New York’s economy is divided into three parts: upper, lower, and under. The first two—upper and lower—are old hat, retailored now to fit the service economy. The third—the underground economy—has moved from being a pest to being a pestilence. In …
Word has it that Machito, the father of Latin jazz who died in early 1984 at 75, was learning how to breakdance. The great Cuban bandleader, who since the 1940s had performed with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie …
Human nature didn’t change once Ed Koch became mayor of New York, but it soon began to display its shabbier sides. The mood of the city seemed to grow sullen, as if in contempt of earlier feelings and visions…. Quick …
Cities, like dreams,” Calvino tells us, “are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspective deceitful, and everything conceals something else” (Invisible Cities). Calvino is right, of course. …
Last March Dissent organized, under the leadership of editor Fred Siegel, a round-table discussion on the problems of New York, with emphasis on the possibilities of solutions. We print below a transcript, sharply reduced for reasons of space. The round …
Every couple of years friends of friends from Denmark come to visit. When they leave I always ask them, “What impressed you the most about New York City?” Always, I hear the same reply. Not the Statue of Liberty, the …
A familiar story, playing itself out in city after city: skyrocketing housing costs send upscale urban dwellers looking for new areas to “pioneer” (some would say invade) and to reshape to their taste. In Manhattan, it has transformed areas once …
For years, one of the most exploited segments in public services had been the nonprofessionals in New York City’s hospitals, public schools, and governmental offices. Receiving the lowest pay among municipal workers, they remained primarily outside the organized labor movement, …
In that long gone time during Hitler’s war when I was madly in love with M., the Village’s most frequented femme fatale, I had to hear a lot about her other lovers, some of whom must have been concurrent with …
The drive for “privatization” first began to gain momentum, like such key elements of the Reagan agenda as deregulation and acceleration of weapons procurement (the infamous MX was a Carter favorite), in Jimmy’s administration. Its advocates claim that privatization not …
During the waning years of the nineteenth century, American workers experienced changes in production methods that proved disastrous to their lives and health. The growth of the factory system and mass production, combined with a nearly total lack of regulation …
Spain last year commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. The occasion elicited a massive outpouring of articles, memoirs, books, conferences. The bloody events were re-examined and scrutinized, but one would have had to look far …
At the end of the Copacabana beach in Rio stands a huge rock called the Morro do Leme. Slowly but remorselessly, the tides are turning the rock into sand. If we measure human change by this standard, Brazil’s 486-year history …
In that part of the world where political legitimacy is derived from the universal law of continuous technical development, industrialization, concentration, and centralization, the strength of dispersed small-scale agricultural production and the relative well-being of the peasantry are not self-evident. …
Few beliefs are more deeply embedded in American popular wisdom than those concerning the inefficiency of government. In an era when liberals, moderates, and conservatives find little basis for common cause, criticizing government’s performance is a unifying ritual. The public …
