Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [9]
Though no longer de jure capital, New York emerged as de facto capital over the course of the nineteenth century, its centrality reflected in the accepted custom of identifying points in its landscape with nationwide functions. Wall Street supplied the country with capital. Ellis Island channeled its labor. Fifth Avenue set its social trends. Madison Avenue advertised its products. Broadway (along with Times Square and Coney Island) entertained it. Its City Hall, as befit an unofficial capitol, welcomed heroes and heroines with keys and parades and naval flotillas, and paid farewell respects to national leaders by organizing processions along Manhattan’s black-draped streets. New York, moreover, was the nation’s premier source for news and opinion; like a magnet, it attracted those seeking cosmopolitan freedom; and as the biggest city of the biggest state it exercised extraordinary influence in national politics.
Hegemony generated ambivalence. The country envied and emulated the city, but feared and resented it too. Farmers, planters, and industrialists needed its capital but disliked their indebted and dependent status. New York’s connections to Europe gave it a glamorous sheen but made it seem the agent of imperial powers and host to an “alien” population that spawned political machines, organized crime, labor unions, anarchists, socialists, Communists, and birth controllers. In the 1920s, relations between New York and its national hinterland came to a rancorous boil, and Governor Al Smith’s defeat in 1928 stemmed in part from widespread repudiation of his metropolis.
With Franklin Roosevelt’s accession to the presidency, however, New York’s national influence expanded again. Under his aegis, unionists, settlement workers, professors, and politicians flocked to Washington, winning a tremendous expansion of federal power to deal with the Depression (along lines pioneered in the city). Ironically, the New Dealers’ success undermined their city’s position. Strengthening Washington saved New York from catastrophe but also directed a huge and transforming flow of resources to the West and South, converting former dependencies into regional rivals—a process accelerated by the Second World War.
The power of the federal state was enhanced yet again during the Cold War, in part at the behest of a New York-based foreign policy elite. In terms of U.S. relations with the world, Washington and New York emerged as partners: the city on the Hudson the multinational empire’s commercial center, the city on the Potomac its military core. In domestic matters, however, no such parity existed. Washington commanded the heightened federal taxing power; New York was just another hard-pressed metropolis. Cold War Washington, moreover, speeded the transfer of wealth from Northeast to Sunbelt, from cities to suburbs. The arms economy bypassed the demilitarized city, industrial jobs fled to other states, and other harbors undercut the aging port. Population shifts diminished New York State’s power in federal councils. The consequences for the city became evident in the urban crises of the 1960s, the so-called fiscal crisis of the 1970s (“Ford to City: Drop Dead”), and the 1980s ascendancy to national power of suburban and Sunbelt/Gunbelt constituencies.
MUNICIPAL REMAKINGS
As the city shifted position and function in global and national arenas, the ways in which its citizens went about earning their livings and generating wealth for collective endeavors underwent repeated rearrangement.
Indian peoples lived off the bounty of the harbor, fields, and hills—fishing, farming, and hunting. The Dutch supported themselves and developed a rudimentary infrastructure chiefly by trading with the Indians for beavers (a rodent duly honored