New York, New York, New York: four decades of success, excess, and transformation

New York in the late 1970s: Dangerous, filthy, and falling apart, garbage piled on its streets and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble. Over the next thirty-plus years, though, it became a different place: kinder and meaner, richer and poorer, more like America and less like what it had always been. Dyja shows that this metamorphosis wasn't the work of a single policy, mastermind, or economic theory. Three New Yorks evolved in turn. After brutal retrenchment came the dazzling Koch renaissance and the Dinkins years that left the city's liberal traditions battered but laid the foundation for the safe streets and dotcom excess of Giuliani's reformation in the '90s. Then the planes hit on 9/11. The city handed itself over to Bloomberg who merged City Hall into his personal empire. A fourth evolution is happening-- and we must understand that the greatest challenge ahead is the one New York failed in the first three: The cures must not be worse than the disease.