and tenacious things this world has ever come up with.
Recommended to fans of cities, city politics, and especially fire fighting.
January 23, 2021
Very good intro to the problems of Data analysis and how it irrevocably changed one city. The author does a good job of balancing data, the peoples, and the story. Certain things, to me, lacked. We were introduced to major characters only to shift them to passive observers. He also bounces the story around between the three characters/ players. However he does an admirable job of capturing the firehouse, and those years that tore the city apart. Very interesting that he mentions issues that are still surfacing -community policing, segregation, and how to build neighborhoods.
January 5, 2011
Joe Flood is perhaps the best possible name for the author of a book called The Fires. Or, more completely, The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City-and Determined the Future of Cities. That title is a mouthful, but accurately reflects the amazing and diverse subtopics that Flood effortlessly moves back and forth across in explaining the rash of fires in 1970s New York and the decline of the Bronx.
Starting with the machine politics of Tammany Hall and the various city departments’ resistance to reform, Flood traces the ascent of Fire Chief John O’Hagan, a unbelievably intelligent, young reformer in the FDNY with ideas of quantitative analysis in his head. Flood explores the origins of systems analysis and operations research in World War II, and then follows the rise of the RAND Corporation through the early days of the Cold War, and the inexorable meetings between RAND, O’Hagan, and Mayor John Lindsay that led to a radical new firefighting regime citywide.
Sophisticated computer modeling directed the closure of many fire stations throughout the South Bronx, which (unbeknown to me) had been an upscale, classy developed area mostly inhabited by Italians and Jews escaping the slums and tenements of the Lower East Side. As fire after fire engulfed the Bronx, and the fire department proved woefully inadequate at fighting them, a massive phase of white flight began to accelerate. Coupled with Robert Moses’ Cross-Bronx Expressway and Lindsay’s repeal of a city law requiring municipal employees to reside within city limits, the number of whites in the outer boroughs dropped dramatically as they fled to suburban Westchester County and across the river to New Jersey.
Of course, there’s far more than even that to the story. Flood does an absolutely masterful job of weaving together all these disparate threads into a cohesive narrative. There’s Moses and his misguided plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LoMEX), an eight-lane behemoth of an elevated highway that would have utterly destroyed Greenwich Village and much of the surrounding area. The Ford Motor Company and Robert McNamara make an appearance as early benefactors of RAND’s pioneering quantitative research. Flood also gives the rezoning of Manhattan that banished most industry and manufacturing a brief, if absolutely intriguing treatment. He excoriates the weak building codes that existed for much of the twentieth century, and the loophole of the World Trade Center’s construction by the Port Authority that allowed it to skirt New York City building codes.
It’s hard to do The Fires justice. It is so far-reaching – but never over-reaching – that to describe all the different components of its narrative would be impossible without actually writing the book again. But in that sense, hopefully this represents a new trend in historical writing, a truly interdisciplinary effort that never seems to bog down. From sociology to politics to urban planning to history to engineering, Joe Flood just bounces around without getting distracted, but while conveying the sheer complexity of a series of events like this. There’s no single explanation; there are six or seven. It’s an impressive feat.
While this book certainly is a “commercial” history (i.e. no footnotes), it has a wealth of information in the back anyways, using the page-number/quote-fragment system (on another note, does anyone know the actual term for this citation method). Much of Flood’s sourcing consists of personal interviews, giving him a truly first-hand perspective of the events he’s covering. The obscure documents he unearths in some instances also speak to his devotion to the subject. And I know that some of the random tangents he meanders down have given me ideas for a book of my own.
If it’s any kind of testament to the quality of The Fires, not only did I buy it for myself, but I got my father a copy for Christmas. I would buy pretty much everyone a copy of this if they don’t already have it. The Fires is unequivocally recommended by me to anybody who can read.
Starting with the machine politics of Tammany Hall and the various city departments’ resistance to reform, Flood traces the ascent of Fire Chief John O’Hagan, a unbelievably intelligent, young reformer in the FDNY with ideas of quantitative analysis in his head. Flood explores the origins of systems analysis and operations research in World War II, and then follows the rise of the RAND Corporation through the early days of the Cold War, and the inexorable meetings between RAND, O’Hagan, and Mayor John Lindsay that led to a radical new firefighting regime citywide.
Sophisticated computer modeling directed the closure of many fire stations throughout the South Bronx, which (unbeknown to me) had been an upscale, classy developed area mostly inhabited by Italians and Jews escaping the slums and tenements of the Lower East Side. As fire after fire engulfed the Bronx, and the fire department proved woefully inadequate at fighting them, a massive phase of white flight began to accelerate. Coupled with Robert Moses’ Cross-Bronx Expressway and Lindsay’s repeal of a city law requiring municipal employees to reside within city limits, the number of whites in the outer boroughs dropped dramatically as they fled to suburban Westchester County and across the river to New Jersey.
Of course, there’s far more than even that to the story. Flood does an absolutely masterful job of weaving together all these disparate threads into a cohesive narrative. There’s Moses and his misguided plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LoMEX), an eight-lane behemoth of an elevated highway that would have utterly destroyed Greenwich Village and much of the surrounding area. The Ford Motor Company and Robert McNamara make an appearance as early benefactors of RAND’s pioneering quantitative research. Flood also gives the rezoning of Manhattan that banished most industry and manufacturing a brief, if absolutely intriguing treatment. He excoriates the weak building codes that existed for much of the twentieth century, and the loophole of the World Trade Center’s construction by the Port Authority that allowed it to skirt New York City building codes.
