Fear City

by Kim Phillips-Fein
Fear City
Author: Kim Phillips-Fein
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0805095268
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PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST An epic, riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster—and an anatomy of the austerity politics that continue to shape the world today When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country’s largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pay back its debts. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was unworkable. The city had to slash services, freeze wages, and fire thousands of workers, they insisted, or financial apocalypse would ensue. In this vivid account, historian Kim Phillips-Fein tells the remarkable story of the crisis that engulfed the city. With unions and ordinary citizens refusing to accept retrenchment, the budget crunch became a struggle over the soul of New York, pitting fundamentally opposing visions of the city against each other. Drawing on never-before-used archival sources and interviews with key players in the crisis, Fear City shows how the brush with bankruptcy permanently transformed New York—and reshaped ideas about government across America. At once a sweeping history of some of the most tumultuous times in New York's past, a gripping narrative of last-minute machinations and backroom deals, and an origin story of the politics of austerity, Fear City is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the resurgent fiscal conservatism of today.

Welcome to Fear City

by Nathan Holmes
Welcome to Fear City
Author: Nathan Holmes
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2018-09-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438471211
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Analyzes how location-shot crime films of the 1970s reflected and influenced understandings of urban crisis. The early 1970s were a moment of transformation for both the American city and its cinema. As intensified suburbanization, racial division, deindustrialization, and decaying infrastructure cast the future of the city in doubt, detective films, blaxploitation, police procedurals, and heist films confronted spectators with contemporary scenes from urban streets. Welcome to Fear City argues that the location-shot crime films of the 1970s were part of a larger cultural ambivalence felt toward urban life, evident in popular magazines, architectural discourse, urban sociology, and visual culture. Yet they also helped to reinvigorate the city as a site of variegated experience and a positively disordered public life—in stark contrast to the socially homogenous and spatially ordered suburbs. Discussing the design of parking garages and street lighting, the dynamics of mugging, panoramas of ruin, and the optics of undercover police operations in such films as Klute, The French Connection, Detroit 9000, Death Wish, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Nathan Holmes demonstrates that crime genres did not simply mirror urban settings and social realities, but actively produced and circulated new ideas about the shifting surfaces of public culture. “Rejecting the easy abstractions and postmodern playfulness of noir and neo-noir criticism, Holmes places 1970s crime films, as he says, ‘in relation to the urban context that was their location, setting, and subject.’ He does this brilliantly, convincingly, and uniquely.” — David Desser, former editor, Cinema Journal

The Dying City

by Brian L. Tochterman
The Dying City
Author: Brian L. Tochterman
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2017-05-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469633078
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In this eye-opening cultural history, Brian Tochterman examines competing narratives that shaped post–World War II New York City. As a sense of crisis rose in American cities during the 1960s and 1970s, a period defined by suburban growth and deindustrialization, no city was viewed as in its death throes more than New York. Feeding this narrative of the dying city was a wide range of representations in film, literature, and the popular press--representations that ironically would not have been produced if not for a city full of productive possibilities as well as challenges. Tochterman reveals how elite culture producers, planners and theorists, and elected officials drew on and perpetuated the fear of death to press for a new urban vision. It was this narrative of New York as the dying city, Tochterman argues, that contributed to a burgeoning and broad anti-urban political culture hostile to state intervention on behalf of cities and citizens. Ultimately, the author shows that New York's decline--and the decline of American cities in general--was in part a self-fulfilling prophecy bolstered by urban fear and the new political culture nourished by it.

City of Fear: An Ava Gold Mystery (Book 2)

by Blake Pierce
City of Fear: An Ava Gold Mystery (Book 2)
Author: Blake Pierce
Publisher: Blake Pierce
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2021-10-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1094372900
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1920s. New York City. When a 16-year-old girl from a wealthy Fifth Avenue family is found strangled, murdered on the eve of her society coming-out party, Ava Gold, New York’s first female homicide detective, is called in to find the killer. But she quickly learns that all is not what it seems, even amongst the glamour and glitz of high society’s wealthiest families. “A MASTERPIECE OF THRILLER AND MYSTERY. Blake Pierce did a magnificent job developing characters with a psychological side so well described that we feel inside their minds, follow their fears and cheer for their success. Full of twists, this book will keep you awake until the turn of the last page.” --Books and Movie Reviews, Roberto Mattos (re Once Gone) CITY OF FEAR (An Ava Gold Mystery—Book 2) is a new novel in a long-anticipated new series by #1 bestseller and USA Today bestselling author Blake Pierce, whose bestseller Once Gone (a free download) has received over 1,000 five star reviews. In the rough streets of 1920s New York City, 34 year-old Ava Gold, a widower and single mom, claws her way up to become the first female homicide detective in her NYPD precinct. She is as tough as they come, and willing to hold her own in a man’s world. But when a teenage girl is murdered, even Ava is shaken to her core. Determined to find justice for the teen girl—and to stop the psychotic killer from killing again—Ava pries into the dangerous rings of powerful high society, finding herself threatened as she is singled out by a tycoon. Fighting for her job, trying to stop a killer, and finding herself in an unexpected romantic relationship, Ava finds herself in the battle of her life. A heart-pounding suspense thriller filled with shocking twists, the authentic and atmospheric AVA GOLD MYSTERY SERIES is a riveting page-turner, endearing us to a strong and brilliant character that will capture your heart and keep you reading late into the night. Books #3-#6 are also available!

