The New York That Felker Saw
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
It wasn’t easy to believe in the future of American cities back in 1968.
Soaring crime rates, exploding welfare rolls, white flight, race riots, the deterioration of urban infrastructure — take your pick. They were all ravaging American cities.
Yet that was the year newspaperman Clay Felker, who died last week at the age of 82, chose to launch New York magazine. What a daring act of faith.
The glossy, irreverent weekly featured the work of writers such as Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin and chronicled the life of New York City, which sure seemed like it was dying back then.
So were so many American cities. The entire country, or certainly the entire middle class, seemed like it was moving to the suburbs. Within years, it was said, the nation’s once-booming metropolises would be nothing but burned-out shells.
This doom wasn’t predicted once, but again and again. “The Death of the Cities” was an almost regular feature of television, newspaper, and newsweekly coverage in the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s. I’m not sure it’s over even now, although $4 a gallon gasoline seems to be sapping some of the suburbs’ and exurbs’ attractiveness.
It can get to you, this year-after-year, round-the-clock bombardment about the death of America’s cities in general and the death of New York, in particular.
I am usually a pretty chipper fellow by nature, and yet I remember riding a boiling, reeking, crowded, graffiti-ridden subway car one summer afternoon in the late 1970s and thinking how I really wouldn’t be surprised if a severed head rolled out from under the seats. This was a couple of years after the city went bust in 1975.
And then in the 1980s, and this was probably as late as 1987 or 1988, I recall sitting down with a municipal-bond analyst who demonstrated how New York was incontestably going down the drain, using nothing more than an official statement from the city’s latest general-obligation bond issue. Of course, that was the point at which I should have gone long on New York real estate.
You know what? I’m not buying this argument anymore. Yes, there are some dysfunctional American cities with some profound problems, but there are more with promising futures.
A few years ago, I happened upon a collection of articles from New York magazine’s first couple of years titled “The Power Game” (1969). It’s an artifact of the city that didn’t die.
In the introduction, Felker wrote, “As a nation we have come to a point in history when the quality of life in the cities will take first priority, and any politician who doesn’t realize it risks being swept away in the tide.”
Did that happen? I don’t think so. If anything, cities seem to have survived without the help of politicians and planners. As Felker noted elsewhere in the introduction, and far more presciently: “We live in an urban civilization.”
People go to the city to fulfill their ambition, if they have any.
In an appreciation of Felker on New York magazine’s Web site last week, author and editor Kurt Andersen observed that there are one-industry towns such as Los Angeles and Washington, and then there is New York.
New York “was and is the undisputed national epicenter of no fewer than seven glamour businesses — finance, news media, advertising, book publishing, theater, fashion, and fine art, with serious players in TV, music, and the movies on the field as well,” Mr. Andersen wrote.
And that is why New York thrives, even with all insistence to the contrary, and in the face of what can only be described as almost continuous outrage and abomination.
Felker built a magazine around what Wolfe called “The City of Ambition,” and within a few years it had spawned imitators in cities everywhere, all of which, of course, were supposed to be on life support.
So can we all stop hearing about the death of the cities, please? Remember Felker’s words: We live in an urban civilization.
Mr. Mysak is a columnist for Bloomberg News.