It’s hard to do The Fires justice. It is so far-reaching – but never over-reaching – that to describe all the different components of its narrative would be impossible without actually writing the book again. But in that sense, hopefully this represents a new trend in historical writing, a truly interdisciplinary effort that never seems to bog down. From sociology to politics to urban planning to history to engineering, Joe Flood just bounces around without getting distracted, but while conveying the sheer complexity of a series of events like this. There’s no single explanation; there are six or seven. It’s an impressive feat.
While this book certainly is a “commercial” history (i.e. no footnotes), it has a wealth of information in the back anyways, using the page-number/quote-fragment system (on another note, does anyone know the actual term for this citation method). Much of Flood’s sourcing consists of personal interviews, giving him a truly first-hand perspective of the events he’s covering. The obscure documents he unearths in some instances also speak to his devotion to the subject. And I know that some of the random tangents he meanders down have given me ideas for a book of my own.
If it’s any kind of testament to the quality of The Fires, not only did I buy it for myself, but I got my father a copy for Christmas. I would buy pretty much everyone a copy of this if they don’t already have it. The Fires is unequivocally recommended by me to anybody who can read.
November 9, 2014
In The Fires Joe Flood seeks to explain what led to what the NYFD called ‘The War Years’-- 1968-1977 when large swathes of The Bronx and other areas were devastated by extensive fires. This is no easy task given the complex web of factors at play including the battles between Tammany political culture and reform agendas, the long run consequences of city planning policy, changes to the city’s economic fortunes, social change and upheaval, and tussles within the fire service as it sought to modernize and change organisational structures and working practices, drawing extensively on the systems op analysis of RAND. Flood, however, does an admirable job of untangling the various forces at play and how they interacted to create a deadly maelstrom. This is achieved by focusing on the intentions, decisions and actions of a handful of key actors, especially Mayor John Lindsay, Fire Chief John O’Hagan, and the RAND Corporation, contextualising these with respect to particular events and wider economic and political factors. This analysis draws on extensive archival research and many interviews with key actors, including politicians, public servants, serving firemen, and families. The result is a nuanced and layered story that demonstrates that there is no, and can never be, a magic formula to running a city; that despite good intentions, reams of facts and statistics, and clever models made by very bright people, cities are messy, complex, multi-scalar, open entities that are social, cultural, political and economic in nature, acting and reacting in diverse ways to myriads of factors and competing and conflicting interests. The book is an excellent read -- well written, engaging, and insightful -- and provides a fascinating story to anyone interested in contemporary urban history. In my view it’s a must read book for all those presently involved in conceiving and building smart city initiatives.
September 24, 2015
Joe Flood writes a solid history of the twentieth century city planning through the lens of The War Years fires that burned out large swathes of the poorest parts of New York City. It's well-researched and hangs together nicely. He cribs a good bit from Robert Caro's massive biography of planner Robert Moses, and some of his points get repetitive—disrupting the otherwise nicely narrativized of history and analysis that Flood puts to paper.
Students of cities and planning and of power politics will find this an interesting read touching on the complexity of decision-making and the way that politics and management are bound to the times and trends in which they occur. And of course, the indictment of RAND's systems analysis is an important reminder that we can't play god even when we are good with all the numbers. The Fires is as a political biography of the men of New York City that did this work and why they did it. As such it offers a companion of different style and scale to James C. Scott's masterful Seeing Like a State, which makes a similar point about reductionist system analytical planning but over a longer historical and geographical arc.
It's a quick, fun read. New Yorkers especially should pick up to learn how their city evolved into what it is today and the long development of the city's racial and economic politic (which were unfortunately replicated around the country).
Students of cities and planning and of power politics will find this an interesting read touching on the complexity of decision-making and the way that politics and management are bound to the times and trends in which they occur. And of course, the indictment of RAND's systems analysis is an important reminder that we can't play god even when we are good with all the numbers. The Fires is as a political biography of the men of New York City that did this work and why they did it. As such it offers a companion of different style and scale to James C. Scott's masterful Seeing Like a State, which makes a similar point about reductionist system analytical planning but over a longer historical and geographical arc.
It's a quick, fun read. New Yorkers especially should pick up to learn how their city evolved into what it is today and the long development of the city's racial and economic politic (which were unfortunately replicated around the country).
March 23, 2023
I reserve five-star ratings for books that I think everyone should read, regardless of whether the subject matter is immediately interesting to them or not. "The Fires" is one of those books.
At its heart, The Fires is about the transformation that has happened in governance over the past several decades towards quantitative management. On its surface, this is a good transition: it's an attempt to do away with the cronyism of days gone by, replacing favouritism with objectivity and nepotism with data. Unfortunately, as we see in almost every situation where this occurs, data-driven approaches tend to be just as prone to failures as more subjective ones.
The Fires reveals how this happened in New York City. In short, austerity measures in the 1970s put the pressure on the NYFD to do more with less. This, combined with an excess of post-war enthusiasm for quantitative approaches (and the capacity/personnel to do this, thanks to things like RAND) led to a notion that 'if we only follow the data, we'll be able to find untold efficiencies in the system.'
Of course, what actually happens is the same as palm or tea leaf reading: sure, there appear to be patterns or images in the data, but you can pretty well make them out to be literally whatever you want them to be. In this case, an underlying tendency among fire leaders to see downtown/highrise fires as important and interesting, and a disinterest in fires in poorer parts of the city, led to magically reading the data outputs as supporting cutting fire services from these less affluent areas. As a result, more fires occurred there, more lives were lost, more buildings were destroyed, and the areas became even less affluent.
