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Title: Welcome to Fear City: The Cultural Narrative of New York City, 1945-1980

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2011

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Abstract: This dissertation examines the cultural and intellectual origins and the political and economic consequences of what I call the “narrative of New York City's decline” during the so-called “urban crisis.” Explicating the development of this narrative following World War II, and tracing its complex evolution through a variety of texts (pulp novels, mass-market magazines, popular sociology, intellectual journals, and film), I demonstrate how cultural production influenced and responded to major transformations in the historical trajectory of New York in the postwar period. Strategically playing on public fears of, first, the physical sustainability of the city in the age of urban renewal, and, later, personal safety and security within the “renewed” city, elite cultural producers contributed to a broad anti-urban political culture, and augmented a seductive ideology hostile to both postwar federal policy and the role of the state in planning and securing the city by the 1960s and 1970s. The narrative of decline, as I show, reached its apex in the 1970s as New York City faced its most difficult political and economic challenges. I argue that New York's decline—and the decline of American cities in general—was in part a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, a contingency of the narrative and the political culture that emerged out of it. More importantly, the narrative of decline ensured future limitations on the state to rectify urban problems such as economic inequality and uneven development, thus ushering in an era of neoliberal redevelopment that, at once, grew out of the decline debate, and now situates culture and cultural infrastructure at the locus of urban vitality. If metropolitan history rests primarily on the “question of power,” as historians Thomas Sugrue and Kevin Kruse insist, then insight into how the narrative of New York's decline shaped ideology and practice, I contend, complements our understanding of the political economy of the urban crisis.

Url: https://search.proquest.com/docview/917707969?pq-origsite=gscholar

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Authors: Tochterman, Brian, Lee

Institution: University of Minnesota

Department: History

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Pages: 297

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Other

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