(by Kim Phillips-Fein)
This was an interesting book to read after having seen the documentary Drop Dead City back in May. The book and the movie cover the same time period/events (the fiscal crisis in 1970s New York City) but each has its own slant, the slant of the book being that the crisis gave rise to a “politics of inevitability” even as things might have gone some other way. “To question that inevitability is the project of this book,” Phillips-Fein writes in the foreword, and throughout, she wonders what other paths the city might have taken. (This was also an interesting book to have finished reading just after the recent mayoral election here in NYC, given that one of the book’s arguments is that the financial crisis gave rise to a new politics that “closed off an older version of New York, shutting down debate over whether the city government should seek to guarantee a set of social rights for all.” The subject of “cities and what they might do for the people who live in them” definitely feels relevant to NYC politics in 2025.)
I think I liked the book more for having seen Drop Dead City first, because I think it kept me from feeling overwhelmed: I could picture certain people and certain moments from the start, and I knew the overall arc of the time period and some of the detail, and it was interesting to see different pieces of the story emphasized or questioned. (Drop Dead City was co-directed by one of Felix Rohatyn’s kids, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a hagiography, and while it seems like Rohatyn really was able to step up and sort some things out in a way that others couldn’t or wouldn’t, Fear City is more skeptical about the role of bankers in general, Rohatyn included.)
I felt somewhat conflicted about the final section of the book: I liked learning about things I hadn’t heard about (the way that residents of Greenpoint banded together to try to protest the closing of their local firehouse, the way that students and others banded together to speak out against the planned closing of Hostos Community College) but I also felt like the deep dives into these particular events didn’t necessarily provide the most satisfying wrap-up to the book as a whole.
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