The World’s Greatest City?
“The greatest city in the world.”
How often do we hear New York described this way? A lot. I grew up in the Connecticut suburbs in the 1960s and 70s and count myself among the Big Apple’s biggest fans, but having moved west a decade ago, I experience New York today largely through its airports. So you can understand why “greatest” isn’t the first word that comes to mind when I arrive at JFK or La Guardia for my occasional visits on business or to see family, like I did last week for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Both airports are a mess, a disgrace, really, considering the wealth that’s concentrated in the New York metropolitan area and the importance of both facilities as major gateways to the region for businesspeople and tourists alike. It’s a brutal first impression.
JFK is bad, but LGA, where I was last week, is worse. The airport is decades behind in its planning and operations and is now trying to catch up, all at once. At best, LGA is a case of poor planning. At worst, it’s an example of a metro region that largely undervalues, if not outright ignores, its infrastructure until it’s too late.
The city's subways and buses, operated by Metropolitan Transportation Authority, are another case in point, with recent headlines declaring the "MTA is completely out of touch," and the MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota warning that the city's failing subway system threatens not only the city's, but the region's, financial future.
Here’s the thing. Ever since I can remember, the region’s infrastructure has been in a colossal state of disrepair. In my mind’s eye, I can still picture the blighted lots in the South Bronx, the graffiti-covered subway cars, the man-eating potholes on the FDR Drive, all circa 1970s.
Meanwhile, for decades, the area has been gentrifying, with once impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Central Harlem now among the most desirable, and super-luxury, super-tall “pencil” skyscrapers popping up across the Manhattan skyline, their apartments selling for as much as $7,000 per square foot.
It’s the triumph of private over public space, of winner-take-all over the common good, and it’s not unique to New York City. We see it all across the United States but, as befitting the world’s greatest city, the disparity between the gilded and dilapidated is most pronounced in New York.
In his 1982 book, “Shifting Involvement: Private Interest and Public Action,” the noted political economist Albert O. Hirschman described the 20-year cycles in which American society oscillates between intense concern for the public interest and an eclipsing focus on private gain. Hirschman argued that every couple of decades people tire of the pursuit of material things, throw off consumerism and individualism, and turn their attention outward to pot holes and public policy, to civil rights and social issues. In turn, their interest in the common good wanes as their frustration with collective action grows, leading them back to their private preoccupations.
While my experience with New York’s infrastructure would suggest a longer cycle than Hirschman describes, I sure hope he’s right. I hope that the pendulum will shift back to a kind of civic awakening, where investment in forward-thinking, socially-responsible and even beautiful public infrastructure will carry the day, as it did at the turn of the 20th century with the City Beautiful movement, whose reforms aimed to make American cities not only more attractive but more functional and humane.
That’s over a hundred years ago, or about five of Hirschman’s cycles.
Better late than never.