Without Fear Or Favor

by LeRoy F. Harlow
Without Fear Or Favor
Author: LeRoy F. Harlow
Publisher:
Total Pages: 364
Release: 1977
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780842514613
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A City Divided: Race, Fear and the Law in Police Confrontations

by David A. Harris
A City Divided: Race, Fear and the Law in Police Confrontations
Author: David A. Harris
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2020-01-10
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1785271148
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A City Divided tells the story of the case involving 18-year-old Jordan Miles and three Pittsburgh police officers. David Harris, a resident of Pittsburgh and the Sally Ann Semenko Chair at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, describes what happened, explaining how a case that began with a young black man walking around the block in his own neighborhood turned Pittsburgh inside out, resulted in two investigations of the police officers and two federal trials. Harris, who has written, published and conducted research at the intersection of race, criminal justice and the law for almost thirty years, explains not just what happened but why, what the stakes are and, most importantly, what we must do differently to avoid these public safety catastrophes.

Escaping the Dark, Gray City

by Benjamin Heber Johnson
Escaping the Dark, Gray City
Author: Benjamin Heber Johnson
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2017-04-04
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0300227760
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A compelling and long-overdue exploration of the Progressive-era conservation movement, and its lasting effects on American culture, politics, and contemporary environmentalism The turn of the twentieth century caught America at a crossroads, shaking the dust from a bygone era and hurtling toward the promises of modernity. Factories, railroads, banks, and oil fields—all reshaped the American landscape and people. In the gulf between growing wealth and the ills of an urbanizing nation, the spirit of Progressivism emerged. Promising a return to democracy and a check on concentrated wealth, Progressives confronted this changing relationship to the environment—not only in the countryside but also in dense industrial cities and leafy suburbs. Drawing on extensive work in urban history and Progressive politics, Benjamin Heber Johnson weaves together environmental history, material culture, and politics to reveal the successes and failures of the conservation movement and its lasting legacy. By following the efforts of a broad range of people and groups—women’s clubs, labor advocates, architects, and politicians—Johnson shows how conservation embodied the ideals of Progressivism, ultimately becoming one of its most important legacies.

City of Fear

by Robin David
City of Fear
Author: Robin David
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2013-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9351160696
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An extraordinary account of ordinary people in troubled times In 2001, a calamitous earthquake struck Gujarat. A year later came the kind of communal carnage the nation had not seen since the Partition. For Robin David, then an assistant editor with the Times of India, the two events engendered a tectonic shift in his own life. The earthquake left deep cracks in his ancestral home, while the riots undermined all the certainties of life, making it impossible to walk through hitherto familiar neighbourhoods. A decade later, the wounds have not healed. At a time when the memory of the riots has already faded in the minds of many, City of Fear documents the varied forms of fear that people in Gujarat experienced during that period, especially those of the author's own Indian Jewish Bene Israeli family.

The Lofts of SoHo

by Aaron Shkuda
The Lofts of SoHo
Author: Aaron Shkuda
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2024-06-19
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0226833410
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A groundbreaking look at the transformation of SoHo. American cities entered a new phase when, beginning in the 1950s, artists and developers looked upon a decaying industrial zone in Lower Manhattan and saw, not blight, but opportunity: cheap rents, lax regulation, and wide open spaces. Thus, SoHo was born. From 1960 to 1980, residents transformed the industrial neighborhood into an artist district, creating the conditions under which it evolved into an upper-income, gentrified area. Introducing the idea—still potent in city planning today—that art could be harnessed to drive municipal prosperity, SoHo was the forerunner of gentrified districts in cities nationwide, spawning the notion of the creative class. In The Lofts of SoHo, Aaron Shkuda studies the transition of the district from industrial space to artists’ enclave to affluent residential area, focusing on the legacy of urban renewal in and around SoHo and the growth of artist-led redevelopment. Shkuda explores conflicts between residents and property owners and analyzes the city’s embrace of the once-illegal loft conversion as an urban development strategy. As Shkuda explains, artists eventually lost control of SoHo’s development, but over several decades they nonetheless forced scholars, policymakers, and the general public to take them seriously as critical actors in the twentieth-century American city.