Flood's analysis of this over-emphasis on quantification is biting at times, such as his condemnation of liberalism's misguided belief that it can use "the scientific method to bring greater order and stability to the system" (p. 20), or the way this propogated into the American identity as a whole ("an idea with profound consequences: that measurement, through numbers and facts, could make America a mighty power, a global empire built on the ability to hold a yardstick up to nature," p 79). He also doesn't pull any punches when it comes to the media's fawning over the perpetrators of this ("The Whiz Kids and their nifty statistical methods became perfect fodder for myth-making journalists, who wrote feature-length paeans to the men..." (p. 84), or the way fire leaders fell victim to this too ("Their use of statistics and charts just dazzled him. The statistics made him feel the city was controllable with expertise," p. 207).
I particularly loved his analysis of the ways that mathematical models chronically over-promise and under-deliver. As he articulates on p. 218,
Of course, this always somehow ends up manifesting in disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable, albeit now with the guise of "objectivity." As Flood lays out,
Or, as a Judge rules later, in a different case (p. 246):
Flood's analysis is similarly valuable, if a little thiner than I had hoped, when it came to the fire service itself. He points out the ways that RAND analysts chronically misunderstood how firefighting resources were actually being used (p. 190, 193), and the ways this propagated into diverging views of what constituted the goal of firefighting (O'Hagan seeing it as optimizing adaptive response to achieve the end of efficiency, while the unions viewed it as being adequately prepared for the worst-case fire, p. 191). He also rightfully points out the ways that measuring fire load can be challenging, a problem we chronically deal with in wildfire (p. 216). And, of course, he reveals that a lot of the technological solutions of the time to improve efficiency ended up being bullshit, prone to glitchier performance and hamstringing the fire service (p. 242).
I do wish there had been more detail about how, exactly, the FDNY was able to escape from some or all of this spiral. Same for NYC as a whole - this is the exact same story as COMPSTAT's influence on the police department in roughly the same era. The perversities and ill-effects of data driven managerialism veiling racism and all sorts of other terrible dynamics continue, of course, but the austerity conditions and community fabric are said to have somewhat improved... and understanding how that change happened is just as valuable as understanding why it all fell apart so badly.
All told, though, it's shocking this book isn't a core text in STS. Perhaps it's too accessible, too well written, and on an issue of too much obvious importance. But it certainly deserves to be read and understood widely, so that the next time "Whiz Kids" show up peddling their models, we can have even a tiny bit of inoculation against their myths and misleading views.
At its heart, The Fires is about the transformation that has happened in governance over the past several decades towards quantitative management. On its surface, this is a good transition: it's an attempt to do away with the cronyism of days gone by, replacing favouritism with objectivity and nepotism with data. Unfortunately, as we see in almost every situation where this occurs, data-driven approaches tend to be just as prone to failures as more subjective ones.
The Fires reveals how this happened in New York City. In short, austerity measures in the 1970s put the pressure on the NYFD to do more with less. This, combined with an excess of post-war enthusiasm for quantitative approaches (and the capacity/personnel to do this, thanks to things like RAND) led to a notion that 'if we only follow the data, we'll be able to find untold efficiencies in the system.'
Of course, what actually happens is the same as palm or tea leaf reading: sure, there appear to be patterns or images in the data, but you can pretty well make them out to be literally whatever you want them to be. In this case, an underlying tendency among fire leaders to see downtown/highrise fires as important and interesting, and a disinterest in fires in poorer parts of the city, led to magically reading the data outputs as supporting cutting fire services from these less affluent areas. As a result, more fires occurred there, more lives were lost, more buildings were destroyed, and the areas became even less affluent.
Flood's analysis of this over-emphasis on quantification is biting at times, such as his condemnation of liberalism's misguided belief that it can use "the scientific method to bring greater order and stability to the system" (p. 20), or the way this propogated into the American identity as a whole ("an idea with profound consequences: that measurement, through numbers and facts, could make America a mighty power, a global empire built on the ability to hold a yardstick up to nature," p 79). He also doesn't pull any punches when it comes to the media's fawning over the perpetrators of this ("The Whiz Kids and their nifty statistical methods became perfect fodder for myth-making journalists, who wrote feature-length paeans to the men..." (p. 84), or the way fire leaders fell victim to this too ("Their use of statistics and charts just dazzled him. The statistics made him feel the city was controllable with expertise," p. 207).
I particularly loved his analysis of the ways that mathematical models chronically over-promise and under-deliver. As he articulates on p. 218,
Within the broader field of systems analysis, this weakness - having to ignore certain realities because they are too complex to quantify - is so common that it even has a philosophical justification. Simple models, the conventional wisdom of the field holds, are better than complex models, because it's harder to keep track of all the moving parts in a complex model... "With RAND, they would start off with these very ambitious plans for simulation and then end up with something you could do on the back of an envelope," says Matthew Crenson. (p. 237)
Of course, this always somehow ends up manifesting in disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable, albeit now with the guise of "objectivity." As Flood lays out,
Therein lies the strength of the city's case for the closings. The unions claimed the city was unfairly targeting black and Puerto Rican neighbourhoods, but RAND could provide reams of jargony technical reasoning and complicated equations that gave the whole process the air of impartiality. The judge concluded that the cuts were based on "exhaustive analysis," not race, and threw the lawsuit out.
Or, as a Judge rules later, in a different case (p. 246):
"...was premised solely upon the neutral, nonracial, scientific, and empirical data available... That the ordered closings will take place in the areas in which they will, was, in the opinion of the court, a fortuitous circumstance." RAND's technical jargon and reams of data seemed able to quell almost any dissent, leaving the firemen and community activists who questioned RAND's recommendations sounding like backyard mechanics questioning NASA rocket scientists.
