Late 19th Century to 9/11

With industry booming, the late 19th century was termed the “Gilded Age.” New York City was an example of this label in action; millionaires built mansions on Fifth Avenue, while rows of tenements teeming with families (made up of the cheap, mostly immigrant laborers who were employed by the industrial barons) filled the city’s districts. In 1880, the city’s population boomed to 1.1 million.
More European immigrants poured into the city between 1900 and 1930, arriving at Ellis Island and then fanning out into neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Little Italy, and Harlem. With the city population in 1930 at 7 million and a Depression raging, New York turned to a feisty mayor named Fiorello La Guardia for help. With the assistance of civic planner Robert Moses, who masterminded a huge public works program, the city was remade. Moses did some things well, but his highway, bridge, tunnel, and housing projects ran through (and sometimes destroyed) many vibrant neighborhoods.
While most of the country prospered after World War II, New York, with those Moses-built highways and a newly forming car culture, endured an exodus to the suburbs. By 1958, the Dodgers had left Brooklyn and the Giants had left the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan. This economic slide climaxed in the late 1970s with the city’s declaration of bankruptcy. As Wall Street rallied during the Reagan years of the 1980s, New York’s fortunes also improved. In the 1990s, with Rudolph Giuliani — whom they haven’t named anything after yet — as the mayor, the city rode a wave of prosperity that left it safer, cleaner, and more populated. The flip side of this boom was that Manhattan became more homogenized. Witness the Disney-fication of Times Square — the ultimate symbol of New York’s homogenization — and the growing gap between the rich and poor.
Everything changed on September 11, 2001, when terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. But New York’s grit and verve showed itself once more, as the city immediately began to rebound emotionally and financially from that terrible tragedy. As this book goes to press, ground has broken on a memorial, but bickering on what should be built on the site continues. Stay tuned.