Wherever enough middle class college graduates can be found to fill a New York meeting hall, there have sprung up Democratic political clubs bearing the label “reform.” Many of these clubs were originally founded as local campaign headquarters for Adlai …
In some ways Harlem is different. It is not the solidest or the best organized Negro community (Negro political representation came to Chicago a full decade before New York). It is not the most depressed, even in the New York …
I sing of the city revived. Citizen, I cry to you in favor of integration and municipal reconstruction. It is time that you reckoned up the cost of your own follies. Consider: a city wasted at the guts like present-day …
At the age of nine I had already acquired the reputation of being the worst boy in the neighborhood. And in my neighborhood this was no easy accomplishment. My frequent appearance in juvenile court was beginning to bother the judges. …
In 1956, the Regional Plan Association, a non-profit research agency, asked the Harvard School of Public Administration to conduct an economic and demographic survey of the New York metropolitan region—a 7,000-square-mile, 22-county complex that, with its core, inner ring, and …
The newest faces in our city are Puerto Rican. They have come in great numbers and settled primarily in the slum areas close to the Negro ghettos. Like the national groups preceding them they speak a foreign language; but unlike …
Elizabeth She was a big blousy red-headed woman with a good-natured face and eyes that squinted at you between long lashes. She was goodlooking in her way, but the day she came in to us she was filthy from sleeping …
The final tournament still takes place in New York. Here the jazzman from Detroit or Houston or Paris is tested. The judges who are by far most important to him are the other musicians. He is interested economically in being …
Growing up in New York during the thirties meant, for me, the Jewish slums of the East Bronx, endless talk about Hitler, money worries of my parents migrating to my own psyche, public schools that really were schools and devoted …
In the recent Broadway actors’ strike, things that most people only surmise came into the open: for instance, that out of 12,000 Equity members only 731 were involved in the Broadway productions that closed down, or that the weekly minimum …
By June 30, 1960, the New York City Housing Authority had become the country’s largest landlord, housing some 567,000 lower-class tenants in 109 projects. Anyone who has visited some of these projects, however, knows that the problem of slums in …
On the tombstone of our race, a famous writer has told us, there will some day be carved the single chilling remembrance: They copulated and read the newspapers. He didn’t go far enough, that writer. Our epitaph is actually going …
The Housing and Redevelopment Board has replaced Robert Moses’s Slum Clearance Committee, and a new order has been proclaimed for the on-going work of tucking in New York’s residential shirt tails. Robert Moses, who now deals only with sovereign nations, …
In Edward Albee’s two-character play, The Zoo Story, the publisher asks the young man who accosts him in Central Park if he lives in the Village. The boy, who eventually forces the publisher to kill him in a desperate attempt …
The giant city of today lives by a miracle: it survives contradictions of policy and endless administrative improvisations. But if its life is miraculous, then its decline, even its terminal illness, is not at all impossible. And in the pathology …