Flood's analysis is similarly valuable, if a little thiner than I had hoped, when it came to the fire service itself. He points out the ways that RAND analysts chronically misunderstood how firefighting resources were actually being used (p. 190, 193), and the ways this propagated into diverging views of what constituted the goal of firefighting (O'Hagan seeing it as optimizing adaptive response to achieve the end of efficiency, while the unions viewed it as being adequately prepared for the worst-case fire, p. 191). He also rightfully points out the ways that measuring fire load can be challenging, a problem we chronically deal with in wildfire (p. 216). And, of course, he reveals that a lot of the technological solutions of the time to improve efficiency ended up being bullshit, prone to glitchier performance and hamstringing the fire service (p. 242).
I do wish there had been more detail about how, exactly, the FDNY was able to escape from some or all of this spiral. Same for NYC as a whole - this is the exact same story as COMPSTAT's influence on the police department in roughly the same era. The perversities and ill-effects of data driven managerialism veiling racism and all sorts of other terrible dynamics continue, of course, but the austerity conditions and community fabric are said to have somewhat improved... and understanding how that change happened is just as valuable as understanding why it all fell apart so badly.
All told, though, it's shocking this book isn't a core text in STS. Perhaps it's too accessible, too well written, and on an issue of too much obvious importance. But it certainly deserves to be read and understood widely, so that the next time "Whiz Kids" show up peddling their models, we can have even a tiny bit of inoculation against their myths and misleading views.
January 9, 2022
"Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning."
Howard Cosell never said this in 1977, but the Bronx surely burned. I read, before, that the fires of 1970s New York were an arson plot, designed to burn out tenants and get rid of unprofitable buildings. Flood convincingly demonstrates that this was largely not the case—most buldings were not burned by arson, and the arson that did occur was largely buildings that had already been abandoned. Instead, the fires were the culmination of a long series of events, largely tied to changes in New York politics and the use of centralized planning and root analysis.
There is an enormous amount of information in this book, most of which is not about the fires themselves. That was slightly disappointing, as I would have been interested to read more about the fires and their effects. Flood doesn't even get to the fires until page 172, and spends the first half-plus of the book setting up his chess pieces. There's far too much to summarize: The tension between Tammany Hall's machine and would be reformers; Mayor Lindsay, who campaigned as one of those reformers after a particularly corrupt stretch; Fire Chief and later Commissioner Joe O'Hagan, who is determined to modernize the department; and the social changes of the 1960s.
When discussing the history of New York and the consequences of urban planning, there's a tendency, which Flood sometimes falls prey to, to romanticize the days of Tammany Hall and the chaos of the slums. Tammany was a corrupt organization that harmed as many as it helped, and as New York diversified, it maintained its Irish-Italian base, closing out Black and Puerto Rican politicians. There's solid reasons that reform mayors have been periodically elected, especially Fiorello LaGuardia. The city's elite made catastrophic decisions to de-industrialize early, to remove working class neighborhoods, and to treat ordinary New Yorkers as chess pieces that could be moved at will. But we need to remember that the old neighborhoods (that my grandparents grew up in) were not all lovely places, and the street ballet that Jane Jacobs memorably described is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city and has been for decades. Flood does, to his credit, acknowledge Tammany's corruption, but it would be better to appreciate its street level organization without liking the organization that created it. By the late 1960s, city politicians, of both parties and all races, were willing to sell out their constituents, making them ineffective counterweights to bad planning.
Flood is on sure ground when he examines the specific flaws of root analysis. Data is useful (the initial CompStat program grew out of a real need, as he points out), but a model is only as good as the data it's given. RAND used data that didn't correlate well to outcomes, and then politicians manipulated it. The result was that units in the busiest areas were cut, making the fires harder and harder to combat. When fiscal crisis hit in 1975, O'Hagan's efficiency bit him: his department had no fat to cut.
This is, overall, a great read about how the pieces of history combined to create a crisis that destroyed large swathes of NYC and displaced hundreds of thousands. Flood wrote this at the tail end of the Bloomberg administration, which was infamous for its centralized, data focused approach, and I can't help but think that this is meant as a retort. In the end, however, we should not view it as a simple binary choice. Planning is useful. Data, when used carefully and thoughtfully, is important: our instincts can fail us. But the story of the fires warns us about the consequences of a root analysis that's done by people with little street level familiarity; who treat a social problem as a mathematical abstraction.
Howard Cosell never said this in 1977, but the Bronx surely burned. I read, before, that the fires of 1970s New York were an arson plot, designed to burn out tenants and get rid of unprofitable buildings. Flood convincingly demonstrates that this was largely not the case—most buldings were not burned by arson, and the arson that did occur was largely buildings that had already been abandoned. Instead, the fires were the culmination of a long series of events, largely tied to changes in New York politics and the use of centralized planning and root analysis.
There is an enormous amount of information in this book, most of which is not about the fires themselves. That was slightly disappointing, as I would have been interested to read more about the fires and their effects. Flood doesn't even get to the fires until page 172, and spends the first half-plus of the book setting up his chess pieces. There's far too much to summarize: The tension between Tammany Hall's machine and would be reformers; Mayor Lindsay, who campaigned as one of those reformers after a particularly corrupt stretch; Fire Chief and later Commissioner Joe O'Hagan, who is determined to modernize the department; and the social changes of the 1960s.
