The Dying City: Postwar New York and the Ideology of Fear by Brian Tochterman (review)

"And we ourselves, the newcomers to the Village, were leaving it if we could. The long process of deracination had reached its climax. . . . Now even New York seemed too American, too close to home." So wrote Cowley in 1934, looking back to the scene of his departure from New York in 1921. Like so many of his generation, Cowley was headed to Paris. "Most of our friends had sailed already," he continued, "the Village was almost deserted, except for the pounding feet of young men from Davenport and Pocatello who came to make a name for themselves and live in glamour—who came because there was nowhere else to go."¹

Cowley's Exile's Return in some ways encapsulates one of Tochterman's central themes—the allure of New York for those who want to "live in glamour" and the simultaneous sense that the Village was almost deserted and the city's best days already gone. Cowley wrote about his own sense of disorientation—and his generation's—after World War I; The Dying City focuses on New York in the roughly three decades after World War II. Tochterman sees these years framed by a narrative dialectic: "New York City as Cosmopolis versus New York City as Necropolis," as he puts it (8). He explores that dialectic in a series of eight paired chapters, organized in four parts, each of which explores a particular urban discourse—"the literary," "planning narratives," "intellectuals," and "cultural responses."

In Part I, Tochterman juxtaposes E. B. White's resonant book Here is New York (New York, 1949) with several of Mickey Spillane's lurid Mike Hammer novels (and their movie adaptations). White's essay, on the one hand, as Tochterman reads it, "put forth a narrative of New York City as a safe harbor for fearless migrants after the horrors of war" as the city, especially with the arrival of European exiles and refugees, displaced Paris as the cultural capital of the Western world (18). Spillane's work, on the other hand, painted a New York that was utterly lawless, where no safe harbors were to be found, and only vigilantism restored any sense of order. Part II re-tells the story of postwar planning debates, pitting the imperious Robert Moses against the more sidewalk-minded William Whyte and Jane Jacobs. In Part III, Chapters 5 and 6, Tochterman surveys the writing of some of the intellectuals of New York's old left as they became increasingly despondent about the state of their city, as well as Michael Harrington's The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York, 1962), which made a heretofore invisible poverty, in New York and elsewhere, visible. In the last section, Tochterman takes a "detour to Fun City" to examine a set of "cultural responses to the death of New York," primarily in movies (Chapter 7) and in the downtown art and music scene of the 1970s (Chapter 8).

As this quick sketch of the broad waterfront covered by The Dying City suggests, Tochterman does not move back and forth between cosmopolis and necropolis; he focuses almost entirely on the necropolis. His argument is that the writers, film makers, planners, and intellectuals that he considers shaped, reflected, and otherwise reinforced an image of New York as ungovernable, pathological, and in all ways inexorably in decline. They contributed, in Tochterman's view, to turning the Big Apple—a nickname popularized in the 1920s—into Fear City.

But Tochterman has bigger fish to fry. This cultural production, so his argument goes, laid the groundwork for the "neoliberal city" that emerged in the wake of New York's fiscal (and almost existential) crisis of the 1970s. The city of "public-private partnerships" and "broken windows" policing, a sanitized Times Square, and the end of "welfare democracy" emerged (202), he believes, because of the ecology of fear created in the years...