The Encyclopedia of New York City
Second Edition
edited by Kenneth T. Jackson
Yale University Press
When terrorists flew two jets into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, they intended to deliver a mortal wound to New York City, the world’s financial capital. Nearly 10 years later, New York City is bigger, stronger and wealthier than ever before. What the new Encyclopedia of New York City calls “the worst terrorist attack ever committed on US soil” horrified and saddened New Yorkers, but barely slowed the city’s forward momentum.
New York’s perennial problems, including its deteriorating infrastructure, persist. Yet it has transformed itself so substantially in the last few years that the original Encyclopedia of New York City, published in 1995 with 4,300 entries, has been rewritten and updated with 800 new entries to cover the immense changes. Some entries concern now-familiar innovations, like the MetroCard, or new services, like the Airtrain. Strikingly, though, the largest category of new tables and graphs has to do with crime.
This is appropriate. For just as the editors of the original encyclopedia were putting the finishing touches on the first edition in 1993, New York’s war on violent crime — arguably the single most important element in the city’s recent makeover — had begun. Only no one knew it. In an almost funny attempt to say something good about crime, the first edition concluded, “Despite its reputation as a dangerous place, New York City by the mid-1990s was no longer among the 25 cities with the highest homicide rates.”
The story is clear in retrospect. Mayor David Dinkins, who was about to be thrown out of office by the voters, had succeeded in re-allocating substantial funds to the NYPD, which instituted “broken-windows” policing. Then (and now) Commissioner Ray Kelly strategically placed street cops in high-crime neighborhoods with orders to police aggressively — even against the low-level, quality-of-life crimes that had long been ignored. Under Dinkins, overall crime in New York started on the downward course that subsequently resulted in a roughly 80% decrease. New York is now not only the safest large city in the country — it is far safer than most rural areas or suburbs, almost unthinkable in 1990 when the city endured 2,262 murders and 3,126 rapes (last year: 431 murders, 1,119 rapes).
Once New Yorkers no longer feared for life and limb, they turned their city back into the 24-hour-a-day, city-that-never-sleeps place that had once made it renowned and glamorous. Restaurants, clubs, and shops opened and flourished. The iron grates that routinely slammed down at dusk started to disappear. During the Giuliani years, investment poured into neighborhoods along with new residents and businesses.
When the terrorists attacked on primary day in 2001, New Yorkers had been looking forward to a contentious election season that most thought would end in victory for one of the Democratic candidates. Instead, voters chose the quiet, aloof, dark horse candidate, Michael Bloomberg, who spent the next nine years taking the city in a very different direction from what the others probably would have done.
With a fundamental confidence that investment and development would benefit everyone, Bloomberg began the most extensive rezoning ever to open up large swaths of deteriorated, industrial land for residential and commercial development. Thus, the new edition carries entries on the waterfront (the “Department of City Planning rezoned 134 blocks along the Williamsburg/Greenpoint East River waterfront manufacturing to residential” . . . thus transforming “vacant, industrial waterfront into luxury housing with required low-income components and parkland”), the Meatpacking District (“a high-end area appealing to young professionals, with luxury housing, boutique stores, and expensive restaurants”), Hudson Yards (“the site [can] accommodate as many as 13,500 units of housing and 24 million square feet of office space”), plus Atlantic Yards, Chelsea Piers, Domino Sugar Plant, DUMBO, etc.
The seemingly neutral, non-judgmental tone combined with the persistent use of the passive voice can become grating, even counter-productive. To write, for example, that the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn “encountered opposition from neighborhood residents concerned about potential crowds and traffic” is almost laughable. It’s rather like saying General Custer encountered a few Indians. In this instance, the courts have consistently ruled that the deeply subsidized project can go forward, but whether or not the project will ever get built is far from clear. My own guess is that the Indians — subdued by the courts though they have been — will triumph in the end.
Every reader is likely to find some personally annoying omission in this splendid encyclopedia. Mine is Moynihan Station. The editors have included a neutral entry on Penn Station, which obliquely mentions the “2007 proposal” to abolish Madison Square Garden, build a new station, and turn the post office into an adjunct station. But Moynihan Station is far more than an old proposal. It is the linchpin of development in west Midtown and a potentially magnificent portal for entering the city — which we now so perilously lack.
Julia Vitullo-Martin is director of the Regional Plan Association’s Center for Urban Innovation.