When discussing the history of New York and the consequences of urban planning, there's a tendency, which Flood sometimes falls prey to, to romanticize the days of Tammany Hall and the chaos of the slums. Tammany was a corrupt organization that harmed as many as it helped, and as New York diversified, it maintained its Irish-Italian base, closing out Black and Puerto Rican politicians. There's solid reasons that reform mayors have been periodically elected, especially Fiorello LaGuardia. The city's elite made catastrophic decisions to de-industrialize early, to remove working class neighborhoods, and to treat ordinary New Yorkers as chess pieces that could be moved at will. But we need to remember that the old neighborhoods (that my grandparents grew up in) were not all lovely places, and the street ballet that Jane Jacobs memorably described is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city and has been for decades. Flood does, to his credit, acknowledge Tammany's corruption, but it would be better to appreciate its street level organization without liking the organization that created it. By the late 1960s, city politicians, of both parties and all races, were willing to sell out their constituents, making them ineffective counterweights to bad planning.
Flood is on sure ground when he examines the specific flaws of root analysis. Data is useful (the initial CompStat program grew out of a real need, as he points out), but a model is only as good as the data it's given. RAND used data that didn't correlate well to outcomes, and then politicians manipulated it. The result was that units in the busiest areas were cut, making the fires harder and harder to combat. When fiscal crisis hit in 1975, O'Hagan's efficiency bit him: his department had no fat to cut.
This is, overall, a great read about how the pieces of history combined to create a crisis that destroyed large swathes of NYC and displaced hundreds of thousands. Flood wrote this at the tail end of the Bloomberg administration, which was infamous for its centralized, data focused approach, and I can't help but think that this is meant as a retort. In the end, however, we should not view it as a simple binary choice. Planning is useful. Data, when used carefully and thoughtfully, is important: our instincts can fail us. But the story of the fires warns us about the consequences of a root analysis that's done by people with little street level familiarity; who treat a social problem as a mathematical abstraction.
December 23, 2017
This story of how a bunch of know-it-all nerds juggled some numbers and burned down the best parts of NYC filled me with rage. Flood -- a Bronx native -- tries for an evenhanded, no bad guys approach, but when there are overtly racist motivations at work he doesn't shy away from describing them. Although he is trying to simply be critical of certain approaches to governance and avoid conspiracy theory weirdness, I was left thinking that a bunch of bad people orchestrated a decades long ethnic cleansing program in my grandparents' neighborhood. Flood uses the oxymoron "free market" a little too often for me, but his general point feels right: that systems that gather knowledge and solutions from the bottom up and with an "entrepreneurial spirit" are less capable of large scale destruction than top-down grand planner hierarchies, and that both are prone to corruption.
There is a warning here for all the people currently enamored with "big data" and "data mining" ... these mostly white boy tech-heads are just going to justify their racist and sexist garbage with a bunch of crap numbers they pulled out of their butts, claiming, "I am not racist, the computer says this is the right thing to do... and if it harms people of color... all the better..." well, sorry, but that's basically what happened when they let the Bronx burn and the same kinds of jerks are working on the same kind of evil today. But that's me, Flood is much more chilled out about the whole thing.
I wanted to read this book because the fires and the fiscal crisis of 70s NYC are the context for true school hip hop and Fania salsa. But this is mostly about the planners and the jerks at RAND and the firefighters and not so much about the people of the Bronx... although the founders of hip hop get a mention in the conclusion.
There is a warning here for all the people currently enamored with "big data" and "data mining" ... these mostly white boy tech-heads are just going to justify their racist and sexist garbage with a bunch of crap numbers they pulled out of their butts, claiming, "I am not racist, the computer says this is the right thing to do... and if it harms people of color... all the better..." well, sorry, but that's basically what happened when they let the Bronx burn and the same kinds of jerks are working on the same kind of evil today. But that's me, Flood is much more chilled out about the whole thing.
I wanted to read this book because the fires and the fiscal crisis of 70s NYC are the context for true school hip hop and Fania salsa. But this is mostly about the planners and the jerks at RAND and the firefighters and not so much about the people of the Bronx... although the founders of hip hop get a mention in the conclusion.
December 15, 2019
Alarming to think that the computer algorithms everyone is rightfully yelling about now were being used (with the same lack of nuance) as early as the 70s. Computers and statistics can only tell you what you’ve told them, and if the input is biased and racist, it follows that the results will be too.
This book has a personal connection for me, describing as it does the burning of the Bronx and central Brooklyn. My dad’s family was composed of German immigrants who settled in Bushwick in the late 1800s and my great-grandmother was born at home there. She and her daughter (my dad’s aunt) were the last to leave, in 1978, as block after block was being literally decimated by fire. She died two months later. My great-grandfather, her husband, was a firefighter who died in the line of duty. At the 100th anniversary of his firehouse awhile back, we each received a booklet prepared for the occasion, full of pictures and statistics. You can see the number of fires that the company took on double between 1966 and 1967.
This book has a personal connection for me, describing as it does the burning of the Bronx and central Brooklyn. My dad’s family was composed of German immigrants who settled in Bushwick in the late 1800s and my great-grandmother was born at home there. She and her daughter (my dad’s aunt) were the last to leave, in 1978, as block after block was being literally decimated by fire. She died two months later. My great-grandfather, her husband, was a firefighter who died in the line of duty. At the 100th anniversary of his firehouse awhile back, we each received a booklet prepared for the occasion, full of pictures and statistics. You can see the number of fires that the company took on double between 1966 and 1967.
December 17, 2019
Recently covered this topic on a PBS show which had me intrigued. This comprehensive book uses each chapter to explore a different facet f how this awful neglect and razing of a huge section of a major city could come to pass. Topics are the leadership in the fire department, the financial fashions governments were led to, the racism and racist policies, city planning ideas, and of course the new idea of using computer analysis that was supposed to make every thing more efficient. I was hoping for more of the latter form the title, but the one chapter that covered it was pretty good. There seems to be little talk of taking responsibility for fixing problems caused by governments' poorly executed ideas, or being certain to check on a safety net for the peoples affected,just the idea of voting officials out and continuing on with newer untried ideas.
