Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York City is a new documentary that tells the story of the city’s long decline from the 1960s through the 1980s and its surprising turnaround beginning in the 1990s under Rudy Giuliani and later Michael Bloomberg. The film, directed by Matthew Taylor and produced by Michelle Taylor and Larry Mone, draws upon archival footage alongside interviews with key participants to show how new leaders armed with innovative policies managed to turn the failing metropolis into the safest and most prosperous large city in the country. As New York and other cities once again slide into disorder and economic stagnation, the film provides voters and policymakers with a timely road map for recovery.
The film begins in 1965 with the election of Mayor John Lindsay. Handsome, Kennedyesque, and (surprisingly) a liberal Republican, Lindsay defeated Abe Beame, the candidate of the Democratic machine. “The bosses who run City Hall don’t have a vision,” Lindsay proclaimed. “They don’t care.” He promised a turnaround in the city’s fortunes. “I’m running for mayor because the city is in crisis. The streets are filthy. There is crime. People are afraid.” This message of reform through the transformative powers of government was a popular theme in the 1960s, at least for a short time.
Lindsay, as shown in the film, ran that theme into the ground in his first term in City Hall. One problem: he could not handle the public-employee unions. Transit workers went on strike in 1966, followed by the sanitation workers, and then the teachers’ union in a dramatic walkout in 1968 that shut down the public schools for weeks. A second problem: Lindsay thought welfare programs were good for New York City because they provided incomes for citizens who did not have jobs (and the federal government paid for half the costs, anyway). But he did not anticipate the consequences of long-term dependency or the effect of large-scale welfare on urban crime. Not surprisingly, welfare rolls ballooned from three hundred thousand in 1965 to over one million by 1969. They remained above one million for the next two decades.
Then there was the crime. Homicides in the city paralleled the rise in welfare rolls, increasing from 600 in 1965 to 1,500 by 1970, eventually rising to 2,500 in 1990. Instances of crime such as muggings and burglaries also exploded in every borough. Many areas, including Times Square, were taken over by drug dealers, pornographic theaters, and scam artists, and remained in that condition for decades.
Mayor Lindsay acknowledged the sense of chaos felt by New Yorkers. “The question now,” he said in 1968, “is whether we can survive as a city.” By this point, Lindsay was so unpopular that he was defeated by a Republican opponent in the party primary in 1969, though he managed to squeak by in the general election by running as an independent.
New York survived but did not prosper. Businesses left for New Jersey and Connecticut. Members of the middle class, fearing for their safety and disgusted by poor schools, ran for the suburbs, further undermining both economic and political stability. Eventually, the city defaulted on its municipal loans in 1975 when banks announced they would no longer provide the cash the government was using to service rising debts. That brought an end to Lindsay’s liberal experiment which had begun with his election ten years earlier and forced the town into a lengthy period of budgetary austerity that lasted well into the 1980s.
Lindsay was replaced by Beame in 1974, who was then quickly replaced himself by Edward Koch in 1977 after the default in 1975. The film is sympathetic to Koch. As mayor, he tried to address the intertwined crises of crime, welfare, unemployment, and drugs, but did so mostly through rhetoric rather than actual policy. In the end, he was unable to reverse the surge in social pathologies that began in the 1960s, though he did succeed in bringing the budget under control (aided by the stock-market boom of the 1980s). As the years passed, however, the voters tired of empty words unaccompanied by genuine advances on the issues they cared about. Koch was defeated by David Dinkins in the Democratic primaries in 1989.
With Koch sidelined, Dinkins narrowly kept at bay the Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani in the 1989 elections. Giuliani’s strong showing was a sign that voters were beginning to consider alternatives to Democratic Party control of the city. But it wasn’t his time yet. In the meantime, Dinkins dismissed fears about lawlessness and decay as overblown and exaggerated and never even attempted to deal with them in a serious way. In addition, his term was scarred by a series of racial and ethnic riots that erupted across the city. His weak and apologetic responses to the riots failed to inspire confidence among voters who were hoping for a stronger response from City Hall. In the end, Dinkins’s tenure as mayor proved—if proof were needed—that progressives had no answers for the city’s problems.
Giuliani, meanwhile, decided to “go to school” to study the causes of New York’s woes and to devise solutions that he would introduce in the next mayoral campaign. The film makes a special effort to present Giuliani’s “education” on public policy as it provided the source for a whole new way of thinking about urban issues in the recovery of New York City.
Giuliani’s “university” during these years was the Manhattan Institute, a modest-sized think tank in midtown that housed or promoted the work of several prominent thinkers, including Heather Mac Donald, James Q. Wilson, George Kelling, Fred Siegel, Myron Magnet, and several others who published their work in the institute’s flagship publication, City Journal. It was by chance that one of Giuliani’s aides picked up a copy of the magazine and passed it along to him. Giuliani, now aware that he had allies among scholars and intellectuals, began to visit the institute on a regular basis, meeting with fellows to develop ideas that might be put to use by a new mayor. Thus began one of the most fruitful relationships in modern times between a determined public official and a devoted think tank in the pursuit of recovery.
