History of New York City (1946–1977)

The history of New York City (1946–1977) saw the emergence of New York immediately after World War II as the unquestioned leading city of the world. However, after peaking in population in 1950, the city slowly declined with changes in industry and commerce, urban sprawl outside the city and crime, reaching something of a crisis period in the 1970s.

Post-war through mid-century

As many of the world's great cities lay in ruin after World War II, New York City assumed a new global prominence, even becoming home to United Nations headquarters, built 1947–1952. After the war New York inherited the role of Paris as center of the art world with Abstract Expressionism, and became a rival to London as an art market. However, the population declined after 1950, with increasing suburbanization in the New York metropolitan area as pioneered in Levittown, New York.

November 15, 1948 marked a significant turning point in the city's economy, when the Interstate Commerce Commission began allowing barges to charge fees for transporting goods from rail terminals in New Jersey to piers in Manhattan.cite book |title=City in the Sky |author=Glanz, James and Eric Lipton |publisher=Times Books |year=2003 |pages=p. 48] This led to the decline of the port, the piers, and places, such as Washington Market in Lower Manhattan.

Meanwhile, Midtown Manhattan was experiencing an unprecedented building boom, fueled by post-war prosperity. This led to a drastic change in the appearance of especially Midtown, where bland office towers in the new International Style began to replace the ziggurat-style towers of the postwar era. Also rapidly changing was the eastern edge of the East Village close to the FDR Drive. Large-scale public housing projects supplanted many traditional apartment blocks. In Lower Manhattan, urban renewal began to take shape at around 1960, led by David Rockefeller with construction of his One Chase Manhattan Plaza building.

In a built-out city, construction always entailed destruction. After the old Beaux Arts Pennsylvania Station was torn down, growing concern for preservation led to the creation of the "Landmarks Preservation Commission Law" of 1965. The city's other great train station, Grand Central, was also threatened with demolition but was eventually saved. Meanwhile, New York City's network of freeways spread under the guidance of developer Robert Moses, with consequent increased traffic congestion.

In 1960, after Lord Buckley's death, the hated New York City Cabaret Card required of nightclub workers was abolished.

The federal Immigration Act of 1965 abolished national-origin quotas and laid the basis for the city's modern Asian American community.

Economic tribulation had by then begun. An early sign of the city's waning competitiveness was the loss of both its National League baseball teams to booming California; the Dodgers and the Giants both moved after the 1957 season. The void was filled in 1962 with the formation of the the Mets in 1962, who played their first two seasons at the Polo Grounds (former home of the Giants), before moving to Shea Stadium in Queens in 1964.

On November 9, 1965, New York endured a widespread power blackout along with much of eastern North America. (The city's ordeal became the subject of the 1968 film, "Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?") Manufacturing declined, and the advent of container shipping shifted much maritime trade to New Jersey, which, unlike New York City, had space to accommodate large stacks of containers. Adult entertainment sites began to fill the Times Square district in the mid-1960s and remained until redevelopment of the area in the mid-1990s.

As African-Americans pressed for civil rights in the 1960s, some chose not to follow the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s nonviolent path. Riots in New York City in 1964 and 1968 produced little improvement in black citizens' inadequate housing, education, and employment but added to the city's growing reputation as unsafe.

The Stonewall Rebellion

A series of violent conflicts between LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) people and police officers, known as the "Stonewall riots" and collectively as the "Stonewall Rebellion", is credited with catalyzing the modern LGBT rights movement worldwide.

The first night of rioting began on Friday, June 27, 1969 not long after 1:20 a.m., when police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. It was one of the first times in modern history a significant number of LGBT people collectively resisted arrest.

By the end of July the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was formed in New York and by the end of the year the GLF could be seen in cities and universities around the United States. Similar organizations were soon created in other countries, including Canada, France, Britain, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand.

The following year, in commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, the GLF organized a march from Greenwich Village to Central Park. Between 5,000 and 10,000 men and women attended the march, a precursor to the contemporary LGBT pride parades.

1970s

The 1970s are widely regarded as New York's nadir. The city had become notorious the world over for high rates of crime and other social disorder. A popular song in the autumn of 1972, "American City Suite," chronicled, in allegorical fashion, the decline in the city's quality of life.

US economic stagnation in the 1970s hit New York City particularly hard, as trading on the New York Stock Exchange fell while the city's welfare spending continued. The city neared bankruptcy during the administration of Mayor Abraham Beame but avoided that fate with the aid of a large federal loan. A statement by Mayor Beame was drafted and ready to be released on October 17, 1975, if the teachers' union did not invest $150 million from its pension funds in city securities. "I have been advised by the comptroller that the City of New York has insufficient cash on hand to meet debt obligations due today," the statement said. "This constitutes the default that we have struggled to avoid." [The New York Times. "When the City’s Bankruptcy Was Just a Few Words Away." Dec 31, 2006. [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/nyregion/31default.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&oref=slogin] ] The Beame statement was never distributed because Albert Shanker, the teachers' union president, finally furnished $150 million from the union's pension fund to buy Municipal Assistance Corporation bonds. (President Gerald R. Ford angered many New Yorkers two weeks later by refusing an outright grant to the city, a decision famously, if inaccurately, summarized by the "New York Daily News" headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead.")

The New York City Blackout of 1977 struck on July 13th of that year and lasted for 25 hours, during which the city suffered heavy looting and civil unrest. Arrests numbering over 3,000 so burdened the city's already crowded prisons that some talked of re-opening the Manhattan Detention Complex, nicknamed "The Tombs," which had recently been condemned.

A rare highlight was the opening of the mammoth World Trade Center complex in 1972. Conceived by David Rockefeller and built by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on the site of the Radio Row electronics district in Lower Manhattan, the Twin Towers briefly displaced the Empire State Building in Midtown as the world's tallest before being displaced in turn by Chicago's Sears Tower in 1973.

However, the financial crisis, high crime rates, and damage from the blackouts led to a widespread belief that New York City was in irreversible decline. Many white middle class families moved to the city's suburbs and to other economically healthier locales. By the end of the 1970s, nearly a million people had left, a population loss not recovered for another twenty years. The more fiscally conservative Ed Koch was elected as mayor in 1977.

References