November 27, 2022
Incredible narrative of the most consequential era in the history of the American fire service.
The book is expertly researched and documented. It takes the reader on an epic ride through Damnation Alley, the Bronx of New York City during the late 1960s and1970s known as the War Years due to the historic number of fires. More importantly it provides an insightful look into the public policy deceptions, corruption and schemes that led to the unprecedented destruction of a major American city and the unimaginable level of human suffering that accompanied it. This book should be required reading for political science students, public policy curriculums as well as students of emergency management, fire science and public finance. Excellent work.
The book is expertly researched and documented. It takes the reader on an epic ride through Damnation Alley, the Bronx of New York City during the late 1960s and1970s known as the War Years due to the historic number of fires. More importantly it provides an insightful look into the public policy deceptions, corruption and schemes that led to the unprecedented destruction of a major American city and the unimaginable level of human suffering that accompanied it. This book should be required reading for political science students, public policy curriculums as well as students of emergency management, fire science and public finance. Excellent work.
December 10, 2024
As someone who does he hazard analysis for a living, this book really stood out. It's a cautionary tale about the over reliance on 'hard' data in complex social environments. Data wonks need to get out of the office and get to know the people their work is affecting. I don't have Flood's faith in the free market but his take on it challenged me. It also is a reminder to look at how people are incentivized. Finally, it's a great case study for understanding current hostility to the 'managerial' class, people who don't work with concrete objects (i.e., knowledge workers, data scientists, financial analysts, etc...).
December 28, 2024
Wonderfully researched and driven as a fiction showing heros and outlaws and everything in between the concrete jungle that is and was the South Bronx. This brings out the faulty mechanics of social change and the lives at stake when money and pride win. Perfect for buffs of the FDNY and NYC underground historians alike.
paused
June 21, 2023Very interesting and well written so far. I am on only page 24 because I have been reading other books. I am skipping to the "Conclusion" chapter because it is due back to the libaray, but I might read the rest someday.
February 5, 2019
Reminiscent of Seeing Like a State.
February 1, 2011
Another book about the Mayor Lindsay administration with a reference to "Good Intentions" in its title. In my review of Morris Cohen's book, "The Cost of Good Intentions," I mentioned that one of the few successes Cohen attributed to the Lindsay administration was its revamping of the fire department under the influence of RAND studies. Considering that significant parts of New York burned to the ground in the 1970s, Cohen probably should have been careful to play up even that claim.
In this book Joe Flood investigates the RAND-influenced fire station closing policy implemented under Fire Chief and Commissioner John O'Hagen that clearly exacerbated the fires of that decade. Flood begins with a largely complimentary picture of O'Hagen, pointing to him as the origin of much contemporary fire-fighting technology (under his leadership, the NYFD was the first to use telescoping tower ladders that extended both up and over burning buildings, the first to use early "jaws of life" steel cutters to save trapped victims, and it used some of the first practical air-masks for fire-fighters. O'Hagen also conducted a study to prove that accelerants in cigarettes were the largest cause of preventable death in NYC, and he helped pass the pioneering Local Law 5 in 1972, which became the standard for building code safety ever-after). Yet Flood goes on to note that the RAND-NYC study of fire-response times, when used to condone cuts demanded by the city's fiscal situation, led to disproportionate closing of stations in the neediest areas (especially the Bronx and Bushwick) that led to fires getting out of control in what firefighters still call "the War Decade."
Of course, as is typical in much contemporary journalism, Flood goes on to indict statistical models in general, and even veers further off tangent to discuss the shortcomings of President Bush and the War in Iraq. His facts, however, actually point to the problems with simple political applications of statistical models. For instance, the stopwatches used by the RAND researchers to measure response time were sabotaged by firefighters' unions worried about budget cuts. Likewise, in order to give the wealthy areas of the cities better response times, RAND divided the city into seven completely arbitrary "hazard categories," with the wealthiest getting more hypothetical stations. Commissioner O'Hagen also pushed the RAND researchers to find more cuts for "second stations" in dangerous areas where his union opponents were most powerful. In the end, the RAND-NYC study (which was later purchased by HUD and became the basis of many fire insurance maps) seems to be more the product of what Hayek called "scientism," a false scientific sheen laid upon fairly arbitrary assumptions.
A lot of the book trods over familiar and often inaccurate territory (HOLC maps, urban renewal, Robert Moses), and does it in a pretty bland way. One cool takeaway though: arson probably never accounted for more than about 7% of all NYC fires in the 1970s, and those were often in buildings already abandoned because of other fires.
May 26, 2016
This was a pretty interesting book! I didn't realize that New York City had a huge fire problem in the 70's, and at first the book provided a lot of background about the mayor, the fire chief, etc. to the point where it got to be a bit much. But then the author did a great job of laying out how the problem started and got worse through a series of bad decisions. The main theme is that it was mostly the fault of a technocratic City Hall, for example:
- Robert Moses (the city planner) had a lot of power to impose a top-down vision for what the city should be like, and used it to destroy a bunch of housing and industrial buildings to build highways, parks, and office towers. This included "slum clearance" which people thought would get rid of the slums, but instead just made the lower-income people move elsewhere in the city, including the South Bronx. The deindustrialization caused even more poverty.
- This caused more fires as a result of crowded living conditions, etc. John O'Hagan (the fire chief) was a technocratic type (as was the mayor) and hired the RAND Corporation to try to make the fire department more efficient.