Giuliani, armed with an arsenal of fresh plans and policies, ousted Dinkins in their rematch in 1993 despite Dinkins’s unanimous support from the Left, endorsements from The New York Times, and significant funding from outside the state. Giuliani was the first Republican to win the office since Lindsay was elected in 1965, though the comparison between the two mayors ends there. Once in office, Giuliani began to reverse the slide in the city’s fortunes that began under Lindsay.
The new mayor, along with his police commissioner, William Bratton, quickly implemented the “broken windows” approach to policing that had been championed by Wilson and Kelling at the Manhattan Institute. According to that approach, the police should focus on low-level transgressions like window-breaking, public drinking, vandalism, and turnstile-jumping because they create an atmosphere of disorder and lawbreaking that encourages crime. The department soon discovered that individuals who committed those “minor” crimes were often wanted for more serious offenses like burglary, rape, and homicide. By arresting individuals for minor crimes, officers were able to take violent criminals off the streets.
Giuliani and Bratton also worked with law-enforcement agencies to implement a CompStat (short for “computer statistics”) program to track crime in the five boroughs so that police patrols could be dispatched quickly to areas of high crime. When the police showed up in those areas, the individuals responsible for those crimes moved to other areas, albeit to no avail—the police quickly showed up there as well. The NYPD also learned through this approach that 95 percent of the crimes across the city were committed by just a few “high volume” criminals. The CompStat system allowed the police either to track them down and arrest them or deter them from committing a crime in the first place.
Those approaches brought about immediate results, as the film persuasively documents. Homicides in the city dropped from 2,500 in 1993 (when Giuliani entered office) to 900 in just four years, and eventually fell further to 600 per year during Bloomberg’s term in office. Robberies plummeted from one hundred thousand in 1993 to fewer than forty thousand in 2001. There were similar declines in rapes, reported thefts, assaults, and other series crimes. By the time Giuliani left office, New York was the safest large city in the country, and safer than at any time since the late 1950s.
Giuliani had similar successes in taming the out-of-control welfare system. He turned welfare offices into job centers and reclassified social-service employees into job-opportunity specialists with the goal of encouraging people on welfare to find self-supporting jobs. When recipients showed up to collect checks, they were pointed toward employment opportunities, and they were expected to take those jobs if they were able to work. That approach had immediate payoffs, in part because many people on welfare already had jobs and had no business collecting checks in the first place. They saw that Giuliani put an end to the welfare scam and dropped off the rolls. Others who were able to work found jobs and got off welfare permanently. The number of New Yorkers on welfare dropped from 1.2 million in 1994 to four hundred thousand in 2002—or roughly where those numbers were in 1964.
The film also shows how Giuliani’s administration addressed other quality-of-life issues: the homeless were sent to city-supported shelters; city officials removed graffiti from buses, subways, subway stations, and public buildings; the squeegee men who harassed motorists entering Manhattan were dispersed; drug dealers were thrown out of parks; and in a signal achievement, Giuliani and his allies cleaned up Times Square with new zoning laws prohibiting sex-oriented theaters and bookstores from operating within five hundred feet of schools, homes, or houses of worship. By the early 2000s, Times Square was once again a place where tourists gathered to visit restaurants and theaters, just as they did in the 1950s.
Michael Bloomberg mostly continued Giuliani’s reforms during his twelve years as mayor from 2002 through 2013, emphasizing competence in public administration and fiscal responsibility. Giuliani had done the heavy lifting in turning the city around during the 1990s, but the film credits Bloomberg for building on those achievements. By the time Bloomberg left office, New York City was in the midst of an urban renaissance that would have been impossible to imagine a few decades earlier. The most surprising aspect of New York’s turnaround? It was achieved under the leadership of Republican mayors in an overwhelmingly Democratic metropolis.
Where Bloomberg failed, as the film suggests, was in neglecting to forge a political coalition that could maintain these reforms once he left office. As a result, politics in New York City reverted to the unfortunate norm in 2013 with the election of Bill DeBlasio, a progressive Democrat at best and a Castro-supporting socialist at worst. Once in office, he quickly abolished the reforms responsible for reducing crime rates and welfare caseloads in the 1990s, demoralizing the police force in the process. Crime rates began to creep upward again, and so did a growing sense of public anxiety. People and businesses began to leave, just as they did in the 1960s and 1970s. New York City’s renaissance, two hard-fought decades in the making, began to unravel during DeBlasio’s reign. The unraveling hasn’t stopped since.
Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York City is an important film, and a timely one as well, not just for New Yorkers but also for those living in failing urban centers across the country. As in the 1970s and 1980s, many public officials and urban experts today wring their hands as cities grapple with crime and chaos, declaring that nothing can be done about them. They are wrong. New York City’s revival demonstrates that fear and danger are not inevitable aspects of urban life but can be remedied by commonsense policies that have been shown to work. Those public officials and urban experts are well advised to view this documentary. It offers a much-needed reminder that the ills that plague the nation’s cities can be cured.