- RAND did a study about which firehouses were busiest, but they didn't gather very much data, and what they did gather was not very reliable because firemen didn't care about them and would often make up their response times, etc. Then the way RAND analyzed the data was laughably simplistic - they concluded that adding two firehouses in the same district was causing more false alarms and therefore was a waste of resources. But all they measured was the number of runs a firehouse went on, which includes false alarms - but false alarms are very quick to deal with, since the fire engine would just drive by, see no smoke, and return back to the firehouse. If you look at the fires that they actually had to fight, the second firehouse made a noticeable difference.
- There's also some evidence that the O'Hagan didn't care about what he called "ghetto fires" and was more concerned/interested in high-rise fires. To be fair, he literally wrote the book on new techniques for fighting them that are still being used today. So when the models came back saying to close firehouses in poorer neighborhoods he didn't push back.
- New York City was on the verge of going bankrupt in the 70's, which led to more cuts from the fire department.
- The author also points out that while Tammany Hall was certainly corrupt, they were corrupt in the "you have to keep constituents happy by giving them jobs, but take some off the top for yourself" way, which while not optimal at least meant they were responsive to the citizens. There were literally riots in the streets because of the fires/poor conditions, but the mayor was convinced he was doing the right thing and stayed the course.
So, yeah! Pretty interesting book.
- Robert Moses (the city planner) had a lot of power to impose a top-down vision for what the city should be like, and used it to destroy a bunch of housing and industrial buildings to build highways, parks, and office towers. This included "slum clearance" which people thought would get rid of the slums, but instead just made the lower-income people move elsewhere in the city, including the South Bronx. The deindustrialization caused even more poverty.
- This caused more fires as a result of crowded living conditions, etc. John O'Hagan (the fire chief) was a technocratic type (as was the mayor) and hired the RAND Corporation to try to make the fire department more efficient.
- RAND did a study about which firehouses were busiest, but they didn't gather very much data, and what they did gather was not very reliable because firemen didn't care about them and would often make up their response times, etc. Then the way RAND analyzed the data was laughably simplistic - they concluded that adding two firehouses in the same district was causing more false alarms and therefore was a waste of resources. But all they measured was the number of runs a firehouse went on, which includes false alarms - but false alarms are very quick to deal with, since the fire engine would just drive by, see no smoke, and return back to the firehouse. If you look at the fires that they actually had to fight, the second firehouse made a noticeable difference.
- There's also some evidence that the O'Hagan didn't care about what he called "ghetto fires" and was more concerned/interested in high-rise fires. To be fair, he literally wrote the book on new techniques for fighting them that are still being used today. So when the models came back saying to close firehouses in poorer neighborhoods he didn't push back.
- New York City was on the verge of going bankrupt in the 70's, which led to more cuts from the fire department.
- The author also points out that while Tammany Hall was certainly corrupt, they were corrupt in the "you have to keep constituents happy by giving them jobs, but take some off the top for yourself" way, which while not optimal at least meant they were responsive to the citizens. There were literally riots in the streets because of the fires/poor conditions, but the mayor was convinced he was doing the right thing and stayed the course.
So, yeah! Pretty interesting book.
September 7, 2010
U.S. government research and development computer modeling -- spun off as the RAND Corporation think tank -- drives military prowess and Robert McNamara's Vietnam War, then intervenes at Ford Motor Co., and on those "successes" ends up promulgating changes in the city government of New York with the fire department as a test case.
Except the changes rammed through city hall subverted the common sense intelligence of those on the front-lines -- specifically, the firemen and NYC's most progressive commissioner/chief, John O'Hagan -- and helped devolve the (arguably) greatest city in the world into a disintegrating, dangerous, fire-ravaged, feared "city in crisis" that was nearly lost to myopic bureaucracy.
In this well-researched, rich-in-details book by the young and wonderfully talented Joe Flood ((http://joe-flood.com/reviewsandmedia)), a post-war history is revealed of a city struggling through financial bungles, political gamesmanship and racial rifts in the '60s and '70s.
Of all the books I've read in the past several months, this is a standout. It is not only about the fires of the South Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan's Lower East Side and Harlem, and how poor neighborhoods were allowed to burn down through practically purposeful neglect, but also about the history of the city's dysfunction -- beginning with the corrupt Tammany Hall and political "clubhouses," and through to the political subversion of fire codes that allowed deathtraps such as the World Trade Center towers to exist -- and how an experiment in social and civil engineering based on flawed assumptions and bad mathematical models was exported to cities across the country.
If you thought NYC was being torched by arsonists at every turn during those years, this book will give you perspective on what was really behind the city that burned.
Includes a serviceable history of the tenures of Mayors La Guardia, Lindsey and Beame.
Except the changes rammed through city hall subverted the common sense intelligence of those on the front-lines -- specifically, the firemen and NYC's most progressive commissioner/chief, John O'Hagan -- and helped devolve the (arguably) greatest city in the world into a disintegrating, dangerous, fire-ravaged, feared "city in crisis" that was nearly lost to myopic bureaucracy.
In this well-researched, rich-in-details book by the young and wonderfully talented Joe Flood ((http://joe-flood.com/reviewsandmedia)), a post-war history is revealed of a city struggling through financial bungles, political gamesmanship and racial rifts in the '60s and '70s.
Of all the books I've read in the past several months, this is a standout. It is not only about the fires of the South Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan's Lower East Side and Harlem, and how poor neighborhoods were allowed to burn down through practically purposeful neglect, but also about the history of the city's dysfunction -- beginning with the corrupt Tammany Hall and political "clubhouses," and through to the political subversion of fire codes that allowed deathtraps such as the World Trade Center towers to exist -- and how an experiment in social and civil engineering based on flawed assumptions and bad mathematical models was exported to cities across the country.
If you thought NYC was being torched by arsonists at every turn during those years, this book will give you perspective on what was really behind the city that burned.
Includes a serviceable history of the tenures of Mayors La Guardia, Lindsey and Beame.
August 3, 2011
It turns out the key word in the title is "How." What I thought might be a book about the fires themselves ended up an amazing explication of the political and policy machinations that led to the burning of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan in the late '60s and '70s. Flood does a more than admirable job making the point that "root approach" governance (in brief, making systematic changes based on statistical analysis to help government become more efficient) was a failure in New York, along the way exposing more general flaws in the approach.
While Flood isn't advocating a return to the corruption and inequality of Tammany Hall-style city governance, he does believe strongly that a more responsive, more adaptable "branch approach" is less prone to the systematic failures that caused the fires of "The War Years," as NYFD men have come to call them.
Though Flood takes a bit of a moralizing tone at times, this first book is a fantastic accomplishment. It's a sobering parable for civic-minded citizens and civil servants everywhere.
While Flood isn't advocating a return to the corruption and inequality of Tammany Hall-style city governance, he does believe strongly that a more responsive, more adaptable "branch approach" is less prone to the systematic failures that caused the fires of "The War Years," as NYFD men have come to call them.
Though Flood takes a bit of a moralizing tone at times, this first book is a fantastic accomplishment. It's a sobering parable for civic-minded citizens and civil servants everywhere.
May 28, 2010
this is set in New york city in the 1960's where a computer model called RANDS is set up by a corperation. RANDS was used by the military and new tork officials thought that it was a good idea to set up RANDS computers in public service areas for the cittizens to use in houses and in public areas where help could be needed from a computer. after a few months of using them fires started blazing around all of New York city from lower manhattan to the hieghts of Queens. the fire fighters called it the war of fires because there were so many of them. it was figured that it was the RANDS models that were starting them and thats where the conflict kick starts. it a good easy read with a unique story and nothing cliche about it so thats why i enjoyed it. i recommend this to anyone who wants something different to read.
November 12, 2014
"During the 1950s, city fire marshals attributed less than 1 percent of fires to arson. Until 1975, that ratio never rose above 1.1 percent. At its peak in the late 1970s, arson made up less than 7 percent of fires. What's more, arson occurred primarily in already burned-out, abandoned buildings -- after all, it made more sense to torch a building without rent-paying tenants than one that had at least some revenue coming in." (18)
"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." (quoting John Von Neumann, 73)
"To figure out how much money the company [Ford] owed, they [the Whiz Kids] stacked up all the bills, measured them with a ruler, and through a formula of unknown provenance turned feet into dollars." (78)
"[B]y 1977, debt service made up a third of all city expenses." (237)
"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." (quoting John Von Neumann, 73)
"To figure out how much money the company [Ford] owed, they [the Whiz Kids] stacked up all the bills, measured them with a ruler, and through a formula of unknown provenance turned feet into dollars." (78)
"[B]y 1977, debt service made up a third of all city expenses." (237)
May 19, 2013
Very interesting book. Flood tells a really good story and does a good job of connecting some dots and illustrating how something like this could happen. His analysis of the bigger picture trends it illustrates and the "what does it mean now?" section feel tacked on and the 12 page conclusion really isn't enough space for him to flesh things out.
Still, Flood does a good job showing up the misguided-ness of attempts to solve problems with forced application of statistical modeling and analysis, a dream that policy makers and planners seem to still hold onto.
Still, Flood does a good job showing up the misguided-ness of attempts to solve problems with forced application of statistical modeling and analysis, a dream that policy makers and planners seem to still hold onto.
August 12, 2013
Thoroughly satisfying as a nerd-lite descent into the perils of trying to use statistical analysis to to turn societal ills into algebra. Veers into repetitiveness a few too many times in the middle, but what I liked most was the picture it painted of a moment in time when a small group of people's individual blind spots all happened to align, for different reasons, on the same spot (the Bronx) with catastrophic consequences.
March 20, 2013
This was an amazing book on several levels, including its readability. It chronicles how the City drove its industry out of the area in favor of real estate developers and Wall Street and allowed Robert Moses to plow through once stable areas in the Bronx and Brooklyn and created the ghettos that burned in the seventies. It all sounds eerily like City governance
Under our current mayor, and the author connects all the dots in the last chapter.
Under our current mayor, and the author connects all the dots in the last chapter.
August 6, 2013
Start with a dash of "The Bronx is Burning". Add equal spoonfuls of the mayoralties of Lindsay, Beame, and Bloomberg. A sprinkle of DJ Kool Herc, a dollop of stop-and-frisk, and one large helping of statistical modeling idiocy. Add some Robert Moses and Jacob Riis to taste, and mix it all up in a large Tammany Hall bowl.
An insanely interesting book about the bleak New York of the seventies, as seen through the lens of the Fire Department. If I could give this book six stars, I would.
An insanely interesting book about the bleak New York of the seventies, as seen through the lens of the Fire Department. If I could give this book six stars, I would.
March 18, 2016
This is probably not a book I would ever have heard of otherwise, so I'm so glad I had to read it for my class on the public policy process. While I would have appreciated inclusion of the accounts of people who were living in the South Bronx during the fires, this book is nonetheless an excellent account of how well-intentioned, rationally based policy can go horribly wrong. Very gripping - I wish I could make every policymaker in the world go read it now.
June 20, 2010
I thought this was going to about computers taking over society. It h some calculatadions and told the history of how math and theory helped organize to win WWII, but this book was mostly about the politics of NYC from the 50's to 60's. It was good though, I learned a lot about Tamnany Hall and Robert Moses. And I'm more skeptical than ever of Democrats' social programs than ever before.
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